Unfurled

by Michelle Bailat-Jones

  My mother nods, but her smile is gone. Her hand on my shoulder has grown tight. We turn away because anyway it’s now our turn.

  After we’ve paid and are walking away, I hear the woman say, “Have a nice day,” but my mother doesn’t turn around. I turn and wave, but my mother takes me by the elbow and tells me to hurry along.

  We are still crossing the parking lot, each of us carrying a plastic bag from the shop, when she asks me about school. She’s walking fast now and her skirt jingles furiously with each step.

  “It was great,” I say. “Really great.”

  “You’re still doing the continents in social studies?”

  We finished them a month or so ago but I nod anyway. “Antarctica’s my favorite. Penguins are funny.”

  “Penguin moms will sometimes kidnap another mom’s chick.”

  Not wanting to be outdone, I say, “Wild penguins aren’t afraid of humans,” I say. “So people who go to see them can get really close. That isn’t good, right?”

  But she doesn’t answer. She’s stopped to watch a car drive past. In the front seat are the man and woman from the store. My mother is frozen, her eyes following the wood-paneled minivan. First, only her head swivels but then she turns completely around. The car is already a half-block away when she snaps her fingers and says, “Quick, do you have some paper?”

  “Why?”

  “Can I have some?” Her eyes are on the car. “Quick, El.”

  I slip my backpack from my shoulders, unzip it and reach inside. “How big?”

  “I don’t care. Small’s okay.”

  “Here,” I hand her a ripped half-page from my Social Studies notebook.

  The car is three blocks away by now, but she whips a pencil out from inside the fold of gold fabric at her waist and writes something down. She hesitates a second, folds the paper, unfolds it, writes a few more words, and stares at it hard.

  “What is that? What’s wrong with those people in that car?”

  She doesn’t answer me.

  “Mom?”

  But she shakes her head. Then she tucks the pencil with the paper back into her waist, watching the car until it vanishes finally, turning left down a side street.

  “Some people,” she says, shaking her head and staring up the empty street. She doesn’t finish the thought.

  “They were nice,” I say.

  Her head swivels around. “What?” The irises of my mother’s eyes are sharp. Her hand rises to her throat and her left cheek.

  “I thought they were nice,” I say. Try as I might, I cannot work out why my mother is so interested in them.

  “Oh, nice,” she says, dropping her hand and frowning at me. “Yes, that’s the word.”

  5

  SOMEONE HAS TO CARRY THE NEW BAG OF my dad’s belongings out of the hospital and the three of us can’t seem to decide who should do it. Neil is holding it as we leave the office, but I take it from him before we hit the lobby. I hold it tight but cannot keep my fingers still; I twist the thin plastic, wrap it tight around my thumb until the blood is cut off and my finger starts to throb. In the space between the two sets of sliding glass doors I pass it to George, who takes it with a confused look on his face. He passes it back to me, but I hand it right over again.

  “What the hell, Ella?” he says. I want to reach toward him, smooth out his frown and the wrinkle in his forehead, but instead, I’m nodding like this is all perfectly natural. You should have this, George, I’m thinking, he’s your best friend.

  “Maybe you can fix the watch.” I say.

  Then George stops and we all stare at the cracked glass of my dad’s watch. It’s been cracked for a month or so, this has nothing to do with the accident. I think of how many times I told my dad over the last few weeks that he should just take it in to get it fixed.

  “If you wait any longer the face is going to fall off,” I hear myself telling him. “You’ll have to get an entirely new watch.”

  “No time,” he says, smiling at his own joke.

  No, he does not say this. So I must put one foot in front of the other and leave the hospital. George has gone on ahead of us toward the cars, is standing in the middle of the parking lot with the bag in his hands. He’s swiveling his head right and left and I know he’s lost his car, I know, too, that he shouldn’t be allowed to drive himself back home. But none of us are willing to come back here tomorrow to pick up a left-behind car. So I watch him disappear into a long row of dark vehicles and then Neil and I are standing next to our own car. We open the doors and Trapp greets us with fitful leaps and nose presses. He calms down quickly when we do not respond in kind.

  We drive off in silence. Out of the parking lot, onto the freeway. Neil’s hands on the steering wheel, my boots on the floor, my knees shaking, my hands fluttering around and over the pocket of my jacket with the torn photos. Why did he have these? Why? But I don’t really want to know why, what I want to know is how will I make it all go away? And how will I keep Neil out of it? The rain against the window blurs the hard edges of the trucks and cars. Neil passes a minivan and then merges the car into the far right lane. The freeway is so busy—what could all these people have to do outside of their homes at this hour? In this rain? I watch it. I listen to it as Trapp fidgets and whines from the back seat. He tries to jump into my lap but I block him. We keep driving north. We cross over Lake Union and I don’t turn my head to seek out the black line of water and mountains to the west.

  And then, somewhere after the bridge, there beside us in the lane to the right in his own car, is George. He’s staring straight ahead, both hands on the wheel; he doesn’t see us and I don’t try to get his attention. I think how strange it is that we are in separate cars but living the same event. I wonder where Lisa is—why didn’t she come with him to the hospital? I want to think it’s because she’s working, but I know it probably has something to do with her daughter and her grandkids and the trouble there. Poor George, I think, but then I am thinking, poor me, and kicking the floor of the car, punching with my fist against the glove box. It falls open and its messy contents spill down onto the floor. I stomp them down and then down again, crush an empty paper cup, grind a few receipts and other paper debris into the wet carpet beneath my boots. Crows do this, I think. Crows gather in the hundreds around the body of a dead crow and in their rage and despair they may tear it to pieces trying to work out what has happened. And this is what I want—to split myself into a hundred little winged bodies and attack.

  Neil reaches a gentle hand to my shoulder and so I must settle. I breathe. I do not settle, but in twenty years I have grown very good at making it seem that I have.

  “This is just insane,” Neil begins, his voice wavering. “Unbelievable, I mean. I just don’t understand.”

  He continues, “I just don’t believe it.”

  Then, “But those photos, El? What do they mean?”

  Of course Neil is far too ready to accept this evening’s exchange. This will seem easier for him.

  “I had to Lethal the Knemeyer’s dog this morning,” I say, talking fast, saying the first thing that comes to my mind. We cannot talk about my mother. Not Neil.

  His head turns at the change of subject, turns back to the road.

  “I had to bite glove, and take her on.” I rub one palm with the thumb of my other hand. “Can you believe I was strong enough?”

  “What happened, what are you talking about?”

  “They never should have bred her. I told you that. You remember I told you that?”

  “Yes,” he says, vaguely a question. His voice is patient. He thinks I’m not being coherent.

  “She was deranged after whelping. It was horrible. She went after the puppies. And Nathaniel and Caitlin…I could have hit Nathaniel.” And I mean this. I think about how it would have felt to take my anger out on my client. In the thought are the dog’s eyes and the tilt, too. I shake my head.

  Neil shifts his legs because we’re driving in my car and he doesn�
��t fit but he hasn’t bothered to adjust the seat. He’s all hunched over like he’s been punched in the gut. I want to tell him to relax, to stretch his legs. I want to help him unroll from this punch.

  But then he says again, “You didn’t know he had those photos, did you? I thought she was …” He doesn’t finish his sentence because I’ve never given him the right word to do it easily. Dead? Missing?

  I close my eyes. Tight as my fists. Create a darkness. “It’s not really that,” I say. “Something doesn’t fit. The photos must be old.” The photos are in my pocket. I don’t reach for them. I open my eyes to a wall of blurry, glaring tail lights.

  “Tell me again how long since he’s seen her?”

  “It’s not like that, Neil.”

  “I don’t know.” He pauses. “There must be some kind of explanation. He’s never said a thing? My Aunt Besta left a letter for her children. You know about that.”

  Because it’s so easy for Neil to think of his family, his mercifully ordinary family whose greatest secret—which they laughingly tell everyone at dinner parties—involves an Old World relative who once left her children to sneak across an ocean and sing in a New York City nightclub. A family whose shared vocabulary does not include shameful terms like persecutory interpretations or maladaptive behavior.

  We are at our exit. George’s car is some lengths behind us. It will continue on one more exit and make its way home. Neil takes our car off the freeway and drives the few blocks to my dad’s house. He avoids the intersection of the accident, but I see it anyway, see the bright lights of the supermarket with its Scandinavian flags, the new pharmacy, the sushi place. I see the wide lanes and the traffic. There is always so much traffic. I see the cars. I see my dad. Then I close it all down and I see nothing.

  When we pull up to the house, I open my door to let Trapp jump out onto the lawn, stepping after him into the pouring rain. I watch Trapp sniff along the parking strip and zigzag around the small tree trunks. Neil is taking our bags from the car, holding his coat over his head, and I take two steps toward the side door but then I stop. I was here just a few weeks ago. Just a few weeks ago I walked up these front steps and into the living room and there was my dad watching a football game with George. I can still hear the televised cheering and my dad’s shouts and fist-shaking at the screen. I see his long legs stretched before him, his beard, his hand wrapped around a can of beer. Even through the storm, I can hear him. I know exactly what he’d be saying.

  From behind the side door come the yelps and whimpering of Daisie. How long has she been alone? Since he went out to get his groceries. Why didn’t he take her with him? This change in the events of his evening would have made all the difference. I think of the time it might have taken for him to put Daisie on her leash, the way she would have slowed him down by sniffing at trees and greeting other walkers and dogs. All of this would have worked in my dad’s favor. He would have been that many seconds later and maybe that pick-up would have passed through the intersection before he stepped into it, maybe that pick-up would have made a butterfly of someone else’s ribcage—I close this thought down, how ugly it makes me to wish for this kind of trade.

  Neil comes up beside me, his pale face crumpled with dark shadows. “Can you take this?”

  Of course I cannot, I think, I cannot take this.

  But he hands me a backpack and nods toward the back door.

  We walk inside. Past the grateful whimpers of Daisie who cannot decide whether to sniff us, growl at Trapp, or pee on the floor. Past the last dishes my dad used, washed and dried and standing at mournful attention on the sideboard next to a neatly folded dishtowel, and on into the living room. I stop near the dining room table, find that my body has made a complete halt. My legs will not move. My hands will not move. The trunk of my body is fixed to the hardwood floor of this room. The backpack I’m carrying slides to my feet. Daisie is back inside from her race around the yard, is now circling my legs, asking for love. But still I cannot move. Trapp is nudging me from behind, pressing his shoulders into the backs of my knees. Still I stand steady. But Neil turns, understands. Knows to come back for me. He helps me through the living room and up the stairs into my old bedroom, long since converted to a guestroom. I sit on the bed until I can hold it no longer and then I throw up in the wastepaper basket next to a photograph my dad took of his Bleeding Heart shrub, the summer before, in full glorious bloom.

  6

  A SHIP’S USEFULNESS IS NOT IN ITS SIZE or the number of decks it is lucky enough to have. “Sure,” my dad used to say, “The Titanic had ten decks, but that didn’t help matters, did it?”

  I always agreed. I knew what he meant. Every boat had a purpose and that was all that mattered. Cargo or fishing or ferrying. Leisure or work.

  “And they can change, don’t forget.”

  “Sure, they can.”

  We spoke in code, our own code, but we always knew what we were saying to each other.

  “Because there isn’t anything wrong with scaling back,” he would say.

  “Aye, aye, Captain,” I’d answer.

  “The thing of it,” he said once, “is that sometimes you have to razee what you originally had, remove the upper deck and re-purpose the vessel.”

  I knew about the HMS America, the Independent, about the French warships, the British sloops, the American gun-whalers. I knew my dad’s stories because this is how we beat George on trivia nights, how we made bets with the other Captains and the crew on long Saturday runs up to the peninsula and weekend fishing trips with friends from work and the neighborhood.

  “Tell ‘em, El,” my dad would say,

  And I’d tell them how the wood of a top deck gets shaved right down, how they melt the pig iron and re-mount the fittings, how they cut new port windows and save the best of the wood for the doors. I’d tell them how the HMS America was cut down from a third rate to a fourth rate and used during the Oregon boundary dispute, that what mattered was the number of gun decks and maneuverability in Pacific coastal waters and so sometimes you just had to make something smaller, lighter. The HMS America had fewer crew members, stronger guns. The mates loved it when I talked like that.

  “Son of a sailor, Ella Tomlinson, don’t you just know your stuff.”

  Yes, I would think. Smaller. Less decks. Increased stability. That way we could move as fast as we needed to. We could choose our harbor. Forget about her.

  7

  I MANAGE A FEW HOURS OF SLEEP BUT THEN I wake before dawn with another roll of nausea. This time I don’t throw up, I lie perfectly still and wait for my stomach to unknot itself. Neil gets up, goes downstairs, and then comes back with two mugs of tea and asks me how I’m doing as he hands me mine. I don’t answer, because what is there to say? As my mind rose from sleep into the dark of the guestroom, for a fraction of a second I didn’t know where I was and for that fraction of a second, I had forgotten what has happened.

  But then I knew. Now I know again.

  I wrap my fingers around the mug, hold tight to the scalding ceramic.

  We are here in my dad’s house and my dad is not here with us. And somewhere downstairs my coat is draped across the back of a chair. In its pockets is the trade that must be someone else’s idea of a very bad joke: my dad for my mother.

  Yet this is exactly what I have suggested to clients over the years when one of their animals has died and left behind a grieving mate or friend. Just a few months ago I gave the idea to a local farmer when her pony stallion passed away and her mare refused to eat and began spending all its time alone in the corner of the paddock or standing on the spot where the stallion had fallen the day he died. I told her to put the mare in a smaller paddock with a new pony, or a dog, or even a goat. She did as I suggested and within a few short weeks the sad little pony had bonded with a sheepdog puppy, was eating again, had seemingly forgotten her loss.

  This would suggest that love is nothing but habit. And don’t people say it only takes three days to get out of o
ne. I can’t even remember what day it is today, let alone count forward three days and imagine that I might accept my mother like she were nothing but an affectionate sheepdog pup and I were a stupid, forgetful old pony.

  Neil slides back into bed, rests his head behind him on the headboard. Drinks his tea. I take a few more sips from my mug. Feel the burn of the liquid on my tongue, on my throat. We have not turned on the bedside light and I have no idea what time it is; outside it is still very dark.

  We whisper to each other across the bed. We say things like, “we should take showers,” and “are you hungry?” and “I hope George made it home okay.” We are polite and careful. I worry he left the headlights on, but he says he double-checked. I worry we left our house in Wenatchee unlocked, but he tells me that he locked it. I worry about the Wolfhound and the tabbies, about the rabbits and the hamster, about the message the clinic has left me about a cat that ingested several pills its owner had accidentally dropped on the floor. I worry that it won’t make it because its liver was so damaged.

  “What if this cat dies in the night?” I say.

  “It will be alright.”

  “It might not.”

  “It might not, but it probably will.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  There is a long pause. A deep breath.

  “I’m not sure, I’m only hopeful.”

  My long pause. My deep breath.

  “Do you have enough to share?”

  And then we are putting our mugs on the floor and meeting in the middle of the bed in a commotion of hands and limbs and mouths. At first Neil’s hands on me are like an erasure; each soft movement of palm and finger against thigh against breast against throat against hip and I lose a few seconds of myself. Here is a trade that does not feel like a cheat. My eyes close, my ears fill with the sound of the sheets, of our skin, of our breathing. Neil covers and contains me and I can stretch this quiet act to make it a new frame. Today’s frame. I breathe and move and give.