by T. Greenwood
Playing House
After Pilar went back home, my side of the duplex felt too quiet, too empty. I could hear Avery squealing in oblivious delight on the other side of the wall, and it nearly brought me to my knees.
It was Sunday, time for me to pick her up and bring her back “home.” I decided to take the remaining enchiladas over to Gus. I’d never be able to finish them all on my own, and they were too spicy for Avery.
I went outside onto the sagging porch and knocked on his door, an odd formality that hadn’t gotten any less odd in the last five months. The streetlights were coming on outside, and the chill in the air had gone from crisp to bitter.
Avery answered the door. “Mama Llama!” she squealed and rushed at my legs. She was wearing her pajamas already, the red union suit I’d bought her to wear as part of her devil costume for Halloween in a few weeks. Her hair was a tangled mess of dark auburn curls. She wouldn’t let Gus near her with a brush, but she also wouldn’t let me cut her hair.
“Hi, cutes,” I said. “Where’s Daddy-O?”
“He’s making dinner,” she said. “It stinks.” She plugged her nose dramatically and twirled on one dirty, bare foot before skipping through the cluttered living room to the kitchen, where I could see Gus standing at the counter.
Something thumped hard in my chest.
“Hey,” I said awkwardly. “I brought some of Pilar’s enchiladas.”
“I already started dinner.” He gestured to the pot. It smelled like curry, but looked like vomit. The rice cooker steamed on the counter.
Gus had grown a beard since we broke up. Shaving was the only demand I’d ever made about his appearance, and it was more practical than aesthetic; I couldn’t stand the gruffness of it on my face when he kissed me, the abrasiveness like steel wool. And now his beard was like the wall that separated us, ensuring neither one of us would slip up and cross over to the other side.
Tonight he also had his pajamas on—a pair of plaid flannel pants I had bought for him a few Christmases ago and a faded Yankees T-shirt. I willed myself not to look at his tattooed arms, muscles straining against the sleeves. He, like Avery, was barefoot.
“You sure?” I asked, motioning to the dish.
“Keep ’em,” he said, nodding. And, as if to prove his point, he ladled some of the goop out of the pot and took a tentative bite. He wrinkled his nose a little and then smiled. “So what’s up?”
My mouth twitched. I knew if I didn’t say it now, I wouldn’t. And there was no reason to drag this out any longer than necessary. I glanced behind me quickly to check on Avery. She was occupied with a house Gus seemed to have fashioned out of a giant cardboard box he must have brought home from work.
“I’m going away for a few months. To help Pilar out with her house in Maine,” I began. “And to work.”
He stopped stirring the disgusting concoction and looked at me. His eyes, steel blue and intense, made me blink and look away.
“Wyn?” he said. “What happened?”
I had hoped he would think this was just the next logical step. That inevitably, one of us would have to leave this peculiar arrangement. That I was just the one who finally called attention to how unhealthy all of this was. But he had always found me transparent. The walls I’d built were impenetrable by others, but never by Gus.
“Av and I need more space,” I said vaguely. “And this isn’t healthy. It isn’t working. It’s weird, Gus. We can’t live like this forever.”
He took a deep breath and waited for me to tell him the truth. This was his way with me. He knew if he were patient, I would eventually stop talking around the truth (or at least part of the truth) and offer it up like a ripe peach in an open palm.
“Also, they’re reopening Robby Rousseau’s case,” I said, the cat hissing and clawing its way out of the proverbial bag.
“What?”
“Apparently, they tested the old evidence kit for DNA. They’re arguing that if this DNA evidence had been available during the first trial, he wouldn’t have been convicted,” I said, forcing a smile, shrugging my shoulders.
“What does that mean? Why?”
“I have no idea,” I said, my throat feeling swollen. “The defense wants a retrial.”
“That’s insane.”
I nodded. “I know. But if this happens, if the court grants the motion, and he actually gets a new trial, I may have to testify. I need some time to think about it. To clear my head and figure out what to do. Pilar’s place in Maine is empty. I can work and help her get it cleaned up. If he goes back to trial, things are going to get crazy.”
“You said he was in for life. What the hell? Have you talked to your folks? Jesus Christ, Wynnie.” He stooped down to my height, clutched my elbows in his hands.
And suddenly I was eighteen years old again, peering up into his sweet face, the black freckle below his eye making it impossible to do anything but love him. When I’d first told him about Robby Rousseau, I’d dismissed it in the same way. As if it were only something I’d read about somewhere. I recited the story I’d created, the only one I could tell without breaking down in tears. The one I’d been rewriting in my head for five years. And that night, as we sat on the precarious rooftop of the group house in Providence where we all lived, he’d taken his finger and touched the thin scar that traversed my damaged throat. I remember closing my eyes and concentrating on the rough pad of his finger as it traced the place that divided my life between Before and After. Between childhood and adulthood. Between truth and lies.
His eyes had gotten glossy that night, but he didn’t cry.
Now Gus rolled his head, cracked his neck. Threw his shoulders back almost imperceptibly. I could see his bicep muscles twitch. And I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking about Robby, the ghost who had haunted our lives for the last fifteen years, who suddenly wasn’t a ghost at all. But a real man. A thirty-three-year-old man who had spent the last twenty years in prison because of me.
“I need you to let me go,” I said. “I promise it will be okay. I just need to get away for a while. And I’m sure, if he actually gets another trial, if I testify, there will be no chance they’ll let him out. . . .”
“If you testify?”
“Look, Mama!” Avery said. She was peeking out through the window Gus had made in the box. The window even had panes. He had stapled two of my old scarves I’d left behind, fashioned them into curtains. Affixed a sort of window box filled with tissue paper flowers.
“Come see my new house.”
Tears stinging in my eyes, I went to the living room and squatted down on the floor next to the box. Her arms reached out through the window, her hands wriggling toward me. I knelt and peered in, and she cupped my face in her chubby hands. She smelled like paste.
“Play house, Mommy? You be the mommy, Daddy can be the daddy, and I’ll be the honey.”
“The honey?” I asked, my throat aching.
“You know,” she said, cocking her head and picking a baby doll up off the floor. “The baby.” She cooed to the baby doll, “Oh, honey.”
“In a minute, sweetie. Daddy and I are talking. Okay?”
Back in the kitchen Gus whispered, “What about Av? Who’s going to take care of her while I’m at work?”
My heart plummeted. How could he think I’d leave her behind? What kind of mother did he think I was?
“I’ll take Avery with me, and you can come see her on the weekends. I can come down too. It’s not that far.” But even as I said this, I knew I’d been foolish to even entertain the idea. Gus would never let me take Avery away.
He shook his head. “It’s too far, Wyn.”
“It will just be a few months.”
He shook his head, rubbed his face, his temples, and then ran his hand through his hair. He peered at me, his eyes filled with both frustration and a sort of reluctant sympathy.
“Think about Avery,” he said. “This is going to mess her up.”
“Please don’t do this,” I said. “Don’
t do this to me.”
He snorted a little, sighed, and I felt myself seethe.
“What?” I asked.
“Yeah, you’re right. I’m the one doing this to you. To us.”
I looked at the cardboard box house Gus had made, at Avery, sitting cross-legged on the floor, humming softly to her baby doll. My eyes filled with tears.
“You can’t always just run away,” he said.
I swallowed. Hard.
“I’m not,” I tried. I lied. “I just need time to think everything through. Please, can you give me this?”
* * *
I brought Avery and the enchiladas back over to my side of the duplex. Avery washed her face, brushed her teeth, and fell asleep halfway through the book I was reading to her.
In the living room, I ate the leftover enchiladas straight out of the pan, dipping each bite into a cold vat of sour cream. I watched the last forty-five minutes of Stand by Me on TV and then plopped into bed. On the other side of the wall, I listened for the familiar sounds of Gus, but was met with silence. I looked at the clock: midnight.
I got up, went to my painting corner, and stared at the canvas. The tidy rows of birches were like the bars on some of the windows in our neighborhood. I couldn’t bring myself to work, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep. Sitting down on the paint-splattered stool by my easel, I absently pressed my hand against the wall that divided us.
Maybe he was right. Our living arrangements were crazy, but running away to Maine was crazier. Instead of creating clarity, it might just make everything even more confused. Especially for Avery. Maybe I should stay here for a while longer. Decide what to do about Gus, about us, after this business with Robby was more certain.
When the landline phone began to ring, I jumped. Nobody but my parents and Gus knew the number. I’m not even sure why we had it. I figured it must be Gus. With time for my idea to sink in, I was pretty sure he’d formulated his argument.
I clicked the TALK button. “Hello?”
Nothing.
“Gus?”
Then there was the faint sound of someone clearing his throat.
“You and me got a deal. Remember?”
My body felt molten, heat flooding my veins, my flesh melting.
Another cough, a sickening smoker’s cough.
“I know you got a little girl. I bet she’s pretty like you were.”
I hit the OFF button again and again. I barely recognized my own hand as it gripped the phone and hurled it across the room. It landed on the couch, its face glowing brightly in the now dark shadows. It rang again.
I paced back and forth, trying to figure out how he’d gotten my number here. How he knew about Avery. Did this mean he knew where I lived too?
I thought about running back over to Gus’s house, telling him everything. Finally. He’d know what to do. But helping me wasn’t Gus’s job anymore. And he could never, ever know the truth.
I needed to get the hell out. Now.
Inquiry
“Did you know him? Robert Rousseau. He was your classmate?”
“Yes, sir.”
Robby Rousseau moved to Haven in the fifth grade. He was tall and quiet and his clothes didn’t fit right. He carried his lunch in a greasy paper sack. His older brother, Rick, showed up after school to pick Robby up in a rusted-out Camaro blasting AC/DC from the speakers, the bass making the earth tremble. If there were a group of us girls lingering outside, Rick would roll the passenger window down and lean across the seat, leering, licking his lips at us. If we ignored him, he’d make a sort of growling sound and snap his teeth together again and again like a dog, and then he’d laugh, smashing his palms against the steering wheel like he’d just heard a hilarious joke. We’d giggle nervously, close our circle in tighter, breathe a collective sigh when Robby came out of the school and ducked into the car and Rick peeled away from the curb. People said Ricky liked to set fires, that he almost burned down the old roller rink two summers ago. And that Robby’s older sister, Roxanne, who was in high school, had gotten pregnant in the seventh grade and had an abortion. I didn’t really know what that meant. It was the stuff of late-night sleepover conversations. Everything I knew about sex came from a book my mother gave me and information dispensed by Hanna Lamont, a self-proclaimed expert. My understanding of this, and most things grown-up, was obscured in a sort of lovely haze then. Some of my friends, like Hanna, were determined to clear that fog, but I was content to stay in the mist.
Robby was tall and pimply with terrible posture and an overbite that made him look a bit cartoonish. He was awkward and always stared too long at people. I’d catch him looking at me sometimes, and because I was not yet a girl that boys looked at, it disarmed me.
At recess he hung out by himself, back against the brick wall of the school, one knee bent, foot against the wall, watching the endless violent games of “Smear the Queer,” my school’s version of dodge ball.
He was just a weird boy from a bad family who never had enough in his lunch bag and lived somewhere far enough away his older brother had to give him a ride.
“Did he ever speak to you? Before that afternoon?”
“A couple of times.”
“And what did he say?”
“Well, one time the teacher made him, the one on recess duty.”
“I don’t understand.”
I was on the swing, alone, soaring, legs pumping, my cheeks burning with the cold air.
Even my teeth were cold. To their roots.
“What happened?”
The bell rang, and I stopped pumping my legs, came to a slow stop. The next thing I remember is something hitting me from behind. I fell forward onto the sandy ground beneath the swings, and I couldn’t breathe. When I looked up, I saw the teacher marching toward the swing set. She asked me what happened, but I couldn’t speak. It was as if he’d knocked my words out of me. I almost thought I might look down and see them scattered on the ground.
“She made him say it.”
“Who?”
“The teacher. She made him say I’m sorry.”
Haven
It took three weeks and three separate conversations with Gus to convince him to let me take Avery with me to Maine. I couldn’t tell him the real reason I was leaving; I couldn’t tell anyone about the call. I only knew I needed to do whatever was necessary to get away and to take Avery with me.
And so I tried a pragmatic approach first, arguing a two- or three-month reprieve from the cost of her preschool tuition alone could make a huge difference for us financially. I should have known this wouldn’t work; Gus had never been motivated by money, never crippled by the lack of it.
“But, it’s school, Wynnie,” he’d said. “You can’t just yank her out. I know it’s just pre-K, but she’s learning important stuff. She’s got friends.”
“I can homeschool her. We’ll do art projects. We’ll work on her reading. Pilar will be there. You know how much she adores her. And Maine is beautiful. She’ll be so close to nature. It’s a great opportunity, if you think about it. Once she’s in kindergarten, we won’t be able to do something like this anymore.”
Gus shook his head.
“Without the tuition, we could actually get ahead,” I added.
“What we?” he said, sitting, defeated, at the edge of the couch, hands in his hair.
I sat down next to him, leaned my head on his shoulder. I didn’t know how not to be with him; his body had been a place of safety for me for fifteen years. When he shrugged me off, I knew I’d need to come up with something more compelling.
“You were right,” I said softly. “About the commissions.”
His mouth had twitched then, likely recalling the argument that had set this disaster into motion.
Gus and I had split up over the tree paintings.
It’s ridiculous, I know. Those stupid tree paintings had been nothing but trouble from the first one I sold.
Of course there were a hundred other smal
l grievances that piled up, as things will in any marriage. He was impulsive, for one thing. And while it was something that made him exciting and fun when we first started dating, it became exhausting and unpredictable after Avery came along. When it was just us, in our twenties, he could talk me into eating magic mushrooms on a Monday night, taking the subway into the city and exploring. He’d blow every dime he had on tickets to a concert we’d dreamed of seeing. Everything about my life with Gus was thrilling. But those same instincts, that restlessness, that impetuousness, grew tiresome. And so later, while I stayed home and took care of Avery, he continued to flit about like some sort of fidgety moth, always seeking a brighter light. It made him a fun dad though. He’d pull Avery out of preschool and take her to Central Park. He’d make lasagna for breakfast on the weekends. He’d stay up all night with her watching cartoons and blowing bubbles.
And not only was he impulsive, but he was irresponsible. He had a good job at the sign shop, and at work he was very dependable. But when it came to our personal lives, he was a nightmare. He forgot to pay bills. Our credit was shit. Once, the lights went out just as I was finishing up one of my commissioned paintings, and somehow I knew nobody had blown a fuse. That it was Gus who’d blown it; the electricity had been turned off because he’d failed to pay the last three bills. But instead of dealing with it right away, he bought a bunch of candles, got Chinese takeout, and made a candlelit dinner in the dark dining room.
He never did his own laundry. He was loud in the morning when I was trying to sleep. He listened to music at full volume even after the neighbors complained.
And he hated the tree paintings. With a passion.
In the spring, I’d been working on a commission for a particularly difficult client. The woman had asked me to incorporate a fox somehow, because foxes are so cute, aren’t they? And so I had sketched out my usual rows of trees and then drawn the pointy face of a fox peeking out playfully from behind one of them.
Gus was playing Go Fish in the other room with Avery. He’d been uncharacteristically taciturn all night as I worked, though he was slamming cabinet doors and clanging the pots and pans around more loudly than usual.