Wayward

by Dana Spiotta

  “I mean, just until we sort it out, I want to make sure you have everything to equip the house.” He smiled. “Whatever you need, Sam, to be comfortable and safe.”

  But I don’t want comfort, can’t you tell? She thought this but didn’t say it.

  “And even if you don’t care anymore about your own comfort or safety, do these things for me. For Ally.” He put his hand on hers. Matt used to be good at reading her, imagining her thoughts from her expression. Apparently, he still could do it when he tried. Goddamn him, he had to turn caring and easy just when she needed to stay mad at him. He put his pen back in his jacket pocket, and he looked up, into her eyes, and then looked down, exhausted. His sadness made him look old, his face too thin from all his running. He was a middle-aged man in a movie about a midlife crisis. A cliché. But in such a film, he would be leaving her, right? So not a cliché. Matt, Matt, Matt, she thought.

  When they’d first moved in together, there was very little money. He was still in law school, and she worked as a waitress. They would carefully put her tips in envelopes labeled with various expenses, like “rent” and “groceries.” One was marked “treats,” and every few weeks they would use this money for a night out, a cheap dinner and a movie. Afterward, heated discussion of the movie (they often disagreed), then wine (occasionally pot) and sex (they were in their stride). Followed by more talk, often about the future. She never wore him out. He would laugh even (or especially) when she made silly jokes (sometimes involving stupid puns). It was easy, then, to make a lot of very little. They were so far from that now. Partly because so much of their future had already unfolded. But not only that.

  “We really fucked this up,” she said, moving her hand in the air between them. He pursed his lips, nodded at her. She looked away. Now he was tender, vulnerable, attentive.

  Too late.

  15

  Syracuse was the inspiration for the Emerald City (though people don’t believe it). L. Frank Baum grew up with Syracuse as the big verdant city in the distance, so green it was emerald. It used to be called the Salt City, when salt harvesting was its reason for being. But the chamber of commerce rebranded it, officially, as the Emerald City, which was supposed to counteract the city’s rep for all snow, all the time. And this time of year, late June, it truly was emerald. Sam ran from her house to the lake, then headed back along a different route. She noticed the long-matured parks and triangles of green spaces everywhere, lush artifacts that remained from a more prosperous era. The endless spring rain and snowmelt fed the trees, lawns, and bushes in the summer. Sam loved the peak density of June, but she preferred the city in the weeks before it reached its full summer green. By the end of May, the flowering trees had popped in variegated pinks and whites, from deep coral to the palest blush. Sam inhaled these trees, noticing them on every corner, in front of faded and ugly wrecks as well as neatly landscaped, tidy houses. They seemed to thrive despite neglect, as if the winter itself made them stronger, deeper, pinker. Each year the spring came slowly, and each year the blossoms left far too quickly, the trees’ flowers gone by early June. A hard rain or wind would knock them to the streets, and for a moment a carpet of pink made the streets lovely, and Sam knew it was not the Emerald City but the Pink City. The flowers moved her and made her feel sad in an inexplicably deep way. The speed of their cycle frightened her, made her want to scream stop, stop, stop. Hold on, this is going too fast. The coming and going weighed on her and almost made it too painful to enjoy.

  Sam ran and then she walked. When she got close to her house, she could see that the front door was slightly ajar. She immediately pictured the young desperate woman from before. Sam hurried to the door and pushed it open. She stood at the threshold and beheld her home. Chairs by the table knocked over, drawers in the built-ins pulled open and left hanging like gaping mouths. Her bed with its expensive mattress pulled halfway off the frame. Everything appeared touched, handled, messed with. Why would someone fuck up her house? But of course it was simply a burglary, not some mysterious creepy crawling. What valuables did she even have to take? Her old MacBook, check, that was gone. And her phone charger. One half-empty stupidly extravagant bottle of single-malt scotch that she had spitefully taken from Matt, some food (cans of dolphin-safe tuna, organic peanut butter, bittersweet chocolate). She didn’t have a TV. Her medicine cabinet: of course, that was the first thing they looked through, and, boy, that must have been disappointing. She glanced in the bathroom. The natural progesterone cream and face cream had been pitched to the floor. She didn’t have any drugs, certainly no opioids and not even a tablet of Ambien or Xanax, just CBD oil for sleep (didn’t work), which they’d taken, and a bottle of Bayer aspirin, which they’d left.

  Sam was proud that she had so few possessions, congratulating herself, and then she remembered her small antique lacquered chinoiserie jewelry box and saw that it was gone. She took a deep breath. It didn’t have a lot of valuable pieces. Sam had already given Ally her mother’s diamond studs for her sixteenth birthday. The only things you could sell were a gold cocktail ring with an amethyst, an engraved tennis bracelet, and a very nice watch Sam had forgotten to wear today. She didn’t care, really. But she did care about the little trinkets that Ally had given her for birthdays and Mother’s Days over the years. Some silver rings and inexpensive earrings. Worth nothing to anyone but Sam. She started to cry, thinking about them. It was just stuff, silly sentimental things. Little Ally had picked them out, and they were a line to the past. That’s all. Also lost in that box was her platinum wedding band, engraved with her wedding date. She had planned to give it to Ally, but who wants a ring from a failed marriage anyway. A memento of a broken promise—Ally would be infuriated by it. Now she didn’t have to worry about what to do with it. It was in a pawnshop.

  She put the house back in order. No real harm done. But she grew more and more upset as she noticed and righted all that had been touched. Someone (not the desperate young woman from before; that thought came again and she dismissed it again, unlikely, silly thought, as if everything that happened to her fit some kind of causal narrative rather than just being arbitrary), some person, had come in and ransacked all her things. Hungry and full of needs. And they’d worked fast so they wouldn’t get caught. But Sam still felt a kind of hostility in it. Did they have to pull everything out of the drawers and dump it? Knock over the chairs, touch all her things? No, they didn’t need to be so angry about it. And she felt an anger and resentment rise in her, and then a fear. She thought she should call the police, get locks installed.

  It didn’t take her long to clean up. She made a cup of coffee, sat by the window, and smoked one of her two herbal cigarettes of the day. Instead of regular cigarettes or vaping, she had settled on smoking quick-burning, hollow, non-nicotine herbal cigarettes that still gave you lung cancer but wouldn’t get you addicted to nicotine. “Made with love and clarity in Portland, Oregon.” They smelled good, and they gave her a way to punctuate her solitary days. They calmed her.

  Her sense of violation didn’t dispel quickly. Had someone cased her, cased her house? It had to be one of those vacant-faced people living on the street, the ones that frightened her at night. Her moving in had been noticed. That the house was no longer empty had been noticed. Her vulnerability had been noticed.

  She looked around. She loved this house, she was house-proud, she had her bourgeois vanity. Even if her things were modest, she liked how it felt with everything in its place. But to like this particular place, to feel at home here, was to also be in this neighborhood and this city. She dismissed calling the police. Remember Dorothy Day. Shouldn’t Sam get to the point where she shared what she had? Leave the doors open, possess nothing beyond what she needed? Anything extra should be given away, and she should live on the least she could manage. Sam wasn’t there yet. She still would lock her door. But if someone really wanted in, it wouldn’t take much. And no police.

  “
Hello?” her mother said. Her voice made Sam feel things when she was like this.

  “Hi,” Sam said, a croakiness in her throat.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Sam definitely couldn’t tell her mom about the break-in.

  “Ally is still not talking to me. Or responding to me,” Sam said, pouring all her emotion in that container of self-pity. Her voice squeezed through her longing for Ally; she began to sob and then pulled it back.

  “Oh, honey, I know. I spoke to her a few days ago.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She’s sad about you leaving, but she tries to act tough, so it comes out as anger.”

  “Yeah,” Sam said.

  “But she loves you—that is, of course, why she is mad.”

  “Maybe. She doesn’t want to be distracted from her GPA and her college-bound activities. Her YAD rankings.”

  “It’s a lot of pressure, junior year.”

  “I know, I know,” Sam said. “I’m an awful mother, wife. And daughter. But really, beyond that, I’m a terrible person.”

  “You’re not at all.” Her mother went through the evidence, which she could be counted on to do. It was silly for Sam to call her one partisan and ask that the case be made on her behalf. Yet it made Sam feel better. See how she still needed her? Didn’t Lily see how needed Lily was, how she was the only person Sam let help her?

  “I miss Ally so much,” Sam said. “And I miss you.”

  “I miss you too. Why don’t you come visit me,” Lily said.

  “Yes,” Sam said. “I’ll come this weekend.”

  “This weekend isn’t good for me,” Lily said.

  “Why?”

  “The weekend after, maybe. Let’s talk tomorrow.”

  When she got off the phone, she lit her second cigarette and texted Ally.

  Grandma said you spoke to her.

  I think I am going to visit her next weekend if you want to come.

  Nice. Use her mother to get to her daughter.

  It was too hot to make a fire, and the liquor was gone. Sam would go to bed. She was putting the matches back in the built-in cupboard next to the mantel when she saw it. She sucked in her breath. A tile was missing from her fireplace. They had taken one of her hundred-year-old Moravian tiles. The green one on the lower right corner, which is why she hadn’t noticed it until now. It was small, had come loose and needed to be remortared.

  “No, no, no, no,” she said out loud, kneeling, putting her finger in the crumbling dust. Why take a tile? To hurt her, no doubt, by hurting this old house. To take a piece of it for themselves like a trophy. Maybe chucked in the street somewhere.

  She was an outsider, an interloper, a fake member of this community. Her comfort amid so much discomfort was a form of affront. It was not personal and it was insanely personal. It wasn’t hostile but it also really was.

  She should go to bed. At night, the lights inside the house made her visible to everyone outside the house. She turned off all the lights except the porch light. She felt invisible, she felt safe, and she lay down on her bed. She was so deeply tired, and right away a merciful, beautiful sleep came over her.

  Two

  Ally

  1

  “Tell me everything,” he said. “As you remember it.”

  So she did:

  “I think the tension started around fourteen, like ninth grade. I remember on many mornings there was some version of the fight. As in, I come down the stairs in a rush, trying to make it to the bus on time, but also hardly awake. I shove every possible needed book into my backpack, so it pulls on my shoulder. All I want is a glass of juice. She will try to get me to eat some toast, which I will take a tiny bite of and leave the rest. Every morning she hears me thump down, and every morning her smile fades as she takes me in. She recovers the smile, but I know something is coming.

  “ ‘Good morning!’

  “I nod, waiting, my head down, hair in my face.

  “ ‘Juice?’

  “ ‘I’ll get it.’ Just leave me be. Just one morning.

  “ ‘Are you going to brush your hair on the bus?’

  “Here it comes. I nod. Gulp juice, avoid her gaze.

  “ ‘Honey,’ she says, the lilt of disappointment in the word. As if she regrets having to point something out, and also it is tediously familiar to us both.

  “ ‘What?’ I say, but it sounds more contemptuous than I mean it to. It all has to exist on a tone plane just beneath anger or it could set her off. Which I really can’t handle right now. She looks at my chest—yes, looks at my breasts. I look down, and my sweater, a V-neck, has slipped a bit down and cleavage and bra top are visible. I pull it up.

  “ ‘Remember those camisoles I bought you? Then you don’t have to worry about your sweater falling down and showing your bra.’

  “I nod, not looking at her. ‘It’s fine, it will stay covered. See?’

  “Her lips purse. More to come. I move toward the door to leave.

  “ ‘Do you have everything? Inhaler, glasses, phone?’

  “ ‘Yeah,’ I say.

  “She pulls out my inhaler, which was on the coffee table in the TV room. Trick question. I grab it. She smiles that ‘what would you do without me’ mom smile. I move to leave.

  “ ‘Have a good day, honey.’

  “I nod. She hugs me, backpack and all. I hug back, frowning. I can’t not hug her; she needs it.

  “ ‘See you later, Mom.’

  “ ‘Have fun!’ But then she can’t help herself: ‘Brush your hair!’

  “There are other versions of the fight. Like I remember shopping for clothes. That was always a joy.”

  “For example?”

  “We are at Marshalls or wherever. She pulls from the rack some heinous smocky blouse, something more frumpy than demure, and says, ‘What about this?’ I shake my head no, with great vehemence, and she sighs and shakes her head as if there is no pleasing me. I then find a red tube top in size extra small, which I know is demented, but I can’t help it when she provokes me. She’s like, uh, no. But I have set the parameters with my extremes—I know what she caves in to will be much closer to what I want.”

  “But you dress pretty conservatively now.”

  “I do—I have to wear ‘Western business attire’ for YAD conferences. And I like the way those clothes make me feel, so I started dressing that way all the time. She doesn’t know what to make of it, she doesn’t comment on it—how can she—but I think it unnerves her. As much as the trashy clothes were counter to her, the business attire is also counter to her taste.”

  “Is it—or was it—always about clothes?” he asked.

  “No. There is other stuff.”

  2

  Ally’s phone pinged. Around nine o’clock, every night, her mother sent a text. Ally always read it, she even left her read receipts on so her mother would know the message had been received, but she wouldn’t text back. But five new texts? So far, her mother never texted more than once. It was a miracle of mother restraint to send only one text a night, and yet that was how it had gone for almost three months. Her mother had never missed a night (expected), and she had never sent more than one (unexpected). Maybe her mother had finally cracked and given in to her need to overdo everything when it came to Ally, loving Ally, bearing down on Ally. “Overbearing” was the word, and when she thought of it, she imagined a giant mother bear. Ally wondered for a second if “bear,” as in “borne,” had the same roots as “bear” the animal, maybe some old English word. Ally had taken five years of Latin, and one of her nerdy habits was to unwind words, to look up their histories. And one reason she needed to know about words was that she liked to stick new (well, new-to-her) words in her papers. Plus her vocab helped make her the top-ranked YAD student in her grade. She sometimes used a th
esaurus, but it resulted in some embarrassing misuses of words, because a thesaurus pretended that words had synonyms but they didn’t really. They all had different meanings if you dug into it, which she had started to. She even had an app on her phone that gave you word derivations and etymological breakdowns from like twenty dictionaries (“-logic”/“logos” she knew meant knowledge or study of, but “etumos” meaning “true” puzzled her). And another app gave her morpheme meanings and derivations. But she didn’t open the app and look up “borne”/“bear.” Instead she touched the green talk-bubble icon, and the lists of texts sprang open. She discovered that the number was five because she also had texts that were not from her mother. A bright flare opened—bloomed, really—in her belly when she saw the glowing blue indicator dot next to the letter N and then the name “Nina.” Just this week, when he’d told her that he might text her, she had input “Nina” for Joe’s name on her phone, just in case someone snooped. Which was why she also turned off her lock-screen text notifications except for that ping sound. Her father wouldn’t snoop, she was almost certain. He lacked curiosity about other people; it never occurred to him that anyone else had anything going on beneath her surface. That was why he’d missed that Ally’s mother was leaving him. Completely missed it. But Ally’s mother would totally snoop. She had plenty of curiosity. And although her mother would feel bad about it, historically it seemed clear to Ally that her mother could talk herself into crossing a line when it came to all things Ally. However, her mother no longer got near her phone or her. That was a kind of miracle, one of so many amazing things that had come to pass this year: that Ally could shut her mother out for so long, and that Ally was alive, walking, existing, still entirely herself away from her mother. Wait, correction. More entirely herself. And just as amazing, now Joe, hers, someone no one would even guess at. Because Ally was the last person anyone would imagine doing this. Certainly, her father had no idea. Her teachers. The girls at school. She could keep it from all of them—that was another surprise. She was careful, and quite good, it turned out, at keeping secrets. She also knew that maybe she wasn’t quite seeing it all through the way she should, she wasn’t letting herself think about what would happen when it would finally come out. All she thought was that she wanted it to continue and therefore keeping it a secret was essential. Ally even changed her phone’s passcode every week or so.