How Will I Know You?

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How Will I Know You? Page 14

by Jessica Treadway


  “Maybe he did do it,” he said to keep the peace, gesturing at the image of Willett on TV. Alison didn’t respond as she tilted her head up at the photos arranged on the opposite wall, a collage of babies born to the obstetrician’s practice. “But to be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up being somebody else.”

  “Like who?” Again she wasn’t really paying attention, he could tell; she was imagining her own baby’s picture up there with the others. A live, full-term baby this time, wearing a onesie and biting a fist.

  “Maybe one of those girls she was with that day,” Tom said. “Maybe Delaney.”

  Alison laughed briefly and said, “Yeah, right.” Then she saw that he was serious. “Of course it wasn’t Delaney.”

  “Why not? We know she’s a criminal. You’re the one who had suspicions about her in the first place.”

  She made a Don’t be silly gesture with the hand not covering her belly. “She’s not really a criminal, just more of a spoiled little brat. You said she had a key to the condo, right? So technically she had permission to go in.”

  “Not necessarily. It depends on how she got it—the key.”

  Alison picked up a copy of Pregnancy & Newborn and started leafing through photos of sonograms. As her pregnancy had advanced, Tom told himself not to look at the pictures in the books, but he couldn’t help it. Alison had bought them the first time around, and she’d been the one to point out the progression of the fetus in ultrasound images, though they’d never made it to the stage they were at now: the baby could supposedly yawn, swallow, and suck its thumb. It was still a couple of months before it would form fat layers and taste buds—before it would become viable, able to live on its own. They’d agreed not to find out the gender, because Tom was convinced that doing so would make a potential loss more difficult. Alison wasn’t so sure—she said she didn’t think it would be any less hard, not knowing—but she’d given in when he asked if they could let it be a surprise.

  “And what about the arrest at school that day?” he asked, not even sure she was still listening. “Delaney’s boyfriend?”

  Without looking up from the page she said, “I told you, he had a prescription.” Then she set the magazine aside and added, “You’re imagining things. Aren’t you the one who’s always saying the most obvious answer is usually right?”

  He had said that, in the past. It was conventional wisdom. And yet.

  “Delaney Stowell didn’t kill anybody,” Alison insisted. “Dad’s right, it’ll be the black guy. Just wait.”

  “Okay,” Tom said, because there was no use arguing when he didn’t know any better. But in this case, his gut told him that the answer was not as obvious as it seemed.

  Before

  Thursday, October 22

  Am I more sad, or angry? And does it mean there’s something wrong with me if I can’t tell?

  But I can tell, all too well. It’s sad.

  In bed last Thursday, before we had to return to campus, I sensed something was wrong. Susanne wasn’t her usual self, but when I asked her about it, she just shook her head. Then she said (almost as if she hadn’t decided whether to speak the words or not), “I was thinking about asking you to paint Joy.”

  I raised myself on an elbow to look down at her. “I’d love to paint Joy.”

  “It’s just that she might bite my head off if I suggest it. We fight over everything lately.” She sighed so hard that the force of it blew stray hairs away from her face. “But I know how much she’d love having—a portrait by you. I thought it might be a way to bring her back to us.” Then she blushed, no doubt because the us did not include me.

  I remained silent, and waited; it’s something I’ve loved about her from the beginning, the way she keeps talking until she finds what she wants to say. Sometimes, when it happens in class, the other students exchange looks and I know they’re thinking There she goes again. But I never have trouble following the path her mind takes to its destination, which is often worthy of my jotting down to record in my book later. You have to be in love with your subject. If you don’t care about what it is you’re painting, nobody else will, either.

  “I could be the one to bring it up with her, if you want,” I said.

  “That’s okay.”

  “It’s because I’m black, isn’t it.” Despite her mood she smiled, though I sensed she thought that the joke was becoming stale. Trying to guess what might be bothering her, I asked, “She doesn’t suspect, does she?” as I gestured at our thighs touching each other.

  “Of course not. How could she?” Susanne shuddered. Seeming agitated, she started to get out of the bed. I pulled her back and she fell beside me, giving little resistance. I asked for just five more minutes, trying to hide the plea in my voice, and she fake-sulked down next to me. Looking out the window, I saw the top of a tree unlike any I had ever seen before. How was that possible? It could have been a tree on another planet, for how unfamiliar it seemed.

  “When we break up,” I said, closing my eyes as the autumn sun came in to warm the seam joining our skin, “this is going to be what I miss most. I don’t mean just the sex. But the lying here. The way we talk about things.”

  She reached without looking at me to put her hand on mine. “Martin—”

  “Okay. You’re right, let’s get up.” I swung my feet over the side of the bed. As if understanding that I couldn’t hear what she had to say yet, she did the same. We dressed in a morose silence, which continued through the time it took to eat a lunch of ham slices and wrinkled cherry tomatoes as we stood at my kitchen counter, and during the drive back to school.

  As usual, she let me out at the foot of campus before heading up the hill to the faculty lot. I waited for her to send her usual guilty, happy, surreptitious wave. But instead she kept going up the hill, and I knew she couldn’t see my fingers closing tighter around my portfolio handle, squeezing until it hurt.

  I waited six days, skipping both sessions of the sculpture studio I only signed up for because Susanne was teaching it. The whole time I imagined—imagined too much, imagined all the time, even when I was in my attic painting, which I resented because that’s always been my inviolate psychic space—calling her. Then, last night, I thought better of it and sent her a text instead: “Joy?” Though I know she’s too smart for it, I fooled myself into thinking she might believe I’m only following up on the idea of having me paint a portrait of her daughter. She is not a fluid or comfortable texter, but I know she checks her phone all the time in case Joy has been trying to contact her, so when she didn’t respond, I knew what the answer would be. Impulsively, I deleted that text and all the others we’ve ever exchanged, which I’d kept in a single thread since September, scrolling through it multiple times each day.

  I regretted the erasures immediately, then reminded myself that it was for my own good as I went out to Cass’s garage to test whether Grandee’s ancient Plymouth Fury, which Cass let me store there and which Susanne had never seen, would start after all this time. When it did, I was sorry about that, too, because I knew where I was going to drive it. If the car had only refused me, I wouldn’t have had a choice.

  I knew that I was taking a chance, driving my grandmother’s old clunker up the hill to Susanne’s house when she didn’t text me back, but I was foolish enough not to care. I went down her block slowly, waiting for good sense to stop me, to wake me up, all the while planning what I would say to her when I called from the car in front of her house. Come out and see me. I want to talk. Please? Just for a minute. I can’t stand this. What can I do to change your mind?

  But when I got closer and parked a few houses away from hers, I lost my nerve and idled for a time before shutting off the engine and slumping down in my seat. Her garage door was closed, and I assumed her car was inside. The Odd Men Out van was not in the driveway, so I figured I’d probably be safe in calling her.

  Yet something kept me from dialing. The last thing I wanted was for her to think of me as a nuisance.
A stalker, even. And that’s what she would think, wouldn’t she?

  I didn’t drive away immediately, as I knew I should. Why? Did I think I might catch a glimpse of her, walking in front of a window or rolling the trash can to the curb? From having been at the barbecue that day in September, I could tell that the only light on in the house was the one in the kitchen. Was she in there, washing dishes? Eating a late dinner, alone?

  As I was reconsidering my decision not to call, I saw a car coming in the opposite direction, and instinctively I ducked behind the steering wheel before realizing that they were the headlights from Susanne’s Mazda shining through my windshield. The ducking down was a reflection of how ashamed I felt, not to mention a reflection of the fact that I was a black man in that neighborhood.

  I stayed low in the seat until I could tell from listening that she’d gotten out of her car and entered the house. As I straightened, more lights went on inside. A tap at the window made me jump, and I turned to see a bushy-haired woman standing there, peering in as she pulled a big sweater around herself. When I opened the window, she asked if she could help me, and when I told her no, I was leaving, she said, “Okay, then,” and stared a moment longer before returning to the house a few doors down from Susanne’s.

  I started the car and began trying to pull away from the curb before even shifting into drive. Once around the corner I glided back down the hill in chagrin, feeling (despite my best efforts not to) that I was headed back to where I belonged, from where I most definitely did not.

  The Most Distant Object

  Almost as soon as they’d been seated at the restaurant table, Susanne saw the text message come through: “Joy?” Her phone was sitting next to her plate, and when it lit up, they both looked toward the screen.

  “Joy?” Gil said, forking into his spaghetti, and Susanne started, thinking he had been able to read the message—and who’d sent it—across the table and upside-down. Then she realized he was only asking if it was Joy getting in touch, borrowing one of her friends’ phones to send the message. Susanne shook her head, trying to hide the quick breath she knew he’d recognize as a nervous one.

  “No. Somebody from work. Joy’s got a ride home already.”

  “With who?”

  “One of those kids she’s been hanging out with. Delaney Stowell.”

  “I remember her. Her father’s the shrink, right?”

  “I don’t think shrinks like that word.”

  “But that’s what he is.”

  “Yes.”

  “And she’s an okay kid, Delaney? She always struck me as kind of wild.”

  “Yeah, I think she’s okay.” She did not mention the snake tattoo she’d noticed winding its way along Delaney’s shoulder when she’d run into Lynette Stowell and her daughter at Price Chopper during the summer. The snake had gray-green skin, but the eyes stood out for their striking shade of blue. Azure, Susanne guessed, her artist’s appraisal automatically kicking in. Or maybe cornflower. Whatever it was called, it complemented the streak of pink in Delaney’s hair. Delaney was wearing a tank top, and the store’s air-conditioning had raised goose bumps that looked like scales on the snake’s skin.

  Across from her husband in the restaurant Susanne kneaded her temples, trying to calm herself. Gil had been sleeping at his office ever since she’d told him about Martin, until she called and said she wanted to talk. When she asked him to meet her at Rubio’s, their favorite place, he agreed and before they hung up he asked, “How will I know you?” Her heart surged at the old joke between them—at the fact that he was willing to make a joke at all. Their first date had come after an exchange of phone calls when she was looking for someone to put up a temporary wall in the Astoria apartment she shared with a roommate, to divide her own room into a sleeping space and separate studio. The landlord nixed the idea and when Susanne called Gil to tell him so, he asked if she wanted to get coffee anyway. After they arranged a time and place, she said, “How will I know you?” and he said, “I’ll be the one who looks like me.” She’d laughed on the phone and then worried a little because he hadn’t given her any clues, but when she stepped into the coffee shop that day and saw him sitting at a back table, she identified him right away. As he had seemed to know she would.

  But if there had been any buoyancy in his mood as he approached this conversation, she couldn’t detect it now. She worried about what would come of it, and though she did not want to admit it to Gil because she was sure it was her fault, she worried about Joy. All she could think was that they’d been too smug, congratulating themselves on the fact that she’d never given them any trouble, pretending even privately that they chalked it up to luck and didn’t feel proud of escaping what other parents had had to endure. But starting in September, when something happened to turn both Joy and the mood in the house grim, it had been their turn. Since Gil’s departure after finding out about Martin, Joy had not mentioned her father’s absence, and she hardly spoke to Susanne at all. By then Susanne was sure it was because she and Gil had refrained from telling her about their financial troubles, and in addition to fretting about how they would afford to send her to art school, Joy felt excluded. “Did you think I wouldn’t find out?” Joy had asked her mother even before Gil had left. Now Susanne saw that it had been a mistake to try to persuade her that things were all right. Yet she couldn’t bring herself to tell Gil now that Joy was aware of the pressure they were under, because it would only reinforce the shame he felt in fearing that his daughter considered him a loser.

  So all she said was, “You know she wants her own phone.”

  “Of course I know that. But we talked about this.”

  “Most of her friends have them.”

  “All the more reason. If she needs to call us, she can use theirs.” He sopped up sauce with a piece of bread as big as his fist.

  She thought he was being unreasonable, but held it back. She was hardly justified in accusing him of anything.

  “How has she seemed?” Gil asked.

  Susanne shook her head, letting him interpret it however he wanted. Then she said, “You saw her at Belle Meadow this week, right?”

  “Yes, but she didn’t seem too happy about it. It’s my fault, though. That damn cat jumped into her lap, and I said, ‘I guess that means you’re next.’”

  “So? It was a joke.” Foolishly Susanne tried to smile, feeling the stiffness in her mouth. “She needs to lighten up.” Immediately she regretted this disloyalty toward her daughter.

  Gil snorted. “I guess she’s not feeling light about much these days.”

  “I know.” She took a breath; now that she’d taken the step of ending things with Martin, she was eager to continue the momentum toward repairing her marriage. As much as she would have liked to let them lie, certain things needed to be discussed. “What did Mark Feinbloom say? About that deposit?”

  “Oh.” Gil looked down. “I didn’t ask him.”

  “You didn’t?” She watched him flinch at her surprise. “Really? I never would have thought you could let something like that go.” She tried to temper the disappointment in her tone, because not only did she understand why he’d neglected to mention the inflated account sum to Mark, she was glad about it; they stood to gain, if only a little, from the bank’s failure to identify its mistake.

  “Desperate times,” Gil mumbled, but she could tell he felt ashamed.

  Though she figured his answer would be the same as it always was, she ventured, “Maybe we should take a look at one of those Medicare places for Emilia. No commitment—just take a look.”

  He shook his head so violently she thought he might hurt himself. “No. I’m asking you not to say that to me again.” Then he softened his expression, his tone. “Listen, Suse, it’s not going to be that much longer. That we have to pay for my mother. I mean—you know what I’m saying.” As long as she’d been married to him, he hadn’t been able to utter any variation of the word “death” without choking a little.

  W
hat she knew was that he was deluding himself. They’d used the proceeds from her mother-in-law’s house for the advance to Belle Meadow when Emilia was admitted in April, but that deposit would run out soon and they’d have to come up with the monthly charges. Emilia was at risk of being booted, if she lived that long. But maybe Gil had allowed himself to forget this.

  “I could see if that job’s still available, with Rob,” Susanne said. “Or maybe he has something else.”

  Gil closed his fist around his napkin. “If I wanted to work for your brother, I would have done it last year.”

  “I know.” She also knew she didn’t need to accuse him of being selfish; he was all too aware of how she felt.

  “Business is going to pick up,” he said, pushing his plate back. “It has to.” He was always asserting things as if the forcefulness of his wishes could make them come true. “I’ll be able to hire guys back. Listen, things can’t get any worse than they were last year.”

  Listen. How many times, during their life together, had she heard him direct those words to her? Listen to this, listen to me. More often than not followed by something that did not particularly interest her, though usually she pretended it did. The morning of the day she slept with Martin for the first time, she’d been skimming through papers her students had written for her undergrad art history class. Across from her, Gil lowered the magazine he’d been reading and said, “Listen to this.”

  She didn’t have the time to listen—she had to return the papers when the class met at ten—but she could tell from his face that he was eager to share whatever it was with her. She gave a tight smile he took as invitation, wondering how it was possible, after all these years, that he did not notice the tightness, or understand she was in a rush.

 

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