Trompe l'Oeil (7 page)

She'd been inside before, once, the previous day: her mother had brought them,
For a dry run
, she'd said, the building empty except for teachers and secretaries, Nora a hummingbird flitting from place to place in the waxy-smelling school, pointing out the bathrooms, making Katy return to the front entrance, then find her second-grade classroom, find the bathroom. The sort of thing you'd never admit, mortifying, except that it took great concentration to find these routes, given the identical wooden classroom doors with identical unsmudged windows, hallways splitting off into additional hallways. Wings, her mother said. It was as if, between school years, Katy had become retarded.

“You know where you're going?” Theo said. First day: they were at the front entrance. Theo had that sour look as if he might throw up. She would vanish one way, Theo another—to the fifth-grade wing, which Katy had not learned to find.

“I'm okay,” Katy said. “See you later.” Other kids streamed around them, and she let go of his hand and pretended he was still there as she joined the stream heading along the route she'd taken twice the day before. When she found the classroom, she chose an empty seat a few rows back, along the wall. A miniature island.

The teacher was a middle-aged lady in a blue-and-green pantsuit and a round poof of brown hair and candy-pink lipstick, like a fruit tree with the trunk obscured by leaves. Roll call. “Kathleen
Murphy? Kathleen?” Katy raised her hand but not high enough, not at first, and had to repeat “Here.” She managed to say, “It's Katy,” before the teacher moved on to the next name.

Say whatever you want
, her mother had told her.
Say what you need to say
. She meant about Molly. About the summer and Molly and maybe, or maybe not, about how everything since had been vacuumed flat.

If they ask about summer vacation
, Theo had said,
tell them you rode bikes and swam
. But no one asked. The older kids had lockers; her grade still had cubbies and a coatroom, so you could put your lunch away, or your notebooks for other subjects. She traveled class to class and collected textbooks, so that by lunch there was a small stack to take home and cover in brown paper. In the cafeteria, she found the line to buy milk and a seat at a table off to the left, where she could eat her sandwich and chips and fruit from home and nobody would bother her.

Maybe she had become retarded; that could happen, couldn't it, even if you didn't start off that way? Because the previous spring she'd talked all the time. Last year, she'd talked from the first day of class; she'd already known everyone.

She had not called or written to any of her Newton friends. She'd said she would write postcards from Italy and the first day in Rome she did, but her father didn't mail them and then Molly was dead. She'd wanted to send them out anyway: in Newton, Molly wasn't dead. No one in Newton had seen the white truck, or Molly on the street, or the hotel room where Theo got sick and their mother rinsed off blood. That was Italy. But Katy still could picture Molly in the kitchen in Newton, wearing pink pajamas, eating buttery toast.

The plank, all week. It took a few days to recognize the other kids in her class. There were safe spots: her cubby, the end stall in the Pepto-Bismol-pink girls' bathroom, the cafeteria seat at the far end of the third table. Fractions in math, which she'd already learned. Her homeroom teacher, the treelike Mrs. Graham, didn't shout, even when Katy's attention wandered. “Katy? Kathleen?” It happened most late in the day, but also some mornings, when the invisible rope she clung to slipped and moved in one direction, while she seemed to move in another. The chalk squeaked and the rustling of other kids in their seats sounded like rising birds; a girl near her named Cynthia leaned in to whisper to another girl. A spitball hit the floor. Her index finger collided with hardened gum stuck under her desk; her shoes pinched her feet. From the playing fields outside the window, boys yelled
Here
, and then a murmuring background voice again became sensical, Mrs. Graham saying, “Katy? Do I have your attention?”

She didn't lose track of Mrs. Graham's voice, but the sounds stuck the way Italian had, strings of vowels and consonants she heard but did not interpret. The words stretched and puckered. She copied what Mrs. Graham wrote on the board, but sometimes missed a piece. A page number. The third week of school, her mother visited her classroom at the end of the day and spoke with Mrs. Graham and copied down all the assignments Katy had already copied. “She needs to be given written instructions,” her mother said, as if Katy weren't in the room. “Most of the instructions,” Mrs. Graham told her, “are written down. She only needs the right page.”

“We just moved here year-round,” her mother said.

“She'll adjust.” Mrs. Graham smiled, but now Katy was marked.

It would happen in other places. Outside. Around other kids. On the bus. She tuned in halfway, missing the first parts of stories, the beginnings of bus fights or jokes. “What?” she'd say to Theo—when he was around—and in whispers he'd explain.

Theo never misread the instructions, never misheard the others. He was cautious: these were year-round kids from the harbor town streets and the bluff. For passing instants his face would go blank before settling into ordinary watchfulness, like a television skipping through the empty, electric-snow channels, but he didn't lose information. Teachers liked him, they had always liked him—he was handsome, well-mannered—but he wasn't a pet. It didn't take long for him to make friends. A few, even in the first weeks, normal boys who seemed lively and unconfused. Sometimes when he joined them, Katy would panic, but all September he was patient with her, explaining, sticking by her in new places (as if she were Molly or in fact retarded). At home, he brought his reading into her room while she finished homework; then he'd return to his room, where he'd sleep. She did not follow him, nor did they sleep in the living room again. He stayed in her room longest—long enough to need a blanket—the night after Molly's nursery school refused to refund a deposit; through the walls they could hear their father shouting,
She's dead—you want to have that conversation?
their mother shouting,
Shut up
.

Some mornings upon waking Katy had to remind herself that Molly was dead, and in that way Rome kept repeating, and Molly kept running into the street.

By October, Theo's old impatience returned. He wouldn't hold Katy's hand in public, though sometimes he'd walk close to her, nudging her, letting her know he was there. She couldn't blame him, really. She'd drift, sometimes just giving up, letting herself slide, and then discover she was alone in a deep dirt pit. Everyone called down clever suggestions of how to climb out but no one lifted her to solid ground. Perhaps she'd have to live there, part-time, always it seemed, everyone nodding in quiet recognition and pitying consolation.
Yes, too bad she isn't like the others
, a shrugging acceptance that she was defective but meant no harm. The way, in Newton, her classmates had talked about Candace Green, a plain girl with skinny white legs and narrow, slightly out-turned feet, a girl who didn't say much, and sometimes was the butt of mild jokes, though not the worst jokes, the worst reserved for even more objectionable kids. Candace Green. Maybe Katy was now Candace Green, only unskinny, and as the weeks progressed, and she comforted herself with cookies and chips, further and further from skinny.

It was better in gym, when she ran or played soccer. By mid-fall her concentration improved; she could follow the through lines of Mrs. Graham's lessons. Still, every success felt provisional, Katy herself tainted—permanently? Nothing seemed more permanent than now.

Afternoons when she did homework, her mother would sometimes sit next to her and smooth her hair and read, as if Katy were a small cat. But when Nora turned her face or crossed the room, Katy could see how brittle she was; and in neighborhood conversations she was strangely cheerful, smiling
and chatting with the other women as if she'd parachuted into the world she'd always wanted.

Outside the house, no one spoke about Molly.

HOUSE II

From the wraparound deck, you entered through the kitchen: white walls and long side windows, a broad oak kitchen table, the white peninsula of the breakfast counter separating the work space from the table. Painted cabinets lined the far left wall, above old laminate counters. A chunky white electric stove, a decades-old refrigerator, its edges curved, the manufacturer's name embossed in chrome script. A stainless-steel kitchen sink along the entry-side wall, a window just above—sometimes lined with tomatoes—from which Nora gazed at the house across the narrow road and the brook-fed pond, and later blew smoke from rationed cigarettes. Sand, always, on the kitchen floor (oak planks beneath the table; linoleum near the stove), uncontrollable in summer, a warm soft grit the family swept twice a day. Two parallel doorways led from the kitchen to a broad living room big enough for two sofas and several chairs, windows on three sides facing the bay and the east- and westward stretches of beach—on sunny days swaths of blue. Below and beyond the windows and the back deck, a concrete patio abutted a seawall of concrete and stone. In fair weather, the blue wooden shutters stayed open, held by steel hooks, and
in storms they were bolted shut, the light and the views of the sea cut off. Other touches here and there: a small alcove beneath the stairs, for a time a toddler's playhouse, for a time a one-desk office.

The clouds of gnats infiltrated the kitchen in May—prompting Nora to hang mosquito netting for a few days before the gnats died and fell into shoes and coffee cups. On the second floor, four bedrooms, modest, the largest at the far end of the hall, with its own tiled bath. What had once been a single large room James and Nora had divided into two, one mid-hallway, one at the near end, beside the bathroom at the top of the stairs. These also faced the bay. For a time, the mid-hallway room was Molly's and pink; soon after Rome, painted white and emptied. A fourth bedroom—Theo's favorite—opened at the top of the stairs along the street side facing the pond, a side window catching the eastern shoreline.

The night view from the deck: a vast sky clotted with stars.

AFTER I

If it had been her own father, her beloved late father, appearing across the street, Nora too would have run: for her, too, there would have been nothing but his face, his wave. Imagine making the leap toward him, recognizing him but not the objects around him, apprehending the man but not the moving traffic. Only in your mind is there clear space between you and your father; only the mind can make a truck vanish. She did not mention this to James. Yet had she told Lydia this, Lydia would have nodded—yes, love, minds, trucks. Just as, for hazy liminal moments, flying dreams can leave us verging on ascent. But Nora had not called Lydia, or answered Lydia's phone messages; nor had she sent Lydia the engraved memorial card for Molly (unsent cards waited stacked in a box, death repeated in tasteful script). Even when she'd settled Theo and Katy into school routines, she did not write to Lydia. Because after Rome you do not get other doorways. Because another Nora might exist—this seemed clear now—only if the children were safe; if Molly still existed, if Theo and Katy had lost nothing. It did not surprise her that both Lydia and Molly showed up in dreams, sometimes together, or that they crossed into dreams
about Nora's mother. It seemed that they might all occupy the same unreachable place.

Of course in waking life, the actual Lydia could appear. One October afternoon, she arrived, her presence made palpable by the downshifting of a motor outside the house, a blue VW, quick steps up the stairs. A sunny day, Theo and Katy still at school. Through the kitchen window, Nora saw Lydia's hair falling loose over a dark suede jacket, then a sheaf of yellow chrysanthemums. She did not want to open the door. She waited, but Lydia was knocking, Lydia had seen her.

“Nora.”

It seemed the light was too bright, dizzying. She opened the door to wind and Lydia, Lydia rushing forward as Nora backed away.

“Nora?”

An odd heat flooded Nora: she propped herself with the curved back of a wooden chair.

Lydia stopped. She slid the sheaf of flowers across the table, took the chair closest to the door. “Will you talk to me?” An herbal scent, the familiar Lydia. “I'm so sorry.”

Nora shook her head, refusing what, exactly? In May, they had talked in a familiar kitchen. Here was another familiar kitchen. Two still points, it seemed, over the chasm of months, ocean, Rome. One might gesture at the chasm; one might peer down, identify shapes.

“Nora. Come on.”

Between them, the table, the chrysanthemums, the muted wind, which seemed to blow pointillist light through the windows and plain kitchen air, onto the flowers, the bowl of
apples. She wavered. Perhaps the blowing light might tip her over. Imagine an armful of grass falling onto the table. Imagine it falling to the floor. Lydia repeated her name. Nora had been looking for oranges; she had been distracted. In Rome there had been no Lydia; there, Lydia had been absent. But if oranges were elements of distraction, Lydia was a deeper element. A layer upon which the oranges might float.

And now Lydia watched Nora from the far side of the table, the Lydia who'd found her way to Cambridge with her two girls intact. If one's kids were intact, one might move. One might then be Lydia; one might accompany Lydia, or visit her.