40
Pat’s arrival at Booth Hill, three days before, did not encourage in CeCe much hope for the rest of the visit. As Pat climbed out of the taxi with Douglas nestled against her, CeCe cried, “Let me have him!” stretching her arms out toward the baby, over the gravel.
Instead of handing her the boy—almost five months—Pat shrank back against the taxi door, her big-lidded eyes, round and sparsely lashed, blinking, a lattice of wrinkles above her brow. Wrong, that her daughter had aged, that her children would ever age. Pat’s style certainly hadn’t changed: her hair was in a high bird’s nest of a straw bun. A hook of silver curled at the top of each ear. Her dress was a sleeveless, billowing tent, hemp or burlap, with a pattern meant to evoke the word indigenous, solemn and festive, but likely indigenous to nothing. “Do you know how to hold a baby?” Pat asked.
“Meu Deus, Patricia!” Lotta said, stepping around the suitcases at the back of the cab, closing her wallet. “Where do you think you came from? Of course she does!”
Lotta whisked Douglas from Pat’s arms and pressed him toward CeCe. But Pat had the truth. Did she know how to hold a baby? CeCe wasn’t sure, and now she might topple over if she tried. So she took Douglas’s socked feet in her hands and pumped them up and down, saying, “Hello, young sir.” She petted the top of his head. Without meaning to, she scowled at him, because Pat had been right. His eyes grew wide and fearful. He began to cry.
“Leave the bags,” CeCe said, feeling dull and dreadful. As they entered the house, she caught between the women a private glance, Lotta’s brows raised. But once they were arranged in the morning room and had dispatched with pleasantries about the flight, Pat said, “I’m sorry. Would you like to hold him?”
Her daughter! She remembers her daughter at eight, carrying an orange cat across the lawn, who knows where she found it. A private, sentimental child. She remembers Pat’s look of stony tolerance when CeCe made infrequent passes at doing the mother things—pulling back the hair only to find she could not make a braid; tugging the sweater over Pat’s head without seeing the neck was too tight. Only occasionally would Pat give in and curl up against her, silently handing over whatever book or toy she clutched. There was the year after Walter left that CeCe woke each morning to find Pat, her strapping, bare feet poking out from the long nightgown, sleeping wretched on the floor at the foot of CeCe’s bed.
Seizing on the word that had caused them trouble so long, CeCe answered, “I’m sorry too.” It hung in the air—too soon, too much feeling, and Pat looked away. “Well, aren’t those practical,” CeCe continued quickly, appraising Pat’s shoes, a pair of felt boulders lumping out from under her voluminous smock, tapping the silk Persian as Pat bounced the baby on her knee. Worse footwear even than the pair of oiled pilgrim’s hats buckled to Lotta. “I hope the pregnancy didn’t give you flat feet?”
“I guess that’s a no.” Pat sighed and grumbled something about being thirsty, mumbled and grumbled as she had as a teenager. She handed Douglas to Lotta and clumped off in the direction of the kitchen.
“You might wait for Esme! On its way, with a moment’s patience!” CeCe called after, to no effect.
“An extraordinary house,” Lotta said. “I can’t believe your family called this a cottage. Custom is crazy, wherever you go. My work’s informed by a different history, but incredible, this ceiling!”
CeCe looked, with her eyes but not her stiff neck, to the gilded vaulting and the circular medallions, the central octagon of pale blue mosaic, the chandeliers like sprayed ice at regular intervals. When she lowered her gaze, she found Lotta was upon her, plunking the baby into her lap.
“Do you mind?” Lotta, already across the room, was inspecting the scrollwork above the door, a droll smile on her face. CeCe clutched Douglas by the armpits. He squirmed but didn’t look unhappy.
“He’s tired.” Lotta said. “Turn him face in. Send him up the mountain. Rub him on the back.” CeCe did, and Douglas tucked his heavy head into her neck. It didn’t take much to learn. To learn or to remember, she wasn’t sure.
They grew easier by the end of dinner, on the wisteria-wrapped end of the veranda, Yasser’s stick hooked over CeCe’s chair, the table facing the dark ocean. Douglas asleep, tied to Lotta’s chest in some kind of felt Chinese puzzle.
“Look at how strong your mother is,” Lotta said, putting her hand on CeCe’s shoulder. “Fierce. A fierce woman.” Lotta, unmoved or unaware of the Somners’ inexperience with spontaneous encouragement.
“Thank you.” CeCe pulled her back straight as she could at the word fierce. Comforted, despite herself, by the weight of Lotta’s hand.
Their stomachs full, they talked about Pat’s work supporting the microeconomies of the favelas and about clean-water access. On her phone Pat showed CeCe photos of narrow streets and water pumps. The word proud did not occur to CeCe, but she saw how Pat had made a family, simple instead of complicated. They insisted she tell them about Oak Park. “Tell us one good thing and one despicable thing,” Lotta said.
For good, CeCe described Yasser’s garden. For despicable, she said, “That nurse, Jean—I was trapped! Every day, summarizing at length—television.” She did not trust she would maintain her composure if she told the truth, if she described getting her hopes up and trading away a year for nothing. The pneumonia, George’s evil Queen, Dotty, all the days in a row she was alone.
Pat laughed. “Did you give the nurse that eye of yours?”
“I did.”
“The American health system is criminal,” Lotta said.
Douglas woke and arched in the sling. “No,” Lotta said to Pat. “Sit. We have the bottle.” She took Douglas inside.
Pat looked glum again and poured herself half a glass of wine. “It isn’t fair.”
“What isn’t?”
“You. What’s happening. I can’t stand it.”
“Nothing’s fair. Children complain of unfairness, not adults.”
“You’re right. I’m right too. Hold on, we brought you a present.”
Pat fetched a box from inside. In the tissue paper was a thick earthenware pitcher, brown with blue polka dots and a heavy base.
“This?” CeCe tipped it and looked inside. “Why are you giving me this?”
“We know the woman who makes them.”
“I hate it.”
First she, then Pat, burst into a laugh.
* * *
Now, three days later, and what a fine morning she’s having with the baby! Even if she’s tired and the previous day’s visit to George was as grim as it was brief. (On the drive back from Somner’s Rest to Booth Hill, Pat looked out the window. “Shit, shit, shit,” she said softly and to herself. To distract them, CeCe asked Lotta her opinion of George’s house. Lotta raised an eyebrow above her glasses and said, “I understand what it’s trying to be.”) A fine morning, even if none of them—not Pat or Lotta or CeCe—is looking forward to having George and Iris for dinner. Even if CeCe woke with her head pinned sideways to her shoulder. Even though Pat and Lotta will return to Seattle in four days and are making plans for São Paulo.
After breakfast, they help her down to the beach, her folding chair and umbrella under Pat’s arm. Lotta arranges the chair in the sand, arranges CeCe in the chair, and puts the baby in CeCe’s lap. Pat angles the umbrella over the both of them and slathers the baby in suntan lotion. Douglas bobbles and babbles and grabs at CeCe’s cheeks and pats stickily at her neck and takes her fingers into his mouth, staring at her placidly from under his white sunbonnet, or with a wide and curious alarm that passes as soon as it has been expressed. Pat sits in the sand beside CeCe’s chair, wrapped in a dry towel, holding Douglas’s kicking foot or resting her hand on CeCe’s arm. Once or twice, CeCe asks herself if Pat has been kind the last days only because she’s never seen her mother in such a pitiable state. She doesn’t know the answer. But then, she doesn’t know if it matters.
“Mind if we swim?” Pat asks. CeCe watches Pat plod away throu
gh the sand, plump like an apple in a maroon suit, the boy in her arms. Lotta, in a black two-piece they explained was called a tankini that CeCe can only think of as a 1920s men’s bathing costume. Pat takes Douglas into the shallows, where he pets the water’s surface and leans forward with alert caution as his mother dips his feet. CeCe watches Lotta swim out, watches the baby splash himself, burst into tears, and recover. Lotta, chopping slowly back to shore. CeCe has to rest. She’s sleeping short intervals a few times a day, to gather energy for dinner. Pat walks her up to the house. They are shy of each other still, without Lotta.
She wakes an hour later but out the window sees no one on the beach. She makes her way to the veranda. Shading her eyes, she sees her chair is still planted in the sand. Likely they’re taking a walk, or swimming farther down. Not knowing which way they might have gone in the unsteady sand, she decides she’d rather stay up at the house. She fixes herself a sandwich with the egg salad Esme left, this being one of Esme’s days with her own family. CeCe fetches her stick and her tortoise sunglasses with the green glass and settles herself on the veranda. It’s peaceful, to eat a sandwich in the sun and watch the billowing hem of the waterline, to scan the foundation’s quarterly report, and then open the book Pat’s left on the table, a Brazilian novel translated as Monster and Hero. The novel begins with the discovery of a set of university lecture notes in the back of a drawer. Their author has gone missing. She finishes her sandwich and is watching a sailboat knock along when something at the corner of the lawn catches her eye. For a moment she thinks it’s a doll. But Douglas is too young for dolls. She hasn’t gotten the distance right. A pair of legs, could it be?
Squinting, she sees it is a pair of legs, splayed under her willow tree, the willow weeping so low as to obscure the man they belong to. On the beach, no sign of Pat and Lotta. Should she go inside? Call the police? Something about how the legs are flopped—is he sleeping? Pointless to be afraid of a trespasser at her age, in her condition. He isn’t here to tear off her clothes and leave with the tea service. She isn’t afraid. She collects her stick and pushes out of the chair and takes the three veranda steps down onto the lawn. Not a cloud. Only an airplane contrail, splitting the blue.
She crosses the lawn. Harder than this morning, harder as the day goes on. She jerks along, jamming the stick into the ground until she makes it to the willow tree. Its branches dip to the ground; she must part a section to discover the man. She lets the heavy green lock fall back behind her. She and the man are in a soft sort of tent together, the light falling in as by a prism. The ground is dirt, in the shade where the grass hasn’t grown. The man is not asleep. He sits with his back against the trunk. His eyes are open.
“Hello, this is private property. What is your business? You can’t stop here. Do you know your way to the road?”
He looks at her, uninterested. His hand rests on a thermos attached to the belt of his cargo shorts.
“Are you lost? Move along please,” she says, louder. “Have you been drinking?”
“No, no drinking.”
She looks more closely at his face—a sweet face, she sees—dark eyes set with an open and youthful mildness above a strong jaw. “I didn’t recognize you. It’s Victor, isn’t it? Are you all right?”
“I’m okay.”
“Well, what are you doing here?” One of his shoes is half off his foot. “Do you mind if I come closer?”
When he doesn’t answer, she leans forward, her stick in the soft dirt. A fly buzzes between them, its iridescent wing. A purple bruise is on his calf. A red crosshatch around his ankle as if he’s scraped through low bramble. Nothing more serious than what a child might acquire in an afternoon outside.
“Where are you coming from?”
“No, I want to stay here.”
Something in the way he’s looking—at the air over her shoulder, as if he were addressing a person behind her—makes her heart snap in her chest. She is afraid. “Have you hurt yourself?”
“Wasn’t me. I do have a headache.”
“You have a headache. What else? Feel this?” She reaches down and squeezes his hand.
“Sure.” He squeezes back.
“Can you get up?”
“I don’t want to.”
“But can you? Can you try?”
“Pull the shades up.”
She peers frantically behind her, as if the apparition might help. There’s only the soft, folded wings of the willow tree and the green lawn racing away, so bright she squints. The sliver of sky between the branches, a lovely blue.
“Yes, we are in the shade. But I think we should try.”
“No, thank you.”
It is difficult, but with the help of the stick she comes down onto her knees. She wants to push the hair off his forehead. She hesitates and does so, gently. His forehead is smooth and warm under her hand. His eyes seem fine. Except—it’s only the eyes looking back at her. The eyes, but not the mind. She moves one hand unsteadily to the trunk of the tree, the other to his chest. His heartbeat is strong and regular. She looks at his neck, his hands, the sides of his head, his black hair against the bark of the tree. Nothing wrong. But something is wrong! She reaches her hand, his hair thick and dark; it could be, yes, blood. Behind his ear, in the hair. So little she wouldn’t have noticed had she not been looking—a matted patch, sticky, no bigger than a penny. It doesn’t seem enough to matter.
For this to be Esme’s day off! Of all the days! She needs Esme! No one she can call for. She shouldn’t leave him. Yet she must get to the house. She’s about to wrench herself up when she remembers what everyone carries.
“Victor. Have you got a cellular phone?” She rifles in his pocket. It’s on! She presses its only button and holds it to her ear. “Hello? Hello?”
She lifts it away from her ear and pushes the button harder this time, twice. Nothing. She holds the phone up to her eye. At the bottom of the screen—the screen, good God, a picture of 3D—are the words slide to unlock, lighting up and going dim, letter by letter. She follows this instruction but it does not unlock. She tries again. If both her hands were free, maybe she could get the angle, but she can’t let go of the trunk.
“Victor, can you unlock this?”
“What?”
The phone buzzes to life in her hand. The word IRIS appears on the screen with a green bubble containing the words U HERE? Iris! Answer, answer! She presses the phone to her ear. “Hello? Iris dear, hello?” The phone buzzes once more, stops.
Now Victor’s hand is shaking. What to do? No, it isn’t his hand, but hers. Of all the unwelcome times, it’s her hand thrusting the phone into his hand that’s shaking, it’s she who’s shaking, she who’s kneeling over him in the dirt, he who’s slumped against the tree; she who’s in charge of bringing this situation to a better conclusion than the one she fears; he who’s looking at her with an unnatural generality. He, with his borrowed tremor that banishes all thought from her mind so she hears herself cry, “Esme!” And, to Victor, “Can you hear me?”
“I can hear you.”
“Can you stand up with me?”
“Motor.” He flicks away her shaking hand. For the first time he looks up, into her eyes directly. “Motor!”
“Oh, dear, oh, no.” It slips out, she hadn’t meant to show him her alarm. She must get to the house.
“My head.”
“Don’t worry. What’s wrong with your head, young man, is you need a haircut. Here we go, please. Up!”
“It’s okay, I have a headache.”
“Yes, yes. How about I’ll be right back.”
Suddenly she’s aware of the cool dirt packed under her knees and how impossible it will be, shaking as she is, to pull herself up with only the stick, but she must. She’s only two halting steps onto the lawn when here are Lotta and Pat and Douglas, the baby’s pudgy legs dangling from the crook of Lotta’s arm, the baby’s white bonnet flapping as the women, wet and wrapped in towels, hike up the lawn toward the house, Pat slouchi
ng as she always has, and CeCe cries, “Pat! Pat! Lotta!” Pat’s dull-blond head turns in the sun, and though Pat’s far away, CeCe knows her so well, she is her mother, she can see her daughter’s focus shift, and the women turn and break toward her in a fast walk and then a run, Lotta dropping the chair but holding the child tight, and as the women hurry toward her, she turns back to Victor, and she becomes aware she is frozen, her knees are locked, that the one hand is clutching the strong, low branches of the willow and the other is wrapped around the stick and she is as rooted to the ground as the willow itself but no matter, they’re coming, and she twists best she can back toward Victor and calls, “Don’t you worry, we’ve got you some help,” and he looks at her as though he understands.
41
Iris is halfway home from showing James and Eleanor Reed a falling-down Victorian, thinking about the conversation she’d had with CeCe, when her phone rings. Two weeks, and what CeCe said won’t let her be. Whenever she is alone, it vaults to mind and sits on her other thoughts, heavy and noisy as a frog. It’s as if with that creepy story about Walter and those ducks her mother-in-law was telling her to go. Two, ten times a day, she remembers the sound of CeCe’s voice as she said, “Before it’s too late,” and how CeCe’s eyes were scary and caring, black and green. But CeCe hadn’t said “before it’s too late.” The memory is as vivid as it is false. CeCe left not one marriage but two. What did she do with her freedom? What did she become? Frail as a chip of salt. Iris’s thoughts, now so often a confusion: Here is CeCe, saying, or not saying, “Before it’s too late,” getting mixed up with what she did say yesterday, that unending afternoon she and Pat and Lotta came over. When George greeted them by asking sulkily, “What’s new?” CeCe answered in a lively, unruly voice Iris had never before heard, “No more new! The life I am living is the life I will live!” And later: “To be thirty-five again! Thirty-five, but not twenty. Twenty is the pits.” She’d laughed as she said it, but her eyes, on Iris, were serious.
The phone. Iris hits accept and puts George on speaker. His voice fills the car. “A hundred and twenty-five grand! A hundred and twenty-five grand!” She has betrayed him. She is a whore. Does she know Bob is going to prison? That he’s a criminal? A financial criminal? Does she know her treachery will likely land him in prison too?
The Unfortunates: A Novel Page 33