Stranger, Father, Beloved (8 page)

“I don't know where you come up with your ideas, but it's so nice to be surprised. Redoing the yard is a great idea. You're so good to me,” she said and then immediately regretted it. Both knew it was untrue.

In the darkness, he searched for something to say.

“I know I have been difficult, Nancy—these past years. I know that.” That was true, and for a moment her heart felt it would collapse with relief. From those words, a forceful physical drive emerged. She snuggled up against him and began to kiss the side of his neck. She felt she could coil herself around him until she could elicit some kind of response. Maybe tonight he would give himself over. She would settle for pleasuring him, for anything.

“Nancy, come on, you know I'm not up for that.” He curled up tighter into his fetal position, hardening into a ball. Were his eyes open or closed? She didn't know. She retracted her arm and rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. The physicality still tingled at the bottom of her belly, but as the minutes ticked by, it dissipated.

There was something about the way Michael slept that unnerved Nancy. He was stiff as a board and silent the whole night through. Because of his insomnia, she was never sure if he was actually asleep.
He usually faced away from her, and when she woke up, she would move very slowly and deliberately so as not to disturb him, in case he was just lying there awake, waiting for sleep to take him.

On nights like this, she missed her former boyfriend, Tim, who, as awkward and wayward as he was, had slept deeply and snored loudly. Back then his snoring had irritated her. But now she longed for it—the reassurance that he was released into the dream world, no longer her responsibility. She could toss and turn, sigh, mutter, and he would sleep through, surrendered, dead to her in a way that she liked, becoming a body with no brain attached. But her husband was like a brittle insect, motionless, silent, tightly wound up, operating on some vague plane between the current moment and a labyrinth in his mind. He was both available and entirely unavailable. His brooding, ever-turning mind frightened her. She could handle his strange mind while awake, but when he tried to sleep, an ominous being seemed to sneak out of his body and into the room, and it sat in the corner watching her. She didn't know what it looked like, that dark mass, but whatever it was, she knew it was sneering at her.

Maybe the landscaping was a sign that things were changing for the better and she should just be patient. That was always the answer. As time went on, he would step back into his role as head of the house and discipline Ryan. She also had faith that, if something changed, Michael would want her again. He might approach her between the sheets, his face relaxed and his mood lighthearted, with a playfulness that rarely came out. The other housewives she knew fantasized about strangers, young studs they invented to spice up routine sex. She fantasized about her husband ablaze with real desire, years into their marriage.

CHAPTER SIX

When Ryan arrived at Jill's house on that early June evening, Jill had not changed out of her work clothes. For almost two years, Jill had been working at a plant nursery. She took care of the register, but when business was slow, she moved plants and big bags of fertilizer. She often came home with dirt smeared on her oversized T-shirt, faintly sweaty and musty, yet smiling nonetheless. She had dirt on the backs of her legs, and, as usual, her yellow T-shirt was damp with perspiration.

She and Ryan began baking a pie in the kitchen, soft jazz music playing in the background. Jill's parents had brought her up in this house, and they had both died before Carol turned ten. After that, Jill became the new owner and permanent resident. She managed to get by largely due to the fact that she had been left the house with no mortgage to pay off.

The house, although in slight disrepair from age, was larger than many in the neighborhood. In Ryan's opinion, the kitchen was by far the best place in the house. Jill had added midnight-blue tiles a few years back, one of her many solo projects, producing a fresh, comfortable space. Large windows lined the two walls and afforded a nice
view of the small yard. Jill said she used the extra bedroom as a study, although she didn't have much to do there except pay the bills.

Carol had already gone to bed, tired from a lacrosse game she had played that evening. Right on schedule, she had come down to the kitchen to take her plate of food up to her room. As she hauled it away, she turned and gave the two of them a little salute before going back up to bed. Carol's conduct was getting stranger by the day as she became more stoic, more robotic in her routines; eating and sleeping were carried out on a tight schedule.

Blueberries and raspberries, freshly washed and shining with little beads of water, waited in green baskets next to the piecrust. Ryan's homework was finished, and the next day was a Saturday. Jill rolled out the crusts, swaying her body back and forth to the music. The night seemed endless, free from pressures. Heat seeping from the oven warmed Ryan's feet as she stood by Jill.

“I don't know what to do about Carol. She seems so unhappy, doesn't she?” Jill asked as she pressed her fingers into some of the knots in the dough. She tore off a little edge of the dough and put it into her mouth.

“Yeah.”

“She won't talk to me.”

“Go to more of her games. That would make her happy.” Ryan reached out, separated a corner from the dough, and, like Jill, popped it into her mouth. The flavor, yeast with a sweetness to it, dissolved onto her tongue once it was moistened by the saliva.

“Am I an embarrassing mother, Ryan?” Jill turned to face her.

“You're better than my parents. I wish I lived here with you. Let's swap. We can put Carol at my place, and I can stay here.”

“Shhh . . . not so loud, she could hear you,” Jill said, attempting sternness, but as she said it she was smiling. It was clear that the thought
had crossed her mind. There was something about the way Jill treated her daughter, and she Jill, that gave Ryan the creeps. There was a lack of warmth to their exchanges and an overall coldness in Jill that Ryan found entirely unnatural. Jill seemed to come fully alive only with Ryan, as if she were capable of giving her love to only one person at a time. At times it angered Ryan, the subtle way Jill ignored her daughter.

“Maybe I could move into the third bedroom—you know, the one you use as a study?” She said it in a lighthearted manner but watched Jill for traces of possibility. Jill smiled, and it did seem to Ryan that it might be an idea that could take form.

Lately, at night, it was getting harder and harder to leave Jill's and return home. Ryan now had her own small domain around the large sand-colored basement couch, an area exclusively hers. Carol never came down there, Jill slept on the second floor, and after hours of company, Ryan was allowed to lie down there alone and read or drift into a nap before going home. A white flannel blanket was always folded neatly over the back of the couch, waiting for her. A large glass coffee table sat next to the couch, and gray wall-to-wall carpeting covered the floor. The basement had a bathroom adjacent to the main room, and it was equipped with a clean bathtub. More and more, as she lay on the couch, sinking into the soft cushions, covered by her blanket, leaving seemed inconceivable. Out of the corner of her eye, she would see a full glass of ice water on the coffee table beside her. If she fell asleep and woke up thirsty, it would be there for her.

Ryan went over and took the bottle of vodka from the cabinet next to the refrigerator. She turned to Jill and raised her eyebrows.

Jill sighed and pressed her hands into the counter.

“Just a splash. I don't want to get into trouble with your parents or whatever. Don't get drunk. I drank too much when I was your age, and I don't want you to end up like me.”

Ryan mixed the cranberry juice with the vodka and watched as Jill scooped the berries into the piecrust.

Outside it began to rain lightly, drops sticking to the windowpane soundlessly, gusts moving through the branches of the trees in gentle waves. Ryan felt a slight heavy feeling in her bones as the vodka tingled her throat.

Ryan looked over, and for a second she saw the younger face of Jill emerge in her features. Occasionally these flashes of Jill as a young woman appeared over her older and more beaten countenance, and they always excited Ryan, as she was aware that Jill had once been quite wild, quite pretty. She imagined Jill baking a pie in a kitchen twenty years ago, with her wild gang of friends, laughing, drinking, and eyeing one another with desire and playfulness.

“Jill, do you have any old photos I could see?”

“From when I was a girl?”

“No, when you were a teenager. Or any time before you had Carol.”

“Yep. Hold on, there's a box of old photos in the living room.”

Jill brought back a brown box and opened it. She pulled out one photo and gazed at it for a moment, frowning.

“Here's me with Carol's father.” She said it in a flat voice and handed it over.

Ryan gazed at Jill and a young man, who stood side by side, beaming at the camera. Jill had on tight jeans and a white tank top, with her hair pulled back. She was attractive, yet possessed the same gentle kindness Ryan knew so well. Looking at the photo, it was clear who the boss of the relationship was, and it certainly wasn't Jill. The man had wavy brown hair, a strong and sturdy build, a beautiful face, and an air of magnetism, an assurance that he was the center and all else was in orbit. Jill's smile was more calculated, while his was easy, transfixing.

“What was his name again?”

“Oh, that's Dave.”

“Were you in love with him?”

Jill sighed, obviously not wanting to talk about it, which sparked Ryan's interest more.

“Well, were you?”

“Of course I was, Ryan. I mean, look at him. It's clear who was in love with who.”

This was the first time Jill had ever seemed annoyed with Ryan, which fascinated her.

“What's wrong, Jill?”

“You ask questions when you already know the answer.”

“Come on, tell me about it.”

“He was funny, unpredictable. I guess you could basically say he was irresistible. Women always loved him. I felt like I was constantly fighting them off. It was horrible, and I guess it also gave me a charge to be with someone like that.”

“Where were you guys when this picture was taken?”

Jill squinted at it. “Oh, out by that damn cabin.”

Jill explained that Dave was the type of guy who would immerse himself in one project or another and then would drop each one suddenly and with no warning. Building a cabin was one of his projects, and Jill had been another one of his projects. He had picked her out of their town's crop of girls and possessively taken her along on his group's expeditions. She had been with him during the year he tried to form his band, Poor Rayna, and then she had watched it come apart. She had been with him when he bought a piece of property on the edge of town, about two acres, and attempted to build a cabin on it. It was half built when he, exhausted financially and physically, left it.

“When I became pregnant, for the first five months, he bought books on babies and their developmental cycles and played music to my belly. He even took up the project of building the cabin again as a future place for the three of us to live.”

Embarrassed by his parents' wealth, Dave had tried to build the structure as primitively as possible, with material he could afford himself. Ultimately, he could not do it; the thing would not come together. Jill had come upon him one day, coffee in her hand, and was alarmed to find him slumped over, sitting on a log next to a mess of beams and boards. What he had built had somehow come down. When she had asked him about it, he refused to tell her what had happened. His friends Rick and Jamie, who helped him build when they had the time, had apparently left for the day. Or maybe his bad temper had driven them off. Jill would never know.

It had begun to drizzle, and Jill told Ryan about how she had looked at his wet, thick brown hair, his perfect face drawn into a tight expression of anger, and had known she was in trouble. His plaid shirt was clinging to his back, and he'd had a cold, distant look in his eyes. She had desired him, sitting there in the rain. It was strange to feel passion for someone so angry and distant. She had felt increasingly panicked as it occurred to her that he was moving on, moving on from
her
this time.

The rent was overdue, and their tiny apartment was cluttered with boxes of his things, useless things he collected, such as vintage magazines and postcards. He refused to throw them away. The place was damp and unclean, and staying there was loathsome to both of them. But she could do it, would do it, for him.

“Why can't you ask your parents for the money?” she'd asked him one night after an argument with their landlord over the rent. “We need to take life more seriously now that we are going to have a baby. Don't let your pride get in the way.”

“If I had known that my pleading would drive him over the edge, I would have kept quiet,” she told Ryan. “But two days later he left town. I waited for about a month, expecting him to come back, but he didn't. I moved back in with my parents and had the baby.”

Ryan was silent after Jill finished speaking. Jill now appeared to her in a new light. It had never occurred to her that Jill had been through such deep suffering or that a beautiful man she really loved had abandoned her. In fact, Ryan had never really thought of Jill as someone who could even have a handsome lover—the idea seemed cartoonish. The boyfriends Jill had had when Ryan was a girl had seemed fake, disposable. But there was the photo, the proof. Jill's connection to such a man was exciting, amazing.

“Well, I can see why you fell for him. I would've too, even if he was a jerk or a coward or whatever.”

“I've always been drawn to physical beauty—it's a weakness in me. I guess everyone is like that. If we could, we would have the most perfect expression of beauty around us all the time, to be closer to the source or something. I've always seen it as a flaw in me. I admire people who don't seem to care about things like that.”

The two of them stood there in silence. Something had changed. Jill was no longer the same old Jill she had always teased and berated in her mind. She was mammoth, a woman of drama, a woman who had had love and lost it. Ryan hunted around in the box and pulled out several more photographs of Jill at various ages. Tiny baby Jill in the safe arms of relatives; teenage Jill, her smile too big, her legs toned, her face sunburned. And more of her with this man, his piercing blue eyes locked into the camera, his arms protectively around Jill.

“Did you ever see him again?”

“No, but his parents have been very good to me over the years.”

She explained that Dave's parents, stunned by his disappearance, had turned to her and her daughter for a connection. They hadn't approved of her as a possible mate for their son, but once he was gone and the two were separated, their attitude toward her had softened into one of compassion and pity. They'd heard from Dave a year after Carol's birth. He was living in Oregon with some woman, and although he occasionally wrote and called, he never contacted Jill or returned to his hometown. Dave's parents took an interest in Carol, and, despite the fact that their son was no longer living in the town or involved in his daughter's life, they decided to send a monthly sum to Jill for Carol's upbringing. They still continued to do so. It was as if they knew that Dave would be lost to them in one way or another, and they wanted to hold on to him in whatever way they could. He had been sinfully handsome, uncontrollable, and self-destructive.

Growing up, Carol had often talked to Ryan about her father, and it was clear that she thought he would return to her one day. She had been taken with an after-school special where a daughter leaves home in search of her father and finds him in a small farming town in Iowa. When she finds him, he clutches her, his face strained with emotion, and vows never to leave her again. He explains that he has had a room ready for her for several years and that he had been ashamed to contact her until he had made something of himself. The room she is shown is painted a cheery pink, and he has begun a doll collection, adding a new doll every couple of months. The whole thing seemed a sappy mess to Ryan, but she knew better than to voice that opinion. She suffered through repeated viewings of the film—Carol had recorded it on a VHS tape and watched it countless times.

“Do you have the day off tomorrow?” Ryan knew that Jill worked only three or four days a week, and she secretly felt that Jill was lazy. Now that she knew Carol's grandparents sent money, she suspected
that Jill used some of it for herself. It was just like Jill to work only a few days a week—this laziness seemed to be part of a general infection, a flaw in character that pervaded all aspects of her. The laziness showed in the features and expressions of her face. She smiled in a lazy way, and being around her, Ryan felt the pull of inertia, the pull to be nothing, do nothing.