The Sunshine When She's Gone: A Novel (12 page)

“Look at the doggy, sweetie,” John said. Clara stopped crying for a moment, intrigued by the figure. John looked over the baby and around the dusky antiques shop for a phone.

Derek was sitting nearby in a mahogany rocking chair with Monika—giggling and overblown—on his lap. That stomach! He’d never seen anything that ripe, that delicious. Without thinking, he squatted to touch it. Then Clara did too; she leaned her head onto Monika’s belly. Monika laughed, but John could see Derek’s face behind her, darkening again. Perhaps Derek was simply scowling at the score of a cricket game on the TV that was propped in the corner.

John turned to find Laura and the phone, but she’d wandered away. “Do you think I could use your phone?” he called out. “Mine isn’t working.” He found Laura dusting a tea set in the next room and stood watching the green feather duster dance in the white heat. He wanted to ask her again but she looked up at him blankly, as she would to any customer, any stranger in her shop. He was a stranger in her shop. “Yes?” Laura said, but John heard Monika playfully beeping the horn as she and Derek sat waiting in the car.

*   *   *

Clara cried for the entire twenty-minute drive to Bridgetown. There was traffic, and young men in synthetic pants wandered between the cars, jaywalking. John was sweltering but didn’t dare loosen Clara from the carrier; it was all that protected her.

They found the stuff in the back of the health-food store, in dusty cardboard boxes. Clara drank a lot of goat milk and passed out on the way back to Laura’s, leaving a deep-brown stain on John’s belly where her diaper had leaked. His high was fading but Derek seemed friendly again, offering him a clean T-shirt from his car.

Laura had a tray of glasses and a pitcher of rum punch waiting when they arrived, and she signaled them to follow her. They cut through the brambly garden and into the polo field, where there were only the sounds of the wind and horses’ hooves and the occasional whack on the ball. About thirty white people dressed in pastel colors were already seated, in rows, under a striped canopy. John was relieved not to have to speak. He took a few large sips of his cold drink. He’d been parched. The cinnamon and sugar were sticky on his lips. Then he crouched on the grass behind the audience and changed the soiled diaper. Clara grabbed the swizzle stick from his glass and licked it, her eyes happy again.

When the baby was clean, John knelt in the grass and drained his glass quickly; Laura appeared and handed him another one. Now that he’d fed Clara goat’s milk, albeit without the special herbs, Veronica receded in his mind.

“Come sit,” Laura said, ushering him to the front row, where she had saved four seats.

“Here?” John said, surprised.

“I married that one,” she whispered, pointing to a man attached to a horse, trundling past in a puff of cologne, thunder dirt, and hay. Where Laura was flabby, her husband was taut; where she was loose, he was chiseled. He was a gorgeous man. An athlete married to this lovely unkempt woman. Their physical incongruity signaled a deep connection. They were the real thing. The thing that Muriel and Evan had been.

The baby was facing out and kicking her feet. The straps of the Björn, now wet with perspiration, dug into his shoulders and back. It was shocking how much he wanted to put her down, to hand her to someone else, but the drink was perfectly spicy and cold, the sunlight was softening, dappling, under the shade of the tent. He would tell Veronica about it all soon. He could remember her. He could remember her finger tracing the edge of her beer glass the first time they met. How smooth and unlined her fingers were, like new pencils. He would tell her this. With this resolution, he started to rise to go find a phone.

Behind him, the sound of the mallet hitting the ball was both new and familiar: like a baseball thwack but cleaner, sharper. He had leaned down to get a zwieback toast from the diaper bag at his feet when the ball met his temple.

*   *   *

There was blood on his fingertips as he held them up above his face. Fingers that were pink sausages. A hammer beat in his metal skull. None of this was as frightening as the emptiness in his arms, the space where Clara had been. He sat up fast, despite his pounding head. He was on a cot inside a white tent, and a woman’s tanned legs were beside him, like roots growing out of the ground. It was Monika, but Clara was gone.

“Are you all right?” she said.

He stood up and tore open the sash on the door, as if Clara might be sitting on the grass playing with a hibiscus. But she was not there. Farther afield, the game was continuing, but she was not over in the audience where he’d last held her, where Derek now sat disconsolately—this time he was sure of it—sipping his drink.

“She’s had some bad diarrhea,” Monika’s voice said. “Mum is cleaning her off in the house. You both need to go see Dr. Bunbury in Speightstown.”

Speightstown
. It sounded like Spitestown. Not Bridgetown or some other town. Spite and retribution town. A long time ago he had climbed into a cab on Canal Street and driven away. This woman named Monika, who smelled of patchouli—how had he not recognized it before—was looking into his face, asking again if he was all right. Her eyes were blue and spacious; inadvertently, he inhaled her scent. His first real girlfriend at Amherst had worn the oil, and it always reminded him of sex. He didn’t even like the smell of patchouli. Quite suddenly he did not like Monika—a stranger—at all. He craved the familiar, his wife. He ran toward the house, his head pounding, to find Clara. Monika shouted, “Slow down. You may have a concussion!” She said something else he couldn’t make out, about heads and concussions and things that seemed wildly irrelevant. Panting, she caught up to him. “John, stop, you’re hurt.”

“I’m fine!” he muttered.

“You need to take it easy,” Monika said, her voice a bit distant, wary.

A cool dread skittered across his chest. He needed to see Clara. He walked fast and couldn’t answer Monika. Nothing mattered but the empty BabyBjörn and Laura saying. “Her mum is here too?” as innocently as if Veronica had never been in danger.

He was aware of Monika’s belly as she hurried along beside him. It had reached a stage that was familiar to John, both round and pointed at the same time: a giant egg-arrow, with all the fragility and determination of such a thing. The enormous oval shook as she moved. Initially alluring, Monika’s body now haunted him.

John rushed across the lawn holding his pulsing head. With each step he took, his head seized. He mounted the steps to Laura’s shop two at a stride, accidentally squashing the ear of an old boxer, who wailed in pain.

8

Saturday

Veronica

Veronica listened as Arthur called Ines from the Oyster Bar to tell her what he was having for lunch. “No, the white one,” he said, “with heavy cream,” referring to his chowder. Lately, John didn’t care what Veronica ate. Ines must’ve been interested, because Veronica heard Arthur say, “No, no, not dinner rolls, the little crackers—you know, in the packets.… Old drunk men at the bar, uh-huh, as usual.…” He laughed and winked at Veronica. “And some drunk women too.”

Veronica smiled at him across the leather booth and licked cream off the back of her thumb. Yes, she was eating heavy cream. In a bar. The “food Nazi,” as John had called her, who’d arrived after the birth, was gone. Her lips were thick from the two martinis, which had done their magic of simultaneously slowing down and speeding up time; they mitigated anything that competed with the pleasure they provided, so that missing her one
P.M.
train to see Clara, and then missing the two
P.M.
, was tolerable. She had left messages about being remiss on both numbers. But
he
was the one who was remiss.
John.
She mouthed his name a few times, until the name became a sound and the sound became strange. When Art hung up, she asked, “How’s Ines doing? Is she all right?”

“She’s still upset but very limber. Apparently they did a lot of hip openers.” Art grinned, delighted at the thought of his wife’s hips.

“She’s still pretty down?”

“Yup. It’s abstract for me. For her … it’s inside her. She puts—every time—the sonogram photo on the kitchen counter. They look like snails, but it’s a real person—you tell yourself that—and then it’s suddenly
not.
” He began chewing on his olives very fast.

“I’m sorry.”

“This one has to not do that, you know?” He looked away for a long moment. “The damage is accruing for her. It just can’t happen to her again.”

“No, no, it can’t happen. It won’t.”

“Can you distract her later, take her out to dinner? We could all go.”

“You think John will be back any minute, right?” She stared at Art as he spread his short fingers out on the red-and-white-checked tablecloth and studied them. “Art?”

“Hell yes, before you can say Jack Robinson, pumpkin! Sorry, sorry, you’re not my pumpkin. These are good. You want another?” He gestured with a cloudy martini glass, then plucked out the extra blue-cheese-stuffed olive at its base.

“I should probably eat more first,” Veronica said, opening her package of saltines and shaking it into the bowl as Arthur moved to the bar. The crackers were crisp and blended well with the leftover chowder. She wanted to lick the bowl.

Art returned with two martinis, even though she’d said no, and placed one before her. “What you should probably do is come with me to the diamond district. I’m going for only a minute, before we meet Ines.”

“I’m … I need to speak to John and find out what’s going on.”

“I think you should stay.” Arthur looked at the edge of the Jasper School lunch-project folder emerging from her handbag. “What you should do is advocate a steady diet of heavy cream and vodka for all second-graders,” he said, “and stay in the city with us.”

“Shit.” Veronica bit her lip. “I have to get that done by Tuesday,” she said. Time was speeding up, sifting away, and she’d accomplished nothing.

“Weren’t you going to be a curator once upon a time?”

“I don’t have a doctorate, only my master’s. And I’m not going to be a docent like my mother.” She was a mother; she had responsibilities Art couldn’t fathom, a fitted path, intractable and set.

“Ah, docents. I love a docent!”

She was sipping the new drink and laughing again. “No you don’t. Trust me.”

“Yes I do, their unbridled enthusiasm, I do.”

Veronica’s mother, Annalena, had woken up one morning when Veronica was five and decided her life was worthless. She had sat up in bed in a tiny peach silk bed jacket—it was fey and oddly Victorian—crying. “It’s time,” she had said when Veronica had dared to ask what was wrong, “for me to continue my education.”

Then every Tuesday morning Annalena began to drive away in her forest-green BMW to study Early American furniture at Winterthur, the du Pont mansion in Delaware. She wouldn’t return all that day or anytime within the blank and dull expanse of the next, which Veronica was told was called Wednesday. And Annalena didn’t come back most of the next interminable day, called Thursday. Veronica would insist on waiting up for her mother but would always fall asleep, still in her clothes, on the nanny’s tiny twin bed in her little room off the kitchen. Art was repeating, “Unbridled, totally unbridled,” as he played with his glass.

“I’d thought all these things—what I would be when I grew up—would be resolved by now, but it’s all much more complicated with a child.”

Annalena would sneak into the tiny room to greet her, her cheeks smelling like winter and her fur coat staticky. She’d hug Veronica more passionately than usual and talk about her program in American Material Culture, which she called “the study of people and their things,” about colonial craftsmanship or spindles.

Art stuffed two more large olives in his cheeks and tried to chew them at one time. “I don’t know how you’ve become this do-gooder type. It’s a WASPy thing. You think it’s your duty to
serve
.”

“I like what I do.” She didn’t want to be like her mother, enamored with aesthetics at the expense of human relationships. She wanted to
contribute
, as Muriel and Evan had always contributed.

She looked at her phone. It was horrible. A loathsome metal rectangle she kept glued in her hand with devotion. There was nothing from John. Rage crept in, warming her in places like her cheeks and chest while her hands turned to ice. She was getting drunk.

Arthur leaned across the table. “Are you all right?”

“I don’t know.” She shook her head as tears slipped from her eyes, landing in fat drops on the gingham tablecloth.

“Why don’t you go home and sleep this off? I’ll get the check.”

“I can’t rest. I need to get up there. I haven’t actually
spoken
with him.”

“You should take a break. Stay here. Ines could use your company tonight.”

“I should be rushing up there to see my baby.”

“She’s fine.”

“Tell me I’m not a bad mother.” John would not tell her that, she was sure. “See, Ines is far too honest and might start pointing out my shortcomings, but you—you’re much better at flattery. Oh, and this is my last drink. Don’t even try getting me into any trouble tonight.”

*   *   *

Trouble had begun during a heat wave in late September, on a Friday afternoon when Clara was ten weeks old and Veronica’s prescription for pain meds had just run out. The pharmacist told her, “Most patients stop taking this after a week or two,” and Veronica had hung up, stung by the unnecessary comment. John found her standing in the center of the loft with the phone in her hand. He squeezed her shoulders. “You should go out—go to the movie,” he said.

“You think?” Ines had invited her to see
The Motorcycle Diaries.

“I do. It’d be good for you.”

Rosemary, in her white squeaky shoes, lumbered by, carrying the sleeping baby to her crib in one arm. How did she get Clara to sleep like that, so solemn, almost formal, in her tight wrap?

Weeks had passed, but the loop of discourse played endlessly in her brain: She’d been cut and dismembered. Parts were taken out and put back in. Regardless of what had happened that night, she needed to feed her baby. A painful scab had formed on each breast. The infection had worsened, but she needed to keep Clara alive. She’d let the baby latch on for a minute or two, but it was excruciating. She was failing to do what was most elemental.