Stranger, Father, Beloved

by Taylor Larsen

  Nancy missed the elation of that evening.

  Something had been lost over the years, yet there was hope. Maybe Ryan would remain at home more often now that the yard would be so pretty. She felt helpless at her inability to stop her daughter from spending so many evenings at Carol’s house, sensed that something awful would happen if she put her foot down and prevented it. Michael, too, was strangely passive toward Ryan and would not discipline her in an outright way. Nancy knew she would have to stay strong and continue to try to connect with her daughter. Michael had enough on his plate, and it was up to her to try to keep Ryan safe and on track. As Ryan advanced into the teenage realm and showed signs of being a woman, she continually wielded more power. A strong will lurked beneath her surface, one that could exert itself at any moment. She was the kind of girl, Nancy felt, who would run away from home and not be heard from again, living in musky lofts with degenerate rock band boyfriends. But now, with Michael looking so animated, maybe the two would rekindle their earlier bond over books and ideas. Ryan could read in the gazebo and would invite her friends over to their house instead of leaving it to go elsewhere. She made a mental note to encourage Ryan to bring her friends here when she saw her next.

  Nancy heard Michael quietly open their bedroom door and tiptoe over to the bed well after eleven. She knew he was most likely drowsy and hoping to fall asleep right away if he lay down before his mind started its turning. She should let him be, but she couldn’t help herself. She waited for him to get under the sheets, then turned to face him, grinning into the darkness.

  “Can’t sleep?”

  “No, I can,” she responded. “But I wanted to stay up to see you.”

  They both paused. The large room around them seemed to grow more still with each passing second.

  “Your birthday is coming up. Anything special you want to do?” he asked.

  “Nope. We can do whatever we feel like, I guess.” Nancy secretly had grown to hate the arrival of her birthday every year. Michael always made a fuss over it, several times throughout the day insisting that it was “her day” and asking what “the birthday girl” wanted to do. During the first couple of years of their marriage she had become giddy with the respect she commanded and the attention she received on that day, yet the fifth time around, she had a sinking feeling each time she was complimented or doted upon. To know that this was how she always wanted to feel and that on the day after her birthday it would all disappear was awful. For those twenty-four hours she had the husband she wanted, and then, after the celebration, with several new presents on their bedroom sofa, she would lay her head down and it would all end.

  “We can just go to dinner,” she suggested.

  “Okay, but maybe I can think of something better.” He rolled over onto his side, his back facing her.

  There was the back she knew so well. She reached out her hand and began rubbing along the creases of his shoulder blades. A bony man, he always ached along his joints and ridges. Little knots of pain would lodge themselves in his back, always at these same places. He said nothing, but she could tell he was relaxing, softening into his pillow. This was her introductory maneuver to foreplay, but she didn’t overuse it. Half of the time she would rub the back of his shoulder blades, and then, as he began to fall asleep, she would curl herself around him, and force herself to doze off as well. The other half of the time she would start to play with his hair and see if he would let the cycle begin. Tonight, like many nights, he was unresponsive as she stroked the back of his neck. She found it hard to let it go. She felt bold, excited. He was the sexiest man she had ever met—his coldness, his troubled nature hidden behind a calm exterior elicited a painful desire in her, one that only seemed to grow stronger as the years passed. She loved tall men with deep voices. She loved men who didn’t chatter on and on. She secretly knew that Michael was too smart for her, but she wanted to keep learning from him, to analyze the world and see the deeper layers underneath ordinary living. Michael had such depth. He was unlike any other man she had ever met.

  “I don’t know where you come up with your ideas, but it’s so nice to be surprised. Redoing the yard is a great idea. You’re so good to me,” she said and then immediately regretted it. Both knew it was untrue.

  In the darkness, he searched for something to say.

  “I know I have been difficult, Nancy—these past years. I know that.” That was true, and for a moment her heart felt it would collapse with relief. From those words, a forceful physical drive emerged. She snuggled up against him and began to kiss the side of his neck. She felt she could coil herself around him until she could elicit some kind of response. Maybe tonight he would give himself over. She would settle for pleasuring him, for anything.

  “Nancy, come on, you know I’m not up for that.” He curled up tighter into his fetal position, hardening into a ball. Were his eyes open or closed? She didn’t know. She retracted her arm and rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. The physicality still tingled at the bottom of her belly, but as the minutes ticked by, it dissipated.

  There was something about the way Michael slept that unnerved Nancy. He was stiff as a board and silent the whole night through. Because of his insomnia, she was never sure if he was actually asleep. He usually faced away from her, and when she woke up, she would move very slowly and deliberately so as not to disturb him, in case he was just lying there awake, waiting for sleep to take him.

  On nights like this, she missed her former boyfriend, Tim, who, as awkward and wayward as he was, had slept deeply and snored loudly. Back then his snoring had irritated her. But now she longed for it—the reassurance that he was released into the dream world, no longer her responsibility. She could toss and turn, sigh, mutter, and he would sleep through, surrendered, dead to her in a way that she liked, becoming a body with no brain attached. But her husband was like a brittle insect, motionless, silent, tightly wound up, operating on some vague plane between the current moment and a labyrinth in his mind. He was both available and entirely unavailable. His brooding, ever-turning mind frightened her. She could handle his strange mind while awake, but when he tried to sleep, an ominous being seemed to sneak out of his body and into the room, and it sat in the corner watching her. She didn’t know what it looked like, that dark mass, but whatever it was, she knew it was sneering at her.

  Maybe the landscaping was a sign that things were changing for the better and she should just be patient. That was always the answer. As time went on, he would step back into his role as head of the house and discipline Ryan. She also had faith that, if something changed, Michael would want her again. He might approach her between the sheets, his face relaxed and his mood lighthearted, with a playfulness that rarely came out. The other housewives she knew fantasized about strangers, young studs they invented to spice up routine sex. She fantasized about her husband ablaze with real desire, years into their marriage.

  CHAPTER SIX

  When Ryan arrived at Jill’s house on that early June evening, Jill had not changed out of her work clothes. For almost two years, Jill had been working at a plant nursery. She took care of the register, but when business was slow, she moved plants and big bags of fertilizer. She often came home with dirt smeared on her oversized T-shirt, faintly sweaty and musty, yet smiling nonetheless. She had dirt on the backs of her legs, and, as usual, her yellow T-shirt was damp with perspiration.

  She and Ryan began baking a pie in the kitchen, soft jazz music playing in the background. Jill’s parents had brought her up in this house, and they had both died before Carol turned ten. After that, Jill became the new owner and permanent resident. She managed to get by largely due to the fact that she had been left the house with no mortgage to pay off.

  The house, although in slight disrepair from age, was larger than many in the neighborhood. In Ryan’s opinion, the kitchen was by far the best place in the house. Jill had added midnight-blue tiles a few years back, one of he
r many solo projects, producing a fresh, comfortable space. Large windows lined the two walls and afforded a nice view of the small yard. Jill said she used the extra bedroom as a study, although she didn’t have much to do there except pay the bills.

  Carol had already gone to bed, tired from a lacrosse game she had played that evening. Right on schedule, she had come down to the kitchen to take her plate of food up to her room. As she hauled it away, she turned and gave the two of them a little salute before going back up to bed. Carol’s conduct was getting stranger by the day as she became more stoic, more robotic in her routines; eating and sleeping were carried out on a tight schedule.

  Blueberries and raspberries, freshly washed and shining with little beads of water, waited in green baskets next to the piecrust. Ryan’s homework was finished, and the next day was a Saturday. Jill rolled out the crusts, swaying her body back and forth to the music. The night seemed endless, free from pressures. Heat seeping from the oven warmed Ryan’s feet as she stood by Jill.

  “I don’t know what to do about Carol. She seems so unhappy, doesn’t she?” Jill asked as she pressed her fingers into some of the knots in the dough. She tore off a little edge of the dough and put it into her mouth.

  “Yeah.”

  “She won’t talk to me.”

  “Go to more of her games. That would make her happy.” Ryan reached out, separated a corner from the dough, and, like Jill, popped it into her mouth. The flavor, yeast with a sweetness to it, dissolved onto her tongue once it was moistened by the saliva.

  “Am I an embarrassing mother, Ryan?” Jill turned to face her.

  “You’re better than my parents. I wish I lived here with you. Let’s swap. We can put Carol at my place, and I can stay here.”

  “Shhh . . . not so loud, she could hear you,” Jill said, attempting sternness, but as she said it she was smiling. It was clear that the thought had crossed her mind. There was something about the way Jill treated her daughter, and she Jill, that gave Ryan the creeps. There was a lack of warmth to their exchanges and an overall coldness in Jill that Ryan found entirely unnatural. Jill seemed to come fully alive only with Ryan, as if she were capable of giving her love to only one person at a time. At times it angered Ryan, the subtle way Jill ignored her daughter.

  “Maybe I could move into the third bedroom—you know, the one you use as a study?” She said it in a lighthearted manner but watched Jill for traces of possibility. Jill smiled, and it did seem to Ryan that it might be an idea that could take form.

  Lately, at night, it was getting harder and harder to leave Jill’s and return home. Ryan now had her own small domain around the large sand-colored basement couch, an area exclusively hers. Carol never came down there, Jill slept on the second floor, and after hours of company, Ryan was allowed to lie down there alone and read or drift into a nap before going home. A white flannel blanket was always folded neatly over the back of the couch, waiting for her. A large glass coffee table sat next to the couch, and gray wall-to-wall carpeting covered the floor. The basement had a bathroom adjacent to the main room, and it was equipped with a clean bathtub. More and more, as she lay on the couch, sinking into the soft cushions, covered by her blanket, leaving seemed inconceivable. Out of the corner of her eye, she would see a full glass of ice water on the coffee table beside her. If she fell asleep and woke up thirsty, it would be there for her.

  Ryan went over and took the bottle of vodka from the cabinet next to the refrigerator. She turned to Jill and raised her eyebrows.

  Jill sighed and pressed her hands into the counter.

  “Just a splash. I don’t want to get into trouble with your parents or whatever. Don’t get drunk. I drank too much when I was your age, and I don’t want you to end up like me.”

  Ryan mixed the cranberry juice with the vodka and watched as Jill scooped the berries into the piecrust.

  Outside it began to rain lightly, drops sticking to the windowpane soundlessly, gusts moving through the branches of the trees in gentle waves. Ryan felt a slight heavy feeling in her bones as the vodka tingled her throat.

  Ryan looked over, and for a second she saw the younger face of Jill emerge in her features. Occasionally these flashes of Jill as a young woman appeared over her older and more beaten countenance, and they always excited Ryan, as she was aware that Jill had once been quite wild, quite pretty. She imagined Jill baking a pie in a kitchen twenty years ago, with her wild gang of friends, laughing, drinking, and eyeing one another with desire and playfulness.

  “Jill, do you have any old photos I could see?”

  “From when I was a girl?”

  “No, when you were a teenager. Or any time before you had Carol.”

  “Yep. Hold on, there’s a box of old photos in the living room.”

  Jill brought back a brown box and opened it. She pulled out one photo and gazed at it for a moment, frowning.

  “Here’s me with Carol’s father.” She said it in a flat voice and handed it over.

  Ryan gazed at Jill and a young man, who stood side by side, beaming at the camera. Jill had on tight jeans and a white tank top, with her hair pulled back. She was attractive, yet possessed the same gentle kindness Ryan knew so well. Looking at the photo, it was clear who the boss of the relationship was, and it certainly wasn’t Jill. The man had wavy brown hair, a strong and sturdy build, a beautiful face, and an air of magnetism, an assurance that he was the center and all else was in orbit. Jill’s smile was more calculated, while his was easy, transfixing.

  “What was his name again?”

  “Oh, that’s Dave.”

  “Were you in love with him?”

  Jill sighed, obviously not wanting to talk about it, which sparked Ryan’s interest more.

  “Well, were you?”

  “Of course I was, Ryan. I mean, look at him. It’s clear who was in love with who.”

  This was the first time Jill had ever seemed annoyed with Ryan, which fascinated her.

  “What’s wrong, Jill?”

  “You ask questions when you already know the answer.”

  “Come on, tell me about it.”

  “He was funny, unpredictable. I guess you could basically say he was irresistible. Women always loved him. I felt like I was constantly fighting them off. It was horrible, and I guess it also gave me a charge to be with someone like that.”

  “Where were you guys when this picture was taken?”

  Jill squinted at it. “Oh, out by that damn cabin.”

  Jill explained that Dave was the type of guy who would immerse himself in one project or another and then would drop each one suddenly and with no warning. Building a cabin was one of his projects, and Jill had been another one of his projects. He had picked her out of their town’s crop of girls and possessively taken her along on his group’s expeditions. She had been with him during the year he tried to form his band, Poor Rayna, and then she had watched it come apart. She had been with him when he bought a piece of property on the edge of town, about two acres, and attempted to build a cabin on it. It was half built when he, exhausted financially and physically, left it.

  “When I became pregnant, for the first five months, he bought books on babies and their developmental cycles and played music to my belly. He even took up the project of building the cabin again as a future place for the three of us to live.”

  Embarrassed by his parents’ wealth, Dave had tried to build the structure as primitively as possible, with material he could afford himself. Ultimately, he could not do it; the thing would not come together. Jill had come upon him one day, coffee in her hand, and was alarmed to find him slumped over, sitting on a log next to a mess of beams and boards. What he had built had somehow come down. When she had asked him about it, he refused to tell her what had happened. His friends Rick and Jamie, who helped him build when they had the time, had apparently left for the day. Or maybe his b
ad temper had driven them off. Jill would never know.

  It had begun to drizzle, and Jill told Ryan about how she had looked at his wet, thick brown hair, his perfect face drawn into a tight expression of anger, and had known she was in trouble. His plaid shirt was clinging to his back, and he’d had a cold, distant look in his eyes. She had desired him, sitting there in the rain. It was strange to feel passion for someone so angry and distant. She had felt increasingly panicked as it occurred to her that he was moving on, moving on from her this time.

  The rent was overdue, and their tiny apartment was cluttered with boxes of his things, useless things he collected, such as vintage magazines and postcards. He refused to throw them away. The place was damp and unclean, and staying there was loathsome to both of them. But she could do it, would do it, for him.

  “Why can’t you ask your parents for the money?” she’d asked him one night after an argument with their landlord over the rent. “We need to take life more seriously now that we are going to have a baby. Don’t let your pride get in the way.”

  “If I had known that my pleading would drive him over the edge, I would have kept quiet,” she told Ryan. “But two days later he left town. I waited for about a month, expecting him to come back, but he didn’t. I moved back in with my parents and had the baby.”

  Ryan was silent after Jill finished speaking. Jill now appeared to her in a new light. It had never occurred to her that Jill had been through such deep suffering or that a beautiful man she really loved had abandoned her. In fact, Ryan had never really thought of Jill as someone who could even have a handsome lover—the idea seemed cartoonish. The boyfriends Jill had had when Ryan was a girl had seemed fake, disposable. But there was the photo, the proof. Jill’s connection to such a man was exciting, amazing.

  “Well, I can see why you fell for him. I would’ve too, even if he was a jerk or a coward or whatever.”