“It’s a terrible feeling to be hated like this,” Mira said. “Despised. I don’t blame her for blaming me. I was the last person to see Wilton. I left him. But still, does she think this is what I wanted?” She gulped down her distress.
She was wearing a very bright white shirt over blue leggings and green sneakers. It was an attempt to be bright, but it tried too hard. The shirt was huge on her, the hem whisking the backs of her thighs. Owen touched the stiff collar and felt her freeze up as his finger brushed her neck. On this Saturday morning, she had asked him to go to Brindle with her to pick through the ruins—a salvaging expedition, he imagined.
“The shirt was my father’s. I found an entire drawer full of them still in their packaging. I think he had a shopping disorder. I mean, look at this house. He was a shopaholic.”
“So everything is an addiction these days,” he said coolly, still reeling from how she’d responded to his touch. “Maybe it’s not disease, though, maybe it’s just pleasure, just single-minded desire. Maybe there’s nothing to cure but selfishness.”
“Maybe.” She looked quickly at him and then down at her feet. “I lied to you, and you should always detest a liar, O,” she said. “A liar is not someone you want to be with, believe me.”
“But the lying is over,” he said.
“Is it? You’re still not living here and Wilton’s still missing. I don’t know the truth about anything.”
He followed her into the hall where she began jamming things into her bag. She couldn’t find her glasses or her keys and searched under the newspapers, under the table.
“I don’t know why you don’t hate me and blame me for everything, too,” she said. “I hate me and blame me.”
She was on her knees, her face hidden. She’d been hiding from him since he’d come in. That she would stay on the floor like this, trying to bend herself into something inconsequential and unseen, was too much for him. “Blame me, Mira,” he said. He forced himself to say it again—so she would at least get up. “Blame me. Hate me.”
Slowly, she stood. She found her glasses in her pocket and cleaned them for too long with the front of her shirt. She held them at a distance, looked at him through the lenses. Nothing was clear; she wiped again and fixed on him.
On that night they’d first met on Ives Street years before, when the boy who’d stolen money from Brindle had finally showed up, Mira got in the kid’s face and asked, “Why do you think what you did is wrong?” The question was imperturbable and patient, and it didn’t take long for the kid to break and fess up. As she examined Owen, he had the sudden, chilling sense that she knew exactly what he’d done and said to Wilton all along. That she’d always known, had learned everything the night Wilton disappeared and was waiting to hear him say it. She was waiting for him to confess and release her. And if he didn’t, well, this is how she would punish herself, this was what she deserved.
In the benign Saturday morning sun that made the oak look newly oiled, maybe what he’d done wouldn’t appear so terrible. Maybe Mira would see it for just what it was—his way of pulling her back from the edge. A house alarm began to wail across the street. It happened often enough now that there was nothing urgent about it anymore, but the noise was a rope winding through the air, choking them quiet. Owen went out to the driveway. Anya was on her father’s porch steps. The cat’s leash tightened as it snooped around in the bushes. The alarm went silent, but the sound still throbbed in Owen’s ears.
Mira appeared and waved to Anya, though she knew she’d get nothing back. In the car, Mira asked, “Did you sleep with her? Is that what I should blame you for?” She was practicing casualness, settling her bag onto her lap, and snapping in her seat belt. He could feel a furious heat coming off her.
“No.” He sped out of the driveway and onto the street. He loved the moment just before the car crested the hill and the city came into sight, but now it came too quickly. He’d missed the instant of expectation.
“Wilton thought you did,” Mira said. “He talked about it that last night. He said it was his fault because he’d pushed you two together—he’d wanted you to help him with her. And then I saw it too the other day, the way she spoke to you, the way she looked at you and you looked at her.”
“I said no, Mira. Jesus. Did you hear me?”
She stared straight ahead, and when they’d reached the bottom of the hill, she spoke. “Do you remember how, when we first met Wilton, we used to talk about him all the time together? And then suddenly we didn’t anymore because it was all secrets?”
“We each had our own private life with him.”
“It doesn’t really work, though, does it.” Mira pushed her hair onto the top of her head and let it fall. “He gave us what we wanted—some excitement, some nice wine, a new friend for each of us. A lot of flattery—too much of it, too easy.”
Because we always want more, Owen knew, we bank on it to head off the sadness coming at us, that first glimpse we have of the end. On North Main Street, a banner strung between the trees announced that it was Roger Williams’s four-hundredth birthday, and the long scarf of park dedicated to him was busy with celebrants bouncing in the chill. The twang of live music scratched through the air. A cluster of balloons straining on a string dipped low in a sudden gust and hit the side of the car with rubbery thuds. Traffic was stopped by a cop who let a long train of shiny-suited cyclists cross. Some of the riders wore pictures of children on their backs, or names and dates of dead ones. Across the river, the tail end of the cyclists appeared around the base of a building.
When the last cyclist finally passed, they headed over the Point Street Bridge, where the hurricane barrier looked like a bird paralyzed in midflap. Owen pulled into the lot behind Brindle. Four parking spaces belonged to Brindle, and all but one were taken. Anything left fallow for too long in the city was grabbed up, and this was free space. And the Dumpster was for free dumping, but he could see that it was empty. He’d expected to see a massive mound of it spilling onto the ground and recalled the feasting rat sheltered from the snow and the legions of black plastic bags lined up against the outside wall.
“Where’d all the garbage go?” he asked.
“I paid the bill I owed and they came and hauled it away.”
“How? You don’t have any money.” He turned to her. “What did you do? Did you play again?”
“Play? No, Owen, I did not play. I don’t play anymore.” His anger had surprised her, but she was ready to fight back. “And screw you for asking me.”
“It’s a fair question,” he said.
“No, it isn’t,” she snapped. “Not now it isn’t. The day Wilton disappeared was the day I stopped forever. My god! What do you think I am?”
She got out of the car and slammed the door. Owen didn’t know what she was or what compelled her. He didn’t know who she was any more than she knew who he was. You imagined your spouse’s virtues when really you should imagine their transgressions. Whether or not she ever played the slots again, she was changed for it—they both were. Just how, he wasn’t yet sure. The shift might take years to reveal itself. But maybe the same wasn’t what I should be after, he told himself. Inside Brindle, he watched Mira stomp through the gallery
“Where did you get the money?” he asked.
She stopped to look at how leaks under the front windows had feathered the wall below the sill. “You look away for one second and this is what happens,” she said, tracing the damage with a finger. “Time moves very fast when it’s going downhill. I’ve spent so many years here and put so much into this place, put everything into it, in fact. Probably more than I should have.” She was talking to herself. “I don’t want to lose it. I’m going to have to start all over, from the beginning, but that’s okay, I think.”
“Tell me where you got the money.”
She considered Owen, her expression revealing nothing. “I sold something that belonged to my mother. A bracelet. She never liked it anyway.”
That
she’d done what she’d said she never would was a sad relief to Owen. He opened the front door to let some warmer air in and listened to the oceanic roar of the traffic on I-95. To his left, two women approached from Point Street, walking briskly with their arms hooked in this unfamiliar neighborhood. They yelled for him to wait and picked up their pace. He put them in their late fifties, expensively dressed in sharply pleated pants and bright jackets that pinched their waists. Silk scarves were knotted at their necks. They exuded fitness and some giddy quality of liberation from men and children.
“Thank you,” the silvery blond woman said, breathlessly. “We’ve been calling and calling and no one answers.”
Her friend gave Owen a generous smile. “We’re thinking of taking a class. Can we look around?”
“Brindle’s closed now,” he said. “I’m sorry.” Their perfume was a strong, confusing bouquet. “You’ll have to come back.”
“No, come in,” Mira said, moving up from behind him. She ushered the women past Owen. “We’re just doing some renovations,” she explained, instantly bright and chatty. He was struck by how effortlessly she switched her mood. “That’s why it’s such a mess. And you know how these things go. It’s taking much longer than we expected.”
“I know how that goes,” one of the women assured her. “But you’ll be open soon? We wanted to take a drawing class. You know,” she glanced at her friend, “with a model. Life drawing.”
Mira explained that the class would start in the late spring. She pulled a notebook from her bag to take down their information. The women said they’d heard good things about Brindle. Mira’s pen was poised, but Owen knew she sensed their sudden reluctance. The disheartening air of the place had begun to leach into their lungs.
“The place is going to be beautiful,” he said. “You’ll see. And the light in the building is amazing.”
“This will change your life,” Mira said, placing a hand on one woman’s aqua forearm. A different picture, and this woman could be her mother. “I swear it will. There’s nothing like drawing, painting. You’ll start seeing everything in a different way once you learn how to really pay attention.”
The woman was startled by Mira’s intimacy and her intent, colorless gaze. You could feel Mira was looking inside your head at a time like this, and that her hand was on your heart and not just your sleeve.
“How?” the woman asked. “How will it change my life?”
“You’ll have to find that out for yourself,” Mira tossed off, clicking her pen for emphasis and laughing. “That’s the mystery. Then later, you’ll have to tell me.”
Her answer was no answer, really, but it satisfied the women. Mira had planted the suggestion that seeing differently could transform you. The notion was simple and anyone could swallow it. You didn’t have to know anything, have anything, come from anywhere. It was the same idea he offered his students every year and every day. Maybe he’d try it himself, a different way of paying attention, a different view of life. The women talked for a while, blinking in the sun, before they wandered back to where they’d come from, no longer hooking arms. Owen locked the front door and followed Mira upstairs to the studio.
“I know you think I’m full of shit, O, but I meant what I said out there about getting Brindle back. I’ll sell what I have to sell to do it.”
He pictured their house empty of all its valuables, the wind whipping through cleaned rooms. “And how about the part about changing the women’s lives?”
She turned around to smile at him. “Well, that—who knows? It’s always possible, isn’t it? I can’t offer a guarantee. People want the change to be like an earthquake, but more often it’s a tremor they don’t even register until much later.”
There was nothing false in how her mood had shifted. She still came to life in this place. He sat on a stool facing the model’s deserted and scuffed platform. There was a half-eaten muffin on the shelf, reminding him of how hungry he was. His appetites were either huge or nonexistent. He needed a shower and some food.
“That muffin over there,” he said, pointing to it. “You’re going to get roaches next.”
Mira handed it to Owen. She tapped it with her ring: clay, glazed white and cakey, complete with blue dots for blueberries. “One of the kids made it,” she said. “Pretty convincing, apparently.”
She sat on the model’s platform and leaned back on her elbows. The sun hit her face and she closed her eyes. “Sometimes I think Wilton’s turned into vapor,” she said. “I see drops of him collecting on leaves and beading up in the mirror. He’s the water on the outside of the bottle. He’s the fog on the inside of the windshield. He’s on my glasses. I can wipe him away and he comes back.”
She was talking about death. Owen had begun to see Wilton’s scattering everywhere, too—on the aging faces of the women earlier; in the sight of George’s dutiful hand dusting the shelves in the apartment, always losing his battle with the dirt and war; in the way some of his students looked hopeful in the morning, their eyelids flecked with optimism. Mira spread a blanket over the platform. She lay down on her side, facing away, and asked him to lie down with her. But he was stuck where he was and wasn’t sure he wanted to lie next to her, because how could he ever get up again if he did? He traced her figure in the air. He didn’t know how to draw or paint or do anything else she taught others to do. He didn’t know how to make much at all. He felt like a man of very small abilities. His finger followed the upsweep of her legs to the sharp fall of her hip, the rise again of her ribs to her head as she supported it with a hand. She looked over her shoulder at him.
“Anya thinks Wilton’s in love,” Owen said. “That he met a woman that night and the two of them have gone off somewhere. That he’s so in love he’s forgotten about everything and everyone.”
“That’s what she should believe,” Mira said, after a minute. “That’s her idea of how it works—that love makes you forget everything, that love can save your life.”
“What do you think happened to him?” he asked. “Where is he?”
Mira turned to face him, and her pose reminded him of women on the pond’s crescent beach in the summer, languid and half-dazed by the heat. He etched the line of her chin and neck, the mouth, the swoop of her breasts, the flat of her stomach, the gullies of her hip bones that disappeared under the waist of her pants. He drew in the air and felt the contact of his finger against the line run hot up his spine. She took her glasses off. Her head was down, and her shoulders rounded forward. Her bare toes curled and uncurled. He lay down on the platform and fit his body against hers.
“I don’t know what’s happened to him,” she said.
Owen’s mouth was just above her ear; he didn’t have anything more to say.
“Where is he?” She tried to roll against him, but he didn’t want her to see his suffering. “I don’t blame you for anything, O. Come home to me, please, O.”
He said he would—he was ready.
16
Chocolate and sugar mixed with the sweet honeysuckle and damp earth as Owen turned the car off Route 6 and onto his father’s road. The air smelled like birthday cake, he said. He tried to catch Anya’s eye in the rearview mirror, but she stared resolutely into the trees, one arm resting on the cat carrier she’d brought to carry home one of Edward’s wild kittens in. A week earlier, she’d watched as her own cat was snatched up by a coyote in Wilton’s backyard. In the morning, she’d shown Owen the red collar that lay coiled like a vein in the grass.
“Maybe we’re on Cake Cod, not Cape Cod,” Mira said. Her terrible stab at humor—and her failed attempts to reach Anya—made her shift uneasily in her seat. “Edward always makes his own birthday cakes. They’re kind of magnificent. Wait till you see.”
The silence was enormous. Owen parked between the locust trees and scrambled out of the car; he couldn’t get away from the tension between the two women fast enough. He closed his eyes against the fluttering shadows, inhaled the scent of new leaves, silt, wet bar
k, tadpole ooze, the ammoniac sting of fish. Then his car alarm went off—the opposite of the painful silence but just as loud. Was it habit that made him automatically set the alarm, even when the women were still in it. Or did he really want to lock the women away? He laughed at his mistake and their surprised cartoon faces behind glass and turned the alarm off. Mira smirked at him; she found the unintentional the most amusing, too. But Anya was stony and stood against the car as if she were ready to leave in the next second, no need to take another step forward into the day. Edward and Katherine rushed out of the house and formed a shield around her as if they’d agreed on this unified compassionate front beforehand. Katherine stroked Anya’s hair. Rey stuck his head in her crotch. Edward scolded Owen about the noise.
The pond was as high as Owen had ever seen it. Sun spiked up from its floor, the moon sleeping in the woody depths. He couldn’t say exactly what had changed inside the house. There were still the bleached, almost indecipherable photographs thumbtacked to the wall, the faded couch with its ripped cushions decorated with animal hair, and his father’s reading chair frayed from decades of ideas and cats scratching. There was his father’s listing birthday cake on the table, rose-colored, dotted with gumdrops, unrestrained and beautifully hopeful.
“Do you see? We got rid of so much stuff,” Katherine said, opening her arms to the room. “All those shells, rocks, those animal skeletons and feathers. It was your father’s idea.”
Here was the end of the Museum of Natural History. Katherine squeezed his arm; the day would be made up of these small touches of commiseration.
Outside, Owen and Mira watched Edward take Anya to the arbor to find a kitten. He peered into the bushes and parted the tall grass, Anya leaning over with him. Two cats leaped away. Edward tried another bush, then another. He whistled and clicked. With his longer absences from the house, the animals were no longer desperate for his food or his company. Owen was struck by the realization that his father was most likely never going to live here again, and this marked the end of a part of his own life, too. He didn’t know what would become of the place. He spotted a stack of plastic boxes partially hidden by the propane tank and the dormant trumpet vine. He showed Mira. Edward’s collections from the house, not thrown out but not quite kept either, and probably hidden from Katherine.
The Tell Page 28