But all of this drama had always existed and occurred outside of our own small family. It didn’t belong to
us
. While Frankie’s sisters and their husbands carried on like squabbling children, we watched (at least the girls and I watched) like spectators at a dangerous circus. This year, I feared that we might not have the same immunity. I had ruined any chance of that.
Frankie’s sisters were distraught over the assassination. As each of them entered the house followed by their respective husbands and gaggles of children, they clung to me, as though we had lost a family member. Many of them were dressed in black. As the first Catholic president, JFK was right up there with Jesus for the Valentine girls. And as a Boston boy, he was even bigger than Elvis. When he’d been elected, they swooned. And when he died, they grieved.
Perhaps it was out of respect for the loss of our president that Frankie’s sisters and their husbands, even the children, didn’t engage in the same rambunctious display I was accustomed to. Of course they still smoked and cussed and drank. Frankie and the other men talked about Jack Ruby, and the women talked about Joann Graff, the latest victim of the Boston Strangler. She’d been killed the day after the assassination in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Frankie’s sisters were terrified by the murders, and this one, on the heels of JFK’s assassination, really rattled them. Occasionally the men would interject, assuring their wives that the Strangler wouldn’t have anything to do with them. His victims were all either old ladies or young coeds, though this did little to appease them.
I tried to change the subject from all this grim business, attempting to engage Maria in a conversation about her new house in Lowell, but that fell flat as quickly as her husband interrupted.
“He’s looking for girls like Theresa,” he said knowingly, pointing across the table at Theresa, the only sister still without a husband. “I hope you girls got a deadbolt on your door.”
The other sisters nodded in agreement.
Theresa looked flustered. Suddenly I wished we could get back to talking about Oswald and Ruby. That conversation seemed light and breezy in comparison to this.
Finally, while all the other sisters were occupied with their husbands, who (as predicted) had had too much to drink and were starting to bicker, and their children, who, fueled by pumpkin pie and too many pilfered mints from the candy bowl, were beginning to wreak havoc on our home, Theresa offered to lend a hand in the kitchen, and I was grateful for both her help and her company. Frankie, perhaps in an effort to keep his mouth shut, had ignored me throughout the meal, speaking to me only when the gravy boat ran dry and when we needed to grab another jar of my bread-and-butter pickles from the basement. Thankfully, everyone but Theresa disappeared into the living room. The sisters wanted to watch
The Arthur Godfrey Thanksgiving Special
on the TV, but the men insisted on the Detroit–Green Bay game. And as they bickered, the children slipped outside to jump in the rotting pile of leaves we still hadn’t managed to bag up in the backyard.
“How are you?” I asked Theresa as I cleared the table and started to scrape the leftover bones and food into the trash. I had seen her only a couple of times since she came to stay with us that summer, which seemed a zillion years ago now. “How is it living in the city?”
“Okay,” she said. I’d heard that she’d started seeing a new boy, somebody she met at church, but that he too had dropped her like a hot potato (though this time it was before he’d put a ring on her finger and gotten her hopes up). “I get lonely,” she said.
It had been a big scandal, her leaving home and moving into an apartment with her friend. Two spinsters (at twenty-five!) living together. It had made me want to laugh and then cry when Frankie started speculating whether there was something “fishy” going on between them. But what I’d really felt was envy. When I thought about her living on her own, I couldn’t help but picture how things might have been if I’d met Eva first—if she and I had not met our husbands, and had met each other instead, how easy it would be to be together: two girls who couldn’t manage to find a husband, playing house in the city. As much as I loved my children, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of having missed an opportunity. You could never be a single girl again after you’d made a family. That opportunity had simply passed us by.
“I’m real sad about the president,” she said, drying a wet plate I had passed her.
“Me too,” I said. “He seemed like a good man.”
She nodded, but her shoulders shook, and she started to cry.
“Hey,” I said. “What’s the matter?” I dried my hands and moved to her, motioning for her to come to me. Inside my arms her entire body was shaking, quaking. It was scary, as though she were being shocked by an electric current.
She started to sob, big childlike gasps for air. I rubbed her back, trying to get her body to stop convulsing. Soothing her with my hands, because I was pretty sure I didn’t have the words.
“Everybody leaves,” she said. “Everybody. The second I love someone, they go away.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “We love you. We’re not going anywhere.”
She shook her head. Family wasn’t what she was talking about.
“What the hell is going on?” Frankie said, storming into the kitchen. He was swaying, somehow crossing the line from
drinking
to
drunk
in the last ten minutes. I could have sworn he left the room sober, but now he was clearly inebriated.
I pulled away from her as though I’d been burned.
“Don’t touch my sister,” he growled.
“What?” Theresa said, wiping furiously at her eyes. “You’re crazy, Frankie,” she said, laughing, because it was so inane.
“
I’m
crazy?” he said, listing and moving toward us. “She didn’t tell you? What she is? The sick things she does with that woman across the street? She didn’t tell you?”
Theresa looked completely confused. She tried to laugh it off, but I could tell that part of her was trying to process what he had just said. “Oh, just shut up, Frankie. Go back to your football game.”
I could feel my own body starting to quake. “No,” I said. “It’s okay. If he has something to say he should say it. What is it, Frankie? What are you trying to say?” Part of me wanted more than anything for the words to cross his lips. For the accusations, the ones he’d been riddling me with every night for the last three weeks to come out, to rise to the surface like bubbles in a pan, to
burst
.
Frankie stood with his hands on his thin hips, his sharp chin jutted out defiantly, everything about his body saying he was ready for a fight. But his face was like a boy’s. His bottom lip was trembling, and I noticed his eyes were wide and wet. Behind all that posturing, behind that bullying, was a man who couldn’t understand how his wife could have betrayed him in such an unacceptable way. Had Eva been a man, had I loved Ted instead, Frankie would simply have gone after Ted with his gnashing teeth and striking fists. He would have been completely consumed by the rage of a cuckold. But this anger, this furiousness, was grounded in a betrayal that transcended simple adultery. It insulted every single aspect of him, including his own sex. I had rejected not only him but everything that made him a man. My heart softened, and I felt awash with guilt.
“Saffica,”
he hissed.
“Lesbica.”
It wasn’t the cheating. Of course, it wasn’t the adultery. It was that I had chosen a woman over him.
Theresa caught her breath, and when I looked at her, she looked away. Her cheeks and the tips of her ears burned red.
“I’m going to go see how the kids are doing. I promised Chessy I’d braid her hair that new way she likes,” she said.
And Frankie and I were left alone, in the kitchen, alone with this chasm between us, growing like a sinkhole. We stood at the edge, peered into the vastness growing between us, and, for the first time, were rendered speechless by it.
“C
ome see what we’ve done!” Effie says, reaching for my hand. “I bet it looks a little different from when you were here, no?”
Effie gives us a tour of the camp, showing us the changes she and Devin have made since they moved in back in the mid-nineties. It feels strange to be a tourist in this museum, these ruins of my own past. As she gestures to the new wainscoting Devin installed in the bathroom, the new washer and dryer tucked into the broom closet, my eyes are drawn instead to the old scuffs on the floor. I can practically hear Johnny scraping the big armchair across the floor. I can see Eva tucking her pretty legs up underneath her, Rose crawling into her lap to have a story read. I wonder if I looked on the bookshelves I’d find that old copy of
The Wind in the Willows
. I can remember the cover’s exact shade of peach, feel the cracked spine.
“This is my favorite room,” Effie says happily, leading me to the sleeping porch that looks out over the lake. When Eva and I stayed here, we filled the room with cots for the girls, each of them made up with clean, white sheets and red wool blankets. Now, the room has been transformed into an office for Effie. On the walls that aren’t interrupted by windows, Devin has built bookcases, which are packed with library castoffs, their shiny, plastic jackets reflecting the bright sun outside. There are books on the floor, a few Barbies, and a pair of roller skates. In the middle, facing the view of the lake, is Gussy’s old desk, painted a deep forest green. This is the desk where I would sit, drafting letter after letter to Eva after she returned to Hollyville all those summers ago. I know that the drawer sticks. I can picture the faded floral drawer liners. I wonder if there is any evidence remaining inside: four-cent stamps, the parchment stationery I loved.
“We call this
the gallery,
” Effie says, smiling proudly, as she gestures to Devin’s artwork that lines one whole wall in the living room: his miniature worlds captured inside crudely fashioned boxes he has made himself. I peer into each one, marveling at the beauty of his handiwork. They are like little tiny dreams. Figments. Glimpses. Effie beams as she runs her fingers along the little brass plaques affixed to each, the ones etched with the titles:
Zu-Zu’s First Haircut
.
Loon Egg, Unbroken
.
Winter
. I wonder briefly if anyone ever commissions work from him, and consider what I would ask him to capture inside a box for me. What glimpse might he be able to arrest, what snapshot? And as Effie steers us through the addition and the little guest cottage Devin is building out back and then, finally, up the stairs to the loft, I think that these four walls, the camp itself, is no different than one of his shadow boxes. It is a diorama of my own sorrow. The glistening threads tying me to the past. The broken bits of glass holding sunlight only having to relinquish it at sunset. Everything that matters in the whole world is etched into the scuffs in this floor, in the faded photographs on these walls.
I stand staring at the bed where Eva and I once held each other, clung to each other like two drowning people. Of course, it is the same bed. A new mattress, I suppose, but the frame is the same: that old iron bed. I feel lightheaded.
“Billie, can I get you some water? You look pale,” Effie says. She is reaching for my arm, her tiny fingers curling around my sweater. Her big eyes look at me, worried and expectant.
“I just need to sit down,” I say. I don’t want to scare her. Poor girl, just trying to show off her home.
“Please,” she says, nodding and gesturing for me to sit on the bed. “Lie down for a minute. I’ll go get some water for you.”
I resist but then have no choice but to acquiesce. My heart aches in my chest. And then the soft bed yields to me, and I begin to sink.
T
he F
OR
S
ALE
sign went up in the Wilsons’ yard the Sunday after Thanksgiving. I watched Ted pounding the wooden stake into the unyielding ground, and with each strike it felt as though he were pounding the stake into my heart. He looked up and caught me watching him through the windows, but I did not retreat. What was there to run away from anymore? He
knew
. And so instead of hiding, I simply stared back at him, trying to convey in my unwavering glance that he could not do anything that would make me withdraw, that I wasn’t afraid of him.
I
was
afraid of him though. I’d seen what he was capable of, and it terrified me. He’d repeatedly hurt Eva. Now he’d killed Calder. He’d murdered a living creature. I feared for the children. I feared, even, for my own life. But I would not give him the satisfaction of knowing how afraid I was. I would not give him that.
The sign was up only for one week before it was replaced with a S
OLD
sign.
The Monday morning afterward, when Ted and Frankie and the children had all left for work and school, I went across the street still wearing my nightgown and robe and rang the doorbell. I peered through the small window in the door and could see boxes everywhere. It looked like it had the first day I had crossed this threshold. Just three years had passed, but in those three years was my entire life, my entire world.
It was almost winter now, freezing cold, and the wind that ripped across the front porch and through the thin fabric of my nightgown felt like an assault. I rang the doorbell again and again until Eva came and opened the door.
It had only been a few weeks since Kennedy was shot and she had sat in my living room watching the news of his assassination unfold on the TV, but she looked so different. Her belly had grown exponentially, and her face was swollen as well. There were deep purple pockets underneath her eyes, and her cheeks were pale. She looked broken. Sad. It was nearly Christmas, but there was no evidence of the holidays in this empty house. No tree, no stockings hung by the hearth. No mistletoe.
I had to touch her; I had been kept away from her for too long. Every frayed nerve in my body buzzed for her. Ached. She reached for my hand and pulled me into the house, looking frantically out into the empty street behind me.
“Where’s Rose?” I asked.
“Upstairs playing,” she said. “I’m trying to pack, but it’s so hard . . .” she started, but I didn’t want her words. I wanted her mouth, her lips. I wanted to feel my body pressed against hers. I wanted to feel her chest against my chest, her hips against my hips. I wanted to smell her hair and breath and the musky scent between her legs. I wanted to swallow her and be swallowed by her.
As I kissed her, she locked the front door behind me, and pulled the curtains shut. We stumbled and tripped across the boxes that littered the floor, their lives carefully packed, all the fragile remnants protected by newspaper. I remember her hands smelled like newsprint as they found my face in the now-darkened living room.
We made love on the dusty floor. I felt my spine bruising as each vertebra made contact with the oak floorboards. But even as I winced, I knew I wanted these blue reminders to stay; I wanted that nebulous pain in my heart to manifest as something tangible: cuts, bruises, something
real,
something that could heal.
It wasn’t until Rose called down from upstairs that Eva opened her swollen eyes and rushed to her feet. She left me, breathless on the floor, and went to her.
Later we sat at the kitchen table, as Rose played with an empty moving box, and Eva told me that Ted had gotten them an apartment in the city. He told her that if she ever saw me again, he would kill her and then he would kill me.
“We can call each other,” I said. “On the telephone. He can’t watch you every second of every day.”
“It’s long distance. He’ll know. Frankie will know.”
“We’ll write then,” I said. “You’ll need to go to the post office. Get a post office box. Pay for it with cash. I will send you letters there. And you can send letters to me at home.”
She shook her head. “He’ll know,” she said.
“No,” I said, squeezing her hand. “He won’t. Eva, it’s the only way we’ll be able to stay in touch. Don’t you understand?”
“I’m worried about the children,” she said.
“He wouldn’t hurt the children,” I said, shaking my head.
“I think he would do anything to hurt me,” she said definitively. “And they’re the only thing I have left. You have to understand that, Billie. I cannot lose my children. It would be worse than death.”
Sometimes when everything is taken away is when you realize exactly what you have left. And what I had left, the morning that the moving truck came and took the contents of the Wilsons’ house away, and Ted pulled up in the red Cadillac and took Eva away, was just the empty blue sky, white snow, and a bitter cold that shimmered like something alive in my body: a bitterness that echoed and resounded against the walls of this empty place. The entire world took on a startling quality that morning. It had snowed, but the sky was a bright, bright blue, an
aching
blue, the sun so bright it made my temples throb.
This is what I had left: I had the back of the yellow school bus battered with mud driving away. I had three loads of laundry to fold, the smell of starch and coffee. Empty plates, slick with egg and grease. I had shoes all over the floor. I had socks to darn and clothes to mend. I had an empty icebox and a full Christmas shopping list with not a single item crossed off. As I sat down in the living room, among the trappings of my life (the junkyard furniture Frankie dragged home; the Douglas fir he’d insisted would fit in the bay window but that was too tall, too full with its lush arms, and crowded out the view; the faint scent of my children—the shampoo, cereal, rubber cement smell of my girls), I felt nothing but a sense of forfeiture, as though I’d just relinquished my whole life.
I drafted the first letter to Eva that morning, spilling all that loss and longing, that desperate emptiness in what, I am sure now, were pages of distraught and overwrought prose. My handwriting was that of a lunatic. I wrote until my wrist joint ached as much as my heart, conjuring with my pen every single moment of happiness she had afforded me, evoking every nuance of hers that I loved. I’d be ashamed to read that letter now; my only hope is that it did not survive these years as I have. Of course, I had no address to which to send the letter. No post office box. No street. I had no idea where Ted had taken her. He refused to tell her the address of the apartment before they left, afraid, I am sure, that she would reveal it to me and I would go to her. And I would have gone to her. I would have, had I known where she was, left all of this behind (the dirty sheets, the unscrubbed floors, the torn and tattered quotidian accoutrements of my life) if it meant one more minute with her.
Each second that the Kit-Cat clock ticked off with his rolling eyes and wagging tail was excruciating, as though time were mocking me. Each morning when the children punched out the next cardboard door on the Advent calendar, taking turns eating the stale chocolates inside, I felt like another day had been stolen from me. Each trip through the snow to the mailbox, as I waited for her words but found only grocery store flyers and bills, felt like a journey around the world. Every night as Frankie lay next to me, willing me to love him back, felt endless. Time slowed to an excruciating crawl.
I knew that I had to do something. I had to find her. Soon, it would be Christmas, and Frankie would be home from work for a whole week. Our house would be filled with company (the sisters, their husbands, my parents); I wouldn’t have even a moment alone. I would be occupied with studding hams and wrapping gifts, with sewing Christmas dresses and helping the girls rehearse their Christmas carols. And my greatest fear was that without me, Eva would forget: that I would slip away from her memory, that all remembrances of me would dissolve like bath salts into so much warm water.
But then, two weeks before Christmas, the postcard came. It wasn’t signed. And it wasn’t dated. It said hardly anything at all, but it said everything. Two
addresses,
written in block letters, etched in handwriting I knew as well as my own. Just a P.O. box and a street address. But those numbers and words were better than any missive of love. Because the numbers were just a secret code for me to decipher; they said,
I am here
. They said,
Come to me
.