In Every Way (23 page)

MARIA RETURNS TO
Philip's house. At the curb she parks. She has never parked here. Before, it has always been in the driveway. She approaches the front door, a door she has never before entered. She has not changed clothes, has not washed her face. She is worn and raw. Her eyes burn. She rings the doorbell.

“What are you doing?” Philip says, and waves Maria in.

“We need to talk,” Maria says, remaining on the porch. She loves how Philip looks, how he is flawed, how his face is asymmetric. Has she ever noticed that his nose was clearly once broken? She imagines what broke it, savoring the possibilities. A bar fight. An accident at sea. The map of life is laid out across his flesh. She is seeing it for the first time.

“Isn't that one of those lines you hate?” he says.

“We have a problem,” Maria says.

“With what?”

“With what?” Maria says, and tries to think of the answer. “Um . . .” It is almost too big for words. “Our lives.”

Philip squints, as if Maria is not in focus. She had not meant to put it this way, but the hyperbole of the statement surprisingly puts her at ease. It has set the bar so high she might not even meet it.

“There's a problem with our
lives?”
he says. “Isn't that a bit dramatic?”

“I'm not sure it is, actually.”

“It is,” he says, and his confidence inspires Maria to prove him wrong. She feels as if she has a secret weapon, one she has longed to reveal to him for months.

“You're wrong,” she says. “And not only are you wrong. I'm right.”

“Well, OK then,” Philip says. “If this is a lecture, please, by all means, carry on.”

This is the closest they have ever come to having an argument, and Maria is surprised to find it so satisfying. It is the first time she has felt truly equal to Philip.

“First of all, you think I don't think about Nina?” she says. “That I don't see all those texts she sends? She's right, you know. This isn't fair. Not to her.”

Philip makes a face, dismissive, as if to say let
me
worry about her.

“Yeah, but I think about her too,” Maria says. “And you know what, and this is the more important thing. What we're doing isn't fair to Bonacieux.”

“Maria,” Philip says.

Maria senses a sad relief in his eyes. She is embarrassed to only now understand that he has probably been waiting for her to do this. That she is solving his problems for him.

“You want this, don't you?” she says. She is suddenly angry that he is not trying to stop her.

“I've said it before, and I'll say it again,” Philip says. “I want everything. But I'm not going to claim that I can have it.”

“You made this mess,” Maria says.

“Is this a mess?” he says. “This is just . . .” He waves a hand in the air, as if softly backhanding a fly.

“You have no idea what kind of mess this is.”

“I have no idea, huh,” Philip says.

“Don't talk to me like that. You don't even know.”

“OK. OK.”

She feels the truth close to revealing itself and recognizes the danger at hand. Bonacieux has begun to cry in the living room behind Philip. Her daughter's wails are like lines attached to Maria, reeling her in. But Maria resists the pull and turns her back on Philip. She knows that if she sees Bonacieux for even one second, there will be no escape.

“Maria,” Philip says. But she can tell that this is not a true protest. He wants her to go. He is letting her float away without even a fight. It is so much easier for him this way. Maria feels as if he has disrespected her. If only he knew the actual situation in which she has been living, that he would give her the respect that she deserves. The continued cries of her child push her to the edge of panic. “I understand,” he says. “I do.”

“No you don't,” Maria says.

“OK.”

Maria turns, furious at the condescension in his voice. Bonacieux cries even harder behind him. “That,” she says. “That person crying? She's my child.”

“I know she is, I understand that too,” Philip says, nodding. But it is clear he is only trying to placate her and that he has not understood at all what she is trying to say.

“No, I mean for real,” Maria says. “She's the child I gave birth to.”

“She is not, Maria. She is not. I know this must be so difficult, but you're talking about two different things.”

“I recognized you in the photos online, on the adoption site,” Maria says.

Philip squints in confusion. “For the adoption of who?” he says.

“Of Bonacieux,” Maria says. “I recognized you. I saw your picture and recognized you, from when I'd see you around last summer. And I picked you because you looked nice and I knew you lived in a town that I love.”

Philip turns his head like a puppy to a whistle.

“You're serious,” he says.

Maria nods and Philip seems to flush. The satisfaction Maria had been enjoying from this argument ceases. It is as if a door has now closed behind her, locking, leaving her in a new and foreign land. Philip's face has undergone a transformation. His lips have thinned, his eyes narrowed. A crease now stands vertically on his forehead above his nose. Maria's confidence in being his equal disappears. In its place she finds fear.

“How'd you find us?” Philip says. His voice is flat and direct.

“Online, like I said. And then later trick-or-treating,” Maria says. She can tell he does not know exactly what she means. “Look, I didn't plan any of this.”

Bonacieux continues her wailing. It is not her cry of boredom—it is one of need. Something is required. Food, a changing. Something. The sound fills the air with pressure.

“We need to go check on her,” Maria says, pointing to the hallway behind him.

“You need to leave,” Philip says. He is directing, as if managing a dangerous animal. Never before has Maria seen him like this. There is no room left for maneuver.

Maria's will is gone. All she wants is to do now is soothe her daughter. She steps forward.

“Just . . .” she says.

“Go,” Philip says. The danger of finality fills the air. Maria wonders, for a moment, if Philip might hurt her. “Right now. Go.”

He blocks the door. And so this is it. Maria has played her last card. For the second time she is losing Bonacieux for good. She wills herself to turn, but she can still hear Bonacieux, even as she crosses the lawn. It is the last of her daughter's voice that she will ever hear, she
thinks. And so Maria herself begins to cry so hard that she is afraid she will not be able to drive safely. She thinks, how does one find a way to physically move during times like these? But she has made it this far, at least, and now, thank God, she can entrust a machine. She spins the car away in a rush, leaving Philip on the stoop. It is all she can do to steer. Even inside the car, she can hear Bonacieux.

AFTER HER MOTHER
goes to bed that night, Maria fights the urge to return to Philip's house. In her room she still cries, blowing her nose into an old bandana of Philip's. She cannot be alone. She dries her face and walks down the hall. At Christopherson's closed door she knocks.

Like some prototype for the Southern young man, Christopherson appears in moccasins, Levis, and a polo shirt. These sartorial decisions soothe Maria at sight.

“Hey,” he says. She can tell that he is unsure of how to act around her, unaccustomed to being with another person so clearly in emotional turmoil.

“Oh God,” Maria says.

“You want to come in?”

“You have any cigarettes?”

Christopherson shakes his head.

“Anything to drink?”

“No.”

“I feel like passing out.”

“OK,” Christopherson says, confused, as if making yourself pass out is already part of different person's past.

“Like doing that trick you taught me.”

Maria tosses the wet bandana on the glass coffee table in Christopherson's room. Against the wall, she begins to hyperventilate. The sound of the air rushing in and out of her lungs scares her, but she wants the escape, if only for the seconds of reprieve it might grant. She does not care that Christopherson seems scared as he counts her passing breaths. She trusts him to be polite and follow her direction. When Maria stands, her legs wobble loopy beneath. The room presents itself at an angle. Before Christopherson can even press her chest she falls.

She dreams of Philip holding her hand, singing with her. Together they run over gravel that flies up at their heels, rising toward the sky behind them. She carries Bonacieux with her as they run. She laughs at the scene, embarrassed by her own visions even while in them. It is so ludicrous that, even if it were to be real, she would still have to laugh.

When she awakens, shards of glass glitter around her. The frame of the table lies under her lower back. She has fallen through it. A splatter of blood stains the carpet beside her. Christopherson is screaming. Maria raises her voice to join him.

FOUR

CHAPTER 22

I
T IS EARLY
September. Fourteen sutures hold together the flesh of Maria's left arm. Her back, punctured in dozens of places, is marked by a diagonal bruise stretching from her left shoulder blade all the way to her right hip. It was left there by the frame of the glass table on which she fell. Nine days have since passed. Nine days in which Maria has been confined to her bed, a soft prison for which she is thankful, as she has never before longed so much for Bonacieux, and if she were not otherwise confined, she feels confident that she would have already found herself back on Philip's doorstep, which, she understands, is not something that can occur. She does not know if there are legal ramifications for what she has done. Twice she has heard sirens and feared they were sounding for her.

“It's Pirate Invasion day,” her mother says, setting an orange plastic plate at Maria's bedside.

Through the window come the intermittent yelps of cartoonish piratese. Someone addresses their matey. Someone's timbers have shivered.

This is a yearly civic fete during which hundreds of costumed enthusiasts descend upon Beaufort for days of invasion reenactment and excessive drinking of rum. The odd cultural obsessions of Maria's generation have begun to fill her with disgust, and these yells entering
her room make her long to have lived in a different time, perhaps one in which pirates were actually real.

Maria's mother stands at the window. Topped by a chic gray crop, her head bears no trace of its former baldness. A rich tan has replaced the pallor of the past. For the last nine days she has delivered medicine and food to Maria. She has petted her good arm and, on the first night after the fall, even slept in the rocking chair beside her. Their roles as caretakers have reversed. Maria has savored these hours. They have reminded her that she is a daughter. She wonders if the physical pain has helped distract her from thinking of Philip and Bonacieux even further, if it all would have been even more intense without. She has explained everything to her mother, including how she fell. She is exhilarated by revelation now, after so many months of living so hemmed in by secrecy. It seems like there is nothing they cannot now share.

“Isn't it time the pirate fad ends?” her mother says. Maria enjoys the unity of their shared contempt. “And why are pirate women supposed to be sexy? Pirate women didn't exist.”

As the cries of the pirates continue to sound, Maria is sure Philip is delivering a lecture somewhere to a room full of confederate Blackbeard fanatics. She is also confident that he is embarrassed by them. It is an understanding she will never be able to share with him.

“I have to go back to Chapel Hill,” Maria says.

“This will end,” her mother says. “It's only two days long.”

“I don't mean because of the pirates,” she says.

Her mother turns to her, elegant in her waste. Her face is so creased that it seems to have been folded in on itself and just now reopened. The effects of the disease upon her flesh have rendered a body seemingly more true to her personality. Over the phone, Dr. Jeanette has said that
remission is not a realistic possibility, but that each case is different. Every body has its own mysteries. “Apparently people can live in the Dakotas permanently,” her mother said after one call, reprising her code name for life after cancer. “Reports are there's even electricity there.”

Maria shifts gently, moving from one set of sores to another. It is not only her wounds that ache, however. Without a child to nurse them, Maria's breasts have become engorged and even more tender than some of her bruises.

“I just can't stay here,” she says.

“But you can in Chapel Hill?” her mother says.

“Absolutely.”

“Even with . . .”

“I don't care about Jack.”