by Alix Ohlin
“Your sister fait comme elle veut, Lark. She wants to be famous, she tries to be famous. She has enough, she leaves. She’s a narcissist.”
“She’s an artist.”
“She gives herself permission to do whatever she wants, if that’s what you mean,” she said.
It seemed to me that she was describing herself. We lapsed into silence, stalemated. “I can’t believe you aren’t concerned,” I finally said.
“She left me, and now she left you,” Marianne said, and I could hear the satisfaction in her voice. “Now you know how it feels.”
* * *
—
I looked up Ytterby and found it on the island of Resarö, in the Stockholm archipelago. Pioneering research in rare earth minerals was conducted there. If you go, you can view the historical marker commemorating the Ytterby mine as a landmark where four periodic elements were isolated from the black stone gadolinite. Ytterby, I learned, is to the periodic table what the Galápagos Islands are to evolution, a small place that birthed great scientific knowledge. I remembered making Robin dress as Marie Curie for my film at Worthen, the sparkling fairy lights of radiation in her lab coat, and tried to picture her now, wandering the little village of Ytterby with gadolinite in her pockets.
The mine was not on the postcard that she sent.
Don’t look for me.
I taped a map of Sweden to the kitchen wall. I drew a circle around the area of the archipelago, the uneven clusters of rocky islands braced in the Baltic, and added lines from Resarö to other islands and cities, to Norrtälje and Stockholm. A line that cuts across a circle is called a chord. I imagined Robin crisscrossing the archipelago, from one chord to the next, a musical geography only she could hear. Before she left, we’d watched Bergman’s Summer with Monika, in which two teenagers from the city run away and spend a romantic idyll on the beach before the realities of life bring them back home. Robin thought the movie was boring. She said it should be called A Not Very Interesting Vacation. But maybe, I thought, the movie had made a bigger impression on her than she’d revealed.
When I contacted the police, they said that since she’d gone away of her own volition, since she was an adult, there was no action they could take. They suggested I monitor her credit cards. “She doesn’t use credit cards,” I said, and they said nothing.
As the fall progressed I imagined Robin shivering in the cold. Of course there was no reason she should have stayed in Sweden; she could have gone south; she could have traveled to Italy or Spain. She could even—I realized with a swift, sharp sting—have returned to New York without telling me. So far as I knew, I was the only person Robin had written to; I was the only person she’d told not to look. Maybe, I thought, the only person she wanted to hide from was me.
* * *
—
Weeks became months and Robin did not return. I slept poorly, each footfall in the building’s hallway waking me with the hope it would be her. Unable to concentrate, I fell asleep during screenings at school, failed to hand in papers. I rarely ate and never felt hungry, though I was often light-headed. At the campus store I scowled at customers and gave back the wrong change. My boss put me on notice. My fellow students gave me an even wider berth than usual. I was in a fog, neither present nor absent, some part of me traveling with Robin despite not knowing where she was. I forgot to shower, slept in my clothes, walked to work the next day still wearing them.
“Jesus, girl,” my boss said. “You reek.”
“Sorry,” I mumbled. She sent me home. I walked down Broadway, the October wind whipping my hair in my eyes with a force that felt personal, and I was so dazed that I didn’t realize until I had already passed her that a woman on the street was saying my name. Through some uncanny coincidence, it was Olga. She was wearing over-the-knee boots and a long grey cape with large brass buttons, and she looked like a general in a fantasy army. Her lips were red and her eyes were wide with concern.
“Are you all right?” she asked me, and I burst into tears. Olga had never been maternal, but she swept her arm around my shoulder and shepherded me into a coffee shop, muttering dismissively to her companion, a man in a tweed sports coat who brought us a large pot of heavily sweetened tea and then disappeared. I told Olga about my sister, in brief incoherent phrases, and she nodded. “I see your worry,” she said. “It is very strange.”
After I had calmed down a little I asked Olga what she was doing in New York, and she explained that she was on leave from Worthen, doing research. When I asked her what her project was, she laughed and shook her head. “Let’s not talk about that now,” she said. “But look, I have something for you.”
She bent down to a leather satchel between her feet and pulled out a book, which she laid on the table between us. The Rise of Nostalgia and the End of the Image. It was her monograph, the one I’d worked on at Worthen. “Here,” she said, and flipped the book open, her painted fingernail resting on the pages like a drop of blood. All I saw were wavy lines on the pages, and only gradually did they come into focus, the list of names on the acknowledgments page, which included my own. The tears came again, and Olga withdrew the book before I could cry on it. I sensed her suppressing a sigh.
She began telling me about a film she’d just seen, Tokyo Story by Ozu, one of her favorites. It was showing at Lincoln Center and she left the library early to watch it, even though she’d seen it many times before. I didn’t interrupt her to say that I had seen the film too, in college. I let her talk. The film depicts an aging couple who travel to Tokyo to visit their children, who are busy and neglectful, but their daughter-in-law is kind to them. Ozu’s style is very quiet; the story is simple, and the audience is left to infer much of the unspoken emotions. Even the camera movements are quiet. I waited for Olga to make an argument about the film, to somehow connect it to her interest in nostalgia, or to draw a parallel between the family in the film and my own predicament. But she didn’t do any of these things. Instead she described the film, almost frame by frame, as if we were watching it together in the coffee shop. We drank the tea. She talked. I listened.
* * *
—
My meeting with Olga cheered me, as did her suggestion that we meet again in a few weeks. Because of this, and because I was so embarrassed by the condition in which she’d found me that day on Broadway, I tried to pull myself together. I did my laundry. I washed my hair. Still, worry about my sister preoccupied me, and I continued to lose weight, and couldn’t concentrate on my classes. The program wasn’t Worthen; it was large and I was only a part-time student, barely known to my professors, who didn’t care if I passed or failed, if I stayed or left. I stopped attending class, and I stopped watching films, too. Most of the time I lay on my bed in the Tunnel, feeling the invisible membrane that had long separated me from other people enclose me, and now it was thick and suffocating, and yet I could do nothing to break through it.
* * *
—
On a cold rainy Tuesday in November I came home from work and opened the door to find Robin inside, sitting on the couch, her dark hair slicked to her cheeks. She was wearing clothes I didn’t recognize, a dirty white fisherman’s sweater and jeans ripped at the knees, and she looked sickly and exhausted. I rushed to her, and then stopped: I wasn’t sure she would want me to touch her. I wasn’t sure of anything. But when I sat down she laid her head on my shoulder as if she’d been waiting for nothing but that, and I put my arms around her.
“Your clothes are wet,” I said, and she nodded. She stood up, leaving a damp moon on the couch cushion. I tugged off her sweater. I pulled down her jeans. She was so thin that she looked like a little girl again. We had no bathtub, so I stood with her in a hot shower until her cheeks were pink. I washed her long hair, untangling it with my fingers. Then I dressed her in pajamas and put her to bed. It seemed too soon, she seemed too fragile, to ask her wher
e she’d been.
When I did ask, the next morning, she shook her head and said she didn’t want to talk about it. She said she needed some time. She used mundane phrases like that, seemingly designed, in their blandness, to discourage further questions. When I asked why she had come back now, she said it was because she was ready to. I couldn’t solve either mystery: the drama of her disappearance or the puzzle of her return. Again and again, I came up against her mute refusal, and it dug a gap between us that deepened by the day.
When I brought up Bernard, she shrugged. She seemed alternately vulnerable and roughened by her time away. Most consistently she was irritated with me. She complained that I woke her too early in the mornings. She complained about my hair in the bathtub. She didn’t like the food I bought. When I asked whether something awful had happened to her in Europe, she answered, sharply, “The only awful thing is having this conversation with you.”
When I called Marianne to say that Robin was back, she said only, “I knew it would be fine,” in a tone that implied I was neurotic and Robin was careless; I was so furious that I hung up before she could say anything else.
I told myself to be patient. I poured all my energies into caring for her, and we spent Christmas together, the two of us, in the Tunnel, drinking hot chocolate in our pajamas. I gave her an intentionally hideous sweater I found at our favorite thrift store, the kind of thing that once would have made her laugh, and she said, “It’s scratchy.”
“Yes,” I said, “that’s kind of the point,” and she frowned.
In the new year, Robin informed me that she wasn’t returning to Juilliard. “It makes sense that you’d need a break,” I said, although none of what was happening made sense to me.
Robin shook her head. “It’s not a break,” she said. “It’s over.”
She’d gained some weight and she was as beautiful as ever, but now there was a glossiness to her I hadn’t seen before. She had her hair done at a Brazilian salon in Brooklyn and started wearing lipstick. She also got long fake nails in brilliant colors; when playing the piano she’d never been able to grow her nails, and now I sometimes caught her studying her hands with pleasure. She started wearing tight jeans and a black motorcycle jacket she’d found at a restaurant; someone had left it behind, she said, with a sly smile that made me wonder if she’d stolen it. She got a job as a bartender and began working late nights, sleeping until early afternoon. She hardly ever spoke to me. It was as if I didn’t exist. I didn’t know what I had done to be so rebuffed, and when I begged her to tell me she would only look confused, as if I were speaking a language not our own.
This continued for months. On my own during those long nights in the Tunnel, Robin out at work, I sat and cried, and one day when we met for coffee Olga put her hand over mine and said gently, “This is not good, your life, Lark,” and I knew she was right. It was my turn to go. I wrote to Wheelock and asked if the job was still available, and as soon as he said it was I dropped out of school. When I told Robin, she hugged me, but mechanically, her arms stiff with obligation, and I knew she could hardly wait for me to leave. I left her my key to the apartment, and I didn’t see her again for five years.
PART THREE
Motherhood
1.
The village of Briar Neck perched at the edge of the Susquehanna River like a child gingerly dipping its toes in the water. In summers it was dense and picturesque, with an explosion of tangled greenery—including the shambling, prickly shrubs that gave the place its name—extending from the town below to the rolling hills above, and tourists came to eat ice cream and shop for antiques along Main Street. In winters it was deserted and lovelier, a sepia postcard of stark tree branches and milky snow. The few restaurants closed early, and people hunkered down in their homes, their pleasures turned silent and internal. These were my favorite months. I lived in a small brick house with red shutters and a tiny front lawn girded by a picket fence, as if mail-ordered from a catalogue of Americana. I’d been in Briar Neck for three years, ever since the runaway success of Wheelock’s film Hello Dolly had enabled him to procure office space there, and I knew the florist, the baker, the best mechanic, and the cheaper but less trustworthy mechanic. Every morning I drove twenty-five minutes along winding roads to a nondescript office park that had been constructed in the late nineties for a high-tech company that was born, spectacularly metastasized, and died all within five years, leaving the buildings well-appointed and empty. It was a company that promoted local bands by researching them on the internet and then emailing people in their towns who, it turned out, knew about them already. Wheelock purchased the entire property for a song, assuming there are songs about bargains in real estate. When we were moving in I came upon a room full of doomed company swag emblazoned with their musical-note logo—T-shirts and fleece vests and mugs—that Wheelock and I, along with a rotating cast of interns and assistants, wore and used whenever we were working long hours and didn’t feel like doing laundry or dishes.
I was Wheelock’s editor and right-hand man, his permanent Mylark, a job that had grown over the years along with his reputation. I no longer made my own films or dreamed of doing so. I was unburdened by ambition, too busy for it. When Hello Dolly came out, following the practices and ethics of cloning from scientists in their labs to the bleating of an artificially made sheep, it won awards and accolades and was nominated for an Oscar, though it didn’t win, and then Wheelock was invited to turn the film into a series for public television, which was widely viewed and adopted by schools across the country, and something similar happened with his next project, a documentary about climate change. These new projects were less aestheticized than his previous work, though still beautifully shot and composed; they were viewer-friendly, issue-based, and Wheelock had become less of a filmmaker’s filmmaker (as The New York Times called him) than a documentary corporation. The Wheelock I’d first met as a student—fragile, shy, and prone to drink—would have been overwhelmed by this change; but the Wheelock I worked for now was prosperous and confident. His personality had shifted so gradually that only when looking back could I see what a distance it had traveled. It’s funny to remember, I emailed Olga, who was now teaching in London, what a mess he used to be. She wrote back, Like all men, he believes his success was fated, which struck me as bitter and not entirely untrue. Wheelock himself had been generous, both financially and otherwise; he always credited my editing work on the films, and in interviews would talk about how much he owed to my eye. But it was Wheelock whose name had become a brand, Wheelock who won a “genius” grant, and Wheelock who was invited to speak at schools and film festivals and symposia—all of which, to be clear, was fine with me.
* * *
—
When he was in Briar Neck, Wheelock and I lived in the same house, in separate rooms. He also had a studio apartment in New York, but he spent much of his time on the road, at residencies and conferences and meetings. Usually I traveled with him. In the third year of my full-time employment, we were on a train in Italy. We’d attended a biotech conference in Milan on genome sequencing—Wheelock was often the only non-scientist invited to conferences like these—and were heading back to the States, where he was speaking to film students in Chicago. We did much of our work on planes and in cars, comfortably in suspension between the task just done and the one ahead. Wheelock was using a voice recorder while I made notes on my laptop, which sometimes rocked against the window or his shoulder as the train sped up or slowed. This, too, was comfortable. As colleagues we inhabited a bodily rhythm together. We each spent more time together than we did with anyone else.
As he spoke his thoughts into the recorder I typed a smoother, cleaner version onto the computer, easing the transitions and clarifying his points as he went along. I never worried about upsetting him by making changes or suggestions, assuming that this was why he’d hired me in the first place. The train lurched, shuddered, stopped.
We weren’t at any station. The landscape out the window was hilly and light green, terraced with vineyards. As soon as we stopped moving the air in the car grew dense and close, and people opened the windows to invite a non-existent breeze. Wheelock undid a button on his shirt, his face unhappily flushed.
I pressed Save on the document as the conductor barged past us down the aisle, trailed by two squabbling engineers. “I think we hit something,” Wheelock said. “They’re arguing about how to fix it.”
“I didn’t know you spoke Italian.”
“I picked some up this week.”
Around us in the crowded car complaints gathered steam. A child spilled his drink and burst into sobs while his mother scolded him, whether for the spilling or the sobbing I didn’t know. I took off my sweater and pressed Save again, although we hadn’t changed the document. I didn’t want to lose anything.
“I wonder what we hit.”
“Either a herd of sheep or a round of cheese,” Wheelock said.
“A round of cheese?”
“My vocabulary’s pretty limited,” he said.
I closed the laptop to preserve the battery. My mind looped ahead to Chicago, and then to Berlin, where Wheelock was to present Hello Dolly to German audiences, and where my sister had briefly lived, working as a painter’s assistant. Not an art painter, her postcard had clarified, a guy who paints houses. His name is Aksel and he looks like Don Cherry. She’d left New York soon after I did; she never graduated from Juilliard or anywhere else, and she traveled a great deal, working just enough to cover her expenses. Marianne said, “She was never suited for regular life,” as if she could have predicted Robin’s path all along. Her complacency annoyed me and yet, perhaps to make up for Robin’s absence in my life, I began calling her every once in a while, to share whatever news I had, though we argued more often than not.