by Alix Ohlin
Lying there strangely keyed up, she heard a moaning sound and sat up to listen. Another moan, the bed creaking, Alan making a choking sound. She squashed the pillow over her head, trying not to hear them, the runaways, the interlopers, the children about to become parents. Making love in her bed.
A month passed, and the summer grew brutal and steaming. Anne’s play closed and she was temping again, trying to put aside more money. Out of all the offers that had coursed around her during the run of the play, only a few had distilled to anything concrete. She picked the one with a well-regarded experimental director whose trademark was deadpan dialogue and sacklike clothing, the actors’ bodies virtually irrelevant in his productions. She hoped the play would stretch her capacities and prove her artistic mettle. So she stood on stage in scratchy burlap and muttered lines she didn’t understand to an audience of bored hipsters in a church basement. Without her body to work with, she had no idea what to do. Too afraid to admit she didn’t understand the aesthetic agenda, she bumbled her part, alienated the director, and got terrible reviews. Just like that, she felt like she was back to where she started.
“You’re a pretty girl,” the agent she had decided on said over a drink. “Let me get you into commercials. There’s a detergent call that would be perfect for you.”
“I don’t want to do commercials,” Anne told her.
The agent shrugged. “I guess I can try for Law & Order.”
“Okay, but I also want something serious. Something important.”
The agent raised her eyebrows. “You’re a pretty girl,” she repeated. “Work with your strengths.”
A week later, the agent called to say she’d gotten her into summer theater in Southampton. “It isn’t Williamstown, but you can hit the beach.”
The play was okay. The people who came to see it were a little buzzed, on vacation, ready to be entertained, complimenting Anne extravagantly and buying her drinks afterward in the bar. She had rented a room from a group of hard-partying young lawyers and slept wearing earplugs. Early in the mornings she ran on the beach and saw herself, in these moments, as if from a great distance: a beautiful young woman, hair streaming behind her, the Atlantic crashing its gentle, gray waves. She enjoyed imagining herself like this, from the point of view of some infinitely knowledgeable and enamored stranger, someone who could tell even from afar just how special she was.
On a sweltering Sunday afternoon in July she returned to the city and found the apartment surprisingly cool; air-conditioning units had been installed in both rooms. The shades were drawn and the lights were off. “Hello?” she said, dropping her bags. “You guys home?”
No one was in the bedroom, and the food in the refrigerator was spoiling. There was an air of dust and abandonment that somehow felt new.
Then a key turned in the lock, and a middle-aged man she’d never seen before walked in.
“Get out of here,” she said instinctively. “I’m calling the police.”
Holding his hands up in deference, he looked afraid, even though he was well built and no doubt stronger than she was. He was wearing khaki pants and a short-sleeved plaid shirt. “Hey, now,” he said. “You must be Anne.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m Ned Halverson.” He paused, apparently expecting some reaction, then exhaled and lowered his hands. “Hilary’s uncle.”
Anne frowned. Hilary’s last name was Benson; she’d never mentioned an uncle. “Where is she?”
The man sighed. “Do you mind if I sit down for a second?” he said. “Those stairs just about kill me, in this heat.”
He moved to the couch, where she noticed a small brown suitcase on the floor and a folded set of sheets on the cushions. He sat with his hands on his knees, back perfectly straight, a military pose. Then, reaching into his rear pocket, he pulled out a handkerchief and wiped off his forehead.
“Hilary told me about everything you’ve done for her,” he said. “I mean to say, she didn’t. She always makes out like she did it all herself, but it’s clear to me that you’ve done a lot. Letting her stay here. And then Alan.” From the way he said his name, it was obvious there was no love lost between them.
“Where are they?” Anne said.
Halverson raised an eyebrow. “She was supposed to leave you a note,” he said, “but she didn’t, did she? That girl was never any too good at following instructions.”
Anne glanced around. “I just got here,” she said.
Halverson seemed perfectly at ease on the couch and uninterested in clearing up her confusion. She walked over to the kitchen counter, then glanced into the bedroom, which was unusually tidy and free of clutter. The bed was made. Somehow this seemed more ominous than anything else.
Back in the living room, she said, “No note. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on? Did you make Hilary go home?”
“Well, now, of course I did,” he said. “My wife took them straight away, and I’m here for the rest of their things. I’m sure you understand. We been worried sick to death. She’s just a kid herself, you know. We can take care of her, and once the baby comes …” He spread his hands out wide. With his ramrod posture and slow, deliberate delivery, the gesture reminded her of the old men who practiced tai chi in Tompkins Square Park. Anne couldn’t quite grasp what he was saying but felt irritated, then enraged, that circumstances had changed without her consent. There must have been plenty of drama—Hilary never would have left willingly—and she had missed all of it. If she had been here, would things have been different? Would they have fought harder to stay?
“You know my son means well,” he said. “I mean, I think he does, anyway, but it’s hard to say what’s going on in that pinhead of his. Sometimes I just lose patience. It’s like he’s got no common sense at all. And the worst part is that he can’t see around his own ideas, he’s built them up so big. He’s bullheaded. My wife says I am too and that’s why we don’t get along. I tell her, that’s just what you say so we can keep loving him when he acts like an idiot.”
He seemed prepared to ramble on like this indefinitely. Anne sat down on the chest in front of the couch. “What are you talking about?”
Halverson rested his palms on his knees again. “My son Alan, of course.”
It turned out, as she should have guessed, that everything Hilary had said about her family was a lie. Halverson told her the whole story without ever relaxing his military bearing, and she believed him not because he seemed more credible but because she knew Hilary and had once been just like her, and therefore understood how fluidly lies come, how easily they spill from you once you get into the habit of telling them.
There was no abuse at home, according to Halverson, and Hilary, his sister’s daughter, had been a good kid. Her parents ran a small farm, and she grew up tending to the cows and the chickens, more at ease with them, it seemed, than she was with people. But both her parents were killed in a car accident when she was ten, and she moved in with Halverson and his family.
“It was weird how it didn’t seem to affect her,” he said. “She didn’t cry, or even talk about them much. We had a counselor over in Hawkington that we were taking her to for a while, but she seemed to be okay. There’s something about her that’s just … steely, you know what I mean?”
Anne nodded. Unconsciously she had mirrored Halverson’s pose, sitting across from him on the chest with her hands on her knees. Noticing this, she shifted her weight and crossed her legs.
Halverson didn’t need much encouragement to keep talking. He seemed to think it was his duty; in exchange for having housed Hilary, Anne would get this story from him. “She lived with us till she was around fourteen, then things went all haywire. I guess it’s the hormones that set in around that age. I don’t know. The kids in our town are like wildcats. One minute they’re normal and the next thing you know, you can’t contain them. Out of control.”
He sighed. This, she could tell, was the hard part of the story. “What happened?” she said.
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br /> “Oh.” Halverson made another slow, vague wave, as if she could surmise from this what he was going to tell her. When Anne said nothing, he sighed again. Still she said nothing. She could wait him out, she knew, because most men—most people—can’t stand silence. Less than a minute passed before he broke down, speaking faster than he had before.
“Comes to pass that my wife gets home one day and finds Alan and Hilary together in her little pink bedroom. The stuffed animals flung around. Bunnies on the floor. It horrified her. She was so upset by it that she threw them all away. I think she just couldn’t stand the idea, you know, of those little-girl things being in the room with Hilary and Alan. You understand it wasn’t just that they were cousins, or so young. It was both things together. And somehow—sure, they were still children—there was something about it that wasn’t innocent. You know?”
Anne nodded, knowing exactly what he meant. Hilary and Alan, in her experience, were clueless and vague and not quite with it, but she would never have described them as innocent. They were too carnal. Too tough.
“I wanted to take the kids over to Hawkington, back to that counselor, to sort things out. They sure didn’t want to, and my wife was so upset she couldn’t even talk about it. The stuffed-animals thing made Hilary so mad she ran away. And she’s kept running away, off and on, ever since.” He kept looking over at the kitchen counter, avoiding her eyes, which she took to be a show of emotion until he cleared his throat and said, “I wouldn’t mind some water.”
She guessed this was where Hilary had learned her manners. But as she got him a glass, she thought of a question she wanted to ask. It wasn’t about Alan; she could picture his side of things pretty clearly, and anyway he’d never interested her that much. She looked at Halverson and said, “What can you tell me about Joshua?”
The silence following this question grew so long that it was as if he might not have heard it. He just sat there staring into space, the glass, now empty, balanced on his right knee. He had Hilary’s same intransigence, or she had his.
“Joshua,” he finally said.
Anne was getting annoyed. “She writes to him,” she prompted. “Postcards. She gives them to women at train stations and asks them to mail them.”
Again he was mute. To stop herself from drumming her fingers, she looked down and clasped her hands together. Glancing back up, she saw tears shimmering in his eyes. “What?” she said.
Halverson swallowed, his jaw clenched. “He was in the car too. Six he was, at the time. I guess he’d be around twelve now. I didn’t know that, about the postcards. Is that true? It breaks my heart.”
She believed him.
After a while, he composed himself and went into the bedroom to pack up Hilary’s and Alan’s belongings. Anne sat in the living room, not sure what to do.
Finally he emerged, listing to the left with a duffel bag. He set it on the floor by the door and held out his hand. “On behalf of my family,” he said, “I thank you for everything you’ve done.”
“Wait a minute,” Anne said. “Can I have your contact information?”
He looked at her blankly.
“Your address and phone number,” she said. “So I can get in touch with Hilary.”
His eyes skidded away from hers, around the apartment, then at the door, weighing his options. For the first time, his ordinary-guyness—plaid shirt, khaki pants, tidy haircut—started to look ominous in its very neatness. “I don’t know about that, miss,” he said. “You see, it would just encourage Hilary to think about coming back here. And she’s got to give up on that. She’s got to accept that being with her family is the right thing. It’s not just about her and Alan. It’s about that little baby.”
That bit about the baby was, Anne thought, what a certain kind of person would consider a trump card in an argument. She moved between him and the door. “They lived here for almost six months,” she said, and stopped herself from adding, they’re my family too. She hadn’t realized until the words nearly came out that she felt this way, and she was momentarily shocked into silence. But it was true.
Instead she—what else?—acted a part. She moved into his territory by making herself a substitute parent, a concerned citizen, older and more tired and folksy than she really was. “I did a lot for those kids,” she said. “I fed them and gave them a roof over their heads. I gave up my own bed. I don’t think it’s a lot to ask, Mr. Halverson, considering everything I’ve done.”
He put his hands on his hips, appraising her, then relented. “All righty,” he said. “You got a pen?”
She watched him write down the address—a rural route upstate—and phone number. It occurred to her that he could be making it all up, like she gave out fake numbers to guys in bars. Hilary was his niece, after all; lying probably ran in the family, as it did in her own.
She took the piece of paper out of his hand. “I’ll be calling to check in,” she said.
Halverson’s eyes grew steely. “I’d rather you didn’t,” he said.
He had taken all their clothes and shoes, Alan’s barbells, Hilary’s magazines, and the tiny apartment yawned with emptiness. She paced for a while in her living room, distracted and confused, until an image came to her—as vivid as a visitation—of her mother sitting hunched in a white-carpeted living room, picking at her nails. Crying in powerless grief.
This thought ought to have softened and saddened her, but instead it made her hard. For the rest of the day, her mission was to remove all traces of the past six months. She rearranged the furniture, cleaned out the refrigerator, changed the sheets, moved the bed against the far wall, filled three enormous Hefty bags with garbage and lugged them down to the street. By then it was nine o’clock and she was so tired that she tripped on the stairs going back up to the apartment. She sat there on the dirty landing and shuddered with tears. She let herself cry to the count of ten, then stood up and went inside.
So this was how it ended, she thought. It wasn’t what she’d expected.
She could have gone up there to make sure they were all right. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. But she didn’t. She was sure that Halverson, notwithstanding his air of domination and control, would take good care of the baby-to-be. She pictured a nursery—Hilary’s old room?—with a crib, pastel wallpaper, teddy bears. She doubted Hilary would get in touch when the baby was born. Anne wouldn’t have, if she were Hilary.
Anne didn’t believe in fate or the universe sending you signals and signs. She believed in making your own luck. So the day after Halverson’s visit, she put on a low-cut top, had a date with a director, and left with the names of three theater companies that were about to go on the road. And systematically she made dates with men in those companies until she had an offer to travel to Scotland on a festival tour. By Friday she was packed and at the airport, proud of herself for having taken charge. Of Alan and Hilary, she would have said, had there been anyone in her life to ask, that she could barely remember their names.
It was the first time she’d ever been to Europe, and she hadn’t been on a plane in over a decade. The security arrangements astounded her; she remembered as a child breezing through airports only minutes before departure, but that was over now. On board, she sat next to a sophisticated, sarcastic actress named Elizabeth who spent the whole flight gossiping about other members of the troupe, explaining which was a sex addict, an anorexic, an adulterer. Anne found all this helpful in terms of navigating the vipers’ nest that a group of actors often amounted to, and she had no problem with the calculating, temporary alliance being offered to her. But she wasn’t interested in sharing stories of her own. So when her seatmate began to press her, at first gently, then more forcefully, for details of her life, she held back. To win her confidence Elizabeth told a long story, maybe true, maybe false, about her affair with a married man, followed by depression, alcohol abuse, heroin, rehab, and “a current infatuation with coke and my nicotine patch.” It was all designed to bring out Anne’s own confes
sion. In this kind of conversation, you had to give up something.
“Where did you grow up?” Elizabeth persisted, digging.
“On a farm,” Anne said. “In upstate New York.”
“You on a farm? I can’t even picture it.”
Anne nodded, gazing through the part in the curtain that showed a slice of first class. “I looked after the chickens.”
“Now I’m imagining you in pigtails, collecting eggs and putting them in a straw basket.”
“I used to gather the chickens for slaughter,” Anne said, calling up stories Hilary and Alan had told her. “I picked them up and held them in my arms to calm them down. I could feel their little hearts beating like crazy. They’d run away when they saw me coming. But I always caught them. I’d grab them by the legs and turn them upside down so the blood drained to their heads and they’d go limp. Then we killed them.”
“I could never do that,” Elizabeth said.
Anne shrugged. “You get used to it.”
Edinburgh was gray, gothic, and awash with actors. She’d had no idea of the scope of the festival, which thickened the streets with hordes of people handing out leaflets for performances and plastering posters on walls. There were Norwegian dancers, Japanese mimes, performances in churches and street corners; it was a planet of actors, and God only knew if there were enough people around to actually attend the hundreds of shows. In the evening the sound of the crowds outside filtered through the walls of their hotel, and between the noise and her excitement Anne barely slept.
In the morning they held a quick dress rehearsal in the back room of the pub where they’d be performing. Though it was August, the weather was cold and the room unheated, and she shivered throughout the warm-up. Most of the others had performed the play for a solid month in Soho and she felt she wasn’t fitting in, a discordant note in the song they’d learned to sing without her. The awkwardness made her nervous, and the nervousness made her even more awkward.
She thought she saw them raising an eyebrow at the director, and Elizabeth abandoned her when it came time for lunch, briskly walking off with the male lead, Tony. Anne went back to the hotel, where they were sharing a room, for a short, furious cry. Then she wiped her tears and worked on her lines for an hour.