“Well,” Louise said, “I enjoyed our visit. And this little one — he loves me!”
She crooked a finger under Max’s chin and he gave her a happy, dopey look. She turned to Gwen. “You have my number. Maybe you’ll call sometime and we can meet in the park.”
“Yes, that would be nice,” Gwen said, though she didn’t intend to call.
Then Louise was off. Gwen stood with Max in her arms watching the tail-lights of the Volkswagen as it disappeared down the street; she wondered if the old woman had very far to drive and remembered that Louise had failed to write down the recipe that had been her pretense for following them home in the first place.
It’s just as well, she thought.
She felt relieved as she shut the door against the cold. A rush of warmth from a nearby heat vent and Max’s arms around her neck made her aware for a moment, before it was time to turn her thoughts to dinner, that she had absolutely all she needed.
(Postscript)
The thing about near-misses is that you forget. Relief fades; you get lazy. The door that leads out to the top of the stairs: You swear you won’t leave it open again, but you do.
4.
So Gwen had taken a nap that snowy afternoon and woken in time to rush Louise out the door before Dan came home; she’d felt as if she’d gotten away with something; she’d even had a small moment of recognition about the state of her life. A fitting ending for a slightly strange day. Both she and Max had come out unscathed and well-rested, and as a result, a series of things happened: First, Max played quietly while Gwen fixed a dinner that wasn’t just slapped-together sandwiches. Then Dan came home and noticed Gwen’s relaxed mood and commented on it, and Gwen told him about her day, though not the whole of it — she left Louise back at the grocery store. She and Dan conversed all the way through dinner without the underlying tension that seemed always in the room with them lately, inching up like water in a flooding basement, threatening to corrode everything from the bottom up. All that water gone, as if someone had poked a little drain hole or turned a relief valve in their marriage. Then Max began to rub his eyes in his highchair and they carried him up to bed together and watched him drift off to sleep without a fuss just as Louise had predicted, sleep begetting sleep.
It had been an exceptionally good evening, which is why, by the following afternoon, with Max writhing in naptime protest in her arms, Gwen forgot all about the near-miss feeling of the day before. Why had she been in such a hurry to get Louise out the door? The answer escaped her as she looked out the nursery window and saw the rust-colored bus parked once again in front of the mailbox.
“I don’t understand,” Louise said. “How do you decide how a story should end?”
“Oh, it’s not as hard as you might think.”
They were seated at the kitchen table. Gwen had disregarded the menacing clause and had told Louise about her job. She’d felt in conspiracy with Louise for over a week now, and so this breach of contract didn’t seem too terribly wrong.
“A story can end one way, or it can end another. I mean, if you view life as a series of small decisions — and every day we’re faced with hundreds of them, right? — then every story has countless possible endings.”
“Or only one,” Louise said as she bopped Max up and down on her lap, “if you believe in fate.”
“Well, I suppose,” Gwen said. “Of course I have to go with the one that seems the most satisfactory, or fated, based on what came before. And it can’t be too shocking or too tragic or too happily-ever-after. I guess it’s a little tricky in that you don’t want readers to see an ending coming, yet you want them to get there and say, Of course!”
“I see. But how do you make them sound right, your endings for other writers?”
Gwen stood to clear the dishes; they’d eaten large slabs of a coffee cake that Louise had baked that morning in Gwen’s kitchen.
“I happen to have an ear for voices,” Gwen explained with her back turned. It was a skill, the way she could step into other people’s stories, but not one she was too proud of, because this ability of hers was tied too closely to one of her deepest fears: that she didn’t have her own voice, that each of her belabored sentences was shaped out of latent memories of sentences she’d read. “I can read two-thirds of a manuscript and take it from there. It’s kind of like the way some actors have a knack for impersonating.”
“You’re very talented,” Louise said.
“Or easily influenced,” Gwen countered.
They hadn’t talked about it in any official capacity, but the old woman had become Max’s nanny. Gwen wasn’t paying her. She felt as if she should be, but the subject of money hadn’t come up and Gwen didn’t want to broach the topic for fear of possibly insulting Louise and because it would mean admitting to just how much Louise was doing for her, and she wasn’t ready for that admission. Also, she and Dan couldn’t afford a nanny, and on top of that, she’d yet to tell Dan about her unspoken arrangement with Louise. Louise arrived each morning soon after Dan left for work and stayed into the early evening. Somehow she sensed when it was time to go, because she was always gone — though sometimes only by minutes — by the time Dan returned.
Gwen’s days were a breeze now. Louise played with Max after breakfast while Gwen worked on her endings. In her basement office she could hear Max’s quick steps and the thunks of Louise plodding after him in Dan’s kneepads. At lunchtime Gwen reemerged and the three of them ate together. Some days, Gwen would give Louise the cash intended for the young babysitter, whom Gwen had fired, and Louise would go grocery shopping. She’d return with ingredients for complex recipes that she patiently taught Gwen how to make. Around three each afternoon, Louise and Max retired to the playroom for a long nap on the beanbags, and Gwen worked on her own writing.
She’d actually begun a story. It was about recent events: an old woman following a young mother and son home from the grocery store and nudging her way into their lives. It had a fairytale-esque quality to it, Gwen thought, though without the dark edge.
So things were good. Of course, there was some unease attached to this new arrangement. Who was Louise? Where did she return to each evening? How did she spend her weekends? Gwen was curious, but whenever she asked Louise about her life away from them Louise would somehow manage to avoid talking about her current situation and would instead drift into stories about her childhood in Germany. Only later would Gwen realize that Louise hadn’t answered whatever question she’d asked. Once, when Louise and Max were napping, Gwen went out for the mail and noticed a gap in one of the flowery, sun-faded curtains that covered the Volkswagen’s windows. She stood on her toes for a peek and saw that the bus had been stripped of its back seats. She saw a sleeping bag and a semi-inflated air mattress, a large black trash bag with clothes spilling out in a jumble, a stack of books, a discarded apple core. A sour taste came to Gwen’s throat. She stepped away. The mess in the bus didn’t fit with her picture of Louise, who was always wiping the counters in Gwen’s kitchen and picking up after Max. The bag of clothes? Maybe she’d been meaning to get to a Laundromat. The mattress? Maybe she was a camper. She was very hippie-ish, very earthy. Maybe, during the warmer months, she liked to sleep under the stars.
Gwen didn’t look in the bus again. Life was going too well to question the things that were a little off about Louise. The tug of dissatisfaction that had been pulling at Gwen in the months before meeting Louise had disappeared. She and Dan were getting along again. She wasn’t tired and grumpy at the end of each day, and he no longer had to work so hard to keep things harmonious. He was taken aback the first time she served spaetzle for dinner, but he was also thankful for the home-cooked meal. He started coming home from work at a more reasonable hour, and they spent their evenings playing with Max, who, once he pulled himself from the stupor of his afternoon nap, was always in a delightful mood. He was learning a few words now (Daddy and uh-oh!), and they loved to listen to his guttural babble. “He sounds German, doesn’t he?” Dan said one night and Gwen, caught off guard, had laughed.