In Every Way (25 page)

Maria and Jane drink whiskey on ice. It is past ten o'clock. Bonacieux has been asleep for hours. Karen is watching CNN. Her mother is tucked in. Philip glows in the light of the fire. Nina flips through
Vanity Fair
. So many lives continue right now without Maria—she wonders if anyone now imagines her. If they do, they do not envision her here. She wishes she could be listening to Bach with Philip and yet even this fills her with guilt. Not because of her transgressions, but because she feels like she should be longing for her mother instead. Her mother is the one, after all, who is sick.

Icy People steps up to the bar, and Maria touches her arm. Icy People has not seen Maria, and when she turns, she sneers. She looks ready to fight. She would appreciate the performance of it, Maria thinks. It would be an asset to her persona.

“Everything's cool,” Maria says.

“OK,” Icy People says, unconvinced.

“I'm serious.”

“OK.”

“I love that song about having things and stuff. It's been stuck in my head for like months.”

“Thanks,” Icy People says, thawing in the warmth of Maria's praise. “What'd you do to your arm?”

“Fell through a glass table.”

“Damn, girl.”

“Yeah,” Maria says. “It hurts.”

LATER, IN THE
car, Maria lays her head back and watches the rain slide like melted light down the windshield. She knows she should not drive. But Jane has gone home with a bartender named Johnny, and Maria has never before called a cab. She starts the car and cruises east, slowly exiting Carrboro. Around her, barhoppers hold hands, laughing on the sides of the streets. She stops and rubs her eyes, only to start again and then stop two blocks later. She comes close to running two stop signs and once jumps a curb, sending pedestrians screaming into a lawn. The danger in this enterprise is palpable, but part of Maria wants to be caught. She passes a young police officer and waves, but he only waves back and smiles.

When she gets home, she cannot stop herself. She opens her computer and begins a message to Philip.
Is there any way I can see Bonacieux again?
she says.
It is all that I want. However it can happen. I'll do what you say
.

CHAPTER 23

M
ARIA AWAKENS TO
the tritone doorbell. She has slept in her clothes. The quilt her mother made for her tenth birthday slides off the bed and settles onto the floor as she rises. She moves her tongue around her dry mouth, remembering in terror the email she sent the night before, positive that this is now Nina or Philip standing on the stoop, or maybe even the handsome police officer from the night before who has returned to finally arrest her. Her head throbs. As she stumbles down the hallway she says “Hello hello hello” aloud, trying to rid her voice of any trace of sleep before she must face whatever actual human awaits. She opens the door, and there, backlit by a painful morning sun, stands Jack.

“You were spotted by my spies,” he says.

There is nothing Maria wants less than Jack right now. She wants French press coffee in Karen's kitchen. She wants Nina's silk robe. She wants Bonacieux against her. Croissants. Grapefruit. But something animal comes over her and she finds a reason to not close the door, because in one hand, Jack holds a greasy paper bag from Weaver Street Market, and in the other, two Styrofoam coffee cups. Maria's desire is carnal. She longs for the contents of that bag. Its appearance keeps her from thinking about all other complications so near at hand.

Behind Jack, Maria's Volvo is parked with its back wheels in the driveway and its front two in the yard. “Jesus Christ,” she says, rubbing her eyes.

Jack hands her the bag, heavy with promise, and finds her car keys on the front hall table. He backs the Volvo out of the grass and straightens it in the driveway. Maria knows it is too late, though. The neighbors have all already retrieved newspapers and gone to work. The Copelands have probably already padlocked their hot tub. The smoke signals have surely gone up: Maria has returned. There was a time when no child on the block was more quiet, more invisible, more sought after to babysit than she. Now Maria is the girl who climbs nude into cold hot tubs and parks in the grass. She is the one who got pregnant at age nineteen. She is the one whose mother is sick. Pity her and beware. That's what the smoke signals say.

“Eat,” Jack says.

An egg and cheese biscuit. Cheese grits. Coffee. Maria feels better with each bite. Jack bends to his toes, then holds his arms out wide till his sternum pops. In silence he washes dishes. He rubs Maria's shoulders.

“Ow,” Maria says. “Stop.”

“What happened to your arm?” Jack says.

“Ugh,” Maria says, and fans the air.

Jack seems to sense that this injury has been the result of something more than just an accident. He softly rubs his thumbs across the skin at the base of her neck.

“I told them everything,” Maria says.

Jack continues his caress.

“You hear me?” Maria says.

Jack comes around the table. He leans on it and looks her in the eye. He is older now, Maria realizes, older than his years. Like her.

“They aren't our family,” he says. “That's the whole point.”

Our family. Maria considers what her family is. Does it now include Jack? She is not sure. The definition has become blurry. It is a classic question of the modern age, Maria thinks. She has read too many essays about it in her mother's subscriptions. But why shouldn't her family now include Jack? The roster is anything but crowded. What she does know is that they had a child together, and that this child would look up at Maria from her breast, more satisfied than Maria can remember ever having been. Bonacieux longed for Maria's arms. It seemed she actually needed Maria's proximity to live. But Maria is now gone, and the child is surely still alive. Maria holds her face in both hands and wonders at the half-life of memory, certain that Bonacieux will never leave Maria's own memories but that Maria is already disappearing from hers.

SHE CROSSES CAMPUS
that evening and enters the Ackland Art Museum. In the renaissance gallery, she sits on a maroon bench before an expansive portrait of Saint John the Evangelist. She feels as if some refinement is required to lift the last of her lingering hangover. The museum is empty, with the exception of three security guards, each of whom it seems would like to speak to her. She, however, does not want to talk. Her days have undergone a simultaneous narrowing and expansion, their focus on Bonacieux and Philip and her mother somehow removing all other social interest while at the same time making the world larger, more filled with magic, unknowable, beautiful and scary. Now that this focus is gone, she feels her world again shrinking, filling with the mundane.

She rises and stands close to the canvas, inches from the brushstrokes placed there by a painter 392 years ago. She longs to touch them but knows she cannot. The rules of civil society are ones she tells herself she must uphold.

“Ma'am,” says one of the security guards. “Not too close to the paintings. Please.”

“I'm sorry,” Maria says, and leaves.

Beneath the huge limbs of the oak trees lining the campus sidewalks, Maria thinks of Philip and Bonacieux. There has been no response to her email, no contact at all. No retribution, no restraining order, no penalty from the adoption service. But this silence carries with it, for Maria, a hint of generosity. A possibility of understanding. She allows herself to think that perhaps there is still a way to fit her daughter into her life.

CHAPTER 24

M
ARIA DRINKS TEA
while paging through an old
New Yorker
. It is the following morning. She enjoys the way this house feels removed from the present, how she can enjoy articles several months old and have no thought for the news of the day. She has turned on no lights, letting the flat gray light of the overcast morning permeate the house like a fog. She wears her old red robe, the one she got on her sixteenth Christmas. She closes the magazine, and as she rubs the terry cloth between her fingers, Bonacieux returns to her. There are so many triggers for this. Bathing. Sleeping. Cooking. But now this too, the feel of terry cloth. With its touch Maria is there, kissing the back of her daughter's neck, nuzzling her cheek. She is breastfeeding her, a soft blanket tossed over her shoulder. She can hear her soft breath.

Maria is snapped out of her reverie by the phone. It is her mother.

“I'm coming home,” her mother says. Her voice is all business, leaving little room for conversation.

“Are you OK?” Maria says.

“No, I'm sick. I need to see Dr. Jeanette.”

Maria measures her breath. Already she is telling herself that all is as expected. Not yet two weeks away from Bonacieux, and her mother has started to fail. It is her fault, Maria thinks. Her chest seems to contract under a sudden insidious pressure.

“What can I do?” Maria says. “I can come get you.”

“Calm down,” her mother says. “Karen'll bring me.”

“I love you,” Maria says. It is something she rarely says on the phone. She cannot, in fact, even remember the last time she said this to her mother, but she is afraid and feels the need to let her mother know it. It is like the bell announcing that an elevator has reached the ground floor, that now is the time to step out and see exactly where you've landed.

IT IS EVENING
. From Karen's car, Maria's mother walks across the fallen leaves slowly, as if very sore. She is wrapped in the same red plaid blanket in which she hid on her trip to Beaufort one year earlier. Her face no longer appears to have been creased by a life well lived; it is now just skin across bone. The ephemeral blossom of life that had returned no longer fills her cheeks with color.

Maria does not rush out to see her. At the kitchen window, she fiddles with a banana peel. This is yet another woman she does not know, another iteration of what she longs to be unchanging.

“Love,” her mother says as she enters. “Oh, sweetie. I need to lie down.”

Karen follows in a cacophony of door banging, clumsy with bags and a basket filled with seashells and assorted flora and fauna. A wasp nest, dead beetles. Bird feathers. From somewhere a turtle shell. Maria's mother has reacquainted herself with the wonders of nature. She has become a connoisseur of biological minutiae. Karen gingerly sets the collection beneath the back hall table.

“It just started yesterday,” Karen says, as her mother disappears down the hallway.

“What is it?” Maria says.

“Fever. Vomit.”

Karen fetches more bags while Maria enters her mother's room. Already her mother is under the sheets, her clothes folded into a neat pile atop the dresser.

“I don't even know if those sheets are clean,” Maria says.

“Ugh.”

“Want me to call Dr. Jeanette?”

“I'm going in the morning.”

“Can I get you anything?”

“A bucket.”

Maria laughs, glad that her mother's sense of humor is still buoyant.

“I'm not joking,” her mother says.

Maria finds the bucket in the laundry room, removing from it a mop and one dead moth. By the time she places it beside her mother's bed, her mother is already asleep. She walks the hall to her room, closes the door, and, in the hushed shadows, dials Christopherson.

“How's your mom?” he says.

“Sick.”

“Man.”

“And I know this is going to sound crazy, but I was calling to ask you a favor.”

“OK.”

“Can you maybe help me figure out a way that maybe we could get Bonacieux up here?”

“To Chapel Hill?”

“Yeah.”

Christopherson is silent for a moment before he says, “Are you OK?”

“I know, I know,” Maria says, “but I'm serious, Mom gets better around the baby.”

“Maria,” Christopherson says, afraid. His fear makes Maria cease. She can hear herself now, through his ear. This is crazy talk.

“OK,” she says. “Nevermind. Nevermind.”

“Is my mom there?”

“Yeah.”

“She can help,” Christopherson says. He has such faith in Karen, positive of her ability to fix. Maria even smiles. It is so simple. There is no reason Karen will be able to do anything more to help this situation, she thinks, yet Christopherson's confidence is sound in the logic of love. She is, after all, his mother.

THAT EVENING, MARIA
joins Karen in the living room. Karen cups a large glass of red wine, swirling it slowly in the space before her. Maria knows there was no wine in the house before her arrival. She is impressed with Karen's foresight. Karen almost always presents an optimistic facade, but her habits reveal the truth. Maria has left a message for Jack but does not know where he is. She does not want to be alone and is glad to have Karen here in the house with her.