What I Had Before I Had You

by Sarah Cornwell

  Laura and Courtney wave to their friend and part ways. It’s amazing how people fail to sense they are being followed. I think I would sense it in a flash. The quick glance of a stranger, that one camel coat seen and seen again through gaps in a crowd. I follow them at a more discreet distance along these quieter streets, until they vanish into a brownstone on Seventy-third Street with empty window boxes and two stone lions guarding its weathered oak door. Inside, a light flicks on.

  I straighten my clothes: jean shorts and a gray Buzzcocks T-shirt. How lost I must look, an orphan, a stray piece of Jersey flotsam. I walk across the street and up those granite steps, and I face the door and its semicircular cut-glass window through which I can see movement, distorted shapes and colors. They are in there. They have led me, finally, to their home.

  I knock.

  This is as far as I have planned. I should have taken a longer pause; I have run for blocks, and I cannot catch my breath. I feel like I am running, still. I almost turn around, but then there are quick footsteps and the click of a deadbolt sliding free, the brass tongue of a door handle depressed. The door swings open in that interminable way that all important doors do, and there, looking at me in the sober city light, is the grocery-store woman.

  Her forehead furrows, and her jaw sets square as she takes me in. Behind her I see expensiveness even before I can interpret and define the objects themselves.

  “Olivia,” she says. “Come in.” She knows my name. She steps aside and I take the step up into the house. Under the warm electric light of a chandelier, the woman looks less pale. Sideboards draped with raw silk line the wood-paneled foyer. Keys rest in a large half-shell. Laura’s laugh drifts from upstairs. The woman takes me by the shoulders and looks at my face. People rarely grab each other by both shoulders. It is deeply unsettling. “I’m so happy you’ve come,” she says in a formal way that confuses me and so gives me a jolt of anger.

  “Who are you?”

  She lets out her breath in a choking sound—a tired, terrible laugh. “Oh my gosh,” she says. “I’m Christie. I’m your aunt.”

  SHE WAS MAKING dinner, she says. Can I stay? The question seems ridiculous. I have stumbled into the home of my secret family, can I stay for dinner? She leads me down the hallway to the kitchen at the back of the house, where she sits me down firmly on a stool at a breakfast bar made of dark, textured stone, and gets me a glass of water. She buys frozen meatballs and canned spinach, I notice: cans on the counter, ripped plastic in the trash. Artificial food. A lidless trash can.

  “Are you all right?” she asks me, her hand flitting to my forehead to feel my temperature. That flitting motion—so jerky, nothing like the way my mother moves. “Olivia?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you doing here?” She looks embarrassed at how this came out. “Of course you’re welcome, but—” My aunt, I will learn, is not a socially graceful woman. “Did your mother tell you about us?”

  I realize my strategy all at once. “Yes. She sent me to visit.”

  Her disbelief reads on her face, but she has no idea how to proceed. Maybe Laura and Courtney never lie to her, or maybe they are better at it. She busies herself heating meatballs in a pan.

  I ask, “So, how come you’ve never visited us?”

  “We didn’t know where you were.”

  Christie eyes me, and I think she is trying to plumb the extent of my knowledge. I scramble for cover. “I mean, this summer, in Jersey.”

  “Your mother would have blown a gasket. You know.”

  I ask her what a gasket is, and she tells me it’s like a plug used in car engines. She smiles at me. A question she can answer. This woman, Aunt Christie, leans forward on the bar seriously, and I see the wispy hair around her temples, her hairline curving there like mine.

  She tells me that she and the girls usually vacation in Lavallette, and it was a fluke that they rented a house in Ocean Vista this summer, a fluke that they found us. They find the Jersey Shore more fun and more relaxing than their friends’ vacation spots in the Hamptons or Cape Cod, and besides, she says, they like going somewhere where they won’t see anyone they know. “And then I saw her there, wearing that purple apron, standing at the register. Looking just the same.”

  “At the grocery store,” I say, understanding.

  “She didn’t tell you.”

  I am quiet. Caught.

  “Would you like a soda?”

  Christie gets me the soda, and I think the task makes it easier for her to talk, navigating through the kitchen, cracking ice cubes out of the tray. If we keep talking, I may end up with four or five beverages. She and the girls happened through my mother’s checkout line, she says. “Your mother didn’t want us to talk to you. She said she’d move you somewhere else. I didn’t want to put you through that. I was still deciding what to do.” There is a guilty twinge to her tone that makes me suspect that is not entirely true. She was going to let things be, as my mother ordered. My mother is persuasive.

  It occurs to me: that shift when Laura and Courtney started running from me. They had been told to stay away. They did know me. None of it was in my head. I feel anger more viscerally than relief: My mother knew that I had seen my cousins in the flesh, and rather than tell me the truth, she let me think I was going crazy. I haven’t had a break today, she said in the grocery store. Do you think you had an experience?

  Christie paints a portrait in brief phrases, watching me for signs of upset: “The last time I saw your mother before this summer, she was pregnant with you. We tried to find her for a long time. It was so odd just running into her. Fifteen years.” She pours my soda at an angle to the glass, so there is almost no foam. “I spoke to her several times this summer about meeting you. About wanting to meet you.” She searches me for permission to speak frankly about my mother. Whose side am I on? “She made a scene.”

  There is a hiss as water from the overheating pasta finds the gas flame beneath the pot. Aunt Christie turns down the burner and gets out a strainer. Normal things to do on a normal night.

  “Would you like me to call the girls down?”

  “No.”

  “Okay.” She shakes the water out of the pasta.

  “It’s just the three of you?”

  She glances at me as she adds the meat. “The girls’ father is on a business trip.”

  I take in the kitchen: polished, uncluttered surfaces, a lazy Susan on a circular wooden table stocked with lemon pepper and gourmet spreads, a purple stained-glass sconce casting cool light over the room, so that I feel vaguely underwater.

  “Weird light,” I say, and my aunt explains that it was Laura’s idea, because she has read that cool colors make you eat less.

  “She’s trying to lose some weight before track season. She’s a sprinter.”

  “Is she good?” I ask.

  “She’s very good.”

  There is the squeak of sneakers on hardwood, and there they are in the doorway, unsummoned, Laura and Courtney, their familiarity laid bare. They stare at me with their large eyes, and then at Christie.

  “Cat’s out of the bag,” says Christie, and the girls move into the room.

  “Hi,” Laura says, but Courtney swoops forward and hugs me, her long slender arms around my back and my face in her red hair, her chin snug to my shoulder. I go dizzy with the speed of change. When she pulls back, her eyes are watery pink.

  We eat dinner at the round table. Silverware clinks. Napkins wipe. Laura and Courtney sit closer together than most people do, and I wonder if, like puppies, they huddle for protection without knowing it. I am a strange, unknown force, potentially threatening to the order of things.

  “How long will you be in the city?” Courtney asks. It is so easy to like Courtney—her impulsiveness, her little-girl politeness here at the table, and the memory of her raucous laughter, her head tilted back to rest on a st
range boy’s shoulder that first night as she watched Jake climb the cross-bracing of the Ocean Spirit.

  “I don’t know.”

  Christie tucks her chin down, twirls her pasta. “Your mother doesn’t know you’re here, does she?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “Really?”

  I can see I won’t be able to convince her. “No. She’s on a trip.”

  Christie sets her fork down. “She left you alone?”

  “I’m fifteen.” I see this is big news for Christie, and my lie generator whirs into action. “She’s at this funeral for this film director. This documentarian. They were really old friends.”

  “Has she left you alone before?”

  “No,” I lie.

  “Well, you’re safe here,” says Christie, as if I have escaped from a prison camp or a cruel orphanage. “I’ll make up the guest room.”

  Laura picks at her food, eyes averted. “Will she go to Chapin?”

  “We’ll see.”

  “I have a place,” I tell them. “In Brooklyn.”

  “Brooklyn!” says Laura.

  “Olivia, I’d like you to stay here,” says Christie, drawing herself up tall in her chair—another familiar gesture. “Until I’m able to get in touch with your mother. What’s the director’s name who died?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “How did she know him?”

  I think quickly. “He was a client of hers at Debbie’s.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The brothel she worked at. Before I was born.”

  They all look at one another, and Courtney laughs, a musical little hiccup.

  “Before you were born?” asks Christie. She looks at me for a long time and then shakes her head. “Sweetie, no. That can’t be true.”

  Tiny hairs prickle on my arms. “Except it is.”

  Nobody speaks for a clock-ticking moment, and then Christie tries to take my hand and I retract it. She speaks softly, firmly, carefully. “I think you know this, but your mom doesn’t always know what’s real and what’s not real.”

  I realize what feels so wrong about the air: There are no pets in this house. These people don’t care for animals. Kids who grow up without animals turn into cold people. They turn into bankers. Suddenly, I hate these people and this house and the dark expensive countertops and the raw silk and the way they are all looking at me and waiting to see what I’ll do. Who is this bitch to tell me about my own mother? My mother wouldn’t have kept me away from them if they were good people. The room warps and blinks, and I am smothered by the clean air of this house where they keep no animals.

  Something I do makes everyone stand up. I go. I move down the hallway toward the front door. There is the dark street on the other side of the cut glass. I won’t run, I think. I won’t let on how hot and muffled and terrible my thinking is, how something is whispering in my ear to run run run run run!

  Christie follows me into the hallway, but I shake her hand off my shoulder. My momentum takes me out the door, between the stone lions, down down down the stairs and out, running after all, onto the streets of Manhattan. I run for many blocks so I can focus on the running, on a pain in my lung, and let that fill my thoughts. Lung. Lung. Lung.

  On the subway rattling back toward Brooklyn, I watch a woman rip chunks from a Big Mac and feed them to her toddler, who strains against the straps of her stroller openmouthed like a baby bird. I want my mother in a way I have rarely felt, a physical yearning. I feel like a baby, like that ugly subway baby. I feel stupid and ashamed. Come back, I whisper inside my head, and I cross my arms tight across my stomach to hold in the tears that are coming. Come back for me.

  “ROYAL FLUSH.” MAX splays his hand across the rickety card table, and the whole thing lurches, tipping my beer into my lap. I jump up, holding my skirt away from my legs as the beer soaks through. It is dusk. Though I have told Jake nothing of what happened on Seventy-third Street yesterday, there was some relief in morning coffee and morning sex and the smell of his warm neck. We spent the afternoon watching movies on Max’s futon, and I am managing, mostly, not to think.

  Bees hover and dive around the honeysuckle bushes that grow on the fence around Max’s backyard. Jake gets up and, pretending to wring out my skirt, sticks the cotton in his mouth and sucks the beer from it. Max grunts with laughter, and his friend Elena, a Spanish girl with short tight-curled hair, smiles lazily, stirring a pink drink in a tall glass with her fingernail. The dogs muscle over to lap beer from the grass, all but Blanche, who lies serene by the far fence, surveying. I am grateful for the dogs: their trust, their musk, their questionlessness.

  Jake has lost a couple hundred dollars to Max at poker, which is most of the cash we brought, aside from the two thousand for the package. I try to explain to Jake that this is a problem. He lays his head on my shoulder and tells me I shouldn’t think so much about money. The sky turns violet and then navy, and the cars pass out front with honks and whining brakes, hip-hop and reggae.

  Max and Elena go inside, and Jake throws sticks for the dogs. Blanche bounds over to join in. The dogs hurtle across the small yard, smacking up against the fence, things of pure tireless muscle. It is the red-nose getting to the stick first every time. Her wide face is all joy as she trots the stick back to Jake. I sit in the grass, reaching for the dogs when they come near, rubbing their thick necks. They sputter and lick and roll on their backs.

  “Let’s take them for a walk,” says Jake. He has that look of excitement on his face that means he thinks he’s found something to do to please Max. He’s been getting that look the last few days: bringing back sausage to grill, cleaning the kitchen, gathering the park wildflowers that Max’s baby likes to pick apart with her fat, tiny hands. I’ve never seen him so helpful.

  “All of them?” I ask.

  “You’re right. Let’s just take two.”

  I snap Blanche’s leash on her collar. I am very careful not to deprioritize her. The red-nose seems to understand and wriggles up to Jake, wagging her stump of a tail. We find some leashes inside and take Blanche and the red-nose out into the dusk.

  The thing happens under the BQE. There are boys under the highway again, in that dark swath of shadow snaking north-south. They could be the same or different boys, but it doesn’t matter. They have dogs, too. Jake is talking about Max’s supplier upstate, who grows in great greenhouses and deals with only one dealer per city, and only dealers willing to drive up and back. That’s power, says Jake feverishly. Controlling the supply.

  “Nice dog,” a kid in a white T-shirt calls out, pointing at the red-nose on the end of Jake’s leash. “You want to sell that dog?”

  “Not mine.” We walk a little faster, feeling suspicious but not sure yet that they are closing in around us, shuffling to invisible tactical marks all around the underpass.

  “She’d fuck your shit up,” the kid says to another kid holding on to a white dog, and they start yelling back and forth, kind of friendly. Then they are laughing, and it seems like one of those moments that just passes away. But then the laughing T-shirt kid breaks out of the group and lunges at our red-nosed dog, pointing at the other kid’s mangy white dog. He shouts, “Kill!” My understanding lags. The T-shirt kid leaps backward and claps his hands to his face, goes, “Oh shit!,” delighted as the red-nose breaks free of Jake’s grip like he is a little girl holding on to that leash and surges across the pavement toward the white dog, who comes forward to meet her with the tragic energy of the clear loser.

  The red-nose sinks her eager teeth into the fur of the white dog’s neck and hangs bloodily to the wound, the white dog screaming and twisting from the tear, where the red-nose holds her off-kilter, so that every twist of her wiry body deepens the wound. Jake is yelling and waving his arms like an idiot, trying to get Max’s dog back. I am still holding on to Blanche’s leash. Blanche watches the fight wi
th watery eyes, her muscles twitching as though she is asleep and only dreaming of a fight. Does this recall her savage puppyhood? I have no idea; I realize I hardly know her at all. I tug on her leash, turning to run away.

  There isn’t time to unloop the leash from my wrist before I am on the ground, skinning my legs on the asphalt, dragged into the fray of teeth and blood-wet fur and the brown intent eyes of dogs. I hear Jake scream, the higher pitch of real fear. I am vaguely aware of human movement around me as the boys come toward the dogs, and of the tightness of the nylon leash binding my wrist, Blanche’s jerking pulling it tighter and tighter. My skirt is twisted up to my hips, and I feel a flare of anger at these boys looking at my bare thighs, all these boys. The red-nose looks huge above me as she raises her head to slam the white dog’s body against the pavement. My sinus fills with the stink of blood and dog and fear.

  The white dog takes advantage of the shift to get loose and lock his jaws into our red’s sandy shoulder. I am thinking of the red-nose, and of how angry Max will be when he finds out, when I feel it: a cold stabbing pain in my thigh. Things go dark and delirious, and I imagine myself bound by the wrists to a giant dartboard, squirming to avoid the rain of dagger-sharp icicles thrown by shadow giants too distant to see.

  I am aware of being carried by Jake and someone else, and then the warm staleness of Max’s apartment. Somebody gives me something to swallow, and for a while things run clear, like a movie without sound. Where is Blanche? I want to ask.

  Jake comes in through the door, the red-nose limping behind him with a huge tear running from her shoulder to her belly, the fur thick and sticky with blood, the edge of the wound discolored where the white dog’s teeth penetrated deeper muscle. Blood oozes down her front leg. She looks at me panting, her tongue lolling from her wide smile. Max lifts her huge weight and lays her on the rug. He curses up at Jake. Jake goes to him, and the two of them gesture and yell until Elena comes out half-dressed, in a floral bra, screaming, “Oh! Oh!,” and kneels over the torn dog, patting the wound with her hands as if that will help.