Precious (15 page)

She leans back, her lips slightly parted, emitting the soundless words she might say to Frank:
I’m sorry. It was a mistake,
she will say, simply.
I’ve missed you.
And as she says it, she realizes it’s true. She has missed Frank. She has missed him perhaps more than anyone. He was, after all, the only one who knew her, the only one who knew the secret of the crease at her neck. He was the one who shared her history. She will say,
The time away from you, the time away from anyone or anything loved is always a mistake. They are difficult things, families. It’s hard not to
feel incidental. It’s hard not to feel forgotten about, eventually; I’m sorry,
she mouths.
It was a mistake.

By two in the afternoon there is a tiredness Natalia attributes to jet lag, to the hours spent with her legs crammed against the seat in front of her, the conversation with the man beside her about weather and food, and the subsequent wait for the luggage and taxi. When they drive by the house, Natalia hesitates, struck by the stark clarity of the white paneling, the burnt-looking grass. “In the back,” she instructs the cab-driver. “In the back, please.”

The cabdriver nods. He takes her money, makes change. He offers to help with her bag, but she declines politely, not wanting to draw attention. Even on a Tuesday and even at this time of day, there will be at least a few neighbors out walking their dogs, or chatting in front of the mailbox, or shredding up weeds with their gloved hands. She can’t bear the thought of announcing her return so publicly, that Milly Morris might know she is home before Frank, before her children, and that seeing her, a woman like that might march over with a disapproving look and demand an explanation, demand pay for extra hours of sitting. If that happened, Natalia would feel caged. She would simply slump and scream.

Thank goodness the back door is unlocked. The knob turns without hesitation. Natalia puts her suitcase down by the kitchen table. Out of old habit, she sorts through mail that has been left to pile up on the counter all week: a water bill, a phone bill, an advertisement from Orr’s for the summer basement sale. She notices a new can opener fastened under the cabinet and notices, too, that the framed needlepoint she made years ago—a lavender-colored house with thin hearts stitched under it—no longer hangs on the wall next to the basement door. Frank, she supposes. He probably threw it into the trash.

If the girls heard her enter or saw the taxicab in the alley as it drove
off, they still haven’t come downstairs. There is no patter of feet, no onrush of questions. She walks down the hallway, cautiously, past her and Frank ‘s bedroom. In the living room, she pauses by the steps and places her hand on the cool metal railing, realizing (as if she hasn’t felt it a thousand times over twenty years) that the metal isn’t smooth but coarse and grainy. Unsettled suddenly, she listens, still unsure if she should call out. Her younger child, and certainly of her two the more open, would come rushing down the stairs like a tolerable breeze if Natalia did call. She would be easier, Natalia believes, if not a bit persistent, interrogating, probing in a way that would eventually exasperate even the Buddha. No doubt, too, Sissy would eventually become quiet and hypervigilant, burning a hole through Natalia’s back with her gaze, as if a sigh or a sneeze or a raised voice might be an indication of disaster, every minute gesture significant. Still, Natalia could withstand that. Eva would be harder, Eva who holds grudges like her father—relentlessly, with words that fall like glass. There has always been something about Eva, an unsettling assertiveness that has left Natalia on the verge of—dare she say it?— jealousy. Eva will lash out, as she often does when she feels wounded or angry. Eva will cast immediate judgment: cruel pretension, sharp disdain. Is it these traits she envies in her daughter, in addition to fearing them? Or does she simply envy Eva, her youth, her defiance that draws such attention, that moves so many eyes? Regardless, Natalia already feels that her nerves today are stretched to the point of elasticity.

She listens anxiously and hears a hushed conversation upstairs, a murmur, then laughter from Eva’s room. Always on the phone. Across the hall from Eva, the television whirls with the rise and fall of cartoon voices. Natalia remembers the argument she had once with Frank, how she warned him that Sissy would spend all her days locked in her bedroom if she were given the old black-and-white. Frank relinquished to Sissy’s pleading, though, the television a compromise since Natalia didn’t want a dog. It all seems distant now, spent. Still, she misses those petty arguments and snubs. She misses her family.

There is no other movement, no opening of doors. They do not know she is here, listening. They haven’t sensed her at all.

She doesn’t call. She tells herself,
Not yet.
Just a moment, she thinks, to orient herself to the house again. Every house has its own vibrations, its own smells emanating from the kitchen, its own secrets hidden about, its own stories told at the table. She looks around, as if she expects everything might be changed, shifted out from under her. The living room rug shows the girls’ constant traffic. She can see the dirt, the dust on the edges of the throw rugs, the cobwebs in the corners, the smudges on the bay window and front door. The colonial blue walls appear less vibrant than she remembers, the wallpaper beginning to curl at the corner behind Frank’s chair. Discarded newspapers lie on the floor. The marble statue by the fireplace, a naïve-looking woman and man held together in an embrace, stands where it has for years.
National Geographics
are on the coffee table in disarray. A photograph of a tiger stares at her, angrily.

At her bedroom, she breathes and closes the door behind her, gently, so that the girls do not hear. She takes in the room, the paneled walls and dim light, the painting hung above the bed of a boat on an ocean. She takes the ashtray from Frank’s nightstand, opens the window, and dumps the charred remains into the row of hostas below. She looks over to Mrs. Stone’s house, to the rosebushes planted years ago, a tangle of thorny blooms.

Her hands shake, and it’s like a test, a foolish test that a child might think of as a game of he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not. She debates, rubbing her thumb over the slight indentation on her ring finger: bare, smooth. She opens her jewelry box and rummages through cheap pearl necklaces and clip-on earrings and pins, until she finds the plain gold band. She doesn’t put it on.

Under the bed, Natalia gathers Frank ‘s
Playboys
and
Hustlers.
They make her feel so outdated and worn, made invisible by time. She places them in Frank’s underwear drawer, under his boxers. Still unsure, still
feeling as if she’s misplaced something, something beyond the room, something deep in herself, she sits on the bed and hears a familiar squeak from the springs as they sag, the same worn sound she always worried about when they made love—the walls in the house are so wafer-thin. Sex needed to be quick, silent. She lies down and turns her head onto Frank’s pillow. It would be within his right, she supposes, if, in her absence, he’d had other women in this bed, if Frank’s chest hair, ample and wavy, had pressed against another woman’s breasts.

The pain caused by this thought hits her bluntly. She tries to dismiss it and tells herself she can rest peacefully for one moment without worry. She feels strange and heavy. There is something so tantalizing about being undiscovered. She closes her eyes. Just a moment to herself, a last moment before she takes to the children. Then she will call to them and persuade them and answer whatever questions they might proffer. She will hear about the months she has missed. Eva’s prom was surely successful. She could have had any number of dates, far more than Natalia might have had at the same age. Sissy probably still struggled with science and would never have a head for concrete facts. She probably also still refused to shower after gym class, even though she’d been told a hundred times she must. Natalia closes her eyes. She sleeps.

To find someone suddenly gone, to see them one day and not know that this will be the last day you see them, to not have the moment register until hours, days later, or years, is never easy. How we catch ourselves as life moves forward, thinking about that last moment and about what we might have done differently, if only we’d known.

For Sissy it is admittedly painful to remember a friend bicycling off, down to the park—to see her again, in the mind’s eye, standing on the bike pedals,
bragging,
as she always did. The new Desert Rose—bright gold with a blaze of red flowers curling down the frame—was startling against the houses and sidewalk as Vicki whizzed by, larger than everything. Sissy might have stopped her, after all. She might have kept anything
painful from happening. It is difficult for her to remember that she silently leveled an accusation against Vicki, that she held her responsible for the destruction of Precious, yet again, that she blamed her for the subsequent chastisements, the yelling of the mothers, the confinement to her room, as if
Sissy
were wrong, as if
Sissy
deserved to be punished, when in Sissy’s mind she had been
taunted
to action. It infuriates her. Even now, after all these months, in the haze of guilt, she is reluctant to admit that as she saw Vicki disappear over the hill, her thoughts weren’t
Come back
(as she now amends) but
Good riddance.
She refuses to admit she fantasized a hundred times about Vicki suddenly being gone, about Vicki being dead (what
is
dead?). Sissy had a goldfish once, the only pet her mother ever allowed, one that, over time, Sissy often forgot to tend to properly. She came home one day from school to find it gone, and her mother told her that she saw it grow wings, breathe air, and fly out the window and into a tree. “It perched there for hours,” Natalia explained. “Puckering its fish-bird lips.” Only Eva told her that their mother had flushed the fish down the toilet after finding it belly-up in its bowl, an egg smear of white over its upturned eye. Still, after that, and perhaps only to assuage her guilt, Sissy imagined death as a grand transformation—the body shifting to another shape entirely changed but certainly not gone forever.

All of this is difficult for Sissy to reconcile. But in the harsh reality of the day, in a house that only knows stubborn realities, to see her mother sleeping exactly where she should be sleeping—in her bedroom, on the right side of the bed—to know that she, Sissy, has passed this door a hundred times and a hundred times has turned the knob, each time hoping against hope and seeing nothing, and then finally to see her mother—right here!
corporeal!—
is nothing short of overwhelming. Yet here she is, in linen pants and heels, her mass of hair, salt-and-pepper gray, pressed against a pillow.

Sissy blinks hard, feeling suddenly that she cannot breathe. To breathe, she thinks, would destroy the moment, making her mother disappear. She inches forward, releasing the door without realizing. It
drifts to the wall and bumps against it, a hollow sound. Her mother awakes abruptly—she has only been here a moment, only taken a five-minute nap—and sits up, collects herself. She says, dumbly, “Baba,” the name her real mother often called her as a child. “Hello.”

Sissy says nothing. Disbelieving, she bows her head slightly and bites her fingernail. She turns and runs upstairs. There is a trample of footsteps, the ascent, a call for help, a frantic call not for her mother but for Eva instead. “Eva! Eva!” she yells.

“Fucking Christ, Sissy, what?” Eva pokes her head out of her bedroom door, ready to holler more, but immediately she sees Sissy’s dismay: her pallor and excitement, the thin wash of worry falling over her face. Sissy shakes her head, unable to speak. She grabs Eva’s arm and pulls it violently.

“What?” Eva asks again. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

Sissy mouths, “Mom.”

Eva rights herself. “You’re lying.”

Still bewildered, Sissy shakes her head. She crosses her heart, but privately she doubts what she has seen, as if she might have imagined it all, as if she dare not call upon the confidence to validate things, not if she wants them to be real. Perhaps it was her mind playing games, wishing things into existence and then placing them where the mind and heart expect. She has no time to doubt, really, no time to find an answer for Eva. Eva storms downstairs, and then there is a reality Sissy can hold on to: Eva’s shrieking—persistent, high-pitched rancor filled with obscenities. She listens a moment, tentatively, until she hears her mother’s voice rise to match her sister’s. She scurries back downstairs. Eva stands in the hallway, angry tears running down her blotched cheeks. “You have no right,” Eva is screaming. “You think we need you now? You think you can just come and go?”

Eva lunges forward, then, in a way that an animal might—angrily unpredictably—but Natalia holds her back, firmly, by the shoulder. She tries to soothe Eva, an action that produces in Sissy an inexplicable confusion:
her mother’s new reserve, her attempt then, when Eva’s words fail her, when Eva is left to angry sobs, to reach for her older daughter and embrace her. “It’s okay,” Natalia says, composing herself as well. “You’re angry.”

Eva steps back and frowns before another insolent look comes over her. If she could know what to do or say, she might stay there in the hallway and let the reality of the moment settle in. She might explain how missing someone can produce not more love but resentment and hate. Instead, she can only think to mumble “Bitch” under her breath before storming off again. She slams her bedroom door in a defiant way with such force that Sissy can almost feel a breezy current travel down the steps.

“Well,” Natalia says, too loudly. She places a hand on Sissy’s shoulder, cupping it, but she does not attempt this time to draw her child near. “That went well, didn’t it?”

Sissy nods, still not moving closer. “I guess.”

“I missed you,” she says. “I missed all of you.”

“Okay.” Sissy doesn’t know why she suddenly feels reduced in this moment. Nor does she understand the hesitation in her that this utterance causes, the newly formed doubts.