Juno's Swans

by Tamsen Wolff

  Lois was still in the hospital.

  I had watched him that morning, Chester the white cat, make a crazed lunge for a bird perched on the ledge of the porch. His full-body leap in the air made him look like a furry bungee jumper, the furious stretch, the hope and elation in it. My heart stretched its rubbery cord bounding up and out with him. I hoped he would take the bird, his first, maybe his only. He had slipped past my legs the day before, when I was standing with the sliding door open, staring into space, thinking about Sarah. Now I could not get him to come to the door of the house even with the promise of open cans of cat food.

  “Good for him,” Titch said tonelessly.

  “I don’t know if I can lure him back in,” I said, mostly to keep talking. She didn’t respond. “I’m kind of worried about him,” I said. “Not to mention the Davidsons.”

  “It’s your fault,” she said eventually, “for taking him to the beach.” But her heart wasn’t in it.

  I had forgotten. I had forgotten that the first weekend we came I insisted, as a lark, on taking Chester to the beach. He had never been out of the house before. We packed a picnic of cheese sandwiches and a little tuna fish for him, but he was too wretched to eat it and sat on the sand, tail lashing, trembling at the sight of the ocean.

  “You gave him a taste for freedom,” Titch added, sadly. “You know that right? You gave him a sense of a whole other world. He’ll never know how to be happy indoors now.”

  “It’s not looking good for Lois,” my mother said, in her practical way, the following night. When I didn’t say anything, she added, “I spoke with Randy. Lois is not responding well to the treatment. Some kind of secondary infection set in.”

  And: “You must be lonely out there without Titch.”

  It was lonely at the Davidsons’. I couldn’t see how I could miss Titch since I hadn’t been living with her, but it was strange in the house without her. After only two days the plants were listless, and Jack the cat was even more than usually on edge without Chester. He would walk back and forth in the kitchen, his nails clicking on the Mexican tiles, his tail twitching, his ears swiveling to and fro, crying incessantly. After I talked to my mother, I grabbed some clothes, fled the house, and drove to Sarah’s.

  “Is Lois going to make it?” Sarah asked, sympathetically, that night in bed, after I climbed in beside her. I couldn’t really make sense of the question. The words bobbled in the air. My eyes swam.

  But Lois wasn’t the one who died. Instead I got another call.

  CHAPTER 29

  There’s been an accident,” Titch said.

  It was five o’clock in the afternoon, six days after Titch had gone home, the seventeenth of August, still hot out, the threat of thunderstorms hovering. There were only four days left of the workshop, we were deep in rehearsals. I was in Truro and I was running late. I was supposed to be meeting Sarah in Wellfleet for dinner before heading over to the rehearsal space. The sky rumbled ominously in the background just as Titch spoke. Her voice was uncharacteristically high and tremulous, piercing.

  “Jason, Jason Peters, the MP’s Jason was in an accident. He was in a really bad car accident, Nina. Amy Klein’s mom hit him with her car at Ledyard Bridge and nobody knows where the MP is. Do you know? Because Jason was asking for his dad. When he woke up, he was asking. And Jason’s mom doesn’t know where his dad is. Nobody knows where the MP is. You’ve got to tell if you do. They have to find him. Amy’s freaking out, her mom is sedated. Everyone is losing their minds here.”

  “Okay,” I said, “okay.”

  I was shaking. I had just stepped out of the shower and my towel had slipped to my knees. I focused on pulling it back up and tucked the top in as firmly as I could. The phone fell off my shoulder onto the bed while I was doing this, but Titch never noticed because she was talking and talking. I could hear her muffled voice in the bedspread while I dug around in the pile of envelopes in the drawer by the bed and scrabbled through them. It smelled like singed hair in the room, like rank fear. My fingers were thick and stupid. I put the receiver back to my ear, but I couldn’t focus on the post dates and the water from my hands and wet hair was making the letter paper pulpy and clumped together. Titch was talking nonstop, her voice dipping and shivering.

  “He was swimming in the river, Jason, he was just swimming with Brian McNulty, and he just came up I guess and ran over the road to the boathouse, and Amy said that her mother just didn’t see him at all until she ran right into him and he’s been asking for his dad, when he was conscious he was asking for his dad and nobody could tell him anything and now he’s back in the coma, but I thought you’ve got to know, right? I mean he told you, right?”

  I had found the letter with the MP’s itinerary, with numbers and dates lurching about on it. I gave Titch the motel numbers for the month. She repeated the numbers back urgently, snapping a little, like a manic operator, and started to say goodbye in a rush when I broke in.

  “But, Titch, listen. Stop. Titch. This doesn’t come from me, it can’t come from me. Okay? This is important. I don’t want it to come from me because why would I have this information? I can’t be connected to him.”

  “Oh for Christ’s sake, Nina,” she burst out, “who cares? Jason could be dying. He’s in a coma. He needs his dad. They don’t know if he’s ever going to wake up. What the hell is wrong with you? It’s not always all about you.”

  Then with very deep hatred, nearly spitting, she said, “Everything is not about you.” And she hung up, with a great bone-rattling bang.

  I sat with the receiver between my knees until the buzzing came on that’s so loud it broke through and then I put the receiver back in the cradle, super gently.

  I did not think about Jason, about our long-ago one-time conversation on the bleachers, the blueness of his eyes, the sun illuminating the back of his intact head. I did not think about the impact of the car, the adrenaline that must have flooded Mrs. Klein’s heart, the way she drove her foot down on the brake pedal when his shocked eyes locked with hers through the windshield. I did not think about the tires squealing or the sound of Jason’s femur bone and pelvis snapping like dry tinder, his body bouncing to the pavement and then not moving. I did not think about Mrs. Klein stumbling out of her car, collapsing beside him on the road, her legs giving away; the terrible keening, the terrible silence.

  I thought about Jason’s voice, when it finally emerged, his wondering parched voice, asking for his father in the hospital. I thought about the MP finding out that Jason had asked for him, that he had asked for him when he woke up and that the MP had not been there, that the MP did not know that he was the one who was summoned, he was the one who was wanted.

  I thought about calling the MP then and letting him know what had happened, except it seemed totally wrong for that news to come from me. It didn’t seem like it had anything to do with me. I thought about how angry Titch was, how far away. And I was thinking about the MP far away too, somewhere out there in the Alaskan wilderness with his backpack on, eating his freeze-dried meals out of powder and water, not knowing, taking notes on the wildlife, looking at the birds through his binoculars, his son lying in a coma in the hospital, all the while not knowing. I was thinking about that precious, precious time before you know, before the piano falls from the sky on your head. Sitting on the edge of the bed, I held my breath and wished hard, I wished with all my might, that he was really happy right now, wherever he was, in his last minutes of not knowing.

  Then I went in search of Sarah. She was at Luke’s house, sitting at the kitchen table with a beer, peeling the label off the bottle and laughing. I saw her through the window first, and I stood there watching for a minute, feeling small and lost. It was getting dark and the birds were gathering in noisy clusters overhead, arguing, visiting, comparing notes on the day. Through the window, it seemed to me that Sarah was the source of all the heat and light in the room, that everythin
g bright and inviting was emanating from her. It was chilly outside and my fingers were stiff. I thought, I’ll warm my hands by her. When I came in nobody paused, the flow of talk continued unchecked. The Beatles were singing “Ticket to Ride.” Luke gave me a giant affectionate smile, which bathed my heart. Then I slipped in beside Sarah on the high-backed bench and she curved into my side, not even looking in my direction, mid-conversation, threading her fingers through mine, miraculously anchoring me, shoring up my faltering self, the way she did that very first time and every other time she took my hand in hers. Bravely and hand in hand.

  Jason didn’t die, but he lost all movement from the waist down, which seemed almost worse somehow. I still think about him running across the green soccer field focused and keen in his white shorts, sweat on his forehead, serious and lovely, intent like only boys following a ball seem to be. I think about him more than I think about his father, if you want to know.

  The MP never found out, because the MP was dead. It’s possible that around the time I was wishing that his last few minutes would be undisturbed he might actually have been having his last few minutes. He never applied for any other jobs. He quit because someone threatened to turn him in. Not about me, although maybe in part because of the rumors about the girl before me. Or maybe he knew that was coming next. Mostly though, he had been embezzling money. (What money? Embezzling from where? Titch would say. The teachers’ retirement kitty? Madame Henderson’s Montreal trip fund?) He made it to Alaska and then he shot himself in the head. I kind of like to think it was on an ice floe, but the truth is that it happened in a ratty little motel room.

  Titch called to tell me. I had spent the day struggling through our first run-through of Three Sisters, and there were a dizzying number of rehearsals and locations and people and lines and exits and entrances and props and cues to remember. She called the gallery to look for me, and then she called the main number during our dinner break. Ann found me outside and said there was a phone call. I was looking at scattered clusters of actors eating, lounging, talking, napping on the floor in the gallery, while Titch was telling me that the MP was dead, that he had killed himself. I felt the MP—who had never existed here in this space with these people, who I had cut loose, given the slip, who was supposed to be gone—I felt his death attempt to reassert his presence, to demand a place, to drag loss, and worse, into the room. I found myself carefully, methodically displacing what Titch was saying, picking up the ugly squarish package of it—like picking up a head itself on the stage, a prop piece decapitated head—and moving it to one side, to the wings. I did this so that the mountain of performance minutiae from the day—also my life—could stay center stage, could still take up its necessary active square footage in my head. I did this too so that the information could not attach itself to me, so that it had nothing to do with me.

  I thanked Titch for calling; I said I had to go. Rehearsal was starting right back up, and I didn’t say anything to anyone. I sat watching the fourth act, which I hadn’t seen all the way through before, and in which I had nothing to do. Occasionally the thought—the MP is dead, he killed himself—would flicker past, but then my brain would kick in officiously, like a British policeman, a bobby swinging a nightstick saying briskly, Move along, nothing to see here.

  I could never have imagined this ending for the MP. I was so sure of what I knew, but what did I know? I could not have imagined it. Tiny cold filaments of doubt crept through me. I tried to keep my attention captive to what was in the room at the moment.

  Sarah was on book, sitting on a tall stool off to the side with one foot on the floor, and one foot hooked around a rung, mouthing along with the lines, her finger in the script, watching the actors. Periodically I would watch her watching the actors, but she was like a buoy bobbing hazily on the far horizon. I felt completely unconnected to her.

  Everyone is hurtling forward on their own trajectories. You think it has something to do with you.

  It might.

  It probably doesn’t.

  I tried to focus on the actors, but I was equally removed from the story inexorably trudging forward in front of me. Except for one moment.

  Geoffrey was playing Chebutykin, the old army captain, the old family friend who has known the sisters since birth, who was in love with their mother. I found myself drawn in by his generous anchoring presence, his openhearted tiredness and good humor. The girl who was playing Masha in this act asked him:

  Did you love my mother?

  And he said: Very much.

  When Masha hesitated, Sarah prompted her next line: Did she love you?

  Did she love you?

  He paused.

  That I can’t remember.

  That I can’t remember. When he said that, I thought for a fleeting instant that I might cry, the way you sometimes think you might sneeze, but I waited, and it passed.

  CHAPTER 30

  On top of everything else, the Davidsons had called to say they were coming home early, they would be back on Sunday, at which point I would have to be moved out of their house.

  “What are you going to do?” Titch asked me, soberly. I had called to ask about sending her stuff and to follow up on the plant situation, since I was afraid I had killed one of the spider ferns. This was not long after the murky underwater conversation when she had called to tell me about the MP. I could tell she thought I had called her back to talk about it. I could tell she was waiting for me to react this time and when I didn’t—I still couldn’t, it was like I had dipped into a well inside me when she said he’s dead and I had pulled up an empty bucket—she and I had entered an even more alienated place than before.

  Now there were short questions and shorter answers.

  “What about your mom?” Titch asked. “You know Kay would be ecstatic to have you back.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know. It’s not like she came home for me,” I said, trying to cover the sliver of self-pity in my voice, “She came home for her mother.”

  “How do you know that?” asked Titch, fighting irritation, and, “Who cares? What does that matter anyway? She’s home now. Don’t you want to spend some time with her?”

  Too late I thought, She’s talking about Lois, she’s thinking about her mom, about not having enough time with her mom, but, “No,” I had already blurted, and she said, “Well then you’re a bigger idiot than I thought you were.”

  I was silent, realizing how she’d heard what I’d said, not knowing how to go back.

  “What are you going to do then?” she asked again, curtly, after a pause.

  “I don’t know,” I said, but I did know, I had the feeling of a plan forming underneath my rib cage, expanding. I would stay. I would stay with Sarah. I wouldn’t go back. What was I going back to anyway? High school pettiness. My mother who was probably packing to leave for another continent right now. My grandmother. I did stop there. I thought about her wispy hair, the curve of her spine, the way she would pat my knee absently or squeak if I came up behind her suddenly. About the companionship of sitting together silently over early dinners of bread and butter sandwiches with the light fading, the warmth of the woodstove at our backs. But then I thought about how she could have that milky, otherworldly, patient look, that waiting for the spaceship waiting to die look, and, although this terrifying thought was unthinkable: I don’t want to be there when she dies. I don’t want to be alone with her when she dies. And I’ll visit. Sarah will come with me. But Sarah was my home; Sarah was where I knew I wanted to be. How are we going to live our lives? Bravely and hand in hand. We could stay on the Cape and when it was time we would move to the city and she would go back to school and I would, what. Finish high school here, or in the city? And apply to colleges this fall? Or next year? Would I be allowed to do that? Here I paused again. But I clung to the burning light of Sarah at the middle of the thought, the absolute glowing certainty of her. The two of us together. C
oupled and inseparable. The truth of it dazzled me. You’re my person. And I thought, that’s it. It’s already done.

  “I’m staying here,” I said.

  Titch paused.

  “You can’t,” she said, sounding genuinely puzzled.

  I didn’t say anything. I felt like I could hear her tension crackling in the silence.

  “Okay, what about school?” she said tightly. “You have to go to school. What about college? What about our applications? It’s senior year, Nina.”

  “I know that. I’m only a semester away from enough credits to graduate. I can pick them up whenever,” I said broadly, dismissively. I felt relieved and magnanimous. It was decided.

  “Whenever? Whenever? What are you talking about?” Now Titch was getting really mad. She was snorting through her nose when she spoke.

  But I didn’t want to have the conversation anymore. I wanted to run to Sarah and tell her what I’d decided. I wanted to get out from under Titch and all her narrowness, her judgment, her thinking she knew me.

  “I was going to do it anyway,” I said, which I believed was true.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I was going to New York with Sarah anyway after graduation.”

  Now it got dangerously quiet at Titch’s end. Or maybe she was just shocked.

  “She asked you?”

  “Of course,” I said, although actually we’d never talked about anything so specific. But if we were going to share our lives, what else would we do?

  My mother called. “Is it true?” she asked, her voice stretched painfully tight.

  I didn’t say anything for a moment. Heat seized my scalp. I was terrified.

  “Um,” I started.

  She hung up.

  She called again. She was yelling and I immediately lost what she was saying as she was saying it, as though it went under a wave. Her anger was a huge, obliterating wall of noise. After several minutes she stopped yelling and began firing questions, which she clearly did not expect me to answer. The only difference was that her voice curved upward at the end. These I was mostly able to make out. Among them: