Alone

by E. J. Noyes

  “Great.” Her smile seems like an exhalation. She’s relieved. I’m not. I already know how it will go. This veterinarian is nice enough, but she is fast time. She isn’t what I want. Or need. I left my slow time thousands of miles away. I left her in another lifetime.

  When I leave the clinic I have a whole bunch of litter and trays, kitten toys, and food, as well a phone number, an email address and plans for drinks after Dr. Samantha Chapman closes up her clinic on Friday afternoon. My kittens settle in right away, rushing off to explore the house then passing out asleep whenever and wherever they get tired. I lie on the floor on my belly to watch them playing, and when I carry them upstairs to go to bed, they settle against my neck, their low kitten purr thrumming against my skin.

  Jekyll curls up between my neck and shoulder, and almost immediately lies still. Hyde bats at my hair, before settling in to chew it. His tiny claws scrape my cheek. I close my eyes and feel my life stretch out again. Slow time. Never thought I’d have it again. I could cry at the unfairness of it all, that moments like this will be the only time I’m ever going to be able to pause and really live my life.

  Friday night, Samantha and I head to the bar at the south end of town. We settle in a corner booth to eat greasy food, drink cheap beer and then later, bourbon. My time with Samantha is…nice. Enjoyable, not earth-shattering, just comfortable. She doesn’t like to be called Sam because her asshole, family-deserting father used to call her that. She’s originally from Maine but came here because she wanted to get away from her family and her ex, and she likes the climate. She’s sweet and smart and funny and very heterosexual. There is no chance of anything between us, and I’m grateful that I don’t have to worry about anything beyond what feels like the tentative start of friendship.

  Samantha skims over details of her ex-fiancée and her ex-best friend who are now together and expecting a baby. I give her the sanitized version of my past and I don’t talk about my ex, if I can even call Olivia that. Samantha and I toast to the past and the future, but instead of excitement for what might come, the hollow inside me deepens. I don’t look forward to the future. All it holds for me is more time alone. I still can’t bring myself to go out and find a meaningless pickup. My life has had so many meaningless things that I don’t want any more.

  I leave my car at the bar and we catch a cab home. After I walk her to her doorstep she gives me an impromptu, slightly tipsy hug then tells me she hopes we can be friends. I hesitate a few moments before returning the embrace. “I’d like that,” I tell her truthfully. Friendship is okay. Friendship I can handle. A spark of hope flares that maybe I can move on after all and live a normal life with a job and my cats and a circle of friends. Nobody dead or absent is talking at me and the people in this town are sweet and kind.

  I work. I fix up my house. I play with my cats. I bribe my goats with grain, bananas, and carrots so they’ll stand still long enough for me to brush them. Samantha and I have dinner or lunch a couple of times a week. On weekends we go hiking, or swim in the creek that flows through my property, or we watch movies and talk about starting a board game club for us and a few of the other singletons in town. The plan is to spend nights with drinks and food and games—no Monopoly—and enjoy each other’s company the way friends do.

  Samantha loves coming to my house in the morning because I have a café-style coffee machine and beans shipped from California. She says my coffee is better than any in town and suggests I open a coffee shop or café to fill in for the one that closed three months before I moved here. She thinks I’d make a killing, catering to the tourists who move steadily through the town and are directed to the push-button coffee machine at Al’s Gas Station. Not to mention the horde of stay-at-home parents who are just waiting for a place to congregate for gossiping.

  I almost snort at the thought of opening what Heather and I used to call a “Hot Mom Trap” in this small town. Masses of moms, perpetually dressed in their gym gear, are always keen to meet up with friends for coffee and lunch after dropping their kids at school. It’s an interesting thought. I liked being a barista, spending my days talking to people. But that was then and I don’t know if I could do it now. I place my grand idea of owning a business on the shelf with all my other dreams, right in between Lawyer and Olivia.

  One Saturday in late June, Samantha tries to give veterinary attention to Sneezy, one of my goats who is lame. I forget to latch the head bale on my new vet crush properly, and Sneezy escapes to run around the barn, gleefully thwarting our attempts to catch her. Samantha is butted and knocked down, and I just manage to get my hands on the goat for a few seconds. She drags me along until I trip over a water bucket. The Three Stooges would be proud.

  Finally we manage to stop our hysterical laughter to agree that Samantha is better sticking with small animals and leaving the farm animal stuff to Dr. Bennett in the next town over, and I should have read the directions for my new farm equipment in order to be a better vet assistant. We drink another beer, wait for Sneezy to get tired of cavorting then bribe her with grain and pumpkin, and restrain her properly so Samantha can drain the abscess and dress the hoof. We laugh the whole time, and when we’re done, we wash grossness off our hands, switch to wine and move inside for Chinese food and movie night.

  She’s a really good friend and I’m glad for her. But it’s all rushing by so quickly that I wonder if I’m really living my life or just watching it go by. I try so hard to make it slow down, to be present in my new reality but it’s so slippery that I cannot grasp it. Some days I think I almost have it and then it falls from my fingertips and out of reach.

  Midway through dinner and our second bottle of wine, her phone chimes a text. She chokes out a laugh, then tells me, “They had the baby.”

  It takes me a few moments to remember her ex-friend and ex-fiancée. “Oh?” is all I manage around a mouthful of sweet and sour pork.

  She turns the phone around so I can see pictures of a newborn human. “My sister Facebook stalked them, because my ex-bestie is so dumb she doesn’t set any of her shit to private.” Then she says exactly what I’m thinking. “That is one fucking ugly baby. I think I dodged a genetic bullet with him.”

  I make a musing sound of agreement, pushing food around the container with my fork. “Do you want kids?”

  “I used to think I did, but now I’m not sure. I have an endless supply of kittens and puppies to keep my ovaries happy.” She chases down her mouthful of food with an even larger mouthful of pinot grigio. “You?”

  “Yeah, I do.” After a beat, my brain steps in and I can’t stop myself from saying, “My ex did too.”

  “So what’s the problem then?” Samantha studies me, one eye half-closed. “Usually the kids thing is a huge break-up point. So is, you know…cheating.”

  I smile. “She never cheated.” I know that for certain. “It was just a bunch of other stuff. I guess you could say the way we met was a setup, but not like the cool way when friends set you up. It’s kind of weird and I can’t really explain it, but she knew me for longer than I knew her. And I didn’t know that initially. And when I did, it all felt like a big, fat lie.”

  Samantha’s nod is repetitive, like she started it and forgot to stop. “You love her?”

  “I think I did, yeah. Actually, I think I still do. At the same time I also feel…felt betrayed by her, but I’ve kinda come to the conclusion that she never lied about who she really is.” There’s only the smallest amount of pain now, thinking about Olivia. I guess I’m making progress. “I think…being with her was hard, but not being with her kind of feels so much harder. The whole thing is just fucking confusing.” I reach for a fortune cookie.

  “Heavy shit,” says all the beer and wine Samantha has consumed.

  “Mmm.” I crack open the fortune cookie, half expecting it to have something that will provide an answer to all my problems.

  How much deeper would the ocean be without sponges?

  Lucky numbers: 11, 5, 39, 87, 18, 6
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  Great, thanks. Very helpful.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  My little piece of Montana is coming along nicely, turning into a haven where I imagine I will eventually be made whole again. This place is mine, somewhere I don’t have to hide or pretend, and its simplicity soothes and revitalizes. As does the physical labor I’ve put into its restoration. All the floors have been sanded back and varnished which gives it a slightly more modern feel. The exterior repainting is complete and now my farmhouse and barn are decked out in a palette of slate blue with charcoal and white trim. The newly repainted interior is full of furniture I’ve picked up at yard sales or the antique store I found one Saturday morning while driving aimlessly around the county.

  One weekend when I’m moving some things out of the spare room that Samantha sleeps in after movie nights, I find the box of Mother’s stuff in the closet. Still unopened. I banked the check from her estate months ago, donated the entire thing to a center for drug addiction, and wondered what Mother would think about her last $2,243.87 being used in this way. Maybe the only reason she had the money was because a center like that helped her out.

  My first impulse is to burn the box unopened but as I’m carrying it downstairs, something stops me. I don’t know why I sit on the couch and pull the lid off, and I sure as hell don’t know what I’m expecting to find. It smells musty but otherwise inoffensive. I think I expected it to smell like her and I’m almost disappointed that it doesn’t.

  Inside are loose sheets of paper, newspaper clippings, some photographs and two plastic dolls with tattered dresses and scraggly hair that I have to put on the floor behind the couch where I can’t see them. I feel like they are looking at me, boring holes in my back with the blue eyes I colored back on them each time they wore off.

  There are two sealed envelopes, one with my name and the other with Riley’s. I can’t open that one—it’s not for me to see what Mother wanted my sister to know. I even consider not opening my letter, because what could she have possibly written that would explain the past thirty years? But in the end, that old pathetic hope flares. Maybe she finally realized everything she did that was wrong and cruel, and will apologize for being such a shitty, abusive mother. There’s the barest tremor in my hand when I slide the letter opener under the flap of the envelope marked for me.

  Her handwriting is blocky and rough, almost robotic, and she leaves overlarge spaces between each word as though she’s thinking long and hard on what to write next.

  Celeste,

  I don’t even know what to say but I’ve had this feeling like I should leave something behind, something of mine for you, before I die.

  I just want you to know that I’m sorry and I don’t even have any reasons or excuses. That’s all I can really say. And I want you to know that I tried the best I could. I know it didn’t seem like it but I really did. It really was better for you this way.

  I hope you’re doing okay.

  Nathalie.

  I read it again, and then a third time. Such a plain, ordinary, shitty note with her vague and broad not-quite-apology. Nothing in it to indicate she showed any real remorse or even the faintest shred of caring about me or Riley. Caring would stretch her emotion to the limit—I gave up trying to apply words like love to Mother a long time ago. The more I stare at the letter, the more convinced I become that the only reason she wrote it was because she was afraid of what would happen after she died, and wanted to put a little more weight on her side of the scales in case there really is something after this life.

  But I don’t see the titan I’ve always pictured when I think of Mother. In every image I have of her, she’s a dark, powerful, and imposing figure towering over me. The malevolent, bitter force who shaped my entire life. But I see none of that in her simple words. All I see is someone at the end of her pathetic life, someone who is afraid.

  And the thought bothers me.

  For my whole life I’ve kept her as the monster under the bed when really she’s nothing, a nobody. I’ve given her all this power, power she didn’t deserve. Does this mean that everything she said to me in the habitat wasn’t true? That I spent all that time torturing myself?

  I’d thought I was okay, that I had made peace and come to terms with what she’d done to my sister and me. But now I have the sickening feeling that I’ve spent my whole life lying to myself, expanding incidents into something bigger or even something they weren’t. I close my eyes. Inhale. Exhale. No, Mother did do some really appalling, abusive things, and treated my sister and me like we meant nothing to her. She hurt us—emotionally, physically, psychologically.

  But from where I sit now, so far removed from it, I see the uncomfortable truth—that my perspective of those who hurt me is warped. Olivia did a shitty thing, one shitty thing, wrapped up in the huge thing she calls love. Then when I learned about it, it was me who let the shitty thing overtake everything else, me who ignored all the good things, the way I felt about her, the things I now know were real. I rub my temples. It’s all right to be upset with her for her lie and the way she manipulated me for the experiment. I’m entitled to that feeling.

  But at the same time she played by the rules I agreed to when I went into that place—that I was up for pretty much anything they chose to do as long as it didn’t physically harm me. And I still overturned the board and stalked away like a sore loser. I grew angry with her, afraid of her, pushed her away when what she did to me was the barest fraction of what Mother did to me. I wasted years of my life wanting to forgive and understand Mother who was truly a bad person, and I didn’t bother trying to forgive or understand Olivia who I know is a good person. And now I know all of this and there’s nothing I can do about it.

  I fold the letter back into the envelope and drop it on the floor beside the box. The newspaper clippings are of Riley in the eleventh grade when one of her art assignments was chosen to appear in a local gallery. The other is of me when I made captain of the state soccer team. I shuffle through the loose photographs, noting that every one of them is of Riley and me, both together and separate. There are none of Mother and for a painful instant I wish there was, just so I could look at her one last time and try to understand.

  There’s one photo in particular to which I pay close attention. I know I’m nine and Riley five. She’s holding an empty ice cream cone and crying, chocolate smeared all over her face. I’m looking down at her, my own full strawberry cone clutched tightly in my hand, which is partially encased in the plaster that continues all the way up my arm to mid-bicep.

  Mother’s voice is an echo in my head, not a whisper in my ear. “It was an accident, I’m sorry, okay? It’s this fucking detox again, okay? We’re going to have an ice cream and forget about it, okay?”

  My voice, weak and groggy from the pain medication. “I don’t want an ice cream. I want to go back and get my shoes.” Her apology tripped me up, but even through the fogginess I remembered what had happened and knew it wasn’t an accident.

  Mother, surprisingly gentle as she tried to persuade me to take what amounted to a bribe. “What about Riley? Bet you she wants one.”

  That was all it took for me to nod my agreement—the mere hint that my selfishness would keep something from my sister. After Riley dropped her scoop of ice cream on the grass, I passed her my cone and helped her hold it while she finished the treat. The whole time, I watched Mother sit on the bench, the disposable camera beside her as she smoked nervous cigarette after nervous cigarette. She stared at my cast, and probably wondered if someone from the hospital was coming after her for sneaking me out without paying.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  In my calendar for today, Friday, is an appointment at four p.m. for my last interview. Six months gone. My feelings are mixed, but the most prevalent is the certainty that I’m ready to put the final piece of that portion of my life into place and move on.

  Even though I’ve come to terms with my actions, I still catch myself thinking about Olivia. Mostly wishi
ng I could apologize for my rudeness or explain what I did and why I did it or wondering if she’s thinking about me. That thought disappears quickly when reason kicks in—why would she be thinking about me?

  I make my way back to work after waiting at the post office for fifteen minutes because Kevin Loman has lost a parcel. The problem is he lost this parcel in his house somewhere, not in the mail system, and he can’t accept that there’s nothing the USPS can do about it. I love my small town and all the people in it. My umbrella is ineffectual against the rain as I hurry back along the wet sidewalk. It’s the day we finish work just after lunch, and I want to get home to make sure the house is completely tidy before my appointment.

  Glenna looks up when I push back into the office. “Looks awful out,” she says, but her tone is her usual cheerful one, not annoyed or sad the way most people are when the weather sucks.

  “It is,” I agree. It’s cold and windy and I’m told this much rain is unusual for September. It’s the kind of weather where you just want to be curled up inside with hot tea and a book. My favorite kind of weather aside from snow. I hang my coat, brushing perfectly round droplets of water from it.

  “Oh, while I remember, someone came in looking for you while you were out.”

  “For me? Who was it?”

  “She didn’t give a name. I let her know that sort of thing, creeping around, wasn’t how we do things around here.” Then it’s not Samantha or any of our small circle of game-night friends, because Glenna knows them. She is a stranger, likely the person from The Organization invading my personal life instead of waiting until this afternoon as scheduled. Her audacity flashes a streak of annoyance through my body.

  I look outside as though the person might be right there staring back at me, and an uncomfortable sensation skitters down my spine. None of the Controllers would have any need to come to my place of employment. None of them except for one who had no issues inserting herself into my life. I try to sound casual when I ask, “What did she look like?”