by T. Greenwood
The next day, I packed my things and got a ride into town, where I bought a bus ticket to Hanover. I had made almost a thousand dollars already, enough to rent a room in a Dartmouth sorority house that was almost empty for the summer. And every day for an entire month, I walked across the campus to Mary Hitchcock, where Peter’s legs were healing.
He didn’t seem surprised to see me the first time I arrived at the door of his hospital room. He never even asked why I’d left The Birches or where I was staying. He only smiled and held my hand when I read to him and brought him smuggled hamburgers. He only kissed me when I left him at the end of visiting hours each day. And in this way, Peter and I fell in love. In this way, I made him forget that I’d let those birds die. In the clean white room that smelled of Clorox and wilting flowers, I had never felt so needed. Or loved. Or forgiven.
When we got home from the café, I went straight to the bathroom to run a bath. I dumped a handful of powdered bubble bath under the faucet and watched the bubbles multiply. When the tub was full, I took off my clothes and sank into the soapy water up to my neck. With a brand new bar of soap, I started scrubbing at the black marks all over my skin. The water quickly turned gray with ink.
After a while, Peter knocked on the door.
“Come in,” I said.
He came in and stood next to the tub, looking down at me in the water. Then he rolled up his sleeves, kneeled down, and put both of his hands in the dirty water. I could see how hard this was for him. But he didn’t wince, he just leaned toward me, kissing my forehead.
“Peter, I’m a mess.”
“I don’t care.”
“Not this,” I said, motioning to the murky water. “I mean, everything.”
He closed his eyes and opened them again.
“It’s too much . . . You shouldn’t have to deal with this shit.”
“I’m still here,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Why not?” I asked.
The cuffs of his sleeves dipped into the water.
“Careful,” I said, pulling his sleeve up over his sharp elbow.
Peter looked at me, his eyes intent, his face serious. “We’re all damaged, Indie,” he said softly.
“I don’t want to hear this,” I said, shaking my head.
“Listen to me,” he said. “Please.”
He sat back on his knees, but his arms stayed in the water. “Everybody’s dented. Everybody’s been dropped and slammed.”
“How are you damaged?” I asked.
He looked at me intently. I knew he was thinking about his legs.
“What? Because you have scars?” I said, snorting. “It’s hardly the same thing. I’ve never met anybody more normal than you.”
Peter pulled his arms out the water and ran one wet hand through his hair. “You think I’m normal? You think the way I live, counting every step, afraid of doing anything out of order, is normal? ”
I looked down at the gray water.
“When I was six years old, I thought that I had to count to a thousand every night before I fell asleep or something bad would happen to my mother. She found me once, interrupted me, and I was terrified. I tried to explain, it made perfect sense to me, and she just kept reassuring me. I started over after she left my room. I was so afraid. Later it was other things. Left to right. All these rituals. And when the accident happened, it was like some sort of proof. It got worse. I must have spent hours trying to figure out what went wrong that day . . . whether I put my right shoe on first instead of my left? I almost drove myself crazy trying to figure out what I could have done. But finally, I had to let go. I had to just let it be an accident.”
“I don’t see what this has to do with me.”
“Everybody’s got scars. But there’s got to be more to us than the accidents in our life.”
“Accidents?”
I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. It made everything wet. When I squeezed my eyes shut, I saw the stars on Benny’s celling.
“You lasted, Indie. Bumped and bruised, but you came out alive. Isn’t that worth something to you?”
“I didn’t survive, Peter. I ran away.” A sob caught in my throat like a knot in a rope. “I ran away and borrowed somebody else’s life. And now, it feels like . . . like an overdue library book or something, and every day I’m afraid somebody will ask me to give it back.” I was crying so hard now my chest was lurching forward with each sob. “And they weren’t accidents. Nothing that happened was an accident. Accidents are things you can’t stop from happening. Somebody could have stopped it.”
Peter came toward me again and held onto my shoulders, gently, keeping me steady. Keeping me from sinking underwater.
I looked down at the gray water, at my pale body trembling in the cold.
“Ma could have stopped it, Daddy . . .” I said, looking at him hard. “I could have stopped it. That’s the difference, don’t you see?”
Peter helped me out of the water. He wrapped me in his old robe, bandaging me in flannel.
He brought me to our bed and stroked my hair until my chest stopped heaving. And then he unwrapped me from the robe like a gift and kissed all of the sore places: the lids of my tired eyes and the palms of my hands.
“I don’t want to make muffins anymore,” I said, later, as I was drifting off to sleep.
“That’s fine.” And he didn’t seem to notice that his arms were stained gray from my bathwater.
Peter had to pick Esmé up at the bus station at midnight. He asked me to come, but I told him I wasn’t feeling well. I offered him vague symptoms and hoped that it would be enough. He felt my head with the back of his hand, and even though I didn’t have a fever, he brought me two aspirin and a cup of chamomile tea.
After he left, I curled up in our bed (sheets so clean they still smelled of soap) and wished I had gone with him. It would have been nice to drive through the woods, which were now laced with snow from an early storm. It would have been nice to watch for Esmé coming down the steps of the bus into the hot and smelly bus station, to have offered her a hand with her heavy backpack. It would have been nice to be anywhere but here, alone. If Jessica had curled up in the bed with me, I might not have felt so lonely, but she refused to get off the dryer, which was warmer than the woodstove. She’d made a nest out of Peter’s boxer shorts and my pajamas. I was glad when they finally came home. But I told him I still didn’t feel well when he breathed questions into my bare breasts. And I stayed in bed with my imagined fever the next morning, listening to them making pies and bread in the kitchen.
Peter had brought the TV into the kitchen so he could watch the Macy’s parade while he made Thanksgiving dinner. I could hear the sounds of a high school band from the bedroom when I finally reluctantly pulled myself out of bed. I could also hear the faint twinkle of Esmé’s sweet voice, rising like a parade balloon.
THANKSGIVINGS. Mountainview, Arizona. Benny liked cranberry sauce in a can. He loved the sound it made as it broke the vacuumed seal and came slithering out of the can into the bowl. He would push his finger into the ridged cylinder until it pierced through the gel.
Leigh Moony was still in the hospital. There had been some complications because of an allergic reaction to one of the antibiotics they’d given her to ward off infection. I was alarmed by how small she looked inside the hospital bed. Chuck had said she could carry a keg of beer all by herself. She could carry a whole keg of beer but not a baby. I wondered how she felt now in a hospital, and empty.
The Macy’s parade sounded like memories of other Thanksgivings. The last parade I went to was when I visited my father in San Diego. Christmas lights strung in palm trees, lighting the way of surfers and VW buses and Harley Davidsons decked with antlers. In the kitchen Esmé was running cold water through the slimy, hollowed-out bird as the announcers glowed pink before Broadway understudies costumed and lip-synching in the city streets.
Ma’s Thanksgivings were made from boxes and cans. Stovetop Stuffing an
d cranberry sauce and crispy fried onions sprinkled over uniformly shaped green beans. Benny had a headdress he wore. A forgotten Halloween costume turned him from a boy into a savage. What he didn’t know was that there were Indians everywhere around us. When he dreamed Thanksgiving, he dreamed Technicolor tomahawks and Tonto on TV. The feathers fell out one by one, littering Ma’s kitchen like autumn leaves.
Chuck Moony married Leigh because of her strength and stoicism. He told us he loved her because she was unbreakable. She wasn’t fragile the way some girls are. You didn’t need to worry about her falling to pieces in your hands.
When Esmé was a little girl, Peter used to bring her everywhere. She liked to ride on the handlebars of his bike when they went out to visit their father at the docks. He carried her piggyback around the house. He let her ride in the front seat of his car when he first learned to drive. Peter’s face lit up when she was around. He missed her when she was gone.
Benny’s laughter might have sounded maniacal to anyone who didn’t know him. He threw his head back and opened his mouth and let out a sound that could pierce eardrums, break glass. His skin flushed red with the effort of laughter. I think he knew even then that in our family joy was hard work.
I brought Leigh a bunch of yellow daisies, which she seemed to like. When she took the bundle from me, the plastic crinkled in her hands and I noticed that her veins were like fishing lines. It must have taken several attempts to puncture her skin with the IV needle. Chuck says that Leigh is like a good tree. Not too beautiful and not too tall but trustworthy and strong. A little wind wouldn’t do much but whistle through her branches. I wondered if she felt hollow. The rotten pulpy insides gone now.
Peter was almost thirteen when Esmé was born. She was an afterthought, Peter says. Accident, Esmé always laughs. Usually siblings with that many years between them lack the shared childhoods necessary for bonding, it seems. The closest brothers and sisters seem to be the ones who were necessarily allied in the great childhood war against their parents. But Peter and Esmé have that closeness. I can see it in the way they easily curl around each other, in the speech patterns that sound like music when they tell stories. I think it’s difficult for Peter to understand that Lily and I have never been allies. That it was always she and Ma. Even after Benny died and Daddy left, it was still Ma and Lily. Impenetrable and united. Sometimes I still think of myself as an only child. A lonely child, Chuck Moony once described it. He was one, too; his brother was more than ten years older than he. I could hear Peter asking Esmé to preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Cymbals and trumpets and horns. Marching bands and majorettes, cold instruments and batons.
I wonder sometimes what would have happened if Benny had lived. I like to think that he would have kept growing until he towered over us: over me, over Lily and Daddy, and over Ma. That he wouldn’t have been able to fit under the table or porch or even inside the house anymore. That his hands would have eventually become as big as the silver sleds we dragged up the neighbor’s hill to slide on. That his smile would have become as big as a canoe. That he could have carried me away in the palm of one of those giant hands.
I got out of bed and realized that I had talked myself into a cold. The fever Peter had been looking for in my skin had become real. I stuck the thermometer in my mouth and sat on the toilet waiting for the evidence. 102 degrees. I shook the glass tube and dipped the end in peroxide. The bubbles hissed as they fought whatever germs I’d left there. I splashed some water on my face and pulled on my favorite slippers.
In the kitchen Esmé and Peter were peeling potatoes.
“Hi Indie!” Esmé said, setting down her half-peeled potato and reaching for me. I took her hand and she squeezed it. “You look horrible.”
“I feel horrible,” I said. And as I said it, it became true. I felt a chill and the scratch of a cold at the back of my throat.
Peter sliced his potato into perfect cubes and dropped them in a large pot of water on the stove. He smiled at me.
“Do we have any Vitamin C?” I asked.
“In the fridge.”
I reached into the refrigerator past the covered casseroles and pies. I knocked a bag of cranberries to the floor as I pulled out the family-size bottle of vitamins. I felt shaky, my hands and knees unsteady.
“You can leave those out,” he said. He grabbed another potato from the wicker bin and ran it under the cold water.
Esmé said, “Peter was saying you might start doing some writing on your own. Do you miss the paper much?”
I hadn’t thought about the paper or about writing for a long time.
“I’d love to read your stuff. I have E-mail at school.You can send me anything you want to.”
“Thanks.” I smiled. “I will.”
“Do you want a scone? Peter made the maple ones I like.” She smiled.
“That’s okay,” I said.
Esmé is beautiful in a way that suggests complete ignorance of her effect on the eye. She blushes easily. She has bad posture and will not take a compliment. She is enthusiastic about everything. Trusting and eager and sincere. She reminds me sometimes of Benny, strangely, in small things she does. In her laughter. In the way she loves Peter. Benny loved me like that.
Esmé rested her head on Peter’s shoulder. My head was pounding, my legs felt weak.
“I’m going back to bed,” I said.“I have a little bit of a fever. Wake me up when it’s time for dinner.”
“I’ll come jump on the bed,” Esmé said without moving away from Peter.
As I was walking back down the hall, Peter came up behind me.
“Don’t forget the vitamins,” he said and offered me two pills in his outstretched hand. His eyes were soft and scared. “Feel better.”
I fell asleep and didn’t wake up until Esmé crawled in the bed next to me.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
I nodded.
She curled up next to me and hugged me. Her skin smelled faintly of cinnamon, probably spilled while making pies.
“I’m so glad I’m here,” she said. “I love your house.”
“You do?” I said.
“I’m so happy when I’m here. It’s easy, you know?”
“Really?”
Esmé sat up and pulled the covers back over me. “He loves you,” she said.
“What?” I said.
“Peter. He really loves you.”
Esmé, like Peter, sometimes knows the exact thing to say.
Chuck Moony arrived just as we were sitting down to dinner.
“I’ll get it,” I said, as he knocked on the door. I shuffled to the door in my slippers. I hadn’t bothered changing out of my jammies.
He stood outside shivering, his hands in his pockets, and his face tired. He had shaved his beard and underneath the scruff he looked younger. His cheeks were hollow and his jaw determined. “Sorry I didn’t call. I came straight from the hospital. Turkey noodle soup wasn’t quite my cup of music,” he sighed.
I grinned and ushered him in, helping him off with his jacket.
Peter had gotten a couple of sawhorses and a piece of plywood from the shed to extend our small table, and covered the whole thing with one of his mother’s tablecloths. He had set a place for Chuck next to Esmé. Chuck pulled off his boots and sat down.
Yams, mashed potatoes, creamed spinach, artichoke hearts, salad with brilliantly red hothouse tomatoes, and cornbread circled the golden turkey in a parade of colors and smells and tastes. My throat was thick with the cold, but I piled the food onto my plate.
Chuck helped himself to several scoops of spinach. One long strand reached from his plate to the casserole dish. He looked apologetic when it stained the white tablecloth. “So what are you studying in school now, Ez?”
Esmé blushed and finished chewing the piece of turkey she had in her mouth. “Still books,” she said. “Stuff nobody else reads anymore.”
Peter quietly cut another piece of turkey off the beautifully garnished bird perched on
a yard-sale china platter. He offered it to me, and I accepted. The homemade gravy was thick and delicious. I ate until the chills in my shoulders had subsided. Until I felt better. Until the tickle in my throat was just a recollection.
Peter made us vanilla lattés to have with our pie. Chuck and I took ours out onto the back porch while Peter and Esmé built a fire and watched It’s a Wonderful Life on TV.
Outside the sun was setting, leaving only traces of pink and gold in the trees. We sat in the porch swing, resting our cups on the end of the tables Peter had fashioned out of two tree stumps.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “For that.” I motioned vaguely to the woods where I had stupidly, drunkenly kissed him.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Water under the road.”
I smiled.
“I’m sorry about the baby too,” I said.
Chuck stared into his coffee cup. “Once I bought this brand-new car. It was the only time I’ve ever had a new car in my whole life. I drove it up to Canada to go to the bars with some friends. When we came out of the bar it was gone. Just like that. I’d hardly even driven it.”
I looked into Chuck’s wide-open face, into the dark ponds of his eyes.
“Sometimes things get stolen,” he shrugged.
I nodded, and I thought about things stolen from me. I thought about the thieves I had known.
When Chuck and I went back inside, Esmé had fallen asleep on the couch with her head on Peter’s lap. Peter motioned for us to be quiet as we came in the door, shaking mud and snow off our boots and out of our hair. He had built a fire and the living room was warm, all the smells of the dinner lingering like ghosts in the air.
“I should be getting back to the hospital,” Chuck said.
“Take some pie for Leigh?” Peter whispered.
“That’s okay. She’s still on the IV.”
“Take some home for yourself at least,” I tried. I pulled the tin foil from the pumpkin and apple pies. I pinched a little piece of crust off and popped it in my mouth. It was buttery and sweet.