by Heidi Pitlor
“You seem to think it’s important that this process work for them. You’ve used that word more than once.”
“I guess I do.”
“It’s a process. The setting down of memories. You might remember this too. The process matters. The journey itself.” She looked at him. “And just so you know, Janine really does want to carry the neighbors’ child. She’s also thinking about getting her tongue pierced. I suggested she talk it over with you first.”
“Holy hell.”
“And Ethan sometimes sleepwalks. He’s been going into Janine’s room, but she helps him back to bed. And he’s worried and more than a little embarrassed about his stutter. You might call up his old speech therapist?”
“I know that. I live with the kid. I already have a call in to her,” he lied. Ethan sleepwalked to Janine’s room now?
“Good. So I’ll see them again tomorrow?” she said.
He nodded but told himself to give these appointments some more thought.
Chapter 22
Once inside her car, Hannah jammed her key into the ignition, started the engine, and shifted into reverse. She pulled out of the spot and forward, but a pickup cut in front of her. She glared at its gray bumper as she slowed toward the exit. “Move, come on,” she said aloud. The driver rode the brakes, waving at other cars to go ahead. Jamie stood again motionless in her rearview mirror, gradually growing smaller, his arms crossed. Unsurprised.
She watched the bumper before her, her foot pulsing on the brake, as she inched toward the exit. She tried to think of what to tell Marcy and Jen. Janine was worse off than I thought. It was a stomach bug and the poor thing could hardly stand up and—it would be easy. And even if Hannah did not say a thing, even if she blazed into the store without any explanation of her further delay, Jen, the manager, would hardly confront her. Jen was twenty-four and painfully introverted, a gap-toothed, freckled girl whose father owned the shop and one other in Wayland. Hannah could vaguely apologize to them, and Jen would avert her eyes and say, Don’t worry. It’s been quiet here. For the rest of Hannah’s shift, the shop would remain empty—there rarely were any customers in the middle of the day. The few who did wander in were trim women in sweat suits, most likely mothers looking for a bouquet to brighten up their dining rooms or kitchens. They wandered around the shop, their arms across their chests, their heads craned in furtive positions above the Yankee candles in their thick glass jars outside the cooler—those bilious scents of Midnight Oasis, Garden Hideaway, Pink Lady Slipper. The mothers smiled sweetly at Hannah and the girls, and chose gerbera daisies or sunflowers. Hannah would check the cuckoo clock on the wall, and seconds later she would check it again as she waited for those tiny wooden doors to fly open and the chipped blue cuckoo to shriek. When her shift ended, she would at last loosen the strings of her apron and go for her jacket and handbag. She would drive off to pick up Janine by the bike racks outside the school library, Janine, who would tell her nothing about her day, who would only complain that she was starving or tired and just wanted to go home and would ask why Hannah hadn’t scheduled Ethan’s appointment for earlier. Why did Janine have to go too? Hannah would then pick up Ethan, who would drop his backpack on Janine’s leg, and she would swat at him and then he at her, and they would bicker and snipe at each other until Hannah hollered at them: Cool it, Jesus Christ, before I drive off the road with all your noise. And on to the dentist’s office, where the terse receptionist with the Boston accent presided over the waiting room, her jaw snapping a plum-size wad of bubble gum, always that syrupy smell of bubble gum and the cloying smell of fluoride, the high wheeze of the drills in the back room. Were people meant to turn off their senses every day of their lives? She would see that poster of the family with the identical pie-smiles, their teeth synthetically white. They sat with their arms around one another on a white porch swing, beneath them the words “Unleash the potential of your smile.” Perhaps they were a real family. They looked alike, the brown-eyed, short-haired, strong-cheeked husband and wife. It was oddly believable that this athletic family had all decided to go get their teeth whitened (maybe Dad was a dentist) and, worse, have their photo taken to advertise this fact. Which led her to believe that if they had to be photographed—as if to prove a point—they could not have been happy.
What sort of person deconstructed a poster like this?
But it was just a consultation for Ethan and would not take all that long. She and Janine would sit rigidly beside each other while they waited, and eventually they would all head home, where Hannah would have to nag them to hang up their coats and leave their sneakers by the front door and not eat any chips before dinner, and then she would set a pot to boil for pasta, spaghetti of course, dreadful spaghetti, one of the few things they all agreed to eat. She had cooked spaghetti four hundred ways, three thousand times, and in the freezer sat a value pack of chicken breasts, two of which she would bread and fry up to serve along with the pasta. She would continue on as if on a conveyor belt, forward to dinner, forward to the dishes, to homework (after all, Janine’s paper was due tomorrow) and the sound of Lovell coming up the front steps, later each night, and the kids demanding to watch TV or use their dad’s computer (but had they finished their homework? Janine’s paper?) and Lovell would say vacantly, I need the computer tonight. I have hours of work to do.
Jamie remained standing there in the same empty parking spot. The sky had gone gray now, and she could feel the gray, she was sure, settling onto her like heavy insulation, wrapping her tight. It was October, and soon would come winter, and Hannah thought of Marcy’s bland smile and remembered that Lovell had a dinner meeting tonight, so he would return even later than usual, worn down, his mind full of numbers, last night’s fight entirely forgotten.
The pickup edged forward. It had been nearly twenty years, two decades, since that moment when Doug had proposed to her. She was a cloud back then—she was air, she was sky, the sun and the moon. She had replied, “Yes, of course, of course,” and he had kissed her and lifted her up and around. That moment, right then, eighteen years ago now—did it ever get any better than that?
Her foot rose and returned to the brake.
Chapter 23
One night, as a nor’easter blew in and the house shuddered against the wind, Lovell found Janine in the kitchen, her eyes on the computer screen in the dark of the room. Ethan had gone to bed an hour earlier. “What are you doing down here?”
“What does it look like?”
“How are you feeling these days?” Lovell asked her.
“I’m feeling awesome. Spectacular.”
“Listen. Should we try to find another therapist for you guys?”
Predictably, she shook her head. “No. Talking to her or some other shrink is just dumb. It’s not going to do anything to get Mom back. Jeff thinks it sounds like Dr. Valmer is putting feelings in our mouths. He’s right—she tells us that ‘it’s normal to feel scared and sad.’ He said I should try to talk about being angry, but when I tried that, she was all like, ‘You’re angry that your mom left and you have every right to feel that way,’ and I kind of wanted to tell her to fuck off, that she didn’t know shit about shit.” She pushed her chair back from her computer and turned to him. Her hair had begun to grow in again. He really hoped she would let it grow longer this time.
“You don’t feel scared and sad?” he asked. “You just feel angry.”
“What was your and mom’s wedding like?”
Where had this come from? “Well, it was on New Year’s Eve,” he said, but she already knew that. “The temperature was below zero outside, and all anyone talked about was the cold.”
She appeared disappointed.
“Mom looked gorgeous. We had the ceremony at the church where she went as a kid, this quaint, old white building that looked out over the ocean. And the reception was at Grandma and Grandpa’s house. We kept it small, maybe seventy or eighty people. Someone hung up little blue lights all around the living room. The ba
nd, they were friends of Mom’s, and everyone danced until late.” He thought a moment. “I even got Great-Aunt Irene to dance with me—”
“The one who weighs, like, three hundred pounds?”
“And Mom’s cousin Monica.”
“She lives in Spain?”
He nodded. “Everyone must have danced with everyone else. I think I even danced with Uncle Simon and my father. By the end of the night, your mom and I were so exhausted, we could barely stand up. The night before Mom had you, we were looking through the wedding album and remembering all this stuff, and then it seemed perfect that you arrived the next day. I remember saying that to her in the delivery room. I told her how much I loved her. And you. We couldn’t keep our hands off you. You were so docile.” He looked at Janine. “You’re not going to offer to carry a baby for the neighbors.”
“I’m still thinking about it,” she said. “But they’ve put it on hold until Stephen’s mother gets better. She had a stroke last week and has been in the hospital. I’m waiting until she’s out before I say anything to them.”
“Oh. OK.”
“I wish Mom were here.”
He nodded. “Me too.”
“Right.”
“Don’t start this up again. She was my wife. Does that ever occur to you? We were married for almost sixteen years.”
Janine stood, her hands in fists on her hips. “Do you ever feel a little bit guilty that maybe she went away that morning because she was fucking afraid of you? Because she wanted to escape?”
“Not this again,” he said. “You are unbelievable.”
“Well? You were horrible to her.”
“We’re done here.”
“That’s good, keep on denying everything. You are so full of shit,” she said before she shut off the computer and stomped out of the kitchen.
He waited for the sound of the front door slamming, and in a moment, crash, there it was. She would march across the lawn and over the gulley and to the house next door to her confidants, her true loves, who were just waiting for her to come and pour out her sorrows to them so that they, this fun, hip couple, could console and comfort her in a way that he could not.
It was after ten. She should have been reading a book or getting ready for bed. To distract himself he set out his own laptop and scanned through the latest Pacific sea surface temperatures, the wind speeds from the northwest, waiting for her to return.
Hannah had asked him more than once whether all his charts and graphs, all his statistics—didn’t they ever grow tiring? Do you ever get sick of trying to predict the precise movement of every molecule in the atmosphere? When you look so close at something, doesn’t it start to disappear? Doesn’t it lose its fundamental it-ness? “No,” he had responded. “When you understand something, you see more, not less, of its essence. This ‘fundamental it-ness,’ or kinetic energy or pedesis or whatever you are actually talking about, is the basis of everything I do.” She had just shaken her head as if she thought he had misunderstood her questions.
One o’clock came, one thirty, and he decided to go to bed. Janine had stayed over next door once or twice before after watching movies. She would be back in the morning.
Chapter 24
The truck pulled ahead and was gone. Hannah waited alone at the exit. She saw a flash of something in the corner of her eye, and there was Jamie beside her window. She swallowed a balloon of air. He made a sympathetic face, and embarrassingly she began to cry. She had to turn away from him. Maybe this was how they would continue today, stop and start, forward and backward and forward again until—what?
When she finally got herself together, she looked back at him and he set his hands on his heart with genuine sympathy. She rolled down her window. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” she admitted.
A car pulled behind them, and he said, “Come on, Hannah. Turn around and park over there. Let’s get you feeling better,” and she did, if only to allow the other car behind her to drive by.
Once in the passenger seat again, he held her wrist and massaged her pulse. He stopped every few moments to adjust his pressure. Doug used to find her pulse on her neck and wrist, set his own pulse against hers as if trying to synchronize them.
Her tears soon began to slow. “You must think I’m crazy,” she said at last. She pulled her hand back. “I don’t know why I care. Do you meet women like this a lot? Do you just ingratiate yourself with strange women all the time?”
“Every day,” he said.
She ran her fingers through her hair and squeezed at the roots.
“I can help.”
She felt split into two halves, one glad for his words, the other too old and wary for promises like these. “So what now?” she asked.
“There are too many people here. There are too many of my students who could see me and just come right over here and bug us. Let’s drive back to that other beach,” he said. “We’ll say our good-byes there.” It was a relief to her, his acknowledgment that their time together deserved a notable good-bye, that she was worthy of this.
She pulled out of the parking lot and onto the one-way road that wound past the enormous, empty fields and then on toward Morrissey Boulevard.
“I’m wrung out today,” she told him as she drove. “See what you’ve done to me?”
He set a hand on her knee. “But soon you’ll be back in your store with all those flowers and you’ll be just fine. And Lovell will be glad to see you after a long day at his office, won’t he? And the kids? It’ll be good to get back home, get back to life, won’t it?”
Hannah recoiled inside at his obvious sarcasm. “What about you? Who’s waiting for you at home?”
“I wish it were you,” he said.
“Come on,” she said, laughing. “Tell me the truth.”
“I told you—I never lie.”
He looked down at his fingers. He drew a deep breath and then another. He turned and glanced around the car, at the stained cup holder, up at the visors, at the backseat, the branch from that willow, Hannah’s green work apron thrown in a heap. He reached for his backpack, and her heart skipped a beat, but he pulled out a bottle of water, just that, and downed a long gulp.
How strange that it was only a right turn, she remembered now, and you followed this road to that long, dusty parking lot at Carson.
A red-haired woman stood by as three young children chased a seagull across the sand. An old man helped a boy fly a yellow kite that caught a wind and spun in a dizzy circle as the man and boy struggled to hold the string. At the far end of the beach, a large family had set up a picnic and milled around a cooler.
“We’ll go dip our feet in the water before you leave,” Jamie said. “Just for a minute.”
“It’s October,” she said. “That water is freezing.”
“And?” he said.
“I’ll stay back here and watch you.”
The woman talked into her cell phone and briefly looked over at Hannah and Jamie. Hannah could now see that she was the children’s sitter. The children had darker skin and smaller bones—and the woman had that bored, superior look of a full-time nanny. Two of the children began to dig a hole in the sand with their fingers while the third, a doll-faced girl with two long braids down her back, watched from the side.
Jamie kicked off his sneakers and walked toward the tide. He turned and waited for Hannah to do the same, but she shook her head. “I said I’m staying here,” she called.
“Do I have to tell you again that I know what’s best for you? Have you learned nothing today?”
She half smiled.
“Fine,” Hannah replied, and she left her shoes and socks by a cracked clam shell. She stepped in just to her ankles. The frigid water stung her toes and seeped into the bottom of her pants, and she bent down to roll them up toward her knees. She turned to see if the nanny or anyone else on the beach was watching her, but the nanny had turned her back and the others were each occupied in some way.
“Here goes nothing
,” he said, and he charged toward the water. He clapped his hands together over his head and dove in cleanly, reemerging a moment later. He paddled several yards out, flipped over, and swam underwater, resurfacing just in front of her. “Come in,” he said, and she shook her head and said, “You must be cold blooded.”
He ducked beneath the surface again and tried to tug her down, but she managed to kick him away playfully. She felt a wet clump wash past her feet. A fish? Seaweed? The nanny, although she tried to hide that she was doing so, had turned back to Hannah and watched her shake her foot around.
Jamie swam next to Hannah and took her hand, and she felt his side drift against her leg, his slick, icy skin, and a charge in her chest, a quickening at the center of her stomach.
And then he stopped. He planted his fists into the muddy sand at the bottom of the water and pushed himself upright. He shook out his hair. “You’re right. It’s too cold.”
Hannah followed him back toward the dry sand where his sweatshirt lay. She picked it up and held it out toward him. He ran a finger around the rim of her ear as if to remind her of the possibility that hovered between them. She moved her hand toward his stomach, but he flinched. “What was that?” he said.
Her face burned as she scanned behind him. The nanny was only a few feet away, picking up some trash that the kids had left. The grandfather and the boy were now winding the kite string back onto its reel, their backs to her.
Hannah stood with her damp, bare toes dug into the clumped sand. “I guess it really is time for me to go,” she said.
He turned his eyes back to her. He was impossible to read. What did he even want from her today? “Play one quick game with me first. Let’s play word association.”
The grandfather and the boy dumped out a canvas tote bag of plastic digging toys and began a sand castle. “I’m worried about my children,” she said. It was one thing she had over him, the one thing he could never understand, the pull of motherhood.
“OK. Kids. Resilient.”