As he surfaces into full consciousness, he senses the familiar sourness, a combination of sweat and scented hair products, the pillow she uses, and the blanket.
For a moment he stays there and feels the wind from the ceiling fan across his face. He hears the voices of his neighbors in their yards outside, but there is no one else in his house, only the overhang of disappointments. He stretches as he stands up, then straightens the blanket on the bed so that it doesn’t look like he has been there.
In the adjoining bathroom, amidst the body washes and rose-scented soap, he sees the reflection of lines that reach from the outside corners of his eyes toward the sides of his face, and grey circles beneath his white lower lashes. No matter how hard he works out, or how careful he is with what he eats, the years draw the skin on his face downward.
On the table by the bedside are two Bibles, one a new annotated version with the sticker label of her church at the bottom of the front cover, the other her confirmation King James version. There is a pencil for her to write in the margins of the Bible, and her iPad. He turns the iPad on and, using an old password that Linda had developed, the middle names of their daughters, he logs into her account and looks at her email. How odd it hadn’t occurred to her to change her password.
Phil had always felt that it would never really be important to see what Linda had in her email account or on her Facebook page. After all, he was the one committing adultery. It was always Linda accusing Phil. Phil left her alone to raise her daughters. Phil forced her to move just as she was beginning to make friends in one place, and then move again. Phil had affairs, and not just one. She had always been victimized by his actions and his life.
There are emails about clothes and dating from Linda’s divorced friends, sort of “Let me set you up” emails; notices about Bible study; love letters from Albert, the man-boy from church. “I can’t wait to see you,” he writes. “I only want to lie next to you.” He quotes songs that Phil is not familiar with. Some are in Spanish, as if that is a sexier language than English. Then he sees the “sent” files, the emails to Sarayu and Eleanor where Linda writes, “I’m praying for you.”
He walks through the hallways as he reads them. Now a few things make sense. To Sarayu there is a particular recent email. And now he knows why she called him, because she had heard from his wife.
“He is all yours,” Linda wrote. “We are finally getting a divorce. I won’t hide the fact that you were partly to blame. But it takes two.”
Why did Linda contact Sarayu? To get them back together? It reminds him of twelve-step programs that force you to apologize to everyone you have hurt while you were an addict, and she is apologizing for him. But Linda does not feel she has hurt anyone. She only says she will pray for them. Is praying for someone the same as interrupting her life with information she might not want? Did she think Phil would find out and then hate her? Would it make her superior to Phil, by praying for those he has sinned with?
He sends a text to Sarayu. He sits and waits for an answer. She doesn’t answer and he calls, only to find that her telephone is turned off. He wants to reassure her that he is sincere in wanting to be with her.
Phil feels he has to get to Sarayu. He grabs his wallet and keys and gets in his car. He has not thought to let out the dog or fill her water bowl. She doesn’t exist right now. At a stop sign before entering the ramp to the expressway, he sends Sarayu another text. Still she doesn’t answer. He calls and leaves another message. Her phone is still off.
KAYE DOESN’T THINK it is unusual that Clara has walked out. Clara walks out all the time. Eric believes that Clara should have the freedom to leave the house to be with her friends after school, to calm down after the frequent arguments she has with her mother. Clara communicates with him. Often Kaye doesn’t know where Clara is eating, or where she is getting her homework done. Eric, who grew up in a different place, says, “She comes home at night, what more do you want?” as if he knows something that he and Clara don’t want to reveal to Kaye.
“How the hell do you raise kids in Scotland?” she asked her husband.
“We don’t chain them to their bedrooms, if that is what you are wondering.”
Eric does not make things easier.
Kaye does what she always does in the late afternoon of a weekday, before Eric comes home. She empties the dishwasher, marinates the chicken, washes the lettuce for a dinner salad, and indulges in a finger of fifteen-year-old whisky. An advantage to being married to a Scot is that there is always fifteen-year-old whisky in the pantry.
Then the clouds come over the sky, shadowing the ground, and from the kitchen window she can see the tree swing moving maniacally and the huge branches from the cottonwood sway. The siren goes off. Kaye sends a text message to Clara. Then she calls her. Clara rarely answers when her mother calls. The rain begins to pelt the windows, sharply at first, then in waves in an uneven rhythm that coincides with gusts of wind. What little she feels she has of maternal instinct she rallies. She takes her rain jacket and keys and runs toward the car parked in front of the house.
By the time she has crossed the parkway and reaches her car, she is drenched. Would Clara seek cover? Was she at someone’s house? Would she find the house of a friend? Clara has been known to walk for hours when she is angry. Kaye sends another text before starting the engine. “Clara, where are you?” She receives no answer.
With the neighborhood siren sounding from the nearby schoolyard, Kaye goes after her daughter. The wind rocks the car and the rain pushes against the windshield. She drives slowly along the street, clutching the steering wheel, trying to see ahead through the watery windshield glass. Up a street, down another, no one is outside. A squirrel runs in front of the car, but she doesn’t brake and she doesn’t hit it.
She finds Clara soaked and hovering on the grass, not far from the house. She pulls the car up to the curb and reaches to open the passenger side door. “Get in!”
But Clara shakes her head. “Why?” she says.
“It’s dangerous! The sirens are going off!” Kaye screams to her daughter. Realizing that she will have to get out of the car and force Clara to get in, she pushes her door open, and, through the shower, she walks over the grass and takes Clara by the shoulders. The girl resists. “Just leave me alone, you fucking cunt!”
Kaye remains standing in the rain and wind. She recalls the time she couldn’t get Clara to latch on as a baby and she was trying to nurse. Through the pain of being rejected and her tears, she argued with the lactation nurse to allow her to use formula rather than breastfeed. But the lactation nurse was adamant, and she pinched and pumped milk until the stubborn baby Clara drank from her breast and Kaye contracted a painful infection. Even before that, there had been the pain of contractions, of childbirth, things she had forgotten. Kaye hadn’t known what pain was then.
With all the things that Clara has called her she has never used the word “cunt” before, a hard-sounding word, shot out in the hope of injuring her. But words don’t matter right now. “Just get in the car and I’ll worry about what you think of me later.”
“No! I am staying here.”
“You’ll get hurt. Come!”
Clara tries to wriggle out of her mother’s clutches, but without enough energy to be successful. Soaked and tired, Kaye leads her into the car. She pushes the door shut and goes to the driver’s side. She cannot hear the sound of the engine, only the pounding of the rain on the car and the blood in her head.
Clara runs through the unlocked front door ahead of her mother when they arrive home. Kaye stands in the doorway listening to Clara slam her bedroom door shut. Then she can no longer hold her tears. They come out harshly, along with seventeen years of failed motherhood.
20
THE STORM COMES on suddenly, as Midwestern spring storms do, and the sky darkens to make it seem as though it is dusk. Frank has just walked into the house from the commuter train. “Eleanor!” he calls out to her. “The trees are bending!”<
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Frank’s “I’m saving the family” act comes about every so often, when there may be a world crisis, when the sewers need rodding, or the bushes in the garden need to be trimmed, or the cars need to be moved to the other side of the street for street cleaning. But this tone is more serious. She can see the sky and the bending branches outside the window, as he goes to the backyard to cover the grill and take down the patio umbrella. He tries to grasp the pole; his hair is wet and flat against his head and his shirttail blows behind him. He cannot hold the umbrella pole, and it shoots off into the air. He runs back inside. “Where is Annie?”
The boys make it slowly into the basement. Eleanor cannot find the dog. Feeling panic, she looks inside closets and behind furniture. She calls out her name as the sky opens and rain pours down. Outside she pushes toward the fence and finds the gate bent. “Did you have her outside with you?” she calls out to Frank, who is crawling along the side bushes, looking for a place she might hide.
“I don’t remember, I think so.”
“Well, she’s out.”
“You go inside and I’ll find her,” Frank says. “Go into the basement with the boys, I’ll find her.”
“It’s dangerous—”
But he is gone. Eleanor shouts Annie’s name and the sound pushes back to her with the wind. The rain slashes sideways through the air and prevents her voice from projecting. Her head is soaked and she can only see vaguely through the drops across her eyeglasses. She looks for the black-and-white dog under trees and on porches as she moves across the sidewalk. She tries to push ahead. Yet the wind forces her back. She can hear the crack and whoosh of a tree branch crashing down somewhere along the parkway into the street. “Frank!” she calls out. “Annie!”
Please be safe, she thinks, longing to hold Annie’s wet spindly body and to bury her nose in Annie’s neck fur; she cannot bear it if something were to happen to Frank, nor could she stand it if they did not find the dog. She weaves in and out of bushes in the wind and pouring rain, looking in the undergrowth of front yards, expecting to find a wet dog curled in a ball shivering, her eyes red and wide, panting. She sees nothing. Then, turning toward her own home, she finds Frank with his hair plastered to his face and his clothes clinging to his skin, holding the petite, frightened border collie to his chest. Eleanor runs against the rain and falls into them, clutching them both with her arms. Annie smells like new wet wool and tilled soil. “Let’s go home,” Frank says. Eleanor is overwhelmed with relief.
In the basement, the four of them lie on the painted cement floor under the Ping-Pong table, surrounded by the dirty towels that had lain in a laundry basket. They listen to a transistor radio, reports of traffic accidents and train delays. Frank clings to the dog, whose head is beneath his chest and whose body moves with each quick breath, her tail beating against the floor. The boys are on their backs with their phones, dry, heads propped up on a rolled carpet. They send messages out to the world about their captivity, and report to their friends in other basements. All of them hear branches knock the sides of the house and rain pelt the above-ground basement windows, rhythmic, sweeping rushes of sound. Then there is a loud crash outside, which vibrates the walls of the house as though a train had passed, or a small earthquake had occurred, only louder. “Shit!” one of the boys says. Eleanor can’t tell which one.
“Do you think a tree fell?” Frank asks.
Eleanor’s phone buzzes in her pocket. She is surprised it is still working after she had been out in the rain. She answers it even though she doesn’t recognize the number. It’s Linda. “Where is my husband? Is he with you?” Startled, Eleanor hangs up.
“What was that?” Frank asks.
Eleanor deletes the call. “I didn’t recognize the number.”
“Why did you answer?”
“I don’t know. I always do.”
“I’m going to check outside. Take Annie.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“Things have died down. Listen.”
Eleanor still hears rain on the window panes. “Don’t go!”
He takes her hand. “I’ll just be a minute.” He gets up and climbs out from under the table. Eleanor pulls the wet dog to her and folds her body around it, still looking up toward the stairs. Then she hears a door slam.
“It was the ash tree!” Frank says as he moves down the stairs toward his family. “It crashed into the middle of the street, taking two cars down with it.”
“Anyone hurt?”
“No.”
“Whose cars, ours?”
“Mine.” He has his hands by his side. “The tree came out of the ground, roots and all. There is a huge hole at the side of our house.”
WHEN THE STORM subsides, Eleanor follows Frank, climbing the basement stairs carrying the dog. As they cross the kitchen threshold, Annie jumps to the floor and runs to her crate. Through the windows they see that the umbrella once over their patio table has lodged itself in the chain-link fence that stands between their yard and the neighbor’s. There are thin, full-leaved branches strewn across the grass. They walk out the door and around to the front of the house to see what Frank had discovered earlier: the uprooted ash tree that now lies across the parkway, its branches crushing Frank’s Subaru. The roots of the tree are exposed, there is now a crater where the tree had stood.
From a distance, the sirens sound. They can hear the slam of the screen door across the street as their neighbor calls to them, “Frank! Eleanor!”
At the same time, Eleanor’s phone vibrates. It is Phil’s home number. Phil has never used it to call her before, and she feels a sudden panic that it might be Linda calling again, yet she answers. “This is Linda Anderson, Phil’s wife. Is my husband with you? He isn’t here and there are storms and a tornado warning.”
Eleanor doesn’t know what to say. Frank bends over the dead tree. The trunk is as high as his thigh. “Have a look at this,” he says to her.
“I’m sorry, who?” Eleanor says to the phone.
“Linda. Phil’s wife. Is he with you? I’m worried about the storms.”
“You don’t live near here.”
“He’s gone. I’m sure he’s in Chicago.”
This is an interruption in her life that she resents. “He isn’t here. I’m sorry.” She hangs up.
To Eleanor, any drama about Phil suddenly feels far away as she looks at the tree on its side, the roots blackened by the dark earth and twisted in the air. A large branch, split along a fibrous, yellow line that breaks the cracked grey bark, lies near the hulk of trunk across the grass. The place where it has split from the trunk of the tree is jagged. Frank circles widely around his car. He can’t get close to it because the tree limb blocks the circumference and most of the street. He stands with his hands on his hips, evaluating the damage. “It’s a good thing the tree went this direction instead of toward the house.”
“It’s like Annie knew,” Liam says.
Eleanor turns toward where her son is now standing. “What do you mean?”
“She knew to run away from the tree, the danger. Then Dad went to get her back.”
Eleanor puts her arm around Liam’s back. He is her height now and leans into her, which he hasn’t done in a long time. She nods, frightened by the possibility that Annie might have been hurt by the falling branches outside, or taken up in the wind, because she is only thirty-six pounds.
Frank has his hand to his forehead, as if he is thinking of what to do, but there really isn’t anything he can do but wait for the city to clear away the tree and then call the insurance company. The car is old. It is the car Eugene is learning to drive. It’s the one in which they brought Liam home from the hospital and took Eugene to soccer games. Eleanor suddenly feels sentimental. She is moved by her husband’s stance and walks to him. He looks at her, shaking his head as she puts her arms around him. “I’m sorry,” she says. She swallows. “I’m sorry.”
He shrugs and they stare at the carnage in silence.
WHEN
THE STORM comes on, Phil is in the city, not far from Sarayu’s apartment. He drives along the four-lane street that takes him east from the expressway exit to where she lives. He can feel he is pushing against the wind in his small sports car. Branches of large trees are bending on the side of the street. Along the sidewalk an umbrella blows, swept up into the air as the man who had been holding it cowers in his coat. Rain slashes against Phil’s windshield and he leans his body forward against the steering wheel, trying to see clearly out the window between swipes of the windshield wipers. But all he sees are blurred colors of the cars in front of him through the wall of rain. They all inch forward, trying to force their way through the thickness of the storm, and thunder rolls with startling cracks of lightning. Behind him, Phil hears the crack of a breaking tree limb and begins to worry that something will hit the thin roof of his convertible.
He has trouble parking in Sarayu’s neighborhood, and with the rain beating down on his roof and windows, it is difficult to wedge his car between two others. He runs up the block to her entryway, through the wind and rain. He is breathing heavily as he pulls the door open and thrusts first his head then upper body into the foyer. He leans against the wall momentarily. Outside it is as if water is falling from the sky in bursts against the rectangles of glass on the door. Lightning flashes from outside into the dark entrance. He will explain everything to Sarayu now, about his almost-ex and her emails, and what is happening in his life. He doesn’t want to hide anything, to keep her in the dark.
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