Halfway House

by Katharine Noel

  “Do you wish I was different?” she whispered.

  He pushed her hands down, holding them against the mattress, and lowered his mouth to her again. In the light that came in around the blinds, his face looked hard and unfamiliar. She wished she could at least touch his cheek, to erase his strangeness.

  Eighteen

  More than fifty years later, ice forming on water—the way it spread in frail sheets; the way the river paled with it; the almost metallic smell, like biting into an unripe plum—took Pieter back to Holland. Other things worked on him the same way: the opening chords of Grieg’s Holberg Suite or a cold shirt pulled on in a dark room. The ridged plastic tops of Crest tubes felt like the old radio’s Bakelite knob, tiny serrated ridges between his thumb and first finger. The scent of wet ground could bring Haarlem back, or the smell of boiling potatoes, or dry mold, or lavender cologne. Once, in Queens, a pair of dusty wingtips thrown up over a telephone wire took his breath away; they were the same shoes his father had worn when he was alive. And more than once a white kite, a white banner, laundry glimpsed from the corner of his eye, had brought back the flash of excitement and shame he’d felt the day of the invasion. His mother had roused him and they’d stood in the yard watching the white mushroom shapes of German parachutists sink gently toward the earth, outlined against the black smoke of bombing.

  After decamping for Madison and returning, Angie had seemed to stabilize for a few weeks before falling apart again, worse this time. Depakote wasn’t working. As he drove toward the halfway house, the river revealed and hidden and revealed by the woods, Dutch words came back to him unanchored by meaning: aardapplen, duur, Woensdag, Donderdag. In the passenger seat, Jordana sipped coffee from a dented thermos cup. She wore a bulky sweater, once Luke’s, stretched over her knees, which were pulled up to her chest. She’d gotten too skinny. At night, when she took off her clothes, her body swam into view, thin, pale, like the wavering flame of a candle.

  He said, “You need to eat.”

  “I mean to. I forget. I just … I forget.”

  There was new snow on the ground. Jordana’s hair, black threaded with coarser strands of white, was pulled back into a rough ponytail. She looked out the window, chewing at her already-short nails. After a while he reached up and gently took her hand away from her mouth.

  “Pieter,” she said, pulling free. Instead of biting the nails again, though, she fisted her hand and pushed it under her thigh, saying, “Sorry.”

  The houses thinned after Westfield, and towns, when they came, were smaller: just a church, a post office, a gas station. An old woman standing at a mailbox looked through her letters, flipping each one up against her chest. There were fields of cows, kids straddling their dirt bikes by the cold ice boxes of small stores, sometimes nothing but dark ponds frozen around marsh grass, telephone lines stitching the sky.

  Towns became denser again before the ragged outskirts of Manchester. They drove through the city, turning from Bridge Street onto the improbably named Koscioszko Street, and then onto the very probably named High Street, Church Street, Amherst Street. Were there New England towns that didn’t have streets with those names? Pieter made a left onto Orange Street, which took them to the east side of town.

  Jordana asked, “What are you whistling?”

  He didn’t know. He frowned, listening to himself. “‘Oranges and Lemons.’”

  “Please don’t. Don’t whistle right now.”

  He felt a stab of disgust at himself. The song backed up into his head:

  Oranges and lemons,

  Say the bells of Saint Clement’s.

  When will you pay me?

  Ask the bells of Saint Rémy.

  When I get rich,

  Say the bells of Saint Nick’s.

  When will that be?

  Say the bells of Saint Glee …

  Surely it couldn’t be Saint Glee. He wasn’t sure, in fact, if he had very much of the song right. Even more annoying was that he heard the song in the high-pitched voices of a child choir. Luke and Angie had had a 45 of the song when they were kids, and a little record player of ocher plastic. He remembered teaching them to lower the needle. He remembered the scratchiness of the built-in speaker and thought again of the radio his family had owned in Haarlem, on which he’d first heard classical music; later the Germans had confiscated it, after he was gone. If not for the war he would have lived his whole life there. His father might still be alive. If Pieter hadn’t been a child immigrant—lonely, watchful, out of place—he would probably never have become a cellist.

  Thinking of Holland, he steered them closer and closer to Angie.

  On Angie’s street, half the homes were kept up; the other half had dirty paint and dying front lawns, on which rested cars without tires and chipped plaster animals. The halfway house was of the kept-up kind, but despite its new green paint and neatly cut grass, it looked a little ragged—listing mailbox, blanket covering one window from inside.

  He and Jordana had gone to the town meetings when the house was about to open and the newly formed Neighborhood Association protested that property values would plummet. A woman stood up and said that, while a halfway house might not be a bad thing in itself, it didn’t belong here. “I just don’t think they’ll fit in,” she said. “I just don’t think they’ll be comfortable.” Others, less indirect, talked about how this was a family neighborhood, as though somewhere there existed neighborhoods without families.

  “How would you feel if your kids couldn’t play on the street?” a woman finally said, struggling not to cry. “How would you feel if your daughter was late home from school and you had to imagine her being dragged somewhere, raped, killed?” Later, when the halfway house had been approved, that woman’s family had been one of three who put their homes up for sale.

  Pieter pulled in behind a Lincoln Town Car already parked in the driveway. Instead of moving to get out, Jordana sighed, looking blankly at the windshield. “Sometimes she seems so close to getting well, and then …”

  “She just needs to go back on lithium.”

  “I know,” she said. “I know. It’s just—I feel like it never stops.”

  Jordana was almost never pessimistic about Angie’s illness. “Oranges and Lemons” began again in his head:

  When will that be?

  Ask the bells of ennui.

  He definitely had the words wrong.

  Jordana got out of the car. It was a beautiful day, the kind that tourists hoped for when they came to New Hampshire: crisp, the trees blazing red, the sky heart-stoppingly blue. A yellow bus rumbled up the street behind them. It slowed, lights flashing, a stop sign unfolding creakily from the side.

  What do you wish?

  Ask the bells of dead fish.

  I do not know,

  Say the bells of old snow.

  The living room had a stack of shabby board games on the coffee table, a poster of a puppy standing on another puppy’s head (ever had one of those days?). A television played to the empty couches. Jordana crossed the room, clicking the program off.

  She paced; Pieter sat on the couch. One of the board games was called Martian Autopsy. PLAYER WITH THE MOST martian organs wins! trumpeted the side of the box. On the top were pictured a wife, husband, son, and daughter, laughing, one holding a small piece of brain-shaped plastic aloft.

  “What’s taking so long?” Jordana asked.

  He opened the game and, using the tweezers, removed the heart and put it to one side, then the kidneys. He started to remove the liver. As he lifted it, the tweezers brushed the edge of the liver’s cavity and the Martian’s eyes flew open, red and huge. It gave a high, ululating cry.

  When Teresa came for them, they followed her up the narrow staircase with its olive high-traffic carpet. Residents watched them surreptitiously as they turned into the second-floor office. Dr. Brown was there, a walrusy man in gray, and Mark, the other staff person. And Angie, pacing, her hands moving as though tearing invisible paper. “You
’ve brought the cavalry,” she said, glancing at her parents. “Plenty of people to keep things in check if the crazy girl does something crazy. Where are the German shepherds, though? Where are the hoses?” She was shaking. “It must be a disappointment, your fat fuck daughter.”

  She looked awful, her long hair ratty with tangles, skin a dull gray. She lay down on her back on the floor, arms and legs spread.

  “Get up from there,” said Jordana.

  “Leave her,” said the doctor. “It’s all right.”

  “It’s all right?” Jordana said. “What about this is all right?”

  “Jordana—” Pieter put his hand on her arm.

  She wheeled on him. “What? Jesus, Pieter, am I embarrassing you? Do you think she’s all right?”

  Pieter shook his head and walked to the window. Across the street, a toddler in a blue jacket was being encouraged by its mother to jump into a pile of leaves.

  “You’re trying to smother me,” said Angie.

  Pieter—though he should have known better—looked over his shoulder at her. “We’re trying to make you well.”

  “Wells are for water!” she shrieked, and collapsed into laughter. “Well, a well well’s for water. Poisoned wells are for witches.” She rolled onto her stomach and began to grind her hips into the carpet.

  “Stop!” Jordana shouted. “Stop it, Angie!”

  Mark and Teresa exchanged a look; Teresa put her hand on Jordana’s shoulder. Pieter turned back to the window. Across the street, the toddler climbed out of the leaf pile, stumbling almost drunkenly with joy. Pieter forced himself to tune in to the conversation behind him. Dr. Brown was saying that he would commit her to the hospital unless she voluntarily went back on lithium—

  “What’s voluntary about that?” Angie said.

  —and she’d need to be on an antipsychotic until the lithium kicked in.

  “Fine. God. Fuck. I’ll take it.”

  And then Pieter stopped hearing again. He touched his left thumb to each of the fingers of his left hand; his thumb made little wooden clicks against the calluses. When he looked up, Angie had a paper cup in her hand. Teresa was checking Angie’s mouth to be sure she hadn’t cheeked the meds.

  “Lift your tongue,” said Teresa.

  Angie lifted her tongue. “La, la, la, la, la.” Then, “Happy now? Are you happy? Are you happy?”

  Mike’s Lobster Shack was housed in a low flat-roofed prefabricated building between a used-car lot and a doll store. Dusky green lobster swam in tanks. Behind the restaurant’s scarred counter, a girl read Cosmopolitan. It was late afternoon, too early for dinner and past lunch; except for them, the restaurant was empty. He and Jordana ordered at the counter. When Jordana asked for coffee, the girl said, “Just beer or soda.” She jerked her head toward the used-car lot: “They have a machine, if you’re desperate.”

  Jordana shook her head.

  They paid and sat down to wait. “Look.” Jordana lifted her chin to point through the window at the sign next door. “The cars aren’t used, they’re Pre-Owned.” Her lips began to tremble; she covered them with her hand. “Oh, God. I can’t stand it, Pieter. I don’t know how to stand it.”

  With his hands he pushed back from the table. “I’ll get you coffee.”

  Outside, it was cold and bright. He walked across the parking lot, fed quarters into the machine. A Styrofoam cup tumbled down, and he righted it. There was a dark, odorless stream of coffee. He wished that, like Jordana, he could feel toppled by grief. He hated that his brain moved immediately to separate this is what we can fix from this is what we won’t think about. In a way, he even envied how Angie was affected by everything around her. Once, very depressed, Angie had been trailing him around the grocery store and they’d seen a woman roaring at her small son, “I don’t give a shit!”—the kid, only about three or four, frozen, staring at his mother. Angie had barely been able to get out of bed for two days afterward. She couldn’t forget the things you had to forget if you wanted to live in the world. It made her the most and the least reasonable person he knew.

  The coffee had slowed to a trickle. He put his hand against the machine’s red glow. It kept coffee hot and milk cold beside each other, but from the outside there was no difference in temperature, only tight vibration.

  Back inside the restaurant, he handed Jordana the cup.

  She said, “At the halfway house, it’s like you weren’t even there. You barely react.”

  There was nothing to say; they’d had this conversation so many times. Tiredly, he scrubbed his hand across his eyes. “Let’s talk about something else for a while.”

  He expected her to get angry, but she just looked away. They sat in silence. Maybe they really couldn’t talk about anything but Angie.

  Their lobsters came in plastic baskets. They cracked the shells, pouring the juice off into a battered metal bowl. He pulled the claw from its shell, the pink meat freckled with red, polished and curved like the petal of a lily. The first bite set off a small explosion in his brain, so that for a moment all he felt was deaf pleasure.

  Jordana asked, “So do you want to hear a joke?”

  “A joke?”

  “This man is driving by a farm, and he sees the farmer out in the orchard, holding a pig up in the air.”

  “You’re telling me a joke?” The absurdity shocked him. Then he smiled that he could be shocked.

  “Shh. The guy’s so curious he has to stop.” She sipped her coffee. “Oh, hot.” He sometimes forgot how beautiful she was, in her harsh gypsy way. “He pulls over, gets out of the car, and walks into the orchard.”

  The joke wasn’t funny yet: it was anticipation that made him laugh nervously.

  “So as the guy gets closer, he sees the farmer is holding the pig up around its middle, so that the pig can eat apples off the tree.”

  Jordana demonstrated, pretending to be first the farmer, then the pig, front legs waving, mouth working, eyes squinched and darting around.

  He laughed so hard he could barely get his breath. “Stop. Stop, you’re making my stomach hurt.”

  “So the man is astonished. He asks what the farmer’s doing, and the farmer says, ‘The pig likes to eat apples.’

  “‘But why don’t you just leave the pig on the ground and climb up into the tree yourself?’ the man asks. ‘You could throw twenty apples down to the pig in a few minutes. It would be much faster.’ And the farmer looks at him, incredulous, and says: ‘What’s time to a pig?’”

  Pieter bent double, hands across his stomach. When finally he’d caught his breath, he took off his glasses, still giggling, and wiped his eyes. “It’s not even funny!” he said, which set him off again. Jordana leaned against the back of the booth, also laughing a little but staring at him, arm across her stomach. Then suddenly, she pushed back from the table, came around to his side.

  Kneeling on the floor, she laid her head on his thigh. “We have to be together,” she said.

  There were so many ways he might take that; he didn’t have the energy to parse it. He put his wrists on her shoulders, his buttery hands arching away—like small wings—so they wouldn’t touch her sweater. They stayed that way, the lobster growing cold on the table. Behind her, through the dirty front window, he could see the Pre-Owned parking lot. The sun was setting between two black pines, turning the wind-shields of the used cars gold.

  Nineteen

  Angie hated being back on lithium, and she hated, hated, Haldol. Her thoughts felt like water bugs, skating rapidly over the surface of a tiny body of water—a sink—trapped and blind and hitting the sides. She dragged herself down to the halfway house’s basement, dumped her laundry into the washing machine, and then had to stop and get a hold of herself—the routine seemed so futile and neverending—before she could reach for the garish box of Tide.

  Back upstairs, she threw herself into a chair in the common room. A too-warm Sunday, the air still and ocher and close. From outside, faint and disturbing as the buzz of insects, floate
d in the cries of children playing. She stood and paced the common room, then sat, then paced, then sat, too unhappy to move and too unhappy to sit still.

  Time felt more like spiral than line to her. When she was manic, she felt closer in time to other manias than to recent flat periods; depression reconnected her with her last depression. Feeling like this, simultaneously exhausted and ramped up, meant she was tuned to the All Fuck-Ups All the Time channel. She saw the day she’d wrecked her room at home, wrenched her mind away and found herself on the day she’d leapt into the pool; then flipping out in front of her parents the other week. Evan Johansson finding her under the bridge at Harvard. Showing up in Madison to rant in front of Luke’s girlfriend. Her overdose at college.

  Luke had helped her write her college application essays, surprising her with his ideas; he was such a mediocre student that she’d let herself dismiss him. Two of her teachers wrote letters of passionate recommendation. Yale still rejected her, but both Middlebury and Wesleyan had accepted her spotty grades offset by the great SAT.

  She chose Middlebury because no one else from her high school went there. When she began, she almost believed it would work out. Her doctor lowered her lithium dose—too low, it turned out, but at first it felt great, burning off the fog she’d lived in for almost a year. Everyone at Middlebury was so good-looking and healthy, playing Frisbee on the lawn, raising their hands in class, talking over plastic cups of beer at Mr. Upp’s. Angie’s first semester she’d run around, meeting new people every day, going out at night, orange leaves crunching beneath her hiking boots, writing papers in an hour, sledding on dining-hall trays down the hill by Stewart. She stayed up late almost every night with her roommate, Stephanie, talking and drinking vodka mixed with Country Time lemonade.

  Over break, she was able to talk about college life with Jess and Tris; she even had a drink once with Abe. He’d been cautious and slow to speak, and when he finally told Angie he had a girlfriend at Harvard, she realized he was nervous she’d have a movie-style crazy-person fit. Clearly he’d been prepared to reject a pass, but when she didn’t make one he kissed her outside the bar, almost angrily. “I’ve never felt this way about anyone else,” he said. She led him back into the alley, leaning against the brick wall, his hands under her skirt, faint music and laughter from the bar drifting around them. She had never felt so irresistible or gorgeous.