Infinite Home (23 page)

H
OW LONG HAD
he been cross-legged on the stiff cowhide rug by the darkened fireplace? What was Jenny’s intention, sitting up in the wide sun-bleached bed, looking impossibly old? The tattoo on her arm was the same as that in the newspaper photo—a faded black circle that he recognized now as a snake eating its tail—and the line of the freckled jaw was similar to that of the little girl in Brooklyn, but she looked as though her body had been systematically deserted, memory by memory emptying out in single file. He kept searching for evidence of her taking in or releasing air. The room seemed a near-total void of history or evidence or yesterday or tomorrow: the sheets white, pristine in the way of nothing else on the property; for a nightstand, a slab of unpolished tree trunk; the curtainless window. Just beyond her, a doorframe revealed a small, low-ceilinged room, within it a black woodstove and two simple chairs stacked together. The smells of food, of things warmed by time and by bodies, were absent.

Finally, without opening her eyes, she spoke.

“Edith sent you.”

“Well—not—you see—” he answered, although it had been clear this wasn’t a question. The woman, once a child on the steps of the building Thomas had come to need, stopped him before his unorganized mumbling achieved any pattern.

“I’m afraid I can’t help.”

“But your brother—”

She put a palm up with the patience of someone directing the weak and hospitalized.

“That person is named Owen.”

Thomas sensed Jenny’s language was one half-forgotten, its structure uncharted, the pressure of the tongue against the palate to make a sibilant sound uncomfortable.

“I should not need to say that these people you mention are not part of here.

“However,” she continued, “I can and will give you the same option I give others who come to me. You can stay here for a week, and stay quiet. If you still have the same concerns then, you may pose them. But I find”—and here she readjusted the pillow behind her back and put a hand to her jaw—“the questions tend to change.”

—

O
NLY TH
ROUGH TRIAL
AND
ERRO
R
did Thomas learn that Jenny—or Song, as he’d tried to start remembering her—meant precisely what she said. No one punished him for speaking—not when he addressed her, or any of the men who arrived with plates of grainy cornbread and boiled, dirt-caked spinach and fried eggs over brown rice—but his words didn’t seem to make it any farther than his lips. They didn’t glare at him or admonish him when, during the first twenty-four hours, he continued to ask, “Would it be possible for me to bathe? Could I make one phone call?” But neither did they acknowledge the sound; they only gazed and blinked, as though waiting for some unseen photographer to press down a button. It’s either like checking into a hostel where no one speaks your language, Thomas thought, or regressing into preverbal infancy, conceiving that care will be bestowed without even grasping the concept of trust. Neither option seemed ideal, but then neither seemed impossible to master. The discomfort of it was like a pulled muscle, unnoticed if he remained still.

By hour thirty-four, he had consigned his old urgency. He dipped his feet into little pools of memories, walked in and around them, trying to absorb every side. A nameless and cinnamon-scented teenage babysitter guiding Thomas’s tiny fingers into pots of primary-colored paints, then across the page. His mother at her happiest, alternately darkened and illuminated by a romantic comedy at the multiplex theater, her hand hovering over an unending bag of popcorn, sometimes squeezing his in delight, calling him
my love
. His high school biology lab partner, a red-haired girl who had undressed in his bedroom while his back was turned and insisted he draw, instead of the assigned feline skeleton, her. The variously svelte and pilled couches he slept on his first months in New York, the friends and acquaintances to whom they belonged. An afternoon he draped himself across the parquet after he had hidden all his art away, trying to forgive it for leaving. His ear pressed to the wall to better hear Adeleine’s song. The end of a film moving across her face. He entered and exited these rooms blithely as the hours passed, sometimes dozing off under a thin blanket, sometimes waiting, with a flat, simple hope, for food.

A
DELEINE WANDERE
D
through Edith’s apartment, determined: the sleep had felt clean and efficient, and she wanted to keep that, bend her body to it. She opened windows and took in scents in all their elements, the exhaust of buses breathing under the loose summer sap, and she ran her hands over bright jars of old buttons and white doilies gone brittle. She turned her face towards lamps, nearly kissed the heat of the bulbs. She tilted an ear to the obsolete, yellowed plastic radio on the kitchen counter Edith always kept turned on but low, and she listened.

She could hear Edith, snoring in the next room, and she settled onto the couch, which had the color and smell of a rose left out and starved of water. She began on the important work of imagining herself capable: by the time Thomas returned, she would have plumped and dusted and shined and scrubbed and generally exhumed the apartment. Edith would grow used to resting under the breezes Adeleine let in, to the cool cloth placed gently on her forehead. As her confused words spilled out and jumbled, Adeleine would nod and rearrange them. If she had committed herself to honoring Edith’s life at its end, she had only barely considered that this effort might mean instilling some new worth in her own. Though she knew the power she felt was mania, she thought she could shape it, polish its rampant energy and send it to work for her. When her moods went running, she could dispute them from a frightened distance or turn herself over.

As she dreamed from an upright position, Adeleine wrapped one arm around her waist, remembering how Thomas had held her. It was then that Owen entered, holding a key ring in one hand and a bag of oranges in the other. He cleared a space for them on the kitchen table’s stiff lace tablecloth, much of which was obscured by stacks of unopened mail, individually wrapped candies in decorative bowls, a single wool glove left out since winter. As though she were a colleague whose face he had memorized in boredom, he nodded at Adeleine, flopped his hand in a kind of wave. “Come here and have a seat,” he said.

I
N
A
MOTEL
ROOM
at the base of the Appalachians, one they’d checked in to at Edward’s insistence, was a television with the sound off but screen bright, the decade-old smell of cigarettes, and two beds covered in faded outlines of peonies. Paulie was in the shower with suspiciously soft plastic walls, surfaces that bent when pressed, audibly enjoying the miniature soaps and shampoos. Edward sat on the end of one mattress, examining the toes of his bare left foot with curiosity and disgust, and Claudia sniffed. The lull of the day enfolded them. Moments were lost, extended in the observation of afternoon light as it stretched in shadows across the nubby carpet.

“Sometimes I wish I had taken up smoking,” she said. “You know?”

“Nope.”

He flipped the mute screen to its next iteration. An ash-blond reporter pushed her breasts forward and said something about the several ambulances next to her, the cosmetic sheen of her face compromised by the red lights that periodically flashed onto it.

“A vice, you know? But a manageable one. Convenient. Just a quick mistake between meetings. I never really let myself explore, is the thing
.
Always responsible. Sensible shoes! Early bedtime!”

Paulie had stopped singing, and the pipes of the building hummed and coughed. The water continued in spurts.

“Claude,” sighed Edward, as though he had filled this role his whole life. “There is no shame in meeting the expectations of the people around you. In being dependable. Please take this earnestly from someone who once blacked out and pissed all over someone’s bedroom and tried to not clean his mess but
absorb
it by shaking baby powder everywhere.” Claudia put a hand over her face, her fore- and middle fingers parted so that she offered her distaste and amusement to Edward with one eye. They lay back on their respective beds and played a largely unsuccessful game in which he launched peanuts, underhand, in an arch over the space between them into her mouth.

Claudia, filled with the kind of comfort that comes from conquering so many miles in one day, curled up. She descended into a light doze, released cloistered sleep from her mouth and remained still within the uneven ring of peanuts that surrounded her.

When he saw her inert at last, Edward exited the room with attention to the door’s gentle close. He padded down the dingy, porous cement stairs, carefully opened the gate with the sign about pool hours, slipped off the drugstore flip-flops he’d bought ninety miles back, and descended the submerged steps into the glowing green-blue.

Paulie, now seated, brought his folded-up legs ever closer to his chest, quivering and murmuring half-words. The shower ran over the empty space of the tub, beating it with uneven sound. He didn’t know why he was crying, or why the space seemed impossible to exit, just that something wrong had set up a home in his body. One moment there he’d been, excited by tiny hotel toiletries, and the next his chest felt smaller, and the room didn’t look like a place a person could ever live, and he couldn’t remember what he deserved or why. Now he whimpered for his sister, and then Edward, and received no reply; now he reached for a phrase in the cache of those he knew and loved, but it wasn’t there.

P
LIABLE
IN
THE
HEAT
, still softened by the rare optimism that had come her way, Adeleine had not been able to deflect his questions, and soon Owen had known: that the building was empty save the three of them, where Thomas had gone, for whom he was looking. The information had seemed to occur to him in stages, first sharpening the movement of his eyes and hands, until he was bloated with it, and his limbs just hung from the chair where he sat. “I need to move,” he had said. “I need to look at something else.” He’d led them up to Adeleine’s apartment with one hand on the back of his neck, one on his mother’s.

Edith took to fits of cursing and forgetting and sleeping, and her son remained collected, occasionally sighing out a bright, focused note. He sat hunched on a chocolate linen ottoman, his legs splayed. The women perched on the brocade chaise under the cracked parlor window, listening to the small sounds of his thumbs on his phone. Every few minutes, a breeze from outside tickled their bare necks.

“Oh, Mom. I wish we could just talk about it. Do you think I like to be here? Think my time is best spent in this strange woman’s apartment? Edith?” He wove his fingers together into perfectly tanned Xs and pressed them outward, stretched then straightened the curve of his back.

“This can be an easy conversation.”

His mother’s jaw worked violently; she looked like someone deep in a casino, lost in obsession, absorbing only the changing light of slot machines.

“Edith, you can sign the house over, or Adeleine, you let me know where your boyfriend has gone to converse with my vanished sister, and we can all go somewhere we’d rather be.”

He turned his body in the direction of Adeleine, tilted his head and considered her as though she were selling something. “Of course, your hands are not tied. You’re free to go. But something tells me you won’t.”