A Brief Lunacy (3 page)

“Please let us know if you hear anything,” he says into the telephone.

“Of course they'll let us know,” I say after he hangs up. “What a stupid thing to say.”

His face flushes as if I'd slapped him. “They're looking in all the usual places,” he says.

“I'm sorry, Carl. I didn't mean to say that.”

“I know, my pet. Of course you didn't.”

“Now what do we do?”

“You could finish the sock,” he says.

T
HE WAIT IS INTERMINABLE
and the socks are finished. Useless balls of yarn, too small for anything but trim or accent, roll around at the bottom of the basket. Then I remember the paper bag in the car with the Donegal tweed yarn that I bought to make Sam a sweater, and some skeins of primary colors for socks. I'm afraid to leave the phone to get the yarn and I hesitate to ask Carl to do it for me because it sounds like such a frivolous errand.

“Shall I heat the chowder?” he asks.

“No,” I say. “I'll do it.” Thank God he asked about the chowder, because the inordinate hush is disconcerting. On the way to the kitchen I lift the receiver, just to make sure it wasn't replaced off kilter. That happens sometimes.

The kitchen is as we left it this morning, which seems strange to me because now life has changed. Wouldn't you think the kitchen would appear darker or lighter or disturbed
in some way? I know this has happened with Sylvie before but that doesn't make it any easier. The table creaks when I lift one end and swing it toward me, away from the wall, just to shift the focus when we sit to have lunch. A change of scenery. Look at things from a new angle. You have to do that sometimes.

Just last night we sat here sipping too-hot fish chowder and eating fresh biscuits, chattering about Sylvie, saying we hadn't heard from her in a while and how that seemed like a good sign. The chowder is thicker today as it falls from the bowl into the saucepan, chunks of potato and haddock plopping into the bottom, splashing milk onto my sweater. Some splatters the lenses of my glasses and I can't see the chowder in the pot.

Carl is right. We always find her. She gets picked up on the street or she calls us from a stranger's house a few minutes away from Douglas House. They can't really keep her locked up, because she isn't a danger, they say. Just crazy. Just out of touch with reality.

When I put the pot of chowder on the top of the gas stove and turn the heat on very low, I take off my glasses and sit at the table to wait. My fingers close around my glasses tight enough to break them but I don't hear any cracks or snaps except in my own brain. Why don't they break? I pound the glasses down on the table and a lens falls out in my hand. Now they're broken. That's reality,
n'est-ce pas?
as Carl would say.

“You all right over there?”

“Right as rain,” I say. “Waiting for the chowder.”

When I was in labor with Sylvie, I wanted chowder and all the hospital had was cheese sandwiches. The doctor said not to eat anything because it would make me sick. Sylvie was big. I remember that. They knocked me out with ether and wouldn't let Carl in the delivery room even though he was a doctor. While I lay there on the table, my arms tied to keep them out of the way, legs tied to keep them open, invaded with forceps and strangers' fingers, Carl went out to the Norfolk Restaurant and bought a triple takeout of fish chowder.

I think my own mother bled to death. Because we were too big. Why couldn't they stop the bleeding? I think my father was with her. Were we there or did they take us away? As a child I imagined my mother cradling us, one in each arm, as my father wiped her cheeks with a damp towel and she whispered that she loved us with her last dying breath. I've gotten over that but I still picture her touching us, placing her fingers in our small fists. I've never asked my father if she saw us. I don't want to know that she didn't.

Sylvie was pretty: dark like Carl, and elfin, her face framed with black hair, which the nurses had to trim because they were afraid it would hurt her eyes. Her fingers waved in the air like dancing ferns. And I couldn't even eat the chowder Carl brought. He ate it all himself except for one spoonful that he fed to me. I couldn't seem to eat anything but toast.

Carl doesn't ask why the table is askew or why my glasses have a lens missing. Sometimes I wonder if he notices things like that or whether he just doesn't mention them
because he's grown accustomed to my odd habits. We chat about Sam and whether the girlfriend can pay for her own medical school and about Charlie's new appointment as partner at McGinty, Trainor, and Hoyt. Carl gets up once to check the receiver. We don't speak of the telephone until we finish eating.

“I'm going to go outside,” I say. “Will you listen for the phone?”

“Where are you going? She's not out there. How would she get here?” He slurps his soup. Carl is a good man but he slurps his soup.

“Just a walk. Breath of air, and I need to get my yarn from the car. Call me if you hear anything. I'll be back soon.”

I half-wittedly hold the door behind me for the dead dog and kick dry leaves from the landing, where they pirouette to the ground. The sun has dried the night dew from the forest. Small noises surround me as I make my way through shriveled ferns toward the pine tree. I stop here and there to listen to rustlings made by squirrels and birds and perhaps mice. Nothing sounds big like a human being walking. Carl is right. She couldn't come all the way here by herself.

My still life has collapsed. I gather dry leaves into a pile at the base of the tree and lower myself onto them. I'll just sit quietly and listen to what comes. A woodpecker hammers in the next tree. I hiss at it to shut up. If there were someone in the woods, I wouldn't hear them over that racket. I shift my weight, unfold my legs, which have fallen asleep, and stretch them out in front of me. My foot kicks the old broken wing bone.

“Sylvie? Are you out here?”

The woodpecker racket ceases. The small rustles disappear. There is nothing. I'm not sure what I expect.

“Look at me, Mommy.” It's a little girl's voice I hear in my head, not my grown daughter who is crazy, hiding in the woods. “Look how high I am.” And I looked and said, “Oh, my. You certainly are a climber.” And afterward we walked through the woods, her small hand tucked in mine, while she gathered her “collection,” as she called it, a tote bag heavy with stones and chipmunk tails and clods of moss. In those days, we lived here only for a few weeks in the summer in a cabin we built ourselves. Sylvie set up a whole village of people and houses made from sticks and bones and feathers in the middle of the living room floor. Did we know something then? Harry said it was strange for a child to set up a disparate world like that. Sam and Charlie knew to stay away from her village, and each year it grew larger and more complicated until the year she was twelve. One day we came back from town and everything was gone. The only sign was a moldy spot in the center of the braided rug. She never spoke of it. When I asked where her village was, she said she was grown up and had no need for such things. Should I have talked to her about that? I guess we should have.

The next year, Sylvie burned the place down.

Then I hear it again. A footstep, perhaps. The snap of a stick. A breath that is not mine.

“Hello? Sylvie? It's Mommy.”

I struggle to my feet because my legs are all pins and needles
from sitting so long. No one answers. I look up but I can't see anything. My glasses. “Come down, darling.” If I had my glasses I could see better. A pinecone drops from the tree and sticks to my sweater. Is that the noise? Pine-cones dropping?

All the way back to the house I listen for her, but I know she isn't there. She would appear if she saw me. She'd laugh and throw her head back, and for a moment I'd think she was little Sylvie of the woods with her tote full of doll parts. But after the laugh would come anger and swearing and then perhaps a lost look and a tilt of her head. “Mommy?” And she'd run to me and kiss my eyelids. Once, after the kiss she bit me. Not hard. But Carl noticed the marks.

Carl sits at the end of the kitchen table, receiver to his ear, twirling my broken glasses around and around through the empty lens hole. He's talking to Charlie at the office, asking if he's heard anything. Now, why would Sylvie contact Charlie?

“Will we see you on Thanksgiving?” he says. “Well then, bye, Son. We'll keep in touch.”

“Why are you using the phone? What if she calls?” I sit down in my chair. “What if she's trying to reach us?”

“Here, Jess. Have some tea.” He pours steaming tea into my breakfast cup. “I just thought they might have heard something. Charlie's her brother, after all.”

“Should we go to Bangor? Should we go searching?”

“Where? Where would we start?”

“Anywhere. The police. Churches. Hospitals.”

“They're looking for her. Did you get your yarn? You
could start another sock.”

“Did Rita call again?”

“No.”

“But you've been on the phone.”

“How about Scrabble? It'd pass the time.”

“Would you drive up the lane to the highway? Just see if she's trying to come to us. It's a long walk down here. What if she fell?”

“I do hear something now,” he says.

“Who would be knocking? Who?” There has been no car sound. And we're over a mile from the road.

W
HILE MY FINGERS
are still wrapped around the doorknob, the knock happens again. Sometimes she knocks. Isn't that odd that a child would knock at her own home? Which Sylvie will it be, elf of the woodlands or queen of the venomous mouth? Although I know there is no God, I pray for the sweet creature who kisses me too hard.

Hans stands just outside the door on the stoop, his ridiculous walking stick held upright, his bare knees bowed out. Who would wear shorts this late in the season?

“Come in, Hans,” I say. Carl can't stand him. “Would you like coffee?”

“I'm off caffeine,” he says. “I'll take hot water. Everything all right here?”

He strides into the house toward Carl, tapping the infernal stick on our shiny floor with every step. He makes an exaggerated swerve around the piled-up tubes and paintings left
in a heap by the cabinet. Why did I invite him in? I don't know. Why can't I say,
It isn't a good time, dear friend
? But he isn't even a dear friend. He stands at the table, waiting to be invited to sit down with Carl. Carl gazes out toward the absent gulls, picks up yesterday's newspaper, reads the back page again. When I catch his eye he nods my way, pushes out a chair for Hans, and resumes reading. Carl is very rude sometimes but I love him. Why? Because he loves me and he's kind to most people.

“Well now,” I say. “How is Marte?”

“She was going to come walking but she fell yesterday and her knee is swollen.”

“Oh, that's too bad.”

“She goes to Boston tomorrow. Visit with the kids.”

Carl says nothing at all. One of the gulls lands on a nearby rock and stares through the window.

“She says to come for cocktails at six.”

“Not today,” I say. “We have some family business going on.”

“More problems with the daughter?”

“Not
the
daughter.” Carl speaks as if he is lecturing to a class of idiots. “
Our
daughter, and now isn't a good time to chat. And her name is Sylvie.”

“I know that,” he says.

“Would you like a biscuit?” I ask.

“Thank you, yes,” Hans says.

“I'm not sure you have time for a biscuit,” Carl says.

“Oh, Carl. Don't be rude.”

“Sorry about invading,” Hans says. “I'll tell Marte you were asking for her. Another time.”

I see him to the door. I wish Carl hadn't told him about Sylvie. I would have left it at
Just family business.
It's really no one else's concern. Hans paid no attention to Sylvie when she was young, but he stopped in a few summers ago when Sylvie was visiting and they took a liking to each other.

I stand in the open doorway waving as Hans walks along the path that leads past the old pine tree and continues toward his house, which is several miles down the shore. He has nothing else to do but walk. And what if Sylvie is there, by the tree? Perhaps it was Hans that I heard in the woods.

“Why did you tell him? About Sylvie?”

“I didn't say a word about her.”

“It's not his business.”

“All I said was her name. I said not to call her ‘the daughter.'”

“Next time, please—”

The telephone rings. Carl answers it. I can tell it's Rita again and that she knows nothing. Now I sit at the table, drum my fingers on the surface, listen to Carl on the telephone. He asks questions and listens politely. Outside, the shadows of the trees lengthen as dusk settles all around. Where is she? When the children were young I sometimes thought about our old age, when they would have their own families and careers, and imagined Carl and I sitting by our fire, sipping our wine, thinking about what a wonderful family we raised together. Now we are old and we sit and worry about our firstborn, who has no family of her own and not even the promise of a career.

Dinner. We still have to eat. From the freezer at the top
of the fridge I pull out a bag of jumbo shrimp. I'll fry them in butter and garlic, serve them over rice with parsley from the herb garden out front. Cool water runs over my fingers into a bowl, slowly, so the sound of the stream doesn't obliterate Carl's voice. I cut open the bag of shrimp. The whole chunk barely fits in the bowl.

“We'll wait to hear from you, then,” he says before he hangs up.

“You were rude to him.”