by Holly LeCraw
At her breast, Grace was falling asleep again. Callie looked down at her closed eyes and drowsily sucking little mouth and felt abandoned—Don’t leave me, stay awake. I need company. As if a baby could be company. But even after Callie detached her, strapped her into the baby carrier and put it on, Grace’s eyes didn’t open.
Inside, the store was barnlike and gloomy, with a corrugated tin roof high overhead. It seemed bigger than she remembered; wasn’t it supposed to work the opposite way? Weren’t places supposed to get smaller, less bewildering? As she made her way deeper into the store between towering stacks of military surplus, she was almost overcome by the smell of rubber, of metal. A foreign, heartless smell. Callie cradled Grace, attached to her front. All this testosterone, this love of war, this maleness—why had she brought her baby here? But she hadn’t felt this way before, years before, as a skinny nine-year-old, legs covered with mosquito bites, begging her mother for an aluminum mess kit.
Her mother had looked down at her with cool eyes. “It’s not on the list, Callie. You don’t need it.”
And Callie had felt a familiar indignation. She remembered looking at the picture on the box, at the way the aluminum pieces fit together snugly in their pouch, how they could come out and be plate and bowl and everything you could possibly need. She had imagined the kit bouncing hollowly against her hip as she hiked through the woods, how it would bang against the canteen they had already bought. She would be like a soldier on the march. “I do,” she had said. “I do need it.” But her mother’s face had not changed. That implacability. That efficiency that did not allow for poetry—the poetry of a girl tramping through the woods: indomitable! invincible!
She hated to think of moments of disagreement. That had been a small clash, but in her mind it was one seed of the separation she had felt when she was nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, so full of her own possibility, convinced she needed no one, least of all her mother. For a time she had been sure her mother had nothing to offer her. No examples, no wisdom. Had she really thought that? Her memories had grown hazy and confused along with the rest of her thoughts. All she knew was that when her mother died there had been a long, long moment when every cell of her had seized up and cried, I didn’t mean it! Please come back!
And then she was back in the echoing olive-green aisle. The mess kit. Had she begged for it? Had her mother caved (no, surely not), had her mother surprised her with it later? Because she had ended up with that mess kit. She remembered it so clearly, could feel the flimsy aluminum in her hands, could taste the metallic tang of the cup’s rim. Couldn’t she? Now she wasn’t sure of that either. She stood in the empty aisle, poised, absolutely still, waiting to know if her memory was true or not, patient, patient, but then Grace stirred in her sleep and Callie’s concentration dissolved. Her back was aching from Grace’s weight.
She began to walk again, more quickly now. A faint, menacing hum seemed to emanate from the shelves. She cut her eyes one way, the other: she needed to escape. She was different now, her mother gone, that valiant girl gone. She could see herself, scuttling through the aisles, hunched around Grace, surrounded by tools of violence, of survival against too-high odds. Calm. Calm. She felt her mind straining like a wild horse. She held it under tight rein. It wasn’t like she had seen any actual weapons. Grenades! Rocket launchers, aisle 6! Ha! She found the tent section, grabbed a cheap two-person model, and hurried back to the checkout.
Her fingers were trembling, and she put her credit card down on the counter with a loud snap. The salesman looked at her strangely as he picked it up. He was a tall guy with a buzz cut and a camo jacket, fresh from the recruiting center, Callie thought, except he had a fuzzy beard and his fatigues were less than crisp. A wacko. Some crazy Unabomber. She couldn’t meet his eyes, couldn’t see if they were kind or not, and how would she know? It didn’t matter, didn’t matter. She was almost done.
He said, “Would you like some help getting that to your car?” He cleared his throat. His voice was thick with a Massachusetts accent, but deep and almost courtly. “Seeing as you’ve got the baby?”
“No,” she said, horrified at the thought of him following her outside, preventing her escape. “No, thank you—” Then she stopped.
The man turned to look behind him, following her gaze to a flat glass case, locked, with a pegboard inside. Attached to the board was a long row of knives. “You need something? You—ah—want to see one of those?” He glanced back at her. “I don’t have the key. I’ll have to get the manager.”
Her mind was about to go galloping away, down the dark path she hated, and she would not be able to stop it. She shook her head. The register flurried with beeps and tickings and the man ripped off her receipt and pushed it and the pen across the counter. “Miss?”
The knives were arranged by size, the shortest ones starting on the left. You could read the row like a sentence, a long sentence ending in a scream. Her eyes slid along against her will. They inched past the ones you might use to cut a steak or whittle a boat or maybe clean a fish, clean, Girl Scout things, safe things, happy camping trips with your new mess kit, yes—but then there were bigger ones, for animals, probably, yes, just for crazy cruel hunters. And there was a machete, God, where was she supposed to be, anyway? A field of sugarcane, a rice paddy? God, how could someone hold a blade that long, that sharp, far too dangerous, the things it could do, flashing in the light—
She saw Grace cut in two like Solomon’s baby, too late, too late. She saw her own blood, pumping out of opened veins with the beat of her own heart. She saw her mother’s kitchen, how the floor was freshly washed, how her mother was not in it.
“Miss?”
She felt a mask come down, a hard, shiny smile. “Why, I’m not a miss! I’m a ma’am. I’ve got a baby. I can tell I’m not in the South! Why, thank you so much!” Her hands grasped the box and she fled. Outside in the parking lot someone, her shadow self, took the sleeping Grace and buckled her in, this other lying self found the keys in her purse and steered the car back onto the road and around the rotary and toward home, while her real self huddled in the corner of her mind, rocking rocking, knowing she had seen both the past and the future and that she could not fend them off for much longer.
III
It was noon on Friday, and Marcella was making a marinade for their dinner steaks. She chopped garlic, poured in wine and olive oil and vinegar. She crushed rosemary from the garden with her hands. She was humming. She had taken a shower a little while before and her damp hair, twisted at the back of her head, was pleasantly cool, as was the kitchen floor under her bare feet. Although she was alone in the house, she could already feel Jed’s presence. She looked through the door into the living room, imagining him lying on the sofa reading, as he often did; from where she stood she just would be able to see the top of his head. She turned back to the counter and breathed in herbs. He would arrive before sunset.
At her house, Jed read only books he found on her shelves; he never brought his own. Sometimes he would pick up a book in Italian, and puzzle through some of it with a dictionary. He got her to read bits out loud to him, and asked about the translating work she did. She said it was only something to make her feel useful. “But you want to think of me as a literary woman,” she said, laughing—“so be it!” He read books in English too, serious and light indiscriminately, with, it seemed to Marcella, a kind of abandon. “Don’t you read at home?” she had asked him.
“I concentrate better here,” he had said, but she knew this wasn’t true. She had never seen him finish a book; he rarely even picked up the same one twice. This was disturbing to her but she could not say what it might mean—
The phone rang.
Her first thought was that it was Jed, something was wrong, he wasn’t coming. There was bad news, she felt it; when she answered and found it was Toni, her heart lurched, still believing her premonition. “Mom,” Toni said, “I’m on the road. I’m about an hour away—”
“What hap
pened?”
“Dad and I—Can I come stay with you?” For a moment Marcella felt nothing—the blankness between fear and joy. She could hear the sound of traffic in the background. She saw Toni, one hand on the wheel, the phone clutched to her ear. Needing her. “Mom?”
And then it came, happiness in a great swell: Toni was coming. “Of course, darling,” Marcella said. “But what is wrong?”
“I had a fight with Dad. I hate him.”
“Toni,” Marcella clucked, trying to sound relaxed, because it really was nothing. Trying not to sound surprised: when had Toni last turned to her? Seemed to need her?
“Don’t you …I had to get out of there.” She launched into a long story of how she had been at the Woodshed in Brewster and her fucking ride had left and she’d been late getting home, but she was in college, Jesus … Marcella was quite sure that Toni was leaving in her profanities on purpose, but she didn’t know to what end, and anyway all she heard was her little girl saying Listen to me, listen to me. She looked down at the steaks, feeling unsteady.
“So I’m almost there,” Toni said. “It’ll just be tonight I guess. Well, tomorrow night too. I have to be at work on Monday,” she said, and Marcella heard a little pride in her voice, and again saw her daughter holding Cecil’s grandchild, this mystery child who, perhaps, looked like Jed. “Mom?” Toni said. “Are you doing something? You’re distracted.”
Toni’s main criticism was that her mother had no life. But at the first sign of one, her resentment sprang up. Marcella wiped her hands on a towel, picked up the pan of steaks to put in the refrigerator. Toni liked steak. “No, sweetie,” Marcella said. “I’m not doing a thing. Not a thing except waiting for you.”
When she got off the phone she took a moment to compose herself. Jed usually called, too, from the road. What if he didn’t? What if his phone wasn’t turned on? Of course it would be but she sat down anyway, her confusion overtaking her. What if he was here when Toni got here? Could she call the house in Mashantum, ask when he had left? How laughable. A cheery conversation with Callie, chatting, How are you, nothing to hide, yes, I am Jed’s girlfriend … girl …For a moment she saw how life could be, someone else’s life; felt a moment of sharp, bitter yearning; and then let herself plunge back into the strange richness that was reality. He would be angry. She had never thought of Jed angry, at her. She would call in a minute but for now she stood and began moving quickly, her eyes darting. Because she also had to purge her house of any signs of him.
She tried to smile as she searched, to feel devilish, but no, she did not enjoy playing such games; it was one of the reasons this could happen between her and Jed, because here in Connecticut she had no one to hide it from. Until now. She did not want to think of Cecil, of how years before in Mashantum they had had to plot and sneak. She had tried to avoid subterfuge then, as much as possible; she had tried not to lie. Instead she simply hadn’t said. And Anthony hadn’t asked, had not, she believed, even cared, and there was no one to care now—but she must not think of Jed and Cecil together at the same time, she must not.
She kept going, kept looking, but there was nothing to find, not so much as a razor or toothbrush, things Toni would not even notice. She was almost disappointed she couldn’t put her frantic energy to use, but she wasn’t surprised. She suspected Jed had made a tacit pact with himself not to leave a trace. Every Sunday night, she noticed that he had even filed the books he had been reading back onto her shelf without marking his place, and she thought she knew why. If they accumulated too many routines, too much familiarity, it placed them in time, and he wanted more than anything to believe that they existed on an island of eternal present. In the pure present there was no threat of past or future, of memory or loss. She wanted to tell him that she knew of this belief, but then she might also tell him that it was no good. She might tell him that on every Sunday night, she laid her face in his pillow and breathed the absence of him in. He might have left no physical traces of himself, but it did not matter.
She stood still for a moment and thought how, this weekend, she would not have him. She realized she was hoping he was almost here. That she would have time to see him at her door, to touch him, before she turned him away.
But she made herself keep combing the house. Toni was coming. Finally she stopped at the doorway of Toni’s bedroom. Where Jed had slept that first night. She had put this room together so carefully after the divorce, in those days when everything she did or said felt like apology. She felt a sudden jolt of longing for her daughter, not just her presence, which she would soon have, but to hold her close, to gather her to herself completely in a way that was no longer possible, physically or otherwise—Toni who was still so angry, Toni who, Marcella believed, quite simply loved Anthony more. She was hungry for Toni, hungry for Jed, and she couldn’t believe she could feel both at once; that was why her legs shook, why she was holding on to the frame of the door. It was standing here, it was thinking of Jed in that bed. Almost reluctantly, she walked into the room and slowly sat down on the pink comforter, as if something might break in the room, or in herself. This was what Toni would see when she lay here. This was the view her girl saw out the window.
Marcella’s own bedroom was last. Nothing. But her glance fell on her made bed, and irresistibly she thought of Jed in it. She walked over and buried her nose in the pillow he used, but it was fresh and bare and smelled only of the laundry.
An odd calm was creeping over her. When she called Jed, and told him to turn around, she would feel the heat of his desire, and her own desire too, in every cell, like sickness. Her spirit quailed but then she steadied herself again. She would try to tell him how clean it was, this automatic love for one’s child. How unhesitating the yes. How there were no questions, how she had gone too long without taking all of her daughter she could get, in greedy handfuls.
She picked up the phone.
FOR HOURS CALLIE HAD BEEN FLOATING in dread, as happened now every Friday, starting in the morning, sometimes spilling back even to Thursday night, when she would lie awake exhausted, her open eyes glued to the blackness that was the ceiling, knowing what was coming … and now it had happened, Jed had left, Billy had arrived, the changing of the guard, the men here to watch over her. To inspect. She didn’t know if she dreaded Billy because he saw too much or too little. He reminded her that this summer was temporary. His presence, meant to fulfill her, reminded her of the yawning chasm at her back where her mother and father should be. He reminded her that they had a life in foreign Connecticut and when fall came it would be her duty to build it up, in the strange place with the house and roads and people that would never, she was sure, feel familiar. When Jed was there she still fought every day to shuffle through in a straight line, to force herself from one hour to the next. Jed noticed, a little, but his noticing did not make her feel exposed. But when Billy came with his laughter and his tossing Jamie up in the air and his awkwardness with his own baby daughter, it reminded her of the person she had managed to be before Grace came and how since then she had failed. During the week, she was alone in a cell with Jed and her struggle was contained, but then Jed left and Billy came and the door opened and it became a public matter—
She was standing at the sink washing dishes. The children were finally in bed and even though it was already dark Billy was outside at the grill, cooking their dinner. That was what happened up here—the days grew shorter even in the heat, even in the thick of July. Time hurtled. The window above the sink was open. Above the slosh of the dishwater she could also hear the hiss and sizzle of the meat, and then a car pulled up. The jerk of the hand brake and the slam of the door, the crunch of steps on gravel. Her brother’s dark form walked over and stood with her husband’s.
“Her fucking parents,” she heard. “Fucking surprise visit.”
“You don’t want to meet them?” Billy laughed. “Jesus, did you?”
“She—I called before I got there.” Jed cleared his throat and Callie thought
he sounded odd, shaky. “Thank God,” he said.
“Not quite up for that, bro?” Billy clapped Jed on the shoulder. “Glad to have you back. Just like old times.”
She was washing Jamie’s plastic cup, the one with the red cartoon fire engines circling it in endless emergency. She could not even move her hand away from the faucet, she could only watch the water filling the cup and then overflowing, spilling to the white porcelain floor of the sink and down the drain, wasted, as she shook with her reprieve.
IN HER BED THAT NIGHT, Marcella lay wide awake. Toni was in the next room, but Marcella didn’t even realize she was listening and waiting until she heard Toni click off her lamp; then the crack of light coming under Marcella’s door disappeared and she let out a breath. In a few minutes, the silence deepened and settled and she knew that Toni was asleep.
There was nothing, nothing, there was nothing like knowing your child was safe asleep in the next room.
Unexpectedly, she thought of Jed. She wanted to say to him, Someday you will have that, but then loss washed over her in a gentle wave and she did not let herself think about that anymore.
It was a minor crisis that had brought Toni to her, but she would take it. She wondered if maybe, just maybe, Toni was starting to feel an iota of obligation toward her, and wondered if she wanted that or not. Obligation had not served her well with her own mother, who had felt so beleaguered by life that she believed she had no power beyond inducing guilt. But I am a mother, she thought, and I want my child however I can get her. Maybe Toni just wanted to annoy Anthony by leaving, maybe she wanted Marcella to slip her some cash too, but Marcella would not be convinced that she didn’t also want some elemental safety, something only she, Toni’s mother, could give. Marcella had cooked her the steaks meant for Jed, she had put the extra pillows on her bed, she had cut phlox and black-eyed Susans and the last precious delphiniums for her room. And it might have been Marcella’s imagination but Toni seemed just a little bit softer, hugged her a little more convincingly, even though as usual she said nothing about the flowers or the food. She was comfortable, that was the thing Marcella could give her. Marcella hadn’t given her enough. She had let Anthony take over, long ago; she had deferred to him, and somehow, by the end, it felt like she had abandoned Toni, the exact opposite of everything she had ever wanted.