by Leah Stewart
“Wait,” Jennifer says. “I’ll take all of them, and the frame.” She catches up to Megan and the boys and says, “I couldn’t resist.”
Megan laughs. She puts her arm around Jennifer’s shoulders and squeezes, leans her head against Jennifer’s so their temples touch. “Sucker,” she says affectionately. “You have to give me one.”
They drive home with the sun low in the sky. The water in the lake is a dull silver now, but the clouds are gorgeous, voluminous, dark and white, lit from behind. Megan rides in the passenger seat with her head tilted back, gazing out the window. “Michelangelo clouds,” she says. “Beautiful.”
The List of Sins
I’ve had too much activity today, I think. I had one of my dizzy spells. It went on and on, even after I sat down. I gripped the seat of the chair like my father used to tell me to. You’re so clumsy you’ll fall off. Yes, Papa, you’re right. When you’re young you get sick and you know there’ll be an end to it, but when you’re old you know a time is coming when you won’t get better. I’ll get dizzy and I’ll get dizzy, and then I’ll fly off the merry-go-round. I’m getting metaphorical, Papa. I mean I’ll die.
Today is my father’s birthday. He lived to be eighty-seven, which seemed so old to me then, and yet is younger than I am now. I am older than he was when he died. I am so old.
What I wanted was for Jennifer to offer to drive me down the Mountain to Murfreesboro, to see his grave, but she didn’t. She wouldn’t. I couldn’t get her to. When she was here a few days ago, I mentioned the birthday, and my habit of visiting his grave on it. At the time I tried not to admit to myself why I was telling her this—though why? Why am I still trying to hide myself from myself? Clearly the old are not immune to self-delusion. I didn’t want to ask her directly, so instead I talked at length about my uncertainty that I should be trusted that long behind the wheel, hoping she would arrive at the idea on her own. Maybe she wasn’t really listening. At any rate she didn’t take the hint. So my plan was to ask her directly, after our morning appointment.
But first thing this morning, the phone rang, and when I answered, it was Jennifer. “I’m so sorry,” she said, “but I need to cancel today.”
“You can’t,” I said.
Silence.
“Our appointment’s in less than an hour,” I said. “I’ve been planning on it.”
“Something came up,” she said. “I’m sorry, Margaret.” She said it like she meant it, but so what if she’s sorry? What do I care if she’s sorry?
“What came up?” I asked.
“Milo’s school has a teacher in-service day,” she said. “This is all my fault, I’m sorry—I’d forgotten. I only just remembered.”
I knew this was a lie. If she’d had a reason that good she would’ve led with it. How many times in my life have I known someone was lying and said nothing? How many times have I lied and watched the other person feign belief? We say nothing, we say nothing. Life would be unbearable without lies.
“Is that so,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. Her voice was cool and crisp, impenetrable. She’d make no effort to persuade me. She is a good liar. She doesn’t care if you believe her.
I look forward to her visits. They are what I look forward to. Forlorn is not the wrong word for how I felt. This is the second time she’s canceled on me. Does she fail to understand what a cruelty it is?
“Also,” she said, “I wanted to tell you I think we should put the history project on hold for a while.”
“What?” I said. “Why?”
“I’m starting to book other clients, and I don’t think I’ll be able to give it my full attention.”
“That makes no sense. Why book other clients when I’m paying you to come here?”
There was a brief silence, and then she said, “To make a living as a massage therapist, I need to have a good-sized client base.”
“But I’m paying you to come here.”
“And I still will. For massage.”
“This makes no sense, Jennifer.”
“Margaret, I’m sorry. Milo’s calling me. I’ll see you on Wednesday at the usual time?”
I put on my sweetest, most genteel voice and said, “Of course.” Then I hung up and sat there trembling. I was supposed to tell her the end of the story today, but she’s bottled me up, and the feeling is unbearable. I can tell it to her anyway, when she comes here. I can insist. But it wouldn’t be the same to blurt it out lying on the table or afterward when she’s hustling out the door. I need her to be listening. I need to see in her face what she thinks of what I’ve done. Otherwise what is the point?
I drove to her house when my appointment was supposed to be. Just to see if she was there. I had in my head that if she wasn’t there it would prove she was lying, though I realize now that’s nonsense, as she could’ve taken the boy to the playground or the grocery store. It’s impossible to be inconspicuous coming up her long gravel drive, so I planned my excuses. I took an egg from the carton and made a paper-towel nest for it inside a Tupperware container. It took me some time to decide how best to transport that single egg. If she was there, I planned to say I was replacing the egg she loaned me. She’d just think it was some antiquated politeness. In my day, and so forth. Being old has so few advantages. One must take them where one can.
She wasn’t there. No car in the drive. At that moment, I still believed this proved she’d lied, and I sat there taking in that knowledge. I was angry but tears pricked at my eyes. I’d told her what happened to Kay—something I’d never told anyone, not anyone. I suppose I’d thought she might say it wasn’t my fault, she might absolve me after all these years. But she said I’d lied about what happened to Kay, in the aggrieved tone of the betrayed, and then she said I should just change the story. And now she’d rejected me. I can’t change the story, Jennifer! Don’t you think I would if I could? I can’t, I can’t, and you can’t either.
I got out of the car. I was at her house, and she wasn’t. What detective would fail to seize such an opportunity?
Of course, I had no idea whether she locked her door. Most people here don’t, or anyway that’s the local lore. It’s the kind of place you don’t have to lock your doors, they say with satisfaction. Unlike Nashville, that crime-ridden flatland, that alien planet. Unlike the rest of the world. Sometimes up here on this mountain it can feel like there is no rest of the world. All those other places we’ve been are just dreams we had, as life would seem like a dream from the pretty claustrophobia of heaven.
I can’t believe in heaven. Even now, as death grows ever harder to unimagine.
Her door was unlocked. She must have heard the same conversations. Inside, the house was much as I had seen it before—disastrous. Not the home of someone who expects to invite anyone inside. But you never know when someone might appear at your door—a neighbor, the UPS man. You must always be presentable. That’s what my mother taught me. You must always be ready to conceal.
I’m not interested in anything that belongs to the little boy. I looked for a space that was Jennifer’s alone, which proved annoyingly difficult to find. Even her bedroom showed signs of the child’s habitation—a tiny knight on the pillow, a discarded superhero shirt on the floor. A pair of his pajamas beside the bed, inside out, led me to wonder if she lets him sleep with her—something my parents certainly would never have allowed. All this bonding they do these days. As if what’s between a parent and a child would vanish without snuggling and trips to the zoo. I can attest that one is sufficiently bonded without those things, one is sufficiently stuck.
Down the hall from the bedrooms is a small room, barely bigger than a closet, that seems to serve as Jennifer’s study. Desk, computer, bookcase, two-drawer filing cabinet, in which papers have been dumped rather than filed. Also in the filing cabinet: photos of Jennifer with a baby and a teenage girl on the beach; a stopped watch; a screwdriver; an assortment of paper clips; the wheel of a toy car; an empty glasses case; a smiling Lego head;
a little card of the sort that comes with flowers. You are all that matters.
On the back of the photo it said: Me, Milo, and Zoe, and the date.
Zoe, who called the police on her own mother, who marked her mother as a murderer, who pinned a letter to her mother’s chest. Imagine if she is wrong. Imagine if she is right. When I looked up Jennifer Carrasco on the Internet and found those articles, I felt a hard-boiled unsurprise. It turns out I am a detective after all. These detectives—they always uncover the same transgressions. A murder, a theft. Another woman’s husband, another man’s wife. We cheat, we steal, we lie, we kill. The list of sins is short. We all do the same bad things.
You are all that matters. Was it from the dead man, her husband? No one has ever said such a thing to me. Perhaps you would keep a card like that even if you murdered the one who wrote it.
Listen, Jennifer, I know what it’s like. I know what it’s like to have a madwoman in the attic of your memory. The thing you can’t let out. The thing you must pretend isn’t there, even when you hear the knocking.
Did you know that pressure on the brain swells it until it pushes its way out the bottom of the skull? That’s called herniating. The pressure can come from a depressed skull fracture. Maybe a piece of shrapnel flew through the air and caught you in the head. Different kinds of ordnances cause different injuries. A shell, for instance, causes percussive injuries, because the body gets thrown, and if it gets thrown hard enough, that’s one way it stops being the person and becomes the body.
We all become the body eventually. I know that.
Sitting in Jennifer’s chair at Jennifer’s desk, I imagined she was dead and I’d come to clean out her house. I often imagine this scenario, except I am the dead one, my house the one being cleaned. A silent interrogation, the examination of my things. What will they think of me?
When my parents died, I was the one who cleaned out their house. My sister came from North Carolina to “help” for three days, but her help consisted mostly of letting me know which things she wanted, then sneaking off to have various items appraised. She cared only about a certain kind of value. She had her eyes on the prize. I got lost in the rest of it—the evidence of their strange and secret lives. An entire dresser drawer full of my mother’s ring boxes: black cardboard; clear, cut like crystal, imprinted with something in Korean; red velvet, worn bare in patches, with a snap-open lid. When I found this last one, I thought I remembered it, presented by my father at a formal dinner party on one of their anniversaries. In one of my mother’s jewelry boxes, I found the ring I remembered belonging in it—platinum with diamonds in a style that had survived to become vintage. “An apology ring,” I once heard my mother call it.
Why had she kept all those ring boxes? Had my father given her all of them? Were there that many apologies?
His drawers, his desk, contained no such mysteries. Everything was organized, spare, neatly arranged, as though in anticipation of my snooping. Unrevealing, I’d say, except in the sense that it’s revealing to want to go unknown.
I’m not saying my sister got everything of value. I’m no dummy. I got it appraised, too, all of it. We split things fifty-fifty. Hers she sold, mine I live with. As I write I’m wearing my mother’s apology ring. It used to fit, but now it slips around my finger, too heavy and too loose. As soon as I was back home in Nashville, I threw out all the ring boxes.
I imagine if Jennifer were dead, Zoe going through her things, she would want what I want—an answer, evidence, an end to uncertainty. When she went to the police about her mother, did she just believe her guilty? Or did she know? What I really wanted to find was a journal like this one. If Jennifer keeps one, it’s well hidden. It wasn’t in the desk. It wasn’t beside her bed. This is as close as I came: in the middle desk drawer, beneath a scatter of scrap paper, was a pad of sticky notes with Zoe and a phone number written on the top one. Below that, a lightly drawn question mark, over which Jennifer had put an X.
Here is a catalog of my precious objects:
The letters I wrote from the war, and my mother’s replies
My father’s medals from the First World War
A dried flower, pressed inside a photo album
My doctoral degree, in a black frame
My first nurse’s cap
Also, this: a silver spoon like people used to collect, engraved with the word Wisconsin. Do people still collect these spoons, arrange them in little wooden curio shelves carved to secure their handles, made exactly for this spoon-collecting purpose? I don’t think so. Oh, the things that disappear from the world. This spoon belonged to Kay. Kay wasn’t from Wisconsin. After she was gone, I found it. I’ve never had any idea what it meant, but I’ve kept it all these years and whatever it meant for Kay, I believe I’ve kept that, too. The spoon is in the bottom drawer of my father’s desk. I’ve never been to Wisconsin, but when I think of it I imagine snow.
From Jennifer’s house I took a small stone. It was on a high shelf of the bookcase in her room, which is how I know it’s hers and not Milo’s. It’s a brown rock—smooth, shiny, close to round but slightly irregular. It contains many shades of brown, even approaching gold. I imagine she found it on a beach. She is the kind of melancholy person one can picture gazing out to sea. Sometimes I picture myself standing on the prow of the ship that brought me home from the war, the salt wind in my hair, on my face an expression of sorrow and resolve. When in fact I spent much of the journey home crying in my bunk, trying not to be heard by the other girls.
The rock is here on my desk now. It’s pleasing to the touch. I’ll have to hide it before the next time Jennifer comes over. One more object that no one else will ever understand.
I have Zoe’s number on my desk, too, and I can’t help but think of how not so long ago I had her mother’s number here, yet to be called, and now my life has changed. I wonder what Zoe would say if I called her. Were I a real detective, I wouldn’t hesitate. I’d think I had every right to call her and ask her what she knows.
So much depends on every choice we make. This is obvious and yet endlessly to be marveled at. So many tales of what ripples outward, so many dreams of parallel universes. Because we tell stories about the things we find impossible to bear. Then we can pretend they are only stories.
I went down the Mountain today after all. I stood for a long time at my father’s grave, and told him none of this.
Offerings
Now that she has friends, or at least potential friends—now that she knows people—Jennifer is cleaning up in case any of them drop by. In case she takes a notion to invite them over. Her grandmother used to say that having someone see your dirty house was like having someone see you naked. And her mother. And her father. They were and are constant cleaners, habitual cleaners, and for most of her life she’s been one, too. But she’s let this house fall into an embarrassing condition, in a way she’d stopped noticing until Margaret came over for the egg and she saw it under her critical eye. Ever since, she’s felt a nagging sense of duty neglected, but she’s done nothing about it until today. She’s in Milo’s room, sorting toys into bins. She saved his room for last, because it was the most daunting. Her own room is spotless, and the bathroom, and the study—everything. She’s just about ready, should anyone unexpectedly arrive.
She slides her arms under Milo’s bed to feel for small items. Wherever she looks, she finds Legos. She sweeps some out and picks through them, sorting by color—an almost entirely pointless task, but she’s feeling thorough. Red, yellow, blue, black, black, yellow, blue. Her cleaning has failed to turn up the stone that belongs on the bookshelf in her study. Yellow, yellow, yellow, green. She thought maybe Milo took it and she’d find it in his room.
When she’s finished she tours her clean house in admiration of her handiwork. The only thing that continues to nag is the missing stone. At the bookshelf in her study, she once again runs her hand over the space where the stone used to be. It’s hard not to believe, when something is lost, that
you’ll find it back in the place where it was, if you just look one more time.
One summer, when Zoe was four, the same age that Milo is now, Jennifer took her to the beach for a few days, just the two of them. The trip had been Tommy’s idea as much as hers, and the theory was that without him there to prefer, to anticipate, Zoe might like her mother more. At first the experiment seemed like a failure, Zoe kicking Jennifer’s seat so hard on the drive there that she had to move Zoe behind the passenger seat, Zoe shouting, “You told Daddy not to come,” Zoe wailing that she’d left behind her favorite toy and wanted to go home. What toy it was, Zoe wouldn’t say. She was skilled at manipulation but not yet good at lies.
On the third day Zoe started bringing her things she’d found around the rental cottage. A shell. A puzzle piece. A feather. A tiny gold bead. Jennifer would come upon these treasures, placed in a way that marked them clearly as meant for her: beside her coffee cup, on her bedside table, resting atop her book. It was like being courted by a cat. Jennifer was afraid that if she acknowledged the gifts out loud they’d stop coming, so instead she responded in kind. She left a dime, a lip balm, a pair of cheap shiny earrings. Once or twice she watched from around a corner as Zoe discovered her offerings. The child’s delight was unmistakable, but she too never said a word. It was hard to say who was following whose lead. One day Jennifer left Zoe that stone, a souvenir of the beach, shiny and smooth, and for the remainder of the vacation Zoe carried it around in her pocket, taking it out from time to time to study it under the light.
The vacation over, they were an hour away from the beach house when Zoe started to cry. The stone was lost. She couldn’t find it. Jennifer turned the car around. She had to go back to the rental office and ask for the keys. It took them another hour to find the stone, behind the headboard of the bed where Zoe had been sleeping. Zoe clutched it all the way home, and when they got there, before Tommy came out to lift his precious sleepy daughter from the car, Zoe handed it to Jennifer, her expression focused and intense, and said, “You keep this for me, Mom. So I can always find it.” As soon as she laid eyes on her daddy, she was Tommy’s girl again, but still, for a long time after that, Zoe had checked in with Jennifer on the stone’s safety, and Jennifer had thought that meant something, and then Zoe had grown older and forgotten, and Jennifer had kept it anyway, had kept it all this time. Now it was gone.