Trompe l'Oeil (28 page)

That evening, Josie returned from work, also unchanged—in her slate-gray suit and elegant boots, her vaguely gingery scent, a fat briefcase in hand. She kissed them and handed them bags from Filene's, sweaters to try on. She'd picked up videos and Chinese food, and they sat in the den eating dumplings
and watching comedies, as they had with her before. A calm evening, yet the air seemed pixilated: they did not know Nora's whereabouts. She had not called, and no one answered at Meg's. But Sara's panic would flatten out and begin to ebb near James and Josie, here beside the familiar oak flooring and vine-and-leaf-patterned carpet, reading chairs and sofas piled with throw pillows. Here in their known house: the airy kitchen, the bedrooms—the girls' rooms—painted white, paperback novels and beach stones on the shelves where the girls had left them, bottles of scented hand lotion and stacks of clean towels on the dressers, beds covered in down comforters with violet duvets.

Briefly, all of Blue Rock was out of sight, as it had been on other nights they'd stayed. The Beverly house steadied them; James himself steadied them, remaining close. Delia slept. Sara also slept, but she woke in the dark unable to locate herself. There was a brief sensation of falling, before the scent of washed sheets and pine pulled her back to the Beverly room. There'd been a dream: the dream had vanished. Hours before dawn, Sara carried her old comic books downstairs to one of the den's oversized reading chairs and practiced drawing characters on scrap paper. The sounds beyond the house were muffled by light snow, the wind just perceptible. A night like others after which she'd found deer tracks in the yard.

It was after 3:00
AM
when James appeared in his robe. “That's a good chair,” he said. Would she mind if he read on the couch? He carried in blankets, one for each of them, and an issue of
Time
, though he soon dozed. He appeared self-contained even in sleep—unlike Delia, who flung her arms
and disordered the sheets, her face suggesting the quality of her dreams. Rare to see James sleep, so there was not much to compare. Might your sleeping self change over time? Maybe for someone like James, it stayed constant. Say you could enter sleep the way you could enter a beautiful room and close the door. Did anyone do that? The place she eventually drifted to was not a beautiful room but a calmer blankness, and when she later woke, her father was there on the couch, still self-contained, still himself.

A turn? Was that the moment? The day her mother dropped her off in Beverly, the night her father found her drawing by flashlight? Or perhaps the moment in which a turn became clearly visible. Other moments had accrued before this—those summer weekends? He'd been more attentive since the downsizing. Still: James on the couch. Her father. In that moment (though for how long?) a father she might trust.

Perhaps the father Sara had glimpsed as a toddler and forgotten? He'd never spoken sharply to Sara, at least that she could remember; he'd never been unkind. Had been, at times, affectionate and playful. But more often faraway, reduced to an idea. And what about money?
That
unkindness. The missing support unavoidable now—but before? She had thought it foolish—at best misguided—to rely on him for anything that mattered.

In the morning James offered to make breakfast. Delia came downstairs in her pajamas and robe, Josie in her suit. Coffee
brewed, glasses of orange juice appeared. And when Josie left for work, James called the high school to get the girls' assignments, insisted Sara and Delia make a schedule (including a walk, including snacks), and cleared the table for them to work.

And so they shaped those days, during which they received only short calls from Nora. In the late afternoons, Sara napped for an hour; nightly the den scene repeated. Delia grew quiet, and there was in both girls a strained attentiveness, as if they were listening for a distant bell. The Blue Rock house was lost but did not seem lost. Certain things Sara did not say, even to Delia, but a corner of the mind allowed: if in your mind, the house existed, might it also exist somewhere else? If you reached the correct universe, the correct highway exit. Say there was another space in which the house might still exist. Say that, like your house, your mother had dropped out of sight: if you were to find one, would you find the other? An alternate house, with an alternate Nora?

“Sweetheart,” James said. “You really must sleep.” He handed Sara a glass of milk with honey. “Maybe no more chocolate at night?” This time he patted her head, and walked her up the stairs.

Nora had never forgotten to pick up Delia or Sara; she was rarely late. Still—if she did not return? Meg's phone connected them only to Meg and Louis—both alarmingly gentle—who would take messages and then speak with James. Nora called sporadically. A few more days, she said. I might have a place. She told them to go to the mall for new clothes. With your father, she said. Remember hats. Remember gloves. She would phone again tomorrow. And for a time—a few hours—the
strain diminished, and they would concentrate on their schoolwork, or cook for James and Josie, or shop for hats and gloves.

But only hours. They would want to speak to Nora again, and instead again reached Meg. They did not in those first days speak to Katy, who remained with Tim's parents in Blue Rock. Katy was fine, James assured them. Connor and Tim were fine.

After a few days, Delia began to miss her favorite jeans, a black-and-pink cardigan, long earrings made of dice, her suede boots; Sara a white lamb's wool sweater, her turquoise-and-coral pinky ring, her pale green robe. Other longings accumulated. For a few days, James drove the girls the two hours to school in Blue Rock, stayed on the South Shore, and drove them back to Beverly. Hardly a workable plan. No one mentioned transferring schools; for a time the thought hovered, unarticulated. But after a week, Nora announced she'd found a three-bedroom condo in central Blue Rock, near the harbor and the high school.

And when Sara and Delia returned with Nora to Blue Rock—the roads lined with half-melted snowbanks and slush and chunks of gray ice, the sky a matching diffident gray—town seemed exactly the same town they'd left, yet also (and deliberately) estranged. As if the town, downsizing by a fraction, had picked which house to burn, which residents were unnecessary. This impression persisted despite daily offers of help from neighbors and friends, the high school faculty, the swim team, the owner of the Harbor café. They did not drive down to
Shore Road—though from the harbor at night you could see out to where the road approached the pond, and the cluster of house lights, and their pocket of dark space.

The condo was at first an undifferentiated emptiness, each room a beige-carpeted box. Beyond the windows, strips of snow-covered lawn bordered a row of saplings, the buildings nearer the harbor, the parking lot. Some days it seemed as if they'd been traveling, their luggage misplaced, their dislocation temporary as they waited for their possessions and the house itself to catch up with them. And in fact for months relied on card tables and folding chairs—which did nothing to break the illusion. In the morning Sara woke, still oriented to the obsolete world, then readjusted. She did not miss Katy or Tim or Connor, but the notion recurred, if fleetingly, of a waiting house in a parallel world from which they all had become detached.

She did not have language for this. None of them did. Delia referred to their lost possessions as “old,” which made them sound outgrown, deliberately discarded. While Nora navigated the insurance (she'd kept up her payments, a small miracle), she perseverated about “value,” of which there seemed to be many kinds. Other language dropped out: for weeks, no one mentioned the daily tides.

On the phone, Katy—now house-hunting—spoke confidently of square footage and school systems. It seemed that, if one Katy had fallen apart in the motel room, another—assertively pragmatic—had popped up after she left. No one spoke about the motel—at least not directly—but between Nora and Katy, that silence marked a new, decisive border.

A paradox: for Nora and the girls, daily life became easier. The condo's location simplified their routines—the walk to school, a longer walk or fast bike to the harbor, five minutes to the office. Perhaps, Nora mused, she should have sold years before (though now her windows looked out on a patch of brown grass and snow, a row of other condos); perhaps she should have rebuilt. She'd been lucky to get a high price for the lot; erosion would continue to wear at the near beaches and seawall and access roads, storms would tear at the houses. But that year without the sea—and after—she felt irrevocably diminished. As if the horizon had steadied her, somehow shielded her from the raw, workaday substrate of each morning.

Still, at first Nora insisted no one visit Shore Road even to see the MacFarlands, whom they would meet in town. Sara and Delia pretended not to care. But when the ice was gone from the roads, Sara biked to the beach. She could still see the lines of the foundation; she could almost imagine the house rising up, almost imagine Nora climbing the air where the stairs had been, or imagine herself floating where her bed must have stood. Now there was a clear view from the far side of the street and the more distant pond to the sea. From the air it must have appeared as a gap in the string of houses, a lost tooth. That day Sara gathered stones and shells from the beach: if she'd had a camera with her, she might have photographed the site, but by the time she returned again, it had already begun to change, new owners preparing construction.

With the insurance payment and the sale of the lot, money worries diminished. That spring, James became, again, an executive, now managing a startup off 128. A bizarre inversion:
the lost house, the found money. At the condo, a chafing normalcy insisted itself.

III

ROME

Apollo and Daphne

Gian Lorenzo Bernini (c.1622–25)

GALLERIA BORGHESE

A consuming desire; a desperate flight from that desire. Here's the moment when the chasing Apollo, eternally young, reaches the fleeing Daphne, their bodies muscular, graceful, both nearly breathing and nearly out of breath; and too the moment when in desperation she cries out. Not to Apollo: he can't hear beyond the rapid whir of his desire, the drive to possess her, but certainly possession will shatter her. She is not fast enough; his hand rakes her hip. They almost fly, her hair streaming behind her, her mouth roundly open in terror. It's her powerful father she beseeches, and in calling him escapes, her body transforming as we watch: her fingers now turning to branches of leaves, her toes taking root, one slender leg now covered by a sheath of bark.

White bodies suspended in marble, stone transformed to muscle and sinew, skin and leaves. It's her face one returns to, and then the astonishment of her body, the smooth belly and
high breasts, and from her raised arms, the hands unfurling leaves, and along her slim leg, the spreading bark.