“Where are you going?”
“California. Heard of it?”
She nods her head. It was a place her mother went. “Are you coming back?”
“Come on, get out of the snow,” he says, reaching out to her and scooping her onto the seat beside him. When he pushes a button, a jazz clarinet dances out of the car speakers. Heat is blasting out of the dashboard, and he takes her hands in his and presses them toward the airstream. “It’s much too cold here.”
“You just don’t know how to dress for it. It’s not so bad if you know what to wear.”
“Is that right?”
“Shoes are good for a start.”
“Well, in California you don’t need shoes,” he says. “They’re really more for decoration.”
The heat is blowing hard against the skin of her hands. On the dashboard, a tiny woman in a hula skirt is standing still, waiting to lurch into life. “Can I come with you?” Viola asks.
“I’m afraid that wouldn’t be a very good decision for you,” he says. “You see, California is crawling with lawyers. You’d be better off carving out a niche. Like Borneo. Or the Gambia.”
Snow is falling against the window, and the darkness outside of the car expands like deep space. Her own ignorance presents itself as animperative, the world demanding to be understood.What is Borneo? What is the Gambia?Orson can tell her.
“Will you come back?”
Orson sighs, scrunches his leg up on the seat so that he is facing her. The hot air on her hands is reassuring, even as Orson’s eyebrow is bending with some emotion she cannot place.
“Probably not, no. Which is a shame. More so for me than for you; you, madam, are destined to forget me. It’s the beauty of being a young person; you forget anyone who doesn’t matter. Or if you do remember me, it certainly won’t be as any kind of full being. But that’s fine. I’ll happily carry on as a blur of color, occupying a wee back corner of your mind.”
I love you, she wants to say.Don’t leave.He cracks the door open and places her out into the snow.
“Have a wonderful life,” he says.
The engine jumps and he is swinging away from her, already lost, the world becoming ordinary again.
Sebastian is backlit in the doorway. “Where were you?”
From the kitchen is the sound of the suck and pop of lids, the scraping of food off of porcelain, and the creaking of floorboards. Her face is wet with tears.
“It’s okay,” Sebastian says. “I miss her too.”
How can she correct him?
Al’s daughter floats toward him in the kitchen, and joins in the ballet of clearing napkins, glasses, trays of half-eaten cheese. The house feels colder than it ever has. He runs his hands under the hot tap, rubbing a sponge over a silver platter, and wills himself to think of warm and pleasant things that have come before, that—if he can only concentrate hard enough—will come again. Fishing boats. Tan lines. The Beach Boys, hot pavement, Florida oranges, the air inside a car that’s been left in the sun. The day he met Susan.
1983
It is so hot she could die.
Sweat pricks the backs of Susan’s knees, unbearable under her puritanical woolen skirts. You don’t realize it, watching her onstage, how intolerable it is under the fat beams of stage-light. How an amateur would struggle to maintain character on a day like today. But at twenty-one, nothing about Susan is amateur. Even as you fan yourself with the flimsy matinee program and beg your eyelids to stay open against the torpid air, she enchants you with her conviction, her delivery, and—yes—her beauty.Her looks don’t belong here, you might think, but then, people have been thinking that for years.
Now, backstage and desperate, she unlaces her blouse, hikes her three skirts up to her thighs. Two weeks ago, the air-conditioning unit at the Courthouse Witch Museum in Salem gave up the ghost, and July is unrelenting. Eyes closed, Susan whispers lines under her breath:
I am innocent of a witch.
She takes the washcloth from her makeup bag, wipes the damp backsides of her knees, the nape of her neck. Her brain cells are melting.How is anyone supposed to work like this?If this show—this role—were not inscribed into her muscles, she couldn’t do it. But after three years, Bridget Bishop—the first Salem woman hanged for no good reason—fits Susan like a second skin. The sting of every slur, every false accusation, the raw rub of the noose on her neck are as familiar as her daily walk to the museum. Susan isn’t well, hasn’t been well for some time. How can anyone be well under these conditions, when daily you are murdered for being different. But that’s the job: making every moment feel like thefirst, staying awake to all that pain. It’s like keeping a wound open that is trying to heal.
In the corner, a fan beats ineffectively, not even loud enough to mask the familiar lumbering footsteps outside the greenroom.
“Bourke?” Susan calls.
