Bodies of Water (7 page)

He was drunker than I had thought. Sometimes this happened; he’d seem fine and then something would shift, and I’d realize that he was actually
loaded
. Like a gun. All the chambers empty except for one. Our conversations like games of Russian roulette.

“Frankie, please,” I said, forcing a smile, trying hard to keep the peace.

“Seems more like
I’m
the one with female troubles,” he said, pointing his callused fingertip into my chest. I couldn’t help but think of Eva, of the tender way she had kissed her finger before pressing it to my forehead. But this was not tenderness. He pushed, and his finger felt like something sharp against my sternum. “Nothing but troubles out of this one. Nothing but grief. I’ll tell
you
about female troubles. You’re nothing but
un pesce morto.
”
A dead fish.

I thought of the baby then, of what was left, swirling down the drain. Grief and anger overwhelmed me. His ignorance of everything that happened that day made me hate him. I knew it was illogical; he didn’t even know. But his obliviousness still infuriated me. His cruelty. I even thought for a moment about telling him what had happened, making him experience at least a bit of the pain I was feeling. But instead, I just silently listened to his venomous words and, finally, his angry shuffling down the stairs. I strained to hear the sound of the cupboard door opening and closing. The slosh into the glass. I worried only a little that he’d be even drunker and angrier when he returned. After a few tumblers of wine, he had a temper and could snap.
Had
snapped. But after half a jug, he usually just fell asleep. When he came up an hour later and sat down on the bed, unable to even undo his belt, I knew I was finally safe. And within seconds, he was snoring.

But I did not sleep, could not sleep. Even with the pills. My brain felt muddy, my emotions confused. Sorrow and relief and anger and guilt all swirled together, mixing with the pain, floating above me like a storm cloud. And the tears that drenched my face, the blood that continued to seep and seep from my body, could have been simply the dampness of rain.

 

Gussy knew something was wrong, of course, when she picked me and the girls up the next day from the train station in Two Rivers. As we piled into Frank’s station wagon, our girls climbing all over each other in the backseat, bickering over who got to sit next to the window, Gussy looked at me in that way she had: that big-sister way that made me feel both loved to death and patronized. I ached to tell her about the miscarriage, but I also dreaded revealing yet another one of my many disappointments. I wanted her compassion but not her pity.

“What happened?” she asked. “Is it Frankie? What did he do this time?”

I had the terrible habit of only talking to Gussy about Frankie after he did something stupid or hurtful. In Gussy’s eyes, Frankie was a caricature, a foolish man who drank too much and whose tongue was too loose. I always had to remind myself to share not only Frankie’s foibles with her but his kindness as well.

“He wasn’t out stealing trees again, was he?” she asked, laughing a little, and I had to resist my own laughter.

The last time I’d had a conversation with Gussy about Frankie was when he’d come home one night with three saplings, pulled up by their roots. He’d gone out for a couple of drinks with the guys after his shift and got the bright idea on his way home that he could take some of those pretty red maples he saw growing on the side of the road near Spot Pond and plant them in our backyard. Convinced that the police weren’t far behind, ready to arrest him for theft or vandalism or whatever crime pulling trees up by the roots and putting them in the back of your Studebaker constituted, he’d pulled into our driveway so fast he’d left tread marks on the pavement.

“No.” I shook my head. I glanced at the girls in the backseat, who were eavesdropping on us now, and said, “We’ll talk later.”

“Because, Billie,” she whispered, glancing in the rearview mirror at the girls. “I swear, if he does anything that stupid again, I’m going to come down there myself and talk some sense into him.” If Gussy had any idea about what really happened between Frankie and me, the words he used, the things he called me, she would be horrified.

Gussy liked to consider herself my protector, even though the opposite was almost always true. I was three years younger, but when a neighbor boy down the road took Gussy’s brand-new bicycle from her on the way to school and wouldn’t give it back, I was the one who wrestled him to the ground, bloodied his nose, and sent him crying home to his mother. When a different boy broke Gussy’s heart in the eighth grade, I was the one who left a nice, fresh cow patty from our pasture in his book bag. Now that we were grown, I simply protected her from the truth.

“No need for that, Gussy. Frankie’s been a good boy.”

And that was the truth, for the most part. Frankie drank too much. He could get angry, even cruel. But while he certainly raised his voice, he would never dare raise a hand to me, or to the children. His drinking usually manifested in foolish, impulsive behavior: stealing trees, setting off firecrackers in the front yard, juggling my best china in the kitchen. On the occasions when his jolly drunkenness turned into rage, I knew how to navigate the dangerous waters of his anger. First I made sure the girls were far, far away from him. Second, I knew what would make things worse and how to avoid them. I also knew that patience, above all else, was the antidote, because his storms were like tornadoes. They brewed, they touched down, and then they were gone. If you could just hunker down and find a safe place to hide, within no time at all it would pass and the air would be calm again. I’d witnessed the same storm pattern with his sisters’ husbands as well, though most of their wives hadn’t figured out that it’s best to stay in the eye of the storm. When his sisters visited, I watched them get berated and shoved around, and later, when they had gone back home, I worried for them and thanked my lucky stars that Frankie was, in comparison, so very tame.

“Mind if I smoke?” I asked. The scent of cigarettes, particularly my own, had been intolerable during the last few months. But now that this pregnancy, like every pregnancy, had ended, I found myself hungry for them again.

“Put your window down then,” she said, rolling her eyes.

Gussy always complained when she rode with Frankie and me in the car, both of us puffing like dragons, the windows rolled up to keep out the cold, the children complaining of upset stomachs in the backseat. Gussy had never even taken a puff of a cigarette, not one puff. I lit my cigarette and rolled down the window. I took a deep drag and allowed the smoke to fill all those empty places inside of me. I imagined myself filled with vapors, the ghosts of all those babies that had once resided inside me.

The air outside was cooler than it had been at home. As we drove through Quimby and then away from town and into the woods toward the lake, I felt like everything was suddenly cleaner, brighter, greener. There is something about going home, like water always wanting to rise to its own level again. This was my level. Here was my water.

The kids opened the car doors before we even pulled to a stop. Mouse tore off her clothes, stripped down to her panties, and ran toward the lake. I smiled at her abandon, her freedom.

“Now will you tell me?” Gussy asked.

“Let’s just swim,” I said, tossing my cigarette into the bushes.

I followed Mouse’s invisible path down to the water’s edge where I took off my own shirt, leaving my shorts on, and swam. I was still bleeding, would still be bleeding off and on for the rest of our time here, but somehow being in the water, being surrounded by water, made it seem not so violent a thing.

I told her about the miscarriage later that night after the children had gone to sleep. I tried to pass it off as though it had been expected (it
had
been expected) and that I was fine. That was the pretense I have always had with my sister: that nothing could harm me, my hide as thick as an elephant’s. But she knew; she always knew. And so she just held my hand as I told her what happened. For some reason, though, when she asked me later, on a lighter note, what else was new that summer, I didn’t mention the Wilsons. I didn’t tell her about Ted and his wide face and giant hands and big, red Cadillac. I didn’t tell her about how nice it was to have a friend so close to home. And I didn’t tell her about everything that Eva had done for me that day. Maybe I didn’t want her to be jealous, to feel like someone was stepping on her big-sister toes. Or maybe I just didn’t have the words to articulate the wonderful sense of contentment I had knowing that, despite everything, I wasn’t alone anymore: that just across the street was someone warm and kind. Or maybe it was more selfish than that, and I just didn’t, for once, want to share.

Gussy helped me unpack that night, lingering longer than she needed to. Finally, as the sun went down and the exhaustion of the trip, of the whole summer, descended upon me, she kissed my head and said, “I’m here. If you need anything at all. Love you, Gingersnap,” and drove away, leaving us alone at the lake.

G
ussy calls tonight as I am getting out of the tub. I can hear my phone vibrating in the other room, and I consider letting it go to voice mail, but know it’s unfair to make her worry. I am careful not to stand up too quickly though. The last time I rose out of a hot bath for the telephone, I saw stars and almost went down, crashing into the porcelain bowl of the tub.
This is how little old ladies break hips,
I’d thought.
This is how bones crumble
. The world is a treacherous place at this age.

“Hi, Gus, what’s the news?” I say.

“I just got off the phone with Johnny,” she says. “He called to see if I’d convinced you to come home yet.”

Feeling a little woozy, I sit down on the bed so that I don’t accidentally fall to the floor. I had stupidly hoped she would just let this go. Forget about Johnny.

“Billie?”

“That’s what they call me,” I say, and wrap my towel around me. My hair is dripping wet and cold on my shoulders. Outside, a foghorn lows.

She sighs. “You know Ted passed away?”

I bristle at the mention of Ted. “How would I know that?”

“Suicide,” she says.

This is startling to me. I would have been less surprised to hear that he’d been murdered. “How?” I ask, not really wanting the grisly details but needing an image, something to make the suicide real. To make his death real.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I didn’t ask.”

“When did he . . . ?” I say. How is it, after all this time, this news comes as a relief? As though I have been waiting for this for the last five decades?

“This summer. I think it’s when Johnny really went off the deep end. He said he’s struggled for years now, he’s been in and out of trouble. But his father’s suicide sent him into a tailspin.”

“I really don’t know what he expects of me,” I say. And I don’t. I am an eighty-year-old woman living on the other side of Johnny’s world. The ties that bind us are frayed with age, weakened by time and distance. Barely a thread anymore.

Gussy coughs. “All of this is, um, more complicated than I thought.”

It is my turn to sigh. I don’t know why she’s being so elusive. “What’s going on, Gus?”

There is silence on the other end of the line, a terrifying abyss growing between us.

“Gus?”

“Please just come home,” she says softly. “We can talk about it when you get here.”

“Talk about what, Gus? There isn’t anything you can tell me about Ted Wilson that’s going to upset me. Seriously.”

There is that silence again, that gulf, and when she finally speaks, there’s a tumbling sense of urgency to her words. “I found a flight that gets into Burlington at three o’clock this Friday. I can pick you up and then we can have supper here, get some sleep. In the morning we can head up to the lake to see Effie and the girls. Johnny said he could come up on Sunday. Would Sunday be too soon?”

“
This
weekend?” I say, feeling suddenly too hot, my skin prickly. “I don’t know. This seems crazy.”

“Of course, he has to work on Monday, so it would be a short visit. I can ask Francesca about coming up too. If you stay a couple of weeks, maybe she could visit the next weekend.”

I can feel a breeze come off the ocean and through the cracks of my window.

“Would chicken and dumplings be okay?”

“For supper. When you get here.”

My sister has always been the one to take control, the one to grab hold of the universe, my universe, when it begins spinning out of control. I am grateful to her. But I am also powerless when she is this determined.

“I already bought the ticket,” she says. “You just need to get to the airport.”

Later, as I lie in bed waiting for sleep, I try not to think of Ted and all the possible ways he might have taken his own life. I try not to think of Johnny and whatever bottom he hit after his father’s death. I try not to think of that tenuous bridge between us, the deep water beneath, the memories and years below. I try only to think of seeing my sister again. It’s been two years, and we may not have that many years left. Either one of us.

A
t the end of that summer, when the girls and I returned to Hollyville from Vermont, the entire pregnancy and miscarriage seemed far away, like a gauzy dream. Going home after being away for so long
always
felt a bit dreamlike; it would take a few days before I felt as though I was in a real place rather than on a stage, the furniture and appliances all out of proportion to the ones in my memory, the colors too bright. Frankie looked strange to me too, like an actor playing Frankie. The touch of his hand felt foreign and papery at first, though he’d just been to visit us a couple of weeks before.

Even Eva seemed like some fabrication of my mind, a story I made up to entertain myself, to pass the time. We didn’t have a phone at the lake yet then, but I had sent her a postcard from Vermont, taking nearly a half hour at the Rexall in Quimby selecting one that would somehow entice her to join us there the following summer. But I hadn’t heard back. And Frankie had been useless. He said he hadn’t seen Eva at all while he was home, that his encounters with Ted had also been few and far between. I half expected when we pulled onto Beechtree Street that Mrs. Macadam would still be sitting on her porch, or that the F
OR
S
ALE
sign might still be stuck beneath the lilac bush. But instead, there was Eva. Eva with a tiny little bundle in her arms. I felt my cheeks flush, my blood quicken in my veins. She rushed down her porch steps when she saw our car, Donna and Sally and Johnny all close behind.

I threw open the passenger door as soon as Frankie pulled the car into our driveway and hollered across the street. “Pink or blue?”

“What’s that?” she hollered back.

“Girl or a boy?” I shouted again, feeling foolish.

“Why don’t you go across the goddamned street instead of making such a goddamned scene!” Frankie said, opening the trunk and pulling out our suitcases.

I ran across the street, overwhelmed by a need to touch her, to confirm that she wasn’t just some figment of my imagination. I put my left arm around her and squeezed, and with my right I touched the top of the baby’s pink bonnet.

“This is Rose,” she said.

“She’s beautiful.” I peered down at her small face. “May I hold her?”

“Please,” she said, and carefully handed her to me. I didn’t remember my own children being this small. She felt no heavier than a whisper in my arms. Her eyes were closed shut, her cheeks the blotchy pink of a newborn’s. “She’s wonderful,” I said, feeling that empty place inside me open wide.

Eva nodded, smiling. Now that I was closer to her, I could see the fatigue in her face, the exhaustion that deepened the shadows beneath her eyes. While my own skin was freckled brown from the summer sun, Eva was pale: not sickly, exactly, but her complexion was one of someone who has been stuck inside and out of the light.

“Tell me about Vermont,” she said, squeezing my hand tightly. “I got your postcard. It looks so beautiful there. I told Teddy I want to go visit you next summer. Even if it’s just for a week. I thought Donna and Sally would go mad without your girls here.”

It had worked! The postcard picture of the lake reflecting the fiery autumn leaves of the trees surrounding it had done its job. I was glad suddenly I hadn’t opted for one with a covered bridge or a cow.

Frankie was glad to have us home, and on his best behavior that first night back. He barely drank with supper, and he even helped dry the dishes afterward. He played six games of Chinese checkers with the girls before shooing them upstairs for their baths. And then after they were tucked into bed, he raised his eyebrow and cocked his head. “Miss me?” Frankie was the eternal optimist, all his glasses half full, even this one.

And so I led the way upstairs to our room, and turned out the lights before slipping off my clothes. I hurried into the bed, and waited for him to undress as well. Under the covers, in the darkness, I felt the familiar angles of his bones, the eagerness of his hands and mouth. I tried to make him feel wanted, to return his affections with equal fervor, but I couldn’t focus. My thoughts were, as always, elsewhere. I tried, God how I tried, to simply be present, to be near, but the moment Frankie touched me I felt myself slipping away. Hovering at the edges of things. So I did what I knew would hasten things, pulled out all the old familiar tricks. And like magic, they worked (they always worked), and then Frankie was rolling onto his back, sweating and breathless, staring at the ceiling. “Good to have you home, Billie.”

From somewhere came the distant sound of an infant crying and for one confused moment, my heart lurched. I had put the lost baby in a closed, quiet place in my mind, a wooden box where I kept all the dangerous secrets, all the lost things. But now, the hinges of the box screeched open, and I felt my chest expand with fear and grief.

“Goddamn, that kid is loud,” Frankie muttered, rolling onto his stomach.

And then I realized the cries were coming from the Wilsons’ house.

 

The new baby had colic. Basically, this meant that unless she was sleeping, she was crying. And it was not the gentle fuss most babies use to let you know that she needs to have her diaper changed or that she wants a bottle, but rather relentless and piercing
screams
. Screams that could make even the best mother feel helpless, useless, even angry at her child.

I could hear her all the way across the street. Even with the door closed. I could hear her when I worked in the garden, when I canned blueberries in the kitchen, when Frankie and I lay down to sleep at night. I imagined that no one in the Wilson house must be getting any sleep. I certainly wasn’t.

After the kids went back to school that fall, it started to rain. For the first two weeks of September there wasn’t a single day that it wasn’t raining. It rained all night and it rained all day. The rain barrels were overflowing. Stuck without a car, I didn’t have much to do besides putter around the house, which was quiet now without the girls. I thought about visiting Eva, but I worried that ringing the doorbell, or even just knocking, might wake the baby. I had told Eva to call me if she needed anything, even if she just needed a break, but she later told me she felt uncomfortable asking for my help. As though Rose would be a cruel reminder of everything I’d lost that summer.

I pleaded with Frankie to take the train in to work so that I could have the car, but he insisted he needed it in case he “found anything.” Frankie was always happening upon discarded treasures and bringing them home. Our solid mahogany dining table had been abandoned outside an apartment building in Brookline. It had a broken leg and, as though it were a wounded animal, Frankie brought it home and tended to its injury, nursing it back to life. A large, framed mirror; an oak vanity; a treadle sewing machine; and a tricycle (though both of our girls were too big for it) had all made their way from the streets of Boston and into our little house. He felt about these salvaged items the same way he felt about the stamps he sold; every damaged piece of furniture, every antique he brought home, had a story behind it. Restoration was about keeping that history alive.

And so each morning he and Ted took off to work in their respective cars, leaving Eva and me behind. Stranded.

The Hollyville library was a mile away, which wasn’t far unless it was raining. But after five days, I decided to go ahead and bundle up in my slicker and plastic bonnet and just make my way. Chessy needed a book on Marie Curie for a report, and I thought I’d look for
The Wind in the Willows
for Mouse. I’d run out of things to read as well.

Outside, I peered at the Wilsons’ house and considered checking to see if Eva would like to bring Johnny and Rose along, but I knew that taking a baby and a rambunctious four-year-old out in the pouring rain was the last thing
I’d
want to do if I were her. However, when I got to the library, it seemed that every other mother with young children in Hollyville
had
decided to brave the storm; outside there were nearly a dozen cumbersome carriages and strollers lined up underneath the narrow awning. And stepping into the children’s room was like stepping into a scene from
Lord of the Flies
. Babies and toddlers, frazzled mothers, and one very harried librarian were not what I had hoped for. So I quickly located the books for the girls and then escaped to the reading annex. I found
Doctor Zhivago
still sitting on the New Fiction shelf, and as the rain pounded against the tall glass windows near my overstuffed chair, I lost myself inside the pages. When I finally looked up at the clock, it was two o’clock. That would get me home just in time for me to meet the girls after the bus dropped them off.

I gathered my things and headed to the circulation desk with my books, but something in the stacks caught my eye. Sitting alone on the floor was a woman, crying softly into her hands.

I stepped back, out of her line of vision, heart pounding, and tried to process what I had just seen. I slowly peeked around the corner again and sure enough, it was Eva. Eva completely alone, weeping into a book.

“Eva?” I said softly, stepping between the stacks.

She looked up, startled. “Billie,” she said, sounding strangely relieved. There were deep circles under her eyes, and her hair was disheveled. She was dressed in a faded house dress and a pair of worn ballet flats.

“Are you okay?”

She looked at me silently and nodded, though I could tell something was amiss.

I sat down across from her on one of the step stools used to get the books from the high shelves. “What are you reading?” I asked.

She rolled her eyes, sheepishly. Embarrassed. “Just a trashy novel.
Peyton Place,
” she said, showing me her book as evidence, and then wiped her runny nose on a hankie she was clutching in her hand.

“Where are Johnny and Rose?” I asked, figuring they were in the city with Ted’s family. Perhaps somebody had finally given her a break.

She looked up at me, her small nose bright red, her eyes bloodshot, and I suddenly knew something was terribly, terribly wrong. “I had to get out of that house. I just wanted to sit and read a book. I just wanted a little peace and quiet. She won’t stop crying.”

“Johnny and Rose are alone at the house?” I asked, starting to panic.

“No, Donna is home sick today. She’s watching them.”

I tried to imagine the sort of mischief Johnny might get into unattended. Donna, while older, was still only nine. Images of matchsticks and flames flickered in my head.

It was as though Eva were suddenly waking from a dream. “Oh, God, you must think I’m just awful.”

“Did you walk here?” I asked.

She nodded, and I noticed her drenched overcoat in a wet pile next to her. “I’m a terrible mother,” she said. “A terrible, terrible mother.”

“No,” I said. “You’re just exhausted. It’s absolutely understandable. But let’s get you home,” I said, reaching out a hand to help her up. Trying not to sound panicked, I said, “You can use my umbrella.”

We made it back to our street in only twenty minutes or so, but we were both soaked, and bone cold. I cannot even explain the relief I felt when the Wilsons’ house came into sight and there were no plumes of smoke, no charred ruins.

Inside, Donna had made peanut butter sandwiches and she and Johnny were sitting on the floor watching television with plates in front of them. Rose was asleep on the couch, covered in a blanket.

“Now let’s get you dried off,” I said, and started to help Eva off with her coat.

Suddenly her mood changed. The despondency I’d seen in the library and felt in every heavy breath on our way home disappeared. She pulled the blanket up over Rose’s exposed arm and playfully scolded the kids. “Well, that’s not a proper lunch! Let me make some tomato soup. Grilled cheese sandwiches? And Billie,” she said, smiling. “We absolutely need to get together if this god-awful rain ever stops.”

Taken aback by this sudden shift, I simply nodded in agreement and made my way to the door.

“Have a nice afternoon,” she said, her face fixed in that strange smile. But then when we were alone again on the porch, she grabbed my arm. “And thank you.” Her eyes were wide and imploring. “Now you have one of my secrets to keep.”

“Of course,” I said.

We were conspirators from the outset, keepers of each other’s darkest truths.

 

“It sounds like air raid sirens,” Frankie said on Halloween night when the baby had been crying for hours. We were in the kitchen; I was helping the girls put the final touches on their Halloween costumes. At first I thought it was just one of the many children dressed up as a ghost, the ghoulish screams echoing in the night. But as I sent the girls off to gather the Wilson children before heading out trick-or-treating, masks affixed and candy bags at the ready, I realized it was Rose.

I left Frankie to hand out candy to the trick-or-treaters and went over to see what I could do to help.

“Where’s Ted?” I asked Eva. His car hadn’t been in the driveway all night.

“Business trip,” she said, shrugging. In a tired housedress and tattered slippers, I barely recognized her. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, and her hair was a mess.

“How long will he be gone?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Probably until the baby stops crying,” she said, smiling sadly.

“Let me take her,” I said. “Is the carriage in the garage?”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I know that,” I said. “Now go take a nice, hot bath. Put on some fresh nightclothes. I’ll be back in an hour. And if she’s still crying, I’ll take her out again.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“And when the kids are done trick-or-treating you can send them over to my house. Let Frankie watch them for a little while.”

“You’re the best, Billie.”

I smiled, felt myself blushing.