by Julia Fine
Before I left with Clara—and therefore with Michael—I went to recruit Margaret. I thought I’d try one last knock at the turquoise door, which, as I climbed the uncarpeted back stairs, I thought might no longer exist. It might have disappeared entirely, or else she might have bricked it up and painted it over. I braced myself for how I would feel if it was there but still locked, how I would feel if I could hear Margaret’s dinner party, Margaret’s construction work, Margaret singing to herself in the bath, and couldn’t find my way in. The stairway smelled like rotting pumpkins. The door to the roof was cracked open, an empty airplane liquor bottle wedged in the jam, putrescence funneling down in currents of cold air.
The turquoise door was also open. Margaret stood in the frame, wearing a fur coat and gloves, her traveling case in hand.
“Are you ready?” she asked me. “Crispian, come.” Apparently she had been waiting for me. Apparently she and the dog were a package deal. I was glad to have the corporeal company. I needed somebody to help me manage Michael. I needed somebody to read the map I was planning to buy at the gas station once we’d hit the highway. I couldn’t use GPS—I’d left my phone in Linda’s craft room.
BY THE TIME we got on the road, it was nearing two o’clock in the morning—Clara had to eat again, Margaret had to find her lighter. When we finally pulled out of the garage and down the empty alley, I had one eye on Margaret, wondering if she’d fade or crackle, disappear with the condo or the last view of our street. But she remained solid beside me, fingers yellow with nicotine, her fug of smoke and fur and perfume so pungent that I cracked the driver’s-side window despite the frigid cold. The streets had other cars, had people huddled in their winter jackets, trudging toward the el or toward home. We even hit traffic passing through downtown. Just before I-90 split from 94 I pulled off to get gas, and ran inside for a map of the tristate area and a warm can of soda. I took Clara with me. The car seat bumped against my hip, the handle digging into my arm when I rummaged in my purse for my wallet.
And then finally we were sailing, Clara lulled to sleep, Margaret fiddling, trying to refold the map. I wanted to instruct her—if she just flipped it over, it would pleat back into place—but I was awkward, worried she would change her mind and be finished with me, that when the time came, she’d refuse to help me separate Michael and Clara. I didn’t know why she’d locked me out of her life, or why she’d now let me back in; I didn’t want to risk upsetting her. So I let her crumple the map into the glove compartment, let her prop her feet on the dashboard while she stared out the window. Illinois flat as ever, warehouses and outlet malls and low clouds that dirtied the darkness. A burned smell was coming from the heating vents. Crispian was asleep. He was snoring.
We were headed to central Wisconsin, where Jeanie’s brother owned a cabin. When we were kids, Annie and I had tagged along with Sam and Kelsey on occasional summer weekends, and I remembered where the spare key was kept, how to get in, that they closed it up in winter because the lake didn’t freeze over enough for skating and there was nothing to do in the nearest town.
The cabin was the closest thing I knew to solitude. It was the closest thing I knew to The Only House, Margaret’s summer home in Vinalhaven, Maine. Unlike The Only House, Jeanie’s brother’s Wisconsin cabin had plumbing and electricity. I didn’t think that Margaret wouldn’t know the difference—I wasn’t trying to trick her—but I hoped that she’d appreciate my effort to find somewhere she could be comfortable.
I suppose I was operating on a number of assumptions: that the roads wouldn’t be iced over, that my half brother and his friends wouldn’t have snuck up with a keg, that the pipes would work. But I figured Margaret could handle any problems that arose: she was used to harsh climates, she liked roughing it. For a wealthy New Yorker, she was surprisingly outdoorsy.
At least she seemed outdoorsy in her letters. At least she was in her biographies.
It occurred to me the woman sitting here was something other than what I had read in her books and her letters, somebody outside the frame. No matter how well a biographer studied her, they didn’t know her fully, which meant I didn’t know her fully, even with years of research. I looked at her—smoking again, despite the fact that I had told her I’d prefer that she didn’t, her cigarette poking through the slit window—and felt a great divide between the person I had been during graduate school, holed up in the library, and the person I was now. I’d been so sure of myself. I’d thought that history could be reconstructed. I’d thought that the world could be known.
ROAD TRIP FILMS imply that it’s easier to speak on the road, to bare the soul while staring at some stranger’s taillights. I kept glancing over at Margaret, the slight flush of her cheeks, her pinned-back hair, which was hay-yellow with just the slightest frizz. I was placing her at about thirty-four, about my age. I wondered if she knew that in less than ten years, she’d be dead. I wondered if she knew she was already.
How surreal to know the moment of another person’s death. Honestly, I had a lot of power. I could tell her not to go to France, where her appendix would swell, where the surgery would go well but the subsequent bed rest would go about as poorly as one could imagine. I could tell her to trust herself, not the doctors. Margaret would want to get up and walk around, the way she knew you were supposed to after surgery, but her French doctors would tell her that she shouldn’t. That was not how things were done then, in France, where the medical care was so recognizably inferior that travelers were advised to carry cards instructing that they be taken to the American Hospital in Paris if they became ill. But Margaret would be in Nice in 1952, and she’d require an immediate operation. The French doctors would remove her appendix and a benign ovarian cyst, and then tell her to lie in bed, and all the while a blood clot would be gathering. After a few weeks a nurse would come and ask Margaret how she was doing, and she’d kick up her leg and grin, because she was feeling just fine and at last was engaged to be married to a man that she loved. His name was Pebble Rockefeller, and he built boats and he sailed, and she was going to sail off with him, just as soon as she was finished with this lie-in. After years of unrequited love, years of love that felt like prison, of love that felt like a freedom she couldn’t keep, love that wanted her to abandon her career, love that wanted her to change her career, love that wasted away with cancer, love that wouldn’t leave his wife, love that left her husband but wouldn’t commit, love she couldn’t find for her own self, she would be happy. She would be forty-two years old and would can-can her leg for the doctor, and when she did so, that blood clot would take off toward her heart. She would be dead in under a minute.
I didn’t tell Margaret anything. I just stared into the taillights of the semitruck in front of us, thinking about different kinds of pain.
WE STOPPED AT a rest area around six in the morning, so I could feed Clara and Margaret could take Crispian for a walk. The restrooms were locked, so I crouched down and peed next to a bush, Clara watching me with cold, impassive eyes. I brought her back into the car to feed her, the heat still on, the windows fogging. When we got moving again, Crispian was restless. I heard him whining in the back seat, scuffing at the floor mats. Margaret had owned two Kerry blue terriers over the course of her adult life, and I suddenly remembered reading all sorts of accounts of one of them causing trouble—ruining photo shoots and dinner parties, Margaret having to bribe her friends to watch him while she traveled. I wasn’t sure which one this was, and I didn’t know how to ask. She’d had the bad dog when she first moved in with Michael; there had been some sort of argument about it. Or had she gotten the bad dog once she was already living with Michael?
Not living with. They never lived together. This was 1943 or so, and Michael didn’t want to stir up trouble. They’d had apartments across the hall from each other, the doors left open and unlocked.
In the back seat, Crispian nudged Clara’s blanket. He howled.
“The dogs didn’t always get along,” said Margaret.
> “What?”
“Smoke and Cricket. And then Crispian and Cricket, once Smoke died.”
“What?”
“When we all lived together. At East End Avenue. It was wonderful, for a time. Michael can host a rip-snorting party, and always so many celebrities. It was a shame, about the dogs.”
“Oh,” I said. Was she implying that Clara was a dog? That Michael’s dog was part and parcel to this haunting? I wanted to pull over, get Margaret’s dog out of the car before he decided not to get along with Clara. Instead I drove faster, passing the semi we’d been comfortably tailing, letting the power of my foot on the gas relieve all other want of power.
As we neared our destination, I began to get the distinct feeling that somebody else was in the car with us. Not Clara, whose every stirring had me bracing for a meltdown. Not Margaret, who continued to chain-smoke with the focus and precision of a surgeon. Not Crispian, who had shimmied his way up to the console between the two front seats and put his head down on my open Diet Coke, a small string of drool collecting on the pull tab. I kept catching whiffs of lemon verbena, of tiger lily. Something was pushing on the back of my seat. I drove faster.
WHEN WE PULLED off the highway and passed through the small Wisconsin town closest the cabin it was six thirty a.m., the utter blackness of night dissolving slowly to morning. This was lucky, because once we passed the town, we had ten miles of highway with only my headlights to guide us. I found the turn onto the rambling drive from memory, the only marker a weatherworn boulder at the edge of the main road. It had snowed here, long enough ago that the melt had muddied the road to the house, and I drove slowly, afraid of spinning out. The car creeping, Margaret tapping a finger on the inside of the passenger-side door, something or someone that was not Crispian or Clara displaying a similar impatience in back.
The cabin rose from the mist, its pointed roof and widow’s walk, the rock garden and empty fire pit, the dock leading nowhere, the lake a film of ice. It was smaller than I remembered, but I was used to the stuff of my childhood being smaller than I remembered.
I made it to the covered car park, asking everyone to stay put while I dug around for the fake rock that housed the key, which was so easy to find that a part of me wanted to call Jeanie and tell her that her brother was an idiot. Or maybe I was the idiot, up here in early December, the landscape barren, and the morning so cold that my nipples felt like shards of cut glass. I pictured them as icicles, I pictured myself leaning down to Clara, her mouth open, my icicles piercing the back of her throat. I unlocked the door.
This cabin was truly a cabin—not the mini-mansion variety so many of the kids Ben knew in high school moved up to in the summers. It had a galley kitchen and a sparely furnished great room; a downstairs master bedroom, and two upstairs rooms filled with rickety bunk beds. The appeal of the cabin was the property it sat on: the acres of untouched forest, the lake. There was only one bathroom, without toilet paper.
Inside, I cranked the heat as high as it would go, and ran the water in the sinks until it came out hot and clear. Then I went back to turn off the car and get Margaret and Clara. Crispian was running in circles outside, Margaret was writing something down on the back of a Starbucks napkin she’d found in the glove compartment. Clara was sleeping.
Margaret helped me carry Clara’s things into the house, tottering under the weight of the pack ’n’ play. When we got inside, she seemed to approve of the cabin, dropping the baby paraphernalia in a clatter and wiping frost from the windows with a gloved hand, sticking her nose right up to the glass. We started a fire with the wood that was already piled up inside, and brought another few logs in from the shed. I nursed Clara sitting on a wide red leather couch, staring into the flames.
There were a few non-perishables in the pantry—a tin of sloppy joe sauce, a can of green beans, a stale sleeve of crackers—and we made breakfast of these and the brownies I’d taken from home. Once we’d finished, Margaret helped me rinse the dishes and pile them in the sink. She ran the tap to fill the rusty stovetop kettle. I was settling back down on the couch—Clara doing her tummy time on a blanket by the dining table—feeling for all intents and purposes that this was just another awkward family trip, when I heard a sharp knock at the front door.
I thought at first it might be Ben, but Ben would just be waking up. Ben would be turning to find my side of the bed cold, would be thinking I’d gotten up with Clara. Soon he’d pull on a sweatshirt and stumble upstairs to find Linda making coffee, Seth unloading the dishwasher. They’d look for me. They’d notice the car was gone. They’d find my phone.
But I couldn’t think about any of that—Ben’s panic, how he’d feel and who he’d call. To think about any of that would make everything else pointless: the four-hour drive, the cabin, the slimy tinned breakfast. And besides, someone was knocking.
The front door was unlocked, which didn’t matter. I had invited Margaret in and I had carried in Clara, and because she was already in both of them, Michael didn’t need me to turn the knob, to tell her where to put her shoes or hang her coat. She was knocking out of politeness, knocking to let us know that it was time to pay attention.
The knocking stopped, and Clara coughed, and what happened next was difficult to describe, although I’m going to try to describe it, because otherwise what use is language, otherwise what use are words. Clara coughed up a bit of half-digested milk, creamy fat collecting like algae on the edge of the small pond of spit-up that formed before her on the play mat. Something was caught in her throat, and I moved to lift her upright, but before I’d even reached her, she’d cleared it—cleared it such that it was swirling up out of her in a steady exhalation, her forehead wrinkled with distaste, her eyes making the same cynical sweep that they had of Linda’s teddy bear, of the back seat of the car. There wasn’t any sound to it, other than her breathing, but if there was a sound it would’ve been the ringing of a gong, reverberating low and warm, a deep, extended gasp.
The word ghost comes from the Old English gast—a breath.
And then Clara sneezed and stuck her hand right in the little pool of spit-up, flinging it off the play mat and onto the thick, cork-soled high heel that suddenly stood solidly in front of her. Velvet, and gluey with Clara’s secretions. A shoe strapped onto a foot, connected to an ankle. A pair of cropped pants. A long camel-colored coat, a man’s coat, buttoned on the left, with a dark collar and gold epaulets attached to the shoulders. A scarf, striped blue and black, tucked under the coat. And then the face.
Michael was younger than I had imagined her—I guessed in her mid-forties, a good five or six years younger than she would have been when she first met Margaret. If she was able to choose, it made sense she’d want a body in its prime. She had sharp cheekbones and small, dark eyes, and a beaked nose that had thinned at the nostrils with age. She wore her hair parted severely to the side, a fluffy swoop of dark curls falling over her right eyebrow. She moved with authority. She smelled of lemon verbena.
Outside it began to hail, an inconsistent pattering. Tap. Tap-tap. Tap. Tap-tap-tap.
Michael glanced down at her shoes, then tightened her lips, closed her eyes, straightened her shoulders. A practiced gesture, a deliberate dismissal of a minor inconvenience. When she opened her eyes again, she’d recovered her charm. She knelt and unbuckled her shoes, placing them gingerly next to the sofa.
“Well,” she said. She smiled at me. “That’s better.”
18
Michael sat down on the couch as if she owned it, legs spread wide, leaning back like a caricature of masculinity in some bad period drama.
“Well,” she said again, obviously waiting. Was she waiting for me? For Clara? I spun around to look for Margaret, who had been standing in the galley kitchen, boiling water for tea. I didn’t see her. “I’d asked Margaret not to come near me,” said Michael, following my gaze. “I’d hoped she could respect my wishes.”
“What?” I was a caught fish, my mouth gaping. A little rabbit, corne
red at the end of the hunt.
“Margaret heightens my anxiety. The doctors agree.”
I looked from Michael to the door—ten paces or so, fifteen if I got Clara. But the car seat was in the far corner, the car keys were in the pocket of my coat. I could realistically grab one and not the other, yet each without the other would do me no good. So far the morning had played out much as I’d imagined, but I hadn’t really planned for Michael’s rebirth. I suppose I’d thought that once we got here, I would give Clara a hot bath, or do some sort of cleanse to release toxins, and Michael would float away on the breeze. I’d thought Margaret might help me confront Michael. I’d thought Margaret might stand up for herself, that she and Michael would either reconcile or finally part ways, and they would stay here in Wisconsin so that Clara could open her eyes, easier. Changed. We’d hop in the car and magically be back at my in-laws’ right as Ben was waking up; I’d tell him that we’d just been out for coffee. I hadn’t counted on time passing, on this distance between me and the door. I hadn’t counted on this conversation.
“I need you to be my legacy,” said Michael.
“What?” My eyes still darting, my boots on the doormat. All I truly needed were my keys. We could hunker down in the front seat, blast the heat, wait for Margaret to find her way back and handle Michael. Clara wouldn’t know the difference. Clara would remember none of this. She’d be happy in my arms, blinking out at the crystalline sun. Watching the shadows of the birds migrating south over the lake.
“My legacy,” Michael said again, rolling her tongue on the l, the guttural g, a final hiss and then a deliberate, elucidated closure. Often when I spoke I found myself dropping the ends of words, a consequence of vocal fry, a consequence of being a woman. Michael spat, rather than swallowed. Her diction was perfectly clear. And here I was, a blurry version of who I wanted to be, leaning down to mop spit-up off my kid with the sleeve of my sweater.