Trompe l'Oeil (10 page)

Yes and no. Katy would not hesitate to hand the baby over to Nora, but after a few months resisted giving the baby to James, or to Theo. One night, then another, the scenes repeated themselves: she'd walk the baby into another room, humming,
ignoring James though he'd just arrived home, retreating when Theo greeted Sara. As if they were not to be trusted.
And who was holding Molly's hand?
James thought and tried to unthink.

When he confronted her, Katy said, “She's my sister.”

“And Theo's sister,” James said. “And my daughter.”

Katy sulkily handed the baby to James and observed him for several minutes, as if he might drop her, then vanished up the stairs.

In the ensuing months, other hard moments accrued: Katy would ignore his instructions to turn off the television, or finish homework, or please help sweep the deck. More often, he'd be sharp. He did not want to be sharp; or, rather, he knew sharpness was no use. He tried to be more attentive, greeting Katy first when he arrived home, sitting with her over math. Waiting. She'd grow quiet, observing him, eventually becoming merely skittish.

“Katy's fine,” Nora told him. “She's doing fine.”

“Really?” James said.

“What do you suggest?” Nora said. “She hardly sees you.”

“I'm just saying,” James said. “She isn't fine.”

And who was, Nora thought. Last week, she'd caught Theo with a beer in his bedroom, trying to drink, coughing, spitting beer onto the floor. Theo was mortified. Later, James only shrugged, as if sneaking beer at twelve were de rigueur.

Most days, Katy attended to her homework. And though she stuck close to Nora and Sara, that year she'd made a few friends, wary odd-duck girls who played board games and tape-recorded fake commercials, girls with strained laughs—girls who, like Katy, relaxed around Sara. They loved small animals,
competed to pet the neighbors' puppy; they called to wandering cats and scooped them up. They were shy girls who eventually burst out with stories of family dogs and younger siblings. They visited the house after school, took turns holding the baby, at times confiding in Sara about slights or private disappointments, as if she were a plump little Buddha. In their presence, Nora recalled school years when her own life had seemed awash in girls, her sister Meg a daily companion. And if the thought of Newton or Lydia or Cambridge also arose, she'd refocus on the baby, or turn the radio to a pop station. Timid at first, the girls would sing along.

A DAY AT THE PARK

On a May Sunday, he took Theo to Fenway Park and discovered that Fenway Park remained itself. As it appeared in televised games, yes, but from those images who could make the imaginative leap to such scale and immersion? It seemed that after all, he and Theo could reenter Fenway as ordinary fans: that he could take a place in Fenway as he had for years. Here were their tickets; here were their seats. A sunny warm day, no sign of rain, a game against the Royals. Theo brought a transistor radio he held to his ear. He rattled off statistics with an intensity James recalled in himself.

When the game began, the day telescoped, pinned itself to the fortunes of the Red Sox, one pitch at a time. The first two Royals out, the third. The Sox began with a single; after a double play, Yastrzemski came to bat and singled. Yastrzemski, whom James had followed for more than a decade. Now, at Fenway, one could focus on Yaz at first base, and the Royals pitcher readying for the rookie batter, the dramatic moment when Yaz made his move to steal second and found himself caught out. It was, at least, early. The Royals scored a run at the top of the third; the Sox responded with a three-run homer from Bernie
Carbo, James and Theo shouting with the crowd. By then the world beyond the ballpark had dropped away: the world was the game, the crowd, the family beside them, the Little Leaguers in the next row, the man in front of them cheerfully insulting the umpire. One batter then the next settled into his stance; the pitcher wound up and threw, the ball flying into the dust or out toward the field, infielders shifting, outfielders in motion, catching and throwing almost faster than the eye could track, the umpire's emphatic gestures. And from the crowd the uncensored shouts, flashes of outrage, drawn-out resignation, flashes of joy. Here James and Theo were one more father, one more son, awaiting the next hit, the next swift realignment of the men on the field after the bat connected. A pure if temporary belonging. In the fourth a Royals home run, the Sox hitless. Theo and James drank cold sodas, watched for a sign. Then in the fifth another Carbo home run, another collective burst, Theo rising up, thrilled—as if, yes, thrill were again possible. Then the innings rolled forward, the rookie Lynn hitting a double in the sixth, the third out coming too soon. The Royals changed pitchers; the Sox held on, Rick Wise pitching the full nine.

Even when the game ended and the throng exited Fenway into the city, despite the crowded sidewalks and occasional shoving, James's elation did not end, not yet, but morphed into a sensation of contentment and possibility, as if he and Theo could go anywhere. Nothing distinguished them from the fathers and sons heading into restaurants or to evenings in unfamiliar towns: all seemed equal. Had he described it, James might have used the word
normalcy
, considered the day a return from exile.

When they arrived at the house, the late-day light was clear gold, the bay cobalt. Katy and a redheaded MacFarland girl raced bikes up and down the empty street; on the deck, Nora paged through an art magazine while Sara dozed on her lap. They had dinner; James drank a cold beer. Theo described the three-run homer; Nora laughed, reached over and mussed Theo's hair. A routine gesture of hers
before
but not
since
. It was and was not the same gesture; and the laugh clearly genuine, clearly hers but slightly altered, as if he had heard it from the next room. Was there, too, a missed beat? He paused, but then Sara threw her spoon on the floor.

“So much for the spoon,” Nora said, and held out a pacifier.

“Next weekend,” Katy said, “Lucy MacFarland's coming back.”

The bicycling redhead? “Oh good,” James told her. “How was your ride? Tires okay?”

“I won,” Katy said. “But it didn't really count.”

“You were fast,” Theo said, apparently in a mood to like Katy.

And then James was clearing the table, and washing dishes, and working on financials for the New York office while Katy read from a textbook covered in craft paper, her name repeated in wavy emerald letters on the front piece. Theo hid in a novel. Nora bathed Sara and settled her in her crib.

Later, as James readied for bed, Nora smoothed cream on her hands, efficient and unself-conscious, and he could see then her deep fatigue, which of course had inflected her laugh. (Were there other inflections? He stopped at fatigue.) Recently, they'd begun to have sex again, gingerly, when not exhausted. He set out clothes for the morning: white shirt, gold tie, sepia
shoes. She perched at the edge of the bed, watching him, her gaze shifting from the pressed suit to his face to the sepia shoes. Her thin blue robe adhered to the lines of her clavicle. “I'm pregnant,” she said. She addressed the pressed suit. “I need this to be okay.”

How astonished they'd been when she became pregnant with Theo; happy with Katy. And Molly, yes, they'd planned for three. With Sara, anxious, but too the hope of—what?—a redemption? A turning away from death. Say you make that turn; say you see glimmers of redemption. Now another child? For the first time, the news less welcome; for the first time, a wish to stop. And yet that turning away; and yet those glimmers, the wish impossible.

He and Nora were altered, this an altered life he could not steer. (Had he thought, for a moment, he could steer?) But okay. Nora was pregnant. Nora was waiting.

He affected serenity. “How are you feeling?” he said.

“Tired.”

He nodded and crossed the floor to the bed.
Do this
, he thought, and mussed her hair.
Do this
, he thought, and kissed her.

SMALL GIRLS AND KATY

At first Katy would have to remind herself, almost daily:
Delia Delia Delia
. They'd grown accustomed to Sara, the baby who was not-Molly, although there had been moments when one or another of them would slip, using Molly's name. It didn't happen often. You'd hear the name aloud, then a flat confused silence before a change of subject. “You're all Murphys,” Nora would say. “Sara with a touch of Connor.” No one argued. But the other baby photos revealed clear variations: Katy with the darkest hair, Theo fair, eyes deep-set, Sara's baby face more oval. Molly and Delia round wide-eyed babies you could not tell apart.

“Take a look at your Murphy cousins,” Nora said. “It's all the same picture.”

It was harder now to remember everything of Molly, even to say
that
laugh,
that
voice was Molly's, this one Delia's, because Delia too was a little wild, her happiness, her sobbing already dramatic, already washing across Molly's first expressions.

Molly as a four-year-old remained more distinct. Katy's memory diverged from Theo's, holding to different details and perhaps different Mollys. Italy blurred: a church, a heavy door
beyond which a high ceiling appeared roped with gold, paintings of apostles and saints swooning. But there was more than one church, and another swooning on the street. Nora naked, washing. The back of Molly's dress, her legs moving, almost in flight. And now Katy couldn't say for sure where they were standing. Or sitting? She's supposed to keep hold of Molly's hand. Sometimes Molly shakes her hand away—so typical of Molly. Sometimes Molly lets go and holds out her palm, so that Katy can give her a coin. But are they in Rome? The flat palm, a copper round. In Newton, Katy gave Molly pennies.

And for a moment, Molly might have sat outside the church, but she did not sit on the bed with Theo and their mother. No one wants to leave the bed. Glasses of water appear. Katy will have to move from the spot beside her mother when her father and Molly come back, of course. The coveted space, the space she is always giving up; but where are they? It's taking too long. If they return, she will relent, offer the space without complaint. There are splinters of hot light at the curtain's edges, and she has to turn her head toward the pillow. She clings to her mother, and then her father returns without Molly. Every time he returns, it is without Molly. Here the story never alters, and here the same pinprick recognition: after the truck, the blood, how could she expect Molly back?

With the little girls, Nora was worn out, but she had also returned—the playful Nora Katy had forgotten. Nora's false laugh, the tinny one, erupted only around people she disliked, the real laugh until now a remembered thing they'd gone without. Katy waited for it to fill other moments, but nothing she tried made Nora laugh, and in the failure Katy found a thick clumsiness,
and the sad puzzle as to why it took the little girls to bring her mother back, her own efforts doomed from the start. But the little girls called—
Tee
, Sara called her—and Delia reached for Katy, squealed when Katy entered the room. With them Katy too felt lighter, and part of her mother's lightness. When the girls were sleeping and she occupied a room alone with her mother, she was no longer as light. She was simply Katy.

And still there were moments when her mother faded out: you had to watch for lapses. She might start to make sandwiches, and then leave the room, forgetting, or might drive halfway to the market before turning and driving to the library. Dropping into the space that was what? Katy kept watch, herded the little girls whenever they went out. She would have liked to tell her father that her mother still dreamed in the middle of the day, but he was hardly home at all.

Between her parents, a rising disturbance. Their Newton way of fighting had been looser, more dramatic and somehow less serious, airy, the big gestures also self-consciously cartoonish: eventually they'd made bug eyes at each other, or stuck their tongues out. But this fighting was different, guarded and tense, the low chattering of dinner plates on a heavy wobbling tray, a rapid clacking punctuated by a stomp or a word—
no
or
lonely
or
go
—and blown through with shushing. Katy and Theo listened together, the fight becoming an approaching train, moving closer and closer and reaching a crescendo only yards away, then—as if their eavesdropping were apparent—retreating,
ssh clack ssh clack ssh
.

Weekends and evenings when her father was home his arms were full of baby girls, or he was reading his files, or speaking
heartily on the phone. He was difficult to catch. In winter, Katy forwent the luxury of sleep and padded down to the kitchen just after 6:00
AM
and found him alone with his coffee, already in his suit. He stood at the counter eating a muffin, scanning the paper. On good mornings he called her
K-kat
.
K-kat, what's up today?
Some mornings he kissed her on the cheek. Some mornings he mussed her hair.
Cereal for you?
he offered. She shrugged and poured herself a glass of milk.
Blueberry muffin?
he said.

It was the prize for getting up early, these moments with her father, the added prize of a muffin. But the moments were brief: the little girls woke early, and soon they were in the kitchen with her mother. Soon one or another of them was on her lap—Delia either cranky or lively, Sara quiet and vague—and Katy was coaxing them to eat Cheerios, trying to minimize the spills. The girls babbled and tossed Cheerios on the floor, and their city-bound father slipped away while Katy was distracted, forgetting a kiss good-bye.