by Kate Ledger
“I’m sure we can probably take a cab to the airport,” Emily said. She felt like she might have a headache coming on, a pinching behind her eyes. “A cab would be simplest.” The air of the hospital was thick. She was looking forward to leaning back in her seat on the plane. She wished Simon would stop being righteous. She wished he would stop talking so loudly.
“No cab,” Simon said, reaching into the front pocket of his slacks and jiggling his keys. “That’s ridiculous. I’ll drive you.”
“The airport’s in the opposite direction,” she protested, “and it was hard enough getting here with all the detours.”
“Visiting hours don’t end for a while,” Simon persisted. “I’ll drive you and Jamie and then I’ll swing back here and take my mother home.”
He followed her into Room 417.
“Well, one thing’s certain. You look great,” Emily said to Charles. The nurse, this one wearing scrubs dotted with clouds, adjusted a tray table across the bed that was set with the hospital dinner offerings.
“I think he does, too,” Lucille said with satisfaction. “It’s remarkable.”
“And I think it’s a miracle to high heaven that you’re not in pain,” Emily proclaimed. “A blessing. You should cherish every moment of it. You’re a very, very lucky man. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.”
“I’d enjoy it more if they’d let me go home,” Charles said.
“Well, just one more night,” she said. “Jamie and I are heading back tonight. Our flight’s soon.” The nurse began peeling plastic wrap from the bowls. Beads of condensation ran down the strips of plastic onto the tray.
“I want to stay, too,” Jamie blurted from her side of the room. “Can I stay?”
She looked at Jamie. Every time, it was like being pinched, she thought. Not just with clamping fingers, but with a grip that twisted, too, intending to make her hurt. And Simon continued to be the favorite, no matter how he behaved. “We’re going to get out of the way,” Emily said.
“I’m staying,” Simon explained to Lucille. “I can help you tomorrow once you’re home.”
“It would be perfectly simple to get a cab,” Emily said.
“I’m starved.” Simon rocked on his heels, ignoring her. Apparently, all that overbearing energy had left him with an appetite. “You starved? Catch a little something to eat before hitting the airport?”
“I’m not going to miss this flight,” Emily insisted.
“Miss the flight?” Simon cawed. “It’s not even seven. You’ve got hours.”
Jamie piped up, “I’m hungry.”
“Yes,” Simon said, as if they’d settled the matter, and it was the two of them against her again. “Let’s eat.”
Emily sighed because the larger battle was that she was leaving on a flight, and she’d already achieved that victory. They said their good-byes and walked across the Landesmont parking lot to an Italian restaurant on the corner. Either the dinner rush was over or hadn’t yet begun, but they were the only patrons as they seated themselves at a table.
“We’re in a bit of a hurry,” Emily informed the waiter, an acne-blotched teenager with his hair parted down the middle. He wore a black apron around his waist.
“Gotcha,” he said with his pen poised.
Emily ordered a chicken Caesar salad, which she knew would be quick to prepare, but Simon ordered a baked filet of flounder with a salad and a side of butternut squash—he always made a point of ordering a variety of colors when eating out. Jamie insisted on gnocchi, even though Emily warned her that gnocchi was a lot of starch for one plate.
“But I like it,” Jamie said.
“She should get what she likes,” Simon interjected. “And don’t worry about the time. There’s plenty of time.”
Jamie dished up a complacent grin, her little eyes glittering, and Emily sat back. There was a mosaic above their table, a replica of something Italian, made of splinters of tile and mirror, and what popped into Emily’s head was a morning long ago in Baltimore that she’d all but forgotten. It was just days after she’d discovered she was pregnant for the first time, and she was giddy with the new secret that she and Simon shared. They were so awed with what they’d managed to do, they giggled and used every expression they could think of to describe her new state. “Now that you’re with child,” Simon said with drama, “we should make the little room into a baby room.” He had already announced he wanted to build a crib from scratch.
“Now that I’m in the family way,” she said.
“Gravid,” he said, jumping onto the bed, straddling her and placing two hands on her still-flat belly. “Parturient.”
“Knocked up.”
One of those mornings early on, when Simon was at work, an errand had taken her to Charles Street, just past the famous Washington Monument. As she walked past a chic art gallery and an expensive custom-furniture store, she happened to avert her eyes from the dazzling sun. Right up to the edges of the sidewalk, the street glittered with the bright flints of glass embedded everywhere in the asphalt, green and blue shards winking, twinkling at her. In city folklore it was known as “glassphalt,” a failed engineering experiment to keep the expanding and contracting road from cracking during weather changes. But at that moment it seemed one of the prettiest sights she’d ever set eyes on. She felt a swelling sense of wonder, a bloom deep down of pride. Expecting, she thought, intending to tell Simon later, overcome with something eerily like fulfillment. All the old longings, she realized, every yearning that had eluded her in her father’s office, had been answered. She felt marvelous conspiracy with Simon, and great personal accomplishment. In the simple act of walking down Charles Street, observing all that accidental beauty, she happened to be in the process of adding something to the world. Her body had taken charge of the task. She was creating.
She looked at the mosaic on the wall. She’d never even mentioned that moment to Simon. Now, as she sat in the restaurant, she thought, with a sorrow that felt biting, it had been one of the few moments in her life when she was truly happy. What had happened to her? “You’ll put a hole in that,” she said, alarmed, as Jamie idly poked a fork into the weave of a cloth napkin, and she remembered again about the piercing. No one ever warned you how hard it was going to be, having children. And you could never guess how much destruction they would do to you, inadvertently, or with your own abetment. You could never imagine how desperately you would want to protect yourself. She wondered whether Jamie was still wearing the stud in her navel, but she decided again not to ask.
She placed a napkin on her lap. “Maybe when you get home, you can come up with an idea for the summer,” she suggested. “You know, plan B.”
Jamie shrugged. “I’ve got things,” she said. She brushed her bangs out of her face, combing her fingers through them. For the tiniest moment, she seemed to steal a peek at her father as if for backup, and then Emily couldn’t let up. How they excluded her! The vision returned to Emily of Jamie standing defiantly in the bathroom, and she felt anger wash over her. Did Jamie think she didn’t care at all?
“Are you ever going to tell us,” she asked pointedly, “what happened at camp? I mean, what could have been so wrong with that place?”
“I told you.” Jamie blinked. “I had this project, and I wanted to finish it. That’s all. But it was dumb, everything about it.”
“Dumb?” Emily echoed. “One week, and you’d sized it up? I find that hard to believe.”
“Like we were supposed to compete all the time. Everything. Like which cabin could clean up the fastest. Or who could be the first person to dive down to the bottom of the pool and pick up all these rings that they’d thrown in there.” She sat hunched over the table, tooling with the fork and twisting the edge of the napkin between the tines.
“So you weren’t winning?” Emily prompted. “Is that what this is about? Because it sounds fun to me.”
“It was just so fake,” Jamie complained, and Emily was reminded all of a sudden of her s
ister, Aileen. Someone like Betsy Ebberly could claim all the moodiness was a teenage phase, but Emily knew for certain some children always felt disdain for their parents and were capable of rejecting them completely.
“You gotta hand it to her,” Simon said, folding his hands on the table. “Life is short.”
Emily looked at him. “That’s the message she should get?”
“The message is we take her word for it. And there’s no point in suffering.”
“It’s camp,” Emily reminded everyone, “it’s not suffering.”
The waiter brought their meal, two dishes on one arm, one in the opposite hand. As quickly as everything had arrived, the grilled chicken on her salad turned out to be overdone, even hardened at the edges.
“The flounder’s great. Anyone want a taste? Just great,” Simon said, scooping up tricolored forkfuls.
She ate part of the salad, decided she’d had enough and pushed her plate away. The waiter swooped by and removed it. She opened the Marac bag, fished around until she located a compact and began to refresh her lipstick. “They might need a little breathing space, you know,” she said into the mirror. “Whether they’re in the hospital or at home.”
“It’s not like I’m a guest,” he retorted. “I’m family.”
“I’m just saying.”
“He totaled the car,” Simon reminded her. “He’s doing fine right now. But they don’t know what tomorrow will be like. He might be really bruised. She might need help getting him home.”
She put her compact and lipstick away and took a breath. It had to be said. “What you’re doing isn’t going to make them any different. You’re not going to win them over.”
She half expected Simon to answer, but he didn’t. The same muscle tightened in his neck. He glanced at Jamie, who was hunched over her gnocchi digging into the mound of glistening potato knobs. Hunger strike, Emily thought. Indeed.
With a mimed pen, Emily signaled the waiter for the check. He brought it and Emily inspected it. She slid her credit card into the leather folder. When he brought it back, she added a perfunctory tip and scribbled her name before returning the card to her wallet. It was midnight black leather with a circular magnetic clasp that snapped shut with a sound like a kiss.
“Seatbelts,” Simon called out as they got into the car. He got on the highway toward the airport and established himself in the middle lane. Traffic passed them on both sides. Emily stared out the passenger window. She glanced at her watch, realizing that it was impossible to tell the hour by the brushed metal color that had overcome the sky.
“Ten to eight,” Simon said, not even looking at her. “We’ve got plenty of time.”
She wasn’t thinking about making the plane, however. She was thinking about the color of the light, neither here nor there, the way it hung suspended in the unnatural, awkward length of the summer evenings. By midsummer, the sun seemed to take forever to set every night. The days felt impossibly long, like guests who had worn out their welcome. Afterward, night came on quickly.
Finally, Simon exited. The ramp led to a light, and a green sign with the outline of a plane pointed the direction of the airport. Sitting at the light, Simon reached for the radio. It crackled to life with static. As he searched, it jumped through the bands from one station to the next. Emily suddenly wondered whether she’d gotten her credit card back from the waiter. She couldn’t remember. She was fumbling through her purse when a shadow rose in the corner of her vision. Before she even looked up, she sensed a face just outside her window. A boy, standing in the midst of lanes of traffic where you least expected a person to appear, practically pressed against the glass.
“Oh!” She started, yanking her purse to her chest. She looked at him, her mouth open, as if she’d temporarily lost control of her features. He couldn’t have been older than eight or nine, narrowed eyes, long lashes that curled. His hair was covered with a bright bandana, and he wore a puffy, sleeveless winter vest over a white T-shirt, even though, Emily realized at once with a terror that was inexplicable to her, the weather was hot enough for no shirt at all.
“Get away!” She hit the power button, locking an already locked door. The boy was shorter than the height of the car. When he leaned his face into the window, a flower of steam appeared next to her head on the glass.
“Clean your windows?” he asked, lifting a dripping squeegee.
She answered by banging the power-lock button again, turning her gaze ahead, refusing to look at the window.
Simon dropped one hand from the steering wheel, ducked his head and hunched forward to see. “What’s that?” he asked.
“He scared me!” Emily said. Her heart was still thundering, shaking her chest.
“He just wants to do the windshield,” Simon said.
Everything that happened next seemed to take place in slow motion.
Emily glanced at the boy. At first he looked amused by her, but then his face transformed. The grin dissolved, as if he’d only worn it on the skin, and it had just been reabsorbed by the muscles underneath. The stare in his eyes hardened. It was a look of such complete hatred, such unveiled contempt. All her body seemed to know how to do was to clutch her purse into her chest with her whole arm, to cover herself with it like a shield. She understood: He hated her. A boy in the street. A little boy hated her. What had she done to deserve such hatred? She’d been holding a purse, that was her offense. It wasn’t even a purse she liked. It was an overblown gift from her husband—and it wasn’t even functional. She didn’t deserve his contempt, but he wanted her to know his hatred, to feel it. She couldn’t move. His glare made her feel small and pathetic. And then, without turning her head an inch, Emily became aware that Simon was shifting sideways, raising one buttock in his seat. He was reaching into his rear pocket for his wallet, which he pulled out and waved at the boy.
“What are you doing?” Emily said. Her voice came out with force but no fullness, like a hiss of steam.
Simon leaned across Emily’s lap, looking into the boy’s face. “Go ahead,” he mouthed widely, waving the wallet again. “Do the window.”
The boy nodded at Simon and got to work. He lifted the sponge end of his squeegee, and sudsy water bled down the windshield. He scrubbed quickly, efficiently, oozing soap bubbles across the glass. Then he flipped the tool. But as the rubber blade cut clean trails across the window, it seemed to Emily he didn’t take his eyes off her face.
“See?” Simon said triumphantly, looking at the pane in front of them. “It needed washing. We couldn’t see before, but now we can.”
Then the boy finished. He walked around the front of the car to Simon’s side. Simon opened his wallet, fished out a bill and folded it lengthwise, holding it between his index and middle fingers. Emily didn’t move. Her hands continued to tremble. She stared forward through the changed windshield, vaguely aware of her husband’s familiar hand holding the creased bill like an elegant origami swan, the dull shine of his wedding band as he passed the money out the window. She felt like she would always remember the expression on the boy’s face. She didn’t turn her head to see him snatch the bill and stow it in a pocket of the puffy vest. When she dared to look again, he had turned his back on the car. Then the light changed, and Simon shifted into gear and continued toward the airport, hitting the button to roll up his window.
“I can’t believe you did that,” she breathed.
“The windows were dirty,” he said with a half-laugh.
“You should have defended me!” she said.
“From what? A squeegee?”
“He scared me.”
“C’mon.” Simon waved her off. “He’s just a kid trying to earn a few bucks. What’s the big deal?”
They slowed in the traffic glutting the lanes of Departing Flights. Simon flipped on his blinker and shifted, angling toward the drop-off point for American Airlines. Long ago, shortly after Caleb died, there had been a dog, a standard poodle, that Simon had wanted to buy from a breeder. He had th
e idea it would be easier to get over the shock of it all if they had something else to love. On the screened-in terrace of the breeder’s house, just as Simon was about to write a check, the puppy had defecated on the rug. It occurred to Emily to inquire how they should go about the process of housetraining. The breeder nodded, and in a single swift motion, grabbed the dog by the back of the neck. The dog straightened its front legs, bracing against the braided rug, rearing back and whimpering in resistance, as the breeder forced its nose directly into the pile of shit. “No other way it’s gonna learn,” the man said. They left the farm with the dog, but without another word. They’d lived with it for six years—its presence replacing nothing, making no amends; it was a dog, after all—until it developed a tumor and had to be put to sleep. But now, sitting in the car, she felt how the force of that breeder’s hand must have felt on the back of its neck, and she felt herself unable to look at Simon. Then she remembered Will. Happily? he had asked, and the word jarred and stung, with painful reverb like a banged funnybone. Happily?
Just then, Jamie leaned forward from the backseat. “You gave him twenty dollars! ” she belted, almost laughing.
“Seat belt, please,” Simon called out. “We haven’t come to a stop.”
“You gave him what?” Emily asked in a voice that still didn’t sound like her own.
“I can’t believe you gave him twenty dollars,” Jamie said again. “Look at that.” She pointed to smudges on the windshield. “He didn’t even do a good job.”
Simon waved them both off. “It was a tip. I was just helping him out. What’s wrong with that?”
Then Emily understood. She understood more than she wanted to, and more than her heart could bear. Simon could help and help, but the helping was sometimes just a distraction, just a fluttering flag to catch your eye, to keep you from noticing anger—yes, anger!—that surged and churned beneath the surface. And you would never be able to address what was underneath because the grandiose gestures of giving made the anger easy to deny. A person could only wait and wonder at all the goodwill, while the rest of the world smiled and approved its various disguises. Happily? It was then that the noise inside her gave out and what followed was a silence, vast and cloudless. She knew before Simon pulled to a stop. Whatever had kept her marriage aloft had begun its slow exhalation, and what was left in her hand was like the string of a deflated balloon.