by Zoe Whittall
The phone blinked again and she put on her headset to answer. It was Andrew, wanting details about the visit. He’d been to visit George earlier and had to return to the city. “I don’t know what to tell you. Wasn’t it so sad, how tired and old he looked?”
“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry you had to experience that.”
Sadie drove in silence for a while with Andrew breathing on the other end of the line.
“Get home safely,” he said gently. “We’ll get through this.”
sadie was becoming accustomed to waking in a manner that made it seem as though she had never been asleep in the first place, usually at four in the morning. rem sleep was a rapidly fading memory, a privilege that no longer belonged to her. She did not feel tired. It was not even a possibility. She felt absent.
She stared at Jimmy sleeping curled around his pillow, clutching its blue and green plaid pattern. Across the room, the blinking blue cursor on his laptop bloomed and receded, lighting up the poster of Noam Chomsky above his desk. There was a line of light underneath the door, as though someone was awake. She sat up and wrapped one of Jimmy’s hoodies around her. It reached below the hem of the boxer shorts she’d taken to sleeping in. There was nowhere to step that involved actual foot-to-carpet contact. Where there wasn’t strewn clothes, there were magazines, discarded art projects, statues of cups and plates. She’d cleaned it up once, and the change had not been welcomed. So she came in to sleep and kept her belongings in the guest room.
She walked downstairs into the kitchen and turned on the kettle to make some Sleepytime tea. Her phone on the table blinked with a voice mail. It was from her father.
“I just want to know how you are doing with school.” He sounded oddly formal, as though they hadn’t just spoken that day, and as though he was inside a cave. “I know your sats are coming up and I wanted to say I know you will do a terrific job and you don’t have to let what is happening … right now … affect your future. You have to focus this year, Sadie, if you want to make sure you can go wherever you choose next year. I’m very proud of you and know you can do it.” He kept talking for a while, and it almost felt normal to hear his voice inquiring about her studies, giving her his trademark pep talk.
She turned the phone off and poured boiling water into a mug. Every mug in the house was a heavy white square shape with a black interior. She sat down at the glass-covered table and laid her face down against its coolness.
“I always find pillows to be more comfortable,” said Kevin, standing in the doorway between the living room and kitchen in his boxer shorts and an old ripped T-shirt that read Vision Street Wear.
Sadie shrugged in response. “Why can’t you sleep?”
“I was writing,” he said, and rubbed his face with his hands as though rubbing off a layer of skin. He always said “writing” in a way that made it sound to Sadie like I was just curing some orphan children of blindness, no biggie.
But despite his arrogance, and the way he walked around like he really, really wished he was still a teenager, Sadie didn’t actually mind Kevin, or having him around. He was chill and non-judgemental. His face and the way he looked at her hadn’t changed at all since the arrest.
He walked over to the coffee pot, which was perpetually on and half full.
“So, darling, tell me your troubles.”
“Did you know that the United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world: 743 adults incarcerated per 100,000 people?”
“I didn’t know that so … precisely,” said Kevin, running his hand through his unkempt hair and staring at her curiously. He didn’t seem too concerned about her response. “Do you want to watch a classic movie instead of talking to this old fart interrupting your tea time?”
“Sure.”
They walked into the living room. She sat on the couch, blowing into her mug of tea. He opened up the dvd drawer.
“This is a true classic,” he said, holding up St. Elmo’s Fire.
She took a sip. It tasted like twigs and was too sweet and she didn’t want to drink it anymore, but it gave her something to do. She couldn’t stop thinking about her father in his prison clothes.
Kevin curled up on the opposite end of the couch and turned to smile at her before he pressed Play. Though it would have seemed inconceivable just twenty minutes ago, she turned up her lips in an approximate symbol of joy, and she meant it. She liked the distraction of Kevin. They sat under separate blankets. Sadie stared straight ahead and watched the opening credits.
“I always watch this when I can’t sleep and I can’t write,” he explained.
“I think this is one of my mom’s favourite movies,” Sadie said.
“Huh,” he said. “I wouldn’t have expected that.”
“She’s not so bad, my mom. She’s actually a pretty strong person.”
“No, no, I can see that. She certainly raised a strong daughter, if you don’t mind me saying.”
“I don’t.” This kept happening lately: Sadie went from hating someone to feeling happy and grateful to have them around in the same minute. She didn’t feel strong, but she was happy to be faking it as well as she apparently was.
Kevin pulled out a joint from the Altoids tin he kept in the drawer of the coffee table. “Do you mind if I …?”
“No.”
He lit the joint, took a long drag, and handed it to her. She tried to pretend it was the most normal thing in the world, holding it between her thumb and forefinger, casually waiting a few seconds before inhaling. It was the first time she’d smoked with anyone besides Amanda or Jimmy. It was only the fifth time she’d ever tried it. She was usually the one who watched her friends smoke and then tried to laugh along, and mostly she just got bored and wanted to go read a book. Minutes passed, and the joint was finished. She just kept accepting it, and inhaling, and by the time it was a stub her entire body felt like an electrified stone. Kevin was not one of those smokers who laughed like an idiot. He just kept acting pretty normal. She opened her mouth and then couldn’t close it. She felt her lips dry out, then her tongue, and she told herself to swallow. Close your mouth, you idiot. But her lips didn’t get the message.
“Marijuana increases the heart rate by twenty to one hundred percent shortly after smoking,” Sadie said, surprised that her lips could move to talk. “One is at increased risk of having a heart attack for one hour after smoking.”
Kevin grinned. “Duly noted, nurse.”
They watched the movie for about fifteen minutes. Not bad, a few too many saxophone solos. Eventually she could move her lips and her tongue, and finished her tea. She was starting to understand why people liked to get high when she felt Kevin’s foot touching her leg.
She didn’t know what to do. She kept staring at the screen. The feeling of Kevin’s foot was making her feel so startlingly alive, his toes to her knee. Her bare knee, where the hoodie had crept up to her thigh.
Turn and look at him.
Just turn.
She contemplated putting her hand on his foot, in a gesture that said, I like that.
Oh my god, how dumb. That makes no sense. Wait, do I like that?
Her rational brain didn’t know. But her body was warm, tingling. Rob Lowe’s face on the screen, his strong arms.
Do I, even? Jimmy is upstairs. Kevin must be in his thirties, for Christ’s sake. Gross. Just watch the movie. Why does the screen look so weird? Then she remembered that she was high, and she laughed. She expected him to laugh too, in response. He didn’t. His foot felt heavier against her leg. Insistent. Instead of feeling horrified, she found the sensation not entirely unpleasant. In fact, she wanted to kiss him. She wanted to kiss Kevin? She’d never wanted to kiss anyone as badly as she did right then.
This is crazy. This is just because I’m high. People jump off buildings when they’re high, or think they see god. This is nothing.
&nbs
p; Finally she put the mug of tea down on the wooden arm of the sofa, trying to be casual. She turned her head to the right, just slightly.
Kevin had fallen asleep. His mouth slack on the square tartan couch pillow.
She understood immediately that his foot had simply moved in his sleep. His hands were curled around the blanket at his neck like a little boy. She felt so foolish. He snored gently. She tried to move away from his foot, but there was no more space on the couch. She pushed her hip against the arm of the couch anyway, and his foot just stayed in place. A white sweat sock with two thin blue lines around the ankle. The kind Elaine bought in bulk.
God, ego much, Sadie? The humiliation came fast and thick. So fucking misguided. She looked at his face, at how old he was, and was disgusted with herself. Why on earth would she ever want to kiss him?
Then the music on the tv got abruptly loud, and it startled him awake with a snort.
“Oh, Sadie,” he said, moving his foot away as though her leg were covered in spiders. “Sorry, I’m not leaving you any, uh, room. I must’ve dozed off.” He petted his foot, as if it were a dog, to brush something away.
“That’s okay, Kevin. I’m just going to go back up … to bed.”
He didn’t answer because he’d already gone back to sleep. When she stood up, he stretched out his legs. He wasn’t looking for action, he was looking for legroom.
She crept up the carpeted stairs, tiptoeing slowly past Elaine’s room, and crawled back under the covers with Jimmy. He reached for her in his sleep. He kissed her forehead. “Where’d you go?”
“Downstairs to have some tea. I couldn’t sleep.”
“Huh,”
“I smoked a joint with Kevin,” she said, as though confessing something illicit. She expected Jimmy might get mad, or feel jealous. She felt guilt for what she had thought might be happening, even though it had clearly all been in her head.
“No fair, he never smokes me up anymore,” he mumbled, and turned so that he was spooning her. He was hard against her lower back. This wasn’t unusual. She reached back and grabbed him, the somewhat familiar but still kind of new feeling of him hot in her hand. He didn’t move. He stopped talking. Sadie could tell he was wide awake with her touch but not saying anything. He probably didn’t want to push his luck. His absolute stillness was arousing.
Normally, when they had sex, he initiated, and they did it the regular way, her legs in a V, hair splayed on one of his plaid flannel pillow cases, and the whole thing had yet to last more than about two minutes. This time she moved her hand up and down, the way she’d seen in porn, listening to his breath quicken. She turned around and pushed him on his back. She grabbed a condom from the stash in his bedside table and ripped it open. She fumbled a bit — this was something he usually did — but he lay there, eyes widened, perhaps afraid that if he moved or said anything she’d stop, or he’d realize it was a dream. She curled her hand around him, noting the chips in her manicure. She applied a little pressure and he got even harder, and moaned. She loved the sounds he made, involuntary, helpless. “Please,” he mouthed. She let go and threw one leg over him, mimicking the position she’d seen in one of Kevin’s magazines, riding him up and down. Jimmy seemed almost embarrassed, eyes fixed on her breasts under her open hoodie, his hands gripping her knees. She found herself imagining Kevin at the door, peering through a crack, watching. The image set her off. It was the first time she’d had an orgasm when someone else was in the room. Jimmy didn’t know that. He had never asked.
“Wow,” Jimmy said, “let’s do it like that all the time. That was … wild.”
He tipped his head back and fell asleep right away, and she lay awake, wishing she wasn’t high but feeling a bit better, the same way she did after running, as though her muscles had finally relaxed, calming her.
in the morning, she woke up before everyone else. She saw the condom on the floor, stuck to the cover of a paperback copy of Heart of Darkness. She tiptoed to the bathroom and wrapped it in toilet paper and buried it at the bottom of the wastebasket. She wasn’t sure what to do, settling in on the edge of the bed and watching Jimmy sleeping for a bit. She felt sore and a little ashamed, as though she had been taken over by some confident sex goddess overnight and in the light of day she felt like the same girl she’d always been. She briefly longed for the days of making out, when sex was still a mystery, a thing she’d eventually do. She didn’t like being older in this moment, despite all the years she’d wished she could just get over the awkward, in-between feeling of being a teenaged girl, the feeling of being ugly in the body that is probably the most beautiful you will ever have.
Saturday and Sunday
seventeen
joan hated to leave her daughter in a house with a man she didn’t even know, a man who wrote novels about Colombian drug cartels and another one about a homeless clairvoyant. Joan felt that he was really just some young sucker living off an older woman’s hard-earned savings. Sadie brought home two of his books and Joan displayed them on the shelf in the living room, but she was definitely never going to read them. He had one of those author photos where his head was resting in his hands. No.
On Saturday afternoons, Joan usually did laundry and organized the week ahead. Andrew and Clara had returned, and Clara was organizing the dry goods pantry. Rows of dusty Mason jars were assembled on the kitchen table, beside a new roll of white masking tape and a felt-tip marker. Joan sat beside her, bereft.
“I want you to write Bulgur, Couscous, and Kasha on these labels,” Clara said, handing her the labels and pen.
“I hate that she’s at that house, with a man I don’t even know,” she said, writing out the first label in shaky cursive. The ink bled and feathered. She blurred the letters in Bulgur with the flat of her thumb, ripped off the label, balled it up, and started again.
“You need to wait for the ink to dry. And don’t worry. Kevin is a ‘has-been’ — someone who caught a break with his first novel fifteen years ago and never lived up to the subsequent five. We don’t review him at the magazine anymore,” Clara said, hoping that would make Joan feel better. “His career has gone to shit.”
For once Joan appreciated how Clara spoke with authority, as though she had the right to make grand pronouncements about how everyone feels about culture, because she worked in the middle of where “it” all happened.
“Your anger at Elaine is misdirected,” Clara said, amalgamating two separate jars of white rice into one. “Write Basmati long-grain.”
“I don’t care if it is,” Joan said, complying. “I don’t know quite how to explain it, but I’m just feeling whatever emotion occurs to me in the moment and going with it.”
“You might be on to something,” Clara said.
Joan took a card out of her handbag that a nurse from work had sent her. On the front were the words If you’re going through hell, keep going. She handed it to Clara.
“Keep going where? Deeper into the hell? What a load of crap,” she said.
“I think it’s Buddhist or something,” Joan said. “I found it comforting.”
“What are you going to do about Sadie staying over there? It can’t keep happening, right?”
Joan shrugged. “I certainly don’t want it to.”
Later that night, Joan encountered Kevin in the checkout aisle at the twenty-four-hour Safeway off the highway near Woodbridge. She was shopping fairly late, so that she could avoid most people she knew. He was standing in a shrug, cradling a six-pack with a bag of frozen french fries on top. He wore a sweatshirt with a skull on the back, and checkerboard-patterned Vans skateboard sneakers, like Andrew used to wear in high school. She didn’t realize it was him in front of her in line, a lazy stubble mapping his jaw. She was staring off unfocused, and he turned to catch her eye.
“Heyyyy,” he said, nodding his chin towards her.
He is too friendly, she thought. He’s going
to pretend this whole mess hasn’t happened, which is almost worse than the pointed, gossipy eye bulges.
“Your daughter’s great to have around the house,” he volunteered.
She gripped the handle of her grocery cart. She looked down at the tub of low-fat margarine, the package of steel-cut oats, the loaves of whole grain bread. She could pretend to forget something, leave the checkout line, but an impatient guy holding giant handfuls of paper towels had hemmed her in. Joan resented every inch of Kevin existing in the world.
“Yes, she is,” she said. “She is a wonderful girl,” she muttered, as though she were speaking about someone else’s daughter.
“I helped her with her admissions essay yesterday,” he said, placing his six-pack on the conveyor.
“Really,” she said.
Kevin handed a crumpled twenty to the cashier, a young girl who smiled at him. “Thanks, man,” he said to her, and turned again to Joan, whose skin was hot metal. “You have a good night, Joannie,” he said, looking briefly concerned at her.
after depositing her groceries in the trunk of the car, she sat in the driver’s seat and turned to punch the passenger seat in rapid succession. It was what a therapist had told Andrew to do when he had anger troubles in junior high school. They bought him a punching bag and put it in the basement for him to pummel whenever he felt the urge.
It did nothing to calm her and made her feel ridiculous.
When she got home, she opened the door and almost tripped on Andrew’s suitcase, which he’d placed by the pile of shoes on the mat. She regarded his shoes, well-crafted leather, as the shoes of a successful man. She remembered taking him to Harvey’s Shoes in town every August before school, where he argued each time about the importance of having the right sneakers. Even though she had more money after she got married than she’d ever had growing up, she still thought it was silly to buy her kids all the newest shoes as the trends shifted.
Andrew was asleep on the couch with the tv on, an entertainment news program blaring. A famous model was dead, aerial footage of the body being carried out of a mansion on a stretcher. The light flickered against the wall, and Payton the cat was chasing it, making clicking sounds with his mouth the way he did when stalking birds. Joan was momentarily arrested by the image, the blanket covering the model’s corpse, the medics walking her to the ambulance, the grating sound of the broadcaster’s voice, the running type under the footage that looped twice before she turned it off. She shut his laptop that was open on the coffee table next to a box of Cheerios, top still popped open, alongside a bowl with several rejected floating Os. She sat in the easy chair, the one that still had the imprint of George’s body in it. The headrest smelled of his hair product. Joan breathed it in and watched her son sleeping.