Comfort Me With Apples(12)

“I don’t understand,” she says, shaking her glossy head. He’s never snapped at her. Not once. “Surely there’s a hundred better pantomimes than our moving-in day!”

“They must like you,” her husband grumbles. “They must like you a great deal.” She has never heard such a tone in his voice. It makes her quail and shrink away from him. Just an inch. Not so anyone would notice. But she pulls away, and she knows he feels it. “I’m leaving,” her husband snarls suddenly.

His expression is unreadable, faraway. He doesn’t even look at Sophia. She can’t stand it. The loss of his regard. Please look at me again, she thinks, I’ll die if you don’t, I will. But it does no good. He stands up and so does Mr. Semengelof in the front row, their sight lines connecting over the heads of the crowd bustling toward the next activity.

“What’s wrong, my love?” Sophia squeaks in a rising panic. He has never been cross with her, not even so much as irritated. She has never given him cause.

“Nothing,” he snaps. “My own foolishness.” He shakes his shaggy head. “I shouldn’t have come, that’s all. Not with work at such a critical stage. I’ve no time for frivolities as you do, wife. I allowed myself this idleness to please you and now I shall have to make it up. I will not be home tonight. Nor tomorrow, I expect. Don’t wait for me.” He takes her face in his hands and for a moment she finds the old version of him there, warm and kind and eager. “Enjoy yourself, Soph. Eat everything you can. Dance as long as you wish. Be happy. Savor it all. It’s for you.” He touches the tip of her nose lightly with his fingertip. “But no gossiping.”

And then he is gone. Sophia is enveloped by the herd of everyone she loves and there is a waterfall of ice cream and everyone has a spoonful for her to try, a hundred colors, as sweet as cold kisses.

Mrs. Palfrey appears suddenly, holding up a bowl of apples swimming in honey and cinnamon. She draws one out on a long silver fork. It drips sauce on the earth. But when Sophia opens her mouth to bite, Mrs. Palfrey pulls it back.

“Did you understand?” she whispers urgently, so no one else can hear.

“No,” Sophia says desperately. “No, I don’t, and I don’t want to!”

Mrs. Palfrey presses her lips together and sighs. She touches the younger woman’s cheek with a terrible, tender pity.

And then Sophia’s mouth is full of the taste of apples and the throng carries her away and she is dancing, dancing, dancing to wake the sun from the depths of the night.





NORTHERN SPY



20.??Limitation of Liability: The Association holds itself harmless from any actions or claims of a third party or parties. Residents shall be wholly responsible for any acts of willful or wanton misconduct, negligence, destruction, abuse of contract, or other harm incurred to themselves or the Property, regardless of outside source or extenuating circumstances.

21.??Solicitation, whether door-to-door, in common areas, or on streets and byways, is absolutely forbidden. Report infractions to the Association at once.





BRAEBURN



The house lies dark on a dark street.

Sophia stands at the threshold of her door. Such a grand, towering door for such a small woman. She loves this door. The cedar boughs carved in relief on the red wood. The brass knob in the shape of a rose. Nothing on the other side could be ever be strange to her.

The heron-shattered windowpane accuses her like a noose hanging lonely in its gallows. Why did she tell him she didn’t know what happened? What harm could there be in a bird’s vandalism? What fault could he find in her over that?

Less than he will find for what she intends now.

The moon hides behind an oak tree. It cannot watch.

Sophia turns on one lamp as she enters her own home, her lovely home, as intimate and familiar to her as her own body. The rest she leaves in shadow.

Quickly, soundlessly, she goes to the knife block and taps out the finger bone—still there, still defying her with its insistence on continuing to exist. She jogs upstairs to retrieve the brush and the hair. All three of them, together, inert, side by side on the kitchen counter.

Sophia begins to search. She opens every drawer. Runs her hands along their hidden corners, between the runners, under the lining paper. She empties every cabinet. Stacks the dishes carefully next to them. Taps the rear wall for hollows. She shakes out every blanket, rolls up every plush, intricate rug, crawls under every bed and sofa, works her fingers into the slats, springs, little underledges of their insides. She pours out the coin jar, the pen box, opens every book on every bookshelf and lets the pages shuffle through her hands like playing cards, their order already pre-determined. She disassembles the lamps, the coffee press, the piano. She turns off the water and opens the pipes under the sinks.

The work goes on for hours.

Sophia sweats and aches but keeps steadily at her task, room by room, methodical, unemotional, like it’s another woman doing all this, another woman bending back the rosebushes and prying up the Gevurah Grey roof shingles and struggling to open the back of the grandfather clock in the hall almost twice her own height.

But it is her, in every second of the dark.

She finishes before morning and sits on the floor of her kitchen, on the black-and-white checkered tile, her throbbing spine against the oven, her hair cold and wet and stinking with exertion. The fruits of her night spread out before her in a dark mandala.