Trompe l'Oeil (27 page)

By late morning, the office had closed, as had the local schools and most of town hall. Nora collected the girls, Katy following as they inched along the slick and jammed-up secondary roads.

Strangely boring, the storm: for the first several hours, Sara watched TV movies and weather reports with her sisters and Nora, took turns entertaining Connor. Had she been alone, or just with Delia, she might have napped. But Katy made no move to take Connor to their room, and the TV chattered on. They ate pizza; Nora phoned neighbors at other motels, left a message at James's office. Finally, Sara and Delia brought their homework to Katy's unoccupied room. Then, for a time, Sara slept. When she awoke, it was full dark and thickly snowing, only the nearby donut shop's lights cutting through the murk beyond the window. She had begun to picture Shore Road as a fast-moving creek, the house's storage room filling with water, high enough to swamp the furnace, leaving the yellow beach chairs and sand buckets floating above sunken metal shovels and bench tools. Dead fish and seaweed might wash up on the outside deck, along with drifts of sand and ice. She pictured the second floor: spongy wet carpet, a flooded bathroom. There had been television reports from the region—footage of gray waves and white foam and, through a veil of snow, somebody's seawall, somebody's roof, more crashing gray waves against sand, but nothing from their neighborhood. When she returned to the other room, her mother was on the phone listening.

It was not news they understood. There had been surge damage all along the road, the worst at the far end, where shutters
had torn off and rushing seawater burst through windows; and then the access road, which had flooded badly, potholed, lost a two-yard bite of pavement. Their immediate neighborhood had held up better, though there would be expensive repairs. But from the bluff looking out, someone had seen smoke, a glimpse of orange. Hard to confirm until a lull, but then, yes, fire and already far along. Which made no sense, the water seemingly all around. It must have looked like a burning boat. “Even in the weather?” Nora said. Yes, in the weather. “And the surf?” Despite the surf. Well, the surf's what might have put it out in the end. What there was to put out.

For several hours, Nora lied. “There's damage,” she told the girls, “but nothing we can fix tonight.” She helped Katy settle Connor in their room, and told the girls to sleep, and crossed the parking lot to the donut shop.

What was true or not true? They were in a motel room; they were taking the word of Joey Connolly, or someone just like Joey Connolly. They were taking the word of a guy who waved orange flags. Easy enough in winter storms to misidentify a house. It might have been a neighbor's house (no one wished that on the neighbors; mistakes are made). Say it was in fact a boat, a large boat, blown too close in—even to the seawall, where boats don't belong. You might mistake that for a house. The Murphys' motel room appeared as it had when they'd arrived; news or not, the house must still be as they'd left it.

Electrical, of some kind, no telling the source for sure—no matter how many times Nora asked, then and in the weeks to follow. There had been roof leaks; they'd had two upstairs rooms rewired, the contractor cut-rate. A leak in the siding Nora had tried to seal herself. Hadn't the girls run a heater? Turned off, yes? And unplugged? “I turned everything off,” Katy said. Once she said it, she could picture herself turning off the burner and the oven, the coffeemaker, and the space heater in her bedroom. And when she later repeated it to Tim, still the picture—but in it, was she wearing the T-shirt and skirt? Stockings for work or plain socks? An image from another day?

At 4:00
AM
, when Sara woke up, Delia was sleeping, Nora still out. Beyond the window, visible under the streetlights, thick flurries.

MOTEL

In that life—the life they'd momentarily entered—the donut vendor played a key role. He was wiry, his face creased and weathered, as if he had been a fisherman before he'd become a donut shop manager. Taciturn but not unfriendly: he'd put extra chocolate creams in the bag when he found out they'd evacuated their house. And after the news, when Sara returned and sat by herself at a table, he poured her free coffee and stationed himself several feet away, neither close nor far. She thanked him; she ordered donuts to go. He asked if she needed a box, and she welled up. Ridiculous. A box. Was it the kind tone? Or just the fact of offering—napkins, creamers, sugar, anything. A stranger could offer things you didn't need and still help you.

The motel bathroom: perfumed white cakes of soap, miniature bottles of amber shampoo, bleached washcloths, hand towels, undersized bath towels the girls called “half baths.” Two double beds, two faux-wood night tables, an armchair, a desk. A compact refrigerator, yellowed coffeemaker, instant coffee, tea bags, sugar, a grainy powdered creamer, red plastic stirrers Connor wanted to grab. A large color television perched on the bureau. Gold polyester curtains covered the windows, which
faced a parking lot: motel lights dully reflected on cleared car hoods and icy puddles.

Katy's state should have been plain when she'd first maneuvered to stay in the same room with Nora, insisted on being near her. When Sara walked in with the donuts, the static seemed visible. From the bathroom, the splash of water, Delia's voice trotting along to “Old MacDonald,” Connor's monosyllabic babbling. Nora's arms flapped in frustration; Katy, red-faced, tearing up again. It appeared to be a play. “Wake up,” Nora said, and her arms flapped again. Katy slid onto the far bed, tucking her legs under her and turning to face the wall.

“Kathleen,” Nora said.

Katy didn't answer. Couldn't, it seemed.

“Beautiful,” Nora said, in a hard unbeautiful way, and stepped outside into the wet cold to smoke a cigarette.

“Here's your bear,” Delia said from the bathroom. “What do bears say?” More loudly she called, “What
do
bears say?”

“I think they growl,” Sara said. She carried the donut box into the bathroom, closed the door, and sat on the toilet seat cover. “But not that bear.”

For a moment one could pretend the world outside the motel bathroom was the same one it had been yesterday. Just another baby bath. Just another box of donuts. “I got crullers,” Sara said. But then Delia seemed to deflate, though her face seemed puffy; there was an odd congruence between Connor's round face, pink from the bath, and the puffy pinkness of Delia's, their eyes the same shape but different colors.

Sara took Delia's place at the tub then and pulled Connor's towel from the rack, the baby smacking the water with the plastic
bear. And she and Delia talked loudly to Connor and quietly about Katy, whose meltdown could easily migrate to him.

Sara was pulling Connor's thick leggings up over his diaper, Connor tugging at her hair, when Nora returned and knocked on the bathroom door. “Okay, angel girls, I'll take him.” Once she'd bundled Connor up, Nora carried him with her back to the donut shop.

Sara left the donut box at the foot of the far bed, otherwise ignoring Katy. On the widest section of carpet, she and Delia shuffled a deck of cards, played rummy, and speculated about the day's schoolwork, books left at the house, and what their father might know.

Still just a bad rumor, until you saw for yourself—although it would be months before Sara revisited the neighborhood. It seemed that she and Delia played rummy for an hour, though it couldn't have been more than twenty minutes before Nora returned, Connor asleep against her shoulder. At first, her face appeared sunken.

Katy was still curled up on the bed. And who didn't want to curl up on the bed? Or hide at the corner table of the donut shop, or lose yourself in sleep. Despite Nora's pallor, her voice remained the same. “Oh, honestly,” Nora said, or Sara remembers her saying. Murmuring. Or perhaps, as sometimes happened, it was Sara's own editorial, posited in her mother's voice.

POST-FIRE

How quickly after they left the parking lot, the motel and donut shop dropped away—as if upon retracing the route you would not find the plaza again. From the car speakers, chamber music asserted an idyllic and precise order, which seemed at once absurd and necessary. Low clouds pushed east, the roadsides piled with snow and ice, snow-crusted buildings and signs, but the highway had been cleared down to dry pavement. In the suspended hours of the drive, it was easier to think of nothing, to take in the flying images of snow-streaked cars and white and graying snowbanks, and the curve of the plowed highway. On the secondary North Shore roads, they found postcard views of white-blanketed roofs, the snow-lined branches of deciduous trees, consolatory evergreens, still-pristine fields. James's house was unchanged—if this house unchanged, then? And again the sticky logic tugged, the image of Blue Rock held in the mind intact, weakly contested by the anomaly of Nora driving the girls to Beverly. Here was the Beverly house, here was James outside, opening the doors of the car, hugging them in the driveway. Hugging Nora.

Today there was no Josie (Josie was at work) and the chamber music stopped and in that moment the quiet seemed a vast
ice-blue plane, absent anything, even the often mute parental discord. No Katy: Katy was with her in-laws. James unloaded the heavier bags from the car while Nora copied phone numbers for the girls on a notepad she'd taken from the motel, circling Aunt Meg's. Nora would call the girls' school and set up a plan for their classwork. The class names themselves—chemistry, history—seemed like small birds flitting into the neighbor's spruce, but the girls promised to keep up. It had again begun to snow. Plenty on the South Shore to take care of, Nora said. (How could there not be?) She would call them later. There was no other plan. And yet, now in Beverly, James lifting Delia's suitcase, it stunned Sara that Nora would leave the girls there. That Nora would leave at all. As if her leaving carried meanings both threatening and opaque: as if
insurance agent
meant
international flight
. Perhaps Katy had sensed
international flight
at the motel. Why shouldn't Sara climb back into the car with Nora and Delia, restart the chamber music, return to the passing views? The impulse must have been apparent in her face: Nora walked the girls up to the house with James and quickly left. Inside, James poured hot chocolate; Delia shuffled a deck of cards.