Chapter 40 1996
“I just don’t want them to think of me like this.”
Susan is sitting on the edge of the bathtub, her feet arching, legs forming a table for her elbows, hands pressing up into her face.
Her shirt is off and Al can see the mountain range of her spine.
She’s going under on Wednesday. Hysterectomy, oophorectomy.
Why do we give the most horrible operations the most beautiful Greek words?
I don’t care, take it all out, she said.
“I’m not as convincing as you are,” he says.
“You’re doing great.”
“Viola keeps asking me why I look so serious.”
“Tell her that’s just your face.”
She flicks water at him. Smiles. Allows him to hold hope. Surgery, then chemo. And somehow, in between it all, a final trip to LA. She wants to say her goodbyes while she still looks like herself.
Oh, the irony, that it has taken this to get what he wanted.
And my God, it’s beautiful to watch her walk around the yard, grateful for the outside space, the trees.
To hear her packing snacks and lunches for the children in the morning, reading them bedtime stories at night.
Together they refuse to acknowledge it, except when it will not be ignored.
The house has taken on the smell of her again.
“You might not be able to walk for a few days,” he says. “How are we going to explain that?”
“We’ll just tell them I’m taking a few days of relaxation.”
No point mentioning the other symptoms. The pain medication that will likely make her gassy and groggy and nauseous. The difficulty urinating. The recovery will take as long as it takes. And then, she will get better.
With some effort, she lifts herself out of the bathtub. He bends to get the drain, holds out a towel for her to walk into.
“Ready?”
“Ready.”
They will live each day in deluded hope.
And when the dissonance threatens to sabotage everything, she will give him that look, the same look he saw in her eye in the dressing room that very first time, like she’s about to go onstage and put on a hell of a show.
And he thinks that, even if they are lying, they are being sincere.
He has never loved her more.
Susan stares out the window as marshes give way to tide pools.
She likes volunteering as a chaperone for school trips.
Now that she has stopped working—or nearly—she has more time than the other mothers with regular office jobs, and it gives her the chance to see Sebastian and Viola with other children, watch them socialize, study them.
One last trip to LA and then it is done.
Now they are tiny marine biologists, listening underwhelmed as an elderly man explains about hermit crabs, damp worksheet papers flapping against the sea breeze.
“They fight, you know. They’ll do anything for a bigger shell.”
The other chaperones huddle together, observing, quietly comparing. Susan hangs back; she feels herself separate from these women who all play doubles at the tennis club on the weekends, whose husbands wear suits to work. She worries about the people their children will become.
Oh God, was it right, to stay? Will their world be bright enough here?
The sea expands to the ends of her senses. Al always says that it’s a relief that the sea exists—something so unknowable that even a life’s work can’t plumb it.
It terrifies her.
Where did her children go? Susan blinks and realizes the fog is deepening around her, or at least the faces of the class are becoming more anonymous.
It takes her a moment to spot Viola in her yellow mackintosh, studiously classifying animals and detailing her observations on the crabs: How many legs do they have?
How fast can they run? Sebastian eludes her, his green coat dissolving into the others—is that him or one of the Dunning boys?
She feels her breath shortening, tightness in her chest. She is shivering, she can see the goose bumps on her skin, but she feels terribly hot in her rain jacket. Where is Sebastian now?
The skies ring out with the cries of Susan’s infant twins—or are they seagulls wailing against the northeasterly wind?
She feels them again being pushed from her womb, sees them identical but marked by the arrhythmia of two tiny hearts fluttering at different paces, one tiny hand reaching faster for the rattle.
How can she hold them both? How can she hold them at all?
Where is Viola now?