Sadie raises her eyebrows. She adjusts the pair of cheap black sunglasses over her nose, waits her out.
“I’m missing their birthday,” Susan admits. Her voice wobbles, and it’s strangely embarrassing, asking for strength from her sister. Laying all of her optimistic bullshit at the altar of a woman who has always been a realist.
“What? How come?”
On Saturday, Susan will be filming a scene in the rain. A climactic scene on a beach. No studio tricks will do. She thought she had more time, but this low-pressure zone has come up from the South Pacificmore quickly than anyone expected. And now she has been required to book a flight for first thing tomorrow. “It’s not really a choice.”
“Are you going to cancel the party?”
“I don’t know. It’s just insane, isn’t it? The whole situation?”
“What did Al say?”
“Haven’t told him.”
Sadie’s mouth is a thin line. The worst part is that, with Sadie, she doesn’t need to explain why. Sadie, unlike Al, gets why it’s important. Why it has to come first.
Often now she wonders how they ended up together. Why they believed, with all the divergence of their desires, a life between them could make sense. What naive chemical possessed them, what impossible blindness? This morning, watching him step in to reexplain to the children how to tie their shoelaces, it occurred to her that all the things she loves about him are the things that frustrate her most deeply. His closeness to the children, his desire to simplify the world, his instincts to protect them all. The way they look at him fills her with jealousy as much as adoration.
“You’re going to collapse if you keep this up, Susie. You’re going to make yourself sick.”
Between them hover the shades of so many events she has missed over the last four years: first words and first steps and first beach days. The shades of future empty seats at plays and sports matches and birthday dinners and road trips if she doesn’t justdo it, just make her move.
“Susie, he needs to understand.”
Her daughter has gone into the bushes and sat in poison ivy and Sebastian is pointing at the rash and screaming. Susan reaches, scoops her up, while Sadie runs upstairs—“I’m sure I have calamine…” Trust her sister to have hung on to this bottle for fifteen years. But the pink liquid retains some effect as Susan rubs it into the backs of Viola’s pudgy legs.
“Is that a magic potion?” Viola asks.
“Yes.”
“Does it taste good?”
“No.”
“Are you a witch?”
Her daughter looks up at her with her own eyes.Has he told her this? That her mother is a witch?
“No.” Susan is firm.
Viola looks perplexed, blinks, tries again: “Are you a witch?”
Susan’s resistance is melting.What is so wrong, if it is only a game?“No,” she says weakly, wiping off her hands on the bathroom towel. I am innocent of a witch.
Viola traces fat fingers through the unrubbed lotion on her legs.
“Please, Mom.”
“You got me,” Susan says, cracking, cackling, losing herself in the sweet giggly folds of her daughter’s neck.
2012
“Right,” Orson says. “Not the beach then.”
They couldn’t go today even if they wanted to. Viola hardly remembers getting home yesterday, the small coast guard boat that picked them up, helped her breathe. One of their rescuers had taken a photo of Orson, and alreadyPeopleis circulating a story about the “Damsel in Distress.”
Orson launches a stream of profanity that startles even the birds. “Weasels,” he spits. “Fucking shameless.”
