“And what about your new therapist? What does she think of this plan?”
“Don’t be scolding, Clemence. It doesn’t suit you.” When Jillian is wounded, she turns to steel. “How come you are the only one who gets to make up your own story?”
“Because Iam a goddamn mess, that’s why,” says Clemence. “Whereas you are Jillian, and your husband is a saint, and you have two wonderful children who need you not to blow their world apart.”
“And do you know what a heavy load that is to carry?” asks Jillian. “Don’t you think Imight want to put it down once in a while?” She says, “Bob understands that.” The dramatic flair on his name incongruous with what his name is. Clemence can’t help wishing his name was something more romantic—Rafe, or Antony.
“Jillian,” she says.
But Jillian stops her. “I’m just saying that progress doesn’t always look like progress. Iget that. But Ialso think you deserve someone who knows how excellent you are. In a way that Todd never did.”
“Iguess Iended up justifying his low expectations.”
“Ithink he never appreciated you for who you are, so what else were you supposed to do?” Jillian puts her arms around her friend.
“Remember,” says Clemence, “when we thought our weddings were the end of the story? That this was what happily ever after would be?”
“When there is no such thing,” says Jillian.
“As happy?” Clemence doesn’t want to believe that.
“As ever after,” says Jillian. “Because the story goes on and on.”
“If you’re lucky.”
“We’re both lucky,” says Jillian.
And Clemence says, “Don’t Iknow it.”
Twenty-Four
Clemence tries to keep the cat out, but he scratches at the door, imploring her through the window with his single steady eye. Bailey, now accustomed to tinned fish, refuses to quit her, and Clemence is not sure what she’d do if it came down to an ultimatum: him or Toby. The cat is less trouble, and way better groomed. Somebody is taking care of him just fine, and Clemence likes that, too, her complete lack of responsibility for his well-being. Bailey comes and goes, an arrangement Clemence is quite sure she’d be incapable with a lover. With anyone who isn’t a feline, she is too subject to obsession.
Because it’s true that she thinks of Toby constantly, and she thinks of Charles, and she even wonders about Toad now, though she wishes she didn’t. At a distance, Toad has become an object of vague fascination. His number on her phone, a string of digits she barely recognizes, because she never saw them back when he was one of her contacts.Her primary contact, her literal next of kin, but it’s different now, and Toad is persistent, that number showing up at least twice a week, and Clemence knows she should accept the call and talk to him, but she doesn’t have it in her. “Not yet,” she says, when friends and family urge her to get it over with, by which she possibly means “not ever,” and she’s curious to see how long she can get away with this, being utterly unaccountable for all her sins and failings. Her arrangement with Toby just another of these things, and she wonders what Toad would make of it if he knew. She wonders if Toad has made arrangements of his own, but this she is having the hardest time imagining. Toad was so set in the life they’d made together that she can easily believe he’s carried on without her, still sleeping in their bed, leaving her side untouched, barely having to make the bed in the morning, but he would. And that Clemence could have ducked out of that life with so little effect is the reason she couldn’t bear to stay.
This cat though, Bailey, who seems to know his name even though Clemence made it up—he abjectly refuses to be apart from her. When she doesn’t open the door, he starts howling.Is it me or the fish?Clemence wonders, and she always gives in. Letting him slip inside, but closing the door behind him—it’s cold out, and the attic is already so drafty. Clemence is layered in sweaters, but the chill is hard to shake. The place seems much smaller all shut up like this. When it was summer and the doors were open, she’d felt connected to the world up there in the treetops with her patchy view of the sky, the sounds of the world drifting into her apartment—car horns, people shouting,birdsong, the jangly music of the ice cream van. And the church bells’ chime, marking off the hours, proving that even when she felt like she was languishing, she wasn’t.
But the church bells sound farther away now, the world shut out with a deadbolt.
Clemence knows that burglars—or theoretical ones at least—might try to access a home through a third-floor balcony, though it mostly seems unlikely. They’d have to be the kind of people who scale walls and leap from rooftops, and the only creature Clemence knows who can do this is the cat. Who jumps up onto her bed to make a nest among the pillows, and she should shoo him away, because the bed is the worst place—she’s thinking of Toby and his allergies. But the cat looks so cozy, and her bed looks so cozy with Bailey in it, examining her. Their three eyes are locked. Clemence knows she’ll be the one to look away first. He’s a judgy cat, too, which you can tell by his expression. But this is what Clemence likes about him, appreciates. He’s judging her, but he keeps coming back. In her mind, she wears this like a badge of honour.
Toby doesn’t come back,but on the off chance that he might, Clemence gathers up her sheets and blankets in the morning, once the cat has departed, and takes the dandered bundle to the laundromat up the road from the bookshop. En route, she begins to notice the trail of destruction—her posters for the jumble sale have been violently removed from utility poles, torn to pieces, taped up corners the only evidence they’d ever hung there. Afewremain intact, but these have been marred by a scrawl in red Sharpie:RACIST SCUM, it says, which is perplexing. Clemence stands there staring, her laundry getting heavy. She’s trying to figure it out. Scum perhaps she could entertain, but whyracist? She thinks of Crampton and that long-ago church picnic, but Crampton wouldn’t have done that to her posters. If Crampton had a problem with Clemence, she would have told her to her face.
She continues on her way considering that someone else might hate St. Saviour’s as much as Crampton does, but could the church really be calledracist? The congregation is more than half Korean. Not that this necessarily brings immunity to racism, but it made the accusation particularly curious. The posters were destroyed or defaced all the way up the street. Across the road, she can see the same thing on the other side. Ripped paper litters the sidewalk, blowing up against her feet. Clemence removes one of the defaced posters from a utility pole and folds it into her pocket—evidence.
The laundromat is quiet, a benefit of the early hour. Clemence stuffs her sheets into the smallest machine to save a dollar, and uses that dollar to supplement the chai latte she buys at the counter. Because yes, this laundromat has a barista. Crampton says that soon normal people won’t be able to live here. Ridiculous rents are now justified by this being an organic smoothie district, meanwhile homeless people line up for food packages distributed by a church whose roof is crumbling. Soon the people with houses will also be standing in line, if the price of organic cauliflower is anything to go by.
Every day there are flyers stuffed into the mailbox at Clemence’s house, developers begging Mrs. Yeung to sell. She could do it, too, and live comfortably ever after, as she deserves to, but then where would Doug the agoraphobic artist live, and the guy who lives next door to him whose addictions are why Mrs. Yeung keeps her Naloxone kit handy? And the Korean students who come and go, looking for a place to stay and somebody who’s not out to scam them? Where would Clemence live? She certainly couldn’t afford laundromat chai lattes if she were paying market rates. Her life, she knows, would be miserable, drudgery. Working such long hours that she’d only be able to do her laundry when the place was packed and all the machines were full. Her life would have none of its spaciousness. She was lucky, she knew—but also this surely wasn’t so much to ask for.
RACIST SCUM. Clemence sits at the counter in the window with her drink and waits for her cycle to complete, watching passersby to see if any of them are clutching a red marker. Are jumble sales racist? Somebody had donated a miniature lawn jockey, but Reverend Michelle had seen it first, plucking it out of the donations pile for immediate disposal. She was aware of these things. The church congregation had an anti-racism committee whose meetings were held before the jumble sale organizers’, and made up of many of the same individuals.
The washer dings, and Clemence moves her sheets to the dryer, returning to her seat to pull her phone from her bag. She has a bad feeling about all this, and the several unread texts she’s received underline it. Shegoes to the events page she’d set up for the sale, her suspicions confirmed by angry screeds, nearly unintelligible, beneath every single one of her postings. So this isn’t just the work of some unhinged person on the sidewalk with a red marker—this person has internet access, too. The postings made from a series of fake accounts whose names were rows of numbers and their avatars empty. All written by the same person, it seemed, who used all caps, spurned punctuation marks, and supposed the St.Saviour’s jumble sale to be a scourge on the community.
But there are so many scourges, Clemence thinks. How would a person settle on this one? When there were baristas in laundromats, and renovictions, and therapists preying on their clients via Yelp? Not to mention warmongers, weapons dealers, and cyberterrorists. How could the jumble sale be it? She tries to read the posts to understand, but they don’t make any sense. There’s no mention of racism, either. People are confusing and difficult, which is why Clemence avoided involvement with committees in the past. Influenced by Toad on this point, and he wasn’t wrong. When they’d moved into their neighbourhood, she’d signed up for the homeowners’ association, but Toad made her quit after she kept coming home from meetings upset that all their plans were about cracking down on guerrilla gardeners and kids on skateboards. “It’s not worth it,” he told her, and it wasn’t, so Clemence resigned, but not before planting a bed of sunflowers on the boulevard to spite them, and some of the flowers even bloomed.
Clemence inhales the freshly laundered bundle that she carries down the street, past the carnage of her publicity campaign. Thinking about Toad, because laundry is a trigger—he’d read that book about tidying up and insisted on his drawers being organized like that, but Clemence could never get the folds right. She’d been so unhappy in their marriage, and she wonders why she’s so reluctant to face him now that it’s finally over. She’s still traumatized by the shock of his tears, and by how much she doesn’t want to have to be responsible for that. She doesn’t want his heartbreak to be her burden, but is there also a chance there’s more to her aversion? Could she still be afraid to let their life together go? Because otherwise, why not just be done with it?
It doesn’t make sense, but then neither does Clemence upending her stable existence and moving across the country into a rooming house, choosing to sleep on a mattress that countless others have slept on, cooking all her meals on a hot plate, and living just below the poverty line. She knows this. But she has spent her entire adult life, until these last few months, making smart and practical choices, doing all the right things, such a miserable, magic-drained existence, and why was that okay, and this new life of hers requires an explanation? And yes, maybe she is angry, too, tired of feeling like a human wrecking ball, when it hadn’t been only her fault that so little of what was left was salvageable, and maybe never had been worth keeping in the first place.
