For hours, he doesn’t sleep. His senses are electrified. He worries about the children. He worries about how to bake two cakes when he has never even baked one. He worries about how to explain where she has gone. He worries about what his mother will say or not say. He worries about the upcoming tenure review, and whether he will say all the right things, whether the students will say all the right things. He worries he will never hear her singing again. That she will write him in her mind as the asshole who tried to constrain her. That she will mistake his love for the opposite. If she left, would he chase her? Would she stillwant him? Would it all become a horrible bundle of lawyers and accusations? Is he meant to make some gesture now, go downstairs and prostrate himself? God, as long as she doesn’t go in the dead of the night.
Eventually, he hears Susan creaking around, and the sound calms him, knowing she is near. He must drift off, because when he opens his eyes the sun is up and Viola is jumping on his bed. Downstairs they discover two birthday cards, handmade on construction paper.I love you more than anything, she has written to them both, and he wishes it were true.
2012
When Viola slides open the porch door again, Orson slips off to the bathroom. Mark Flowers—evidently sloshed—looks at her now with frank concern.
“You’re sweet together,” he says, “the two of you.”
“Well, that’s kind,” she says, though she knows it has not been true tonight.
“He was sweet with your mom.”
Hot, heat, tongue fattening. Don’t respond. Don’t bring her into this.
“You had a brother, yes?”
Dissonant, the phantom Sebastian conjured into this room where he could never be. Sebastian is so close. She feels unsteady.
“That’s right.”
“How is he?”
“Oh. He’s well, thank you,” she mumbles. “He’s an artist now.”
“Any good?” Mark asks.Is this a trap?Why should she be the arbiter of goodness? A good person would have called him sooner, perhaps after he won the magazine award last year. Or the thousand times she thought of him, wondered what he was doing, whether he would find something funny. When she felt lonely.
“It’s hard to be objective,” she admits.
Mark sits up as straight as he can now, rests his elbows on his knees and his pudgy face in his hands.
“Orson ever tell you he was so sick after your mom died?”
“No.”
“Fever for weeks. Meningitis.”
“He never said.”
When did she become so unsure about so many things? Who her mother was or wasn’t, or what she did, or what it makes her.
Don’t ask a question you don’t want an answer to.
Mark slumps back into his seat, gazes out at the endless darkness through the window. “Orson really loved her, you know.”
No.Mark Flowers is not the person she wants to hear this from. If the horrible twilight fact is to emerge, to destroy her world, it should come from Orson.
Fuck Mark Flowers.
Orson comes back in and places a hand on the small of her back. “Bedtime, I think.”
As Orson bundles Mark off, she spreads herself across the bed and closes her eyes. The click of the door. Heat, weight, a nose burrowing into her ribs, wet, forgiving lips.
“I hate that guy,” Orson says.
“Well, you could have fooled me.”
“We all had to fake it. We needed him.”
