Oh, sounds were what brought the past alive most clearly! “Take my hand,” she heard the back-of-the-room boys crooning, “I’m a strange-looking parasite…” And then other, more anonymous voices, blurred and staticky like those ancient radio waves rumored to be traveling endlessly out into space. “One potato, two potato, three potato, four,” and “He-e-ere’s Johnny!” and “Instinctively, the arthritis sufferer rubs the afflicted area.”
From his bed across the room Peter gave a sudden sharp sigh, and Willa started. It took her a second to remember who he was.
5
They skipped their hospital visit on Friday morning, because Denise telephoned during breakfast and said she’d be having a physical therapy session. “She’s going to learn how to use crutches,” Cheryl announced when she had hung up. “We’re supposed to come in the afternoon instead.”
“In the afternoon I’ve got a conference call,” Peter told Willa. “You two will have to go without me.”
Willa said, “Oh, can’t you come too? I wouldn’t know how to get there.”
“Then it’s high time you figured it out,” he said.
To him it was a cinch, figuring out directions, but Willa seemed to be lacking that particular part of her brain. And the GPS on her phone was no help, because it didn’t let her see more than two inches ahead; and anyhow she hated driving, and she especially hated driving a car that wasn’t familiar to her.
But instead of reminding him of all this, Willa just made her voice go soft and said, “Well. All right, sweetheart.”
“The call’s been scheduled for weeks now,” he said in a defensive tone.
“That’s okay. I know I’ve been a pest,” she told him.
“I didn’t say you were a pest; I just said I’d be tied up.”
“I understand.”
There was a brief silence. Peter took a sip of coffee. Then he said, “Well, I suppose I could take you after I’m finished. If you don’t object to waiting.”
“Oh, we don’t object in the least!” she said. “Do we, Cheryl?”
Cheryl said, “Um, no.”
“Thank you, sweetheart,” Willa told Peter.
“Whatever,” he said, looking resigned. But she could tell he wasn’t all that put out about it.
Marriage was often a matter of dexterity, in Willa’s experience.
After breakfast, she and Cheryl took Airplane on an extra-long walk. They hooked him to a leash, for once, because Cheryl said he got nervous when he had to cross through traffic.
The air had a watery feeling today, although no rain had been forecast, and the breeze seemed loaded with promise. Willa wore sandals and a cotton shift. Cheryl, of course, was in shorts. For some reason she had a crab decal stuck to her right cheek.
They walked past Mrs. Minton’s house, its lowered paper shades giving it a blank-faced look. Mrs. Minton never got up till noon, Cheryl confided, and then she fixed herself one big meal for the whole day because it was so hard to cook leaning on that walker of hers. “How does she get her groceries?” Willa asked, and Cheryl said, “Ben does that. Mrs. Minton gives him a list every Friday evening.” (“Mrs. Mitten,” she pronounced it.)
They walked past Ben’s house with its peeling white wooden sign suspended from a post: “Benj. Gold, M.D. Walk-ins welcome.” An ancient couple was creeping toward the rear where his office was, the wife clinging with both hands to her husband’s elbow. “Arthritis, I bet,” Cheryl said knowledgeably. “Cortisone shot will fix that.”
In the window of the house next door to Ben’s was another sign: “Raeburn Investigations,” with “Domestic Adultery a Specialty” in smaller letters beneath it. “That’s where the private detective lives. Dave,” Cheryl said. Willa wondered if there was some type of adultery that wasn’t domestic. (And had Dave known about Sean’s secret trysts with Elissa?)
They passed the last house on the block, where blue hydrangeas billowed in abundance. “Barry and Richard,” Cheryl said. “They’re both gay, but-that’s-all-right!”—these last words running together in a reflexive little chant. On the corner they waited for a police car to streak by, its lights flashing but no siren sounding, and then they started up the next block. The signboards multiplied: picture framing, computer repair, clothing alterations. All those hopeful little enterprises squeezed into front rooms or glassed-in porches.
After that the houses gave way to actual shops—delis and dry cleaners—and Willa and Cheryl took a right to get back to a more residential area. “Over there is Briscoe Road, where Patty and Laurie live,” Cheryl said when they paused for a stoplight. “They’re so lucky! Their grandma has a swimming pool in her apartment building.”
“That does sound lucky,” Willa said.
“Also, both of them get their nails professionally manicured. Would you ever take me for a manicure?”
“Oh, honey, I wouldn’t even know where to go,” Willa said.
“Their grandma takes them,” Cheryl said.
The way she stressed the word “their” made it sound as if Willa were her grandma. Willa couldn’t help feeling pleased by that. All at once she could imagine tracking down a manicurist for Cheryl.
“Mama says we don’t have the money for manicures,” Cheryl said as they resumed walking. “We just do our own nails.”
“Me too,” Willa told her.
“Mama cuts our own hair, even.”
“Well, she does a good job,” Willa said.
“How about you?” Cheryl asked her.
“Me?”
“Do you cut your own hair?”
“No, somebody does it for me,” Willa said. She almost felt she should apologize.
“Do they dye it, too?”
“Well, they touch it up.”
Cheryl squinted at it.
“It’s not gray but it’s starting to fade, kind of,” Willa told her.
“That’s okay,” Cheryl said. Then she said, “You’re really pretty, for an old person.”
“Well, thank you.”
“Were you pretty when you were nine?”
“When I was nine? Oh, goodness, no.”
Cheryl smiled at her.
They took a second right; they were heading toward home now. Airplane met another dog, a tiny gray dust mop who bounced straight up off the sidewalk in excitement and yapped frantically, but Airplane just gave an aloof sniff and turned away. The other dog’s owner was a hunched old lady in a droopy black dress. It seemed to be the time of day for the old people to be out, Willa noticed. Everyone else had work to do.
When Willa and Cheryl reached their own block again, Willa asked, “Do you know the neighbors across the street, too?”
“Nope. None of us do,” Cheryl said. “Across the street is real snooty; they think they’re so diverse and all because they’ve got an African-American family. And the boys who live in the house where they power-washed the deck go to private school and they never say boo to Erland even though they’re his same age.”
Willa clucked.
They had traveled in a circle, so that they were returning from the opposite direction. They passed a house that Cheryl identified as Hal’s, where a red sticker reading “Your Friendly SafeHome Insurance Agent” was plastered to the front window, and then Callie’s house and then Erland’s. A man perhaps still in his twenties strode down Erland’s front walk frowning at his cell phone—a short, dark, muscular man with thick black hair that seemed all of a piece. “Sir Joe!” Cheryl said in a thrilled voice. He glanced up, and his forehead cleared. “Well, hey,” he said.
Sir Joe wasn’t the hoodlum that Willa had been led to expect. His pants were not leather but denim, and the vehicle parked at his curb was not a motorcycle but a white panel truck with “Season-All HVAC” painted on its side. “Sergio Lopez,” he told her, tucking his phone into his rear pocket.
r /> “Oh, Sergio,” Willa said, finally understanding.
She must have sounded like some sort of groupie—like Cheryl, in fact—because he favored her with a slow, gratified smile. “That’s me, gorgeous,” he said.
“Willa,” Cheryl corrected him sternly.
“How’s your mom?” he asked her.
“She’s okay. She’s learning how to use crutches today.”
“Terrible thing,” he said. He turned back to Willa and gave her a cocky salute with two fingers tipped to his temple. “See you around,” he told her, and then he sauntered off toward his truck, his crumpled leather boots clopping heavily and a loop of steel chain clanking from his belt.
Willa was amused. Cheryl stood gazing after him with a rapt expression, her lips slightly parted. Even Airplane was gazing after him.
“Shall we get on home?” Willa asked.
Cheryl sighed and said, “I guess.”
* * *
—
After lunch Peter went upstairs to wait for his conference call, and Willa and Cheryl baked a batch of peanut-butter cookies to take to Denise. It didn’t surprise Willa that Cheryl owned a dedicated Tupperware cookie bin, into which she carefully layered the cookies once they had cooled. Meanwhile Willa checked her e-mail: nothing but spam and one birth announcement from an old San Diego friend’s daughter. She’d been hoping to hear from Ian. Well, maybe over the weekend. Occasionally he drove to some little town on weekends where his phone could pick up a signal. She typed a brief e-mail just to let him know where she was in case he tried to call her at home—not that there was much chance he would. Then she sent almost the same message to her sister. Elaine wouldn’t notice if they were gone for months on end, but Willa liked to keep up some illusion of connection. She had only the one sister, as she often told Peter when he asked why on earth she bothered. He had met Elaine a single time, when she passed through San Diego several years before, and he said later he couldn’t believe that she and Willa came from the same family. “Charmless” was the word he used for her.
Something went wrong with his conference call; it appeared they forgot to include him. Eventually this was straightened out, but it put him in one of his “harrumph” moods, as Willa thought of them, and he had to mutter and grumble a while and complain about the incompetent girl in the office who had caused the mix-up. It was almost four o’clock before he agreed to head to the hospital. Four o’clock on a Friday: people were taking off from work already, and when the three of them walked into Denise’s room they found a little party going on. Two young women were filling plastic tumblers of wine while an older, managerial-looking black woman stood at the bureau spreading Brie on crackers. “Oh, look, everybody!” Denise sang out. “It’s Peter and Willa! Sean’s mom. So, this here is Ginny, from school, and that’s Sharon, and over there is Mrs. Anderson, our principal.” The younger women just smiled and murmured their hellos, but Mrs. Anderson turned with a cracker poised between her thumb and index finger and said, “Oh, I always like meeting the grandparents. We consider them a resource. Do you-all have any skills you might want to share with our students?”
“We’re not actually from Baltimore,” Willa told her, gliding right past the grandparent reference. “We live in Arizona.” Just like that, she and Peter fell off Mrs. Anderson’s radar. Ginny handed each of them a glass of wine, and Cheryl passed around her cookies, and Mrs. Anderson proposed a toast to Denise. Peter didn’t take so much as a sip, though; Willa hoped nobody noticed. He set his glass down untouched and told her, “I’m going to go buy a paper.”
“I’ll come with you,” she said. Maybe she could smooth his feathers a bit on the way.
She set her own glass down and they stepped out into the corridor, which seemed very wide and peaceful compared to Denise’s room. As they walked toward the elevators, Peter said, “Wouldn’t you think one of them could have taken Cheryl?”
“They have jobs, Peter. They work at Cheryl’s school.”
“Still,” he said, unreasonably. He pressed the elevator button.
The gift shop was a disorganized alcove off the downstairs lobby. It offered newspapers and celebrity magazines, a bucket of cellophane-swaddled bouquets, a cluster of coffee mugs printed with jokey slogans…On a ledge behind the register stood a row of tiny, whiskery saguaros identical to the one Peter had brought her. They were nowhere near any sunlight, not even under a grow light. Willa felt an absurd urge to buy them all and set them free.
While Peter was paying for his paper, a very pregnant woman walked in wearing a pink flannel bathrobe, her hair straggling down limply on either side of her face. She started drifting around the shop, gazing at various items in a distracted, unhappy way. The cashier—a young man barely past his teens—called out, “Can I help you?”
She turned and glared at him. “Why are you asking me that?” she demanded.
“Ma’am?”
“What makes you think I need help?”
“Ma’am, I was just wondering if there was anything you were looking for.”
“Don’t you think I can find it for myself?” she said.
The cashier turned to Peter and Willa with a baffled expression. Willa raised her eyebrows sympathetically, but Peter said, “Let’s get out of here,” and he seized her by the upper arm and propelled her toward the door.
In the lobby, which was a sea of chairs and couches in little conversational groupings, he didn’t head for the elevators but let go of her arm and collapsed onto a green vinyl couch. “I hate this city,” he said.
Willa sat down next to him in a gingerly, unobtrusive way, barely entrusting her weight to the seat cushion. “Was it that woman back there?” she asked him.
He didn’t answer.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“It’s everything. I hate the heat; I hate the humidity; the accent is atrocious…I don’t know what we’re doing here.”
“Well, sweetheart? We’re just helping Denise for a few days.”
“We don’t even know Denise!”
She couldn’t think what was upsetting him so. She cast her mind back over everything that had happened since their arrival. She felt she had missed some important clue. “Is it something to do with the firm?” she asked. “With the person who messed up your conference call?”
“What do you care about the firm?”
She grew still.
“Willa,” he said. “I think you’re going to pieces.”
“What?”
He didn’t repeat it.
“I was just wondering if you were the one going to pieces,” she said finally.
He let out a puff of a breath. Then he gave his knee a brisk slap with his folded paper and said, “Well, back to the funhouse,” and stood up and started for the elevators.
Willa rose and followed him. She had a heavy feeling in her stomach.
In the elevator, they didn’t speak. They rode upward in a humming silence and glided to a stop at the second floor and stepped off. Even from here, she could hear the rising swell of merriment coming from Denise’s room.
6
On Saturday she was awakened by the ringing of the telephone. It was unlikely anyone would be calling her, but the fact that the ringing went on and on still managed to make her feel anxious. Even when it stopped she couldn’t relax, because the air conditioner was running full blast in the window and she didn’t know whether Cheryl had answered or the caller had merely given up. She lay squinting at the ceiling, straining to hear. No sounds at all made it through that infernal droning.
It was almost nine, according to the elderly electric clock on the bureau. Peter’s bed was empty, his covers tossed back and his pajamas in a heap at the foot. The light from the windows was a mellow gold, not the early-morning paleness she was accustomed to.
She sat up and smoothed her hair do
wn and slid her feet into her slippers. As she was reaching for her kimono, Peter opened the bedroom door and stuck his head in. “You’re awake,” he said.
“I don’t know why I slept so late,” she told him.
“Denise just called. They’re saying she can come home today.”
“Oh, good!”
“She told Cheryl she’ll be ready to leave once her doctor’s stopped by. Ten or so.”
Willa stood up and tied her kimono sash. “So, will you…are you going to drive us?” she asked.
“I should, I guess. You’ll need my help loading her into the car.”
Willa felt relieved, but she didn’t show it.
“And then as soon as Rona’s office opens,” he said, “I’m going to give her a call.”
Oh. Rona was their travel agent. Willa said, “Well, maybe we should wait on that. We’re not sure yet when Denise will be able to manage without us.”
“Manage what?” Peter asked. “She’s got Cheryl; got her neighbors; it’s only a broken leg, for God’s sake.”
“Yes, but—”
“In fact I might just go online and book the tickets myself,” he said.
“Oh, let Rona do that, why don’t you,” Willa said. “You always tell me she’s so good at finding upgrades.”
“Well, you’re right, I guess. I’ll wait. God damn all these time zones!”
Peter sometimes claimed—jokingly, she assumed—that the whole country should keep its clocks set to the same hour, even though that meant that some states would have to conduct their business in the dark.
* * *
—
Willa wasn’t at all sure that Denise could make it up the stairs, but even so, she and Cheryl changed the sheets in her room and tidied a bit after breakfast. Cheryl turned bossy, first deciding that Denise would need an extra pillow and then clearing every bit of clutter off her vanity—even things that could have stayed there, like a hairbrush and a bottle of perfume. “Mama’s such a slob,” she said affectionately. The crab decal on her cheek had faded to little orange dots by now. She was wearing majorette boots today—white, with tassels—along with her usual bunchy-crotched shorts and a crop top that exposed the globe of her tummy. Willa found herself admiring the child’s lack of self-consciousness.