Aileen resisted turning the rearview mirror toward herself. She knew the outside light was highlighting her face in a way that would define the age spots and give her wrinkles a deeper shadow. She could see the furrow deepening between her eyes, even under the carefully applied layers of pro-mineral foundations and powders. Her new year’s resolution had been to be brave and give up the syringes of filler, so accessible in a drawer in the treatment room. They were full of toxins, of course, but that never upset her — she hated that furrow in a way that made toxins seem wholly appropriate, ideal even, a chemical weapon for an enemy combatant. It was a war, she reasoned, while convincing herself to take the injection. Afterward, she would observe her smoothed face and feel ashamed, cowed, cowardly, ineffective, rationalizing. In bed at night, she imagined the toxins seeping into her heart.
She was stuck at the longest light in town, longer for rush hour, allowing northbound traffic to escape the city square. A city bus inched along within the line, and Aileen examined its passengers as they advanced one by one. There was a lineup of heads facing away, a young girl slumping, an older man reaching for the bell cord. Behind the man, Aileen saw Frances.
It was such a natural feeling, so clearly Frances, that Aileen’s first thought was that Frances didn’t ride the bus. Yet there she was, smiling, touching her hair as if she was aware that she was being watched by a friend, a favorable eye, one that had missed her. It took a moment for Aileen to place Frances within the timeline of events. As she did, Aileen’s hand lifted to the car’s windshield. She pounded on the glass, startling pedestrians in her line of sight as she called out, fist against the windshield, calling toward Frances on the bus, who looked like a photograph now, hand frozen in her hair, obscuring her face, a prop of a woman in a moving vehicle, a mean joke but a good one, Aileen near tears with laughter or near laughter with tears, the two states of emotion so close that they shared a border.
Aileen reached for her door, tugged the handle, found herself locked in, and banged on her driver-side window with an open palm. The bus was moving then, pulling away. She fumbled with the lock until it released, and she tried to step out of her vehicle but was restrained by the seat belt, so many things holding her back. She screamed at the seat belt and the bus, threw the emergency brake and unbuckled, and was finally out of the car, waving her arms at the driver, leaping over the curb into the grass bordering it, trying to get his attention, though he had already progressed through the intersection and was merging into the turn lane and was gone.
Drivers behind Aileen had given up honking and began to maneuver around her car, rolling down their windows to yell at her on the sidewalk. She could hear their noises as they drove away. A man approached her and said some words, but she did not move from the curb. She watched the corner where the bus carrying Frances had vanished, and then she sat down on the sidewalk and twisted her knuckles into the concrete. Her skin curled back and bled like all skin bleeds.
47
THAT WINTER featured the kind of cold people forget about during the rest of the year. Franny would haul the wood and David would make a fire and both of them would promise themselves that they would always remember the feeling.
David remembered another such winter, when they lost power and burned old greeting cards in a bowl for light. Franny had kept the cards in a shoebox but spoke often of throwing them out to eliminate clutter. There were yearly birthday greetings from her parents, seeming store-bought and inauthentic despite unique signatures. They burned nicely. Franny found letters on fine stationery from a great-aunt long gone. The aunt would conserve postage by fitting a year’s worth of news into one letter, writing on all sides of all accessible space, a postscript on the back of the envelope. David and Franny read each piece of correspondence aloud before burning it. The ink made the flames glow green and blue.
They swore that night that they would better appreciate the warmer months for the way they forgot their bodies. David remembered that during an illness he swore that he would remember the swollen and aching feeling in his chest and legs and throat, that he would appreciate the days when he could breathe without coughing or walk without stumbling. Then those months of wellness and heat came again, and he did forget, as they eventually forgot that winter when it was gone.
48
ONE AFTERNOON, years before, all the juice glasses in the cupboard shattered simultaneously. The sound it made was of a single powerful firework followed by a garbage boat advancing slowly through ice. David had been out front, painting their mailbox, and he assumed it was children rolling a large stone or a small car onto the thawing pond at the end of the road. It was one of the early sunny afternoons during that first year David and Franny had the house to themselves.
Franny was the first to see. She had been in the living room, packing books for storage, taking her time to open each and looking for envelopes full of money. She wouldn’t put it past David’s mother, though the woman had never mentioned such a possibility during her brief meetings with her daughter-in-law and in fact hadn’t been in the house in years.
When the glass broke, Franny dropped a book pertaining to the travels of the saints. The force had blown open the kitchen cabinets, and she could see that each level was layered with shards. She took a step into the kitchen and onto a thin layer of glass. It was clear that moving her bare foot would drive the glass farther in, and so she existed on the glass in a way that was simultaneously precarious and painless. She called for David.
The thick tumblers at the base of the cabinet were crumbled into sparkling chunks. Glass dust lined the counters and floor, varying from tooth- to palm-size. The room was silent, as if the shards held a power to absorb sound. Franny opened her mouth and closed it without speaking to David, who was standing in the doorway of the far side of the kitchen. He ran around the side of the house and in through the front door. She was too far away to reach and so he laid his heavy coat on the floor, stepped carefully on it, and guided Franny down to sit. He put his arms around her and dragged her out of the kitchen. Then he brought his old dental examination light up from the basement and spent the evening tweezing glass from his wife’s feet, dabbing the cuts with isopropyl alcohol, depositing the glass onto a plant saucer he had found on the front porch. She cried a little at first and then got over it and read to him from his old saints book while he worked on her.
There had been no movement of the earth, no discernible change in pressure. An unknown explosion, and then broken glass. A few wineglasses belonging to Franny’s parents came away with hairline fractures, suggesting that the blast must have had a low epicenter.
Franny was convinced that someone had entered the house while David was painting the mailbox. She held his shoulder and told him that there had been an intruder, that the intruder had obviously entered through the front door and walked by Franny in the living room without her knowledge, a theory that made her feel as if the intruder had made actual physical contact with her, held her against a wall. She imagined the intruder was a small but powerful man who wore ski pants. The intruder would have stolen the ski pants from another home or perhaps a store, putting them on under his jeans and walking out, maybe even waving to the cashier, cavalier, his stocky legs insulated with stolen goods. Franny said that it was time to buy a security system. David considered the possibility of wiring the doors in the house and adding an electric current that could be broken and restored on a whim, by a machine. She talked about security cameras and motion detectors while he thought about the impartial entity observing them making love or eating breakfast.