The History of Us

by Leah Stewart

  “Eventually, you mean?” Josh asked.

  “Now,” Eloise said. “I mean now.” She could see by the set look on Theo’s face that Theo hadn’t needed this clarification, and by the confusion on Josh’s face that he still needed more.

  Theo stood, her chair threatening to fall before it righted itself. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll go pack.” Moments later they heard her footsteps pounding up the stairs.

  Claire slid her chair backward as if trying not to make a sound. She, too, left the room. Who knew what she felt? Who could ever tell what she actually felt, looking at that unaffected, upright spine? The front door opened and, quietly, closed.

  Josh and Eloise sat at the table. Eloise looked at her palm, which was not scarlet and pulsing, as you might expect, but merely a faint pink. She’d never shown her hand to a palm reader. Would anyone have predicted this?

  “Aunt Eloise,” Josh said. His voice was cautious and soothing, the voice you might use to talk to a wild animal, the voice, it struck her, he had probably used on Sabrina. “Should I go, too?”

  She looked up at him. Her boy. Her boy who wasn’t her boy. “I guess you might as well,” she said.

  It took a surprisingly short time for Theo and Josh to pack. Eloise didn’t know precisely how long it took, because she went into her room and lay on her bed in the darkening evening and fell asleep. Before she fell asleep she thought of the day she came home, the day she heard the news of Rachel’s death, and found her own mother lying on her own bed in this very room, utterly incapable of helping a soul.

  She woke into an empty house. It was ten o’clock. She got up and walked from room to room. Theo had taken nearly everything—her clothes, her books. Of course she had. If there was anything Theo couldn’t bear, it was the idea that she might impose herself on someone who didn’t want her, that she might presume. And Josh, of course, had left most of his things untouched. Josh believed above all that trouble would blow over. As far as Eloise could tell he’d only packed an overnight bag. Where had they gone? she wondered. Funny that for more than a month she’d been wrong about where Claire was, and now Claire was the only one whose location Eloise could pinpoint.

  Eloise walked through all the rooms, feeling a compulsion to check each one, as Claire had once made her check every closet for ghosts. They were free of people, and seemed surprised to see Eloise. There was a faint buzzing quality to their silence. All these years she’d been the one who wanted out of the house, and now she was the only one in it. She could have gone to spend the night at Heather’s. She could have gone to Heather in a state of triumph, if an approximate one—no, she hadn’t told the kids she and Heather were a couple yet, but she was one step closer to moving out of the house. So their dreams could finally come true. So they could remind each other to buy toilet paper and argue about where to set the thermostat.

  She went back to her room. Her mother’s room, as she kept for some reason thinking, though her mother hadn’t lived there in years.

  The first summer of her guardianship, after her mother had gone, Eloise decided to take the kids on vacation. The fall and winter had been a blur of grief and confusion. By the time she emerged from the fog it was far too late to try to get teaching for the spring. So she’d spent the rest of the school year rearranging the furniture, sending CVs into the void, trying to cope with Claire, and making halfhearted stabs at potty training. At times it felt like both her body and her mind were itchy and burning, like she had an internal case of hives. Finally, in July, she heard from the chair of the History Department at Wyett College, offering her three courses for fall. The news that a little money would soon be coming in seemed sufficient justification to travel. She told everybody the kids needed to get out of town, and for all she knew that was true.

  She got a deal on a rental in Gloucester because it was in the woods, a few miles from the beach. “Long drive to Massachusetts,” people said. “Do you have friends up there?” She said no, and then made no effort to help people through their resulting confusion. She hadn’t really had time, those few months in Boston, to make friends. She’d been so focused on getting settled, running to Target for trash cans and towels, writing her syllabi, deciding whether to alphabetize the books in her office or arrange them by topic. She’d been getting her life in order in anticipation of actually living it. Sometimes she could feel that life pulsing beneath this one, as though it had gone on without her. She could see herself teaching her classes, counseling a student, having lunch with a colleague in Harvard Square. She could feel her hand on the railing as she climbed the stairs to her office, students swarming past her with their books and their bags and their single-minded purpose. Get to class, get to class, get to class. She remembered the satisfying clunk of her office door unlocking, the gorgeous, expensive rug she’d bought at a funky furniture store and later, in her haste the weekend she came back to pack, left behind.

  She couldn’t afford to take the kids to Boston for a whole week, and besides she would’ve spent the entire time searching for parking or schlepping them around the city on the T. The thought of that exhausted her. But in Gloucester they could run around and go to the beach, and one day they could even drive into the city. The kids would love the Children’s Museum and the street performers in Harvard Square. They could get a taste of life in the Northeast. And she could—what? She could pretend.

  The house was at the top of a long gravel drive that turned off a long gravel road. It had a huge yard surrounded by woods, and a swing set and jungle gym, and neighbor dogs who came over to play every morning. All the kids loved the dogs, but Claire in particular had to be dragged away from them, even to go to the beach. Eloise had vacationed with the kids before, but never without their parents, and in envisioning herself reading and relaxing while Claire played and Josh made up his little songs and Theo read, she’d forgotten she’d still be doing all the planning and the driving and the cooking and the cleaning and the monitoring of the heedless, newly defiant Claire. By the third morning Eloise was in a terrible mood. Claire had been up four times in the night, and Eloise was wrung out, wondering why the child insisted on coming to wake her even though she was sharing a room with Theo, wondering why she’d put herself through seventeen hours in the car and considerable expense to relocate her duties to a house that wasn’t even childproofed. Thank God for Theo, who took seriously her big-sister duties. Theo was so endlessly responsible, Claire so endlessly exhausting. Eloise could just assume Theo was with Claire, and that’s why she didn’t even look up from her paper when she heard Claire say, “The doggies are here!” That’s why she registered only dimly the screen-door slam. Five minutes later she looked up, struck by one of those eerie, sudden parental alarms, when you register an unnatural quiet in the house. “Kids?” she called, and from upstairs Theo called, “Yeah?”

  “Is Josh outside with Claire?” Eloise asked.

  “No, he’s in the shower,” Theo said.

  Eloise rose from her stool. She looked out the screen door at the lawn, where there was no sign of Claire. “Hmmm,” she said.

  “Aunt Eloise?” Theo called. “Is Claire okay?”

  Eloise heard both fear and recrimination in the child’s voice but couldn’t spare the time to answer. She picked up her sandals and carried them out onto the porch. Even with a wider view of the yard she didn’t see the little girl. She slipped on her sandals and walked down the back steps without fastening them, so that they flapped and wobbled on her feet. “Claire?” she called. She heard nothing. “Claire?” She walked down to the place where the gravel driveway split. To the right it led down a hill to the main road. To the left it became a trail into the woods. “Claire?” she called again. She bent to fasten her sandals, but she couldn’t do it, it was taking too goddamn long. Finally she kicked them off and began to run, barefoot, her breasts bouncing beneath her pajama shirt. Which way to go? She had no idea which way to go. She ran toward the road, because her first vision was of Claire hit by a car: Clair
e ran out into the road, reckless and small, and there came the car, her body flying into the air. Eloise’s mind rewound the vision and showed it to her again, and all the while she ran, screaming Claire’s name and hearing nothing in return. At the road, no Claire in sight and another choice to make, but as Eloise swung wildly around, still calling for her niece, she realized there was an old woman on the porch of the house right by the road, clutching the railing, leaning forward, her face worried, surprisingly worried, because she didn’t know them, didn’t know Claire, but she must have known what was happening. She sensed a missing child. “She didn’t come this way,” she was saying. “I’ve been out here all morning. She didn’t come this way.”

  Eloise nodded and then spun back into her run. Her feet slipped on the gravel. Her body threatened to fall, but she didn’t let it. She leaned into the hill. She ran back the way she’d come. She was not aware of her feet on the gravel, the movement of her body, only the empty spaces ahead, the spaces that did not contain Claire. She barely registered Theo, standing at the intersection of trail and drive. “Where is she?” Theo called, as if Eloise could tell her, as if Eloise knew. “Stay here!” Eloise shouted and kept running. “Claire!” she screamed. “Claire!” She heard the hysteria in her voice. A calmer voice inside her head said she’d find her niece, that everything would be fine. This voice seemed to have nothing to do with her. Even the visions her mind was playing now—Claire falling from a cliff, Claire mauled by a bear, Claire snatched by a predatory passerby—seemed to have nothing to do with Eloise. She was a machine who existed entirely for running like this, for screaming that crucial name.

  It would be hard, later, to describe how she’d felt. Panicked, freaked out, scared. Such inadequate words. She’d want to explain—but couldn’t even try—that she had not been real, that nothing had been real. The trees, the path, the dappled light: they’d formed a magical tunnel. She’d been in a fairy tale. Not the pretty Disney kind, but a real fairy tale, the kind people told to explain why children disappeared.

  Claire’s voice broke the spell. Eloise heard it—her piping small-child voice—somewhere close by, around the curve up ahead. She wasn’t answering Eloise. She wasn’t calling out in fear or pain. She was talking to the dogs. “Hey, Belle,” she said. “Hey, Belly girl,” and then she laughed. She laughed. Like everything was normal.

  Eloise slowed to a fast walk. The bad magic began to ebb away, though the world still seemed brighter and stranger than normal. Shiny. Her breathing was loud in her ears. She rounded the corner, and there was the object of her quest: a little girl. Just a little girl in a blue sundress, playing in a clearing with two dogs nearly as tall as she was, sunlight in her hair.

  In the moments before Eloise picked up her niece—her baby girl—and hugged her and scolded her and hugged her again, she acknowledged a truth that had lurked for months in a cave of her mind: She had not wanted these children. She’d been angry at Rachel for leaving them to her. A hopeless, futile anger, which she’d been doing her best to hide behind her grief. She struggled to find joy and purpose in taking care of others, the way her sister always had. She wanted her job back, and her little apartment, and the satisfactions of her research, the time and energy to work. She was selfish and solitary, like her mother, and like her mother she wanted to be left alone.

  And yet the prospect of being left alone had become the worst she could imagine, so she must never wish for it again, not after this glimpse of how bad it could be. She had not wanted these children, but now they were hers, and they must never, ever know she’d felt that way. She herself must pretend not to know it. She said Claire’s name and ran, now, to scoop her up. She believed in magic. She believed that that thought would vanish forever the moment she felt the weight of the child in her arms.

  Part Two

  Elsewhere

  15

  Somehow it seemed worse to call first. At least there was drama in the unexpected arrival at his door, a bag in hand. He might be alarmed or delighted, but either way there’d be some kind of flourish to the moment. Theo didn’t say this to herself, but she was fairly certain he wouldn’t say no, so that was another reason she didn’t have to call. Of all the people she could think of he seemed the most likely to happily take her in.

  In the seconds after she knocked at his door she suddenly, intensely regretted her decision to come. She felt like a hobo, with her portable belongings, knocking on a stranger’s door in hopes of shelter and sustenance. This was pathetic—what had she been thinking? Before she could bolt Wes opened the door wide, and as he surveyed her standing there a broad smile broke across his face. “Are you moving in?” he asked.

  She felt herself flush. “My aunt said we have to move out,” she said. “But of course I don’t expect you to . . . ” She waved her hand, not quite sure what the gesture was supposed to mean.

  He raised his eyebrows, still grinning. “You’re moving in,” he said.

  “Just, you know, tonight, or—”

  “Explain later,” he said. “Come in, now.” He reached out to put an arm around her waist, pulling her close. “Put your toothbrush in my bathroom,” he said, and then he kissed her. She dropped her bag, awash in relief and gratitude, and put her arms around his neck. She stood there kissing him in the hall for a full thirty seconds before she remembered herself and pulled away.

  “You don’t mind?” she asked.

  “Why would I mind?” He pushed a piece of hair off her forehead. “Who’d object to you for a roommate?”

  Lots of people, she thought, though really she was thinking mostly of her aunt, and maybe of Noah, or Josh, or Claire. Wes picked up her bag. “I kind of have an urge to carry you over the threshold,” he said. She laughed, but she sensed that he was partly serious, and hurried inside before he could put that idea into practice. What if he tried to pick her up and realized that she was heavier than he thought? And how was it that he could bring himself to say things like that with any degree of sincerity? How had he come to be okay with saying so openly what he wanted?

  She circled the living room, looking at the posters like this was the first time she’d been here, and as she passed the one for Josh’s band it occurred to her to wonder where her brother had gone, or if maybe Eloise had let him stay. Maybe this eviction notice had been only for her. She sighed and resumed her course, annoyed with herself for harboring, even nurturing, this sense of being personally under attack. Nobody loves me, everybody hates me, think I’ll go eat worms. It wasn’t as though she didn’t recognize the feeling, but not since adolescence had she had it so consistently and for so long, and even then it had been tempered by the obvious devotion of her siblings, especially little Claire. Now she could hardly think of Claire without being shot through with frustration and hurt, and that was the problem, wasn’t it, that was the reason for this conviction that no one cared for her, that no one needed her, that no one wanted her company or counsel. Because Claire didn’t, and Claire was the one who always, always had.

  Theo sensed Wes approaching rapidly from the side and turned just as he grabbed and lifted her, propelling them both through the door into the bedroom and onto the bed. “Whoof,” she said, laughing and breathless. He rolled off her to lie on his back beside her. “So instead of carrying me you decided to tackle me?”

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s my special way of welcoming you to my home.”

  Theo blew out air at the ceiling, which did not have a crack, which had puckered paint and a rather hideous light fixture. “I’m a sad case,” she said. “Not just sleeping with a student but sponging off him.”

  “For the hundredth time, I’m not your student anymore.” Wes rolled back over, holding his weight off her so that he could look her in the face. “Except,” he said, “in the ways of love.” And then he began to tickle her, finding the spot just under her ribs that no one had discovered since she was small and her parents were alive. She laughed helplessly, convulsing as she tried to evade his hands. “Stop,
stop!” she cried. He did, and regarded her seriously for a moment. Then he moved down, lifted her shirt, and blew a raspberry on her stomach. She laughed again. He turned his face to the side, away from hers, and rested his cheek on her bare skin. She slid her fingers into his hair, feeling his head rise and fall on her stomach as she breathed. She felt like a child, like a safe and happy child. She remembered—like a room suddenly illuminated, like a camera flash—how that had felt.

  Wes had a gift for making the world go away. For a week it didn’t even occur to Theo to work. Life was eating and sleeping and having sex and starting a movie and then abandoning it to have sex. She was on vacation from herself. No thoughts of her family, of money, of the fact that she had no place to live, of the fact that she should be finishing her introduction or gathering her application materials. Would she even get a job if she applied? Who cared? She was in the here and now, after years of living in the future. She’d been struggling up a mountain, and here was a nice, wide plateau.

  “I’d like to build a house right here,” she said to Wes. They were lying in his bed. They were always lying in his bed.

  “It would be a small house,” he said.

  “It would be a metaphorical house.”

  “Good,” he said. “Because we only have metaphorical money.”

  She liked that he never seemed baffled or annoyed by the stranger things she said. The guy she’d dated in grad school—his favorite question had been “What are you talking about?” He’d called her weird so often she’d just shut that part of herself down. And that part of herself was shy to begin with. Hide it away too long, and it might never come back out. “How much metaphorical money?” she asked.

  “A million dollars,” he said.

  “That’s it?”

  “Don’t be greedy.” He picked up her hand and studied the palm. “How much money do you need?”