by Robin Black
When we emerged from the home, the sky had opened up, a perfect rumbling thunderstorm. We were drenched as we ran to the car. Owen drove, and any possible conversation was lost to the attention he had to pay as the windshield wipers struggled against the deluge.
Jan would be back from Nova Scotia in three days and the place had agreed to let us wait to clean everything out together. I had picked half a dozen items to go with him, transition objects, like little children use. I wavered over my own painting as if it were some sort of symbolically important decision, and then put it with the other things on his bed. That painting. A picture of me, Charlotte, and Jan in our teen years, all looking like he had told us to stand up straight and think about brussels sprouts. That was my one smile as I packed: that this sourpuss lineup was his favorite shot of us. I tried to include a porcelain figurine of a dog that had belonged to his mother, but was told that nothing that could be thrown, broken, or in any way rendered sharp could go with him, so I wrapped it in a washcloth and put it in my own bag.
When we got home, I ran through the rain, but got soaked again anyway. Upstairs, I stripped everything off, put on a bathrobe, lay down in bed and soon fell asleep—as though the events of the day were like a fever that had left me weak. I woke to find Owen sitting beside me. “I didn’t think you’d want to sleep all afternoon and then be up all night.” His hand was on my shoulder. I turned over, away from him, knowing he would rub my back.
“I feel like someone dropped an anvil on me,” I said. “Me and Wile E. Coyote.”
“Life dropped an anvil on you.”
As he kneaded my shoulder, I closed my eyes. “It’ll be better when Jan gets home. She’s so competent. She makes everything feel manageable.”
Neither of us spoke for a minute or so and then he said, “We’ve been invited for dinner—by the neighbors. The daughter leaves tomorrow. But only if you’re up to it. I told Alison I wasn’t sure, that you might just want to hunker down tonight.”
“That actually sounds fine,” I said. “I can’t just lie here in the dark all night.”
“You can do anything you want.”
I stretched out some more, arching my back. “Right there,” I said. “Right next to my spine. That’s what I want.”
At Alison’s we ate in the living room, Owen and I on her couch, each of the others on a chair. She’d made chili and rice. It was all very simple and should also have been comforting. But the shift in dynamics since our dinner just two nights before unnerved me. During the day when I’d absented myself working, and maybe also during my sleeping hours that afternoon, Owen and Nora had moved well beyond the polite talk of strangers. Somehow. It was as though a thin pane of glass had shattered between them—but stayed intact just enough to keep me on the other side.
Alison was solicitous, offering every imaginable kind of help. She would drive me to visit my father. She would make us dinners. She would be a shoulder. “You deserve some coddling right now,” she said.
“What Gus really needs,” Owen said, “is to get back into her work. Gus is always at her happiest there.”
“It’s true,” I said, though vaguely irritated at the claim.
“Well then, I can also leave you alone to work. Whatever you need. This is such a difficult thing to go through.”
And so the evening wore on, worries about me alternating with more talk about the sorts of jobs Nora should be looking for back in Boston. She thought maybe something to do with early education—those jobs are still pretty available—though she really wanted to work in publishing, at least for a while. Owen, a whiskey or two in, proclaimed that that would be soul-destroying, unless she could find a small press filled with people who did it just for the love. She asked what he thought about people applying right after college for graduate programs. He said he thought it was a shame that she couldn’t just take some time to write before all the vultures set in. Alison thought she should consider whether she really wanted to be around little kids and their germs all the time.… And then someone would ask me how I was doing; and I would say fine, and that it was so interesting to watch someone teetering on the cusp of adulthood; or something equally inane. And as an hour passed, then another, I felt as though I were being aged, rapidly, like the beautiful princess in the fairy tale who is suddenly revealed to be an old crone, every aspect of me having to do with repair, while across the table from me sat the embodiment of potential.
Yet I didn’t hate Nora that night. Even if I envied her youth and her devoted mother and the amount of attention she seemed to accept without noticing. I felt I owed it to Alison and even to myself to get past all that. Yes, she was self-absorbed, but now that she had relaxed, it seemed less as though that was the result of ego and was instead entirely appropriate for a young woman excited about her life and also excited to have met someone to idolize. She was a bit short on boundaries, but to be otherwise at twenty-two might have been off-putting in its own way. For all her elegance and beauty, she clearly didn’t have her life figured out at all, and even the drunken barn episode, I decided, could be folded into this larger picture, as a typical overstep of youth. I noted that she stood to help her mother, clearing plates, wrapping food, slicing the pound cake, brewing the coffee. Alison had joked about her being well brought up and I’d had my doubts; but in some ways she clearly had been.
On the walk home, I said something nice about Nora to Owen, and he made a sound, an umhmm or a yep, which seemed a little distant, as though his mind was elsewhere. And then he put his hand on my back and said, “It’s been a long day, hasn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s been a very long day.”
Later, as I lay awake, sleep playing hard to get, it occurred to me to wonder if there had been anything in that sound he made, the umhmm or yep, to which I should have been attentive, whether in its indecipherable, preoccupied quality, there lay a clue to something worrisome. I had spent so long fearing that a young woman, adoring and beautiful, would make easy any need the universe might feel to even scores. And now one had shown up as if sent from central casting. But she would be leaving in the morning, I knew. And my tired mind longed to be at peace. So I shook the worry off.
10
The shouts from Alison’s yard drew me from my studio and Owen from the barn. A man. “Maybe if you weren’t such a FUCKING selfish cunt …” I could only see his back. Alison stood facing him, one step up on her porch. The ex-husband. Paul. It had to be. I thought Nora must be inside until I saw the window of the strange black car go down. “It doesn’t matter,” Nora yelled, her head leaning out. “Stop it. Just stop it! None of it matters anymore. Please … please just stop it. I want to go. Can we please just go?”
Owen and I, fifty feet apart, exchanged a look. Should we intervene? But then the man slammed his way into the driver’s seat and with more noise, more havoc, drove away; and Alison went inside.
“Jesus,” I said, as Owen and I met up. “That was … I thought someone else was picking Nora up. The friend. Martha. Or Heather. Heather, I think.”
He was still staring at Alison’s yard. “I thought so too.”
“I should go over there. See if she’s okay.”
“I don’t know.” He looked at me. “I don’t know if you should. Maybe let her settle down a bit?”
“That’s just wrong,” I said. “Why are you saying that?”
“I don’t know. I’m just not sure you want to get more involved.”
“Well, I’m sure I do. And you should be too.”
When I called “Hi there” into the house, Alison answered, “Up here.” At the foot of the steps, I said that I was just checking in. I said that I could go if she wanted me to, that I didn’t mean to barge in.
“No, come on up,” she called. So I climbed the stairs, trying to avoid tripping on the tattered runner as I did.
“I’m in the bedroom, toward the back. On the right.”
I had been in the hall often before, every time I’d gone into her st
udio. But it had a different feel to it with Paul’s bellowing voice still vibrating in the air. I wondered that I’d never noticed the absence of a light, the cracking plaster walls. When I reached her bedroom, I only peered around the door. She sat on the bed, leaning against a maple headboard, her legs straight, crossed at the ankles, her arms crossed too.
“I just wanted to check on you,” I said. “Be sure you’re okay.”
She was shaking her head. “He isn’t supposed to know where I am. And Nora knows that. He isn’t supposed to be here. Ever.”
“I’m so sorry.”
She patted the bed and I stepped into the room, sat beside her. “I had no idea,” I said.
“Thanks for checking on me.” She reached over, laying her hand over mine.
“You had told me, I just hadn’t …” Hadn’t what? I had believed her—in a sense. I certainly hadn’t thought she’d been lying about his hitting her. But there was some other way in which I hadn’t given it enough thought, hadn’t forced myself to imagine her being slugged, the power, the fear. The part about hitting had come up when I’d been so upset by Laine’s news about Bill, and all of my attention had been on that. My own little melodrama had allowed me to glide over what she had been through.
“I didn’t really get it,” I said. “I should have been more aware.”
“You have enough to worry about,” she said. “Your father … everything. I don’t understand how he got here. I know Nora wouldn’t have told him. She doesn’t … she doesn’t know every detail, but she knows enough. I told her, ‘I’d rather your father didn’t know …,’ and then how could she not tell me he was coming?” Her eyes were starting to brim.
“I’m sure it was just a mistake. She let something slip. Or he … maybe something about her cell? Maybe he could find her?”
She laughed, which pushed a tear down her cheek. “I don’t think even Paul is nuts enough to have her tracked on a GPS. I just … Oh well. It’s done. And you should know …” She was looking right at me. “… well, you saw. He’s awful. He’s so awful. I wanted a few months’ break from his rage.”
“I just hate that you’ve lived with that.” The room smelled like her, I realized, that distinctive lime perfume, but then also a little musty, the aging wood of old homes. “What was he so angry about, anyway? If I can ask.”
“Money,” she said. “Stupid, minor things about selling the house. But it could have been anything. It’s really about me walking out on him—probably. Who knows. It’s two years. More. And before I did that, it was a million other things.”
The windows were open, white curtains floating in a breeze too mild to be felt. The furniture, mismatched, some maple like the bed, some mahogany, looked as though it had been in the house for eighty years or more. So did the wallpaper, yellowed, vertical stripes of tiny flowers buckling so few of the lines appeared to be straight.
She seemed to read my mind. “The website made it sound a bit less shabby than it actually is, but I don’t care. I love it here.”
“No, I wouldn’t care either.”
She sat up a little straighter. “You know, he’s never been at all that way with her. Nothing like he is with me. I just hate for her even to see it.”
“That’s good that he’s better with her.”
“And she uses the religion, you know. It keeps her tied to him. ‘Honor thy father,’ all of that. I figured it out a while back. I’m sure that’s part of why she took to it. It’s a system. Rules. You know, children almost never do break off. Not really. This just gives her a reason to hang in with him, I think.”
It was so difficult not to stare at her, just trying to take it in as real. Even as I could hear his angry voice still ringing in my ears, it was impossible to imagine. Her beauty had everything to do with a certain delicate quality. He must once have seen that clearly, must once have loved it in her.
Alison was staring toward the motion of the curtains, two white flags fluttering. “I know Nora spent a lot of her time here with Owen. And I was really glad for that. Your Owen is so calm and so reassuring. He seems … unflappable. And he was very gentle with her about her literary ambitions. I kept thinking it had to be good for her to be around a man like that. I hope he didn’t mind. I hope she wasn’t a bother for either of you.”
“Oh, Lord. Owen enjoyed the ego boost. It’s been such a rough period. Workwise, I mean.”
“Well, he certainly got that.” She turned back toward me, a real smile hovering. “Nora seems to worship him,” she said. “She was entirely star-struck.” But then the smile fell. “I just don’t understand how Paul found us. And where the hell is Heather? How did the plans get all changed around? It makes no sense at all.”
“You’ll find out. You’ll talk to her.” I was pondering Owen as a father figure. A positive male influence. Maybe something like the role I had played for Laine.
“I should go paint,” she said. “That’s what you would do, right? I should stop feeling sorry for myself and go make something.”
“Maybe. Though …” Did I stop feeling sorry for myself when I worked? In a way. Often, I stopped feeling much at all. “You should paint if it will help. Or, I don’t know, we could go out? It’s Tuesday, you know.”
“Right. That’s not a bad idea.” She sat up a tiny bit. “That might be just the thing.”
The fact that the local farmers’ market fell on Tuesday afternoons had been information haphazard in my consciousness until Alison’s arrival; but by then it was woven into the rhythm of every week. We agreed to meet on the hill at two forty-five.
“I’ll drive,” she said, and I feigned horror, but agreed. As I stood, I considered leaning to kiss her. She would have, had the roles been reversed, I knew. But I only said, “See you in just a bit.”
While I painted that afternoon, I thought about violence. I hadn’t been around much in my life, yet when I’d heard it outside my window I had known it right away, known the difference between a raised voice anyone might use and the sort that carries physical weight behind it, the sort that seems somehow connected to tissue, to muscle, in a seamless continuum that could lead to impact. In this case it had been only the slam of a car door, the screech of tires, the foot too hard on the accelerator. Nobody hurt. But violence nonetheless.
I was back to working on Jackie and his chessboard that day, fiddling with the light coming in through the window—a west-facing window, so low, falling light. Violence had killed these boys, every one of them, but violence of a chillingly impersonal sort.
The paintings were tender ones, and I wondered if more evidence of violence should be found. The word potential came to mind. That was really what had been in that terrible voice. The potential for violence. Like the wild animal slipped beneath my father’s skin, staring at me through his eyes. Was it something I wanted in the pictures? Some glimpse of the tension produced by that potential in the air? How would I do it, if I wanted to?
It was all outside my experience. Even when decimated, Owen had never shown the palest hint of a threat in his voice or demeanor. And Bill. Bill and I had been tender with each other in the way only lovers with stolen time can sustain. Even in parting, gentle, gentle, gentle, like the tedious people who must unwrap every present slowly, leaving the paper entirely intact.
I looked around the studio, at the paintings, the sketches leaning against the wall and taped to boards, and I realized that these weren’t depictions of potential of any kind. Not for violence and not for love and not for happiness or misery or disloyalty or forgiveness. They were something else, something far more resonant for me. “Consequence.” I said the word out loud, and went back to work.
With Alison at the wheel, I braced myself.
It was a cool day for the second week of September. We talked about the surprising early signs of fall—surprising though they arrived at this time each year. The scrubbier maples, we agreed, were always the first to turn and never made it beyond yellow. The Japanese would be the last to go ou
t in their scarlet, phosphorescent blaze. But this summer had been a wet one, so the whole show promised to go on a long time. Well-nourished trees were always slow to drop their leaves, I said.
“I hope I’m still here then,” Alison said. “I have some decisions to make. I’d been counting on being lost, I suppose. Lost to him, anyway.”
“Oh, you have to stay.”
“We’ll see. That’s very nice of you.”
“Just don’t think about it today,” I said. “Just enjoy being here.”
“Okay.” And then after a silent stretch, she said, “I’ve had days here when I can almost forget about Paul, you know.”
“Another reason for you to stay.”
“Yes. If I still can.”
As Alison drove, she told me more about him than she ever had before: how they had met back in London, how surprisingly happy they had been in those early days. “He was the most magnetic man I’d ever known,” she said. “And romantic. Very good at the big gestures, the bouquets, the thoughtful gifts. I’ve never been sure how much he changed and how much I started noticing more of what he really was. Probably some of both.”
By the time Nora was born, she said, they were already caught in a terrible cycle of fights and then those grand, sweeping declarations of love. “Those good moments always seemed like windows to a whole new life. I was constantly looking for the turning point. Eighteen years in, I was still telling myself that things were going to improve. And the sad part is I could read about it in any book. I would. I would go to bookstores and sneak into the self-help section, and I knew, at a certain level I knew that all couples become the same couple. There I’d be. Page sixteen. The enabling spouse. Exhibit A. I saw it. Even before he started hitting me. I knew it. I did. But I didn’t accept it. Not for a very long time. To be defined by something so … so ultimately not about me. To see myself staring out from a page. It felt impossible in some way. I thought I should be more my own person. It sounds odd, but I found it insulting.”