“No. I’m not.”
“Youare not supposed to behere?”
“No!”
“Where are you supposed to be, if not here?”
I gesture helplessly at nothing. “I’m supposed to behere,buthereshould bedifferent.”
“Butthisis what ishere.What else could behere,if notthis? Who could be here if notus?”
I feel like I’m frozen in the pages of a children’s nursery rhyme. I amhere,I amthere,I am miserableeverywhere! “Forget it,” I say.
Mary gives me a chiding look. “Really, the way you let your mind run wild with fiction, no wonder you’re so exhausted all the time.” She begins to churn again. “Anyways: you know not to go to the woods. There are all manner of terrible things in there. Wolves and Indians and other souls who are bent—”
“—on our spiritual destruction,” I mutter sniffily. “Yeah, yeah, I know.”
Mary stiffens. The churning increases in speed. “You know, there are people in the world who don’t have a family at all. And how would you like that? Being all alone in the woods, no one to save you when you stumble into a trap?”
A gust of anger whips through me, strong enough to snap a neck. “You. Are. Not. My. Family.”
Mary freezes. The room falls silent. “Go get more firewood,” she says quietly, and I’m suddenly transported back to my real house, myreallife, as I say to Clementine:Go tell Nanny Louise to check the forecast.The kind of meaningless command designed to remind someone who’s in charge. Designed, also, to give you a moment to collect your shaking breath.
Mary doesn’t speak to me for the rest of the night. At dinner, though, she does hand me a piece of bread slathered in fresh butter. A peace offering. This world, I realize, is full of them—or rather, the girl holding the buttered bread is. She stares at me, palm extended.
The butter is delicious.
22
One Saturday morning,Caleb burst into our bedroom and said triumphantly, “I’ve found my purpose!”
It was wintertime. The holidays had come and gone. Caleb’s brothers and their families had descended upon the estate for Christmas and New Year’s, the veritable flock of Mills children dragging mud through the hallways, the brothers sharing raunchy jokes in Doug’s office, the women smiling mildly at one another over champagne flutes in the kitchen, and then they had all gone again, returning to their lives in San Francisco and Manhattan andDC. And still, Caleb and I remained here.
Now it was January. Which meant Reena was back in Boston in her off-campus apartment. At this very moment, she was probably still in bed, perhaps just waking up now, leaning halfway over the mattress, fingers dragging groggily past empty red Solo cups on the floor, searching for a half-drunk bottle of Gatorade or a Tylenol bottle to soothe her pounding headache. I, on the other hand, was at the changing station, moving through the fourth diaper blowout of the week. My fingernails were dark with shit. I had a deranged expression on my face, something between a grin and a grimace.Pretend you’re being watched,my mother whispered in my mind—an especially easy task at the current moment, since Clementine was lying on her back, actively glaring at me while I pulled out the fifth baby wipe. “Hold on,” I sang softly, “that’s it, almost finished …”
I glanced over my shoulder, only just processing my husband’s entry into the room. “Your purpose?” I tossed the final wipe to the side and began fastening Clementine into a new diaper. I resisted the urge to reply in singsong,Did you finally check the couch cushions?
“Remember when we drove past my old school the other week?”
“Uh-huh.” Clementine let out a warning shriek, and I moved more quickly with the diaper straps.
“Well, I stopped by the other day, just to say hi to everyone”—That’s my husband,I thought merrily,saying hello to everyone at a private school in the middle of nowhere, not a concern in the world, while his wife uses her last five brain cells to power wash a baby’s buttcrack—“and they need a substitute kindergarten teacher this spring. The current teacher is on maternity leave, and they love to find teachers who are alums. Perfect timing, don’t you think?”
I fastened the snaps on the diaper and picked Clementine up, then turned to face him. “What about that is perfect?”
“They need someone to fill the position. I need a job.” He held his two palms up in the air, weighing them equally, like a math equation had been solved.
I sat down on the bed, letting Clementine crawl onto the comforter and into Caleb’s arms. “You’re saying you want to replace her.”
“Don’t you remember our conversation a few weeks ago? How I said I wished I could play with kids for a job?”
A kindergarten teacher. My husband wanted to be a kindergarten teacher. My first thought: I had never met a kindergarten teacher who wasn’t a sixty-year-old woman. Then the second thought arrived. “What’s the salary?”
“I didn’t ask.”
He didn’t ask. Of course he didn’t ask. “I didn’t know you wanted to be a teacher.”
“I didn’t either, but now that I think about it—I think I’d be good at it.”
