In Every Way (17 page)

Maria feels certain that her mother, sorting mail at the kitchen table in a yellow sundress and leather sandals, knows the source of
Maria's elevated mood. They have not discussed what happened with Philip, but they do not need to. Maria emerged from a night at his house a changed woman.

“Mail from Yale,” her mother says, and hands Maria a manila envelope. “From the ivory tower to my flower. A note for my goat. A . . .” she has stumped herself with rhyme. “What the hell?”

Maria never told her mother about last season's inspired application. She was afraid of any appearance that she is planning for life after her mother's death. She expects nothing from Yale, least of all an envelope, and it is surprising to her that anyone would even use the postal service and not just send an email. She wonders if she should remove herself so that she can learn away from her mother's eyes the news this letter carries. But her mother has already seen the return address, and to her the word
Yale
is like some magnetic force. Maria decides she might as well look here and now.

The envelope is heavy, and she thinks of the myth that heavy envelopes mean good news. She tries to remember if this is supposed to be true or not. She decides to find out for herself. The first sentence of the letter inside answers her question. She does not even know what words she has read exactly, absorbing their mass in a sequence of jumble and flash. The meaning is all that she gets. It is what she has dreamed of for years. She has been accepted.

“Holy shit,” Maria says, and Bonacieux begins to fuss. Her mother approaches, afraid of what message has been received.

“What is it?” she says. She takes the letter into her mottled hands. As she reads she flinches softly, as if a soft wind has blown into her face. “Sweetheart,” she says. “My God.” She lowers the letter and looks Maria in the eye. “How did this happen?”

“I applied this past fall,” Maria says. “Rigby told me to.”

“Why didn't you tell me?” her mother says, unable to restrain her pleasure. It is as if she can only believe the reality of this news incrementally, the enormity of it too much for her to grasp at once. She looks happier every second.

“I didn't think it was going to work,” Maria says. Which is, of course, true, but also not the real reason she kept her effort a secret. She does not want to discuss the truth, which is that it was only a Hail Mary in the awkward process of trying to plan for a life without her mother.

“Go,” her mother says. “Tell me you'll go.”

“OK,” Maria says.

“Say it.”

“I'll go.”

Her mother hugs her, and as she does, Maria realizes she never before considered that a plan for life alone might not weigh heavily on her mother. She now sees that it might, in fact, lighten her load. Because what does a parent want but to know that her child's future is filled with promise?

Maria retreats to her room. It so warm that she simply removes her shirt and bra. Bonacieux attaches herself to Maria's breast. The pain of this act has now, for the most part, ceased. Maria's nervousness about it has also receded. The practice has become a given, and she now looks forward to these daily moments with Bonacieux that no one but she can replicate.

Maria's love for Bonacieux, and that is what it is, has only increased over time. But, Maria wonders, as Bonacieux suckles, drowsy and serene, is she toiling to care for the child because Maria loves her, or
does she love the child because of the hours she has spent caring for her? She is not sure. In the end it doesn't matter. Either has produced the same outcome. The problem. The love.

In the silent room, Maria can hear her own blood rush in her ears. The urgent hum has nothing to do with the feeding, though—it is only a response to the thrill and confusion into which Maria has been thrust. Over the whirr of her veins, she hears her mother in the hallway, calling for Karen, thrilled with the news. The future is so insistent, despite Maria's greatest efforts to keep it from being so. She thinks of Philip's face buried into her neck. She remembers his slow, heavy breath. With her daughter in her arms and the memory of Philip playing fast across her mind, Maria closes her eyes tightly, confident in the knowledge she will tell Yale that she cannot under any circumstances attend.

NEIGHBORS WAVE AS
Maria and Bonacieux walk their return path to Philip and Nina's house. The Mercedes is gone. Philip enters the back door only a few minutes after Maria, attempting nonchalance, as if he always rushes out of his writing shed at the moment of Maria's return.

“Nina went to the beach with Naomi,” he says.

“Who's Naomi?” Maria says.

Philip shakes his head. Naomi is not important. His glance lingers longer than usual. He grins. He says, “Has she napped?”

“Yeah,” Maria says, amazed that he might think otherwise. It is well past any hour at which a nap might successfully start.

“Damn.”

He leans on the counter and becomes serious, like a boy who might be punished. He lifts the hair from Maria's neck and kisses her just
above the collar. She wants to tell him about Yale but is afraid of having to explain exactly why she is not going to go. She raises an arm to the leaf of a fern hanging from the sill above. Philip moves his lips to her ear and fills it with his warm breath. Maria has aspired to reach this new territory, one populated by her own child, Philip, and her mother, and in its sunlight, now slanting through the window, spinning orange webs across her closed eyelids, she is ecstatic and lost in it.

THREE

CHAPTER 16

I
T'S JUNE, HOT
and crowded. Parking spots have reached a premium. Houses unpeopled for months now scream with children throwing water balloons from windows. Maria and her mother have moved on from their roles as mere visitors here in Beaufort and have now become some type of residents. They know when to avoid crossing the drawbridge. They know where not to park. And they know the neighbors, many of whom have come to take great interest in the improving health of Maria's mother. Over the last few months, Maria has undergone a general remove of desire. She wants exactly what she has. Her successful practice of not thinking much about the eventuality of things has continued. The shift in seasons comes as more of a surprise than an inevitability.

From a tourist shop on Front Street she buys three white dresses. They are all exactly the same, folded into the same white box, each crispy white cotton and so simple that Maria feels confident she could have sewn them herself, within minutes, had she the right materials. She wears one almost every day, cinching around her waist one of three belts purchased at the Salvation Army: a black-and-white checked New Wave number, one brown suede, the other yellow plastic. She divides her body into two hemispheres, each erogenous. She is pleased with such a simple equation. Her hair continues to thicken
and curl in the salty humidity. Almost no one in town has seen her eyes. When not couched behind her bangs, Maria covers them with oversized green Oliver Peoples sunglasses purchased on a whim in Raleigh, wiping out a third of her bank account. She feels it was money well spent.

It is the twenty-ninth of the month. Already Philip and Nina's house has been overrun with workmen in preparation for the Fourth of July, the occasion for their famous party. It's a local standard, a yearly marker of the season, and Philip says he rarely knows more than half the attendees. Philip and Nina shoulder the burden like a civic charge. Maria considers the responsibility of it all and admires its largess.

Christopherson has spent the last two mornings preparing Philip and Nina's lawn. He now stands atop a ladder, hurling wet clumps of leaves from a gutter. Two large men, each with thick neck hair fuzzing orange above the collars of faded polyester work shirts, drive spikes into the sandy lawn. They anchor a white tent large enough to hold a hundred people. Rosa, an elderly Mexican woman, appears with a vacuum in each room in which Maria tries to settle. At last Maria surrenders and escapes with Bonacieux to the public library, a squat brick eyesore just south of the ancient courthouse. She is glad to be free of the party preparations, and the sight of familiar faces on the sidewalk on her way to the library fills her with an ease to which she is not accustomed. She waves at Megan, the waitress at the Royal James, Darrel from the post office, who lost his dog and pasted pink poodle flyers everywhere. Before, these local demi-celebrities would never have deemed Maria worthy of notice, but with Bonacieux, she has gained entry to their society. She has a reason to now be known, a reason to be a part of this town.

Inside the library, on an IBM monitor the size of a microwave oven, Maria checks her email. This is where, a few weeks before, she declined her admission to Yale. She has lied to her mother about it, saying that the option to attend is there when she wants it. That there is no rush. The truth is, she did not solicit any flexibility. She simply supplied an electronic decline.

In her inbox today she finds the usual empty type. There is a sale at Urban Outfitters. An update to her Etsy account. A video of a lemur sent to her by her mother. But this morning Maria has received something more. When she thinks back on this moment later, it still makes her nervous. It is the end of something. She has received a message from Jack.

Hey
, he says.

I look at
Isn't Bonny Bonny?
every day. I found that shit right after you left. And you're all over it. I don't even know how to start asking how this happened. But I'll just start: how'd this happen?

Jacque

Maria's fingertips tingle as her stomach begins to knot. She considers the obvious first: Jack has changed the spelling of his name. This doesn't surprise her. She knows he'll change it back, or to something else again later. The rest is what matters: he knows.

Like some barometer of panic, Bonacieux begins to fuss. Other public computer users glance sidelong at Maria, annoyed. She says, “Shhh,” and signs out of her library account. Without responding to Jack, she exits the building.

So many times Maria considered this possibility, this exact thing, the chance that Jack might find photos of her and Bonacieux online. There was a time when she wanted him to. But that time has passed.
And now, he hasn't written with an apology or out of some unrestrained desire, but instead with a demand. Maria is not concerned that Jack has plans to destroy her insulated world, but he doesn't need malice for the outcome to be disaster. His interest alone is enough to spell danger.

She tries to employ her newfound ability to not think about the future, but in this case it does not work. As she moves toward Philip and Nina's house through the streets in which only minutes before she found social refuge, she now feels paranoid, scanning all visible pavement for Jack. She is on the lookout for his black Scirocco, expecting at any moment an appearance.

What she fears more than the revelation of her secrets and ensuing dissolution of her position within the Price house is the ending of whatever spell has been cast upon her mother's health. Maria cannot cease ascribing mystical powers to Bonacieux and the child's effect upon her mother. Before Bonacieux's birth, her mother was dying. Since her birth, her mother has ceased that grim progression and has, in fact, reversed it. Without naps, without Bonacieux, and without playtime and the changing of clothes, Maria fears her mother might just wither away. She is like a balloon inflated only by the child's presence.

On the cracked leather couch in Philip and Nina's living room, Maria applies sunscreen to Bonacieux's fair legs. She packs bananas, frozen strawberries, two bottles on ice, an extra pacifier, and a baked sweet potato wrapped in tinfoil. Philip is taking them out on the boat. Maria is glad to board any vessel today that is charted away from land.

In the study, Philip asks Maria to apply sunscreen to his shoulders. They are strong and sprouted with sparse gray hairs. As she rubs the
lotion onto his warm flesh, Philip checks his phone. He could not be more at ease. In the rectangle of light at the end of the hallway, Maria sees the form of Nina appear and pause to watch. Maria removes her hands, and Philip, who has not seen his wife, pulls his shirt back onto his shoulders without saying a word.

In the kitchen, Nina says, “Isn't the water too rough?” She has no plans to join them, ever ready to capitalize on a chance to be alone, but today she seems determined to keep Philip inside.

“Maybe,” Philip says.

“Stay here,” she says.

“If it's too rough, we'll come back.”

“Maybe we should stay,” Maria says, trying to act like she doesn't want to be alone with Philip. She cannot tell if it has worked or not, though. Nina is too reserved. She only kisses Bonacieux and says, “Please be safe.”

Maria feels Nina's eyes on the back of her neck as they exit. She tells herself that this suspicion is only an effect of Jack's note, that everything is actually fine. But she does not believe it.

Philip steps into the street, three worn canvas bags dangling from one thick finger over his shoulder. He wears frayed khakis rolled high above old brown boat shoes. A stained white oxford flaps untucked at his waist. It is all effortless, this elegance. Tortoiseshell sunglasses hang from a shoelace around his neck. His face is like a piece of parchment removed from a fire, tanned unevenly and worn, peeling atop one ear. His beard seems to have grown more coarse. His hair twists into thick unruly curls, absorbing salt from the air like a sponge. She conjures against this image a memory of Jack and feels like she has aged ten years since she last saw him.