by A. J. Finn
thedoctorisin: You are NOT a freak. You are a victim of circumstance. What you’re going through is hard as hell. I’ve been housebound for ten m onths and I know as well as anyone how difficult this is. PLEASE don’t ever think of yourself as a freak or aloser or anything other than a tough and resourceful person who’s been bravev enough to ask for help. Your sons should be proud of you and you should be pruod of yourself.
Fin. Not poetry. Not even decent English—my fingers slipped on and off the keys—but every word was true. Strictly true.
GrannyLizzie: That’s wonderful.
GrannyLizzie: Thank you.
GrannyLizzie: No wonder you’re a psychologist. You know just what to say and how to say it.
I feel the smile spreading across my lips.
GrannyLizzie: Do you have a family of your own?
The smile freezes.
Before answering, I pour myself more wine. It brims at the lip of the glass; I bow my head, slurp it down to high tide. A drop rolls off my lip, down my chin, onto my robe. I smear it into the terry cloth. Good thing Ed isn’t watching. Good thing nobody’s watching.
thedoctorisin: I do, but we don’t live together.
GrannyLizzie: Why not?
Why not, indeed? Why don’t you live together, Anna? I lift the glass to my mouth, set it down again. The scene unfolds before me like a Japanese fan: the vast flats of snow, the chocolate-box hotel, the ancient ice machine.
And to my surprise, I begin to tell her.
30
We’d decided ten days earlier to separate. That’s the starting point, the once-upon-a-time. Or rather—to be entirely fair, to be strictly true—Ed had decided, and I had agreed, in principle. I admit I didn’t think it would happen, not even when he summoned the broker. Could’ve fooled me.
Why, I reason, isn’t for Lizzie to concern herself with. With which it is not for Lizzie to concern herself, as Wesley might insist; he was a stickler for dangling prepositions. I assume he still is. But no: The why isn’t important, not here. The where and the when I can provide.
Vermont and last December, respectively, when we packed Olivia into the Audi and revved onto 9A, over the Henry Hudson Bridge, and out of Manhattan. Two hours later, wending through upstate New York, we’d hit what Ed liked to call the back roads—“with lots of diners and pancake places for us,” he promised Olivia.
“Mom doesn’t like pancakes,” she said.
“She can go to a crafts store.”
“Mom doesn’t like crafts,” I said.
As it turned out, the back roads of the region are remarkably fallow when it comes to pancake places and crafts stores. We found a single lonely IHOP in easternmost New York, where Olivia dredged her waffles in maple syrup (locally sourced, claimed the menu) and Ed and I arrowed glances at each other across the table. Outside, a light snow began to shake down, frail little kamikaze flakes smiting themselves against the windows. Olivia pointed with her fork and squealed.
I jousted her fork with my own. “There’ll be a lot more of that at Blue River,” I told her. This was our final destination, a ski resort in central Vermont that Olivia’s friend had visited. Classmate, not friend.
Back to the car, back on the road. The ride was quiet, on the whole. We hadn’t said anything to Olivia; no sense spoiling her vacation, I’d argued, and Ed nodded. We’d forge ahead for her.
So in silence we swept past broad fields and little streams lacquered with ice, through forgotten villages and into a feeble snowstorm near the Vermont border. At one point Olivia burst into “Over the Meadow and Through the Woods,” and I piled on, trying and failing to harmonize.
“Daddy, will you sing?” Olivia pleaded. She’s always done that: asked rather than ordered. Unusual in a child. Unusual in anyone, I sometimes think.
Ed cleared his throat and sang.
It was only as we reached the Green Mountains, bulging like shoulders from the earth, that he began to thaw. Olivia had gone breathless. “I’ve never seen such things,” she wheezed, and I wondered where she’d heard those words in that order.
“Do you like the mountains?” I asked.
“They look like a rumpled blanket.”
“They do.”
“Like a giant’s bed.”
“A giant’s bed?” Ed repeated.
“Yes—like a giant is sleeping under a blanket. That’s why it’s all lumpy.”
“You’ll be skiing on some of these mountains tomorrow,” Ed promised as we hugged a tight turn. “We’ll go up, up, up in the ski lift, and then down, down, down the mountain.”
“Up, up, up,” she repeated. The words popped from her lips.
“You got it.”
“Down, down, down.”
“You got it again.”
“That one looks like a horse. Those are his ears.” She pointed at a pair of spindly peaks in the distance. Olivia was at that age when everything reminded her of a horse.
Ed smiled. “What would you call a horse if you had one, Liv?”
“We are not getting a horse,” I added.
“I’d call him Vixen.”
“A vixen is a fox,” Ed told her. “A girl fox.”
“He would be fast like a fox.”
We considered this.
“What would you call a horse, Mom?”
“Don’t you want to call me Mommy?”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay, Mommy.”
“I’d call a horse Of Course, Of Course.” I looked at Ed. Nothing.
“Why?” asked Olivia.
“It’s from a song on TV.”
“What song?”
“From an old show about a talking horse.”
“A talking horse?” She wrinkled her nose. “That’s dumb.”
“I agree.”
“Daddy, what would you call a horse?”
Ed glanced in the rearview. “I like Vixen, too.”
“Whoa,” Olivia breathed. I turned.
Space had opened up beside us, beneath us, a vast chasm gutted from the land below, a huge bowl of nothing; thatched evergreens at the bottom of the void, rags of mist caught in midair. We were so close to the edge of the road that it felt like floating. We could peer into the well of the world.
“How far down is that?” she asked.
“Far,” I answered, turning to Ed. “Can we slow up a bit?”
“Slow up?”
“Slow down, whatever? Just—can we go slower?”
He decelerated slightly.
“Can we slow down more?”
“We’re fine,” he said.
“It’s scary,” said Olivia, her voice curled up at the edges, hands edging toward her eyes, and Ed eased up on the gas.
“Don’t look down, pumpkin,” I said, twisting in my seat. “Look at Mommy.”
She did so, her eyes wide. I took her hand, gathered her fingers in my own. “Everything’s fine,” I told her. “Just look at Mommy.”
We’d arranged to lodge outside Two Pines, about half an hour from the resort—“Central Vermont’s finest historic inn,” bragged the Fisher Arms on its website, a slick collage of hearths in full bloom and windows frilly with snow.
We parked in the small lot. Icicles hung like fangs from the eaves above the front door. Rustic New England decor within: steeply pitched ceiling, shabby-genteel furniture, flames playing in one of those photo-friendly fireplaces. The receptionist, a plump young blonde whose name tag read marie, invited us to sign the guest registry, primped the irises on the desk as we did so. I wondered if she was going to address us as “folks.”
“You folks here to ski?”
“We are,” I said. “Blue River.”
“Glad you made it.” Marie beamed at Olivia. “Storm’s coming in.”
“Nor’easter?” suggested Ed, trying to sound local.
She trained her laser smile on him. “A nor’easter is more of a coastal storm, sir.”
He nearly flinched. “Oh.”
>
“This is just a storm-storm. But it’ll be a whopper. You folks be sure to lock your windows tonight.”
I wanted to ask why the windows would be unlocked the week before Christmas, but Marie dropped the keys into my palm and wished us folks a pleasant evening.
We trundled our luggage down the hall—the Fisher Arms’ “many amenities” did not include bellhop service—and entered our suite. Paintings of pheasant flanked the fireplace; layer cakes of blankets sat on the edges of the beds. Olivia made straight for the toilet, leaving the door ajar; she was afraid of strange bathrooms.
“It’s nice,” I murmured.
“Liv,” Ed called, “what’s the bathroom like?”
“Cold.”
“Which bed do you want?” Ed asked me. On holidays, he and I always slept separately, so that Olivia wouldn’t crowd the bed when she inevitably climbed in. Some nights she ferried herself from Ed’s bed to my own and back again; he called her Pong, after that Atari game with a four-bit ball bouncing between two bars.
“You take the one by the window.” I sat on the edge of the other bed, unzipped my suitcase. “Better make sure it’s locked.”
Ed swung his bag onto the mattress. We began to unpack in silence. Beyond the window, curtains of snow shifted, gray and white in the creeping dusk.
After a moment, he rolled up one sleeve and scratched at his forearm. “You know . . .” he said. I turned to him.
The toilet flushed and Olivia burst into the room, hopping from one foot to the other. “When can we get up to ski?”
Dinner was to be prepacked PB&Js and assorted juice boxes, although I’d stowed a bottle of sauvignon blanc amid my sweaters. By now the wine was room temperature, and Ed liked his whites “really dry and really cold,” as he always notified waiters. I rang the front desk, asked for ice. “There’s a machine in the hallway just past your room,” Marie told me. “Make sure to give the lid a real hard push.”
I took the ice bucket from the minibar beneath the television, walked into the corridor, spotted an old Luma Comfort model humming in an alcove a few steps away. “You sound like a mattress,” I informed it. I gave the lid a real hard push and back it slid, the machine exhaling into my face, frosty cold, the way people’s breath looks in spearmint-gum commercials.
There was no trowel. I rummaged within, the cold scorching my hands, and shook the cubes into the bucket. They clung to my skin. So much for Luma Comfort.
That’s where Ed found me, wrist-deep in ice.
He appeared suddenly at my side, leaning against the wall. For a moment I pretended not to see him; I stared into the basin of the machine, as though its contents fascinated me, and continued to scoop ice, wishing he’d leave, wishing he’d hold me.
“Interesting?”
I turned to him, didn’t bother feigning surprise.
“Look,” he said, and in my head I completed the sentence for him. Let’s rethink this, maybe. I’ve overreacted, even.
Instead, he coughed—he’d been battling a cold in recent days, ever since the night of the party. I waited.
Then he spoke. “I don’t want to do it this way.”
I squeezed a fistful of ice cubes. “Do what?” My heart felt faint. “Do what?” I repeated.
“This,” he answered, almost hissing, sweeping one arm through the air. “A whole happy-family holiday, and then the day after Christmas we . . .”
My heart slowed; my fingers burned. “What do you want to do? Tell her now?”
He didn’t say anything.
I withdrew my hand from the machine, slid the lid shut. Not “real hard” enough: It jammed halfway down. I propped the bucket of ice on my hip, tugged at the lid. Ed gripped it and yanked it.
The bucket rolled away from me, clattering to the carpet, spattering cubes across the floor.
“Shit.”
“Forget it,” he said. “I don’t want anything to drink.”
“I do.” I knelt to rake the cubes back into the bucket. Ed watched me.
“What are you going to do with those?” he asked.
“Should I just let them melt?”
“Yes.”
I stood and set the bucket atop the machine. “You seriously want to do this now?”
He sighed. “I don’t see why we—”
“Because we’re already here. We’re already . . .” I pointed to the door of our suite.
He nodded. “I thought about that.”
“You’ve been thinking a lot lately.”
“I thought,” he continued, “that . . .”
He went quiet, and I heard the click of a door behind me. I twisted my head to see a middle-aged woman moving down the corridor toward us. She smiled shyly, eyes averted; picked her way through the ice cubes on the floor, walked on to the lobby.
“I thought that you’d want to start healing right away. That’s what you’d say to one of your patients.”
“Don’t—please don’t tell me what I would or wouldn’t say.”
He said nothing.
“And I wouldn’t talk that way to a child.”
“You’d talk that way to their parents.”
“Don’t tell me how I’d talk.”
More nothing.
“And as far as she knows, there’s nothing to heal.”
He sighed again, rubbed at a spot on the bucket. “The fact is, Anna,” he told me, and I could see the weight in his eyes, that broad cliff of his brow near collapse, “I just can’t take this any longer.”
I looked down, stared at the ice cubes already softening on the ground.
Neither of us spoke. Neither of us moved. I didn’t know what to say.
Then I heard my voice, soft and low. “Don’t blame me when she’s upset.”
A pause. And then his voice, softer still. “I do blame you.” He breathed in. Breathed out. “I thought of you as the girl next door,” he said.
I braced myself for more.
“But right now I can barely look at you.”
I screwed my eyes shut, inhaled the cold tang of ice. And I thought not of our wedding day, nor of the night Olivia was born, but of the morning we harvested cranberries in New Jersey—Olivia shrieking and laughing in her waders, buttery with sunblock; slow skies above, the September sun drenching us; a vast sea of rose-red fruit all around. Ed with his hands full, his eyes bright; me clutching our daughter’s sticky fingers. I remembered the bog waters risen to our hips, felt them flood my heart, surge into my veins, rise within my eyes.
I looked up, gazed into Ed’s eyes, those dark-brown eyes; “Completely ordinary eyes,” he assured me on our second date, but to me they were beautiful. They still are.
He looked back at me. The ice machine thrummed between us.
Then we went to tell Olivia.
31
thedoctorisin: Then we went to tell Olivia.
I pause. How much more would she want to know? How much more can I bear to tell her? My heart already hurts, aching within my chest.
A minute later, there’s still no response. I wonder if all this is hitting too close to home for Lizzie; here I am talking about a separation from my husband when she’s lost hers irrevocably. I wonder if—
GrannyLizzie has left the chat.
I stare at the screen.
Now I have to remember the rest of the story on my own.
32
“Don’t you get lonely up here by yourself?”
I wriggle from sleep as a voice questions me, male, flat. I unpaste my eyelids.
“I was born lonely, I guess.” A woman now. Creamy contralto.
Light and shadow flicker in my vision. It’s Dark Passage—Bogie and Bacall making bedroom eyes across a coffee table.
“Is that why you visit murder trials?”
On my own coffee table stand the remnants of my dinner: two drained-hollow bottles of merlot and four canisters of pills.
“No. I went because your case was like my father’s.”
I swat at the remote
beside me. Swat again.
“I know he didn’t kill my stepmoth—” The TV goes dark, and the living room with it.
How much have I drunk? Right: two bottles’ worth. Plus lunchtime. That’s . . . a lot of wine. I can admit it.
And the drugs: Did I take the right quantity this morning? Did I take the right pills? I’ve been sloppy lately, I know. No wonder Dr. Fielding thinks I’m getting worse. “You’ve been bad,” I chide myself.
I peek into the canisters. One of them is almost depleted; twin tablets crouch within it, little white pellets, at either side of the bottle.
God, I’m very drunk.
I look up, look at the window. Dark outside, deep night. I cast about for my phone, can’t find it. The grandfather clock, looming in the corner, ticks as though trying to get my attention. Nine fifty. “Nine fiffy,” I say. Not great. Try ten to ten. “Ten to ten.” Better. I nod to the clock. “Thanks,” I tell him. He gazes at me, all solemn-like.
Lurching toward the kitchen now. Lurching—isn’t that how Jane Russell described me, that day at the door? Those little shits with their eggs? Lurch. From The Addams Family. The gangly butler. Olivia loves that theme song. Snap, snap.
I grasp the faucet, duck my head beneath it, jerk the handle toward the ceiling. A whip of white water. Plunge my mouth forth, gulp deeply.
Drag one hand along my face, totter back to the living room. My eyes wander across the Russells’ house: There’s the ghost-glow of Ethan’s computer, with the kid bent over the desk; there’s the empty kitchen. There’s their parlor, merry and bright. And there’s Jane, in a snow-white blouse, sitting on that striped love seat. I wave. She doesn’t see me. I wave again.
She doesn’t see me.
One foot, then the other, then the first foot. Then the other—don’t forget the other. I melt into the sofa, loll my head on my shoulder. Shut my eyes.
What happened to Lizzie? Did I say something wrong? I feel myself frown.
The cranberry bog stretches before me, shimmery, shifting. Olivia’s hand takes my own.