Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance, page 24
“Well, I shouldn’t have been in the car,” I said. “If I hadn’t been so in love with you, if I had just given her the notebook and let her go to school, she’d be here with you right now.”
Billy was quiet. “You were in love with me?”
“Of course I was in love with you. You were my older sister’s handsome boyfriend. I had no choice.”
He laughed a little. “Do you still … love me?”
“Does it even matter? You’re becoming a priest.”
“It matters a lot,” he said. “It matters to me.”
“Why?” I asked. I was determined to make him say it.
“Because I love you.”
It was something I had been waiting to hear my whole life, and even as he said it, it didn’t sound possible. Billy Barnes, your boyfriend. Billy Barnes, the boy who once sucked on your tits. He loved me.
“Then why are you becoming a priest?”
“Because it’s the only thing that feels possible for me,” he said. “I can’t explain it any other way.”
I stared out at the water.
“You were just a kid, Sally,” he said. “You know that, right? You’re not to blame.”
It was nice of him to say. But I didn’t want to be a kid. Not when I was with him. So I took the cigarette from his hands.
“If you’re not going to smoke this,” I said, “then I will.”
I put the cigarette in my mouth.
“You’re really going to steal my second-to-last cigarette?”
“It doesn’t have to be your second-to-last cigarette, if you don’t want it to be.”
He nodded. Billy, he would have given me anything, I knew. He would have given me his skin if I were cold. If I asked for it. But he couldn’t ever give me the one thing I wanted, which was him.
“Do you have a lighter?” I asked.
Billy leaned in close to light it up for me, and then he stopped. Pulled the stick out of my mouth, turned it around, and put it back in.
“Can’t smoke it out the ass, Holt,” he said.
“Oh,” I said.
We started laughing. I laughed so hard, in that hysterical way that Mom always laughed when she was most sad. I couldn’t catch my breath.
“Whoa,” he said. “You okay?”
He put his hand on my chest. Pressed his palm over my heart like he was already a priest, healing me. I closed my eyes.
“This isn’t an easy decision,” he said. “I do want you, you know.”
“I know.”
“I think about you a lot,” he said. “I mean, all of the time.”
I put my hand on his chest. On his nice shirt. The only one he had, I guess, because he wore it nearly every day.
“What do you think about?” I asked.
“I think about what it would feel like to kiss you,” he said.
“You should try it,” I said.
Then, he leaned in to kiss me and I know I don’t have to describe what it’s like to kiss Billy Barnes. I know you know what it’s like to feel him inside your mouth, searching for something with his tongue. But he tasted smokier than I had imagined. A little metallic. After, I looked into his eyes and said, “Hello,” and he laughed. A strangely formal greeting at this late stage. But it was nice.
“Hello,” he said. “Hello, Sally.”
We stayed like that for a while. I laid in the nook of his arm the way girls always do in movies. I looked up at the moon. But maybe you know all this already. Maybe you were there, watching us from Jan’s big window.
Do you remember that photograph of Mom on our kitchen wall? It’s Mom’s favorite photograph of herself, she told me one night at the end of summer.
In it she is twenty-five, young and sexy—she is Michelle Pfeiffer; her thin legs crossed over each other, her blond hair long and straight, her dress white. It is summertime. She is laughing about something the photographer must have said. The photographer was Dad, Mom explained—a photo he took before they were engaged. Before she knew they would get married and have two children together. Before she knew what it would feel like to walk away from her daughter’s grave. In the photo, all this woman knows is that she is a sixth-grade teacher who puts on plays for her students and she dates a handsome man in the National Guard who takes her dancing after work. And when she’s too tired from work, she doesn’t wash her hair and just wears a wig.
“He couldn’t tell the difference between the wig and my real hair,” Mom said.
“I bet Jan would be able to tell,” I said.
“Maybe,” Mom said. “But I’m telling you, your father had no idea when he came to my apartment on our first date. And we sat right next to each other, playing piano.”
“You and Dad played the piano on your first date?”
“Yeah, why?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Just surprising, is all.”
I tried to imagine Billy and me playing the piano together. Something like this would never happen, I knew. We were not piano players. I had told Billy I thought concerts and plays were a waste of money, but I wished I didn’t, because I wanted to be someone who went to plays and concerts with Billy. I wanted to wear my beautiful black peacoat in the closet, but it felt too extravagant for anything we did. Even on our last night together, when we could have gone anywhere, Billy and I had sat in his childhood bedroom, which looked very much like a childhood bedroom.
“Are you sure your parents are gone?” I had asked.
“Yes, trust me. They’re out of town,” he had assured me. “Thank God for Disney World.”
“Yes. That’s what I say every day when I wake up,” I said, and he laughed so hard, he squirted water out his nose.
“Fuck,” he said. “Give me some warning, Sally. That burns.”
“I can’t believe they still go, even without kids?”
“They say it’s better without kids,” he said. “I don’t know. Don’t ask me. I think they get tanked at Epcot.”
I had never been to Billy’s house before. Had you? I had never heard you talk about it. Maybe because it was unremarkable—just a regular house, like ours, with pictures on the wall. Pictures of Billy at Disney World. Pictures of Billy in California. Billy through the years. It surprised me to see how young he looked in some of the photos from high school. He had seemed so old to me then—so big. Such a hero. But that whole time we knew him, what he’d really been was a boy. He had acne along his jawline. He had neon blue walls. A plaid bedspread. Basketball trophies studding his desk. I ran my hand over his bedspread, trying to feel all the years that Billy slept here.
“It was always kind of a fantasy of mine to have a girl up here,” he said.
“Oh yeah?” I asked.
In Billy’s fantasy, the one he had over and over again as a teenager, he comes home from basketball practice to find a girl waiting for him in his room. She is just standing there in the dark, and when he closes the door, she starts to slowly undress. He watches her until she is entirely naked …
“Sally,” Mom said in the kitchen, “are you even listening to me?”
I moved away from Mom and went to sit on top of the kitchen counter, like if I got farther away, I could hide myself from Mom. From Jan. I looked at the photo of her on the wall instead. I looked to it for proof of something, but I was not sure what. I was always looking to the past as evidence of something. Always looking to Mom to learn something, because Mom had secret ways of making people love her. I’m not sure what it was, but I think it’s how she smiled before she said anything—that was how she did it. She reacted to what she said before she even said it.
“Are you having sex? Jan—”
“Mom,” I said. “Stop. If you say Jan one more time, I’m going to lose it.”
“I’m just asking. I’m your mother. If you’re having sex, I should know. Jan says—”
“Who cares what Jan says? Jan is crazy and so are you!”
Mom looked down at the table. I hurt her. Or I embarrassed her. She was ashamed of herself. She was ashamed of me. I no longer understood boundaries. This was what your death did to me. It made life feel like death, love feel like hate.
I hated Mom. I loved Mom.
I waited for Mom to speak. I was desperate for her to speak. She didn’t speak. We swallowed at unnecessary moments. She took a sip of tea. RELAX NOW.
“Jan knows that I’m not wearing my mother’s necklace anymore,” Mom said. She draped her hand across her neck. “I mean, how could she possibly know that?”
“Your neck is bare,” I said.
Mom picked up her tea.
“She says my mother has forgiven me for taking it off. Which is nice to know. It was just so ugly, silver and gold hearts. I just couldn’t wear it anymore, Sally.”
And it really was starting to seem as if Jan knew everything. She knew I was not taking my vitamins. She knew my thyroid was slow. She knew I was still not eating, not anything besides string cheese and waffles and pretzels and soda. She was worried about me: I was listening to my music too loudly in the car, staying up too late at night, having sex with some boy I shouldn’t be having sex with, and how did she possibly know all of these things about me?
Why would you be haunting some random lawyer named Jan, and not me?
“Jan’s a fraud,” I said to Mom. “Women like that used to be dragged through the streets. They used to be executed.”
“Sally!” Mom said. “That’s a terrible thing to say.”
“Jan’s a terrible person,” I said. “Only a terrible person could do what she does.”
Mom stood up. Mom wasn’t in the mood for tea anymore. Mom wanted to sleep.
“Have some faith,” she said.
I did have faith. I had so much faith. I had stood there in the middle of Billy’s bedroom, completely naked, and I waited for just a moment before I kissed him. I waited, to see if you might finally show your face, to see if you would swing open Billy’s door and see me reaching out for your boyfriend and say, Slut. What are you doing with my boyfriend? I would have understood, you know. I would have let you grab my hair. I would have let you drag me back to your grave. Down there, I would have lit a candle and told you things about life—about your boyfriend—that you wouldn’t believe.
That was my fantasy.
But you didn’t come. So I kissed Billy and he kissed me back. He put his hands through my hair and he spread my legs with his hand and it all felt so good when he put himself inside of me. Please, come inside of me, I begged him, and he did.
“Oh, Sally,” he said.
After, in the morning, I had watched him smoke his last cigarette out his bedroom window. I had watched him pack his bag. But then he said, “Goodbye, Sally,” with such a finality, such a seriousness, I felt like he was departing for the moon.
And now I was here, at the kitchen table, with Mom. How did I end up here? I wanted to ask Mom. I wanted to tell Mom about what happened with Billy and how much I had always loved him. I wanted her to know me. I wanted to cry into her chest the way I used to when I stubbed a toe. Mom used to know about every single one of our cuts. Imagine that? Mom used to put Band-Aids on our fingers and IcyHot on our backs and stroke our hair and hum songs until we fell asleep.
But I said, “Good night,” and Mom said, “Good night.”
Mom kissed me on the forehead and went up to her room. I waited for her door to close. For the house to settle. Then, I grabbed my keys, and I went to Jan’s.
* * *
I really liked driving. Especially at night, when the sky and the ocean all looked like the same thing. As I got closer to Watch Hill, the houses started to look like the sea, too. Most of them were quaint-looking houses, all built so long ago.
But then there was Jan’s modern monstrosity. A geometric prison, spread along the ocean. I parked in front of the FOR SALE sign that now had an X over it.
I got out of the car and could smell it right away: the dead seal, somewhere in the distance. I walked to Jan’s front door. I didn’t even hesitate. I felt very aware of my feet, of myself moving toward something.
Knocking seemed like the right thing to do. The door was solid. An expensive door. One that obviously didn’t come with the house. It must have been special ordered by Jan. You couldn’t break that door down with three axes. Nothing, except maybe a ghost, could get through that wood.
“Hello,” Jan said.
I knew it was Jan because of the hair. It was a blond helmet. Two pearl earrings underneath. She looked like the women at school who lectured us on how there were nine teaspoons of sugar in a can of Coke. She looked like Mom, once upon a time, and maybe this is why Mom trusted her. It was like consulting her former self.
“Hi,” I said.
I knew I was supposed to introduce myself, but I didn’t. I stood in the doorway, and I waited for her to extract the truth, because this was Jan; she already knew everything about me. I wanted her to prove it, to remark on the familiarity of my arms, the malnutrition of my face, to finger my thyroid and check for nodules and say, Sweet girl, please! Why did you sleep with your sister’s boyfriend? I wanted her to put an arm around me, to usher me into the bright light of her house, where we would summon you.
“Can I help you?” Jan said.
“Yes,” I said.
In the silence that followed, Jan laughed a little, but a worried kind of laugh, the kind I did when Peter used to put my hand over the crotch of his jeans. I laughed because it felt like the only alternative.
“Okay, how can I help you?” Jan asked.
“I’m here to see Kathy,” I said.
Jan did not even twitch. “I’m afraid you have the wrong house,” she said. “There’s no Kathy here.”
Still, I waited. For what? For anything. For her to comment on the sharp line of eyebrows that I shared with you, to lean in and trace them with her finger and say, “Wow, you two have the same eyebrows.” Because we did.
But Jan began to close the door, backing away so that only her face and shoulder were visible. I pushed the door open and shouted “Kathy!” like a crazy person. It was amazing how quickly this made me feel like a crazy person. In here, in Jan’s foyer, I was nobody I knew. And how was this even possible?
“Excuse me!” Jan said.
Her voice was loud and aggressive, but her body language was reluctant. She moved farther away from me as I called for you. Jan looked up the stairs, as though somebody should be coming to help her, but nobody did. Jan was not the type to push or shove, I could tell by the pearls laced around her neck. This was my only advantage.
“Kathy!” I shouted. “Where are you?”
I walked into the kitchen. There was a wooden table, with the leftover remains of a big dinner. Chicken thighs and drumsticks. A blue decorative vase in the foyer. And the smell of it all—the woody newness. It was not a dark, spooky house. There were no incense or candles or anything else you’d think one would need to contact the dead. It was so big and open, every room was every room. The kitchen was the living room was the foyer, lit up with strong overhead fluorescent lighting, like the kind we had at school, and I wondered if this was why you came. For the good lighting. For the pool. For the air-conditioning. For the mother who keeps her pearls on all through dinner. Maybe life was just better here.
“Please,” Jan said. “What are you doing?”
I was waiting for something to happen. For the clock to fall off the wall. For the blue vase on the table to burst. For the chandelier to come crashing around my head like a wave. I was waiting for my nails to thicken, for my hair to grow and snake down my back like yours. For Billy to call my phone and say, “I’m sorry. I’ve changed my mind. I love you.” But nothing happened—nothing miraculous ever happened—so I picked up the blue vase and I threw it to the floor and we watched in shock as the blue pieces spread like water.
The weirdest part was that Jan didn’t even get angry. She said, “Please, my family is sleeping.” She stared at me pleadingly, like she was the victim of my sudden appearance, which, I guess, she was. It is late, Jan’s eyes were saying. Let me go to bed. And why wasn’t Jan angry? Did Jan think I was a ghost? Is that why she wasn’t calling the police? Did she think I was you?
“I’m not a ghost,” I said. I felt a sudden and desperate need to make her understand this. “I’m alive!”
“I know, I can see that you’re alive, sweetheart,” Jan said, and put her arms around me.
And this is what I liked about Jan: She didn’t even hesitate. Jan was a good mother, I could tell. She held me firmly to her chest, like I was one of her daughters, and it was there where I could finally cry.
THE WEATHER REPORT
Hurricane Kathy. No matter how many times the weatherman says it, it doesn’t sound right. A Kathy does not flood canals. A Kathy does not, would not, flip over a tractor-trailer on 95. It’s like a Mildred shooting up a convenience store. An Edith severing heads. An Adelaide snorting coke. It’s a joke. That’s what it still feels like, like the violence of it all is just a joke.
And who is pulling this joke on me?
This is a question my therapist likes to ask.
“I don’t know,” I say.
Sometimes, it feels like Mom. Mom wants to keep me trapped in your death. As if your death is a birthday cake we all must eat until we die. But Mom hasn’t mentioned the hurricane or your name once since the storm formed south of the Caribbean days ago.
“I don’t know what I know anymore,” I say.
The therapist nods.
“That’s good. All we can ever know is that we know nothing,” the therapist says. “Do you know who said that?”
Billy? A long time ago, Billy once said that.
“Socrates,” she says. “Socrates said that.”
My therapist is always quoting important people of antiquity during our session, people like Ovid and Horace, and this doesn’t bother me as much as you might think. I like knowing that my problems exist within a large and respected tradition of problems. That ever since the beginning of civilization, humans have been very upset.
