by Sarah S.
A glint of light on the landing caught her eye. James’s office door was already ajar.
She walked inside. It was chilly in the room. She walked to the window and looked out. There was something in the yard. She leaned her head against the glass, frowning.
It was a tent.
She hurried back downstairs and out the door, certain it was a hallucination—for how could she have missed it when she came inside? But no, it was a tent, big and yellow, fully erected in her backyard. She had no idea when she’d last seen a tent. Its presence here seemed alien, unnerving. And then she saw something dark moving inside. A shadow.
Slowly, she walked toward it. She squatted, her heels immediately sinking in the mud. There was a zipped flap at the front. “Hello?” she said softly.
There was rustling. “Mom?”
More rustling. Then the opening unzipped and Charles stared out at her. He’d taken his shoes off; they were sitting on the tent floor next to him. He was dressed in work clothes, a blue button-down shirt and dark khaki pants. His eyes, cheeks, and the tip of his nose were red. At first she thought it might be windburn, but then she wondered if he’d been crying.
“What are you doing?” she asked. She tapped one of the posts. “Where did you get this?”
“In the garage. It was Dad’s.”
She blinked, still not understanding.
“I built it,” Charles went on. “Do you want to come in?”
She hesitated, the idea of it was not very appealing. The ground was cold, wet, and there was a bitter chill in the air. But she wondered if something in him had broken, just like something had in her. It was probably high time things broke inside all of them. She looked inside the tent again. Everything was an iridescent gold. “I guess I could come in for a minute,” she said softly.
Charles moved back so she’d have enough room to crawl in. She climbed into the tent awkwardly, her skirt riding up, her necklace bouncing against her collarbone, her knees instantly cold, separated from the tent’s floor by only a thin layer of pantyhose. Charles was lying down, so Sylvie did, too. There was just enough room for them to lie side by side, their arms touching.
For a long time, neither of them said anything. There were a lot of things Sylvie wanted to ask him—why he’d built the tent or why he wasn’t at work, for instance—but she sensed that she shouldn’t. They lay next to each other in their own separate and walled-off pain, listening to the wind.
“It kind of doesn’t feel like we’re in our backyard,” Sylvie said.
“I know. We could be anywhere.”
“And it’s cozy, in a way. Sort of like a nest.”
“I guess it is,” Charles said. “It’s pretty crazy that people used to live like this. Not in tents, I mean, but so exposed to the elements. So primitively.”
“They were used to it, though,” she said. “I guess if you’re used to it, it’s not such a big deal.”
Far off in the distance someone started up what sounded like a buzz saw. “Why did Dad hate me?” Charles asked.
A shiver ran through her. She sat up halfway. “Honey. He loved you.”
“Well, he didn’t exactly like me. Is there something I could’ve done differently? Is there something I should’ve said? A way I should’ve looked?”
Her throat was tight. “I don’t know if it was as simple as that.”
“So you did notice it.” He watched her for a moment. She neither nodded nor shook her head. “Couldn’t you have said something to him? Couldn’t you have asked?”
“You don’t think I tried? You don’t think I agonized over it? That I questioned why he acted the way he did? You don’t think it killed me?”
“I …” Charles stammered, surprised.
She shut her eyes. It felt like there was a tidal wave brewing deep inside of her, beginning to build momentum. What had she harmed, trying to keep the peace? Apres moi, le deluge, her grandfather said. She didn’t know any answers. She wished she did, but she didn’t.
“I’m sorry,” she said, sighing. “I did try. I did. But no, I didn’t try enough. No one did. Don’t just blame him, though,” she said quietly. “It’s my fault, too. Maybe it’s mostly my fault. Don’t think it’s yours.”
Charles said nothing in response. Sylvie touched his hand, and then leaned her head on his shoulder. His skin was warmer than hers.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“For what?”
He looked away, maybe guilty. A crack formed in her brain. Could he know, too? About this girl, as Tayson had called her?
But, no. It hadn’t been a girl. She couldn’t believe that. Tayson had heard a rumor and took a gamble. It worked on Sylvie, too. He’d hit her in her softest, weakest spot, exactly where he needed in order to get her to act.
She waited for Charles to say something, but all he did was shake his head. “You have nothing to be sorry for,” she said. And then she moved onto her hands and knees. “I think I’m going to go inside now.”
“Okay.” Charles unzipped the tent flap for her. She crawled out, stood up, and assessed herself. Her skirt was wrinkled. Individual blades of grass were imprinted on her knees. She peered in at Charles, who was sitting cross-legged.
“Are you going to stay in there?”
“For a while, if that’s okay.”
“Of course it’s okay.”
She turned and opened the front door. Retraced her steps up the stairs, walking under her grandfather’s portrait, coming to a stop outside James’s office. She took a deep breath and walked across the room.
The key slid easily into the filing cabinet lock. She heard a release, and the drawer opened. A dull, metallic sound echoed throughout the room.
There was a single paper clip at the bottom of the drawer. Rusted. A bit bent. Nothing else.
She pulled the next drawer open. It, too, was empty. And so was the next. She reached to the very back, but there was only cold metal. She stood back and pushed her hand through her hair, letting out a defeated laugh through her nose.
All this time, fearing an empty drawer.
She sank down on his office chair. What James had done was an indelible part of her now; she would have to live with it. So it had blindsided her; so she hadn’t seen it coming. So James hadn’t seemed like the type of man who would ever do such a thing. The point was that it had happened, and there was nothing she could do to change that. He had made a mistake; a lot of people did. People she loved, people she thought would never make mistakes. That was the only conclusion she could come to, the only way she could really come to terms with it.
The sun outside broke free from a cloud, sending a carpet of gold across James’s desk. Sylvie was sitting at just the right angle to notice a gleaming hair next to his old computer. She bent down. It was a gray hair, short and coarse. His.
A sob welled in her throat. It felt like it was the only tangible, organic thing left of him. Not the ring he gave her, not the clothes in his closet, only this single, tenuous hair. Her heart clenched. She’d spent so much time fixating on the woman, maybe as shelter from the fact that he was really gone. And he was gone. He would not come downstairs to talk to her ever again. He would not sit next to her when she was sick, putting cold washcloths on her forehead. She wouldn’t hear the noises of him moving around, getting ready for work, swearing as he bumped around in the clumsy, woozy morning. She had stood over him in his last few hours alive, cursing what he’d done, and after he died, she’d stared down at him, too numb to think. And that was all there was. She wouldn’t get any more time with him. She’d squandered what she had.
After a while, she looked down into the backyard. The tent loomed, silent and cheerful, next to the same exact brick patio that had been there when Sylvie was a girl. And there were the same exact flowerbeds, too, and the same gazebo and pool that no one used but they’d never replaced with something else. That old decking. That old blue diving board. The DNA from her grandfather’s feet was probably all over that div
ing board, as well as skin from his hands on the edges of the pool and the metal ladder and the long-handled device that skimmed the bugs from the surface.
Sylvie supposed she could imagine that the Charles inside the tent wasn’t a troubled adult but still a little boy. Both he and Scott could still be little boys, and things could still turn out differently for them, more like she’d envisioned. She supposed she could even imagine that she was a little girl, too. This office was still her grandfather’s, and the tent down there was hers. And she wondered if that was what she’d been doing all this time, living in this big, broken house, working so hard to keep things exactly the same. She wondered if, deep down, she hoped time wasn’t a straight line but could loop back on itself, letting her start over.
She turned away from the window and walked downstairs to the kitchen. Taking a long time to consider, she decided to make herself a tuna sandwich on rye bread, mixing the tuna and the mayo and putting in pieces of celery and red onion. And she put on classical music, something from her own collection, not her grandfather’s old records, and she sat down at the kitchen table and ate. She tried as hard as she could to enjoy every bite.
………………………………………………………… twenty
Catherine spent the rest of the afternoon and the early evening in the hands of doctors, heavily drugged. They did an ultrasound of her liver, then a small biopsy. They were running
tests for hepatitis and cancer. Joanna went from thinking this was a cruel joke to knowing it was some manifestation of karma to feeling numb all over, all in the span of three or four seconds. Finally, when she was in the waiting room, reading the same pregnancy magazine for the third time, Dr. Nestor called her aside and told Joanna the news was good—her mother had cirrhosis.
“That’s good?” Joanna exclaimed. It was good because it was manageable, he said. But she would have to quit drinking immediately. One drink, and she could be dead. She’d have to begin taking a whole host of pills, ones that were actually prescribed to her, and nothing else. But in a few days, she could actually go home.
Joanna sat in her mother’s room, waiting for her to wake up. The most entertaining things in the room were her mother’s monitors, the gentle, subtle changes of her pulse rate and blood pressure, the amount of oxygen present in her blood. Catherine’s face was still free of makeup, and she looked both younger and so much older concurrently. Then her mother opened her eyes. “Hi,” Joanna said. Catherine made little smacking noises with her lips, and tentatively touched the tube that fed oxygen into her nose. “Jesus. I must look awful.”
“You look fine.” She stared up at the ceiling, placing her hands over her sternum again. “Well,” she breathed. They looked at each other for a moment. Catherine sighed dramatically. “They’re telling me I took too many pills.”
“Yes.”
“And my liver’s shot. It’s going to kill me, I bet.”
“The doctor actually said it could be managed.”
“Mark my words. These doctors don’t know anything.” Joanna looked away. A little smile curled on Catherine’s lips. “You
think I’m overreacting.”
“I don’t know.” She counted three long breaths. “I’m sorry for what
I said before,” she said. “I shouldn’t have gotten you worked up.” Her mother shifted, not answering. “So, where’s Scott?” “I don’t know. I think he left.” On a trip outside, she’d noticed Scott’s
car wasn’t in the parking lot. She’d tried not to think about their conversation very much; it made her feel too gloomy and ashamed. Where had
he gone? Back to Pennsylvania? He’d seemed so changed after what she
said to him, as if she’d opened his eyes to how he truly appeared. “Did you have a fight?” Catherine asked.
“No.” Joanna let out an exclamation point of a snort. “Scott and I
aren’t close enough to have a fight.”
“You seem pretty close.”
She flexed her calf muscles. She had to say something. “Contrary
to how it seemed, I would not want to marry him. Any old BatesMcAllister won’t do.”
Catherine pressed her lips together sternly.
“Is that why you said that stuff about me and him? And about
the photos of his family? Making it sound like I was some kind of
crazy, obsessed teenager? Because you thought he was in love with
me?”
“I didn’t tell him you were obsessed.” Catherine crossed her arms. “I heard that very word come out of your mouth.”
Catherine weakly crossed her arms over her chest. “I didn’t mean
obsessed, necessarily. Enamored. Entranced.”
“But you weren’t enamored and entranced? I just . . . dreamt all
that up?”
“Well.” Catherine flicked her hair over her shoulder. “I don’t know.
I mean, I was going through all kinds of things, Joanna. It was a long
time ago.”
Joanna stared at the front walkway. The black plastic bag in the
trash can was empty, and it flapped in the wind against the can’s mesh
sides. A couple passed, their heads down, their faces somber. No one
looked happy at hospitals.
She picked at a string on her sweater. “I think Charles is having an
affair,” she admitted, bracing herself.
Her mother’s sheets rustled.
“With his old girlfriend. The girl he dated in high school.” “Are you sure?”
She couldn’t meet her mother’s eye. “I talked to her on the phone
before I came here. She was telling me where they were going to meet.
Either she’s really ballsy, or she thought I was the cleaning lady.” “It could’ve been a misunderstanding. Did you confront him about
it? Ask him if that’s what he was doing? I figure he must’ve called you
since you’ve been here, right?”
Joanna watched several nurses rush down the hall. “He did call.
But I didn’t ask him, no.”
“Why?”
“He would’ve denied it.”
Catherine struggled to sit up. “So, what, you talked to him on the
phone and pretended it hadn’t happened?”
Joanna gazed out the window. The sky was an ashy gray. A man with
a walker hobbled down the sidewalk. “She’s better for him, probably.
They come from the same background. They both went to Swithin.” “So?”
Joanna looked at her helplessly.
Catherine’s lips were tautly pressed together. “What the hell is
wrong with you?”
“I know, I went and ruined it. Look at all I was given, everything
we ever wanted, and I’ve messed it all up.”
It was hard to contain the bitterness she felt. But Catherine was
squinting at her, lost. Joanna sighed. “You said that at my wedding.” “What? I didn’t.”
“Yeah. You did.”
“Well, surely I meant—” Catherine trailed off abruptly, pressing
her lips together and shifting her eyes to the right. Realization seemed
to slowly trickle into her, reminding Joanna of red food-coloring dye
dropped into a water glass, the molecules gradually dispersing and
turning the water pink. Catherine’s throat bobbed as she swallowed.
“Well,” she said, touching her neck. She looked out the window, then
at her hands. “I just meant … I didn’t want you to ruin the day by
dwelling on the negative. I could tell you were. I could see you looking
around, scowling at something that was wrong. The apple doesn’t fall
very far from the tree, I guess.”
Joanna flinched, amazed at her mother’s self-introspection. But
she didn’t believe Catherine for a second. Surely
this explanation was
fabricated, once Catherine realized the harshness of what she’d said.
“You never thought I deserved Charles. You were horrified when I told
you we were dating, as if it was unnatural or something.”
Catherine sighed and shut her eyes. A nurse at the desk just outside her room let out a cawing laugh. A doctor ran past the door at a
full gallop. “Look,” Catherine said. “I spent a long time around those
people. I don’t know what they deserved or who deserved them. I tried
so hard, but they didn’t want me. I couldn’t help but be bitter and hate
them a little. Of course once I moved here, I realized it wasn’t even
about them, specifically. It was just about belonging somewhere. I’ve
found that here.”
Joanna sniffed. “The sail club?”
“That’s right.”
Joanna breathed out. It felt like she’d been holding something in
for years. She looked around the room, from the monitors to the graygreen walls to the flecks in the linoleum to her mother’s feet, stumps
beneath the blanket. “What was so wrong with your life, Mom?” Catherine thought for a while, as if no one had ever asked that
question. Finally she cleared her throat. “One day, when you were
about ten, your dad just wasn’t there anymore.” Catherine kept her
eyes on her blankets. “For years he adored me. He defined me. Because he watched everything I did like it mattered. And then … he
just … checked out. I thought you understood that. You were there.
You watched it happen.”
“I was ten.”
“I thought … I don’t know. I thought you understood.” “Why would I understand that?”
Catherine sighed, shaking her head. “When you were a baby, you
were very clumsy,” she said in a faraway voice. “You used to fall all the
time. And then I would pick you up all worried, and you’d be crying
and I’d sit you on the couch and give you a little piece of a banana and
after a while you were okay. But then, this one day, you were playing
