The Third Person

by Emily Anglin

  It’s spring now, damp and echoing, and the air seems to expand at dusk, full of a diffused rain that cleans your skin as you walk. My mom called me last week and asked me to meet her at a café about halfway between our homes—between my family home and the home of Rosalind. Over coffee with some kind of orange liqueur in it we talked about how she’d been. She’d been calling me and asking to get together, but I’d been preoccupied with job applications and some copyediting work I’d picked up—a grant application some friends of mine in another city were putting together. But I was happy to see her.

  “I just go out, walk around, feel the sun. I come home when I want. All I have to do is avoid Rosalind on the way to my room, if I don’t feel like talking. I close the door, and the room is mine. I can lie down and close my eyes and rest.”

  “But what about Rosalind? What’s her story?”

  “She’s unlike anyone I’ve met. At this point in her life, she’s a bit...unmoored. I think people find her hard to understand. I don’t see her reaching out to others in a conventional, overt way, from what I’ve observed, but I also know she’s been through a lot. To be honest, I find her personality relaxing. She’s calm. I’m here, and she’s over there. She’s not too close to see. She’s unpredictable, but somehow she’s also known to me, like a book I read a long time ago.”

  “You can read her like a book?” I paused. “Not like books where charming sociopaths are interesting rather than dangerous, I hope?”

  “I don’t think I know what a sociopath is. But the key is that I can read her. I’ll always be able to get out of the way when I need to be away from her, and she needs to be away from me.”

  “‘Get out of the way’? I’m picturing Norman Bates coming through the shadows. Should I worry?”

  “Try not to, honey. It’s important. Ask yourself: do you know what it’s like to be me, or Rosalind, or your brother? And I’ll ask myself the same thing. We all feel for each other, but that doesn’t mean we know. Besides, where did this term ‘sociopath’ come from?”

  “In general?”

  “No, specifically. Well, in general, too. But I meant as applied to Rosalind.”

  “I thought you said it,” I said. But then I remembered the scene of the kitchen table on the night my mom had told us more about Rosalind: my brother Glen slumped over with his head in one hand, in front of a glass of whiskey; my dad’s hands folded on the table, as though pinning it down to keep it from flying off; my mom looking tired, explaining Rosalind’s personality and what she likes about her. I supposed any one of us could have thrown out the word ‘sociopath,’ and it could have just stuck.

  When I came home that night after coffee with my mom, around nine-thirty, I saw that my dad had fallen asleep on the couch in front of the TV, where an old black-and-white movie was playing. The remnants of a dinner of toast and peanut butter sat on the coffee table in front of him.

  Sometimes when I think about my dad’s work I feel an impotent frustration well up in me that I can only express to or at other people. Why psychology and not sociology? It’s fine to think about individuals, I think to myself, or tell Glen or my mom, but what about the systems?

  But my dad works hard, and I was worried about him too. I tucked a blanket around him on the couch and called upstairs to Glen to ask him if he wanted to go have a drink.

  “So, what are we supposed to make of this?” I asked Glen that night. “Just tell me what you think, and I’ll argue with what you say until we figure it out. But I can’t start.”

  We were sitting at a bar we go to a lot because it’s close to our house: Fiddler’s Dell. The lonely men and occasional women who frequent the bar tend to sit in silent solitude, except for a few quiet words tossed sideways now and then. There are green-upholstered booths illuminated by low-hanging lights. It’s always dusty in there, in a way that makes it feel like a lined nest. Sometimes when Glen and I go for a walk together at night, without saying anything out loud, we just automatically walk toward it, go in, and order glasses of beer. The beer is usually stale, but the waitress brings a basket of pretzels, and it’s a quiet place to talk.

  There’s one waitress who thinks Glen and I are married.

  “It’s good to get away from the kids for a bit. It’s important. Time for just you,” she said once, with the kind of sideways wink that always strikes me as a ballet of social grace. How could we begin to correct her or explain? Would we call her back to the table to tell her? Bring it up when she returns to check on us? Would she sit down with us for a while to talk about it? It would be too strange. Maybe it wasn’t important for her to know the truth.

  Besides, it was true, in a way, what she said; we did need time for just us. Glen and I are very close, although he’s older than me—my parents adopted me when he was six. Our minds work together, room and anteroom. I always want to be with him, but then when I’m not with him I notice that my thinking becomes clearer; it might be because we drink a lot when we’re together. He drinks a lot more than me, though. Oddly, Glen claims that it wasn’t his own drinking, but someone else’s, that caused his marriage to break down.

  Unlike myself, Glen had his own house for a while—when he was married to his wife, Kali. Not long after they got married and bought the house, Kali asked Glen if her twin brother Andre could move in with them, because he was having a hard time. He was drinking himself to death, Kali told Glen bluntly. How could Glen argue with that? So Andre moved in.

  But having Andre there was too much for Glen. He couldn’t shake the feeling that Kali and Andre were criticizing him telepathically while he was in the room. And never once did Glen see Andre have even a sip of alcohol; he soon found himself wondering if Andre had made up the story about his drinking, or if Kali had made it up. Glen made the mistake of telling Kali his suspicions. “He’s an alcoholic and you’re upset because he’s not drinking?” Kali had asked.

  Glen started having night terrors: he would wake up yelling, and Kali said she couldn’t help but feel like he was yelling at her. Things disintegrated from there, and Glen came back to us, about six months before our mom moved out.

  “What I can’t understand is how she’s paying for the rent at the new place, since she’s also helping me out so much,” Glen said, his face softened by shadows in the dim light of Fiddler’s Dell. He’d aged a lot in the last year. He wasn’t working, though no one had told my dad that because Glen didn’t want him to know; my mom had been helping him with lawyers’ fees and some other expenses from what she made working at the doctor’s office. “The place is really nice. It can’t be cheap. Say what you will about Rosalind, but her house is beautiful.”

  “Mom does okay at the doctor’s office,” I said. “She’s been working a lot, or at least she was up until recently.”

  “But they have a whole house to themselves.”

  “Rosalind’s house, not hers,” I said.

  “Can we talk about Rosalind? Have you met her yet?”

  “No,” I said. “Have you?”

  “Yes, I have, and the weird thing is that I liked her. Despite the worrying conversations we all had when Mom told us about her.”

  “But isn’t that how sociopaths work? They’re charming when you first meet them, but it’s a veneer?” I said, wondering how I knew what I was saying.

  “I know, but she just didn’t seem like a sociopath to me. She didn’t seem flat. I didn’t really find her charming…just calm and pleasant. She was lying on the couch reading a novel with an afghan draped over her. I looked at her face while she was reading. She looked thoughtful.”

  “Did you see what she was reading?” I asked. It was irrelevant, but I was curious, looking for any window to look through to see who this woman was.

  “I did look, but her hand was covering the title,” he said. “If she was reading, though, maybe that means she’s fine, and not a sociopath. To read you have to have an in
terest in others and an inner life, right?”

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “Unless she was pretending to read. Or reading a book about getting ahead or manipulating people,” Glen said. “Like Machiavelli’s The Prince, or whatever the modern version of that book is.”

  “I doubt she was reading The Prince,” I said.

  “No, that’s not really a lying-down read—it’s more of a desk read,” said Glen.

  “Why are you making this into a game?” I said.

  “I’m trying to distract you, and part of me is scared. It’s how I cope. I’m sorry. But in any case, Rosalind seemed like a nice, calm person to me. Maybe there’s something strange, but she may just be calm and nice.”

  “Then why is Mom implying that she’s unmoored?”

  “I guess that’s the question. I think maybe Mom is just trying to say that Rosalind has been though a lot, and she’s trying to get us to stay away and let them have their space. She doesn’t want us trying to poke holes in her story. Besides, I don’t think Mom ever used the word sociopath herself, come to think of it. I think maybe Dad did, or you did.”

  “I didn’t call her that,” I said, thinking that Glen himself may even have been the one who had introduced the word. “And I wasn’t trying to poke holes in her story. I was just worried about her. Worrying and poking holes are different things,” I said. Even as I said it, I began to worry it wasn’t true—maybe when we worry about people, at least sometimes, we’re really trying to unravel them, to integrate their selves with ours so we have more control. No, I thought. Worrying is part of love; only a sociopath wouldn’t worry.

  The next afternoon I let my students leave class early after a discussion of The Woman in White that I was having trouble focusing on. I decided to stop in at my dad’s office to say hi. I walked down the muddy hill between the Humanities building and the Social Sciences building and went through a dented brown metal side door that led to the basement. A pipe dripped a rusty brown hole into the concrete floor inside.

  I knocked at the door to the research centre, but there was no sound from inside. I brushed some dust from the plaque on the door, rubbed my finger over the shape of the words.

  “Hi, Nancy,” said a voice behind me.

  “Oh, hi, Georges,” I said, turning, my heart beating quickly. Georges was always so quiet. It was as though spending his life in a basement had soundproofed his body.

  “Have you seen my dad?” I asked him. “Is he in today?”

  “No, he hasn’t been in at all this week. I know things haven’t been great. He mentioned your mom has someone new in her life.”

  “He put it that way?” I asked.

  “A woman came by here the other night, actually. I thought it was your mom, at first. She came in from the rain and she had a coat on, with a hood. But it was someone else, asking for your dad. I wondered if it was your mom’s new friend.”

  “But my mom wasn’t with her? Where was she?”

  Georges unlocked the office door and turned on a lamp just inside it, on a desk. I stood on the edge of the threadbare carpet on the office floor, which was worn so thin that its pattern of squares and roses looked like it was painted right onto the concrete. It had been there since I could remember, an old carpet my mom once had in her bedroom.

  “Would you like to sit down?” Georges asked. “I could make tea.”

  “That’s okay, thanks. I should get home. I’m worried about my parents, actually.”

  “I know things must not be easy right now.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m fine, actually.” I couldn’t open my mind to the merest threat of scrutiny through Georges’s academic lens, even though I knew he was expressing concern as a family friend and not as a researcher. I pulled the door closed behind me and studiously avoided looking at the “Understanding Is a Relationship” plaque.

  When I got home, this time it was Glen passed out on the couch. The TV was off, but the radio was on: it was tuned into a local AM station. A woman with a reedy voice was singing about following a river’s song to the sea. Glen still had his shoes on, and they were wet; there was a smeared line of mud, still wet, beside one of his feet on the couch cushion. His face looked flushed and radiant. I knew he looked like that when he was very drunk, the same way he had looked as a kid when he had a fever.

  I’d noticed that Glen had been drinking a lot—even more than usual. He’d been a heavy drinker as a teenager, but had seemed to pull things together as a young adult, until things got hard for him in the last few years. If we had a bottle of wine with dinner and started a second, that second bottle would always be empty the next morning, rinsed out and set on the back porch to be recycled. The bottles of bourbon, vodka, and scotch—even the liqueurs—in the cupboard dwindled quickly. My dad didn’t really drink, so I knew it must be Glen. Looking at him, I wondered, not for the first time, if the story of Kali’s brother Andre’s alleged drinking problem had been cover for the role Glen’s own drinking played in the end of his marriage. Kali had called me once, before the whole Andre thing, and asked me if I thought we should do something to help Glen with his drinking. We decided we would try, but were never really able to find a way of broaching it, and around that time he seemed kind of fine again for a while, until things got bad again, right before they separated. Not for the first time, I felt frustrated with him, and unsure of how much I could trust him.

  “Glen,” I said. “Have you seen Dad? Apparently, Georges hasn’t seen him at work for a week.”

  “He’s in bed,” Glen said. “He says he has a cold.”

  “More importantly, apparently a woman came by, looking for Dad at his office, but Mom wasn’t with her. This is getting weirder.”

  One eye opened slightly, but didn’t quite look at me.

  “Just because they live together doesn’t mean they’re together all the time. If you’re worried, we could just go see her at the house,” he said. “It’s the big white house beside the train tracks. On Wallace Street.”

  “That white house? Why didn’t you tell me? I thought you said her house was nice.” The house on Wallace Street had stood empty off and on for years, with a sagging porch and windows covered over with ivy. As kids, we would stop on our way home from school and play on a tire swing hanging from a birch tree in the side yard, scaring each other as we swung back and forth by saying we’d seen someone move in one of the house’s windows.

  “It’s fixed up now,” he said, even as his eye rolled back in its socket. He was asleep.

  I sat beside his legs on the couch and shook them. He wouldn’t wake up. I turned the radio and the light off, and left Glen a note on the coffee table telling him I’d gone to Wallace Street to talk to our mom and Rosalind, and that he could join me if he wanted when he woke up. I let myself out the back door, noticing a cluster of phosphorescent green rings of light gleaming from the line of empty bottles sitting on the porch’s floor, catching the beam of the street light overhead.

  I walked around for a while in the rain before I turned onto Wallace Street and headed toward the white house by the train tracks. It was a tall brick house with what looked like a new roof and windows. The broad white wooden porch had also recently been repaired. Thick shrubs grew up on either side of the porch, reaching almost as high as the balcony that sat on the porch roof. Ivy, in places, choked the bricks, and in other places I could see the dried suction cups and twining stains left behind where ivy had recently been stripped away. The house was a full three storeys, with one light on in a second-floor room, behind curtains.

  On the porch, I rang the doorbell and looked at my watch. It was just after ten. Too late, really, to come by unexpectedly and still act casual about it, but I didn’t care. I rang the bell again, and waited. I walked back out to the sidewalk and saw that the light in the second-floor room was off now. I thought about it and decided that if my mom lived in the
house, it was fair game for me to open the door and look for her. I went back to the porch, opened the screen door, paused for a second, and then tried the door. It swung open, and I was looking into a carpeted front hall, with a dark kitchen to the left ahead, and a staircase leading upstairs directly ahead of me. I stepped in quickly so that I wouldn’t have time to think about what I was doing.

  But as I started up the stairs, which were lined with family pictures—people posed in groupings, individuals sitting portrait-style—the candid smiles of strangers in their quaint, multi-picture frames made me realize I’d essentially just broken into a stranger’s house and was walking up into that person’s private world. Though I was filled with fear—for myself, but also fear of myself, this reckless, aggressive self—the need to see and know pushed me forward, no matter the consequences.

  I got to the second floor and called hello—but no response. There were more pictures along the wall and the faint sound of a TV. Then a door, and a hallway at the end of which I heard a whirring sound mixing with the TV voices behind a final door. As though compelled, I knocked on the door, preparing to face the shock and anger I deserved for being there uninvited.

  Nothing for a moment, then the door opened. It was a woman a bit younger than my mom, in a pair of navy blue cotton pajamas. Behind her was a bed. A small box fan was set in the windowsill, blowing the cool, rainy air into the room through the open window. Across from the bed, two chairs were set up facing each other at a table with a pot of tea on it, and a cup.

  “Hello,” she said. I looked at her closely. She looked vaguely familiar. She also looked perfectly calm and unsurprised to see me. It made no sense, and I struggled to reach for the regular, conversational words that had been banished from my brain by adrenaline.

  “Yes,” I said. “Hi. Are you Rosalind? I’m sorry for coming up here like this. The door was open and I thought I heard someone up here.”