Chapter 3
“Why don’t we see Sadie anymore?” Sebastian asks.
Alcott Bliss and his two motherless children are standing in front of a thousand-pound pumpkin.
Somewhere, someone is purchasing a rabbit, somewhere a man painted as a clown is falling into a tank of cold water.
It’s a Saturday, and the Aldwych Fair is heaving with all of New England: preps in chunky Land’s End sweaters and mud-ready boots, hooded townies out for the day in their best or worst jeans.
He has done okay today, until now. He has dressed the children and convinced them to eat a large hasty omelet and counted to sixty while they brushed their teeth. He has got them into their fleeces and out of the house, away from the glowing red eye of the answering machine.
“Your aunt’s been busy.”
He has started unplugging the phone at night. If he doesn’t, Sadie will just keep ringing and ringing.
“Is she mad at us?”
“Of course not, buddy.”
“Then why does she sound mad?”
The problem is, Sadie won’t stop asking about the tapes. Whether he’d watched them, whether they were helping. When he was going to return them. How could he explain: Al (the husband! the historian!) had destroyed a singular archive.
He could claim he lost his mind. It wouldn’t be wrong; for so long, his mind had reverberated against Susie’s.
Now thoughts hang loose, unable to form against anything—anyone.
How can they? The world is a steady stream of vacuous conversation, ghoulish euphemisms, small talk, sales calls—all of it maddening and insignificant.
But he hadn’t lost his mind. In many ways, it was the sanest thing he has ever done.
Because what was it but a deranged fixation on some consecrated pieces of plastic?
Those spools of film were not, and never would be, his wife.
Al puts his hand in his son’s curly hair. “Your mother and Sadie grew up in a difficult house,” he says. “Your mother was able to move past it, but Sadie had a harder time. Sometimes her emotions get the better of her.”
“Is she okay?”
“Don’t worry, Sebastian. We’ll see her soon.”
Al never wanted to become a liar, but deception has become a reflex.
Mom isn’t sick, she’s just tired. Mom isn’t dying, she’s just sick.
Maybe it started even earlier: Mom doesn’t want to be away from you.
And always implicit: It’s not my fault. They won’t be seeing Sadie soon. But no one need worry about that.
“It looks like an elephant,” his son says, pointing at the pumpkin’s pachydermic folds.
“Like an orange elephant,” says his daughter. “Did you know, Dad, elephants never forget?”
At seven, Viola is a kind, unusual creature and seems to enjoy his company.
As he enjoys hers—though she is becoming a conduit for Susan’s intrusion.
Every day, her mother’s features ripen on her face.
Her eyebrows, her collarbone. It’s become confused—who belongs to whom, that sort of thing. Sticky-feeling.
He hugs them close as a band of teens pushes behind them.
One boy shoves another one hard, upending a table of gourds.
So many carefully cultivated specimens reel onto the floor and before Al can stop himself, he is bellowing “Hey!” in a bark that sounds like his father’s, his arm is grabbing the boy’s wrist.
“Pick those up.”
Behind him, his children are trembling. With great composure he arranges his face, releases the wrist. When he turns back he is smiling and undangerous. This is the job, he repeats to himself. To shield them. Even (especially!) from his own ragged rage and anything that might provoke it.
In her last message, Sadie hissed: She was going to leave you.
Hug them close, never let them fear that they are not safe and loved.
Blinking, the Bliss family steps into the bright autumn sunshine.
Pop songs battle cacophonous from rickety roller coasters, fried batter barely covering the undertone of manure.
As Al turns to consult a large map, his name slices through the wandering bodies.
His son is shouting, legs in motion, bolting in the direction of—whom?
On his back, the terrible clap of a hand.
“Dan!”
A stampede of robust redheads. Dan’s wife grabs Al’s arm for a quick squeeze, chasing her brood and his strays into the face-painting tent. Al faces his oldest friend, reluctant. In the last few months, neither has found the right way to reach out.
“It’s good to see you, pal.”
“What are the odds?”
“You’re looking really well,” Dan says emphatically, registering (Al surmises) the fact that he is dressed and upright.
Al refrains from strangling him. He understands: they both want it to be true.
But however well he might be faking it, he is not well.
No one says his wife’s name anymore. And Dan, who hardly knew her, who certainly did not love her, will not be the one to bring her back.
Al smiles. Fills his mind with other things: the stock market, an ancient technique for making red dye. Illuminated manuscripts. Space travel. Pasts and futures that reach beyond her. “You too, my friend,” he says.
“Ahoy, mate!” Viola bounds up to them, face smeared with thick black paint, delighted with her eye patch and mustache. She ties her hair into a beard underneath her chin.
“Ahoy, sailor!” How sweetly she places her hands on her hips, cocks her head, plays the part. “Are we sailing the high seas today?”
“Ahoy!” she says again, her conviction greater than her pirate vocabulary.
“Aha!” Dan says. “Another actress in the family!”
His daughter blushes and beams and darkness wells inside him.
Please, God. Not again. It’s too soon to consider, to entertain dreams of departure, of becoming anything other than his sweet child.
No more invented worlds where he doesn’t exist, no more sharing, not yet, she’s only seven years old and still his—his only—only his!
His hands tingle, begging to offer her something else to belong to. He only has himself.
“I don’t think so.” He smiles benignly enough. “Wealth management, maybe. Buried treasure, it’s a good start.”
Dan chuckles, looks to his scrambling children. “Lunch soon?”
Over Dan’s shoulder, his wife is reaching into a large bag, procuring a tidy plastic pack of Kleenex.
She is wiping the snot and rubbing lip balm onto her littlest, while talking to the middle ones about their evening plan.
She is watching the oldest, who is shooting a horse with a water gun.
She is probably thinking about how to have a conversation about guns and violence and fairground games.
She is probably thinking about how to adjust all of their meals to their liking, how to stop them from hitting each other, and making sure all their homework gets done in time for tomorrow.
Watching her feels like watching a future he once believed in, as familiar as if he had occupied it.
His pockets are empty except for Viola’s overstretched hair elastic and his own wallet.
“Sure,” he says. “Let’s do lunch.”
As Dan departs, Sebastian bounds over, wielding a large stick like a sword. “Ahoy!”
“Ahoy!” Viola says, picking up her own smaller stick and raising it en garde.
“Enough!” Al snaps. “You’re going to hurt somebody!”
Shocked, Viola drops the branch. Because it is the only thing he can do, Al resumes wandering through the grounds, unsure where he is leading.
When he gathers the energy to turn back, his daughter is brooding, beard falling out, eye patch smudged, untouched by the music of the carousel. She looks at him and asks—
“Was Mom in the movies?”
Her father looks at her sternly, as though she has broken a promise.
Why does she feel so wrong? Wasn’t her mother an actress?
Or maybe she was a fortune teller. Her mother is receding in her mind like the ocean, something so big she can hardly get her head around it.
When she picks it up it disappears into droplets.
“No, Vi. She did some acting, but it was only TV. They don’t make recordings of TV.”
“They don’t?”
“Afraid not. Mommy lived with us, remember?”
She is tired of her mother being dead. Nothing ever changes about it. For a while, she expected her to walk back through the door, that death might be somewhere like California. But every day that passes makes it clearer: there will be no coming back.
As far as she can remember, her mother was mostly not there.
She was never allowed to look at her, not on the television and not behind the closed door of her room.
The strongest imprint is a sense of waiting, cold glass pressed up against her nose and a certain terror.
Some facts seem important, and she clutches them like playing cards.
Her mother was allergic to stone fruits.
She doesn’t know what a stone fruit is, but it doesn’t sound very good.
Her mother wore beautiful scarves on her head.
Her mother grew up in Salem, which is where witches came from. But the sound of her voice?
“I can’t even remember her.”
When a person dies, can their memories die too? A terrible, tremulous thought.
Her father squats, eye-level. He takes both of her hands firmly between his and says:
“We all came here together, remember?”
The landscape of the fair breathes life into the story.
She was there at the petting zoo, in her soft brown sweater, placing animal feed into their tiny hands.
And wasn’t she there, swinging Viola by the arms as they waited in line for the tiny train?
Didn’t she buy them each a candy apple, Sebastian’s dipped in sprinkles?
Didn’t they all learn to square dance? The vision catches like a lit candle, flickers like a dream.
Yes, her mother might have been just there, with sparkles in her eyes and color in her cheeks. The thought of it carries her away.
“She was the queen of the fair,” he says. “She got to ride on the pumpkin float. She awarded the prize for best bovine. Everybody loved her.”
“Did she wear a crown?”
“Absolutely. Don’t you remember?”
She doesn’t remember. But he is looking at her like she needs to make it true.
“I think so,” she says.
“But she couldn’t go last year,” Sebastian says. “She was sick.”
“I meant the year before,” his father says.
“She didn’t come the year before.”
“Sure she did.”
“I remember. She cried because she couldn’t come.”
Her brother faces her father, flushed and indignant. The moment ripples out into other moments. Sebastian picks up his sword stick and smacks it on the ground until it shatters into pieces.
“Okay, Sebastian,” he says. “You’re right. It was just pretend.”
As they race back to the house, the world rips away, open rolling fields and fences, thickets of houses and mailboxes, all of it too fast to make an impression. And the front passenger seat is still empty.