Rhetorical questions were some help, but when Jody was awake — when it seemed that she was totally alone in the house, in spite of her child sleeping upstairs and her lover sleeping in New York City and dreaming dreams of her — only the slight absurdity, and the awkwardness of having created this life, seemed pertinent. She could have turned on the lights, but then everything would have looked too stark — the room would be obliterated by such brightness. She could have stayed in bed and thought about all this, but one of the advantages of being an adult was that she could rise and claim her territory without being challenged.
She sat alone in the big chair and listened to the sound of the trees blowing in the night wind. An irregular patch of light from the street lamp jutted across the wood floor. She studied it as if it were a slip of test paper: What would be the proper exposure to register every gradation of white to black? It was a luxury, she knew, to be able to speculate, to seriously put observation before action. To be neither the harried mother nor the beleaguered artist.
She put her empty glass on the kitchen counter and looked through a pile of papers ready to slip into chaos. She got a large manila envelope and put into it the bag from the pharmacy, with the receipt stapled to the outside, that had held a bottle of eardrops for Will, and a crumpled receipt for the Chinese takeout they had eaten the night before. Will loved wonton soup. He loved the special spoon that came with it and had as much interest in the wontons sunk to the bottom as a fisherman looking at trout in clear water. Jody also dropped in a note she had no intention of responding to, from a woman whose wedding she had photographed, which asked for a written reminiscence of the day. There was also Will’s printed request for another G.I. Joe, the letters enlarging and sloping as the pencil came near the edge of the paper; a computer letter offering Jody two free days in a Key West condo if she agreed to consider buying; the cartoon that came with a cube of bubble gum; a grocery receipt with a smudge of strawberry juice that looked like blood; another postcard from the Electrolux dealer, urging her to reserve a date for a demonstration; Hershey’s Kisses wrappers; a Polaroid of Will holding one pajama leg high, trying to look elegant in a pair of pink satin high heels; a note from Will’s teacher expressing her concern that Will’s attention drifted too often; a place mat imprinted with a picture of a cardinal, the state bird, crayoned on by Will, who drew a stick figure pointing a gun at the bird’s beak; the label from a jar of black currant jelly that Will had asked her to soak off and then had lost interest in. In the morning she would stop at the post office and mail the envelope to Wayne. She took some pride in her audacity, even though there would be no acknowledgment, even though she might as well be sending it to Mars. She just wanted him to know things: the price of a quart of soup, the fact that medicine had been prescribed. She thought of some of the things she enclosed as wide-angle views of their lives and other things as close-ups. Nothing much could be made of a parking ticket — a common enough occurrence — but there was something almost intimate about sending the pharmacy bag.
She ran her finger along the flap of the manila envelope. The first time she mailed one to Wayne, she had realized what a devilish thing it was to do. But after the second and third, when he never responded, she realized she had found a way to confound and intimidate him.
She sealed the envelope tightly, licking until the glue of the top flap became wet enough to adhere perfectly to the dry strip of glue underneath. At the same time, she took care not to cut her lip on the paper. This was what the careful kisses of years ago — the lightly placed night kisses, meant to register without awakening Wayne — had become: a lick along a line of glue, and a flap folded and pressed in place with the strength of one person strangling another.
When she finished putting things in the envelope she began to straighten up a bit, even though she knew Mel would say that of course she couldn’t be expected to be the perfect housekeeper when she was raising a child and supporting herself. Mel understood final notices and took fines for not paying on time in stride. He urged her to be even-tempered when cops stopped her for speeding, and he didn’t hesitate to run out into the rain to tip the paperboy at Christmas. Mel was nobody’s fool and came close to being ideal. He was a more patient lover than Wayne and found Will’s laughter contagious. He loved her and had let it be known that he was very sad that she had not yet chosen to marry him and move to New York.
That was a good part of the reason why she stayed awake at night, pacing like a lost person. Because she suspected that she would have to relocate, be lost, capitulate, in order to keep what she had. She was feeling another version of the anxiety that had made her pace through the house years ago, mesmerized by late-night fears about what would become of her and Will. Though she had found a way to make a stable life for them, she still felt everything could become precarious. That once again she would walk out her door and be a night traveler, but that this time she would have to go it alone because she wouldn’t dare awaken Will. When Will was a baby she had held him in her arms and taken him for walks. If he couldn’t sleep, she couldn’t sleep. It always surprised her that there were not other mothers who were nightwalkers. At three or four in the morning she and Will would start down the hill, and along the way she’d ask, “What’s this?” and really the question would be as much for herself as for him. The Indian cigar tree did look surreal at night: something of a mix between an upside-down birthday cake whose candles improbably stayed stuck in the icing and the mobile that had once dangled over Will’s crib. “What’s this?” she’d say, pointing at the sky, and they’d both say, in unison, “The moon.” Even on the coldest winter nights they’d wander through a strange dream that distorted the daytime world, noticing what was highlighted by streetlight or by starlight. There was hardly ever a noise. Sounds, certainly — the cat darting out of the bushes, leaves rustling in the breeze — but the overall impression was of quiet. The neighbor’s old blue car glowed lavender when the moon was full. Falling snow looked as solid as pearls. Tar could look like satin. Sometimes her own voice would imitate the breeze; lips on top of Will’s ear, she’d whisper, “What’s that?” drawing out the last word so that the a’s, exhaled, caused their own air current. “Whose baby are you?” she’d say, and Will would say, “Yours.” She’d point: “Whose house is that?” and he’d say, “Mine.” A kingdom to be claimed. Who could have blamed him for feeling powerful? Moving through the night, she became for him a galloping horse with an unerring sense of direction. Smell the air: danger there. Feel the breeze, coming from the north.
Without him, she would have perished. Only a baby — someone who truly needed her care — could have made her rise to the occasion. Held tightly against her chest, Will became her buffer against the world. When he had bad dreams and she consoled him, the warmth of his body had made her relaxed enough to sleep. Now there was enough money to get by, enough time to work and to play, and there was Mel — even the person closest to her had no idea that she and Will had ever been night travelers. If she did not confide in him about that time, she would forget it sooner, she was convinced. Why remember your vulnerabilities? It was a great advantage that her accomplice in those days had been a baby, who would forget the wind blowing through his hair and the rush of hot and cold as she put her lips to the brim of his stocking cap and tried to breathe evenly, getting over her anxiety about how they would live and what would become of them. That would all be as lost to him as the moment of birth. It would matter no more than a lost marble mattered a month after its disappearance. Your secrets were always safe with babies. With adults — and sometimes even with yourself — they were not at all safe.