by Dan Noble
Suddenly, I’m in motion, careening around a taco chip display at the end of the aisle in an attempt to conceal myself. I pick up one of the organic styled paper sacks as if to inspect the ingredients, and watch Kennedy’s sandwich get nimbly wrapped. He points to one of the fancy soda bottles in the refrigerator case and the woman in the white apron retrieves it, and tucks both of his items, along with a wad of napkins and two straws, into a rustic paper bag with the Watson’s logo. That should be my straw. Talk about grasping at…
I cannot believe what I’m seeing. Kennedy makes his way to my father, who is just palming his change at the buffet register, balancing on his tray an assortment of fountain sodas beside the hulking Styrofoam container. His pitiably named boys—Leonardo and DaVinci—are already gnawing on a wing apiece, the high-pigment sauces clowning their mouths. My father looks up and Kennedy catches his eye, indicating toward an empty table with six swivel chairs.
My father corrals the boys to the table and they all sit, Kennedy alone on his side, the three Burns men on the other side. Kennedy is gracious and at ease, asking the boys questions that make them squirm and smile. My father cocks his head and folds his hands in a prayer position as if getting down to business. What is the business? Judging from where Kennedy has just come from, it can’t be good. Why else would he go to this extreme? We don’t see my father. There was the one time at our wedding. And of course, Mother’s body-less funeral.
I put the chips down and pick up another bag as if this identical one is more to my liking. Across the way, Kennedy ignores his sandwich and digs inside his jacket pocket, pulling out a leather envelope (we have eight of these from the original design samples sent to his store). I fumble for my bag’s zipper, as if simultaneously holding my own leather envelope will somehow bridge the gap.
From his, he slides out photographs. Even from here, I can tell they are of Rose as Kennedy looks and then rotates them around for my father and the boys to see. Who are they telling these boys Rose is? More photos with Rose “writing” her name, Rose taking her first no-hands goosesteps, and Rose in her first red, shocking, hour of life, swaddled and tight-lidded between my swollen breasts, my robe barely covering a thing.
That’s as much as I can take. I return my attention to the taco chips, putting this second bag down, clumsily, unevenly. As I circle my cart to escape, that row of chip bags topples over onto a woman in a rabbit fur vest who takes the opportunity to draw attention to her expensive blow dry by yelling as if she’d been stabbed.
Everyone looks, but there’s only one person whose reaction I check. Kennedy turns and our eyes lock. He’s got the birth photo in his hands and we both look to it before he excuses himself and comes chasing after me. I run, leaning into the cart to pick up the pace.
In the obscurity of the next aisle, I stake out a hiding spot by the gourmet cheese case. A corpulent man in an elongated chef’s hat approaches from the other side of the counter.
“Yes, ma’am! What can I get for you today?”
I notice his delicate smile—tight lips and miniscule teeth—as he hands me a toothpick-speared chunk of Munster with the one telltale corrugated orange side. In my panic I decide I must purchase something. I know it’s important what I buy, symbols being what they are, and my mind reels. This is when things get tricky.
It’s all well and good to have an idea, but I’ve been chasing the ghosts of these ideas my whole life. This time it has to be put into action. Kennedy has seen me and I can’t pretend anymore.
The cheese monger must sense I’m overwhelmed because he dips a knife into a giant wheel in front of me, even though I haven’t even bitten the Munster, and says, “Try this.” This gentle man holds out the cheese-skewered tip, winking like he’s about to let me in on his best secret, and this—ridiculously—soothes me. There is always cheese.
I reach over a basket of water crackers for the hunk he’s lopped off. It’s creamy and melts on my tongue, pooling at the sides and back, going pungent, then smooth, hitting all the right buds. I’m sure I’m not supposed to eat this. Anything this good has to be forbidden for pregnant women.
I hear tight, determined footsteps that I could identify anywhere as my husband’s.
“A California brie,” the cheese man says. “Small boutique creamery. People kill for this stuff. The town it’s made in, the locals tear the sign down all the time. They’re sick of the tourists.” The taste is divine, and I try hard to concentrate on what he’s saying as if working this out could save me—killing for cheese, tearing down signs.
“A cheese with a story,” I say, mostly to myself.
Kennedy is behind me. Any second he is going to place a hand on my shoulder, and then what? Will I melt into a puddle, which will disappear in a cloud of green smoke? I wish for an escape like during that time at Pinocchio’s office.
“Everything’s got a story these days. Without a story you’ve got nothing. Boy or girl?” the guy asks, passing me the tiniest disk of baguette. People are just starting to notice. That man hamfisting a Day-Glo chicken wing one aisle over is going to be a grandfather. Again. Leonardo and Davinci will twice be uncles. Mother is dead, or gone, or—
On my shoulder, the hand falls, not exactly gently, in its place. I watch the cheese monger’s eyes work out our equation.
“I’m having a boy,” I say, acknowledging the fact grounds me.
“Really?” Kennedy says. “A son? Why didn’t you tell me?”
Why did I say that? Kennedy didn’t want to know. But I did. And I wanted to know about Kancer but he wouldn’t tell me. And apparently, he thought my father should know first. Nanny nanny pooh pooh. Beneath the compulsory adult considerations, I’m just a child.
“You have to be careful what you reveal these days,” I say further proving my immaturity. Shut up, Millie. Shut the frig up. “Did you know people kill for cheese?” I say to my husband. What was the point of all the sucking it up if I was going to do this? Fuck, I hate myself. And I hate how suspicious and distant I feel from the man I love.
After we stay silent another few seconds, the cheese man turns and smiles at the next woman, a dip of the chin begging her patience.
“I’ll take a quarter pound,” I say, desperately buying myself another minute. This man doesn’t know, but neither of us likes scenes.
“Here you go,” he says, and hands over my butcher paper package of cheese people kill for, hide the signs for—the secret cheese. Kennedy reaches out for it. We’re both complicit, the gesture seems to say.
My husband escorts me to the checkout. I don’t know what he’s said to my father, but he’s nowhere in sight. He never liked scenes either. I didn’t see him shed a tear at the funeral. In fact, he looked disgusted with me, as if hugging me were a task too distasteful. I fumble for the change and Kennedy hands it over before I have the chance. The gesture makes me sheepish.
He tucks the bag under his arm and leads me by the waist to his car, opens my door then walks around, sliding into the passenger side. Sighing, Kennedy allows his jaw to drop slightly before he self-corrects. I look to his hands, to the radio buttons he touched on his journey, the rearview where I caught his eyes.
“Anything to say, Mill?” His gaze is trained straight ahead—to the air balloon advertising a discount carwash. God, I wouldn’t mind soaring up on one of those right now.
“Yeah, sure. Crazy seeing you here! And with my father! Why don’t we go around the corner and visit his lovely wife, Tennessee? While we’re skipping down memory lane, maybe that lady who used to talk about all the army wife sluts with VD is still at the Cuckoo Bird Hut; we should check it out. That would be a hoot. Visiting hours are only forty minutes away.” God, why is anger always the lowest hanging fruit?
He turns to me, and this is worse than the not looking; it’s disarming. Even at this juncture he looks so self-contained. I almost believe he could tell Kancer to fuck off.
“Cut the shit, Millie. I know you followed me. I don’t know how you know, or
exactly what you know, but you do know where I went this morning and a bit more than that. And it really shits me. So it looks like we’re both going to have to face up to something in a way we don’t approve of.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Kennedy.” I say it without cadence or emotion. It’s a retreat, a chance for him to go back to pretending if he thinks that’s best, because now I’ve got what I want, I’m worried I didn’t really want it after all. I feel more separate, on different teams.
He searches my face. I try to remain steely. This man appears fine. What his look is saying, as far as my mind goes, is this could all still go away, just like this. If he knocked down the signs like the cheese people, maybe I wasn’t meant to go there after all. I’m just thinking how lovely that would be when I realize it’s as if he has blurred the lines of fact and fiction, too. Kennedy, being literary! Imagine that. I wouldn’t dare say it.
In the distance, like a mirage, I see my father corral the kids into a Ford SUV, and I know I’m kidding myself. Not only can’t we go back, we shouldn’t. What’s known can’t be unknown. What’s unknown should probably fucking stay that way. I shiver. What kind of wisdom can we expect to gain from a move like the one I made today?
He looks at me so long, his finger at his lip, my eye twitches where it feels watched.
Finally, he speaks. “Right, of course you don’t know. Maybe I was confused—” The bridge between the words and the truth stretches for miles. It’s too long for a bridge and I know it.
“Stop. No, obviously I know, Kennedy. I know you’ve been seeing an—” I find it’s one thing reading the word, and it’s something infinitely uglier to utter it, “—an oncologist.”
From the tightening at his features, the pinch of his shoulders, it doesn’t sound so great on the receiving end either.
He strokes my hair, the way he does with Rose, pulls it tight from my forehead. Are there hard C cells just beneath his skin attacking—beneath those fingers that are touching me? He smiles. “I did have it all under control, Millie.”
“Did? What did you have under control?” I ask, terrified, getting it out before it’s too late. There’s a foreign, practiced tone to his voice. How often had I imagined him on his merry way, driving to work, when all the while he was rehearsing this tone, getting the slow cadence, the unspeak-overable volume just perfect?
This erstwhile solid man of ease, with his sloppy give—his stroking of his palm so rapidly, I know he isn’t aware he’s doing it—is the anti-Kennedy. This soothes me slightly, as if I can pretend it’s someone else we’re talking about.
“That’s what I’m getting at, but first I want to explain about your father.” He pauses, his chest shaking out the exhale.
“What’s to explain? You were having lunch with a man who’s basically a stranger to you, who doesn’t know your daughter, who abandoned your wife, likely because you think you’re dying and want us to have my family in your place. It’s all very sensible to me.” Too late, I clamp my hand over my mouth.
He opens his mouth and then shuts it. He looks at me for a long moment. “Are you done with that?”
I nod.
He lowers his gaze until I meet his. In it, I’m trained to see all the male things that Mother had claimed our enemy. Are all men this powerful, or just this one? Either way, I’m so obscured I can’t tell where one of us ends and the other begins. Who’s got the Kancer? Which of us has to sit up on the noisy hygienic paper? However he frames it, however self-sufficient he forces himself to be, he is about to smash my world.
“I know it looks fucked up, Millie, but I want to do what’s best for you. Sometimes, though, means I don’t always know what that means. That was my thinking. Has been my thinking all along.
“And you know the truth is I’d rather do this on my own. You know me, and I don’t have to explain that to you. That’s thanks to what we’ve built, and I believe it’s something—excuse the frou-frou language—magical. I believe it’s what’s helped me all this time.”
All this time? All this time? All this time I’ve been enjoying his parental concern without really considering the burden of it. Suddenly my life of novels and mothering and blocking out my own mother’s mothering seems an indulgence while the real people are off working, protecting their family from the Hard Cs. I can’t believe Kennedy had to get Kancer in order for me to recognize the mountains we’ve erected between us.
Perhaps all our lives are a fiction.
I feel my chin wobble. Oh, stop it. What will crying do? He squeezes tighter and this pushes out the tears. However fucked up our expectations, he is my life. How could I have wound up here—with everything to lose again?
Because it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter even what you think you know. It’s rubbish. This is love. We’re helpless against it. We expect the impossible from it. With each reading we come away with something different. And the truth is, there’s no point to any of the rest without it. The question is, how far are Kennedy and I willing to go in the name of it?
“I wanted to tell you. But how could I? I come home and there you are with Rose and your growing belly—all this fucking unbelievable life that’s everything.” He stops speaking just when I want to tell him to stop fucking speaking. He fears he will crack. I see it in the twitch of his left nostril. But he won’t allow it. He fixes the line of his sight directly on mine.
When did those lines etch the skin above his brow? I want to press my fingers there, smooth them out. I want to have never seen those words on that page. I can’t imagine how many receipts I’ve washed since I stopped looking. And this is exactly what I’m aching for now—complete denial.
And then, all the bits of the car around me are suddenly so hyper-vivid, I have to shield my eyes. There’s a sort of halo around everything. I close my eyes to shut it out, but then the images in my mind are just as brilliant. Some are memories—there’s me and Rose on the swings the other day, and some are from books—the scenes flash so quickly, but I identify that Jane Eyre scene I felt I “lived” that day in Pinocchio’s office all those years ago—the hands carrying me, the deep, almost triumphant connection in pain. There’s another one, a dark-haired man riding a horse, a rock lifted in my hand that I feel myself push away as an intrusive thought. I have to hold on from the dizzying effect.
Seeing myself with the rock is terrifying, not knowing what I’d done, who I’d been with, or whether it was real even. It is not a good sign that this is coming back to me again. Or that I feel a blackout coming on after so many years. I recall my therapist’s words: it’s a defense mechanism. My brain’s way of reacting to stress. Not unlike a panic attack, only a lesser known manifestation of the stress. That’s all this is. There is no “book world.” There’s just me, losing moments here, in this car where my world is crashing in on me.
“I want to know what’s wrong with you,” I say, though I’m trembling, certain the exact opposite is true. “You’ve been found out. You can’t go on pretending you haven’t. I deserve to know what’s going on.”
He droops slightly. “Obviously, you’re right.”
“And there are things I need to tell you.” My words terrify me even though I know he can’t possibly know what those things are. “Listen, why don’t we go home first?” I say, still buying time, hoping the car ride will allow us to consider our positions, make this trembling go away, ground me in reality before it slips completely out from beneath me.
Over the two bridges and the now slowing early rush hour traffic, I must drive my car home, as Kennedy leads the way in his, but I can’t recall a moment of it. Instead, when I pull in the driveway, I can think only of where my mind travelled: I found it easy, comfortable to give in to what I’d fought all these years. First, I focused on one concrete image: the metal box in the yard. The one Pinocchio gave me when Mother disappeared for good. I buried it in the garden without looking. I did not want proof that it was all real. But now I do. Now I am desperate for it.
I am going to alter reality so he does not have Kancer.
I am going to dig it up. I am going to see what is in there. I can no longer pretend it isn’t important. I can no longer pretend I don’t want or need to go where Mother has gone. Even if the possibility is incredibly destabilizing.
I must have been driving, but all I can recall is thinking of the box, its incredible relics, of going over in my mind Mother’s mysterious disappearance.
Words I’d forgotten from Dr. P’s office that day came to me. “If I spoke,” he said, “Emily would turn as if she were listening to me. And if I asked a direct question, say, ‘What year did The Great War start?’ Half the time, she did answer. With words. ‘Nineteen fourteen,’ she’d say. ‘The War to End all Wars.’ And then wouldn’t say anything again for weeks on end. You see what I mean? She could speak. She chose not to.” Had he said those things as I blacked out in his office/felt myself carried away as Jane Eyre in the terrifying upstairs room? What did it mean if Mother could speak? Were those words giving me a clue, and if so, what?
11
MILLIE
“Right,” I say two hours later, heading from the fridge to the table. Inspecting the bowls Kennedy and I had eaten clean, the careful spoon drag lines in the dregs of tomato sauce. I’m surprised at our appetites. Aren’t people supposed to feel sick at the sight of food under such conditions? When I grasp my fingers around my bowl, I have every intention of restarting the conversation from the car, but he seems to have forgotten all about it.
Apparently I’d fallen asleep in my car after I pulled into the drive and he’d carried me to my room. I don’t remember any of that, and since I woke, I’ve been stuck with a feeling of disharmony, the way I imagine a painter would when he discovers what he assumed would occupy the top left corner of his canvas in reality doesn’t feel right.
