The Visibles (31 page)

She took an annoyed bite out of the apple, crunching loudly. “I’m going down to Duane Reade for some Tylenol. I have a headache.”

“Can you get some packing tape?” my father called. “I think we’re running out.”

“It’s on the list,” Rosemary responded gruffly. She shrugged into her wool duffel coat and slammed the door.

For a while my father just continued to shuffle around the boxes. Then he turned and examined the living room wall. He reached into a blue duffel bag, pulled out a yellow-and-black measuring tape, and began to pull it from one side of the room to the other.

“I can’t believe you can do that,” I said.

He stopped. The tape remained taut. “Do what?”

“You used to be afraid of measuring tapes. You used to hate using them.”

He thought for a moment. As he moved his head to the side, I saw a smattering of gray at his temples. It was arresting; I’d never seen gray there before. “I think that was kitchen knives,” he concluded, glancing again at the blank wall. “I really don’t know if we should knock this down or not.”

“I don’t think you should sell this place, Dad.”

He looked at me blankly. I pointed to my sternum. “I offered to take it over, remember?”

“You don’t want to live here.”

“Why?”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

I leaned back on the counter. “Why? Is someone else moving in here instead?”
My mother, perhaps? My mother and you?
But did that make any sense? Why would he be putting it on the market? Why would he bother moving his things out?

My father pressed a button, and the measuring tape retracted back into its holder. I felt a big wave welling up inside of me, building, ready to break. “I know what’s going on,” I said.

He whipped his head up. “Sorry?”

“…I know you’re talking to her.”

His mouth dropped open. No sound came out. I couldn’t believe I was actually right. I thought about Rosemary, strolling down the street, her nose into the wind, her purse swinging by her side. She knew a lot, but she probably didn’t know this. Perhaps they’d been communicating for a long time, and my father hadn’t had the heart to tell her. Of course he’d still find it hard to tell people difficult things. Of course he’d still avoid conflict whenever he could.

“I wondered if you knew,” he said.

“It’s okay,” I said quickly. “I mean, I don’t blame you. I understand.”

“You do?”

“I do.”

His face crumpled into a smile. He perched on the edge of one of the boxes, his hands in his lap. “Wow.” He let out a sigh. “Did you tell Steven?”

“Well, no. I haven’t said anything.”

He sighed, staring at his palms. “So.”

“So.”

“Well…perhaps this is a strange question, but would you like to see her?”

I fluttered my hands to my throat. Right now Rosemary was weav
ing through the narrow Duane Reade aisles, pausing to buy Tylenol, tape, cough drops. Philip had asked me plenty of times what my mother was like. Each time, I stopped in my tracks. I knew
what
she liked—cashmere sweaters, imported olive oil, Himalayan cats, cooking utensils she didn’t need, exercise crazes, her oversized cell phone—but not exactly what she
was
like. “She was very particular,” I always ended up saying. “She had very specific tastes.”

All I knew was this: She’d still be beautiful, but cold and dismissive. She’d be effusive but mercurial and impatient. I’d still find her mysterious, another species. She’d be the same person as when she left us, her feelings out of arm’s reach, always unspoken. And as usual, I’d try tirelessly to snatch something from her, to coax her to tell me that I was, indeed, loved.

“Yes,” I whispered. “I’d like to see her.”

“Okay.” My father smiled shyly at me. It felt like the first sincere smile he’d given me since before he’d admitted himself into the Center. Once there, his smiles became hazy, bogged down by medication or resentment. “I’ll call her, then.”

“Okay.” My heart beat fast. It was happening, whether I wanted it or not. I pointed to the door. “I’m going to…I have stuff to do.” I didn’t, but I felt like I needed to feel some air on my face. I wanted to walk to the river and stare at the buildings.

“That’s fine,” my father said. “And…Summer?”

“Yeah?”

He looked at me but said nothing. All at once, we were us again. He was grateful, and I was tall and competent. I blew him a kiss and walked out the door. The hallway was blue-carpeted, the same as it had always been. And as I walked down one flight for the front door, I remembered another time when I was walking down these same steps, back when I was little. I was following my brother and mother; we were in bathing suits, headed to the community pool. It was one of those blisteringly hot days when you couldn’t think straight, when everyone walked around on the streets squinty and cross. When we hit the street, we saw that one of the fire hydrants was spraying water everywhere. The neighborhood kids were playing in it—it was too hot and too stifling
to resist. I looked at my mother, and she shrugged and put her hand on the small of my back. I pulled off my shorts and ran into the hose. Steven ran, too. We screamed and pressed our faces into the water. And when we were finished, we walked the rest of the way to the pool.

I paused on the landing, smiling, remembering that. Sometimes, returning to places brought back good memories, too.

B
efore Stella
died, she pressed a piece of paper into my hands.

She had written an obituary, she said.
The
obituary. But she didn’t want me to read it until it was time to send it to the newspaper to be printed. She didn’t want me to diverge from the text, either, but to dictate it exactly as it was written. “I’ll know it if you do,” she warned me. “I’ll see you. I’m going to follow you around when I’m dead.”

I had horrible thoughts about what the piece of paper would say:

or:

Whatever it was, it had to be more extreme than those we’d crafted when the doctors had first diagnosed her—otherwise she wouldn’t have made me wait until after she’d died to open it. I kept the obituary in the pocket of my suitcase, which I’d folded up and stuffed in the back of the Cobalt house’s closet. I nearly forgot about it after she died.

It was late afternoon, and I sat at the old ice-cream parlor near the Promenade, the one my father and I had gone to when he told me my mother had left us. I hadn’t been back here since he’d made that announcement, staying away because the place had felt cursed. Despite the frigid temperature, the line for ice cream grew longer and longer. My father said he would meet me here, but he was late. I considered calling Philip. I wanted to tell him that he was right, that I had been distracted. That I was scared. That maybe I was running from something.

I dialed his cell phone, but it went to voice mail, the very same voice mail message I had heard over a year ago, in the hospital with Stella.
I can’t come to the phone. Thanks
. His voice sounded far away, aloof. Beep. I hung up.

I couldn’t make sense of our argument last night—it was the equivalent of seeing the beginning and end of a movie but missing the middle. I called his phone again. “It’s me,” I said after the beep. I thought of everything I should say. Really, there was so much. Finally, I blurted out, “Please call me. Please. Okay? I’m sorry. I need you.”

The voice mail beeped again. There was a lump in my throat; had I really just said that?

Rosemary plopped down across from me. “So this is where you’re hiding.”

“I’m not hiding.” I cupped the still-warm cell phone between my hands.

“No?” Rosemary was wearing an oversized burnt-orange sweater with a small moth hole in the shoulder. She wrapped her hands around a small paper cup from the coffee cart on the corner. There was a smudge of pink lipstick around the sip top. “You’ve been awfully quiet, Summer. Is everything all right?”

I shrugged.

“Did you and Philip have a fight?”

“I don’t know.”

A few seconds passed. A woman at the counter was yelling, appalled that this ice-cream store didn’t offer anything for vegans. “Have you talked to your father much?” Rosemary pressed.

I stared at the scuffed checkerboard floor. I didn’t want her to get this out of me. My father should be the one to tell her about my mother. “Not really.”

She cleared her throat. “Are you two still upset at each other?”

I looked at her suspiciously. “What do you mean?”

She smiled sadly. “I know I’m not the right person to talk to you about this. I know that, I really do. But I know how things used to be between you two. I know how special your relationship is. If you ever need a friend to listen, I’m here.”

I folded my paper napkin into smaller and smaller pieces. To be honest, I’d found it surprisingly pleasant to talk to Rosemary about a lot of things—gardening, New York, books, music—but when it came to my father, I just couldn’t. It felt cheesy, like an invisible eye was somewhere above us, looking, chuckling. “I’m okay,” I mumbled.

“I found something in the apartment that you might want.” She reached into her bag and pulled out a tattered white envelope. The Brooklyn apartment’s address was written on it in what looked like my handwriting when I was younger, letters that weren’t quite so slanted and rushed. There was a twenty-nine-cent stamp in the corner, but no postage marks to show it had been mailed.

I slid my finger under the paper and pulled out the envelope’s contents. It was a single sheet of lined stationery, addressed to me.

I set the letter back down and raised my eyes to Rosemary. We watched each other for a long time. “He has been keeping something from me,” I finally said. “And not even the secret about you, I mean. Other secrets. He keeps secrets from everyone.”

Rosemary shifted in her seat. “Maybe he keeps secrets for your own good. To protect you. Not all secrets have to be told right away…or at all. But you should talk to him. You two should sit down and air everything out. I know you both want to.”

“He keeps secrets from you, too,” I snapped sharply.
A big secret, maybe. One that might unravel everything
.

Rosemary tilted her head. Some of her hair fell over her face. Outside, a gust of wind kicked up, blowing trash around. We remained there for a few moments, saying nothing, letting this sink in. Then I felt a hand on my arm.

“Summer?”

My father was standing above me. Next to him was a woman in her mid-thirties with shoulder-length brown hair, pink, glossy lips, stark freckles. She wore a down coat, a black dress, opaque tights over her slender thighs. Something about her looked familiar, but I wasn’t sure why.

“Summer, this is Josephine,” my father said. “Josephine, this is Summer. Josephine was good enough to take some time away from her conference to come out to Brooklyn.”

Josephine stuck out a small, pale hand. “It’s really, really nice to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you.” Her hands were cold and chapped. She had an open, friendly face, with one incisor crossing over the tooth next to it. There was a thin wedding band on her finger. A map of the New York City subway system peeked out of her coat pocket.

Josephine.
The name sliced through me. “Hi,” I said back, more a question than a statement.

“Richard.” Rosemary stood up abruptly, her voice quavering. “What are you doing?”

“It’s okay. Summer and I talked about this.”

“You…did?” Rosemary looked startled.

“Wait, what?” I tossed my eyes from Rosemary to my father.

The woman, Josephine, looked down at the table and pointed at the letter from Mr. Rice. “Oh, that’s Richard’s handwriting, isn’t it?”

“Can I talk to you for a second, Richard?” Rosemary took my father’s arm, nudging her chin at Josephine.

“It’s all
right,
” my father repeated. “Summer and I were talking about it this morning. Stella told her.”

Josephine’s eyes darted back and forth. She drew her bottom lip in her mouth. “Maybe this is a bad time?” she asked slowly.

“Stella told me
what
?” I couldn’t remember my father and I having a conversation this morning about Stella. What had Stella told me? I examined Josephine again, my thoughts half formed, like I’d just woken up from a dream.

My father’s mouth hung open. He laid his palm flat on the table. “Well, wait a minute. I mean, when we talked this morning, I just
assumed
Stella told you, Summer. I mean, I didn’t know how else you
could
know.” When he registered my lost look, he tried again. “Our discussion in the apartment today. After Rosemary left. This is…you said you knew we were talking. Stella told you, right? She told you about Josephine?”

Rosemary covered her face with her hands, took a few steps away, and circled back around. “Richard, I think we should…”

It was as if time had stalled. They were in on the joke, while I was still floundering to get it. Josephine scratched her upturned nose and let out an uncomfortable laugh.

It was the upturned nose that did it. I saw a photograph, the one I’d found in my father’s old desk drawer in his bedroom and then had moved to Stella’s hutch, next to the important papers, after she’d come home to die. A girl smiling, her body tilted toward a guy. I remembered
looking at her nose and thinking what it must be like to have a nose like that. On the back of the photograph was an inscription about two people who were secretly engaged in 1970.

And I saw the same face, older now, as the dark-haired, freckled girl in the picture that had appeared and disappeared in Stella’s house, first under a
National Geographic,
then wedged into an encyclopedia. I even found it propped in the medicine cabinet in the downstairs bathroom—practically in plain sight. Stella knew I would see it.

The baby is healthy,
Stella had screeched, steeped in dementia.
She’s being taken care of. You think the world knows, but who cares if they do, Ruth? The only one who really cares is you.

He’s got something in hiding. Like the Nazis.

My mind was a sheet of paper. Someone had just pricked a pin in it, and a slice of light shone through. I stared at Josephine. Maybe Stella had given me the punch line before the joke. Maybe a lot of people had.

“Oh.” It popped out of me like a hard lead BB, falling out of my mouth and plunking to the ground.

My father took a big step back. “Oh, fuck.”

He turned around, stumbling over an empty chair behind me. A few patrons looked up, startled. He passed the chrome trash can near the front, which was overflowing with crimped-edged paper plates, and practically fell through the door. I watched him disappear behind a bus kiosk, then found him again across the street.

“Oh, dear.” Rosemary touched the edge of her cheek. “I’d better…” And she darted after him, pressing out into the cold street.

It all happened so fast. I was still sitting at the table, the old letter in front of me. Josephine shifted her weight, still standing. “Okay.” She let out a self-conscious laugh.

I glanced at her. The cold, icy shock had begun to thaw, not entirely, but enough for me to react. I hid my hands in my lap and curled them up, cursing my childish, incompetent father for leaving me here alone to grapple with what I didn’t quite yet understand. My mouth puckered, about to say something dismissive, perhaps an excuse that I needed to use the bathroom. I could find a back door and escape. Or I could just
get up and leave, like the rest of them had. I didn’t owe this woman anything, not exactly. She probably knew much more about me than I did about her.

I had asked my father about this, of course. I had asked if the baby died. He hadn’t answered me. I hadn’t lingered on it, though—I hadn’t thought about it, because there was so much else to think about. And maybe because I hadn’t wanted to consider it.

“Jesus,” I whispered.

They’d probably been corresponding for years, my father telling Josephine much more than he told me, using his sober, unglamorous words. Rosemary seemed to know Josephine, too.

I peeked at her. Josephine fidgeted with the strap on her purse and scanned the laminated menu, just for something to look at, because she wasn’t sure of her place, or where she was supposed to go. She had a funny way of nervously smiling with only one side of her mouth. I felt a warm, bittersweet ache—Stella used to smile just like that when the irritatingly chipper nurse prepped her for her blood draws.

Something inside me reversed directions. I released my hands from the crimps in my lap and forced my shoulders down from their locked position. It was possible Josephine was more confused than I was. If she was who I suspected—it was beginning to make more and more sense—then what had her life been like? What sorts of problems did she have? What kinds of questions and fears were inside of her?

I counted three long breaths.

“They make really good espresso milkshakes here.”

Josephine jumped. My voice even startled me a little. I swallowed, then continued. “I used to get them as a little kid, probably when I was too young to really have coffee. They still have them on the menu. I know it’s cold out, but do you want one?”

Josephine’s entire face lifted. With just that, with those few words. “Oh.” She fumbled with her purse. “Well, sure. Let me give you some money.”

“I’ll get it.”

Her eyebrows rose. She looked so grateful.

“No, it’s fine. I’m happy to.”

I reached into my own purse and found my wallet. My hands were shaking so hard it was difficult for me to get the money out. While I fumbled, Josephine asked, “So you lived in Brooklyn your whole life, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“This is one of my first times here,” she said. “I’ve mostly lived in Colorado, in the mountains. But I was born where your dad’s from. Cobalt. We moved when I was about eight.”

I know,
I wanted to tell her. Of course I knew. I pushed my hands deep into my sweater’s front pouch, begging them to stop shaking, and walked to the ice-cream line. Outside, my father and Rosemary stood at the curb. It didn’t look like they were saying anything, but just standing, staring. Josephine sat down at my table and looked at the letter my father had written to me, pretending he was Mr. Rice. Reading every line. And I let her. Everything was there.
Things will work out as they are supposed to. You are the best person of all.