by Robin Page
They hug goodbye, and Jocelyn heads slowly to her car. She wonders and remembers. We weren’t stupid either though, she thinks. That was not our problem.
She reaches in her purse. She puts on her Cutler and Gross sunglasses. She wishes she had told Maud about what happened with Kate. She just wants to let it out of her body. She wants to let Mr. Baird out too.
I will watch him, she thinks. Closely. Whenever I come to school: pickup, drop-off, volunteer shift, assembly, classroom parties, field trips, lunchroom duty. I can do this. I have to. I’m her mother. I’m a good mother. It can’t happen. Not to Lucy. There is a quiet ruthlessness to her plan.
She sifts through possibilities, more ways to keep her daughter safe. She could add volunteer days, although she’s already really involved. She gets into her car, tells herself that Maud knows. Maud is part of this world. Maud would tell her to worry if she should worry.
3
“I THINK WE SHOULD FINISH TALKING ABOUT YOUR BROTHER,” DR. BRUCE says, but Jocelyn doesn’t want to enter the past. Her brother is not on her mind after what has happened this morning. Mr. Baird and Kate. Mr. Baird and Kate. Mr. Baird and Kate. These names ricochet back and forth inside her brain, one word after the other, no room between. Which should she say? Which should she deal with? Neither, she thinks. She has the sense that they will break her open. I am not ready yet.
“Last week it seemed there was a breakthrough with your brother,” Dr. Bruce says.
Jocelyn stares. She does not even remember the session. “Why do you say that?”
“I don’t know. I just thought we were close to something. You’ve had a lot of loss—your brother, your mother very recently. In my opinion, people do not talk enough about the dead.”
“People always talk about the dead,” Jocelyn says, “when the dead aren’t their own.”
It comes out aggressively, a criticism of the doctor, but Dr. Bruce doesn’t seem to notice.
“What more can you tell me, Jocelyn? You have to talk or I can’t help you. What about his illness? Were you his caregiver? The story you told last week about his head on the desk.” Dr. Bruce looks at her notes. “About the fat lady, made it seem as if you took care of him when he was dying. That must have been very, very hard.”
She looks at the therapist. She feels herself surrendering, as if to something physical. She decides she can’t fight her. She can’t fight Conrad either. She must be here. Life is eternally something to behave for.
“I took care of him. He was very sick at the end. There wasn’t much that we could do. He was the one that got away. You know? Ycidra and I loved watching him escape. CVG airport, across the Brent Spence Bridge. It was like a movie. Of course, he went to Manhattan.”
In the corner of the office she sees toys. She wonders about the children that come here: Are they as she and her siblings were as children, damaged and unlovable? She remembers eating Chinese food with her brother in bed in his apartment in Midtown. They shared the same chopsticks, passed the same box of orange chicken back and forth. It is a memory from the early days of the disease, before he seemed sick, when eating was something he still did.
“Were you comfortable with him being gay?” Dr. Bruce asks.
“Yes,” Jocelyn says. “Sure. I didn’t think about it. Gladys and Uncle Al said it was a sin, but there’s not much to be done about being gay, right?”
Jocelyn tries to anchor herself on the poster again, but it isn’t working. It’s too far out of her view for her to read the difficult words. Her brother always liked men, never women. She always liked men too, never women. The girl in college was curiosity more than desire. She likes Kate, but that feels singular, as if Kate is the only woman in the world whom she wants or will ever want.
“You seem more distant than usual today, Jocelyn. I felt that way last time too,” the therapist says. “Are you okay? Remember, the fight will be easier if I prescribe something. You can always come off of it again. We can taper off.”
“No. I’m fine. No meds,” she says. “I don’t want to depend on a drug.”
“But why?” Dr. Bruce asks. “It will help you. Prescriptions aren’t the same as street drugs.”
Internally Jocelyn rolls her eyes. Ycidra and her Vicodin. Ycidra and her doctors, the Oxy, the Percocet, just the beginning of things. The session ends and she has not talked about Kate or Mr. Baird. Nor has she told the whole story about her brother. She finds herself keeping things from Dr. Bruce more and more. Her brother is still with her when she leaves the office, and she is angry about this. It is as if Dr. Bruce has performed a séance and has drawn down the dead. She’d like for her brother to go away. She’d like for Kate to go away too. She’d like for Mr. Baird to teach some other little girl, not her own, for Ycidra to leave her mind. The death of Gladys has opened some Pandora’s box and she can’t get it to close again.
She walks to her car—the car that Conrad has bought for her this year. It costs as much as a house in a good Cincinnati neighborhood. It has four doors because of Lucy, but it is sleek and fast. It is dark blue, the color of the sea that night when she and Lucy painted with Simon. It isn’t the kind of car that sneaks up on you. She longs for Conrad suddenly. He is so steady. Never a blip in him. She dials.
“Hi, my love,” she says. “How’s it going?”
“It’s okay. I miss you. And Lucy,” he says. “Actors are annoying. All the extra social shit I have to do, you know.”
“We miss you a lot,” she says, fiddling with the air-conditioning vents in the gleaming dash. “I hope you’re being good,” she says, half joking, half thinking about her own sins.
“I’m being pretty good,” he says. “Lots of temptation. Entertainment has been provided.” He says this as if they are sharing an inside joke. “I’m holding out though. You’d be proud.”
“What do you mean?” she says. There is a snap of jealousy. “You mean like women, like dancers?”
“Sometimes,” he says. “Not all of them dance. Some just sit around and look pretty. Others bring us whatever we want. Drinks. Food. They change the music. They walk around in skimpy clothes. It’s a thirteen-year-old’s wet dream. You know, female slaves. The actor pays for it, I think. Although he doesn’t admit it. It’s totally stupid, totally predictable. It doesn’t really warm me up.”
“Hmmmm,” she says, doubting him.
“No sex,” Conrad says, firmly. “Don’t worry about it, silly. You know I don’t want that from anyone but you.”
“I guess,” she says, and then relaxes a little. She laughs. “You are so full of shit. You’re enjoying it, but I like that you lie to me sometimes.”
“I’m into you,” he says. “That’s not a lie.”
“What else?” she asks.
He tells the rest of it. The bathing suits, the few married men who have gotten blow jobs in a back bathroom. Gossip and the landscape of Louisiana—endless rain and water everywhere, the bugs. He tells her he has stepped in a mound of fire ants. One of the women poured Pappy Van Winkle on his foot.
“Oh my God,” she says. “What a waste of good bourbon!”
“Exactly, but the fucker worked. She was my nurse.”
“Uh-huh. I bet,” she says. All coy.
She can tell he is smiling on the other end of the phone, and thinks, We have always been like this, have always told the truth about everything—until right now. I should tell him about Kate. I have crossed a line. She feels tender toward him.
“There are alligators here,” Conrad says, as if he is looking at one just outside his window. “It’s really beautiful,” he says. “I don’t mean the girls.”
“I know,” she says. “I know.”
They sit saying nothing, just holding the phone. It is intimate. The girls come to mind again, and beyond Jocelyn’s jealousy, she knows they are just commerce, like Walmart, like Costco, like the shops that run up and down Sunset, like Kate and her hourly fees, they are a part of the transaction. There are so many worse things.
“The pills will make your brother better,” the doctor said to her. He had stopped her in the hall at Saint Vincent’s Hospital, as they made their way out of the fat lady’s office. Her brother had to lean into her to stay upright. She held his thin elbow.
“Make an appointment. Come to me directly,” the doctor said. “Your brother can stay home.”
And then when she got to his office, a few days later; sleet as she ran up the subway stairs, almost slipping, a day impossible to forget: “On your knees,” the doctor said. Just like that.
The pill bottle when he handed it to her was warm as his cock had been in her mouth. Business, she thinks. Negotiation and favors. Transactions. But still, my brother is dead.
“Jocelyn?” She hears Conrad’s voice coming through the Bluetooth. “Hello? Did I lose you?”
“We used to play Monopoly on the steps outside of our building,” she says. “My brother was always the banker.”
She can feel herself getting shaky. His memory here, a needle in and out of the skin, making a stitch.
There is a pause because her husband knows her—twenty years is a lifetime to be with someone, and so, very gently he says, “Yes, babe. It’s okay, sweetheart. Are you all right?”
“I’m not doing that great,” she says, feeling as if she might cry. Her voice breaks. The day has been long and full and confusing. “Something’s not right with me since Gladys. I’m just not myself.”
She hears other voices coming through the phone now.
“I’m going to be home soon, okay? Are you going to therapy? You’re keeping up, right?”
“Yes,” she says. “I’m being good. I’m just leaving her office.”
“Your mother was an ass, honey. She never did a good thing in her life, except make you.”
Jocelyn feels defeated by the words. She thinks about Ycidra and William. Her brother’s final zealousness. Her looking away. Groveling at the end. God will save me, he said. Shallowness in the voice, tapping the black Bible cover with his thin fingers. Religion—the worst last resort. They all knew God had never saved them from anything.
She sighs, feels the fact that therapy is making her worse. What was she thinking, why go back? A chain on the waist, restrictive, a boulder attached, something to carry, up, up, up. She shouldn’t talk to Dr. Bruce anymore. She shouldn’t return to the past. She should tell Conrad right now about everything. She should tell him about Kate and Mr. Baird, and it will be better, because she will repent. She will stop therapy and stop tennis and just mother. She will take Lucy to the park and the zoo and the pool. They will hold hands on the diving board. She will be the best mother. She will not cry anymore without meaning to.
“Jocelyn?” he says again, and she thinks, I cannot let him hang up. If I don’t tell him now, I will be punished. Lucy will be kidnapped or touched or ruined. Conrad will die in a car crash. Have I not learned to speak up?
“Conrad?”
He is talking to someone who has walked into the room. It sounds as if there are children there. Young girls? Are the girls in the back bathroom children? She feels nauseated.
“What do you mean it’s the wrong location?” she hears her husband say. “We have to scout today. Not tomorrow.” And then back to her: “Honey, can I call you right back? Twenty minutes at the most, my love. I’ve got a screwup here, and you know, everyone just walked in.” He whispers: “It’s not a good time to talk.”
She waits, because the answer to whether he can call her back is somewhere inside a vast black hole that she cannot find her way out of. Speak up! she tells herself again. The yellow pajamas, his voice, cold floors. Please don’t, Ycidra said.
He is angry suddenly. “Jocelyn? Can I call you back?!”
“Conrad?” she asks again. She feels weak. She needs to tell him.
“Please, Jocelyn. I’ll call you right back.”
She hears the disconnection of the phone. She sits many minutes thinking. She needs to drive the car, to get back home.
4
HE DOESN’T CALL RIGHT BACK OR AT ALL THAT EVENING. AT THE CONDOMINIUM, with Lucy in the white Waterworks bath, she wonders briefly if he is with one of the women. The Louisiana cottage would be large, with many bedrooms—down comforters and king-size beds. The women would be problem-free. Why has he forgotten about her? An unrelenting sorrow presses against the edges of her mind, discouragement. She had been doing well until just—when? A day ago, a week ago, a minute ago, when? The memory of her brother settles across her brain again, the doctor and the meds, Kate, Mr. Baird and Gladys, Ycidra. A curtain made of people, sweeping shut. All of it dark.
She recognizes the instant descent. It fills and presses, swells. Her heart aches, literally. There is the sodden heaviness of inadequacy like wet newspaper. She tries to focus on the breathing that Dr. Bruce has taught her, the tapping for survivors of trauma. That’s what she is, the doctor has defined her—a survivor of trauma. She has been named.
The Before, she thinks. All of what has come before is demolishing me.
Jocelyn moves through the good things. They should buoy her up. She thinks about Lucy in the inner tube, Lucy building the park with Simon, she and Lucy on the high diving board at the Miramar club, but the sorrow seems to be her, not some other thing, and so it will not go. The good will not right her.
She studies her daughter as she plays in the bath. The girl will be prey if she doesn’t keep hold of it. There is the slim shape, the soft skin. Her fingernails are little crescent moons. Her brown eyes are clear and happy. The child is utterly uninhibited. Totally trusting. Jocelyn admonishes herself. She has to be ever mindful. She has to be focused on this one thing and let the other things go. She cannot weaken. If she can be a good mother, it will be a true thing. It will bury Gladys completely. No ghosts will hover into Lucy’s future.
“Remember Eloise Takes a Bawth, Mama?” Lucy asks. “Remember how fun she was? She almost sunk the Plaza, Mama. What’s the Plaza again?”
“It’s a hotel, my love. Well, not any longer. At least I don’t think so. Now it’s residential.”
“What’s residential, Mama.”
“Apartments, sweetheart. Apartments.”
“What’s an apartment, Mama?”
“Well, it’s like this, sweetheart. Like our house.” She presses her fingertips gently to her eyelids.
“Papa says we live in a condo, not a house,” Lucy says. “A luxury condo. Papa says it’s important to have a concierge, which we have at our condo. Papa says it’s good to have a doorman too. George is our doorman and Rodrigo. Papa says it’s unique to have a doorman in Los Angeles, but that we are unique. I say, ‘Hello Rodrigo!’ Every day.”
“Yes, well. An apartment is like this, only you pay rent.”
“What’s rent?”
Jocelyn sighs.
Lucy splashes around in the tub. The question is forgotten as soon as it is asked. The water jumps in sharp little waves, some of it landing on the marble floor, some on Jocelyn’s dark jeans. The bubbles are excessive. Dish detergent is what they had in Winton Terrace. No such thing as bubble bath in their house. Ycidra had figured out that if they rationed it, she could make Jocelyn a “day at the spa,” bubbles all around her, indulgent and special. But then Gladys had noticed, and had beaten them both, calling them thieving, stinking dirty birds anyway.
A beating for soap? It seems unreal to her now, but she knows that it happened.
“Don’t cry,” Ycidra would say whenever they were punished. She’d put her hand out, and when Jocelyn wouldn’t take it, she’d put her palm on the top of Jocelyn’s forehead, and say, “The Great Ycidranova will tell your future. You will grow up to be a famous sailor.”
There was warmth in those fingers, and then she would pull Jocelyn into her own body, being careful of where the belt had cut her, and the blood was drying, and the shirt was sticking, and Jocelyn can still feel the pull of this sometimes. She can still hear the beating of Ycidra’s heart, fast and afraid, al
though she always pretended otherwise: “I’m here with you, Jo-Jo. Don’t be scared. We’re going to sail away one day.” But where did they sail?
“It’s a bawthroom, Mummy,” Lucy says in an English accent, and cracks up laughing.
Jocelyn smiles at her child, but the fight to not cry hurts and suppresses her breathing like knuckles pressed into rib bones, or a heavy body on a small one. My child, she thinks. But how had that girl come from her? How had something so breezy come from the solid damp of her?
The brown swirl of the Ohio River falls across her memory. The walk across the bridge to school, a crossing over, into another land. The cars whizzing by, the rocking of the bridge, its singing. She, holding her sister’s warm hand. I’m on the car side, Ycidra would say. A following after. An imprint. She was Ycidra’s duckling.
She hands Lucy the raspberry soap. Ycidra, she thinks. My child doesn’t know my sister’s name. She does not know my brother’s name. Ycidra and William, she wants to say, but keeps both names in—protective, fearful that whatever infected them all as children might implant itself in Lucy now. Do not speak the names of the dead. Where had she heard that? Gladys, she knows. And the beg again, fight the forced dilation.
She tries to use Kate to steady her, but the image of her and what she wants from her does not lift her or come clear. She loves Conrad. She knows this, but there seems to be some trick there too. She is vaguely aware that she needs to pull herself together, that she needs to find something light, but it isn’t there. The dark has been made for her by Gladys. She reaches for a towel from the towel warmer. She thinks she had better get her child out. Get the child out of the water! She hears an inner voice shrieking, but she can’t move. She can’t stop thinking about the dark. The known and familiar dark.
Chapter Eight
Simon
1
HE RUNS INTO JOCELYN IN THE HALL. IT HAS BEEN TWO DAYS SINCE HE last saw her and her daughter, since Lucy read the book to him. They both wait together for the elevator. He has a meeting at the museum and is running a bit late. She looks gloomy. He does not like to see her sad. The child is not with her, and he worries before he can stop himself that something has happened to Lucy. Panic moves through him like wildfire. He reminds himself that he has just seen her, that she was fine when they shared the book. He knows he is experiencing his own paranoia, his own residual fears from Claudette. She is fine, he tells himself.