That night I wander between the living room and the kitchen as usual. Strange feelings pulse through my body. The house across from me is dark and silent, and I stare at the façade, try to picture Veronica, Philip, and Leo in their beds. But when I picture the sleeping Veronica before me, she suddenly opens her eyes and stares straight into mine. As I watch, she gets up and slowly walks around the large double bed, a phantom in white. She doesn’t make a sound. Philip doesn’t hear her footsteps as she approaches.
I take a step forward, want to yell Watch out, but no sound comes out of my throat. Instead it’s as if my forward motion causes me to be sucked closer, into Veronica, and flung around in what’s pulsing and roaring through her veins. Everything that isn’t visible from the outside, everything she’s holding back, I feel all of it, I’m suddenly privy to it all.
All of a sudden I’m standing in their kitchen. Leo is there with me, and I reach out to run my hand over his hair. It’s a motherly gesture, and I realize that I’m his mom. But Leo ducks when I bring my hand over his head, and then I’m myself again. My own childless self. There’s a tingling in my fingertips. The tingling becomes an ache, a hopeless longing. It wasn’t meant for you, a voice says. It’s my voice, but the mouth that forms the words is my sister’s. Then it’s not just the moving lips but also the voice that belongs to my sister. You know, it is possible to live a happy life without children. I start crying, and someone reaches out to comfort me. At first I think they’re my sister’s arms wrapped around my back, then I realize that it’s Mama who’s here with me. Then I’m crying even more.
My mother embraces me, holds me, is my safe haven. I can’t believe it’s really her, that she’s back with me, so I cautiously disengage and lean back to look at her face. And there she is, my mother, bathed in a weak light, but otherwise the spitting image. She looks like she did long before her illness broke her down, the way she did that time all those years ago when she took my frail, obstinate body into her lap and whispered that I wasn’t alone, that everything would be all right, that she would never let me go.
Then I notice the shadow next to us, the shadow of someone twisting away from us, or maybe mostly from me, and I know that it’s Papa. I know that he’s leaving, even then, and when I turn back to Mama again, she’s lying in her bed, sick and gaunt. Work is the best medicine, she and my sister say in unison. Then Mama is gone, but someone is still lying in the bed. It’s Philip Storm.
He’s asleep and doesn’t notice Veronica Storm coming closer and closer. She stops by the head of the bed and stares at him. Her face is pale, her mouth a tense line. Then she raises her arm, and something flashes in her hand, something cold and sharp. Kitchen shears? Or a knife? I gasp, and she looks up. Our eyes meet, and she understands that I am there with her. It’s going to happen. Not now, not like this, I hear her think. But soon.
You’re not going to be able to stop me.
Her voice is in my throat. Her words come out of my mouth. I realize, too late, that Veronica has led me straight into a trap, that I walked into her darkness with my eyes open. Now she’s chained me, snared me, and there’s no turning back from here. From here there is only a slow, sucking motion down into the mire. Dark sludge rises around me, getting ready to swallow me, forcing itself into every pore, eventually making it into my mouth and my eyes. I can’t breathe anymore. It’ll be over soon. Soon it will all be over. If that’s what I want.
I wake up because I’m screaming.
18
“I wonder if you could help me with something.”
Leo is standing outside my front door, drawing circles on the ground with the tip of one shoe. The morning air is still chilly, and I shiver in my thin clothes. I almost didn’t open the door at all, thinking about my puffy face and my bloodshot eyes, but then something came over me: a cold streak of worry. What if something’s happened, if he needs my help? Where did that worry come from? Was it from something Leo had said the previous day, from what I saw play out in the kitchen between Veronica and Philip, or from my violent nightmare? Maybe a bit of all three.
But Leo seems OK. He looks maybe a little pale and has a hard time getting to the point.
“You did say that… Do you remember saying that I could ask you if…”
Finally he gets it out, what this is about. They’ve been given a writing assignment at school. They have to describe a childhood memory as clearly and in as much detail as possible. The contents aren’t important. What matters is how well they express themselves. Their language arts teacher wants them to focus on developing the characters. “Use all your senses. Make me feel something and experience the event as if I were there” were the instructions she gave them.
Leo tosses his head and flips his bangs to the side, but a few locks remain stuck at eye level. He brushes them aside and then shakes the rest of his bangs back down over his face. It’s not due until next week, but he’s already done and would really appreciate my thoughts. If it’s not too much trouble, of course.
As I listen, a sequence from last night’s disconnected dreams comes back to me. The one where I reached out my hand to run it tenderly and protectively over his hair, as if I were his mother, someone’s mother. And then the voice reminding me that wasn’t in the cards for me.
Leo heaves off his backpack and pulls out a thin folder, explaining that his essay is inside.
“It’s about my mother,” he says, holding the folder out to me.
I’m the one who takes it, even though it’s not about me. Although I’m very aware of how my hand reaches out, how my fingers close around the folder, I feel strangely separate from my movements.
Leo smiles at me bashfully and at the same time gratefully, reminding me that there’s no hurry. I think of the hours that lie ahead of me, all the empty minutes and all the seconds without anything to do, without anything sensible to do at all.
“I’ll look at it during the day,” I say. “Stop by after school if you want, and we can discuss it.”
I intend to go through Leo’s essay right away. It’s just that after he leaves and I return to the kitchen, the display on my phone shows that I’ve received a new text message. I read that and then fall onto a chair, trembling. I read those two sentences over and over, and each time I expect the words to transform before my eyes, for the meaning to become something else. But no matter how many times I do, the content of the message remains the same. Thinking about you. Hope you’re doing well.
It’s from Peter. The man I built a life with. The man I thought would be the father of the children I longed to have. The man I am living apart from. The man I haven’t stopped loving.
Thinking about you. Hope you’re doing well.
It’s only seven words, but between the lines it says something else, something more. This time, this attempt at contact cannot be dismissed as a mistake. Somewhere inside me a silent scream forms, one that wants out but has gotten stuck. A scream of unfulfilled longing, of desire and absence, of grief and broken dreams. I’m thinking about you, too! But I can’t answer, just can’t. I run my hand over the top of my head. And then I keep sitting there.