Commuters (10 page)

“That tree is ninety-four feet high,” she said. “And its branches are almost the same width—did you know that? I didn’t, that a tree’s ‘wingspan’ can be equal to its height.” These facts quieted the audience a little, though Winnie didn’t know why she was saying them, other than to speak something into the microphone in front of her. “And I did see purple finches nesting there. And blue jays, of course, though they’re not so picky. Isn’t that right, Tess?” She had spied an old comrade of George’s, one of his early-rising birder group.

“
Now
you take an interest,” Tess called back, sassy as ever.

Winnie hurried on, afraid of more comments related to George. All these people in the audience—many had known her for fifty years or more, and now Jerry was sitting in their midst, a total stranger to them. It was hard not to feel on trial. Two of the protestors had stopped shouting, for the moment, as if to hear her out. She cast around for something else to say. “Its trunk is nine,
ten feet around—oh! Listen to this. It appears that after two hundred years, a sycamore becomes hollow. But it lives on, hollow or not; did you ever hear that? I read somewhere that pioneer families could even live inside one while they built homes. She caught Lila’s eye and smiled. “Packed in like sardines, you have to imagine.”

At this, Winnie faltered; she was running out of tree facts, and that last image gave her pause. She’d made a faux pas, a bad one; she knew Rachel had to be thinking of her own living situation. In fact, Rachel was sitting still and calm, looking up at her with an expression that read,
You’ve made your bed, Mom. Now what?

“Don’t think I haven’t done my homework,” she said, casting her voice across the small audience, her neighbors and town people gathered here. “Due diligence, as my son-in-law might call it.” Bob saluted her, his bald head lit and shining, the brightest thing in the room. The protestors, though, were not appeased. They bent their heads together for a quick conference. Winnie didn’t mind; she realized it wasn’t to them that she was speaking. “These photographs, all this history…” She waved an arm vaguely toward the hallway where the exhibit was mounted. Winnie felt tired, all of a sudden; she should have told her daughter about the pool, about the tree. A tree all hollowed out, living on despite that emptiness, that gutting out. Why had that stuck with her? Why was it so disturbing?

By now the one security guard, a gray-haired man, had ambled over to the chanting protestors. He wore a small smile, as if to acknowledge the sudden starring role of his minor part. He began to shepherd the group toward the door, calmly, a bit wearily, and the protestors didn’t resist. Their voices grew smaller and smaller as they moved toward the back of the gym.

“Some things are more important than the past,” Winnie said into the microphone, but that wasn’t what she meant, exactly. She knew she sounded as if she were pleading to the audience. How could anything she said make them understand? All those faces, some filled with doubt, others with confusion.

The first woman, who had ambushed Winnie, was the last to be led out of the room. “How do you
sleep
at night, you rich bitch?” she screamed, just before disappearing.

That energy and fury flew directly to Winnie like a sharp slap. “Oh,” she said weakly, backing away from the podium, hand to her jaw, covering the dark patch. Her own distressed exclamation, a low sound, hung in the air, and the unintended push she’d given to the microphone stand touched off a piercing squeal of feedback that hissed around the large room. The speakers whined, drowning out Erica. Most people in the audience had left their seats. Someone was saying something to Winnie, but she shook off the kind hand on her arm, and she ignored Rachel’s worried expression, now right in front of her, blocking her way. Winnie worked her way free of them all, and either he had made it to her, or she to him, but at last Jerry’s thick hand found hers, and they stood still together.

None of it mattered, then—not any suit or countersuit, not this public comeuppance—as soon as Winnie felt Jerry squeeze her hand, once, hard. She returned the favor, and let the tumult go on around them.

Rachel stood in front of the girls’ shared closet in their shared room. Dresses and skirts were crammed tightly together, packed in so close that to dislodge one item meant several others pulled off their hangers in unison. Piles of clothes were on the floor, too, tangled with shoes and an extra blanket that had fallen off a shelf. Tank tops, bathing suits, and summer dresses were still here, in October, forgotten and flimsy-looking, but Rachel had no energy to weed them out and pack a box for storage. Nor had she any space for storage in this two-bedroom apartment. There was a single crawl space under the stairs, but it was stuffed to bursting with brooms and buckets, two extra dining chairs, and too many unmarked boxes of—what? Books, probably, or pots and pans. Parts of their old life: haphazardly packed up, tucked into corners, and pretty much ignored. Rachel tugged halfheartedly at a few items of Lila’s, hoping for inspiration—these flared jeans, for bell-bottoms? But then Melissa might insist on some kind of belly-baring “hippie” top. No way. A pink-and-white turtleneck…what about a candy cane? Cute, but in a kind of ironic way. Was that even a possibility?

“You wish,” she told herself. Last spring a girl in Melissa’s class was suspended for wearing a skintight camouflauge T-shirt
THAT READ MAJOR FLIRT REPORTING FOR DUTY. AT YOUR SERVICE, SIR
!

It had come as a surprise this morning, when Melissa asked about a costume. They were having cereal.

“Seriously?” Rachel had said. “Kids are still dressing up? In the seventh grade?”

“I don’t know,” Melissa said. “Not, like, officially or anything. Not for class.”

“It’s just that it’s kind of late in the game, sweetie. Today’s Thursday.”

“I don’t have to.”

“Mom,” Lila said, and it had brought Rachel up short, her older daughter’s tone half question, half warning. So much had changed for them. Rachel herself had changed, so much, since the accident, since the move.

The problem was, she used to love Halloween.

There had been the Mother Goose year, when Lila was Little Miss Muffet (in lace-trimmed pantaloons, carrying a stuffed spider and a paper cup of sludgy white paste marked curds and whey), and Melissa portrayed Hey Diddle Diddle in a furry gray-and-white cat suit that had taken Rachel three weeks to make, with mascara whiskers drawn on her tiny face. She’d carried Lila’s school violin for a fiddle—or Bob had, anyway, during trick-or-treating, to prevent its being dropped or dented or altogether forgotten in the heady rush for doorbells and candy. Then, when Lila was about ten and Melissa seven or so, Rachel had made them both into birds, using the same sheer black fabric with flecks of shimmery green, and each girl had long, swooping wings they delighted in
all night, and wild feathered headpieces, and curved plastic beaks stapled to elastic bands that itched and chafed and were promptly discarded. In the photos, taken each Halloween on the front steps, you couldn’t tell at all that they were meant to be birds (without the beaks, they looked more like 1920s-era flappers), but they were ebullient, barely contained, standing side by side: Melissa’s round little tummy, Lila’s bare ankles.

Now Rachel stood in the girls’ room—smaller than either of their own rooms had been in the real house—and tried to summon that old energy, that once-powerful interest in batting, industrial adhesive, cardboard tubes. Time was short. She made up the beds without needing to move, pivoting from one side to the other, smoothing sheets, pulling up coverlets. Their desk was wedged between the doorjamb and the closet. Rachel stacked folders and righted a pencil cup. She nudged the computer mouse in doing so, and the monitor whirred to life. A screen-saver picture of Greg Louganis mid-dive was immediately covered by a dozen instant-message boxes and Lila’s (ldive4gold) and Melissa’s (mel5334) “we’re not here” automatic responses. Rachel clicked through a few, reading enough to make sure nothing smacked of forty-something-pervert-pretending-to-be-thirteen. There was a certain way you had to arrange the desk chair; to make enough room to get out, it needed to be pushed backward, toward the beds—not tucked under the desk, as one would think—and Rachel, who’d forgotten this, did an awkward little dance with chair and door before figuring it out.

Across the tiny landing was the bathroom, and next to that was Rachel and Bob’s room. Was there anything Melissa might use from her own closet? Rachel mentally scanned her gaudiest
dresses for possibilities. But the thought of entering her own bedroom, and the sight of their oversized carved-wood bed and bulky matching dressers, everything too big for the space, depressed her. It was always stuffy in there too, mostly because of the single, oddly rectangle-shaped window, placed too high for any breeze to cool the room. Most nights, Rachel woke at least once with her skin on fire, heart pounding.

(Worse, the joke was on her: once, several years ago, between tenants, they had considered widening and replacing this window as part of a few projects to maintain the apartment and
Rachel
had been the one to successfully argue that it wasn’t necessary.)

Her mother probably had the right idea about bedrooms. On a first visit to 50 Greenham, Rachel had been startled by Winnie casually inviting her to peek into “Jerry’s” room—she glimpsed a high single bed with a tartan print blanket, and a pair of pants laid across an armchair—and then, down the hall, to “my” room.

“So you don’t…?” Rachel said, pointing at the distance between the two rooms.

“What?” Winnie asked with a twinkle, pretending not to understand. “A person likes her space. You’ll understand, down the road.”

“Doesn’t it make it hard to—you know? Sleeping apart?”

“Absolutely not!” Winnie laughed. “We visit each other,” she said, scissoring her fingers back and forth in a walking motion, from one room to another. Rachel couldn’t decide if this was practical or utterly romantic.

“But you and Dad always shared the same room.”

Winnie snorted. “Oh, that. Well, let’s just say that we slept well together.”

“Right. Never mind. I don’t want to hear about it.”

“I’m talking about
sleep
! We were compatible in that way.”

“And you and Jerry aren’t?” This was the first Rachel had heard of something not perfect about Winnie’s new love.

Her mother had flashed a tiny, inward smile, before moving on to show Rachel how they’d decorated the girls’ room. “We’re compatible in another way,” is all she’d said.

Bob took a potent cocktail of drugs before bed—he was still on anti-seizure medicine, as well as several others—and therefore slept a thick, unmoving eight hours every night. He slept better in the tiny, overheated apartment than he ever had in their airy, real bedroom. Infuriating. At one of Bob’s appointments last year, Rachel had once, only half joking, protested the strength of his nighttime drugs. “What if there’s a fire?” she said. “How on earth will I be able to rouse him?” One of the doctors had glanced over at Bob’s shaved head, and the scars. “Trust your luck more,” he’d said. “I would, if I had your kind.”

“Sure thing,” Rachel said aloud, turning sharply away from her bedroom. “Lucky me.”

She was supposed to be at Hand Me Down, but she had switched days as a favor to the other employee, Moira. On any other day, she would have been glad for the surprise day off, a chance to run errands and pick Melissa up from school herself. But now she was stuck with the costume problem. Rachel wandered from the living room to the kitchen and back again, eating an apple. Through the back wall, behind the couch, she could hear the clang and thud of Vikram’s mail drop through the front door slot and land noisily in his—her—front hall. A minute later, footsteps on the side path as the mailman wedged their own mail inside the screen door.

Rachel put her apple down on the coffee table and wiped her hand on her jeans. She found the phone number in a drawer in the kitchen and dialed, saying to herself even as she hatched the idea,
He could be home. He could have a day off too.
But of course he wasn’t, and the call itself was just for show. Rachel listened to the phone ring, in her handset, and the faint, practically unrelated echo from deep within the house. And then she hung up, and found the keys.

In less than a minute she had gone around front and was letting herself in, trying to look natural to anyone she knew who might be driving past. The heavy pop of the lock was a familiar, lost sound. Rachel busied herself with stepping neatly out of her clogs in the entranceway and pulling the door shut behind her, so that she could delay that first long look around her house. It was the first time she’d been back since they moved out.

He—Vikram—had reversed the dining and living rooms, and that was idiotic. Not that she was biased. Three modern sectional pieces (two white, one black) were arranged on a geometrical-print rug where Bob’s mother’s antique table used to be. A big framed still of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman hung over one couch, and a 3-D sort of sculpture (metal, twisted) took up space just outside the kitchen entrance where Rachel had always had a side table and matching mirror. A rough, dark wood table with benches instead of chairs was in the living room, draped with an elaborate red-and-gold runner and strewn with piles of mail and magazines, folders, empty soda cans, a laptop computer, and a bowl of half-eaten cereal. Where their couch had been, the one on which Bob had collapsed, was nothing now. Just empty space.

A cell phone rang somewhere in the house and Rachel’s heart
stopped. Suddenly, the stupidity of this plan came crashing in, even as she wildly thought up unlikely, unnecessary alibis—
just checking the…furnace.
She took the stairs two at a time, saw with relief that the master bedroom’s door was closed, and hurried up another flight into the hot, musty attic.

There they were, neatly labeled plastic boxes, set amid the furniture Vikram had said it was fine to leave. Rachel tripped in her rush, and fell heavily, tearing her sleeve on the head of a nail protruding from one of the unfinished wood posts. She lurched upright, ignoring the stinging in both palms, and yanked at the boxes until the right one tumbled toward her. It was getting hard to breathe. The crib her babies had slept in, dismantled to dusty pieces leaning against the wall. The lamp they’d bought in Florence on Rachel’s thirtieth birthday. Her favorite chair, streaked with dirt.

“I’m fine,” she said out loud, teeth gritted. “It’s fine.”
Jeans shirts skirts dresses no no no no no no no.
Wait! Black shimmery polyester, with long, flappy sleeves. Perfect: Lila had worn it in a school play, and Rachel knew there was a hot-pink wig somewhere in the girls’ closet. “Funky witch. Kooky witch. Who gives a shit.” She heard herself, sounding crazy, but didn’t care. She started to stuff the other clothes back in, and then gave up, left it all a mess and bolted for the stairs in the grip of a panicky, powerful urge to get out.

She might have made it too, if it weren’t for the other doors, ajar, on the second floor. What she glimpsed made Rachel falter. It was something wrong, and it slowed her, still clutching the witch dress, and drew her over to the rooms inside—Lila’s, on the left. Melissa’s, right across the hall. Both were empty, completely empty. As echoing and empty as the day they had moved out. Ra
chel took a few unsteady steps into Melissa’s room and her throat closed. She touched the wallpaper, sobbing, the repeating pattern of pastel elephants holding each other’s tails.

“She’ll grow out of it so fast,” Rachel had protested, pregnant, when they were decorating another nursery. She loved their choice but wanted to be practical. “Or he will.”

“So, we’ll redo it,” Bob had said, swooping Lila up over his head in that way Rachel hated. “When he’s a surly teenager. Or
she
is. Maybe we’ll paint it black. Right, Ms. Big Sister?”

Because she was crying so completely, a shuddering, whole-body sort of weep, the sound of Vikram’s footsteps down the hall, and his sleepy-eyed presence in the doorway behind her, were somehow normal, as was the way he took her elbow and guided her to sit down on the floor, with her back against the wall. He knelt, in a half-crouch, asking without words if she was all right. Rachel signaled that she was, a half smile through the gasps. Then it was just a matter of time, of the sobbing’s needing to run itself out in a few more spasms.

Pine tree branches were scraping at the front window, the one that gave out onto Locust, like the sloppy dark-green paw of a huge dog.

“That used to drive Mel crazy,” Rachel said, pointing. She wiped her face with the witch dress. “It would wake her up at night.”

Vikram watched the needles mash against the panes. “It’s like being in a car wash, isn’t it? I guess I haven’t noticed.”

“I’ll call the tree guys this week to trim it back. You don’t want those branches this long over the winter—they get heavy with ice and then break off against the house.”

“Or I can do it.”

“What? No, you’d never manage. They’ve got this ladder on a truck—and these machines, automatic saw things—”

“I meant I could call them, if you’d like.”

“Oh.”

Rachel gingerly put the back of her head against the wall. Mentioning the tree guys brought it all back: last week’s mortifying fiasco at the high-school photo exhibit, and the strained, infuriating conversation she’d tried to have with her mother afterward, denying all the while that the real reason she was opposed to this pool was because she hadn’t been told anything about it before the rest of the town, when they were all treated to Winnie being publicly shamed by a bunch of vociferous tree huggers, whom no one even recognized as being from Hartfield, by the way. Why that mattered, Rachel couldn’t say, except she knew that it did. And the reason she was opposed to the pool was because it was total madness! You didn’t just drop a swimming pool in the front of an old property like that! So, Jerry’s back hurt—he could have massages! He could try yoga. Rachel told herself to be more sympathetic; after all, she knew about caring for someone in pain, how easy it was to get caught up in a desperate mission—how even the wackiest New Age cure-all could seem a reasonable, prudent form of treatment.