Trompe l'Oeil (16 page)

He was, in many ways, kind. He was, in many ways, responsible. On papers or exams, he'd never cheat, but elsewhere his ethics would slide. More than once he stole a book he couldn't afford, or skipped out on a café tab. Present in one world, he could easily block out another, believing, it seemed, if one ignored a condition, the condition might vanish.

Only many years later would he speak to friends about Molly.

And Katy? She, too, took physical risks, though not in the company of her sisters.

In field hockey, a bold, aggressive player. Trained hard, extra workouts twice a week. She, too, would run distances,
sometimes in harsh weather, though Nora knew her routes, and often she'd run with a friend. She stole but did not like her mother's cigarettes. In high school, she'd drink beer or smoke weed but only when she didn't train or watch the girls, which was rare. Too often, she'd ignore homework. When eventually she'd begin to have sex, it would be with one boy, to whom she'd be devoted. They'd share what would seem a dreamy wildness together—reckless certainly about locations and birth control. She was both defended and careless with herself. She'd diet strictly, then binge on sweets. At times, she wished her sisters would disappear, a wish that horrified her, a monstrous wish, and she would punch her pillows and mattress, and pinch her upper arms or thighs where the bruises would stay hidden, or might be taken for sports injuries. Until later, until the boyfriend, who would not be able to stop her but would stay. Would see her monstrousness and kiss her head and stay.

HOUSE IV

Late August, the dark peach end of summer: Theo stepped lightly through the house and took the little girls to the beach and grilled burgers for dinner. More often now he escaped the house, to summer parties nearby, beery evenings, bonfires. Sometimes a girl. Soon to college in DC, which seemed far enough to begin again, simply as Theo, a Theo set loose from Murphy history, from Rome and grief and divorce, at least for a while. There he was, sunburned and jocular, swinging Sara and Delia in circles over the soft sand above the high-tide line, Sara now five, thin and limber, Delia at four more compact. There was Theo rolling the big rainbow beach ball; Theo on the deck sliding burgers onto waiting plates; there splashing water at Nora and Katy in the kitchen. As if he'd just arrived. As if leave-taking, and this particular leave-taking, were a simple intermission.

Say you crane your neck and call it intermission, but it was more of an ending, a common one, palpable only after time. There would be thick smatterings of visits, but he would travel farther and farther from this house, choosing, he thought, what to carry forward, seeking a separate life in universities, seeking cityscapes that might in fact blot out Rome. Say he had
always been alert to stories of leave-takings: his father driving toward the city; a fleet of boats sailing from Spain. Here was his chance. At his father's place, he'd already dropped a duffel and suitcase, a cache of books. He would leave Blue Rock with a small overnight bag and take the T to meet James for the drive. In this way, James was fatherly. But better that James avoid Blue Rock.

If what Katy felt was sadness, she did not say; or perhaps she did not recognize it as sadness. In the morning, after breakfast, Nora drove Theo to the T, and Katy and the girls—all of them cranky, the girls hard to distract—assembled jigsaw puzzles of cartoon characters, the pieces as large as Katy's hands. Later, running, she imagined her father and Theo gliding southward out of Massachusetts in a blue cartoon car, along a bright yellow tubular turnpike, speeding farther away from Blue Rock, which appeared on the map near the Cape as the eye of a mutant fiddler crab. It seemed that Theo and James were always together (although they were not); and it seemed that they were always on the far side of the road (in Rome, yes, and also elsewhere). And yet there had been Theo at the grill; and Theo who since their father moved out had been more ally than foe. Still the Theo who could glide through anything.

A house of girls, now. From Theo's bedroom window, Katy watched swans gather on the pond, and evening porch lights and distant harbor lights appeared. Relieved—wasn't she?—by Theo's absence, a felt-sense she did not articulate. Perhaps could not. She could not say if she loved him. There remained the dismissive Theo, the Theo who ignored her, the one paired off with their father. And yes: the Theo perpetually across the
road, waving; and she the one perpetually losing hold of Molly. The bitter nameless ongoing thing. Were she to find a name, she might call it a curse, one weaker in Theo's absence.

Within days, Theo's room seemed to her a guest room, and soon her schoolbooks appeared on Theo's desk, her calendar on the wall, though she referred to the room as
ours
. The house
ours
, meaning Nora's and Katy's and the girls'. Katy slipped into an
us
that referred to herself and Nora, and was bound to the girls' safekeeping—another consequence of losing hold. The girls, then,
ours
. Say that Sara and Delia were another chance: Did it matter that, before or after, Katy had never wished for a sister? She did not allow herself to think it. She loved them. Sisters appeared: you could not avoid displacement by small girls. You cared for them or failed.

And, too, Katy claimed Sara and Delia in a way she believed that their father had not. She took them to visit James in Cambridge, and because he'd lost track of who they were in time—buying toys and books too simple or too advanced—she translated, bridged the gap. Demonstrating, perhaps, that they were firstly hers. On the best days, Sara and Delia followed her, vied for her attention. On the best days, she made them laugh.

A year after Theo left for college, Nora painted the guest room a pastel blue: it became Sara's room. Then Katy would visit regardless, as if it were still
ours
. She finished her homework while Sara paged through library books, watched the swans while Sara strung beads. In that room, in Sara's company, she felt content.

For a time, to Katy, household proportions appeared correct.

KATY IN LOVE

Say that her father had become a telephone. Some days a telephone, some days a receding car, some days an idea. Occasionally a man. If Katy had been able to say directly that she missed him, would he have assumed the form of a father? But she could not acknowledge that she missed him. She wondered if, had he been able to deny paternity, he'd be any kind of presence. For her? To Sara and Delia, he could be sweet. A sweet telephone.

The times she shyly told him about a track win, or hardwon math grades, he spoke heartily for a few minutes. Then the interest wore off, and his phone voice became perfunctory again and once more she felt like an idiot. Tim—now there was Tim, a breathtaking runner, a breathtaking boy—Tim did not think she was an idiot. Neither, for that matter, did Nora. But once she felt like an idiot, something else might go awry. She might say things. She might refuse a visit but despair when her sisters met James without her. She might hang up and hide in her room, fall into a pinching trance.

For months she did not tell her father about Tim, though Tim often visited the house. Summer mornings while Nora
worked, he'd join Katy and the girls on the beach. The girls took to him, as did Nora: he was good-natured, easygoing. Most afternoons, he headed into work at the Blue Rock Inn, and Katy bicycled to the Harbor Café. After their shifts, he racked her bike on his car and drove to the house, and they lounged on the beach and drank beer and fooled around. On days off, he took her sailing; rainy days they watched videos.

Tim and James seemed to exist in separate worlds, or perhaps the split resided in Katy—one Katy with Tim, another with her father? She talked to James about her teammate Amanda, Tim's younger sister. She talked about
biking with friends
. James knew of him from Sara and Delia, perhaps also from Nora, but Nora spoke to James reluctantly. He did not ask Katy about romance (though why, she thought, didn't he ask?).

Finally, on the phone, she said Tim's name. She used the word
boyfriend
. She told James, “He's tall. He's worked on boats.”

“Does he have a boat?” James said.

“His dad has a Sunfish.”

“Oh?”

“Theo knows him,” she said, although invoking Theo was backpedaling. Theo and Tim had played high school soccer, but the point was not Theo; Theo was a faraway cloud.

And Tim was the door to that parallel world in which she was beautiful. Tim's love for her (love, really, no matter what her father might say) had nothing to do with Theo, or her pixie-ish little sisters, or the tragic dead one.

“He's calm,” Katy said. “Funny.”

“So he's older,” James said.

“Amanda's brother.”

“How old?”

“Graduating,” Katy said.

Which was, he said, a nonresponsive answer.

“You wanted a new start,” she said. “Tim's my new start.”

“Okay. Tell me about Tim's plans,” he said. “After graduation.” And James talked, as he often did, about “going places.” Was Tim going places? Did Tim care about going places?

Going places, Katy thought, meant leaving other places. That's what James did. Once the family had gone places together; once they'd gone to Rome. “Like Europe?” she said.

There was a kind of détente. A making-of-efforts. Even her mother said,
Make an effort
. Yet too often it seemed that James was provoking her. Wasn't he? Or at least he didn't know how not to. In the fall, a few months after she'd told him about Tim, she began to notice small changes at her father's condo—specialty jam in the refrigerator, English teas, a grocery list in a flowery script—each one emitting a tiny nasty shock. Another kind of provocation, wasn't it? A violation of
something
.

As if the jam and tea bags occupied entire rooms, cutting the space left for Katy. Long after James left Blue Rock, it seemed to her that he was walking out again, following the trail of flowery script. Again there was no recourse. Leave him back? She had tried. Had he noticed?

She could admit: at times, her making-of-efforts inverted. Say the day she arrived early to her father's Boston office and
found him outside the building, inches from a woman he introduced as Charlene—younger, and pretty in a skinny blond way, nervous in her tight black suit and fur-trimmed coat. “Hi there, Katy,” Charlene said. And Katy—in that moment another, bolder Katy—found herself touching the fur trim and asking if it was real. “My little sisters love animals,” she said. “Better rethink that, Charlene.” James insisted, then, “That's enough.”

Yet even when she pretended otherwise, Katy missed him. Wondered if, had she been Molly, or a different Katy, he would have stayed. Found herself imagining him appearing at the sidelines of her field hockey games, in the scruffy crowd of parents huddled over coffee cups yelling encouragement. Sometimes when he phoned, he called her “sweetheart.” Today he said it.

He said, “Hi, sweetheart. How are you?”

“Fine. Good,” she said, almost ready to say more. There was more to say (a B+ on a pop quiz, a bike ride along the shore).

“I was hoping to talk to your mother.”

For a time on her bike, the breeze was so light you could coast past the second jetty, the sky so clear the water stayed more royal than navy for a time before the wind kicked up bringing the wide white clouds and darkening the sea, before the cold set in. She had not yet started to tell him, but he was already on to Nora. How quickly she could hope; how quickly hope sank. No scruffy crowd of parents, no depth to
sweetheart
. He couldn't stop to listen: he'd become the retreating car. Stay in the middle ground, Nora would say—but never exactly how.

“Oh.”

“Is she there?”

There and not there, both, often. Now at the mall with the girls. Still
there
in a way James wasn't. “Busy,” Katy said, failing, yes, to mention the mall. But why should he—especially now with his secrets and specialty jam—why should he know Nora's comings and goings, or Katy's comings and goings? Had he taken a minute more, she would have offered her news. Steer him back? Unlikely. When he said, “But she's there?” Katy answered, “No. Out,” then blurted, “Taking care of your kids.”

James cleared his throat. “I see. Perfect, Katy. That's just great.”