She was a milk machine with an infant, a toddler who wanted to nurse again, and a son who complained that she was always too tired to do anything with him. Friends advised her to sleep while the little ones napped, but while they napped, Sharon would sit at the kitchen table, comparing photographs of her new baby to pictures of herself at the same age. Just about identical. Like twins. Her mouth would get dry, all the moisture used up by her eyes, which ran, wetting tissue after tissue, which she left crumpled on the table. She’d look at the photographs and feel like she was disappearing until one day Eleanor found her sitting like that, and slapped the Yellow Pages down in front of her. She told Sharon to pick a psychologist, any one of them, and call. Sharon made an appointment with someone who worked out of a basement office on Hope Street, a block from the public school. While her sister-in-law babysat, Sharon spent an hour talking to a total stranger for no reason she could fathom. And for no reason other than it was the only time she’d had to herself in the whole week, she decided to go back.
One Thursday led to another and when Emmie was about a year old, after one of those sessions, Sharon was taking the girls to the library, pushing the baby in a stroller. Nina was walking and whining about it. She scuffed her new shoes on the sidewalk, rubbing them into the blue and slimy mulberries that had fallen unpicked, looking up at Sharon to make sure she knew it was deliberate. “I want to ride,” Nina said. “It’s no fair.” Again and again. Sharon tried distraction, “Do you see the robin going to her nest?” Threats, “Do you want a time out?” And bribery, “I’ll get you an ice cream cone but only if you behave.”
It was summer, it was hot, and Sharon still nursed at night to get Emmie to sleep. Her right nipple was sore where she’d been bitten. The sky had the smoky look of a heat wave that would never lift. In the playground at Christie Pits, moms and nannies slumped on benches while their children ate sand, threw sand, and stuck twigs into sand birthday cakes. Toddlers chased pigeons, old ladies practised tai chi. Someone, heading into the park with a double stroller, smiled at her sympathetically. Sharon’s back was wet, her T-shirt sticking to her. By the time she got to the convenience store on Hope Street, Nina was stamping her feet and wailing. Sharon pushed down the foot brakes on the stroller and sat on the picnic table at the side of the store, staring at baskets of berries, pots of geraniums, and the blue Christmas lights that decorated the store year-round. She didn’t dare open her mouth, afraid of what would come out. The words shut up came to mind, for starters. The door opened and a couple of big kids came out, sucking on Popsicles.
This was what she heard herself say: “You want a piggyback?”
Nina stopped in mid stamp. “But you got the stroller.”
“Yup. You want to try?”
And Nina came onto her mom’s back, clinging with arms around her neck and feet around her waist. Her mom ran like that for a whole block, pushing the stroller, both kids laughing uproariously. Then all of a sudden, Sharon couldn’t do it. She couldn’t run another step. But Nina came down and walked willingly the rest of the way to the library. Later in the day, an obscene caller phoned the house, interrupting a rerun of The Waltons. She found herself swearing back. In more than one language. At the next session, after she mentioned these odd things, her therapist didn’t seem surprised.
“You’ve talked about things like this before,” she said. Brigitte Felber was a plump, white-haired psychologist from the French part of Switzerland. She never said zis, but carefully articulated the th sound, tongue touching her front teeth. “For example, you told me you picked me out of the Yellow Pages because you hate driving and you can walk here. Yet your first holiday with Dan was a road trip and you did the night driving.”
Sharon nodded, her chest tightening. Sometimes, lately, she didn’t hate driving. The radio would be on, the volume deafening, her hands beating time on the steering wheel.
“You’ve also mentioned that occasionally you forget, for a moment, that Eleanor is your sister-in-law. Especially right after therapy. And sometimes in our sessions your voice sounds very young and I have to explain big words to you. Do you have any thoughts about what could cause all these kinds of things?”
“Alzheimer’s?” Sharon asked, but there was a deeper worry. “Or maybe I’m crazy.” There—she’d said it.
Brigitte shook her head. “You show no signs of dementia and you are assuredly not crazy. Your thinking is fine. You have no delusions.”
“Then why is this happening? Swearing at people on the phone—it’s just not like me.”
“I agree. It isn’t. But there is an explanation. Have you heard of DID? It used to be called multiple personalities. About one in a hundred people are multiple.”
“You mean like Sybil?” Sharon asked.
“No. Not like that. Let me ask you this.” Brigitte smiled as if thinking of some delightfully silly joke. “How long can you stand to be in a mall?”
“An hour,” Sharon said in a small voice. Her first therapist, in the counselling centre at her university, had never asked questions like this. “How did you know?”
“When you have many people in your head, all looking out, all being attracted to different things, a mall is over-stimulating. Like a loud party. But an hour of therapy isn’t long enough for them to talk. I’d like to book you for ninety-minute sessions.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Sharon said. “I don’t like parties because I’m shy. That’s all.”
Brigitte asked, “Are you always shy?” Sharon looked around her sister-in-law’s living room. A graphic designer, a vet, two or three psychologists, an author, a journalist, a photographer, two scientists, a teacher, a linguist and one stay-at-home mom who homeschooled her four kids and made hand-crafted Christmas ornaments to raise funds for the homeless were waiting for Eleanor to open the wine. She collected people, interesting, talented people, even the odd famous one, proving to herself, if not her mother, that dropping out of school had had no ill effect. None of these people would wear a shrunken, past its best-before-date sweater. If the earth had opened up to swallow her, Sharon would have thanked it on bended knee before diving in. One of the psychologists was sitting on the couch, engrossed in conversation with the homeschooling mom. The psychologist wore pointy boots.
“Hi Sharon.” That was Amy Grossman, the vet. She was the mother of a kid in college, her chin-length hair brown with a tasteful touch of red. Once a month Sharon went into her clinic to do the bookkeeping. Amy glanced across the living room to Ingrid, her partner, who was staring out the window. They lived in the other side of Heather’s semi-detached, which they rented from her parents. “We’ve been talking about Heather. You just never know, do you?”
The homeschooling mom, whose name was Sofia Rosales-Oyibo, and Laura Anderson, the psychologist, turned toward Sharon, expectantly. There were things people said when they came together in groups, right things and wrong things, and they knew by instinct which was which, but she’d been born without that instinct and could only stand half-frozen, caught in her awkwardness.
“I guess not,” Sharon said finally. And from inside came a barrage of invective: moron, idiot, useless piece of trash.
Perfume was wafting from the couch, either Laura or Sofia doused in something flowery and old-fashioned and suffocatingly sweet. From inside voices were hissing, You can’t get anything right, you’ll never amount to anything. Sharon could see it was true. Hadn’t she once tried to fix Amy up with a man, too stupid to know that Amy liked girls? And there were worse mistakes, darker ones, hidden ones.
“It’s amazing that the baby survived.” Sofia was reaching for the chips.
“Don’t you think it’s …” Sharon crossed her arms, trying to stay present. “I mean cutting out …”
“Don’t get so grossed out. The baby lived.” Amy dipped her chips in salsa. “The truth is that we’re all animals.”
Meat, just meat. Like the lamb or Miss Piggy or the child of your heart lying blasted on a bed. She coul
dn’t hold on anymore. The room wavered and she was falling inside, someone catching her as someone else moved into her place, switching quickly. Eyes momentarily on the floor, then sideways, making note of all the exits, she looked up, not precisely a she, though that is what the neighbours still saw: a mom like themselves, red haired and skinny, cheeks red with an embarrassment that was starting to fade, walking loose-limbed toward the kitchen.
One minute you were inside, keeping things under control, and then all of a sudden you shot out. Boom. Like that. Crashing through the eyes. So you just had to deal, even though you might be thinking, what the hell am I doing here, I’m not a mom, I’m not even a girl. You’d answer to “Sharon,” put up with the boobs, and piss sitting down as long as you had to be out in the body. He—for Alec was a guy whatever the body was—looked over at the table set with a stack of plates, cream cheese, smoked salmon, guacamole, brie, bagels. His sister-in-law always put on a good spread. At least he’d have something to eat. He was hungrier than the others inside, and taller, and the body had to stretch to accommodate him. On nights when the girls called from their bunk beds, scared of monsters, he’d fold himself in one of their little chairs, keeping guard until they’d fallen asleep again.
Eleanor was in the kitchen, reaching inside the oven. “You were right. I don’t know how the corkscrew got in there. Do you want a glass of wine?”
“Beer. If you got any.” His head hurt from switching hard and fast.
Opening the fridge door, Eleanor took out a bottle. “I want you to do something for me. Go and talk to Ingrid. She heard the shot.”
“No shit.”
“They’ve only been there a few months.” Eleanor had told Ingrid when the house was available for rent. It was perfect, close enough to the university and just a couple of blocks from Amy’s clinic. That was what Eleanor did. She collected people and then she matched them up: you marry her; you work with him; you move into that house. “Now this.”
“Got it.” And he did.
“Wait. There’s more. It was her gun.” Eleanor looked up, daring her sister-in-law to blame her for bringing Ingrid, with her rifle and her handgun, next door to the house of a depressed child. She put the bottle down on the counter, hands on her hips.
“So you ask her to come here where everyone can bug her?”
“She should be with friends. Nobody else knows. Oh, and I’ll want you to take the food over later. You can use the minivan. Go talk to her, okay?” Eleanor pushed her sister-in-law in the general direction of Ingrid as if she had no idea that Sharon was shy. But then he wasn’t Sharon. He just thought most people were assholes. Picking up the beer, he moved toward the food. The salmon smelled good.
“What do you do?” Bonnie was asking, pushing the conversation along while Ingrid stood with her arms crossed.
“I teach at the university.” Trapped between a table crammed with finger food and Bonnie Yoon, the famous author, Ingrid gazed out the window at the small patch of yard, the alley, the backs of other houses pressed together.
“Oh? What do you teach?”
“Astronomy.”
“That must be interesting.”
“Yes.”
Bonnie waited for a question in turn. When none was forthcoming, she fiddled with the gold chain she wore. Her fingernails were painted dark blue. Alec was helping himself to bagel, cream cheese and lox while Ingrid stood quietly, saying nothing until Bonnie moved away, escaping to the hum of conversation at the other end of the room. The lox was good. Alec swallowed it down and slathered guacamole on pita. He didn’t say anything either. Silence never bothered him.
“I should be going,” Ingrid said. With her black hair, her white shirt and her grey eyes, she looked like she’d stepped out of a black and white photograph, not sepia, not old-fashioned, but angled and sharp. She’d moved here from the west to take a tenure-track position. She smelled of cigarettes.
“Lucky you,” he said.
She half-smiled. “I need to drive out to the observatory. I’ll be up all night and I want to air the dogs first.”
“What kind?” He hadn’t thought that the moms would be talking about dogs. He liked dogs.
“Two greyhounds. They’re beautiful but hilarious. They go swift as the wind and then poop right out. Forty-five-mile-per-hour couch potatoes. The rescue foundation got them before they were destroyed.” In her eyes was a hard and steady anger. “That’s what people do when they’re finished with racing greyhounds.” She was quiet another moment then said, “I’m not much of a people person.”
“Me neither. Too many questions.”
Ingrid nodded. “Everyone’s been asking if I noticed anything.”
“Like you want to think about it over and over.” He moved away from the table to make room for Laura and Ana, in a black and gold sari. Right behind them came Sofia, the homeschooling mom, who took up space disproportionate to her physical size as if her good works marched before her. Two of her children were adopted, two of them birth children, all of them biracial. The women descended on the food, saying, I shouldn’t, well just for tonight, you only live once. And before any of them could ask him what he heard or what he saw, he moved further, out the back door, Ingrid following.
Lights went on, triggered by motion detectors. It was cold on the deck and quiet. “I have no idea what I’m doing here.” Ingrid pulled a pack of cigarettes from her pocket and lit up.
“It’s Eleanor. She does this thing.” Alec stepped away from the circle of light, into the shadowy corner of the deck. “You don’t even know how she does it. All of a sudden you are somewhere you had no intention to be.”
Ingrid was standing right under the lamp, her skin paler, her hair darker. “I detest crowds, even faculty functions. Everyone playing games. I’m no good at it. That’s what I like about hunting, it’s clean. You know what you’re there for.”
“And you’re doing something useful, not just talking. What do you shoot with?”
“Remington rifle for deer, shotgun for birds.” She laughed. “I never imagined that a mother of three, here in granola land, would have any interest in hunting.”
“Yeah. Well. You don’t know someone till you do.”
Ingrid took a deep drag on her cigarette, then flicked it into the yard, lighting another. “It was my gun. The kid appropriated it. But it was mine.”
She stood under the porch light, sucking down the nicotine as fast as she could get it into her lungs.
“Feels like you did it?” he asked.
“If we hadn’t rented the house … But our apartment was too small for the dogs.”
He looked over the yard. His eyes were used to making out shapes in the darkness, discriminating between monsters and, say, that ash tree or the tarp thrown over Eleanor’s gas barbecue. “She was the one who took it. And the one who used it.”
“But I was right next door and didn’t give any thought to my gun cabinet except to make sure it met the legal requirements. Anyone could have broken in. I’d just got back from the observatory. I didn’t want to wake up Amy, so I went upstairs to my office.” She glanced at him. “You live that close to someone’s house, you hear things. It can’t be avoided.” She moved her hand as if to stub out the cigarette and say something else, but instead she took another drag, smoking it down to the filter. The backyard faced the railroad tracks a block north, but the track was hidden by trees. “Whatever. There are too many houses jammed together. I don’t know how people can breathe.”
“I like it out here. It’s quiet. Bet it’s a lot quieter when you go hunting.”
“Deer and moose season aren’t till fall. But turkey’s coming up. Can you shoot?”
He was actually a very good shot. But he was here to protect the life, not live it. Everyone inside had to make things look normal. And Sharon hated guns. “I haven’t for a long time,” he said.
Ingrid was taking a pen from her pocket, writing on a scrap of paper. “I’ve really got to go home and let the dogs ou
t. Here’s my e-mail address. If you want to come with me to the shooting range, let me know.”
Alec shoved the piece of paper in his pocket. What else could he do with it? Someone like him didn’t have friends. He did his job. That was all.
CHAPTER
SIX
Alec parked the minivan in front of Rick and Debra’s house, wheels on the sidewalk, hazard lights blinking. Then he stacked the cartons and carried them, two at a time, to the porch before ringing the bell.
“Hi Mrs. Lewis,” Cathy said as she opened the front door.
“I’ve got some stuff here for you,” Alec said. “Did Eleanor phone about it?”
“Oh. We haven’t been answering the phone. Mom!” Cathy called over her shoulder. “Mrs. Lewis is here.” Her parents had raised her with an old-fashioned politeness: never call adults by their first names and other rules that she generally obeyed and her sister had not.
“Tell her to come in.”
“No thanks,” Alec said. “I’d better …”
But Cathy’s mom was at the door, looking with bewilderment at the cartons on her porch as if she didn’t know what to do with them.
“I’ll just bring these in then, okay?” he asked. “Kitchen?”
“Yes. Please,” Debra said—always Debra, never Debbie or Deb, and in her pediatric office, Dr. Dawson. She looked like her daughters, both of them, the one who’d survived and the one who was gone, slender and blonde, though Heather had countered the resemblance by chopping her hair short, sometimes wearing clothes that swallowed her up, leaving her formless, or at other times showing everything she could legally show. Debra dressed tastefully even in grief. As she often told her daughters, People who do well, do well. She worked here in the neighbourhood, her practice on Hammond Street above Magee’s. Parents felt reassured by her assuredness, for she always ordered lots of tests, and they’d heard that in an emergency, someone could even bring a sick kid to her house in the middle of the night.
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