The Myth of You and Me (32 page)
I don’t know how long I sat at that table, listening to myself breathe. What was I supposed to do now? I’d been taking direction from a man who didn’t exist. Maybe I didn’t exist, either, with no one to bear witness to my presence, no one to testify that I had combed Oliver’s hair, felt the warmth of Will’s skin, stripped off my clothes and plunged naked into water, twirled in circles with Sonia in her backyard. I sat there until I began to feel that if someone didn’t touch me I would slowly disappear.
I crept up the stairs as quietly as I always had when Madame Gray was there. Sonia’s room was still pink and white, a little girl’s room with a woman’s clothes hanging in the closet. She wasn’t in there, and I heard a soft murmuring of voices coming from the end of the hall. I’d only ever seen Madame Gray’s room in quick glimpses. It was on a dark side of the house, and was made darker still by the lowered blinds. I’d thought of it as a cave, as the lair of a dragon from one of Sonia’s father’s stories. Now, as I walked toward the half-open door at the end of the hall, I felt a childish nervousness about what I’d see on the other side, like when you wake in the night, frightened by something you can’t name, and force yourself to look inside the closet.
Sonia was perched on the edge of her mother’s bed, her back to me. I could see the shape of her mother’s body beneath the tangled sheets, but Sonia’s position obscured my view of her face. For a long moment they sat there in silence. Then Madame Gray lifted her hand and touched Sonia’s head, and I knew what Sonia was doing here. Her mother had tried to kill herself. A large white bandage was wrapped around her wrist.
I wondered how she had done it. Had she threatened suicide on the phone to Sonia and then nicked herself with a razor, or had she cut her veins open, lengthwise, in the tub, and watched the water turn red? Had she only wanted Sonia’s attention, or had she really expected to die? I wanted to ask Sonia these questions, but I knew she would only look at me, incredulous, and ask me what difference it made. Her mother needed her, and here she was, no matter what the woman had done. Was that weakness on Sonia’s part, or strength? Her whole life, she’d loved a person who gave and withdrew her affection at every turn. No wonder she thought of me as a coward for fleeing the moment something went wrong.
As I watched, Madame Gray began to stroke Sonia’s hair, and Sonia bowed her head and submitted to her mother’s touch. She let out a long, shuddering breath.
“Je t’aime,”
she said.
Here was the secret of this house, the thing it took bravery to face—that to go on loving someone means to over and over allow the necessary pain. Standing there in the doorway, I had a moment of empathy so total that I felt I was Sonia—we were, finally, singular, as we’d once imagined ourselves to be. For the first time since we met I didn’t just witness Sonia’s life, I lived it. I struggled, between my mother’s blind hatred and my father’s blind love, to figure out which one I deserved. I heard my own mother say she wished I had never been born. I watched as my best friend abandoned me. I felt what it was to be negated in that way, and I understood that if hatred can negate us, love can create us, and when we lose it we don’t know who we are.
The moment passed. I was only myself again, and that seemed a lonely thing to be. I crept back down the stairs, intending to leave, but I couldn’t bear the thought of being any more alone than I was here in this house with the two of them upstairs. I went out the back door into the yard. It seemed to have shrunk, too, barely big enough now to contain me and the swing set that still stood in the corner. Someone had fixed the swing. Over the fence, I saw the roof of another house, and above it dark electrical lines cutting through the enormous sky, the scene made watery and unreal by the tears in my eyes. I crossed to the swing set and sat on one of the swings.
Oliver’s letter was still in my hand. I unfolded it and read it again. This time I didn’t think about the lies revealed. None of that seemed to matter. I read out loud, “Didn’t you love me after all?” and nobody answered, because even though Oliver said he loved me, and I believed him, now he was just a piece of paper in my hands. I felt what Sonia felt after her father died, that I was nothing at all, and I knew that when you felt like that you would hang on to anything that presented itself, like a flimsy raft in a vast ocean, anything that made you feel you were here, you were real, and someone wanted you.
“Oliver’s dead,” I said, my voice trembling. “He’s dead.” At the sound of those words in my own voice I felt shocked. It was like I was learning of his death for the first time. As I leaned back, pumping the swing, tears ran down my temples and into my hair. Sonia and I used to come out here and swing like children even as we planned our adult lives, all the things we were going to do and be. I pictured Sonia leaning way back, her hair brushing the ground, her eyes closed against the sunlight, her mouth open in laughter, her feet shooting into the air. And then I heard my father say he was proud of me, twirled with Owen through the newspaper office, and watched
The Philadelphia Story
with Oliver, laughing at his Katharine Hepburn imitation. I lay in bed with Will as he put a line of kisses down my arm and asked me to stay, but try as I might I couldn’t live in that moment, because I was also in that other one, when I sat there and did nothing while he walked away. How much had I lost, racing down the highway with everything I owned in my car, trying to arrange my life so that I had nothing to lose?
I stopped the swing and sat there with the letter in my lap, my face in my hands, sobbing like a small child who cannot find comfort. I was alone. For the first time I felt nothing but my grief, and it was like a cave, like being in the attic with all the lights off, and I didn’t want to leave. I stopped crying only because my body couldn’t do it anymore, and then I became aware again that I had a body, that I was in Clovis, in Sonia’s backyard, on a cool, bright afternoon. I wiped my eyes on my shirt and sat there blinking like I was new to the light. I took a deep, shaky breath, and then I sensed movement beside me and jumped.
Sonia was sitting in the swing next to mine.
For a moment she went on swaying, watching her feet trail in the dirt, and I thought she wasn’t going to say anything. Then she looked at me. My face was sticky and stiff with salt, my hair damp around my temples. My eyes felt swollen. “Oh, Camazon,” she said, her voice tender. She reached over and tucked my hair behind my ear. “You’re a mess,” she said, and then she took my hand.
My father once
told me that a happy ending is just the place where you choose to stop telling the story. So this is where I choose to stop. More things are still going to happen, of course, some good, some bad. Some things never get any better. When people die they stay dead. None of us knows why we love, or why we stop loving, or why everyone we love we lose.
When Sonia and Martin get married, I’ll be there, among the guests, while Suzette stands at her side. On my thirtieth birthday Will and I will walk along the beach in Gloucester, and I’ll hear him shout over the wind, “Cameron, let’s go home,” and I’ll know that this is what you live for—to hear someone say, “Let’s go home,” to hear someone you love call your name.
But this is where I choose to stop. I’m sitting beside Sonia in her backyard, and as I hold her hand I’m holding hands with the person she is and the person she was when I first met her, and she’s holding hands with the person I am and the person I used to be. They’re all there—all the people we were and will be, linked like a chain of paper dolls, girls and women, unfolding and unfolding from the moment when one fourteen-year-old said to another that it was a beautiful day.
Acknowledgments
I couldn’t ask
for a better editor than Sally Kim, whose insights into and support of this novel have been immensely helpful. I continue to owe a huge debt of gratitude to my agent, the incomparable, indefatigable Gail Hochman. Thanks, too, to her assistant, Joanne Brownstein, and to Shaye Areheart and everyone else at Shaye Areheart Books.
I’m grateful to Vanderbilt University and Sewanee, the University of the South, for support during the writing of this book. Thanks especially to Mark Jarman, Wyatt Prunty, Cheri Peters, Phil Stephens, and John and Elizabeth Grammer.
Many thanks to my sources: Samantha Wood, Terry BenAryeh, Shivika Asthana, Caroline Kim-Brown, and Carolyn Ebbitt. And thank you to everyone who offered comments on the various versions of this novel: Leigh Anne Couch, Juliana Gray, Dana O’Keefe, Manette Ansay, Margot Livesey, Alice McDermott, Elwood and Nina Reid, and especially Matt O’Keefe.
And last, thanks to my daughter, Eliza, whose impending birth compelled me to finish this novel on time.
About the Author
Leah Stewart
is the author of
Body of a Girl
. She has taught at Vanderbilt University and Sewanee, the University of the South. She lives outside of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with her husband, writer Matt O’Keefe, and their daughter.
A
LSO BY
L
EAH
S
TEWART
Body of a Girl
Copyright © 2005 by Leah Stewart
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Shaye Areheart Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
SHAYE AREHEART BOOKS
and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stewart, Leah, 1973–
The myth of you and me : a novel / Leah Stewart.— 1st ed.
1. Young women—Fiction. 2. Female friendship—Fiction. 3. Inheritance and succession—Fiction. 4. Loss (Psychology)—Fiction. 5. Historians—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.T465258T73 2005
813'.54—dc22 2004028578
eISBN 0-307-33748-0
v1.0