“Come here,” he said.
She shrugged. Mostly, he was happier here than anywhere else, but she got into these moods. It seemed like there was something specific she wanted him to do, but she wouldn’t tell him what. He looked at her clock: nearly midnight. He’d have to leave at five, which meant tomorrow was another day he’d sleepwalk through school.
“Khamisa, I have to get up in a couple of hours.”
She crossed the room, turned off the light. He heard her take off her jeans and unhook her bra. In the dark, she opened a dresser drawer, took out clothes to sleep in. When she got into bed he tried to embrace her but she turned away, managing—despite the smallness of the bed—to lie without touching him.
“Are you pissed because I said we’d watch the movie with your mom?”
“I’m not pissed.”
“It seemed rude to just come upstairs.”
“I’m not pissed.”
“Fine, you’re not pissed.”
“I’m not.” She was silent a minute, then burst out, “You never even tell me when you’re going to come over. I’m supposed to just wait around.”
This wasn’t how he understood things between them at all. He could feel Khamisa beside him, rigid, arms crossed over her chest, staring at the ceiling. “Right,” he said, rolling away. “Whatever you say.”
He must have fallen partway asleep, because when she kissed him it startled him awake. She rolled over on top of him and he ran his hand down her back, then up under her T-shirt to one of her smooth, heavy breasts. Although he knew they were allowed to do this, he put his hand over her mouth as they made love, so her mother wouldn’t hear.
Four
The drive to the farm took them down to Northampton, then west along the Mass Pike, leafy green, punctuated every twenty miles by a service plaza: always McDonald’s, Boston Market, Dunkin’ Donuts. Twisted toward him in the passenger seat, Jordana used both hands as she talked.
“You know, one good thing that’s come out of all this,” she said. “Angie and I are closer. Not that I want this to have happened, but now that it’s ending. …”
The cello was the instrument that sounded most like the human voice, and to Pieter his wife’s was the human voice that sounded most like the cello, vibrant and rich. In her happiness, she skipped from topic to topic: the clinic, the summer ahead of them, a movie she wanted to see. Had they seen a movie since Angie had gotten sick? He couldn’t remember. Now, at last, their life had doubled back to where they’d been before; they would become themselves again. Jordana’s hands moved together and apart and together, as though cat’s-cradling invisible yarn.
“… So now I’m thinking, why not?”
She paused, clearly waiting for a response. He said, “Why not—?”
“You weren’t listening to me.”
“I was listening. I just—”
“Goddamn it, Pieter. Forget it.”
She undid her seat belt and arched back to reach into her bag, which sat on the floor behind her. The last few weeks she’d almost seemed to be seeking arguments; things she usually didn’t balk at drove her crazy. Pulling Crime and Punishment from her bag, she thumped back into her seat, opened the book, and began to read. Defensive about her intelligence, self-conscious because she hadn’t finished college, she would never read anything that wasn’t recognizably serious.
Pieter held off as long as he could before saying, “Jord—”
She looked at him, brows raised.
“Your seat belt.”
She pulled it over her lap, went back to her book. He envied that she could read in the car. Even checking a map made Pieter carsick, and carsickness flung him back to the Atlantic crossing he’d made when he was six. He could smell the salt and the diesel fumes, feel the unending chop of the sea and the crawly headaches that had accompanied his nausea. After escaping the occupied Netherlands for England—his parents had sent him out and stayed behind—he’d sailed to New York on a ship full of children, mostly British. Miserably homesick, miserably seasick, they abused each other in miniature dramas of dominance and submission. Against the madness of this tiny society, unrelated groups of children formed rough family relationships. A three-year-old girl, Beatrice de Groot, had attached herself to Pieter. He had fed her with a spoon, as though she were a much younger child, a baby. Feeding his own infants, who smiled and babbled and grabbed for his hand, had never moved him in the way he’d been moved at six by Beatrice de Groot, her eyes fixed on his as she let herself be fed.
In Stockbridge, they exited the pike for the smaller roads of western Massachusetts, then eastern New York. Phone lines dipped and rose across the sky. After a time, Jordana looked up from the book, marking her place with a finger, and looked out the window. Although it was late May, there had been snow the night before. Fields clicked by, white, smoothly parted by barbed wire.
* * *
Angie was walking in circles, picking things up from one spot in her room and putting them down someplace else. The carpet was covered with piles of sweaters, papers, mud, glazed and unglazed pots, boots, yarn. An opened-mouthed box held a tangle of dirty laundry.
“You were supposed to pack,” wailed Jordana.
“I am packing.”
Pieter asked, “What time is our meeting with Samara?”
“Things aren’t even sorted,” Jordana said. “What have you been doing?”
Angie looked pleadingly at Pieter.
He said, “The three of us, working together, we can do this in an hour—” Jordana turned and glared at him. He stiffened. “I’m just being pragmatic.”
“Pragmatic,” Jordana said, as though it were something disgusting. He shook his head—he didn’t want to argue in front of Angie—and turned, picking up a box. “Do you have a marker?” he asked his daughter.
“There’s a pen around somewhere.”
They located a ballpoint in a drift of work clothes that were caked with mud and dried manure. He labeled the first box to wash. The writing looked shuddery and skeletal, bumping over the corrugations invisible beneath the cardboard’s skin. Already he felt discouraged.
He’d envisioned this homecoming: They would carry Angie’s boxes to the car, Angie and Jordana chattering. If his wife’s voice was a cello, his daughter’s was usually the lowest, most open notes of the flute, though when excited her voice went to the higher, closed notes. After packing the car, the three of them would meet for a final time with Samara, in her office decorated with lumpy weavings. She would close Angie’s file, stand up, shake their hands. He’d imagined his daughter’s excitement as they pulled into the driveway of their house. In his mind’s eye, she rushed into the kitchen and hugged Luke, who looked embarrassed and pleased.
As he packed, Pieter tried to sort and throw out and fold. Jordana didn’t fold but at least she sorted. Angie just threw things at bags, sometimes missing, tapes and clothing and papers all crumpled together. He found on the floor one of the activities calendars that showed the farm’s schedule of town trips and hikes and contra dances, classes on yogurt making and beekeeping and spinning wool into yarn. The farm seemed to him a huge overreaction to Angie’s breakdown, but the calendar made him feel the weird hollowness of loss. Angie could at least have taken advantage of more there.
“Did you learn to spin?” he asked.
“I learned to knit.” Angie gestured toward a heap of brown yarn.
“It might have been interesting. Spinning.”
“Might have been.”
There was a knock on the doorframe. A tall boy stood there, very thin, red hair, red face. He lowered the headphones of his Walkman so that they hung around his neck. The music was turned up loudly enough that Pieter could make out isolated words: instruct … monkey … rocket.
“You packing?” the boy asked Angie. He jittered from foot to foot. “That’s cool, that’s cool.” He threw a few punches in the air. “Bam. Bam.”
Angie got up unsteadily, then stumbled. “Shit, my foot�
�s asleep. These are my parents. This is Tim.”
Tim nodded hello, threw another punch. “Bam. My parents tried to poison me. Bam. Bam.”
Jordana threw Pieter a startled look. He was used to her knowing what to say, but it was Angie who seemed unfazed. “Are you going on Town Trip?” she asked.
“Yeah. You?”
“No, I’m leaving.”
“That’s right. That’s right. You’re leaving. That’s right, you’re leaving.”
Angie talked easily with Tim, diverting him back to concrete topics when the conversation began to veer off. She seemed deliberately not to look at Pieter or Jordana, though Pieter could sense her awareness of them, the unnaturalness of not looking around as she spoke. She was demonstrating something, but he wasn’t sure whether it was that she belonged to the world of the farm or transcended it, whether she was rebuffing or reassuring them. He wondered if she knew.
“So,” Pieter tried, when there was a break in the conversation. “Where are you from, Tim?”
“Everyone knows where I’m from. Carlisle, Pennsylvania.”
“How far is that from Philadelphia?”
“You don’t have to talk slow, Dad. He’s not retarded.” Angie went out onto the porch with Tim so he could smoke.
They’d planned to leave the farm by two in the afternoon, but it was nearly seven when they finished. By the end, they were packing things that they would have thrown out earlier in the day, just to be done. Their daughter squeezed into the backseat with the boxes and plastic garbage bags of her belongings. Jordana drove, the car bumping down the dirt road from the farm, through eastern New York and onto the Mass Pike, lined with darkening trees. At least, now that they were finally on their way, Jordana was calmer. Her hand, when she didn’t need it to shift, rested on his knee.
Glancing into the rearview mirror, she asked Angie, “What do you want to do first when you get home? What’s the very first thing?”
“I don’t know. You keep asking me that.”
He could see Jordana was trying to be quiet. After a few minutes, though, she said, “Maybe we could go to the Lobster Shack. To celebrate.”
Angie shrugged, turned toward the window.
“Or ice cream.”
He revised his fantasy of the homecoming. Angie was probably not going to embrace Luke so enthusiastically that his feet lifted off the ground—but in a few days she would be used to her family again, less worried, adjusting back to her old life. Her plan was to swim this summer, as always, and then retake her senior year at Applefield. He and Jordana had suggested that she go to a different school, that she give herself a break from competitive swimming. She was adamant, though, that everything be the same, and he found himself relieved by this, her surety that she could pick up where she’d left off.
They were passing farms now; the rich brown smell filled the car. Pieter turned on the radio, searching until he found a news station. A muffled thump came from the backseat, as though something in the pile of Angie’s things had shifted and settled.
Pieter turned just as there was a second thump. Angie swung her head toward him, then back into the window. “Angie?” Jordana said, then, “Stop. Angie, stop.” Angie’s temple hit against the glass twice more, a dull, regular thud, before Pieter grabbed her, digging his fingers into her knee.
“You can’t,” he said.
Angie stared back at him. Then her body relaxed and she looked away, giving in.
“Angie, God, you can’t do that,” Jordana said. Pieter shook his head and she caught herself, closing her mouth.
By the time they reached the pike, Angie had fallen asleep, her cheek against the black plastic of one of the garbage bags holding her clothes.
He let go of Angie’s knee and they drove in silence, leaving the pike at Northampton for 91, then taking the exit for 121. They passed the art school and New Hampshire State’s Cort campus, then Jordana’s clinic; they reached the railroad tracks just as the gate arm lowered, clanging.
Boxcars flashed by. On trains, Pieter had sometimes had the illusion that the landscape was moving slowly backward while he stayed still. Now he had the same experience in reverse: For a moment he didn’t know whether it was the train moving or their car, sliding away beneath him.
His shoulders hurt from twisting toward Angie, and he slid low so he could lean them back against the seat. “What are we going to do?” Jordana asked.
“It’s okay. She was. … They said she’d be anxious.”
When he looked at his wife’s profile, he saw it from below, her strong jaw, the flare of her nostrils. To his surprise, she laughed—a loose, unhappy sound.
Five
Back from the farm two weeks, Angie went to the first Summer League practice but made it only as far as a changing stall in the locker room because she was shaking so hard she felt she might throw up. The stall had a plastic shower curtain, patterned with bikinied fish, that shielded it from the room. From outside she could hear, dimly, splashing and the shrill of a whistle. Pawing through her bag she found her new lighter, nearly dropping it, and lit an absolutely prohibited-within-fifty-yards-of-the-pool-house cigarette.
Deep inhalations of smoke calmed her enough that she could sit. The coach called, Gather round! By the time a mother and, from the sound of it, two toddlers came into the locker room, Angie had the presence of mind to stub out the cigarette, pushing it down the metal floor drain. She pulled herself into the corner of the changing stall, knees to chest, head down. Her breath sounded very loud. It was 8 A.M. and still cold.
“Do you need to go wet-wet?” the mother asked. “Go wet-wet while I put on Julia’s suit.”
“I don’t need to.”
“Will you just try? Try sitting on the toi-toi.” In a lower voice she muttered, “Smells like an ashtray in here.”
At last she got both kids into their suits, got all their belongings gathered up, and sailed out toward the wading pool. Angie, alone again, picked at the bench’s varnish, which was peeling in brittle yellow curls.
Summer teams—made up of any kids who belonged to the local pools—were low-key, much less competitive than the winter high school league. She’d always loved summer practices, especially the morning ones, the misty cold, almost no one else at the pool, wispy silver vapor lifting off the surface of the water.
Midway through practice, someone came into the locker room. Angie pulled her knees more tightly to her chest.
“Ange, I know you’re here.” Jess. She walked over to Angie’s cubicle. “Luke said you came together.”
Water dripped from Jess’s suit onto the turquoise-blue tiles at her feet. Angie said, “Since when have you had a toe ring?”
“Can I come in?” Jess waited a second, then pushed aside the curtain and scooted into the cubicle, sitting on the wood bench next to Angie. She wore a green bathing suit over an orange one. Angie had on two suits as well: it increased drag in the water, as did letting her leg hair grow out between meets. Not that she particularly needed increased drag, since she still had ten pounds of lithium weight.
Jess worked her hands under her butt, sitting on them. She looked at the curtained door of the stall. “Luke asked me to find you. I didn’t even know you were back.”
“It’s just been a few days,” Angie said, also looking ahead at the curtain.
“It’s not like I’m your best friend or anything.”
“You are. I just—”
“Just what?”
“I don’t know,” Angie said miserably.
From outside came the noises of splashing, the coach’s whistle.
“You’re going to get in trouble,” Angie said. “You should go back.”
Jess shrugged. “I’ll say I got my period.”
They sat side by side, Jess swinging her legs, Angie still hunched into a ball.
“Your period? Really?”
“Jerry will turn, like, bright red and start waving me away. Do you want to hear about graduation?”
She said that graduation had been so hot that one person fainted crossing the outdoor stage. Because of the heat, and because they were drunk off their asses, some of the boys hadn’t worn anything under their gowns; after receiving his diploma, Avi Goldman had turned and mooned the audience. There had been a party out at the radio towers, and the cops found them but looked the other way.
“I’m sorry,” Angie burst out.
“It’s okay. It’s not like you’re doing it on purpose or anything.”
The words soaked her with relief. Until Jess said it, Angie hadn’t even known what she dreaded: that people thought she was being an asshole, that she was being an asshole. “Luke really asked me to find you? I mean, asked you to find me?”
Jess nodded. She stood, running a finger under the edge of her suits’ leg holes, pulling them down. “There’s only so long I can pretend to be dealing with my period. Are you coming?”
“It’s too obvious,” Angie said. “I’ll come to this afternoon’s.”
“I’ll pick you up at your house.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I know I don’t have to do that.”
Afternoon: the white concrete apron of the pool hot beneath her feet; pool a surreal blue. Jess walked beside her, for which Angie was grateful. She wished she could talk to Jess, seem truly like this was no big deal, but her heart beat too fast. Mothers read heavy novels from the library, looking up occasionally to shout warnings. On vinyl-webbed lawn chairs, girls and a few boys sunned themselves, the glib smell of Hawaiian Tropic rising off their warmed skin. Two little girls just finished with the twelve-and-under practice lay on the edge of the pool, arms tight to their sides, trying to soak up the concrete’s warmth. They had poochy little stomachs, like porpoises, and their teeth were chattering, but they were also clearly enjoying the heat after an hour in the pool, clearly enjoying the grown-upness of having suffered, especially now that it was over. They were pale; by fall they would be the same brown as the leaves.
The coach, Jerry, was a college kid with a stupid goatee. He looked like he was going to say something to Angie about this morning’s missed practice, then quickly shut his mouth and concentrated on his clipboard. People were looking at her. She began to feel light-headed, as though her cheeks were hollow, as though her elbows and knees were made of glass. When she got to the edge of the pool, she dove in quickly. The shock of wet and of cold. She broke through the water, down toward the pool bottom with its squiggling white reflections of light, its thick black lane markings.
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