The Visibles (18 page)

They encourage me to write letters to everyone I know, even if I’ll never send them in a million years. They say if I’m stuck, I should just start writing. Just go for it, they tell me. Dive right in. Talk about anything.

So I guess you’d be out of school by now. Maybe in grad school, if you’ve gone that far, or maybe out of that, too. Perhaps you didn’t go to grad school, or even college. Which is perfectly okay. Sometimes I’m not sure how much I learned in college, really. There was an awful lot that was just filler.

You might have a job now, or perhaps even a family. Your house might have a view of those enormous mountains. I admit the only mountains I’ve ever seen are pretty pathetic in comparison, mere hills stuffed with coal—although, I suppose, they were the first mountains you saw, too. What did you think when you first laid eyes on the real ones, all purple and capped with snow? Was the wind knocked out of you? Did you cry?

And what do you go by? Jo? Josie? Just J.? Or maybe you have a fabulous nickname.

One day, maybe I’ll work up the courage to write a real letter to you, one with substance and explanation. Sometimes it doesn’t even feel like you exist. You’re so far away, almost nothing. But some days, when I’m feeling very brave, I admit to myself that I don’t want you to be far away, not anymore. Some days, I think I want to know the truth about you, once and for all.

cobalt, september 2001

S
amantha pulled
into the driveway in a deep gray Mercedes SUV. Stella and I watched her through the dingy curtains in the front room, the one with the pictures of Sinatra and the television. “Well, isn’t she fancy?” Stella said in an awed voice. “I bet that car has that wonderful, leathery new-car smell. You know that smell?”

Samantha parked, slid out of the front seat, and grabbed a brown snakeskin purse from the back. When she rang the doorbell we snapped the curtain closed, as if we hadn’t been watching. Stella settled back into the chair, and I answered the door. Samantha’s head was bent down as she keyed something into her cell phone. “Hi,” I said.

She looked up and broke into a five-alarm smile. “Hello, Summer! So nice to see you!”

Her blazer and skirt were the same iridescent gray as her car. As she pushed her sunglasses up on her head, I tried to make myself presentable, standing taller and wriggling my toes around to conceal the hole in my sock. I quickly tried to think up excuses for my disheveled appearance: I was wearing pajamas so Stella wouldn’t feel so self-conscious. I hadn’t washed my hair because we were trying to conserve water. And anyway, Samantha told us she was coming yesterday.

“Sorry I got tied up yesterday,” Samantha said, as if reading my mind. “I was waiting for paperwork from a seller and it took for
ever
.” She pushed her way into the door…and then stopped. I watched as
her knuckles gripped her bag and then released. It was pretty obvious what she was looking at.

“Hi, Sam,” Stella cried in a voice louder than mine. She sat up straighter on the couch, adjusting her black satin gloves and straightening her magenta wig.

“Well, Stella!” Samantha cried, returning to herself, as polished and as unsnagged as her nut-colored pantyhose. She gently rested her purse on the worn corduroy couch, glided over to Stella, and gave her a delicate, uncertain hug. “Are you cold?” she asked, her eyes falling to the blanket around Stella’s legs and the other blanket around her torso.

“Not really,” Stella said. “Nice car out there!” She attempted a whistle.

Samantha rolled her eyes. “Well, you know. It was a present to myself. For closing on six houses in one month. In the real estate world, that’s tough—that’s more than a house a
week.
I worked like a dog, though.” She sighed and panted, as if she’d just finished not only closing on the houses but building them, too. Then she looked around, frowning. “You could use some more
light
in here.”

She walked to the window and pulled back a curtain. The sunlight barreled its way in, showing off every crack in the windowsill, every stain on the carpet, every yellowed blotch of water damage on the ceiling. I watched as Samantha gazed around the room, taking in its pieces. I’d done the same thing when I came to live with Stella over a year ago, trying to match the room to the mental image I’d been carrying around for years. The living room was smaller. There were more pictures of Frank Sinatra. I hadn’t recalled the curio cabinet above the mantel with the little crystal figurines—a leaping dolphin, an owl, a turtle—or the complete set of encyclopedias from 1965.

Samantha gingerly crossed her legs. I sat down on the poky blue upholstered chair near the dining room, which smelled like stale cigarettes and root beer barrel candies. “So I have been so,
so
busy,” Samantha sighed. “It’s been constant work since I’ve started, which is a really good thing, of course. The Northglenn area is absolutely on fire. Everyone wants in. They just built a new hospital, they’re splitting the schools in two, and there’s this wonderful gym up on the hill that
just opened, too. It’s just so…
chill.
I got them to teach yoga classes there!”

“Yoga!” Stella repeated. With some difficulty, she raised her arms into a Y, like she was doing a cheer. Gimme a
Y
for
yoga.

“There are adorable little developments,” Samantha went on, the words tumbling out of her fast. “That’s mostly where I’m selling. To young couples, like Chris and me. Neighbors of ours, in fact! The houses that have cropped up around us are just lovely. They have built-in barbecue grills and side basketball courts. They’re brand-new. I always tell customers that a new house is the best. You can put your own stamp on it, you know?”

Stella gave her a dippy smile, seeming perplexed.

“Where is Northglenn, anyway?” I asked.

“It’s just past State College,” Samantha said.

I drew a map in my head. “So it’s not that far away,” I said slowly, so perhaps Stella would get it.

“Yes, but it’s not the best highway,” Samantha said. “Lots of accidents.”

And then she started up again, taking a deep breath. “So Chris sends his regards, of course. He would have loved to come but he couldn’t spare the day, obviously. It’s busy, busy, busy with all the building he’s doing.” She pantomimed wiping the sweat off her brow. “He comes home so bushed every night.”

At the word
bushed,
I stood. Samantha’s eyes lingered on me for a split second. We’d only talked on the phone before this. Each phone conversation had been the same: Samantha reiterated how badly she wanted to see us, but she was just so
busy
. First because she and her husband, Chris, were buying a new house. Then because she was studying for her Realtor’s license. Then because she was selling houses. And more houses. And more houses. For some reason, I couldn’t quite imagine Samantha selling real houses—little plastic green ones from Monopoly seemed more plausible. People came to her real estate office, all prepared to look for a three-bedroom, two-bath, and Samantha held the little game piece between her hands and said,
You don’t want that. You want this.

At the end of each phone call, Stella loomed in the kitchen, weakly reaching out for the receiver. I told Samantha that Stella wanted to talk, but Samantha always said she had another call coming in. Or a client had just walked into her office. Or Chris needed something,
urgent.
When I went to hang up the phone, a little flurry of hurt crossed Stella’s face, but she quickly distracted herself by picking at the skin under her wig, or digging through her box of cassette tapes for something by Elvis, or tickling her slobbering pug, Nelson, on his belly.

“I’ve gotten Chris on this vitamin program,” Samantha went on now. “There’s a health store that opened across town, too, which I tell my clients is a really,
really
good thing because that indicates wealth in a community, you know? The whole McDonald’s phenomenon—the poorer people are, the worse they eat. Because, you know, McDonald’s is cheap. And…fattening. If people want to eat better, it means they have more money.”

“But vitamins aren’t food,” I offered. “They’re…pills.”

Derailed, Samantha scratched the edge of her chin. “Well, anyway. They have the most amazing selection of vitamins and herbs, and I’ve told Chris that if he’s going to be working such long hours and feel so stressed he should get his body into balance. I’m trying to get him to yoga, too, but you know, he
is
a man.”

“I’ve tried vitamins,” Stella piped up.

Samantha’s forehead creased. “Really?”

Stella’s eyes gleamed excitedly. “They were the size and smell of a horse’s asshole. I practically couldn’t swallow them. Made the inside of my mouth smell like a barn. Now, what if I wanted to kiss a man? He wouldn’t want to come near me, my mouth smelling like manure.”

Samantha’s mouth dropped open a little.

“It’s true!” Stella looked at me. “Tell her, Summer. Tell her about the men that kiss me.”

“There are lots of them,” I said. Stella liked to kiss men on TV, crawling up to the screen and suffering through a few moments of static to get her mouth close to their faces.

“Chris takes vitamin E, vitamin A, and vitamin C,” Samantha said. This person she’d become. “And then he takes a multi. I think it’s really
been working for him. I take them, too, of course. And calcium. Do you take calcium, Stell?”

“What were the things I took, Summer?” Stella asked. “The asshole pills? It was a vitamin that wasn’t a letter.”

“Well, I mean, you take lots of vitamins,” I explained, searchingly. “You’re supposed to. I think you’re thinking of the herbs.”

“That was right around when I did that walk for breast cancer,” Stella said. She glanced at me, sheepish. “Or, well,
started
that walk for breast cancer. There were too many people to finish. I thought it would be more like…oh, I don’t know. A
parade.
Everyone was walking so damn fast! I would think you’d want everyone to
look
at you, not just whiz right by.”

The cuckoo clock in the dining room chimed out the hour. The truth about the breast cancer walk was that Stella had been in terrible pain that day. She’d stood at the start, all ready to walk, but then went pale and grabbed my hand. “Honey,” was all she needed to say. We moved to the sidelines fast. Children stared at us. Other people looked away. Shortly after that, the doctors put her on a low dose of morphine.

Samantha ran her hand through her hair. “I brought you a present, Stell.” She pulled out a fat romance novel. There was a woman on the cover, her breasts tumbling out of her corset. She had windswept hair and a troubled I-have-to-make-a-huge-life-or-death-decision-about-my-kingdom expression. “You used to love this series, remember?”

“She’s not reading that much,” I butted in.

Samantha looked at me sharply. “Well, why not? It’s probably good for her.”

“It’s true, I’m not reading much,” Stella admitted. “TV is far more interesting these days. My favorite show is
Road Rules.
”

Samantha wrinkled her nose. “Really?”

“Oh, it’s so good,” Stella said. “We’ll have to watch it later—it’s so deliciously nasty. It’s just the kind of show you’d like.”

One of Samantha’s eyebrows shot up. “I don’t
think
so.”

Stella pursed her lips. “Well. Maybe not anymore.”

There was a catch in her voice. Samantha looked startled, as though she’d been slapped. My gaze ping-ponged from Stella to Samantha, not
sure what would happen next but hoping, maybe, for an altercation. But Samantha just stared down at her purse, running her fingers along its brass grommets.

According to Stella, Samantha left Cobalt when she turned eighteen. Just disappeared. Stella had a lot of excuses for it.
She
was like that when she was young, after all—
she
never played by the rules. Then, during the time my father was suffering through the worst of his depression, Samantha called Stella out of the blue. She was working as a legal secretary, she said. She’d just gotten married on a cruise ship to a man named Chris; he developed townhouses in central Pennsylvania.

I asked Stella if she’d seen Samantha since she took off, and Stella shrugged and said Samantha had only come back once to retrieve her savings bonds from the safe-deposit box and haul away the rosewood chest that had belonged to her parents. When she visited, she dropped off a few wedding photos, and after enough pestering, Stella finally showed them to me. I was stunned to discover that all of Chris’s family had attended the wedding ceremony, boarding the cruise ship for the afternoon when it docked in Miami. Stella slowly pointed out each family member, saying both very little and so very much. “Here’s his mother, his father, his grandmother, his great-aunt,” she recited. She squinted viciously at the great-aunt. “Good Lord. What idiot wears
black
to a wedding at sea?”

“Do you want something to eat?” I asked Samantha, heading toward the kitchen. “A sandwich? A soda?”

“Oh, goodness, Chris forbids me to drink soda,” Samantha said quickly, desperate to break the conversational void. “Do you have any fruit?”

“We have grape jelly.”

“I want a glass of wine,” Stella called from the living room.

Samantha ran her hands over the crystal candy dish, which had a fine layer of dust on its bumpy edges. “I don’t really drink wine, either,” she said quietly. “It gives you wrinkles.”

“Sweetie, you’re so pretty, you have so many years until you get wrinkles,” Stella called out. “Summer, get us wine, okay?”

“We don’t have any.”

“Break out that bottle on the top of the fridge.”

I walked back into the living room. “You can’t have wine. You can have an iron pill. That’s it.”

Stella rolled her eyes. “I’ll sip. Slowly. Give me a thimbleful.”

I turned back for the kitchen. There was the same peeling alphabet wallpaper that had been here when I visited for my grandmother’s funeral. The same lopsided cabinets, an even bigger accumulation of thermometers and bags of charcoal and garage-sale crap on the back porch. There was indeed a dust-covered bottle of wine on top of the fridge. I pulled it down and searched the silverware drawer for a corkscrew. Samantha hovered near the kitchen table, pulling her cell phone’s antenna in and out. I could hear Stella grunting in the other room, and hoped she wasn’t trying to attempt to come in here. It always took a huge effort for her to move from room to room. “Are you okay?” I called for her.

“I’m fine, fine,” she said.

“We’ll be there in a second.”

This morning Stella had been so excited Samantha was coming. Samantha had finally carved out a niche in her busy schedule to see us! How fortuitous that she had a conference in Ohio, and that the drive took her right by Cobalt! “I hope she remembers how to get here,” Stella said, worried. “Do you think she’ll remember to look for the McDonald’s off the interstate? The one with the really high golden arches?”

I helped her put on makeup. She pulled on her gloves and slid her feet into her green high heels and dug out a set of blue plastic dumbbells to keep on her lap, perhaps to make Samantha think she’d just been working out. And then, after she was ready, I found her on the living room floor, clutching her side. “Again?” I asked.

“Again,” she said.

She insisted that she didn’t want to take something that would completely knock her out, so I suggested she take a bath to relax. I filled up the tub with bubble bath, laid out her red and black robe, and spritzed Charlie perfume, her favorite, around the bathroom. She told me that when she was younger, she used to take bubble baths all the time, with
Skip perched on the toilet admiring her. She would smoke cigarettes, he would drink scotch, and sometimes he would climb into the tub with her. “Those were the good years,” she sighed.