Alone With You

by Marisa Silver

  “Okay.” She drank, then handed the bottle back to Marie, like a child handing her mother her used Kleenex. “At least Teddy doesn’t have to see this part.”

  “He’s thrown up a few times in his life,” Marie said.

  “It’s not exactly sexy.”

  Marie thought about Edward’s voice coming through the bathroom door: You okay in there? Her face against the cool tiles of the floor, the tiny box of a room a kind of calming embrace as she waited for the bottle of sleeping pills to take effect, for darkness to block out the shiny whiteness of the floor, for release. He’d had to break the lock on the door.

  “In sickness and in health,” Marie said.

  Elise’s eyes widened. “Whoa! We’re not getting married or anything.”

  “I know that. I was just remembering.”

  “We’ve only been going out for a few months. Who knows what will happen. I mean I don’t even really know him.”

  Teddy had shrugged on and off a series of girls throughout high school without much visible turmoil. But Marie had watched him these past few days. His arm slid around Elise’s waist or shoulders whenever she was within reach, the way he used to reach for Marie’s hand when they would walk on a busy street or through a crowded store, uncertain of his wholeness without her.

  “You have lovely hair,” Marie said.

  Elise touched her curls self-consciously. “I hated it when I was younger. I used to pull on it to get it to lie flat.” She shrugged. “It’s Jewish hair.” She looked at Marie. “Did Teddy tell you I was Jewish?”

  “No.”

  “He told me you never met a Jew until you went to college.”

  “I grew up in a very small town.”

  “That’s just so crazy,” Elise said. “I mean that’s how prejudice starts.”

  “I’m not prejudiced.”

  “Sometimes people don’t think they are, but they are.”

  “I’m not prejudiced,” Marie repeated, irritated by having to defend herself to this girl.

  “I’m just talking theoretically. I mean it’s worth thinking about, right? Instead of just accepting that most people aren’t because we know it’s the wrong way to be, maybe we should accept that most people are and start from there.”

  “But I don’t believe that’s true.”

  Elise shrugged. “Look at this thing with Selim.”

  “What about Selim?”

  “He carries our bags. He cooks us meals.”

  “That’s his job. He’s making a living.”

  “We didn’t even invite him and Achmed to eat lunch with us.”

  Marie looked at the girl’s breasts, pushing out at her tank top. She reminded Marie of herself as a girl, plucking those ridiculous daisy petals, certain of everything. One day Elise would discover a secret or a lie, a dirty magazine in the trash, and she would have to decide if she could manage all the opposites at once.

  Elise stood up and ran behind a low, barren bush. Her body was barely obscured as she retched. Looking clammy, she returned to the table.

  “I’m sweating,” Elise said.

  Marie stood up, concerned. “Let me check your temperature.” Without thinking, she put both her hands on each side of the girl’s face and brought her mouth to Elise’s forehead, her dry lips always the more reliable indicator of fever than her hands.

  “You’re cool as a cuke,” Marie said.

  “A what?”

  “A cucumber. It’s something my mother used to say.” She sat down again.

  Elise put her own hand to her forehead as if to contradict Marie, but then dropped it and sat. She leaned over and put her head in Marie’s lap. “Can I ask you something?

  “Yes,” Marie said.

  “How are you sick?”

  Adrenaline flooded Marie’s body, leaving her feeling unsteady in her chair.

  “I mean, Teddy told me. But I don’t really get it.”

  “What does he say?”

  “That you had a breakdown. And that you get depressed. But, I mean, what’s it feel like?”

  Marie looked at the desert. Maybe Edward was right: it was nothingness. She was nothing in it. She could feel an incipient panic take root.

  “I mean, I get bummed out too,” Elise said. “But I don’t want to kill myself.” She sat up and looked at Marie’s face. She was not being glib. She was frightened. “Sometimes, when he’s asleep and I’m lying next to him, I try to imagine taking my life. Ending it. Saying good-bye. I can’t imagine it.”

  Marie remembered taking Teddy to the sea for the first time, trying to explain to him how far he could go before he would become defeated by the power of the water. He needed to intuit where the invisible line lay that separated safety from danger. The signs were so slight, so easily missed. It was only experience that would teach him. Marie lifted her hand to Elise’s head and ran her fingers through the tangles of the girl’s hair. She felt her anxiety ebb.

  “It’s not something that you imagine,” she said. “It’s something real.”

  By the time Selim arrived and drove them to the campsite, the sun had set and the sky was a deep iron blue. Already the sand was recovering from the pummeling heat of the day. Teddy and Edward both rushed to the jeep, each solicitous of the weakened Elise.

  “We’ve made up her bed,” Edward said, helping Elise down from the jeep. He reached back and put her arm around his taller shoulder so that she hobbled beside him, as though her foot and not her stomach were the cause of her troubles.

  “I’ve got it, Dad,” Teddy said, smoothly taking Elise from his father, so that Edward was left empty-handed.

  “Let her rest!” Edward called after them. He watched unhappily as Teddy and Elise disappeared inside their tent. “You’re okay, Mimi?” he said. “I was worried about you alone out there.”

  “I wasn’t alone. Elise took good care of me.”

  Elise laughed from within her tent.

  “He should let her be,” Edward said to no one in particular.

  That night, the stars broke out across the sky, nearly obliterating the blackness. Their quantity was overwhelming. Marie was stunned. The sky was like a woman who had been gifted with a surfeit of brilliant jewels and, unable to choose among them, wore them all at once.

  “Kids! Kids!” Edward called, drawing Teddy and Elise from their tent. “You have to see this!”

  Elise and Teddy stood, necks craned, silenced by the view. Edward, puffed up as though he himself had produced this wonder, pointed out Cassiopeia.

  “I don’t see it,” Elise said.

  “There.” Teddy pointed. “See? It’s amazing, Dad.”

  “I don’t see it!” Elise whined.

  “It’s right there,” Edward said, still pointing at the sky. “Plain as day.”

  “Oh, I see it,” Elise said, her voice low and thick with pleasure.

  Edward stood back, his expression contorting slightly as he watched the young couple discover the sky. Marie remembered when Edward had shown Teddy how to cast a rod, his pride in his own mentoring replaced by the recognition of loss as Teddy easily grasped the technique. Marie understood that for her husband, knowledge was his defense against emptiness. How hard it had been for him, this year, to have understood so little of what she was experiencing. She had betrayed him. She hadn’t meant to. But that is what had happened.

  Marie chose not to sleep that night. When she’d begun to take the dulling medications, she’d taught herself how to defy sleep. The skill had felt like some measure of victory over her situation. She had loved the nighttime hours especially, when she was not assaulted by the raucous sounds of the day—the car doors opening and slamming shut, the Doppler of the neighborhood children’s voices as they walked to and from school. Unmistakable rustlings came from Teddy and Elise’s tent, and then stifled moans. Edward turned in his sleeping bag and opened his eyes for a moment. His face was soft, his expression confused.

  “Shhhh,” she whispered, until his eyelids lowered and his breat
hing became light again. Carefully, she took his hand in hers. She felt its weight, the warmth of it despite the cold air. She thought of him foolishly chasing after the girl. And why not? Weren’t they all turning toward the sun, yearning for life? It was only that they had discovered that they needed to look away from one another to find their futures. She had come to the desert in order to make a decision. She had once been unable to imagine living. But now she could only imagine it. Life was a needy child that you wished both to hold and escape from. She could envision herself inside the tumult, the confusion, the utter illogic of it. She believed she could endure the terror. But she could only manage it alone. But she could not pretend to be other than who she was.

  She thought about how it could happen. Would she pack her things and drive away while Edward was at work? Or would she stay and confront him with her choice when he returned at the end of the day? A conversation might be difficult for him. It would demand words he did not have, feelings he could not name. She did not want to be unkind. She closed her eyes and saw the stars against the infinite night of her eyelids. She imagined their migration to some other part of the world. Soon, in a place far away, other people would look up and point and wonder and realize that they were only strangers visiting a foreign land.

  Acknowledgments

  My heartfelt appreciation and gratitude go out to: Sarah Hochman, Julia Prosser, Wendy Sheanin, and the team at Simon & Schuster for their intelligence, dedication, and support; Kimberly Burns for making this entirely too much fun; Henry Dunow for always seeing exactly where I need to go; Deborah Treisman and The New Yorker for first publishing many of the stories in this collection; and Ken, Henry, and Oliver to whom much more than thanks is due.