He led her past their children to the bedroom. All her boxes had vanished. Her clothes were in drawers, her dresses on hangers in the closet. In the far corner, on either side of her desk, were two tall bookcases. All her books stood neatly on the shelves.
“I knew you needed them, since you had all those built-in ones in your old place. I just put everything in alphabetically, but you probably have a much more sophisticated way of arranging your books.”
“Yes, much.” She tried to smile at him. She hadn’t realized how much she’d counted on her boxes remaining packed, things remaining temporary, reversible. “How did you do all this?”
“I got back from Springfield at three. And I’d already stained the wood last weekend.”
“You made these?” She ran her fingers along the edge of a shelf. She couldn’t identify the wood but it was a lovely burnished color and sanded to silk. Each side of the top shelf had been carved into long narrow birds. “Herons,” she whispered.
Behind her he shut the door and flopped onto the bed.
“They’re beautiful,” she said, still standing.
“You’re beautiful.” He sat up and pulled the butcher’s twine from her hair. He spread the mass of it (how she had always hated this bulk of frizz, so inexpressive of her and her love of order) from shoulder to shoulder and stroked it with his wide warm hand from the top of her head to the middle of her back. He eased her down on the bed and continued to touch her head and face. This time, he didn’t speak at all. His kisses were gentle on her cheek, her neck, her shoulder. Even his mustache was soft. She could feel the bourbon in her system protecting her, obscuring the path back. He rolled her nipple between his thumb and fingers carefully, as if it might break, and desire, that elusive bird, fluttered faintly. Then he got up, snapped the lock in place, and everything died inside her once again.
“I love you, Vida,” he said when he finally gave up. “We’ll figure all this out.” He pulled her naked chest to his and closed his eyes.
Maybe she slept, she wasn’t sure. The light was still on. Tom was still beside her, though his grip has loosened. His eyes were open, staring straight ahead at a framed drawing on the far wall she’d never noticed before, a pencil sketch of an infant wrapped loosely in a blanket and held low in its mother’s arms, its head resting heavily on her bent wrist, her breast depleted at his cheek. The mother had no head; her figure began at the small knobs of her shoulders and disappeared at the waist, behind the blanket’s folds. Her hands were her most expressive feature, the fingers longer than possible, spread carefully above and beneath the sleeping child. Vida understood that Tom had drawn it, that the wife and infant had once been his.
Draw him! Draw his face, Peter had cried all those years ago, and when she refused, tears soaked his collar and bright blotches appeared on his neck but he wouldn’t give up. Please! She’d grabbed the pencil and made three thick lines of hair then, her fingers shaking by now, smashed the lead to the paper four more times — first the mouth, then a low bent nose, and finally the eyes, two short vertical lines that nearly punctured the page, eyes that conveyed not cruelty or pain or whatever had made that man do what he’d done to her but surprise, as if he himself were startled to have suddenly been drawn by her. She had wanted the drawing to be uglier, more frightening; even if Peter was only five she wanted him to stop asking and understand that this was a man you must forget, not remember. The picture was cartoonish, the head too round, but when she moved to correct it he snatched it from her. She’d never seen it since.
She remained still. If Tom saw that she was awake he might want to try again. He would keep trying. That was the sort of man he was. So she waited for his eyes to shut, his breathing to thicken, before she pulled on her shirt and slipped quickly out of the room.
The rest of the house was dark. Walt’s tail pounded the carpet as she crossed the living room, but he didn’t get up. He refused to come into the bedroom now that she shared it with someone else. She needed to see Peter, needed to know he was all right. The door was open, the way Peter liked it. The boys hadn’t pulled the shade and a street lamp cast a fan of light across the room. Peter was asleep on a narrow bed that came out of the wall like an ironing board. She glanced over to Stuart’s by the window, hoping he slept as deeply as Peter. It was empty. The clock on the bureau read 12:52. She moved quickly back down the hall. No one on the sofa; no one in the kitchen. Where was he?
If he was gone, he’d have taken her car; she’d blocked in Tom’s. She headed for the window by the front door that was closest to the driveway, already angry. She needed that car to get to work in the morning, to get more groceries, to drive away from here if need be. She pushed aside the curtain. The Dodge was there, behind Tom’s, just as she’d left it. The anger clung. Her eyes scanned the rest of the driveway and the small yard. The grass and bushes seemed frozen in place. It was a winter’s night. Fall was over. Another season gone. She could feel the cold on her face through the glass.
Then she saw them. Stuart and a girl. Had they just appeared, apparition-like, or were they there all along? Stuart was leaning back on his elbows against the trunk of her car while the girl performed a trick that made her arms momentarily whirl together like a pinwheel. Vida couldn’t hear them but she knew Stuart was saying That’s so easy as he brought his weight back down on his feet, freeing up his weedy arms to show her. But they just flopped in front of him unmagically. The girl was laughing and said something that made him laugh too. He reached out to grasp her wrists but she was too quick and spun a few feet away from him.
She was a lovely girl, the kind Vida remembered from a decade ago: long, untampered-with hair, silver bracelets, and a skirt of printed cotton. She had a small, foxlike face which helped magnify her round eyes. Stuart hopped up on the car and patted the spot beside him. The girl took a few moments to decide, then scrambled up beside him. He pointed up at the heavy pink clouds and watched her as she watched them move. Just like his father, Vida thought with shock, never having seen a similarity before.
She meant to turn away from the window, but the scene was as compelling as the performance she’d glimpsed on stage at lunchtime. Like Helen, Stuart had transformed himself, and Vida could no longer find the sullen child from dinner in this spry fellow wooing a girl on her car.
They played like kittens; she nudged him off the trunk and he feigned injury until she came to his side, then he leapt up and ran off and she chased him, catching him by the shirttail and zigzagging with him across the yard as he tried to free himself from her small clutch. Then he twisted and stopped and she slammed into his chest. Vida thought they would kiss then, but they just stood there, close and coatless on the frost-stiff grass.
When the girl left, she moved in a slant across the lawn as if pushed by the wind. Just before she turned from the driveway she called out something. To Vida it was a thin underwater sound, but it made Stuart laugh deeply as he walked toward the porch. Though he was only a few yards away from where she stood at the window, he was oblivious to an audience, even as he raised his face to the house. On it was Tom’s grin but wider, his eyes nearly forced shut by the bulge of his cheeks. She saw them each simultaneously, Stuart and Tom, as they once were: exuberant, unbridled boys, untouched by grief.
And then the faces fell away, instantly, as Stuart’s foot landed on the first step. Vida was relieved. They had frightened her, those faces, two ghosts of what had been. The knob on the front door clicked and Vida, having nowhere else to go, fled down the hallway toward the slit of light escaping beneath the bedroom door of the man she’d just married, toward the hope that he’d remain asleep.