To one side of the screen door lay a heap of wet towels that must have blown down from the clothesline during last night’s storm. Although as Lorna parked by the woodpile and got out of the car, she couldn’t remember hanging towels on the line, only her bathing suit, still dangling from two clothespins.
She’d come bearing a fresh box of doughnuts, prepared to spend part of the morning cleaning up the kitchen and setting everything to rights, but to her surprise and faint disquiet the kitchen was mostly tidy, the dish rack full of clean dishes, pots washed and put away, counters wiped down, the smell of strong coffee emanating from the percolator. Adam must have cleaned up, as he’d promised to do. Contemplating the quiet, shadowy kitchen, she felt a small but definite displacement.
In the living room all the windows were closed, as they had been the day she arrived. It was very hot. Outside the picture window the lake was full of haze that matched the sky, both a sullen shade of freezer burn. Marika sat hunched in her chair, pine stick beside her, wearing the same outfit she’d worn for the past two days. Her flat cheeks were colorless, scanty gray hair sticking up in tufts, head sunk between her bony shoulders. She looked to be asleep. But at Lorna’s entrance, she turned her head to the side and lifted her chin.
“You,” she croaked. “You practically killed me last night.”
Lorna had intended to begin by apologizing for the previous evening—she hadn’t been sleeping well, had a lot on her mind, should never have had a second/third glass of wine—but was so taken aback that she froze, holding the box suspended above the picnic table.
“Sorry?”
Marika had turned back to the window. What was visible of her expression looked as if she had flung her face open for an instant and was now refastening the latches.
I have misjudged her, Lorna thought in amazement. I have misjudged her feelings about me. But I have never spent enough time with her to see it.
Yet now everything was suddenly clear. Marika had always been secretive, that was her nature. But last night, forced by Lorna’s accusations to confront what she had done, Marika had finally allowed herself to admit the crushing guilt she’d been hiding all these years. Never thought of it, she’d said bitterly. Of course not. Because she couldn’t bear to.
Lorna lowered the doughnut box to the table, placing it next to a tray she hadn’t noticed at first, set with a plate of blackened toast, half a stick of butter, and a saucer of strawberries. To give herself time to compose herself, she said, “Where is Adam?” looking through the windows to the empty deck outside.
“Out,” said Marika.
“Well, I brought more doughnuts.” Dazed, Lorna took a seat on the lumpy sofa and leaned back, a hand placed to either side of her as if for balance. “So,” she said, “can you say more about how I practically killed you?”
Marika made a face. “Garlic,” she spat. “In your fancy sauce.”
Lorna sat up straight. Her first thought was: Again? Could I really have been so stupid again? Her second thought was: Naturally Marika would now try to hide what she’d felt. How could it be otherwise? Hiding was her normal state. Her third thought was that she’d been so distracted by her plans for dinner that she had forgotten Marika was allergic to garlic. Every year at Thanksgiving Marika peered suspiciously at the buffet loaded with dishes and announced, Can’t have garlic. How could she have forgotten? It was one of the few things she knew for certain about Marika, that she could not have garlic.
“I am so sorry,” she said. “I forgot.”
“Garlic,” repeated Marika. “Kept me up half the night.”
“I really am sorry,” said Lorna.
At the same time she was realizing that, no matter what conclusion she reached, she would always be mistaken when it came to Marika. Probably because Marika would always be mistaken about Marika. Garlic? That’s all that nearly killed you last night? How much was it possible not to know about yourself?
“The boy had to give me a shower.” Marika squinted at her balefully. “That’s how bad it was. He wanted to call an ambulance.”
“An ambulance?” Lorna was now fully attentive. “A shower?”
“He handled himself very well. A very intelligent young man.” Marika glared over the top of her glasses. “He was sorry for me.”
“I’m sorry, too.” Lorna tried to picture Adam helping his grandmother into the shower, but all she could see was the white plastic shower curtain, like a screen around a hospital patient.
“I completely forgot,” she said.
“Hah,” said Marika.
“I’m sorry you don’t believe me. People do forget things.” To calm herself, Lorna focused on a column of spiraling dust motes. “So will you tell me what happened?”
“The boy dried me off.” Marika pulled out a tissue to wipe her nose. “Made me a cup of tea. Treated me better than any doctor, I can tell you that.” She dropped the tissue onto the floor and gave a hard sniff. “Then we sat up for a while. He wanted to talk.”
“To talk?”
“Yes. Wanted to tell me about his trouble at school.”
The dust motes stopped moving. Lorna’s armpits had dampened and the backs of her thighs prickled against the sofa’s rough fabric.
“So what did he tell you?”
Marika leaned back in her chair, shifting her hips. “Not my place to say.”
“But you’d let me know, wouldn’t you,” said Lorna, “if there’s something I need to worry about.”
“Chickadee.” Marika craned her neck. “Two of them. At the bird feeder.”
“But you would tell me,” Lorna held herself very still on the sofa, “if anything was really wrong?”
“He’ll get over it.”
Silence followed. A silence that began to have its own smell, damp and dank, with an undercurrent of fish.
“Had a cardinal here this morning.” Marika pointed to the window. “A nuthatch and two jays.”
Outside, the bird feeder hung from a low pine branch. Beside it rested the ladder Adam had used for cleaning the gutters, propped against the tree trunk. The sun had begun to appear, thinning the vapor on the lake and tinting it pink. There was almost no sound at all, save for a few birds in the trees, the lap of water against the rocks, and a faint, insistent tick, tick, tick from somewhere near the woodstove.
“I’m glad that he wanted to talk to you,” Lorna forced herself to say.
“What?”
“I said I’m glad he talked to you. I’m glad that you and Adam are starting to have a real relationship.”
Marika grunted, and then gave a coy smile that was almost girlish. “Always have had a way,” she said, “with the boys.”
A kind of wavering unsteadied the air between them, like heat rising, a molecular breakdown dissolving the definitions between things. The ticking from the woodstove grew louder as Lorna’s heart began to pound. She pictured herself standing over Marika’s chair and striking her with her fists. Pushing her to the floor. I wish you had died last night. I wish I had killed you. Nothing has changed. You left me fifty years ago to run off with a stable hand. And this time you are trying to make off with my son?
But all she said was “Stop.”
Because amid that furnace-blast of fury, she’d had a chilling thought: Was it possible that she had, subconsciously, tried to kill Marika last night, by feeding her garlic? Acting on a buried impulse? How much was it possible not to know about yourself?
In her armchair, Marika was kneading the armrests with her knotty fingers. “He ran away,” she said finally.
No, thought Lorna. It was not possible to be that insensible. Not for her, at least. She was a therapist. There was a vast difference between desire and action, even when driven by the subconscious. She blinked and shook her head as if to clear it. “Who ran away?”
“That dog. Last night, when it was raining.”
“You left Freddy outside in the rain?”
“We forgot about him. We had other things to think about.”
Trembling, Lorna stood up. “Where is he now?”
“The boy’s out looking for him.” Marika had returned to glaring over her raised chin. “Went out after making my breakfast.”
“Did he say where he was going?”
“I asked him to hang up my bird feeder.” Marika pursed her mouth sourly. “Asked him three times yesterday. Finally had to do it myself.”
Lorna had reached the door. She was perspiring heavily now, and all that mattered was to get out of that stuffy room and into the fresh air. But she forced herself to turn around.
“You did what?”
“My birds were starting to think I forgot about them.”
“You climbed that ladder?”
“Well.” Marika smirked. “Didn’t fly up it.”
Stumbling slightly, Lorna returned to the sofa. She looked at Marika’s pine stick and then at Marika, who was no longer smirking. “I don’t understand. Are you telling me that your ankle isn’t sprained anymore?”
Marika pushed out her lower lip. “No.”
“No? So what are you saying?”
“Never was.”
Clasping her hands tightly together, Lorna said, “Your ankle was never sprained?”
“Look there,” said Marika. “Another chickadee.”
“Why did Dennis call me if your ankle wasn’t sprained? Are you saying you only pretended you’d fallen off the ladder?”
She looked searchingly at the old woman in the chair. “You pretended to hurt yourself because Dennis is leaving? Is that it? Because he’s going to Florida? You faked spraining your ankle because you want Dennis to stay up here with you?”
Marika was once again staring out at the lake with the same blank rigidity as when Lorna had first arrived and found her motionless in her chair.
“But instead,” Lorna said slowly, recalling Dennis’s odd behavior when she’d met him yesterday afternoon, his unwillingness to look at her. “Instead he called me.”
What she had first taken for reticence must have been embarrassment. Dennis must have known what Marika was up to, that her sprained ankle was a ruse. Maybe Marika’s illness last night had been an act, too. A scheme to win back Lorna’s sympathy and cooperation after her burst of anger. Maybe even Adam was in on it. But this last thought was unendurable and she dismissed it.
“Okay.” She set her clasped hands on her knees. “I see. But for once, let’s try to be honest.” She took a deep breath and leaned forward on the sofa. “Can you at least admit what you’ve been hiding?”
A sudden movement in the chair. Marika’s blank expression disappeared, replaced by something fearful and cagey. “Hiding?”
“Yes, hiding. Can you at least admit that you were afraid I’d find out about Dennis?”
Marika looked affronted. “I didn’t care about that.”
“You didn’t?” Lorna stared at her. “Then what do you care about?”
The caginess was back. “Well, I’d like to know what’s for lunch.”
A bag of knitting sat at Marika’s feet, needles poking out of a skein of blue wool, a long strand of kinked yarn trailing onto the floor. It’s always the same question, thought Lorna, wondering how she could find this surprising.
“You know,” she said, determined to try one more time, “you could have told me you needed help. You could have told me that you’d stopped driving, and that it was getting too hard for you to be on your own.”
Marika frowned and lifted her chin. “I don’t need any help.”
The sun had come out and the mist on the lake was vanishing. Two gray birds at the bird feeder were pecking at the same opening. Birdseed sprinkled onto the ground. The bird feeder swayed and winked, sunlight glinting off its pointed metal cap.
“Why have you never tried to talk to me?” Lorna said quietly. “And please don’t say it was because you didn’t think of it.”
“Don’t have to.” Marika dragged another tissue from her sleeve. “You said it for me.”
Lorna unclasped her hands and looked at her palms. She was used to difficult people. She was used to denial, irresponsibility, selfishness, obfuscations, even real cruelty. She was used to unhappiness. Day after day, people came to her office with their disappointments, their rage and regrets, their longing, their loneliness, which they tried, gropingly, with much effort, to explain to her, or at least pretended to try. And it wasn’t just in her office. Everywhere you went, you encountered people who held such pain; you knew this, because when told about someone else’s suffering, most people made a supportive remark or shared a difficult experience of their own, to show that they, too, had been there. In its way, it was common courtesy.
But with Marika there was nothing to share. She had nothing to say, or would say nothing. She acknowledged no pain she had felt or caused. She did not care about Lorna enough to try to explain herself, even in the most basic terms. She was a missing person. She would never turn up. No matter how many questions Lorna asked, or how long she waited.
Outside, the bird feeder continued to bob and sway as the birds flew away from it and then alighted again. Just beyond the bird feeder was the urn of lavender, which had an unpleasant sheen this morning, the color of spoiled meat.
“So what’s for lunch?” said Marika, tucking away the tissue.
“Nothing is for lunch.” Lorna exhaled deeply. She rose and flexed her fingers. “I am going out to find my son and my dog. And then in a little while we are going to drive home.”
The old woman peered at her.
“This week,” Lorna turned toward the window, where the lake now reflected a hard brilliance, “I will make arrangements for a home health aide to start visiting you. Someone who can drive you to town for your shopping and errands and do some cleaning. There are agencies that provide help for people in your situation.”
“I take care of myself,” said Marika.
“When the time comes that you need more help,” Lorna continued as if Marika hadn’t spoken, “when it becomes unsafe for you to remain up here on your own, we will make other arrangements.”
Once again she was at the door, a hand on the latch. “But now,” she said, “I’m leaving.”
“So,” came a thin, childlike voice. “Go.”