While I Was Gone (2 page)

WITH THE CLOSING OF THE DOOR I FELT RELEASED FROM THE

awareness of his sorrow that had held me in his orbit. I began to roam the house, with the dogs as my entourage, feeling restless, a feeling that seemed connected, somehow, to that moment in the boat, and maybe also to Daniel’s sad news. I went up the steep, narrow stairs to the second floor, where the girls’ rooms were.

All the doors were shut up there, and I opened them, standing in each doorway in turn. The sloped-ceiling rooms were deeply shadowed. Light from the hall fell in long rectangles on the old painted pine floors. In the older girls’ rooms the beds were made, the junk was gone—boxed in the attic or thrown away forever. Only Sadie’s room still spoke of her. One wall was completely covered with pictures she’d cut out of magazines. There were stark photos of dancers in radical poses, of nearly naked models in perfume or liquor ads, engaged in moments of stylized passion, there were romantic and soft-focus views of places she dreamed of going to—Cuzco, Venice, Zanzibar. There were guys, Daniel Day-Lewis, Denzel Washington, Brad Pitt. In the corner of the room where the ceiling sloped nearly to the floor, all the stuffed animals and dolls she’d ever owned were standing wide-eyed in rows by height, like some bizarre crowd in the bleachers at a high school event.

I went into Cass’s blank room and lay down across her bed. Maybe it was the girls I wanted. Maybe I just missed the comfort of their noise, of their smells and music and flesh.

And then I laughed out loud, thinking of how angry I’d gotten at them, and how often, for these very things. Allie, our old retriever barked at me, for my odd sudden noise.

“Sorry,” I said, and dangled my hand off the edge of the bed so she could lick it.

“Sorry, old girl.”

Suddenly I was thinking of a morning years before when all three girls had climbed into bed with me and Daniel. I kept trying to get up to make breakfast, and this became the game. The twins held me in their bony hard arms, they wrapped their long stringy bare legs around me. They were shrieking, “No! No breakfast! You must stay in the nest! You must!” Sadie, sleepy, plump, all our baby, lay in front of Daniel in the curve of his arm, her pink, wet thumb resting at her lip.

The two of them—Daniel and Sadie—were turned to watch us wild wrestlers, but they had moved out to the edge of the bed, trying to avoid the odd knee or elbow.

I reached over, making my hand a desperate claw.

“Help me, Sadie,” I croaked dramatically from the flailing mound of bony flesh.

“Help, help!”

Sadie sobered and looked for a moment up at her father.

Was it real? She believed in everything. He made a face that put her at ease.

She laughed.

She lay thoughtfully still for just a few seconds more, before she, too, threw herself forward into the fray—my rescuer. And then Daniel’s arms were encircling all of us, and he grabbed somebody from behind—Nora, I think—and swung her up. I felt his legs push powerfully against me.

It lasted only a minute or so, the shrieking, the laughter, everyone’s nightie hiking up, all the bare flesh, the bones and angles, feet big and small, soft parts, damp parts. Our familiar smells.

Ordinary life. Flesh. It was my world then. I was wrapped in it, held in it, I thought. And now I’m not. Now I float.

Allie was steadily licking my hand. I turned, and she stopped and smiled at me, panting, her long curled tongue flicking upward slightly with each breath.

“Laughing Allegra” we had named her, because her face fell into this happy, dopey grin when her mouth opened.

“It was fun, wasn’t it, Allie?” I said. She thrust her head forward and licked my face, once.

I got up and went downstairs, into our bedroom. At one time it had been the front parlor of the house. It had a working fireplace with painted wooden mantel, but no closet, so we’d mounted a row of hooks on the wall and hung them with what we most frequently wore—Daniel’s slacks and jackets, jeans and scrubs for me and one or two nighties, both our bathrobes, homely, wrinkled shapes. A motorcycle blatted rudely past on the town road, only a dozen yards or so from our bed. We had talked about moving upstairs to the back of the house now that the girls were gone, but we hadn’t done anything about it yet.

I stood for a long time in front of the mirror. Flesh, indeed. From time to time Daniel felt moved to say to me, “God, you’re a beautiful woman,” but this was kindness, or love. I examined myself objectively, clinically now. I saw a nice-looking middleaged person, someone you wouldn’t look at twice if you passed her on the street. And I’d never been beautiful, in fact. I’d been attractive, tall and blond and strong looking I’d had a notable kind of energy, and people—men—were drawn to it.

Now, though, when my face was in repose, I looked tired. the down curving lines at the corners of my mouth made me seem judgmental and stern, even a little pissed off. Sometimes my receptionist, Beattie, a woman I’d known and loved for twenty years, would ask me—out of the blue, from my perspective—“What’s wrong?” and I’d realize my face had fallen into those lines again.

“Nothing,” I’d say.

And then consciously try to open my face, to make it pleasant. To make it, I suppose, younger.

Here’s what else I knew, I was no longer sure exactly what color my hair would be if I didn’t regularly rinse it a color called Silver Ash. I was about an inch shorter than I’d been in youth, and had earned at least that much more waistline as my body had compressed. I had arthritis in my hips, and it was starting a little in my back.

And I was lucky, I knew this too. There was no cancer in my family, there were no blood pressure or cholesterol problems. Though my father had died when I was small, it had been an accident of nature-a quick, brutal case of hepatitis. No, I was a good specimen, from good stock. My mother, eighty, still worked part time as a secretary, typing articles and papers for two or three retired professors who’d known her since she was a young woman. She still lived by herself in the house where I’d grown up—though I suppose she was technically not alone, since she rented rooms to students at the university, and I suspected that more and more they did the work of keeping the house up.

Still, she managed it all. She managed it well, she kept herself going through the long Maine winters.

Thinking of her, looking at myself, I wondered if she’d ever felt this sense of dislocation from her past, from her present, from her own reflection in the mirror. This empty unease. And then I smiled at myself, remembering her answer to questions of this nature.

“Now, why would I bother to do that?” she’d say. She wouldn’t stop what she was doing, she wouldn’t turn to look at the eight-year-old, or ten year-old, or thirteen-year-old girl who stood next to her, asking.

She wouldn’t wonder where the question had come from or what its deeper meaning was. She’d slap the sifter to loose the flour, she’d slam the iron down on the shirt under attack, she’d rat-tat-tat even harder on the typewriter and violently fling the return across.

“Now, why would I bother to do that?”

“Just cause, Ma,” I said out loud now. And then I turned and said it to the dogs, who’d gathered in a circle behind me and were staring up, pondering my immobility.

“Just cause, guys and gals.” Their tails thudded the floor. The little one, Shorty, growled in pleasure just at being spoken to. I felt, somehow, comforted. This was all of it, no doubt, the strange passing feeling that had come to me in the boat.

Age. Vanity. The impossibility of accepting the new versions of oneself that life kept offering. The impossibility of the old version’s vanishing.

Ah, well, it had vanished, hadn’t it? As surely as the rooms upstairs stood empty and neat in the dark.

I washed my face and put on fresh makeup. Daniel came back from the barn and we began to move around the kitchen, making dinner.

He hadn’t been able to reach Mortie, but he’d talked to everyone else he needed to talk to. Now he turned the radio on to the news. As we did our separate chores, we listened and commented idly to each other on what we heard—the politics, the plane crashes and crimes, the large disasters of the day, which we all use to keep the smaller, more long-term sorrows at bay.

When we were sitting at last at the kitchen table, with a curry I’d quickly put together and a salad he’d made, he looked over at me and frowned.

“What’s wrong?” he said.

Beattie’s question. I laughed.

“What’s so funny?” he asked.

“Now, wait a minute,” I said.

“It’s either What’s wrong?” or “What’s so funny?” It can’t possibly be both.”

“But it is both. I can’t keep up with what goes on in your face, it changes so fast.”

“Well, nothing’s wrong,” I said.

“Aha! But something”—he lifted his fork and waved it in rhythm-” is not right.”

” And we smiled at each other, in honor of Sadie’s favorite book. We began to eat.

“That’s about it, I guess,” I said after a moment.

“The unnameable something.”

“Give it a shot,” he said.

“Name it.”

I took a breath. And then, abruptly, I had the sense of how much I loved this, this conversation freed of the reports of what one or another of the girls had done in school that day, of what she needed, wanted, had to have before the junior prom or the class day or the party at Sarah Malone’s. We’d had five months of it, alone together, and there were times like this moment, Daniel pushing me, wanting to know me again, that made me feel it would be enough, more than enough. That it would call forth all that was in me. Later I would remember this moment, too, and wish I’d held on to that feeling of possibility.

“I don’t know,” I said. I shrugged.

“Earlier, in the boat today, I was feeling odd. Just a sense of… dislocation, I guess, in my life.”

“From what?” And when I didn’t answer right away, “Dislocation from what?”

“From… just one thing from another, I guess. I don’t know.” I looked at him and made a face. It seemed, suddenly, an embarrassing, even a foolish feeling to have indulged. I settled for an easy answer.

“It’s probably a little bit about the girls, actually. In a way, missing them. But more… just all that energy, all that work and closeness.

Where did it go?”

“It went into making them wonderful. Making them who they are.”

I made a noise, and he frowned, which with Daniel was the tensing of a single faint line between his brows.

“Don’t go pJt. It’s true,” he said.

“I’m not consoling you, Joey. I’m not humoring you, so don’t act as though I am.”

“Ach. I know,” I said.

“I know.”

More gently, he said, “You always go pfft when I say something good. You should let me be loving to you.”

“I know,” I said again.

“I need to learn to just say thank you.” I reached over and rested my hand on his arm. I could feel the wires under his skin.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Thankyov,” he said.

“And you’re welcome.” After a minute, “But name it better than that.”

“Oh, Daniel!” I cried.

Still, I stopped and thought for a moment.

“I really don’t know. I don’t. I’ve just felt… creepy. Crepuscular? Weird, anyway, all day. It feels… admonitory or premonitory or something.”

“Which?”

“What’s the difference, exactly?”

And he explained, Latin-lover that he was, the derivation of each.

“But I don’t believe in premonitions,” he said thoughtfully, after moment’s silence.

“I don’t either, really.” And then I remembered.

“Except, remember the time that Cass and Nora got up on the roof?”

“That wasn’t really a premonition, though.”

“I saw them. In my mind’s eye, I saw them there, with the sky behind them, toddling around.”

“But that was the result of thinking. You hadn’t heard them in a while, your brain ran through a few options, the kind of stuff they might be up to. You thought of the ladder and the skylight—” “I didn’t, Daniel. That’s not the way it happened. I just saw them in my mind and ran upstairs. I knew. I knew where they were, and I knew I needed to get to them.”

Daniel was helping himself to more curry. He looked over at me.

“Yeah, but I bet that somehow, maybe so quickly you never remembered it discretely, you went through those steps.”

“I suppose I might have. But that’s not what I remember.

What I remember is popping up through the skylight and seeing them just as I’d seen them mentally, staggering around, happy as larks. As close to death”—I held my fingers an inch apart—“as that.” I remembered their faces lifting in delight at the sight of me, just my head sticking up through the open skylight at first, then my hands rising too. They laughed, as though I were doing a kind of magic trick, conjuring myself out of thin air. I stayed right where I was, on the ladder, so they wouldn’t be tempted to tease me by running away, a favorite game.

So they wouldn’t step back, back over the edge and down. I made my voice as richly cozy and seductive and welcoming and calm as I could through my panic. I spoke as slowly as ooze.

“Hi! Hi, you cuties.

Come here and tell me what you been doing. I didn’t see you for a long time. Come right here by me, come by Mumma. Come for smoochies, sillies. Come right here”—and as they ran forward into my grip, “Oh, my good girls, my loves.”

“But you know,” Daniel was saying, “the way memory works, you might have attached that image—the real image, the way they truly looked—to your earlier thinking.”

“Which was premonitory.”

“Yeah, but maybe not in that exact, image-based way.”

I stopped and looked at him.

“Why are you arguing endlessly with me, Daniel?”

“I’m not. I don’t mean to be.” He looked sheepish suddenly.

“I just think it’s interesting. I’ve been doing all this reading about memory, how it actually gets laid down and altered over time. It’s fascinating.

“Memory,”

” he sang suddenly in his light tenor, ” lights the corners of my mind

.. .”

” He let the song trail off. I was smiling at him.