Something about motherhood hadn’t set within me as it should have. I was a good mother. I read my sons books about talking steam shovels and misunderstood spiders; I kept them out of the pool for an hour after they ate. There were those who felt a higher calling after giving birth, but for me motherhood was anything but the magical, mystical thing that other women talked about. Nine years of parenting had leached so much red from my hair that, left in its organic state, it would be potato-skin beige.
There was a hole in me, a perforation that had been there as long as I could remember. I’d always thought a husband and family of my own would pull that together, knot it tight, but what was happening was a fraying at my edges, an unraveling that began in my fingers and toes and was working its way through me, quietly tearing sinew and muscle until the day when there would be nothing left but a pile of bones.
It was my 34th birthday, and I sat forlorn before my presents, which included a wicker basket filled with colorful rolls of silk yarn (which I had requested) and a ghastly music box made of hammered copper that had been soldered into a crude piano. It plunked a lethargic version of “Bolero” when I lifted the lid. That was from my husband of nearly 10 years.
“You’re hard to shop for,” he said.
My father palmed me a neatly folded hundred-dollar bill. My mother gave me a cookbook (“101 Potato Recipes”) and some potted tulips that I happened to know my sister gave her for Easter a week earlier. “I wanted to get you something you couldn’t kill,” she said. “But these will have to do.”
The vertical blinds sifted the afternoon sun into wide slats of dark and light that draped across the family room couch where everyone stood, watching me solicitously. I sat on the brick ledge in front of the fireplace. My four sons gave me wildflower bouquets and watercolored pictures of spiders and UFOs, which should have made me sentimental but didn’t.
My second-youngest, Luke, was a year younger than his brother Sean, but 15 pounds thicker. The obstetrician had to break his collarbone to get him through my pelvis, and I’ve never felt the same from the belt buckle down. He had hair the color of tarnished silver and wide-set eyes that slid flat and out of focus when he was upset. He plowed through life without ever checking his wake. I admired him for it. When Brad carried the cake in from the kitchen, everyone started singing. Luke said, “If it were my birthday, I’d wish that Sean wasn’t such a freak.”
“Suck me!” Sean shrieked. He grabbed his crotch with both small hands in a moment that horrified and amazed me. I wondered where on Earth he’d picked that up.
“What kind of talk is that?” my mother said.
“Oh, he talks like that all the time,” Matthew, my oldest, said. When he caught my look, he said, “Well, he does.”
I blew candles off of a lopsided chocolate cake with 20 white candles on top. I wished I were 20 again. At 34 I was pregnant with my fifth, and my energy was tapped out every day before the sun was midway through the sky. The baby moved around the taut cocoon of my belly and tickled my bladder. I imagined it feeling its way around like a person in a blackened room, trying to get its bearings. Sometimes I slid down in the bathtub until my head was underwater to help me imagine its liquid world. I’d heard of women who dreamt the sex of their children before they were born, but I dreamt stranger things, snowmobiling across the ocean floor, or having my hands turn into toasters.
“What did you wish for, Mom?” Sean said.
“I’m not supposed to say. It’s bad luck.”
“Well,” Brad said. “You know what they say. Be careful what you wish for.”
He didn’t understand the thing that tugged at me so insistently: the feeling that I was meant for a different life, one as far from this one as white from black. At the same time I couldn’t imagine being without him, except on those mornings when I woke first and found myself staring at the cracked gray soles of his feet hanging off the bed, and existence stretched out on all sides of me like the surface of the moon, bleak and cratered and curving down into blackness, and I thought, My God, I have to get away from this person.
I treated myself to a birthday break-in. Just as the crickets and cicadas were beginning their evening chorus and the boys were starting their nightly game of kick the can, I handed the baby off to my husband, complaining of back pain, and slunk through the currant bushes. The twilight air lifted whiffs of sage and mint from backyard gardens. I walked briskly up the street, imagining the baby in my stomach sloshing around, trying to grab hold of a rib with its translucent fingers.
When the tedium of motherhood dragged me toward melancholy, I snuck into strange people’s houses and wandered around, touching their bronze sculptures, listening to what their humming refrigerators and dripping showerheads had to tell me. I was drawn to kitchen pantries and dusty attics the way other people were drawn to poker or vodka. I cased houses in my station wagon, sometimes with sons asleep, sagged against each other in the back seat after a long, hot baseball game or an afternoon double feature. For me, slipping into another family’s life had great restorative powers.
There was more than just trespassing. I took things, stray or broken items that no one would miss. I swiped an expired rabies tag from a sugar bowl filled with buttons. I smuggled a lone bowling pin out of a garage full of junk. I stole a carved, soapstone water buffalo with one horn missing from a mismatched Nativity scene.
I walked to the end of our street, crossed the bridge and walked another half block, to an enormous, two-story Victorian, white with multicolored gingerbread trim. Its roof was pitched in places, high and steep in others. It had a chimney, two big turrets, ornate windows and upper stories that protruded in some places over the lower ones. I’d always loved that house.
After ringing the doorbell twice, I squatted on the front stoop, feeling my way along the keyway plug, pin to pin, with my pick, nudging each one above the sheer line until I heard the faint pluck of each fine pin being set loosely in place. You had to take care not to dislodge any set pins or you were back to Square 1. I turned the plug using a tension wrench until the knob turned and voila–I had reason to hit the confessional Sunday. I had acquired my lock-picking kit from a catalog that sold spy gear to armchair operatives.
In the foyer hung a crystal chandelier in the shape of an inverted wedding cake. Moonlight from a rectangular window above the front door cast a brittle, gray light across the round foyer. Two curved wooden staircases reached down like arms from the second floor.
The walls were all painted smoky shades of green and blue, and the trim was all white. The house had a warm, sensuous feel. The owners had filled it with all sorts of tribal art, along with simple furniture and sumptuous fabrics. I walked from room to room, wiping windowsills, then brandishing my finger and telling an imaginary woman named Sylvia that I found the level of dust objectionable. The place smelled of old books.
In the master bedroom, partially covered by a canopy bed fit for a princess, lay the most beautiful rug I’ve ever seen. I knew a thing or two about this sort of thing from years of rug-weaving classes at the community college. First, I made a 3-by-5-foot carpet from ivory, gray and maroon wool. It had all the complexity of the French flag, but still it kept me up nights, tying Persian knots in the darkness. The next project consisted of six solid rectangles, tan and black, nested inside each other. This year I envisioned magical designs and deep rich colors, using expensive wools dyed from flowers and bark.
At this carpet’s center was a large gold medallion set against a royal blue backdrop. There were dragons in each corner connected by a web of smaller medallions, butterflies, serpents, vines, birds. Flowers rotated every which way. I explored it on my hands and knees. Whispers of sex and blood and spices surfaced in the air above it for a few seconds then disappeared just as quickly. I smelled coffee one second, smoke the next. When I moved, patterns moved with me, teasing colors from my skirt so easily you would have sworn I’d risen up out of it, bloomed somehow from hidden buds. After I rolled it up, a rectangle of silt remained on the floor. I swept that into an envelope because it seemed more exotic than any spice in my pantry.
I hauled the rug toward the stairs, thinking this may have been a bad idea. Twenty-five weeks pregnant and my hips felt liable to give way at any moment, like a doll’s legs popping out of their neat round sockets. My back ached day and night because of the soft pink stone in my belly. Yesterday, I counted 27 trips to the bathroom to empty my bladder; I was like some torpid dog continually marking the same spot. History dictated that I would tip the scales at 180 by the time this was over. I was already pushing 160. I’d never enjoyed one of those subtle pregnancies and took an instant dislike to any woman who crowed about how she could barely choke down a bite during her pregnancy. I bolted my food. I licked my utensils. I might have been a bear preparing for a long winter’s nap.
Although I’m sure the rug’s owner enjoyed it for the way it felt under her bare feet in the morning, or maybe for the fact that her husband bought it for her, she didn’t know what she had. I loved its symmetry. I loved the way the weaver breached the symmetry, knot by knot, shucking colors and flipping designs where you least expected it. I needed time alone with it, to coax it into giving up whatever it was that I was missing. I’d bring it back. Eventually.
I dragged the rug down the staircase and out the door behind me. I must’ve been quite a sight, dragging that carpet over lawns, driveways and unplanted flowerbeds, all the way back to the bridge, like a movie murderess disposing of a body. Creamy fringe swept over my footprints, covering my tracks.
It took a day of machinations to retrieve my prize from the woods beside the river. I’d barely slept, worrying that it would rain or that someone would steal it. When I unrolled it on the front lawn for Brad to see, he said, “How much did that cost me?” Then, “I thought you went out for limes.”
Sean ran up and jumped onto the carpet as though it were a pile of leaves. He said, “It smells funny.” As a baby, he’d had the face of an old man. Now he had a large forehead and electric blue eyes made wise by thick glasses. He was an odd fawn of a boy.
“It smells like adventure,” I said. I pictured a cinnamon-skinned woman bent over this rug, knowing what she wanted it to be in the end, hoping she could get it there. Doing something like that day in and day out for so many years must have been exhausting. Lines wandered, colors blurred. She must have thought about dropping the bright colors and fanciful designs for plainer patterns, and shades more representative of everyday life. It must have been tempting to cut it short or even walk away one day, leaving the loom hanging like an unfinished sentence.
“Have you ever seen such beautiful colors?” I said.
“I think the color of our carpet is just fine.” Brad gave me a look that made me feel like a very thin pane of glass. “It hides the dirt.”
I’d been known to pull the car over to the side of the road to make my boys look at soft rainbows and fiery sunsets, but this rug somehow slit other colors open and used what spilled out. The designs weren’t like any I’d ever seen, but I understood perfectly the red tug of temptation and the black of old hurts pulling at what lay underneath it all. I wished I could slip in between the colors of this carpet and go to the place where these patterns came into being, where I would be a spirit flitting in and out of velvety trees.
A carpet began with warp, strong wool threads running vertically across the loom, and the weft, which is woven through the warp horizontally. The pile brought all of the colors and patterns to a carpet. It was created by knotting colored yarn around adjacent pairs of warp, row by row, then pounding the weft thread down on top of the warp to tighten the knots up. Once the pile was complete, it was cropped to a uniform length. The finest carpets had 600 knots per inch. There were weavers in Iran, China and Afghanistan who could tie 10,000 knots a day. The person who made this rug may not have known how to read or write, so this was how she said what she needed to say. I pictured her brown hands swirling like a harpist’s over taut wool strings.
The warp and weft of my loom glared at me as balefully as the empty staffs used to when I composed piano solos and string quartets in college. In those days, every time I finished a piece and started a new one, I suffered through long days of fearing I had nothing left to say. I’d press my mind to tell me where to place those opaque ovals, but it would only give up static.
What little pile I’d already knotted had a watery quality. The shapes seemed to have been crushed into the weave rather than purposefully knotted. I drew the whole design out beforehand on a piece of kraft paper, elements from my life all arranged just so, but the simple faces and treble clefs in particular ended up contorted beyond recognition, the colors looked washed out.
I examined the rug, front and back, picking at it with my fingernails. I, too, had wrapped my naturally dyed, hand-spun wool around pairs of warp threads and beaten the row of knots down, same as this weaver, but my rug went wrong somehow. The secret to making it right, I was convinced, lay enmeshed in this rug. The problem was that the weave was so tight I had no way of seeing how it all came together. It was like listening to a symphony and trying to discern what every bassoon, viola and French horn was doing. So I took a little seam ripper and shaved six strands of fringe off the end. When that didn’t help, I picked at the cut edge until fibers loosened into lace between my fingers. I was sure I felt the brittle crumbs of long-dead leaves. A tiny hair no bigger then an eyelash may have tickled my fingertip.
I loosened more than I needed to, really. I kept rolling the weave between my fingers until the strings softened, then I pulled at the pile, feeling only the barest tension when I yanked a strand loose, like pulling the fluff off a dandelion gone to seed.
The Castillos lived in a mission-style house with arching doorways and windows, white-stucco walls and a red-tile roof. Two summers ago something terrible had happened to this family. The twin girls, 3 years old, disappeared one hot and humid day during a game of hide-and-seek with their older sister. There had been a drifter in the neighborhood asking to do odd jobs for money, and he was widely assumed to have harmed the girls. The search went on for two days with dogs and helicopters and vigils, until Mr. John Castillo popped the trunk to the family sedan to retrieve an umbrella and found his little girls in there, blue and stiff. To a hermit crab like me, always ready to scuttle into a different shell, there was something miraculous about people who stayed in lives that had been crushed by a careless sandal of God.
One Saturday, I left Brad sitting in a lawn chair, grading papers, and the boys pushing tractors and earth movers around the sandbox. As I walked to the Castillos’ house, I kept hearing the canvas whoosh of pant legs rubbing against each other, but when I turned, all I saw were mailboxes and smooth lawns, and all I heard were leaves shivering in the breeze.
Inside the house was a plant-filled atrium with a faded mural of a bullfight taking up three walls. An amiable white terrier followed me about, rolling onto his back every so often so I could rub his pale belly. In my experience, even the most conscientious dog could be won over with a piece of bologna.
The house had a fusty smell that made me think its wooden bones were rotting. Outside, the shutters sagged on their hinges. Inside, the cabinets lolled open and the window valances drooped listlessly on bowed rods. I believed the Castillos’ sorrow had hardened within these walls. If Brad had just heard me say that, he would have said: “For crying out loud, Helen. Where do you come up with this stuff?” But I knew.
I literally walked in other people’s shoes. I stepped into sling-back heels or wing tips or cleats, whatever it took to help me imagine the lives I was inhabiting. I wore their clothes too. I explored a townhouse in tan leather chaps with fringe that sounded like raindrops when they tapped against my leg. I drifted through a drafty Tudor wearing a lovely beaded wedding dress, trailed by the smell of cedar.
A dozen worn ballet slippers hung on brass hooks in the Castillos’ master bedroom. Judging from photos on the bureau, Mrs. Penelope Castillo was a ballerina back in her day. Now she was 30 pounds past grand jete-ing into anyone’s arms. I shuffled about wearing blunt-toed slippers with pink satin ribbons trailing on the floor behind me.
The house was an uncomfortable melding of two people, both with bad taste. There was an antique spinning wheel in the same room as an abstract painting and a stuffed blue marlin. The master bedroom had fake Southwestern touches, including a neon saguaro cactus and a ceramic cow skull hung over the bed. The “Navajo” rug came from Bangladesh. There were several Encyclopedia Britannicas stacked next to each toilet. I pictured the man of the house lecturing in scholarly bursts about tectonic plates or Mesopotamian history at the kitchen table while his wife gazed at the ghost of her former self in the window above the sink.
The twins’ room was clean and dusted, the two beds made, as though they were expected to return at any time. I left it alone. They had another daughter, in Sean’s class at St. Andrew’s. I was in her bedroom, fiddling with a diary lock, when I heard the whine of the front door, then rubber-soled footsteps starting and stopping, starting again. I pulled a bent rhinestone tiara out of my hair and put it in my pocket. I opened a closet crammed with long wool coats and sweaters on hangers. The wooden door swung on its hinges quietly, for which I thanked God. Everything was so tightly packed that I surely crushed an imprint of my body into the clothes.
Minutes passed. I watched the crease of light at my toes. In my nervousness, I dug my fingers into the meshes all around–softly criss-crossing angoras and knotty plaits of wool–feeling very much like a bug waiting for a hairy black spider to sidle across its diaphanous web to do me in. Footsteps approached, stopped.
The door opened. I’d covered my face, but through a gap in my fingers I could see a child standing over me, dark in the middle, bright and misty around his edges.
“What are you doing in there?” The voice was plaintive, familiar. Deep for a girl.
I felt the rough rub of denim when I pushed past. A grab at my shirtsleeve.
“Mom! Mom!”
I ran. What I didn’t need was any heroics from this kid’s angry mother, or anyone providing a description of me to a police sketch artist. I could just see the warning flyers stapled to telephone poles and rolled up in mailboxes. I pounded down the hallway, out the door, and across the Castillos’ tidy lawn with pink satin ribbons like kite tails fluttering behind me. Everything in sight melted into splotches of color. For a little while there, I soared.
Twenty minutes later, I strolled into my own back yard, ready to claim that I’d been napping if anybody asked. The boys were playing tag. Brad had moved the folding chair underneath the maple and was staring up into the maroon leaves. He stroked the back of his forearm absently. I closed my eyes to remember his callused fingertips brushing the insides of my thighs this morning while the boys slept; my body arching toward him even though I went to bed last night not liking him much. My body had a habit of betraying me. He’d swirled his tongue and fingers, gently then more insistently, while I rocked against him until my insides shuddered over and over. I thought I would explode and what flew out would be goose feathers.
Moths bouncing off the floodlights tapped me out of my reverie. Josh lurched from tree to planter to fence post, trying to stay on his feet. Sean was born six weeks premature, and I wasn’t sure he’d ever outgrow that fragility. Every time Luke thundered after him, I fought the urge to charge in and scoop Sean out of harm’s way, but my plan was to toughen him by neglect. Matthew was my oldest and so like his father that it gave me a lump in my throat. The second he came into the world, wailing at the cold indignity of it all, the softest part of me moved outside of my body and into his. I guarded it fiercely, because if anything happened to that boy I could never recover. It was not the same with the others. Everyone expected you to love your children equally and unreservedly, but I loved my kids differently. What I felt for each was a different shade of the same color, and who could say whether the blue of the ocean was better or worse than the blue of the sky?
“Mom! Sean elbowed me in the face!”
“Luke cheated!”
I tossed a clod of dirt at Brad’s loafer. “Why don’t you play with them?”
“I’m the coach,” he said.
I once overheard him giving this advice to a colleague whose wife had stunned him by asking for a divorce: “If my wife wanted out, I’d tell her not to let the door hit her in the ass on the way out.” I asked him about it later, and he said, “I was just trying to cheer the guy up.” The sad part was that he meant no malice.
I hoisted myself up and shambled over to my husband with my hands pressed against my lower back. Brad had a willow branch pinched in one hand like a bow and was drawing it back and forth across the white side of his other arm near the elbow. His free fingers cavorted up and down the neck of an invisible violin. It amazed me that he still played the violin every night, lifting the instrument from its cushioned case at 8 sharp, unswayed by any earache or familial intrigue mushrooming around him, when for me the thought of playing the piano made my fingers hurt. His skills had leveled off in the years since we’d met, and that gave me secret, shameful pleasure.
He was a circle, smooth and self-contained, and for as long as I could remember I’d been trying to burrow into the slippery contour of his life. His detachment was probably the thing that drew me to him the most. He unfailingly left me wanting more. When we married, we wrote our own vows. Mine were mostly plagiarized from lesser-known poets and Valentine’s Day cards. Brad slid a plain gold band onto my finger and said, “I have only ever loved one woman.” To this day, I couldn’t say for certain whether he meant me.
I touched Brad’s arm, bumping him out of his silent solo. I whispered, “Sometimes I wish illness would take me out of this life. Something quick and painless but noble too, so people would think I was brave.”
He smiled sadly. “Sometimes, I wish that too.”
I’d been keeping my stolen carpet in the basement because the sight of it irritated Brad. It had perfect, velvety pile and metallic threads woven throughout that made it sparkle in the right light. I sat on it to match up socks warm from the dryer. I even talked to it a little. A lot.
The once-square corner that I’d cut with a seam ripper had thinned very quickly. I retied that section using my birthday yarn, and although no one would mistake my work for that of a professional restorer, I did love winding my way into such a beautiful thing. It was like dabbing a few lemony petals onto one of Van Gogh’s sunflowers, or perhaps filling in a whole note on one of Tchaikovsky’s original scores.
The opportunity to step into someone else’s beauty seldom presented itself, so I took full advantage when it did. In a Dutch colonial on Elm, the owners (two women with mermaid paintings, curtains, drawer pulls, you name it ) converted a spare room into an aviary and filled it with delicate white birds. The bedroom door was a screen, the floor a bed of pebbles. I stepped inside the room, causing a burst of wing flapping hysteria and a snow of feathers, and stood very still, with my arms outstretched. Wings beat the air near my head, but I didn’t move. I was St. Francis. I was a mighty elm.
Then there was this dreary bungalow on Adams filled with thousands of old newspapers, neatly folded and stacked 6 feet high. An old man with startling red hair drove out every morning at 9 a.m. in a late-model Cadillac and came back at noon carrying armloads of newspapers. Other than that he never went out. I felt like a mouse in the narrow, newspaper maze that led me from door to bathroom, bedroom and kitchen, but it wasn’t so unlike the path I’d worn for myself over the years, if you thought about it. I traveled from grocery store to home to school, only rarely veering off to a party where Brad would stand unhappily by the door checking his watch and I would drift, slack on a river of white wine, until it was time to go.
I’d sat atop a short stack of Tribunes reading about floods and elections and celebrity weddings that I’d forgotten, cast under an ephemeral spell that carried me back to a time when life awaited me like a warm bubble bath.
I read strangers’ journals and listened to the messages on their answering machines. I thumbed through their photo albums. I sampled the contents of foil-covered casserole dishes in strange refrigerators all over town, and stretched out on strange beds among herds of stuffed animals or neat rows of tasseled pillows. I was Goldilocks, searching for a life that was just right.
Two weeks later, I broke into the rectory at St. Andrew’s Elementary School. I’d just dropped off Matt’s glasses in the office. On my way back to the car, I couldn’t keep away from a door marked “Private.” Father Parisi’s quarters lay just beyond that door, past a little courtyard that was not much more than a weedy lawn with a few untended rosebushes. St. Andrew’s itself was a miniature gray cathedral complete with gargoyles, flying buttresses and thick marble pillars. The school was built 40 years after the church, during leaner times, which meant plain lines and garden-variety construction materials. The rectory was a stub of white brick, streaked with rust from gutter runoff, attached to a side door in the school by a covered sidewalk.
A cement angel stood outside the rectory door holding up a shallow bird bath. I dipped a finger in the birdbath on the off chance it was holy water and crossed myself. My heart drubbed my breastbone when I stepped inside. I wondered if what I was about to do constituted a mortal or merely a venial sin, and how I could ever confess it.
You’d think homes as bland and orderly as military barracks would be dull to explore, but compulsive sterility made quick work of uncovering a person’s story. No time was wasted sorting through the scrap heaps that packrats kept around. He was a skier. There were clues in the medicine cabinet that Father Parisi was losing his hair, although I’d never noticed. His closet contained black shirts and trousers, crisp white albs, and stoles. Everything was grouped by color, the hangers evenly spaced. His few casual clothes (which included saucy, colored briefs) were stored neatly in a drawer shared by tidy stacks of clerical collars. The bed was made so square and tight, I simply had to plant wrinkles in the bedspread. Earlier, I’d unalphabetized his spice jars to help Father understand that control was an illusion. Although there were no puzzles around, he kept a handful of stray puzzle pieces in a Japanese lacquered box with a picture of a foamy, cresting wave on its lid.
A pearl-handled gun stored on a closet shelf stuffed inside an oven mitt jolted me. I pointed the heavy gun at my reflection in the bathroom mirror and said, “May God have mercy on your soul.”
When I turned around, I saw my son, Matthew, peering through the bedroom window at me. He dropped down out of sight a second after he saw me see him.
“What are you doing out of school?” I yelled.
I listened to his sneakers pound their way into silence, wondering if the baby adrift in my belly could feel the slow brown tightening of fear twining around my spine.
I took the boys to the city zoo after school, because the lion habitat was Matthew’s favorite place on Earth and I wanted to soften him up, get him to see the morning’s events differently. It was a muggy day. Clouds of gnats made it worse. The entire zoo smelled of honey-roasted almonds sold by vendors pushing carts painted with zebra stripes.
Josh was asleep in the stroller with his arms and legs splayed and his mouth slack. He was an agreeable baby who would probably grow into a boy easy to overlook. I would guard against dereliction of my duties with him or he’d end up warped and marry an indifferent woman. When I was pregnant with his older brothers, I used to lay awake nights, wondering if they would have Brad’s beautiful fingers, or my green eyes. I worried that they’d come out with club feet or wine stains on their faces. I strategized how to make them good, or at least not bad. With Josh I’d thought about strawberries, mostly.
In the big-cat section, a cheetah prowled from one side of his round cage to the other. He had a long, lithe body with tall hips and a smallish head. His pacing had worn a hard dirt triangle in the grass, and I wondered if he knew he’d be walking that same mindless path for the rest of his life. He had grace and energy and was more interesting to watch than the leopard or tiger, who didn’t move except to twitch away flies with their skin.
“Indefatigable,” I said. “Does anyone know what that means?”
“Time to go?” Sean said. He wasn’t a fan of the zoo.
“It means tireless,” I said. “Can anyone spell it?”
We walked through the yawning mouth of a great fiberglass lion into the air-conditioned building where the big cats ate and slept. There were cages right and left with two sets of bars separating animals from people. The cage walls were painted to resemble deserts or jungles or mountain passes. A male lion with a reddish mane lay on his back with his huge front paws resting lightly on his chest. He twisted his head to watch us pass. The lionesses napped in a tangle in the cage beside his.
Luke and Sean dropped to their knuckles and monkey-galloped toward the exit. When Matthew started after them I grabbed hold of his shirt sleeve. “I want to talk to you about what you saw. In the rectory.”
He looked startled. Fear or doubt flickered across his face. “What do you mean?”
“I know you saw me. I was just dropping off some homemade spaghetti sauce for Father, as a surprise.”
He laced his fingers together at the nape of his neck and rolled his head back, same as his father. “Then what were you doing under his bed?”
“Straightening up a little. What were you doing out of class anyway?
“I went to the office to get my glasses and I saw you go in. I saw you with the gun.”
“Oh that wasn’t a real gun. It was a toy. A lighter.”
Matthew’s face brightened. “Could I get one?”
“Absolutely not. Let’s don’t tell your father about this. You know how he hardly ever goes to church with us? He wouldn’t understand.”
Matthew shrugged. A lioness stood and walked slowly forward, rubbing her shoulder against the black steel bars. I wondered if she recognized herself when she glimpsed her reflection in the concrete pond outside, the smear of tawny hide or blur of black-rimmed eyes. It was too easy to squander your life when you had everything you needed. You became an animal in a zoo so contented eating out of silver bowls that you forgot how your life was supposed to be. If you stood close enough to iron bars you couldn’t see them any more, so after a while they became a part of you, a second skeleton that held you up.
Days went by without Matthew making a peep about seeing me in the rectory. We didn’t exchange secret looks, and he didn’t try to extort me in any way. I hadn’t broken in anywhere since he saw me, but now I found myself sitting in morning mass, or stirring a pot of alphabet soup, aching to take on a new lock.
Between loads of laundry, I lay on my stomach holding the rug’s fringed edge and imagined it was a magic carpet, carrying me away. I could feel wind lifting wisps of hair from my face and even the carpet listing on swells of air. Together we weighed no more than a dragonfly wing. We soared above the clouds to where blue evaporated and stars burned slow white holes in the darkness.
“Ma!” Sean squatted beside me, shaking my shoulder. His blue eyes looked fearful.
I had been asleep on the rug, but now the lights were on and I was squinting at neat rows of two by fours and flickering fluorescent tubes.
“Dad had us looking all over for you. Good Christ. How could you sleep down here?” He turned and yelled up the stairs. “She’s down here!”
“Watch your language.” I heard Brad’s footsteps on the stairs and scrambled to my feet. He said, “May I see you outside please?”
He stood in the garage, peering into the green canoe, which should have been hanging over the hoods of our two cars, suspended by ropes and pulleys as it had been for the last seven years, but was instead resting on the cement floor.
Matthew, Sean and Luke stood behind my husband, craning to see the contents. All of a sudden, the garage felt like a walk-in freezer. Sleds, shovels and coiled green hoses hanging everywhere frosted over before my eyes. I touched a grayed bicycle, half expecting it to disintegrate like burned paper. I shuddered when it didn’t.
“I took this down so I could get it cleaned up and teach the boys how to canoe.”
“That’s nice. They’ll enjoy that. Do you want me to find the life jackets?”
He reached into the canoe to pick up a rhinestone tiara with one hand and a jar filled with dried sea horses in the other. “Where in God’s name did all of this crap come from?”
“Rummage sales mostly.”
“You paid money for this?” He dropped the tiara and picked up a plastic torso with organs that were removable. The small intestine and one lung were missing.
“I thought the boys could play with it. Learn about ventricles and spleens.”
“And this?”
“The stuffing is all gone but that’s some beautiful beadwork don’t you think?”
Brad threw the torso into the canoe and its clear front popped off, scattering organs.
I said, “It looks kind of like he stepped on a mine.”
“Why were you hiding all of it?” Brad turned to the boys. “Did you boys know about this, this stash? I’m sure you did. You know where every goddamned thing is in this house.”
They stared at the floor, swallowed repeatedly. Brad squatted to stare each boy in the eye for a good long minute. No one budged. I thought I was in the clear.
Matthew mumbled, “Mom goes into strangers’ houses sometimes.”
I blurted, “He means at garage sales, of course.”
“She went into the rectory while Father Parisi was saying morning mass. I saw.”
It was my turn to swallow and stare at the floor. I tried to pull a reason out of my brain, but my thoughts were hopelessly tangled. I thought of running away. Instead I said: “OK. I admit it. I’ve become one of those pathetic women who thinks making dinner for the parish priest is my ticket to heaven. I know you think it’s stupid and beyond all reason, but I do it anyway.”
Matthew said, very softly, “She was in the Castillos’ place too. I followed her inside.”
Brad pressed a delicate glass dragon into my damp palm. Its arms were meant to wrap around a candle, but both were broken and taped in place. He was ready to drop it into a metal garbage can when he saw something in my face that made him reconsider. I stood there thinking that my other self–the one that was fluid and daring–would fade like a cut flower into a dried, beige husk. By rights I should have been seething at my son the Judas, but what I felt was despair. All of the sadness living inside me began pooling like mercury and rolling toward my center.
Brad said, “Do something with this stuff or I will.”
The entire family went that afternoon to Possum Lake. A former quarry, it was deep and very cold, but pretty enough that people had built large homes on its shores. By mid-summer, the undeveloped shoreline would be thick and green with trees, but they were still on the sparse side. There were three small sailboats on the lake and about a dozen kids leaping off the floating dock, screeching when they hit the cold water. Brad took the boys out one by one in the canoe while I sat on the shore, watching the rest try to catch sardine-size fish darting in the shallows. The baby inside me had a case of hiccoughs. I found the rhythmic throb of them soothing.
Eventually, I took my turn in the canoe with Luke sitting at the bow and Matthew at the stern. I was glad not to have to look at Matthew. There was a slight easterly wind, which the boys paddled hard against. Each was so concerned that the other wasn’t pulling his weight that they barely noticed me at all. I sat in the middle with my fingers trailing in the turbid water. I imagined rolling my body into my beautiful stolen carpet and heaving myself into this lake.
In my pocket were a few items that I had plucked from the two garbage bags bulging with my plunder. It wasn’t long before we reached the red buoy marking the place where the bottom of the lake dropped down half a mile to where a chain of rail cars lay rusting like sunken ships. I tossed a mermaid bottle opener into the dark water.
Luke twisted around in his seat. “What was that?”
“Keep your eyes on the road,” I said.
The next thing to go overboard was a pair of silver-rimmed spectacles with one lens smashed into a spider web. I enjoyed the idea of keeping my simple treasures in a place that only I knew about, just in case I needed them someday, like stray puzzle pieces in a lacquered box. I had a baggie filled with loose keys collected from the backs of two dozen kitchen drawers, spare keys to old apartments and long-gone cars. I tried skipping a silver key across the water, but it sunk without even a single hop. My sons had stopped paddling, but I didn’t care. It was comforting to have them for the first time in their lives entirely focused on me. It was comforting to hear water dripping off of their wooden paddles into the lake.
I threw the rest of the keys like pennies into a fountain, one by one. I wished to love the plodding work of motherhood, the knotting of pot-roast twine and the lacing up of tennis shoes, the tying of bonnet strings under soft, pink chins.
———-
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Karenmary Penn was born and raised in Libertyville. She earned a bachelor of science degree in graphic communications from Clemson University and a master of fine arts degree from the University of Arizona. In 1999 she received a grant from the Nevada Arts Council. She is a Schaeffer fellow in creative writing at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and writes a monthly column for the weekly Las Vegas newspaper City Life.
