by PW Cooper
She drew further into the seat, sliding against the door and as far away from Carl as she could manage. Her heart was pounding in her chest. Was this how it had been for Michael?
Then Carl's hand was held in front of her, and dangling between his fingers was a tiny little plastic bag filled with what looked like crushed glass. She looked at him, and he lifted one eyebrow at her.
“You ever try it?” he asked.
“What is it?” she asked.
He smiled, and his hand tightened on her knee.
The whole world seemed to be closing steadily in on her. She felt a surge of claustrophobia rising in her chest. She shut her eyes and tried to breathe slowly.
The rain pattered on the roof, the wipers flicked, the heater hummed. She tugged her coat tight around herself and stared out into the darkness, waiting for the lights of her mother's car to break through the slithering gray rain.
* * *
They drove endlessly into the night. Trevor was in the driver's seat, his thumbs hooked loosely on the rubber-clad wheel.
The air was still warm, even now long after the sun had gone down.
Molly and Gena sat together in the back seat. Molly's head lay on her cousin's lap, her arms tucked into her sleeves and held against her body. Gena sat and stared into the wind.
“What time is it?” Molly asked. Her eyes were closed.
“Twelve-thirty.” Gena glanced at her watch. The numbers glowed, drawn in soft-edged digital shapes.
“It's tomorrow... That's good.” Molly fought back a yawn. “I don't really like how today turned out.”
“It wasn't all bad.” Gena ran her fingers through her cousin's long hair.
“I guess not.”
They drove on, on to where the road and the night met. They went further and further away from the world, entering into something new and special and alien.
Gena wrapped her arms around her cousin and watched the road bleed away.
* * *
Gena walked through the empty house, listening to the sounds of her own footsteps echoing around her.
She closed her eyes, and she thought that she could almost step into the past. Smell her father cooking in the kitchen, hear her mother working on the car outside. She reached out and buried her face in her father's chest, the coarse itchy fabric of his wool sweater rough against her nose and her chin, her cheek. She could feel his arms around her. She could smell her mother, her earthy warmth like grass after a misty rain. Her mother looked at her and she smiled, her face burning with a fierce pride and her mouth soft and alive.
Where has my family gone?
She opened her eyes. The lights were off in the trailer. There was a layer of thin gray dust on everything, as though she saw it through a smeared window. She could feel Gena the child slipping away, and all that was left was Gena the in-between thing. There seemed to be no way either forward or back; she was stranded in a gray place while the ground under her feet crumbled.
She could barely stand. Gena slumped onto the couch. Her knees were weak.
She lay back and stared up at the close ceiling, tracing the lines and cracks.
She picked up the crumpled newspaper on the floor and tried to read. The headlines blurred before her.
She turned the page. There was a short notice about Mike. Something about the police having found some kind of forensic evidence which pointed towards murder, though they couldn't release any definitive information at the moment.
She turned the page. There was an editorial about increasing troop deployment in the Middle East. Impending war. The cramped black words swam before her. She couldn't read, couldn't focus. She threw the paper across the room. It came apart in the air, scattering across the room like a retreating figure in a miserable and terrifying cloak.
She went to her parent's bedroom and collapsed on the bed and she breathed in their smell from the bed-covers as though it was the only thing keeping her alive.
American Families Are All Alike
Alice Summers stood alone in the grass, her eyes shut as she listened to the chattering of the songbirds and the wind in the oak trees and the murmur of clear water cascading over eroded rock. She breathed in deeply, and she could smell nothing of humankind, nothing but the sweet bitterness of the natural world.
A smile tugged at her mouth. She was not used to feeling so happy. She turned her blind face up to the light of the sun, and she saw it clear in her mind: there was the little glass house nestled in the shadow of the stony escarpment, shining in the sunlight, each window like the facet of a precious stone. She heard a car door shut. Robert came up behind her and caged her in his embrace. He kissed the back of her neck and he slide his hands down her sides, tracing the curve of her hips.
“Well?” he asked.
She allowed the moment to be. Sometimes, in rare moments, she could remember what it felt like to love him. Those rare moments when she could almost let her guard down, when she could let herself forget everything, where they two were real people, loved, and not such red-blooded monsters.
We are just two people in love, and life loves us back.
“What do you think about it?” he asked.
“What do you think?”
“I want to hear what you think, baby. Tell the truth.”
“It's lovely,” she said, and she meant it. Couldn't she be happy here? She opened her eyes. There was the world, rushing in around her. She looked at Robert and made herself smile. He was so beautiful, it made her chest hurt to look at him. How could anything that beautiful be so terrible? She wondered again if it was all somehow her fault, and none of his after all. “We're really going to live here?” she asked, “In this house?”
Robert laughed. He took her hands and spun her about under his arm. Like Fred Astaire.
When she was a little girl she had loved nothing more than watching old movies on the TV. They didn't have a television in the trailer until she was older, so she'd used to go down the street to the laundromat and watch the little black and white TV hanging from the ceiling. There was no sound, but she still liked to watch the people dancing on the screen. She would sit there for hours, surrounded by the thrumming laundry machines, lost in that gray-shaded fantasy world. The women were so beautiful, like swans in their flowing white dresses, soft as silk and weak in the arms of their partners. She had never been beautiful, she knew that, knew that she didn't deserve anybody as beautiful as Robert.
She held onto him, turning slowly beneath him in a kind of dance. She shut her eyes again and made herself ignore his tight claw-grip on her fingers, made herself bite back the discomfort and just let herself turn beneath him. She was not her own person, she and Robert were one being. That was what they had promised each other, wasn't it? Standing there at the alter while the old man read from the book and her mother daubed her eyes in the front-row pew. There was no Robert anymore, no Alice. They were one.
Sometimes she thought it was all worth it, anything to be able to stand in the sun and see your reflection in the glass windows of the house that you owned. The place where you were safe from everything, that was yours and yours alone and couldn't ever be taken away or moved out from beneath you. And there were no other houses nearby, she liked that best. They were alone here, nobody to take him away from her, nobody to make him hate her. Only the two of them, as it was always meant to be.
It was such a beautiful fantasy, she could hardly keep the tears from her eyes. She wanted so badly to be happy. She was so frightened now, so very miserable. Who was going to protect her, if not him? And what would become of her if there was nobody to protect her?
“Come on,” he said, “let's go inside.”
* * *
Alice sat at the bay window, looking out through the glass at the waterfall spilling down into a bubbling rock pool full of clear water. It wasn't very big, really, just a drizzle of cold water into a shallow pond, just a fragile thing. She was sure that it wouldn't take more than a few maliciously placed stones t
o block the stream and dry it out forever. Already she loved it as dearly as though she had always known it. It was like a fragment of memory always just out of reach, like something from a fairy story.
The countryside around the house was a nest of gnarled rock formations, gorges and waterfalls and rippling rivers running down towards the lake.
There was a certain place nearby called Treman Park. The river there wound through a deep-mouthed canyon, falling off at intervals over spectacular falls, whitewater spraying the hawks where they roosted on the craggy walls. You could swim down in the mouth of the gorge, and there was a place where you could stand on the wet rocks and look down into the swirling black eye of the world dropping endlessly into nothing. It was been years since she'd last seen it, but she could still recall it clearly: the gnarled trees along the sides of the road, the slapping sounds of feet on wet black rock, the dusty trails leading up towards the falls, narrow walkways carved out from the rock.
Her mother used to take Jeff and Alice there all the time, just the three of them. Alice remembered lunches in wicker baskets, cool sunscreen rubbed on her shoulders, the way the sun's reflection caught in her mother's round dark sunglasses. She remembered Jeffrey's body sparkling wet as he clambered alone the rocks below the falls, she remembered strange children's voices raised to a wordless din, she remembered smooth-voiced men with gray streaks in their hair eager to sit beside her mother, she remembered jumping hand in hand with her brother into the cold mystery of the waters below.
How many of those memories were real, she wondered, and how many were just wishful imagination sprung from sepia-tone children's novels. Sometimes she forgot where the Anne of Green Gables or Nancy Drew ended and where she began. It would do no good, probing too deeply. She was deathly afraid of discovering that all her beautiful childhood memories were nothing more than imagination.
And then Robert was beckoning her wordlessly from the doorway, and then she was following. And then they were driving, and the house and the waterfall dwindled behind them in the mirrors.
* * *
Robert hummed to the music in his head. She knew better than to ask where he was taking her. Alice had stopped looking at road signs a long time ago. Wherever she ended up, that's where she would be. What did it matter how she got there? There was no point knowing which way she was going when she couldn't change her direction. Knowing only made it worse.
She watched her husband. His eyes seemed to be eating up the road as it came at him. He was always hungry to get somewhere, to be somewhere. His face was taut, fixed but for those eyes of his always flicking to the mirror, to the sign on the side of the road, to the speedometer, to her.
Alice had never driven a car. She'd been barely old enough to get her learner's permit when Robert had come into her life. Sometimes when they were driving places he would promise to teach her, take her hands in his own and wrap them around the steering wheel of his car. Teasing her.
But a car meant freedom, meant escape. There was nothing so American as an automobile. Freedom, opportunity. To be alone with the road, that was what it felt like to be in love. He would never trust her in a car. As well he shouldn't; if she ever did drive away from him then she might very well not drive back. So he never taught her. Just another broken promise.
Like the first time he hit her. Just hours later: “I'm so sorry, baby.” His eyes had seemed honest to her then, had seemed open, “I don't know why I did that. It won't ever happen again. I promise.” And he drew her to him, drew her face against his shoulder like parent cradling their child. “I love you?” he had said, sounding unsure of it.
The next time it happened she was so angry that she hit him back. That had made him angry. He had to take her to the hospital afterwords. Three stitches along the jaw where her chin had caught the edge of the stove. The nurses had been so kind to her, like angels in their white uniforms. But they had kept hinting at things, lawyers and police. One of them put a domestic abuse brochure in her purse. Robert was so angry when he found it, he didn't speak to her for almost a month. It had almost been a relief at first, but the silence became unbearable, and his refusal to speak had said so much through the quiet.
She saw a green road-sign pointing out the number of miles remaining to Syracuse.
“Did you ever read Anna Karenina?” she asked, blurting out the question just as it came into her head and immediately regretting that she had spoken.
He glanced at her, eyes twitching from their cycle for just a moment. “Who?”
“Anna Karenina. It's a book. I read it when I was a little girl...”
“Alright. What about it?” his voice colored with annoyance. Robert didn't put much stock in books, nor fiction in general, really. Movies seemed to bore him, and she had learned early in their marriage that she must shut off the television if he came into the room. She'd never seen him reading anything longer than a newspaper article, certainly never anything fictional.
“Have you read it?”
He said nothing. No.
She turned her eyes back to the floor of the car, watched thin trickles of water roll off her boots.
“What about it, this book?” Robert pressed. “Why would I have read it?”
“I don't know. In school maybe.”
“Karenina, what is that, German?”
“Russian,” she said quietly. Robert liked to be right. He hated it when she knew something he didn't, not matter how insignificant.
His face twisted. “Russian. Why the hell would I have read Russian books in school? What's wrong with American books, huh? I'm telling you, that's what's wrong with this country today. All these fucking teachers filling kids heads with shit. I'll bet that teacher of yours was Russian. Was he Russian?”
Alice shook her head. She tried to picture wispy little Miss Dubaunt from Mississippi spitting out lines from Dostoyevsky in a thick European accent and she smiled. School had been hard for Alice; nobody seemed to like her, though she hadn't ever been able to figure out why. At least she'd had her friends from the trailer park. She missed them so much...
Robert grunted. “Maybe not. Sympathizer, though, no fucking doubt. Like the war never even happened, sometimes. Let me tell you, twenty years from now, we'll all be reading the goddamn Qur'an in schools. That's how they do it, you know, it's not the attacks. It's the schools. Once they get in the schools, that's where they do the real damage.”
They drove. The wheels throbbed on the road.
“What war?” she asked. She hadn't had a conversation this long with Robert in months.
“Huh?”
“What war are you talking about?”
“The fucking Cold War, Alice, Christ! Don't you know anything?” he laughed, amazed. “Did they actually teach you anything at school, or was it all Russian novels and sex ed?”
“I'm sorry.” She hated how small her voice had become. She could only speak in little sounds, like each syllable was a struggle to get out.
“So what is it about this Russian book, huh? What's your point?”
Alice shifted in her seat, propping her chin in her hand and lifting her eyes to the window. She looked out at the green earth flying by, at the city beyond belching black fumes to the sky. “There's a line in it. The first line... I don't really remember it, but it, uh, it's something like: 'Happy families are all alike, and, uh, unhappy families are all unique.' Everyone's troubles are different, I mean, is what it's about. I think.”
He didn't say anything at first. She could see his hands turning on the wheel, white knuckled, black hair sprouted from his skin, his nails wide and flat. He cleared his throat. “What made you think of that?”
The empty New York hills were all around them, green and brown and fading to blue, like clouds brought low to the earth.
She shrugged. “I don't know. It was so long ago, I hardly even remember what the book was even about.”
“And us? What kind of family are we?”
Alice looked at her husband. His eyes we
re tight, locked on the road. His body was taut, she thought she could see every bone in him, locked like a steel joint.
We're not like anyone else. The words rose in her throat, forming a hard lump there. But she did not speak them.
She put her hand softly on his arm and she let the silence descend. And the car carried them onward, hurtling ceaselessly into a great nothingness.
Fractures
“But I just don't understand why she would give up like that. It's not very good storytelling if you ask me. She should have done something!”
“I think it's a case of... I mean, what choice does she really have?”
“Oh, for God's sake! She's just a character, she doesn't have a choice because the writer didn't give her one. I think he's just selfish, making everything go wrong for her.”
“I had a hard time relating to her.”
“You know, mothers don't always love all their kids the same. I know, nobody wants to admit it, but it's true, isn't it?”
“Not me, I love all my children just the same, and all their children too. It's not about favoritism, after all. I remember my little grandson Abraham, my daughter's son – she lives in Maine you know, they had to move because of her husband's job – my little grandson comes up to me one day when I'm out in the garden weeding my rosebushes.”
“Oh, I love those roses of yours.”
“Aren't they lovely? Of course they're a pain in the hinder.”
“Really? I always thought they were very hardy.”
“It's the animals, dear. Rabbits, I'm sure!”
“Oh, I don't believe that! Rabbits? That's so strange, I never would have thought.”
“Your grandson, what did he say?”
“Oh, I'm sorry, I've gone off topic again, haven't I?”
Adelaide looked quietly around the circle of elderly ladies. They all wore the same clothes, all wore their hair the same way, all had the same book, all with their same tea cups clenched in shriveled fingers. And all of them looked just like she did. She looked down at her own hands. They hardly seemed a part of her. It had happened so fast, so invisibly: her once smooth fingers had turned into these decaying things. They couldn't be her hands, they just couldn't be! Those horrid mummy fingers couldn't belong to her.