Days of Awe (21 page)

“She was alive even after she met me. And do you really think so? Happily married?” The briefest twitch of contempt flickered across his face.

A woman in a pink T-shirt plopped down on the couch across from where we were sitting, blew out a long puff of air, and smiled at us. “Whew,” she said. “I don't know who's going to need a nap more when we get home, my boys or me!” She kept smiling, her round cheeks mottled with heat and exhaustion. She was clearly desperate to engage in some adult conversation, no matter how banal. Normally I would have sympathized, but not today. I smiled tightly and wished for some small emergency to present itself to her.
Uh, is that your kid? I think he just ate a Lego.
Alex didn't even bother looking at her, just slid closer on the couch and leaned toward me. We must have looked like a couple, like two parents jealously guarding our moments together. For a second, I wished we were. “Whew,” the woman said again, and looked away, embarrassed, pretending she had been talking to herself all along.

“You make it sound like this is some kind of Mexican soap opera.” Alex whispered to me. “Do you think I casually broke Josie's heart one day,
ay, Dios mío,
and she killed herself? Did you know her?” I breathed in sharply, and he stopped himself. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean that.” He rested his forehead in his palm for a second. “This is…this has been so hard.”

The woman across from us was now staring into the distance with the blank, practiced look of the eavesdropper. Alex inched even closer to me, brought his voice down another notch. Was this the way he seduced Josie, with this unbearable proximity, this heat? There were faint lines between his eyebrows, a small scratch on his chin. His breath smelled of coffee and spearmint. His irises were almost black. He put his hand on mine, just for a second, then quickly moved it away. “I feel responsible,” he said, “but I don't know how responsible to feel. I'm guilty.”

“Me, too,” I whispered. “Oh, me, too.” Mark was trying to drown his sorrows in those early months, pushing me away, lost. Hannah was feverish with grief and confusion, capable only of receiving comfort, and only in small doses. Chris just squinted at me hard from very far away, trying to make me out. But here was Alex Cortez, and there was no distance between us. I felt my whole body loosen, my rib cage unlock, the pull of desire. I wanted to kiss him, or press my forehead against his and just rest there, the two of us. I bit my tongue so that I wouldn't cry.

Alex nodded at me, his eyes a little teary, relieved. And then he pulled his phone out of his pocket. He glanced down at it, cradled it in his palm. “I might be a bastard, but I love my wife. My marriage isn't perfect, but I love her with all my heart.” He sighed. “Josie had certain…expectations.”

Oh,
I thought.
Wait.

“I tried to manage them, and then I couldn't any longer. You know how she was,” he said, drawing me farther down this path that had suddenly become a maze. “She would look at you like you were the brightest star. I mean, she thought I was this brilliant artist, this tortured soul. I'm not! I mean, sure, I dabble, I'm not terrible….” He trailed off for a second. “But it was too much. In the end I was scared of her.”

“What do you mean, scared?” My heart started pounding uncomfortably, my body beating out a warning to my brain.

“She talked about moving to Madison, getting a job at my school. She wanted me to leave my wife. It had gone too far. I told her we had to cool it.” He cleared his throat, shifted on the sofa. “She didn't take it well.”

I just sat there, trying to mask my dread, waiting.

“She, ah, she said she wanted to talk, she wanted to go for a drive.” He picked up his coffee, blew on it, set it down without taking a sip. “It started out okay. I told her, we can't take this any further, it was all getting too complicated. She seemed all right with it. She said she understood.” He paused. “And then she drove us to my house. She parked across the street and turned off the engine and she said, ‘It's time for me to tell your wife. I'm going to tell her that you have been cheating on her.' ” He ran his hand through his hair once, then again. “I think I just sat there for a minute, you know, with my mouth hanging open. I couldn't believe it. I thought my chest was going to explode. She put her hand on the door handle and she said, ‘Once a cheater, always a cheater,' and I said, ‘Josie, I have three kids.' She didn't do anything. And then, after a few minutes, she started the car again and we left.”

I remembered the story she had told me about “Roger,” her faithless high-school boyfriend, how she had admitted to doing and saying almost the exact same thing.
Once a cheater, always a cheater.
Was this the confession she had been trying to make, telling me the truth about Alex by inventing a fake boyfriend, handsome and shifty as his real-life counterpart?

Alex Cortez exhaled and looked up at the ceiling, as if for guidance from the god of bastards. “I know she was only trying to scare me. And holy shit, she did.” He laughed a little, like he was trying to shrug it off. “Man, I was furious. That was it. Afterward, she kept sending me her weird art, paintings where the men were women…the Venus de Milo as a guy wearing a beer hat!” There was mockery in his voice, not a lot but how much does a person need? It was like a sharp slice through soft flesh.

“Yeah,” I said, “so weird.” I thought about the painting she'd given me for my forty-first birthday, thirteen smiling women gazing rapturously at Tupperware. “Ridiculous.”

“Right?” he said.
“Right?”

I ran my finger along the sharp plastic that edged the lid of my coffee cup. It was a design flaw—you had to place your upper lip right here, on this jagged rim, to drink your coffee. It was just a tiny danger, another risk that came out of nowhere when you weren't looking. “Josie was…she did have certain expectations,” I said, my voice cracking idiotically, my face pulsing with heat. “Maybe she just expected better from the people she loved. She was passionate that way.”

Alex looked at me, a little smirk on his face, like what did I know about Josie's passion? He held the secret map to that country. “Oh, she expected better?” he said. “You think she could claim the moral high ground?” He was still smirking. I could see that Alex Cortez was the kind of person who enjoys proving his point. “Yeah, she wasn't exactly innocent.”

A laughing girl tumbled out of one of the bouncy houses and climbed back in. From across the room, a chorus of high-pitched screeching sounded, just for a second, like cicadas. A few feet away, a woman with curly blond hair and a tattoo of a cresting wave on her shoulder scooped up her small boy and said, “It's all right, sweet pea.” A young woman in a short blue sundress—a babysitter, a nanny, too young to be even one of these mothers—walked through the front entrance with three little girls. And,
whoosh,
I was free from Alex Cortez's fraudulent intimacy; I emerged, sputtering, from the weak tea of his sorrow.

I blinked and looked around the room, pretended to settle on a point in the distance. “Whoa,” I said. “I think Antonio threw up.”

“Seriously? Dammit,” Alex muttered. He got up quickly to investigate, and I stood and grabbed my purse. I left my Styrofoam cup of horrible coffee growing cold on the low table and headed for the door. I had had enough. I had had more than enough. From the side of a three-foot-high Mount Rushmore, four inscrutable, unblinking kittens watched me go.

When I tell Helene about Cal, she does not offer the sympathetic ear I had hoped for.

We're driving home from her doctor's appointment. Dr. Petrova had reminded her again that improvement after a stroke diminishes greatly over time. She gestured with her hand, a gradual incline followed by a flattening. “You have made an excellent recovery. But there are no miracles,” she said, in her no-nonsense, post-Soviet way. This was why we liked Dr. Petrova, mostly. But sometimes it could come across a little heavy-handed.
No miracles! God is dead! Long live Mother Russia! See you in two months.
“I'm afraid you are no exception, Mrs. Applebaum.”

“I do the strengthening exercises every day. I never miss a rehab appointment.” There was desperation in her voice, pleading, as if by carefully explaining how diligent she was being, my mother could convince Dr. Petrova to upgrade her prognosis. I was surprised by how embarrassed I felt and pretended to study the human anatomy poster on the wall. “But even after all these months,” Helene said, “I can hardly hold a pen in my right hand.”

“So now you learn how to write with your left hand, hmm?” Dr. Petrova was entering something into her records, tapping away on her laptop. “Something the occupational therapists can help you with. A challenge.” The twenty-minute appointment was a minute away from being over.

So Helene was not in a great mood.

“Okay, Mom,” I'd said as we left the office. I carried her purse in my left hand and offered my right arm to support her. “It's not what we were hoping for, but where you are isn't so bad, is it?”

She snarled as she gripped my elbow. “I can't drive. I can't read at night anymore. The whole right side of my face droops when I'm tired, like a suitcase.” She looked at me, her dark eyes scared, her face pale and old. “Not so bad? Huh. You're not the one who can't open a damn bottle of Advil.”

What is the correct answer to my mother's raw attempt to offer up her pain and force me to see her as more than just a wellspring of maternal comfort?
Mommy, hold me?

“I went out with Cal on Saturday,” I tell her as we pull out of the parking lot.

She perks up a little. “Oh?”

“We drove to Lake Kass and did some bird-watching.”

She looks out the window. “Stop it.”

“Stop what?”

“I never know when you're joking.”

“I'm serious. We visited his grouchy, racist mother in her assisted-living complex, and then we went bird-watching. We watched birds. And then we went back to his house. And then I freaked out and he drove me home.”

“That sounds like a nice day.”

“I really scorched the earth,” I say, turning left down Lake Drive toward our neighborhood. “I kind of…made it clear that I wasn't ready. I kind of ran away screaming.”
I kind of suggested I'd be up for casual sex and then bolted.

Helene is silent for a while, considering what I've just told her. She doesn't say anything at all for a long time, and I start to think she's dozed off. “Do you understand,” she says quietly, but with a steely undertone that makes me take notice, “that a downhill slide ends at the bottom of the hill?”

We roll through a yellow light. To our left, the street slopes up toward the city. To our right, Lake Michigan flashes blue and silver in the late-morning sun like a wading pool, deceptively welcoming.

“Huh?”

“This is it. This is all we've got. I liked Cal. He seemed kindhearted. I thought he might be a shoulder for you, but okay, I guess not. But you have a beautiful daughter. And Chris, well, I don't know what's going on there, but I know he's a good man. Maybe you need to focus, to…to…refocus on those things. I'm tired of you sabotaging yourself. I'm up nights worrying about you. I lie awake.” With her left hand, she massages her right. “Well, I can't sleep anyway. But, you know, I'd rather be reading a novel than worrying about my forty-three-year-old daughter.” She shakes her head and sighs, and I understand that there's a part of her that would like to wash her hands of me, and even though she never will, the realization feels like a sharp-toothed piranha lurking beneath calm, turquoise waters. We're as entwined as a long-married couple, my mother and I, but if this past year and a half has taught me anything, it's that nothing is permanent, no knot too tight to be loosened.

The blue Subaru in front of me slows gently and puts on its turn signal, and I tap my brake pedal. “Whoa!” I say, then fling my arm across my mother's body. It's an attempt at a joke—there's plenty of room between our car and the Subaru—but Helene doesn't laugh.

I have the sudden memory of driving with Hannah for the very first time, about a week after she was born. She was properly straitjacketed into her car seat, backward facing, so I had no view of her from the driver's seat. But I knew that she was awake, because she was making those little mewling baby noises that remind you that you are the mammal who would lay down your own life for the tiny, helpless creature in your care, although she is brand-new to you, although she is nothing more than gaping, consuming need, although in twelve years or so she will become surly and unfathomable and mutter
You're so annoying
under her breath after you've told her for the twentieth time to turn off the TV and do her homework, although she will borrow your favorite pair of boots without asking and then casually insult your taste in footwear. But you don't know that yet. And even if you did: you will always be that mammal.

That afternoon in the car, twelve years ago: I white-knuckled the steering wheel like I was driving into a blizzard, even though it was a warm, cloudless afternoon. I heard a sucking noise from the backseat, and I knew that baby Hannah had jammed her fist into her mouth, and it was such a terribly sweet sound that I could hardly bear it. I wanted to pull over and call Chris to come get us. I had to force myself to stay on the road, to drive up to the speed limit. I was shaking with fear, at the mercy of all the other cars on the road, the cell-phone dialers, the drunks, the cell-phone-dialing drunks: an endless parade of peril.

“I don't want you to worry about me, Mom,” I say now. “And I know that you're right.”

She sighs again. But would it be that easy? To adjust my lens a little? To stop wallowing in all this murky sorrow? To change my attitude, let the sunlight in, fix myself? I glance over at my mother. The late-morning light in the car is unforgiving, illuminating a few broken blood vessels on her cheeks, the centimeter of dull gray at her hairline, the traces of lipstick bleeding out into the wrinkles around her mouth. I have the rest of the day off, and it suddenly feels like it will be a chore to fill the empty hours. “Do you want to go get a little lunch?” I ask. Helene never says no to a little lunch.

“No, I'm tired. I think I'll just go home and lie down for a bit. Can you take me home, please?”

It's only when I look at things now, more than a year after Josie died, that any of it begins to make sense, only when I work it out in my memory that it looks like a series of actions building up to her death. Perspective, in that way, is cruel.

We were walking across the parking lot together one day after school. The wind tossed up swirls of powdery snow, and the dazzling winter sky was a shock. I huddled into my collar, and Josie pulled her jacket tightly around her. I glanced at her and said, absently, “Oh, cute coat. Is it new?”

She stopped and turned to me, grabbed my arm so that I had to stop, too. Sunshine bounced off the cars, and, facing each other, we simultaneously lifted our hands to shield our eyes, like mimes.

“I stole it,” she said.

I stared at her for a second, squinting. “What?”

She gave my elbow a little squeeze and looked down at her coat—soft, camel-colored wool. “I stole it.” She raised her eyebrows, daring me to pass judgment. “Yep. I did!” Her cheeks were reddening in the cold. “It was actually an accident, if you can believe that.”

“Um, what?” I said again. My brain felt dulled by the chill. “You stole that coat? By accident?”

“I was at Macy's,” she said. “Shopping. I had picked this one out.” She ran her hand down the sleeve. “Isn't it pretty? I was looking for a clerk. You know how that place can be.” She shrugged, as if everyone knew how that place could be. “I couldn't find anyone. I searched and searched, and finally I just got so fed up, I draped the coat over my arm and walked out.”

“Josie!” I said. “You have to go back and pay for it!”

“Well, yeah, I probably should. But I'm not going to, obviously.”

Janice Van Dyke, the seventh-grade math teacher, walked past us in the parking lot and waggled her leather-gloved fingers in a tired wave. In the busy intersection of Rhodes Avenue and Willow Road, in front of the school, a bus honked.

I had had a hell of a day: an outburst during homeroom; a call from Hannah, who had forgotten her clarinet, and the attendant tears when I told her I couldn't leave school to bring it to her. A skirmish between two boys in the hallway before lunch. There was a load of towels that I'd accidentally left in the washing machine for three days, and I knew that when I got home, it would smell like wet dog and need to be rewashed. (I wondered, often, how many years of my life I'd lost to laundry. Sometimes I dreamed about it.)

“I mean,” Josie continued, glancing around the parking lot, “it's not like this is some kind of habit!” She looked, finally, a little sheepish. “Although it
was
kind of a rush.”

There is so much between two friends: love and disappointment, resentment and optimism and a very smudged reflection of your own face. Maybe I had a hunch that this moment was significant. But I was thinking,
If I get in the car right now, leave school, and don't encounter too much traffic, I might be able to stop at the grocery store and still make it home before Hannah does.
She had her own key, but I liked to be there when she got off the bus.

Josie looked at me, waiting for something: guidance, maybe?

“Jose,” I said. “That is bonkers.” I laughed a little. I thought,
She could get arrested.
There was a thick sheaf of essays in my bag, weighing me down. That was another thing. “Don't do it again! Promise.”

“Right,” she said. “Promise.” She nodded, turned away from me, looked around at the emptying parking lot. Her hair flew in her face. “I wouldn't.”

“I need to…” I motioned toward my car. “I've got to get going,” I said. “Seriously, don't do that again!” I leaned in for a quick hug, and then I walked away. I left her there, in the school parking lot, huddled up against the cold wind in that pretty, new wool coat.

The day Chris moved out, after he assured me, on the phone from his new apartment, that everything would be okay, and after we hung up, I moved some furniture around in the living room: the couch to where the armchair had been, the end table to the other side. I was trying to make it look intentional, like I just wanted to spruce things up a bit, instead of spare. But the room just felt abandoned, like a twenty-two-year-old's first postcollege apartment after her roommate moved out to live with her boyfriend. It looked impermanent, accusatory:
Now how are you going to pay the rent?
Displaced dust bunnies blew around in the hot furnace wind. Finally, the life outside my head and heart reflected the life within.

I swept the floor. I made myself a grilled cheese sandwich and took one bite of it. I thought about the Sunday afternoon a few weeks earlier when I had been too sad to get dressed, how I'd wallowed all day in the old, ripped T-shirt and sweatpants I'd been sleeping in and watched reality show after reality show about home remodeling; how, late in the day, as dusk darkened the house, Hannah had asked me to play Scrabble with her and I'd said, “No, sweetie, not now, not just now,” and how Chris had marched into the room, stood in front of me with his arms crossed over his chest, and said,
“When?”