by Ann Packer
“Hey,” I said.
He looked up, and all at once I wished I’d left Katya in the crib.
“Fucking fuck!” he cried as he crossed the room to us.
“This is your niece.”
“Kind of figured.”
“It’s amazing to see you, J.”
He hadn’t shaved in several days, and up close he looked even more tired. Holding out his arms, he said, “Will she come to me?”
Katya buried her face against my chest, and I stroked her head. “She’s a little sleepy now.” I signaled to Marielle to come get her, and then I wrapped my arms around James. He felt thinner than he looked, and he smelled bad, like old cooking oil and unwashed hair. In the days since my father’s death I’d cried so much I was surprised there was more in me, but there was. I cried, he didn’t. “Let go,” he said at last, barely audible, and I stepped away.
Later, back in the shed with Katya and Marielle sleeping inches away from me, I recalled the look on his face when he first caught sight of Katya. It made me uneasy. I remembered being five or six years old and following him around the house as he pointed at things and said, “Want!” Then I thought of the yearning Katya might inspire when she was older, and I was terror-struck again.
• • •
After our father’s funeral, James stayed home for two or three months and then moved back to Eugene, where he’d lived briefly in the early nineties. He sounded pretty good when we talked, so I wasn’t prepared for how unhappy he seemed when he showed up. It wasn’t just the way he went after Robert. There was something sad in his eyes. Even his hands looked sad, the way he held them as he sat, one index finger curled around the other.
I told Marielle I thought it was love troubles. He’d had love complications in the past, or relationship complications, but not love troubles.
Her name was Celia, and as soon as I saw her picture I understood. Faces fit with other faces. Sometimes it’s a match and sometimes it’s a contrast. Theirs was a match. They both had dark eyes and good chins. Their earlobes were the same, long and unattached. They both had strands of wavy hair framing their faces.
Late one afternoon he showed me picture after picture. We were on Rebecca’s couch, sitting opposite the large painting of the land. I loved being there with him and the painting, and I held his computer on my lap and put my feet on the coffee table and sank into the photographs.
They first met in some kind of group, so there were a lot of pictures of her with other people. James liked to take candids and I got to see her unposed, maybe unaware of the camera. Talking to another woman, she leaned forward and held her fingertips to her throat. She had small, plump hands with dimples at the knuckles. In a couple pictures she sat cross-legged on the floor with her children draped over her like shawls and seemed to glow with happiness.
He said he didn’t fall in love right away, but he was drawn to her. She was kind to people. She had a way of listening that made you want to keep talking. He talked and talked and told her he didn’t usually tell people so much about himself. She said, “I hear that a lot.”
We came to a photo of the two of them sitting on a picnic bench in front of a table piled with food. Her hands were together in her lap, one on top of the other, and her head was turned in his direction. He was looking at her, but she didn’t seem to be looking at anything—more looking at nothing because she was listening so carefully.
“That was last spring,” he said.
“She already loved you.”
He tipped his head back against the couch and stared at the ceiling. I put my hand on his, and he let me keep it there for a moment before pulling away to scratch his jaw.
There was a picture of her alone, a close-up of her face and torso. She wore a long, droopy white sweater that flared out at the bottom. The sleeves covered her hands and flared out, too. She was like a cluster of closed white lilies held upside down.
Another one I liked showed her lying on a bed, her head propped in her hand. She wore a bathrobe and her feet were bare.
“Oh, you shouldn’t see that,” James said, reaching for the computer.
I had seen pictures of him with other women, but this was different. Celia was different. Marielle thought so, too, and she hadn’t even seen these pictures. We’d talked about it as we were falling asleep the night before, hoping it would work out for him.
“You’ll love her,” James said.
“Of course I will.”
“No, I mean you’ll really love her. We’ll have you guys for a visit once we get settled. If we get settled. Selling the house will be huge for me.”
I looked across the room at the painting. On that autumn afternoon Rebecca and Walt’s living room had a milky light that seemed to bounce off the walls and hover over the painting like a fine mist. There was a thing I did sometimes, blinking the house into place in the painting and then blinking it out again, but I couldn’t do it now.
“Am I terrible?” he said. “Do you hate me?”
I loved the house, but I knew we couldn’t hold on to it forever, just as I knew that Marielle and Katya and I couldn’t live in the shed forever. My dad’s death had started the clock ticking. I said, “It’s been three years since Dad died. Almost three years. It’s probably time.”
“No, not selling the house,” he said. “Do you hate me about that? I’m sorry, I know it’s not what you want.”
“No, it’s okay. Really, it’s got to happen eventually. You mean Celia?”
“Yeah. Am I terrible?”
“Of course not. It’s complicated, and obviously her kids have to be protected, but can love be terrible? I don’t think so.”
“You’re such a simpleton,” he said, but he closed the computer and put both palms on it and seemed peaceful.
• • •
Living in the shed had changed for us after the Vincents rented the big house. With my father up there, the shed had been like a suite that we occupied in a large shared house that included a lot of land in addition to two separate structures. Once he was gone, our space shrank to the shed and the spur off the driveway. Then Susanna started practice babysitting for us—playing with Katya for half an hour here, an hour there—and we got friendlier with them. They invited us to dinner and while the girls were in another room told us they were worried about Daphne. She had trouble making friends, she didn’t like school, she was terrified of squirrels. “You know that thing ‘failure to thrive’?” Lewis said. “It’s like that, only mental.”
“It’s not only mental,” Lisa said. “She has allergies, she burns after five minutes in the sun.”
“I didn’t mean it’s only mental,” Lewis said. “It’s both. She’s like the boy in the bubble. You remember the boy in the bubble? His immune system didn’t work, so everything affected him? Everything affects her.”
A few days after James showed me the pictures of Celia, I arrived home to find a fire truck parked at the foot of the driveway. I raced down the spur to the shed, dropped my bike, and ran inside, but no one was there. I ran up to the big house, where two EMTs stood at the base of the steps, talking to Marielle. Katya was in her arms and I was worried she’d been hurt, but when she saw me, she wiggled to the ground and ran to greet me. She was wearing a pair of overalls that had originally belonged to Robert’s boys, but Marielle had sewn flowers and butterflies on them, and as she got closer I saw big new daisy patches on the knees.
“Daddy.”
“Look at you,” I said. “Look at those daisies.” I hugged her but kept my eyes on Marielle.
“It’s okay now,” she called.
Holding Katya’s hand, I joined Marielle and the EMTs. Daphne had gotten stuck inside an end table and Lisa had called 911. The EMTs had tried a number of things before finally turning the table on its side. From there they had helped Daphne get one foot free, and after that, the rest was re
latively easy. Daphne was upset but not hurt physically.
“Lewis?” I asked Marielle.
“In Chicago.”
“I guess this is like a cat getting stuck in a tree,” I said to the EMTs. “Or do people really call for that?”
“I never had a cat,” one of them said.
“I had a cat on a roof,” the other said, “but it was hurt.”
They said goodbye and headed down the driveway. I looked at Marielle and shook my head. “Oh, dear.” Dusk was falling fast, and as I glanced up at the house the kitchen lights went on. This illuminated the Halloween silhouettes Lisa had put in the windows, arched black cats and witches with pointy hats. It was a couple days after the holiday, and it wasn’t like her to have left them up. Something was wrong in there. “Should we go check on them?” I said.
Marielle squeezed my hand. “They need to recover.” She put her arm around me and we started down the driveway.
Katya ran ahead and I said, lowering my voice, “That must’ve been awful.”
“It was. Poor Lisa. The firemen kept telling her not to worry, but she was bouleversée.”
“And Daphne?”
“Screaming when we first got there, but she was pretty meek by the end.”
We were almost at the spur where Katya was waiting, and with a look we agreed to finish the conversation after she was in bed.
Dinner was leftover chicken stew, and once Katya was bathed and in her pajamas the three of us sat on the love seat and worked on a story we’d begun a few evenings earlier about a small bear whom we called the Katya bear. In the past Katya always wanted a book, but lately she’d started asking if she could “be the story,” so we had several small Katya-like animals enjoying adventures of one kind or another.
“Tell what she learned,” Katya instructed Marielle. “Tell about how she saw the other bear be stuck.”
“She learned that some places are smaller than they look.”
“But why?”
“Because you can’t always tell what something is like from the outside.”
“Like omelets?”
I smiled at Marielle; Katya had recently discovered that inside an omelet you might find something other than cheese, something dismaying like spinach.
“Kind of like that,” I said.
“Why the other bear got stuck? Why her mama didn’t tell her not to go?”
“I think the mama bear must not have known what her little bear was doing.”
Katya sat in silence for a moment, taking in this troubling idea. “Well, what about . . . what about . . . what about the Katya rabbit?”
“The Katya rabbit is sleeping now,” Marielle said, “and it’s time for that in our house also.”
It had been only a few months since we’d put a bed in the side room for her, and I imagined tonight would be one of the nights when she asked to sleep with us. Instead she slid off the love seat and bowed her head for Marielle’s kiss and then followed me into the other room. It was tiny, with just enough space for the small bed we’d created with cinder blocks and plywood and custom-cut foam rubber; a regular twin wouldn’t fit. We’d been thinking we’d have another three or four years, but now it seemed we’d be gone before she outgrew the room.
I tucked her in and sang a song or two. “I’m sleeping,” she said as I finished. “See my eyes?”
“They’re closed tight.”
“I’m squeezing them.”
“I see that.”
“I’ll squeeze them all night, okay?”
“Okay, baby.”
A little later, Marielle finished with the dishes and joined me on the love seat, her hands still damp as she took my face and kissed me. We sat together, one of her legs draped over one of mine.
I said, “We may be hearing more about that other little bear.”
“Poor little bear. Lisa told me she wouldn’t go to school yesterday. She went today but only lasted till lunchtime. Too bad they wouldn’t let her go with you.”
I had suggested Sand Hill Day when the Vincents first talked about taking Daphne out of the local elementary, but like a lot of people, they thought we were old-fashioned because we didn’t have a computer lab. This was initially a matter of funding, not principle, but as other schools adopted more computer-based learning, we recognized that we wanted to keep our students’ eyes in the classroom.
“We’re not for everyone,” I said.
“Maybe you should offer again, for next year. You could get her in, non?”
Like every private school on the Peninsula, we had more applications than openings, but unlike at most other schools, our admissions process occupied the entire staff, and many children were admitted because of an outside relationship with one teacher or another. As Tom, our director, often said, it wasn’t fair, but it was true. He didn’t mean true in the sense of factual. He meant true in the sense of faithful to who we were. We worked hard to be the community we wanted to be.
I said, “I think so.”
“They should take her to therapy, that’s what they should do.”
“I like it when you’re opinionated. It’s very alluring. Very French.”
“Ach, that did it.”
She was referring to a joke of ours about what did and didn’t turn her on. Usually I could put my thumb on her nipple and move it around a little and she’d get aroused. Other times she was slow to light, like a fire with damp kindling. And then there were occasions like now, when a scrap of conversation got her going and I had to catch up with her.
“Really?” I said.
“Yes, but is our child even asleep?”
I climbed over her and went to the door. I opened it a crack, enough to see Katya’s head on her pillow. Her eyes were no longer squeezed tight, just softly closed.
“She is.”
Getting ready for the night was a little complicated, but we had it down to a science. We’d attached these caps called Magic Sliders to the legs of the love seat, and when we were ready for bed it was easy to slide it out of the way so we could open the Murphy bed. The love seat temporarily blocked access to the bathroom, but you could climb over it.
“It’ll be okay,” Marielle said.
I knew she meant leaving the shed, and I nodded. It would be. Sad but okay. We’d been here almost seven years. I remembered the first time she saw it, about a week after we met: I was living in the big house with my father, and I brought her over to meet him. Penny had been in Taos for several years, but the shed was still full of her stuff, and I showed it to Marielle not with any idea that we might live there together but because she was curious. “Tell me about her,” she said as we stood on the threshold and looked in at the worktable and the narrow bed. “She must have been very sad, no?” I said no, I didn’t think so.
And I didn’t. Thinking of Penny now, I recalled a summer afternoon toward the end of high school when I needed to ask her something. The door to the shed was open, but she wasn’t there: it was empty, her bed neatly made, her worktable cluttered with papers and paints and glues. The extra room was empty, too, and so was the bathroom. I turned around and there she was, coming from the driveway. She was wearing blue espadrilles. I said, “Were you up at the house? I don’t know how I could’ve missed you.” And she said, “Oh, no, when it’s this beautiful out I can’t stay inside and work all day. I went for a stroll. Too bad you didn’t come down sooner, we could’ve gone together.” All those years when we tried so hard to keep her with us: she hadn’t wanted to go that far away.
“You’re thinking about your mother,” Marielle said.
I smiled, loving the way she understood me.
“I can’t believe James hasn’t talked to her since Robert and Jen’s wedding. Do you think he really didn’t speak to her at our wedding? The whole weekend?”
“It’s possible,” I said. James
had stayed with Robert and Jen that weekend, the house overflowing with Marielle’s family.
“Maybe you should help him call her.”
“That’s a good idea.”
“Come here,” she said, and I walked into her arms.
• • •
Sand Hill Day School was located on Cañada Road, on land formerly used for grazing cattle. It was made up of a series of low-slung dark brown buildings connected by covered walkways. The idea was that in the rain you would be able to go from building to building without getting wet, but unfortunately this wasn’t true. Because of the way the buildings were sited, even the lightest rainfall was blown sideways, and a quick walk during a downpour guaranteed a drenching.
For this reason we kept dozens of plastic ponchos near the classroom doors. The ponchos were color-coded so the students didn’t have to bother opening one and looking for a size tag, they just reached for the right color: red for the big kids, green for the in-betweeners, blue for the little guys. In October or November, whenever the first storm of the season hit us, we taught the new children how to pull on a blue poncho and duck their heads and go. Every Sand Hill Day student got this lesson, which was how the phrase “grab a blue” entered our lexicon as a metaphor. It meant something like “get ready” but without any admonishment, more with encouragement and confidence. When we told a student to grab a blue, we were telling her that we knew she already possessed the skills to tackle the challenge at hand. We were saying: “You can do this.”
It seemed to me that Daphne didn’t know how to grab a blue. It rained the day after Lisa called the EMTs, and once my students left I shook out the wet ponchos and thought maybe Marielle was right and I should bring it up with the Vincents again, Sand Hill Day as a possible alternative.
