Acts of Love (13 page)

Ali was smiling eagerly, waiting to be chosen for a dodgeball team, when Theresa Mitchell slid up next to her, brushed her blond bangs from her eyes, and said, sneering, “So what's your sister gonna do, shoot us if we don't choose you?”

Ali's smile faded slowly as she registered the remark. “Shut up.”

“You still got the gun up at your house? What's your Dad gonna do, shoot you if you don't do your homework?”

“Cut it out, Theresa,” Tim Varonsky warned nervously, unconvincingly.

“I bet there are ghosts up there now,” Theresa continued.
“Oooooh, oooooh.”
She waved her hands wildly about Ali's head while the other kids giggled hesitantly, knowing it was wrong, but still, they had heard their parents, their older siblings, and if they didn't know the precise depth and width of the stain, they nevertheless knew that it was there.

Ali lunged at Theresa, pulling her down by the ponytail, snapping her head back. “Shut up. I told you to shut up.”

Julia looked up to see the knot implode, heads sinking to the center, Ali's among them, and she ran over, clawing arms and torsos away piece by piece until she reached her sister, sprawled on the ground, and began pulling her out. The other children parted, disgruntled but cowed by Julia, her nerve, her solitude, her dealings with a gun. She yanked Ali away. “C'mon,” Julia pronounced dramatically, “let's get out of here. You don't need to play with these cretins.”

They began to walk off the playground together while Theresa Mitchell called after them, “Bang. Bang, bang,” and the other children laughed.

 

“H
ERE
,” Julia said as they walked. “Look.” She handed Ali the guidebook, which was open to an illustration of Leonardo's
Last Supper.
“It's in a church. The Santa Maria delle Grazie. It was painted five hundred years ago.”

She peered over Ali's shoulder. Jesus' hands, palms up. Eyelids lowered. The disciples, pointing and whispering on either side. She took the book from Ali and shut it. She did not much believe in God, but she had definite ideas about good and evil, and she divided everyone she knew accordingly.

“I'll take you there,” she promised as they rounded the corner and the school fell from sight. “You'll see.”

 

T
HE FOUR OF THEM SAT
at the round table in Sandy's kitchen, awkwardly listening to each other's sounds; the atonal swallowing, grating, sipping; unfamiliar, self-conscious. They did not yet have the language of family, the burbling tumble of words and gestures, the bumping into each other and overlapping that goes by unnoticed until it is gone, and they glanced sideways at each other, searching for a rhythm.

Sandy looked at the fortress of cut green beans that Ali had built about the edges of her plate, a perfect, oozy circle. “You're not eating very much.”

“I'm not hungry.”

“I know I'm a little new at this cooking thing. We'll try something else tomorrow night, okay? What would you like? Bubble-gum soufflé? M&M omelet? Spaghetti with chocolate sauce?”

Ali didn't smile. “I don't feel good,” she said quietly. “I don't think I should go to school tomorrow.”

Sandy touched the back of her hand to Ali's forehead, which was cool and smooth. “Did something happen this afternoon?”

Ali pushed one more green bean into the wall and then ran suddenly from the table, knocking over a chair as she went. For a moment, Sandy, John, and Julia remained still, their eyes on the space where she had been. Julia took another bite of her hamburger. Sandy pushed her plate away and followed Ali.

“Julia?” John asked as he reached to pick the chair up from the floor.

“She's just a kid. Why don't they leave her alone? She didn't do anything.”

“Who was giving her a hard time?”

Julia looked at John, his sturdy neck rising from a maize oxford shirt, an archipelago of razor burn to the left, the lock of light brown hair that fell, no matter what efforts he took to control it, across his right eye. “No one. Everything's fine.” She picked up her hamburger and took another bite, careful not to get ketchup on her fingers.

 

U
PSTAIRS
, Sandy sat on the bed, holding Ali between her legs while she cried, her soft flat chest throbbing against her arms. “Ssshhh, it's okay.” She stroked her hair, which, as if loosened by the tears, fell in wisps about her face. “It's okay. Ssshhh.”

“Where did they take her?” Ali asked at last, her voice sanded down by grief.

“Who?”

“My mother. I saw them take her away. Where did they take her?”

“Oh, honey. She's gone. I'm sorry. She's just gone.”

“I know she's dead,” Ali lashed out. “I'm not stupid. But where did they take her?”

“We buried her. You know that.”

Ali brushed her own tears from her face with the backs of her balled-up hands. “I was in the kitchen. Julia knows. Julia knows I was in the kitchen.”

“I know, honey.”

“Sandy?”

“Yes?”

“Is Daddy gone, too? Am I ever going to see him again?”

“Oh, Ali.”

“Am I?”

Sandy sighed. “I just don't think it's such a good idea right now.”

“Do I have to go to school tomorrow?”

“I'm afraid you do.”

 

L
ATER THAT NIGHT
, after the girls had gone to bed, Sandy and John sat on the couch, their legs up on the coffee table, her head in the hollow between his shoulder and his neck.

“I wish I could go to school for them,” she said.

“Kids are tough on each other. Always have been.”

“It's good training for adulthood. Did Julia say anything to you while I was upstairs?”

“No. I don't think she trusts me yet.”

“I don't think she trusts anyone.” She paused, shifted. “John. Something happened at the mall this morning.”

“What?”

She looked up at him. His good-boy face, his intractable belief that in the absence of natural stellar abilities one must use hard work and perseverance to prosper—it was what she had wanted, what she had thought to try, anyway, this steadiness and devotion. Lately, though, she often saw it as a warning to keep any messiness at a distance. She looked away. She longed for a cigarette, though she had quit smoking years ago. “Never mind. It was nothing.” She sank back into the couch. “I don't think she likes me much.”

“Of course she likes you.”

“Children don't automatically like adults, any more than adults automatically like each other. Maybe it's not a matter of like. I don't think she quite approves of me. It's what I was saying last night…”

John tapped his feet restlessly. “Can we talk about something else for a change?” he interrupted.

She looked up at him, pursing her lips. “What would you like to talk about?”

“Anything. The news. The weather.
Us.
”

She sat forward without answering.

He put his hand on her back and began to rub it in determined circles. “Why don't we go out to dinner tomorrow night? Just the two of us,” he suggested.

“What about the girls?”

“They're old enough to stay by themselves for a few hours.”

“I don't know,” Sandy said, hesitating.

“Then get a babysitter.”

There was a shortness in his tone that drew her up and she swallowed the word she most felt,
crowded
—by children, by death, by him; crowded by choices she had never made and by doubts she could not quell. “I'll think about it.” She moved her weight forward. “So. The paper put this new young guy from out of town on the story. Peter Gorrick.”

“What's wrong with that?”

“I just don't like his type, that's all. I've seen too many of them. They come here to get a year's worth of bylines that they can take to the city, any city, and never look back.”

“You could have done that if you had wanted to.”

“Maybe I should have.”

“What stopped you?”

“I wish I knew.” She had thought, at various times, that it was a failure of courage that kept her from the immense options beyond Hardison that she so keenly enumerated at three, four in the morning, or perhaps a failure of ambition itself. There was the possibility, too, that the thing that tempted her most about leaving was in the end the very thing that stopped her: the ability to create a self free of the constraints of place and position and history, the lack of a superimposed definition. “What stopped you from moving to Albany or Syracuse and opening up a chain of Norwood's Sporting Goods stores? I'm sure you could have gotten the financing.”

“Nothing stopped me. I never wanted to. I like it here. It's home. It's where I belong.” He had told her little of his determined early struggles with the banks to get money for his own store, the precarious first few years, his pride in its eventual success. It was not in his nature to complain or to boast, and though he was aware that his reserve sometimes led to the accusation of complacency, he saw no need to change.

She groaned sarcastically. “How the hell did I end up with Wally Cleaver?”

“It's your nonjudgmental attitude I love so much,” he said, laughing.

She remembered him vaguely from high school, a year ahead of her, remembered that his mother came to every basketball game he played in, that his father mowed the lawn every Saturday, remembered that he might even have been on the student council. But she remembered, too, that there had been a cloud around him, a dense cumulus, though she hadn't known the cause of it at the time. It was the cloud, of course, that had attracted her.

He reached over and stroked her face gently, suddenly serious. “It never goes away,” he said quietly. “But it gets easier, you'll see. Somehow, it gets easier.”

It was only when they were reintroduced fifteen years later that Sandy learned that John's older sister had died of leukemia when she was ten and he was eight. “After that,” he had said, “it was as if any sign of tiredness or laziness on my part was suspect. They only wanted me to be cheerful, successful. Sometimes at night, I would see my mother sitting in her sewing room, surrounded by the headless torsos of her sewing forms, weeping. But never in the daylight. We weren't allowed to talk about it.”

“You should have seen my mother,” Sandy said. “She wept in every room of the house for absolutely no reason.”

“I wish I had met her.”

“No you don't.”

“Maybe you were luckier,” he said wistfully. “At least the craziness in your family was out in the open. It was the subversiveness in my house that was so confusing. I thought the problem had to be with me, since everyone kept saying how well my parents were coping.”

Months after they had become lovers, John had told Sandy in an oddly offhanded manner that he'd had a minor breakdown during his junior year of college. “I just couldn't be cheerful anymore,” he said. But after two weeks in the infirmary and a few months of counseling, he had decided that madness and inertia were not for him. Still, the steadfastness that had become so prominent a part of his personality was a decision rather than a trait. Or, if it was innate, it was something that had been lost and only consciously reconstructed, and it was the fact of this decision that so intrigued Sandy. Nevertheless, whenever she tried to bring up the subject again, to probe and to hold it, he managed to evade even the most direct inquiries.

“You know,” he said now, squeezing Sandy's thigh, “I think you'd be more comfortable with me if I were all torn up and tormented, as if being satisfied is a sign of simplemindedness.”

“I always said that little breakdown of yours was your saving grace.”

“Saving me from what?”

“Complete inanity.”

“Why do you assume that there's something wrong with staying here, that it's something you need an excuse for?”

“They don't exactly hand out Pulitzers for covering the town council of Hardison, New York.”

“There are other things in life besides Pulitzers.”

“Please don't give me that ‘staying home and baking cookies is a completely valid decision' rap. I know it's a completely valid decision. Just not for me.”

“I wasn't aware that those were your only two choices.”

She hesitated. “I used to have fantasies about taking over Ray's job as managing editor when he retires.”

“Used to?”

“I'm not sure I want to run a newspaper, if running a newspaper means putting things like that picture on the cover.”

“Would you have made a different decision?”