“You’re not serious,” he says. “You’re not serious.”
She nods. His knees give way to a squat, and his hands clutch at his awestruck face, and his eyes cannot move from her eyes.
“Holy hell.”
He is up, his arms around her, the smell of his chest consuming her. The world recedes to a dim concern. They are conjurers. They are voyagers bound for the unknown. She looks in his eyes and sees his readiness, his unvarnished love of her, and says:
“Al, I’m scared.”
“Why are you scared?”
“I’m going to lose my job.”
“And I’m going to get tenure. It will be fine.”
She pulls away. “That’s not the point.”
“No,” he says. “I understand that.”
“I just don’t know who I’ll be if I’m not…”
“You’ll be you. You’re always you, Susie Q.”
His eyebrows furrow.He is worried about picking up the pieces of me, she thinks.He is not worried about my life.
“We’ll figure it out, Susie. You might feel differently. After.”
An abrupt estrangement falls between them. She cannot blame him for expecting her to change. She has always been open to change. Asay yeskind of girl. But what if this is it? If there are no more characters, no more stories? No more transformation. No thousand lives lived in a thousand ways. Oh, some rebel part of her is screaming that she will never feel differently after. That she will never want to stop.
“I might” are the words she says.
When he saysI love you, he is talking about something distant from her. A simplified image of herself she allowed him to paint. Because she has not said:I might not.
Placing her hand in his, Susan follows him into the house.
2008
Al remembers a boy of seven years old, standing on a beach, eyes drowning in his first encounter with death. He remembers a boy of twelve, bringing home a report card that read: “Shows some promise, but limits himself.” He remembers a boy, minutes old, heart rate plummeting, emerging for air from a cavity in the center of his wife.
The clock in the kitchen is ticking into the shrouded morning. Viola, who he discovered last night nursing a bloody nose, has not emerged from her bedroom. His son, whom he found fucked and remorseless at the end of the beach road, is sitting across from him, pushing soggy marshmallow cereal around a bowl of gray milk. In an act of profound generosity, Al had saved the conversation for a soberer morning.
“What are we going to do, Seb?” he asks.
They towed Tillie’s car. Sebastian’s was still on the beach, a junkyard job. Tillie had been remarkable, waving her hand breezily, saying:We’ll figure it out later.She watched the car disappear with the acceptance of a woman for whom destruction has become commonplace; who understood boys and their lack of regard for the material. But the house has taken on the charge of a war zone.
“You could ground me.”
“Do we think that’s sufficient? You hit your sister.”
The dishwasher begins to beep and old anger is rising in his chest, a sense of cosmic injustice. He cannot stop the crescendo of the words: “Violence is unacceptable under this roof.”
“So kick me out.”
Defiant, like Susie, to the point of dangerous. It’s arrogance, actually, obliviousness to the lives and needs of other people.
“Really. Where would you go?”
“I don’t know. The city?”
