Chapter 11 2008
The clock by Sebastian’s bed reads four in the afternoon.
On his desk is a mess of unfinished homework.
Doodles grow like fungus in the margins: geometric mazes and rocket ships and sea creatures.
Crumpled efforts at essays stud the floor amid the cairns of dirty clothes and unpaired sneakers.
But Sebastian is not there. And Sugar Baby is not in the driveway.
If you’re looking for him, follow the scent of his deadly tail pipe out of Aldwych, toward the city.
You’ll hit the main road that passes over the Essex Bridge and drops into Salem.
Keep to the back roads, away from the witch kitsch and ambling tourists, and you’ll find him cruising a shabby side street, staking out a pale blue house.
His ankle is still throbbing from yesterday, complaining every time he taps the gas, so it’s a relief to slow down.
The house doesn’t have a number, but the mailbox does, along with a crudely painted assembly of kittens clambering out of a basket.
He hasn’t seen Sadie in a decade, but she was right there in the phone book.
Vaguely, he remembers the voicemails, a franticness he did not associate with adults.
They had a tough childhood, his father said once when he asked about her. Your mother was better equipped to get out of it.
But it doesn’t look so bad, this house. Sure, it’s smaller than his and a bit run-down, but not unloved. There are gnomes in the front garden and an American flag. An old board that says Welcome! hangs from the gate in the low chain fence.
Sebastian pushes it open.
On the front porch, he stands before the weather-beaten screen door. Pop music plays inside. The sun is still high in the sky, and several miles away Lola is running around a track. A dog barks. He rings the bell.
The woman is shorter than he remembered, her blond hair chopped in a puffy fringe on her forehead. She’s wearing fuzzy leggings and a purple tank top.
“If you’re selling knives, I’m sorry, I bought some from the kid yesterday,” she says.
“Sadie,” he says. “It’s me.”
His aunt looks him over and whispers under her breath, “Mary Mother of God.” She wraps her arms around him.
“Come inside,” she says. “I’m making coffee.”
The walls are all papered: tiny rose bouquets and yellowing pastel stripes.
The carpet exhales ash and citrus spray.
In the living room, cat hair clings to everything.
A black angora ball animates from underneath an armchair and slinks over to him, rubs against his calf.
It is missing chunks of fur from the top of its head. Sebastian bends down to it.
“That’s Nomar,” Sadie says. “He’s scrappy.”
Boxes rise like buildings, a cityscape of old papers and photo frames and DVDs and small plastic containers.
Abandoned gift baskets and stereo cables and Happy Meal toys.
And everywhere, on every wall, is his mother.
Upside-down and leotarded, head dangling off a sofa and pink satin slippers shot up into the air.
Blood-spattered and nightgowned under a local newspaper caption reading “Salem Drama will be on Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.” Open-mouthed and diffident in red velvet, gesturing to a Christmas tree next to blond and buoyant Sadie (laughing infectiously, sharp little nose thrown back like a mouse).
In a smart white suit with shoulder pads, her arm thrown around her maid of honor.
“I’ve never seen this,” Sebastian says.
“No shit, I bet it’s the only copy. Where you been, kiddo? Last time we spoke, you were obsessed with the rainforest, is that still your thing?”
“Not so much,” he smiles.
When he looks at her eyes, they are rimmed red. “So to what do I owe this visit, business or pleasure?”
“Actually, Sadie, I was wondering—do you have any videos of my mom’s show?”
Her face freezes.
“I gave them all to your dad.”
Her nephew, sitting on her couch, his eyes dancing on the television in that way that Susie’s used to, engrossed in the moment.
That is the miracle of Sebastian: even as he breathes in the here and now, he is full of a world gone by.
The layers of innocence and becoming are still so bright in his face that she can almost forget the years that Al robbed from her.
For a few months after Susie died, Sadie had been allowed (begrudgingly, she suspected) to take the children off of Al’s hands.
It wasn’t much, a few Sunday afternoons.
But each had been wonderful and urgent with the need to introduce them to their mother—the woman who had existed before Al, the parts of her that had been unchanged by him.
They looked through old photo albums and she told them stories about the neighborhood growing up, the Halloween hijinks and the time they got chased by a dog after playing ding-dong-ditch and all the bonfires and sandcastles and Susie in all of it, the bravest of everyone, determined to do whatever it took to make something of herself.
Susie inventing a not-so-secret club where they all had to eat dandelions.
Susie in the school talent show, singing like Judy Garland, all the mothers crying.
There was never enough time. After she’d dropped the twins off, she would think up all the things she had forgotten to say, write them down next to her bed. It agitated her, how little they knew.
One afternoon, she mentioned to Viola that her mother was an actress, that she had been on the television.
That she was famous. Her little blank face was a shock.
As though she didn’t know a thing about where she came from.
As though Al hadn’t shown them all the tapes she’d meticulously recorded over years.
Maybe it’s too emotional for him, she thought as generously as she could.
After all, he hardly watched the show when Susie was alive—he couldn’t handle it even then.
But when he met her at the door, she suggested, gently: It might be good for you to give them a play.
He’d smiled and thanked her, and closed the door in a way that gave her no assurance.
Of course, when he cut her off, Al did it like he was being clever, like Sadie was an idiot and incapable of detecting a pattern.
After that day, the twins became permanently busy.
Whenever she wanted to take them to dinner or a Sox game or drop by on their birthday, they were never short of commitments: band practice or swim practice or math practice.
They were always practicing, though God knows what for.
Why there isn’t tax-paying practice or taking-shit-from-your-boss practice, she’ll never be sure.
With children, people are generally unrealistic.
What did I do? She begged him to tell her, but he only said: It might be confusing for them.
Being around you might make them upset. Whatever that was supposed to mean, she had no idea.
Did he think she might remind them of their mother?
Was that such a bad thing? Or was her mere existence upsetting: a woman in her forties without a husband or any kind of life objective? Either way, it fucking pissed her off.
Sadie had disliked Al from the first day she met him.
The rain was coming down heavy, spilling off into black puddles on the pavement.
She was aware of the percussion of it, seventeen, practicing her footwork in the kitchen.
Susie said she’d be back for dinner. Didn’t say she’d be bringing anyone with her, especially not a man old enough to be Sadie’s teacher and dressed like one in a suit jacket and foggy glasses.
They burst through the door as though she wasn’t supposed to exist.
“Oh!” Al said, seeing her in her leggings, startled but still hopping up and down, petite battement. “Gee, sorry, hi.”
Susie, unfazed, introduced them. Al, Sadie.
Sadie, Al. He started fussing with his shoes, shapely, expensive-looking leather ones, rubbing the wetness off his glasses and taking in the house.
As he squatted to the floor to untie his lace, he nearly lost his balance, and grabbed onto the back of Susie’s calf. She giggled.
“Sorry,” Al said. “I’m making a mess.”
“It’s fine!” Susie said before moving to the sink, brushing past Sadie to wash a dish—something she had never done before unless under duress. Dishes were their mother’s job, if anyone’s. But now Susie’s hands cut through the soapy water, scrubbing and scrubbing.
He held his shoes, his toes curling underneath his feet in thin, argyle socks, assessing the uncontained pile that had accrued by the door: broken jelly shoes and single flip-flops, dirty trainers.
“Do you have a bag?” he asked.
“A bag?”
“A plastic shopping bag. It’s just, they’re wet, I don’t want to ruin—”
Susie turned off the sink and dried her hands. She fished a plastic bag out from under the sink and handed it to him, like this was a normal thing to do, and he placed his shoes into it so that they didn’t come into contact with the other shoes.
Sadie felt a sudden desire to throw the sugar bowl on the floor.
It was easy to decide she didn’t like him. That the relationship couldn’t last.
Maybe it could have been different. If it hadn’t been raining.
If they had met in a park or a cinema. If she hadn’t been interrupted.
But it clouded her idea of him forever. She saw who he was and couldn’t unsee it; a man who needed the world to comfort him, for its ugliness to be hidden away by other people.
So she decided to be ugly. For months after he stopped letting her come around, she left long, wine-fueled messages on his answering machine.
Eventually he blocked her number. For years—she is now ashamed to say—she gave up trying to see them.
Maybe when they’re older, she thought. And now? It’s as though no time has passed.