She suddenly wondered what her father was doing in Maine, where he now lived. They’d barely spoken at her wedding. He’d shown up, walked her down the aisle, but then she’d barely seen him at the reception. He and her mother didn’t sit together, and if he’d tried to find her to say good-bye, he hadn’t succeeded. But she remembered feeling relieved that he hadn’t stayed longer—the more Catherine drank, the feistier she got, and she would have picked a fight with him, right in front of the Bates-McAllisters.
She excused a lot of her dad’s absences this way, not really examining if those were really his intentions. She couldn’t even recall the last time they’d had an actual conversation. Probably about three years ago; he’d been driving south for a business trip and stopped off to see her for lunch, picking somewhere cheap and close to the turnpike. He paid for their club sandwiches with an American Express corporate card and talked a lot about a mystery book on tape he’d been listening to during the drive.
She should have asked him why he’d been the way he’d been. Why he’d stopped accompanying Catherine to the hospital, how the responsibility had always fallen on Joanna. And why, that day of her eleventh birthday party, when Catherine declared she felt sick, her father had been so adamant about removing Joanna from the situation and taking her and her friends for pizza. “You’re doing the right thing,” he’d said to Joanna as they got out of the car at the pizza parlor. “We need to break this cycle.” Joanna tried to believe him. She wanted to think he was doing this for her because it was her birthday. But what if it was to undermine Catherine, too?
When Joanna had arrived home from the pizza parlor later that evening, her friends rushing to the Nintendo in the basement, she noticed a light in her mother’s bedroom and went upstairs. Her mother was lying face down on her bed, curled up in a ball. Her eyes were closed, and she didn’t seem to sense Joanna was there. She didn’t look ill, just alone. Like there was no one in the world who wanted her. It made Joanna crumple up inside. She couldn’t bear to see her mother like that, so lost and without purpose. And so she’d swallowed her frustration. It was the only thing she could do. She collected the photos of the Bates-McAllisters, turning to them for respite. They were removed from Joanna’s world, eternally as perfect as their pictures.
She thought about what she’d said to Scott a few hours ago. And how he’d stormed away, upset. It was no different than how anyone would have reacted. Scott was the last bastion of the Bates-McAllister mystique, an impenetrable, unknowable person that she could mold to her whims and desires. But Scott was the same as she was—as anyone was—with the same emotions, secrets, and demons.
Realizing this made her feel woozy and weak-kneed. It made her feel childish, too, for being so naive to think that Scott would be any different. And for being so blind to assume that Charles would be exactly what she’d created in her mind. Maybe she was the one who lived in the bubble, not Charles and his family, not Catherine with her diseases and her panic. Joanna was so set on people being one way and one way only, her brain practically locked when someone did something unexpected. Of course she was disappointed—she had nowhere to go but disappointment. But it didn’t mean the disappointment was bad. “That tree that fell over,” Catherine piped up. “It has to make a sound, doesn’t it? Everything makes a sound, whether we’re there or not.”
“I don’t know. I guess it’s up to everyone individually.” “And this is a common question you’ve heard before?” “A popular philosophical question, yes.”
Her mother patted her hand. “You should go back home. You should go home and talk to him, figure this out.”
Joanna shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“You think this ex-girlfriend is better for him? That’s the worst excuse I’ve ever heard. It just sounds like you’re scared.”
“I’m not scared.”
Catherine grabbed Joanna’s wrist hard. “Did you marry this man because I wanted you to? Because of those silly pictures in the newspaper?”
She thought for a moment. Maybe at first she did. But there was more to it now, too. “No,” she answered honestly.
“Do you really want to end things with him?”
She looked away. “I don’t know.”
“Come on.”
Joanna bit down on her lip. She had no idea what the right choice was. She had no idea how things would play out. No one did. “Just answer,” Catherine encouraged. “Say the first thing that comes to mind.”
Joanna’s mouth wobbled. Her mother’s nails dug into her skin. “No,” she whispered. “I don’t want things to end.”
Catherine released her grip. “There you go.”
“It’s not as easy as that.”
“With Charles, maybe it is.”
Joanna snorted. “You don’t really know Charles, Mom.” Catherine turned her head from side to side. “Charles called me once. Back in December. You’d been married for a few months. He asked me what you’d like for Christmas.”
Joanna lifted her hands from the bed.
“I told him that I had no idea what you’d like for Christmas, and that he probably had a much better idea of what to get you than I did. But he was persistent. He asked me what I would have wanted for Christmas my first year of marriage. ‘My marriage didn’t work out,’ I reminded him. And he said, ‘Well, pretend it that it had.’ ” Joanna stared at her. Charles hadn’t told her any of this. “He got me lingerie,” she blurted.
Catherine’s eyes lit up. “That’s what I told him to get you! I wanted your father to get me fancy lingerie for our first Christmas together. It sounded so sexy. Not that he did. He got me a vacuum.”
But it wasn’t what I wanted, Joanna wanted to protest. Charles didn’t know her at all. And instead of asking his mother, who was no doubt an expert at choosing the right gifts for everyone, he’d called Catherine.
“Isn’t that funny,” Joanna said in a faraway voice. A heavy gloom came over her suddenly, and every cell in her body felt immensely tired. When had people become so confusing? When had things suddenly shifted from Joanna knowing everything to knowing absolutely nothing?
She sat on the edge of Catherine’s bed for a while longer. Catherine turned on the television and flipped around until they found a reality show about four very wealthy women living in Southern California. The show featured a lot of shots that panned over the women’s mansions, their jewelry collections, their cars, their asses, and the two of them watched silently for at least three minutes until there was a commercial break. Catherine was leaning forward a little, taking it all in. Joanna could see her mind at work. Even if Catherine had discovered that status would never fulfill her, her hunger for it hadn’t abated. It probably never would, not entirely.
The following day, after the doctors started Catherine on proper medicine and scared the shit out of her some more about how if she drank one more drop, she’d go into liver failure, and after Robert arrived at Catherine’s bedside, looking concerned—it was obvious, Joanna realized, that he was in love with her—and after Catherine told Joanna she should go back home now, Joanna would gather her things and drive back up I-95.
She would call Charles’s cell phone on the drive and tell him she was coming home. He would sound relieved and say that’s good. He would also say that something happened while she was away. Something he needed to talk to her about. Joanna would clench her stomach and wish they could just bypass all this, but then she would say she needed to talk to him about some things, too. Okay, he would say. There would be a twinge to his voice, a worried desperation she’d never heard before. She would wonder, after hanging up, whether he knew she knew. She would wonder, too, if he knew she’d brought Scott along, all the things she’d said to Scott, even that she’d kissed him. It seemed doubtful Scott would have told him, but anything was possible.
She would turn into their development and pull into her garage. She would drop her bags in the foyer. The house would be dark and empty. Outside the sky would be gray, rain imminent. She’d hesitate a moment, then turn back for the door. She would walk to the end of the block, and then take a left. Her footsteps would ring out on the cold slick pavement. All the houses she would pass would have cars in the garages and lights shining in the windows until she would turn on Spirit.
The huge, empty houses loomed. All the driveways slanted at the exact same angle. The first one on the block was the very same model as her house, the commonwealth. Except this one was bare and dark, its windows unadorned.
Joanna would walk up the front steps. At first she would intend to just ring the doorbell to see if it worked or to see if that, too, had fallen into disrepair. But then her hand would touch the doorknob, and it would feel loose. The Realtor’s lockbox would clunk against the doorframe. The door would swing open eagerly.
The house would still smell like paint and new carpet. There would be the same little archway into the dining room as was in her house, the same light fixtures. She would open a closet to find a bare shelf, empty space. No life here. No happiness, no sadness. Just emptiness. The kitchen countertops would be covered in a fine layer of dust. Instead of a table in the breakfast nook, there would be raw square footage. Every sound she would make would echo off the bare walls and vaulted ceilings, nothing to absorb it. She would walk upstairs. The rooms were without beds or bureaus. She would continue into the bedroom where she and Charles slept. The day they’d moved into their own version of this house, after the movers left, Charles had urged her upstairs and tossed her down on the bed. He’d tickled her, too, saying all good houses needed to be christened with its first tickling. She writhed around, blissfully aware that she could make whatever sounds she wanted—there were no downstairs neighbors to complain. We are now adults, she’d thought. But she had so much further to go. There was so much she didn’t know about herself and even more she didn’t know about Charles. They were strangers to each other, assumptions upon assumptions. It
might take years for them to peel down to who they really were. A car door would slam outside. Joanna would freeze in the empty upstairs hallway. There would be lights in the driveway. She’d rush down the steps, her heart pounding, remembering the rumors about the kids using the houses to grow cannabis. There would be a figure at the front door, peering through the window. Joanna would search for somewhere to hide. She’d consider slipping out a window. Before she could do anything, the front door would open.
“Ahem.”
Mariel Batten would be wearing a down-filled coat with a furry hood and black leather gloves. She would be brandishing her car key at her sternum, pointing it toward Joanna like a weapon.
“Oh,” Joanna would say, stepping back.
“What are you doing here?” Mrs. Batten would say, eyes wide, making a slightly ugly face.