Chapter Twenty-One

When the taxi dropped off Abby and Bea, they all three got out and embraced and double kissed one another and said “au revoir” all around. A few minutes later, the taxi turned onto Flora’s street where the Lawnmere sign, enormous oaks, and her own modern split-level looked like a movie set—spacious and orderly and simultaneously familiar and alien. The driver brought her suitcase to the front door and she gave him a large tip. Toto, who stayed in the laundry room when he was home alone, had the same reaction he had every time she opened the door and released him, whether she had been gone for an hour or a week—he looked up at her with his shiny black eyes, quaking. She picked him up and kissed his tiny, bony head, and let him out the laundry room door for a piddle. Will was not yet home and she thought to call him at the office to let him know they were all safely returned. She sat at the kitchen table to make the call and saw on the notepad a scrawl that upon closer scrutiny could be deciphered only as “Pavlik call” followed by a phone number.

She had forgotten, truly forgotten, for a few hours, that there was this to contend with. A numbness spread down her arms as she panicked over the dual facts of the existence of the results and Will’s most certain curiosity if not knowledge of her biopsy and maybe even her results—would Dr. Pavlik betray her? How had she thought she could manage to keep this a secret? Will would be furious. It was something that never caused her consternation before, but she had to forcefully banish a fleeting memory of his striking Bea.

She was startled when she heard the front door open and involuntarily shouted, “Fuck!” in her rattled state. She didn’t get up.

Eleanor appeared in the kitchen doorway.

“Mrs. Rose! I am so sorry! I didn’t know you were home.” Eleanor. She had lost track of the days. She hadn’t actually seen Eleanor in over a year, due to her well-managed avoidance schedule. She looked thinner and grayer. How unconscionable to have anyone, much less an elderly woman, cleaning her home. The force of her protestations and accumulated shame hit her at once. She should have been kinder to Eleanor from the start.

“Don’t apologize, Eleanor. I’m sorry if I surprised you. I forgot what day it was.”

“I was here earlier, but I realized I must have left my—” Flora followed Eleanor’s eyes to where a thin sky-blue cardigan was draped on the back of one of the kitchen chairs. She hadn’t noticed it.

“I did leave it here,” said Eleanor. “I didn’t want you to have to come home to my clothes lying around. I hope you had a good trip. You went to Paris, Dr. Rose said?”

“Yes,” Flora said quietly. How utterly despicable I am. “It was very nice. Thank you.”

“You saw the message?” said Eleanor, gesturing to the notepad. “I never do, but today I was right near it when it rang, and I answered it without thinking. I think I got the name right. Dr. Pavlik? Does that sound right? He asked you to call him back. I see now that I wasn’t clear in what I wrote there. Also, I have terrible handwriting. He would like you to call him. I’m sorry Mrs. Rose. Let me get out of your hair. You must be very tired from traveling. I’ll be off.”

“Thank you very much, Eleanor,” said Flora, again quietly, as she began to gain some feeling in her limbs again.

Eleanor walked towards the front door and Flora stood to follow her.

“Eleanor.”

“Yes?”

“Have you been well? We haven’t seen each other in so long. You know, I just try to keep out of your way on the days you come, and well, I guess I’ve done too good a job of it because it’s really been a long time and—are you doing well? You always do such a beautiful job here. Thank you.”

Eleanor smiled and nodded. “Yes, I’m doing fine. Thank you. I’ll let you get to it, Mrs. Rose. Welcome home.”

Flora did not return Dr. Pavlik’s call. Nor did she call Will’s office. She unpacked completely, took a bath, and put in a load of laundry. She looked in the pitifully bare refrigerator and then the freezer for something to make for dinner. Hungry-Man Salisbury Steak dinners would have to do.

She heard Will’s car in the driveway and Will raising the garage door. She readied the lotus bowl with pretzels and mixed his Martini. When he reached the top of the stairs, there was his wife, sitting placidly in the slate blue Louis XIV chair beside the bar table, her legs crossed, a crisp gin and tonic in her hand.

With his elaborately affectionate welcome home concluded and armed with his Martini, Will joined Flora in the living room.

“Tell me the highlight,” he said. It was the same directive he gave to Bea when they discussed her school day. Details vexed him. The moment it became clear that someone was setting off on a chronological account, he cut them off with “What was the highlight?” The abruptness dovetailed with Will’s overall manner and most people construed the aggressive question as energetic interest. Flora approved of this tactic, as she, too, was uninterested in play-by-plays but was too polite to cut anyone off and consequently often found herself in many one-sided conversations so discursive that she feared she might actually faint.

With her reply, she spared him the frills and cut to the highlight. “I’ve had a biopsy, Will.”

“What do you mean?” He put his drink on a coaster and seemed unsure of where to put his hands. He settled on clasping them in his lap, as if in prayer.

“An abnormality in my breast when I went for my annual with Dr. Pavlik and he took the tissue before my trip and the results, I assume, are waiting for me. Eleanor said he called today. I didn’t call back yet.” Flora spoke blandly as if dictating a telegram.

She expected a medical lecture. When she’d had her miscarriage, on the car ride home, he had described in cold, clinical detail what had occurred, as if it had happened to someone else. She didn’t know then, more than thirty years ago, but she was all too familiar now with this as a way to deflect—or absorb, the better to control—his emotions.

She had told Will on the day they met—the first and last time he had actively sought her judgment on a subject other than decorating—that she believed in redemption. She did, for other people, but somehow not for herself. She had never seriously entertained the idea that she could rid herself of the anger or guilt or selfishness or—could she claim depression now?—by deconstructing her life with Dr. Simmons. Like Cesare Lombroso’s cretins with their physical stigmata, she was doomed to her congenital nature, resistant to improvement.

But Will did not deliver a lecture. He stood, walked toward her, and reached out his hands, indicating that she should take them, which she did. He gently lifted them so that she stood, and he embraced her. “We’ll call him tomorrow, my sweet. I’ll be with you.” She would have felt as though she were in the arms of a stranger except that she was already a stranger to herself. Something had been dislodged.

The night sky was still in play and Flora had a sudden wild thought that the project should be taken outside. There was still time.

“Bea, patoot,” Flora whispered as she pressed her hand with increasing firmness on Bea’s warm, small back. “It’s time for the sunrise.”

Bea turned over and grabbed Flora’s hand, pulling herself to a sitting position. “I’m ready,” she said, groggily. Some remaining post-transatlantic jet lag worked to her benefit.

“Let’s get our shoes on. We’re going outside.”

“We are?” Bea was now ready and eager.

“The trees make it hard to get a good view of the sky. If we’re outside, we can get a better view.”

They tiptoed in their nightgowns and housecoats, Flora in her Chinese silk mules and Bea with her sloppily tied canvas sneakers, past the ajar door of the guest room where Will snored evenly, down to the laundry room where Flora thought to grab a dish towel from the top of the clothes dryer. Outside, she wiped off the sheen of dew on the two chaise lounges. They lay on their backs side by side without talking. The sky went from black to purple to pink. Flora surreptitiously looked at Bea’s reaction and tried not to laugh or comment on her exaggerated wide-eyed focus, as if she feared missing something. By the time they felt the first fingers of the sun’s warmth, Flora realized that she had slept for some indeterminate number of minutes or perhaps only one second. She thought of Will waking. Would he notice their absence and then wonder where they’d gone? She had left the inner laundry room door open, and she could imagine him there in his usual relaxed stance with his hands behind his back, the right hand holding the left wrist, looking out into the yard without worry.

She acknowledged the boisterous birdsong from above and around them, then a light whooshing just behind her head, and suddenly there was Will, standing above her with a metal kitchen tray, the one, Flora recognized from its rusted underside, that said, “Have a cocktail with the Roses” accompanied by a caricature of each of them clinking Martini glasses.

His presence caused them both to sit up. “Hi, Grandpa,” said Bea. “We watched the sunrise.”

“I can see that,” Will said, ceremoniously handing each of them a small glass of orange juice from the tray. “How did it go?”

“It took a long time but then it was like it had always been there,” said Bea.

Flora and Will nodded solemnly. The bird orchestra paused briefly as their voices dominated the yard, then restarted with ferocious joy as the three humans silently looked toward the sky for a few more moments.