Chapter 29
I feel cooped up, imprisoned almost, as we eat the bean and avocado quesadillas I made for breakfast, and Ella whines her way through math. She’s antsy and disagreeable. Everything seems hard for her today. She was asking to stop after the second problem.
“Just keep going,” I say, still thinking about my fight with Dee.
“Just try again.” It seems like not having sex with Joel for one night makes everything worse the next day.
It seems like now that I am accustomed to feeding the curse, it can’t abide a missed meal.
I feel angrier, unfairly denied, hungry in my cells.
“It’s too hard!” Ella whines, every syllable drawn out into a small howl.
I want to just say fine, stop, go watch TV.
But I’m not going to do that. If I let myself do that I’ll start doing it every day.
I am responsible for this child’s basic education, even though it’s hard to remember why exactly I thought homeschooling was the thing I should do with the majority of my time.
I load the dishwasher aggressively, trying to remind myself of what Al said about my love for my family. It was lucky for me that Dee had to leave earlier than usual for a meeting this morning. But I’ll have to face her again soon enough. And I don’t know how.
“Titi! Titi, you’re not answering me!” Ella calls from the table, where she always does her math on the purple iPad.
I turn the faucet on, spray a pan. The water ricochets, soaks my shirt. “Shit. Shit.”
In addition to the fight with Dee, I’m repeatedly reliving Joel crying on the front step.
The moment when he brought me down into his arms, the weight of his head on my head.
The shift, the awareness of it in my stomach, in the marrow of my bones.
The feverish, rushed feeling of us on the couch again, me pinning him first, then him pinning me, his eyes evading mine with practiced precision, his hands claiming me.
It didn’t feel right.
Why does it matter that it didn’t feel right?
It doesn’t have to feel right.
But the cello. The aching sweetness of the song that he played in the night, alone in his house. Thinking of me. Not just hating me, but telling the dark a secret about what might be hidden under the hate.
I grit my teeth, slap my hands down on the counter. Stop.
Why can’t I just take the hot sex I am given, like Dee said? No, she said to give Joel a chance. She said love. She doesn’t know anything. She’s never known anything.
That was the last time, on the couch. The last time I’ll ever touch him.
My body hates this thought, it’s instantly furious.
“I said I need help!” comes Ella’s bratty cry. “I’m too tired to do math today!”
I message the homeschool group, asking for a playdate.
There is a quiet knock on the front door. I fling it open. It’s Al.
“Tempest Dunlap.” His eyes brighten at the sight of me.
“You can just say Tempest,” I snap. “Or even better, T.”
“Tempest,” he says.
I wait.
“Tempest,” he says again.
“What?” I feel my eyebrows go up in irritation.
“I was hoping I might come into your beautiful home so that I could release my bowels in your excellent room with the bath kept inside of it.”
I stare at him.
“Because of the arr vee,” he explains patiently.
“Right, I get it,” I say. “Fine. Go ahead.”
“Thank you very much!” He breezes by me, calling cheerfully, “Hello, Ella child!”
“Hi, Al!” Ella’s two favorite men are a murderous angel and a lethal pain demon. This is what happens when you’re raised without a loving father figure in the home, apparently.
While Al is taking his time in the bathroom, Molly writes that she’s at the chiropractor, but her husband is there with the kids if we want to go over.
“We’re going to Sinai’s,” I announce. “You can finish your math later.”
Ella jumps up.
“Would you mind very much if I ate some of your food although you’re leaving?” Al asks, reappearing. “I am not sure where in this area to catch a fish. . . .”
“Yeah, fine, just open the fridge. Help yourself.” I can’t seem to locate the polite register of my personality, the instinct to be nice.
His eyes widen. “I am permitted to eat anything in your frigid box?”
Actually, frigid makes a little more sense than the real word, come to think of it. “Yup. Go ahead.”
He looks deeply conflicted. “I should come with you.” He taps his fingers on the counter, then taps them together in a fast spidery motion. “I am sworn to protect you.”
“This has nothing to do with the angel,” I hiss, embarrassed that I have to explain myself to him. Ella yelps at the same time, “From what? Why do we need to be protected?”
“You’re scaring her,” I whisper, leaning forward to loom over him. My mood is its own creature, rampaging.
“I am so sorry!” he cries. “I have frightened this poor child whose mind is too young to contemplate the wonder of her death.”
“Al!”
Ella gasps. “Wonder of my death?”
“Child.” Al reaches toward her. “Death is only silence. There is nothing to be so afraid of. It’s perfectly natural to fear, of course, but— ”
“Al!” I snap.
“I am saying another wrong thing.” He looks crestfallen, his mouth twisting with regret. I doubt he finds me delightful now.
“Why is he saying I’m going to die?” Ella splutters. She’s standing with her rainbow boots in her hands.
“All of us die, except for immortals.”
“Come here,” I say very sternly. Al follows me obediently into the living room, where I flick through the iPad until I find a particularly colorful game. “I want you to try this.”
“Not dots?” He sounds a little disappointed.
“Even more fun.” I hurry back to the kitchen, toss some cheese on a plate, bring it over, slap it down on the coffee table.
He sniffs, intrigued, crams a piece into his mouth.
His eyes bulge with joy as he follows the exuberant bludgeoning monkeys on the screen.
He’s already reaching for the iPad. I show him how to capture the golden banana before it gets smushed.
He tries, gasps when the banana is pulverized with a loud squish.
“I have failed!”
“Nah, you’re fine. Try again. You’ll get points—see?” I show him where they accumulate, vibrating, in the corner.
“Points!” He seems impressed. “I hope I will get them.”
“Yeah, you will. Just keep going.”
He nods many times.
I drag Ella out the door, holding her pink coat with the winged rabbits on it, and off we go to our playdate at Molly’s idyllic half a farm in Hopewell, with the garden that stretches for whole regular-sized backyards.
It’s been threatening rain since dawn, and the sky hangs moodily over the trampoline as the girls bounce and I stand there in the grass looking at my phone.
The weather seems pent up, repressed—a day that was taught not to touch itself, that release is a sin.
Molly’s husband—Louis—comes out and offers me coffee.
He’s friendly, apologizing for being busy with work.
Also, the toddler is asleep inside. She just conked out in the car on the way back from Costco!
He smells good—a clean scent. He works out, I can tell.
He has a close-trimmed beard, very dark eyes.
I like Molly. She’s my friend. We have sipped tea and talked about starting a book club.
We’ve bonded over how much our girls hate practicing their instruments and how much we hate making them practice but how we do it anyway and we don’t even totally know why sometimes.
I was there for her when she cried and told us about her marriage, about her deepest fears.
I like Molly, but I am wondering what her (depressed?) husband looks like naked. How he would react if I put my hand on his arm, looked into his eyes.
It would be so easy. I picture him under me, teeth bared, arching, helpless.
I smile at him for a flutter of a moment, and his expression slips, just a hair.
I startle, turn aside, ripping my eyes from his.
Did I really just consider leaving Ella to jump on the trampoline under the outstretched arms of a sprawling maple tree so I could murder her friend’s father just there, in the happy yellow farmhouse? Also, I feel for some reason like I’m betraying Joel. Which is absurd.
“I’m sorry,” I mumble. “I just remembered—we have to go. I didn’t realize—violin lesson. Ella!”
I drag her away as she protests and Sinai tries to reason with me, promising she will make me a present, one of her famous butterfly paintings, if I just let Ella stay.
Louis, seeming to understand that something dark and untoward has occurred under the surface of our interaction, avoids eye contact, tugging Sinai back to the house, bribing her in the end with popcorn.
Will this man now flinch away from me at the weekend family meetups in the park? Will he say something to Molly? Is there anything to say? Will I no longer be allowed to be her friend?
I try to worry about it, but Ella is whining in the car and I’m thinking about Joel again—the weakness, his hands on my back when he held me. Simple hands, a simple embrace, something infinite in it.
Now that we’ve cut the playdate short, I can’t think of anything else to do to fill the time, and I’m dreading running into Al at home.
I feel trapped. I feel like I don’t belong in this car with this kid in the back seat demanding that various songs from the Encanto soundtrack be played in a specific order.
I don’t belong in this town. This state.
I should be on the open road, alone. I should be headed somewhere big.
Maybe I should go to New York. Maybe I should fly to Paris.
I slow down on our block. Al’s RV is now pulled all the way into the driveway. I park behind it and we go inside. I steel myself, but it’s quiet, the iPad abandoned on the coffee table.
Phew.
But there’s still nothing to do.
Ella flops around in the living room, asking for sugar. “When the heck is the ice cream truck going to come again?” I don’t like the sweary tone of that. “Do you think it’s still going to come every Tuesday?” The truck hasn’t shown up in over a year. Its route must’ve changed.