Outside on the balcony, Clemence thinks she can see paw prints, and wonders about Bailey, if he’s missed her. Where he goes when he’s not here, and whether there are other people all over the neighbourhood imagining he belongs to them. She regrets having shut him out over those few weeks in order to make her apartment hospitable on the off chance of Toby who—unlike the cat, old reliable—rarely showed up at all.
Her parents are standing around awkwardly, hovering. Clemence realizes they’re uncomfortable with sitting on her bed; they don’t want to mess with the arrangement of pillows, plus no doubt they feel it’s an intimate, personal space, so she pulls out the chairs from her small kitchen table, offering these instead. The table is crowded with her laptop, and Dr. Penelope’s notes—Clemence is not yet behind on her deadline for the index, but she will be unless she quickly gets herself together. The idea of having to scramble and rush seems strange and foreign from where she’s standing now, and she’s not sure she remembers how to do it.
“And all your books,” Bonnie is saying now, studying the spines that are lined up on the shelf, something else she can use to try to decode the mystery that is her daughter. “Mortimer, Farmer, Lively—how can there be so many authors called Penelope?”
“And over here, too,” says Roger, perusing the pile onthe table, holding up Penelope Harkness’s backlist—Say Yes: The Secret to a Happier Marriage;Zap: How to Bring a Spark to Your Romantic Connection; andAfter You Stray: Putting Your Marriage Back on Track. “Pen by name, pen by game?”
He laughs. Nobody else does. Bonnie is too interested in the titles in his hand. “Clemence, what is this?” she’s asking. “What are you doing with these books?”
“They’re for work,” Clemence says, and she doesn’t know how to read her mother’s anxious questioning, if she’d be happier to know that the books were for personal research and Clemence was actually trying to rebuild her former life. Bonnie says she doesn’t like to judge, but of course she judges. Everybody does. She just makes a special effort not to show it. What would it be liked if they talked to each other, instead of functioning as respective ciphers, but no, because then they would fight all the time. If she’s being judged, Clemence doesn’t want to know. “I’m doing the index for her latest book. She’s friends with Grace. Did you know that?”
“Grace gave me an autographed copy ofZapfor my birthday. Some of the ideas she suggested were very effective. You know the one, Roger?”
“Gross,” says Clemence. The kettle is boiling, not a moment too soon. She picks up her yellow teapot and waits for Bonnie to admire it, because she wants her mother to know that Clemence too can have beautiful things. As she prepares the tea, she explains how she bought it from a potter at the artisan market in the summer, and there is a moment of silence as everybodythinks about Mary-Ann Arbuckle, and how Clemence had tried to stab her with a brooch. “In a fit of delusion,” Clemence would add, if she were explaining the situation.
Clemence gets down three mismatched mugs that had come with her apartment, chipped and charmless, but at least they would not remind anyone of Clemence’s very public breakdown. Although if anyone had mentioned it, Clemence could gently remind them that the sale made record profits, moving jumble like no committee had managed to in decades. She’d been a part of that, in spite of everything, and the negative attention inspired by Mary-Ann Arbuckle’s campaign could hardly take all the credit.
“So you’re going to be okay here,” says Bonnie, as Clemence places the mugs on the table. She’s talking about the cozy room and the pretty teapot, the books and papers that are piled on the table because Clemence is employed, if not altogether gainfully. She’s talking about how Clemence’s cough has subsided after weeks of her sounding like a barking seal, her chest still rattling audibly every time she inhaled, but now she breathes almost normally. Bonnie is still worried about mould, but the gingham curtain and the teapot have helped bring her around. She’s exchanged numbers with Mrs. Yeung and they’ve been texting, and Bonnie admires her, trusts her to be looking out for her daughter.
“Idon’t need anybody looking out for me,” Clemence tells her. “I’m a grown woman.”
“Agrown woman who is still convalescing after a veryscary illness,” Roger corrects her. He worries as much as Bonnie does.
“Everybody needs someone,” says Bonnie. “Though it does seem like you’ve got an awful lot of someones.” The last month had demonstrated this, friends and family showing up. Crampton Goldberg had sent a floral wreath, and there had been great debate as to whether she thought that Clemence had died. Once Clemence regained capacity for speech, she’d phoned the grocery store—perhaps the last grocery store left on the planet where an actual human being answered the phone—to thank Crampton for the generous gesture, and also as proof of life.
But she hadn’t heard from Toby. Perhaps he’d gone home for the holidays to see his mother, which was what he’d been planning, even though his stepfather’s cologne aggravated his scent sensitivities, and he’d end up with brutal migraines. Toby had tried to talk to his mother about it once, but it turned out that his stepdad had a glandular disorder and the cologne was to disguise his body odour, and Toby’s mom is stuck between a rock and hard place, and so Toby doesn’t go home a lot.
Sitting with the tea in Clemence’s apartment, no one mentions Toby now, a conspicuous omission. Because they’d met him, Clemence’s unsuitable attachment, a face to match the idea, undeniably real, and so where had he been while his sometime girlfriend had been ill enough to be hospitalized and then even after? He’d been there when it happened, when the paramedics came. They’d all seen him there, as useless as the rest of them, mouthgaping, arms hanging. And then after, once Clemence’s mom had gone in the ambulance, and the rest were figuring out what was what—touching base, making plans—he’d somehow disappeared and no one saw him again.
Clemence had been hoping for a message of some sort. But Toby was out of reach, their relationship existing in the realm of the physical. And they’d never had another conversation about the terms of their relationship besides its boundlessness. Had she missed him? Truthfully, not really. In the throes of her illness, everything was overwhelming enough that she hadn’t had the latitude to think about anything else—except she must have been, because Toby kept appearing in her fever dreams. But then so did Mrs. Yeung, and Charles, and Crampton, and Clemence wondered if she’d dreamed it all, surreal and absurd. What if Toby was actually a figment of her imagination? When she googled him, she got no results. The only other person who could corroborate his existence was Crampton, and who’s to say Clemence hadn’t dreamed her up, too—but no, there was the wreath. Tangible evidence.
Clemence knows that getting rid of her parents will be a problem, that they would find every excuse to linger. To throw her back in the car and bring her home again where she could be under their watch, with no mould, and they can monitor her life choices. No more jumble sales, because those turned out to be stressful and dangerous—who knew?
Roger decides that he can fix the leaky pipe under her sink—he’d brought his tools specifically for the task—andstretches out underneath the gingham curtain to do so. Bonnie says that she might as well clean Clemence’s tub while she’s waiting for him to finish, and Clemence lets her mother do what she needs to do to feel useful, taking the opportunity they’ve offered for her to take it easy. She sits down on her bed, which will take some readjusting to. It’s true, she’s quick to tire, and she was only planning to sit, but now she’s lying down, and she closes her eyes, listening to her mother’s tuneless hum, the incessant sound she doesn’t even know she’s making, but to Clemence it sounds like home.
When she opens her eyes again, her parents are sitting on the edge of the bed watching her.
“What? Where? How long have Ibeen lying here?” she asks them. Lately time has been a slipstream. Has it happened again? But no, just a few minutes, they tell her. The tub is scrubbed. The leak is fixed—for now. Roger doesn’t have a good feeling about the hardware, but he’s done the best he could.
“This place needs some overhauling,” he says, looking around, but with the cost of an overhaul, the rent would no longer affordable. It was a fact. Shabbiness was built into the program, and you learned to live with it, leaky pipes and all. By now it’s unfathomable to consider the convenience of the kitchen she’d once had—counters that wiped clean, a stove with four burners, a refrigerator that made ice cubes and could tell you when you were out of butter.
But this place has character. This was what Bonnie said, and she even sounded like she meant it, huggingClemence as they said goodbye, telling her no, she didn’t have to walk them to the door. “All those stairs,” and Clemence could hear in her mother’s expression that the stairs had replaced mould as primary household threat.
“I’m going to be okay,” Clemence promises them both, after they’d promised her that they would pull the front door firmly shut behind them, testing it too because sometimes the latch sticks and the door blows open again. “I’ll take it easy on the stairs, get lots of rest, and not push myself too hard, and take lots of vitamins.”
And finally they are gone, and Clemence is alone, really alone, for the first time in weeks, comfortable in her own space, and properly home. She’s missed it, the way the wind makes the windows rattle, and how the little radiator chugs along, creating a warm oasis in such a cold world. Clemence had arrived with so little, and here she’d gone and built a universe. She’d missed her pillows, and her books, and that beautiful teapot. She likes this place. She doesn’t mind the solitude.
Particularly because there’s never very much of it—there’s someone knocking on the door right now. “Come in!” Clemence shouts, looking around the room for whatever it is that her mother may have forgotten. But when the door opens, it’s not her mother at all. Instead, it’s Charles Yeung, a sight for sore eyes, and he’s carrying a jar of—“Soup!” Clemence exclaims. Is it possible that Charles’s pecs have become even more defined since the last time she’d seen him? “Aren’t you supposed to be back to work?”
“Not until next week,” he says. “My mom sent me up.”
“Of course she did,” says Clemence, who feels ridiculousreclined on her daybed, but she’s also too tired to sit up. Those stairs had been quite a climb.
But wait—there is something about Charles, something that’s wrong, and Clemence can’t seem to remember what it is.
“Are you okay?” Charles asks her, reading the bewilderment passing over her face.
“Iam,” says Clemence. “Imean—” And then she remembers. “Your book!Minor Feelings! Charles! Oh my god! Ithought Igave it back to you. Igave it to your mother.” She is sat up on her bed in a panic.
