“I wasn’t looking for advice.”
Susan rolls her eyes at her sister, chokes back the wordsattitude is altitude. She really does believe in it, making your own luck. Sadie reaches out and peels a small roll of green paint out of Susan’s hair.
“It’s more that I feel like I’m supposed to want more than what I have. Like I’m weird because I don’t have, like, a dream, like you.”
“You’re not weird,” Susan murmurs, pulling her sister close. “Okay, you are weird, but only in ways that I know about.”
“Oh shit,” Sadie says, pulling back, giggling, holding up green hands. “Shit.”
Two green handprints wave from the back of Susan’s white T-shirt. A moan turns into a laugh, the playful struggle for revenge.
“What’s going on up there?”
Sadie looks at her sister, giggles calming to sighs. “I should go.”
“You don’t want Chinese?”
“It’s fine.”
The kitchen air is thick with barbecue ribs and juicy dumplings. Susan watches her sister and husband exchange curt pleasantries. It’s a shame they don’t get along. But you can’t make people like each other. You can’t will them to be anyone other than who they are.
“Hello, beautiful,” Al says. His face is tired contentment. He has been working late hours, taken on new lectures. He holds two square hands against her lower back underneath Sadie’s prints and she can feel the weight that she has been carrying release into the warmth of him.
“God, that feels good.”
As he decants the hot-and-sour soup from plastic jugs into bowls, he tells her about his day, the papers he has to mark this evening and—
“Oh.” Her chair is wet, maybe with soup, maybe with urine, maybe she is pissing,No, they need to go, right now, there’s no more time!
Her body, cut open and numb, flooding with the soft, gorgeous smell of the tiny body alive on her breastbone, her daughter’s pinched, perfect face, her lips, her nose, everything that she has yet to be. They breathetogether, her impossible fingers clutching at Susan’s dressing gown. The new wordmom, applied to herself. A soft, insipid word—not enough, not remotely, to capture the conquering flood of everything between herself and this little person.
Al, in the corner, is holding her son.One of each.Susan looks at him for an endless moment, and he gazes back, his face soft with gratitude.
Twelfth Night? he had suggested in the early hours.Confusion and a happy ending?She hasn’t seen the play, but in the end it felt like nothing, giving him this—she knows the tumult and theatrics of these children are hers. Everything she thought she knew about the earth is upended. Each breath, each heartbeat is its own reason. Each clench of little fingers, each twitch of the mouth. She doesn’t want to miss a second of this life.
“Hi,” she says as the little eyes flutter open, green and unfocused, looking at but not seeing her face. The bare, damp top of Viola’s head rolls back as she opens her mouth and screams.
2011
Viola leans naked against the bathroom door, avoiding the mirror. On the other side is a real, slowly exhaling man, a man who comes and goes and remembers her birthday but forgets her middle name, who leans his head to the side and listens to her opinions on matters of varying importance, who keeps most but not all of his promises.
“Everything okay?”
Orson is everything she wants. Over the last year, their relationship has grown in the eaves of their lives, in a handful of stolen moments during the breaks in his filming schedule and her term time. They have met in London’s private corners, sharing drinks, tentative brushes, occasionally—when they know they are alone—a kiss. He touches her like he cannot resist her, like he ought to resist. He disappears into taxis. Until now, time has frustrated them, refusing to amount to anything, to give them certainty and space. The world detains him for long, unpredictable months. But he sends her small intimacies, her phone blinking out the thrill of him like a lighthouse.
O
saw a crow on set today kill a pigeon
sorry is that disgusting
i had to tell someone
Viola
you didn’t intervene?
I thought you were a hero
