FROM THE OTHER ROOMS, THE CHILDREN COULD NOT HEAR their mother’s laughter. From the other rooms, the children had not heard their father’s return. The little house was so well made (walls so solid!) and so seductive too that it made you forget other people altogether.
Archie ran the shower very hot. His balls were tight against his body, bumpy like he’d just got out of the pool. The muscles in his back softened as he watched the water twist down the drain, dirty and then clear. He dried his body on white towels. He put on boxer shorts and took to bed, where, unable to watch The Office, he diverted himself with that important repository, the hidden album on his phone. The pictures were mostly beautiful. The stuff Archie liked best was not so terrible. He was weirded out by the internet’s complex configurations: three women, five women, seven women, massive dicks (his dick would never get so big, he worried), two men, three men, pretended incest, racial violence, spit, ropes, athletic equipment, public spectacle, stage lights, mussed makeup, swimming pools, toys and tools he didn’t know the name of, the supposed beauty of punishment. He just liked women. Dark hair and tan skin. He preferred them to be completely naked, rather than posed with clothes to emphasize the parts of their body there for you to see: wooly sweater raised over heavy breasts with satin nipples, plaid skirt up over pale hips to show off what he called pussy because he was sure he didn’t know the exact word for it, denim shorts slashed or torn, lips protruding. He liked her to look pretty and happy. Archie wanted to please and be pleased.
Rose pulled the down comforter of her parents’ bed up to her chin, then over it, up to her nose, drawing in the smell of detergent and bath soap and her own skin and the lingering traces of her parents’ chemical signature. This was comforting, almost canine. Her book was not an escape (adolescence’s trials, the body’s betrayals, the heart’s new desires) but preparation, the Fodor’s to a country she planned on visiting soon. But it couldn’t hold her attention. She thought about the quiet of the woods, punctured by that bang overhead. She could barely picture her little bedroom in Brooklyn. She shook her head to clear it, but that didn’t do anything.
She didn’t want to hide in bed. Rose didn’t want to hide at all. She stood up and stretched as you might after a restorative night’s sleep. She stretched her arms and legs, and they both felt powerful and alive. Rose walked to the window and tried to see into the trees. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, but she would know it when it appeared, and knew, too, that it would appear. Earlier, she’d wanted to prove that she’d seen those deer, but the ground had showed no sign of them. The beasts trod lightly on this earth.
She was standing before the glass back door, looking out at the flat sky, clouds close enough to touch. She saw that there was a crack in the pane and understood this had not been there before. It made sense. The rain was as it always was: hesitant at first, then confident. The trees were so thick with leaves, they’d sop up most of the water before it touched the ground. The overflow from the gutter over the door made a kind of waterfall. What did the deer do when it rained? Did animals care about getting wet? Rose wished she could go for another swim, or just sit in the hot tub. She wished for a little more vacation, even just an hour.
The phone in one hand and himself in the other, Archie’s body did not respond as it usually did. He could come in the morning’s shower and in his nighttime bedroom lit by the laptop, volume turned low. Sometimes afternoons too: huddled in the drafty pee-smelling cubicle, spit on palm. First ropes of cum, then an abbreviated sneeze of the stuff, finally a dry shudder, his dick red and tired and maybe a little sore. He’d always swear it off but—it finds a way. It was life!
There was a storm forming outside, and the light was strange, but even if not for that, Archie would have had no idea how to guess what time it was. He knew it was odd that the people who owned the house had shown up, but he didn’t care, or they seemed nice. Mr. Washington had asked him the kinds of questions that grown-ups always asked, and had seemed nice. Archie abandoned his phone. He slipped into the beautiful void. If he dreamed of anything (the noise?), it was with some part of his mind so distant he barely controlled it.
Did he feel warm? Well, he’d just taken a shower. When he tucked his wrist under his cheek, that told him nothing; touching your own skin is not diagnostic. The body was a splendid and complicated machine, almost always humming along happily. When something went wrong, the body was smart enough to make accommodations. The light was muddled and soupy, the room filled with the music of rain on the roof overhead and the unassuming sound of objects in space—the presence of Archie’s body, his bed, his pillows, his glass of water, his paperback of Nine Stories, the wet towel curled on the floor like a napping pet. It was like the white-noise machine his parents had used to trick the infant him to sleep.
Washing her hands, Ruth could not hear the rain. Then she left the guest bath and saw the tumble of water and understood. The wine had done nothing to her. She was not sleepy, or pacified, or distracted. She gathered their dirty clothes into a little pile. How were there so many already? There was something comforting about the yellow of the bedside lamps and the gray outside the windows. She could have got into that bed and read a book. She might even have dozed in that indolent way you do when you’re in a vacation home—not for need of rest but because you can.
Instead, she went to the walk-in closet down the hallway, found a laundry basket on the shelf beside all of George’s provisions, those bottles of wine, those helpful tins, those sturdy plastic containers of thousands and thousands of calories. She allowed herself to think—good. They were prepared for whatever this was. She’d have thought this might comfort her, but she didn’t want cans of tomatoes or sticky Kind bars. It was fruitless to dwell on what it was she wanted, which perhaps explained her resolve to simply do something. Ruth filled the basket with their dirty laundry. She righted the throw pillows on the bed. She put the useless television remote control back onto the dresser. She turned off the reading lamps that no one was using. She retrieved the damp towels from the bathroom.
It was too intimate, but she knew she should invite Amanda to put in her dirty clothes. It would be a more efficient use of power and water. It would be neighborly, though that word didn’t describe their relationship—maybe no word could. Ruth knew a conversation was warranted, and knew that it would demand that she pretend to be a better person than she felt like being. She thought of the satisfying weight of her grandsons on her body.
Rose put her hand on the window. It was cold, as glass tended to be. There was something satisfying about the surface of the swimming pool, roiled and rippled by the steady rain. There was no thunder, and anyway, Rose understood that the noise before had not been thunder. She saw the temptation in believing that, but she knew in her own teenage way that belief and fact had nothing to do with each other.
The question was not what that had been; the question was what they would do next. Rose knew that her parents did not take her seriously, did not think her grown. But Rose knew that their troubles were not a matter of some sound overhead. She’d seen what the problem was, and she’d try to solve it. Then she remembered that her mother had promised her that when it rained, they would bake a cake, so Rose forgot her book and went to do just that.