Songs Without Words

by Ann Packer

  “Mom,” Myrna said from the passenger seat. “Don’t call us beauties.”

  Her mom shrugged. “Damn—busted on my first sentence.”

  “You said ‘Hey, doll’ to Lauren when we first got in.”

  “That’s true, I did.”

  In the backseat, Lauren closed her eyes. She felt a smile pulling at her mouth, and she let it pull, let her lips come apart and her teeth feel the air.

  At home she dropped her backpack at the foot of the stairs. “Picking up Joe,” said a note on the kitchen counter. She went up to her room, found a sketch pad, and flipped through it to a clean page. She thought of Jeff after school today, that little smile he’d given her—or had she imagined it? The little smile, the shrugged shoulders. He was going to Chico. Party school, everyone said.

  She started to draw a mouse in a bucket. The problem was, she kept making it cute: Its little face peeking over the edge. Its big eyes and long, silly whiskers. She didn’t know how to get the despair in. It might work better if it were a view from above, but how to put despair in a mouse’s ears and tail? Desolation in its legs and terror in its lumpish little body.

  Jeff, staring at the ground. What was he looking at? What was he thinking? She wondered if she was going to laugh about him someday, like Sarabeth with the guy Doug.

  Puppy love, she thought.

  Mouse despair.

  Mouse-sized despair, as if it were small, what she’d felt: a junior version of something adults experienced, of something she might experience someday. On the Internet she’d learned that depression often came back. Did it come back bigger?

  What are you doing? Dr. Lewis might say.

  I don’t know—trying to scare myself? As a way of attacking myself?

  I can see that. But I think there’s another possibility. Maybe you’re trying to prepare yourself for something that’s very scary. So you won’t be surprised if it happens. I could make an argument that you’re not attacking yourself, you’re trying to take care of yourself. Do you think?

  Sure, Lauren said. She flipped the page and started to draw again. If you say so.

  Brody had a busy week, including a quick trip to LA and a management meeting late Thursday afternoon. It was Russ and all the VPs, gearing up for the first-quarter board meeting. Last time around, Brody had been caught short—how he’d gotten anything done in December he didn’t know—and so he was actually ahead of the game. He sat and listened to the other guys—plus Joanne Ramirez, from HR—talk about how they were ready with their updated PowerPoints, knowing full well they’d spend their weekends here.

  At home that evening, Liz asked him to help her move the bench to the entry hall. He got the old one out of the way first, then carried the new one in and stood with her while she appraised it.

  She held her right arm across her stomach, tucked her left fist under her chin. He could tell she was disappointed, and he said, “I think it looks good.”

  She shook her head. “No, it’s all wrong here. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  The entry hall had a serious look: grayish-green walls, some botanical prints he’d given her for Christmas early in their marriage. The old bench had fit better—a woven straw seat on dark wood legs.

  “It kind of livens things up,” he said, but she grimaced, moved to drag the bench away from the wall, gave up and headed for the kitchen.

  He followed after her. “Maybe it could go in here,” he said, glancing around the family room and knowing even as he spoke that she’d say no.

  “That wouldn’t work, either. It doesn’t matter. When you get a chance can you just take it back to the garage?”

  Lauren was sitting at the coffee table doing homework. She looked up and said, “What are you guys talking about?”

  “The bench,” Liz said. “It doesn’t really go.”

  “You’re kidding.” Lauren got to her feet and made for the living room. In a moment she was back.

  “See what I mean?” Liz said.

  “It totally doesn’t go.”

  “I didn’t think it was so bad,” Brody said. “I thought it was kind of cheerful.”

  “Dad, you’re high,” Lauren said. She went to the refrigerator and got an apple; Brody watched as she cut it into slices and arranged them in a pinwheel pattern on a plate. Back at the coffee table, she took up her pencil again and said, “You know who it reminds me of?”

  Liz looked over at her. “What?”

  “The bench,” Lauren said. “Sarabeth.”

  Liz looked as if she’d been punched. Brody didn’t understand what Lauren’s problem was. Why was she bringing up Sarabeth again? Surely she’d noticed the effect on Liz the last time.

  He moved to the drainboard, where Liz was putting things away. He said, “Here, I’ve got that.” He took a platter from her and reached it to the high shelf where it was kept. He put away a colander, a mixing bowl.

  She hadn’t spoken, and he said, “I think you should give it a day or two. Or you know what? It could go upstairs, on the landing. Wouldn’t it be nice to have something there?”

  She was looking at Lauren, and he wondered if she’d even heard him. “But it’s plaid,” she said to Lauren. “With preppy colors.”

  “I know,” Lauren said. “But it made me think of her.” She picked up an apple slice, then set it down again. “What’s going on with you guys?”

  “Honey,” Brody said to her, “why don’t you go upstairs?”

  “Don’t do that,” Liz said to him. She turned to Lauren and said, “I don’t mind your asking. It’s just that the situation is complicated.”

  Lauren glanced at Brody and then looked down. “I’m sorry.”

  “There’s nothing to be sorry about,” Liz said. “Really. And you know what? You know what’s going on. It’s no big secret. We’re out of touch.”

  There were footsteps on the stairs, and Joe came in. He looked surprised to Brody, but just for a moment; he crossed the kitchen, opened the cookie cabinet, and helped himself to a handful of gingersnaps.

  Liz went over to him. She said, “How many of those do you have, mister? At least drink some milk with them.”

  Joe gave Brody a quick smile. “OK.”

  She poured a glass of milk and slid it close to him. “I’ll take my tax now,” she said, holding out her hand for a cookie.

  Lauren went back to her homework. Joe ate his cookies. Liz returned to the drainboard. Brody sat at the table and paged through the business section of the Times, feeling uneasy. Should he ask Liz about Sarabeth? Press her to tell him what happened? He had work to do, and in a while he headed upstairs, thinking he’d figure it out later. There was an e-mail from Russ, sent just twenty minutes ago to the product development team working with the Boston company; things had gotten off to a rocky start, and Brody had suggested a quick intervention now, before the situation got more complicated. “Let’s tread softly here, folks,” Russ had written. “Cook it like an egg, not a steak.” Amused, Brody composed a reply: “Well put, boss.” But he dumped it without sending it.

  He stayed at his laptop for about an hour, then went back downstairs and carried the bench through the now-empty kitchen to the garage. He set it against a wall and stepped back for a better look. It was very flowery—maybe that had been Lauren’s point. Sarabeth’s house was full of flowery stuff. He’d always felt uncomfortable there, afraid he might break something.

  Liz was asleep by the time he got to bed and up by the time he woke. At breakfast she seemed cheerful, chatting about plans for the weekend.

  He was taking both kids to school, and when they were ready he kissed her goodbye and followed them out to the car. He unlocked the doors, then hesitated. “Hang on a sec,” he said, and he went back inside.

  She was at the sink, a dishtowel tucked into the waist of her black yoga tights. “Forget something?” she said.

  “No, I just—” He crossed the kitchen and touched her shoulder, then bent to kiss her again. “Just that. Are you O
K? Last night?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I didn’t mean to cut her off, I just—”

  “You wanted to protect me.”

  “I guess so.”

  “You’d better get going,” she said, but he didn’t want to; he wanted her to talk to him. Didn’t she need someone to talk to at this point? With Sarabeth out of the picture? The dishes were right there, a stack of plates with silverware piled on top like kindling, and he pushed them away with the back of his forearm.

  “How are you?” he said, and she gave him a puzzled look.

  “Fine.”

  “No, really. I want you to tell me everything—I want you to.”

  “Brody.”

  He looked across the kitchen table and into the family room. Over the years he’d missed hundreds of hours here: weekend hours taking the kids on outings; evening hours sitting up with Liz, listening for peeps and murmurs from upstairs. Nighttime hours, pillow to pillow.

  “Hey, let’s plan a weekend,” he said. “Let’s go to Napa, just the two of us.”

  She held her palm to his jaw. “That sounds very nice. But come on, you better go—look what time it is.”

  In the car the kids were quiet, Lauren beside him and Joe in the backseat. When they arrived at the high school, Lauren got out and said goodbye, but Joe stayed in back, the ride to his school too short for it to be worth his while to move.

  “Cook it like an egg, not a steak.” That was a new one. Mike Patterson had a collection of corporate lingo, scrawled on Post-its stuck all over his office: “We’re not trying to boil the ocean here, folks.” “That’s like trying to roll Jell-O uphill.” Brody would forward Russ’s e-mail to him, soon as he got in.

  “Joe?” he said, glancing at the rearview mirror.

  “Yeah?”

  He adjusted the mirror so he could see Joe’s face better.

  “What?” Joe said.

  Brody took in Joe’s patient expression, his willingness to listen to whatever his father wanted to tell him. “Nothing,” Brody said. “I just wanted to hear your voice.”

  Not much later, a few blocks short of Yoga Life, Liz pulled to the curb and stopped. She was on a quiet street, commercial but far enough from the main shopping district that some of the storefronts were vacant. Four minutes till class, and she suddenly wasn’t sure she wanted to go.

  But that was silly. Of course she’d go.

  A row of flowering plum trees had been planted along the sidewalk; she’d always liked the deep burgundy of their leaves. She turned the radio on, then turned it off again. There was a car parked ahead of her, the only other stopped car on the block.

  Napa with Brody. They’d gone a few times when the kids were younger, rented bikes one springtime, lazed around the pool at an insanely expensive hotel one summer. Gone wine tasting on both occasions. She didn’t think she had an appetite for wine anymore. She pictured herself in the passenger seat of Brody’s car, Brody standing on the sidewalk waiting for her to get out. Herself, not moving.

  Two minutes. She hadn’t driven all the way down here to turn around, had she?

  Don’t be late.

  Don’t be lazy.

  Don’t be weak.

  I can’t help it, she thought, and she lowered her forehead to the steering wheel. She lifted her foot off the brake, felt the car roll forward, slammed the brake down again. Heart racing, she looked up, but the car in front of her was still a good five feet away.

  One minute—she’d walk in breathless just as Diane was telling everyone to lie on their backs and take a minute to go inside. Her heart would be pounding as she pulled her knees to her chest and rocked back and forth.

  She made a U-turn in the middle of the block and drove away. It was nine o’clock on a Friday morning, and she had no responsibilities for the next six hours. What did she ever used to do with herself?

  She thought of the front yard at home, the greening hydrangeas and the leafy shrubs, and the bare spots where she usually planted annuals. There was actually a wonderful nursery in Napa; if she and Brody went up for a weekend they could stop in on the way home. She pictured zinnias, daisies, some color to fill in the garden while she waited for the perennials to bloom. Maybe they could even buy a tree; there was a spot in the backyard that needed some height.

  But could they really go? The kids were too old for a babysitter but way too young to spend a weekend alone. She could ask her parents, but she hated to ask them for something they’d feel compelled to say yes about. They had their own lives now—though according to her mother at Easter dinner, they’d had their own lives for just about ever.

  When she got home it was only 9:23. She’d been gone such a short time she could still smell coffee and even a trace of toast.

  There’d been an e-mail plea last night from the middle-school vice-principal, saying parents were needed to organize the eighth-grade graduation dance, and she thought now was as good a time as any to write back. She’d worked on the dance Lauren’s year and had a file she could offer the committee—if she didn’t volunteer herself, which she ought to.

  But first, to find the file. It was stuffy upstairs, and she opened the kids’ windows before going to the file cabinet in the TV room. There was a bulging Pendaflex labeled MIDDLE SCHOOL, and she pulled it out and took it over to the old plaid love seat, a relic from the house on Cowper Street. BOOK FAIR, PTA, HOT LUNCH: folder after soft-edged folder, papers jutting out of all of them.

  And then there it was: GRAD DANCE.

  Grad dance. She clasped the folder to her chest. There was something so innocent about that—“grad” instead of “graduation.” Her mouth felt dry. She looked again and saw the hurried scrawl, pictured herself just two years ago, quickly labeling this thing she’d need again very soon—in no time at all, in the blink of an eye. Before anything could possibly change.

  Having no idea.

  She leaned back into the love seat, held the folder close again. How nice it would be to think that in the end it would merge, life before and life after: into life itself—just life. She longed to believe this, but she thought something permanent had come into being at the exact moment Lauren touched the blade to her skin.

  Liz dreamed that night that she was trying to reach a red Frisbee that had lodged on someone’s roof. She had a mop stick screwed onto the extension handle, and she was leaning out Joe’s window, except that it wasn’t Joe’s window, it was the window of a huge loft place, and she was reaching and reaching for the Frisbee, and missing and missing it.

  Brody dreamed of his father, sitting behind the wheel of the Cutlass he’d bought in ’71, tan with a dark brown roof. He was smiling. He was in the middle of a vast, sunny field, no road in sight: just sitting behind the wheel, windows open, smiling. In the dream, as in life, Brody thought the Cutlass was the coolest car his dad could have bought and still been his dad.

  Lauren dreamed she couldn’t find her little pillow. She needed her exact pillows, a big one under her head, a small one over it. Myrna had confessed one day that she still slept with a stuffie, so Lauren’s extra pillow was nothing. She woke and found it, and when she slept again she dreamed about Ada, sitting in the canoe.

  Joe wasn’t dreaming. He wasn’t sleeping, and he wasn’t at home. Fridays were turning out to be poker nights, and he was at Trent’s, lying in a sleeping bag in the family room, wide awake though it was almost one-thirty. Nearby, Trent snored, and Anthony whacked the floor every now and then as he tossed in his bag. They’d played till midnight, till Trent’s dad pulled the plug on them. Conor and Elliot had gone home, and Joe had thought at the last minute about getting a ride from Conor’s dad, but he’d decided to stay. It would’ve been hard to explain to Trent why he was leaving, harder still to explain to his parents why he’d come home. They’d’ve been in bed, and he’d’ve had to use his key to get in, and he didn’t like the look of that in his brain, tiptoeing into his own house, uncertain whether or not his parents were still awake. Not wanting to
bother them.

  Rosie, Trent’s golden, twitched in her sleep, then whimpered a little. She was on the couch, in her usual spot; Rosie in that spot on Trent’s couch was as old as anything.

  He’d won. They only played for pennies, so it was just a few bucks, but still, he’d cleaned up. “Lucky,” Trent kept muttering, but Joe wasn’t lucky, he was good. He knew something the other guys didn’t: the cards didn’t really matter. What mattered was how you played. What mattered was your face.

  The ice maker in the freezer clicked on, water filling the reservoir. Joe moved onto his other side. He didn’t mind being awake here, at Trent’s house. He could pretend he was anywhere.

  An hour later he was still awake. Still not tired. The clock on the DVD player said 2:43. He pulled his legs from his sleeping bag and got to his feet. He knew Trent’s house almost as well as his own, and he walked slowly and quietly to the family room door.

  Out in the hall, he had to be even quieter. Trent’s parents’ room was directly above the back door. He twisted the knob slowly and pulled, but nothing happened. He let go of the knob, quietly unlocked the dead bolt, then twisted again. Outside, he pulled the door after him to within an inch of the jamb.

  It was colder than he’d expected, and he crossed his arms over his chest. He could see a fair number of stars—nothing like what he’d see at camp this summer, but not bad for here.

  He couldn’t wait for camp.

  Trent had two little brothers, and the backyard was full of sports equipment: bats and balls, a pitchback, two different-height basketball hoops on stands. There was some really old little-kid stuff, too, and he waited till he could see, then picked his way across the grass to an ancient plastic seesaw. He could barely get his butt between the handholds, but he wedged himself in anyway. He and his sister had had a seesaw exactly like this. And a little green sandbox in the shape of a turtle.

  His sister had scars, two on her right wrist and four on her left. She touched the ones on her left wrist a lot. One, two, three, four: he imagined her counting. They were at home, the three of them—his father, mother, sister. He was here. One, two, three, four. When she was doing something else, he sometimes looked at them. The third was the longest, the fourth the darkest—the slowest to heal. A day would come when they would be close to invisible, and he wondered: Would she touch them still?