“They were more real to him than my mother and me.”
“I feel sick looking at you,” she said.
She dug in her shoulder bag for her keys. They were easy to spot. After she had lost them dozens of times, Hamish had presented her with a key chain topped off by a giant red cat.
Jake tried to fill the space. “Sarah is coming on one of her visits today. We won’t have the happiest news to greet her with, I’m afraid.”
He had put his hands in his pockets, which he had always done to keep himself from fidgeting. Out of nowhere I thought of the shirt he was wearing beneath his sweater: “Life is good.”
“I’m headed up to York with my contractor. I’m meeting his mother for the first time,” Natalie said to Jake. She would not look at me. I had suddenly become the unstable one to their upright citizens. Had I killed the only person who, in comparison, made me appear sane?
Moments later I was lying curled up in the backseat of Jake’s car just as I had the night before in my own. Natalie had turned from me with no good-bye.
“Take care,” she said to Jake.
“It was nice to see you again, Natalie.”
“I guess it was,” she said. Jake started the car, and I closed my eyes. I would ride in the back the way I had as a child, with my father driving and no one in the front passenger side. I hadn’t told Natalie about my mother, and now I never would.
After the remaining parts of Lambeth were destroyed to make way for a new bypass and an outlet mall, I had written down a line for my father: “All of them are gone except for me; and for me nothing is gone.” I couldn’t remember who had said it or in what context.
When Jake stopped drawing me, I thought his fascination with the way ice coated a leaf or the way crushed berries mixed with snow could make a dye was a temporary fancy. I thought he would come back to me. But then he began building things out of earth and ice, sticks and bones, and left all human flesh behind.
Emily found one of his first crude sculptures and marveled. It was made out of grass and dirt woven together, the grass of winter acting as a thatch to keep the mud from disassembling. If it were not for Emily’s delight, I would quickly have grabbed it with a covered hand and flushed it away. It looked like a particularly nuanced piece of shit to me, sitting as it did on the floor behind the toilet. But because Emily made me get down on my hands and knees first, and called it “him,” I had a chance to see.
Jake had made a small sculpture. As I stared at it, openmouthed, Emily launched, as only a small child’s body could, in one swift motion from bent knees to sitting with legs stretched out in front of her and began to bang the flat of her palms on her fleshy thighs with joy.
“Daddy!” she screamed.
“She’s afraid of the toilet, Helen,” Jake said later, after I had brought out the offending object and placed it on the small ceramic dish where he put his keys and change at the end of the day.
“And this is how you propose to cure her? By making donkeys out of shit?”
“It’s mud, and it’s supposed to be a dragon.”
If I wanted to talk to him in those days, I had to stop him between the front door of the small house we rented and the shower. He would begin to disrobe in the hallway, peeling off the layers of scarves and hats, parka and vest, and heavy wool plaid shirts so that by the time he hit the bedroom, he was dressed like a normal man about to sit down to dinner.
That day I had chased him from the front door to the bedroom with the sculpture held aloft on its ceramic dish.
“Did she like it?” he asked as we reached the bedroom.
He wore his rag-wool sweater over a turtleneck and, I knew because I watched the routine in the dark each morning, hidden layers of T-shirts and long underwear. First to come off before entering the house were always his boots, but still on his lower half were the old army pants from the surplus store and huge wool socks that looked as prickly as cacti and that necessitated liners between them and his humid, winter-tenderized feet. On his hands he wore nothing, swearing that as they acclimatized to the cold, he would ultimately become more dexterous, able to stand more hours outside and capable of finer detail work.
“Of course she liked it,” I said, not wanting to concede what was so obvious, that any child, even a fearful one, would love an animal made out of mud and found at the base of a semipristine toilet.
He turned to me. His cheeks were permanently ruddy where the wind got to them between his wool cap, which sat low over his eyebrows, and his scarf, which he knotted up above the tip of his nose. His eyes, watering a bit from the shock of the baseboard heat inside the house, seemed liquid blue to me.
“That’s all I wanted for her,” he said. “To make her laugh when she was face-to-face with that thing.”
I could not say that I was jealous, not of my child but of the objects that he’d begun making, nor could I bring myself to beg him to keep drawing me.
He peeled all the underlayers of T-shirts and thermal underwear off together and threw them on the bed, then walked into the bathroom to turn on the shower. I followed him inside the shower stall, fully clothed.
“What are you doing, Helen?” he asked, but he was laughing.
“Fuck me,” I said.
I did not think about what was happening to me. I had begun to chase my husband as I had once chased my mother, toe to toe, a shadow girl trying to be what I thought they wanted me to be.
I felt Jake take the speed bump just before exiting Westmore’s front gate.
“Sit up and talk to me,” he said. “I know you’re awake.”
I pushed myself up with my arm as if I were in yoga class, about to come out of the all-too-fitting corpse pose.
He caught my eye in the rearview mirror.
“So after suffocating your mother, you decide to seduce Natalie’s son? Is that the timeline?”
“Yes.”
Jake shook his head. “Now you’re diddling with children.”
“He’s thirty.”
“Well, mine is thirty-three,” he said.
“Yours?”
“Her name is Phin.”
“Fin? What kind of name is that?”
“The best she can do, having been named Phineas by her father and called Phinny. She works at the art museum in Santa Barbara.”
“What’s she like?” I asked.
“Shouldn’t we be talking about other things?”
“Like prison?” I said.
“Or what we’re going to tell Sarah?”
He pulled the car into a lot across from the Burger King. There was a store there I’d never been inside of called Four Corners.
“Do you want anything?” he asked.
I shook my head.
As I watched Jake hold the door for a young mother pushing a stroller with another child in her arms, I thought of my mother giving my phone number to the man who’d dug new sewer lines that spring.
“I’ve told you not to give out my number without asking first,” I had said. The sewer man had already called me three times by that point.
“Your sordid life is your sordid life,” she had said. “You shouldn’t live it if you don’t like it.”
It had been as easy as that. She had stood in her kitchen and issued her riddle-me-this invitation to end my life. When was she, and when was she not, aware of what she said?
I wondered what specific rhythm had been playing inside my father’s head as he lifted the pistol. He had plunged down the staircase face-first, blood arcing up and splattering in a diminishing wavy line along the stairwell. He had done it in front of her. Had she begged him to stop or had she begged him to go, directing the thoughts in his head like a traffic cop?
I got out of the car and closed the door. I watched Jake exit the store.
“Cigarettes,” Jake said. “This is what you do to me. Get in.”
This time I sat beside him in the passenger seat.
He closed the car door. “I saw a park off the highway between here and the house this morning. We need someplace to talk.”