The Hazards of Sleeping Alone (9 page)

But Charlotte is rattled. How could moments—whole phases—of Emily's childhood be completely forgotten? Moments that were still etched in such perfect detail in her own mind? It lent every moment in the present a thin, fleeting feeling. This visit, for instance. Emily would probably remember the first time she came to Mom's new condo. But would she remember the bag of arugula? The trip to Thai Heaven? The talking cat? Charlotte would remember all of these things.

Maybe this is just how memories work: the brain has only a finite capacity for them, so you hold on to the ones that make the deepest impression. If that's true, Charlotte guesses, the majority of the memories she carries are of her life with Emily on Dunleavy Street. She honestly can't imagine she's forgotten a single day of it. But her daughter's memories, she suspects, will be largely of other people, other places, things Charlotte can't even begin to know.

“Well, it doesn't matter,” Charlotte decides. She isn't going to force the issue. With a little prodding, Emily might have remembered, but she doesn't need to know for sure. “But tonight we should stay up. At least until Walter gets here. It'll be like a little slumber party.”

“Okay,” Emily says, amused. “But you do realize I am going to be here for two more days, right?”

“Yes, but—”

But the difference between tonight and tomorrow is so obvious, Charlotte doesn't know how to explain it. She's hurt that she would even need to. How can Emily not recognize how completely different it will be once Walter gets here? That her visit, in essence, ends tonight?

“But those two days don't really count.”

Emily looks up from her magazine. “Why not?”

“Well, no, they
count.
Of course they count. But you know what I mean. They won't be the same. We won't get this opportunity again.”

“Which opportunity?”

“To be
alone,
Emily,” Charlotte says, exasperated. “Just the two of us. Just you and me.”

Emily tosses the
People
on the coffee table. All the images Charlotte had of staying up confiding over tea and Thai food go swirling down the drain.

“Mom.”

“Yes, honey?”

“You don't want Walter to come here, do you.”

“It isn't that,” Charlotte lies.

“What is it, then? Do you not like him?”

“No.”

“No, that's not it? Or no, you don't like him?”

“Honey, I hardly know him.” Though at the moment, truth be told, she's fairly sure she doesn't like Walter. In fact, she might hate Walter. She certainly blames him for ruining her weekend.

“So maybe his visit will be good for you,” Emily says, scratching her elbow. “Help you get to know him better. He's a fascinating person.”

Charlotte clenches her teeth. She is so tired of all these
fascinating
people, these
fascinating
ideas and
fascinating
theories. “I'm sure he is.”

Emily nods, as if Charlotte has just proven her point. Though what point that is, Charlotte has no idea. She's irritated by her daughter's air of knowingness, her presumption that she has her mother all figured out, when in reality Emily is missing the most obvious of truths: that Charlotte misses her daughter.
That she wants to spend time with her. She is lonely without her. Why should she have to spell out such a need?

All at once the anger Charlotte has been barely restraining since Walter's phone call comes rushing out. “If you want the truth, Emily, no, I don't want Walter coming here. And it isn't because I don't like Walter, it's just—we never get to spend time together. I never get to see you.
Just
you. You see Walter every day!”

She stops, blinking quickly. Emily's expression remains calm. Charlotte wonders if this was part of her teacher training: how to respond to unexpected outbursts in the alternative learning environment.

“Is there anything else you want to say?” Emily asks.

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact.” Charlotte hoists herself higher on the sofa arm. Her voice is shaking, but she will not fall apart. “I want to know if you two planned this.”

“Planned what?”

“This trip. Walter's trip. I want to know if you planned the trip before you left.”

Emily doesn't reply, so she keeps on explaining.

“If you planned for Walter to come here tonight, planned for him to stay the two whole days you're—”

“Stop calling it a
plan.
There was no plan, Mom. It's not like this was some big plot Walter and I cooked up in our basement dungeon to trick you.” Emily lets her head flop back against the pillows. “It's not one of your paranoid—” She stops, clicks her tongue.

“One of my what?” Charlotte says.

Emily speaks to the ceiling. “I had no idea Walter was coming. This morning was the first I heard of it. I swear.”

“What did you mean before?”

“Nothing.” Emily sits up and pulls her knees to her chest. “You can just get overly worried sometimes. And I'm saying, don't think this was some plot we made up to fool you, because it wasn't.” She stares at her kneecaps, a soft pink slope under the fuzzy blankets. “If you want to know the truth—” She opens her mouth, then closes it. “If you want to know the truth, I
wasn't
completely surprised to hear Walter was coming. But not because we planned it. Because of reasons you know nothing about.”

This revelation is delivered with a fair amount of drama. But it comes as no surprise to Charlotte. She's all too aware of these “reasons she knows nothing about”—the whispered phone calls, vague problems Emily will allude to but not explain. In fact, she's tired of them. When Emily and Walter's problems were confined to New Hampshire, to ask about them was prying. But now, Charlotte is involved. It's
her
house that will be the site of their fighting, or reconciling, or whatever happens when Walter pulls up in the middle of the night, and Charlotte wants to know what's going on. She's entitled to it.

“I want you to tell me what's going on with you and Walter.” Charlotte pauses, squares her shoulders. “Now that he's coming, I think I deserve to know.”

In the silence, Charlotte's gaze bounces around the room, skipping from the crowded bookshelves to the wood-paneled TV stand to the heavy curtains with their dull gold glow. When she alights on her daughter's face, Emily's expression is unchanged. If anything, it looks harder. More defiant. And the defiance is enough to firm Charlotte's own resolve. She's spent years being so careful, so respectful of Emily's privacy, never prying, never asking too much, trying to read her for signs of trouble, tiptoeing around the beige phone cord that strained so
urgently from under the kitchen closet door. She is tired of being oblivious, out of it, “without it.” Most of her life as a mother has been spent in the dark. Now, after all these years spent imagining dangers, she deserves to be told this one small thing.

But just as Charlotte is gearing up to say so, Emily's face softens. Her lips quiver. Two bright spots of pink appear on her cheeks. It's the same transformation Charlotte used to watch when she was a baby, right before she started to cry. She feels a familiar panic rising, like watching a wound open, wanting to heal it, make it stop. Emily wraps her arms across her knees and draws them under her chin. She drops her head down on her thin, freckled forearms. “I just don't want to get into it,” she says, voice muffled by tears, or blankets, or both.

And just like that, Charlotte feels her anger melt. Her heart relent. Emily has always been capable of this—her fierce, tiny body brimming with so much feeling, so much drama, that she can evoke anger or tenderness within the same breath. Just being in her close proximity is, for Charlotte, something like being pregnant all over again: the hormonal shifts, the unpredictable mood swings, the emotional crescendos. The dynamic began with Emily's conception—kicking and squirming in Charlotte's gut, dictating her sleep patterns, pulling her strings—and has gone on ever since.

“Honey,” Charlotte says. No longer is she the naive, out-of-it old lady. She is the mother again, the one whose job it is to comfort and listen. She lays a hand on the blanket covering Emily's feet. “Why don't you tell me what's going on?”

Emily's head is still bent, only the top exposed, the part in her hair endearingly crooked. “I don't know.”

“Maybe I can help.”

“I doubt it.”

Charlotte rubs her feet; part in comfort, part encouragement. Finally Emily looks up and exhales a shuddery breath. “We're going through some kind of big stuff.”

“What stuff?” Charlotte pounces. Too eager, she thinks.

“Just … some differences of opinion.” Emily wipes a sleeve across her nose. “We're not seeing eye to eye on some things.”

This time Charlotte waits a measured beat. “Like what?”

“Nothing tangible really.” Emily hesitates. Charlotte can see her face working, looking for the right words. “It's more like differences in ideologies. Belief systems. I mean, I have strong opinions, Walter has strong opinions …”

Probably the kinds of opinions they didn't stop to consider before moving in together, Charlotte thinks. They jumped in, and now they're in over their heads.

“It's just hard to, I don't know, compromise sometimes. Or even know if you
should
compromise,” Emily says. “I mean, if you really believe strongly in something, you shouldn't bend for someone. No matter who it is.” She looks up at Charlotte, her cheeks flushed.

Charlotte gives her what she hopes is a reassuring smile. “You know,” she says gently, “you don't have to keep living together.”

Emily sighs. “That's not the point.”

“But—it's just good to know you have options,” she says quickly. “You can always move out. You can always move back here.”

Emily looks at her incredulously. “This is so not about that.” She flops backward. “Just forget it.”

“What?”

“You're not
hearing
me. I'm not moving anywhere. I'm trying to do the opposite. I'm trying to—” She stops, then yanks the
blanket up around her shoulders. “I know you have some weird thing against Walter, but we're a couple. We're together. You need to accept that.”

Startled, Charlotte retracts her hand and tucks it between her knees. “But I thought you were having problems?”

Emily draws a deep breath. For a moment Charlotte thinks she might start confiding in her again, but she just looks down at her chewed fingernails and says, “It's complicated.”

The insinuation is unmistakable. “Complicated” is something Charlotte can't understand. Because she's never had a “real” relationship. One that is passionate and turbulent, romantic and dramatic. She's had only Joe: ten years of politeness that receded into resentment and, finally, distance.

And Joe
has
managed to achieve a “real” relationship-at least in Emily's eyes. Over the years, Charlotte has listened to her recount fights between Joe and Valerie in which voices were raised and insults hurled and objects thrown—mirrors, phone books, bowls of Caesar salad—things Charlotte, when she was married, would have never dared do. It was strange imagining her ex-husband in this relationship, such a far cry from the tense calm of their marriage. And yet, though Charlotte had never seen that side of Joe outright, she wasn't surprised it was there. There had always been an undercurrent to him, something willful, temperamental. It was the quality he channeled into his trademark clipped humor, into jokes that were never really jokes, into running laps at the gym and playing video games. The quality that prevented Charlotte, for ten years, from ever feeling truly relaxed around him.

Emily, on the other hand, never seemed unnerved by these marital dramas. There was fascination—even admiration—in her tone as she described scenes of Joe yelling and Valerie storming
out and how, afterward, they sat on their deck overlooking the crashing Pacific, holding hands, breathing in the salt air. Maybe, Charlotte thought bitterly, you can afford to have fights with your husband if your house has a deck with an ocean view. Fighting in South Jersey, well, that's more of a risk. Because afterward, where do you go? The bathroom? The basement? The garage, with its broken toy bikes and sagging lawn chairs? A wife could feel much more secure fighting with her husband if she knew they'd be stepping into a postcard after, that the tide would be there to carry their words away, the ocean air to dilute any anger they'd let loose.

She wonders in spite of herself how Valerie would handle this conversation. From her limited exposure to the woman, she knows Joe's new wife exudes no maternal quality. She's too fashionable, too angular, without hips or belly—it's obvious she devotes too much time to herself to be truly devoted to a child. She seems less like a mother than a remote, revered older cousin, one who moves in a mysterious world of college boys and Virginia Slims. Charlotte feels sure Emily would never let herself cry in front of her stepmother. (Charlotte hates that word, just the presence of “mother” inside it.) Yet she guesses Emily would be more forthcoming with Valerie, more likely to ask for advice. Valerie would probably offer inappropriate stories from her sordid dating past, then treat Emily to an impromptu shopping spree or rock concert.

It is as Charlotte is imagining Valerie and Emily with arms linked, wearing jeweled sunglasses and ripped jeans, elbowing their way through a crowd of sweaty teenagers, that she hears the noises from outside. The jangle of keys and the sounds of two voices: one female, one male.

She glances at Emily, who has lifted her head. Together, they
listen to the sounds of feet stumbling up the stairwell. One a tinny, unsteady pair of high heels, the other a heavy, clomping set of work boots.