Attachment

by Isabel Fonseca

  “Thing?”

  “Actually, her name is Magdalena, but yeah, Thing, Ginger …Come on, Munyeroo! And of course Cruella, but that’s another—”

  “Stop!” Jean’s stomach was a burning hole.

  “Don’t worry. Mark knows nothing about it. He may have seen one or two pix of Magdalena, but in her incarnation as Brunhilda. I can’t even remember if you’ve seen those. All very confusing. Once I realized it wasn’t Mark who was writing, I realized—yeah, it’s true, he was never very keen. Doesn’t have your talent, if you want to know, Mrs. H. And Gio? I’m sure he only ever saw one or two of Giovana. She’s our little slice of shared-history pie, our own private duologue—”

  “Good-bye.” She hung up and slumped back into her chair. She felt weightless, panic-stricken, nauseous. The earth could open at her feet and she would gladly lean forward, tumble right in. Dan as Giovana: How could that have happened? How could she be so stupid?

  The phone rang again almost immediately. Jean looked at it, summoning the nerve to answer—maybe it was him again, calling back to say this too was all a joke. And not one she’d sickeningly played on herself. And on her husband.

  It was Victoria. “Mum? Your phone has been engaged for ages. And I’m getting a terrible echo, so I’m just going to be quick… Happy birthday! There’s something else I want to tell you. Vikram and I were at Borobodur early this morning. It gets to be thirty-eight or even forty degrees so you really have to do as much at dawn as possible… It was amazing, hundreds of Buddhas and all these great latticed bells of stone…but I’ll show you pictures when I get back. Listen, I have wonderful news.”

  “Good. Where are you now, darling?”

  “I’m in Yogyakarta. Guess, Mum. I’m sure you can guess.” There was a silence and Jean thought the line had gone dead. “Mum?”

  “Hm? You know, darling, I really don’t think I can.” Her own recent “news” had left Jean in doubt about whatever she might say, think, feel; her head was swirling with the implications of Dan’s emergence as Giovana’s keeper and perpetrator and voice. Of course. That night in his loft—they’d rehearsed it by e-mail for months. No wonder he’d thought her so “playful” and “daring.” No wonder he’d showed her those films. “Isn’t that what you asked for?” Yes, she’d asked for it, all right. Or at least she’d asked Giovana for it, up against the kitchen counter.

  “Mum? Are you there? Please, try.”

  “Try what? What is it, sweetheart?” Jean was thinking—despite her passionate credulity, none of this actually happened to Mark; but it had still happened to her. She couldn’t unthink those violent thoughts, or reverse the profound incremental shift in her deepest feelings. Could she? Just run the new information through her brain and sit back as life gradually returned to normal, let the color flood black into this black-and-white world?

  “No, you guess. Wonderful, wonderful news. Mum? Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. I don’t know. You’re engaged,” Jean said—the last thing she really believed.

  “I knew you’d guess.” Victoria sounded not amazed but gratified: here was the confirmation of the ineluctable. “It was very romantic, at the top of the temple just as the sun appeared. We just spontaneously decided, not really like a question and an answer. It was all very natural, only one element of a wonderful day.”

  Jean tried to hold back tears. She took a deep breath. “I’m going to cry. I’m so happy. And I am, I’m going to cry.”

  “Mum!” Vic was laughing; she turned to speak to Vikram; Jean couldn’t hear what she said but knew she was telling him that her mother was about to cry. Not, perhaps, for the exact reasons she imagined, but certainly for some of them.

  “Dad’s not here, sweetheart. He went out to get a fish. He’ll be desolate to miss you. Can we call you back? Wait a second, I hear the truck now—”

  “Mark!” Jean ran out toward the car, calling him. “It’s Vic!” Panting, she gave him the phone and stood there for a moment, arms crossed. Mark was just listening and not talking while she looked at him, this man she’d known so long and so well and then somehow betrayed, and she felt spongy kneed, leaky, pierced through with sorrow and also panic. Clearly she’d wanted to go to bed with Dan so much that she’d persuaded herself not only that this was “the culture” but that it was one imposed on her by Mark—professional foister of the newfangled.

  One piece of wild luck—thanks, improbably, to Dan’s calling—she hadn’t uttered Giovana’s name. And her pious words about trust, he might think, were those of a careworn wife—not the residue of her smoldering hexes, honed over months and capped by vindictive God knows what with his employee. Like Bill’s illness coming on the heels of that lunatic foray into Dan’s lair, undeniable reality rained down on her again, pelting shame.

  After a minute, she took the plastic bag hanging from his finger, the fish. So he hadn’t gone to the bar. He’d gone, just as he told her, to the fishermen. Was there anything she didn’t get wrong? She’d let him speak to Vic alone. This, between father and daughter, was a long-anticipated moment—an “iconic” moment, Mark might’ve said if he was writing the copy. And even though she had no wish to deny any impulse of his ever again, she dreaded his inevitable moping and whining. Victoria was very young, but an engagement could go on forever. To Jean the real news was that her daughter was truly happy.

  Back in the kitchen, she turned to the fish, which seemed to be staring up at her as she prepared it for the oven like a corpse for entombment. Perhaps Mark’s trip to the fishermen contained a gesture: making dinner was a ritual and, like most any other ritual, this one offered salvation by minutiae, deliverance for a time from ruin. She thought for a moment of what Larry had said—all we have is the law. Well, a recipe was a local ordinance, and this kitchen was her fiefdom, her command-and-control station. Jean wasn’t going to fall apart. She wasn’t going to drink dinner from a jar. She’d serve the fish à la Grecque—roasted whole with rosemary and lemon—as in the tavernas on that first trip they’d made together to Mykonos, before Vic was born. And now Victoria—who, it seemed to Jean, only a few fish dinners ago didn’t even exist—was engaged to be married. Her gratitude to the newly affianced was inestimable: they alone could restore this family.

  She leaned to look out the door. Mark was walking, all hunched, the phone in his neck. He’d stay outside, she knew, and wait to watch the sun as it slipped behind the hills. She didn’t go out to join him; instead, she returned to the kitchen sink. Through the window she caught sight of Emerald, hovering in the bougainvillea in the last gleam of light. Her wings were beating so fast you could hardly see them, and this added to the impression she gave of being more fish than bird—swimming on air.

  Mark had said no more Brunhilda. He was in his way a participant, she thought, willing some kind of balance. She cut the potatoes into wedges, scattered thick salt and oil over them, and shook them out of the bowl into the pan. And for the first time, she stopped to think about the real “Giovana”—Magdalena, Brunhilda, one and the same, Dan’s bird. How many people had drooled over this young Brazilian? Jean felt weak, as fragile as the sand dollar balanced on the window ledge. With one or two exceptions mostly relating to advice on hairdos, she’d distanced herself from Giovana, made no true acknowledgment of her, after all a real girl somewhere, and so ill used. There was your betrayal of trust, Mrs. H. Jean opened the oven door and shoved in the tray. It was too dark now to see if Emerald was still outside, though she never lingered. Jean wondered where she went. In all her searches through the garden, she’d never found a nest.

  She was going to skip dinner—and the dinner conversation. She scribbled a note about not feeling well, which was true, and put herself to bed in the guest room.

  Jean was on the road at seven and headed for the Domaine du Pêcheur, a dense reserve with a roaring river and the closest thing left on St. Jacques to a wilderness: the Beausoleil project’s field headquarters.

  She was glad to have work t
oday, and this job in particular. In the drive of the Domaine, a couple of old jeeps converged: hardly the media event she’d imagined when she dressed in her airport-and-interviewing skirt. There were only three journalists—Jean, a Mauritian in absurdly oversize sunglasses, and a reporter from Le Quotidien who wandered around the log cabin that belonged to the center.

  The project assistants reminded Jean of a group of prop mistresses before curtain time—they consulted one another in low voices, checked and then rechecked their monitoring equipment and, occasionally, Bud, their ward. Zeb, a zoologist from London, listened to the Mauritian journalist talk about the wildlife program on the Big Island: “complete rescue of the near-extinct pink pigeon and the echo parakeet.” Zeb was nodding so enthusiastically he was practically pecking. But Jean found herself unmoved by the fates of these other birds, despite their equally dramatic dips and resurgences and their more obvious charms, the bright wing coloration. The kestrels were more like her: relatively sedentary and solitary creatures, even their chest feathers were spotted like freckles. No, all her feeling was for the runt, as if he was her family; unpromising though he might seem, he was the one.

  Jean remembered that today was her birthday. Looking over at Bud, the caged prince, she wondered for the first time if all this worked-up survival was the good thing everyone assumed it to be. They were beautiful, the little falcons, and of course she knew the arguments for restocking. But maybe, if they couldn’t rally on their own, the kestrels should be allowed to die out, like the flightless dodo over on Mauritius. Others had survived DDT and habitat loss—for instance, humans. Jockeying made you strong. Or was it going to be prekilled mice forever? Along with egg pulling and egg clutching, artificial incubation and hacking, hand rearing and fostering and predator control?

  She thought of Vic and Vikram beginning their life together, and how unquestioningly happy they must be, with everything falling into place and no end in sight.

  …I know this is paradise

  Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—

  Bonds and gestures pushed to one side

  Like an outdated combine harvester,

  And everyone young going down the long slide

  To happiness, endlessly…

  Larkin again—he saw them going down the long slide “Like free bloody birds.” Would Bud pair up with the right mate when he went down the long slide? They went for the most promising breeder, she knew, but with little or no discernible difference, with nothing like a hip-waist ratio to guide them, how could they tell who that might be? Bud was such a little player, a mold breaker—who was out there waiting for him? Maybe another kestrel, or maybe one very endangered pink pigeon. And she wondered how she’d ever make up for all that she’d done. Her column and even a more in-depth article about species survival seemed ever more abstract.

  Finally the great man appeared: Bruce McGhee, the project’s creator, looking more Old Testament than ever, with his bushy sideburns and ear hair like unblown dandelion fluff. How fitting for a species rescuer, Jean thought, that he resembled God as you first imagine him: the long white beard and look of stern regret, signaling that this pestilence and that drought and those floods hurt him more than they hurt you.

  “Hello, Bruce,” she said in her creamiest, serious-newspaper voice, holding out a hand.

  “Good to see you again,” he said, pumping her hand. He was grayer and more grizzled than when they’d first met. Maybe, Jean thought, it was time Bruce was released back into civilization.

  “We all here?” he said, glancing around as he tucked in his shirttail, obviously disappointed by the small turnout. “Any questions before we get under way?”

  “How do you reckon old Bud here will feed himself in the future?” Jean asked.

  “Good question, Jean. The truth is, this has been a more gradual weaning than it might appear.” He explained that Bud had been let out on occasion and attracted back each time with a pan of mice. Now that daily meal was at an end. She thought Bud was definitely stockier. He looked like he was wearing his own small yoga pants, baggy, then tapering sharply at the twin twigs of his ankles. The littlest kestrel as well as the last, he hopped and dipped his head to both sides and shook out like an Olympic athlete about to begin the event he’d trained for all his life. Which was about right, Jean thought, feeling in her bag for a pen. Bruce, man of few words, lifted his arms.

  It was on her way home that she was overcome, alone in the truck and finally crying: her own foolishness, her busy wrongdoing, but also, just now, the image of Bud. Jean, privileged witness at the moment of freedom not conferred but seized: his initial uncertainty, and then, looking over at his trusted captors, tasting it, soaring. “Just like when you were born,” she said as if her daughter could hear, “your skin hot and slick with that waxy roux of vernix, and I watched as your tiny chest sank, and then rose, and then sank—expelling air, breathing, all by yourself.”

  Jean took a great spluttery gulp and cried a bit more, spasmodically, quieting down. She started along the last big stretch of coast, the heroic landscape. Only a mile to go before their turning, then inland through the hills and beyond, to the red track and, finally, home. She loved this road—for the silver view but also for the promise of arrival, to the zinc-roofed mining office on the steep coconut-littered slope. But was it still, could it possibly remain, the good place?

  “Why are you crying?” she asked herself out loud and not quite rhetorically, rejecting self-pity. Somehow the question demanded a real answer. And then she knew. She’d never released Victoria.

  Instead, Jean had released herself. And, incredibly, it hadn’t struck her all this year. She was away, but Victoria was gone.

  Without any very clear intention, she and Mark had sidestepped the historic moment of their daughter’s flight, the beating of maiden wings, nurtured by good example and bad, perspicacity and neglect, whole food and half food and slow food and fast food, and no home team to cheer her on. This hurts me more than it hurts you. And the feeling that spread through her now was like a kind of pesticide poisoning, Jean thought—its lethal effects might not even show for a generation, grief by then curdled into regret—a vast decrepitude of missed chances. As Victoria, aged five, had asked her parents: What kind of people are you? (She’d just discovered the frozen half lamb, laid out on newspaper in the cool pantry, sawed by the butcher right down the middle.) The kind, Victoria, who chuck the emptying of the nest.

  Just as she parked, it started to rain—an almighty downpour, the kind that couldn’t last. Now great explosions of thunder, and Jean rested her head and closed her eyes, singing a song Gladys used to belt out on stormy nights to beat back Jean’s fear.

  My Lord, he calls me by the thunder,

  The trumpet sounds within-a my soul…

  I ain’t got long to stay here.

  Green trees a-bending, poor sinner stands a-trembling,

  The trumpet sounds within-a my soul…

  I ain’t got long to stay here…

  Trapped in the truck, she wondered how Gladys was. How could she not know—Gladys, the center of her universe for so many years? She sat in the humid cab waiting out the worst of the rain. Before long the windshield was steamed over, and then drops of water started falling inside, faster and faster, watering Jean from a chorus line of dancing droplets all along the edge of the glass, the whole truck threatening to come apart in the wet, like something Victoria used to make in school, from painted egg cartons.

  Rain, rain, rain. Jean thought of that miserable wet afternoon in London just before they came to live here, when she’d seen Sophie de Vilmorin, so utterly bedraggled in the dry cleaner. And the obvious now struck her: the person Sophie reminded her of was Vic. Even if SdV was scrawnier, untended, frightened, and unlikely ever to become engaged to a handsome cosmologist. She wasn’t nefarious; she was just a runt, a trapped Rapunzel—Jean’s specialty. Then, with equally sudden clarity she saw what she wanted to do next. Not her column, which could onl
y offer inadequate solutions to women she’d never meet. And not only a better class of journalism. No, it would be something more direct; she’d go back to the law, and finally use her degree—could you volunteer as a legal adviser at Women’s Aid? But she’d start with Sophie, take her in hand. Why hadn’t she seen it before, this chance to be truly useful?

  Jean made a dash for the house, disappointed to find Mark not there. She wanted to tell him her new plan—before she could think of all the reasons not to carry it out. There was a note. Gone for a walk on the beach. For once, she didn’t read this as code for a jaunt to the Bamboo Bar; she believed him. She dried herself and sat right down at the kitchen table with a new yellow legal pad and Bud’s picture propped against the honey jar. Without moving from her hardback chair she sketched out her piece in twelve paragraphs, and just as she was finishing he came through the kitchen door. Jean didn’t let him catch his breath.

  “Mark, I’ve been thinking. About Sophie de Vilmorin. You know how she’s been on my mind, and how I worried about her hanging around Vic. Well, I got it all wrong. Wait—just hear me out. I know, you’re going to say this is a crazy scheme, but we’ve got to invite her to St. Jacques. Please, hang on a minute before you jump in…” Mark, sitting down, looked decidedly unenthusiastic, even alarmed. “I’m totally serious—and I want to ask you, just give it a little thought before commenting. Vic is growing up; she’s finding her way, and brilliantly. Our job is done—well, for now. Of course she’ll be back, and nothing is ever done. But, don’t you see? It all dovetails. She needs us. Sophie, I mean. And she needs us now. I don’t suppose she has any useful skills, but maybe, when the article is published, I can ask Bruce McGhee if he might take her on at the project. It would restore her completely, you have to see what those kids are doing down there…”

  Jean stood up; she was exhausted but too excited for sitting. Then Mark spoke.