Hidden faces. Reed was just beginning to realize he had lots of those. His wife, Carol, was realizing it too. That meant that he had to have more time to deal with them, but it was hard getting enough time to himself. Having a family seemed the most “real,” the most normal thing he had ever done with his life. But it demanded a great deal of time. Grownups didn’t always have a lot of time. Reed was thinking that perhaps he needed to be a young boy again.
Early morning walks, before the rest of the family got up, seemed to help a little. And it calmed him, helped lower his blood pressure. That was another thing… his blood pressure. Abnormally high of late; it had him scared. He was too young to be thinking about dying. And although it wasn’t spoken, Carol was terrified over it too. She wasn’t up to raising a family by herself; in some ways she was as much a child as he was.
He took a long walk, up around Sloan’s Lake—virtually deserted every year once the temperature began to drop. He and Carol had spent a great deal of time there when they were first dating. It was beautiful at night, the dark water rippling with melting lights and metallic colors. This morning there was a slight mist drifting off the water, catching on the docks like wet, fraying cotton. Any kind of fog was unusual here, unlike Simpson Creeks, where the thickest fog became an expected part of your mornings. He’d left there when he was fifteen, but he could still remember looking out of his bedroom window and seeing it creep across their front yard, drawing back occasionally for a brief moment, as if the fog had suddenly realized Reed was watching it.
Every place possesses a hidden spirit…
He walked across Sheridan Boulevard and wandered for a while in the neighborhoods on the other side. This part of the metropolitan area was known as Edgewater, a small incorporated town with its own mayor and police force, right in the middle of the city. Reed and Carol used to go to a place there called the Edgewater Inn every St. Patrick’s Day to drink green beer served by a slightly seedy leprechaun.
On one of the side streets Reed sat down under a large elm tree. Even this far away he could smell Sloan’s Lake, the water vapor in the air, and that odd, slightly sour smell of wooden docks that have been sitting in the water for a long time.
The smell of the water, the overpowering sense of a large body of water nearby, seemed to pull at his own liquids, his blood and cell fluids, with a frightening kind of sympathy. He rested back against the tree, closed his eyes, and tried to track down his disturbing sensations, the sense that he had forgotten something it was very important to try to remember. He felt himself falling asleep trying to track down the memory. On his face the sense of there being water in the air was disappearing, as the morning sun rose higher in the sky to burn it away.
Carol was sitting in the green overstuffed chair by the front window when Reed walked in the door.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Morning,” she said quietly. He glanced immediately at his watch. Eleven A.M. He’d been gone four hours. She was furious with him—he could tell. Her eyes were downcast over the newspaper, but she didn’t have the intense look about her face she had when she was actually reading. She was faking it, waiting for him to say something, to explain himself. Her lips were pressed out thinly in her efforts to hold her tongue. She obviously knew he was watching her, and ran her hand down her long, shiny brown hair to hide more of her face from him.
He should say something—there was always pain in letting things hang with her. But he had come to avoid confrontations; they twisted his stomach, made him tighten up so that he felt he had no control over what he was saying. And he might say something he regretted. Besides, if he didn’t bring it up, he could always say later she should have confronted him at the time, and not waited until they’d both forgotten the exact details of what had happened. It was a damned dishonest tactic, but he thought it protected their relationship. And there was a great deal of truth in it—often by the time they got around to talking about a problem there were so many layers of ill feeling over it neither of them could even pretend to be objective.
He’d love to be able to strip away those layers and get at the true difficulties, work on solving them. But he didn’t feel capable. In that way, most of all, he felt he was still a child.
He walked out of the living room, through the kitchen, and up the short flight of steps to the office over the garage.
They’d built this office together, Carol and he, the first month they were married. It was meant to be a place they’d occasionally share, but whose main purpose was as a place of refuge, a sanctuary for either of them to use when they’d had too much togetherness. But as their family had grown—first having Alicia and then adopting Michael—Carol had found herself using the office less and less, spending her spare time with the children, whereas Reed discovered he needed it more and more. Reed had a desk made out of an old barn door sloppily lacquered. Carol’s desk was a small, antique, oak rolltop; he bought it for her their first Christmas. She’d always loved the feel of sitting at an old writing desk; she said she could feel the presence of the woman, or man, who had used it a hundred years ago. It made writing letters a little special.
Two stacks of year-old magazines filled the top of the writing desk. Reed pulled out the chair with the fading wine upholstery from his own desk and sat facing the west window. He could see the back of the house, the yard where his children played.
Reed liked having a family. When he first met Carol, things had worked out so well, he’d been almost numb with the overwhelming “normalcy” of their relationship. He’d grown up in an unhappy family, a constant atmosphere of resentment and revenge. Even at the time he knew the situation was not usual, and yet had never been able to picture himself in any other kind of family.
Then the two children had come along, and their addition had seemed to work very well, unusually well. The situation between Carol and himself had been rough of late, but not overwhelmingly so. There were always good, satisfying things about their relationship, nice times when they seemed to have an unspoken understanding and caring for each other.
That house, his family, was relatively solid. Perhaps the first solid thing he’d ever had in his constantly shifting life. But sometimes he couldn’t enjoy it.
Sometimes he just had to sit back here and watch it, enjoy it from afar. Sometimes he would watch his children playing from that west window—watching Alicia talking animatedly to her dolls and Michael working on the bicycle Reed had bought for him, shiny and red like the one Reed had as a kid—and he’d be filled with such love for them his facial muscles would contract, trying to hold back the tears. Those were his kids. His wife. His house.
But if he got up out of this chair and walked back to the house, if he left his sanctuary too soon, he’d find himself thrust into their arguments, their worries and concerns, and Carol’s almost electric expectations of what Reed should do about them. Sometimes he just couldn’t handle them. He wasn’t always adult enough. In so many ways he knew he hadn’t yet grown up. He wasn’t completely ready to be normal.
There were footsteps of a certain weight on the staircase. He knew she’d feel compelled to come back here to the office, try to say something to him. She always did. He could have gone somewhere else where she couldn’t follow, but he never did. This way, she always knew where to find him.
She paused at the top of the stairs and her fingers lingered on the dusty surfaces of the magazines covering her writing desk. She stared a moment at the wall. Without turning she said, “There’s really no point in my talking about it… but I really resent your leaving me here all morning to take care of the kids by myself.”