Halfway House

by Katharine Noel

  As soon as he imagined the act, there was no longer a possibility of doing it; it would be self-conscious now, theatrical, ridiculous. Laboriously, he turned over to face the front of the car. The pain in his back had receded to a kind of glittering buzz. Moving stirred it up, a hive of bees.

  “Were you ever reading?” Pieter asked. “Any of those nights you were gone?”

  He thought she was ignoring him, but then she said quietly, “I can’t believe—it’s like I went crazy or—”

  He reared up. “Don’t. Don’t talk to me. I don’t want to hear you.”

  She gripped the steering wheel, shaking it. Slowly, stopping when it hurt too badly, he rolled from his side flat onto his back, putting both feet on the seat, knees bent. The rainstorm had stopped, or they’d driven through it. Telephone lines stitched the hazy sky. His wife’s wet hair stuck to her skull. In a gesture he had seen thousands upon thousands of times, she lifted the back of her hand to rub her eyes, tiredly.

  “I don’t know if I can live with you anymore,” he said.

  She wilted. “Don’t say that. Please, Pieter.”

  He felt oddly clear and calm, as if he’d been climbing a forested mountain and had suddenly emerged to the barren rock, thin air, and long views above the tree line. More than clear and calm: disdainful.

  “Please take it back,” she said.

  Savoring the words: “I don’t think I can live with you.”

  Abe waited on the steps of his dorm. They’d made it to Cambridge in an hour and a half, some kind of record. Seven in the morning, darkness just beginning to pull back and soften.

  Abe was talking before they reached him: “—campus police. Or supposedly. They’re ‘keeping an eye out on their rounds.’ My roommate’s still out looking. I came back to meet you.” He wore a wool turtleneck and a backward baseball cap, and Pieter felt some of his animosity shift onto Abe.

  “I’ve been all over campus. She was so—I should have stopped her. I keep trying to think where—there’s nowhere to go.”

  Pieter knew that now Jordana would step forward and hug Abe, say it wasn’t his fault. She didn’t move, though. Turning away sent a spasm of pain across his back. He jerked and stood motionless, grimacing. Jordana reached toward him.

  “Leave me alone. I’m fine.”

  “You’re in agony,” she said.

  “Leave me alone!”

  Abe said, “And what if someone … if something happened. There are lots of places she shouldn’t be, and it’s been hours now, hours and hours. Last month, there was a girl jogging by the river—”

  “Stop it,” Jordana said. “We’re going to find her.” She was the woman Pieter knew again.

  To Abe, Pieter said, “We should have been here earlier. Getting here so late, it’s unpardonable.”

  “Why didn’t you leave without me, then?” Jordana didn’t look at him.

  Jordana had the flashlight from the car. They decided she would go north, Abe east; the roommate had apparently gone toward the river. Pieter stayed behind, in case Angie returned to the dorm.

  He sat on the cold stone steps, which immediately chilled him. Wrapping his arms around his torso, he rocked forward, conserving body heat. Jordana had a habit of running her thumb over his cheekbone—after sex in particular, but also when they just lay in bed, or looked up at the same moment from newspapers, or waited for their food in a diner. He thought of that gesture as theirs. But of course, it was hers. He heard himself make a strangled noise, part sob, part gasp. Putting his head down on his knees, he struggled not to let himself go. He bit the inside of his cheek until he tasted blood. Getting here so late is unpardonable. How stiff he’d sounded, how formal and absurd.

  Getting here so late is unpardonable. He jumped up and began to pace around the building. When he put weight on his right foot, pain zinged through his back. He had to go up on his toes, which made his walk a stumble: a heavy stride with the left foot and then a quick, high step with the right. He lurched around the building. Stupid, he should have just sat. But when he reached his place on the steps and sank down, his thoughts rose, smashing and grinding and he jumped up again. He realized he was speaking: “No. No.”

  When he rounded the building the third or fourth time, a wide cloaked figure was lurching toward him from the other end of the quad.

  Pieter wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. The figure limped, holding something beneath its arm. Nearer, the person resolved itself into two: a boy he’d never seen before—the roommate?—and Angie, both of them wrapped in an enormous cloak.

  Pieter went cold. He had forgotten his daughter.

  Her eyes appeared to be closed, and she was stumbling a little. The shaggy boy held her up, half dragging her. Pieter couldn’t move. A bird swayed on Angie’s shoulder, its feathers a dull greenish-black. It appeared to be anchored to the cloak; when Angie and the boy moved forward it swung down, as though nipping at her, and then reared back, curved black beak glittering in the weak winter sun.

  Twelve

  Luke had bought records at Stars, and, walking the mile home from downtown to his house, his bad mood of the last weeks softened for a moment. He liked the way winter afternoons turned dark and cold, wind scudding across the ground, lifting small cyclones of snow. He liked the knock of the bag against his knee; he liked the decorations still up on the houses and the way the snow reflected the colors of flashing lights. He had to get through dinner at home, but tonight there would be a New Year’s party out at the Burnt House. Luke stuck to the side of the road. Cars passed him; an Indian man in a white turban fought to keep his old black bicycle upright against the wind.

  At home, his dad met him in the hallway, holding the phone message pad. He said, “Cole, Warren, Khamisa, Khamisa.”

  “Okay.” The bad mood was instantly back, a tightness in his chest and behind his eyes.

  The front hallway was dark. His dad, in his old-man cardigan with leather elbow patches, seemed to be waiting for more.

  The night six weeks ago when his father had come downstairs with that haunted, accusatory look, Luke had thought condoms, pot—maybe he’d forgotten to lock his bedroom door, and his father had found something incriminating there. But his dad had just said, “I thought you were your mother.”

  “Mom’s not here?”

  “That,” said his father, “is something of an understatement.”

  Upstairs, he’d found his bedroom door hanging from one hinge, like an arm dislocated from its socket. The window was still open, and rain blew into the room. There were puddles of water on the desk. He closed the window—carpet squelching under his shoes—and went to bed. Downstairs, he heard his father in the kitchen. Headlights flared across the hall ceiling as his mother’s car pulled to the curb, and he put his pillow over his head. He didn’t want to hear.

  Hours and hours later, he woke to find his room hot, bright with afternoon sun. His father stood in the doorway, screwdriver in hand, fixing the hinge on the door. Luke sat up, pushing off the too-hot covers.

  “Angie’s sleeping in her room. There, that should hold.”

  “She’s home?”

  His father gave a funny little salute and bent to put his screwdriver back in the toolbox.

  Nothing more had been said about his sneaking out by either of his parents. After a week or so, Luke started going out again, more often than before. He stopped waiting for his parents to go to bed: he went into his room, locked the door, and went straight over to the window and down the tree. Sometimes he went to Khamisa’s house; other times Cole would be waiting for him at the end of the street in his old Volvo. They’d get stoned out at the radio towers or they went to Paisano’s Pizza, where the waitresses didn’t card. Sometimes they just drove around.

  His father held out the sheet of phone messages. Luke took it, jamming the paper into the front pocket of his jeans. For something to say, he asked, “Is Angie home?”

  “Working on her college applications.” Angie had been working
on applications for two months. Out of nowhere, his father said, “Last night of Nutcracker!”

  “I guess.” His dad hated December, when the orchestra did six Nutcracker performances a week, but what was Luke supposed to say about it? He ducked around his father and went upstairs. At the top, he knocked on his sister’s door. “Ange?” When she didn’t answer, he pushed the door open.

  She was halfway out of bed, headed for the desk, but when she saw it was just him she lay back down. She still had on that sweatshirt, the stained gray one she’d gotten at Yale two summers ago, and her hair looked as though she hadn’t washed it in a few days.

  “That sweatshirt’s gross.”

  “You could knock.”

  “You could close the window. It’s freezing.” He crossed the room to push the frame shut, then turned and leaned against it. “I did knock.” Some papers had blown onto the floor. Leaning to gather them up, he saw a raised blue crest, a raised maroon crest. There were the beginnings of essays on stray pieces of paper, but the applications themselves were blank. Who is the person, alive or dead, you’d most like to meet? A few pages later, What would you say is your “moral code”?

  “There’s nothing on these.”

  “Jesus, Luke, leave it alone.”

  He put his record bag down on the desk and moved to perch on the edge of her bed. It made him nervous. Her body gave off a murky, pinching smell, like frying onions. “Ange, how’re you going to finish this?”

  She buried her face in the pillow. Along her part were thick flakes of skin. Not thinking, he started to brush one away, then pulled his hand back and stood up. They didn’t just touch each other.

  “Do Mom and Dad know?”

  Her head jerked up. “Don’t tell them!”

  He shrugged, annoyed; he didn’t tell his parents anything.

  “I mean it. Don’t tell them.”

  “Fine.”

  “The essays are done. I just need to copy them over onto the forms.”

  “I said fine.”

  Angie put her head back down on the pillow.

  Clothing was heaped all over the room. He bent and gathered up an armful, carried it to the closet. Balled up with the sweatpants and flannel shirts were two sweaters he’d never seen, tags still attached to the cuffs, and her prom dress from two years ago, its blue taffeta creased and wrinkled. He crouched to reach under the desk, where there were T-shirts, shoes, a pair of underpants with a smear of blood at the crotch. Embarrassed, he jammed the underwear into the middle of the pile. When he’d dumped all the clothes on the floor of the closet and shut the door—this was how he cleaned his own room—everything looked better. He took the books and cups off the desk, arranged the college applications in a stack.

  “Here,” he said, coaxingly. “All’s you have to do is fill in the blanks.” He held the pen out, waving it a little, the way you’d try to interest a baby in a toy.

  “I’ll do it.” She turned to the wall. “Just go away, Luke.”

  Jordana dressed in a flowered dress she’d worn when pregnant, a white apron, a cameo pin. Her friend Beth, and Beth’s husband, Stephen, were having a costume party—a Masquerade Ball, they called it, to make it sound New Yearsy—and she and Pieter were going as the American Gothic painting. Pieter had left already for his performance, taking his costume with him, and would meet her at the party later.

  Since that first night, he’d brought her affair up only a few times. Once, sitting in the kitchen, he’d asked suddenly, “It’s over now?”

  In her nervousness and relief, she dropped the toast she was buttering. She crouched down to retrieve it from under the table. She’d spent so many hours thinking what she would say that now all the sentences logjammed in her head. “I love you so—”

  “Stop.” He stood, eyes narrowed. “It’s bad enough that it happened.”

  Another time, they were lying in bed—she’d thought he was asleep. “If it had just happened once,” he said suddenly. “If you’d been drunk. …”

  She waited for him to go on. Instead, he threw back the covers, got out of bed.

  “Pieter. Wait, don’t go.”

  He left the room. A few minutes later, the faint strains of Bach rose from downstairs.

  He did that, just took himself away. Every few days, he might let a few words slip, a conversation come unstrung. She could have better withstood anger, accusation. If she pressed, though, Pieter would only retreat further. One morning, she’d come upon him in the living room, looking through pictures from when Angie was a baby. “Pieter?” she’d said.

  He looked up with his mouth agape, as if he didn’t recognize her. Then he pulled his knees up to his chest and began to cry, gaspingly, rocking forward.

  “Pieter—” She’d rushed forward and he lifted his face, which was twisted and wet.

  “Get away!” he bellowed.

  These six weeks, she’d done any conciliatory thing she could think of. She didn’t spend too much time with Beth, or alone, or even reading on the living room couch. She took Angie to doctors’ appointments. She made dinner, shopped, did laundry, picked up her clothes instead of letting them fall where they might.

  Pulling her hair back into a bun, she went into the bathroom. She was a mess. She tried slicking her hair back with water, but it was too kinky, and when she passed a mirror a few minutes later she saw that she had a fuzzy penumbra around her head. Glad of the excuse, she went and knocked on Angie’s door.

  Scuttling noises. “Angie?” Jordana said. She knocked again, waited a moment, then pushed open the door. Angie sat at the desk, forehead in one hand, pen in the other, hard at work.

  “Do you have hair spray or something?” Jordana asked.

  Hand still on her forehead, Angie turned to look incredulously over her shoulder. She’d been holed up for three days, finishing her college applications. She didn’t look like she’d even showered or changed clothes. “Mom, I’m working?”

  “I just wanted to see if you had something. …” Jordana suddenly felt embarrassed, slightly pathetic, for having wanted so badly to see her daughter. Trying to maintain authority, she said, “What was all that noise, anyway?” She twisted the doorknob back and forth. “You’re sure you don’t want me to read them? Even proofread them?”

  “I told you I’d tell you if I needed anything. I’m fine.”

  This fall, had she missed signs that Angie needed more help? Had they been too eager to believe Angie was stable? Worst of all, had the affair kept Jordana from paying enough attention? But then what was Pieter’s excuse?

  Angie had already turned back to her applications. Jordana said, “Okay, then. I guess I’m going.”

  Her daughter wrote something carefully.

  “I guess I’ll see you later, then.” Leave, she told herself. She made herself step back, pulling the door closed—but slowly, in case Angie called her back.

  Angie lay down on the bed. She was cold but she didn’t have the energy to pull the covers up.

  Dr. Tepper had asked some questions about Cambridge, muttered “Mixed-state,” and wrote something on his prescription pad. “This is an antipsychotic,” he ripped off the slip of paper, holding it out toward her. “A very low dosage to start.”

  She put her hands behind her back. “I can’t take those. Antipsychotics. I can’t take them.”

  “Haldol is very mild.”

  “You don’t think I need to … you don’t want … I thought, the hospital?” she whispered. She’d hated being hospitalized last year, but she’d accustomed herself to the idea of having to go back in; now she realized she’d begun to long for it. She just wanted to rest.

  “This should begin to work almost immediately,” Dr. Tepper said. He seemed cheerful; he lifted his hands and wiggled the fingers, saying, “We’ll fiddle-faddle around until we hit the right combination.”

  Haldol didn’t knock her soul out of her body, like Mellaril, and it didn’t make her feel as if she was on Jupiter, the gravity so strong she could
barely move, like Klonopin. It did dry out her mouth even more than lithium alone; she drank water constantly and so had to pee constantly. The images of hurting herself retreated. She didn’t like the idea that her brain chemistry could manufacture obsessions without her consent. Maybe all the things she thought of as her personality were really just neurons firing around randomly.

  The images’ disappearance relieved her, and then it didn’t. She still felt awful, and she couldn’t blame it anymore on visualizing her gashed wrists. On the phone, she broke up with Abe before he could break up with her. When she saw Dr. Tepper, she said she felt great. Really great. Even if she failed at everything else, she could be a good patient.

  * * *

  At Beth and Stephen’s party, a woman wore heavy black eyeliner and the letter P pinned to her shirt. “I’m a black-eyed P!” she cried out and laughed.

  “I bet she didn’t come up with that on her own,” Jordana said to Beth. She wished she had more of an independent life; then, when she was alone in social situations, she missed Pieter. Somehow parties invariably ended up like this, leaning against a wall with Beth, talking about the other people there. “Someone else did that at another party and she stole it.”

  “Probably.” Beth ate a carrot stick. She was always on a diet and never lost weight. She and Jordana had worked at the clinic together since it was just starting out as a grassroots egalitarian center, where they’d all taken turns mopping the floor and womanning the front desk. Beth brought brownies to staff meetings and never forgot birthdays and cooked casseroles topped with cornflakes for families when there was a sickness or death. Jordana had initially distrusted her: too nice. But Beth, not critical or brusque herself, had a surprising taste for those qualities in Jordana.

  Beth dunked a cucumber spear in dressing. “You know, giving parties sounds like such a good idea in the abstract, and then when they actually happen I just want to go hide in my room.”

  “We never have parties. I don’t know why that is.”

  Across the room Beth’s husband, Stephen, turned to the black-eyed P and smiled. Jordana couldn’t stand Stephen. Even if she hadn’t known from Beth that he cheated, she would have known from the distinct tang of willingness that he gave off—leaning too close when he talked to women, throwing his head back when he laughed, as he did now across the room. She supposed she’d lost her right to judge Stephen, but if anything her dislike of him had grown stronger.