JACK PHILLIPS, THE PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR OLIVIA HIRED, turned out to be a man of uncommon good looks, an undercapitalized documentary filmmaker who financed his deadpan movies about gay cowboys, aging tap dancers, and cruise-ship entertainment directors with six months a year in the detective business. Phillips’s office was in Poughkeepsie, on the second floor of an old wooden house in a crime-ridden neighborhood. His dusty bay windows looked out over porch stoops full of idle men, broken Colt 45 bottles, fistfights. Raised in Shaker Heights, Harvard- educated, Phillips felt safe and strangely calm in the chaotic neighborhood, and when he pointed out the garish pink clapboard house across the street to Olivia and said, “The most lucrative crack den in upstate New York,” it was with a discernible sense of pleasure, almost pride. He wore an old, shapeless Brooks Brothers blazer, a threadbare white shirt, a rumpled red tie, and lusterless wing-tipped shoes, and he seemed to take pride in these things, too. He liked to wear the uniform of his class, but in a shabby, somewhat deconstructed fashion, like a rogue prince wearing his crown at a jaunty tilt.
“I don’t really care about that,” said Olivia. “I don’t care about anything, actually. Just finding Michael.”
“Of course, of course,” he said, standing close to her. He was parting the Venetian blinds with his long, tapered fingers. “Well, then, perhaps we better get down to cases.”
Astonishing to realize how little there was to say about someone who had disappeared, even her own son. What did a person amount to, once removed from context? Hair, height, weight, eyes, no scars, no tattoos—whatever faint pattern of habits he had created was already obliterated like sandpiper prints washed out by the next wave. He went from home to school to home, and now that he was no longer doing that he could be anywhere. Olivia recited the bare facts, her voice cracked and dry; yet Phillips wrote everything down eagerly, nodding his encouragement.
“Okay, got it,” he said, when the meagerness of what she had to offer turned to silence.
She lowered her eyes. Her hands were in her lap. “Do you?” she asked.
He smiled at her, leaned back in his old-fashioned swivel chair. The mechanism squeaked loudly. He tapped the trigger end of his ballpoint pen against the edge of his desk.
“Well, it’s a start.” He smiled; if he sensed the depths of her distress, he didn’t let it cause him any undue concern.
Yet his attitude did not strike her as cavalier. It was as if he were watching her go through emotional stages that were predictable to him, feelings he was trained to deal with. Would a doctor gasp and throw up his hands when a patient described the aches and pains of a fever? The trick was to do some good, to solve problems, not empathize with them. If she wanted breast-beating, she could always call Sam, and if she lost track of where he was in his coast-to-coast fool’s errand, she could just sit tight and he would call her.
“Are you going to find my son?” Olivia asked Phillips.
He held her in his gaze. He was confident around women; his good looks, his charm, and a rather low libido meant he always had as much feminine company as he desired. He was the kind of man who came late to dinner, or got absorbed in something and forgot to arrive altogether. He was the kind of man who didn’t ogle women, who didn’t really need women. Olivia sensed his vagueness, his evasiveness, his laconic touch-me-not quality, his self-absorption, and it struck her that to be with a man like that, if only for a short while, would be a little bit of heaven, and a relief from the nearly nonstop ardency of her husband, whose boyish passion and unceasing appetite for physical contact had, after winning her heart, come to exhaust and annoy her.
“Can you start right away?” she asked Phillips.
“Yes, of course.” He gestured toward his notebook, as if to remind her that he had already begun. “But I’ll need to come to your house.”
She raised her chin yet felt herself shrinking back.
“Nothing mystical about it, scout’s honor,” he said. “But it’s always helpful to see the room of the missing person, to see his stuff.”
“When?”
Phillips shrugged. “Now?”
He drove behind her from Poughkeepsie to Leyden. She searched for him in her rearview mirror, but most of the time she could not see him; he was always four or five cars behind, yet keeping pace. Perversely, she sped up, considered a quick turn off of Route 9 onto one of the smaller, left-behind roads, most of them with stodgy, unpronounceable Dutch names. When she came into Leyden, Olivia checked for Phillips in the rearview mirror and did not see him, and as she drove down Red Schoolhouse Road, past the familiar sights that had of late become hideous to her—the lawn jockeys, the swing sets, the clicking plastic propellers meant to frighten the birds from vegetable gardens, the newly seeded lawns, the neighbors’ sleek black Labrador skulking around in his cumbersome electronic collar that gave him a shock whenever he approached the outer limits of the invisible fence—Olivia’s stomach turned, as if she had been stood up, rejected. Where was he? Everyone was disappearing.
Yet as she pulled into the driveway, Phillips was behind her, like something forgotten and then suddenly remembered.
“I thought you got lost,” she said, as they got out of their cars. Her voice was peevish.
“I was right behind you,” said Phillips, with perfect neutrality.
She showed him the house. Room by room, as if she was selling it. He took it all in with a practical eye: the colors she had chosen, the objects, all of the things that were more than things because she had chosen them.
He picked up a carved Christian icon from Guam, showing some saint on horseback, with a primitive-looking dog at his side. “Fabulous,” he said, and then put it back down on the old pine tavern table, in the exact spot. “I once did a movie about Santería. It was really neat, watching these people lose their minds.” His smile was quick, untroubled. He patted the saint’s head, gently, with the tip of his finger.
“I’m in the antiques business.” She had almost said, “I somehow find myself in the antiques trade,” but lost the nerve for the affectation. She was realizing that she wanted to make herself interesting.
Yet he did seem interested. “Really? Why would you do a thing like that? Do you have a store or something? Or do you just sell things out of the house?”
“I work for a chain of stores in the city. I’m what’s called a picker.”
“Picker,” he said, smiling. “Sounds wild. Maybe I’ll film you, one day, when all this is over.”
Olivia smiled back. She was grateful for the casual confidence of that phrase: “when all this is over.”
“Do you want to see Michael’s room? We’d better get this over with, before my daughter comes home from school.”
“Amanda,” said Phillips, remembering.
He followed her up the stairs. She sensed his eyes were not on her—unlike Sam, who still gazed at her ass when she walked in front of him, put his hands on her hips, slipped his fingers into her back pockets. What a relief to be away from that. Nevertheless, it felt strange to be walking toward the house’s intimate quarters with a strange man following her.
The first thing Phillips did when he entered Michael’s room was go to the bookcase and check the spines of his books.
“He’s not much of a reader, is he?” said Phillips, after a quick perusal. “These books seem like they’re for a much younger kid.”
“He used to love to read. But…” She shrugged. “It might have something to do with his father. Sam writes, and he puts such an emphasis—”
“What does your husband write?”
“Books.”
“What kind of books?”
“I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” said Olivia. She protected the secret of Sam’s writer-for-hire oeuvre as carefully as she had been taught to tell no one of her parents’ adherence to the teachings of Max Schachtman—they feared reprisals from certain conservative elements in the university, and what made it worse was that they now shared their colleagues’ low opinion of socialism, just as Sam would share in the scorn others would heap on books like Traveling with Your Pet and Visitors from Above.
“Maybe your husband wrote something that bugged Michael. I was once going to do a film about the children of writers—a lot of them have problems, especially those who feel their parents use them as subject matter. Or maybe he writes things with a lot of gore and violence. I don’t know. A strong sexual content. Maybe Michael was offended by something in his father’s writing.”
Olivia watched as Phillips picked up a few of Michael’s music cassettes—maybe she would turn into one of those mothers who testified in front of Congress against the music industry, fixing the blame for her son’s disappearance on a bunch of flaxen-haired strangers in leather pants. “He’s indifferent to Sam’s writing. I don’t know that he’s ever read a word of it.”
Phillips nodded at her. His expression was deadpan, neutral, but intrusive.
“But relations between them are strained, yes?” he said.
“What makes you say that?”
“Your husband isn’t here. I have a sense of marital discord. And teenage sons and their fathers—” He held out his hand and then wobbled it back and forth.
Three evenings later, Sharon dropped by for an unexpected visit. She had been teaching a class called Making Fishless Sushi at the Lutheran Home for the Aged. Russ didn’t object to Sharon’s myriad commercial enterprises, but in other ways he was an old-fashioned man and liked a fairly minute accounting of her time away from hearth and home. Since the day Olivia had appraised the Tiffany painting, Sharon had called several times, to see if anything had happened in the search for Michael, to see how Olivia was faring with Sam on the road.
Now, Sharon was harried; she quickly unwrapped her purple scarf and folded it with an uncanny precision. Her dark eyes glittered with excitement. Her voice was quick and high. She allowed Olivia to drag her into the kitchen for a cup of tea, but she had no patience for the boiling of water. Glancing at the kettle on the stove, Sharon shook her head quickly. “Maybe just a glass of water, okay, Olivia? Tap water would be fine.”
“Sharon,” Olivia said, admonishing her, “it’ll take two minutes to boil.”
“Russ goes crazy when I’m late. You may not see this, but he’s very emotional.”
“Most men are. That’s why there are so many of them in prison.”
Sharon brought the glass of water to her lips and drained it in one long swallow. She patted her mouth dry with her palm and then fixed Olivia with a conspiratorial smile.
“Now you have to tell me about Jack Phillips,” she said.
“He hasn’t found Michael. What else is there to say?”
“I think there is a lot more to say.”
“He calls, I’ll give him that. He keeps in very close touch.”
“Jack?”
“Yes”
“Well? You see?” Sharon smiled broadly, a child’s false grin.
Uh-oh, she’s in love with him, thought Olivia.
“He calls to tell me what he’s done, where he’s gone. That sort of thing.”
“He likes you,” said Sharon, with a wave, as if shooing away the spots before her eyes.
“Oh, stop it. It’s all completely businesslike.”
“Of course it is. That’s Jack’s way. Everything businesslike, but in the meantime he has a big erection in his pants.” Sharon sat forward, and with her elbows on the table, slumped her face into her hands. She seemed utterly dejected. She tried to pull herself out of it by smiling at Olivia and then pinging her fingernail against the empty water glass.
“Would you like some more water? Or anything else? Beer, Diet Coke? I have this strawberry-and-lime juice.”
“Russ doesn’t like Japanese women, or Japanese people in general.”
“You’re kidding me,” said Olivia.
“No, I’m not. It’s very common. That’s why Russ likes war. To him, it’s a bunch of guys going out and killing yellow people. Every time America goes to war it’s against Asian people. World War II, Korea, Vietnam.”
“Was Russ in Vietnam, Sharon?”
“No. He has a bad back. But if he had gone, he would have liked it—except for the danger. I know him very well. He would have brought home a yellow ear in his bag.”
Olivia remembered Russ’s appliance shop, with its oversized American flag snapping in the breeze, or, on still days, drooping there like a turkey wattle.
“Look who they dropped the atomic bomb on!” cried Sharon. “Not on the blacks, or the Arabs. On us!” Incongruously, she laughed; the relief of finally saying these things made her giddy. “Russ is always buying me perfume and so I asked him why. He didn’t want to answer, but I asked him over and over, and that’s the night he told me I have a smell. Like fish. I don’t ever eat fish. I don’t even like it, and I don’t think it’s healthy. There are no government inspectors for fish, the way they have for meat. But Russ says I smell like fish. Is it surprising that I liked Jack Phillips so much?”
“If you feel this way about Russ, why don’t you leave him?”
“For who?”
“I don’t know. For no one. And why did you hire a detective to follow him?”
“Japanese pride. To think of people laughing at me.” She drew her forefinger over her throat. “And we have so much between us. Things. Our house, the truck and two cars, a motorcycle, a wood lot outside of town. And our collections—comic books, and the baseball cards are worth sixty thousand dollars. Can you imagine? The paintings. And Russ’s business. If he wants to leave me, then I need time to protect myself. I know you must understand these things.” She gestured somewhat expansively, and it took Olivia a moment to realize the wave was meant to encompass the objects in Olivia’s house.
“There’s nothing here worth very much.”
“But everything is so pretty. And you know how much things are worth. This is your field.”
“Yes, well, I don’t know how I ever got into it. I’m not terribly interested.”
“You’re not?”
“Not really. In fact, I sort of hate it.”
They were quiet for a moment. Olivia was almost conscious of the entire world and her place in it, the curtain that concealed the grand design was about to blow to one side; but then it didn’t, and then it wasn’t really a curtain any longer, it was a wall, and a moment after that the wall wasn’t necessary, because there was no grand design to conceal.
“But weren’t you relieved,” she asked Sharon, “when Jack told you Russ wasn’t seeing anyone?”
“Yes.”
“You see? You still must care.”
“I don’t want to be humiliated. And I didn’t want Jack to see me that way. He might figure if my husband went around behind my back, then there was something wrong with me, or my body, and then Jack would start to lose interest. Not that he was ever interested in the first place,” she added with a laugh.
“I don’t think Jack is terribly interested in women,” said Olivia.
“What a mean thing to say!” cried Sharon happily. “But don’t worry, he’s very normal, and I think you are his type. The model type, with large eyes and long legs, very tall.”
“I’m not tall,” Olivia was going to say, but then decided not to, because she was quite a bit taller than Sharon. “I’m too old for love affairs,” she said instead.
“He doesn’t care about that. Jack is no spring chicken. He’s nearly thirty-eight years old—his birthday’s in July. And what is he doing with his life? He works as a detective because no one will give him money to make his movies.”
“The people we knew in the city,” said Olivia, “most had to work at various jobs to support their art.”
“To support their art? I thought a man worked to support his family. Oh well, I feel sorry for Jack. He told me about the movies he wants to make. They are all crazy. And then what will happen when he turns forty?”
Impulsively, Olivia reached across the table and took Sharon’s hand. Sharon looked at her frankly. It was one of those fleeting moments when all of the pretense of life is dispelled, but as usual it was not dispelled for long enough to discover what lay beyond it.
“I’m just so happy,” Olivia said, feeling she needed to explain to Sharon why she was touching her, “not to be talking or thinking about Michael for five minutes.”
That night, quite late, while she was in bed reading Wilson’s life of Jesus and realizing that in her exhaustion not only had she read the same page three times but each time she understood less of it, the phone rang, and it was Olivia’s intuition that despite the hour it was Jack Phillips on the other end of the line.
“I’m sorry to be calling so late,” Phillips said.
Olivia drew her knees up, and the satin comforter slipped off the bed. She was wearing an old flannel nightgown, not exactly fresh from the laundry, and turquoise woolen socks. She hadn’t shaved her legs in a while. With the men out of the house, she was reverting to certain bohemian, solitary habits from college—eating irregularly, masturbating, falling asleep with the reading light on, waking in the morning with the goose-necked lamp peering inquisitively down at her, its bulb as intense as an acetylene torch.
“Olivia?” said Phillips, moving tentatively into her silence. “Did I wake you?”
It seemed more than coincidence that Sharon’s visit and Jack’s call were only three hours apart. Were they working together? Maybe. Maybe Sharon was a romantic stalking- horse, the way things were done back in high school, when an intermediary was sent to test the emotional waters. Olivia used to do it for her shy sister: what would you say if Elizabeth asked you to her party?
“Any news?” she asked Phillips.
“Nothing worth reporting.” A long pause. She heard the street noise from his apartment. It gave her a strange feeling.
“Damn,” she said.
“It’s frustrating as hell,” he said.
“I’m sure it is.” She noted the coldness in her voice and reached down to pick up the comforter.
“I just want you to know,” he said, “I’m not going to let you down.”
“I appreciate that, Jack.”
“You believe me, don’t you?”
“I believe you’re doing everything you can.”
“No. I’m sorry. That’s not enough. You have to believe I’m not going to let you down, you have to believe in me.”
Oh—of course: he was loaded. He was alone, with a drink in his hand, making calls he would regret in the morning. It made her want a drink, too. And the sense of the glass in his hand and the lonely sound the ice made when he brought the drink to his lips moved her closer to him. They were joined by a bridge of regret; they each regretted the night, this night, night itself. And now the possibility that he had urged Sharon to visit her and speak about him filled Olivia not only with pity but desire. Maybe everything that had happened to her—the mysterious, dispiriting drift of her marriage, the move to this rural nowhere, the gloomy afternoons warming her hands on mugs of Earl Grey tea and looking out of some frost-laced window at the nuthatches hanging upside down in the bare trees while the windows of the house displayed her cameos, her damask, her tarnished treasures and second-tier heirlooms, each piece with a story attached to it like the tag on the toe of a corpse—maybe, maybe it was all leading to this, this moment, to Sam’s tour, Michael’s disappearance, Amanda’s sound sleep, and Jack Phillips’s voice in her ear; maybe it was all one long gesture culminating in the sudden, startling resurrection of her desire.
“I’ve been to his school,” Phillips was saying. “I’ve talked to everyone he knows. Normally, I can talk to these kids, I’m good at it. I can make them sing.”
“No one really knows Michael.”
“Right. That’s the thing. But there was something…” He let his voice trail off, forced her to come after him.
“What? What thing?”
“The kids talk about a guy who lives in the woods. Did Michael ever mention anything like that to you?”
“What woods?”
“Somewhere, anywhere. In Windsor County. It’s half forest here. Still.”
“He never said anything about it. Why?”
“I don’t know. One of the kids in high school said, ‘Maybe he’s with the Tree Man.’ I knew who he was talking about. Every time something happens around here, if no one can explain it, they bring up this guy supposedly living out in the woods. Weekenders come up, a can of peas is missing, it’s got to be the man in the woods.”
“Is it just a story, or is there someone out there?”
“I don’t know. I tend to think there is someone out there, and people make up stories about him.”
“Do you think he’s got Michael?”
“There’s one thing. All the robberies that have been taking place this past year? Well, suddenly, they’re not as stupid as they used to be. Suddenly, the thieves are taking things of real value—paintings, carvings, stuff worth serious dough. Suddenly, they know what they’re doing.”
“Michael?”
“Well, his disappearance does coincide with the rise in the quality of thievery. But you realize, I’m just speculating. It’s a speculation based on a speculation. It’s just talk.”
“Just talk? Jack, I want to know what you’re doing. I feel as if we’re running out of time.”
“I look and I look and I look.”
“Christ.”
“And then I look some more.” A pause. “There’s one more thing.”
“Yes?”
“It’s a little…I don’t know.”
“What is it?”
“This Pennyman—I went to see him.”
“Did I give you his name?”
“He was reluctant to talk to me. I mean, give me a small break, the guy’s not even a Ph.D. and he’s acting as if his fucking confidentiality is a matter of law. Anyhow, he told me Michael was upset.”
“Upset? Of course he was upset. That’s why he was seeing Pennyman in the first place.”
“I realize. But—I don’t know. Maybe I can get more out of him later. But it seems Michael was worried about something specifically about you and your husband.”
“Really? What?”
“I don’t know. But it seemed as if Michael knew something, or heard something, and now he and your husband had to have some kind of reckoning.”
“What are you basing this on?”
“Instinct—that’s what you’re paying me for.” He laughed. “May I ask you a personal question?”
“What?”
“Are you in bed?”
“Yes. Why are you asking that?”
“I don’t know. Your voice. I feel as if I were in bed with you.”
Scalding blood rushed to her face. Where had such hot blood been stored?
“Are you crazy?”
“I don’t know. A little. I thought I could come over.”
She hung the phone up and quickly pulled her hand away from it, as if the receiver might jump back into her grip.
She rearranged herself beneath the covers. The cold spring night pressed against the black windows. Her alarm clock was set to go off at seven in the morning and it was already eleven. If she fell asleep this very instant it would give her just eight hours. From now on every tick of the clock took a piece out of tomorrow. Yet: desire. She felt it moving within her, not exactly racing, but stirring, moving in its deep slumber, like a bear disturbed in the depths of its hibernation.
Soon after, Olivia was out of bed, scowling at the clocks as she passed them on her frantic night rounds. She looked in on Amanda, who slept on her back, her face placid, hands folded around a lily of moonlight. Next, she went down the hall and looked in at Michael’s room; its emptiness was sullen, banal. She closed the door on it hard.
Downstairs. She hated the look of everything. The faded Persian runners, with their Islamic reds and oranges; the cane chairs pressed against the wall, the kind of chairs that made you not want to sit down. She could not look at anything in the house. The tasteful pictures on the wall— the sepia portrait of Crazy Horse, the dazzling lithograph of the Lusitania torn from an old Harper’s, a credible imitation of a Renaissance Assumption done by a woman named Abigail Waterson, a distant cousin of Emily Dickinson. The correctness oppressed her; everything was so chosen.
What if she were to call Jack and tell him yes, come over, come over now—hurry? She thought of him in her house, in her body. She thought of the juice of him going into her, and she felt a twist of revulsion and a bone-deep chill of fear.
She hated the fear within her, abhorred it as something unclean. It was a fear of men, all men; she knew this without being able to say it, felt its justification without being able to defend it. Her father’s petulant silences, his suspicions of academic plots and counterplots. Her several boyfriends’ beseeching need of her, the way they plucked at her clothes, crushed her. Even Sam, though gentle, was fixated on the idea that his life was real and safe only when he was in her arms, making love to her, and his need for her was now oppressive, like caring for a sick person. And Michael: it was the hardest thing to say. The look of him suckling blindly at her bloated breast, his little razor-sharp fingernails, with no earthly use except the infliction of pain, the incitement of hatred—yes, Michael clawed at her, and when he had sucked her dry, he arched his back to get a better look at her and yowled miserably, accusingly.
She stood in her house, trying to calm herself with deep breaths. There: breathe, just breathe.
This was not her life, not the life she was meant to have. Her real life was elsewhere, but she had no idea where. She was out of the orbit of her destiny, tumbling through space. A fantastic yet pathetic series of accidents, compromises, held horses, bitten tongues had led her into this jerkwater life, this dollhouse without dolls. Where was it written that she would be scouring the countryside for undervalued antiques (often settling for knickknacks)? What was she doing anyhow? What in the hell was going on? What could she have possibly been thinking when she linked her life to Sam’s? She stood at the carved Victorian bookcase, filled with his (and ostensibly her) books, and swept them off the shelves with sudden violence, not even flinching when some of them struck her on their way to the floor.
Had she really been one of those girls who wanted to be an artist’s wife? How could she have thought so little of herself? What was the deal supposed to be? To pitch in with the typing and wait with him on the edge of the loveseat while he stared at the telephone? Why hadn’t someone taken her aside and whispered in her ear: “You know, you have to have a life, too”? Why hadn’t she thought of it herself—really thought it, not just have it pass through her head? Her mother was ambitious; her mother’s chainsmoking, argumentative friends, her sister had a good career; most of the women she liked and admired had made their way persuasively in the world. Why not her? What did she have to show for her years on earth? One child on the dark side of the moon, another pierced by moonlight on her bed, and a husband on the radio pretending to be someone else? But you see? You see? Even this cold-eyed total excluded her. She was outside the arc of her own accountancy. It was all about Michael, Amanda, and Sam. Surely, there were things in her life outside of her family.
She went into the kitchen, turned on the overhead lights. Too bright. She flicked the switch off and the room settled back into its moony ambiguity. Not quite enough light to see, so she opened the refrigerator and let the twenty-watt bulb inside push its dim glow through the bottle of skim milk standing before it.
All she wanted was enough light to find the Scotch; was that asking too much? It was in the pine cupboard above the sink. She opened it up. Standing in the first row were bottles of Gallo sherry and Astor Home gin, which Sam used to mix cut-price versions of a drink that Lester Young and Billie Holiday reportedly enjoyed—a Back and Forth, or an Up and Down, something like that. What a pretentious pain in the ass he could be sometimes, though her heart went out to him, too, in a way, that he would actually want to better himself through a drink. As stranded as she felt, she at least did not feel the emptiness that was his, day after day.
She parted the bottles and found the Dewar’s, and behind that bottle was another.
Without the ice you could really taste it—the grain, the barrel, the nicotine on the fingers of the old men who bottled it. She poured another.
She drank quickly, less interested now in reverie than in results. Yes, it was about time to get a little result-oriented here. That word—“oriented.” A vague, irritating memory of Sam pontificating upon it, how with the rise of the Pacific Rim everyone suddenly wanted to get oriented, something like that, nonsense, blather against the anxiety of a still mind. He should have stuck with that meditation teacher. He should have broken the habit of running words through his mind like worry beads, fingering them, darkening them with the oil of his own touch. She hadn’t even bothered to inform him that “oriented” meant finding east, Mecca.
She was about to leave the kitchen but stopped herself at the threshold, doubled back for the bottle. No sense wearing out the floor going back and forth. Economy of movement had always appealed to her. Her sister once told her of a girl from college who’d stay statue-still during sex and then, just when you thought she was either dead or resentful, she would flick her hips once and have a short, breathy orgasm, comme ça.
Oddly enough, she remembered nothing more of the night when she finally awakened the next morning. She was in bed, but wearing her robe; the bottle of Scotch was on the night table, touching the phone, as if the two had formed a relationship. And Amanda was at her bedside, looking both stricken and curious.
“Mom?” she said, shaking Olivia’s shoulder. The thing about drinking too much was that it dissolved the boundaries between soul and shit, and it all mixed together like food some furious infant has mashed upon his plate.
“Don’t shake,” said Olivia, shading her eyes, though it was barely light in the room. What was that sound? Rain?
Oh God, what if Michael was out there somewhere, in the rain?
“I missed the bus,” said Amanda. “You didn’t wake me up, or make breakfast, or anything.”
“Sorry, sorry.” Her legs ached; her mouth felt like the inside of a vacuum cleaner bag. A sharp smell in the air— pine tar, turpentine, something.
“Mom?” Amanda’s voice wavered between concern and amusement. There was no question that seeing her mother sacked out so helplessly was an event of some kind.
“I’ll drive you to school,” Olivia whispered.
“It’s already started. And you get in more trouble for being late than being absent.”
Olivia sighed deeply. There was something way off in what Amanda was saying, but it was too complicated to refute right now.
“Mom?”
“What.”
“What happened downstairs?”
Olivia was silent. She was having no thoughts of which she was aware, yet Amanda’s question disturbed her. It was like the physical equivalent of déjà vu, a bodily sensation familiar yet elusive; she remembered herself doing something but could not say what.
“Did you write on the walls, Mom?”
“What?”
Amanda reached for Olivia’s hand and plucked it off of the satin comforter. Amanda’s hand was icy.
Olivia opened her eyes and looked at her right hand, as Amanda held it before her. The sides of her first three fingers were stained dark blue. At first, it meant nothing to her, then it began to, and then she was blank again.
“Everything’s knocked over, Mom. Maybe we should, I don’t know—call the police?”
“What time is it?”
“Mom, I’m serious. Where’s Daddy? Maybe we should call Daddy.”
“No, that’s okay.” Olivia was silent. There were thick black velvet curtains over the windows of consciousness; no breeze could stir them. If she did not speak—now!— then surely she would fall back to sleep. “What kind of writing on the walls, sweetie?” It was what Sam called her—never mind.
“Your name, with a face in the O.”
“You’re—” She stopped herself from saying the rest of it: “kidding me.” “What else?”
“Swears, in paint. Mom, did you do that?”
“Is anything broken?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. The books are on the floor.”
“Is that all?” She forced herself up on her elbows; her insides fell away, groceries out of a wet sack.
“The windows were open, and it was real cold when I came down. I closed them, so it’s okay now. But that’s why I thought someone might have snuck in, maybe some teenagers or something. Or Michael?”
“No, it was me.”
They were silent, mother and daughter, it was one of those moments that neither of them would shake loose; for a long time it would be a line of demarcation: things happened either before the night the walls got painted or after.
“Graffiti,” said Amanda.
“Yes, that’s what it’s called.”
It had taken her daughter that long to remember the word she wanted. Something inside of her kept snatching away the words she needed, hiding them under things.
“You know what you should do?” said Olivia. She sat up, leaned against the bedboard. The wood felt cold straight through her nightgown and her robe. “You could go to your room, and read, or color, or do whatever you want to do. I’m going to go downstairs and straighten up a little, and then we can both go to town and have a lovely girls’ breakfast at the Silver Spoon.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
Amanda nodded but did not move. Finally, she asked, “Why did you do all that, Mom?”
“You know how it is when you get real mad and lose your temper? Well, moms sometimes do, too. Just because you get old doesn’t mean you don’t sometimes lose your temper.”
“But I never paint anything, and I don’t break stuff or throw stuff around.”
“You used to. We called them temper tantrums.”
“Yeah, but I was two years old, Mom.”
“Well, last night, I was two years old.”
“Are you going to be two years old tonight?”
“No. I promise. It’s just that, you know, I’m worried about Michael, and I really miss Daddy.” She was a little surprised to hear herself saying this, but as soon as it was out she realized it was true—she missed Sam, she wished he were here at this very moment, to survey the damage she had done, to help her get through whatever was next.
As soon as Amanda left the room, the telephone rang. Something told Olivia she ought to just let it ring, but she picked it up anyhow.
“Hello,” said the voice at the other end of the line. “This is Nadia Tannenbaum. Do you remember me? I was a guest at your home last year.”
“Yes,” said Olivia, her heart pounding. “I remember you.”
“It’s…it’s very important that I speak to Sam, Mrs. Holland,” said the voice at the other end of the line. “Is he there?” And then Nadia began to weep. “Never mind,” she said, and tried to hang up, but was too upset and failed to break the connection. “Oh, shit,” Olivia heard her say. “Can’t I do anything right?” A few more fumbling noises and the line was dead.