Infinite Home (26 page)

T
HEY
ARRIVED
in the late afternoon, after a stretch of silence punctuated only by the occasional sound of the turn signal or a sigh from Edward. The fireflies wouldn’t appear for another few days, and much of the campground radiated absence, stretches of empty sites, wooden tables free of human clutter, squat and blackened grills.

They circled the campsites carefully, commenting on the dramatic slant of number sixty-four, pausing to investigate the well-shaded opportunity afforded by seventy-two. Edward, who had not camped once in his life, kept proximity to a bathroom a priority, and narrowed his eyes as they traveled farther from the friendly wooden stalls of the showers. Claudia, though weary, held her initial vision of perfection close, and quickly found flaws in each of the most promising sites.

They had nearly completed the double-loop, an infinity shape paved in concrete, when they saw it. Claudia braked, and Paulie exclaimed. Each opened their door carefully and moved slowly closer, evaluating the patch of dark land that would be theirs for the next eight evenings. The heart of it was situated in a slight valley, and they had to hike down in small steps, Claudia holding up Paulie’s hips while Edward struggled with the chafing confines of the cutoffs. Two trees stood on the north and south borders of number eighty, their trunks covered in a mantle of kudzu vines, an impenetrable green. The branches of each strained towards the other in the sky, not quite meeting, admitting an avenue for the sun to flood the rust-colored picnic table. Farther back leaned two smaller trees, echoes of the first, spaced as though destined to receive the blue-and-white hammock that Claudia had impulsively purchased at a roadside store. But this tug of serendipity did not bear comment: at the rear of the site cantered a confident stream, which took its rhythm from the modest but fierce waterfall where it began, and the sight of the fresh rush was immediately soul mending.

“Fuck,” said Edward.

“
Fuck
is
right
, Eddy,” said Paulie, reaching for his hand. They strode towards the water together, leaving Claudia where she had plunked, cross-legged, in the dirt, finally excused from obligation. At first they stood in the center, where the deepest water played above their knees, and looked around with a kind of guilt, as if waiting to be caught. Paulie was the first to sit, disappearing briefly beneath the surface to dunk his curls, then Edward, whose balding pink crown shone wet and bright in a patch of sun. From Claudia’s vantage, it was difficult to imagine that the two heads peeking out of the water, lolling wildly, maintained ties with any bodies.

Eventually she rose, retrieved white towels from the trunk of the car and carefully set them on the table to warm. She began unpacking the supplies they’d brought, stackable rubber dishes and nectarines bundled in starchy linens and a heavy, ovular cooler of water that thudded when shifted. When Paulie and Edward approached, twenty minutes later, shaking the moisture off with the subtlety of feral dogs, she wrapped each of them in the stiff new cotton, and then they ate, surveying the landscape and discussing the very best position for sleep.

A
FTER
DRIVING
twenty miles south to the nearest town, the last place his phone had picked up reception, Thomas cruised the main drag of square wooden buildings, seeking a parking place where he might gather the confidence to make the call.

In the lot of an abandoned drive-in diner, he got out and sat at one of the metal tables, the type covered in waffled plastic and bolted to the earth. The figure of a giant wooden boy biting into a hamburger cast a horrific shadow over the lot; when the hot wind blew, it quivered at its tenuous point of attachment atop the boarded-up kiosk.

Thomas looked at the phone and willed enthusiasm. Though it had been less than a month, he found he could no longer envision Adeleine’s shape. He saw the nape of her neck and the arch of her back, as from behind her in the afternoon, and remembered her hand as it held a fork, her hair as it grabbed light, but he could not force the fragments into concert. He considered the possibility that he no longer produced the hectic energy that he had transferred so effectively into loving her. His brain fed him images of cartoon firemen, holding out a trampoline, looking up at a curling orange window, dancing into different positions, bracing to catch something impossibly large.

Thomas prepared for, even anticipated, the number of rings—it generally took Adeleine at least four to tear herself away from the fabric of her thoughts and answer—but then she was on the phone almost instantly.

“It’s me,” he said.

He could tell, solely by the way she paused before she spoke, and then by the dull theater of her questions—
Where are you? How are you?
—that their language, one that had taken so long to grow, was lost. Until he began to ask her the same, he didn’t consider the alternative: that their dynamic had not been relinquished, but plundered, thieved of the little optimism that had made it possible.

“Her son was here again.”

“Did he put up some new eviction notices? Adeleine, I can’t really believe it, but Edith’s daughter is giving me—”

“He knew I wouldn’t leave the house, and he took advantage of that.”

It was here that Thomas faltered, and did not pose the inquiries that he surely would have, had he somehow divined the cramped shape of her posture, seen the ragged chew of her fingernails. Across the country, Adeleine sat on the floor with her body coiled as tightly as she could manage, her knees pressed up against her chin, her arms around her shins, the telephone held against her cheek by her left shoulder. Edith, on the couch behind, occasionally placed a hand on the top of her blond-red head and sighed.

“What happened?” he said. “Are you all right? Did he try to inspect your apartment?”

When she brushed away his questions and assumed a hardened, mostly monosyllabic conversational position, he found he didn’t have the focus to chip at it, find his way inside.

“Adeleine. I’m going to ask you—I need you to agree to something. It’s not what I expected. Jenny won’t come. She’s going to sign over the property, but we have to bring Edith here. I don’t know how to ask any other way—you need to walk out of there, and you need to bring her with you. Time doesn’t give us any alternatives.”

“Talk to Edith,” Adeleine said. The voice he heard was scrubbed of her, as though she were hours into reading a manual aloud. “Tell her you found her daughter. Tell her Jenny still exists.”

“Well—” The phone was already in transit.

“Good day?” lilted Edith.

“Edith,” he said. “It’s Thomas.”

“. . .”

“From upstairs?”

“Mm,” she said, without much commitment. “We could certainly use your help around here, then!”

“Edith. Your daughter. Jenny? I’m here with Jenny.”

“You
are
?” said Edith. A grin moved across her face, touching all parts of it. “How are her grades? Jenny,” she continued, “is such a storyteller. I always say, you could hand her a tissue and an orange and she’d give you back a whole world built around them.”

“She’s—she’s certainly built a whole world here.”

Adeleine moved to the couch and laid her head in Edith’s lap, tried to isolate all the tiny sounds of the body moving breath outward and taking it in.

Thomas looked up at the peeling colors of the hamburger boy, at the blue shirt that had faded unevenly over the uncooked pink color beneath, so that it appeared something was eating away at his clothing.

“Jenny is doing well,” he said, too quickly. “She wants you to come visit. She wants to show you her life. Jenny missed you, Edith.” To assuage a wave of guilt—the mention of her mother had not exactly filled Song with longing—he tried to convince himself of its truth, recalled how it had been Song’s idea and not his. He wished desperately that Edith were there with him so that he could take her warm hand and assure her, see the flicker of recognition as it came, even as it went.

“Will you come, Edith? Will you come visit?” Thomas heard a muffled clatter, then a distorted car horn. He had not broken through her fog, all of its shape-shifting, its short-sighted convictions, and she had put the phone down. He repeated Adeleine’s name with increasing volume, begging her to remember him from wherever she’d retreated to.

Edith had gingerly placed the phone at the base of a plant, so that his voice lost itself in the waxy yellow-green leaves, and Adeleine didn’t realize the sound as coming from outside of her head for a full three minutes.

“The strangest thing,” she said. “You were obscured in my arrowhead plant. I thought for a moment it was finally talking back. You know, you’re supposed to talk to them.”

“Okay. Sweetheart? This is it. This is the last thing you have to do. I’ll make all the arrangements for you. After that—”

“All right,” she said, her agreement stopping his voice dead-on. “How long do I have to pack?” It was moments like this, when questions of poor odds dissolved and an improbable outcome came into fruition, that he could nearly sense the lost parts of his body tingling, preparing to wake up from their long sleep and feel again.

D
OWNSTAIRS
IN
E
DITH
’
S
APARTMENT
, the two women surveyed the clothing laid out on the bed, some of it removed from the cherrywood wardrobe for the first time in decades: a buttermilk angora cardigan beaded at the collar, a silk dress of peachy violet with a sash at the waist, camel linen slacks dotted with greens and grays, high-waisted denim shorts with a golden five-button fly, a brick plaid shirt with pearled snap enclosures. Edith sat near the foot and moved her hands over the pieces as though caressing a sleeping child awake, touching the grain of her former lives.

Standing with her arms crossed and lips pursed, imagining coordinated pairings, Adeleine envisioned Edith embracing her daughter in these clothes, linking an arm with hers and beginning a long walk. That her own life was missing from these fantasies, hardly considered by the plans at hand, felt like a generous gift from someone who knew her well.

“They’re stunning,” Adeleine said, holding her left hand with her right. “They’re perfect.” She opened the two metal latches of the powder-blue vinyl suitcase, which she had also retrieved from the deep corners of the stale-smelling armoire, and began folding the items with care, smoothing creases, fastening clasps. She found some peace in doing so, and answered Edith’s mumbled concerns without hesitation, as though contending with matters of geography
.
Edith looked out the window as Adeleine talked, then stood to grip its cracked, whitewashed frame with her knuckles.

“Fall forward?” Edith asked, groping for any adage that explained time.

“Almost. Back. Spring forward, fall back.”

“Are we going on a vacation?”

“We’re going to see your daughter. We’re going to see Jenny.”

“Will Declan meet us there?”

“No, he won’t, Edith. I’m sorry.”

“They found Jenny? Did she get my letter?”

“She’s doing fine, Edith. She’s looking forward to your visit. She wants you to stay as long as you like.”

“Imagine,” Edith said. She was breathless and bright-eyed in a way that belonged exclusively to adolescent girls as they imagined the rest of their lives, the porches of houses where they might live, the gleaming offices where they might work, the forbearing men they might love. “Imagine.
My
daughter.” The possibility felled her, and she settled again on the bed.

“Edith,” said Adeleine, now behind her in the light, running a hand down her back, then kneeling before her, scouring the ruined face for an answer. “Is there anything else you’d like to bring with you? From home?”

Adeleine cupped Edith’s knees and held her gaze. After a brief quiet of consideration, Edith shook her head.

“Oh, no. No need to bring home with me, dear. I know what it feels like.”

An hour remained until the car Adeleine had called would come and take them to the airport, and at the thought of its horn inevitably sounding, even her teeth began to itch.

“What if I did your nails?”

“That would be
nice
,” Edith said.

Adeleine returned with a small suede box of her own colors, metallic golds and creamy yellows and sheer whites, and asked Edith to choose one. As though choosing a color to paint her new home, she ran her hands over the bottles with concentration, finally settling on a robin’s egg blue. For the next twenty minutes, Adeleine kneeled, first filing, then daubing the tiny brush across tobacco-yellow ridges age had left, pausing to wipe any stray lacquer from the cuticles. She kept her head low, offering frequent praise, ushering Edith back to the moment. “It’s a perfect color,” she said. “It’ll match the sky out the window of the airplane.”

Adeleine’s body, in anticipation of their leaving, produced a trembling cover of sweat. She held up each individual nail and blew through her puckered mouth; she asked Edith to please stay still; she went to the neatly made bed and sat, imagining statues, stone hands folded. In her mind she counted back from one hundred, the digits pulsating black on white in rhythm with her pulse.

When the two complaints of the horn sounded outside, it was Edith who rose first, who placed a hat on her white head and reminded Adeleine it was time to go. Edith who allowed Adeleine to bury her head in her arm, who guided them down the stoop as though it were a wedding aisle, her shoulders thrown back for the loving audience. They watched as the driver lifted their suitcases and deposited them in the shadowed maw of the trunk. On the top floor, a curtain licked at the arid day through a window left open.

“It was a wonderful party, anyway,” Edith said.