Now everything is ready, and all there is left to do is mourn, and Tanya knows that once she starts crying today, she won’t be able to stop.
“I’m going to take a shower,” Nessa says, sitting up in bed.
Tanya watches Nessa undress, pull off her T-shirt and shorts, flick her underwear off her ankle onto the floor. She walks naked into the bathroom attached to their room. Usually Nessa is shy about her body around Tanya, changing quickly with her back to her. Today, though, there is ease in Nessa’s nakedness, in her slow walk from the bed to the bathroom.
While Nessa’s in the shower, Tanya gets out of bed and goes downstairs to find Eitan. She hears quiet conversation coming from the kitchen, and she finds Eitan and Ben sitting across the table from each other in their pajamas, eating cereal.
“Morning,” Tanya says from the doorway.
“Hi,” Ben says.
And Eitan: “Come sit.”
“Is it only you two up?” she asks.
“Your dad’s outside on the porch,” says Eitan.
“I’ll be right back.”
She finds her father outside, already dressed in his suit and kippah, though the service doesn’t start for another two and a half hours. She realizes then, in the harsh sunlight, that he’s grayed substantially. There’s tiredness in his eyes, a resignation. He looks, for the first time in his marriage, significantly older than Simone.
Jonathan turns to her and gives her a quick, fierce hug. Already he’s been crying.
“Did you get the bagels?” Tanya asks.
“We picked everything up this morning. Camille is coming over at nine to set the house up.” Camille is their housekeeper, a woman who comes every week to clean.
“That’s good.”
“How’d you sleep?”
“Okay,” Tanya lies. “You?”
“I barely slept. Ben came in and woke Simone up in the middle of the night. First time he’s done that in years.”
“How much does he know?”
“Not much,” her father says. “He knows that your mom died, but not how. He asked, though. Simone told him it was an accident.”
Tanya nods and looks out into her father’s backyard. It’s teeming with equipment—a soccer net and a smattering of small orange cones, a swing set, a batting tee. The entire property is surrounded by trees—enormous, towering trees that must be hundreds of years old. It’s hard to believe that her father and Simone own all of them.
“How are you doing, sweetie?”
“I mean, not great,” she says, irritated by her father’s use of the diminutive.
“Is there anything I can do?”
“Unless you can go back in time, not really.”
“I loved your mom, Tee,” he says. “I always have.”
Tanya turns and gives her father a sharp look. “You don’t cheat on someone you love.”
He seems surprised and looks down. “What I did wasn’t right.”
“You chose a different life,” Tanya says. “And you have one, with Simone and Ben.” She gestures to the backyard. “And that’s okay—it was your choice. But you left our family. And right now, this isn’t your loss.”
“Tanya, I’m not saying it is. I just want to be here for you and Nessa. I love you two more than you can imagine.”
Tanya looks at her father. His left eyelid is quivering and she can’t tell if it’s a twitch or if he’s about to cry. “You left us, Dad,” she says, holding back tears herself. “You left us alone with Mom and Jesse.”
“Tanya, you have to believe me, I didn’t know he was like that,” Jonathan says. “God, if I had known, I would’ve done something. It kills me that—”
“What would you have done?”
“Well.” He pauses. “I would have talked to your mom about it. I wouldn’t have wanted you and Nessa in the house if—I keep thinking—he never touched you, did he?”
“Jesus, Dad, no.”
“Because if I knew the extent of—”
“Why would she have listened to you?” Tanya cuts him off. “You’re off with your new pregnant wife and you call Mom up and tell her to break up with her boyfriend? How do you think that would’ve gone over? No. When you cheated on her and left her, you gave up the right to give her your opinion.”
“There’s no easy answers, I know. I’m sorry, though, that I let you down.”
Tanya shrugs, suddenly exhausted by the conversation.
“It’s okay that you’re angry at me,” her father goes on. “I can handle that.”
“I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“You don’t have to say anything.”
They sit for a few minutes in silence. Inside they can hear Eitan and Ben, their voices soft and indistinct, floating out from the kitchen.
“He knows,” Tanya says.
“What?”
“Ben knows. He’s ten. He’s a smart kid.”
Jonathan seems to consider this. “You might be right.”
“Kids pick up on stuff. They understand things even if they don’t know how they understand.”
Jonathan closes his eyes and nods slowly, and in his suit and kippah he almost has the look of praying.
“Dad, I’m pregnant.”
Her father opens his eyes and whips his head to look at her. She nods and his eyes widen into two green pools. “What?” he says. He draws her in then, hugging her so tightly that she gasps. He begins to cry, and Tanya can’t tell if it’s from happiness or sadness, though the line between the two seems not to matter.
“I love you so much,” he says, and for the first time since she was a child, Tanya says it back.
After the funeral, a small gathering of family and a few of Lorraine’s friends come back to their father’s house for an abbreviated shiva. Simone is in the kitchen with Camille, cutting and toasting bagels, and everyone else is gathered in the living room or the den, talking in soft voices. Nessa goes back and forth between the kitchen and the other rooms, helping to bring in food and clear away used plates and cups.
Lorraine’s closest friends, Wendy and Marcy, have offered multiple times to help. “Sit down and rest,” they’ve told her, but Nessa refuses. She likes having things to do. She doesn’t have it in her to sit in a puddle on the sofa, the way Tanya is.
Her sister is curled up, small as a girl, Eitan diligently by her side. Tanya’s face and lips are raw from crying, her eyes naked. Nessa doesn’t know what to make of Tanya’s tears. She wasn’t expecting to be the stoic one, the only one to speak at the funeral. When it had been Tanya’s turn, her sister had collapsed against Eitan, so distraught that Nessa worried Tanya might need to leave the room.
People have been dropping food off all day, and it’s Nessa who’s been answering the door and accepting condolences, fielding questions. People want to know the details of Lorraine’s death.
“Where is Jesse now?” they ask. “What’s going to happen?”
One of Lorraine’s coworkers just came out with it: “Do you mind if I ask what he did to her?” she said to Nessa, sidling in close.
“Yes,” Nessa answered shortly, and the woman, surprised, nodded and left soon afterward. Details are getting out, though. Nessa’s watching it happen. She can read on people’s faces how much they know. Their expressions soften—they look at Nessa and Tanya with stunned disbelief and pity.
A couple hours in, Nessa goes down to the basement where her father and Simone keep extra paper goods. She’s searching through the storage closet for more napkins when she hears Wendy and Marcy talking on the other side of the wall.
“The thing is,” Marcy is saying, “I wasn’t really surprised.” Marcy lowers her voice and Nessa strains to hear. “Wendy, when I got the phone call, it was almost like I was having déjà vu. Like it had already happened.”
“I know.�
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“God, it sounds awful to say, but I was almost expecting it.”
“I think we all were,” Wendy says. “Think about all the times we talked to her about this very possibility, Marcy. We were begging her. And you know me. I don’t beg.”
“Jesus. I feel sick with guilt.”
“Marce. Blaming ourselves won’t do anyone any good. It has nothing to do with us. You know that, right?”
“I just keep thinking about that last time. The way I stormed out. I was so frustrated with her.”
“Well, she was frustrating!” Wendy’s voice rises in protest. “She wasn’t seeing anything clearly. She never could with men. With Jesse especially. That’s not new, Marcy. This was a long time coming.”
“And the girls. I feel so bad for them.”
“Nessa seems so cut off,” Wendy says, her voice changing in tone. She sounds relieved, to be talking about Nessa and not Lorraine anymore.
“I was thinking that.”
“Do you think she’s high?”
“Right now?”
“I don’t know. Could be. She seems so blank.”
“I wouldn’t blame her,” Marcy says wryly. “What a fucking miserable day.”
“And when she spoke. It was strange, don’t you think? She looked almost in a trance.”
“God, and it’s weird seeing Jonathan. What a fucking prick.”
“With that hot new wife.”
“Well, not new anymore.”
“She’s hot, though. Jesus.”
“Lorraine would have hated this,” Wendy says, laughing bitterly. “Us sitting around with them, eating bagels and lox. And don’t get me started on the Jewish stuff. It’s strange. It’s bizarre, is what it is.”
Nessa steps out then, gripping the package of paper napkins.
“Nessa,” Wendy says. Both women gape at her, stunned expressions on their faces.
“What’s wrong with you?” Nessa hisses, surprising herself with the venom in her voice. “If you knew she was in trouble, how could you not tell me? I could have done something.”
Marcy’s eyes are huge. “Honey, we’re just—”
“Don’t call me honey, Marcy. You don’t get to make things better by calling me that.”
“Nessa, none of us knew how bad it was—”
“You talk about my family like we’re characters on a TV show. My hot stepmom. My prick dad. My pathetic mess of a mother. And to make assumptions about me. Just because I’m not spilling my guts and crying my eyes out doesn’t mean I’m not feeling things. Why are you even here? If you’re here to judge us and make yourselves feel better—that this isn’t your fault—you should go.”
Marcy has started to cry softly, wiping at her eyes with a wadded tissue she’s pulled from her purse, but Wendy’s face has hardened and when she speaks there’s an angry edge of condescension in her voice. “The truth is, Nessa, we were all in denial about what was going on with your mother and Jesse, how bad things had gotten. But what happened to your mom is only one person’s fault, and that person is Jesse. Putting blame on yourself, or on—”
“I don’t blame myself,” Nessa interrupts. “Why the hell would I blame myself?”
Simone appears in the doorway then, and they all turn to look. Her stepmother is holding a fancy-looking bagel cutter in her hand and turns worriedly from Nessa to the other women. “Is everything okay?” she asks.
And that’s when Nessa drops to the floor. She’s crying from the pit of her stomach, as though her body is trying to rid itself of something impossible, like an organ. The women run to her. That’s why they’re here, after all. To soothe, to hold, to love. But she hates these women. She wants nothing from them. All Nessa wants is her own mother.
Nessa gets a bus back to Northampton. She tells everyone she has to go home for work, which is a lie. Dr. Janeski has told her to take as much time as she needs. Her father and Simone have told Nessa she can stay with them as long as she’d like and Tanya has practically begged her to come back to New York City with her and Eitan. Nessa considers it, but painful as it will be to be apart from her family, it’s more painful to be with them.
And besides that, she wants to see Henry. They’ve been texting every day since the morning he dropped her off in Lexington, and since she’s been away from him, she’s thought about him almost constantly.
Nessa was upset that first day, when he didn’t stay with her, but her anger faded quickly. He’d texted her that night, and despite her hurt, it felt frighteningly good to see his name pop up on her phone. A few days later he’d asked her: When are you coming home?
Home. It was such a loving word.
* * *
—
THAT EVENING SHE SHOWERS and shaves her legs and her bikini line. She does her makeup and spritzes perfume on her wrists and neck. There’s an unopened bottle of wine in the back of her cupboard and she sticks it in the freezer, then searches her closet for something to wear. She finds a pair of black jeans she hasn’t fit in for years and a black top with short lace sleeves. She’s lost weight. She hasn’t been on a scale, but she guesses it must be ten pounds or so. Her body looks different. She looks less like herself and more like Tanya.
Since Lorraine died, food has tasted strange and chemical, too bright—like a headache in her mouth. The very act of swallowing makes her nauseous. She’s also been smoking cigarettes, further curbing her appetite. Smoking gives her an excuse to go outside, to leave whatever unbearable roomful of people she’s in at the time.
Henry is supposed to be at her house at eight. At seven forty-five, Nessa is dressed and waiting. At eight thirty, she texts him. Where are you?
Sorry, held up, he texts back. And then, several minutes later, On my way.
At eight fifty she hears Henry’s car in the driveway and she glances at herself in the mirror before walking to the door to greet him.
When she opens the door, Henry is standing with his hands shoved in his jeans pockets. He’s wearing an old sweatshirt and when she leans in to hug him, she can smell beer on his breath.
“How’s it going?” he says, when they pull back.
She doesn’t know what she was expecting, but it wasn’t this. She pushes her disappointment away and leads him into the living room. “Would you like a glass of wine?” she asks.
“Sure.”
In the kitchen, she pours two generous glasses and watches as he settles onto her couch.
“How was it?” he asks, as though she’d gone to a concert.
She shrugs and hands him a glass. He sips right away, and this angers her, that he doesn’t wait for her to sip first.
“You doing okay?”
“Not really,” she says.
For the whole time she’d been in Lexington, she’d been narrating the events to Henry. There’s my mother, she told him, privately in her head. There’s my mother’s body. But now that she’s with him, she has no idea what to say.
Nessa downs her wine, eager suddenly to get into bed. She wants desperately to be held. She wants to feel his giant hands on her new, unknown body. Her stomach is flatter and her face is slimmer and her smallness, especially in comparison to his largeness, makes her feel unlike herself. He could wrap his arms around her and she could simply disappear.
The single glass of wine hits her hard and she starts to laugh.
He looks at her, unsure whether to smile. “What’s so funny over there?”
She shrugs and puts down her empty glass. “I just feel kind of wasted.”
“Yeah?”
She moves closer to him on the couch.
He finishes his own glass and sets it down on the floor.
“Are you drunk?” she asks.
“Kinda.”
She climbs onto his lap, straddling him, and wraps her legs around his waist. “I missed you,” she w
hispers.
“I missed you, too.” He slips his hands under her shirt, moving them up and down her back.
“But actually,” she says. “Like, I actually, genuinely missed you.”
“I really missed you, too.”
They begin to kiss and Nessa drapes her arms over his shoulders, running her fingers through his hair. She’s waiting for the feeling of disappearing, that almost dreamlike state she goes into during sex, or that period of touching right before sex. The high that it brings, the anticipation, is almost better than what follows.
But the high doesn’t come. She can’t shake the feeling of terror. It’s all there, everything that happened. She wonders, sorrowfully, if it will always be there.
“Let’s go to my bedroom,” she whispers.
Henry stands up, with Nessa still in his arms. And this seems to work—there is the high. The feeling of disappearing.
She feels like a little girl being carried by him. She buries her face into his neck and breathes him in. Closing her eyes, she allows herself to enjoy the walk from the living room to the bedroom. She allows herself to enjoy the feeling of slowly being lowered onto her mattress, like a child being put to bed.
She keeps her eyes closed while he undresses her.
“You look different,” he comments.
“How?”
“I don’t know. Smaller maybe.” He kisses her shoulder. “You look so pretty.”
The words melt her. “I missed this,” she says.
“Me too.”
When he finishes undressing her, he begins to undress himself. She listens: the zipper of his fly, the rustling of his jeans, the gentle sounds his clothing makes when it lands on the floor.
“You know what I really missed?” His voice is soft and close to her ear.
“What?” she says, eyes still closed.
“This.”
He takes her hand and pulls it toward him, then wraps her hand around his erect penis. Nessa opens her eyes. Nausea dances its familiar dance in the pit of her stomach. She jerks her hand away and sits up.
Something Wild Page 27