Among the Ten Thousand Things: A Novel

by Julia Pierpont

  When people saw the house they became reverential, as though something really had happened there. Heads poked through the broken windows and holes in the walls. The bolder ones began to climb through the larger opening, exploring. Let them. Others followed. They looked for clues in the way the teacups were painted. Let them.

  Jack was by the door when the last explosive went off toward the back of the room, a large bang. A woman screamed. He thought at first that something had been knocked over. Then he saw the smoke and heard another scream, and people were leaving the house, trying not to run, or else they were gathering around one woman, who held her arm strangely. Stanley motioned to security. People were ushered out. An ambulance was called and the woman, five or eight years older than Jack with hair she’d let mostly gray, sat on the ground, clutching her arm and crying.

  Jack went over to her, asking, “What was it?” The receptionist teetered in with a box of first aid. “What did you do?”

  The woman just cried. “It doesn’t matter, Jack,” Stanley said. He had one arm around the woman’s shoulders.

  It didn’t matter either when Jack said that he’d realized the problem, that it was with block #3, the bit that had not blown all away. It didn’t matter when he said he was sure that explosion was the last one, that all the others had gone off and that it was safe now for everyone to come back. None of that mattered, except to him.

  —

  The gallery was far west, near the river, but Deb was a whole avenue away when the first show cards began dotting the street like bread crumbs. She took one, catching the corner with her nail, and walked with it, big block letters, BAYT, bobbing in view. In smaller print, the Hebrew and the Arabic, and below those the English: House.

  A police car pulled past her, no siren but lights revolving red and blue, which looked less threatening, candy colored, in the still-daylight.

  The police stopped just before a small crowd. There was an ambulance too, its rear doors swung open and an old woman sitting in back.

  Stanley was near the entrance, talking to an officer. He gesticulated, his hands cupping a small, round space and springing outward, fingers wide.

  Through the lobby and its people, some she knew who called to her. The doors were propped open, and she smelled smoke faintly, the beginning or tail end of it. One of Stanley’s assistants put a hand out to stop her. “I’m married to the artist,” she said, and the girl let her pass, but Deb had heard herself too, the strange claim she had on this other person that let her go places, that demanded she did. It had brought her into a room marked off with caution tape, and there was Jack, his arms wrapped around himself like a boy in a fit, the position so at odds with the size of him, the large man he was. “Larger than life,” he used to say, collapsing on top of her, pinning her to the bed.

  “They won’t listen.” He rubbed his face.

  She thought she would reach out, touch his shoulder, but didn’t. And then he moved, out of reach, to the caution tape, which he took a tall step over. “Jack.”

  He touched the wall with just his fingers, then with the whole of his hand. Deb watched him walk up and down, crouching, reaching, now running his palm along the surface, as though looking for a wire to trip. Then inside the house, and he was only feeling things, and she imagined ducking under the tape and stepping through the large hole on the side to follow him.

  Thinking it, she found she had. In the room now, she bent down and picked up one of the books he’d made, leather bound, the pages creamy and blank. She thought it would make a good journal for Kay, cleaned up.

  Jack was sitting in a chair he’d built on a carpet he’d hired someone to weave. There was a second chair, on its side, and Deb thought she should turn it right and sit with him, take his hand. But on the floor, too, was a toy, the Tigger with the missing eye that she recognized as Simon’s, something she thought they’d lost or thrown away. The leg was torn off and she didn’t know where he’d found it.

  She stood and turned slowly toward the door.

  “Deb?”

  She didn’t like the bits of glass under her shoes or the air she was breathing. She could not fix the Tigger any more than she could fix anything else, and wasn’t sure anymore that she wanted to.

  What Deb wanted was to go home to her kids, but the apartment was dark when she got there, except for a green light, minute and glowing on the living room floor, the Xbox Simon always left on. She dialed his cell.

  “Hello” was how Simon always answered her, soberly, never betraying that he knew who was calling. It was something she’d always meant to ask him about, why never “Hi, Mom,” why not even “Hey,” like she heard him answer his friends.

  “Where are you guys?” She tried to sound sunny. There was a lot of ambient noise wherever they were.

  “Everything’s fine.”

  “That’s good. Where’s that?” She carried her bag to the counter in the kitchen and switched the light on.

  “Just a diner.” Plates clattered around him. “With Grandma.” Ruth used to be Ommy, a name Simon had shied from over the years, saying it less often and more quietly before stopping altogether. Kay took the cue from her brother not long after, and thus was Ommy replaced with the generic.

  “That’s good,” Deb said again, pulling open the refrigerator. “About how long do you think you’ll be?”

  “Well, we just sat down.”

  “Which diner?”

  “We ordered already.” The soft magnetic strip suctioned the refrigerator shut the rest of the way. “I mean, come if you want to.”

  “Nah, I’ll just be here when you get back.”

  “Or we could bring you something—”

  “No, please, there’s plenty of food in the house.” Simon was speaking to someone. She thought she heard her mother’s voice. “I’ve got all that fresh broccoli and avocados from yesterday.”

  “Hang on. Grandma wants to talk to you.”

  “Tell—say I’ll call her in the morning. And say I might go to bed early so not to come up.”

  “Okay.”

  “I love you. Tell Kay I love her.”

  “Hey, Mom loves you,” Simon said unceremoniously. Then, “Yeah, she loves you too.”

  “Okay, I love all three of you.”

  Simon hung up, and Deb, as though he could see her, went about enacting the things she’d contended she’d do on the phone, setting a pot of water to boil on the range. She fished an avocado out from its crinkly produce bag and cut it open lengthwise, turning it in the palm of her hand. She hit the pit with the blade of her knife and pulled it out this way, a trick Jack had taught her.

  She wouldn’t go to bed early. She’d call Stanley in an hour, ask what had happened to that poor woman. Could Jack be charged for a thing like that? Assault?

  She wished the kids were there with her. They would have been nice to come home to, just to feed and to sit with while they read or played or groaned over their homework. It would have been so obviously the better decision, Simon and Kay and the living room, instead of Jack and the gallery and his rubble. Her mother was always going a step too far. Deb had asked her to check in with the kids, not to take them somewhere away. Now she was alone in the house, alone with the box, sentient on the rocking chair in the back bedroom.

  She was picturing it, slicing avocado in parallel lines, when she heard a key in the door.

  —

  At the diner they ordered like it was the last supper, but no one could eat. Simon got waffle fries, and Kay got waffles, and they both got milk shakes even though one would have been enough, they were so big and came with extra in frosty metal cups. Their grandmother ordered a bowl of matzah ball soup, cutting the ball in two and spooning the bigger half onto Simon’s plate. Ruth was five foot nothing, bird boned, and it was sometimes strange to think of her as their protector now that even Kay stood taller.

  When she first turned up, around five-thirty, Ruth said she’d been shopping in the neighborhood and needed to use the bat
hroom. She stood at the living room mirror and ran a comb through her dyed blond bob in little pulls. Simon and Kay sat on the couch and listened to the soft rasping sound as the teeth of the comb brushed through hairspray. She didn’t know anything, they didn’t think, and for a horrible moment, each thought the other would break and tell her, but neither did, and by the time they’d climbed into the mauve vinyl booth, they felt secure that neither would. And their grandmother, they were quite sure now, knew nothing at all. Her indulgences with them required no special purpose. She loved to be Ommy, to bring parties wherever she went, mainly in the form of chocolate and cake.

  They used to sleep at her house every New Year’s Eve while their parents went to this and that social function. Ommy would buy poppers of confetti and plastic hats and those cookies with the rainbow pieces, and they all three would watch the ball drop together. The first year that Simon defected, to go to a party of his own, Kay promised her grandmother they’d always spend New Year’s together. “No,” Ommy had said, “you’ll go too, to your friends’,” and when Kay protested, Ommy had added, “It’s natural you should go with your friends,” and still Kay had sworn inwardly that she never would. But this past year she had, to a sleepover at Racky’s where the girls drank sparkling cider in plastic champagne glasses, played Cranium, and gossiped in corners about each other.

  “Terrific,” their grandmother muttered. A small child at another table had started to wail. Ruth brought her hands up around her ears. She loved children but only her own, her own’s own. Babies crying, big crowds, people walking on the wrong side of the street—tumult. “Oh no. Not good. Why do they bring them into restaurants?”

  “Restaurant,” Simon repeated, mocking, his point being that this wasn’t one. He thought he’d meant it to be funny (had he?), but it came out rude and cruel.

  No one said anything. Kay’s fingers webbed with maple syrup and her thighs stuck to the plasticky booth. Across the room the child howled.

  —

  Jack was kneeling on the bathroom tile where Deb had gone to get away from him. He was six one and solid and slow moving; the floor did not come naturally. He covered his face. She hated to see him cry and hoped she wouldn’t, that he’d keep his hands where they were until she’d slipped away again. A bad place to have a scene, the bathroom. Too bright. The bathroom was where they’d first kept Travolta when she was still kitten enough to get lost or trapped under things. They set out food and water, a blanket and a litter box, made sure the toilet seat was always down. They took turns sitting with her, letting her learn the feel of their hands, the smell of their skin and cuffs of their jeans.

  “Deb. Deb Deb Deb Deb Deb.”

  Some new creature filled the space now. Deb looked away, looked back at him, closed her eyes, stared at the bare bulb over the sink and followed the afterimage as it drifted. She was holding this new thing up against the rest of their life, certain memories. She had to decide what she could live with, what could fit, be made to fit.

  “How’s the woman? They take her to the hospital?”

  “She’s fine.” Jack breathed into his hands, the sound of snot and expelled air against and between his fingers. “Her arm—it doesn’t matter. I don’t care.”

  “Don’t be stupid. You better care.”

  “Deb.”

  “What.”

  “I went to the park.”

  “Just now?”

  “Yesterday I went. I watched the kids climbing. It made me think of us when we used to take them. They were so little.”

  “Kids are little.”

  Again they fought and again it went the same place as before. How many times can I say it? Everything I do is wrong and I don’t know how. It’s just so much more than I thought it was going to be. I’m sorry. More and also worse. I feel like I’ve been sleepwalking, like I was two people and one died and forgot the other. The kids were so little and you were so old and you what, Jack, you felt jealous of them? What time is it? I’m sorry. I love you, do you believe me that I love you? God it’s almost ten. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. The word had lost meaning to Deb somewhere in the air, she suspected to both of them. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Like a wrap—what are those, a sari? Like a wrap for everything.

  “Get off your knees,” she said, louder than she’d meant to.

  She didn’t want all this sorry in her life, in her bathroom, her bedroom, the kids’ rooms. She climbed into the bathtub and leaned her head against the wall. There were long hairs, her own, stuck dead to the sides of the ceramic. She didn’t clean the drain out, and Jack never said anything. So, see. She wasn’t so easy to live with either.

  When she was pregnant, in this tub, Jack had washed her hair. He changed a million ways but that was what she remembered most, that at some point both times he’d started climbing into the tub and washing her hair, one hand cupped over her forehead to keep the soap from running into her eyes. When she remembered it now she couldn’t even picture him, behind her, just the faucet skimming the waterline—two bodies upped the level—and the water falling in little splashes behind her and his hands learning the shape of her skull.

  “The kids, they treat me like I’m a stranger.” He was still on the floor.

  “Well, you’ve made it very hard for them to feel like they know you.”

  “I’ve ruined everything.” His voice was flat.

  He had made so many mistakes. Maybe her own was to think of the past, or maybe the past was not to be discounted. But she could feel it softening her. She used to do okay on her own. More than that. Only after she’d met Jack had she ever felt really lonely. Lying awake on that awful twin bed in her first apartment and him asleep for barely an hour beside her, she thought she’d made a terrible mistake, loving. She’d wanted to go brush her teeth, but that would have meant getting out of bed with his warm body, and she hadn’t gone.

  She thought about what she would say next. It was a bit of a gift. “But hopefully, they could get over it.”

  Jack nodded as if to say yes, he’d thought of this, they were kids, their hearts were open still, there was time to make it up. “And you?”

  Deb was in the tub, which was a boat, and Jack was on the floor, which was an ocean, and she had to decide if she would let him drown or bring him aboard. Maybe. She had to be practical. If he swabbed the deck, she thought. There was so much hair in the drain.

  —

  Ruth took them the eight blocks home in a taxi. While the cab idled outside their building, a roll of tissue materialized from inside her blouse and opened up to reveal a smaller roll of bills. She gave them each two tens, which they stuffed into their pants pockets, and put the tissue in the zippered front compartment of her purse.

  Simon wanted to kiss his grandmother and whisper to her, Sorry, sorry for how he’d behaved at the diner, poorly, but Kay was between them, so he couldn’t kiss her, and if he’d whispered she wouldn’t have heard. It wasn’t just that she was generous—Simon knew, though wasn’t supposed to, that his parents gave her money—but that she’d put the roll of tens there, wrapped in Kleenex, when she was getting dressed that afternoon before coming to meet them, and that it had been there all the time, even when he’d been mean, and for what? So she could give it to them like this, not from anyplace so vulgar as a wallet but from actually almost her heart.

  “Call me when you get upstairs so I know she’s home,” Ruth said.

  “She’s home.”

  “You two didn’t eat.” She was the smallest person in the world and also probably the very best, the most concentrated good in one package. She just loved him. His mother loved him too, in that open oozing way that she must have learned from Ruth, but his mother’s love embarrassed him, made him feel somehow pathetic.

  —

  “I keep—it’s crazy, but I keep thinking about what it would be like, to have another baby with you.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Yeah, I know, I’m just. I miss it, is all I’m saying.”

/>   She was almost disappointed to hear him back away from the idea so quickly, because she understood what he meant when he said he missed it. She missed it too. Not that it was a thing she’d consider—it would be too obvious a distraction from what was wrong, like making a window out of the mirror they were standing in, just so they wouldn’t have to look at their own reflections.

  It had been a little that way the first time she was pregnant. The timing was terrible—she said it, everyone said it—but inwardly she knew the timing was also so good. It was the summer after Izzy made soloist, and everyone was moving up the ranks or moving on, south or west, to start families or join smaller companies. Deb had been in the corps seven seasons without any sign of rising up out of it, and it thrilled her to think of never going back, that her ticket out was growing inside her.

  Children brought new problems, a respite from the old ones, and made them tender toward each other. It had been true with Simon and again with Kay, though not as much maybe, the second time. It was possible that with a third there would be less still, and there was the fear of diminishing returns. Because if that didn’t fix everything then nothing would, ever.

  “Maybe,” she said, “you should be more concerned with the kids you have now. You don’t just screw up a pair and have another.”

  “Don’t say that, Deb. Don’t tell me I’ve done that.”

  —

  The avocado had browned and would have to be thrown away. Simon and Kay were surprised to find their father in the back bedroom, sitting up on his side of the bed, head lowered even when they stood in the hall and he knew they were there. Deb came out from the bathroom, her face and her hands a little wet from washing, and shepherded them to the kitchen.

  “Hey,” she whispered, “your dad wants to stay here tonight, but I want to know what you guys want.” It was true. She could not bear the burden of a wrong decision, and whatever her children wanted was inherently right, for all of them. “Hm?” She bent down between their two heights. “Whatever, seriously. He has the studio, he’s more than fine. I have no problem sending him.” She snapped her fingers, like that, but they didn’t make any sound.