The Hazards of Sleeping Alone (29 page)

As she navigated the heart, Charlotte felt claustrophobic. She tried to keep an eye on Emily, but her little body was too fast, ducking around corners threaded with bright pink veins and bulging blue arteries, disappearing under signs like
LEFT VENTRICLE, RIGHT ATRIUM, AORTIC ARCH.
When Charlotte groped her
way past the arrow pointing
TO THE LUNG,
the thumping was replaced by a breathy, sickening whoosh, like the inside of an enormous conch shell. As Charlotte fumbled her way out of the lung and back into the heart, the return of
th-thump
made her nauseated; the sound was coming from all around her, inside and out. The irony of this trip was not lost on her either: that she should be here, squeezing through an aorta made of plaster, not more than a year after her mother's heart attack. Stranger still, this fake heart pumping still seemed more plausible—more scientifically accurate—than her mother's coming to a stop. It wasn't high cholesterol, the doctors said, not blockage, but sixty-five years of silent worry capped off by a loss and a sorrow so deep that, in their medical opinion, it literally broke her heart.

When Charlotte emerged, she sagged on a bench beside a display of hearts in various states of disease. “Can I go again?” Emily had begged, and Charlotte nodded. For what seemed like hours she watched while Emily ran through the heart over and over, dutifully making eye contact each time, like she did at the swimming pool before and after going underwater. She waved to Charlotte when she entered the heart, then waved again when she popped out on the other side, unscathed.

Your goal is nothing more than to live the present moment. Do not think about the past or the future. Simply be here, acknowledging your thoughts and feelings right now.

Charlotte's feeling right now is that she wants badly to turn Vu Khan off. “Living the present moment” is completely at odds with her state of mind. At the moment, she can think of nothing but what will be happening
after
the moment, in the moment when she arrives at Emily's house and the moments after that. For the past five hours she's been trying to picture her arrival, scaring herself with images of a house exaggeratedly dilapidated
and rambling. Loose shutters, cracked aluminum siding. No glass in the windows or screens on the doors. Skinny local animals pawing at the front porch, begging for handouts.

She passes a huge green billboard by the side of the highway:
LIVE FREE OR DIE.
Her official welcome to New Hampshire, and it couldn't be more fitting. It is exactly as she suspected: New Hampshire is a giant free-for-all. An ungoverned, untamed wilderness. A place with no rules, no grades, no shoes, no shaved legs, no report cards, no marriages. Quite literally: a state of chaos.

Charlotte reaches for the volume and turns up Vu Khan, as if making the words louder might make them more convincing. She is trying to be positive. Trying to reserve judgment. This trip will be a good one, regardless of what the house looks like. Tonight they'll have a nice dinner. Tomorrow Emily will take her on a tour of the town. And Saturday, they will arrive at the real reason for Charlotte's visit: Emily's twelve-week sonogram. Charlotte had insisted on being there for it—she told Emily she wanted to be involved in this process, and she does—but also, she wants to be sure this doctor is qualified. She needs to know for sure Emily is in good hands.

To be present is simply the experience of being awake and aware. Do not judge. Do not reflect on the past. Do not worry about the future. Simply rejoice in the—

Charlotte snaps the volume down. Does Vu Khan have children? She thinks not. She doesn't turn him completely off, so technically he is still talking, but his words are too low for her to make out. She can't handle this man's opinion on happiness right now; it's too blithe, too easy. As happy an event as this pregnancy is—as happy as Emily still seems—Charlotte knows it's not that simple. She remembers the glow on Emily's face
when she announced they were keeping the baby. Charlotte's seen that glow countless times before: Emily recommending a great book, Emily adopting a new cause, Emily discovering an amazing new friend or painter or professor or rock band or organic peanut butter. Emily discovering Walter. It's the same look that was on her face at the Wesleyan graduation. That day, Charlotte had called it love.

And maybe it is. But already Charlotte senses Walter and Emily's dynamic changing. She can't help but feel he's more committed to the relationship than she is. In Emily's whole life, have any of her passions amounted to more than a bright flash? Has she ever made a decision and stuck with it?

Charlotte fishes in her purse for the directions Walter sent by e-mail. She smoothes them against the steering wheel with one hand, guiding the car with the other. Her eyes flick back, forth, from the notes to the road.
Go through toll ($1), Walter instructed. Follow signs for NH Lakes/White Mts. Take Exit 4, on left—

She drops the directions in her lap. The toll is already approaching. Charlotte slows and rolls her window down, but when she stops, she sees a handmade sign in the empty window:
HAPPY THANKSGIVING!
She pauses, touched by the gesture. Like the metal bridge, it too strikes her as being very New England, softening the rough conditions with an unexpected kindness.

She follows Walter's instructions, turning off the highway, passing a few lights, making a few turns, and eventually finds herself on an abruptly rural road. She glances at the directions, puts her blinker on and pulls over.
Go straight on Song Lane
—she looks up, Song Lane it is—
about 8 miles.
Charlotte surveys the narrow road, bordered by topheavy trees. It doesn't look like it could stretch more than twenty feet.
Pass Mahar Pies & Real
Estate on left. Cat hotel (no joke!) and produce market on right. After market, watch for Willow Rd. Turn left and … home sweet home! p.s. If you get lost, ask. People around here are nice.
:)

Walter punctuated this last line with a smiley face made out of a colon and a single parentheses. “Emoticons,” he explained, when Charlotte asked about them. He even e-mailed her a long list of facial expressions constructed of various combinations of punctuation. Semicolons for conspiratorial winks. An equals sign for a pair of eyes. Hyphens for noses. A mustache masquerading as the sign for greater-than.

She reads the directions once more, committing them to memory. Vu Khan is still murmuring vaguely from the dashboard. Tentatively, she starts driving down the dirt road until she spies Mahar Pies & Real Estate. She'd assumed it was two different stores, but no: real estate and baked goods in one establishment. On her right, she sees the cat hotel.
The purrfect place to board your pet!
The produce market is closed, but a very Thanksgiving-ish spray of corn cobs and gourds garnishes the entrance. Charlotte slows to a crawl—there's no traffic, after all—scanning the thick trees for Willow Road. If she hadn't been going nine miles an hour, she might have missed it, the sign so entangled with vines and leaves that it's actually become part of the landscape. Below the road sign, she spots a swath of manmade color: a homemade poster with an arrow pointing left and bubble letters that spell
WELCOME MOM!

Her heart swells. She snaps her turn signal on, then off; it seems not only unnecessary here, but borderline offensive. As Charlotte turns into the driveway, her breath feels stuck in her chest. After so much worrying and conjuring, it is surreal to actually be here. In front of her stretches what looks less like a
road than a long, rutted driveway, bordered on each side by deep trenches that look like they were gouged by a monster truck. In the middle, a hump of dirt is covered with sparse grass, like an old man's whiskers. Charlotte hears branches snapping under her tires, then something scraping the bottom of her car. She maneuvers to the right, planting one wheel in a trench and the other on the hump, and it is at this awkward angle that she approaches the alternative living arrangement.

The house looks like pieces of various houses patched together: a tall wooden middle section, a clapboard appendage jutting from one side, a porch poking from the other. In the yard sits an old-fashioned, slate-roofed red barn. The middle section of the house is painted magenta at the top, reverting to a dingy white about a third of the way down, as if the painter abruptly lost interest. Emily is waving from the porch, wearing what looks to be an apron. Walter is in the yard, beckoning Charlotte into a makeshift parking place. At the last second she remembers
Embracing the Moment,
and lunges for the volume so forcefully that Vu Khan's lisp is deafening when Walter opens the door. “Charlotte!”

She turns the car off, Vu disappearing. “Walter! Hello!” She is surprised by how happy she is to see him. Her legs are stiff as she stands and lets him enfold her in his customary hug.

“Mommy! Mommy!” Emily calls, skipping over the grass.

Charlotte feels Emily's strong arms around her neck, then steps back and takes her usual inventory. Nothing too surprising, except the apron, which comes as a mild shock; Emily always objected to her aprons, calling them “old-fashioned” and “demeaning.” Underneath it she's wearing a bulky, oatmeal-colored sweater and scuffed blue jeans. Charlotte doesn't think she's showing yet, but under all those layers it's hard to tell.

“How was the drive?” Walter is saying. “Any traffic? Problems?”

They're the questions Charlotte has grown used to asking.

“None at all,” she says, as he grabs her suitcase from the backseat. “Here, let me—”

“Mom, please. He's got it.” Emily hooks Charlotte's elbow. “So how were the directions? Did you get lost?”

“Just once—”

“Where?”

“It was my fault,” she says, glancing at Walter. “Somewhere in Connecticut, I think.”

Emily frowns. “This is why you need a cell phone.”

After twenty years of resisting an answering machine, she's not about to go catapulting into a cell phone. But rather than argue, she smiles.

“Come on,” Emily says, tugging her hand. “Let me show you inside.”

They step onto the porch, crowded with white wicker furniture and hanging plants. Up close, it's not as ramshackle as Charlotte had imagined. The screen door is a little crooked, the paint peeling in spots. She steps gingerly over a sagging porch step as Emily swings open the front door.

“Home sweet home!”

The first thing Charlotte notices is the smell: home cooking. Not a familiar cooking smell, though. Woodsy. Cinnamony. Had Charlotte ever gone camping, this might have been what it smelled like. The counters are dusted with fine brown silt and scattered with open spice jars, spoons, measuring cups. Pushed against the far wall is a wooden table (one of Walter's creations, Charlotte guesses) draped with a tapestry so long it pools like a curtain onto the floor. Table and floor are heaped with stacks of
mail, books, candlesticks, potted plants, a pair of eyeglasses, set of keys, a plastic yellow timer that looks like it belongs to a board game. On top of the stove is something large, round, and wrapped ominously in tinfoil.

“Coming through!” Walter appears with Charlotte's suitcase in one hand and her purse draped over his opposite shoulder. “Mmmm,” he murmurs, lifting the edge of the tinfoil. “Smells good, Em.”

“Hey! No peeking!”

He drops it.

“It's supposed to be a surprise,” she explains to Charlotte.

“You're the boss,” Walter says, heading for the doorway. “Where's this stuff go, boss?”

“Mara's!” Emily calls, as his footsteps echo up unseen stairs. She shakes her head. “We've only talked about a million times about where you're sleeping.”

“Where am I sleeping?”

“Mara's room. She's away for the weekend.”

“Oh,” Charlotte says. “Right.” It had never occurred to her that the roommates might be there, but she's relieved to know they're not. “Of course,” she says out loud. “They're with their families. For Thanksgiving.” It's somehow reassuring that these roommates have families who observe Thanksgiving.

“Well, yeah, Mara is. But Anthony's still here.”

Charlotte tenses. Does this mean Anthony is joining them for dinner? After her long drive, and this unfamiliar place, the last thing she needs is the social pressure of spending the evening with a stranger.

“His family's in Hawaii. He's leaving tomorrow to meet Mara down in D.C.”

“So will he—”

“She just didn't want him dealing with all that holiday shit. Mara's family is completely fucking nuts.” Seeing the worry on Charlotte's face, she adds, “Sorry, but they really are.”

“So Anthony is—” Charlotte tries again.

“Going down tomorrow morning, just in time to deal with all the family fallout. Come on,” Emily says. “Come see the rest of the place.”

Charlotte tries to put this news aside and trails Emily into a large room awash with sunlight. The walls are filled with bright windows, each ledge crowded with plants of various shapes and sizes: thick reddish leaves, long spidery tendrils, tender leaf cuttings floating in empty yogurt containers and mason jars. The leaves are all tangled in one another, jostling for the light like a crowd of schoolchildren. On the floor are several large colored pillows substituting for a couch, a trunk doubling as a coffee table, a tiny rabbit-eared TV in a corner on the floor. In another corner squats a black potbellied stove and a stack of cut wood. The furnishings all feel somehow peripheral, as if the room has all the accents but none of the things they're supposed to be accenting. Taking up most of the floor is a multicolored, braided rug strewn with random magazines, socks, books, shoes, empty mugs, stray newspaper sections, half-melted candles, a game of Scrabble that looks like it was called off mid-play, words still frozen crisscrossed on the board:
ASP, PLAN, FEELS.