by Nicole Bokat
“It’s Marc. Hadley just called me. She’s wondering where you are.”
Her pulse quickened. “What do you mean she called you? She’s at your place.”
“No. You were supposed to get her at Sophie’s.”
“Oh, god, I got mixed up. Can you call her?” Natalie searched for the exit so she could turn around, head east. The rain was worse, streaking down the chalkboard sky. “Tell her I’m coming.”
“Sophie’s going out to a party. Hads doesn’t want to be alone there.”
“On a school night? That doesn’t sound like the Slaters.”
“I can’t answer for them.”
“Of course not.” She was the one familiar with the quirks of Hadley’s friends, the habits of their families—Sophie hated red licorice but loved black; her mom posted a chore wheel on the fridge every Sunday, and her Dad wore suspenders to work which he snapped loose as soon as he took off his coat. “Just call and tell her I’m on my way.”
“I’ll ask her what she wants to do,” he said and hung up.
When her phone rang again, she anticipated the pressure of Marc’s voice in her ear. “Did you reach her?”
“Hadley’s tired. She wants to go home. I told her to borrow money from the Slaters and call a cab, that you’d pay them back.”
“Okay. Does she have her key?”
“She said she always takes it with her.”
Another reprimand: their fifteen-year-old daughter was more responsible than she. Good. Her head throbbing, she thanked the god of biology that her daughter had inherited Marc’s sensible nature.
“I’ll be home soon.” A truck roared past, and Natalie grasped the wheel with both hands.
“Did something happen to upset you?” he asked more gently, a vestige from their marriage when he still loved her.
For a moment she imagined them in their bed, facing each other in the dark. Puddles of shadows would dot the floor, while outside the night’s crescent moon would glow. They’d be close enough that Natalie would smell the musk of his skin, the mint from the toothpaste. “You were a child,” he’d reassure her. “The crap with your family, the accident, none of it was your fault.” He’d cradle her head on his chest, and she would see from that angle that they’d soon be making love, followed by the sound of Marc’s quiet snores, her body soothed.
But this new Marc would never console her again. Anything could be used as fodder against her now.
“Jesus, Marc,” she said. “I was at Isabel’s group and lost track of time, that’s all. You don’t get to check up on me anymore.”
“You’re right. What you do with your time isn’t my concern. But Hadley is. She comes first.”
“Seriously? You’re the one who moved out.”
“Not on Hadley.”
Natalie looked at her arm, the one still steering. The veins to her wrists flowed like runnels below the thin slice of skin. She could twist the wheel sharply and justify Marc’s reasons for bailing on her.
She said, “Ask your daughter how she felt after you left.”
“Of course, she was angry. But we got through that. Hadley understands it wasn’t about her; she’s forgiven me.”
“Really? Are you sure about that? ‘Cause what you did was unforgivable.”
Not as bad as what I’ve done.
She never saw her mother’s face. Her hair was sprawled over her head, which was collapsed onto the wheel. But Natalie had smelled the sweet, slightly rusty smell of blood.
“Look, I know how you react when you’re really stressed,” Marc said. “Hads can stay with me more often, if you need time, just until you feel better.”
She felt a muscle twist and tighten in her chest. She pictured Elizabeth’s earnest face in the photo she’d tracked down on Facebook once Marc let slip his girlfriend’s last name. She’d felt a thrill of triumph as she studied the plain face, the wide forehead with the hair swept back behind a headband and the practiced, thin-lipped smile: I’m prettier than she is.
“That’s super generous of you, offering for my daughter to spend more time with you and your fucking girlfriend so I can recuperate from you dumping me.”
HADLEY WAS SITTING in the lotus position on her bed, her laptop in front of her. Natalie glanced at the sapphire and marigold batik hangings of the Indian goddess on her daughter’s wall. Druga—the mother of the universe—her large, slanted eyes lined with kohl, her eighteen weapon-carrying arms, seated upon a growling tiger. “I’m not, like, becoming a Hindu,” she’d said when Natalie asked about her recent redecoration. “I just think she looks really powerful. I like the idea of a goddess to believe in.”
Natalie sprinted to her daughter, kissed the top of her head.
“Where were you?”
“I screwed up that you were at Sophie’s, not Dad’s.” Natalie sunk onto the bed. “I was distracted, sorry.”
Hadley wiggled her silver earring, imploring, “Okay but, Mom, I told you a hundred times I was going to Sophie’s.”
“A hundred times?” She smiled at this exaggeration; her girl was still just a girl.
“I couldn’t wait to get out of there, and you were so late.”
“That doesn’t sound like you, wanting to leave,” Natalie said with a pang of worry. She caressed her daughter’s downy skin and made sure not to pull at the same knot in her hair that needed to be combed out every day since she was two. “You always beg to stay at Sophie’s.”
Hadley disentangled her legs and stretched one out, her calf muscles defined in her black jeggings. She flexed, then pointed, her foot. Her toenails were painted a bright orange-red called Speak Your Mind. “Ever since she started hanging out with this senior, Priscilla, and her friends, Sophie’s been acting like an asshole.”
Seniors? What had she missed? “How long has this been going on?”
“Since the school year began. They party too much.”
“What does that mean exactly?”
Her daughter shrugged. “Weed, drinking.”
“That’s not good.” Jesus. Where have I been? “I don’t want you hanging around those kids.”
Hadley scrunched up her brow, an expression that resembled Marc’s. “I’m not. That’s the point. I don’t even like being with Sophie anymore.”
Her best friend since first grade. During one of their last fights, Marc had said, “Without your obsession, you’d be left with us, your life now. You’d have to concentrate on us. And that’s not enough for you.”
“Oh, Hads. That’s so painful.” Natalie reached for her daughter’s hand. As always, her child’s long, slender fingers came as a poignant surprise, how they resembled her mom’s. “Why haven’t I heard about this?”
“You’ve been so sad. It’s gotten worse since you got back from your vacation.”
Natalie picked at a flap of loose scab on her wrist. “How do you mean?”
“You’re, like, more preoccupied. I hear you walking around sometimes really late.”
The old nightmare was the culprit, only in this version her mom was driving on a dirt road on a tropical island. She tried to grip the wheel, but her hands kept slipping as if coated in grease. Natalie heard herself say, “Your brain isn’t working now.” Then the driver’s seat was empty. Natalie pushed open her door without resistance. The car sparkled, not a dent on it. Natalie whisked above the road, feet not touching the ground. She saw it lying there, her mother’s body curled into the shape of a capital C. When she moved the hair flung over her mother’s face, it was gone. Not bloody and bruised but wiped clean of all features: a porcelain plate with three holes where eyes and a mouth should be.
“I’m so sorry if I’ve been waking you.”
“It’s okay,” Hadley said. “I fall back asleep. Are you upset about Garrick?”
“Yes, of course.”
“You, like, never talk about him. I mean I know you weren’t close. Are you worried about Aunt Isabel?”
“Not worried, no. She’s sad, of course, but she’ll
be all right.”
“It’s just … I tell you stuff over and over and you just space out about it.”
“I didn’t realize I was doing that.”
Shivering, she hugged Hadley. Even in the winter, her child slept with the window open. Sometimes, Natalie envisioned Hadley freezing in the night, icicles stuck to her hair, her lips bluish. She’d check on her, over and over, creaking on the wood floor until Marc would say, “Come to bed. You’ll wake her.” He and Hadley used to race out the door of the cabin they’d rent in Vermont, in bulky ski attire, laughing in camaraderie. Natalie would venture out into the village, shoot photographs. She hated the crackle of the air and snow, the swish and roar of speeding down the mountain—that fast motion she couldn’t control.
“I’ll try to be better.” Natalie scraped the skin on her wrist until drops of blood sprouted.
“I didn’t want to bother you about Soph. I mean, it seemed so … dumb after Dad moved in with Elizabeth.”
“That happened to both of us.”
“Yeah.” Her daughter wriggled free of Natalie’s embrace to attend to the polish that was beginning to peel off her big toe. She chipped away at the edges.
“Hads, your relationship with Sophie isn’t dumb. Nothing in your life is. Please don’t think that.”
Hadley nodded, her slim back still bending away from Natalie.
“If you have to nudge me to pay more attention, do it.”
The girl turned around, her glare a condemnation. “I thought it would be so much fun being in the Caribbean with Aunt Isabel, going to that resort, getting massages, even those lectures—some of them looked cool.”
“It was fun.”
“Then, Mom, what’s wrong?”
Natalie shook her head, mouthed: nothing. “Maybe Isabel can take you to the conference next year. I know she’d love that. I’m not sure you can go to the events till you’re eighteen, but she told me it’s going to be in Australia.”
Hadley gasped, her eyes wide, prismatic. “Oh my God, that would be the best! I’d be fine hanging out with the kangaroos.”
She’d slipped free of the noose. This time.
LATER THAT EVENING, Natalie cajoled Hadley into watching an episode of Project Runway, which they always recorded. At eleven o’clock, Natalie followed her daughter back to her room. Hadley, at the edge of her bed, nudged the Kurdish throw rug with her big toe. “This could just be a stage with Dad, this Elizabeth thing. All my friends agree you’re a cool hot mom.”
Natalie watched as her girl chewed the side of her cheek, a nervous tick usually reserved for trying to solve a word problem in algebra or structure the argument of an English paper.
“That’s hard to believe,” Natalie said, with a static smile.
“C’mon. You’re way younger than most of my friends’ mothers, and you have good bone structure. You could do a lot more with yourself. Get highlights. Wear pumps, like, you know, a heel, not those sad looking boots.”
The ones with the fake fur lining that she wore when it rained or snowed. Did Hadley believe that if she’d worn stilettos Marc wouldn’t have left? She kissed the top of her daughter’s head, smelling coconut shampoo. “I don’t think it’s a stage. But I’ll try harder. At everything. I really am sorry I’ve tuned you out.”
“Mean it.” Hadley raised her head.
“I do.” She felt loose and overflowing, a river of apology.
After saying goodnight, Natalie took a moment in the hallway to observe the professional shots of her girl as a toddler, her copper-brown corkscrew curls and hazel eyes with the scar above the right one from stitches she’d gotten after falling off a playground swing. “Here is your life,” Marc would say, pointing to these images, when Natalie was caught chasing her elusive past, images not taken by her. She snapped casual pictures of her family on her cell phone, but she hadn’t attempted serious portraits since her mother’s death.
As a child, she’d loved taking photos of people, her mother’s compliments, “That’s wonderful, how you caught her expression, how it makes me want to know more about her.” They were on vacation, in Muir Woods, the summer Natalie turned ten when she’d started. Her mother observed how the sequoias resembled relics from medieval times, an eerie army of knotted giants with enormous bunions on their trunks, and yawning, cavernous mouths. She shared her Leica with both girls during that trip. But it was only Natalie who’d shown interest, not in nature—other than as background—but in Isabel and her mom standing in the triangular opening of a split Redwood tree. And, oh, the swell of pleasure as the image started to emerge in the chemical bath. It was a trick of timing, luck, and skill producing that ideal shot, the truth behind the person’s gaze.
But, after the accident, Natalie stopped altogether, not lifting a camera until college, when she’d dared to try again. Natalie signed up for an elective: food photography, and she’d thought, Well, food doesn’t have a soul, why not?
She changed into her flannel pajama bottoms and Marc’s t-shirt with the Apple computer logo on it, then lifted her engagement ring out of the velvet box on her night table and snuck it on her finger. She only wore it when she was alone. Staring at the small, round diamond, she wondered how much it was worth. Soon, very soon, she would sell it to a jeweler in her neighborhood. Out of habit she curled on her right side, as she had throughout her marriage.
What you do with your time isn’t my concern.
Sorrow burned Natalie’s eyes, and she switched off the lamp at the side of her bed. She should try Isabel’s relaxation app. Instead, she opened the drawer to her night table where she kept her “emergency” bottle of Xanax. Among the coins and Post-it notes and squishy earplugs was a photograph she’d taken of her mom the summer before the crash. In the snapshot, her mother’s head was thrown back in profile, mouth open in joy as if trying to swallow the sliver of sunlight above. Grief was an inflammation, a bodily sensation. The flare-ups never stopped. Time, that famous healer, was a quack.
She eased the photo back into the drawer, along with the pill bottle. Then, she saw it, the small silver flashlight, the one she kept in case of a blackout.
Her mother’s voice: The light’s blinding me. For Christ’s sake, what’s going on?
Her heart fluttered, skipped beats.
Who are you?
five
—
AFTER DROPPING HADLEY AT SCHOOL THE NEXT MORNING, SHE typed: “traits of a psychopath” into her browser. Manipulative: no, that wasn’t her. Lacking in empathy. She paused for a second, and said aloud, “shush,” the way her doctor did when listening to her heart with his stethoscope and, just for a second, Natalie worried about an arrhythmia. No. She might be forgetful, but she adored her child, her sister Isabel, and for almost two decades, her husband. Egocentric? Marc might differ with her if she protested. She stared at the PET scan images of a psychopath’s brain. The black splotches, where green and yellow should be, indicated reduced activity in the areas that regulated aggression and morality. A decade ago, George had ordered an MRI at Natalie’s request. He’d reported that the findings showed no lingering effects from her concussion. “Some people have mild injuries but profound memory issues. What you have is retrograde amnesia, meaning erased sections of your past.”
But what about more significant abnormalities? Garrick’s letter wouldn’t provide scientific proof but might reveal her character without it.
Yet, two days passed, and Ellen’s FedEx failed to arrive. Natalie checked the vestibule of her townhouse where the packages piled up, then her mailbox for a notice in case it was being held at a facility. She listened to the message again, the assertion that Garrick’s assistant would be sending his documents. Future tense.
Before running out to the studio, Natalie sat at her desk. It was like the aftermath of a hurricane: paperclips strewn haphazardly, bills in several piles, lens cleaning cloths bunched in a corner, and Post-it notes stuck on her computer, as well as the stand she used to hoist up the laptop on an angl
e, with her to-do lists scribbled on them. Marc had wondered how she found anything amid the clutter. But, jutting up from the pottery holder Hadley had made in elementary school were business cards she’d saved for years, including her stepfather’s from the university.
When a young man answered, she said, “I’m calling for Ellen Alden. She worked for Professor Walker. He passed away recently.”
Ellen must have been reassigned to work for another professor or several in the department. Most of them shared assistants, Natalie knew. Garrick’s situation was unusual due to his status and long tenure in the department.
The man said, “Right, of course. Horrible loss. One minute. I’ll find out for you.”
He put Natalie on hold, and when he returned said, “Ms. Alden hasn’t been in all week.”
Isabel’s words buzzed in her head: Poor woman has no life outside of her job and my dad.
“Is she ill?”
“Uh, not sure. Would you like me to ask around and see if anyone has more information?”
“No, that’s fine. I’ll try her home number.”
After a brief search, Natalie located an E. Alden in Cambridge. Ellen’s phone peeled in the same interval, over and over, as if content to never stop. Natalie stared at the cracks in her wall and wondered what kind of person didn’t use voicemail. Perhaps Ellen had no need for the service now that Garrick was gone. According to Isabel’s reports over the years, Ellen’s identity was tied to her relationship with him.
I don’t think she’ll be happy until Dad declares his undying love for her.
This Natalie remembered: there had been a party, the first gathering at their home after her mother’s death. A year had passed, maybe two. Isabel was in discussion with one of her father’s younger colleagues who fiddled with his miscalculation of a bowtie. Natalie took a glass of wine from the sidebar without anyone noticing. She had no parents, no one to monitor her. That fact was a constant, an involuntary act, like the beating of her heart.
Her friends had tried to reconnect at first. At school, they’d smiled at her in the hallway, invited her to sit with them at lunch, even asked her halfheartedly to join them at the mall or the movies. Natalie always declined their offers. She had wanted to be with them. But the hum and hustle, the shrieks of surprise and gasps of laughter startled her. Unexpectedly, she’d feel as if she were hovering above the group, a quivering apparition. Then, in a swish, she’d be suctioned back into the suffering cavity of her body, all thrashing heart and overheated skin. She felt safer alone in her bedroom, or the bathroom stall at school.