by Deborah Reed
Vivvie flicked her cigarette butt into the grass and slid her palms down her thighs. The world did not owe her a thing. And yet she had the urge to tell a Lord she’d long stopped believing in that she recognized she ought to be grateful for having been given this day, like a gift she in no way deserved but willingly accepted, even though she could not feel its worth. Not now, not yet, not this offering or anything else, but surely there would come a day when she’d no longer be numb, and she’d recall what she’d been given, this day with her daughters, her granddaughters, gathered together this one and only day, and she would cry hot tears and give herself over to agony, and she would not be terrified by either.
TWENTY-SIX
ELIN’S MOTHER HAD BECOME OBSESSED with domestication of the highest order, her life’s purpose apparently managing cupboards and a refrigerator, stacking groceries from Roth’s, the counters gleaming, even as lunch, and perhaps dinner, simmered in white cast-iron pots on the stove. But now she was smoking on the children’s swings, her lips shaping into words as if she’d gone crazy, as if she were speaking to ghosts.
Elin stopped watching, felt herself useless, idle hands and all that. Even her nieces had occupied themselves in subtle, low-tone beats in other rooms, with storybooks and dollhouses, sketchbooks on the living room floor, and in between playing quietly with Fluke, their voices floating sadly down the hall. “Oh, little puppy. Sweet little puppy boy, come here.”
Another blue-black storm, like a puffed giant, was ready to howl and blow. Elin felt small inside her loose white blouse at the window, as misplaced as she’d ever been, incapable of doing what was needed, unsure, in any case, of what was needed. She couldn’t protect her sister, or any of them against what was to come, and she supposed what she felt was hopeless, helpless. Utterly alone. Then she remembered—as if her marriage had happened decades ago in some forgotten country—that somewhere in the world she had a husband. She’d married a man with the intention of spending her life with him, he for her and she for him, a kind and loving buffer against the harsh edges of the world, a man so different from herself, their life together so unlike any she had known, that she could not help but forget all about the person she used to be. But how strange that all sounded now. And yet how perfectly correct it rang out when they began, how right the promise declared itself, a win-win deal cut and shaken upon, and everything that followed, everything built up and out around them was evidence of their agreement. And now? So soon, the marriage was already feeling past. And looking back she had no way of knowing if Rudi had ever actually loved her, or if he loved her still. What had he seen when he looked at her all those years? Had she ever allowed herself to be seen?
He had done them both a favor. She saw this now, evidenced by the pang of guilt she’d felt the other day. She’d been waiting for something to happen, waiting since the day they married, since she’d branded love like one of her accounts, slapped it with an identity, an easily recognizable logo. She’d been waiting for someone to come along and break it open, let the yolk ooze in directions unknown because that mess was where she was, all over the place. That mess was who she was, neither here nor there, and she’d been waiting for someone to free her from the neatly assigned category where she lived so tidily, dry as an egg shell, as Rudi’s wife, waiting so she wouldn’t have to bust it open by herself.
And yet, grief rolled like a tide toward her, grief for what she’d wanted it to be, for what it would never be, no matter the want. She was going to need a lawyer, her life about to head into overdrive on the lexicon highway of divorce law, something she knew little about, save the official term for their discord—irreconcilable differences—which surely they could agree on. Everything would be accounted for, the worldly accumulation of what had been their life, reduced to a list—business, house, cars, furniture, bank accounts, retirement funds, antique rugs, Tiffany lamps. Fluke.
Kate moaned softly behind her. Elin had briefly forgotten, slipped away from what was happening at her back. Wake up and tell me what it’s like to be divorced. Wake up. Wake up.
Elin dropped into the chair, the whole of her a hot mess of convulsing sobs, which was how Nancy found her a short time later, and handed her a box of Kleenex, a tool of her trade. She kneeled and patted Elin’s knee, which, surprisingly, soothed her.
An hour later Elin was alone again and the buttery scent of cupcakes had taken over the house. Kate’s birthday was next month. She would turn, or would have turned, thirty-six years old. Elin held her hand, a semblance of small, white bones. According to Nancy, Kate could feel everything, feel and think and understand just like before, and Elin wondered if she could sense things, too, like Elin’s sorrow. She wondered if regret could pass through her skin into her sister’s, and, if so, would Kate intuit that Elin’s marriage, at least in part, had been to prove a point? That part of the scaffolding that had held up her marriage was assembled by a one-upmanship, an in-your-face middle finger directed toward Kate, a competition of relief-from-the-past, that, until this moment, Elin had believed she’d won?
“Ah, hell,” Elin said out loud. “Don’t be so hard on yourself.” It had all worked out in the end, hadn’t it? Those two beautiful girls everybody’s proof, everybody’s reward?
A book of poetry lay on the nightstand. Elin leaned back and sighed. She glanced at the shelves, more poetry, novels, books on birds and plants. “Would you like me to read to you?” She lifted the book from the nightstand and it fell open in her hands to a page read many times, the spine worn in place, a poem about winter Sundays had been underlined and Elin began there.
Kate moaned, her right arm twitching.
Elin read that poem and several others before the rainstorm, a deafening racket, crashed against the roof. A sheet of drizzle on the windows distorted the dark outside, lightning flashed, and Elin placed her hand back onto Kate’s, feeling the life inside her sister thin and cool as fog.
The lights flickered, and after a moment Fluke crept into the room, his whole body trembling. He’d been forbidden to leave the living room, and Elin wondered if his defying her had caused him more fear than the storm.
“Come,” she said, and he hopped onto her lap. She held his warm body to her chest, and then she placed him next to her sister like a hot water bottle on the bed near her hip. She leaned and kissed the top of his nose, squeezed his small ears. Coffee was brewing in the kitchen. Elin could smell it, could hear the gurgle as the last of the water dripped through the maker. Evening had already arrived, the light now pewter-colored in the far corners of the room. A long night lay ahead, which must have been what her mother was thinking with the coffee, something to help keep vigil.
When Elin looked up Averlee was in the doorway wearing her cobalt-blue shirt and tan capris, a cupcake in her hand. Her face was hidden in the shadow of the unlit hall. Elin couldn’t read her expression.
“Come here,” Elin said. “Come sit with me.”
For the next hour Elin held Averlee to her chest and gave her tissues and patted her knee. She could hear her mother in the other room playing a quiet game with Quincy, engaging her in a way she’d never done with Elin and Kate.
TWENTY-SEVEN
THE HOURS HAD LOST ALL shape. What day was it? What time?
Saturdays had been Kate’s favorite. No school, no work, the girls up early, whispers from the living room, spoons tinkling cereal bowls Kate’s weekend alarm. Late mornings swimming in the cold springs. Kate loved to swim. Even after what had happened with Elin, she loved the freedom water gave her, the buoyancy. And later, when it was no longer safe to get in, it was nearly enough to dangle her legs from the sideline, a hot slab of limestone heating the backs of her thighs, while her feet floated in what felt like an ice bath. Her daughters loved the water, too. Three sea creatures in the cold spring waters of Central Florida. Hot days diving into bottomless cold, fresh Plant City strawberries on the grass, a sloppy burger and chocolate shake on the way home. Wordless, exhausted car ride home, a silent, satisf
ied pleasure lasting into the evening, then showering away the grime, piling under overlapping blankets, the cool air conditioning slowly drying twisty cords of hair, a movie, caramel corn, pop.
If Kate had magic wishes she’d grant such joy to Elin. She’d offer her more than her own disappearance, selfless as it was—the most selfless act she’d ever offered her sister—but not enough, not even close. She was about to offer her so much more.
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Elin said.
Was Elin reading her mind? Had Kate spoken her thoughts out loud?
And anyway, look what had happened: Who could have predicted the applesauce jar? One day her hand could no longer turn the lid. Could not. One day. Just like that. One day it all made sense. Her father’s feeble arms, legs, how quickly he was gone before he was gone gone.
And now someone was crying in the room. She’d rather they didn’t. Please don’t do that.
“Would you like me to read to you?”
Elin. Kate knew her voice, recognized the poem about no one thanking the father.
Mother.
Tick, tick, tick. Rain on the window. A clock. Her mother in the truck. Pistons ticking. Eagles. They were going to see an eagle in a tree.
Someone had turned on a lamp. Window black. The middle of the night. A flame. Not a lamp. A cupcake framed through the slit of an eyelid, a pure white cupcake, white tray on a white bed, the single candle burning. Kate’s vision tipped. Thank you. Her mouth defying her wishes. Thank you. Her mouth humming. No sense. Nonsense.
A tickle. A movement, like laughter in her chest. Like choking. Swallowing a sharp chisel. A buzz, a razz.
The hours had lost all shape.
Her mother, her sister, her father. She missed them. Felt a four-year-old’s yearning for their faces, arms, laughter, a giant all-encompassing yearning, guzzling her whole.
Forgive me. For God’s sake, line up at my feet and forgive me everything.
Just like the poem, Kate had not understood the sober sacrifices of love. Then six years ago it became clear. Staying would have hurt them all, staying could only maim the spirit of the living. Staying was to be a stand-in for her father, for what her mother had done. Yes, Kate had known all along, the way Elin knew. Knowing without knowing.
She had no choice but to disappear. She had never been fully part of the world in the first place, one foot in, one out. Only these past six years had she truly come alive.
Elin never even knew her, would never know Kate.
A mother.
A good mother.
Rosemary in her kitchen windowsill.
Notebooks full of poems.
A poet.
Elin never knew.
Never knew how she’d broken Kate’s heart.
Never knew Kate understood that she’d broken Elin’s, too.
Dear sister.
Dear mother. Oh, mother.
So attached to their versions of the truth.
TWENTY-EIGHT
ELIN’S HEAD FELL BACK IN the chair next to Kate. She watched the ceiling for a time and then closed her eyes and listened. Her sister’s labored breathing, and in the living room Averlee and Quincy winding the wool throw into a bed on the floor again for Fluke, making him their doll, their child, their baby going to sleep. “Good puppy, good boy, good night, baby boy.” The faucet gushed on and off in the kitchen sink, dishes clamored into stacks, and after that a broom scratched the wooden front porch with a rhythm that nearly put Elin to sleep. At some point a moment of silence fell over the house, even Kate’s breathing seeming to falter, and Elin’s eyes shot open, as if everyone had stopped and remembered at once.
Nancy’s business card was a presence like the woman herself, there if needed but otherwise fairly unnoticed. It littered every surface—Kate’s nightstand, kitchen table and counter, the coffee and end tables, natural places one might be standing or sitting after Kate passed away, and wondering whom to call.
When night fell Elin guided the girls through their bedtime routine of pajamas and teeth brushing, ordinary tasks carried out with eerie, gel-like movements. The world would not be the same when they woke, and their small bodies seemed to understand, articulating what their minds could not as they crawled, tenderly, beneath matching lavender sheets. Elin kissed their foreheads as Kate must have done, wished them sweet dreams as any mother would do, while quietly hoping sleep would at least come for them, knowing it most likely would not.
She hesitated near the door. Her mother had gone into Kate’s room across the hall.
“I’m sorry,” her mother seemed to say, though Elin couldn’t be sure. “I love you,” Elin thought she said, hoped she said. Elin slipped into the bathroom and waited until the wooden floor creaked where the hallway joined the kitchen before coming out.
She found a sleeping bag in the mudroom closet, and then passed her mother settling beneath a blanket on the sofa. “Good night, Mom,” Elin said, but there was no reply. “I’ll let you know if there’s anything.”
Elin unfurled the sleeping bag on the floor next to Kate. She crawled in fully dressed and lay awake in the dark listening to the soft rattle of Kate’s breath. Fluke lay on the bed with Kate near her feet, everyone awake, everyone waiting.
“When I’m forty I’ll be rich, married, have five kids, and live on the beach,” Kate had said on the way to the beach the day she nearly drowned.
“When I’m forty I’ll be rich, single, no kids, and live in the city,” Elin had replied, and then came the station wagon with the pig-faced boy, and after that Elin whispered a feverish evil into her sister’s ear.
Elin sat up, held her knees to her chest, and listened as bloated raindrops ticked the windows at intervals before disappearing.
“Remember when we caught a firefly in a jar and wished we had a tree house so the jar could be our lantern?” Elin said. The rare memory had pushed its way to the surface, rescued from before their father was dead. “Such logic. Wishing for a whole tree house just to put a lantern. Do you think we ever asked Dad to build us one?” What could he have said? What could he have felt? There were no memories to say.
Elin reached up and stroked Fluke’s back and stared out at the night sky, wispy clouds pulling apart, starlight appearing with a fragment of moon.
The cupcake from Averlee sat on the nightstand and Elin opened the drawer and pulled out a set of matches she’d found earlier in the kitchen. She lit a candle on the cupcake and placed it on a white tray on Kate’s bed, and the ghostly silhouettes in the room made Kate appear as if she’d already passed, her eyes sunken in shadow, hands coupled across her chest. But a meek rattling breath, a small gap of an opened eye said otherwise.
“I want you to know that I got over Neal years ago,” Elin said. “I was just too proud to say so. That’s not true. I was too mean to relieve you of any guilt you might have had.”
Elin recalled how Neal had followed her from the house to her car that day as she piled in her bags, his look of disbelief, mouth gaping, palms open at his sides as if waiting for her to hand her stuff back. She’d kept thinking about what Kate had said, that there was no way he’d let her go. He would surely go after her. He never did.
“You don’t even know where you’re going,” Neal said.
“Not exactly, but I have a good idea.”
“This is crazy.”
“Staying here is crazy. For me it is.”
“Running away is not going to solve whatever’s going on with you.”
“I’m not running away. I’m running toward something.”
“But I’m here, Elin.”
How to explain? He didn’t see her misery, her interior life a ponderous, blood-deep anguish, and maybe this too was what she believed Kate had understood about her, because she lived it in the same way. But here was a man who put out fires for a living, pulled mangled children from wrecks, siphoned scalding water from busted hot-water tanks, and he did not see the emergency in Elin’s soul. “Come with me,” she said, an
d Neal, an only child of older parents long since dead, let slip his steadiness, his need for safety first. A risky adventure seemed to hook his imagination, an alternate, unknown future flashing behind his eyes. “You know you can get a job anywhere,” she said.
“That’s not true,” he said.
“It’s mostly true,” she said, and watched as his steely, protective curtain returned, forever obstructing the view of the great wide open.
“Come back inside,” he said. “Please. Just for a minute, so we can talk.”
“I’ll call when I get where I’m going,” she said. If she’d gone inside he would have talked her out of it, out of her shorts and shirt, too. He would have prodded her with a reasoning that wasn’t necessarily wrong, just wrong for her, but by then she would not see past it, not with him touching her, gazing eye to eye. “Maybe you’ll have changed your mind by the time I get there,” she said, still believing her sister without reason, believing out of want, but Neal turned away from her. How many destinies were altered when he slammed the door in her face? How many more when Elin got into her Volkswagen hatchback, trembling and weeping down Interstate 4 with the hurricane season at her back? She’d brought a copy of The 50 Best Places to Live in the United States, read it at rest stops, and four days later she arrived in Portland, Oregon, a place she’d never before been. How many more lives felt the ripple effect of that? How many reshaped, transformed, and undone?
A week after arriving, when she was at the base of Mount Hood, she’d slipped into the phone booth, barely able to contain her excitement. She knew what she needed to say to him. But as soon as he heard it was Elin on the line, she lost her voice, not because of what he said, but because of his silence, the wall of disdain so impenetrable, he could not absorb what she needed him to take in, which was that leaving had been such a simple, small thing, like stopping the car on the side of a road to take in a farmhouse, to study a tree on the side of a hill. Leaving had allowed her to think about the people who lived other lives in other towns, and to find her own life, because it did not exist in Florida, she did not exist in Florida, but she did now, in the west, come alive like an animal, roused and catalyzed through the wilderness.