by Ann Packer
“Rock climbing,” Jim added. “Do you get that?”
“I guess. The challenge?”
“Yeah, but the discomfort. The terror.”
“Some people are into that.”
They toured the house, got back in Jim’s car, drove to the next property. Jim’s niece in Southern California was about to have a baby, and he told Sarabeth about his sister’s near-daily phone calls to update him on the condition of her daughter’s cervix. “She will never live this down,” he said. “That’s a promise.”
After the last property, he excused himself to make a phone call, and Sarabeth leaned against the car and waited for him. She felt the chill of the air, looked at the thinning winter trees, and there was something so familiar about how she felt: it was as if she were hearing music she’d known long ago and forgotten. A song, maybe, but what were the words?
Jim came back. He said, “Do you have time to look at a new listing with me?”
It was an apartment in Adams Point, a third-floor condo with all the character of a Days Inn motel room. The owner had bought it after getting divorced, only to decide that she couldn’t live without a yard. Sarabeth didn’t understand how that could happen. How could you not know that about yourself?
Her name was Helen. She wore the kind of baggy black pants and tunic that Sarabeth thought of as no-clothes—the kinds of things you wore when you had given up. In a sad attempt at style, she’d tied a colorful batik scarf around her neck, but this highlighted rather than overturned the general impression of misery. Was Sarabeth, by chance, projecting? She was, of course.
“This is going to sell so fast,” Jim said as the three of them stood together in the entryway. “The only tricky thing is that there’s another unit coming on, but I don’t think it’s nearly this clean. Come on,” he said to Sarabeth, “wait’ll you see.”
Helen had owned the place for two years, but it looked like two months, two weeks. The furniture was all new and so bland as to defy the idea that an actual person had chosen it. The walls were worse: hung with framed reproductions of Impressionist paintings that were so familiar you didn’t even see them.
Sarabeth smiled at Helen. “It’s lovely.”
“Thank you.”
The kitchen was a galley with nothing on the counters but a folded red dishtowel. The bathroom could have been taken from a plumbing showroom, right down to the unused soap. It wasn’t until they got to the bedroom that Sarabeth saw anything interesting: a rather lovely antique rolltop desk. It made the room way too crowded, but it would work well in the living room—an improvement for both spaces.
“So where are you going?” Sarabeth asked at the door, and Helen retied her scarf before responding.
“I’m not sure—a little cottage, maybe.”
Sarabeth got a look from Jim. They said goodbye to Helen and descended the stairs in silence. In the car she turned to him. “What was that?”
“I’m exercising good boundaries. She wants to sell her condo, I’ll sell her condo.”
“And then she’ll be on the front page of the Chronicle, fished out of the bay under the bridge.”
“Sarabeth!”
She fastened her seat belt. Her own age, that’s what she was thinking. Helen was about her own age.
“Did you take me there to show me how much worse my life could be?”
“No!” he exclaimed. Then he looked over at her and sighed. “Well, maybe a little.”
She stifled a giggle. “Oh, God.”
“What?”
“It could be.”
He started the car and headed back to north Berkeley, neither of them saying much as they drove. At one point his phone rang, and he silenced it without so much as a glance to see who was calling. When they arrived in front of the Heidts’ driveway, he put the car in park and pulled her close.
The Volvo was back. She said goodbye to Jim and stood eyeing the distance to her front door; then she took a deep breath and walked as naturally as she could past their house, past their back door, past their yard, and up onto her porch.
Inside, she went straight to her bedroom and lay down. Tonight was a Center night, and she opened Anna. Went back to what she’d read two weeks ago. Read ahead. She was ready. She saw herself as globally ready—Anna fully in mind, lampshade paper on order, a new listing to stage (barely). Globally ready and locally absolutely idle.
What if she called that Helen and said: Who are you, what was your life, what happened? She tossed Anna aside. Again, the idea of distant music, familiar and sad. A song without words.
20
She couldn’t get used to it. Her room, the family room, the kitchen; her mom, dad, brother—how could you live somewhere your entire life, go away for two weeks, and return a stranger? She wasn’t the stranger: they were; it was. It was her first day home, late afternoon, and she sat at the kitchen table with Glamour while her mom made dinner. “The Moves That Make Him Crazy”—she didn’t want to read that. She didn’t want to read “Movie Star Arms in 8 Weeks.” Why eight, when you got right down to it? Why not nine? Or ten? Forget it, if I can’t have them in eight I won’t do it.
Her mom kept looking at her—over the salad spinner, a steaming pot, the wooden board where she cut bread. Lauren felt twitchy. She didn’t want to be alone in her room, but she didn’t want to be looked at, either. In group earlier this week a new girl had hidden her face in her hands and said, “Stop looking at me, stop looking at me.” Later, when Lauren had her session with Dr. Lewis, she told him about this, and he said, “You felt a connection with her. It’s hard to be looked at. But I think it’s also hard not to be looked at.” And at that Lauren had begun to cry.
“How’s it going?” her mom said.
Lauren looked up. Her mom looked like shit. And why did she have to ask questions all the time?
“Fine,” Lauren said, and her mom got this stricken look on her face, which she then tried to hide with a fake smile. It was all so bogus.
Lauren’s scars were a vivid, wet-looking red, four on her left wrist and two on her right. She could no longer remember doing it. All she remembered was being in her room beforehand while everyone was downstairs finishing breakfast and getting ready to leave. She hadn’t slept at all. All night, her two options had run through her mind, but when she thought of going to school she still thought of the other, whereas when she thought of the other, as horrible as it was, that was all she thought of. At around two she got out of bed to figure out what to wear in the morning, but searching for the jeans she looked best in and a sweater no one would notice, she felt the pull of the other as the only logical choice, the one that would solve all her problems, not just the current one about how she could face Jeff after the catastrophe of blurting out I’m Lauren.
“There’s a difference between wanting to die,” Dr. Lewis had said, “and wanting to stop suffering.”
Lauren didn’t really have a right to suffer, was the thing. When she thought of Lucas, when she thought of Callie, even Abby—Lauren knew she had it lucky.
“Would you set the table for me?” her mom said. She was at the stove again, stirring whatever was in the steaming pot.
“OK.” Lauren closed the magazine and set it on the counter, then went to the place mat drawer. She had never really thought about it before, but her mom was sort of freakily well organized. And her dad—had he always been so pissy? Coming in from the hospital earlier today, he’d tripped over the little rug in the hallway, and you’d have thought her mom had put it there on purpose, the way he rolled his eyes at her and kicked it back into place. In the middle of the afternoon he’d left for a couple hours of work, and Lauren was pretty sure he was glad to go.
She distributed the place mats, got napkins and silverware.
Her mom said, “So how are you feeling about the partial stay?”
Starting Monday, Lauren was going back for partial hospitalization—days at the hospital, nights at home. Which part of how much that sucked did her mom not get?
“Whatever,” she said.
Her mom was still at the steaming pot. She looked at Lauren for a long moment, then she picked up the pot and carried it to the sink, where she released a cascade of steaming water and peas.
“What are you doing?” Lauren cried.
Her mom gave her a weird look. “Draining the peas,” she said, and only then did Lauren realize there must have been a colander in place to catch them. She was a basket case. Partial hospitalization? She never should have left.
The evening was slow for Brody, creeping. At dinner Liz worked way too hard to keep a conversation going, and as a result every word she uttered struck him as false. Christmas was coming! Robert and Marguerite were going to be in a big concert! Joe’s soccer team had won an invitation to a tournament over winter break! And of course they were going to Tahoe!
After dinner, Joe asked for a ride to Trent’s, and Brody took him; he and Liz had agreed in advance that forced family time would be a mistake. Liz had rented some movies, and when Brody got back, Lauren chose one for the three of them to watch.
Much later, after Joe was home again and everyone else was asleep, Brody left his laptop, where he’d been trying to catch up on work, and made his way to the garage. He’d taken to leaving his tennis shorts and shoes in there, a change he felt sure Liz had noticed, though she hadn’t remarked on it. They were on a shelf above the dryer, and he reached for them, shucked off his khakis, and pulled them on. He slid his feet into his tennis shoes without bothering to change his socks. Dark socks for tennis—what an iconoclast he was.
“Where are you going?”
He turned, and there was Lauren, standing in the doorway to the kitchen.
“Honey,” he said. “Gosh, I didn’t hear you.”
She was flushed and tousle haired, her nightgown sweeping the floor.
He said, “Can’t you sleep?”
“I was thirsty.”
“Want some water?”
“What are you doing?”
There was nothing for it: he had his shorts on, his shoes. “I’m just going to hit some tennis balls.”
“In the middle of the night?”
He turned away. The garage was a mess, or seemed so because of the bench Liz had abandoned, which sat on newspaper in the middle of the floor, partially painted, perhaps never to be completed. One evening he’d brought it up, meaning to offer help of some kind—a hand in moving it out of the way if nothing else—but she’d seemed furious at the mention of it, and he hadn’t gone on.
“Yeah,” he said to Lauren. “In the middle of the night.”
“Where can you hit tennis balls in the middle of the night?”
The realization of what he was going to have to say hit him hard. He did not want to do this, did not want to utter the word “school.”
Instead he said, “What would you like to drink?”
She lifted her shoulders. Her nightgown, he realized, was a castoff of Liz’s—it was possible he himself had given it to Liz one Christmas. “Lanz” came the brand name out of nowhere. He remembered now that Liz had worn these nightgowns—Lanz nightgowns—for years, so unsexy they were almost sexy. A longing for her swept over him, but in her presence these days he felt something like its opposite. Maybe not revulsion, but something close.
“Juice?” he said to Lauren.
“I’ll get it.”
She moved away from the doorway, and he hesitated a moment, the darkness outside the garage calling to him with its promises. He left his racquet on the dryer and went up the steps to the kitchen.
She stood in front of the cabinet where the glasses were kept. Her hair hung past her shoulders, blondish brown, tangled. She wasn’t moving. Had she truly wanted to kill herself? Kill herself?
“Laurie?” he said.
She bowed her head, and in a moment her shoulders were shaking. He crossed the room and turned her, pulling her close. “It’s OK,” he said. “It’s OK.”
Pressed against his chest, she shook her head. “I can’t go back.”
He thought of the other kids: anorexic girls, a boy with a vacant face, another ranting about bin Laden. “It won’t be much longer,” he said. “I promise. Just a week or two.”
“To school,” she cried.
He stepped back, hands on her shoulders, and looked into her face. She was terrified.
“Why?”
“Because it’s horrible,” she wailed, and she covered her face and wept. “There was this girl—she cut herself all the time. She used scissors if she couldn’t find a knife.”
“What?” He was shocked. “Didn’t anyone do anything? Go to a teacher or something?”
“Not at school, at the hospital! I mean, she didn’t do it at the hospital—that’s why she was there.”
She was tired, exhausted—he’d only just realized it. He needed to calm her down, get her back to bed.
“Laurie,” he said.
“You were going to my school, weren’t you?” She wiped her face with her sleeve. “To hit the balls.”
He hesitated. “Yeah.”
“It’s OK.” She moved to a box of Kleenex and plucked one out. “I don’t care.” She blotted her eyes and blew her nose. “But I want to go to the hospital all the way until Christmas, OK? Please? Otherwise I might have two or three days of school right in the last week. I don’t want to go back for a few days and then have a huge break.”
“I can see that,” he said. He knew his insurance wouldn’t cover it, but maybe he could work it out. “I’ll look into it, OK? I’ll try to make it work.”
She stood still for a moment and then crossed the kitchen and poured herself some orange juice. She drank it in an unbroken series of gulps and set the glass near the sink. “I’m going up,” she said.
He heard her on the stairs, heard a creak from her bedroom floor. Going in there that first day, when he came home from the hospital; he’d left to fetch Joe but had stopped at the house. Her room had been unusually tidy, just her backpack in the middle of the floor and a pair of jeans slung over a chair, as if she’d intended to go to school. He had stood there for a long time, not entirely unaware but not really aware, either, that he was postponing, little by little, the moment when he would first see the bloody bathroom.
21
Sarabeth wanted, she needed, to find out what was happening with Liz and her family, and several times a day she reached for the phone, only to draw her hand back, terrified that she’d burst into tears at the sound of Liz’s voice. She hated herself for her cowardice, but what if Liz sounded cold again? How would she bear it? And wasn’t it the case that if Liz wanted to talk, she’d call Sarabeth?
One thought chasing another, catching it, swallowing it.
She lay on her couch when she was not in bed. For a while, she had books and magazines with her, but she didn’t read much, and a low point came when she realized it was not the book or magazine but herself—she couldn’t concentrate. This had never happened before, not for days, and she wept about it, then stopped, then wept again. You couldn’t die of this, but if it got worse you could decide you couldn’t bear it, and then what?
This. At times it was loud, at others quiet. When it was loud, it used her own voice to snarl out her failings one by one. There was her failing as a friend. There was her failing as an income earner. Her failing as a housekeeper, a homeowner. These days she failed at personal hygiene, at the small job of feeding and watering herself so that as she lay in bed she became light-headed at times and thirsty beyond tolerance. She was a failure at coping with failure, because what she felt was that most disgusting of things, self-pity. She was a failed lover, many times over. She had failed, in fact, at being an adult.
The quiet was different. It was more like being ill.
Saturday, almost a full week since the terrible, brief conversation with Liz, Sarabeth mustered all the courage she had and called Liz’s parents.
Robert answered. “Sarabeth!” he said. “Now there’s a voic
e I like to hear. No, no, you’re not disturbing me at all.”
And then, “Gosh, you haven’t heard from her? She’s pretty overwhelmed, but it’s really fine to call her.”
And then, “They brought her home yesterday, actually. I’m surprised you didn’t—Listen, call Liz, really. My gosh. Hey, I’d put Marguerite on, but she’s out Christmas shopping.”
She thanked him and hung up. Lauren was home. That was what mattered: she was home.
Nina had reported that the Murphys were back from China, and a couple days later, on a cold afternoon, Sarabeth drove to Mark’s shop with a new lampshade. Nina had said they were exhausted, but even so Sarabeth was surprised by the deep hollows in Mark’s cheeks, the slight hoarseness she heard in his voice.
“Look,” he said, and he led her to a picture of the baby, who had silky black hair and a round face and dark, lively eyes.
“She’s so cute,” Sarabeth said. “What’s her name?”
“Maud. Maud Li-Wei Murphy.”
She looked up at him, tried to read his expression. His eyelids had a dark cast. “How are you?” she said. “How is it?”
“Intense.”
“Intense as in…”
“Intense as in intense.”
She hesitated and then knelt in front of the box she’d brought; she didn’t want to pry. She pulled out her new piece. It was steep sided and gray-green, with long narrow slices cut out on the diagonal. “Silvered with Rain” was how she’d been thinking of it. She tried to remember if it had been before or after the weekend of Miranda’s play, of Brody’s phone call, that she’d made it. She recalled being in her workroom; she recalled the sound of rain.
“Wow,” Mark said, sucking air into his mouth. “That is beautiful.”
The slices were as narrow as she’d been able to make them: slivers, hairs. At the time, she’d especially liked the way it looked when it was illuminated, the paper a cool, silvery green, warmer where the slices of lining lightened the light.