That night, though, Jordana had followed Pieter into the library to choose more records, shaking with—adoration? disappointment? She stood behind him as he looked at the spines of her father’s record collection.
Pieter turned, about to speak. He might have been about to suggest a piece of music; he might have been about to say something about her father’s behavior. She couldn’t have stood either.
“I love you,” she blurted. “I’ve loved you forever.” She kissed his astonished mouth.
It had always been that Pieter couldn’t sleep and she could, that she wanted to be held when they slept and he felt too hot. Now, though, he slept beside her, arm draping her hip.
Had she really ended things with Ben? She couldn’t stand lying still like this, thoughts racing. As gently as possible, she freed herself from Pieter, finding clothes by feel on the floor of the room.
Downstairs, she checked the back door. She had forgotten to lock it after all.
It felt like if she could be with Ben for five minutes, she’d be all right. Putting her hands to her head, she walked blindly through the rooms. It was just after midnight. She could call Ben, apologize; then she would be done with that. She rushed to the phone, dialed the number. Ben’s deep voice answered on the second ring. She hung up, hands shaking. She moved to the sink, pressed her forehead to the window above. The glass was cold. “Okay,” she said out loud. “Okay, okay.”
She shook out her hands. Listing stacks of dirty dishes filled the sink. Taking a steadying breath, she reached for the soap and squirted it over the dishes, ran hot water, then gripped the edge of the sink and wept. It was almost soundless, eyes closed and mouth stretched into a grimace, a dry chugging of air in her throat. She gasped, trying to stop, then bit her lip as hard as she could.
Her friend Letty had left a husband of fifteen years for a man she’d known three months. I’d given up on finding my soul mate, Letty had told Jordana, and then I met him. I think—I think the universe would be angry if I turned my back on this.
Jordana hated Letty’s desire to believe she had no choice. In her mind she always called her own relationship by its ugly name, affair, not allowing herself to call it falling in love. She felt the draw of blaming fate, but her life was dishonest enough as it was. If she was falling in love with Ben, it was not because it had to happen but because she had allowed it to happen. It was a betrayal, and shitty, and the worst possible timing, but she had let it happen.
Fishing an envelope out of the trash, she scrawled on the back that she couldn’t sleep and was going to Papa Toby’s to read. Back soon.
She grabbed her book and her wallet, then let herself quietly out the front door. Frozen grass crunched softly under her feet. Something moved under the big oak.
The girl stood up from the lawn and then squatted, bouncing, probably to uncramp her legs. Standing again, she reached down for something, hefted it to her shoulder. A bookbag. She didn’t seem to hear Jordana’s approach.
“What are you doing?”
The girl jumped and gave a cry, quickly covering her mouth.
Jordana asked, “What do you think could possibly come of standing on our lawn?”
The girl closed her mouth and raised her chin, as though Jordana weren’t there. She moved left. Jordana moved too, blocking her. The girl ducked right; Jordana reached out and grabbed her wrist hard, pulling it up.
They stared at each other for a moment. Then Jordana felt the absurdity of it and let go. The girl pulled her arm to her chest, making a show of rubbing the wrist.
“Where do your parents think you are, all these nights?”
She stiffened. “Just my mom. She’s fine with it.”
“I’m not going to call her.” It struck her that most adults would have done exactly this. Somehow, she had never made that transition fully away from identifying with the children to identifying with the parents. But why had Pieter not called? As soon as the question formed in her mind, the answer formed alongside it: He didn’t like messiness.
The girl’s glance slid away and, following her gaze, Jordana twisted around. Luke had just come into his room. He pulled off his sweater, moved out of the frame of the window. A moment later he reappeared, shirtless, brushing his teeth. He crossed in front of the window and Jordana drew back.
“He can’t see you,” the girl said disdainfully.
Luke bent one elbow, drawing it straight up over his head, a stretch, and then bent the other up and back. For all that he acted annoyed by the girl’s presence, he was playing to her.
The girl said, “I tell her I’m going to a friend’s house.”
Late at night, the traffic lights in Cort flashed yellow. The roads were nearly empty. Turning left onto York, Jordana descended the long hill toward the highway. An oil truck passed in the other direction, gears grinding as it lumbered uphill. She imagined being someone who was up every night this late, a truck driver or maybe a security guard, someone for whom darkness was just a condition of work. It was very cold, stars blistering the sky, and the dark seemed full of mysterious promise.
She was underdressed again. Ben’s apartment complex was in western Cort, down Route 121. By halfway there she was shivering, driving with one hand, the other beneath her thigh for warmth. She passed the clinic and the bread factory; its sign was broken, so that instead of GOOD BREAD it just blinked GOOD.
It was only when Jordana was out of the car, up the stairs, and standing outside Ben’s apartment door that the wild energy pushing her there dissipated. He might not even be awake still. And if he was awake, what did she think would happen? Had she been thinking at all? It was nearly one in the morning. She’d shown up in the middle of the night a few times before, but they hadn’t been fighting then. What if he’d seen his date again tonight? She could be there, sleeping next to him.
Now she was terrified Ben would wake. She moved down the stairs quickly. Reaching the parking lot, she saw that she’d left the car’s headlights on. She got in, turning off the lights, and sat still for a few minutes, looking at the dark building in front of her.
She drove halfway home, then made an illegal U-turn and drove back toward Ben’s. When he opened his door, she said, “I’ve spent the last hour trying to get here.”
“What time is it?” His hair stood up all over his head. “What are you doing here?”
“I was horrible yesterday.”
“The First Fight,” he said, in a deep sports-announcer voice. He held out his arms, and she felt gratitude slide down through her as she moved into them. “The First Reconciliation.”
“How was your date?” she asked, muffled against his shirt.
“Boring.”
She was letting something shift between them, letting something be settled: She would be the impetuous one, given to blurting and scenes, and he would be the one whose affection for her triumphed over his exasperation.
“What I think of this—it’s not what you said before.” She couldn’t bring herself to say fuck-fix. “That’s not what this means to me.”
“I know that. Not me, either.”
“I’m completely crazy about you.”
What was she doing? Why couldn’t she leave well enough alone? And yet she felt only relief and something like deliverance as she pulled herself more tightly against him, as he said her name. He thrust both hands deep into her hair, putting his head down on her shoulder, the world around them dark and sleeping on.
It began raining in the night. By four-thirty, when Jordana said goodbye to Ben at his front door, it was pouring. She felt so happy that dashing to the car only relieved a fraction of her energy.
She couldn’t walk into the house grinning like this. It was not only Pieter but also Luke she might run into. Being only a good, not brilliant, swimmer had never seemed to bother him, but in the last six months he’d suddenly added long morning runs to his workout, coming back just in time to change clothes and leave again for practice.
She turned on the radio: T
he Cars, singing about the fineness of a best friend’s girlfriend.
And she held on to happiness, not allowing it to fade out even though the road was filled with water and the drive took too long, held on to it by force of will. She passed the clinic and the bread factory, its sign blinking GOOD, GOOD, GOOD. When she pulled up to the curb and turned off the engine, it was a shock to see the stoic brick of her house unchanged, lights shining warmly in the windows. Pieter must already be up. A lighthouse she thought: a house filled with light.
It was raining harder now. Jordana ran toward the house, slipping a little on the wet lawn.
Halfway to the kitchen door, she was stopped by her view of Pieter, bending over the dishes she’d left in the sink. Light, tarnished by rain, shone a little way out onto the lawn. His thin face seemed heavy. Standing in her front yard, beyond the patch of light silvering the wet grass, Jordana felt longing rise in her throat. The scene was so worn and domestic that it seemed there must be a wife just outside Jordana’s vision—that from here Jordana might see that other self rise, touching her husband’s shoulder as she crossed the room to lock the back door.
Eleven
Pieter, waking at one-thirty, found Jordana gone. She’d never dealt calmly with insomnia. Frustrated to the point of anger by even twenty minutes’ sleeplessness, she would jump out of bed, pull on clothes, and drive to the diner, where she could be around other people who were also awake. Since Angie’s homecoming, her sleeplessness had become more frequent. The next day, she would seem energized, almost manic, shadows under her eyes dark as bruises.
In the kitchen he put water on to boil, found carrots in the fridge, cut off the tops. Putting back the carrots themselves, he washed the feathery leaves—wet, they were as dark and silky as seaweed—and curled them into the bottom of the teapot. Bean came and wove around his legs, and he leaned down to lift her. He stroked her, feeling the round bones of her skull beneath the fur, saying, “Yes, you’re a good cat. Yes, you’re a very good cat.” She hooked her head under Pieter’s arm, purring. Last year, when he’d remembered in the midst of Angie’s hospital intake to tell Jordana about Bean, she’d looked at him blankly and said, “A cat?” as though she wasn’t sure what the word meant. Those first days and weeks, they’d operated in such a state of emergency that they’d just absorbed the cat into their lives. Now, though, he liked having her. Holding her with his left arm, he moved to the refrigerator, opened the milk carton with one hand. They still hadn’t fixed the fridge thermostat, and slushy chips of ice ticked together as he poured the milk into Bean’s bowl. She leapt lightly down from his arms.
The air in the house felt thin. Ever since childhood, he’d been able to tell by feel if there were other people in the house, but tonight—even though he’d heard Luke come home hours ago—Pieter felt alone. The oddness of having both his wife and his daughter gone in the middle of the night must be throwing his sensitivity off. When the water boiled, Pieter poured it over the carrot leaves, added honey and a few drops of orange juice, then carried the pot into the dark living room.
Two in the morning. He put on a recording of Baroque Flemish songs, turned down low, and wished Jordana were there. If she were awake they could sit together companionably; if she were asleep, he’d know that eventually he’d be returning to the warmth of her body in bed.
At the same time, he loved that she was impulsive and restless, that she was so different from him. On the night more than twenty years before, when Jordana had kissed him in her father’s library, he’d pushed her away. After, he’d still thought of her as a little girl. But he no longer teased her; she no longer perched on the arm of his chair while he played chess with her father. Eventually, they almost didn’t speak to each other at all. That went on for some months until one day—he’d just come into the apartment and said hello to her—Jordana turned and threw her coffee cup at him. The cup struck his chest and fell, shattering on the parquet floor. Jordana, stricken, wheeled and ran down the hall. Kneeling down awkwardly to gather the thin white shards, Pieter had thought, I’ve never done one unpremeditated thing. It stunned him.
Now he stood at the living room’s dark bay window, sipping from his cup. Carrot tea was a remnant of his childhood, something his mother had drunk during the war and had continued—why?—to drink after she emigrated. It tasted sweet and grassy, run through with the faint metallic note of dirt. He could feel nostalgic, drinking it, because he hadn’t nearly starved, as his mother had. Pieter drank two cups, washed out the pot, climbed the stairs to bed.
* * *
An hour later, he startled, sitting straight up, not knowing what had awoken him. An enormous white rabbit loomed over him, and he said Jesus Christ, and then the phone rang again and the rabbit dissolved into the light cast by the streetlamp outside.
He felt toward Jordana’s side of the bed, still empty. Another ring. He fumbled in the dark through two more rings before finding the phone. He said into the receiver, “A moment,” then held it against his chest, trying to quiet his breathing. And then another alarm rolled through him. The phone call meant something seriously wrong.
It was Abe. Angie had gone out and not come back. He’d been out searching for two hours.
Oh, God, Pieter thought.
He told Abe they were on their way and hung up. But maybe it was better to stay here. By the time they got to Harvard, Angie might be long since returned. Or what if they didn’t go down, and two hours from now she was still gone, and they might have been there by then? He could go down and Jordana stay here, or vice versa. He couldn’t think; his mind kept jamming.
Downstairs, he pulled out the White Pages and found the number for Papa Toby’s. The cashier who answered put the phone down briefly—faintly, the ephemera of a restaurant came over the line, chatting, a cook calling, “Order up!”—and then returned to say there was no tall dark-haired woman there alone.
Jordana was already on her way home, then; it wouldn’t take more than ten minutes.
He started upstairs to wake Luke. But if they didn’t drive to Cambridge, there was no reason for Luke to be awake. He hesitated, mid-staircase, torn between not wanting to wake his son and not wanting to be alone. Jordana would be home soon. He turned and went back to the kitchen, put the kettle on. Angie and Abe might have had a fight, she might have stormed off; it would be ridiculous for her parents to show up. Jordana would know what to do. The kettle boiled and he turned off the stove but didn’t pour the water. He paced the dark first-floor rooms, picking things up and putting them down, starting upstairs and then coming back down. Twenty minutes. Twenty-five. He picked up the phone, began to dial Papa Toby’s, hung up.
Thirty minutes.
He could be almost to Manchester by now.
He dialed the diner to ask how long ago Jordana had left. This time the cashier sounded annoyed. She put the phone down and called, “Sue? It’s that guy who’s lost his wife.”
Another woman came on the line. He began to describe his wife; the waitress cut him off. “Are you talking about Jordana?”
Of course his wife would have talked to the waitresses. She said, “I haven’t seen Jordana in … I don’t know. Weeks.”
Heart knocking, he made for the stairs, beginning halfway up to run. He banged hard on Luke’s bedroom door, though the weightlessness of the air—he should have trusted himself—said his son wasn’t there. He tried the knob. Locked. Going to the linen closet, he ran his hand under the stack of towels, feeling for the skeleton key, knowing it would be gone and at the same time so able to imagine its flat, crooked shape that he could almost feel it beneath his fingers. He pulled the towels off the shelf to be sure: only the ancient shelf paper, a design of little girls rolling hoops. He ran back to Luke’s door, banged again, rammed his shoulder into the wood, then backed up and ran at it. The door shivered in its frame. He ran at it again. On his third try, a muscle in his back twisted and ripped just as the lock gave.
The room was still, dark, peaceful, Piete
r’s ragged breath the only sound. He leaned against the doorframe, back flashing with pain.
Where was his family?
Flipping the light switch, the room’s dim shapes leapt into focus. A tap came at the side of the house, then another. Rain. In the evidence of Luke’s escape—empty bed, the open window, the slick black branches outside—Pieter understood that his wife was with someone else.
Jordana’s closet revealed nothing, nor did her bedside table with its stacks of books and notepads. He opened the top drawer of her dresser, which held boxes of jewelry she never wore, handed down from her mother and grandmother. Nothing, and nothing in the T-shirt drawer or the drawer that held jeans. The air in the room was so thin his heart beat crazily. He sat at the edge of the bed. Rain gusted against the side of the house.
From downstairs came the softest click of a key being fitted into the lock. Pieter went to the head of the stairs, turning on the hall light.
Below, Luke was just closing the door behind him. His hair and sweat-clothes were soaked with rain. Blinking, he turned.
Pieter started down the stairs. The pain in his back flared.
Luke looked uneasy, as though he thought he might be in trouble but was going to brazen it out. Water dripped onto the carpet at his feet, darkening it. “Why are all the lights on?”
The hum of the wheels over highway. The car’s heater was on high. Lying on the backseat, Pieter felt every bump; he closed his eyes and tried to still his breath.
They’d driven an hour. He could almost feel normal, but it was like being poised on the crest of a terrible wave. Each crash down was terrible, but weirdly a relief. Jordana’s upper arm had the asterisk of a polio vaccination scar. Someone else had touched that scar, even kissed it. He wanted to put his fist through the window. The smash of glass, his wife screaming.
Halfway House Page 13