by T. Greenwood
And then we were kissing. The heat of our mouths in such contrast to the bitter cold around us. His beard scratched my face. And the tears that fell down my cheeks were also hot, salty as they fell into our open, hungry mouths.
His hands reached underneath my parka, wrapped around my waist. And I didn’t care my middle was soft; I only cared about his hot skin on my hot skin. I was shaking, trembling, quaking.
I squeezed my eyes shut and let him kiss the tears off my cheeks, let his lips find my ears, my neck.
“Mama!!!!” The sound was tremendous. The crackle and hiss, the echo of her cries.
He touched his forehead to mine.
“Shit,” he said. “I’m sorry.” But I didn’t know whether he was sorry we’d been interrupted, or sorry it had happened in the first place.
“Hurry!” I said, regretting leaving her alone. Feeling like a crappy mom.
We ran back around to the front of the mansion. He was still holding my hand. On the monitor, Avery’s wails grew and grew.
“Let’s cut through here,” he said, motioning to the trees.
“Mama!!!” Avery cried. “Mama!!!”
And so I nodded, and I let him lead me into those dark woods. The trembling I had felt earlier took over my body as we made our way along the path between the two houses. I held my breath the whole time, closed my eyes, and trusted (because I had no choice) he would get me to the other side.
* * *
She’d wet her bed again. She’d been wearing footie pajamas, which were soaked through. There had to have been a gallon of piss pooling inside her PJs.
“I’m going to give her a bath,” I said to Gus. “Would you mind stripping the sheets?”
I took Avery into the bathroom, wrapped her in a dry towel while I ran the water. The room filled with the smell of rotten eggs.
She was shivering, her skin cold and clammy.
“Come here,” I said, reaching for her. I helped her into the tub and she curled her knees to her chest.
“I was crying and crying. Where were you, Mommy?”
“I’m sorry, baby. Daddy and I were just outside looking at the snow.”
“It’s snowing?” she said.
I grabbed the washcloth draped over the faucet, dried stiff. I dipped it into the water and squirted a dollop of liquid body soap on it. I ran the washcloth down her back, noting the little ladder of her spine, and how long her legs were getting. How many more years would she need me to bathe her, to make swirls across her back?
“Can I make a snowman?”
“Tomorrow,” I promised. Her body relaxed. By the time I lifted her out of the tub and slipped a clean nightie over her head, she was half asleep again. I carried her to my own room and laid her down. The windows rattled in the wind. I noticed there was a small crack in one pane of glass. I would need to call Pilar’s guy, Hank, to repair it before it got much colder.
I made my way down the stairs. Gus had brought the wet sheets down to the washing machine in the basement. I could hear the pipes groaning as the water came on. The teakettle was whistling on the stove. I poured us each a cup of tea as I heard Gus’s footsteps coming up from the basement.
Gus sat down at the little kitchen table. I handed him the mug of tea and sat down across from him with my own cup.
“So, is this the first time she’s done this?” he asked.
“No, it’s happened a couple of times.”
“She’s four,” he said in disbelief. “She’s been totally potty trained for over a year.”
“She’s fine. It was just an accident. We can’t make a big deal out of it. You need milk?” I got up and went to the fridge.
“Well, it wasn’t happening back at home,” he persisted.
I poured the milk in my tea, left the carton on the table between us in case he changed his mind.
“She’s in a strange place,” I offered. “There have been a lot of changes for her lately.”
“Exactly,” he said, setting the mug down hard on the little kitchen table. “It’s messing her up. She’s regressing. She’s wetting the bed, because of us.”
I suddenly felt like he was attacking me. Blaming me.
“She’s wetting the bed because you let her drink a huge cup of chocolate milk right before bedtime,” I said, trying hard to lighten the mood.
But Gus clenched his jaw. “Kids regress when they’re upset. When their worlds are turned upside down.”
I shook my head, tears filling my eyes. I thought of her upside-down room. Upset down.
“She’s confused,” he said.
“I’m confused,” I countered.
“Can’t you see this is messing her up?”
“What?”
“Taking her away from me.”
“I didn’t take her away from you,” I said. “She’s not a toy I took out of your goddamned toy box.”
“Then what do you call it? You’re on a fucking island. It took me twelve hours to get here. You haven’t come home to visit. It feels away to me.”
“So, it’s better to have her think everything is fine and freaking dandy at home? Pretending like it’s totally normal for her parents to live next door to each other like neighbors?”
“Yes,” he said, throwing his hands up.
“Well, it’s a lie,” I said. “Because nothing about that is normal.”
“And since when have you been concerned with normalcy?”
“What is that supposed to mean?” I said.
“Just what I said. You’ve never cared about normal before. About the status quo.”
I felt that familiar, awful burn of his words.
“That’s funny, because that’s pretty much what you’ve been accusing me of for the last year, right? Pandering to the status quo?” I mocked and gestured toward the stupid commission painting in the other room.
Gus closed his eyes and leaned his head back, rolled his neck. “Can’t we just talk this through?”
“I don’t want to talk,” I said, standing up.
“Great,” he said. “Then let’s just not talk about it.”
“I’m going to bed,” I said.
“Because that always works, right?”
* * *
I slept curled around Avery that night, her small body enclosed in a cave made of blankets and arms and legs. When she struggled to break free in the morning, it was as if she were being born again, emerging from the hot womb I’d made to keep her safe.
“Daddy’s up!” she whispered. “I’m going to go see Daddy.”
And for one disorienting moment, we could have been in the big, lumpy bed at our house in Queens. The bluegrass music Gus loved, jangly and light. The smell of coffee and bacon and something sweet beckoning us. But we weren’t at home. We were in a freezing cold room in a crumbling house at the edge of the world. Wind rattled the windows, and cold air sliced through that crack in the glass. Outside, the sky was bright, and the snow, at least a foot of it, was blinding. Everything was obscured. Suffocating.
I pulled on the long johns Gus had brought me from home, my slipper socks, and my robe. I glanced at myself in the mirror only quickly, piled my hair into a ponytail, and tried to pat down my bangs, which stood up, willful and defiant against gravity.
Downstairs, the kitchen was a disaster. Gus had brought a waffle iron from home as well, and I could see there was a red velvet cake mix sitting next to the counter. Red batter oozed out of the edges of the machine.
“Cake waffles!” Avery said.
This was a Gus invention, one he’d come up with back when we were still students. The food bank often got donations of cake and muffin mixes, and Gus had discovered if you poured them into a waffle iron, they made delicious waffles. We didn’t always have a functioning stove, but we always had a waffle maker, and so we always had waffles: German chocolate, blueberry, confetti waffles for my birthday one year.
Gus and I didn’t speak. He took a shower. I did the dishes. Without a word.
“Dad
dy and I are going to make a snowman,” Avery said later. “Come on, Mommy. You come too.”
I shook my head. “I have some work to do, sweets,” I said. “You and Daddy have fun.”
* * *
After they both got bundled up and headed outside, I went to the dining room and looked at the commission painting propped up on the easel and tried to see it through Gus’s eyes. Only two trees completed, the others sketched, ghostlike on the canvas. Beside the easel was a rolling cart that held my paints and turpentine and rags. The brushes fanned like a bouquet of thin flowers in a coffee can vase. I plucked the smallest brush, ran its tip across my palm. Made of the smallest cluster of hog bristles, it was the one I used for the detail work. For the meticulous, compulsive even, rendering of these goddamned trees.
* * *
Outside, Gus and Avery made a family. A mother, a father, and a baby.
When they came in, each red-cheeked and breathless, I was grateful for the interruption. I hadn’t made even one stroke on the canvas.
“I wanted to make a snow mermaid,” Gus said, as if in apology, as we looked out the window at the snowmen below. “But Avery said there’s no such thing.”
“Of course there is,” I said to Avery. “Remember, we found her tears?”
“It’s make believe, Mama,” she said, and I felt my heart sink.
I didn’t know how to tell her there was no such thing as this family she’d made either. That Mother, Father, Daughter was just as much a fantasy as a woman with shimmery fins instead of legs.
I willed it to snow again that night. When we each went to our respective rooms, I said a childlike prayer the sky would fill with clouds again, that the snow would come down in cold, hard slivers. That it would enclose us, making it impossible for Gus to go home. For as angry and guilty as he made me feel, I didn’t want him to leave.
I listened to the sound of him reading to Avery on the baby monitor, which crackled and hissed on the nightstand.
He was reading Where the Wild Things Are, her book of choice because he was so good at making the grumbly voices of the wild things. “We’ll eat you up, we love you so . . .” And she giggled. And she whispered.
I strained to hear what she was saying, turning the volume up on the monitor. Desperate to hear the secrets she was sharing with him. And more than that, wanting to be with them.
“I miss you, Daddy,” I made out.
“I’m right here,” Gus said, his voice sad and soft.
“I miss you even though,” she said.
“I miss you even though too,” he said.
I clicked off the monitor, my head pounding, my heart pounding. And I wished I hadn’t been so curious, so needy. That I hadn’t eavesdropped on this private, quiet moment.
* * *
Despite my prayers, it didn’t snow again. And the snow that had accumulated the night before melted in the new, bright sun. When we walked Gus out to the car the next morning, the snow family had begun to melt; the mother was listing to one side. She’d lost an arm. The father looked resigned to his fate too. Only the child remained upright. Optimistic.
Gus hugged me quickly, but he already felt so far away.
“I’ll let you know what Wes says, hopefully he has time to process the film for you.” He wouldn’t look at me, not even when he was talking to me. “You sure you don’t want prints?”
“No. That’s cool. Maybe just contact sheets? And if he could do them in date order, that would help. All of the canisters are dated.”
“And the plan is still to meet at your folks’ for Christmas?” he said.
I nodded again. We were going to spend Christmas Eve with my parents in New Hampshire, and then Gus would take Avery back to New York with him for two weeks. He’d arranged to have the week between Christmas and New Year’s off, as well as the first week of January, so he could spend time with her. And I would go back to the island alone until Pilar came back from her trip.
“Let me know if you need me to send anything at all,” Gus said.
I shook my head. “We’ve got the waffle iron, what more could we need?” I offered a small smile, but he didn’t return it.
December
The knock on the door startled me. I was engaged in what was turning out to be an ongoing battle with the plumbing in the downstairs bathroom, Avery’s chosen place to conduct all number two business. She liked to sit on the toilet with the door open so she could talk to me as she waited for her bowels to move. Sometimes, she’d sit there waiting for ten or twenty minutes. No matter what I fed her—vegetables snuck into her pancakes, sweet, plump prunes on top of her morning oatmeal, dried apricots, which I promised tasted like candy—whatever was happening inside that tiny belly was wreaking havoc on the pipes.
I’d already had Hank come by twice. Both times he’d snaked the toilet and found nothing of significance. He suggested perhaps the roots from the trees out in the front of the house were somehow encroaching. He’d stood and shaken his head, mystified.
“Usually it’s a toy,” he said, in his thick Maine accent. “Barbies, Legos. You name it. Kids like to flush things.”
“Avery’s not a flusher,” I’d offered. And it was true. To a fault. Once, before Gus and I split up, we’d been showing the other side of the duplex to a prospective tenant, and when we opened the door to the bathroom, we’d found one of Avery’s happy little turds floating blissfully in the bowl.
After the second visit to Pilar’s house, Hank had offered to go down there with a camera, sort of a colonoscopy of the house’s innards, but I’d declined. Who knew how much something like that would cost her? Especially when the problem could most often be remedied with a plunger and some patience.
Today’s battle had been going on for nearly an hour, though, and I was exasperated. Sweating. A headache creeping in.
The pounding on the door was so disorienting, it took me a moment to remember what that sound even was.
“There’s a man at the door!” Avery said.
“What kind of man?” I asked, feeling my heart quicken as I set the plunger down.
“A regular kind,” she said.
And so I washed and dried my hands quickly, hoping it was just the guy to fix the stairs, and went to the front door. It took a moment before I recognized him.
It was the man from next door. From the mansion. He looked different standing in my doorway than he had in his own massive one. It was probably only about twenty-five degrees outside. He was wearing what looked like a Lands’ End wool jacket, seemingly fresh out of the package. Jeans and L.L. Bean boots, soft leather uppers and forest green rubber bottoms.
“Hi,” he said. “I’m from next door.”
I nodded. Then I thought, Shit. Gus and I are totally busted. Had we left something behind at the pool? Could they tell we’d been traipsing through their backyard? I started to formulate my defense, my apology, when he said, “May I come in? It’s cold out here, and I forgot my gloves.”
“Oh, yes, please. So sorry.” I gestured for him to come inside. Avery clung to the back of my legs.
We stood awkwardly in the foyer for a moment, before I remembered the etiquette.
“Would you like to come in? Can I take your coat?”
He seemed grateful for the niceties.
I handed the coat to Avery and said, “Av, can you hang up Mr . . .”
“Ferguson. Seamus Ferguson,” he said, and awkwardly extended his hand to shake mine. “I’m sorry our last encounter was so . . . rushed. Fiona, my wife, is going through a difficult time. There’s no excuse. I’m sorry. The pie was lovely.”
He was so genteel. Even in the soft plaid shirt and perfectly faded jeans.
He didn’t mention the pool.
Avery took the coat from me and hung it up on the wooden rack by the door. She stood there, curious.
“Why don’t you go for a swing in your room,” I said.
She frowned but then obeyed, tiptoeing carefully up the stairs. I was so grateful
to Gus for the temporary fix he’d made, but still eager for the stair guy to finally get here.
“Would you like a cup of coffee or something?” I asked the man, who was slipping off his wet boots.
“That would be wonderful,” he said.
I offered him a seat at the kitchen table, which was covered with the detritus of Avery’s latest artistic endeavor, the wooden surface sparkly and sticky with glitter and glue. “Sorry,” I said, pushing aside the stacks of construction paper and Popsicle sticks and pom-poms to make room.
I filled the coffee pot with water and started to pull out the industrial sized can of generic coffee from the cupboard when I suddenly remembered the fancy coffee Pilar had brought. I dug through the freezer, found the little bag, and filled the filter.
“So, are you and your wife here for Christmas?” I asked. Christmas was just a week away now.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “We spend Christmas in Colorado with Fiona’s sister.”
I thought of my client in Aspen, waiting on the birches painting, and felt a little shock of anxiety.
“I’m just here to check on the house. Make sure the pipes don’t freeze.”
I would have thought people like this would have an entire staff to take care of their homes, their pipes, while they were away.
“Are you enjoying the island?” he asked suddenly. And then, awkwardly, “You and your . . . wife?”
I smiled. He wasn’t the first person to assume Pilar was my lover.
“Pilar is just my friend. She’s actually the one who bought this place.”
“And the little girl? She’s your daughter?”
I nodded. “Yes, Avery.”
He took a sip of coffee. “Your friend, she said you’re both artists.”
“Yes,” I said. “In fact, she’s going to be profiled on CBS Sunday Morning just after Christmas. She’s an incredible painter.”
“And you,” he said, seemingly unfazed by Pilar’s fame. “You’re a painter too?”
I sighed and shrugged. “I paint.”