by Deborah Reed
Goddamn Florida. If she could just figure out why Kate had decided to call after all this time, and then only to talk about the day she’d nearly drowned, then maybe Elin could let it go. But the more Elin had asked about where she’d been and how her daughters were, the more Kate kept on about what it had felt like in those moments before Elin blew the life back inside her. “I must have been dead,” she said. “Think about it. Dead.”
“I don’t want to think about it,” Elin had said, wanting to get off the phone. There’d been no love lost between them, but the bad blood, the residual rancor, had caught Elin off guard.
She shut the burner down before the kettle whistled. She needed to call her mother, the last person in the world she felt like talking to.
The metallic green back of a broad-tailed hummingbird caught the sun as it dove into the salvia at the window. Hummingbirds didn’t appear very often, especially a broad-tailed with its cricketlike whistling wings, and Rudi called spotting one a sighting. He would motion her to the window so they could watch the tiny creatures as furtively as spies through a keyhole. But today Elin rubbed her eyes, hoping that the flash in her head from earlier wasn’t a migraine, and for a moment she yearned for winter, for the misty rain and dull overcast perfect for sleeping.
The whistle from the hummingbird’s wings traveled through the screen and zapped her forehead with tiny cross-stitches of pain.
She folded the paper closed. The font was fine. Blocky was bold. PDX had signed off on it. Loved it. Loved her. She just needed sleep.
It wasn’t until the phone rang that she realized how long she’d been staring at the glassy green backsplash above the sink. Lotus, Rudi’s receptionist, wanted to know if he’d already left for the dealership.
“Why?” Elin asked. “Is something wrong?”
Lotus didn’t answer.
“What is it?”
“It’s none of my business really. But it’s not like I want to work here so bad anyway.”
The last thing Elin wanted to hear was Lotus’s affected rise of intonation as if everything were a question. “I don’t have a lot of time this morning,” Elin told her. “Rudi will be leaving in a minute—”
“I don’t know how to say this.”
Fluke’s claws clicked like glass beads across the tile. Elin opened the screen door and he bolted for the back corner of the yard. “Say what?”
“Well. You remember that time you told Rudi that I deserved a raise for bringing my dad’s golfing buddy in? The one who bought the Audi TT?”
“Yes?”
“And how you covered the phone lines for me that time you happened to be here and I had to leave with that diarrhea thing?”
“Lotus.”
“I guess I just feel like I owe you. I mean, you’re such a nice person and I just, well, if I were you I’d want someone to tell me?”
Elin’s head zinged with a certainty that she should hang up the phone that instant and never speak to this woman again. A before-and-after was about to define Elin’s life—she knew this—and yet the moment for hanging up was wrestled away by the strength of her own manners, the need to comfort strangers before comforting herself.
Fluke whined at the door. Had he already gone? She let him in and then slumped back onto the stool. “I’m sorry, but I really need to get off the phone.”
Fluke leaped onto Elin’s lap, the dewy soil from his paws smearing across her robe. She shoved him off, and his ribs thudded against the floor.
“Damn it!” Elin reached for him, but he ran into the next room, and then upstairs and down the hall above her head. “Why are you calling, Lotus?”
“Okay! The other day I’m at the counter and this Beemer guy is asking for the owner, you know, he just wants the owner, no one else? But I can’t find Rudi anywhere. And I’m like, looking all over, out in the garage, and he’s not there either, and so I go to check the bathroom, the one by the accountant’s office. And I knock on the door and I don’t hear anything and I’m thinking, Oh my God, what if something has happened to him. I heard of this guy once who fainted in the bathroom…”
Elin cupped the receiver and called Fluke, whistled softly, but he didn’t come.
“And on the way down to the floor he hits his head on the urinal and goes into convulsions and dies right there. So I’m thinking about that guy when I try the bathroom door. Well, I knock, like I said, and I don’t hear anything, but it’s locked so I go and come back with the key and when I open the door, so, well, there’s Poppy, the girl mechanic? And she’s on top of Rudi who’s on top of the toilet and neither of them, you know, has their pants on?”
“What’s up with him?” Rudi said, appearing in the doorway with Fluke in his arms. “Who’s on the phone?”
Elin fumbled the receiver onto its stand. “PDX,” she said, her words launched by the banging in her chest, the whole of her insides thrashing. And yet her tone, as clear and calm as if someone else were speaking, prevailed with a purpose she did not quite understand, overcome as she was by a sense that if she could just pull back and hold still the world would not crack in two. “Changed their mind about the logo,” she said.
Rudi set Fluke on the floor. “I thought they loved your work,” he said, touching her shoulder. Prickly vines unfurled behind her eyes. Another flash of migraine.
His cologne rose like a fence corralling everything in—the passing of his sage-colored dress shirt, fingers through golden hair, chinos swishing socked feet—a collage of a man, arms through a summer jacket, leather shoes cutting across the kitchen, and then a slow, slow face pressing warm lips onto her cool forehead.
“Gotta run,” Rudi said, wiping her sweat from his mouth.
Elin closed her robe at her chest. “Early appointment?”
“You don’t look well. Are you all right?”
“Headache.”
“Should I stay and have breakfast with you?”
Her heart shifted, hard. “Yes,” she said. “Why don’t you?”
Rudi hesitated, and then sidled onto the stool next to her and grabbed a bran muffin from the bag near the toaster. He didn’t remove his jacket.
“I still think you should see another doctor,” he said. “A second opinion.”
“I’ve had headaches all my life.”
“Jawohl. That doesn’t make them normal.”
Elin clutched a muffin, took a bite, and cleared the choke in her throat. She shook her head, and a feeble laugh she didn’t know was there broke loose.
Rudi swallowed. “What?”
She dipped forward in a silent, spastic fit of laughter that produced several tears. She shook her head but her mind would not fall back under her control.
“What?” Rudi asked.
“Kate,” she said, finally.
“What about her?”
“On the phone. This reminds me of it.”
“This?” Rudi glanced at the screen door, his foot bobbing beneath the stool. He took another bite of muffin.
A whole mountain of heartache sat on her chest, making it difficult to breathe. Her mind kept charging toward Kate as if she were the source, the force beneath the unbearable ache. Should anything happen to me, Kate had said, who… would look after my girls? If intended as a dig, it made no sense. You disappear and then ask such stupid, shithead questions, Elin had replied. Where the fuck are you, Kate?
Elin wiped her runny eyes and fingered the top of her head in search of the side-part, flipping cords of hair where it felt like they belonged. “I think it’s a migraine,” she said, trying not to squint.
“Sorry?”
Elin stared at his mouth. His German accent made sorry sound like soarey, like something you couldn’t spell in the English language, and the back of her throat filled with disdain—coppery, dry, scratchy as sand.
She coughed. “That’s when my headaches started,” she said. “That day at the beach.” The faded image of Kate’s body in the sand appeared like a tarnished photograph in her mind.
The phone rang.
“Don’t touch it,” Elin said.
“Why?”
“Because I asked you not to.”
“O-kaay.” Rudi scratched his forehead.
“And don’t mock me.”
“Who’s mocking you?”
The migraine aura filled in the edges of the room with a soft, fleecy violet.
“We need to fix the damn faucet in the master bath,” Elin said. “The guy was just here a month ago—we paid him some ungodly sum, and now it’s leaking again.”
“I hadn’t noticed,” Rudi said, and glanced at the ringing phone as he slid his jacket off and laid it on the counter.
“Are you serious?” Elin said, and Rudi nodded, his eyes still caught by the phone. “It drips all night,” she said. “It keeps me awake.”
“That’s what you said.”
“That is what I said.” She threw the remainder of her muffin in the sink.
“Okay then.”
Elin’s cell rang in her purse, which dangled on the coat rack.
“No. It’s not okay,” Elin said. “That’s the point. It’s not in any way okay.”
Rudi reached for her purse.
“Leave it,” she said. And then, “Please.”
Rudi stared at the stove, the kettle untouched, the coffee unmade. He stood and took a glass from the cupboard. “Can I get you some juice?”
Elin shook her head. The tiled floor moved in sections like a kaleidoscope. She lifted her eyes to see Rudi’s back, his hands, the way they gripped the carton. She imagined yanking at his belt, coming face-to-face with his hard-on. The space behind her eye tightened as if pulled by an invisible wire, and still she couldn’t stop herself from wondering what Rudi and Poppy did in that bathroom, exactly what they did, and how often, and how long they’d been doing it, and whether it was different from what she and Rudi did at home in what he called their Ehebett, their marriage bed, of seven years.
Elin’s chest rose for air. She pressed a finger into the bone between her breasts, hard and long, as if corking a hole.
Rudi’s phone vibrated in his pocket, each phone going off after the other, a desperate chorus of needs begging them to reenter the outside world of other obligations, other lives. Elin wiped her eyes, one-two, and the aura deepened into a silky, silvery white, one cheek tingling numb. Kate’s problem was that she’d never been practical. Not ever. She didn’t understand that the only way through a mess was to barrel, smack dab through the middle, as if it had no effect. As if it never happened. “I’ll call the guy,” Elin said, hopping off her stool.
“I can call him.”
“If he thinks he can charge me,” she said.
“I said I’ll call him.”
“No.” Elin pulled the bag of kibble from the lower cabinet and filled Fluke’s bowl, adding an extra scoop for making him wait, for knocking him to the floor, while feeling Rudi rigid and tall as a maypole at her back.
“You should go to bed,” he said.
“I was thinking the same.”
“Before it gets worse.”
“Yes,” she said, and nudged the bowl with her foot as Fluke gorged, just to see if he’d growl. Just to see if he’d bite as he stumbled after it. Elin stopped, and then she nudged it again.
Rudi came up from behind, turned her around.
“Don’t touch me,” she meant to say. “Don’t,” right there in the curl of her tongue, where it stayed as her cheek tingled against his collarbone, words dissolving into the purple patina around her head.
FOUR
THE CARDBOARD BOXES STACKED AGAINST the wall were decades old and soft as suede to the touch. Vivvie carefully shoved as many as she could lift up onto the closet shelf while balancing atop a stepladder in the spare bedroom. If she came crashing down Averlee would have to call 911 again, and the awful possibility was like a rope holding Vivvie stable above the girls drinking Pepsis on the floor below her. From this high up their white curls appeared like cotton wigs in the heat. In an instant her house had become another planet—slurpy little elves underfoot, bare toes swishing across her kitchen floor like whispers.
The window unit sputtered cool air, but a dampness remained, especially after Vivvie stripped away the musty blankets and drapes, now knocking the drum inside the washing machine across the hall. The air smelled faintly of bleach.
It was nearly lunchtime in Florida and still no word from Elin. Surely she was up by now. Vivvie had left three messages on both of Elin’s phones. Call me, call me, call me.
Averlee reached into a box of plastic knickknacks and pulled out a set of speckled pink poodles. Quincy found the porcelain pigs with the black bows that Kate had painted sloppily on their heads during summer camp when she was around Quincy’s age. For years the pigs had been arranged from largest to smallest on the kitchen windowsill until Kate hit adolescence and declared them the dumbest, most embarrassing things she’d ever seen. She raged at Vivvie for having placed them there, for liking something so stupid, and Vivvie found herself defending the ugly pigs against her daughter, clutching them to her chest, and then, in the end, carefully packing them away, like Fabergé eggs, in the box her granddaughters now opened.
“Once I get this room all straightened up I don’t want to find a thing thrown down in here,” Vivvie said, sweating as she stepped off the ladder with a box of photographs that wouldn’t fit.
The girls said nothing, not now, not most of the morning.
Vivvie set the box on the bed. “Averlee, why don’t you go ahead and pull your stuff out of that grocery bag and put it in the bottom drawer.” Vivvie pointed to the oak dresser. “Put yours to one side and Quincy’s on the other.”
Averlee plopped the whole bag inside the drawer.
“That’s not what I said.”
The girl leaned back on her heels and stared.
“What? Are we having some kind of standoff, you and me?” Vivvie wiped her forehead.
Quincy scooted in front of Averlee and emptied two striped shirts and three pairs of khaki shorts into the heavy drawer. Unlike what they were wearing, the clothes in the drawer had seen better days. A frayed shirt hem, pockets worn white along the edge.
“You two are going to need some more clothes,” Vivvie said.
“How long are we going to be here?” Averlee asked.
Vivvie didn’t answer.
“And what do we call you?”
Sunlight caught the dark flecks in Averlee’s light eyes. Elin’s eyes. Jackson’s before hers.
Vivvie sat on the bed. What should they call her? She was no different than a neighbor lady, a stranger who could have sold them candy at Roth’s. She was Mrs. Fenton, an old woman living alone in a house at the end of a street. “I’m your grandma,” she said, but that was just a hollow fact. “So… Grandma will do.” She massaged her jaw. “We’ll have to see about the rest.”
Averlee pursed her lips, keeping whatever thoughts she was having to herself. The washing machine whined and thunked to a stop, deepening the sudden silence.
“Are you done with that Pepsi?” Vivvie asked.
Averlee jiggled the empty can.
Was it considered rude these days, jiggling a can instead of answering your grandmother? Kids did and said all sorts of things at Roth’s while their parents poked at cell phones, glancing up just long enough to ask if pulling candy off a shelf or fighting with a sister or hitting their own mother was a good choice or a bad choice.
Vivvie rose from the bed. “Put the can in the bag of empties under the sink,” she said.
Averlee leaned on her heels again, and after a moment seemed to think better of whatever she’d had in mind, and headed toward the kitchen with the can.
Vivvie carved out extra space in the bottom of the closet, and it was only then that she noticed her old jewelry box on its side, a wooden creaky thing held together by a rusted hinge at the back, a single
latch clasped shut at the front. The smell of cedar rose when she opened it. The colorful beaded necklace Elin had made for her in the third grade lay on top in a tangle. Beneath it a scatter of cheap bangles Vivvie’s mother left behind when she died, and there was Kate’s baby bracelet from the hospital. At the very bottom lay Vivvie’s wedding band, thinner than she remembered, the gold turned on the inside from her skin, a part of her left there for decades.
She spun it around her knuckle, but it was made for a younger hand. She wedged, and pulled taut her finger, but the ring would not budge, and she finally slid it off and returned it to the box.
Averlee stood in the doorway, watching. “Quincy’s feeling better,” she said.
Vivvie stuffed the jewelry box behind a larger box in the closet, and added another on top like a barricade. “Well, good. That’s good,” she said. “Did you put the can where it belongs?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you,” Vivvie said, feeling the girl’s eyes still on her even after her back was turned.
FIVE
THE CONCRETE PILINGS BENEATH THE house allowed for the pounding feet inside to echo past the floorboards all the way out into the yard. Vivvie could hear the girls’ laughter, too, could tell they were playing some game.
A trail of confederate jasmine ran wild up the telephone pole to the rear of the side lawn, and every morning Vivvie watered and sniffed and pinched away dried buds. But it was nearly noon, too hot to water, too hot not to, and hurrying through the wet heat with sugary perfume around her head made her feel a little sick. She shut the hose down and grabbed the broom from the porch.
In her imaginings their reunion was always filled with hugs and apologies, softhearted as they’d never been in real life. But Vivvie’s arms felt heavy at the thought of wrapping them around her own daughter. The vision of Kate’s bloodless face and wasted body was now the only vision she seemed to own of her daughter, the rest of their lives erased, and to touch that woman in the hospital bed was to break her in half, kill her dead on the spot.
She swept the sandy soil from the walkway, needing a cigarette as bad as she’d ever needed one in her life, but the tiny voices springing from the house made her want to quit, turned the act of smoking into some kind of disgrace. She’d never felt that way with her own daughters, never hesitated to fill her insides with tar when they were around.