Viola holds his gaze. There is her determination, a stubbornness entirely different from his own, unafraid of lighting out in the dark. The familiarity crushes him. But he battles the instinct to argue, to drive her away as he drove Susie away, underestimating her desires.
“Am I going to meet him?”
She shakes her head. “He’d like to, but it won’t work out. Next time.”
The mysterious older man. A person already moving into his life, settling into a sense of what is required of him. Al never wanted Viola to be determined by someone else’s dreams. But hadn’t he been six years older than Susie? Hadn’t he wanted to shape her?
“I hope he treats you well,” he says.
“Oh, he does,” she smiles. On her plate is most of her fish and a fistful of uneaten chips.
“You gonna finish that?”
“Can’t. Stuffed.”
The next day he watches her graduate, allowing the musical Latin to wash over him as a man confers magic upon her, transforms her from one thing into another. She emerges afterward robed and beaming, and they take photographs together. The sun is shining, and as they walk through town, young people are pushing boats down the river and laughing, and the world is good but not his.
“Could you see yourself living here?” she asks. Her eyes are bright and sparkling.
No sense in putting her out. He smiles benignly. “Maybe,” he says. “You certainly seem happy here.”
She beams. “I really am.”
He will give her the gift of her departure, even though he is breaking inside—it is his only hope. If he lets her go freely, then freely she may return.
The next day, he is gone.
1991
They would never understand: it was love of them that made Susan close the door. Love of them that sent her out into the snowy night, up above the thin black rip of the tarmac into tomorrow’s California. The worst part was the thud of the lock, clicking into place with her on the wrong side. She was walking away from the wail of their great and immediate need for her.
The aircraft shudders against a cloud. Dawn breaks on another shore. By the time Susan disembarks, her back is aching, feet pressing against the sides of her shoes. No one told her about that, how her feet would never be the same size again. She slips into a pair of flip-flops as she steps out into the cool city. It’s a nice time of year, the concrete no longer holding heat. She stretches herself out, peers around.
Eventually she sees him, a man leaning against a tall pillar in a crisp black T-shirt, holding her name. His caterpillar eyebrows furrow as he searches, then release when he spots her, his gaze traveling over her unswollen stomach.
“There she is,” Orson says, and all of it floods over her, the memory of herself as a beautiful creature, wanted and good and desirable, the relief of coming home.
“God, I’ve missed you,” she says, and in an instant they both know that the words contain too much.
The brown, diamond-patterned carpet, the brown striped Travelodge duvet.It’s not so bad, she tells herself. She told Al she was staying at the Hilton. She didn’t want him thinking of her in a place like this. He would think she couldn’t take care of herself. She deposited the savings into an account at California Federal Bank under the name SusanByrne.Just in case, she told herself. The secret filled her with a luscious guilt, as though she were playing a private game with him and surprised them both with an outlandish move.
It didn’t need to mean anything, if she didn’t want it to. If she really felt bad, she could always buy him a nice Christmas present.
Everyone’s going out later, Orson told her.If you’re interested.
Her mind is too full of her children.Did they fall asleep easily or wake in fits and starts?Little Viola is always having nightmares these days. They say it’s normal for one-year-olds. Susan always lobbies for her to come and sleep between them, but Al is firm. She won’t learn that way, he says.
Naked, she crawls into the sheets, like she used to after she and Al first moved in together. Naked had been a revelation of textures, the reassurance of his warm, freckled back expanding and contracting in the deep of the night. Always, it made her feel so free. But here the sheets are stiff and starchy and rub raw on her breasts. She is swollen with the need to express, but cannot bear the thought of her milk pouring down the drain. She left them as many bottles as she could, showed Al how to prepare the formula. Her brain counts the sets of clean clothes and packs of diapers. Is it enough?
Stop, she tells herself.Nothing you can do now.
Five minutes. Ten minutes. Even in the dark, Susan knows where the remote is, the distance from her outstretched arm to the base of the bedside lamp. Nothing but light from the television, blue-yellow images diffusing onto all of her pale skin. Bosnia again, cameras almost pornographically close to the faces of sobbing mothers, grim-faced fathers, amputees, broken, bloody families. The footage is running, shaking, blasted by the explosions that are rocking a city called Sarajevo, a city she had never heard of until a few months ago. Everyone speaks its name now with concern and a sense of inevitability. On the program, another mother is handing over her child to a man in a blue helmet who is going to carry it across the border.It is the only thing I can do, she is saying, and the woman is crying and Susan is crying, and the child is screaming, and then gone.
She could hear them babbling today, in the background, when she called to say she’d arrived.
“It’s Mom on the phone,” Al had said, muffled and distant. “Where’s Grandma?”
“Grandma’s still there?”
