“No.” Jesse seals a hand on her shoulder. “Stay.”
“Okay. I’m just going to run to—”
And then, before she has time to realize what’s going on, her face is on fire. Her hand flies to her cheek and she holds it, the flesh hot and ringing in her palm.
“Don’t think about leaving.”
Sally has materialized by Lorraine’s side, pressing her warm, old body against Lorraine’s leg. Lorraine tries to swallow, but her mouth is too dry, and for a second she gags, unable to breathe.
Usually when Jesse turns this way, Lorraine relinquishes her body to him. It’s better than trying to resist. Sometimes she even eggs it on. The sooner it happens, the sooner it will be over, and the waiting is almost always worse than what follows. Physical pain no longer scares her. She hates it; she dreads it—but she knows how to close her eyes and wait for it to be over. It’s simply a matter of time. Time until he loses steam. Time until he has to go to work. Time until they reach the far end of the room, and she’s pushed up against the wall with nowhere left for them to go.
Today is different, though. Today she wants to leave before he starts. She cannot stand the pain today. She will not. She’s barefoot, but she won’t bother with shoes or a jacket. All she needs is her purse from the living room.
Jesse is gripping her by her forearms, his breath hot and stale and alcoholic.
“Let me go,” she says, and then she hurls herself into him with all her strength. Jesse tumbles backwards, shock etched into his eyebrows and mouth. She’s never done that before. Lorraine seizes the moment and runs from the kitchen to the living room, her breath knocking noisily in her ears, Sally staggering behind her.
She leaps toward the chair where her purse is, but the seat is empty, and it’s then when she remembers that her purse is upstairs. “Fuck,” she says. Frantic tears prick at her eyes.
She starts to run to the front door, but Jesse’s there and he’s cornered her, wedging her against the couch. He slams his body against hers, and she tumbles to the floor, landing hard on her tailbone. She yells out in pain.
Jesse is above her, red and panting, eyes wild with hate. Because he hates her, she realizes then, in a moment of terrifying clarity. He despises her.
He begins to beat her, shoving her across the floor with his arms and legs. The air is ringing with Sally’s howls, each louder and more desperate than the last. Lorraine has curled up into a ball, her arms over her head, the sounds of Jesse’s fists against her, of Sally’s protesting, of both of their breathing and yelling and crying filling up the house. Eventually they’ll cross the room and Jesse will push her against the far wall and there won’t be anywhere else to go. She looks through her fingers to see how close they are to the wall and she begins to count in her head. One Mississippi, two Mississippi.
“How much longer?” the girls used to ask on car trips, and she would say, “One hundred Mississippis.” And they would start counting, sometimes making it all the way to one hundred, but usually getting bored and abandoning the counting, which had always been the point.
Ten Mississippis, she tells herself now. Ten until they reach the wall and it’s over.
She’s on eight when she feels a hard blow to her side and head—the wall—when Jesse’s breathing slows, when her own breathing no longer sounds like somebody else’s, someone heaving into a microphone. For a moment, sound stops altogether—pain stops; fear stops. Even Sally takes a breath. They’re done. Lorraine puts her hand to her face. Her nose is bleeding and her mouth is, too, where her braces have smashed up against the insides of her lips. There’s a sharp pain pulsing above her left hip. She looks up at Jesse.
She’s crying and she opens her mouth to say something—this is usually the part when the softness comes back in Jesse’s eyes. But before she has the chance to speak, Jesse’s hands are around her neck, squeezing. She swats at him with her arms, but she’s on the floor and he’s above her, and she’s powerless.
The room is dead silent, except for Sally, her moaning strange and eerie all by itself. This, more than anything, scares her; all that quiet. Lorraine is starting to see stars and Dr. Reimer’s face has appeared in her mind: Tell me about the stars, Lorraine, he’s saying, and she’s saying her daughters’ names in her head, Nessa Tanya Nessa Tanya, like a chant or a prayer, or maybe an apology. Help me, she’s screaming, but her screams are silent because Jesse’s hands are around her neck and she can’t breathe and now she really is seeing stars. Hundreds of them, thousands of them, twinkling against a pitch-black sky.
It’s a Friday and the pub is packed with people. The music—something loud and melodic—is throbbing in the walls, the floor, the glasses on the bar. Nessa is on her second rum and Coke and Henry is finishing up his third Guinness. They’re seated at the corner of the bar, leaning in to hear one another. Nessa’s cell phone is in her purse, which is slung over the back of her chair, so at eleven p.m., when the calls start coming through, she doesn’t hear them.
“We all lost touch after high school,” Henry is saying. “Or I lost touch, anyway.” Nessa nods encouragingly. She’s asked Henry about his friends, and with little prompting from her, he’s been talking about them with more emotion than she knew he was capable of. “Now most of my buddies are married and having kids,” he says.
“Is it all over Facebook?” she asks, smiling.
Henry grins and takes another swig of beer. Glances in the bartender’s direction. “Yup,” he says. “If I see one more goddamn professional photo shoot for babies . . .”
Nessa laughs.
“You want another?” he asks, nodding to her glass.
“Sure.” She pushes back her chair. “I’ll be right back.”
She walks to the bathroom, aware of Henry watching her walk away. She smiles, remembering the way he looked that morning, naked and wrapped in her floral sheets, his bare feet sticking out off the end of the bed. They’ve spent every night together this week, and earlier this evening, Henry asked if she wanted to go out to get drinks at the new bar that opened up on Main Street. She said yes, happily. It is, technically, their first date.
In the bathroom there’s a line and Nessa pulls out her phone, and that’s when she sees that she has twenty-four missed calls. Most of them are from Tanya, but some of them are from her father, some from Simone, and a handful from various unknown numbers. Terror takes hold and Nessa’s stomach plummets.
She runs out of the bathroom into the bar, shoving people out of the way. She’s aware of the pounding music and the looks people are giving her as she pushes past them, but all she can hear is the blood between her ears—like a heartbeat, an underwater sort of death march.
Outside, it’s cool and it’s started to drizzle. Tanya answers on the second ring. “Nessa,” she says breathlessly, and Nessa can hear in her sister’s voice that something is terribly wrong.
“What happened?” she says.
“Are you alone?”
“I’m with Henry. What is it?”
“Mom.” And then Tanya starts to wail.
Nessa’s body turns cold from the inside out. She clutches the phone. “What happened, Tanya?”
“He killed her.”
Nessa drops to the ground. It’s as if there’s a string running the length of her body and someone tugged hard on that string—through her head and down her torso and stomach and one of her legs, coming out the back of her knee.
“What?” she says, though she’s unsure if she’s said it aloud or in her own head. On the other end, Tanya is sobbing, unable to speak, and Nessa grips the phone to her cheek. She’s kneeling on the pavement, several feet from the entrance of the bar, and people are walking around her, their voices loud and distant at the same time. Her heart feels large and oversized in her chest, beating so hard she might pass out.
“Watch it,” somebody says, stumbling over her.
; “Tanya,” Nessa says, and her own voice is like a dismembered thing. “What are you talking about? Where did you even hear this?”
“The hospital,” Tanya cries. “The police called.”
Nessa shakes her head into the phone. “Give me their number. I’ll call. He must have hurt her again. Where is she? Is she at Somerville Hospital?”
“Nessa,” Tanya heaves through tears. “She was already . . . when they got there.”
“When who got where?” Nessa demands.
“The police. The O’Briens called 911 when they heard sounds coming from the house.”
Something dark and heavy is descending over Nessa. “Tanya, are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
Nessa tastes it first—the hot sourness in her mouth, the rum, and then the sick. She vomits onto the pavement.
Behind her someone says, “Did you see that? That chick just barfed.”
Her ears are ringing and she can’t hear Tanya anymore. Her sister’s voice is far away, just out of reach.
Then Eitan is on the phone, and Eitan’s voice is louder, right in Nessa’s ear. He’s explaining to Nessa that Jesse has been arrested and is at the hospital, but that he’ll be transferred soon to the jail, where he’ll be held without bail, that they need to go to Boston where they will identify . . . He pauses there. Then he’s saying things like You won’t be alone and We’ll get through this.
Henry appears in the parking lot then, with Nessa’s coat under one arm. When he sees her, bent over on the pavement, he runs to her, a panic-stricken look on his face. “Eitan, I have to go,” Nessa says into the phone, and then she stands, shaking, the string still there threatening to pull at any moment.
“What happened?” Henry says, and Nessa falls against him. “Nessa, what happened?” he urges. He’s holding her and rubbing her back.
“He killed my mom,” she says into his neck. And that’s when she starts to cry. It’s a deep and terrible crying, a noise an animal would make—not a human. Certainly not her. “How did this happen?” she says, and she pulls back to look at Henry, who stares back at her with alarm.
He pulls her close then. She’s sobbing into his shoulder and he’s stroking her hair and her back and the sides of her face. She can feel his chest heaving against hers. She hears Tanya’s voice over and over again—the words she said—and she tries to think of a way to make them not true.
* * *
—
THE NEXT HOURS are a blur of phone calls. Jonathan and Simone both offer to come get Nessa in Northampton, but Nessa refuses—she can’t bear the thought of seeing her father—and so she tells them that Henry will drive her to their house in Lexington the next morning. That night she packs a bag: a dress for a funeral, two pairs of pants, three pairs of pajamas, one skirt, and not a single top. Enough underwear for two weeks. Sneakers and a coat too heavy for May. She forgets toiletries entirely.
Henry gives her something to fall asleep and she takes it, not bothering to ask what it is, and she falls into a horrifying sleep, waking up every thirty minutes. She cries in her dreams and every time she opens her eyes.
Images flash through her mind—ones of her mother that are so terrible that she scratches at her arms, digs her fingernails into her flesh to keep herself from fully seeing them. At three in the morning she goes to the bathroom and, for the first time since Tanya’s phone call, looks at herself in the mirror. Her reflection makes her so sick with loneliness that she has the impulse to call her mother. She goes so far as to pull out her phone.
Henry stays over, and in the morning, they get in his car. He has his license back now and it’s the first time he’s driving her instead of the other way around. Nessa leans back in the passenger seat and stares out the window. They don’t speak on the ride, but something silent and close radiates between them. At one point, Henry nods toward the radio and asks, “Is this okay?”
Nessa nods. She hadn’t realized there was music playing.
“You alright?” he asks at one point. “Actually, that’s a stupid question. Sorry.”
They stop at a gas station in Sturbridge and Nessa watches out the window as Henry pumps gas. He keeps one of his hands in his jeans pocket and the other gripping the pump. His lips are chapped and there are reddish acne scars on his cheeks. She wonders then if she’s in love with Henry, and she imagines what it would be like if she and Henry were to get married. She pictures them having a pack of children, all boys, who’d grow up to be just as big and tall as their father. She imagines herself in a kitchen, serving huge plates of meat to her family of boys. Henry in a suit coming home from work, bending down to kiss her cheek. It’s a strange but comforting thought.
After Henry finishes pumping gas he goes inside the mini-mart and comes back with cigarettes and Swedish Fish.
“Want one?” he asks, holding out the pack of Camels.
She nods. Between the two of them they smoke the entire pack by the time they get to Lexington.
* * *
—
WHEN THEY PULL into her father’s driveway, Tanya and Eitan’s rental car is already there. Nessa turns to Henry. Tears come and she blinks them away.
“Do you want to stay?” she asks.
“Here?” Henry glances at the house.
Nessa nods. “The funeral is on Monday.”
“I don’t know.” Henry looks down at his lap. “I have to work this weekend.”
“Do you think you could stay just one night?”
Henry looks uncomfortable. “I would, but I’m actually supposed to work this afternoon.” He eyes the clock. “I gotta book it back there by two.”
“Okay,” Nessa says, and the image of Henry and their giant sons floats away like a balloon that’s escaped a child’s fist. “Well, thanks for driving me,” she says, a new layer of grief descending upon her.
“No problem.” Henry reaches over and takes Nessa’s hand. “Also, I feel really bad asking, but do you think you could throw me a few for gas? I’m not getting paid ’til next week so I’m running a little dry.”
Nessa reaches for her purse on the car floor. She feels nauseous again. “How much?”
“Fifteen okay?”
She pulls her cash out and counts. “Twelve is all I have on me.”
“That’ll work.”
“Okay.”
“I’m really, really sorry about your mom,” Henry says. He leans over the console then and kisses her quickly on the cheek. “See you when you get back?” he asks.
“Sure.” She climbs out of the car and pulls her duffel from the backseat, throws it over her shoulder. “Bye,” she says, as she slams the car door, though she doubts Henry can hear her.
* * *
—
INSIDE, HER FATHER’S house is muggy with grief. The air is thick, as though it’s reached some sort of saturation level, as though Nessa might actually choke if she breathes in too deeply. She wishes she could turn around and run after Henry’s car.
But then Tanya appears in the front hallway, and Nessa is stopped short by her sister’s appearance. Tanya’s eyes are so swollen that she looks as though she’s had an allergic reaction, and her cheeks are red and raw, painful looking, just shy of bloody. The expression on Tanya’s face is filled with such unimaginable terror, all Nessa can do is open her arms and take her sister in. Tanya weeps into Nessa’s shoulder.
“It’s going to be okay,” Nessa whispers, holding her sister’s shaking body. “I’m here and we’re going to get through this.” She doesn’t know where these words are coming from, or, for that matter, the calm she suddenly feels, but she understands now why she’s here, and what her role is, and that in itself is a relief. She’s here to take care of Tanya.
Tanya has collapsed against her and is crying with such physical force she starts to gag.
“It’s okay,” Nessa says,
and she leads Tanya into the living room, where she sits her on the couch. Kneeling before her, she takes Tanya’s hands. “Breathe, Tee. Concentrate on breathing. Inhale, okay?”
Tanya draws in a ragged breath and Nessa nods. “Good. Now exhale slowly.”
She leads Tanya through this, one breath at a time, until her sister has stabilized. At some point she becomes aware of other people in the room. Once Tanya is breathing normally again, Nessa turns around.
“Sweetheart,” her father says, and Nessa sees that her father and Simone are crying, too. When her father hugs her, he says, “I’m sorry,” and Nessa isn’t sure what he’s apologizing for.
Then Ben appears, solemn and quiet, and Nessa hugs him. Her little brother doesn’t say anything, but he rests his head against Nessa’s neck, and she feels dampness in his eyes, though he holds his tears back the way an adult would.
“Ben,” she says, and the softness of the syllable is strangely comforting. She sniffs sharply and contains herself, letting her tears sit like screens over her eyes, blurring her vision and giving her something to concentrate on.
It’s only when Sally pads in, the dog’s eyes sad but watchful, that the unbearable heaviness of last night returns. The dog looks around the room, confused, unsure of where to go. But she goes to Nessa and Nessa kneels, taking Sally’s face in her hands. Up close Nessa sees that Sally has aged since she saw her just twelve days ago. The fur on her muzzle and nose is whiter and thinner and her eyes are even more bloodshot than before. Sally nuzzles her nose deeply into Nessa’s lap, making small, unfamiliar childlike noises.
* * *
—
THAT NIGHT THE WEIGHT of her sister’s body beside her in bed is enough for Tanya to close her eyes. They’re lying beside one another in the guest room, in a bed freshly made, the linens soft and clean smelling. The hallway light slips in beneath the crack under the door, stretching along the length of the room.
Tanya’s body aches. Her throat, her lungs, her abdomen, all the muscles in her neck. That morning, the first without her mother, she woke with her eyes swollen shut, and for fifteen minutes she couldn’t see, feeling around with her hands like a blind woman, yelling Eitan’s name. She thinks of killing herself—throwing herself in front of an oncoming train, swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills. She tells herself it’s the baby that’s stopping her.
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