Penny was going to try to poop by the couch, Rose was sure of it.
“Pen! Potty!”
“No need poop, Mama!” She put her chubby fists on her hips.
“Yes, poop.”
“No. Poop.”
Rose’s head hurt. Her eyes hurt. Her stomach was sore from coughing out sobs. She felt hung over … though that sensation at least was the result of something that had been fun. Instead there was a flat, cold feeling inside of her.
Hugo.
Not now, she thought. No time to think of it now. Put it away, Rose.
The boys were making a racket. They had devoured the toaster waffles she had caved to, and with extra time to burn, they were careening around the kitchen, waving swords at each other. Zackie was playing aggressively, his foam saber too near his brother’s eyes for Rose’s comfort. But Addy was loving it, grinning in the warm shower of his brother’s full attention.
His face was so different from the way it had been last night, a yaw of panic. A stream of sand pouring from his throat. But he was fine this morning. As though nothing had happened.
Because nothing had. Rose forced the word on herself. Nightmare.
Was that what they were like for the children? All these years she had been comforting them, trivializing their dreams … she had never known how horrible they could be.
Penny started crying. Someone had knocked her over.
“That’s it! Backyard!” Rose pointed to the door. The boys’ faces were suddenly pictures of innocence. “You have twenty minutes before the bus gets here.”
They stood stock-still on the carpet, staring at their mother. Penny rolled to her feet, rubbing her head.
“Out.”
The boys walked slowly to the door, giving Rose ample time to change her mind. She didn’t.
Zackie turned to look at her once he passed the threshold. “But it’s cold outside.”
“It’s not cold.”
“It’s colder than in the house.”
Rose needed them out of her hair. Just a few minutes of peace. They would be fine. “Move around. It’ll keep you warm.”
Zackie crossed his arms. Her little adult. “Mom.”
He sounded like Josh. That flat, reasoned tone. It pissed her off.
“Adam. Chase your brother.”
Addy grinned. He roared and charged Isaac. Isaac took off, jumping from the steps to the patio and landing in the grass.
Rose closed the door, muffling the sound of the boys’ yells. She put her forehead against the cool glass. In twenty minutes they would be out of here and she could … what? Sleep? Think? Cry?
“Momma?”
Penny was tugging on her sweatpants.
“Yes, honey?”
“Need to go poop.”
Rose looked at her little girl. This was a milestone. “Then let’s get you on the potty.”
Rose helped Pen pull down her panties. She watched her lower her little bottom onto the potty seat situated in the middle of their kitchen floor. The two of them sat across from each other a moment, Penny’s eyes searching her mother’s for approval. Rose managed a thin smile. “Good girl, honey.”
Outside the boys were yelling, their play more raucous in the outdoors.
Rose’s head hurt.
“You want Momma to get you a book, honey?”
Penny nodded.
“I’ll be right back.”
Rose made her way up the stairs. Maybe she’d call Mrs. D to take Penny for a few hours.… She could figure out some way to distract herself. To make herself feel better.
They had gotten to Castle City last night.
The thought sent a thrill through her body. The thing they had been waiting for for years. The place they had been trying to reach, they had gotten there.
But then there had been the nightmare. And before that, the phone call. Josh’s anger. His threat.
Rose couldn’t live without her children.
And though she didn’t believe she was crazy (I’m not; I can’t be), she also knew how it looked to her husband. How it would look to the world. If they knew what she believed.
Hugo.
Her chest ached remembering the silence on the other end of the phone. What he’d said.
What we have is real.
But not as real as my family, Rose told herself. She reached Penny’s room and knelt to pull books from the bottom of the bookshelf. Good Night, Gorilla. But Not the Hippopotamus. Penny’s favorites. The ones she would pretend to read aloud.
A corner of paper protruded from under the throw rug. Rose tugged it out.
One of Adam’s drawings.
Hugo and Rose at Castle City.
We were there. We got there.
Rose wanted to call her friend. She wanted to apologize for hurting him. She wanted to say she was sorry she ever saw him. Sorry she ever brought him out of her dreams and into her life.
But she couldn’t.
She crumpled the paper up and put it in the waste bin by the door.
Penny was singing as Rose made her way back down the stairs.
“Just remember when a dream appears, You belong to me.…”
She handed the books to Pen. Something was wrong. She couldn’t hear the boys. Or see them through the window.
“Did Adam and Isaac come back inside?”
Penny shook her head.
Rose walked to the door. Adam and Isaac were hunched on the porch steps.
With Hugo.
He was bent over them, his back to Rose. The boys’ eyes were round, their mouths open to whatever tale he must have been spooling for them. Their heads were close together, conspiratorial—breath making small clouds in their midst.
Rose opened the door. “Time to come inside, guys.”
Isaac turned to her, the spell broken. “But—”
“The bus will be here soon. You need to get your backpacks.”
The boys hesitated. Hugo was staring at her, his mouth closed. The skin under his eyes was dark and baggy.
He made her heart hurt … but this … him appearing in her backyard … It wasn’t okay.
Rose took a step onto the porch. “March, boys.”
Isaac and Adam tumbled into motion. Launching themselves at the sound of Rose’s command.
Rose didn’t take her eyes off Hugo. But she waited until she heard the door shut behind her.
“You—”
“I needed to see you.”
“I told you.” Rose’s throat felt as if it were being pulled. As if it might tear.
“But we almost … Please, Rose. Just … just one more time.”
His face looked like it did in her dreams. Like it had when he was a boy and he had told her how long he had been waiting for her. A sweet, open pleading.
She had known him her whole life.
She owed him more.
Rose felt herself nodding. “Let me … let me take care of them.” She jerked her head back toward the boys and Penny inside.
“Thank you.”
“I’ll meet you at your house … just … go.”
* * *
When Rose was about nine years old, her mother had campaigned to get her father to join the local country club. Dinnertime talk and drives home from church were peppered with casual talk about how it “would be good for business” and “healthy for Rosie.”
Rose’s mother had tempted her with visions of snack bars and tennis courts, hoping to recruit her to the cause. Rose had remained ambivalent, namely because there had also been mention of a swim team with early practices that would “get her out of the house for the day.”
Rose’s father had remained stoic through all of it. Noncommittal. Nodding without ever agreeing to anything. Whenever Rose’s mother pushed him, he had shrugged and said, “I don’t know. I’m of two minds about it.”
Two minds. Rose pictured her father holding two jars with brains in them. The man with two brains, like that Steve Martin movie she had seen a few minutes of before her mother had caught her and turned off the TV.
They did not end up joining the country club, but the image had stuck with Rose as she grew. The ridiculous picture of two brains in jars held by a single person would flash into her mind as she grew: deciding whether or not she was going to lose her virginity to her high school boyfriend, or whether to go to the college that offered her the highest scholarship or the one with the better reputation. It had even briefly visited her when she held the pregnancy test that had announced the coming of Adam, years before any other baby had been planned.
I don’t know. I’m of two minds.
It came to her again as she waved Hugo away from her back door. A static image of brains in vitro.
Because if Rose knew anything, she knew her brains were at war.
They had, in fact, been fighting since the moment she spotted Hugo in the drive-through window. Her brain for weeks had been the site of bickering. But her confession to Josh and his subsequent “line drawing” was the bombing of Pearl Harbor. An incitement to full-out combat.
Josh had only made clear something she had been telling herself for weeks: that Hugo was a threat to everything she held dear. That whether or not there was any truth to her dreams, she should not hope to have a relationship with this strange unmarried man. That it was unsafe. That it was unseemly.
But then there was her “other mind.” Source of the deep, rising syrupy feeling that came with Hugo’s kiss. The whisperer of “what if.” The curious wonderer who reminded Rose that she had known Hugo all her life. Who needled her to find out Why him? Why you? Why now? Why?
Rose hated that mind. Hated herself. Wished for the conviction of Josh, always so sure.
But then there was the look on Hugo’s face. This was all her fault. She owed it to him, this promise. This final good-bye.
Rose’s minds warred as she prepared to go see Hugo for the last time. One driving her to shave her legs and put on a skirt, but the other urging her to skip the makeup. One making her tell the Widow Delvecchio when dropping off Penny that she would only be a few hours, the other keeping her from naming a specific time at which she would be back. One who told her even as she exited the highway into Hemsford that she could turn around, go home, never see him again.
And the other who shrugged and said, Why not? You’ve already come all this way.
It was this mind that pushed her out of her parked car and onto Hugo’s front porch.
* * *
Hugo’s house was a mess.
Though, to be truthful, “mess” was a kind word for it. Mess implies a kind of homey clutter. Papers that need to be filed. Shoes that need to be put away. Beds that need to be made.
But as Rose sat on his couch, perched uncomfortably on the edge, the disorder around her had none of the casual, “get around to it” feel of a “mess.” Clothes were everywhere. A shirt draped over the couch. Pants caught under the front door. Used plates and glasses stacked in the sink. She resisted the urge to start picking up. Jesus, what the hell had happened here?
She had.
She was the reason Hugo’s life was falling apart. Rose felt this with a deep certainty.
Hugo had answered the door quickly, swinging it open before she had even landed the first knock. He had smiled, relieved she had come. As she stepped inside, Rose noticed his skin looked different from the way it had earlier in the morning light of her backyard.
It looked gray.
He offered her a glass of water. Rose nodded, saying nothing as she took in the systematic decay that was his living room. He motioned for her to sit on the one clear surface in the center of the couch.
So she sat and she looked and she listened: The sound of the faucet squeaking on. The ringing clank-clank of water pressure knocking plates in the sink against one another. The change in the sound as he moved something under the stream. Then the rising ring of a cup filling.
He returned, pained smile, his fist clamped around a still damp mug. “Sorry. I had to clean a glass.”
Rose nodded. She still hadn’t said anything. She didn’t think she would be able to. She felt … flayed. Raw. As though she’d been stripped of her skin and everything she was experiencing was right on the exposure of her nerves.
“Rose?” He still held out the cup.
She took it and he sat on the couch, his weight displacing the air in the cushions for a moment and lifting her. Rocking her.
Rose felt a word bubble up. “Hugo—”
“They fired me.”
She didn’t understand. His smile was gone. He was staring at the mug in her hands, his eyebrows furrowed.
“At work. They fired me.”
Rose’s brain finally computed the information Hugo had given her. She had been expecting something else, so it had taken a moment to get it. Hugo had lost his job. Her brain had no idea how to handle what it had been anticipating, but this, this loss of employment … this had precedent, appropriate responses. It was almost a relief to know for a moment what to do. Comfort. Sympathy.
“Oh, Hugo … I’m so sorry.”
He swallowed. Shook his head. “It … it’s not a big deal. I just wanted you to know.” He took a shallow breath and shifted. Rose felt his movement through the cushion. His gravity changing her position. He inhaled sharply. “It’s just sometimes I feel like this part is the dream, and the other … that that’s who I really am.”
His eyes grew glassy with unshed tears, and he buried his face in his hands.
Rose had never seen Hugo cry. On the island he was always calm, happy, serious when the occasion called for it. But never had she seen him broken like this.
Her heart ached for him. His back shuddered like Adam’s. A little boy.
“Oh, Hugo.” Instinctively, she reached out and touched his shoulder.
He lifted his head, thumbed an errant tear from the corner of his eye. “That’s the problem. To everyone else I’m someone else. I’m David. I’m only Hugo to you.”
He leaned toward her, wrapping her in a hug. Rose felt the scratch of his whiskers against her neck. His hot face pressing against her hair and scalp. His arms over hers, so different from Josh’s—their shorter length intensifying the angle. Making his grip on her stronger.
“Only you know how I really am. Who I really am.” His chest vibrated against her.
Rose let herself lean into him. Her chin cupping over his shoulder.
Caramel. He smells of caramel.
He whispered, breath dancing in her hair, “And I’m the only person who knows who you really are.”
Rose heard a small squeak come from somewhere inside her.
“I love you, Rose.”
He turned his head, his nose sweeping an arc until it was only an inch from hers.
Rose held her breath. Her mind cleared of the images of brains in jars, swept away by another familiar phrase. Of what consequence are the dreams of housewives?…
And then he was kissing her.
It was different from the dream. His lips were rougher, their texture different beneath that foreign shelf of whiskers under his nose. But Rose felt that blooming within herself nonetheless, that rising syrup of a feeling within.
Yes.
Rose parted her lips and began to kiss him back. Hugo pressed her into the couch, moving his torso up against hers. Rose could feel his heat on top of her. His hands were suddenly everywhere.
Yes.
Hugo clung to her, a lifeline, even as his mouth and hands struggled to possess her. “I need you. I need you.”
And Rose wanted him to take whatever would make him feel better, whatever would make them both feel better. Their clutching became desperate, almost flailing.
“Do it.”
Rose had said it, her voice a desperate whine.
Suddenly Hugo was seizing her hips, yanking them forward on the couch. He fell forward onto her, burying his face into the space between her breasts, leaving sweaty trails on her shirt. His hands left her body to fumble at his fly. Rose pulled up her skirt and yanked her panties to the side.
“I’ve thought … about this…” His breath was a mutter, his weight sinking into her. “You … you feel like home.” Rose held him tightly as he trembled, sinking her hips into him, traces of his kisses drying on her skin.
Home. Yes, he was right. This was home.
Then Rose reached down. She touched him, brought him toward herself.
But he remained soft in spite of the urgency of the rest of his body.
“I’m sorry, I—I don’t … I don’t know why…”
She heard the frustration in his voice. The turmoil. And she knew.
“It’s okay. It’s okay, Hugo.” But he shook his head, turning away. Ashamed. He’s a broken boy, she thought. My poor, sweet man. Rose slid off to comfort him. “No. No.” Kissing his face. “No. No. No.”
She wrapped her hands around his head, pulling him into her chest. “No. It’s not supposed to be … this isn’t how we belong.”
* * *
He had a bottle of expired sleeping pills in his medicine cabinet. They were fifteen months past the “use by” date printed on the label, and Hugo did not remember buying them.
They took them anyway.
The pills had been Rose’s idea. Hugo had led her to his bedroom. She had pulled the coverlet up over his unmade bed and rumpled pillows. There they had tried to fall asleep, the backs of their hands touching, their eyes gazing across the expanse of inexpensive cotton.
But neither had been able to slip off consciousness unaided.
As they lay in the bed, Rose felt things bubble up through the sweet, syrupy feeling of Hugo’s affection. Her obligations. Her responsibilities. Josh. The kids. What was she doing, anyway? In bed with a man who was not her husband?
Rose tried to put out these impurities. To drown them in the honey of her desire for Hugo. She wanted this, she wanted to know what it would be like.
And besides, it was just sleep.
She had stopped just shy of any real infidelity. What haunted her was the possibility that she would have to think of herself as an unfaithful wife. A few minutes more and she would have been denied that … but this …
Well really … this was just a nap.
But regardless of these mental acrobatics, thoughts of her husband continued to bubble up through the syrup of desire, keeping her from sleep.
Hugo, too, seemed to be struggling, his eyes bright.
When Rose asked if he had any sleep aids, she did so shyly … almost the way one would ask about a condom. Hugo nodded quietly and the two of them went to his bathroom.
There was a moment, before Hugo swung open the mirrored medicine cabinet, when Rose saw both herself and Hugo standing together at the sink.
A moving picture framed in stainless steel.
Hugo and Rose.
But they were the wrong versions of themselves. Both fat. Too old to be beautiful. Wrinkled. Hugo’s shirt unfashionable and cheap. Rose’s breasts and belly too saggy under the fabric of her shirt.
She felt herself pushing at the image, kicking away to swim toward the dream. To who they really were.
She was relieved when the mirror finished its arc, revealing its contents, hiding their images from them.
The bottle was directly in the center of the chest. A sun to the solar system of Hugo’s deodorants and aftershaves.
“I think these were my wife’s,” he said, pulling them out. “I’ve never had a problem falling asleep.”
Mention of Hugo’s long absent wife brought Josh bubbling up through Rose’s mind. Rose shook it off. She wanted to feel like herself … like her real self. She snatched the bottle out of his hand as he read the expiration date.
“It’ll be fine,” she said, squeezing off the childproof cap. She shook two pills into her palm. “Open your mouth,” she commanded him.
Rose tried not to think about how similar she sounded to when she gave medicine to her sons.
But Hugo complied. A good little boy.
Rose placed the pill in the center of his tongue. A communion.
They each took sips of water from the mug he had washed for her and went back to his bed.
Despite their expiration date, the pills were potent.