Infinite Home (25 page)

B
Y
THE
TIME
Song finally opened her mouth to speak, Thomas had long since stopped expecting it. The unfamiliar travel of human speech confused him, and he looked around the small house, at the peak of the ceiling and the slanted gap beneath the door, as though to find where the word had landed. It was afternoon. He sat cross-legged on the floor, sorting through rocks the color of long-circulated money, and she watched him from the wicker chair by the room’s one window.

“Hello,” she said. They had grown so comfortable with each other’s silence that the greeting seemed unnecessary, even foolish. Not quite ready yet for whatever it was that language might reveal, Thomas kept his fingers on the stones, thumbing the smoothest stretches, admiring dramatic variations in shade, and nodded. “I’m prepared to speak about the issue of your friend Edith,” Song said. “I trust you now. We grew that.”

“Oh,” he said, searching himself for a feeling of concern for their conversation. “Well?”

Hunting for the pivotal speech he’d filed away, he played back images and sounds: the locked door to Edith’s apartment and Owen’s impatient words behind it; the rigid form of her body in her son’s presence. Adeleine on the top floor, every object placed to amuse and comfort her, the safety that finally played across her face as she slept. Paulie at the keyboard, the clamor refining into pristine patterns and flying up the stale stairway. Edward, whispering something to Paulie as they made their way down the street, towards the park and the last of the sun. Claudia waiting for them on the stoop with overflowing grocery bags, heads of watermelon, ears of corn, smiling at Thomas with a muted, infectious contentment.

“It’s the house,” he said to Song. “She left it to you.”

“To the person I was, once, a long time ago.”

“Okay, yes, to who you were. But Edith is sick, and Owen is trying to put her in some retirement facility against her will. He wants to get rid of her and take over the property, push us all out of our homes and rent them for six times as much.”

Song’s face had not turned. Her peace rivaled a houseplant’s.

“He’s rough with her, Song. He herds her around like she’s his inmate.”

“Oh.” Her eyes closed briefly, and he could sense her muffling a response, pushing memories down as they surfaced, like things in a basin of water not yet clean. She gripped the arms of the chair, and a bellicose purple stood out in the veins of her throat.

“Please present your purpose.”

Thomas went to Song and knelt, as if positioning himself like that might let him catch some of the unwanted, unhappy recollections that spilled from her.

“You have to take the house, Jenny,” he opened gently, careful about how he called out to her past, careful not to send it scurrying away from the light. “You have to save her like she wanted to save you.”

She released a ragged sound, as though some long-struggling part of her body was trying to open.

“Jenny,” he said.

“
Jenny
,” she said.

Almost as soon as her moan filled the room, it seemed replaced, eliminated by the atmosphere’s familiar muting of extremes—the structure never too cold or warm, the sun always filtered by trees, only the necessary words spoken—as if snatched up by some invisible maid who didn’t prefer the messiness of suffering, and swept back out into the wild. Thomas couldn’t locate the moment before, the split second when he’d connected her to who she had once been, and her eyes, placid again, revealed nothing.

“A sweet person,” she said, with apparent regret. “The girl you’re looking for doesn’t exist, don’t you see? I gave up my past when I came here. I made a commitment. I was born
after
, do you understand? I don’t have any right to that place. In fact, the system we built here precludes ownership.”

“But—”

It felt as though his blood were moving through him at a perilously slow rate, but he continued, even knowing how little power he held. “But she was your mother. She was your mother and—” His voice broke as he thought of the photo, of Edith on the lumped and sun-strewn bed, holding up the tiny new human to the concentration of light; then he recalled his own mother, throwing an arm across his chest at sudden stoplights, the bashful smile she always gave him after.

“She never stopped missing you, do you understand? She was sorry her whole life. She never stopped
looking
.”

Song turned away with a long gaze, taking in the horizon in no hurry, but Jenny’s mouth softened and quavered. In an expeditious series of motions Thomas wouldn’t have thought her capable of, she was up and at the door, lacing up her boots, reaching for a hat.

“I’m going for a walk,” she said without affording him a glance. “I have some listening to do.”

A
S
HE
MOVED
through her home, picking things up and letting them drop like some machine sent to methodically dismantle, Adeleine practiced her ability to live remembered moments in full detail, to focus on the greens and whites of other days and forget her current circumstances completely. After he had carried her up from the street, he had arranged her back on the chaise and flashed a palm across his mother’s field of vision, as if to alert her to his upcoming performance. He pulled the curtains open, one by one, with his thumb and forefinger. Although Adeleine had bucked as he placed her there, sent her legs up in a few frantic kicks, her body, spent from its failed escape and stunned by the brightness and volume of the outside world, soon collapsed. Adeleine had not replied when Owen had asked her whether she would let him borrow a few things, had not watched as he approached the bowed bookshelf as though it were an infestation he intended to eliminate. She was already recalling a former life, sinking into another time.

He tapped out a jar of skeleton keys, and the rusted browns and grays fell like birds that dive into water; he held up records to read their labels, then sent them into flight; he removed a stack of age-bloated postcards, their backsides filled with tight, extinct cursive, and he flicked his thumb across each as he dealt them onto the floor. With a fine moisture growing on his upper lip, he shifted his focus to the rows of books, lower down: he took some poems by A. A. Milne and tore off leaves of the plain ink drawings, the verses about introverted mice, the place halfway up the stairs, the vanishing of glamorous mothers. His vision snagged on the stacked Pyrex and skillets of the kitchen, and he crossed to touch them.

With a snap, the stuck knob of the oven reached its highest setting, and on the middle rack he placed her ceramic coin banks, tiny dachshunds that leapt through hoops with pennies in their mouths, hand-painted golfers forever poised to putt. In a brief, cheerful stretch, he bent his knees, then moved to the bathroom, where he raised the toilet seat, pissed for a full minute, and jiggled himself dry. He turned on the bathtub’s hot water with a flick of his wrist as purposeful as a plumber’s, and he made several trips to the living room, forming aslant stacks of novels and journals that he wedged under the stubble of his chin.

Submerged under the steam, the books resisted a minute before releasing inky gasps of black and gray.

Adeleine, ankles crossed, eyes closed, was visiting a place she had been with her parents as a child on vacation: a summer cottage in a small Massachusetts beach town—a modest structure, made mainly of windows, that stood on stilts above an overgrown lawn. To counter the sounds of her life combusting, she replayed the moment when her mother finally pronounced the dusky light insufficient and flicked the switch, spilling yellow through the mesh windows and out onto the uneven grass. Adeleine had insisted on sitting outside to watch this, the whole house suddenly so bright, as if built then and there, the round wooden dining table and blue painted chairs and overstuffed couch appearing as if summoned by a magician.

She could sense Owen growing still, surveying the room he had laid to waste, but she remained in the tall blades of grass, eleven years old and very thin, devouring the smell of wet dirt, an odor that was in equal parts the determination of growth and the languid pace of rot. She knew that soon she would stand, say good-bye to the chorus of fireflies that lingered in the bushes below the house, make her way up the uneven stairs, past her parents where they sat reading, down the low hall to the bed with a time-softened quilt. She would lie quietly with childish dreams of bicycle rides, of the pink-cheeked boys who might kiss her.

By the bell she had hung there with a brief, fleeting optimism for a future full of comings and goings, she heard the apartment door of her adult life close. Adeleine sat up from the twin mattress in the wood-paneled room, heard the laughter of her family nearby, saw the clear rubber sandals and fluorescent-thread bracelets of girlhood. She put them away in her past, and returned to the vestiges of her home.

Adeleine could smell her books, the aged scent of them more pungent with moisture, like a futile weapon dispatched to combat their drowning; she could feel the heat of the oven, her precious items roasting and cracking. Around her feet were pieces of things she’d loved, the gilded circular plate of a rotary telephone, the wheel of a wooden airplane, splayed strings of violet and oak-colored yarn unspooled from their perfect globes. A herd of marbles lolled, mapping the slant of the floor. Next to her, Edith repeated the ends of sentences, pieces of conversations that twirled in her head like wind chimes, revealing one glinting part and obscuring another. “. . . About two blocks down,” she said. “Expensive side,” she said. “And what a view.”

Adeleine positioned herself gingerly on the edge of the cushion and leaned in to touch Edith’s uncombed, colorless hair. She was acutely sad to smell the hour-old sweat on her own body—an odor stiff like the air of a revolving door, the perspiration she had worked up just by thinking herself away—and she reached over and up to unfasten the peeling white latch and let in the weather. She had feared for her body, but instead he had exposed the tableau she had built to protect her mind, the tokens she had appointed as mediators between her and sanity.

With the window open, she felt the change in pressure as though it were some communication, a phone ringing or a package slipped under a door.

A
FTER
THE
RATTLE
of her exit ceased, Thomas listened for the last sounds of Song on the porch and crawled onto the great blank bed. He didn’t understand what he was searching for until he knew it was missing: it was not in the snowy wool blanket that lay folded at the foot, or in the folds of the enormous down comforter, or lying on top of the pillows. He discovered no odor, no stray hair, no impression of a body’s weight resting. The lack of evidence of her gave him a feverish chill, and then fatigue settled, vaporlike, around his collarbone and temples. He had come all this way and failed: she felt nothing for the property across the country or the woman decaying inside it. He wanted sleep the way the terminally ill finally turn their curiosity towards death and begin their small negotiations with it.

When he awoke, he saw the men’s faces arranged around the bed like beads on a shared string, moving in one line, secured by Song’s place in the center. He gathered the blankets around him, and Song smiled without showing her teeth. From the lilac patch of sky through the window, he knew it was the hour in which they would use their saved-up speech.

“We hope you slept well,” she began. “I’ve done the listening I need to, and think I’ve found a bridge of a kind.” Thomas looked up at the woman, her white hair backlit by dusk, and realized his position in her bed would make disagreement absurd and impossible. Though she spoke in gentle peals, and glowed the pink of a long walk, she had not arrived in the spirit of compromise, but rather to offer one firm solution. The men now bowed their heads, and he saw, for the first time, the shared aquiline nose, the eyes the color of alpine lakes. These were her sons.

“We don’t have any right to that property, unfortunately.” They nodded. “Or interest.” They tittered. “However.” Their heads dropped again.

“I’ve come to believe that your friend Edith and I might enjoy meeting each other. Reuniting,
you
might say. We could forgive each other for who we once were. She could live out the rest of her identity here. She would rest. She would be safe.”

Presented with the possibility of Edith in this strange place, all of Thomas’s repressed intentions for her appeared in vivid presentation. All along—on the airplane that had crossed the Midwest in the middle of the night, in the darkening library where he’d looked for any meager trace of her daughter, around the curves of the narrowing two-lane highway—he had assumed he would be the one to protect Edith. He would be gentle with her when she was furious, would keep her mind at ease with whispered comforts, preside over the moments in which her febrile confusion became fear, bring her water with decorative straws and simple games in subdued colors. He would hold the crook of her elbow and guide her through the neighborhood, naming the streets she had known much of her life.
It was supposed to be me
, he thought, and knew, simultaneously, that the reality of the task, the hushing and the spoon-feeding and the laundering of soiled sheets, would have been too much for him to hold.

The only word of protest he summoned was weak, led nowhere.

“But—”

“Of course, there’s the matter of the house. I cannot accompany you back there, but I am willing to assume the temporary authority, of my former self and name, in order to sign over all rights to you, if you can arrange for her to arrive very soon.”

“Song, I would have to go back across the country to get her. I’m not sure I can do it so quickly—”

“I can give you two days. You’ve already upset our arrangement by coming, and I can’t guarantee my answer will be the same beyond that. We will welcome Edith, and you will deal with the building however you see fit. She will be cared for here. We’ll build a bed for her near mine.”

Jenny’s sons—Edith’s grandchildren, Thomas reminded himself—nodded in echo of her earnestness. He let himself imagine it: Edith waking and breathing in the elevation, the clean air like none she’d had in sixty-odd years. Edith sitting in a little wooden chair by the vegetable garden while someone picked jewel-dark roots and rain-polished greens for her dinner. Edith on the porch at dusk, babbling out the fragments of her life as they surfaced in her mind to an audience of passing chickens, then growing quiet again. And just as he had in the days after his body betrayed him, he tried to cajole acceptance with outward expressions of agreement he hoped would move inward. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.” His chin wagged up and down wildly, like a simple toy sent into motion by an eager hand.