It was around then that Tanya went to Simone and for the first time told someone about what had happened all those years ago. Simone had insisted that talking to Eitan was necessary, and a few weeks later, Tanya told him. To her relief, Eitan responded calmly. He didn’t demand to know Dan’s last name, didn’t cuss him out. He didn’t cry or yell or look at her with disgust—which was Tanya’s biggest fear.
For a month following their conversation, they didn’t have sex. They held each other in bed, they hugged one another tightly, but they both kept their clothing on and their hands to themselves.
Then one night Tanya reached for him in bed. “Is this okay?” she asked, letting her hand wander down the plane of his stomach, over the front of his boxers.
He turned to her and nodded.
For a while they lay like that next to one another, Tanya’s hand skating the surface of his body, Eitan still, except for the rise and fall of his chest, beside her.
When Eitan finally reached over, his hand tracing the waistband of her pajama pants, Tanya exhaled audibly, relieved.
“Is this okay?” he asked, and she nodded, closing her eyes and moving closer to him.
They continued like this. Before each further movement, they asked each other if it was okay. Before they removed one another’s clothes, before they used their hands or mouths to touch one another, before Tanya rolled on top of Eitan and guided him inside her.
* * *
—
TANYA NO LONGER BLAMES NESSA for that night. But when Nessa told Tanya that she’d driven to Dan’s house, when Nessa suggested they report Dan after all these years, Tanya began to play with the idea of responsibility again in her mind. In a way, it would be easy to blame Nessa; easier, even, to blame Lorraine. She’d thought sometimes of telling her mother what had happened to her. Not for comfort, but out of anger. You left us alone. Look what happened.
It would be too awful, though, seeing her mother’s face. Anger burns quick. Once the anger was gone, they would have to live with that knowledge forever between them. She thinks how hurt Lorraine had looked when Tanya had told her she wasn’t a good mother outside the courthouse. Lorraine made it impossible to talk to her—her mother’s hurt and sadness and neediness louder than anything and anyone else around her. Except for Jesse, of course. When it came to Jesse, Lorraine paled in comparison.
But here was Nessa, all these years later, still wanting to blame Dan, as if Dan had anything to do with it. There was no evidence of that night, no hospital visit, no rape kit—and even if there was, Tanya had no interest in pressing charges, in testifying. She never wanted to see Dan again.
Tanya has the feeling sometimes that her sister lived in an alternate universe—a fantasy world. That somehow, during that night, Tanya had been sucked into her sister’s head, dropped into a world in which she’d never really agreed to go.
Or maybe, Tanya sometimes thinks, it was more complicated than that. Maybe Nessa had opened up something in Tanya’s own mind—somewhere Tanya had never wanted to open up. That little bud of desire. That feeling of pride. There were some things better left sealed.
“Nessa drove to Dan’s house,” Tanya blurts out that night in bed to Eitan. It’s strange, saying his name out loud, and for a moment she’s scared Eitan might not know who she’s talking about, but when her husband rolls over and looks at her, she sees that he does.
“Why?” Eitan asks.
“No reason that makes any sort of sense.”
“How do you feel about it?”
Immediately Tanya wishes she hadn’t brought it up; she’s not interested in having a conversation about Dan. “I don’t feel anything one way or the other. I just think it’s pretty fucking idiotic.”
“Thinking something is pretty fucking idiotic is a feeling, I’d say.”
“Thanks, Dr. Phil.”
“Just saying,” he says, reaching for her hand under the covers.
“Just saying,” Tanya mimics, squeezing his hand back.
When Tanya thinks about the kind of mother she wants to be, she knows she wants to be different from her own. She wants to be the kind of parent who never lets her child see any of her own sadness or anger or loneliness, because she knows how much it hurts to see that in your own mother. How stifling it can be; how impossible it becomes to have any of your own feelings. She knows it’s impossible, though. That if she tries to mask all of that from her child, she’ll just be hiding. And the truth is—children are smarter than that. They’d see right through her.
Really what she wants to be is a mother who isn’t in pain. She wonders if such a woman exists.
Lorraine doesn’t tell Jesse about Lou’s phone call. Things with Jesse are going well, and she doesn’t want to rock the boat. There’s an easy quality that’s come over them that Lorraine hasn’t felt in years. Jesse seems to be seeing things clearly. To be seeing her clearly. That part of him is there—she knows it must still be there—but together, the two of them, they will fend it off. They will control it. If anybody knows how to control it, it is Lorraine.
Lou called back twice that week and left voice mails both times. She hasn’t returned his calls. The night before their second appointment, Lorraine decides that the only choice she has is to cut things off with the therapist before Lou messes things up with her and Jesse.
“I was thinking about what you said last week,” Lorraine says to Jesse, that night in the kitchen. She’s preparing dinner and Jesse is at the table paying bills. “I think Lou is an old geezer.”
Jesse looks up, surprised. “You do?”
“Yeah. I don’t think I even want to go back tomorrow.”
“What made you change your mind about him?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I was thinking about it and it’s just a lot of money to sit there and have a conversation.”
Jesse smiles and turns back to the checkbook. “Yeah, no shit.”
A pang of uneasiness passes through her.
“I still think we should talk, though,” she says. “Just you and me.”
“Of course.”
He folds the check and slips it into an envelope, then brings the envelope up to his mouth, carefully licks the edge.
“Like maybe we could talk right now,” she says.
“I’m kind of in the middle, Lorrie.”
“Okay. After you’re done?”
He looks at her, irritated. “I spent all day working. Can we do it when I’m not so tired?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Sure.” She turns back to the stove and prods the onions in the pan. She tries to push away her uneasiness, but it’s hard to shake. It’s something about the way he said, No shit.
Lorraine turns off the burner and is about to transfer the onions to the saucepan when Jesse comes up behind her and slips his thumbs into her belt loops.
“I want you,” he whispers into her hair.
She smiles. Ever since she’s come home they’ve been having a lot of sex. Good sex, too. “Okay,” she says. “Let me just get these into—”
“No,” he says. “I want you now.”
“Give me a few minutes,” she says.
He reaches between her legs. “I can’t wait.”
“Jesse, this is time sensitive—”
“I don’t care about the sauce.”
He wraps his arm around her waist and fiddles with the button on the front of her jeans. “Shit,” he mutters, tugging at it, but he can’t get it through the hole, so Lorraine reaches down and undoes the button herself.
He yanks her pants down, and then his own. “Bend over,” he says roughly, and she bends over the counter, her arms outspread.
She isn’t ready, and it hurts.
“You feel so good,” he says, breathing hard in her ear.
“So do you.” She squeezes her eyes shut and tries to focus on
feeling good, but Lou’s face keeps getting in the way, so she gives up on feeling good and opens her eyes, concentrating on the red of the linoleum counter, the way it’s faded in some spots and bright in others. In one section of her mind she’s thinking about the sauce, calculating how long she has before it’s ruined. In another section of her mind, Lou is still there, watching her from above, his kind eyes big and filled with disappointment.
It’s only a few minutes before Jesse finishes and shudders against her. “Jesus,” he says into her hair, and she moans softly in response.
He takes a step back and zips his fly.
“I’m going to put these in the mail,” he says, walking over to the table.
She’s still bent over the counter with her pants down by her ankles when he leaves the kitchen.
Sally pads in then, as though she was waiting for them to finish before entering. Lorraine sinks to the floor and Sally nestles her head in Lorraine’s lap, whimpering. They sit together like this until Lorraine hears the front door close and Jesse’s car start in the driveway.
Gently, Lorraine stands, pulls up her pants, and fishes through her purse for her phone. She finds Lou’s cell phone number and composes a text message. This is Lorraine Bloom, she types. We can’t come in to see you tomorrow, but I’d like to schedule a time to come see you on my own. I think you might be right about Jesse. Please call me.
After sending it, she deletes the outgoing text from her text messages. If Jesse looks through her phone, there is nothing he can use against her.
* * *
—
THE NEXT EVENING, Lorraine and Jesse sit together on opposite ends of the sofa. The day has passed uneventfully, though there’s been a slight yet perceptible downward shift in Jesse’s mood. Neither one of them has brought up the therapy appointment, and three o’clock came and went without comment. Lorraine’s checked her phone several times, but Lou hasn’t called or responded to her text message. She tries to convince herself that he must be busy, that his silence is not something to read into, but she can’t help but feel let down by the therapist.
Beside her, Jesse is flipping channels, abnormally quiet. “What do you want for dinner?” Lorraine asks. Her voice sounds nasal and she can feel Jesse’s irritation, like a silent alarm.
He shrugs, his eyes glued to the TV, identical little screens reflected in both eyes.
“How about pizza?” she says. “Andrina’s?”
“Fine.”
“The white pizza?”
“Sure.”
Lorraine stands, grateful for a task to get her out of the living room.
“Wait, Lorrie.” Jesse’s voice lifts a bit, and for a moment she thinks his mood might pass. “Let’s do pepperoni. It’s not a pizza if it doesn’t have tomato sauce.”
She nods. “Okay.”
“With extra cheese.”
“Sound delish,” she says, a little too brightly, and he rolls his eyes and turns back to the TV.
Lorraine makes the call from the kitchen. Maybe he’s hungry, she thinks as she waits for someone to answer. Maybe he just needs some food in him.
After she puts in the order she stays in the kitchen cleaning so that she doesn’t have to sit with Jesse in the living room. She opens the fridge and a smell wafts out, thick and dank. She begins to pull things out. Everything, it seems, is expired. There’s raspberries fuzzy with mold, dark green lettuce, slime against a plastic bag. She finds a Tupperware container full of chicken and green beans that’s been shoved in the back of the refrigerator for so long that she’s scared to open it. When she pulls out an empty carton of milk, she’s hit with sudden anger. It’s been years since she’s seen Jesse clean.
“Where are they?” Jesse calls from the living room.
Lorraine glances at the microwave clock. It’s been almost forty minutes since she placed the order. “I’ll call them,” she says.
When the doorbell finally rings, twenty minutes later, it’s almost nine and Lorraine hurries to the door, Sally padding along behind her.
The delivery boy, a scruffy teenager, smiles bashfully at her. “Sorry for the wait,” he says. “I went to Winter Lane instead of Winter Street.”
“That’s okay,” Lorraine says. “An easy mistake to make.”
The boy reaches down and scratches Sally’s ears. “Yeah,” he says. “Turned out 12 Winter Lane was having a party. They tried to get me to leave the pizza with them.”
“Ha,” she says. “Thanks for holding on to it. How much do we owe you?”
The boy glances at the receipt stapled to the box. “Fourteen dollars and sixty-eight cents.”
“Sure, let me just grab my purse—”
“I got it, Lorrie,” Jesse says, appearing in the doorway.
She nods and takes the pizza from the boy and leaves Jesse to pay the kid.
“Thanks, man,” she hears the boy say to Jesse. Then the front door closes and Jesse strides into the kitchen, smirking. “Flirting with the delivery guy?”
Lorraine stops herself from making a face. “No.”
“Is that why you put on makeup?”
“I didn’t put on makeup,” she says.
“Sure you did. Look at your lips, all red.”
“I didn’t.”
“I saw the way he was looking at you.” Jesse is smiling, but his eyes are sharp, barely blinking.
“He wasn’t looking at me in any kind of way. He was fourteen, Jesse.” She nods toward the table where the pizza box is sitting. “Should we eat while it’s hot?”
“Don’t play dumb, though. Who’d you put on lipstick for?”
“I’m serious, Jesse. I didn’t put on any lipstick.”
“Come on.” He’s standing close enough now that she can see the bluish tinge of his contact lenses.
“Even if I had put on lipstick,” Lorraine says, “it wouldn’t be to seduce the pizza delivery boy.”
“It looks good on you, that shade of red.”
Lorraine tries to walk past him, but Jesse blocks her. He leans forward and presses his lips to hers.
“Do you want to eat?” she asks, tilting her head away.
“Yeah.”
Lorraine walks across the kitchen and pulls two glasses from the cupboard. She’s fuming. Lou was right. Of course Lou was right. She’ll call him again, she decides, maybe even later that night while Jesse’s in the shower. Angrily, she pops ice cubes out of the trays and drops them into the glasses, then refills the empty trays with water and slides them back into the freezer.
When she turns around Jesse’s face is hardened with rage and Lorraine’s stomach clenches.
“What’s the matter?” she says.
Jesse takes the pizza box from the table and shoves it in her face. Her heart sinks. The pizza is white.
“Fuck,” she mutters. “I don’t know how that happened.”
“It’s not that hard to figure out. Obviously you ordered the wrong pizza.”
“I can run over there,” she says.
Jesse thrusts the box back on the table. “It’s fucking nine o’clock, Lorraine. By the time you get there and wait for them to make a new one, it’ll be ten.”
Lorraine glances at the dog, who is lying in the doorway, watching, her eyes moving back and forth between them.
“I can throw something together now,” she offers. “I have that cheese to make—”
“And what?” Jesse interrupts. “Just throw this pizza away?”
“I’m sorry, okay?” She pauses and thinks back to their therapy session, when Jesse talked about stepping back and talking calmly about his problems rather than exploding. “Jesse, it was an honest mistake. And you said you wouldn’t talk to me like that.”
“Do you know how much you’ve put me through, Lorraine? Does it even occur to you the kind of month I’ve had wit
h all of your shit? A police officer showing up at my door, for God’s sake?”
He has that look in his eye and Lorraine knows there’s no reasoning with him now.
“I saw the text messages from the shrink on your phone, by the way.” He smiles then, and fear settles over Lorraine like a fog. “About coming in to meet with him alone, as soon as possible.” He takes a step closer. “You’re so desperate for attention that you’re even wanting it from some short ugly therapist who probably hasn’t been laid in decades. You know he gets off listening to other people’s sex lives, since he doesn’t have one of his own.” Jesse’s eyes have hardened completely. “Lorraine, do you understand where you’d be without me?”
In her peripheral vision Lorraine eyes the living room. A plan is formulating in her mind. She’ll insist on going to get another pizza and take Sally with her. In the car, she’ll call Nessa. She’ll drive straight to her daughter’s house in Northampton that night. She’ll call Lou, too, explain that she never received his text messages, that Jesse must have gotten to her phone first. And the next morning, she’ll call Tanya. She’ll tell her daughter that she needs to make another plan; a restraining order isn’t going to keep Jesse away.
All she needs now are her wallet and her keys. Her purse is on the armchair in the living room. She takes a small step backwards. “I’m going to get another pizza.”
“Don’t bother,” Jesse says, taking another step toward her.
“I’ll be right back, Jesse.”
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