“Missing?” Tess bites her lip. A remark like this would usually cause her to feel defensive, but somehow, coming from Claire right now, what it makes her feel is caught.
Claire nods, takes a sip of espresso. “I sense something just under the surface. Something untouched. This is what I want you to explore in the piece you will create for me.”
“I’m sorry?” Tess murmurs.
Had she already agreed to do the piece? And what exactly was it this woman wanted?
Tess sits forward on the couch, ready to make polite excuses followed by a quick exit.
“Passion,” Claire says, leaning forward to put her hand on Tess’s arm, sending such a surprising jolt of electricity through Tess that Tess lets out a little gasp.
Claire smiles, keeps her hand where it is. Says, “That’s what’s missing.”
Chapter 29
DRIFTING IN AND OUT. Clouds in the sky. Clouds in his head, on the back of his eyelids. Pretty pictures. Fluffy bunnies. A jack-o’-lantern. A moose. (Oh god, not a moose.)
Once upon a time, Henry, Tess, and Emma lay tucked inside a brightly colored hammock strung between two trees, watching the clouds, cocooning. The world felt so safe then. So perfect. They’d get up soon and build a campfire. Make some s’mores. Tell bad jokes.
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Boo.
Boo who?
Why are you crying?
Henry hears a splash, opens his eyes. The world spins. He’s not in a hammock at all, but on a reclining plastic lounge chair beside the pool, a plastic tumbler of warm vodka in his hand. Emma has just done a cannonball. Henry watches his daughter surface, but he is unable to do the same. His eyes close. He’s under the clouds. Under his own pool of water.
“Hey, Dad! Watch! I’m a frog!”
That’s nice, sweetie. So nice. Nice to be a frog. Ribbet ribbet. Hop hop.
Henry thinks of the frogs in the aquarium. Bloated. Forgotten. And then he’s gone. It’s like someone’s flipped a switch in his brain. The you’ve been drinking since seven in the morning and got almost no sleep last night switch. He’s with the frogs. And they’re splashing. Croaking. Trying to escape. His daughter the frog. His daughter. The frog. Croaking. Splashing. So much frantic splashing.
Henry can’t open his eyes.
“She’ll drown in that pool,” Henry is saying to Tess somewhere in the back of his brain, in the land of the past. The voice of doom and gloom. The little black rain cloud. “You should have let me fill it in. We could have a tennis court. Green clay.”
Henry rises to the surface, forces his eyes open. Emma is upside down in the pool. Henry only sees legs. Legs. Thin little legs scissoring in the air. Coming out of the rubber inner tube. Kicking. Head underwater, she’s caught, struggling to right herself.
Oh God! Henry rolls off the lounge chair, tips the whole thing over. He gets to his feet, lurches forward. His baby is drowning, there, right before his eyes, like he always knew she would. Like he’s seen in his dreams a thousand times.
I told you so, he hears himself say to Tess.
The legs are kicking furiously. Henry runs toward the pool. Trips on the white wooden deck chair he usually perches in at the water’s edge. Tess calls it his lifeguard chair.
He goes down. Crash. Like a tree. The tree in the yard that became the canoe. One hundred and twelve rings. The ridiculous boat that will never see water.
His head hits the concrete and splits open. There go my brains, he thinks. There goes my life.
What if time is not a linear thing?
What if you can go back?
Put the two halves together to make a whole. Crawl through the hole.
Boo who?
Why are you crying?
Splash. Stroke. Stroke. Someone has jumped into the water with Emma. Splashing. Struggling. Emma coughs, gags, cries. Henry lifts his head—his bloated, two-ton head—blood seeping from the gash above his eyebrow and into his eyes.
Suz is carrying Em out of the pool. Only it’s not Suz. It’s himself in a blond wig. The wig falls off and he sees shaggy dark hair. White T-shirt.
He’s sure he sees himself—his young, brave, college self—pulling his daughter from the pool. The Henry he was meant to be.
The figure comes closer, holding Emma in his arms. Henry closes his eyes, afraid to look up into his own face, sure that if he does, this Henry—the weak, pathetic, drunken Henry—will just disintegrate into a pile of useless atoms.
Emma is gasping, crying so hard and loud, calling, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!”
Henry holds his breath, counts to three, and opens his eyes.
“Hello, Henry,” says the man, who Henry can see is not a man at all but a woman. A woman with the strongest, most beautiful arms Henry has ever seen. But then, looking carefully, Henry sees the pale cross-hatching in the skin, a pattern of scars covering her arms like sleeves.
“Winnie?” Henry gasps, finally looking up from the arms to the woman’s face.
“Looks like you might need some stitches,” Winnie says.
Henry lets all his breath out and everything fades to black.
Chapter 30
PASSION?
Fuck.
Tess puts on her sunglasses, pulls the shift lever toward her so that the car is in reverse, begins to back away from the salt-box covered in weathered gray shingles. Claire is standing on the porch, waving with the hand that holds a lit cigarette.
Tess sees the hummingbird return for a moment, zigzagging through the air above Claire. Claire looks up, smiles slyly, and points to the bird.
Tess nods, smiles back. Eases her car down the driveway in reverse, tires crunching gravel.
Claire asked her to think over the offer and call in the next couple of days. She mentioned that Tess would be “well compensated” for whatever work she produced.
“Even if you decline, it would be nice to see you again. Maybe we could have lunch,” Claire said. Tess promised she’d call.
Tess’s hands are shaking as she grips the Volvo’s wheel tighter. Nicotine, she tells herself, but that’s not it.
It’s that Claire is right. This woman who hardly knows her saw through the crappy peonies stuffed in rusted watering cans; saw through to the carnivorous, dripping flowers with faces like gods who swallow men whole.
Tess’s skin is still buzzing from Claire’s touch.
It reminds her of…of what? Some long-forgotten feeling.
She’s too pumped up to go home just yet; she knows that whatever magic happened just then at Claire’s will be gone when she sees Henry and Emma. When she steps back into her regular peony-in-a-watering-can life. Up ahead, she spots a field of lupines and pulls over. Ordinarily, she’d pick some to take home for a painting. She sees herself doing this, like watching an actress in a movie. The artist in black T-shirt and crisp linen pants doing what she does best—getting a bucket and some water from the trunk and filling it, then racing home to arrange the found flowers, get an image down on canvas while their life force is strongest, before they begin to fade.
NO! she wants to scream at this image of her ghost self already out of the car, going through the motions of normal life. It’s all wrong. Stop.
It’s like those horror movies where the girl does something stupid—steps into the shower, opens the front door, goes down to the basement—and the whole audience is screaming NO!, feeling doom in the pit of their popcorn-full stomachs.
Stop.
“Passion,” she whispers to herself, still gripping the steering wheel. “Shit.”
IT WAS SUZ WHO finally got Tess and Henry together, at the beginning of senior year.
“It’s obvious you’re totally in love with him,” Suz said to Tess.
“I don’t think it’s obvious to him,” Tess said, picking at the lint on her sweater.
They were getting stoned in the tube that connected the painting and sculpture buildings. It was one in the morning and Duane, the security guard, had already made his
rounds on that side of campus. When you were in the Habitrail tube at night, you felt as if you were right up in the stars. Tess sometimes imagined that the two buildings and tube that connected them was a space station orbiting around the earth. The hardest part was always coming back down.
“So tell him,” Suz said, exhaling smoke as she spoke.
“I can’t,” Tess told her. She’d tried a thousand times, dropped hints whenever she could. By now she figured it was pretty much a lost cause. And besides, if she actually came right out and told him and he didn’t feel the same way (which she was pretty sure was the case), then that would probably screw up their friendship, which was the last thing she wanted.
“Life is too short for can’ts, babycakes,” Suz said. She handed the joint to Tess and stood up. “Stay here,” she said, heading toward the sculpture building, where Henry was working.
“What are you doing?” Tess asked, terrified by what Suz might do. “You’re not going to say anything to him, are you?”
“Don’t worry. Just stay here.”
Tess waited for what seemed like forever.
She lay on her back and looked up at the stars, imagined she was out there, spinning through the universe, untethered.
Just when she was about to give up and head back to the painting building, Henry arrived in the tube.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” Tess answered back. He sat down beside her, picking at a hole in his jeans. They were quiet a minute. Tess’s heart felt as if it had dropped into her stomach. What had Suz said to Henry? What should she say now?
Life is too short for can’ts.
“Remember the dream you told me,” Tess finally said, “when we first met? About being a cow in a field?”
Henry smiled. “Yeah. I think about it a lot. It’s kind of an existential conundrum. I mean, how do we know we’re really who we think we are? I think I’m here sitting beside you, but what if I’m really a cow in a field, or a guy in a coma?”
“So all of life might be a dream,” Tess said, the words trailing off as she looked out at the stars.
“Right,” Henry said. “And how are we supposed to live our lives knowing that’s a distinct possibility? It adds this whole other layer to things, don’t you think?”
Tess smiled. “I think we just have to make sure we have the best dream we possibly can,” she said.
And that’s when he kissed her.
Later, when she asked him what Suz had said to him, he shook his head.
“Nothing,” he told her, his eyes focused on the spot just over her shoulder—the look that she would, over the years, learn that meant he was lying. “She just said you were out there waiting for me.”
Chapter 31
HENRY DOES NOT NEED stitches. Winnie was able to revive him by pressing her knuckles firmly into his sternum and rubbing; grinding her bones into his cartilage so hard that when he woke he felt like she was kneading his heart as if it were a piece of soft dough. Winnie stopped the bleeding above his eye and put on a butterfly bandage from the first-aid kit in the bathroom. Then she made a pot of coffee, and some hot chocolate for Emma.
“Danner would like some too,” Emma says.
“Danner?” Winnie says.
“Invisible friend,” Henry explains.
“She’s not invisible. I can see her just fine, Dad.”
Emma’s sitting on a stool at the counter, her bare feet resting on the bottom rung. She looks to her left, at the stool beside her, where apparently Danner is waiting patiently for her own cup of cocoa.
Winnie smiles, gets down an extra cup and passes it to Emma, and says, “I gave her extra whipped cream,” with a wink.
She looks right into Emma’s eyes, and says in a low, conspiratorial voice, “You know, I used to have a friend no one else understood.”
“Really?” Emmas asks. She’s perched at the edge of her stool, leaning ever-so-slightly toward Winnie.
Winnie nods.
“Could other people see her?” Emma asks.
Winnie shakes her head. “Not really. Not the way I saw her.”
Henry sits propped up in a kitchen chair and watches Winnie move through the kitchen as if he’s peeking into some other dimension: some place and time where he married someone else. Maybe in this version of his life things worked out. Maybe their love for each other is somehow enough for both of them. Maybe she’s not going to kick him out to live in the barn or hand him a newspaper with apartment listings circled in red pen.
Winnie has changed out of her wet things into a pair of sweat-pants and T-shirt that belong to Tess. She’s a good deal taller than Tess and has rolled the already short pants up into capris. Her own clothes and the drenched wig are draped over the shower curtain rod in the downstairs bathroom.
“Drink this,” says Winnie, placing a cup of hot black coffee in front of him. “I’m going to make some sandwiches.”
Tomato. Lettuce. Smoked turkey. Swiss cheese. Rye bread. Stone-ground mustard. Winnie seems to know where everything in the kitchen is. Some part of Henry’s brain knows that this should puzzle him, worry him even, but instead, he’s comforted. He smiles drunkenly at Winnie.
“You saved my daughter’s life,” he says.
Emma sets down her cocoa, looks from her father to Winnie, then back to the invisible girl beside her. Is it Henry’s imagination or does Emma seem frightened when she glances at the blank space where Danner is supposed to be?
“Drink your coffee,” says Winnie, slicing into a tomato, juice and seeds spilling out onto the cutting board. He watches her lick her fingers. Thinks that if they were married, this is one of those familiar gestures he would love, something he’d look forward to at the end of the day—Winnie, his Winnie, licking her fingers after slicing a tomato.
“Are you sure he doesn’t have a concussion or something?” Emma asks. “He looks a little dopey.”
Winnie glances up, still holding the knife. “Doesn’t your father always look a little dopey? He did when I knew him.”
Emma laughs.
“Seriously,” Winnie says. “He’s fine. A little food and some coffee and he’ll be good as new.”
When she’s finished with the sandwiches, she hands Emma a plate and asks if she and Danner could go watch TV in the living room for a while. “Your dad and I have to talk.” Emma nods and leaves them alone. Sometimes Emma seems like a grown-up in a girl’s body. Intuitive and wise beyond her years. Such a serious kid, always counting, straightening, bringing things to order. He remembers the day the old tree fell in the yard, how frightened Emma had looked; how she’d said, Maybe it’s a sign. She’s a girl who believes in signs, who understands when the universe is sending you a warning.
“She would have drowned,” says Henry, his eyes filling with tears. He’s pathetic. He knows that. The most unworthy man on earth. The worst father. The most faithless husband. Maybe Tess was right. Maybe they’d all be better off if he found someplace else to live. But the thought of leaving his home, his family, splits him open. He’s sure it would kill him.
“You don’t know that,” says Winnie.
Winnie begins stroking Henry’s hair. Comforting him as if he were a little boy. Henry lets himself rest against her and stares at Winnie’s arms. The beautiful patterns of scars that stop right at the wrist. Crisscrossing, like row after row of diamonds. Or fish scales. Maybe she’s a mermaid, this wife in another dimension. Maybe she’ll take him to live underwater.
Under. Water.
Down, down, down. Stones in her clothes.
He gets a cold chill, pulls away from Winnie.
“What were you even doing here?” asks Henry with the sudden realization of a drunk person.
“I came to see you. To apologize for that ridiculous stunt last night, and try to explain. See, a couple of weeks ago, I got this postcard—”
“But I didn’t hear you. You didn’t come in a car.”
He feels cagey, sly.
“I parked by the road.
I walked in through the woods. Through Tess’s sculpture garden.”
“Did you see the grotto?” Henry asks. He’s slurring his words and grotto sounds like rotten.
“Yes, I saw it.”
“Pretty unsettling, huh?” Henry asks.
“It’s a beautiful tribute,” Winnie tells him.
“You want to know a secret?” Henry asks, leaning toward her. He’s still just drunk enough to be able to share secrets. To say anything.
“What is it?”
“Sometimes,” he begins with a whisper, “I think Suz is here. I think she’s found a way back.”
Put the two halves together and make a whole. Crawl through the hole and escape.
“Lately,” Henry continues, “I find myself wondering if she’s behind everything that happens to us.”
Winnie smiles. “Sometimes,” she says, gently fingering the butterfly bandage over Henry’s left eye, “I think so too.”
They look at each other a moment. Henry remembers what he thought when he watched Winnie pull Emma out of the pool—that she was him somehow. He thinks, as he looks into Winnie’s eyes, that Winnie can see everything that’s happened to him in the past ten years: how one disappointment begot another; how he’s never managed to make it to the happily-ever-after he was so determined to find for him and Tess. And Henry is sure that it’s the same for Winnie. He sees the same emptiness in Winnie’s eyes, and when Henry speaks, he says, “We deserve more than what we’ve had.”
“Maybe,” Winnie says, then she leans in and kisses Henry on his forehead, just above the butterfly bandage.
“Winnie,” he whispers, the name itself a sort of life raft he’s clinging to. But Winnie’s not even her real name, is it? When he first met her, she was a girl with some other name who wrote poems thick with grief—suicide letter poems, lost-soul-at-the-end-of-her-rope poems. A twitchy, nervous girl who wouldn’t look you in the eye. What was her name before? It was the name Bill Lunde had just called her by this morning, but the funny thing is, Henry can’t think of it now.
All he remembers, all that matters, is that Suz turned her into someone else. She gave Winnie a gun, a haircut, and a new name. Henry wants to ask Winnie whatever became of that old Winchester rifle, but then, his drunk mind circles around again.
The Jennifer McMahon E-Book Bundle Page 58