The other chaperones huddle together, observing, quietly comparing. Susan hangs back; she feels herself separate from these women who all play doubles at the tennis club on the weekends, whose husbands wear suits to work. She worries about the people their children will become.
Oh God, was it right, to stay? Will their world be bright enough here?
The sea expands to the ends of her senses. Al always says that it’s a relief that the sea exists—something so unknowable that even a life’s work can’t plumb it.
It terrifies her.
Where did her children go? Susan blinks and realizes the fog is deepening around her, or at least the faces of the class are becoming more anonymous. It takes her a moment to spot Viola in her yellow mackintosh, studiously classifying animals and detailing her observations on the crabs: How many legs do they have? How fast can they run? Sebastian eludes her, his green coat dissolving into the others—is that him or one of the Dunning boys? She feels her breath shortening, tightness in her chest. She is shivering, she can see the goose bumps on her skin, but she feels terribly hot in her rain jacket. Where is Sebastian now?
The skies ring out with the cries of Susan’s infant twins—or are they seagulls wailing against the northeasterly wind? She feels them again being pushed from her womb, sees them identical but marked by the arrhythmia of two tiny hearts fluttering at different paces, one tiny hand reaching faster for the rattle. How can she hold them both? How can she hold them at all?
Where is Viola now?
2012
Her new, unbearable reality hits in shockwaves. Orson’s absence permeates her phone, her hands, her bed.
Every day she searches for his name. What is he doing, who is he with, how is he feeling. She gorges until she makes herself sick on it, all the promotional materials for his new movie, the publicity shots and glib interviews and threads of speculation and baseless opinion, and herself absent from all of it. As though she never existed. None of this will give her the rough bitten edges of his fingernails, or his late-night doubts, or his half-drunk coffee cups littered around the house, or the heartbeat of his affection in her pocket.
hi little thing—
this made me think of you—
I didn’t want to wake you but—
I’m feeling so bluuue without you—
love you too
really really
always
Is that all she gets from him?Always?What a pointless word. Dangerous, even.
She wanted more time. She was robbed of all the time she thought she would have, and it was—
Her fault.
And now Niamh is leaving, their flat a sea of cardboard, their life sorted into piles. Yours, Mine, Trash, Donate, Sell. People from theInternet keep coming out to trade crumpled bills for the stuff of their lives: lamps, place mats, the Botero. In all that time, Orson never came here. Because she wouldn’t let him.
Viola gets off the couch as Matthias, Niamh’s boyfriend, helps lift it outside and into someone’s van. When he comes back in, Niamh kisses him.
“He’s handy.”
“That’s why I’m keeping him.”
It’s pitiful watching the two of them, their all-encompassing happiness. Viola sits on the stained beige carpet and wraps herself in the blanket that she refused to pack.
“I’m going to be alone forever,” she says.
“Oh stop.”
“I’m fine with it. I’m going to die alone.”
“Well, of course you’re going to die alone. We all die alone. Honestly, I’ve been trying to tell you for years.” Niamh rolls her eyes and Viola leans her face into her palms.
“I don’t want to go home,” she says.
