Signs and Wonders

by Alix Ohlin

  “Excuse me,” she said, “one of the children lost her mitten.”

  “Like a kitten,” Tori says.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” Tori tells her, shaking her head. This is her life. Nothing she says sounds as right as it did inside her head.

  “Are you, uh, a mother?”

  “Oh, no,” Tori says. “I’m just sitting here. Come to think of it, I don’t know where their mothers are.”

  Rebecca stands in front of her, holding the mitten by its cuff like it’s something dirty. She doesn’t know why, but she feels it’s important that she not lay claim to it, or try to resolve the problem herself. Okay, she does know why. It’s because she thinks the reason she has no kids is that she doesn’t deserve them, she’d better stay away from them, because she might do it wrong. By some higher and mysterious authority this much has been decreed. When Gabriel told her she shouldn’t keep the baby, that they weren’t going to be a family (because of his wife, that long-suffering woman), he said, “There will be other chances.” She agreed with him and his wisdom. But in the doctor’s office, she felt, no, she knew, there would be no other chances. She could have gone off and had the baby on her own, right? After all, other women—stronger ones—did. Just not her.

  Tori sees that Rebecca is weirdly paralyzed, helpless. The woman is small and pinched looking, tired in that permanent way that afflicts women on the other side of thirty. Tori used to think this was caused by being a parent. Now she thinks it’s just life.

  She stands up. “I’m sure we can figure out whose mitten it is,” she offers. “Let’s just look for a kid with frostbite on one hand.”

  Rebecca smiles at her gratefully. She’s younger, this other woman, around her sister’s age, and very pretty—short and voluptuous, with olive skin and green eyes, a complexion better suited to the red coat than Rebecca’s pale one. She’s wearing lipstick and has a come-hither look. Rebecca bets she’s popular with men. Some women just have it, this thing, a magnetism that doesn’t only have to do with beauty or even sex. It’s desirability. Women like that never go two years without a date. They never wind up agreeing to have a drink after work with their older, sweet-tempered, sad-eyed boss, even though they’re sensible and morally upright and know much better than to get involved with a married man. Women like that never know the pulsing, toothachey loneliness of an ordinary life.

  As she’s thinking this, Tori shakes her head as if she wants to deny the claim, and Rebecca notices a little wetness around her eyes, like she’s been crying. Although it could be the cold. “Are you okay?” she asks suddenly.

  Tori blinks, then smiles. “Sure,” she says. “Let’s find that kid.”

  Together they walk through the playground like some kind of police duo, fashionable Mounties in their red coats, looking at the kids and trying to figure out, in the blur of skipping and falling down and crying again, which one they’re looking for.

  “Hey, hey, kids,” Tori calls out. “Which of you kittens has lost a mitten?”

  The kittens ignore her. “It’s like I don’t exist,” she says to Rebecca. “Kids don’t recognize that I’m alive. Good thing I don’t have one, I’d never get it to do a thing I say.”

  “It’s probably different once you actually have one,” Rebecca says. “A mothering instinct kicks in, and then you’re good at scolding and nagging.”

  “And giving advice and instilling guilt.”

  “Exactly,” Rebecca says. “It all happens automatically. At least I think so, anyway. I wouldn’t know for sure.”

  Tori doesn’t answer. The two women stand for a moment encircled by their thoughts, each examining her own future and its branching flowchart of possibilities. Tori thinks about a life with Tommy and/or kids, and how they might be able to make it, to be happy, but then again might not; also about life with Frank, and/or kids, and how this life once seemed not only necessary but inevitable, until it dissolved. And it’s so strange that this can happen, and something so counted-on can just wither once exposed to the air; but it never withered for Frank, who insisted on meeting her here today, for one last time. She loves Frank. She misses him constantly. But Tommy—they’ve been together since they were nineteen and he’s going through rehab, changing everything for their life together. “It’s not something you walk away from,” she told Frank, and she could almost hear him thinking, Neither am I.

  Rebecca is thinking about how something drained out of her in the doctor’s office, some part of herself that believed in change and possibility, in all the and/or flowchart branches of a long and storied life. She thinks about how she hated Gabriel then, and blamed him, and wrote that letter to his long-suffering wife. But the truth was that in spite of it all she did love him; she didn’t idealize him or anything, she simply loved him, and that love was pure and true and strong even though its circumstances were sordid and trivial and absurd.

  · · ·

  The bus stops at the other end of the park. Coming out of the rec center, snapping her gum (which seems to lose its tensile strength in the cold, and she wonders, briefly, why), the day-care attendant notices a man in a gray wool coat get off and start across the park in the direction of her charges. The only reason she notices him is to think that her boyfriend is better-looking and taller and more muscular, and she can’t wait until she sees him tonight. She’s got a one-track mind, that attendant.

  A child runs up to Rebecca and doesn’t say anything, just stands in front of her, a strand of blond hair leaking out from underneath a fleece cap. Crouching down, Rebecca can see it’s a girl, who removes her hand from the pocket of her snowsuit and shows it to her, shyly, like an injury of which she is ashamed. Their eyes meet.

  “It’s okay,” Rebecca says mechanically, and the child nods. “Come here.”

  She fits the mitten over her small, white hand and tugs it up over her wrist, the girl so close that Rebecca can smell the sour yet wholesome scent of her skin. The two of them look at each other, the child still holding up her mittened hand as if Rebecca isn’t finished yet. What’s left to do? A kiss on the forehead, a “You’re dismissed”? What’s the protocol? Then she realizes she put the mitten on wrong, that the girl’s thumb isn’t fitting into its slot. So she has to pull the mitten off and start over again, the child staring all the while. Rebecca’s starting to wonder if something’s wrong with the kid, with the whole lot of them, and that’s why they’ve been abandoned in the park to play by themselves.

  Tori, meanwhile, is standing next to her, standing there in her red coat, her long blond hair snaking down her back. From the back, of course, she looks just like Rebecca. Only one thought exists in her mind: Frank.

  The man coming toward them, the gun warm in his hand, could be Gabriel or Frank or even Tommy, escaped from rehab. But not all of them; only one. As it turns out, it’s Gabriel. It’s the sad-eyed ones you have to watch out for—another piece of advice that could usefully have been given to Rebecca, but which she would probably have ignored.

  You can see where this is going, right? With the red coats and the blond hair? There are no surprises for you here.

  From a distance of ten yards Gabriel sees only Tori’s back, and he is so blinded by his belief that it’s Rebecca—the woman who wrote a letter to his long-suffering wife—that he doesn’t notice the other form crouched down next to her. If he did, he might think it is a bundled coat or a child on a sled; his focus is that intense, the world outside it merely peripheral.

  The day-care attendant puts away her cell phone, wonders who all these adults are, then sees him pull out a gun and fire. A woman in a red coat falls to the ground, lightly, almost casually, as if in jest.

  The attendant starts to run. Children are screaming, some of them running away. Rebecca drops the mitten and stands up and turns around. She thinks of cars: backfires, accidents. She doesn’t take a gunshot into account. Then, seeing Gabriel, she thinks he has come for her, to make a life with her, that he has finally left his wife. All
this crosses her mind with certainty in the second before she notices the gun. Once she does, she sees the woman on the ground beside her, crouches again, and turns her over, feeling for a pulse. There is none. The woman still looks alive—that is, exactly like she did only moments earlier—but she is dead.

  “Oh,” Rebecca says. “Oh. Oh.” The little girl runs away.

  You knew that the gun was going to go off, and that it was going to kill a woman in a red coat. It was only a question of which woman, and when. And of course why. This isn’t some kind of mystery. It’s not even a story about the murder, really, or police and jail and a trial. It’s about the moment after the murder, when Rebecca looks Gabriel in the eye and he looks back. The bitter, burnt smell of gun smoke is in the air between them. Here’s the thing: in that instant, Gabriel knows that he’s killed the wrong woman, that his Rebecca—the love of his life, notwithstanding the long-suffering wife, whom he couldn’t bear to have hurt—is still alive, and he’s so grateful and happy that he smiles. And Rebecca, who with one part of her brain knows he must have come to kill her, with another part of it registers this happiness and smiles back, out of instinct, acknowledgment, and love.

  And meanwhile Tori is gone and, somewhere in the world, Tommy and Frank do not know it yet.

  Soon, of course, there will be police, jail, a trial. There will be repercussions, grief, and pain of enormous proportions, with consequences radiating out from each of the three people in this park, toward friends and families and coworkers and neighbors and childhood acquaintances they haven’t spoken to in years but in whose minds they nonetheless appear and flit around, moth-like, unexplained, from time to time.

  You think this is a story about coincidence and/or injustice and/or fate, about the extraordinarily wrong actions of ordinary people. But you’re wrong. This is about the moment when one of them realizes he has killed the wrong person, and the two of them, these lovers, very nearly run to each other and embrace. They almost kiss over the dead body of the woman who is not her. It’s about the moment in which hope leaps in his heart. The moment in which she vows never to let him go again.

  The Only Child

  It all started when Sophie came home from college, between her sophomore and junior years. She wasn’t happy to be back. She’d grown to love Boston, the depressing, blustery winters, the intricate one-ways and roundabouts, and felt she’d outgrown California and its sunny, childlike weather. Worst of all was her mother. Sophie was an only child, and her mother had always clung to her. She tiptoed into her room at night to watch her sleep. As a child Sophie hadn’t noticed, but now that she was older she usually wasn’t asleep yet when her mother came in, and she’d look up from her book and say, “What are you looking at?”

  Which only made her mother smile affectionately and back out of the room. By late June Sophie couldn’t take it anymore; she went over to her friend Beena’s house and they called up Trevor, their high-school drug connection, and got a dime bag and some Ecstasy, and suddenly it was four in the morning and Sophie drove home at breakneck speed only to find her parents still up, waiting.

  “You guys,” she said, “you’re driving me crazy.”

  Her mother was crying.

  “It’s not that bad,” Sophie said. “I was just out late. At school I do this all the time. I mean, not all the time. But you know what I mean.”

  “We have to tell you something,” her father said. “We should’ve told you a long time ago.” He was a serious man, her father, prone to ominous pronouncements about issues he had no ability to affect. “This real-estate bubble will burst very soon,” he’d say while barbecuing chicken. Or: “Gas prices will go up much farther before they ever go down.”

  So Sophie wasn’t that concerned when she sat down to hear what they had to say. She hadn’t steeled herself for any news in particular, and this, in addition to the drugs, was probably why, in the future, she could never remember the exact words in which her parents told her that she was not, after all, an only child.

  She had an older brother who’d been given up for adoption, and for all these years they’d never known where he was.

  “We were very young,” her mother said. “We weren’t married yet. You didn’t know my parents, Sophie, but they were very strict. We had the baby, then gave him up. Eventually we got married and had you, and that was wonderful. But I’ve thought about him every day since he was born. I was so happy when we got his letter today, saying he wanted to meet us.”

  At this point she had to stop talking, because she was crying so hard. She could hardly breathe. Sophie crossed the room and sat down next to her mother, who melted against her shoulder. On the opposite side, Sophie’s father held her hand.

  The brother she’d never known existed, Philip, lived in New York City and was an investment banker. His adoptive parents had given him a good life, with good schools and love. He didn’t want anything from her parents, only to meet them. Her mother wrote back that they’d love to see him and told him about Sophie. Two weeks later the phone rang. Philip was going to be in L.A. on business the following week. He wanted to meet, but not at the house. Her mother said they’d all be there.

  That morning her mother put on and discarded every item of clothing in her closet. Sophie was wearing a T-shirt and jeans, and it was her father, who ordinarily never noticed her appearance, who asked her to change into something a little nicer. “This occasion,” he said, “is something we’ll remember forever. Not many days are like that, pumpkin.”

  So she put on a dress. She still hadn’t decided how she felt about anything. She’d never thought about having a brother. She’d always wanted a sister, someone to confide in and whisper with at night after the lights were out. Someone mischievous and fun, down-to-earth, not dreamy like her mother—though now she understood what her mother had been dreaming about.

  They waited at a Taco Bell on the freeway, holding medium-sized Cokes. The three of them always ordered mediums, never smalls or larges. They were a family that took the middle road. The door opened and a man in a suit came in and stood there looking around. Her mother gasped. Sophie felt a strong wind shake her arms and spine, a buffeting force. Red hair and green eyes, freckles, a square face and a round nose, a flush on his cheeks and a wrinkle that ran straight across his forehead. All this time there had been someone in the world who looked exactly like her.

  Philip came toward them, unsmiling, and sat down. “This is awkward,” he said. “Hello.”

  “I know,” her mother said, then bit her lower lip.

  Sophie leaned forward. “Would you like something? We have drinks, I could get you something.”

  He looked at her—she saw it register on his face, how much they looked alike—and smiled stiffly. “Sure,” he said. “Root beer, a large? Thanks.”

  Sophie felt stung. She hated root beer. Of course she understood this didn’t mean anything, but she thought it meant everything. The situation made everything symbolic, made everything, even root beer, carry too much weight.

  When she got back to the table her parents and Philip were talking about the weather. They didn’t seem able to move any deeper into the conversation, to say the things they wanted to say. She sat there feeling annoyed with all of them and the spindly artifice of small talk. She didn’t realize that there were some things that couldn’t be said, that these were the most important things, and that everyone except her knew it. After she married her first husband, Lars, ten years later, she would tell him constantly, effusively, how much she loved him and how much he meant to her. And Lars would hold her hand and nod, his silences driving her crazy, so crazy after a while that she went off and slept with his best friend and business partner, Joe, who was short and squat and called her “Cookie” in bed, and the act wasn’t even finished before she started hating both him and herself. Afterward she came home and found Lars sitting in the living room with a drink. She could either tell him or not tell him. She still loved him. Instead of telling him she stopped taki
ng her birth control pills and got pregnant, and that’s how they had Sara. During her pregnancy Lars broke off his partnership with Joe even though it left them at a terrible financial disadvantage, and Sophie was so angry at this—about to have a child, they needed to be stable, plus there were house and car payments to think about—and hormonal that she cried and raged and threatened to leave him. And Lars said quietly, “But I have to. Don’t you see?”

  She understood then he’d known about her and Joe all along, that he was trying for a fresh start. And she was grateful, and wanted it to work so badly; but it didn’t.

  This was later. At the time, at Taco Bell, she had no idea how small talk was protecting them from the scabrous weight of the past. All she knew was that her mother asked Philip for the story of his life, and he told it, and then her parents talked about their business, Sophie’s college in Boston, their house, even the perennials they were trying to grow in the garden. It was a conversation people might have on an airplane.

  As they were leaving, Philip turned to her. “You and I live so close to each other,” he said. “You should come visit me in the fall, when you go back to school.”

  “I don’t know,” Sophie said. Her mother, who hadn’t wanted her to live in a coed dorm, who worried when she took a cab from school to the airport, was nodding vehemently.

  “You can stay with me and my girlfriend. I’ll tease you and pull your hair, or whatever a big brother’s supposed to do. We’ll figure it out. You’ll like Fiona, she’s nice. All this was actually her idea, me getting in touch with you guys.”

  “Oh,” Sophie’s mother said softly, as if punched.

  “Not that I hadn’t thought about it myself,” he added.

  · · ·

  Sophie went back to school and in October, on Columbus Day weekend, she took the train to New York. She’d been there once before, with her roommate, who was from Long Island. They stayed in the suburbs and, during their one day in Manhattan, went to FAO Schwarz. This time she took a taxi from Penn Station to the Upper West Side, where her brother—saying it, inside her mind, still gave her an intense but not entirely unpleasant shiver—lived.