And Give You Peace

by Jessica Treadway

  My brain darts back to the date of Pete’s first hospitalization: June nineteenth. “So he would have gotten the letter that day?”

  “Bingo.” Now Ben points as if aiming a pistol at me, and pretends to shoot. I duck my eyes without thinking and he says, “Oh, shit, Ana. I’m an idiot.”

  “It’s okay,” I say, though any mention of guns still gives me a quick jab in the heart. I try to concentrate on what Ben’s just told me. “Jesus. We couldn’t have invented a better script.” The deadline is approaching for submissions to a big psychology conference next spring, and we’ll be able to whip up an abstract based on this new information.

  “I know.” We sit there without speaking further while Ben finishes my cake. He takes his time licking the last of it from the fork tines. “Do you think,” he says, after a few moments, “that if you had the choice, you’d ever want to be like him?”

  “You mean Pete?” Once again I marvel at the way Ben has intuited my most secret of thoughts. I’ve never mentioned to him the perverse jealousy I sometimes feel when I think about the possibility of painful memories being completely banished from the mind.

  “If you could. Forget everything.” Then he puts a hand out and covers mine with his own. It’s a very un-Ben-like gesture, and the feel of his touch brings me tears. “Would you?”

  I think of my nephew’s first day of nursery school. Jake was silent on the whole car ride over, Justine told me; when she kissed him good-bye, he wouldn’t look at her. On the ride home, she asked him how it had gone. “Well,” Jake said from his car seat, meeting her eyes in the rearview mirror, “when you left I was annoyed, and in the middle I was nervous, but then we had Circle and I was happy.”

  The memory of Justine telling me this makes me smile. “No,” I tell Ben, and he nods, as if I’ve given the response he expected. It would surprise him to learn I’ve surprised myself with my answer. But it’s the truth. And knowing this causes a cave to widen inside my heart, as if making room for something to move in.

  Driving to campus every day, I always take the same route along the river. There’s a certain office I always look for, on the third floor of a ten-story building behind a nursery-school playground. The office belongs to a woman who appears to be a little older than me, but not by much, and if she’s sitting at her desk I can watch her, especially if traffic is stalled to a crawl. To myself, I’ve named the woman Charlie, because she reminds me of the glamorous lady executive in those old Charlie perfume ads.

  Most of the time she is sitting at her desk, with her back to the window, when I drive by. I watch her hunching over her papers with a pen twiddling between her fingers, and I wonder what she is reading—are there words on those pages, or figures? Projections for the future, or appraisals of the past? A couple of times I have seen her get up from her desk to stretch or walk out of the office, and other times I’ve watched as she talked on the telephone while walking back and forth in a path on the carpet, the cord twisted around her hand. She wears a navy blue suit more often than anything else, and she rotates the color of scarves around her neck. In winter she leaves her hair long, but in warm weather she fastens it back with barrettes or a band.

  Once, last summer, she was leaning her forehead into the window and looking out at the river with her fingertips pressed tight against the glass. Her posture was one of despair, and I waited to see if she would wipe away tears. But she didn’t move until someone else, another woman, came into the office, stood on the other side of the desk, and seemed to say something. Charlie took her fingers down from the window and turned, and then I lost her because traffic forced me to move forward. Her office was dark for three weeks after that day, but of course I never knew whether her absence had anything to do with the moment I’d witnessed. She might have had a vacation already planned for that time. I preferred, though, to believe that something had shaken her soul—something it would take her a long time to get over, or to get through. It’s not that I wished anything bad on her. But other people’s distress tends to comfort me. I used to feel guilty about this, until I realized that such comfort is a form of sympathy—“the one poor word,” George Eliot wrote, “which includes all our best insight and our best love.”

  Today, Charlie seems to be in a good mood. She hangs up the phone laughing and shoots a rubber band at the wall. It’s a Friday in November, it feels like snow, and maybe she is thinking of leaving work early, before the roads get jammed. I watch her neaten the stacks of paper on her desk, sharpen a pencil, jot a few things onto a pad. She shrugs into her coat and hesitates with her hand on the light switch to look out the window, as if she knows someone is watching. And then the room goes dark.

  On Saturday night the snow is still falling, but the newscasters have stopped warning people to stay off the roads. I am twelve, no one has died yet, everything is still possible in the world. We drive into Albany to see Jaws II at the Taft Theater, then buy a pizza from Antonelli’s to take home. It turned dark while we were inside, and we ride back to Ashmont in high spirits as the windshield wipers whine across the glass. Justine hums the shark theme music as she tiptoes her fingers across my lap to tickle Meggy, who shrieks even though she has seen it coming. In the front seat, my parents smile at each other and touch hands in the space between them.

  At home, my mother runs a bath while my father puts out the pizza. Last one in is a rotten egg. The three of us get wet quickly, briefly, then step into our towels. We put on our pajamas and pitch like madmen downstairs to the family room, where he’s set up the TV tables for dinner. My father catches my mother around the waist and draws her close in a kiss. Justine goes “Ooh, ooh” and Meggy says “Yuck” and makes a face. My mother moves to pull away, but my father tightens his grip and whispers a line from that old movie, the one I’ve heard them quote from so often over the years.

  “’Life’s a funny thing,’” my father says, and my mother, wriggling, picks up her cue: “’Compared to what?’” Then they laugh and my mother tries to escape him. But he holds on; he will not let her go.

  Acknowledgments

  For their sustaining support and encouragement during the writing of this book, I am indebted to, among others, the following: my family (especially my sister, Molly Treadway Johnson), Kathleen Wolf and Michael Glenn, the Elizabeths Berg and Searle, Debra Spark, Joan Wickersham, Charlotte Troyanowski, Kay Sweeney, Dawn Skorczewski, Jean and Jim Lucey, Donna and Larry Stein, the third-floor group, the Sunday-night group, and my own dear Anastasia; Richard Parks, the kindest, most patient agent and buoy; and, finally, Fiona McCrae, editor and friend nonpareil.

  My gratitude, as well, to the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

  JESSICA TREADWAY’s first book, Absent Without Leave and Other Stories, received the John C. Zacharis First Book Award in 1993. A native of upstate New York and formerly a reporter for United Press International, she teaches creative writing and literature at Emerson College in Boston. She was a Fellow at the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College and is the recipient of awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the National Endowment for the Arts.

  The text of And Give You Peace has been set in 11/15 Joanna, a typeface designed by English artist Eric Gill (1882–1940) and cut by the Caslon Foundry, London, in 1930.

  This book was designed by Wendy Holdman, typeset by Stanton Publication Services, Inc., and manufactured by Bang Printing on acid-free paper.