Chapter 66
Shortly after, I stood at the kitchen sink rinsing salad greens in a big bowl.
Louise had put the flamenco record on. I could hear Ida moving in one of the rooms down the hallway.
Not much longer now, I told myself, followed by a wave of uncertainty, a wash of terror at what might happen when we were found.
Beside me, Allan stood patting at the meat with paper towels, the muscles in his forearms twitching as he salted and seasoned it, caressingly coating it with flour as though powdering a baby’s bottom.
“Mia adores this music.”
“Is that right?” Allan answered with unconcealed delight, gazing into my face. “Your mother and I used to listen to this, once upon a time.”
I made an assenting sound, as though the fact charmed me.
“And now you, too,” he said, his eyes glossing with tears.
I let him caress my cheek with the back of his dirtied hand.
Louise had begun to totter around, gathering cloth napkins and silverware from a woven rectangular basket.
I chatted and smiled as I performed the tasks Allan asked of me: fetching down a jar of olive oil from a shelf, tearing the remainder of the bread he’d baked yesterday into hunks, lighting the flame beneath the big pan.
All the while, I was vigilantly aware of Ida’s position within the small house.
Moving in and out of view, dashing here and there but always skirting back to Louise, in the way the dog had scampered and barked and circled Louise’s legs on that first evening.
Periodically I glanced at my watch, keeping up a mental calculus of where Tom might be.
Could he and the police have arrived at the field?
Were they at this very moment making their way to us?
In these moments of glancing at my watch, I felt the margins creep nearer; the fact that everything would end, had already ended somewhere—love, family, our life here.
With a kind of serene authority, Louise had begun setting a small cloth-covered table. “Should we open a bottle of wine?”
“I think we should,” Allan said. “Mia, why not do the honors?”
Ida had returned to the living room wearing a tiny artist’s apron speckled with paint that Louise must have sewn for her. “I’m hungry.”
“You’ll eat when we all do,” Louise answered in that harsh tone that Ida improbably seemed to like and be soothed by, astonishing me by saying:
“Yes, Nonna.”
Did she actually believe that Louise was her grandmother? In a way, it didn’t matter. Ida had an active imagination; whatever she played at became real to her.
“You can go and wash up,” Louise instructed, as if making a small concession.
“Maybe take a bath, if you want,” she added, and I was seized with dread at the thought of her nakedness, wanted to scream for her to stay dressed, stay near me.
I suddenly thought I glimpsed, through the back window, the red pulsing of police lights.
But it was nothing. Only the last remnant of sun that presages night.
“What’s gotten into you?” Louise chided, taking the still unopened bottle of wine from my hands, uncorking it. As she was pouring, a sudden noise made me start.
“What now?”
“No, it’s nothing,” I said, turning from her and managing a laugh. The sound was only Allan laying the meat into the hot pan, searing it. “I’d love that glass of wine.”
Louise handed it forward to me, her body pressing my back, her breasts and bony chest, as for what seemed many minutes I listened to the sizzling and the sporadic pops of grease, those insistent little detonations.
A new song began, Ida reappearing, crying excitedly, “Nonna, I love this one!” She had changed into a dress I’d never seen before, white satin trimmed in bits of lace, resembling the dresses girls wore here to their first communions.
Louise clapped her hands, shouting merrily, “Dance for us!”
“Yes, do your dance!” echoed Allan.
Without hesitation, Ida lifted her arms and began to twirl in the white dress with that overweening confidence that is particular to children.
The dance wasn’t a girlish princess’s dance, but that of a woman, a sorcerer.
Intermittently she would stop her twirling and stomp a bare foot against the floor, still holding her arms above her head with fierce eyes, her small mouth set into a proud expression.
There was something queasily intimate in her performance, like witnessing a person enact a fantasy of love in the privacy of their bedroom.
Wrapping her arm around my waist, pulling me tighter against her, Louise cooed, “Isn’t it wonderful, being together like this?”
“Yes, I’m so happy.”
“I love you,” she said, lifting her voice in invitation for me to say it back, Allan turning to us expectantly. Somehow I managed to say it, the words weightless, barely more than whispers. Then, more loudly to make sure I’d been heard:
“I love you, Mother.”
With the phrase, I felt cleaved. My face placid, smiling; my mind a black, disordered fury.