by Robin Page
“Just be careful,” Maud says. “Have your fill and then end it, okay? I had my own little tryst after Austin was born. I mean, how long is a girl going to look good naked? I just kept thinking, ‘Forty more years of just Scott? Really?’”
Maud laughs at her own joke. Jocelyn knows she is trying to lighten the air between them, but it isn’t working.
“Don’t be a child about it, Jocelyn. It’s never worth giving up your family. I mean I don’t know how deep in it you are, but it’s not worth that. You’ve got everything. Other women would die to have our lives.”
“Yep,” Jocelyn says, thinking she’s not really admitting anything, but knowing she’s admitted it all.
“Conrad is great,” Maud says. “Scott is great too, but make no mistake. They’re men who get their way. They’re men who don’t like losing. Conrad would take custody of Lucy from you before you could even react. He’s not letting you keep his daughter if he finds out you’ve cheated on him. Even if it’s just to hurt you, he’ll take her.”
“My daughter,” Jocelyn says. “Not his.”
“Trust me,” Maud says very solemnly.
Jocelyn’s head is pounding. She has never even considered Conrad, and custody, and life without her child. She gets an Advil, gives one to Maud. She wants to say something. She wants to share a moment and explain more than just this. She wants to tell her friend about Gladys, about Uncle Al, about Mr. Baird, and Lucy’s panties in a brown bag. They are too hungover though. They have already spoken too many words. They walk out into the kitchen. Conrad and Scott are making omelets. The kids are taking turns on Lucy’s small bike and scooter. They ride back and forth along the length of the balcony deck. I learned to ride a bike when I was twenty years old. There wasn’t anyone to teach me before then.
She looks around at the large condo. It is a mess. It will take her all day to clean. She notices how much she hates the curtains. They are too dark for a house on the sea. Too dark for this space.
“Let’s go,” Maud says. “I left the Ambien in your bathroom mirror.”
They go.
SHE CALLS THE MEN WHEN SHE GETS HOME FROM THE DRILL, AND THEY come with squeegees and scaffolding to conquer the windows.
“There are smears,” she says, showing them. “In just that light,” she says. “I need the view to be clear,” she says. The men are baffled. “Can’t you see?”
She begins her own work in the corner of the kitchen, blocking thoughts of drill. Kate ignored her. Missy made jokes. Make them go dark, she thinks, and stares at the floor.
The floor is an enemy to be conquered. There is never enough time. Her fingers and knuckles are wrinkled and dry. She likes the pain of it, the skin tight from the hot water and bleach. She works for two hours on the floor, changing the water constantly. And then she has to stop. She has to pick Lucy up from school. From Mr. Baird. She will not be late.
WHEN THEY GET BACK FROM SCHOOL, LUCY SITS AT THE WHITE MARBLE kitchen island.
“I’m hungry,” she says.
“A snack,” Jocelyn says and gets it. She is efficient about it—all business. Lucy rattles on and on about the fun she had with Maud’s family. The bread crumbs from Lucy’s Nutella sandwich settle on the counter and fall onto the freshly scrubbed floor. Jocelyn stares at the crumbs.
“Can they come again?” Lucy asks.
“Who?” Jocelyn asks.
Lucy sighs. “You aren’t listening to me, Mama. You have to listen to me.”
“I’m listening,” she says, wetting a paper towel, lifting the crumbs into the trash. “How about some Netflix?”
Lucy is astounded. Television exists for her only as a special treat. “Yes,” she says, excitedly. “Octonauts, Mama. I want Octonauts.”
Jocelyn is pleased to have made her baby happy. She continues with the kitchen. The trash bag smells, even though it is almost empty. She sends one of the window cleaners to take it out. She empties cabinets, cleans the pantry, dumps all unhealthy food. The sun sets and in the evening light, she is surprised to see that there are still streaks on the kitchen floor. She decides to begin again. Sun to sun, she thinks, trying to retrieve something. Sun to sun, but she’s forgotten it. She bends over a floorboard. Scrubs. Each time she looks back to see what she has accomplished, she finds that she is not so far along on the floor as she would expect. She has faith, continues, eradicates the dirt. Sits back to admire her work.
The men move from one room to the next. The smell of lavender and eucalyptus follows them. A man’s work is from sun to sun, she hears now. Lucy giggles from time to time about something that’s on the cartoon. Jocelyn moves to the next square of floor, but this time when she looks back, the spot she’s just finished is somehow dirty again, and so she begins again. Time passes. Lucy whimpers about being hungry, about Simon or Maud’s kids, but Jocelyn just tells her to find something new on the TV.
“I’ll make you something in a minute.”
By the time Conrad gets home, her hands are red and blistered. Her face is strained. He walks quickly to Lucy, kisses her cheek. A man’s work is sun to sun, but a mother’s work is never done. Mother or woman? she thinks. She can’t remember.
“Is everything okay, my love?” he says to her, but she doesn’t answer.
“Jocelyn?” he says.
She feels her face tighten.
“Can I help you, love? What’s going on here? What’s happening?”
The window cleaners are still milling around, dumping their buckets, wiping their squeegees.
Jocelyn sits holding the brush she’s been using on the floor. The water dripping onto her thighs and the parquet floors.
“I’m going to do it well,” she says. “I’m going to finish and make it nice again.”
Conrad tells the men to leave. He tips them into silence. “We won’t talk about any of this,” he says into the telephone, speaking to their boss. The window company is a local Palisades business. The owner has kids at the same school. She is puzzled by what Conrad is saying.
“Papa is going to put Mama to bed,” Conrad says to Lucy, but Jocelyn just vaguely hears. He lays her on her pillow.
“We’re not doing this again, Jocelyn. I love you, but I can’t. You’ve got to get it together.”
3
HE DRIVES HER TO THERAPY. HE WANTS HER THERE FIVE DAYS A WEEK. HE seems confused when the therapist asks him to stay.
“Just for this session,” Dr. Bruce says, with an air of subservience.
Conrad vents about Jocelyn. He tells the therapist to put her on medicine, that she needs something. Things aren’t going well.
Jocelyn blinks at him, realizes just at that moment that her husband is sick of her, and why wouldn’t he be? The things she carries are unbearable. She is sick of herself too.
On the second day, they sit—just she and the doctor this time, unable to connect. Jocelyn knows that she cannot disentangle herself from the past, no matter what Dr. Bruce says. No mater what Conrad offers her. It is in her. Even with the bounty that is in front of her, it is not possible to fix her. She cannot get empty, and she will be heavy and filled forever. And this is the lifelong smothering, a big body on a small one. A slow, steady killing of that original girl. By whom though? By someone? By something? Acceptance, she thinks. I accept it.
“Can you tell me anything that you are feeling, Jocelyn?” the doctor says as if she is afraid to break her. “Anything you are thinking? Right now is okay.”
Jocelyn hesitates. She lets the words come. “I just think how strange it is,” she says to Dr. Bruce.
“How strange what is?” Dr. Bruce asks.
“Me.”
“What do you mean, Jocelyn? Why do you say that?”
“That I am still, no matter what, who that girl is too, but I can’t get her out. I can’t get her out, even with Lucy and Conrad.”
“What girl?”
“The girl from before.”
“From before what?” Dr. Bruce says.
Just be
fore, Jocelyn thinks.
“Do you want to tell me about the girl?” Dr. Bruce asks.
“Not really.”
“Is she you, Jocelyn? Or is she someone else?”
“Of course she’s me,” Jocelyn says, thinking how exasperating the doctor is. “I’m not crazy.”
“Then tell me about her, please. I know you aren’t crazy.”
Jocelyn looks at her nails, clean and white. “I used to think if Gladys died, then I’d be her again. I’d be my good self, my unsoiled self. I always thought she’d be great. It’s like I wanted her to stay hiding until just then. She’d be amazing and successful and untouched, and so I’d be amazing and successful and clean again.”
“In what way?” Dr. Bruce asks softly.
“Well, in a lot of ways.” Jocelyn pauses. Thinks. “I mean, she wouldn’t be me, first of all. Me as I am now.”
Jocelyn opens her water bottle. An indigo thing that she has purchased at her local spa. Twenty-eight dollars but it keeps the water cold.
“What do you see as wrong with you, Jocelyn? What’s so bad about you?”
“I should have saved my sister,” she says, suddenly. “I should have saved my brother. I should have done that.”
“You were a child, Jocelyn,” Dr. Bruce says. “You were a child.”
“I’m not a child anymore,” Jocelyn says. “I should have kept this life clean, but I couldn’t. I didn’t.”
“What are you talking about? I don’t understand.”
Jocelyn doesn’t answer. “I can’t sleep anymore,” she says. “At night, I sit on my balcony.”
“I want to prescribe something for you, Jocelyn. I think it’s a good time. Your husband agrees. What do you think? To pick up your mood.”
“Last night, I was sitting out there, and the wind was blowing, and I was feeling good, and then out of nowhere, I thought about how he raped her at night, and then in the morning on the way to school there were ducklings. Just like that in the middle of the night, on my balcony, this far away, this many years later, in peace, it came to me. I can’t be clean. I can’t have anything that’s pure. I ruin it.”
“Ducklings?” Dr. Bruce asks.
“Ducklings. You know, like baby ducks.”
“Yes. I know what they are.”
“They were too small to get up on the curb. Black and gray with a little bit of yellowish brown on their chests.” Jocelyn shivers. If she were a therapist she would find a place filled with light. She would make her office warm.
“Go on.”
“He made us get out of the car. He told us to make a line beside the car, to block the oncoming traffic. It came to me last night. It’s the girl. She won’t let me sleep. Memories. But I can’t figure why.”
The therapist nods.
“Uncle Al lifted them. One little ball of feathery fur at a time onto the curb. The mother tried to bite him. I watched him. I’ve been thinking about him, about all of my mother’s boyfriends, about my mother, each of us. The ways we make no sense. That’s what I do when I can’t sleep.”
“What do you mean you make no sense?”
“I mean it’s all inside of each of us, right? All of it.”
“Well.” Dr. Bruce pauses. “All of what exactly?”
She can’t figure out how to say it. She knows the girl is there, beneath that other girl, but neither of them can get out.
She sits up startled.
“What is it Jocelyn?”
Could it be me? she wants to say. Me on top of her?
“What he did was wrong,” Dr. Bruce says, swiftly.
“The dregs, the residue,” Jocelyn says, not really hearing. “They’re there. Even when everyone who knows you can’t see them.” She waves her hand around the room, hoping to signify something. “This,” she says. “It’s all for nothing.”
“That’s not true, Jocelyn. There’s healing.”
“I have to go and see Gladys’s grave,” she says, firmly.
“Okay,” Dr. Bruce says, but Jocelyn can feel her resistance. “Let’s talk about that.”
Jocelyn stays silent. So many moments of silence in therapy. It never seems real. It isn’t real. It’s talking to a stranger about incomprehensible things. We are all alone in the world, no matter what we believe.
“What do you hope to accomplish?”
I have been dismantled by her, Jocelyn wants to say. I want her to give me back to me. Relinquish me to me.
“Closure,” she says instead to the doctor—the smart doctor, who can never really know.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Jocelyn
1
SHE GOES TO THE CABIN ON A DAY THAT SHE DOESN’T HAVE TO VOLUNTEER in Lucy’s class. She thinks she can feel Kate again, get better again, here in the woods. She lies in the cool sheets of the iron bed, head on a soft pillow, pretending Kate is beside her. She takes one of Maud’s Ambiens.
She dozes and sleeps and sleeps and sleeps. All the lost sleep of the weeks before is found in the bed that she shared with her lover.
When she finally wakes, her phone is alight with missed calls, voice mails: Kate? But there is only the bland voice of a bored school secretary, the panicked anger of her husband.
She surges, runs bleary eyed up the long series of steps, trying not to slip. She cannot believe it. She has never done anything like this.
I am not even a good mother, she thinks, when she reaches the top of the stairs. I can’t even be a good mother.
How could she have done this? How could she have taken something and then slept through picking her daughter up? She is just like Gladys. Her daughter is waiting. Waiting, always waiting.
Defeat is alive inside her.
2
CONRAD IS AT THE SCHOOL WHEN SHE GETS THERE. MR. BAIRD IS WAITING with Lucy. Conrad is apologizing. Jocelyn just looks, studies, sees.
Mr. Baird says it’s no problem. He stays this late anyway, he says. Things happen.
And, of course, it’s no problem, Jocelyn thinks. Not for men like Mr. Baird. Not for the men waiting in her childhood. The brown bag. The panties. Gladys, late, more often than not. The teachers, the janitors who depended on her being alone. Jocelyn knows how it goes, how it goes and goes.
She reaches for her daughter’s hand, nods at Mr. Baird. She wants to lead Lucy out of the classroom. Her daughter is pale and angry. She will not take her mother’s hand. She will not touch her mother. Conrad shakes Mr. Baird’s hand and the three of them walk out. Lucy holds on to Conrad, who scolds Jocelyn as they walk out to the parking lot.
“I have to work,” he says, harshly. “Got that?”
“I’ve got it,” she says, as if she were a toddler, just learning the language. There is no fight inside her.
“How can you forget your own daughter at school? What the hell is going on with you?”
What the hell is going on with me? she thinks, but she says nothing.
He quiets his voice just a bit. “Ever since your mother, we’re back to this shit. You’re up half the night. You’re working your way around the house with a rag and a bucket like a maid. If you can’t deal with your responsibilities, get a fucking nanny.”
She says nothing and he goes on.
“Do I begrudge you anything? Do I? Do I?”
“No,” she says.
She walks beside her husband and her child. They seem a part of each other and yet separate from her. She is just a robot following instructions. Mr. Baird, saying No problem, is at the fore of her mind. I’ll watch her, the camp counselor said. Of course, you don’t have to come on the trip. We’ve got plenty of volunteers, the pastor at their church said. Free babysitting is what Gladys thought. Always happy to be rid of them.
“Go get some meds,” Conrad says, interrupting her memories. “I don’t give a shit about how you feel about drugs. We aren’t doing this again. I’m telling you. I called everywhere. I called Maud. I called Theresa. I called the club. I called my mother, for God’s sake. I thought you might be
dead. Where were you?”
She looks at her husband. She considers telling him about the pill. She will not take medicine. If she has learned anything today, she has learned that.
“I was shopping,” she says, because Conrad comes from the kind of woman who shops. “My phone was off. I haven’t been able to sleep. I turned it off last night. I forgot to turn it back on. I was just taking a little rest in my car in the mall parking lot, waiting for pickup time.”
“You have a six-year-old!” His voice is sharp and angled. “You cannot forget. You need to get your ass in gear. Go do something. You aren’t even playing tennis anymore,” he says. “I thought you were doing well for a while.”
“I was,” she says.
They keep walking across the lush green courtyard of the beautiful school. She feels very small on this great campus.
“I have to go home,” she says. “I think I have to see Gladys. I think that will make me better.”
Conrad stops walking. He looks at her, his face goes completely white. “Gladys is dead, Jocelyn. Your mother is dead.”
“I know,” she says. “I know. I didn’t mean it like that.”
The blood returns to his cheeks, and she realizes he has thought her completely and finally mad.
“Her grave,” she says. “I have to see the grave, and I want to see the old apartment, and maybe the bridge. I think that’s what’s wrong with me. I was talking to my therapist. I need closure.”
He opens up the back door of Jocelyn’s car and seatbelts Lucy into her booster. Lucy is crying now: “I want Papa to come home. I don’t want you to go to work, Papa. Please.”
“It’s okay,” he says to Lucy gently. “Papa will be home very, very soon.” He kisses her. She snuffs a bit, trying to stifle her tears. He shuts the door, turns to Jocelyn.
“Get some plane reservations for the two of you. Get yourself to Cincinnati and get right back here. I told you to go before. I told you to go to the funeral. You need to listen to me, Jocelyn.”