by T. Greenwood
I live alone now, but I am not lonely.
I am a creature of habit, and each of my customs involves daily interactions with my neighbors. If I don’t show up for my coffee and raspberry scone at the Daybreak Café or at the library or at Theo’s, where I get a Greek salad every day for lunch, I’ll be missed. If I fail to stop by the little pub where I like to have a pint of stout before going for my nightly swim, Juan Gaddis, the bartender, will miss me, maybe even send someone over to the cottages to check in. Once when I was sick with a cold and didn’t appear for my nightly pint, he came over himself and knocked on my door. Since Lou died, these are my caretakers. My friends.
Each night I turn on the Christmas lights I have strung along my porch like twinkling stars, and I click them off when I wake. It is my silent signal that all is well, that I have survived another night. And in the morning, Pete, who owns and manages the cottages, delivers my newspaper to my door while I swim. He would notice if I didn’t wake up.
Of course Gussy would also know if something were amiss. As would Francesca, if I failed to answer my phone for her Sunday call. Only Mouse might not notice, at least not right away, if I disappeared off the face of the earth.
The fog is still thick, and I walk the six blocks from the coffee shop to the library, unable to see more than one block ahead at a time. I am surprised every time a fellow pedestrian comes into view. They appear suddenly, emerging from the haze like apparitions: Bob Hudson, who owns the jewelry shop; a floppy-haired teenage boy on a skateboard; a sullen homeless woman in a bathrobe and boots, clutching a battered phone book under her arm. I see her most mornings; sometimes she asks me if I have a quarter so she can make a call. I wonder who she’s looking for in those tattered pages.
It’s chilly without the sun, but I also know that by noon the sun will have won in this struggle with the fog. For now, I wrap my cardigan more tightly around me, knowing that for the walk home, I won’t need it.
The library doesn’t open for another ten minutes, but I have to walk past a half-dozen people waiting outside. When Linda unlocks the doors they’ll all go straight to the computers. Like them, I don’t have a computer in my cottage, though Francesca keeps trying to buy me one. She went so far once as to send me an Apple Store gift card with explicit instructions as to what to buy. I even made the trek to the store at the mall, allowed a salesman to ring all the bells and blow all the whistles for me, but I left empty-handed, leaving him red-faced at the display. I am happy to use the computers at the library. And when I’m done, the computer stays right there. I’ve seen how lost people get on the Internet, tapping away frantically. Teenagers lined up in a row not speaking to each other, but rather clicking away on their Facebook pages, sending e-mails, instant messaging, ignoring one another in favor of their virtual friends. Watching them makes me feel strangely lonely.
Linda waves at me through the glass and unlocks the door, ushering me in and telling those waiting outside, “Five more minutes.”
“Pretty sweater,” she says to me.
“Thanks,” I say.
Linda’s husband died last year after a boating accident in Mission Bay, but her cheer is unwavering. I know it is in part because of her son. Robert had just graduated high school when the accident happened. He’s delaying college for a year now, staying at home to help out. He is inside already, flicking on all of the fluorescent lights.
“Good morning,” I say, and he nods silently at me.
He is at the library all day long every day. I know Linda is trying to keep him close. But despite proximity, they rarely speak to each other. I watch them, and it makes my heart ache. I try to imagine them at home, moving around that empty house filled only with their grief, and it pains me. I felt the same way after Lou died, like a single marble rolling around inside an elaborate maze, looking for a way out.
I push the cart full of library books waiting to be returned to the shelves into the children’s room. And I take my time; after nearly a decade of volunteering here, I am familiar with every single book. I have repaired hundreds of them myself. I know each of them simply by the feel of their cracked spines in my hands. After I have finished putting the books away, I settle down at the librarian’s desk and wait for the computer to boot up. After last year’s budget cuts, the children’s librarian position was reduced to half time. I am here more than she is now, and so I have taken over some of her duties. I conduct the Wednesday morning story time, reading to a crowd of mothers and their squirming toddlers. I assist the teachers from the elementary school across the street who bring their students over once a week to pick out books. Today she has left a note asking if I can make a wish list by looking at recent award winners and starred reviews in the Library Journal. This is one of my favorite jobs, though we rarely have enough funds to purchase even a fraction of the books on my list.
I spend an hour or so compiling a thoughtful list of new picture books, middle-grade chapter books, and young adult novels. Robert comes in as I’m finishing up and slumps down into one of the beanbag chairs near the puppet theatre. He sighs and puts his hands behind his head. Linda told me a few months back that he hasn’t cried yet, not even once, about his father. I suspect they’re both trying to be brave for each other, but to what end? I can see his sorrow. I can feel it; it’s palpable.
“Would you like to read to the kids today?” I ask, and he shrugs.
I have discovered that this is something he is really good at, and the children love him. While he rarely speaks to anyone else, he comes alive when he reads for the kids. He changes his voices for all of the characters, making the children laugh. For the half hour of story time he loses his sullenness. His sadness. It’s all I have to offer him. And so after the mothers and their children have come in and settled down on the colorful carpet, after Robert has selected a stack full of books to read, I settle back in at the computer.
I am not even sure what I am planning to do, but it can’t hurt to browse some of the travel sites Gussy mentioned. Check out the airfare specials. Now that summer is over, I imagine I could probably get a deal. If I change my mind and decide to go. It amazes me how simple it is to make such an enormous decision; a couple clicks of the mouse, a credit card number, and suddenly I could be going home.
I try to imagine leaving, returning to Vermont if even only for a couple of weeks. The possible disruption in my routine worries me a little; I tick through a checklist of all those people who might notice my absence during those two weeks, the people I would have to let know I’d be gone. I tell myself that if I were to leave, if I were to actually take Gussy up on her invitation, I would be missed.
I look up at Robert, who is impersonating a bear, his face and body and voice transformed by the story, and see that Linda is standing in the doorway watching. She smiles as she watches him, and catches my eye. “Thank you,” she mouths, and I nod.
I worry that without me here Linda might fall apart. I have heard her crying in the bathroom. I have seen her sit in her car eating her lunch, her eyes wet with tears. What would she do if I were to leave?
I stare at the computer screen, and I feel short of breath, a heat spreading through my body. And so I stop. And I think about what Lou would say, if Lou (logical Lou) were still here to help me keep the past in the past.
I’ve made a life here. Why would I want to revisit this? It’s not as though Eva is still alive. When I speak of Eva now, I distill things, reducing her and everything that happened into a single, aching anecdote, offering only a shadow to prove there was a sun. I’m sorry, was all that Lou had said when I explained what happened, as I uttered their names like sharp slivers: Eva, Donna, Sally, Johnny.
Johnny. His name feels like a sharp knife in my chest. I try to picture what he might look like now, what sort of man that little boy became. But every time I try to assemble the details of his face, I see only his boyish cheeks flushed pink, a coonskin cap cocked crookedly on his head, his tiny hands pulling the trigger of his Daisy rifle. Pop,
pop, pop. What does he want with me? Why can’t he let me be?
The girls and I were scheduled to leave for Vermont at the end of July. Usually, it was my favorite moment of the whole summer; climbing the steps onto the Boston & Maine as the sun rose meant that by the end of the day we’d be pulling into the station in Two Rivers, and that Gussy and Frank would be waiting to pick us up and drive us north to Lake Gormlaith. Even though I’d fled Vermont years ago, it was a place I still longed for. Ached for. Gussy and Frank’s camp offered everything I loved about Vermont, but at a safe distance from my mother and father. I’d take the girls, of course, on an obligatory visit or two to see them at the farm, but they never came to the lake, and that was just fine with me. It also meant a vacation from the domestic drudgery that was my life. And a furlough from Frankie.
But this year, I wasn’t just leaving Frankie behind. I was also leaving Eva. My new best friend. My first best friend. Since the Wilsons came over for the barbeque, Eva and I had spent nearly every afternoon together chatting and avoiding the various household obligations that awaited us inside our respective homes.
“What’s it like there?” Eva asked a couple of days before our departure. It was so hot, we’d taken to sitting in my backyard with our feet in a baby pool of cool water while the kids ran around, somehow immune (or at least oblivious) to the heat. “I only know the song. You know, ‘Moonlight in Vermont’ . . .”
I laughed and thought of the moon, of its bright light reflected on the still surface of the lake. The view from the window in the loft where I slept. I thought about the sound of the loons, that strange avian lullaby.
“It’s peaceful.” I sighed as Mouse ran past me squealing and tripping on my outstretched legs. “And cooler because of the lake. The children play in the woods all day and only come home when it’s time for supper. It’s quiet enough to think, to read even. I bet I read twenty books last summer. And if the weather’s good, you can swim every day.”
“I’d probably sink,” Eva said, laughing. She was due in three weeks, but she looked as though she might go into labor any minute.
Suddenly an idea struck me. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before. “Next summer you should come visit!” I said. “Bring the children.”
“Really?” she asked.
“Oh, please, it would be so nice. They could swim. Pick blueberries. There’s a tree house. Johnny would love it.”
Johnny, at the moment, was bouncing on a pogo stick on the small, square patio near the back steps. Up and down, up and down. Squeak, squeak, squeak.
“Well, then, it’s a plan!” she said, clapping her hands together.
I knew that by the time we got back from Vermont, Eva would have had her baby. And I would be four months along, nearly halfway there. Eva had convinced me that I needed to tell Frankie about it before we left. I was three months now, farther than I’d ever made it before. I’d hidden the slight swell of my belly under aprons but I wouldn’t be able to pull it off much longer. Besides, I knew Frankie would be over the moon; Francesca and Mouse would finally have a baby brother or sister. And as frightened as I was, a little tentative part of me thrilled at the notion of becoming a mother again, and of having a friend to share the experience with this time. Eva and I had discussed the names we’d considered, imagined the little ones playing together as our girls did. We’d pored over pink and blue paint samples Ted brought home from the hardware store, lingered over baby layettes in the Montgomery Ward catalogue. Still, the idea of telling Frankie made my stomach do flip-flops, and so I waited. On the Thursday before we were to leave, I still hadn’t told him.
I spent the entire morning packing and cleaning the house. I must have done five loads of laundry, most of it the girls’. I gathered their favorite toys, packed a bag for the train ride: cards and snacks and books. I made sure I had saltine crackers and a bottle of ginger ale for Mouse’s motion sickness, hoping she would sleep most of the way. I made a freezer full of casseroles, things that Frankie could just pop in the oven and heat up throughout the month: tuna casserole, beef stew, and lasagna. He wore a uniform to work, and he knew how to operate an iron, so I was spared there. But I made sure all the towels were clean, that there were fresh linens on the beds.
Chessy and Mouse were trying to get in every last possible minute with Donna and Sally; all morning they were back and forth between the houses, clinging to the final few hours with each other. I kept reassuring them that we’d be gone only four weeks, and that when we got back, school would start and they’d see each other every day. They would be in the third and first grades, respectively. Frankie had lobbied for the Catholic school but had, due to my stubborn resistance, lost. I had no problem with him bringing them to Mass every Sunday. I didn’t put up a fight when he wanted them baptized or later when they each had their first communions. But I put my foot down when it came to their schooling. Frankie must have known I wouldn’t budge, because he let well enough alone after our first discussion. Besides, the Catholic school was halfway across town, and the brand-new elementary school was less than a mile away. Even he had to admit that the round building, with each classroom like a slice of pie, opening to a huge cafetorium, was pretty impressive compared to the tired, old brick monstrosity that was St. Dorothy’s.
I fed the girls an early lunch, and then the older ones took off out the door again. Sally and Mouse stayed behind, lingering under my feet in the kitchen as I tried to clean up. Despite the fact that they were playing nicely, I was starting to lose my patience. “Girls, why don’t you go play outside?” I said as kindly as I could. They had their baby dolls set up around the kitchen table and were feeding them imaginary sweet potatoes.
“Mama!” protested Mouse, but then they reluctantly left, cooing apologies to their baby dolls.
I stood at the kitchen sink, washing the pots and pans, looking out the window as the girls put their babies together in the toy baby carriage that Mouse had gotten for her birthday. Their tenderness was so sweet—little mommies and their small charges. I’d never played with dolls myself, so it always surprised me to see my girls exercising those precocious maternal instincts. I’d preferred climbing trees and swimming in the river when I wasn’t busy reading books. Gussy was the one who played with dolls; by the time we adopted Chessy, she and her Frank already had two real babies of their own.
I’d never been opposed to the idea of being a mother, but I also had found it less instinctive and more like playing an elaborate game of make-believe. Chessy and Mouse were each just a couple days old when we adopted them. With Chessy I had felt like a fraud, like a big phony, when the nurse put the baby in my arms. It was as though I were, indeed, only playing dolls, and with no experience. Frankie tried to comfort me, but I spent her entire first night at home crying. But then, somehow, after only a few nights and days spent caring for her, of watching her face as it twitched in sleep, of smelling the scent of her skin when I held her close to me, I began to feel like a mother. Or at least like less of an imposter. By the time we adopted Mouse, it seemed that this was just the way things were supposed to be.
I tried to imagine what it would be like to have a newborn in the house again. All those hours spent feeding and diapering and cleaning. I dreamed that blue light of three a.m., the eerie solitude that belongs solely to new mothers. I wondered if I would feel differently with this baby than I had with the girls—if carrying this baby inside of me would make any difference at all. I’d been alone with both Chessy and Mouse. Alone all day while Frankie worked and then up alone with them most of the night. I imagined taking walks with Eva, each of us pushing a stroller, our babies nestled inside. This time I would have someone to share it with. Someone to talk to. A friend.
As I washed the dishes, I rehearsed the ways I would offer the news to Frankie, anticipated his glee.
I was drying the cast iron pot in which I’d made the spaghetti sauce when I felt the first pain. It nearly knocked me over. I set the pot down and steadied mysel
f, pressed my hand against my chest to slow my heart. No.
The cramp came again, and I gripped the edge of the counter. I felt my entire body being taken over by the pain, and my temples pounded. But surprisingly, instead of thinking of the baby, instead of worrying about what was happening inside my body, my first impulse was to call Eva. Wincing, I made my way to the phone.
“Hello?” she answered. Her voice immediately calmed me.
“Eva. Can you please make sure the children don’t come over here?”
“Billie, what’s wrong?”
“Oh God,” I said, my grip loosening on the phone. My legs gave way and I sank to the floor, watching both horrified and fascinated as a bright red flower blossomed across my apron. The tears came then, and like the miscarriage, there was nothing I could do to stop them.
Eva was at the door within seconds. She helped me into the guest bathroom and called my doctor. She sat with me in the bathroom, held a cold washrag to my face, gave me ice to suck on, talked softly to me, and stroked my hair. And later, when I was finally able to stand, she got me up the stairs. From my room, I could hear her cleaning up the bathroom.
I managed to get into the shower, where I stood, watching the blood swirl down the drain, picking up the slippery, tattered pieces of another imagined future in my fingers. Sadness and loss overwhelmed me.
Eva knocked on the bathroom door.
“Come in,” I said. I could see her shadow behind the glass.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
I let out a small cry.
Her hand pressed against the glass door of the shower; I pressed my own palm against it. The water at my feet was pink now, but the pain continued to come in thick, powerful pulses.
“I’m going to go check on the children,” her silhouette said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.” And then she was gone again. I squeezed my eyes shut, riding the waves of pain as though they were only water. I tried to imagine that I was swimming in the lake in Vermont. I tried to conjure moon, loon, sky.
