Trompe l'Oeil (14 page)

It would be easy now to skid, the moment having become slick, the kitchen counter, the wall of drawings, the basket of washed sheets failing to give traction. Here the James who wasn't James; or maybe she had misperceived from the start. She would not strike him. Had never. (Though if they'd talked in the bedroom? Might she have? Later she would speculate.) She surmised he had chosen this moment—the kids all home—to prevent her from shouting.

“Watch the kids,” she said.

“Nora. I have to go,” he said.

“Your kids. Work it out. Watch them,” she said (aware that Katy, fourteen, had been minding Sara and Delia, that Theo, seventeen, reading upstairs, would help if they needed him).

Here was her pocketbook, here her keys. She called, “Katy, I'm off to the store. Dad's here,” thumbing the familiar keys, eyeing the table legs. “Tell Theo” and then she was outside on the windy deck, the sky a patchy gray. Down the stairs, into her car, wearing her kitchen sandals, ignoring for a moment the weather, forgetting about shoes. In the backseat she found an extra pair of sneakers, socks. Here was a crumpled blue sweatshirt redolent of grass and dirt, Katy's or Theo's, here a ball cap.

She drove, aimless, first west and then south, around the sand and rock outcropping of her neighborhood, to the next beach down. Empty but for a few boys throwing a softball, dog walkers, a retriever, two Dalmatians veering close to the running boys, then away, distracted by the neon-yellow tennis balls their owners tossed. And then she cut back north and
inland, one town up, to the far side of the harbor and a plaza with a drugstore, a pizza joint, and a pay phone, into which she dumped enough coins for three minutes of Meg.

“Today first,” Meg told her. “Order pizza. Give me a half hour.”

The red-and-white pizza boxes leaked warmth. But for the kids, she could have stayed in the car, driven around Blue Rock. She returned to the house, his car still parked in its gravel spot; she did not let herself consider it.

Nora carried the boxes up the wooden stairs to the deck. Through the small window she glimpsed Katy's face, and the door swung open.

Beyond, in the living room, James sat on the sofa reading to Delia and Sara, a once-familiar image. One could almost wedge the moment into a past, simpler day. They'd chosen the book about zoo animals; a zebra, he read, named Zachary. The girls were curled against him, rapt; how quickly he could charm them back. Delia and Sara were happy. Interrupt or not?

She paused, retrieved plates and cups, cleared the library books and house bills from the table. “Katy, tell your brother we're having pizza.”

Sara and Delia glanced up, having heard her voice, having heard “pizza.” And then James closed the book, saying, “We'll finish later.” In that moment she felt both a flash of regret and a pinching satisfaction. And too, a quick shimmying self-doubt, a minnow-sized impression that she'd imagined the earlier conversation; that the one-bedroom had loosened from her own
imagination and attached to James. Perhaps he would sit down and share pizza and forget. Perhaps he would ban the idea of a Cambridge place, as she once had—a passing blip, harmless debris from a life not theirs.

There was the business of supervising Sara's and Delia's hand-washing, and setting the table and pouring cups of milk, soda for Katy and Theo, all of which occurred with a startling lucidity—the rising swoosh of milk in blue plastic cups with fat straws, the melted mozzarella, the arrangement of round white plates on place mats the color of moss all more intensely themselves. She set the table for five while James receded. Footsteps drummed up the carpeted interior stairs and down, and down and up the weathered wood stairs from the deck to the narrow gravel drive. Nora heated the kettle for tea, stationed herself by the stove, calling over her shoulder, “Anybody need more napkins?” When she turned, his coat was buttoned, his hands empty, as if he were also just heading out to the plaza. He told the kids he had to take care of some things in the city, as if the kids had neither heard their conversation nor seen him pack the car. Theo and Katy chewed their pizza, and he patted Theo on the shoulder, saying, “I'll check in later,” without saying exactly how or when or what the checking-in entailed. He kissed the little girls, kissed Katy on the head. Katy did not move, but gazed out the side window, toward the beach and the slate-blue tidal ebb, away from the door, away from James and the narrow shoreline road.

ROAD DAY

As if the mall had dropped off the map—her mother had forgotten. Nora had promised to take Katy to buy running shoes, but after they'd finished the pizza, when Katy said the word
mall
, Nora's loose backhand wave banished the idea. In that moment, Nora's universe contained no malls; why counter with the actual world? It wasn't about Katy: Nora had promised to bake with Sara and Delia, and that plan, too, dropped away. Flaunting house rules, Theo tumbled with the girls in the living room. Through the archway from the kitchen, Katy watched them, sandy-haired sprites, Sara almost willowy, Delia still more dumpling shaped. Nora had not once intervened, instead drinking cup after cup of tea, cleaning the kitchen with fast brittle motions before growing still and unreachable. Sara's somersault edged the coffee table, which Theo was only now pushing out of the way. In the cleared space, he swung one girl, then the other, in circles so their feet lifted off the ground—what they called
flying
—and when they grew dizzy he performed handstands. It was a clowning reserved for the beach.

When Aunt Meg pushed the door open and called, “Hi everyone,” the girls ran to her—pink-faced, hair wild—and Theo
began to slump. Nora slumped differently, a momentary sag when Meg hugged her, then after whisperings a compensatory physical stiffening. In a moment she was up the stairs, gone from the room.

Aunt Meg did and did not substitute. She and Nora looked alike, the same pale blue eyes, blond hair cut short and beginning to silver, though Meg was rounder, seemingly more solid, seemingly taller (though she and Nora were the same height). More anchored, more earnest: she shared neither Nora's inventive play nor her distraction.

“Okay, sweeties,” Meg said. She kissed the little girls on their heads and set them to drawing at the kitchen table, the sixty-four box of crayons and white paper spread over newspaper. Theo pulled up a chair and drew comics with pink stick-figure Saras, purple Delias. Then Meg carried her suitcase up the stairs to Katy's bedroom and set it on the twin bed opposite Katy's. This happened sometimes, Meg staying in Katy's room, which felt both intrusive and reassuring. No one else ever shared a room with Aunt Meg; Theo never shared a room with anyone. And Katy was fourteen now: that should count for something. But that day—rapidly flooding with loneliness—her silent objection was fleeting and weak.

“Your mom needs some space to herself,” Aunt Meg said, confirming what no one had yet said aloud: Nora would have the master bedroom to herself.

Once the day became strange, there was no going back. There would be other reversals. For example, Theo did not retreat to his books, but offered to take Katy to the mall.

“Let's go,” he said, and drove her there. He walked her to the sporting goods store, waited while she paced the aisles and jogged in place in four different pairs of running shoes. What did she think of the players on her field hockey team, he wanted to know; he seemed to remember their names.

On the drive home, he turned up the radio, and they sped past strip malls and into the harborside neighborhood and to the long road down to the beaches, and the narrow access road to Shore Road, the sky increasing in size at their approach.

“What do you think?” she said.

“He took more than one suitcase,” Theo said.

What's wrong with us?
The phrase had again begun to form, though she did not say it aloud: she seemed to be breathing the question,
what?—
she and Theo both
—what
; sensing a rapid vagrant cracking, the tumbling of dominos their father had just kicked.

Here was Aunt Meg's red Chevy, parked on the gravel drive. Otherwise, Shore Road seemed entirely itself—a relief, a small betrayal. She stomped on the gravel near the Chevy, close enough that stones flew hard against the door. “I'm going for a run,” Katy said.

How else to manage? The day had begun a plain day and now she was clogged and swelling and on the verge of kicking cars, wanting, it seemed, to vandalize the neighborhood, every
closed beach house, everything that had been shut and left, and flee. In betrayal, she'd flee her mother too.

Katy glanced up the wooden stairs to the deck, her gear stashed in the now-disturbed house. She was wearing jeans, a sweater. “I'll just go from here,” she said. She sat on the bottom step of the thick plank staircase and pulled off her shoes, laced up the new Adidas. No gauze to wrap her left ankle, injured in a scrimmage. Awkward, but she could still run. Like most days she'd follow the residential streets, leading farther and farther away, out of Blue Rock, to the next town. On those longer runs, you could escape almost everything.

Theo's face. Somehow they'd crossed into the old country of two, a skinny rough-bordered place you go because there's no choice, because you're both about to vandalize the neighborhood. Maybe they had always been this way, though less often in the shared country than in their thick-bordered, neighboring states. Even before Molly—before the end of Molly—if one could remember. A harsh speckling in the air around Theo would come and go, sometimes mixing with the static around James. After Sara was born, he tended to ignore Katy, or mock the things she liked. But now he was gazing at her, no detachment, no brotherly mockery: today it was sympathy mixed with outrage, and for an instant he stood close, tucking her long, falling bangs behind her right ear, as if she were Delia or Sara. “Okay,” he said. “I'll go when you get back.”

She headed up Shore Road, along the shuttered beach houses and the open year-round ones, gaining speed as she veered toward the town road, the salt marshes, the inland road leading farther south, beyond the harbor toward the next town, past
houses with lawns and small groves of pine and birch, along roads where she knew no one, running until the tight skin of the world finally opened.

HOUSE III

Miniature horses and miniature sheep fenced into powder-blue pastures or waiting in a plastic barn; a piglet-sized velvet pig, rabbit-sized stuffed rabbits; a two-story, two-bedroom house you could close up and carry like a cheerily demented briefcase; the living room's minefield of colored wooden blocks—these did not change. Nor did the room's color scheme—blue and yellow and white—cornflower sofa, blue tufted carpet, pale lemon reading chair—nor the kitchen's broad oak table, the shells along the windowsills, the finger paintings pinned to the walls. By the kitchen door: piled running shoes and school shoes and boots. In Katy's room, stacks of hair bands, a poster of Colorado wildflowers. A fruit scent of shampoo wafted from the upstairs bathroom, spilling past laundry baskets of kids' shirts and jeans and socks, baskets of pastel and dark blue pajamas. The pungent scent of coffee in the morning, sharpened by noon, the scent of stewed beef or roast chicken, onions, green beans, baked sugar, hot chocolate. All the same. A clock on a living room shelf—once belonging to James's father—disappeared. In the bedroom, now Nora's alone, James's absence became apparent, his socks, boxers, and T-shirts gone from the
drawers, the closet empty of shirts and suits. In the storage room, Nora stacked boxes of the things he'd left.