“The judge just called your name, Mom,” Nessa says, approaching. Her entire body is shot through with nerves.
Lorraine doesn’t answer.
“You’re not going through with it,” Nessa says. It starts out a question, and ends a statement.
“I’m not,” Lorraine says. “Jesse and I are going to try therapy first.”
“Nessa,” Jesse says, and Nessa turns to him. He’s crying. “I’ve been awful. I know you probably can’t forgive me. But I’m going to get better, I promise you. I feel sick to my stomach about the way I’ve been. Your mom deserves the best,” he says. “I want to be the kind of man she deserves. I’m going to make it up to you. I promise.”
The anger that Nessa has been waiting for finally arrives—an escalation in her chest, a heartbeat so fast and hard it could’ve burst right out of her body. She could’ve hurt someone with her anger. She could’ve blasted someone apart with it.
“If I was Jesse’s girlfriend,” Nessa says to Lorraine, “and he had hurt me the way he’s hurt you. If he had put his hands around—”
And then it strikes her to stop talking.
It’s subtle, the shift she senses in Jesse. She wouldn’t have noticed if not for the fact that she knows him well. There’s the straightening of his back, the slight flare of his nostrils.
He’s too dangerous, Nessa realizes then—with a fear that puts her anger to shame. It would be a mistake to repeat to Jesse what Lorraine has told her about him. It would be a mistake to get angry, to be reckless and emotional.
“If you think you can work things out, I support that.” Nessa looks right at him, luring him with her softness and her weakness. “Jesse,” she says. “Promise me you’ll go to therapy?” She sounds practically flirtatious.
Jesse nods and allows his tears to bubble forth. He’s back to playing sweet. “I promise, Nessa.”
“I’m going to get Tanya,” Nessa says, but when she turns around she sees that Tanya is already there, running across the parking lot toward them. She’s crying. Loudly and sorrowfully—the only one of them that day whose tears are not manipulative. “Don’t,” she wails, and it’s unclear who she’s talking to. “Don’t,” she begs, and all three of them look down in shame.
When it dawned on Tanya that her mother and Nessa were not returning to the courtroom, she stood. She slid past the other people in her row, tripping over a purse at a woman’s feet, muttered sorry. She glanced at the attorneys, safe and smug in the front, separated from the rest of the courtroom, and felt queasy with jealousy. That they were at their jobs; that after this they’d return to their offices and at the end of the day, go home and eat dinner, this morning long forgotten.
As she stumbled out of courtroom 1, she glanced back over her shoulder, with the crazy notion that one of the attorneys might notice her and catch her eye, maybe even run after her. Clearly something was not right. Clearly she needed assistance. And that was why they were here, was it not? To set things straight, to defend, to prosecute?
But nobody was looking at her, and Tanya found herself out in the lobby, alone and shaking. She leaned against the wall and listened to the indecipherable drone of the judge’s voice inside. Then she hurled into action. She found the women’s restroom and burst inside, bending down to check the stalls for her mother’s shoes, for Nessa’s. Nothing. So she searched the courthouse. She glanced inside conference rooms and offices she had no business looking into, down hallways and around corridors, getting only one strange look the entire time. She was dressed well enough to look like she worked there. She tried calling Lorraine and Nessa multiple times. Nessa’s phone was still off. Her mother’s was on, but she wasn’t picking up.
A feeling came over Tanya then, as she hurried down the main hallway of the courthouse for the fifth time, and it was a feeling she’d had before, as cold and sudden as a blanket being ripped away in the middle of sleep. She was alone. She was not going to find her mother and sister in some back room. They had left the building and hadn’t told her.
Tanya put her fists angrily to her cheeks and squeezed her eyes shut, willing herself to hold it together—pull it the fuck together—but a sound escaped, high-pitched and childish, and it was so embarrassing, Tanya lost her cool and gasped.
She rushed out of the courthouse like that, crying like a child, with her fists still up by her cheeks, and circled the building.
That was when she saw them across the street. It all clicked into place in one terrible instant: Jesse, towering in his suit, his arms splayed out in a grand, arrogant gesture, and Lorraine and Nessa with their faces turned up toward him.
Tanya didn’t want to believe it. She picked up speed, breaking into a run, crossed the four lanes of traffic, which was practically suicidal.
Now, when Tanya draws near, they all take a step toward her. “Tee,” her mother says, reaching for her, but Tanya lurches away.
She doesn’t look at Jesse. She can feel his eyes, hot and proud, boring into her. After all these years, he’s never seen her cry before. She turns to her mother and uses the only thing she has left.
“You’re not a good mother,” she says.
“Tanya—” Lorraine’s eyes are naked with hurt, but Tanya stops herself from looking away.
“You left me alone in there,” Tanya says. “I was looking all over for you. If you knew you were going back to him, you should have told me.”
“I know,” Lorraine says. “Honey, I’m sorry. I didn’t know until just now. I wasn’t—”
Tanya’s heart plummets; she was hoping Lorraine was going to say that Tanya was mistaken.
“I need to go home,” Tanya interrupts.
“Okay,” Lorraine says, nodding. “Let’s go home.”
“No,” Tanya says, viciously. “I need to go to my home. With my husband.”
“Oh.” Lorraine’s eyes fill up with that helpless hurt again. “Of course. We should get going, then.” She wipes at her eyes, and Jesse, who has been watching this entire conversation without moving, reaches out a hand as if to comfort Lorraine, but it’s as if he’s reached out and grabbed for Tanya.
Tanya jumps backwards.
For the first time, she actually makes eye contact with him. He’s staring at her—his arm still extended toward Lorraine—his eyebrows lifted in anticipation.
Tanya collects herself. “Don’t ever touch her in front of me,” she says. When he doesn’t respond, something swells huge inside her. “DON’T EVER TOUCH HER IN FRONT OF ME, JESSE. DID YOU HEAR ME?” She yells it, yells it so loudly that she surprises even herself.
“I heard you,” Jesse says, lowering his arm.
She turns on her heel then and goes to the edge of the lot, waits for a break in traffic. She makes a promise to herself that she won’t start to cry again until she’s in her rental car alone, driving back to New York, with miles between her and her family. Crying in front of them had been a mistake. This whole weekend had been a mistake. The restraining order, the motel, all of it.
When they get to the car, Tanya goes into the backseat and slams the door shut. Lorraine starts the car and Nessa turns around in her seat and looks at Tanya, concerned. “Are you okay?” Nessa asks.
Tanya looks back at her sister and feels inexplicable anger. None of this is Nessa’s fault, of course, but all of it, somehow, feels that way. Dan’s face flashes in her mind then—the way it sometimes does without warning, triggered by a smell or the change of season or the way a man looks at her on the subway. But this time it’s simply triggered by Nessa’s face, by her sister’s round, quiet, earnest eyes.
“I’m fine.” Tanya looks away.
Her sister leaves not even half an hour later. Tanya hugs Lorraine and Nessa goodbye in the front hallway, giving out her cold embraces like obligatory handshakes. Lorraine kisses Tanya’s cheeks and tries to reassure her with a smile, but Tanya has grown gray and stoi
c. She simply does not speak to Jesse or look at him, and he slinks off into the kitchen.
“Text me when you get home, okay, Tee?” Lorraine says.
Tanya nods without meeting her mother’s eye.
“And tell Eitan I say hi,” Lorraine adds, but Tanya doesn’t respond.
Nessa walks Tanya to the car. The day has turned cloudy and Winter Street is quiet—almost ghostly—the neighborhood kids at school, the adults off at work, driveways empty, curtains closed.
“Tee, we did everything we could do,” Nessa says, after Tanya’s put her bag in the backseat. They stand, leaning against the car. “Mom isn’t ready to leave him.”
“It’s not a matter of being ready or not. He strangled her, Nessa.”
“I know,” Nessa says.
“I’m not sure you do.”
“Tanya, I’m just as upset about all of this as you are.”
Tanya looks outraged at this. “You don’t seem that upset.”
“We’re different that way,” Nessa says. “I don’t know how to get angry like you.”
“What do you mean, know how to get angry?” Tanya cries. “Getting angry isn’t something you choose to feel, it’s a feeling that comes over you.”
“It doesn’t come over me the same way it comes over you.”
“Well, what do you feel?”
Nessa shrugs helplessly. “I feel sad. I feel scared. I feel like you’re mad at me and I don’t know what to do to make things better.”
“Why do you like Jesse?” Tanya demands.
“I hate Jesse. I hate him, Tee.”
“Not when we were kids. When we were kids you liked him.” She pauses. “You had a crush on him.”
It’s as though she’s punched Nessa in the stomach. “No, I didn’t.”
“You did,” Tanya says quietly, her eyes bright with accusation. “It was obvious.”
“No. I didn’t, Tanya.”
Tanya shrugs and looks away.
“What do you want me to do, Tee? Do you want me to stay here with Mom and Jesse? I can quit my job and come live here.” She’s not sure, as she’s speaking, if she’s being sarcastic or sincere.
Tanya doesn’t say anything.
“Look, I’ve been thinking of applying to social work schools anyway. I could move in with them during school and make sure he doesn’t do anything to her. If that’s what you want me to do, I’ll do it.”
Tanya exhales, exasperated. “You’re a grown-up, Nessa. Do what you want.”
“I don’t know what I want! Why are you talking to me like this, like it’s my fault?”
“I’m not blaming you. I just don’t understand your choices sometimes.”
“What choices?”
“I don’t know. Everything.” Tanya pulls out her phone and unlocks it. “Eitan’s texting me. I need to call him back.” It’s obvious she’s lying.
“Right now?” Nessa’s on the verge of tears. She doesn’t want her sister to go, leaving her and her mother and Jesse alone in the house, on this street.
“I need to go,” Tanya says. “I want to beat traffic.”
“I don’t want you to.”
“I have to. I have work tomorrow. I’m exhausted and I still need to drive five hours.”
“I love you, Tanya,” Nessa says.
“I love you, too.”
“Are you sure?”
Tanya laughs, but her eyes are glazed over. She’s somewhere else. “Of course I’m sure,” she offers, and then she gets in her car and leaves Winter Street behind.
Nessa goes back inside and asks to borrow her mother’s car. The drive is too quick. She parks across the street and checks her teeth in the rearview mirror, reapplies her lipstick. She experiences a pang of self-hatred, that she cares how she looks in front of him.
The moment she knocks on the door—the very same door—her stomach revolts. She glances back at the car. She needs a bathroom, and she needs one immediately. She could run away. Drive to a Starbucks, shit her brains out. Come back later, or another day.
But then the door opens and there’s a woman looking at her from behind the screen. She’s small with bleached blond hair, cut short around her ears. “Hello?” the woman says, raising her voice at the end, making it a question, and just like that, Nessa’s stomach calms.
“Hi,” she says. “I was wondering . . . is Dan here?” She hasn’t planned how to phrase it.
“Dan?” The woman frowns. “I think you have the wrong house.”
“Oh.” Relief and disappointment flood her. “I’m sorry. I used to know someone who lived here.”
“Really? My dad’s lived here forever. He owns it. Eddie Wood?”
“Eddie Wood,” Nessa says, absorbing the information: Dan is not Dan. Dan is a father. “Eddie. Of course. That’s what I meant.”
The woman smiles uneasily. “You’re here to see my dad?”
Nessa nods.
The woman narrows her eyes. “How do you know him?”
“I used to live around here,” Nessa says, and then, remembering the dog barking: “I walked his dog sometimes.”
The woman’s eyes widen. “Daisy,” she says. “Poor Daisy. He had to put her down a few years ago. Cancer.” She speaks softly, watching Nessa’s face for a reaction. She’s not beautiful, but she also isn’t plain. Her mouth is expressive, more so than her eyes, which are hard and dark, heavily lined. She’s one of those people who could be nineteen or forty-five, depending on the light.
“Oh,” Nessa says. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
The woman opens the door then and waves her inside. “My dad took it hard. I’m Heather, by the way.”
“Nessa,” she says, stepping inside. The hallway stuns her with its familiarity: the wood paneling, the low ceilings. The smell is the same: stale tobacco, a house that hasn’t been cleaned for a long time, a hint of something citrus.
Heather leads her through the living room and into the kitchen, and Nessa follows, eyeing the furniture. There’s the La-Z-Boy, the gray couch. The same blank walls, nothing hung. She wants to stop and stare, take out her phone and snap pictures, though of course she doesn’t.
Nessa always envisioned Dan’s kitchen to look like their own growing up, with linoleum countertops and a white tiled floor, windows that look out to a swamp and a school. She’s pictured it countless times: Dan reaching into the refrigerator for the beers, prying them open with a bottle opener, or just using the countertop, the way Jesse sometimes did. She’d wondered if Dan had bought the beer in preparation for that night, or if he already had it lying around.
In actuality, Dan’s kitchen is windowless, a galley kitchen. There are no signs that cooking is ever done there.
Heather pulls a photograph off the fridge and hands it to Nessa. A brown dog with a tight muscular body and an underbite. Daisy.
Nessa makes herself smile sadly. “Wow. Poor girl.”
“Yup.” Heather takes back the photo and sticks it on the fridge with a magnet. “My dad is resting upstairs,” she says. “You know he’s sick, right?”
Nessa shakes her head.
“Cancer,” Heather says again, this time with an ironic shake of her head. “Lung.” She pauses. “When was the last time you saw him?”
“Not for years.”
“Well, you should know he doesn’t look like himself. He stopped responding to chemo months ago. We’re kind of just waiting it out.” Her voice is harder than the one she’d used to talk about Daisy.
“I’m sorry,” Nessa says. “How long has he been sick?”
“A year, now. He was diagnosed right after his fifty-eighth birthday.”
Nessa’s stomach lurches, her brain jumping into action, doing the math. That made him forty-five, she calculates, when he had sex with Tanya. She feels a twisting in her stomach, the sharp
wrench of a screw being turned. “Can I use your bathroom?” she asks.
“Sure.” Heather points to a door off the kitchen.
Nessa moves quickly, accidentally slamming the door behind her. She sits down right in time, her bowels emptying instantaneously. Shit, she whispers to the dank room. She’s trembling. Her body immediately begins to hurt in that hot, shaky way an upset stomach hurts. Sweat forms on her upper lip and forehead.
Nessa closes her eyes and tries to recall Dan’s face. What had she seen when he’d opened the door all those years ago? What had she missed?
She opens her eyes and looks around. There’s a slow, steady drip from the faucet, a yellowed divot where the water has eroded the sink basin. Mildew has bloomed like bruises above the shower, crawling out across the ceiling and walls. The shower curtain looks decades old, stiff with soap scum. On the edge of the sink there’s a purple toothbrush and a travel-sized tube of toothpaste, a blue retainer swimming in a cup of water. Heather’s things, most likely.
Nessa flushes the toilet and washes her hands, opens up the mirrored medicine cabinet. Aleve, floss, a silver pair of nail scissors. She takes the scissors and slips them into her pocket.
Then an um floats out from the other side of the door, and Nessa can picture Heather with her hand up, deliberating whether she should knock or not.
“Be out in a minute,” Nessa says loudly.
When she opens the door, Heather is standing right there. They look at each other. “Sorry,” Nessa says, touching her abdomen. “My stomach.”
“No problem,” Heather says quickly. “My dad’s in his room. I’m sure a visitor will do him good. It’s been pretty quiet around here.”
Nessa nods and follows Heather down the hall and up the stairs, imagining Tanya all those years ago, following Dan.
When they reach his room, Heather knocks twice before cracking open the door. “You have a visitor,” she says, opening the door all the way. “Nessa. Daisy’s walker.”
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