“Matty? Your door was closed. I thought you were sleeping.”
“No, I was outside.”
“What were you doing outside? What are you doingup?”
Matty shrugs. He’s not wearing running clothes. There’s so much water in his shoes that she can hear them squishing. She points to the towel they keep near the front door for Otis and says, “Not another step. Take them off. Dry yourself before you go upstairs.”
Matty says, “Mom, I—” He pauses. She has lost her train of thought: it was already so slender, so ephemeral, and now it has disappeared altogether.
“Yes?” She tries to make her voice tender and patient. “Yes, Matty?”
“Nothing,” he says. This comes to her:Here is a boy who needs his father. Every thought the girls have comes somersaulting out of their mouths at top speed, like a gymnast taking its turn on the tumbling mat. But boys are different. Talking to a boy can be likepicking tiny stitches out of a hem: you need time and patience and excellent eyesight.
“Are you sure? Come sit down. Talk to me.”
“That’s okay,” he says. “You’re working.” He goes up the stairs.
She turns back to her work. The view outside the picture window is obscured by the rain and fog. If there are any boats out there she can’t see them.The sea was angry that day, my friends,she thinks.Like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli.Vintage Seinfeld.
After a time Abigail and Claire come down, warm and sleepy-eyed and hungry. They press into Louisa’s side and she kisses each one on the top of the head and tells them that Granny and Grandpa and Pauline are all gone for the morning, and it’s just them. “Breakfast soon,” she says. “I’ll make pancakes.”
“Pancakes!” says Abigail.
“I’m just going to do a little more work first. Why don’t you go play for a bit.”
The girls set up a game of Clue in the playroom, but Clue is only good with three or more people, so before long they are yelling for Matty to come join them. The volume of their voices does battle with Louisa’s hangover. “Go upstairs and ask him instead of yelling,” she suggests. She puts on headphones and turns back to Pitcairn.
More time passes. It’s no use. The most dire parts of the hangover are beginning to recede but the headache is here to stay, like the houseguest who spreads the newspaper all over the living room and doesn’t fold it back up. She can’t get a handle on what she wants to say in this chapter. She thinks about Phoebe Richardson, who by now has changed out of her silk pajamas, completed a Pilates class, and donned one of those elegant, expensive blouses whose ads fill Louisa’s Instagram feed. (When she clicks on the links, she often learns that they cost north of $300.) Why can’t she imagine Pitcairn as clearly as she can imagine Phoebe writing about Pitcairn?
Even through the headphones she can hear the children’s voices. Why did she promise pancakes? Pancakes are messy. Her mother doesn’t stock mix, so she’ll have to make them from scratch. There will be a lot of cleanup. By the time she’s finished with that, the day will be half over and she’ll have nothing to show for it but this silly drawing of the longboat.
She looks up, startled, when she hears the door from the screened-in porch to the inside open. It’s Claire, with a sopping wet Otis. How did Claire get by her? She whips off her headphones. “Where’d you come from, Claire?”
“From outside. Otis really needed the bathroom. I tried to tell you but you had your headphones on.”
Claire is dripping all over the good dining room carpet. She is still in her nightgown, a careworn pink hand-me-down from Abigail, which is stuck now to her bony little body. Louisa can see each individual rib.
“Claire.”
“He had to go. And he didn’t want to go alone.” Claire juts out her lip.
“Towel,” says Louisa, pointing to another Otis towel by the porch door. Claire either doesn’t hear or hears but doesn’t listen and Otis steps closer to Louisa, then closer, almost like he’s about to tell her a secret. “Towel, Claire!” Otis gives one of those giant golden retriever shakes and every droplet that was in his fur is now on Louisa’s notebook, the screen of her laptop, her color-coded index cards.
“Claire! There’s water all overeverything!I told you totowel him off.” Louisa is trying to keep it together, but there’s water on the walls too.
Claire’s lip wobbles. “But I couldn’t...”
Without the headache, the lip wobble might have been enough to force Louisa to speak more softly. But then Matty pokes his head around the corner, and says, “I heard there were going to be pancakes,” he says. “Is that still happening, or—” And now she’s sort of screaming.
“You have to respect the house, Claire. This isn’t our house! And all of you, you have to respect my time. I. Am. Trying. To Concentrate!” Each word comes out like a firecracker, lit with its own fuse, ready to explode.
It feels like it’s beyond her control, though, because her head is pounding, and her heart is pounding, and it’s not just about the water, of course. The water is merely the conduit for all of Louisa’s other problems: The house. The book. Her mom. Her dad. Steven. Kristie. The money that she hasn’t the guts, or the heart, to ask Annie for on behalf of Kristie. The house again. Her dad. Then back to the book.
Matty stares at Louisa. Louisa looks at Otis, who is frozen in place, ears down, tail low. Is there any worse feeling than scaring a dog? Yes, thinks Louisa, scaring your own child. Claire fixes Louisa with such a look of disenchantment, of disappointment, maybe even wound through with a shred of hatred, before she turns and drips her way across the dining room, down the hall, and up the stairs, drip drip drip, each footfall on the hallway like an affront to Louisa, like a stab in the center of her rotten black heart.
36.
Matty
