All anyone has is a few brief moments. The lingering sense of how she made them feel.
Maybe that’s enough.
In the morning, Viola leans by the front door as Sebastian pulls his suitcase out of her room and checks the bathroom for any traces of the last week.
“Don’t go.”
But he will, he has to. He looks at her with all the sad inevitability of adulthood, the impossibility of retreat into a house they can both call their own. And she will have to reckon with the wreckage, the number on her phone that she cannot text, the love that has gone.
“I’ll see you soon?”
The memorial. Eight weeks.
She hugs him until he is too heavy to hold.
When the door clicks she is alone with the shadow world of her thoughts.
The play wasn’t all terrible, was it? Surely it asks some questions of merit. Is love deluded? Can you walk away from grief?I don’t know, she thinks.I don’t know.
1996
“I just don’t want them to think of me like this.”
Susan is sitting on the edge of the bathtub, her feet arching, legs forming a table for her elbows, hands pressing up into her face. Her shirt is off and Al can see the mountain range of her spine. She’s going under on Wednesday.Hysterectomy, oophorectomy.Why do we give the most horrible operations the most beautiful Greek words? I don’t care, take it all out, she said.
“I’m not as convincing as you are,” he says.
“You’re doing great.”
“Viola keeps asking me why I look so serious.”
“Tell her that’s just your face.”
She flicks water at him. Smiles. Allows him to hold hope. Surgery, then chemo. And somehow, in between it all, a final trip to LA. She wants to say her goodbyes while she still looks like herself.
Oh, the irony, that it has taken this to get what he wanted. And my God, it’s beautiful to watch her walk around the yard, grateful for the outside space, the trees. To hear her packing snacks and lunches for the children in the morning, reading them bedtime stories at night. Together they refuse to acknowledge it, except when it will not be ignored. The house has taken on the smell of her again.
“You might not be able to walk for a few days,” he says. “How are we going to explain that?”
“We’ll just tell them I’m taking a few days of relaxation.”
No point mentioning the other symptoms. The pain medication that will likely make her gassy and groggy and nauseous. The difficultyurinating. The recovery will take as long as it takes. And then, she will get better.
With some effort, she lifts herself out of the bathtub. He bends to get the drain, holds out a towel for her to walk into.
“Ready?”
“Ready.”
They will live each day in deluded hope. And when the dissonance threatens to sabotage everything, she will give him that look, the same look he saw in her eye in the dressing room that very first time, like she’s about to go onstage and put on a hell of a show. And he thinks that, even if they are lying, they are being sincere.
He has never loved her more.
Susan stares out the window as marshes give way to tide pools. She likes volunteering as a chaperone for school trips. Now that she has stopped working—or nearly—she has more time than the other mothers with regular office jobs, and it gives her the chance to see Sebastian and Viola with other children, watch them socialize, study them. One last trip to LA and then it is done.
Now they are tiny marine biologists, listening underwhelmed as an elderly man explains about hermit crabs, damp worksheet papers flapping against the sea breeze.
“They fight, you know. They’ll do anything for a bigger shell.”
