Halfway House

by Katharine Noel

  Wendy was already out of her seat. “I’ll get it.” She took the butter dish from the fridge and put it in front of Jordana. “There you go.”

  Angie told stories about her apartment hunt. “San Francisco was so crazy. I went to this one open house—kind of a bad neighborhood, just a studio. The whole thing was, like, as big as this room. And people are showing up with the first year’s rent in cash. This one couple had a résumé for their cat.”

  “But you found something,” Jordana prompted. The thought of Angie without a place to live made her throat tight.

  “Oakland’s much easier. And especially with a dog.” Angie looked toward Luke. Normally, their banter would have filled the spaces. He concentrated on his plate, eating with one hand, the other hand holding Wendy’s under the table. Angie hadn’t once mentioned the friend she’d supposedly stayed with before finding a place; she must have lived in her car after all.

  To break the silence, Jordana blurted the first thing that came to her. “I did something awful today.” She told them about the rabbit.

  “My God, Mom.” Angie put down her fork.

  Pieter asked, “Did you bury it?”

  She shook her head. It hadn’t occurred to her.

  “I’ll do it with you,” he said. “If that would help.”

  She shook her head. “That’s okay.” Why had she told that story, which made her look incompetent and cruel? She reached for the salad and busied herself with the tongs.

  “So on that cheerful note—” Luke said.

  Wendy broke in. “Maybe later, Luke.” The two of them looked at each other.

  Angie covered her lips with her hand. “Oh, my God. You’re getting married.”

  Jordana’s heart jumped unpleasantly. “You’re getting married?”

  “Actually. …” Wendy was blushing a deep red.

  Luke put his arm around her shoulders and said, “We got married. Last week. At City Hall.”

  “Wow.” Angie looked stricken. “Congratulations. I mean … well, just congratulations.”

  Automatically, Jordana had started to reach for her husband’s hand. Remembering, she pulled back.

  Pieter went around the table to hug Wendy. He said, “I think we have some champagne in the cellar. Just a moment.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” Jordana asked, as his steps receded down the basement steps. She tried to keep her voice light.

  “We wanted it to just be us,” said Luke.

  Angie seemed near tears. Feeling Jordana’s gaze, she said, “I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m just surprised.”

  Pieter held a bottle of champagne by the bottom as he came back into the room. “It’s not chilled, but the basement’s pretty cold.” He found glasses, tore off the foil.

  Angie shoved back from the table and picked up a glass, holding it out toward Pieter.

  “You’re drinking now?” asked Luke.

  “God, lay off.” Angie flushed. “I’m behaving like a normal person. It’s like you want me to be crazy.”

  After dinner, Pieter said he’d found an old reel of film they’d taken.

  “That’s so TV,” Angie said, and, when they looked at her blankly, “That’s always in TV dramas. You know, a scratchy home movie of happier times.”

  “We’re happy,” Jordana said.

  She and Pieter had only recorded part of one reel of film—a few minutes at most, if she remembered right, but it was good to have the distraction of figuring out how to set up the projector. They flipped switches until they found the right ones, and on the living room wall suddenly there Pieter was outside against the back of the house, tall and boyish in a way she’d never thought of him before; he’d always been so much older than she was. He crouched down as baby Luke—naked except for a diaper, his brow powerful even then—staggered toward him. Angie ran into the frame and stopped, legs planted wide, until Jordana appeared and swooped her up.

  Several seconds of darkness and then a slightly older Angie leaned toward a lit cake. Pieter reached out to catch her hair back, holding it out of the way of the candles.

  “God, look how little I am,” Angie said.

  The old projector hummed and clicked. Onscreen, there was jiggling, a ragged swoop toward the ceiling, as Jordana handed Pieter the camera without remembering to turn it off. Then back to the party, children spooning up ice cream with wooden paddles from small paper cups.

  Jordana’s hands ached; she realized she’d been clenching them. She massaged one with the other. Now Angie, about nine, stood on the concrete apron of the pool. She used both hands to smooth her hair into a ponytail, pulling a rubber band from her wrist with her teeth. When she looked toward the person filming, she waved. Then, still waving, raised her eyebrows, signaling enough already.

  The starter must have told the swimmers to take their marks, because the line of little girls quieted and bent forward, toward an invisible water. They dove, and the camera followed the twenty-five meters of butterfly. Even then, in Angie’s awkward, galloping stroke, you could see the sureness underlying it. She touched the opposite wall with both hands, looked around, and saw she’d won.

  The screen went black and stayed black.

  “We didn’t film much,” Jordana said. “We don’t have a lot of pictures, either.”

  Wendy moved to the projector. She turned the knob to stop and then to reverse. Onscreen, the girls swam backwards, wake disappearing behind them. Angie was absorbed back into the group. Together, they sprang backward onto the blocks, the churning water gone magically still. Children took pieces of cake out of their mouths; Angie blew her candles alight. Jordana and Pieter kissed, then Jordana said something, put Angie down and walked out of the shot—rather she hadn’t yet walked into it. Luke in his diaper was staggering back, his grin dissolving into furious concentration, and only Pieter remained, talking to an invisible Jordana, his hands gesturing elegantly. He turned and walked backward toward the camera. He became larger, enormous, filling the whole screen, and then he disappeared and only the back of the house was left, brick and stone.

  Jordana hadn’t eaten much, and when she got back to her house, she put water on to boil in the kitchen. Cream of Wheat with sliced bananas and heavy cream was one of her favorite dinners. Now that she no longer had to accommodate Pieter and his insistence on “real meals,” she usually ate on the porch swing, sometimes with a book or the radio for company, sometimes just looking out across the fields.

  She was upset, somewhere inside herself, upset by the strangeness of the whole night, but she couldn’t close her fingers on what she felt. Maybe it was because she’d cried already today, after killing the rabbit: she’d sat next to the lawn mower and wept, stopping when she couldn’t breathe, wiping her face and nose with the flats of her hands. She’d cried without thinking about anything. Crying had just felt necessary, the way it felt necessary to throw up when she was sick. It had left her feeling scoured out, limp, weirdly virtuous.

  With the Cream of Wheat and a glass of red wine, she made her way to the front door, pausing there and moving the wineglass to the crook of her other arm so she could flip on the porch light.

  “Hello.”

  She startled; there was a man sitting in the old wooden porch swing. The light from inside the window reflected off his pale hair. For a long second, she didn’t even think his name. “What are you doing here?”

  “I don’t know,” Pieter said. “I wanted to see you.”

  “You made me spill my wine.” She heard how childish she sounded. “Did you follow me?”

  He shook his head. His pant cuff had ridden up, showing a pale swath of shin. Behind him, across the road, a nearly full moon was rising between the tines of the trees. She drank more wine. Pieter used his foot to gently rock the porch swing.

  “So, married,” she said. “I can’t believe he didn’t at least tell Angie.”

  “Maybe it’s good. I mean, getting married. They seem good for each other.”

  “Maybe.” She did
n’t want to argue.

  A silence. Pieter looked out over the yard. “This is a nice place.”

  They had filled hours, years, with talk. Even when things had been bad between them, she’d never felt they weren’t talking because they had nothing to say. But everything she could think of now seemed too minute or too huge.

  Pieter’s long, slender hands rested on his knee. She stood and walked to the porch rail. It was too disquieting, those hands that had touched her so many times. It wasn’t even sex that seemed most impossible and intimate to her now, but the touch of his hand on her shoulder as he pointed out something through the car window, or his fingers un-threading an earring from her earlobe.

  A sharp breeze rifled through the grass. Pieter crossed his arms across his chest. “You’re cold,” she said. “Let me get you something.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I’ll get a sweater or something.” Glad to have something to do, she put down her glass and went into the house. Upstairs, she grabbed the largest things she could find: a sweatshirt from a clinic fund-raiser (it said never again under a picture of a wire hanger), a wool hat that had once been Luke’s, a pilled red sweater, the letter jacket had been Angie’s. Halfway down the stairs, she remembered the sweater had belonged to Ben. Like the hat and letter jacket, she’d had it so long she just thought of it as hers. Furtively, she put her nose to the sweater’s shoulder but smelled only her own detergent.

  As she held out her offerings, she realized she didn’t expect Pieter to accept any of them. He reached out for the jacket, though, awkwardly poking his arms back through the sleeves. “I’ll help you with the rabbit,” he said.

  She led the way to where she’d left the lawn mower. The rabbit wasn’t where she’d thought. Pieter went to get a flashlight from his car, jogging down the lawn. Returning, he began to make increasing circles around the mower. She wanted to grab the flashlight from his hands—she hated following—but swallowed her irritation.

  “Are you sure it was around here?”

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  He shrugged, which made the beam of light bob. “Something must have carried it off. A hawk?”

  Taking the light from him, she trained it on the spot she thought she’d left the body. No smear of blood or wisp of fur. There wasn’t even a depression in the grass to show where it had been.

  She clicked the flashlight off and the fields leapt back in focus. Clouds scudded across the moon. The hair on her arm prickled with the closeness of Pieter’s body. For the first time she understood that she would never kiss him again. Never put her palm flat against his stomach, never lie pressed against his naked back, never watch his familiar, beautiful face wrench, as though with pain, when he came.

  She could take it all back. She could turn to him, as she had years ago in her father’s study, and put her arms around his neck.

  Taking a step away, she said, “I’ll walk you to your car.”

  If he noticed the tremor in her voice, he didn’t comment. They walked in silence down the long driveway. The moon cast its unsteady blue light across their path.

  They reached Pieter’s old Volvo. “Well.” He reached out and took her hand. He turned it over, looking at the palm, and then let go.

  Opening the car door, he bent to fit his long body behind the wheel and shut the door. He rolled down the window.

  “Twenty-six years,” he said. “You’d think …”

  “I know. I—”

  “Don’t tell me.”

  “It’s nothing bad.”

  He shrugged, smiling crookedly. “Still. I’d rather not know.”

  He could still do it, make her feel messy and immature. She wrapped her arms around herself.

  He started the car and turned it around. When he reached the foot of the driveway, she thought he would do something—honk, put his arm out the still-open window and wave. But he just pulled into the road and drove away.

  She remembered standing next to him in their bathroom, wrapped in towels, waiting for the shower to get warm. Pieter knew the second the temperature changed: there was a change in pitch. He’d tried to show her, humming the two tones. “You can’t hear it?” he asked. “You really can’t hear it?”

  She stood there for a long time after his taillights disappeared, so long she forgot where she was. When she finally turned, she was surprised not to see their old brick house but the small one, her own. Its lights shone across the dark grass.

  Forty-six

  Luke followed the U-Haul in his car. It was six in the morning, still dark out, and for a moment he remembered driving with Angie to swim team practice one morning before she got sick. Angie had quizzed him for a biology test; she balanced his study sheet on the steering wheel, glancing between it and the road.

  At the house where she used to live, Angie parked—the truck continued to shudder for a minute after the engine was off—and climbed down. Silver clouds of their breath rose in the cold air.

  “Do they know you’re coming?” he asked.

  “No, I’m an idiot. I thought I’d surprise them.”

  “I’m just asking.”

  She sighed. “They know. They’ll be asleep anyway.”

  He shrugged, looking away from her and up at the house. On the porch, three or four bikes leaned together; behind them sagged a water-stained beige armchair.

  Angie unlocked the back door and they walked quietly up the stairs to her old room.

  “They haven’t rented it out,” he observed.

  “Obviously.”

  “You don’t have to be a bitch.” They’d come for her iron bedstead, the big wooden table she used as a desk, and her couch—Victorian, covered in olive green velvet, with lion-claw feet. “I don’t understand why you need this stuff.”

  “God, Luke! Would you just stop?”

  He shrugged, stiffly. Talking as little as possible, they disassembled the bedframe and lifted the headboard between them. As he backed out into the hallway, headboard awkwardly clasped between his arms, a girl in a pink kimono came out of one of the bedrooms. Isobel, her brown hair knitted with sleep.

  “We’re here for my stuff,” said Angie.

  Isobel yawned, raising her arm and curling it over her head to pull her hair behind her ear. Her breasts pressed against the kimono silk. She looked at Luke. “Who are you?”

  They’d met several times. He said, “I’m Angie’s brother.”

  “Hi, Angie’s brother.” She yawned again, this time fighting it, keeping her mouth closed. Her eyes narrowed and the wings of her nostrils trembled. Raking her hand through her hair again, she turned away, groping sleepily for the doorknob of her room.

  “God, she hates me,” Angie said, when the door closed behind Isobel.

  “Why do you let her get to you?”

  She just shook her head, not looking at him.

  They carried the headboard down the narrow stairs, stowed it in the truck, and came back for the rails. Then they carried down the wood table. The couch wasn’t big but it was surprisingly heavy: Luke hefted his end then staggered back a few steps. “Jesus.”

  They backed and feinted to maneuver the couch into the hallway. Velvet on the arms had worn away in patches, and the bald fabric glimmered. “They don’t have a Salvation Army in Oakland?”

  “This is mine, though.”

  Luke felt carefully behind him for each step. The weight of the couch made his arms shake; his face flushed. The couch had big springs underneath, hard to grip. Halfway down, where the narrow staircase turned, they got stuck.

  “Back up!” The couch pressed against Luke’s breastbone; he couldn’t breathe all the way in. “Back up!”

  Angie took hold of the legs and yanked, taking a step up. The pressure eased from Luke’s chest. They struggled the couch onto its back. He went down a step, then was jerked as the sofa leg caught the wall, ripping a stuttering gash in the paper.

  “Shit,” said Angie.

  “We’re not going to get this d
own.”

  “They got it up. Bradley and Jason.”

  “Maybe it’s different going backward.”

  His sister’s forehead, sheened with sweat, shone dully in the dim hall light. Her hair was slipping out of its ponytail. “How could it be different? Going backward?”

  “Parallel parking is different going backward.”

  She stuck out her lower lip to blow hair out of her eyes. “Listen,” she said. “I’ll take a step up and we can roll it onto its side.”

  “Ange, it’s not going to go.”

  “Why won’t you even try?”

  “It’s not going to go! How many ways can I say it? It’s not going to go!”

  She shook her head, not looking at him.

  Trying to speak more gently, he said, “We have to take it back up.”

  Angie didn’t say anything, head turned, looking at the wall. Finally, still not looking at him, she nodded.

  He pushed and she pulled. The couch didn’t budge. Luke crouched to set his shoulder against the arm, throwing his weight against it, but the sofa was wedged between the two walls.

  Angie crawled awkwardly under the couch, emerging with the crown of her hair standing up. They both wrenched at it together. Nothing. He kept his arm from touching hers.

  It was Angie who finally straightened and said, “Just leave it.”

  “Leave it?”

  She turned and started down the stairs. After a minute, he let go of the couch—even though he knew it was jammed, he let go carefully, half expecting the thing to come crashing down—and followed.

  A thin sleeve of light was beginning to line the yard. They tromped across the frosty grass to where the back of the U-Haul stood open and mostly empty. Besides the two pieces of furniture, Angie had about a half-dozen boxes of things she’d packed up from her old room.

  “It’s hardly worth it,” Angie said.

  It had been completely not worth it, but his anger was slipping away, out of reach.

  Angie said, “Everything. …”

  He waited for her to finish the sentence, but that was all. Reaching over tentatively, he smoothed down her hair, still standing up from when she’d crawled under the couch.