What We Both Know, page 16
The biggest dream of all is the one in which I had reason to envy Pauline, reasons to fantasize about us swapping places. I am the only one who has ever belonged to him, been kept safe under his protection. I wore a halo of protection, sat back and watched him harm the others.
I remember things one way and then I return and things are different. Scenery evaporating into the air like it’s been released by my opening it up to examine. So long as I don’t interfere everything remains pristine. Otherwise, I can twist and sicken. For example, all of a sudden one day I took offence to Baby having worn a yellow suit to visit Pauline when she was at her most unwell. It was as if he’d been trying to antagonize her. I revisit and it looks clownish, he’s laughing. His truck is bigger and it makes a racket when he pulls into the driveway. Though I specifically remember taking a liking to it when he’d arrived. I’d felt it was in line with him being different. He could never just be quiet and do things normally, and the familiarity of this behaviour—the inability to fade into the background—comforted me. And so this change in feeling upon recollection was a shade away from a change in memory: assigning a sinister intention. Could I remember anything? Any one thing about him, truthfully. Had he acted at all throughout my upbringing? Surely he could have just as easily stayed perfectly still, in one room in the house, for the extent of my childhood. Surely he could have been—could be, still—a statue. I could have imagined everything else. But not with Pauline. Every moment between Baby and Pauline lives somewhere inside of me, replays in my mind.
* * *
—
I AM NEARLY FINISHED the manuscript. It’s not so bad. At least parts of it. It is when I am not with Baby that I’m able to see him with some objectivity. The words come faster, but I worry they are more critical.
I return to the new empty page. It feels as though it belongs to Baby, as if it is already bound in his memoir, under his big bold name on the front cover. I am to write a scene somewhere in his late forties, when he is established but rising. I feel his scrutiny each time I move to begin the passage. Funnily, I look behind me. All alone, I dare to stray. At the top, I type, “by Hillary Greene.” Above it, a space for a title. But what? To enter one feels a crime. Sure, I have written before. But only ever played at it. And what if I were to write something great? Something of mine. I type a letter A. Well, a start. It is nothing, the idea. At least not yet. But something has happened. A small spark. Now I am pleased, and I put off the work on the memoir, and I go downstairs.
* * *
—
WE HAVE LUNCH TOGETHER and Catherine asks me to read her some of what I’ve written. She seems not to notice the writing itself, asks questions only about the content. She’ll say, “That’s a nice moment, with your mother,” or, “That sounds just like him,” or, “Would Pauline want that in there?”
I feel frustrated with her, as if I’d been expecting praise or recognition of some linguistic mastery. I am beginning to deflate insofar as Pauline’s story is concerned. It’s possible these ways I’ve imagined I am doing her a great favour I am really just digging around in her past. Pauline was not a writer; she may not have felt the same redemption through text. Catherine is right: Would Pauline want any of it in there?
When we were young, our mother was always getting involved in our personal affairs. She would storm into our school and negotiate our report cards, intimidate the awards committee. She once told a boy on the playground who had all of Pauline’s hair clenched in his hand that she would kill him if he did not let go. Pauline’s face went a deep shade of red, and she whispered something to the boy. As if to punish my mother, they became good friends.
I consider taking it all out, telling Baby’s story and his story alone. No word about what he’s done to anyone else.
When we finish with the dishes and they’re set to dry slotted neatly between the wires of the rack, Catherine asks if I’d like to come for the dogs’ midday walk.
“Although I guess you’ve got more work to do,” she says.
“No,” I say. “I could take a break.”
We divide the dogs between us, one with me and two with her.
“Actually,” I say, looking forward into the wind, “I thought of something today.”
She sniffles, uses the back of her mitten to push at the tip of her nose. I take this as a cue to continue.
“A book, I think.”
“What is it called?”
“I don’t know yet. A something. I know it starts with A.”
“A something,” she says. “Now that’s it,” and we laugh.
* * *
—
I KNOW THAT WHEN we get to the place where the dog was hit, the body will not be there. I think that I do not believe any of the events that happened that day. And so of course there is no body. Of course there is not a mark on my jacket. I invent many things. Surely I embellish stories. The moments with Pauline, for example. Did Catherine not like that I wrote them in because I exaggerated them? She was around for some of it, too. She knew what was going on. She, too, did nothing.
Together we walk the same route I took with the dogs.
We pass irregularities on the other side of the road in the snow and I think I see parts of an animal emerging from the surface, but I do not. Then, I do. There is blood in the snow in a pattern of splotches. The body, however, is not there. The presence of the blood makes the dog feel more alive to me than before. Not as alive as when it was living, but more alive than in my memory of its death. It confronts me with the closeness of the event. As time goes on, the closeness of the event and of this present moment will become greater, until they have merged into one memory, the day of and the day after. Each moment is as far as these events will ever be, more time layering over top and compressing time into a flat straight line.
I wait for Catherine to go up ahead, from where I can hear her chattering happily to the dogs. With the leash looped around my wrist I take handfuls of the bloody snow and put them in the pockets of the camping jacket I borrowed from Catherine. I pack it in until they are full, and wet spots grow at the bottom of the overstuffed pockets. Once the snow melts out, the blood will stay.
The pockets are too full to be fastened shut with their snaps so I tuck the edges of the flaps around the snow and put my cold wet hands inside of my sleeves and quicken my pace to catch up with Catherine and the other two dogs.
* * *
—
WHEN WE GET BACK the snow has melted through my pockets, left wet streaks down the front of my coat. Catherine runs her fingers through her hair, pulling clumps of snow and ice. She hangs up her coat and it drips small puddles onto the floor in the entranceway, eases into the warmth of the living room.
The door leading to the basement is ajar, and through the gap I can hear the sound of multiple chewing mouths. I tap my nails on the wood and downstairs the dogs stir.
They accept me into their territory, contrary to my anticipation that they might now act aggressively in my presence, without Catherine. All three stop eating when I reach the bottom of the staircase. In a state of fear I surprise myself by saying, “I am sorry,” to Chuck. He rises on his legs, comes to smell something familiar about my coat.
“Sorry,” I say, and I pat his head. He digs his snout into the fabric of the camping jacket, against the bulging wet pockets. The majority of what is in them has not yet melted, but enough has that the material of the pocket is soaked and dripping. There is a faint hormonal smell. The dog fishes around with his nose until he discovers the opening of one of the pockets, and then he eats the contents. I open the other for him, and he eats out of it too. Then I lay down flat on my back and he comes and rests his body against my torso and sniffs at my face and I move his head away and he comes back and sniffs again, and we do this over and over. The other two dogs come over and lie on my other side, and all of us fall asleep.
* * *
—
THE SMELL OF THE basement, the smell of the dogs, and their food. Catherine has her hand on the side of my face and is holding my phone.
“I didn’t mean to look,” she’s saying, “but I saw that it’s your mother calling, and I thought you might want me to tell you.”
The pot lights in the ceiling are a painful yellow, and one of my eyes feels sealed shut. I’ve lost track of the time, and down with the artificial lighting it’s impossible to tell how long I was asleep.
Catherine is quick to leave the basement, to give me privacy. In part I wish she would stay, referee somehow. If my mother knew where I was she would drive down and take me out herself.
“We’ve worked out a good day-to-day,” I say, about Baby. “Sometimes he’s there, sometimes he’s not.”
“Must be better when he’s not,” she says, and laughs.
“In a way.”
When I tell my mother the anecdote about the bugs, I expect that we will laugh together. Her voice on the line is a relief, a brief opening of lightness. So, I explain the events. The white powder, the blow dryer. What worse surprise than to find something living among the possessions of a dead sister? Well, okay, it’s not so funny. Maybe it’s pity I wanted. But it was only meant to be a segue. See, I knew eventually I’d have to bring up what I know.
“It might just not be the right time,” says my mother. “You know, while they’re there.” The bugs, she means. She worries I will bring them with me, that they will infiltrate her house and reproduce. How foolish I feel for having assumed I was the one doing her a favour by visiting for the holidays.
“They’re not,” I say. “Really, I haven’t woken up with another bite.”
The feeling of the phone call is off now, seems not to invite any sort of closeness. Instead, I invite her to the award ceremony. How stupid. What interest would she have? She’ll let me know, she says.
Really I’d been wanting to confront my mother’s husband. It wouldn’t have done any good, anyway. It’s as if I expect they’ll congratulate me for putting all of the pieces together. As if I had been clever, rather than Baby destructive.
Baby once told me that the more his work is edited, the less it feels like his—sometimes even someone else’s book entirely. “I’m closer to having written the last book I read,” he said. So, maybe Pauline didn’t belong to the first husband anymore. Maybe it was too painful for him to see her raised by Baby, and somewhere in his mind (or in his heart) he had had to sever something very early on.
Anyway, does the first husband even know? He’d have had to consent to the adoption, no? Perhaps there was more going on. Though I must admit since discovering the truth I’ve started to see so much of Pauline in him, when I look at the photos in my mother’s old albums. I almost feel as though I love him. I remember the last time I saw him and I think, Ah, just like Pauline.
* * *
—
I HANG UP. I imagine the nurse speaking ill of me, finding small pieces of evidence around the house that I have been a poor caregiver, an even worse daughter. I still have not called home to Baby. And he hasn’t called me. I worry I may even miss him. Not him, perhaps, but the house, and our routines. My relationship to Baby feels inaccessible, as if I am very far away, in time and location. Like he is a character in a book written long before I was born. Baby’s life before me feels like one very long day, with one overarching mood. It seems there was purpose to every action, no stakes, that he would inevitably end up here, having daughters, a house, having and losing a wife.
We have tried to contact the dog’s owner, who left a relative’s number in case of emergency. She is in Rome, the relative tells us, but does not know how to get in contact with her, and does not know when she will return. Without the direct consequence of my action I feel I cannot escape it. I worry I will live the rest of my life in waiting for the woman to punish me with her immense grief. But, she goes for months at a time. She drops off the animal and rarely checks in. It is Catherine who I have wronged.
The least that I can do is find out exactly to what degree I have misbehaved. I look up the internet forums on animal control, on caring for pets, on untraceable killing of living things. A veterinarian in Minnesota says that the kindest way to deal with an injured dog is to shoot it between the eyes with a large-caliber gun, 9mm, point blank. The next best way, she says, is to feed the dog pills, like benzos. When it’s out, she says to slit the throat to the bone and let the dog bleed out. Another user suggests the most humane thing is to sell one’s personal items in order to pay for humane euthanasia. So, I erred. That’s that.
* * *
—
CATHERINE HAS ARRANGED a display in the living room. She is wearing a nice but casual dress: black, cotton, with braided straps over her shoulders. I am surprised by her upper body, her bare legs, which have been so buried under her winter wear. There is soft classical music playing on the radio and it is making me emotional, reminding me of Pauline’s funeral service. None of it was personal to her, that’s what got to me the most, I think. Now it’s a generic ceremony that will forever hit me where it hurts. The living room is reflected in the blacked-out windows. Beyond the blurry reflected furniture, wallpaper, our bodies, is complete darkness. Somewhere out there is the road home.
“Would you like to share any words,” says Catherine. On the small side table is a photograph of the dog, its curled-up leash, and a toy; presumably its favourite.
“Um,” I say. My face feels hot. I am at a loss for what to do. In the photo, the dog has its mouth open, as if grinning.
“You were a noble character,” she says, looking at the photograph. “You held your head up high, and you knew right from wrong.”
“I agree and I, well…” I look at Catherine, then at the floor. “I think the thing that, well, harmed you, is the same thing that made you so brave. You never hesitated.”
What I said was wrong, it was not true, and it wasn’t beautiful like what Catherine had said. I never learned how to be like that, is the thing. To just say something and mean it. I worry that on one level Catherine hates me, thinks I am evil. Knows I am evil. I feel completely transparent in the room, completely alone, and then Catherine puts one arm around my shoulders, and kisses me.
* * *
—
MORNING. I DON’T HAVE a thing to say on the drive over. How could I? Not an hour ago the sun yellowed the bedroom walls, the linens, it eased us out of one state and into another, more conscious of each other’s bodies. I realized I’d been sleeping with her hand flat over my belly, which seemed to pool with its own weight toward the bed; self-consciously I rolled over onto my back, and her hand found its way downward. I’d retired from trying to feel that certain feeling, and all of a sudden there it was. My body cinching at the pelvis, then falling away from itself. In that certain way I feel I must love her. But there are many ways to feel, many ways to be.
We pull to one side of the road that separates the cemetery. Pauline’s plot is two rows back, sits proudly in front of an oak tree. Often a flower from another site will blow over to hers, and no harm in letting it stay. The shame is that I don’t bring them myself. It’s just I feel she’d laugh at me.
“Do you think she’d want me to wait in the car?”
“What?” I say. “No.” I want to reach out and touch her, but I don’t.
“It’s just I was always around, getting in the way.”
“She’d want you,” I say, but I am unsure of the truth of it.
“I had this sense that every minute I spent with your dad I was keeping him from you two. I imagined I was some sort of witch.”
“Oh,” I say. “I always felt he was more yours than ours.”
She thinks, nods. “He was sometimes. Or, he wasn’t really anybody’s, is what I mean. It was whoever was in his line of sight at the time.”
Now he is mine, I think. Like a taxidermy animal.
“She’d want you,” I say.
* * *
—
CATHERINE GETS OUT FIRST, but doesn’t know where to go. She is holding herself with a certain reverence toward the place. I imagine if I were to crack a joke, she would be put off. This is the thing about others: they always seem to know what to do. In my hands I have the manuscript, well, part of it. I’ve printed the manuscript, stapled it, then sealed it in a manila envelope. It was Catherine who suggested the envelope, as if I am sending a letter. I didn’t tell her what is in the envelope, that it is an apology to Baby for telling his true story, and to Pauline for not doing it sooner.
You see, acting from a place of revenge had been changing my posture. I had begun to crawl like a rat, I imagine my face must have sat in a sneer when I let it relax. The symptoms of this evil thinking had been pangs: Pauline, Catherine, my mother. I’d tried to convince myself the truth was the truth, told or not. That their secrets belonged to them. That there was wisdom in being dormant, in remaining small, in sacrificing my person. I have long wanted to strip myself of my smallness, but worried to act big in a small world would be a crime. I hold precious objects in my hands, must keep constant watch over them. I had always imagined that chaos was beneath a great precipice, that I would have a thought, for example, Now I will become chaotic. I understand the silence of destructive things. And so I must meddle, must enter back into the world from which I came.
Keeping Pauline’s secrets has been a long slow act of violence against her. I went so far as to invade her, and did double the harm by letting things be. I would sneak into her bedroom and read her secret writings, and feel pity for myself for my absence in her stories. They were great adventurous stories of her and Baby, a friendship unlike any other. In this vague, juvenile world, they were ageless, without any declared relation, alone in a world that they would conquer again and again. As if, if it were just them, alone with the unspeakable behaviours, things would be alright. As if it had been the real world and its intrusive morality that presented the problem. Without a name for it, the relationship could just be. For this reason I felt my interference would only pull us further apart. How could I be her saviour when I wasn’t even a character in her story?
