While I Was Gone (22 page)

“Ah, ah!” I said. I picked up his tight, barrel-shaped body and carried him to the center of the yard, set him down where the snow was already dented from the bigger dogs’ play. As he circled to find the perfect spot, he picked each paw up and gave it the most delicate of shakes, a kind of rumba of fastidiousness. Finally he did his business.

Then he made a bounding yet dainty run, nearly like the hopping of rabbit in the deep snow, back to the open door and in.

I stood in the center of the yard for a moment and tilted my head back to let the soft snow touch my face. The dogs pranced and rolled for pure joy in the pale, gray-brown light. They chased each other wildly. I made snowballs and threw them, the dogs leapt and bit at where they’d disappeared. As they played, their muzzles whitened, their paws pined up.

I left them reluctantly and came back in. Watson trailed me around as I did my chores, watching me soberly. I shut him out of the cat room, where we had only two boarders. I let one of them out to roam and use the litter pan while I checked its cage. I put more food down.

Then I went back out and worked my way through the dogs’ cages.

Two of the dogs had had accidents, so I cleaned up and changed their bedding. Several of them had their own food, in cans—those dishes needed to be washed. Water refreshed, kibble set out for the others.

I went to the cat room, put the first cat back and let the other one out. Then I called the reluctant dogs in. Watson greeted each one like a tiny worried mother, licking at their snow, fussing about how they smelled. Slowly I recaged them. I released Lucky and let him go outside for his solitary run while I refilled his food and water dishes.

Three dogs needed medications. I put the last cat back in, called Lucky inside, locked up.

And while I did all this, I thought only of them, of the dogs and cats, of their requests for affection, of their comical or passionate relations to one another, of the performance of their bodily functions.

was taken up by them and their life and energy, by what they needed and asked of me. I let go of everything difficult or complex in my life.

It reminded me of my days at Dr. Moran’s, caring for the dogs and cats he boarded and treated. It reminded me of what a comfort it had been to me, even just physically, the escape into the lives of animals. As I was driving home, I thought of all this, and it seemed to me that I’d chosen work which offered me daily the presence of a pure innocence, a forgiveness for all my human flaws. It occurred to me suddenly that this, too, might be a kind of running away. A thought I dismissed quickly. Or didn’t dismiss, exactly, but allowed to be subsumed in memories that came to me now, memories of what my earlier, real running away had brought me, Dana. Lyman Street. Eli.

Eli, whom I’d see the next day.

For we were having a party—we’d decided on it after Nora agreed to come home—in order to dilute what might be the intensity of the family weekend. It was Daniel’s suggestion, and he’d offered to make several of his party dishes—a mammoth pork stew, roasted chicken wings. He’d also suggested I ask Eli and Jean. What he actually said was, “And why don’t you ask Eli Mayhew, since you have such a flaming crush on him? And Sadie would like having his wife, I suppose.”

“Daniel! I don’t have a crush on Eli!” I said.

“How can you say such a thing?”

“Okay, you don’t have a crush on him,” he said, smiling.

“Ask them anyway.”

It was only later, a day or two later, after I’d thought about it and realized how often I’d spoken of Eli since I’d seen him again, that acknowledged to Daniel that I did, in a certain way, as I put it, have a crush on Eli. And I started to explain the web of memory and loss and yearning I’d spun around Eli’s arrival in my life. But he just grinned at me. And then laughed as I kept earnestly at it. Finally I gave up, smacking him lightly several times on the butt as he danced away from me, crying out in mock pain.

But here’s what I thought, that if I had a crush, it was on an earlier Eli, one who didn’t exist anymore, and the real Eli was just a vehicle for it. Or, perhaps even more complicated, that the crush—if you could call something so psychologically distorted by such a playful name—was on myself. The middleaged Eli contained for me, of course, his youthful self, yes. But he contained me also. The self that had known him then. Myself-when-young. And that was what made him attractive to me. You read or hear every now and then of a romance starting up between middleaged or even elderly people who knew each other years earlier. People who throw over long established comfortable marriages or sensible lives for the chance to love again in a particular way—a way that connects them with who they used to be, with how it felt to be that person. And now, with Eli’s arrival in my life, I could understand the potency of that connection.

The self-intoxication you pass off to yourself as intoxication with someone else.

So yes, I said to Daniel. I did, I had a crush on Eli Mayhew. And now I looked forward to the party, to seeing him there. We’d asked the girls for names of their friends to invite, and so it would be a big gathering, fifty or sixty people, and it would include all ages, even some babies, the first of the children of Cass and Nora’s friends. When called to ask Eli and Jean, she’d answered the phone. I told her there would be a real cross-section of the population of Adams Mills, and she sounded delighted.

“I feel as though we’ve barely even had time to look around us so far, and we’ve met almost no one, so this is wonderful. How nice of you.” After a pause, she said, “What should wear?”

and we both laughed.

Now, driving home on this snowy morning, I wondered how it would go, how it would be to see Eli in a purely social context.

Mentally I’d rehearsed various conversations we might have. It seemed possible we would speak of the past, it seemed possible we might offer each other some new ways of thinking about the pain and confusion of that time, some new ways of understanding who each of us was then.

And it also seemed possible—and more likely, I reminded myself-that we would make standard chatter. That Eli would become just another pleasant person I knew in Adams Mills.

DANIEL AND SADIE WERE UP WHEN I CAME IN. SHE WAS IN

her bathrobe at the table, drinking coffee, a new habit for her, one that made her look older, to my eyes almost jaded. Daniel was peeling potatoes at the sink.

“Ooh!” she cried.

“Cold air!” She clutched her bathrobe around her throat.

“Shut the door! Shut the door!”

“It is shut, darling. It’s just a little atmosphere that’s attached itself to me.”

“Is it awful out?” Daniel said.

“Not so much, actually. But the snow is really deep and heavy.

Wet.”

“Nor called,” he said.

“She’s started.”

“Well, the main roads seem fine. Tons of salt. She’ll arrive coated with it. But our yard Daniel!”

“I know. I’ll get on it before she turns up.”

I kissed Sadie’s head, her smooth brown hair. She smelled of shampoo.

“How’d you sleep? Have enough covers up there?”

“Mmm. I was snuggly. But Cassie! She snored like a big fat old man all night long. I could hear her even through the walls!”

“That must have made her particularly popular on those nights when they all slept together in the van.”

“God, the whole van probably vibrated.”

“What time will Nora get here—did she say?” I asked Daniel. I moved over and stood next to him, watching his quick hands flick potato peels into the sink. He was still wearing his pajama top.

His hair was wild.

“She thinks around one, unless there’s some problem on the road.”

“So you think dinner around two?”

“Yeah, I should think so. She’ll be starving.”

“But we don’t want to cut it too close, in case she’s late.”

“I suppose that’s right.”

“Have you noticed,” Sadie piped up in her baby voice, “that when we’re all home, half the conversation is logistics? Who’s going where, what time, how, who’ll drive. Like that.”

Daniel turned to her and grinned.

“Half logistics and the other half battles to the death.”

“Daniel!” I cried.

“God, what a depressing thought.” And I went to change out of my scrubs.

Of course, there was truth to his remark, and it was the reason he had been reluctant to have all the girls home at once. Our holidays in particular had a history of disaster. Once, in childhood, upset about some slight, Cassie had run away Thanksgiving morning. We hadn’t noticed she was gone for more than an hour, at which point Daniel started driving around looking for her and I began to call friends.

By noon, the turkey in the oven, Nora baby-sitting for Sadie (“Do I get paid for this?”), each of us was out in a separate car, cruising all the back roads slowly, stopping and hiking across the dry, pale-brown meadows to any place she’d ever shown interest in—Bishops Pond, the woods behind the Holt estate, the old mill site, the playground behind the school.

We’d agreed to meet every forty-five minutes back at home, and I remember waiting for Daniel’s car in the driveway, watching for the little bump of her head in silhouette in the front seat, and never seeing it, Daniel shaking his head as he got out of the car to confer with me, his mouth bitten in, a grim line. At four, I came back early, certain any more looking was fruitless, and went to call the police—in Daniel’s study, I thought, so Sadie and Nora wouldn’t hear me and be frightened.

And there was Cass, curled up asleep in his day bed her thumb to her mouth, her face streaked with the dirty traces of tears. She’d been in the barn earlier, she said when I woke her, but it got too cold, so she’d come in here, ” cause it reminded me of Daddy.” As though he were the one who’d run away.

On another occasion, Sadie had decided she was vegetarian, on moral grounds. No turkey for her, thank you—just stuffing and potatoes. These she doused liberally with gravy. After Sadie had almost cleared her plate, Cass leaned over and asked, “Know what gravy is made of, dummy?”

“Cass, don’t,” I said, realizing only at this moment what we’d let Sadie do.

“No, what?”

“Blood and gooey fat that’s dripped down from your poor, innocent, slaughtered, turkey-lurkey.”

There was a silence.

“No, it’s not,” Sadie said. Cass grinned even more widely.

“Is it, Mom?” She turned to me.

“Cass,” I said, “I could skin you alive.”

Sadie shrieked and rose from the table.

“You made me! I hate you—you made me eat it.”

“Sweetie,” I was saying.

“We didn’t notice.” I couldn’t say, We didn’t care.

But she was running off now. Her chair went crashing against the wall as she spun away from it. You could hear her feet thudding on the stairs, her door slamming.

First Daniel went up to her, but she wouldn’t let him in.

Next we made Cass go up and apologize. We could hear her raised voice, we could hear that there was no answer.

When she came back down, Cass was smirking.

“She’s got a big sign on the door now, and it says we’re all murderers and sadists.”

“Hmm,” said Nora, theatrically thoughtful.

“I thought she was the only Sadie,” and they laughed together wickedly, twins again in meanness.

Another time it was Nora who refused to come to the table, refused to eatwithAss because she’d called Nora a ho, and with us because we hadn’t be willing to intervene. The charge had something complex to do with Nora’s stealing a boy away from a friend of Cass’s, and we couldn id low any of it Besides, we’d learned long since to stay out of the runnUlg conflicts between them.

“But a ho, Mother!

That’s-that’s e.”

“k’s juXta word from a rap record, Nor. No worse than lots of others. Can’t you let it go?”

But she took her plate and went up to her room, and we all ate downstairs in joyless silence. Near the end of the meal, Cass burst into tears and said, “JUSt. say it. You all hate me. You all wish I was the one who wasn’t here and Nora was the one who was.”

“Shoot me now, Daniel,” I said when we went to bed that night.

“Oh, no. That would be too easy.” We both laughed, grimly.

NORA ARRIVED JUST BEFORE ONE, LOOKING ELEGANT AND

arty in a chic way. All black, naturally—bell-bottom slacks, and over them a very short, tightly fitting jacket with a zip front, the silver tab outsize and industrial-looking. She had large silver earrings on, too, and her hair was pinned back with a silver clasp. She was slender but not thin. She had a bosom. The only resemblance to Cass initially seemed to lie in the similar, very clunky boots they both wore, though Nora’s had a higher heel.

She and Cass were sitting next to each other on the couch in the living room before we ate, and I kept coming in from the kitchen to look at them. Would I even have known they were twins if they were strangers to me? I suppose, when you stopped and really compared their faces, it was clear. The long nose after me, Daniel’s clear white skin, the dark brows and wide mouths. The lazy sensuality, the held-in quality that made them seem older than Sadie by more than the five years that separated them. But the differences between them, between how they’d arranged and treated what they’d started out with, were so profound that they seemed more than accidental, more than just where life had led them.

Cass had been telling Nora about her plans, and now Nora, in a proprietorial tone (it’s my New York), began to offer to help her.

Cass was more than gracious enough in response, I was glad to i’

!

!

hear, talking with a calculated hesitance about the place she thought she might live in with Stellie, about the job she might be going to get.

Nora had started in on what jerks those model-agency guys were-what did Cassie know about him? she ought to check out his reputation, Nora had some friends in that world, she could get phone numbers for Cass to call, and so on—when I called them to the table.

Several times through the meal I met Daniel’s eye as we kept things rolling innocently, interestingly, along. Daniel was open and easy with them, and all three were easy with him. As they always had been.