Five Tuesdays in Winter(48)

More than an hour later, still in the back seat, legs draped over her big duffel that she’s already practiced lifting twice to make sure she can carry it to the bus, Flo remembers when she heard the story about the ghost. It was the first night she’d ever spent in her father’s apartment, after the separation. Her whole life is now divided into what came before and what came after the separation. This was just after, in those first few weeks whose details are impossible to recall. But she has a flash in this hot car heading south of crying in a brand-new bed, begging her father for a story to put her to sleep. He didn’t know how to tell a story, he insisted, but Flo did not believe him. Anyone can tell a story, she hollered at him. Anyone. Finally he sat on the bed and told her how when they were very young, he and Marie-Claude (and Flo remembers this, too, how he said Marie-Claude and not Maman like he used to, as if her mother were now a sister or some friend of the family) had been invited to a castle in Austria. In his version, he saw the ghosts. And Marie-Claude didn’t believe him. No one did, he told Flo. They all thought he was nuts. But as the night went on, he became friends with these ghosts and, though he couldn’t tell Flo exactly how, got them back to their other world safely. Remembering this ending, Flo laughs out loud.

“Look,” she hears her mother say softly to herself. The ocean is suddenly beside them. They have reached the beginning of the cape earlier than expected, before dinner, before sunset. Waves crack, then flatten onshore, releasing a sour smell that quickly fills the car. Plump seabirds stand on one leg in the shimmering glaze left behind. Flo has forgotten to mention the bus station.

Marie-Claude feels Tristan stir beside her. “Look,” she whispers again, and he opens his eyes onto the wide shaft of blue alongside the car, turns to her, and asks her to tell him, just once more, the one about how he was born.





THE MAN AT THE DOOR





There were two of them in the basement already, unfinished, the pages hidden in a cabinet behind the cans of paint and stain. This one was her third attempt.

Last fall she’d been on a binge, filling two notebooks on weekdays during the baby’s morning nap while her husband and two older children were scattered at their own desks miles away. But now that it was winter, a familiar torpor had set in. For weeks she’d written nothing, though she couldn’t break the horrid compulsion to sit there and wait.

This morning, however, without warning, a sentence rose, a strange unexpected chain of words meeting the surface in one long gorgeous arc. As she hurried to get it down, she could feel the pressure of new words, two separate sentences vying for a place next to the first, and then more ideas splitting off from each of those and where there had been, for so long now, arid vacuity there was fertile green ground and any path she chose would be the right one. Words flooded her and her hand ached to keep up with them and above it all her mind was singing here it is here it is and she was smiling. The baby bleated through the monitor.

She’d only managed to get three sentences on the page.

He was not the good kind of baby who cried out and then, sensing that no one was going to come running, rolled over and fell back asleep. The crying would swiftly build to a crescendo of outrage and reproach that would wipe out all hope of another sentence. She stomped up the stairs to his doorway. “What baby takes a six-and-a-half-minute nap?”

He pulled himself up, pressed his teeth into the coated crib railing, and began to sway fetchingly, grinning all the while at the cleavage within the V of her bathrobe.

“Don’t you get it? I need you to sleep.”

He whimpered at the ugly sounds she was making.

Her only choice was to nurse him back to sleep while she worked. She hoisted him out, squeezing him hard at his armpits. He studied her face uneasily.

She carried him to her spot at the kitchen table, latched him on, and reread the three sentences. How quickly they had flattened, lost their music. For those few words she had been rough with her son? Her eyes passed over the page again. Awful. She felt like driving the pencil through her skin. The baby sucked, his eyes shut for the long pulls and open for swallowing, unseeing the whole time. The strong tugs at her breast returned her to a more familiar self. She pressed her lips to the fuzz at his hair-line and nibbled. These animal moments of motherhood obliterated everything else briefly.

Eventually he drifted off, her nipple hanging from his lips like a cigar. She read her words several more times trying not to condemn them, straining to catch the faintest echo of what she thought she’d heard before. Just as she lifted her pencil, the doorbell rang. She glanced in its direction through the walls and shook her head. It rang again. The threat of losing any more of this precious time forced another sentence out of her. Then the doorbell was held down so long the chimes played notes she didn’t recognize.

“I’m not coming,” she said quietly.

Sharp knocks began on the thin side window, growing louder and louder until she was certain a hand would shatter through before she could reach the door. She swung it open wide.

“That’s enough!” she said in a harsh whisper. She wasn’t about to wake the baby up for this man on her porch, a man who did not hesitate to knock on glass as if it were solid steel. His knuckles, she saw, were red as he dropped them into his pocket.

“What are you selling?” Usually she would have cared—about her tone, her bathrobe, the great bulb of breast and the dark brown areola still tenuously attached to the baby’s mouth—but her anger consumed all weaker concerns.