* * *
—
Outside Milwaukee, Roman turned off the radio and said, “It’s great that he killed himself.”
“Are you being sarcastic?”
“It’s a better story this way! And the better the story, the more likely Bill is to include his stuff. If it’s just some random guy, then they’re just cow sketches. But if it’s her love, and he killed himself, then it’s, like, the main story of the collection. When we go back, we’ll get the details! Do you think he shot himself? He must’ve, right?”
Yale’s stomach was a mess, and he needed to put his head down and sleep. He didn’t want to break it to Roman that he’d quite possibly never get the end of the Ranko Novak story, at least not firsthand.
Roman said, “Did you know that when Jules Pascin slit his wrists, he wrote a message for his mistress with his blood?”
“How romantic.”
A minute later Roman said, in a quieter voice, “You know that’s not—last night—that’s not the kind of thing I do.”
“Okay.” Yale kept his eyes on the road, tried to act completely neutral.
“God, I’m so messed up.”
“I don’t think that’s true.” He tried to remember why he’d let it happen, who had initiated it all. The heavy stickiness of that room was still with him, but none of it made sense anymore.
Roman’s face was turned completely away. What good could he even be to this kid? It was January 29, three days past the circled spot on his calendar, and he was heading back to the city, to real life, with everything he still owned in the back of a rental car he’d have to return before dinner. He had a few dates jotted down for Bill, but no scoop on any artists besides Ranko Novak. And he might have just burned their one bridge to Nora. He had no idea where he was spending the night. Roman might have needed a role model, but it sure as hell shouldn’t be Yale.
He said, “If you don’t mind, I’m going to turn the radio up.”
2015
Starting when Claire was eight, she would come in on Saturdays to help Fiona in the resale shop. Fiona had just been made manager, and she still needed to spend twice as long as she would in subsequent years with the balance sheets, the payroll, the ancient and temperamental computer. She’d pick Claire up from ballet and head back to work as the store was closing. Claire would wander, dusting and straightening. She’d come and tell Fiona if a bulb was burnt out, and Fiona would give her a notepad and tell her to write down which one.
Or sometimes it was Claire and a friend, some girl who thrilled at the prospect of walking around an empty store as the streetlights came on outside, pretending to be trapped in an old mansion.
The store was chic and sparse and curated, two floors of artfully arranged living rooms and dining rooms and closets. Sometimes Fiona would ask Claire to straighten up the ladies’ shoes, and Fiona would emerge from the office an hour later to find the high heels sorted by color into rainbow stripes. Just as often, she’d find Claire sitting on one of the couches, staring into the middle distance, not having done a thing Fiona had asked. It didn’t matter much—she’d really just been inventing tasks—but this, Claire’s teachers said, was what she did at school too: Sometimes she’d do her work and sometimes she’d stonewall them, just sit silently drawing trees, impervious to threats of lost recess.
Once, that year, there was a tremendous snowstorm, and Sophia, the friend they’d brought back to the store from ballet, worried she wouldn’t be able to get home. Or at least she and Claire enjoyed pretending to worry. “You can sleep on the stripy bed upstairs,” Claire said, “and I’ll sleep on Soft-more.” Soft-more was her name for a particular leather couch that had been in the store for more than a year. Sophia said, “We’ll have to change into new clothes in the morning. We’ll have to pick outfits.”
Sophia lived only six blocks away, though, and at seven o’clock Fiona called Mrs. Nguyen and said she’d be happy to walk her home. She told the girls it was time to go. Sophia whined a bit but Claire was silent. It wasn’t till they’d dropped Sophia at her door and were back on Clark that Claire sank to the snowy sidewalk and shouted, “I hate you!” Not crying, just seething in a little ball, angry and red.
The affair Fiona had started with Dan from yoga was, right then, at its most confusing point. Dan would email her every day on his lunch hour, and on days when he didn’t—as he hadn’t today—she’d invent all kinds of scenarios wherein he’d suddenly reconciled with the wife he was divorcing, or had abruptly, in the middle of the morning, grown sick of Fiona. She was convinced that she loved him, that she’d never loved anyone more, but then when she did see him, when he managed to slip away from the home he still shared with his ex and their kids, meet her at a hotel or at the store—where, lights off, they’d make love on top of a blanket on that same couch Claire adored—she’d remember that he wasn’t all that special. A brown-haired guy with nice eyes, average intelligence. He could have been in an insurance commercial. That winter, though, he had her in a permanent haze, and when Claire dropped to the sidewalk, Fiona could only stare at her.
If they’d been home, she might have called Claire out for her language. But here, an upset Claire could decide to take off into the street or onto a city bus. Fiona stood a long time between Claire and the road. The few people who passed smiled sympathetically. The wind hurled snow in everyone’s face.
Eventually she put her hand on Claire’s back, and Claire screamed. How had she even felt it through her parka? She yelled, “Leave me alone forever!”
Someone had stopped behind them, a woman who bent down and asked Claire, in a Jamaican accent, if this was her mama.
Claire, caught off guard, said yes.
The woman stood and said, “Just pick her up and carry her. Last time she little enough for that.”
And although Fiona expected Claire to kick, to bite, she bent and scooped her from beneath, a compact mass. Claire clutched her own legs to her chest but did nothing to fight. A block later she was sobbing into Fiona’s chest, and by the time they reached home, she was shaking so hard Claire worried it was some kind of seizure.
Why hadn’t she thought to pick her up in the first place? Why did it take a stranger to tell her this?
She laid Claire on the bed and zipped their coats off and curled up around her, and Claire didn’t elbow her away, didn’t act, for once, like Fiona was touching her with ice hands.
In the hospital, when Claire was born, Fiona had been so flooded by hormones and panic and grief and fear and guilt and revulsion that when Damian brought her the baby, impossibly small and alien, its body a lurid pink, Fiona told him to take it away, to keep it safe from her. She had some horrid, febrile vision of a mother animal smothering its young, eating it. In fact Fiona did have a fever, as it turned out, and when she emerged from its fog, five hours had passed, and Claire had been given a bottle in the nursery. Fiona was furious—all the books had said not to do this—but when they brought Claire to her for a supervised feeding, nothing worked properly anyway. The baby wouldn’t latch, and Fiona had no milk yet. The nurse assured her this was how you got the milk, by letting the baby try. Fiona was crying so much, sweating so much, that she couldn’t imagine her body would ever secrete anything but saline.