“Orson.” Her voice cracks.
“I really want what’s best for you, Viola. And I said nobody was going to get hurt.”
“Please, can I just see you?”
The walls of the room have not changed, but she is standing in a blown-up building. Her purpose is hanging like loose cable and—
“I’m going to miss you, Viola. Always.”
The phone is dead.
After a moment, breath. Sharp, gulping breath, breath taking place in a new world, a world that refuses to contain Orson Grey. She looks around the room for evidence of him, anything solid, but all her proof is unraveling. No one can tell her it was real, that the worldwas, that Orson existed for her and loved her and had terrible taste in music and looked great on a bicycle and could be kind and wrong and gentle and distant and hers?
It’s stupid, and it’s her own fault. She searches and finds the dull, useless truth; the only person she wants to speak to is the mother that she was just beginning to know.
From the living room, murmurings. It doesn’t sound good.
When Viola first mentioned Orson, Sebastian assumed it was trivial, a brush, that she had oversold it even then. What an idiot he had thought her, not to have asked him more. Why didn’t she tell him then, what it was becoming? Was she afraid of his judgment? Is that who he is?
The living room goes quiet, and then there is some shuffling and the door cracks open.
“You okay?”
“Just looking for something,” she says. But she only hovers over her darkened desk, the light on her phone barely moving.
“Couch okay?”
“I’ll be honest,” she says. “It’s not the one.”
He flops open the duvet on one side of him. “There’s room. Don’t be weird.”
In the dark, he cannot see her face, but he can hear how fraught her breath is. When she crawls in next to him, he can feel her exhaustion.
In a small voice directed mostly into the mattress, she says: “I don’t know what I am doing.”
“He loves you a lot,” Sebastian says.
“I know,” she says, high and breakable.
“He’s a good person. But he really is just a person.”
Meeting Orson was like meeting any old guy. Like shining a bright light upon a shadowy corner that he had long presumed to be full of intrigue, and revealing it as a series of ordinary things. Clearly Orson loved their mother in his own way. She had been a friend to him. Clearly he loves Lola—regardless of the strangeness of tonight and whatever he said on that call. It had been a joy to spend an evening moving through his memories. The disappointment is hard to articulate. There was nothing Orson knew beyond anyone else about the workings of his mother’s mind: not what she wanted or who she loved. All he really held were a few brief moments, and the lingering sense of how she made him feel.
Sebastian places a hand on her back, chucks her a pillow.
“It’ll be okay.”
“Maybe.”
“No, it will.”
1995
In the waiting room are two women who look like her. Susan studies their faces. One has a longer nose, one is younger. They both look nervous and she tells herself: you’ll be okay. She looks up to the ceiling, counts the tiles, tries to hang on to a sense of control.
When she walks in, a man (older, mustache) is busying himself with some papers. Would you mind taking your clothes off? She’s done this before, it’s nothing to her, remember Al, the first time, how unthinking? But hasn’t her body changed, become more vulnerable, less her own? Slowly, she folds up her shirt, facing the wall, buying herself time before she has to face him.
The words do not make sense coming out of the doctor’s mouth. They are words for another woman. They do not apply to her, to the organ that grew her children. Quite far advanced, normally a compliment, something she never was in school. We’ll have to act fast.
