Hannah was the only one who wasn’t shocked by Gabe’s disappearance. The rest of our group picked over the rumors in the dining hall, hushing in sympathy when I sat down. But she was silent and evasive. One night, while doing homework in our room—Hannah sitting in the chair by the window and I in her bottom bunk, leaning against her enormous frog-shaped pillow—she swiveled abruptly to face me.
“I’m glad he’s gone,” she said. “There—I said it. Everyone acts like this whole thing is some Shakespearean tragedy, but he wasn’t exactly a great guy to begin with.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “You didn’t even know him.”
“Neither did you!” burst out Hannah. Her curly, corn-silk hair was wrapped in a towel; below it, her cheeks were the color of strawberries. “No one else will come out and admit it, but he was using you, Sylvie. You think it’s a coincidence that he only came over at night? That he left before you woke up the next morning?”
“We were talking, those nights,” I said, but Hannah only raised her eyebrows. “What? You think he was using me for sex?”
“He wouldn’t be the first guy to do it.”
“That’s a really shitty thing to say, Hannah.”
“I’m not saying it to hurt your feelings,” said Hannah. “I just don’t want you to look back through rose-colored glasses.”
It was one of our inside jokes, a phrase our English teacher favored. (“Now, it’s Gatsby’s nostalgia that gives him life, but it’s also what destroys him—he can’t help but look back through rose-colored glasses.”) But I didn’t laugh.
“I’m not,” I said.
I turned back to my math sets and looked down at them, hard. I could feel Hannah’s eyes on me.
“It’s not like you were in love with him, were you?” she asked.
A wave of heat washed through my body. My cotton pajamas felt like wool, and Hannah’s blanket was stifling. Hannah stared at me, but I couldn’t answer her; I pushed out of bed and ran to the bathroom in my socks, slowing as I passed the hall monitor’s office. At the sink, I splashed cold water on my face until the heat passed. I had never been in love before, and I couldn’t explain to Hannah how I knew I was now. But my love for Gabe was as tangible and recognizable as anything I had seen with my own eyes. Mr. Keller’s garden, for instance: its unlatched gate, its shapely darkness, and that strange doubled flower, so vivid a color it could be seen without light.
For months, I was sure I would hear from him. But he didn’t call or write, and my own calls to his mother’s house went unanswered—there was only her drawl on the machine, the cool beep, and then my own voice, cryptic, tentative (“Gabe, it’s me . . .”). It would have been easier to move on if I thought our relationship had been a fling, but I knew that wasn’t true. Our conversation in bed, that final night, was a hook in me; I returned to it again and again, searching for meaning I hadn’t found before, trying to tease it out of the skin.
Hannah and I returned to our old group of friends, but the girls on our hall seemed colorless and uninteresting now, their conversations petty. At mealtimes, I dragged my fork in circles until Hannah asked me if I was hypnotized. When I went home for winter break, I couldn’t sleep. I was groggy during the day, prone to mistakes that startled my family: I put scissors in the refrigerator, ketchup in the freezer, dishwashing soap in the laundry machine.
“It’s a breakup, Sylve,” said Rodney, “not the zombie apocalypse.”
But I couldn’t snap out of it. When I got back to school in January, I left my duffel on the floor and climbed onto my bunk, spreading my arms and legs like a starfish. With Gabe gone, there was too much space. It was raining outside, sloppy and plashing; when Hannah walked in, her hair was slicked to her cheeks. She stood in the doorway—huffing from the stairs, a puddle pooling at her feet—and looked at me with her eyebrows raised. Then she dropped her bags.
“Okay,” she said. “No.”
“No what?”
“No,” she repeated, climbing up the ladder to my bunk. “You are not doing this all semester.”
“You’re getting everything wet,” I said in protest.
“Try to stop me,” said Hannah, and then she was tickling me as I yelped for leniency, both of us laughing so hard the bed shook. “Come on, Sylvie. You don’t want to spend your last semester of high school as some miserable blob of longing.”
Over dinner, we plotted a self-betterment program. We took frigid runs before physics, dragging ourselves out of bed at six thirty, racing so fast downhill we were practically falling. We spent even more time in the workshop, using charcoal to draw our hands open, shut, twined together. Over spring break, we drove to her family’s farm in the Sacramento Valley. We sped down Route 101 with the radio turned all the way up, howling at the redwoods, sugar-high on Blizzards from the Petaluma Dairy Queen. Hannah’s sisters had all left home, so we had our pick of bedrooms in the farmhouse. During the day, we helped her mother, Ingrid, in the nut orchard. I preferred the almond trees: their hulls fuzzy and green as unripe peaches, their delicate ecology. They needed five years of pollination to bear fruit. It was our job to find and shuck the seeds, tapping each shell with a hammer until it split in two along the seams. At night, we spread out in the unused barn with our charcoals and worked in easy, simpatico silence.
There, I felt peaceful—not ecstatic or despairing, as I had with Gabe, but fine. Even content. It’s the physical sensations I remember most: the sun close as a hand pressed to my neck, the relief of a crack in the almond’s stone shell. Each nut was a small adversary, a minute-long accomplishment. By the time we left Sacramento, I had almost convinced myself it was possible to let go of him. I could live on my own, I thought, or on a farm with Hannah; maybe I didn’t need the highs and lows that came with love. Maybe this quietude—these small, daily pleasures—could be enough.
•••
That April, I got into UC-Berkeley, and I began to map the pillars and floorboards of my new life. I missed Gabe most in moments of camaraderie among us seniors—reading by the lake in early June, or crowding around someone’s computer, looking at photographs from a college visit. But I tried not to dwell on his absence, and with each month, it became a little bit easier to leave him behind.
By the time graduation came around, I had almost done it. After the ceremony, everyone congregated on the lawn in front of Keller’s house, eating cheese cubes and drinking out of plastic cups—champagne for the adults and sparkling cider for us. I stood with my parents and Rodney at a center table, talking with Mr. Keller, when I felt something soft brush against my leg.
I jiggled my foot, thinking it was the tablecloth. But then I felt it on my other leg, and when I reached down, I found a moving, velvety body, its muscles rippling against my calf.
It was a small cat, tawny in color, with rust-colored flecks on its forehead and paws. But what I noticed most was the pressure of its head on my leg, a firmness, as though it wanted to push me into the table.
I dropped my hand and straightened as if I’d touched something soiled. I must have knocked the table with my elbow on the way up, because Rodney’s glass began to quiver. Mr. Keller reached for it, but he wasn’t fast enough, and the cup toppled lightly into the grass, where the sparkling cider barely missed the cat’s tail.
“Is that your cat?” I asked.
“Indeed she is,” said Keller. “Lucy.”
He had been talking to my mother, a cup of champagne in one hand. I could tell she wanted to continue the conversation and wished I hadn’t interrupted it, but I couldn’t pretend I was fine.
“I had a dream about her,” I said.
Keller’s face hardly moved.
“I’m not surprised. You wouldn’t be the first. Lucy’s always lurking around the dining hall and the library. Come finals, everyone’s dreaming about cats.”
There was a pause while my family looked at me.
Then my father started to laugh, and Keller smiled briefly before turning back to my mother. But I still felt as though every nerve in my body had been lit with a match, and I couldn’t concentrate on the reception. The whole thing gave the end of my time at Mills an uneasy feeling. Soon, I began to avoid thinking about the school at all. It became easier and easier until the summer before my last year of college, when Gabe returned.
4
MADISON, WISCONSIN, 2004
One Wednesday in late September, when the heat was just beginning to lift, I went to our neighbors’ house for the first time. I was standing at our kitchen sink, washing water glasses with the window open, when I heard someone call to me.
“You want lemonade?”
I looked up. It was the woman next door, hanging out of a second-story window that faced our house and the train tracks. She leaned from the waist, so that her upper body tilted out of the frame, her hair streaking the sky.
“Sorry?”
“I said would you like lemonade. I saw you looking at my porch. Sometimes I sit there with a drink but I’m in today, it’s too goddamn hot. So I thought I’d invite you.”
I had planned to go to the office to enter the data from last night’s session. Our participant had wriggled out of his leg straps and walked down the hall to the building’s emergency exit. When Keller brought him back to the lab, he had no recollection that he’d been there before; eventually, he became so agitated that Gabe had to sedate him. We woke him several hours later.
We hadn’t lost control like this since patient 222, a woman named Anne March. She was the first person I worked with, and she left our study abruptly, though I tried not to conflate these two facts. I still wondered if we’d helped her at all; sometimes I thought we’d actually made things worse. Every so often, I forgot about her, but then, like a fussy, chronic injury—a pulled muscle or a bad ankle—she made herself known again. But I didn’t want to spend the day thinking about Anne, and I was too curious about the woman next door to turn down an opportunity to meet her.
“Okay!” I shouted back. “Thank you!”
I put my last glass upside down on a towel and crossed the driveway that separated our houses, the screen door hissing shut behind me.
The woman had left her front door ajar. She stood by the refrigerator, her large feet turned out. She wore a ruffled white dress, and up close, her legs looked even more like a calf’s—shins longer than thighs, with hyperextended knobs for knees. When I stepped inside, she came to greet me, a glass pitcher in one hand. The liquid inside was bright yellow, topped with little pieces of cucumber and strawberry and torn mint.
“I’m Janna,” she said. She pronounced the J like a Y—Yanna.
“Sylvie.”
I held out my hand. Her fingers were long and thin, cool from the refrigerator.
“Sylvie. That’s fascinating. Do you like it?”
The barbell above her eye raised along with her eyebrow. Her irises were the iridescent gray-blue of abalone shells.
“Like it?” I asked. “I guess so.”
“I do,” she said. “Very much.”
She walked to a large standing cabinet, painted yellow and peeling, and took out two ceramic cups. The kitchen’s layout was identical to ours, but the two rooms looked nothing alike. Here, a mix of pots and pans hung from multicolored pegs, and the kitchen table—wooden and water-ringed, one bad leg wrapped in duct tape—had a matryoshka-doll centerpiece. The nesting dolls reminded me of my paintings: the bright figures resting inside each other like secrets, increasing in detail as they decreased in size.
“Janna’s not a name you hear often,” I said. “Are you from the States?”
“Nope. Finland. But the name itself is Hebrew. Mother started out Lutheran, but Daddy’s a Jew and she converted. His family’s from Israel, but he met Mother in Helsinki, where he was born. There are a little more than a thousand Jews in Finland, you know, and that’s where most of them live.”
“I didn’t know. Are you practicing?”
“Ah, no.” She shook her head, and the strands of red and black rustled together. “I left a lot of things behind. But I appreciate it, the ritual. Ritual and ceremony and songs and bitter herbs. And the sweet things, too. Charoset is sweet. You’ve had it?”
She set down the cups, one blue and one green, and poured the lemonade hastily. Drops splattered the table.
“I haven’t,” I said.
“Are you religious?”
She put the mug of lemonade at my place and sat down across from me, waiting for me to drink. But I was trying to keep up with the conversation: like a wild bird, it kept jumping unexpectedly, then resettling on delicate claws.
“No,” I said. “Neither were my parents—my mom is a microbiologist, and my dad’s an ancient historian. He studies ancient history, I mean—the Sumerians. He himself is very modern.”
Janna smiled, distant. “Funny,” she said.
“Anyway, I suppose that’s where I get it, the atheism. I’m in academia, too.”
“What do you study?” asked Janna. But she was examining the fingers on her left hand, her knuckles bent; eyeing something, she brought the fourth finger to her teeth and tore at the jagged skin around the nail bed.
“Oh, it’s complicated.”
I could tell this upset her. Her face and neck flushed, and I became more conscious of the blue veins beneath her skin. Is it terrible to say I was delighted? It was a small moment of leverage—my foot wedged in a cranny of rock, my body muscled above hers.
“I’m not sure I can say much about it, honestly,” I said.
Gabe and I could talk about our work within limits—Keller asked us to be vague, and we were to never share information about individual patients—but we had never done it. Both of us feared we would be seen as quacks—or worse, interrogated, doubted, and criticized. It was safer to keep the truth between us.
“I see,” said Janna. She took a gulp of lemonade and looked out the window to the street, as if waiting for someone to join us.
“What do you do?” I asked. “Sometimes I see you coming back in the evening.”
As soon as I said it, I reddened. I didn’t want Janna to know I’d been observing her as closely as I had. But if she was surprised, she didn’t say so.
“I’m paid to garden. Landscaper is the term, I suppose, but I prefer gardener. I work for one couple at the moment who’ve got a big plot of land, several acres. It’s like a bunch of needy babies crying out for me. That’s what Thomas says: I’m raising my children.”
“Thomas,” I said. “Is that the man who lives here?”
Janna nodded. She put her spidery fingers on either side of the mug and began to rotate it.
“My husband,” she said. “He’s in academia, like you—the English department. He’s a Romanticist, studying for his PhD.”
I wasn’t sure whether he was studying the Romantics or if she meant to imply that university work was a romantic gesture in itself, a comment that had to be directed in part at me. Then and even months later, it was difficult for me to gauge Janna’s slyness, to sift it out of what was sincere.
“And you?” she asked. “I’ve seen someone else coming out of your house. Is he your husband? The short man?”
“My boyfriend.”
I was irritated by then. I finished off my lemonade, ready to make an excuse about work. But Janna leaned forward in her chair and began to tell me about her courtship with Thomas—how they met in college when he was studying poetry and she was in botany; back then, she said, she thought she might be a field researcher. Something delicate in the bright sheen of her eyes, her quick, pale hands, stopped me from resenting her.
The tattoo on her arm was a plant, black and white, with slanted flowers and sharp leaves. It traveled from her palm to her elbow. Her skin seemed too thin to withstand such inkiness. But most d
isturbing was the piercing on the back of her neck, which I only saw when she turned: two balls spaced an inch or so apart without a bar. I couldn’t tell how they’d been inserted, and that was what unnerved me. Keller had shaken my notions of privacy, and though I was now tied to his work, it made me fiercely protective of my core. There was something about the piercing in Janna’s neck that seemed invasive, even if she had chosen it. That was what struck me: her allowance of invasion, her desire for it.
•••
As it turned out, Gabe spoke to Thomas the next day. He told me that night while we did our exercises. In Fort Bragg, we had begun to feel the physical toll of our lifestyle, in which we were either sleeping or observing the sleep of others. Our lower backs ached; our knees popped. Because our work schedule was so irregular, it didn’t make sense to join a gym, so Gabe suggested we use DVDs. We rented stacks of them from the library, our tote bags clattering on the walk home. Today, we were using 8 Minute Abs with 8 Minute Buns.
“I went over to the neighbors’ house yesterday,” I said. “The woman invited me—Janna.”
Gabe grunted. When we finished our sit-ups, we sat up and took a sip of water.
“Funny,” he said. “I met the guy this morning. At the Laundromat.”
We started bicycle crunches.
“You didn’t mention that,” I said.
“It was a little strange, to be honest. He sat down next to me by the dryers. I thought he recognized me, but he didn’t say anything. He took out all these books. And then”—we stood for lunges—“when I was leaving, he asked if I would wait for him, so we could walk back together.”
The Anatomy of Dreams: A Novel Page 5