And Sometimes Why

by Rebecca Johnson

  Misty frowned. “I never get anything for free.”

  The waitress returned with an iced tea for Cyrus.

  “Thank you, Berenice.”

  “Could we get some bread and butter?” Misty asked.

  “Do you know what you want?” Berenice frowned.

  “Yes.” Misty nodded. “Bread and butter.”

  Berenice opened her mouth to say something.

  “It’s okay,” Cyrus said.

  Berenice made a horsey noise at the back of her throat, took the menus, and left.

  “Can I ask you something else?” Misty asked.

  Cyrus opened his large hands. “I’m an open book.”

  “Me, too.” Misty nodded her head vigorously. “What’s the point in hiding anything? Everything eventually comes out. So…were you ever a cop?”

  “Why would you ask me something like that?”

  “You have cop eyes.”

  “I like her,” Cyrus said to Anton. “She’s sharp.”

  Anton shrugged. “We haven’t known each other long.”

  “As a matter of fact, I was a policeman in my younger days.”

  Misty pumped her hands in the air, like a champion crossing the finish line. “I knew it!”

  Anton rolled his eyes.

  “The minute my pension kicked in, I left to pursue my dream.” Cyrus looked around the room. “The piano man.”

  “Don’t you think this is a sign?” Misty looked at Anton.

  “For?” Anton asked.

  “You know,” Misty said, “that friend of ours with that problem.”

  Anton had no idea what she was talking about.

  “I know someone.” Misty fixed Cyrus with a look of such studied sincerity Anton understood exactly why she had never been cast in any of the 423 auditions she had gone on during the time she was in Los Angeles. She never looked phonier than when she was genuine. “This person may or may not have contributed to an accident through something this person did to someone’s motorcycle, though that was not ever this person’s intention.”

  Cyrus knit his eyebrows together. “You poured sugar in your boyfriend’s gas tank?”

  Misty’s eyes widened. “Holy fuck.”

  “At least you didn’t start a fire with a flaming bag of dog poop.” Cyrus laughed. “I saw that happen once. Destroyed a whole block.”

  “Did you tell him?” Misty looked accusingly at Anton.

  “Yes,” Anton said. “I used a secret set of hand signals while you were drinking your margarita to telegraph the entire story.”

  Cyrus chuckled, a sound like a lawn mower trying to start.

  “It’s just too weird.” Misty’s eyes filled with tears.

  “Don’t worry.” Cyrus patted her hand. “The sugar dissolves. Tell your friend to have the gas tank drained. It costs about eighty bucks.”

  She blew her nose on a cocktail napkin. “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I think you just saved my life.”

  25

  sophia woke to the sound of Monty’s tail thumping under the bed. She knew something had changed but it took a few seconds to remember what it was. Right, Darius was gone. Lying back on her pillow, she examined the fact in the light of day. She had seen enough friends divorce to understand how differently it affected people. Some women were hastened into old age by the surprise of loneliness after so many years of crowded rooms, while others—no other way to put it—blossomed like flowers. Without even realizing it, they’d been slowly bored to death by their angry husbands and solipsistic children. They made new friends, began working out, changed their wardrobes, took vitamins, traveled the world. Some went back to work or quit bad jobs for better ones. Every one of them said they had never been so happy. Darius had been a good husband, but it only took Sophia a second to choose the kind of ex-wife she wanted to be.

  She began to feel a stirring of optimism, the way she had felt when she was eighteen and leaving home for the first time. Back then, she’d been convinced that one day she’d be famous and successful. She hadn’t even picked a field—maybe art, maybe politics. The world, she felt, would point her in the proper direction after she’d done some real living. The young, she now understood, always feel that way. She could see the same certainty in her daughters and their friends. It never occurred to them that things might not go well for them. Even Miranda, whose cynicism was supposed to protect her from disappointment, felt special. Sophia supposed all that idiot optimism was a good thing. If somebody had told her when she was eighteen that she’d be doing what she was doing now, she’d have laughed. No way. And she wasn’t even doing so badly. She knew women who had it much worse. Women whose lumps weren’t the result of too much coffee. Career-obsessed women who’d woken up at forty-five, bored by their jobs and suddenly desperate to be a mother. Women whose husbands had cleaned out the joint checking account and left no forwarding address.

  She went downstairs and made herself a pot of coffee, something Darius, the early riser, usually did. By the time she came down, it was always slightly burned. She could have thrown it out and made a fresh pot, but that would have been wasteful. For years, she had simply put up with bitter coffee until it became what she knew and expected. She savored the taste of a fresh cup and looked out the window. The neighbor’s automatic sprinkler system turned on. She and Darius looked down on the wastefulness of watering the desert. “If they want to live in Connecticut, they should move there,” he always said. But, as a gardener, she knew her lawn benefited from the runoff—the side that bordered them was much greener than any other part. Now that Darius was gone, maybe she’d put in her own sprinkler system? No, she made an effort to clear her mind of those kinds of thoughts. They were too small. Too minor. What was required of her now was something large. Something radical. Darius needed the house for Helen. She needed to leave. It was that simple.

  She took a piece of paper and a pen out of the kitchen drawer and sat down at the kitchen table. The phone rang. For a second, she let herself believe it was Darius calling to say he had made a mistake and wanted to come home. But of course it wouldn’t be. He wasn’t the type. She let the answering machine pick up. A few seconds later, Harry’s voice filled the room. “Hi! It’s Harry. Harlow. I just wanted to call and see how you are doing. Last night was…” He paused and laughed nervously. “I mean, I hope I helped. If you need something. Anything. Please. Call me. I mean that.”

  Sophia started writing.

  Paris

  Istanbul

  An island. Washington State??

  New York

  London

  Paris was out of the question. Her French was not very good, the exchange rate was terrible, and she didn’t even like the city. When she was nineteen and the currency had been in her favor, she and the rest of America had gone for a visit. Everywhere she went, Moroccan men with bad teeth followed her, certain that she was eager to have sex after only five minutes of conversation concerning the new Michael Jackson album. Now she might be tempted to take them up on their offer—no-strings-attached sex with beautiful young men actually sounded pretty good, bad teeth or not—but now they wouldn’t be interested in her. Too old. Perverse world. She’d only put Istanbul down to make herself seem more interesting than she was. She had no interest in a city of Muslims. An island was tempting. She had it in her to withdraw completely from the world. Once, she and Darius had rented a cabin for two weeks in the boundary waters of Minnesota. She had loved the perfect stillness of the place, but Darius had gotten lonely for the girls and suggested they leave four days before their lease was up. It was too soon for that. Also, she feared she might drink too much if left on her own.

  That left New York and London. Several years before, Darius had exchanged jobs for a semester with a professor from the University of London. They had gone to live in the man’s house in Camden Town while the man had moved with his wife and family into their Los Angeles home. Everybody in the family hated it. Except her.

  “When are we going home?
” the girls would ask after each friendless London school day.

  “Soon,” Sophia would reassure them, momentarily vexed by the intractable cool of the Brits. It was one thing to be snooty to her—she liked being left alone—but to children? The entire time they lived there, the girls were never asked on a single playdate. The few times she brought up the subject with other mothers, she’d been met with reactions ranging from bafflement to what seemed like outright hostility. Finally, an American mother with older boys (and therefore useless) told her that playdates were unheard of in London. “The family knows you or they don’t. Plus, I don’t think the English really want to encourage ‘playing.’” It was even worse for Darius. He liked to joke that an Irishman from the United States teaching Shakespeare in En gland was like walking around with a Kick Me sign taped to your back. Even his students would say things like, “Well, I guess in the New World…”

  “Can you believe they still think of America as the New World?” he’d fume when he arrived home.

  But Sophia had loved it. After dropping the girls at school, she’d get a newspaper, sit and read in a café near the tube station, and spend each day exploring a new part of the city. She began with the obvious places—Hyde Park, Holland Park, Hampstead Heath, Cheyne Walk—but even the less touristy neighborhoods she wandered into—the tail end of King’s Row, the nondescript row houses behind Victoria Station, the Indian hotels near Hyde Park Gate, the Arab embassies near Sloane Square—all stirred memories of the novels she had read as a girl. The Bennetts coming to London for the season; Isabel Archer buying, buying, buying; the dissolute party girls of Evelyn Waugh; the clerks of Shaw; the Schlegels of Howards End; the urchins of Dickens. Those characters had been her companions in a lonely childhood. Their lives and histories were vividly alive to her even now. The fact that London had changed, become a world capital struggling with waves of immigrants from places like India and Pakistan, made it even more interesting. When the nine months were up, she made tentative noises about making it permanent, but her family had been adamant. They wanted to go home. London without them was unthinkable. She’d read too many contemporary British novels about lonely middle-aged women to have any illusions about what her life would be like. In nine months of ordering meat from her local butcher, the man never once smiled at her.

  So, New York. Sophia looked out her window at the bright white California sun. She’d been so entranced with the weather when they had first moved there. How could anyone live anywhere else, she’d ask Darius as each day bloomed more gloriously than the next. But now the sun had come to oppress her. She knew how ultraviolet rays could unscramble your DNA, sending silent, deadly messengers deep into the epidermis. She was ready for seasons. Rain and snow. A place where things died but then came back to life. A place where you could believe in new beginnings.

  “Mrs. McMartin?”

  The sound of a voice made her jump. Maria, the cleaning lady, came every Wednesday but Sophia was usually at work or, more recently, the hospital. It must have been a year since they’d actually seen each other.

  “Maria! You scared me. How are you?”

  “I am fine. I heard about your hija. I am so sorry.”

  “Oh.” Sophia looked down at the table. “Thank you.” She stood up. She hated sitting while others worked. “I’ll be upstairs.”

  Maria nodded and turned toward the sink. Sophia noticed the bag of sugar where she’d left it the previous night.

  “Maria,” she said, “can you throw the sugar out?” She couldn’t bring herself to do it.

  Maria looked at the bag. “Okay,” she said, and nodded. “Bugs?”

  Sophia hesitated, then agreed. “Yes. Bugs.”

  26

  miranda looked out the window. Snow. Everywhere. And coming down still. Growing up in Southern California, snow was an abstraction. Something sprayed from an aerosol can onto the Nativity scene at the Beverly Center. The few times the family had gone East to visit her grandparents for Christmas, the massive white piles veined with dirt and grime had been a bother. Watching it drift dreamily onto the landscape, like confectioner’s sugar on a cake, she suddenly understood its magical allure. Below, she could hear Jason tending the fire in the wood-burning stove.

  “It’s snowing,” she said out loud. The house had no doors except the one to the bathroom.

  The clatter below paused, then continued.

  Was it her imagination or was Jason different in Alaska? When she’d gotten off the plane, he’d held her in a tight, reassuring hug as the old people streamed around them, beaming at the young lovers, but by baggage claim she noticed something stiff in the way he held himself, as if he were embarrassed to be seen with her. Then again, how well did she really know him? In California, he had been the gobsmacked tourist, the one exclaiming in banal amazement over the dry hills dropping into the vast blue of the Pacific Ocean, the orderly ant farm of traffic on the thruways, the crush of Chinatown. Now she was the one gaping at the stuffed polar bear in the airport lobby.

  She took a deep breath, threw off the down comforter, and climbed out of bed. Goose bumps rose on her skin.

  “It’s blood rushing away from the surface of your skin, going to the organs that really matter,” Jason had explained the night before, his hand creeping down to one of those organs. She had tried not to tense but something about the sex had felt false, as if they were feigning passion to justify the upheaval of the last six weeks.

  Miranda climbed down the ladder from the sleeping loft, trying not to shiver.

  Jason handed her a cup of steaming coffee.

  She cradled the cup for warmth. “Is there milk?”

  He shook his head. “Nondairy creamer,” he answered.

  “Fine,” she said, as cheerfully as she could. She hated the stuff.

  “I don’t know what you usually have for breakfast…”

  “Fruit,” she said with a shrug. “Granola.”

  “How about Cheerios?”

  “How do you eat them without milk?”

  “You just. Eat them.”

  When they arrived the night before, the outside had been lit by a full moon reflecting off the white of the snow, but inside, the house had been pitch black. In the morning light—a weak, gray wash of color that more closely resembled five a.m. in California—she looked more closely at her new home, an unfinished A-frame built by a husband-wife team of accountants from San Antonio. In his e-mails, Jason had called it “luxurious,” with indoor plumbing, a generator, and a snowmobile they could use sparingly. But looking around, Miranda was surprised by the exposed studs and baffles of pink insulation resembling cotton candy.

  “Doesn’t that, like, cause cancer?” she asked, pointing to one of the walls.

  “Fiberglass?”

  “Forget it,” she answered, realizing too late that she had been thinking of asbestos.

  “A lot of people out here don’t even bother with Sheetrock. With all the contracting and expanding of wood, nails can pop right out of the wall. The natives had the right idea. They built their houses underground.”

  Miranda thought that sounded awful. Who wanted to live like a mole? Somebody—a woman, she guessed—had made a few poignant stabs at livening the place up. Panels of stained glass hung from the windows. Red-and-white gingham curtains covered the bathroom windows. (So the bears couldn’t see in?) Embroidered poem fragments hung from bare nails. We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars. God grant me the serenity to blah blah blah.

  “Can we take anything down?” Miranda asked.

  Jason shook his head. “They’re trying to sell the place. The deal is, we get it free, but we have to keep it in shape. People could come at any time to look.”

  Miranda guffawed. It had taken an hour by snowmobile to get there—a loud, uncomfortable ride that made her bottom sting—on what Jason claimed was an old mining road but contained only trees covered with snow. She saw him look away, an expression on his face somewhere between a scow
l and pain. “I just mean,” she said, “it’s not likely someone is going to drop in.”

  “I told you it was remote.”

  Miranda felt a sudden desire to cry. Everything she said seemed to annoy him. Had coming here been a mistake? How long did she have to stay before she could admit her error and leave without feeling like a total fool?

  “So,” she tried to change the subject, “what do you think happened?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “To the accountants. Why are they getting divorced?”

  Jason scratched the underside of his jaw. She could tell from the red rash and whiteness of the skin around his mouth that he hadn’t been shaving regularly. “It takes a certain kind of person to survive solitude,” he said finally.

  “What kind of person?” She sat on an uncomfortable wood chair and took a sip of coffee. Maybe she could learn to drink it black. Her Greek grandmother always said people who needed milk were weak of character.

  “People with very high expectations. Or very low. Either way, they’ve been disappointed. They come here thinking the land will heal them.”

  “Does it?”

  He shook his head. “Everything is just harder. But it does seem to make people appreciate what they had. I guess that’s something.”

  “What about you?”

  “I was born here. It’s different.” He checked his watch. “I need to get going.”

  “Where?” Miranda sat up, surprised. She thought they’d have a leisurely day together, getting reacquainted with each other.

  “Check the trap lines,” he said, pulling a fleece over the wool sweater he was already wearing. Until spring, when he and his father could start logging, the only money to be made in the woods was in trapping. Demand, he’d explained in his e-mails, had been depressed when rich ladies in New York were being spattered with red paint, but in the past few years, prices had bounced back, even higher than before. It’s the Russians and Chinese, he had written. They’ve got money to burn and the woods are full. Marten, lynx, fox, even wolf.