* * *
Do you need my help? Cristina calls again from behind the door, louder than before, her tapping escalating to a full-blown knock. I can help, she offers, the manipulation creeping in, Marcella no doubt looming nearby.
Coat on, briefcase held in front of her with both hands at the bottom corners, she gets up from her bed and walks to the door. When Cristina’s knocking finally stops, Dana speaks—just above a whisper, with a trace of acquiescence, as if selflessly agreeing to perform a very difficult task being asked of her. I’m ready, she says, and waits for the door to be opened.
Jackie
A vinyl shade slaps the window near the foot of her bed. From the basement, a slow ticking, the bang and shudder of the propane furnace. Outside, old tree limbs creak and pop above the single-story house. Robins and finches deliver the news of morning, but more loudly than usual, as if they are greeting sunlight for the very first time.
Eyes closed, cheek pressed into the foam pillow she’s slept on for decades, Jackie curls onto her side toward the middle of the mattress. She rubs her feet together, circles the pillow with both arms, and burrows deeper into the familiar softness. The lingering fragrance of dryer sheets tugs her gently back across the gap between awake and asleep, where ghost sounds of crowded mornings fill her ears—cabinet doors slamming shut, young voices tangling from the kitchen, a chair squeaking along the linoleum floor. An old, low flame of duty flickers to life. Lunches to pack, report cards to sign, laundry to graduate from the washing machine to the dryer, hamburger meat to move from the freezer to the refrigerator to thaw, a blouse to iron for work. A rapid-fire volley of shouts, Give it back! Leave me alone! I’m telling Mom!
A crow’s mad caw fouls the air. Nawwwh! Nawwwh! The shrill holler repeating, repeating. Jackie refuses to open her eyes, though the half-dream of facing a day busy with errands and work and children has gone. Nawwwh! Nawwwh! The almost-words feel like rocks thrown at her. She winces and pulls the bedding around her shoulders. The crow continues, its call bossier, more human. Now!, it insists. Now! Now!
When it finally stops, Jackie listens for the noise of her squabbling children, both of whom have long since grown up and moved out. She tries to will the old feeling of too many demands on her time to return, but she only becomes more awake and aware of the morning as it actually is. The slapping shade. The tick and moan of the furnace. The straining hum of the refrigerator in the empty kitchen. And on the other side of her bedroom door, what is always there: lifeless rooms and a day that does not need her.
Jackie opens her eyes, but remains still. Something flashes in her peripheral vision and she tilts her face to the wall next to the bed. On the scuffed pine floor, blades of light expand and thin as the shade gapes out and up, then down. She remembers how her son, Rick, would taunt the family’s cat, a skittish calico named Maude, with the beam of a flashlight along any surface. Watching Maude scramble and rush after the bright spot was one of his favorite mischiefs. No matter how forcefully Amy would marshal her older-sister authority and insist he stop, Rick was unmoved. The cat would go berserk and hurl itself at the elusive glow until it slammed into the wall or a piece of furniture, shaking its whiskered head, stumbling to regain equilibrium. Amy would eventually put a stop to it, scoop Maude in her arms. You’re going to kill her, she’d hiss. Look at her shaking! Rick’s pleased grin made clear that his sister’s fury had been the goal all along.
The window shade calms and the light show ends. What’s left is a bedroom wall with cracked paint and brown silhouettes of small fist-shaped clouds—water stains from a roof leak in the ’90s. Jackie hears the dull sizzle of a bumblebee buzzing and bumping against the screen. She’s seen the bee only once, less than a week ago, when it came around for the first time. It was enormous, and appeared drunk or ancient or both and seemed barely able to stay aloft as it knocked softly against the wire mesh. It has returned every morning since but only as a sound.
She remembers Rick mowing the lawn at fourteen, upsetting a nest of yellow jackets. When Jackie first heard his shouts she’d reflexively reached for a dish towel and ran it under water. Swatting and howling, ripping off his shorts, T-shirt and underwear as he made his way down the hall, Rick exploded into the kitchen like he was on fire. But before she went to him, she noticed small, blond-brown hairs curling at the center of his chest, under his arms, above his privates. She could also see the beginnings of muscles along his shoulders and arms, nudging from beneath his still-perfect boy’s skin. For the first time approaching her son’s body, she paused. In that split second Jackie felt simultaneously startled, shy, and betrayed. It was as if he’d deliberately grown up behind her back, and was only now, by accident, getting caught. A sharp pinch of fear tightened in her chest with every other complicated and all-at-once feeling. She rushed to her son and began swatting the yellow jackets from his neck and legs, stomping them under her rubber-bottomed slippers as they fell to the kitchen floor. Get them! Hurry, Mom!, he’d shouted as he danced naked and desperate, a little boy again, between the butcher block and the kitchen sink.
Outside the bedroom window, the bee’s drone fades, and as Jackie’s eyelids close again slowly an older memory overwhelms the one of her son. Floyd, the summer between her junior and senior years in high school, standing alongside a green barn, looking intently at something, or someone, behind the building. There is no break from his focus and Jackie cannot tell if he’s upset or curious. She’s pulled into the dirt driveway at Howland’s Farm to pick up eggs for her mother. A quarter for a dozen, which everyone who knew to do so left in a rusty blue coffee can that sat on the plastic crate by the door. Of course she’d hoped to run into Floyd. Why else would she have driven her mother’s Mercury wagon twenty minutes to get eggs when the grocery store in Cornwall was less than five minutes from her house? Seeing him right away feels like a too-good-to-be-chance stroke of luck, like a shooting star at the first glimpse of the night sky. And here he is. The second tallest boy in the senior class, the one who kissed her two Saturdays ago on the dock at Hatch Pond. It hadn’t been a long kiss, and it started more on her right cheek than on her lips, but it was her first. He’d kissed her again last night, too, briefly, in his truck, after driving her home from the Fourth of July picnic. Now, appearing in almost perfect profile to her, so transfixed by whatever lay just beyond the barn’s edge that he hadn’t heard the station wagon crunch dirt and rock as it rolled to a stop, she wonders if these had been his first kisses, too.
A pipe rattles in the bathroom wall. Jackie opens her eyes, but it’s not the edge of her pillowcase bunched against the fitted sheet that she sees, it’s Floyd’s blue shirt. It must be new, she decides, as it starts to fade from view, because the collar is stiff, like a dress shirt, and the color—some shade between denim and cobalt—is flawless in the way that’s only possible before a garment has had its first wash. Against the brilliant green of the barn, the blue is striking, even strange. Has she seen these two colors, on their own or together, since? Not likely, she thinks, squinting her eyes shut—tight, quick—and opening them with purpose to switch off the memory as she would an annoying television commercial.