The Next Time You See Me (46 page)

“As well as can be expected, I guess,” Susanna said. “Medically, she’s OK. Her mother told me she woke up pretty upset.”

“It’s no wonder,” Tony said.

“Was she with the body?”

His hands were in his pockets, his shoulders slumped. “Nearby. Ten or fifteen feet from it.”

“You think she found it?”

He shrugged. “She was within sight of it. But I’m not sure. Maybe it was a coincidence.”

“I wish she would wake up,” Susanna said.

But the child slept on, her breaths long and steady, her features smooth. If she had been dreaming before, she didn’t seem to be now. The monitor at her bedside beat out a steady time. Somewhere down the hall, a television blasted the laugh track to a sitcom. Susanna sat again in the chair Kelly had vacated, thinking that she could almost be jealous of Emily right now, despite all of the hard truths she was about to awaken to. In this moment, the girl had found a hiding place. She was still young enough that the world would allow her that.

“You’ll go home?” Tony asked. “Your husband seemed worried about you. Genuinely.”

She smiled a tiny, rueful smile. She understood what he was really saying.

“What I mean to say is that he seems to love you.”

But you don’t,
Susanna thought. She was gripping the edge of the rough-woven thermal blanket on Emily’s bed, and she unwound it from her fingers.

“And your daughter,” Tony said. “I saw her. He seems like a good father to her.”

“Well, then, I guess I’ve got all a girl could hope for.”

He shuffled uncomfortably.

“I know that’s not what you meant,” Susanna said hoarsely.

Tony went to the door, halted. “I’ll call you tomorrow, when we hear from the lab. It’s possible that we’ll need you to come in and identify some clothing items.”

“Perhaps you could have that Pendleton guy take care of it,” Susanna said. She turned and looked over her shoulder at him. “Just for now. For this part of things.”

“Are you sure that’s what you want?”

She nodded, lips pressed tightly together.

He was propped against the doorpost stiffly, as if he needed holding up, and she wondered if his back was paining him. His temples and forehead were damp.

“Try to get some rest tonight, Suzy.”

She lifted her fingers in a little wave. It was all she could manage.

2.

She looks down at Emily Houchens, not seeing her. She is thinking about what comes next. She will go home and pack a bag. She will pack a bag for her daughter. She will take Abby to her mother’s, and she will try to explain to the both of them about Ronnie, and then they will face the rest of it together. She knows now what she is getting, which isn’t much—and what is left, which is enough. Just enough to keep her going. She suspects that this is a decision she will have to make not just now but every day of her life, each time she passes her daughter off to Dale for a visitation, each time Abby asks her the difficult questions, each time her mother draws her lips in disappointment. Am I right? Is it worth it?

Ronnie, she thinks, is the only one who would have understood. Who would have told her, each time she needed to hear it,
yes.

Thanksgiving

Ronnie had come with a bottle of white wine, because Susanna liked it, though Ronnie had known she was baiting Dale—that he would spend the rest of the day silently angry about it. And she was right, of course; he scowled when Susanna dug out a corkscrew before serving dinner, scowled when she poured equal portions into two of her crystal water goblets, the only glasses she owned with stems. His disapproval was only matched by their mother’s. “I don’t see how the two of you can tempt fate that way after what your father put us through,” she said. “They say it runs in the family.”

“What?” Ronnie said. “Crazy? We got that from your side.”

Susanna laughed.

“Oh, hush,” their mother said. “You know what I’m talking about.” But she wouldn’t say the word. She never said the word.

When they’d finished eating, Dale stood and tucked his cloth napkin under the lip of his plate. “It was good,” he told Susanna. “I’m going to watch the game in the bedroom, if that’s all right with you.”

“We were about to play hearts,” Susanna said. “You don’t want to? We need a fourth.”

“Just deal out an extra hand and don’t do pairs. It’s not a big deal.”

Susanna snatched his plate from across the table and started scraping it roughly into hers. “Fine,” she said, and Ronnie couldn’t help but wince a little. Dale was an asshole, behaving in characteristically asshole fashion, but she hated seeing her sister this way, so prissy and petty.

“Calm down, Sister,” Ronnie said. “I’ll help you with the dishes. Let Dale take off.” She threw him an exaggerated smile. “We’ll just finish this bottle of wine and yak.”

He left the room without speaking again, and it was better, really. Even their mother seemed to feel the difference, and she didn’t object when Ronnie poured a small amount of wine into her empty water goblet, or when she poured her own and Susanna’s back to full.

“Well,” their mother said, taking a tentative sip, “it
is
Thanksgiving.”

They all went to the living room. Abby hunched down at the coffee table to play with Matchbox cars, and Susanna set the television on a cartoon, something the grown-ups could ignore. It was so rarely like this: the three of them together, enjoying each other, talking about something besides old grievances. How many holidays had they spent rehashing their father’s sins against them and their sins against one another? The most terrible days of Ronnie’s and Susanna’s youth had taken on a kind of legendary status among them, and they each had their pet stories: Ronnie’s was the time that Dad had slapped her so hard her ear bled, and how Mama’s reaction was to flee the room weeping instead of tending to her. Susanna’s was when she came in from school to find their father passed out naked on the couch, and though Ronnie never said so, she thought that Susanna was being a bit dramatic about the whole thing.
Ever been socked in the ear?
she wanted to say.
I’d have rather gotten a look at the old man’s pecker any day.

Their mother didn’t have stories so much as she did favorite excuses, even accusations. “You girls don’t know how much I protected you from,” she liked to tell them. “You don’t know how many times I took the punches so you wouldn’t have to.” By the end of it she was the victim, and Ronnie and Susanna were the ones apologizing. That’s how these powwows always went: storytelling, accusations, apologies, tears. By the end they would convince themselves that they’d really and truly cleared the air and gotten closure; they weren’t angry anymore; they just loved each other
so much.
And yet, when the next holiday came, they were ready for another round.

But maybe they really had gotten it out of their systems last time, because here they were, bellies full, talking about Christmas shopping and decorating, and Susanna was saying that it was going to be the first year that Abby could really appreciate the idea of Santa. This got them into some old memories, but only the good and funny ones: The year Ronnie had gotten a bike and Susanna had gotten roller skates, and they were each so sure that the other’s present was the superior one that they screamed for a solid hour. The one time Dad dressed as Santa, because a guy he worked with loaned him a costume. The year Dad drove them way out in the country, parked them on the side of the road, and led them through a stranger’s woods with an ax and some rope, and how they didn’t realize until they were adults that they’d trespassed and stolen a tree. “I don’t know about that. Are you sure that’s what happened?” their mother said, and Ronnie and Susanna said “Yes, Mother” in sync, in the same droll tone of voice, and they all laughed. They were feeling the wine in that really good way that was warm and tickly and innocent, which was when Ronnie would usually open another bottle or dip into the whiskey, because she was always so afraid of losing the good feeling that she ended up killing it by having too much. But here, now, this was enough. She was comfortable on her sister’s ugly sofa, with her foot propped up on the coffee table; Abby kept crawling under her leg and driving the Matchbox cars along her shin.

Susanna went to the kitchen and returned with a camera. “Smile, Mom,” she said, and their mother grinned in that tortured way she had, so that the bones in her face stood out more and her eyes narrowed to lines. “Okay, now you, Ronnie.”

Ronnie held a hand in front of her face. “Put that thing away. We were having a good time, for God’s sake.”

“You can do this one thing for me,” Susanna said. “I made green bean casserole for you. No one else even eats it.”

Ronnie huffed and set her shoulders. “All right, all right,” she said. “Get it over with.”

“Smile,” Susanna said firmly.

Ronnie crooked her lip a bit and then blinked away the flash. She hated taking pictures, hated how vulnerable it made her feel to put herself on display like that, not knowing if her expression was pretty or if she was dropping her chin in that way that made it seem as if she didn’t have one. She beckoned Susanna briskly with her right hand. “Here, give me that,” she said. “Let me get one of you and Mom and Abby together. Three generations of Eastman women.”

“OK,” Susanna said. “Abby, come here to me. Let’s take a picture with Grandma.”

“You can all get on the couch,” Ronnie said.

Susanna and their mother sat on the couch together, close, and put Abby awkwardly between them, so that one of her legs was on each of their laps. Abby still had a grip on a Matchbox car, and Susanna tried to pry it out of her hand, but she grunted as if she might cry. Ronnie boxed them in the camera’s viewfinder, putting its red crosshairs on her niece’s face. She felt something, seeing the three of them like that. She wasn’t sure what, but it was like a flutter in her chest, something that would take flight and stick in her throat.

“Wait a minute,” Susanna said before Ronnie could snap the picture. “Ronnie, we can’t do this picture without you in it. Let’s get Dale in here to take it. Dale!” she yelled. “Dale, come in here a sec and take our photo!”

There was a split second when Ronnie would have posed for the photo, when she wanted very much to be part of it, and then Dale yelled back, “Does it have to be right this minute? I’m going to miss this play,” and she just shook the want away and said, “Never mind that and smile. I’ll be in the photo next year.” Then she snapped it.

Something changed then. Abby’s cartoon ended, and Susanna spent five minutes flipping channels, trying to find something else that would satisfy her. Ronnie’s wine buzz dissipated. Their mother started making noises about leaving, and Susanna said, “If I don’t get those dishes in the washer soon I’ll have to scrub them.”

Ronnie went to the porch for a cigarette. It was a gray, drizzly day,
temperatures in the forties, and she hadn’t thought to slip into her coat before stepping out. She sat on the front stoop and smoked her first cigarette almost immediately down to the filter. She flicked it off her thumb into the yard, thrilling a little at the sight of it littering her sister’s neat lawn, and wondered where this anger had come from. She had looked through the camera lens and there it was. She couldn’t explain it. But anger was always sneaking up on Ronnie, appearing at the bottom of a glass or around a bend in the road or in a song on the radio.

The door behind her opened just as she was lighting her second cigarette. “Here,” Susanna said, and Ronnie looked at what she was offering: her jean jacket. She slid into it and grunted a thank-you.

“Want one?” She offered the pack.

“Guess not,” Susanna said. “Though it might be fun just to piss him off.”

“He’ll smell mine on you,” Ronnie said. “That’s enough to do it.”

“I’m sure you’re right.”

They watched as a car pulled in at the house across the street, where a half dozen other vehicles were already parked in the drive and lining the road in front of the house. That was what Thanksgiving was supposed to look like, Ronnie thought as a graying couple emerged and pulled foil-covered pans out of the backseat; she could make out the steam rising off of the dishes from here. It was supposed to be big and rowdy and chaotic, not five sullen people gathered around a table with room to spare.

“How’s work going?” Susanna said.

“Like it always goes. I do the same thing every day. There ain’t exactly highs and lows.” Sensing Susanna’s discomfort, she tried to soften her voice a little. “It’s fine. I can do it in my sleep now. How about you?”

Susanna laughed a little. “The same, in a way. I teach the same lesson five times a day, and then the next year I start the whole thing over again.”

“It’s not the same,” Ronnie said flatly, and they were silent for a moment.

“I guess it isn’t.”

Ronnie pulled on the filter and blew smoke through her nostrils. “What are the kids reading?”

“They just started a unit on tragedy, so we’ll do
Oedipus Rex
and
Death of a Salesman,
and then we’ll do
The Diary of Anne Frank
right before Christmas.”

“That sounds awfully fucking cheery. Merry Christmas.”

“Eighth graders love this stuff. They really do. It appeals to their already heightened sense of drama.”

“OK, what else?”

“Well,” Susanna said, “we just finished that John Knowles novel I told you about,
A Separate Peace.
”

Ronnie thought. “Remind me what that’s about?”

“It’s set at a boarding school during World War II. There are these two friends, Finny and Gene. Gene is the serious, studious one, and Finny’s just this really vibrant character, full of life. He has this magnetism that everyone responds to.”

“He sounds like fun. What happens to him?”

“He dies.”

Ronnie laughed sharply. “Now see, this is why I don’t read novels. They always kill off the people you’d actually want to spend time with and stick you with the bores.”

Susanna shook her head and huffed with exasperation. “I think you’d like the book if you read it. I honestly do.”