The Myth of You and Me: A Novel

by Leah Stewart

  For a moment I wished I were back there, Sonia laughing while Owen and I twirled through the newspaper office, before everything went wrong.

  As she unlocked the door to Sonia’s office, Daisy said, “So who was your boss, anyway?”

  I told her about Oliver. She raised her eyebrows, impressed, and I felt a flash of pride. She pushed open the door. “I know who he is,” she said. “But he just died, didn’t he? I read the obit in the Globe.”

  I stepped around her and into Sonia’s office, hoping she’d say nothing more. I didn’t want her condolences. There was nothing she could say that wouldn’t remind me how irrevocably my life had changed. At this time of day I should have been bringing his dinner to the kitchen table, laughing as he pretended surprise at the sight of the meat loaf we ate twice a week. My eyes had filled with tears—I hated that, how close my grief was to the surface, how easily my throat closed—and I tilted my head back so the tears wouldn’t fall. The office swam. I blinked, and blinked again. Photographs everywhere. A large desk, the surface bare except for a computer and a tray of in-boxes. File cabinets with long, thin drawers along one wall. “What does Sonia do here?”

  “Oh,” Daisy said. “She’s the photo editor, of course. I guess you don’t know her that well.”

  I said, “I guess not.” I walked over to the cabinets and opened a random drawer. A stack of photographs, the first one of a church, looming oddly, as though shot from below, with a sign in front reading SEVEN DAYS WITHOUT PRAYER MAKES ONE WEAK. Except for the green lushness of the cemetery to one side, the church could have been in Clovis.

  “Other people took those,” Daisy said. She opened another drawer, pulled out some more photos, and began to spread them across the desk. “These are Sonia’s. I really want to run them, but she keeps saying it’s a conflict of interest.”

  The pictures, every one of them, were of Sonia’s mother. They were black-and-white. One showed her mother in bed, in a room with the blinds drawn but some sunlight pushing through. One white arm was thrown over her head. Another had her laughing, but Sonia had taken this one with two of her own fingers in front of the lens, segmenting her mother’s face. In another Madame Gray looked right at the camera, her eyes tight, her mouth twisted in contemptuous anger. I knew what this expression meant, and at the sight of it my stomach tightened. I wondered if Sonia had held on to the camera when her mother slapped her face. I had to look at the prints twice before I realized that there were numbers hidden everywhere in them, turned upside down and sideways, tucked into corners, a tiny four etched into the pupil of her mother’s angry eye.

  “How did she do this with the numbers?”

  Daisy shrugged. “I don’t know, I’m not a photographer. I’m not an artist of any kind.” She was watching me closely. “You didn’t know she did this?”

  I shook my head. “She was photo editor of our college paper, but that was mug shots and frat boys playing Frisbee on the lawn. Nothing like this. These are beautiful.”

  “Beautiful? Disturbing, I think. But, yeah, she’s fucking fantastic.” She began to stack them, not looking at me. “You’re friends from college?”

  “High school,” I said. “Actually, both.”

  She looked up. “So you’ve met her mother?”

  I said yes, I had, but I was wary. Perhaps Daisy saw my presence as a chance to learn some of Sonia’s secrets. When we were in high school, my mother had slipped up and revealed to Sonia that she knew about her dyscalculia—I’d had to tell her after she caught me doing Sonia’s math homework once. Even though my mother had sworn to keep her knowledge secret, on that day, during a Scrabble game, she offered to count up Sonia’s score. Sonia gave me a look of cold assessment, and then without a word she stood up from the table and left the house. She didn’t speak to me for a week. She’d never been angry with me before, but now she hung up on me when I called, and when I approached her in the hall at school, her left eye twitched and she walked away. Sonia and I were so often together that her absence branded me. For a week I felt like the whole world looked at me with pity and scorn.

  Even now, the old rules seemed to apply. I couldn’t reveal anything to Daisy about Madame Gray. To change the subject, I said, “This seems like a fun place to work.”

  “Oh, it is,” Daisy said. “It’s great. Except for the boss.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Avery Sidwell, founder of this magazine. He comes in once a month and fucks everything up. Every so often he fires somebody, or pisses somebody off so bad they quit. He thinks he’s lord of the jungle. He looks at people like he’s waiting for them to drop behind the rest of the pack.” She sighed. “He loves Sonia, though. He thinks she’s enchanting.”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  Daisy laughed. “Exactly.”

  I wandered to the window, where Sonia kept a large jar full of broken glass on the sill. The sun hit the jar and scattered pieces of colored light across the gray wall. When I lifted the jar for closer examination, a postcard slipped out from behind it and fell to the floor. “What’s this?” I said.

  Daisy picked it up. “Maybe it’s a clue,” she said, and handed it to me.

  It was a picture of an old bathhouse in Hot Springs, Arkansas, one of the places where Sonia and I stopped on our last long road trip. On the back, Sonia had written only an address. There was no name, just the number, with one normal three and one backward three, the street, and Gloucester, Massachusetts. I had no idea where that was.

  I asked Daisy if she recognized the address, and she said no, but she took the card back and studied it again. “Maybe this is where Sonia went,” she said. “Who knows?” I waited for a comment about the backward three, but instead she said, “I guess you have to go there.” She handed me the card.

  I was taken aback. I thought, but couldn’t say, that even if the address was a clue, Sonia had most likely written it down wrong. I envisioned myself stopping at every house on a street, asking a series of suspicious homeowners if they’d ever heard of Sonia Gray. “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “What else do you have to go on?” She sighed. “I’m starting to worry. I wish you could find her.”

  I started to say I wished I could, too, but then someone shouted from the other room that Daisy’s phone was ringing, and she darted out the door. “I wish I could, too,” I said to Sonia’s empty office.

  I picked up one of the prints from the pile on Sonia’s desk. In it, an image of Sonia’s mother was superimposed over a drawing of a woman on a throne, a sword in her hand. I recognized both pieces of the composition. The photo was of Sonia’s mother at about fourteen, posed like a pinup on a lawn chair. She sat on the edge of the chair in a white bikini, her toes pointed, her hands on her thighs, her hair blowing in the breeze. In high school Sonia kept this picture in a frame on her bedside table. The first time I saw it, it took me a minute to realize that it was Sonia’s mother, and not Sonia, smiling coyly out of the frame. I had never seen the resemblance before, and it made me wonder what had happened to Madame Gray to make her so much less pretty than her daughter.

  The other image was the Queen of Swords from a tarot deck. Our freshman year of college Sonia and I had been obsessed with tarot cards. She was the one who dragged me to my first reading, in an old house in East Nashville, a blue hand with an eye in the center of its palm painted on the door. But I was the one who believed. While Sonia waited in another room, the tarot reader told me I was in love with a new boy—Owen—after having spent years harboring a secret crush on another. She said I should tell this new boy how I felt, that this time I could trust that my love would be returned. Then she told me I had the insight to read the cards myself. She sold me a deck for forty dollars, and Sonia laughed at me all the way home.

  Sonia might have teased me, might have called me “witchy woman,” but whenever she got drunk she begged me to tell her future. We’d shut the door, sit on the floor, and lay out the cards. Every reading I ever did for her, the Queen of
Swords came up. This queen represented the presence of a powerful and controlling woman, one who resents others’ independence and whose advice will bring about ill. She sat on her throne, face hard, hand lifted in judgment, a crown of butterflies imprisoned in stone around her head. At the beginning of every reading, we held our breath, waiting to see if she would appear, knowing somehow that she would. “Oh, shit,” Sonia would say, giggling helplessly, when I laid that card down. “Hi, Mommy.”

  By then, Sonia had formed out of the events of her mother’s life a story that explained everything. There was the strict, religious upbringing in a tiny town in West Texas, chafing a brilliant girl who picked up Spanish, taught herself French, solved the quadratic equation independent of any textbook at nine, and graduated from high school at fifteen. The harsh father who would not let her date, who insisted she go to a college within an hour of home, crushing her dreams of Harvard or Oxford. And then West Texas State, in Amarillo, and the appearance of the young man, gallant and devoted, charming a sixteen-year-old who was smart and beautiful, but naïve and socially awkward. He married her the summer after graduation and took her back to his hometown of Clovis, where his father owned a bank. But after the fairy-tale courtship, there were disappointments. The miscarriages, the ectopic pregnancy, the doctorate from a local university, which subsequently turned her down for a teaching post because her brilliance cast the provincial members of the French department into shadow. Stuck teaching in the stultifying environment of a public high school, she finally gave birth to Sonia—and like any good child, Sonia was to fulfill her mother’s failed dreams. “But I turned out stupid,” Sonia said. “The end.”

  A week before we were to leave for Tennessee and college, Madame Gray finally agreed to let Sonia go shopping with me at the mall in Amarillo—we wanted to buy matching bedspreads for our dorm room. Sonia knew what time I was coming to pick her up, and yet when I arrived and let myself into the house with the key from Frank the Frog, she was sitting on the couch in the living room with Will. They were so entranced with each other that they hadn’t heard me come in, didn’t see me standing there, and I was paralyzed by this and couldn’t interrupt them. There was an air of tragedy about them. Will’s cheeks were splotched red, and if he had not been crying, he had at least wanted to. He was going to school in Massachusetts, leaving the week after us.

  Will lifted Sonia’s arm and kissed the inside of her elbow. I backed out of the house as quietly as I could, a lump in my throat.

  I circled Sonia’s development in my hatchback a few times, passing the same three little boys on bicycles until they started to give me suspicious looks. A week suddenly seemed too long to wait for departure. I wished that we were leaving right then, that day. My parents were leaving, too. Our tour of duty was up.

  I turned out of the development and pulled into a gas station, and as I stood at the pump I saw Madame Gray’s car go by. I waved, but she didn’t see me. When I went to pay, I reached inside my pocket and realized I still had the front-door key. That meant the front door was unlocked, that Madame Gray would walk right in without the warning Sonia probably expected.

  I sped back fifteen miles an hour over the limit, as fast as I dared.

  Madame Gray’s car was parked in front of the closed garage, the trunk open, bags of groceries baking in the sun. The front door was open. In the foyer two plastic grocery bags spilled out on the floor. The coffee table was askew, and a dainty white bra was flung across the back of the couch. “Hello?” My voice was small. I tried again, louder this time.

  Will appeared out of the hall bathroom. He was pale, with a strange cross-eyed look, one hand pressed to the side of his head. When he took his hand away I saw that there was blood on his fingers.

  “Oh, it’s you,” he said. “I cracked my head on the coffee table.”

  I noticed Sonia’s pink T-shirt on the floor and, without thinking, moved to pick it up.

  “I can’t decide whether to go out there,” Will said, in an eerily conversational tone.

  “Out where?”

  “The backyard,” he said. “She caught us . . .” He waved his bloody hand at the couch.

  I ran from the room. From the kitchen I could hear the screaming—not even words, just this high-pitched animal sound—and my first thought was to hope that the neighbors had not called the police. I pushed through the screen door, and stopped.

  Sonia was on the ground underneath the swing set. She was half-naked, curled in on herself, her hands cradling the top of her head. Above her stood her mother. In Madame Gray’s hand was the chain that normally attached the swing to the bar, and as I watched, she whipped the chain across Sonia’s bare shoulder, the swing’s plastic seat beating against her side. Sonia’s body jerked, but she didn’t cry out or try to move. Her mother brought the chain back to strike another blow. But I was there. I had crossed the lawn without knowing it, and wrapped my hand around the chain.

  Madame Gray rounded on me, and the rage in her face was like nothing I’d ever seen. I faltered, and she moved like she was going to hit me, too. All at once my rage equaled hers. I lifted my hand; it seemed to drop from a very great height, and as hard as I could, I slapped her across the face.

  I lifted my hand again, but Madame Gray’s face was already dissolving, like a child’s, into tears, and even though Sonia never cried, she looked so much like Sonia that for a head-spinning moment I couldn’t be sure which one of them she was. From somewhere in the distance I heard Sonia shouting my name.

  Sonia got up off the ground and pulled her mother away from me. She put both hands on her mother’s shoulders and looked her in the face. Madame Gray closed her eyes and shook her head. “Maman, maman,” Sonia said, her voice soothing. “Ne pleure pas. Ce qui est fait est fait. Maman. Je t’aime. Ne t’inquiète pas. Je t’aime.” If Sonia remembered she was half-naked in the yard, she gave no indication. The Sonia of just moments before, curled up on the ground beneath a swinging chain, might have been my imagination.

  I stood there shaking. Was I in the wrong? My palm still stung from the blow.

  “Ça va?” Sonia said.

  Madame Gray nodded. Sonia said, “Good.” She took her mother’s hand and led her back inside. “Go take care of Will,” she said over her shoulder. She hadn’t once looked at me.

  I found Will sitting on the couch with his head in his hands. When I said his name he jerked like he’d been asleep. From the kitchen I fetched some ice and wrapped it in a dish towel. I sat beside Will and pressed the ice to the cut on his head, and when he reached up to hold the ice himself, his hand brushed mine, and I snatched mine away. “What happened?” he said.

  “Did you pass out?”

  “I don’t know. I’m such a weakling.”

  I didn’t contradict him. We sat there and listened to Sonia on the phone upstairs, telling her father not to worry, that everything was fine, but that her mother wasn’t feeling well and he’d better come on home. Not feeling well. I couldn’t believe this had happened now, when I was so close to taking Sonia away. Maybe my notion that I could rescue Sonia from Madame Gray was laughable. Maybe, no matter how far away I took her, she’d bring with her the memory of what had happened here today; she’d go on loving her mother, even if her mother never loved her back.

  “What the hell happened?” Will said.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Rien.” I hated him, and myself, for our inability to help or understand—both of us so tall, so capable and controlled, so large with failure.

  15

  I left the city for Gloucester on Route 1. As night came on I drove past restaurants that were like a series of illustrations mistakenly put in the same storybook. First, a gargantuan Chinese place built to look like a temple, the corners of its roof rocketing into the sky, huge Tiki faces grimacing outside. Then a seafood restaurant shaped like a ship, so true to life it was as though some great wave had marooned it there centuries before. Then a steak house in the green, glowing shadow of a giant neon cactus.<
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  The postcard sat atop the package in the passenger seat, and I wondered if it meant anything that the picture was of a place where Sonia and I had traveled together. Searching for lunch late in the day, in a town that seemed nearly deserted, we had wandered into the lobby of a once-grand hotel. There we found tables of old people playing bridge, Benny Goodman on the speakers, and the remains of a fried-chicken buffet. At first, the sight gave us the giggles—two of the ladies had hair that approached a beehive—but as we sat at a table in the corner eating red Jell-O with cocktail fruit, we were hushed into silence by the way no one took notice of us, as if they were ghosts, or we were. That feeling of unreality persisted everywhere we went. Hot Springs had once been a resort town, and the pictures in the old bathhouses were of fine ladies and their gentlemen arriving in carriages to take the baths. I couldn’t shake the feeling, as we passed through, that we would turn a corner and find ourselves in period clothes, attendants brushing past, voices ringing off the stone walls. I could tell by Sonia’s face that this was a feeling we shared, and that communion made it seem all the more possible that everything was about to change. How strange it was to emerge from that still, cool place into the sun-bright afternoon.

  Now I thought of wild, implausible things—that she had deliberately left this postcard to lead me somewhere. “Stupid,” I said out loud. Oliver was right—I was too much alone. My life was becoming a story I was telling myself. If I went to the address on the card, I would probably find nothing more spectacular than an art gallery. A restaurant she liked. A shop full of architecture magazines. I came up with a long list of prosaic things I might find in Gloucester, Massachusetts, but I believed in none of them. What I did believe in I wasn’t quite sure—that I would turn a corner and find myself in a long-ago world.