Local Knowledge

by Liza Gyllenhaal

  I hadn’t gotten very far before I heard voices. Children’s voices. Singing. In a round. “It’s raining. It’s pouring. The old man is snoring …” They were stumbling down the road toward me, Max and Beanie first, holding hands, followed by Rachel, who was carrying Lia in her arms, while Katie marched along beside her clutching a corner of the bedraggled towel that Rachel had wrapped around her waist. Max and Katie wore nothing but bathing suits and flip-flops. My girls at least were wearing their cover-ups and Keds, though everything was soaked through. Their legs were splattered with mud.

  “It’s Mom!” Beanie cried, seeing me first. In another moment, I was clutching wet limbs and dripping hair to me, breathing in the sweet perfume of my daughter’s body.

  “It’s raining, it’s pouring!” Max cried, jumping in place. “I win! I never stopped! I’m the winner!”

  “We’re having a singing contest,” Beanie told me, as I brushed the wet hair out of her eyes and kissed her forehead. “We’ve been singing all the way down the road.”

  “That’s great,” I said, standing up and turning to Rachel. I longed to tell her that I was terrified, grateful, sorry, ashamed. Instead, I reached out my arms and said: “Let me take Lia for you.”

  There was no safe place to turn around, so I was forced to back the car down the road. The children, wrapped in the spare towels and blankets I carried in the trunk, were in high spirits, all squashed together in the back. Rachel, her hair turbaned in a towel, sat next to me in the front seat, helping me navigate our difficult backward passage. By the time we made the turn onto Route 198 the rain was nothing but a light smattering on the windshield. I think Rachel sensed how upset I was, but we both have a tendency to tread lightly when heavy emotions are involved.

  “You know, I tried to call you,” she said. “But I couldn’t get a signal.”

  “I tried to call you, too,” I told her. “Quite a few times. You must have been walking for—what? Half an hour?”

  “About that. I decided we should go when the lightning got really bad. I left everything there on the beach. I’m afraid Mrs. Zeller’s picnic hamper is pretty well ruined.”

  “Did you try to call her?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Rachel said. “Like I said, the signal’s—”

  “Where is she, Rachel?”

  “I don’t know, Mom. I really don’t. The last couple of weeks she’s been late a lot of times picking us up. Once, we didn’t actually get back until just before you. Like around seven or so.”

  “I wish you’d told me,” I said, trying to sound calm. “I could have said something to her.”

  “She told me not to,” Rachel said. “She said not to worry you, because you were so busy at your job. She’s always really sorry. And thoughtful. She’s been giving me an extra ten dollars each time to make up for everything.”

  19

  I dropped the children off back at our house and told Rachel to give everyone a hot shower, including Max and Katie.

  “Wouldn’t it just make more sense to drive them right home?” Rachel asked.

  “No, I think this is better,” I said. “I’m going to run over there and talk to Anne.”

  “Oh, Mom, please—”

  “Don’t worry. I won’t tell her what you told me. I just need to find out what’s going on. If I’m late getting back, go ahead and give everybody supper.”

  The temperature had dropped precipitously since the front had come through, and the air had a charged metallic smell, like spent gunpowder. The sky was clear again, and the lowlying sun shimmered across the rain-soaked fields and woods, setting the trees aglitter and turning the roadway into a river of light. As I made the turn onto Maple Rise, I noticed that Luke had put up a new piece to replace the sunflower Paul had bought from him. It was more abstract than his usual fare, a curving shaft of tempered metal, about five feet high. It felt odd to be approaching the Zellers in such an emotional state. I usually feel so privileged to be making the climb up the curving hillside and tend to compose my best self for Anne: the loving mother, the good listener, the sympathetic friend. Now I was too upset to care how I came across.

  I parked the car in the turnaround behind Anne’s Volvo and walked down the rain-slicked pathway to the front door. I don’t think I’d ever used the bell before; I’m usually expected and just walk right in. Now, though, I felt the need to formalize my anger. I pressed on the buzzer. I waited. I leaned toward the door to listen for Anne’s footsteps. Silence. I buzzed again. Nothing. That was the moment it occurred to me that something might be wrong. That Anne could have had an accident, fallen down the unfinished basement steps or taken too many sleeping pills trying to get some relief from her insomnia. There’s always a part of me that worries about her. I don’t have her emotional problems. I don’t understand what it feels like to carry such a burden, though I’ve seen her at both extremes—feverishly exhilarated and anxiously deflated. I’ve been a good, practical help to Anne, I know. But her deeper troubles remain beyond my grasp. I tried the bell again, but I was already pushing open the front door as I did so.

  “Anne?”

  Late-afternoon sunlight filled the soaring space: the entrance hall, living room, and the long gallery leading to the master bedroom suite. From the foyer, I could see straight through into the spacious dining area and the cutout windows that opened to the kitchen. The rooms were finally fully furnished. Rachel had helped with some of the ordering and had brought home a few of the glossy catalogs as souvenirs, I suppose, of her summer sojourn in what must sometimes seem to her a foreign country. She’d been shocked by the prices for what looked to her like stripped-down and not particularly comfortable furnishings. Except for the whisper of the central air system, the house was silent. The rotating ceiling fan in the kitchen gently riffled some papers on the countertop. Other than that the rooms seemed preternaturally still.

  “Anne? Are you here?”

  I stepped down into the sunken living room and walked across to the dining area, glancing down the corridor on my way. The door to the master suite was closed, the hallway ending in shadows. I continued into the kitchen, opening the door to the deck to make sure that Anne wasn’t reading or sleeping on one of the chaise lounges. The outside air was damp and chilly, the trees and the sloping field beaded with water and dripping. I closed the door. In the silence, I heard a sound. Someone. I crossed the kitchen to the hallway.

  “Anne? It’s Maddie—is every—”

  “Maddie.”

  Luke was walking slowly toward me down the corridor.

  “What are you doing here? What’s happened? Where’s Anne?”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Everything’s fine.” But I could tell from his tone of voice that it wasn’t. He looked disoriented. Disturbed. I feared the worse. He had found Anne—where? In the garage with the car running? In the bathroom, bloody water overflowing? Some instinct had drawn him here, or else she had cried out. Help me. Help me. Afterward, I would think back on my initial impression of what had brought them together, and would wonder if I hadn’t actually hit on something pretty close to the truth.

  “Where’s Anne?”

  “She’s coming,” he said gently, taking me by the elbow and leading me back into the living room, as though I was a child who needed comforting. But his tone only frightened me further. What was he doing here? Luke Barnett, in his worn jeans and fraying T-shirt, inviting me to sit down on the Zellers’ pristine white leather couch? I felt as though I was in one of those nightmares where, standing in a familiar room and engaged in what seems like a perfectly normal situation, I find myself conversing with someone I know to be long dead. The whole scenario seemed surreal, off-kilter. Luke turned as Anne emerged from the bedroom and went to meet her at the steps that led down to the living room. He took her hand.

  I try to remember how I saw them then, that first time. How they struck me as a couple, because it changed so much about how I thought of them as individuals. For one thing, they both looked exhau
sted and somehow radiant at the same time. They didn’t have to say anything. I understood immediately that they had become lovers. It was crazy. I knew that. Their circumstances were so utterly different; their daily lives might as well be taking place on different planets. And yet, despite my vast reservations, I also saw how right they looked together. How, physically, they seemed to be made for each other—both slight, tense, restlessly attractive—and how, together, they appeared to complete each other. Calm each other. A part of me saw all this, but I still had angry questions for Anne.

  “Do you have any idea where your children are?”

  “Katie and Max?” Anne asked, looking baffled. “Why, they’re with Rachel, aren’t they?”

  “Yes? Up at the pond? In the middle of the worst thunderstorm of the summer? Christ, Anne, they could have all been killed up there! While you two were—”

  “Is everyone okay?” Luke cut me off. I noticed how he’d put his arm around Anne’s waist, pulling her to him protectively.

  “Now they are. When I couldn’t get through here, I drove up there myself. I found them on the road, they’d walked at least half a mile in the rain. They were soaked right through. I left them at our house with Rachel.”

  “Thank God,” Anne said, as she stepped down into the room and slid into an armchair. Luke sat next to her on the ottoman.

  “Do you really care?” I asked, and saw with some satisfaction how Anne bowed her head, how Luke nodded, appraising me.

  “You must be furious with us,” Luke said. “You came here to confront Anne, didn’t you? And you discover us together. This isn’t the way we wanted you to find out, Maddie. We wanted this to be a—well, a joyful moment, not one filled with anger. We’ve been in our own world, really. We didn’t hear the storm, okay? Tell us what happened.”

  I think what surprised me most was Luke’s measured, solicitous tone. It seemed utterly lacking in the bitter sarcasm I’d become so accustomed to hearing from him. As far as I was concerned, he had never really bothered to hide his dislike for me. Though for several years he managed to temper it in front of Paul and my daughters, I’d always sensed it was still there, just below the surface. And the last time we saw each other, we couldn’t have parted on worse terms. You have something you want to tell me in the future, Maddie, have the guts to come over here and say it yourself. But he seemed to have forgotten all that now. What I didn’t understand then was that he was already starting to view me as an extension of Anne’s life. He’d discovered I was her friend, her confidante. I learned later that she told him I was the only other person besides Luke himself who knew about the collapsing state of her marriage. So he thought of me as an ally. An advocate. And much more. He saw me as belonging to the magical circle of life that surrounded Anne. I would come to realize that he held Max and Katie, whom he knew only by sight, in the same loving regard. He also saw me as part of their future, as someone who, along with Paul and my daughters, would be built into the architecture of their happiness.

  At that point, though, as I described the storm that had raged through the area, I felt only a deep uneasiness. Despite Luke’s impoverished circumstances, he could still have almost any woman he made an effort to seduce. Women seemed to be drawn to his reckless disregard for their feelings, his willingness to let them batter their lives and families against his impenetrable solitude. He’d never had a relationship that lasted more than a year, and if anything went on even that long it usually only meant that the woman was unwilling to let go. The worst of these, or certainly I think the one most injured by it all, had been Kathy’s older sister Leslie, who met Luke at Kathy and Bob’s wedding and had abandoned her own life for what turned out to be nine months of misery. I remember Ruthie telling me years ago that she thought he was simply incapable of love. She was engaged to Lester Hall at that point, seemingly happy to be planning a traditional wedding with bridesmaids in matching gowns and a raised dancing platform at the reception, when she confessed to me that she still thought about Luke all the time.

  “He gets into your bloodstream,” she told me. “Like a disease. But he’s only a carrier, you know? He’s never touched by any of the symptoms—the fever, chills, heartache, and everything. It’s like he’s empty on the inside. Though he’s so intense and seductive it’s hard to believe he doesn’t really feel anything. But he doesn’t. I think that he’s just kind of immune.”

  And Anne? She seemed so vulnerable to me. She was just beginning to pull herself free from Richard’s domineering orbit. She needed time, space, the self-determination to find a new footing in her life. But I already sensed that whatever she and Luke had found together, it wasn’t going to help make her more independent. No, it was as though they were collapsing into each other. I could almost feel the pull of their mutual attraction.

  “God, we didn’t hear any thunder, any of this,” she was saying, leaning over to rest her elbow on Luke’s shoulder. She tucked a strand of his hair that had fallen forward back behind his ear. “We’ve just lost all track of time. All track of everything. Maddie, it’s been—oh, I know I should have told you. We wanted to tell you, really. I mean, we were so excited when we realized that we shared you. As a friend. Someone who could understand. But we—this thing has floored us both, really, do you know what I mean? I can’t explain it.”

  I was irritated that they imagined they could co-opt me so easily. That they just assumed I would take their part. Their passion had made them utterly self-centered, blind to any possible misgivings I might have about their being together. I was raised in a conservative family; like Paul, I believed that marriage was sacrosanct. And yet they sat there together, the aura of recent sex almost palpable in the room, expecting me just to throw up my hands and join in their celebration.

  “So this has been going for—what?—over three weeks? It started before you told me about the troubles you and Richard were having, didn’t it?” What hurt me most was the memory of how she’d made me think we were sharing intimacies—and the whole time she was keeping the real story, the deepest secret, to herself. I couldn’t help but wonder, too, if it wasn’t actually the start of her affair with Luke that had forced her to see that her marriage was failing. Was Anne the kind of woman who couldn’t conceive of giving up on even the most destructive relationship unless there was a new one in the offing? I realized I was viewing her in the worst possible light. But I felt she had manipulated me, and that she had taken advantage of our friendship.

  “I know I should have told you,” Anne said. “But it’s been such an amazing time for us. Just the two of us. It happened so quickly. Neither of us was ready, or knew what to do. But from that first afternoon—when we first talked—it was just kind of inevitable. It was right. I know it was unfeeling of me, but I didn’t want that part of things to end. I wasn’t ready to share what we had yet, Maddie. Even with you.”

  I understood that; it was how I felt when Paul and I were first together. We were a power of two, alone in the world. I sometimes think that it was the strength of that realization that helped us hold things together through the bad times. It was always there to fall back on; that memory of our beginnings, that sense that our love made each of us better people, and that what we had was somehow destined to be.

  “She’s leaving Richard,” Luke announced, taking her hand. “The marriage is over. It’s just a matter of working things out about the kids, the house.”

  I felt a weight lift at his words. This was what I needed to hear: divorce, custody, plans, legitimization.

  “So Richard knows?”

  “Not yet,” Anne said. “He’s on a business trip. This is not something I can very well tell him over the phone. But, yes, I’m sure he already knows. Not about Luke. Just the impossibility of the two of us staying together.”

  “Do the children know?” I asked. I thought about Paul’s concern that Rachel seemed distant to him, moodier than usual. He’d been worried that it had something to do with Luke, and now suddenly I did, too. Rachel�
�s so observant, sensitive to other people’s lives and feelings. She told me that Anne had often been late recently picking the children up, that she didn’t know where she was. But had she perhaps sensed what had been going on? Or worse, had she seen Luke and Anne together? Making love in the master bedroom? “Did Rachel find out somehow?”

  “No!” Anne said, both hands closing around Luke’s fist. “Believe me, we’ve been careful. We’ve never been together when the kids are in the house. Never. Please, Maddie, I’m not that careless. That thoughtless. Nobody knows but you. Just the three of us. And we need to keep it that way for a little while longer. Until I can talk to Richard rationally. I’ll need as much money from him as I can possibly get. I’ll have to think about how to manage things with Max and Katie. I know I’ll have to talk to a lawyer soon, start sorting all of this out. But it’s been so hard”—she lifted Luke’s hand to her lips—“to think beyond the moment.”

  “These are all details,” Luke said, turning to look at her. “What matters is us, all the rest of it is going to fall into place. Don’t worry. Hey, come here.”

  He pulled her into his arms, and she curled up like a child on his lap while he rocked her back and forth. It was as though they’d forgotten I was there, or that I even existed. Nothing was real to them except themselves. On the surface, it was hard to imagine them as a couple. Anne was utterly impractical, volatile, indulged. Though she was well educated and clearly intelligent, I’d never heard her express any strongly held opinions. She was self-referential, her interests circumscribed by her work, her family, her houses, her possessions. She was a consumer, who would buy and discard things on a whim. Her kitchen closet was filled with empty shopping bags that had piled up in the few months she’d lived here. And Luke was such a loner. An eccentric. He held radical views on the environment, animal rights, living an ecologically sustainable existence, and endless other issues. He recycled everything, washing out and reusing plastic bags and bottles. He was a vegan and a reformed addict who hadn’t touched alcohol or drugs in over fifteen years. He seemed to me as unbending and set in his ways as Anne was careless and changeable.