The Vanishing Year(38)
“Issues with what?” I’m curious now. What are the issues on a Saturday if you work on Wall Street?
“Zoe, do you know how boring my job is?”
“No, tell me. Put me back to sleep, and I’ll sleep till you come back.”
He laughs and the sound swallows me. I love it and miss it all at once. “Okay, fine. So Japan’s market is not actually closed on Saturday, and we have a security issue with the agency bonds.”
“Okay, okay. I feel like you just made all that up. Go.” I give his arm a gentle shove and he laughs again. I think it’s possible that this house, this town, has let out a new Henry, like he’s been unzipped. I picture him stepping out of his own skin, clapping his hands together, looking around. Okay, what do we do first? Fish? Hunt? Hike?
He kisses his fingertips and touches them to the crown of my head and I hear his shoes clack on the hardwood floor and the door click shut, and just like that I’m alone. I’m not necessarily afraid, but I have a pit settled right under my breastbone. I’m at loose ends. It’s hard to have a whole day in front of you and nothing to put in it, nothing to pencil in, no phone calls to make. I have this feeling often but generally I can fill my time by going out, taking in Manhattan. In New York, you’re never bored. I look at the clock above the sink. Six-thirty.
I part the curtains. Out leads to a forest in the back and a copse of trees in the front, then a quarter mile away, a road. I take my mug and from the back of the easy chair in the living room, I grab a sweater that I assume must be Henry’s but I don’t recognize it. It’s heavy and cable knit, its sleeves are long, with big wooden buttons. I wrap it around myself tightly and open the back door.
The deck is wide and spans the back of the house, looking out to a sea of black and green. In the corner is a single rocker, made of rough-hewn logs, a deliberate attempt to look woodsy. I curl into it, bring my knees to my chest and cup my coffee. It’s cold for April, I doubt today will be a day for exploring the outdoors. It smells like wet pine.
I’m reminded of Lake Tahoe. Evelyn had nabbed a cabin once, a gift from a friend. She had a million gifts from friends. She didn’t have any money, but always said she had a lot of friends, and some of those friends had money. She’d come home with steaks that she’d gotten as a gift, or wine she “found.” All trinkets that people gave her, she claimed. She’d explain it away with a wave of her hand, and a soft tinkling laugh. You can get anything you want if you’re nice to people. People like to do things for people, it’s so easy to be kind. She dragged me to Tahoe, where the rich vacation, she’d said. We’ll be queens for a week! My seventeen-year-old heart had nearly broken at the idea of a week without television and very little phone communication. I dragged my feet, I huffed and puffed, whatever-ing my way through half the trip. Sneaking calls to friends when Evelyn wasn’t looking.
Evelyn never faltered, her grin bright, coral lipstick smudged on her two front teeth when she smiled, which was all the time. It’s easy to glorify the dead and say things like that: Oh, they glowed, they were always happy. With Evelyn, it was true. Any attitude I threw at her that week, it’s like she caught it all with Jergens-soft hands and never stumbled.
She unmoored the boat, a ramshackle rowboat that I insisted would sink (So what, she’d scoffed. We can swim, right?) and paddled us out into the middle of the lake with one oar, one side, then the other. Her cheeks had grown bright red and I thought she might pass out. I’d rolled my eyes and took the paddle from her, Don’t die, Ev. And her arms had looked so thin. It was the first time I’d realized she’d grown so incredibly tiny.
“God, Evelyn, you’re a stick. Eat a sandwich or something.” I knew I was being mean, but it would be so embarrassing to have an anorexic mother, like one of the fainting cheerleaders at school. She leaned over the side of the boat and swatted a handful of water at me. I took the oar and with a sweeping motion, drenched her. She laughed, but it sounded like it came from inside a barrel.
She looked away and when she looked back, she bared her teeth. “Do I have lipstick?” For the first time, she didn’t. We’d made it back to the cabin, where we blasted Billie Holiday and simmered vodka sauce, and she let me drink wine until the edges of the room blurred. She got me to talk about boys, or who I thought were men at the time. Don’t be afraid of sex. Be afraid of love, but not sex. Love can swallow you whole, consume you, change you, but sex? Sex is just for a night. And I had no idea what she meant.
Later, I heard her on the phone in her room. I stood in the hallway of that cabin and I swore she was crying. I pushed against her bedroom door but couldn’t hear the words.
She was sick then, and it was only after she’d died that I realized she’d known it.
A thought nags at me, one I’d asked Mick, filled with hate and anger. If she had so many friends, where were they? When she died, where’d they go? No one called. No one offered to pay for a simple cremation. I’d stayed in her apartment for weeks after her death, that foggy milky time before I ran, but never once did the phone ring unless a bill collector was on the other end. I search my memory for who Evelyn said was the cabin’s rightful owner and come up empty.
The sky has lightened to a dove gray and the rain mists all around, not falling in drops from the sky, but like it’s raining from the bottom up. My coffee cup is empty and I’m cold. I venture inside and look at the clock. It’s not even nine. I wander upstairs halfheartedly, to find my book buried under sweaters and jeans in my overnight bag. All the doors in the hall are closed and I nudge open the one next to our bedroom. The bed in the center is made simply and a hand-stitched brightly colored patchwork quilt adorns the bed. The pillows are made from old jeans pockets and the walls are adorned with red wooden stars, an upmarket Americana theme. I am sure of two things: Penny decorated this room, not Henry. And nothing has changed since Tara died. Upon closer inspection, the bureau top contains bottles of women’s perfume, turned yellow in the sun. The nightstand holds a mystery book with page 137 folded down at the corner. There are blue peep-toe bedroom slippers (Chanel makes bedroom slippers?) peeking out from under the bed. She could have been here yesterday. Then there is the dawning realization that there’s not the slightest layer of dust on anything. It’s not as though this room has been closed off, never to be entered again. Someone cleans this room. Rearranges the perfume bottles, just so. Moves the slippers to vacuum, and replaces them so that their toes line up perfectly underneath the dust ruffle.