Read by Strangers

by Philip Dean Walker

  At dinner, Billie sits to Gloria’s right, across from Wade and to the left of Hank, who sits at the head of the table opposite Anna, who is at the other end. Anna and Hank have always arranged themselves like this, across from each other at either ends of the table. They share knowing looks, nonverbal cues during dinner when all the boys surround them at the table.

  What’s so surprising for Anna to think about now is that this is the same kind of thing she did with Gloria as a child. Even when they were at one of Gloria’s all-night dinner parties that inevitably arose out of an earlier cocktail party and then gave way to a boozy game of poker with cigars, there was Anna up way past her bedtime, mixing it up with the adults—always the only child. Gloria would stop flirting or drinking or accepting a cigarette from whichever male suitor had been beckoned to her side to give Anna their secret look—an exaggerated rolling of her eyes as if to say, “Isn’t this all ridiculous, babe?” topped off with a wink.

  “Are you working on a new book?” Hank asks Billie, pouring her a little more wine.

  “As a matter of fact, I am,” Billie answers, picking up the glass to take a sip.

  “What’s this one about?” he continues. Anna looks at Hank, hoping to catch a wink or a knowing nod. He read one of Billie’s books once and didn’t think it was very good. He called it “trite,” if she recalls correctly, yet he now appears to be intrigued by her new one. He fails to return Anna’s look.

  “It’s a novel about a group of children who escape from an abusive foster home, then become exposed to a chemical agent that allows them to see people’s thoughts. They use their new skill to make the most private desires of the people around them come true. Or, in some cases, redirect those people whose unsavory desires might lead them down a bad path.”

  “It sounds kind of like The Boxcar Children series. Anna, I used to read that to you when you were little,” Gloria says. She looks at Billie, and Billie nods.

  “So it’s science fiction?” Hank prods.

  “It is, yes. Kind of. I’m thinking of doing a trilogy.”

  “What kind of ‘unsavory desires’?” Wade asks. Wade, who is rarely checked into what is happening at the dinner table outside of eating, is unusually attentive to Billie. He is involved in the conversation. During a normal dinner, Anna might be able to get three or four sentences from him before he inhales his meal, then rushes off to hang out with friends or play basketball.

  “Well, it’s a young adult novel, so there’s nothing too obscene in it. I have a bit of leeway with my editors, though. Listen, I think everyone has a stray bad thought in the course of a single day. It doesn’t mean you’re an awful person; it just means you’re a human. What makes the children in my novel special, I think, is that they’ve tapped into their intuitive powers to ‘read’ people. It comes off as telekinesis or something supernatural, but I think it’s something we all can do to a certain extent.”

  “Are there animals in this book, like the others?” Anna asks. She chooses a moment in which Hank, Wade, and Gloria all seem to be totally enraptured by what Billie is saying. Private desires and secret thoughts. This isn’t groundbreaking territory, Anna thinks, and has to stop herself from saying it out loud.

  “That’s kind of my trademark, so yes, there’s one animal.”

  “What kind?” asks Anna.

  “There’s a golden retriever the children save from being abused by their foster father. They take her with them when they escape. I’m thinking of naming the dog Gloria after Mother, of course,” she says, turning toward Gloria.

  “I’d be so honored!” says Gloria.

  “Can I get anyone a second helping of chicken?” Anna asks Hank, who passes the casserole to her.

  “Who’s your father?” Wade asks Billie.

  “Wade!” shouts Anna, letting the serving spoon on the chicken casserole clank off the side and spill to the table. A stunned silence takes over the room that lasts three seconds but feels much longer. Wade sits back in his chair with a confused expression. “Don’t be rude,” Anna says, placing the spoon to the side on her napkin.

  “He’s not being rude, Anna,” Billie says. “He’s just curious.” Gloria begins to nod to agree with Billie but stops to sneak a glance at Anna. “I suspect that’s more of a question for you, though, Mother. Don’t you think?” Billie asks Gloria.

  Gloria looks back at Billie, who, for the first time that night, appears as if she might not entirely trust Gloria. The chummy togetherness of the two of them seems broken for a moment. But put on the spot, Gloria is always at her best. She is, of course, an actress and has, presumably, been rehearsing these lines for decades.

  “His name was Dash. Dash Sinclair.”

  Anna just knew it and feels temporarily vindicated at Gloria’s confirmation. Gloria tosses her brown mane with the white shoots at either side above her ears and kind of stares off into the distance at the movie of her life playing on the opposite wall.

  There’s a sly way Gloria has of parsing out this information, telling it to the assembled table as if they’re at a reading in a coffee shop, waiting to be entertained. Or at a one-night-only Broadway event. “An Evening With…” type of thing. By this point, it’s not some painful memory she’s reliving; it’s been sculpted into a dramatic monologue, the facts of the story doled out in careful beats. “Dash was—well, it goes without saying—utterly dashing. He was the captain of the football team and the debate team. I wore his varsity jacket.”

  “What did he look like? You’ve never really said,” Billie asks, her eyes hopeful.

  “He had strawberry-blond hair, which is where you got yours, I suppose, dear.”

  “What about his family? Whatever happened to him?” Wade asks. Billie appears ravenous at this opening.

  “Mother and Daddy told me never to speak of him again. By the time I came home, he had graduated and gone off to school. I’m not sure where.” Gloria pauses for a moment, as if forgetting her lines. Then, as if she’s just remembered what she wanted to say, she asks Anna, “Can you refill my sherry?”

  In this moment, Anna feels a certain kinship to Billie. She feels bad that Billie must rely on Gloria’s erratic whims in order to gain such basic information as the fate of her father, his appearance, his age—questions a fifty-something-year-old woman never should have to ask anyone.

  Anna recalls asking Gloria the same questions in her childhood about her own father and being continually redirected in a way only her mother could do. Relying on crumbs of information to toss over and over inside her head like clothes in a dryer in the Laundromat downtown.

  Anna remembers meeting her real father at a Senators game when she was about ten years old. She wasn’t told the man was her father until she was returned home. He bought her a hot dog and a Coke while he drank large gulps from a wide plastic cup of pilsner. He smoked Marlboros down to the filter, then shoved the butts off the steps next to a woman in front of them who seemed to become more agitated as the innings progressed and he got louder and drunker. Anna never saw him again.

  “Dash Sinclair. Sounds like someone out of a novel from the turn of the century,” Billie says, a faint smile on her face.

  “What about your adopted dad? Where’s he?” Wade asks.

  Billie becomes very still. She picks up her glass to take a sip but holds it in midair. “He’s dead. And so is my adoptive mother.”

  Gloria looks away from the table, as if she’s just heard a doorbell or suddenly remembered something she had tried to recall weeks before. Billie looks over at Gloria.

  “I have a younger sister—Alicia. My…” Billie stumbles a bit before saying, “…adoptive parents had a baby after I came to live with them.” She finally takes a sip of her wine after the glass has been hanging in the air.

  Hank stares at Anna. He finally gives her a look. But she doesn’t know what this one means. She’s never seen it before. He could be asking her to do something, but she’s not sure.

  “Cheers to Billie,” Ha
nk says, raising his glass. “Welcome home.”

  THAT NIGHT, AFTER Gloria and Billie go home, Anna gets into bed with Hank, who’s already half asleep. She pulls the covers over and lies on her side, bringing her hand up to her face, bending it so that her cheek rests upon her knuckles. She feels Hank’s hand begin to encircle her waist.

  “That was nice, you agreeing to take Billie on Wade’s field trip,” he says. “I think she was touched. And Gloria seemed delighted.”

  “I don’t know why it’s so important to cultivate this relationship with her. She’s a stranger. To both of us. I don’t have the time for this.”

  “Shh…Billie’s good.” He brings his hand down around her waist and pulls her close to him in a spooning position. He pushes up her nightgown from the back and pulls down her underpants with the other hand, so quickly that she can barely register what’s happening. They’re having sex for the first time in what must be over six months. He presses up inside her from behind and she loses her breath for a second, letting her body relax with his as he settles into her. Hank is always such a careful lover. They made three boys this way, there’s something still beautiful about that, isn’t there, she asks herself.

  But she also wonders if he was turned on by the sight of her half-sister whose beauty is more traditional, less squinty than hers. More regal, less domestic. Is he making love to her, she wants to know? He doesn’t often take her from behind like this, so she has to ask. But she doesn’t. She goes along with the rhythm he’s established, like a good warm body, riding beneath the wave of him as he washes over her, up inside her. He’s asleep almost as soon as he pulls out, as if it were only a dream.

  A SIGN AT the front of La Ronde, the amusement park in Montreal, informs patrons that the staff of the park is currently on strike. The park—the sign announces with small insignias of construction hats and crossed pick axes and smiley faces—is being run by “independently contracted operators.” Scabs, Anna thinks to call them in her head.

  “Well, isn’t that reassuring,” Billie says, winking at Wade and two of his friends as they make their way past the sign. The group walks past the welcome cottages and ventures onto a tree-lined path, surrounded by blindingly white three-picket fencing and globular bushes in fresh red chips of fertilizer. Anna walks a few paces behind, watching as Billie shoots her arm through the hook in Wade’s windbreaker. Wade looks at her and smiles.

  The Ferris wheel at La Ronde dwarfs everything around it. Even the nearby arch, which is admittedly taller and resembles the one in St. Louis, seems to be bowing to it, dipping its apex in deference, quivering on its spindly iron legs. There’s something almost prehistoric about the Ferris wheel—its massiveness, as if the thing has always been there, cemented to the ground and moving perpetually in a calm, circular motion, the rest of the amusement park—the entire city of Montreal, in fact—only built around it, trying to reach the heights it so effortlessly inhabits.

  Instead of the open-air compartments Anna had seen in the Ferris wheels of her youth—the ones where children’s legs would dangle and swing with each revolution—this one is fixed at the spoke of the wheel with a rust-red car able to seat four passengers, two seats facing each other. So gigantic it is, the wheel needs to contain its passengers in order to keep them from flying out into the sky.

  Anna isn’t afraid of heights in the traditional sense. She once stood on the observation deck at Niagara Falls with Hank and the boys. They were driving Ben off to college. Holding the handrail with a firm grip, Anna hastened to look straight down. The swirling pistons of water, crashing into one another at the bottom of the great falls, lulled her into a sort of peaceful daze, drawing her away as if by hypnosis from the reality of just how far she was from the bottom. The sounds of the water pulled her closer to the misty whisper of the crashing jets. As if the whorls of water could envelop her like a claw, lift her straight off the deck, into the air and let her float deliriously above them.

  But years later, after she had climbed a tree in their front yard to retrieve a kite for a sobbing Wade, who had begun to pitch a fit on the driveway, she temporarily had lost her footing as she descended the giant oak. After reacting quickly by grabbing the nearest thing, she found herself hanging from a thick bough of the old tree, clinging to it for her very survival. As she looks back, she realizes it was perhaps the most terrifying moment of her life. She could see the whites of her fingernails digging into the bark as she felt something slip out of her—a sense of the most basic security. By some miracle, she was able to shimmy down the long bough back to the trunk and make her way to the ground, thick chips of bark scraping her knees and elbows. Wade, who only minutes before had been hysterically weeping about his kite, was shocked into catatonic silence as he watched his mother climb down to the foot of the tree. When Anna had scooped him off the ground, her knees skinned and arms rattling on their own accord, as if the blood flowing through her were now some kind of hydroponic fuel, he awoke from his trance and burst into tears again. Too stunned to cry herself, she had held him tighter. From that moment on, she’d been afraid of anything higher than her second-story window.

  As they stand in line to get onto the Ferris wheel, the kids quickly assemble themselves into groups of four. Wade, always so popular with his classmates, soon has a gaggle of teens of both sexes on either side of him. Anna and Billie, like two kids left over from choosing teams, climb together into a car by themselves.

  “Is there a safety bar? What’s keeping me from falling out of this thing?” Anna asks the teenage girl helping them into the car.

  “There are seatbelts inside. This door latch is controlled by those levers over there. No need to worry, ma’am. Enjoy the beautiful view!”

  As the wheel lifts them higher into the air, Anna can see the other amusement rides become less focused in the distance. The roller coaster off to the far left looks like a Fisher-Price set she got one of the boys for a birthday years ago. The tiny cart zips along the tracks, fitting into tiny grooves, holding the tiny people with their tiny arms raised into the air. If she looks far enough, she can see the tall steel buildings of the business center of Montreal rising up out of the trees that surround the park. It would be easy, she thinks, to love the world from way up here. The way the air is crisp and clean and the silence is not threatening, but calming, organic. The wheel stops as they reach the top. Anna feels the same quiet take over yet now wishes they’d keep moving.

  “I’m glad we have a chance to talk, Anna, because I wanted to bring something up with you,” Billie says.

  “Oh? What is it?”

  “Well, Mother’s birthday is coming up in February, as you know, and I thought how great would it be if you and I took her on a cruise.” Excitedly, Billie looks out the grated window of the wheel car, looking, to Anna, as if she already can picture the three of them off in the distance, embarking on a mammoth white ocean liner.

  “I don’t think that would be such a good idea,” Anna says.

  “Why is that?” asks Billie.

  “She was uncomfortable with the idea of going on this simple overnight trip. What makes you think she’d suddenly sign on for a vacation where she’s on the water for days on end? No, it’s not her at all. Not now at least.”

  “That’s certainly not the impression I’ve gotten.” The Ferris wheel jerks back to life and starts to move again, waking their car on its descent to the ground. “Gloria seems to have traveled more than most people have in a lifetime. I’d think a cruise would be tame for her, considering the miles she’s logged throughout her life.”

  “It’s so like her to exaggerate. If you went back into those stories—I mean, really delved into them—you’d probably find a lot less based on actual fact,” Anna states. She notices that Billie has pursed her lips a bit. “Besides, she has restless leg syndrome. She’d have to pace up and down the ship’s deck like a ghost every night. That alone would drive us both crazy enough to want to kill her.” Anna knows this, but Billie, of course, co
uldn’t possibly.

  “What an awful thing to say,” Billie proclaims.

  “Listen, Billie, you might think you know her, but you really don’t.” Anna pauses suddenly, almost breathless. The Ferris wheel has stopped at the top again after another revolution so that they’re at the wheel’s apex, above the clouds even, it feels like.

  “No, I don’t know her like you do. How could I? What do you think I’m trying to do here but get to know her better? To get to know you better.”

  “I meant that you don’t know her like I do. She’d actually find a way to think less of you for coming up with a trip like that—not more. Believe me.”

  “What is this, Anna? What’s this really about?”

  Anna looks to the floor of the compartment and sees dead leaves that have been tracked inside.

  “I don’t know what that question means. What is what about?” Anna says.

  “I’m trying to connect with you two, and you’re—you’re making it so impossible. You’re so cold.”

  “I’m not cold! This is just who I am.”

  “Then why can’t you let me in? Mother has.”

  “Mother isn’t even thinking about you. She’s thinking about herself. This whole chapter in her book—the book in her mind—this chapter isn’t about you. This chapter, like all the others, is about her.” Anna’s voice has escalated into a kind of growl. She notices her teeth have temporarily gritted together. Billie pauses for a second to take this in. A quick snap of wind passes through their car.

  “Tell me, Anna. Would you have rather I died in the orphanage where I lived until I was three? Or at birth, even? Would that have been better for you? More convenient?”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Anna says.

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Nothing! I don’t want anything from you. I don’t even know you!” Anna screams. “None of us do.”