by Tara Conklin
“You don’t understand the project.”
“I don’t need to.”
“How’s the coke habit, Joe?”
Pause. Curl, release, curl.
“I just want you to find someone you love.”
“Love? What would you know about it?” And the anger I’d felt mounting as the conversation progressed, my anger at Joe for leaving New York, for lying to me, for hiding so many parts of his life, rose up in my chest and throat, making it difficult to breathe. I couldn’t speak, and so I hung up on him. The last conversation I had with my brother ended when I pressed my phone to off and set it on the floor.
The shower stopped and Man #82 entered my room, towel around his waist, hair wet, skin flushed. “Who was that?” he’d asked. “Everything okay?”
“Fine,” I’d answered. “Family. Don’t you wish sometimes they’d just disappear?”
I began to walk very fast, only vaguely aware of my direction. I thought of the last words Joe had said to me and also of what had not been said. The sounds beneath the words. What had I heard? The in-out of a woman’s breath. A creak of floor beneath a slender, bare foot. A door closed, a door opened. Had Luna Hernandez been there with Joe?
I traveled deep into Crown Heights, arms flapping at my sides to keep myself warm. Down unfamiliar streets, past parks where children played unfamiliar games, past shops selling goods that seemed unusual and oddly specific: pet toys and carrier cases; dog food, cat food, birdseed; rabbit hutches, rabbit runs. Celeste?
I stopped. Joe? I asked, scanning the signage atop storefronts for something, anything.
Joe?
Joseph?
Joe—
Blam—a man ran flat into me and dropped what he was carrying. He spun around and looked at me, and despite my shock and pain—he quite literally knocked the wind out of me—our eyes held for a moment, and I saw that his were black, bottomless, containing an empty wildness.
“Fuckin’ A, lady!” he said. His hair hung lank and greasy around his pale face, purple shadows beneath his eyes. A stench of unwash and urine.
“You dropped—” I said, and when I bent to pick up the package, I saw it was a woman’s purse, brown and large and battered.
The man looked at the purse, looked behind me, and began again to run. There were distant shouts drawing closer, and at last I understood what was happening. The man turned the corner and disappeared. From the opposite direction came two figures: one man, one woman, both coming quickly but neither seeming of an age or condition to run. I held the purse with both hands and looked up to the sky, where there was no suggestion of Joe, only sparse clouds, wan sun, and a blue, brittle sky.
“You . . . you got it!” the woman called from half a block away. “You’ve got my bag!”
I held up the purse. “I’ve got it!” I called back.
The woman smiled at the man, both of them seventy, or perhaps eighty years old. Old in the way that for me back then was difficult to gauge specifically. When hair and bodies have fallen, when every step trembles.
“Thank you,” the woman wheezed as she reached me. “I can’t thank you enough for stopping that man.”
I handed her the purse. “He just kind of ran into me,” I said. “I didn’t really do anything.”
“Oh, but you did,” she replied. “You were right here. Standing right here. Thank you.”
“You okay now, Mrs. Diaz?” the man asked the woman. She closed her eyes briefly and breathed yes. He clasped her hands, gave me a curt nod, and then headed back the way he had come.
The woman bent to the purse and went through it quickly, with sharp eyes, taking stock of its contents. She sighed, satisfied. “Now let me give you something, dear,” she said. Her breath came in plumes of frost as she removed from the purse a long wallet with a tarnished bronze clasp.
“That’s okay,” I said. “Really, you don’t have to do that.”
“But I want to. That young man was high on something. Did you see his eyes? What a waste. What a godawful waste of a life.”
“I don’t want anything. Really.” I put up my hands. “Thank you anyhow. I’m glad you got your purse back.”
I turned away from the woman and retreated quickly, not wanting any further gratitude. My left side hurt where the man had crashed into me, and my right hip, which had struck a mailbox as I spun, now throbbed. I forced myself to keep a steady pace. There were no other people on the cold sidewalk. The only sounds were the dull thumps of my sodden boots striking the pavement and the slushy splash of a car passing on the road. When I had walked two full blocks, I allowed myself to pause and look behind me, but the woman was gone. She must be on her way home by now, I thought. Rattled but okay. This would be a story she’d tell her husband, her friends and neighbors, a cautionary tale to watch out for hollow-eyed young men with fleet feet, to hope for dazed young women who do not look where they are headed, who search the skies and rooftops for signs of dead brothers, lost worlds.
I continued walking. I remembered then a hardware store somewhere in Brooklyn. Where? A hardware store where Joe had purchased for me a beautiful hammer with a solid red handle, heavy, strong. You need essential tools, he had told me. Nothing fancy. A hammer, a screwdriver. Preferably a wrench, too, though that can wait. The hammer. The last gift from my brother. Where was the hardware store?
The last conversation. Please, cheapen, love, someone.
Joe
Joe
JOE
Joe
JOSEPH
Joe
Four more blocks, maybe five, and there was no hardware store, nothing at all familiar. I stopped because my hip now pulsed with pain. I’d made several turns and seemed to have crossed over into a different neighborhood. The smell of cooking was stronger here, a steel-drum kind of music spilled down a stoop. I hobbled a bit, testing out my range of movement. Ouch, ouch. Looking up, I realized I was blocking the doorway of a coffee shop. I considered for a moment the possibility of entering: inside, the walls were painted yellow, and a black woman with long glossy braids stood at the counter. Perhaps she could direct me to a hardware store, I thought. There was a glass case laden with swirls of pastries, fat round bagels, bottles of juice in sunny colors, and it seemed a world away from the grim sidewalk, the bitter cold, my feet, which were damp in my old boots and had begun to ache from my wandering. My throbbing hip. I could feel the rise of a bruise.
I placed a hand on the door and stopped because there was Will. Man #23. The man I saw at Joe’s engagement party. That night had marked the last of so many things I couldn’t possibly name them all. Everything returned to me: Kyle, Sandrine, Ace, the poem, the woman with strawberry-blond hair, the window and its impossible expanse of green smack in the middle of a gray, cold city.
Will sat alone at a small, round table. I stared at the reddish curl of hair around his pale neck, at the yellowed paperback he was reading. The white cup and saucer on the table. His freckles. His strong, square shoulders. The book was Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.
Will did not look up, he did not see me, and a woman pushing a stroller bumped up behind me with a small grunt of impatience. I apologized. I turned and moved farther onto the sidewalk, where I lingered in the dismal winter sun, staring at Will through the café’s wide front window, watching him turn his pages, sip his drink.
I didn’t know what to do. Panic rose from the pavement and through my old, tired boots, panic that I was imagining all this. Had I truly lost my mind, after all these months of wandering? Did I hit my head, did that man knock me harder than I thought? I had never attended a grief support group meeting, though Noni had urged me to. All these months I’d kept my distance from Caroline and Renee. But now I wanted desperately to talk to my sisters, because they would tell me the truth. Have I lost my mind? I wanted to ask them. Will I ever be the way I was before?
Again I looked through the window. Will. Yes, it was him. I couldn’t leave him here, nor could I go inside, and so I waited and I stared, silently urging him to
look up, to remember my brown curls and my half-read poem. And finally, after what felt like a lifetime of waiting, Will lifted his head from the book, and he saw me.
Chapter 15
Caroline was roaming her house. It was 3:00 a.m. The TV played a news report of international financial collapse, a housing market gone to hell. Caroline was holding an apple in one hand, the remote control in the other, when Nathan walked into the den.
“Caro,” he said. “You’re up.”
“Yep,” she replied. She took a bite of apple.
“Can I fix you something?” Nathan asked. “There’s chicken. Betty cooked some chicken for the kids.” Betty was the unemployed school nurse Nathan had hired to help with “household organization” once it became clear that Caroline would not be organizing anything for a while. As far as Caroline knew, Betty had assumed the role of housekeeper, nanny, chef, tutor, driver, and whatever else Nathan asked her to do. What else did Nathan ask Betty to do? Caroline had no idea but found that she didn’t really care one way or the other.
That year, as Will and I were falling in love, Caroline was falling into a period of despondency. It was as though the grief that she had refused to acknowledge after Joe’s accident had waited for the second, lesser apparent death of Luna Hernandez to descend. And descend it did. Every last ounce of effort and resolve departed Caroline’s body like the contents of a bottle emptied into the grass. For nine months, through the financial collapse of 2008, the closing of Lehman Brothers, bankruptcies and foreclosure and demonstrations, Caroline lay in her bed and languished. She slept and cried. She ate whatever it was someone brought to her or things she’d pick up in the kitchen—a piece of bread, an apple—that required no preparation or heat. At night she roamed the house, reading a page or two of a book, watching ten, fifteen minutes of television, checking over homework left out on the kitchen counter. And then, just as the sun was beginning to rise, as the colors of the house moved from dark to dusky, Caroline would return to her bedroom (this was her bedroom now; Nathan slept in the guest room down the hall), pull the duvet up over her head, and fall into an agitated sleep.
Nathan was still teaching a full course load at Hamden College, still publishing further conclusions about his beloved Panamanian golden frogs, a species that seemed to offer a boundless wealth of data and insight despite the animals’ negligible size and, if Caroline were being honest with herself, annoyingly high-pitched croaks. Tonight Nathan wore his monogrammed blue pajamas, the ones Caroline had given him for Christmas two years ago. She’d ordered them for the whole family, though, she realized now, she hadn’t seen her C pajamas in months.
What had happened to her C pajamas?
“Caroline,” Nathan said, “I’m worried about you.”
This, Caroline had to admit, was fair. Ever since she’d returned from that meeting with the private investigator, Nathan had drifted at the corners of her peripheral vision, an apparition on the horizon that did not approach. I’m sorry, Nathan would call across the distance. I’m so sorry. And she knew what he meant: that he had kept Caroline away from her family all those years with their various moves, that she had lost her brother long before he fell on that kitchen floor. But Caroline didn’t blame Nathan, not for this; she blamed only herself for allowing it to happen.
“You know how sorry I am about all this,” Nathan said now. “But please come back to us. The kids miss you. I miss you.” He folded his arms around her. Instinctually she pulled away but then stopped. She felt his hands on her back, drawing her closer, and she relaxed. She laid her head against his chest and remembered the feel of this, being close to someone. He kissed her on the neck and lingered there, his breath warm on her skin.
All at once Caroline wanted Nathan to fuck her. She wanted nothing but that. It was the smell of him, sweaty and sleepy, a bit of musky deodorant, and the softness of the pajamas, these stupid, sentimental flannel pajamas. Slowly she traced the cursive N stitched in shiny white thread across his chest and then began to unbutton his shirt, and then she was pulling off the shirt, pulling off his pants. His hands were under the T-shirt she wore, had worn for days now, and he backed her onto the couch where their children watched TV and played video games. Where now a scattering of Lego pieces lay across the upholstery.
“Ouch,” Caroline said, and reached beneath her to sweep the toys onto the floor and pull down her sweatpants. Nathan waited, and then he was on top of her, and she arched her back, her legs went around his waist, and he was inside her. Her apple, one bite taken from the flesh, sat on the arm of the couch; it fell to the floor as Nathan grasped for a better position.
It was over quickly, both of them coming with a speed and force that startled her. Afterward Caroline lay against the couch, stunned more than sated, as Nathan stroked her stomach, her breast, her cheek.
“I love you,” he said.
Caroline nodded. “I know,” she replied.
After that night on the couch, Nathan tried to entice Caroline back to life. Sex. They returned to it as though they were newlyweds again in those short, fevered months after the wedding, before the first move, when the idea that they could do this without secrets or lies or shame acted as the greatest aphrodisiac. Nathan changed his office hours and began to return home by two o’clock on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
And so on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, Caroline waited for him. She wore satin negligees or matching bra-and-panty sets in electric reds and pinks. Sometimes she greeted him at the door in nothing but a pair of stilettos or a short, frilly apron. They began an affair that was similar to their honeymoon in sexual intensity, but now the sex was slower, smarter, better. Now they came to each other with an unapologetic, unembarrassed understanding of what they wanted and what they could do. Nathan attended to Caroline with such precision that she forgot everything else. She was left only with a crystalline awareness of how he touched her and moved within her.
Soon Caroline had left her bedroom and began again to ferry her children from this place to that, soccer games, doctors’ appointments, play dates. To make dinners and load laundry into the machines. She cut and colored her hair into a sharp-edged bob the color of honey, lighter than her natural color ever was. She fired Betty.
The twins, eleven years old now, seemed satisfied by Caroline’s renewed presence, by these acts of going through the normal motions. Only Louis, fifteen and taller already than Nathan with angry raw patches of acne on each cheek, looked at Caroline askance. He spoke to her as though she were a child. Or, worse, a disappointing pet. Louis, Caroline suspected, understood her secret. That even as she went about her maternal duties, even as she cooked and joked and brushed her teeth, her essential self remained upstairs in that bed, underneath the down duvet, wrapped in darkness.
Every so often Caroline wondered what we, her sisters, were doing. If we were okay. If Renee was still angry, if I was still searching for Luna under the guidance of some shaman or raven-haired witch. Sometimes Caroline dreamed of Luna, and it was as though she, Caroline, entered the Polaroid picture and stood beside Joe at the bar and watched him but did not touch him. Caroline studied Joe’s face, and then she turned to Luna and examined her as you might a piece of art. Looking for meaning. Joe and Luna remained still and silent for these examinations, and then, as though charged with a sudden electric pulse, they began to move and talk. Caroline stepped back and watched them together. She recognized the way Joe and Luna looked at each other and touched, fingers lingering, gazes held, because once she had done the same. It was clear to Caroline that Joe and Luna were in love, and in the dream this realization brought her a great upswell of joy and also unspeakable regret.
One morning after Nathan left for work, the kids at school, Caroline sat alone in the humid, ticking house and wondered what it said about her that she mourned for her brother by fucking her husband until she was raw and senseless. “What do you want?” Nathan would always ask before they began. “Caroline, what do you want me to do?” Caroline
always offered a detailed reply. Nathan’s imagination only got them so far. But she and Nathan seemed no closer. Nathan operated on her, he made her come night after night, but there was no corresponding transcendent intimacy. If anything, the sex pushed Caroline deeper into herself. She sailed away during their lovemaking to someplace fast, primal, dark. Afterward she would fall immediately asleep, exhausted, and Nathan did the same. In the mornings, when he kissed her and smiled and placed a hand on her cheek or stroked her hair, she felt doll-like, an empty-headed body responding mechanically to another empty head.
Today Caroline sat at her dining-room table, the long one they used at holidays and for Sunday family dinners and the parties they threw—or once had thrown—and she examined her hands. Caroline, what do you want? The veins were risen, the skin spotted faintly with irregular freckles; her wedding ring, scuffed and scratched, cut into the pink, swollen flesh of her finger. Her nails were raw and bitten, though she could not remember biting them. The mysterious failings of her own body, Caroline thought. Like the nightmares that had fallen upon her as a child, and she powerless to make them stop. Now her body again seemed consumed by its own set of principles and needs, divorced completely from what she herself, Caroline Skinner-Duffy, wanted. She wanted to laugh. She wanted to feel like things mattered. She wanted her brother back.
* * *
Nathan’s promotion to chair of the biology department of Hamden College surprised no one. But still, when he told Caroline, she gasped and felt tears spring to her eyes. It seemed the appropriate response.
Nathan wanted to host a party, something for faculty, administrators, a few standout graduate students. “You know how much I hate these things,” he told Caroline. “But I think it’s important. A new day in the department. That kind of thing.”
“Of course,” Caroline replied. “Shall we do steak or salmon?”
Caroline had been “better” (Nathan’s word) for over a year now. She had not spoken to me since that rainy day in Brooklyn four years before. Renee communicated with us all via the occasional group e-mail with subject lines of “Update from Jo-burg” or “Notes from the clinic in Port-au-Prince.” Personal phone calls were difficult to arrange, unreliable, and expensive, Renee told us. Caroline did not bother inviting either of us to Nathan’s party, and I understood why: it had been too long, it seemed too risky, as though a chemical reaction might occur. Without Joe our atoms did not know where to rest, how to behave. We were free radicals, spinning in our own small orbits, dangerous, poisonous, causing invisible but elemental damage to anything we touched.