Chapter 8
The Person She Calls
The phone rang at ten to seven on a Saturday morning, and it was her mother, and she was shouting.
Sarah sat up in bed with the blanket round her shoulders and her heart going, and said, "Mom? What's wrong? Is it your chest?"
"It's not my chest. It's your brother." Linda Bennett had a voice that had been trained on forty years of night shifts. It was low and carrying and could go through a wall. At the moment it was cracking on every second word. "He's dropped out. Did you know about that? Did he tell you? Eli has dropped out."
"What?"
"Of school. He left in October. He's been, he got a letter from the college. They sent it to the house. It came yesterday. It says he hasn't been in a class since October."
"Mom. Slow down."
"I'm not going to slow down. I've been up since four. I've been sitting in the kitchen with a piece of paper." She drew a long shaky breath. "I paid for that. Your father and I, we put that money by since he was six. And he's been, where has he been? Where has he been going every morning?"
"I don't know."
"He's been going to a warehouse. He's been moving boxes. For nine dollars an hour." She began to cry. It was a sound that Sarah had heard only twice in her life, once at a funeral and once at a hospital. "He says it's what he wants. He says he's happy. I said, you can't be happy, you're nineteen. You don't know what it is."
"Where is he now?"
"Asleep."
"I'll come."
"You don't have to."
"I'm coming," said Sarah.
She was dressed in four minutes. She did not shower. She drove across town in the pale cold dawn with the heater going and a heaviness settling in her chest, and she thought, as she had thought so often, it's always like this. It was not a complaint. It was only a fact, like the weather. When her father had died, it was Sarah who had made the calls. It was Sarah who had found the insurance papers and answered the cards. Her mother had sat in the dark. Her brother had gone to a friend's. Somebody had needed to be the one who was all right, and it had been her, and nobody had asked.
It was a long morning.
She stood in the kitchen of the house on Maple Drive, where she had grown up, and made coffee for her mother, and watched her brother come down the stairs at eight in a T-shirt and boxer shorts with his hair on end.
Eli was nineteen. He was tall and thin and rather beautiful, with their father's wide mouth and none of his patience. He stopped in the doorway when he saw them. He looked at the paper on the table. He looked at his sister. He said, in a voice thick with sleep, "Oh, come on."
"Sit down," said Linda.
"I'm not doing this."
"Sit."
"It's eight o'clock."
"I know what time it is. I know what time you got in, too." She pushed the letter across the table. "Read it."
"I've read it. It's, I wrote it. In a way." He sat. He did it with a sort of sulky grace, folded into the chair, with his feet on the rung. "I told you in September I wasn't sure."
"You said you were tired."
"I was."
"You said it was the, you said the first year was hard."
"It was."
"You didn't say you were going to leave."
"I didn't know that. I didn't know until I did." He put his face in his hands. "It's not what I want, Mom. It's not who I am. I sat in a lecture hall with four hundred people and a man telling me about, it was accounting. And I thought, I'd rather die. I'd rather be in the warehouse. At least in the warehouse I'm useful."
"Useful."
"I make things move."
"For nine dollars."
"For ten, now. I got a raise."
Linda made a noise. It was the noise of a woman who has been struck. She put her hand over her mouth, and her shoulders went, and Eli looked up, and for a second his whole face crumbled, a boy's face, appalled, as if he had not known until that moment that she could break.
"Don't," he said. "Mom. Don't cry. I'm sorry."
"Dad would've," said Linda. "Dad would have, if he were."
"He's not."
"If he were here."
"He's not here," said Eli. He said it loudly. It cracked across the kitchen like a plate. "He's not here, Mom. He's been dead two years. I know what he'd say. He'd say go back, and finish, and do it right. He'd have a chart." His eyes were bright with tears. "But he isn't. And I have to, I'm the only one who's, I'm nineteen. And I can't be the, I can't carry it. I can't be the one that fixes it. That's Sarah's job."
The kitchen went silent.
Sarah was standing by the counter with a mug in her hand. She did not move. She felt the words arrive, and settle, in a place she had not known was open. That's Sarah's job. He said it lightly, bitterly, without malice. He said it as a person says that the sun comes up in the east.
She did not know why it hurt so much.
"It isn't," she said.
"Isn't what?"
"It isn't my job."
"Sure it is. You're good at it." Eli wiped his nose on the back of his wrist. "You did it for the funeral. You do it for everybody. You're, I'm not saying it's bad. I'm just saying it's not me. I can't do that. I'll break."
"I'm not, I didn't, I never asked to be."
"Nobody asked."
"I'd like somebody to have," said Sarah.
She had not meant to say it. It had come out of her, flat and low, in a voice she did not know. Her mother and her brother looked at her. It was the first thing she had said for twenty minutes that was not a question about coffee. She stood there, in a shabby kitchen, in her coat, with a mug in her hand, and felt something very large and old come up out of the floor.
"Sar," said Eli, gently.
"I have to make a call."
"What?"
"I'll be back."
She put the mug down. She went out through the back door into the yard, with the frozen grass crackling under her shoes, and stood by the old swing set. It was a flat white morning. Her breath hung in front of her. She took out her phone, with her fingers shaking so that she had to hold it in both hands, and she called Mark.
He picked up on the fifth ring.
"Hey," he said. His voice was thick. "Is it ten? I'm still in bed."
"It's nine. Mark, I'm at my mom's. Eli's dropped out of college. He's been working in a warehouse for three months. My mom's, she's in pieces. And he said a thing. He said, he said that it was my job to, that I'm the one who."
"Slow down. Slow down, babe. Breathe."
She breathed.
"Okay." She could hear him sit up. A rustle of sheets. "Okay. So your brother's an idiot."
"He's not an idiot."
"He's a kid. He's made a bad decision. It's not the end of the world. People go back." He yawned. "He'll be fine. He'll get bored and he'll be back at school in a year."
"I don't think he will."
"Of course he will."
"He said it's not who he is."
"He's nineteen. He doesn't know who he is." There was a pause. "Sarah, you're doing it again."
"Doing what?"
"Taking it all on. I've told you. You're not responsible for everyone. You can't fix them." His voice was patient, kind, a little weary. It was the voice of a man who has explained something many times. "It's why you're so tired. You make everyone's problem your own. You should let your mother handle her son."
"She can't."
"Then that's her problem."
"She's my mother."
"I know. And I love that you care. I do. But you've got to draw a line." He was fully awake now, and warm, and reasonable. "Listen. You're overreacting. It's a Saturday. It's, they'll sort it out. Just leave. Come home. Have a bath. I've got the Marchetti thing tonight, and I need you at seven. You'll feel better. We'll have drinks. Wear the black dress."
She said nothing.
"Sarah?"
"I don't think I can come."
"What?"
"I don't think I'm, I might want to stay with my mom."
"For what? You'll sit in the kitchen and listen to them yell." He sighed. "Babe. I know you're upset. I get it. But I really need you tonight. It's a big one. They're bringing their wives. It's, you know how much it matters. You're good at these."
"I know."
"You're so good with people. They love you. You're like, you're my secret weapon."
Secret weapon. She looked at the frozen grass.
"I'll think about it," said Sarah.
"Great. Great. I'll text you the time. Love you. Don't let your mother stress you out." And he was gone. The line clicked. She stood for a long time with the dead phone in her hand, in the frost, looking at a swing that had rusted on its chain, and the wind turned it very slowly, back and forth, without a sound.
You're overreacting.
She said it to herself, in his voice. It was warm and reasonable. It sounded like a thing a sensible person would say.
She did not feel as if she was overreacting.
She felt as if she had been trying very hard to hold a door shut, for two years, with her back, and had just been told, kindly, to stop making a fuss.
She stayed another hour.
She made breakfast. She listened to her mother, and listened to her brother, and said, in the right places, I know, and it's okay, and we'll work it out. She found a bottle of her mother's pills, and made her take one. She sat on the stairs with Eli and talked about trucks. At eleven, when everybody had gone quiet, and her mother was lying on the couch with a damp cloth on her forehead, she said she had to go.
"You'll come tomorrow?" said Linda.
"Of course."
"You're a good girl."
"I know, Mom."
She got into the Civic, in the drive, and shut the door.
She did not start the engine. She sat with her hands on the wheel in the cold, in a thin winter light, and looked at the house. It was a small brick one, with green shutters, and a basketball hoop over the garage that her father had put up in 2006. The net had gone gray. There was a white plastic bird feeder on a pole, swinging, and a single chickadee on it, shaking seeds onto the snow.
She did not know when she began to shake.
It started in her hands. It went up her arms, very slowly, and into her chest, and then all at once she could not get a breath. It was not a sob. It was a horrible tight flat gasp, as though a belt had been drawn round her ribs. She put her head on the wheel. She tried to breathe in, and could not. She tried again. A thin high sound came out of her, and she did not know it.
You're overreacting.
It's your job.
You're my secret weapon.
It's nothing. It's nothing. It's nothing.
She fumbled for the phone. She was not thinking. She had the idea that she should call someone, that there must be someone, and her thumb went to the list, and went down it, blindly. Tessa. It was Saturday. She was at her sister's. She would be kind. She would say, oh, hon, and come, and sit, and she would also say, afterward, in her gentle way, in the staff room, you know I love you, but. There was her mother, who was sick. There was her brother, who was a child. There was Mark.
No.
She did not know why the no was so complete. It was not a thought. It was a thing that happened to her body, a flat wall, like a hand held up.
Her thumb stopped.
Daniel (Dog-Approved).
She looked at it.
She could not call him. It was a Saturday. It was not Tuesday. It was not the time. It would be a thing that she should not do, a thing that would change, in some way that she could not name, the shape of what they were. She knew that. She was as sure of it as of her own name. She sat with her thumb over the glass and her breath coming in thin ragged sips, and she said, in her head, clearly, don't.
She pressed it.
It rang once. It rang twice.
"Hey," said Daniel.
His voice was warm and a little surprised. There was a clatter behind it, a thump, a dog's nails on a floor. "Hey, hi. I was just, I'm in the garage. I'm covered in, what's up? Are you okay? It's Saturday. You never call."
She opened her mouth.
Nothing came. She sat there with her lips parted and her eyes wide and the phone against her ear, and she could hear her own breath, and it was terrible. A small broken whistle. She tried to say hello. She tried to say sorry. She heard herself make a sound, high and thin and wrong.
There was a pause on the line.
"Sarah," said Daniel.
It was a different voice. It was lower, and much quieter, and perfectly steady.
"Sarah. I'm here. It's okay. Where are you?"
"I'm," she said. "I'm in the, I'm in the car."
"Okay. Which car?"
"My, it's at my mom's. It's on Maple."
"Okay. Are you hurt?"
"No."
"Is anyone hurt?"
"No. No, it's nothing. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have, it's stupid. I shouldn't have called."
"Don't hang up."
"I'm, it's nothing."
"I know. Don't hang up." She heard a door slam, and keys. "I'm going to stay on the phone, and I'm going to put my shoes on, and you don't have to say anything. You can just breathe. I'll count. Do you want me to count?"
"What?"
"I'll count. In for four. Out for four." He was moving. She heard his feet on gravel. "Ready? In. One, two, three, four."
She breathed.
"Out. One, two, three, four."
She breathed out.
"Good. In."
He did it eleven times. She counted. She did not know why. She sat with her forehead against the cold wheel and listened to a man count to four, in a steady voice, over the sound of a car door and an engine, and she felt the belt round her chest loosen, one notch at a time, as if somebody had undone a buckle.
"I'm in the car," said Daniel. "I'm coming. It's twenty minutes. I'll be there at about, I'll see you at twelve-fifteen. Is that all right?"
"You don't have to."
"I know."
"It's not a, there's nothing to fix."
"I'm not going to fix it," said Daniel. "I'm just going to come."
He parked behind her.
She watched him in the mirror. The green Subaru swung in at the curb in a cloud of exhaust, and stopped with a jerk, and he got out. He was in a stained gray sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up, and there was a smear of black grease on his forehead. His hair was wild. He had one shoe untied. He came up the drive at a walk that was almost a run, and slowed, and stopped about ten feet from the car.
He did not come to the window.
He stood there in the cold with his hands at his sides. He was looking at her, through the glass, with a look that she would never forget. It was not pity. It was not alarm. It was the look a person gives to somebody on the far side of a river, when he is trying to work out whether she would like him to wade in.
He raised a hand, a little, and pointed at the passenger door.
She nodded.
He came round. He opened it, and got in, and shut it behind him very softly. He folded his long legs into the footwell. The little car seemed suddenly smaller, and warm, and smelled of grease and dog. He put his hands on his knees. He did not say anything. He looked straight ahead through the windshield at the gray garage door and the basketball hoop, and she saw that he was breathing hard, and that he was trying to hide it.
They sat there.
It was the longest silence she had ever been in. It lasted perhaps four minutes. There was a clock on the dashboard that ticked. A snowplow went by at the end of the street. The chickadee on the feeder dropped a seed. And Sarah, who had been taught from the age of six that a silence is a thing you fill, sat in it with her hands in her lap and found that it was possible to stop.
"My brother dropped out of college," she said.
"Okay."
"He's been in a warehouse for three months. He didn't tell us."
"Okay."
"My mom's, she's not well. She had the, there was a thing. With her heart. After my dad." She stopped. "I think I'm always the one. I think I've been the one for a long time. And nobody, it's not that they don't love me. It's that they don't, they don't see that I'm, I might not be."
"Okay."
"I called Mark. And he said I was overreacting."
He did not say anything.
She waited. She waited for it, the thing a person would say. He's wrong. Or he's right. Or you should. She had a whole drawer of answers ready, and she was prepared for each of them. She knew what she would say to every one.
"Was it a lot?" said Daniel, at last.
"What?"
"The thing. Before you called. Was it a lot?"
She looked at him.
He had turned his head. He was looking at her with his brown eyes steady, and tired, and extremely gentle. There was no theory in them. He had not got an opinion. He only wanted to know, as one asks a person who has come in from the rain whether she is cold.
"Yes," said Sarah.
"Okay."
"It was a lot."
"Then it was a lot." He said it simply, as he would have said that the sky was gray. "I don't think you get to be overreacting about your own family. I think you just get to have a day."
She began to cry.
It was not like the other time. It was a loud, ugly, helpless, gulping cry, with her whole face working, and she put her hands over it and bent forward over the wheel and let it come. He did not touch her. He did not say anything. He sat in the passenger seat with his hands on his knees and let her cry, and when after a long time she felt a hand on the back of her coat, it was only the flat of a palm, light, between her shoulder blades, and it did not move.
They went to a diner on Route Nine.
It was his idea. He said that he did not know what a person ought to do after that, but that in his experience it involved a lot of syrup. She sat in a booth by a window with a plastic menu in her hands, and a cup of coffee she did not want, and a red-eyed, blotchy, wrung-out face, and he sat across from her, and ordered a large stack of pancakes, and a side of bacon, and two forks.
"I don't need two," said Sarah.
"I know. They're a gesture."
"Of what?"
"Optimism."
She laughed, with a little hiccup, and wiped her face with a paper napkin. He pushed the bacon across the table. She ate a piece. It was salty and perfect, and she felt it go all the way down. She ate another. A waitress came and refilled the coffee and looked at them, and looked away, with the carefully blank tact of a woman who has seen every sort of couple.
We're not a couple, thought Sarah.
Everyone thinks we are.
I should say.
She did not say.
They talked, in the end, about almost nothing. It was a long gray afternoon, and the snow came down against the window in big slow flakes, and a jukebox in the corner played old songs. He told her about his father, who had once chased a dog for a mile on his mail route and been bitten and tipped. She told him about her father, who had built the basketball hoop with a level and a six-pack. Twice she cried again, quietly, into her coffee. Once, to her surprise, she laughed so hard that a man at the counter turned round.
"What?" said Daniel.
"I just thought of something."
"What?"
"You said I'm not going to fix it. In the car. You said it like a doctor."
"I was nervous."
"You were extremely good."
"I was extremely terrified. I thought, if I say the wrong thing, she'll drive off."
"I wouldn't have."
"You might. You're very good at leaving rooms."
She stopped smiling.
"What does that mean?"
"Nothing. It's, I only mean that you, when it gets hard. You do a thing. You get quiet. You get polite." He was not looking at her. He was looking at the maple syrup. "It's a very good trick. I've noticed. I've seen you do it with, I think you've been doing it for years."
"Maybe."
"It's not a criticism."
"I know."
"It's just that today you didn't."
"I called you."
"Yes."
"I don't know why."
"I don't either," said Daniel. "I'm very glad."
He said it in a low voice, plainly, with his fork in his hand. And it was only that, for a second, she saw his face across the table, in the gray window light, with a smear of grease still on his forehead, and the steam from the coffee between them, and a kind of stillness in him, as if he were afraid to make a noise. She saw it, clearly. She felt it go through her, a warm, slow, terrible tide, from her toes to her scalp.
She looked down.
Oh, she thought. Oh, no.
It was not a thought that she had ever had before. It came to her fully formed, in the plain voice, and sat on the table between the syrup and the salt. It did not frighten her. That was the strangest thing. It was only that it was so very big, and the booth was so small.
I called him.
I didn't call anybody else.
I called him because he's the person who, because I knew.
I knew he'd just come.
She went to the party.
She did not know why. It was nearly six when she got home. She stood in the shower, and let the water run till it went cold, and got out, and put on the black dress. She did her hair. She looked at her face in the mirror, red-eyed and clean and calm, and she put on lipstick, and thought, I'll just go. It would be easier. She would smile. She would be good with people.
She walked into the Marchetti party at twenty past seven, in a private room at a steakhouse, and Mark crossed the floor to her with his hand out, and a face like the sun.
"You made it," he said. "Oh, thank God. I knew you would."
"Sorry I'm late."
"You're not. You're perfect." He kissed her. He put his arm round her. He turned, and presented her to a stout man and his wife, and said, "This is the one I told you about," and she smiled, and said how lovely to meet them, and the whole warm bright noisy room closed round her like water.
She did not look at her phone until ten.
It was in the ladies' room, in a stall, with the door locked. She took it out of her clutch. She held it in both hands. There was one message. It had come at 7:48, while she was shaking a stranger's hand.
Home? it said.
Only that. It was a single word, with a question mark. There was no are you okay. There was no how was it. He had not asked her where she was, or what she was doing, or with whom.
She stood in the toilet stall, in her black dress, with her forehead against the cold tile and the phone to her chest. She could hear a woman at the sink, laughing, and the faint thump of music. She stood there a long time.
I'm not home, she thought.
I'm not anywhere near it.
She typed, with a thumb that did not feel like hers.
Home, she wrote.
She sent it. It went. It was the first time she had ever lied to him.
And as she stood there, with the small word gone, and the screen dimming in her hand, she knew, with a plain, sick, enormous clarity, that it was not the last, and that there was no longer any point at all in pretending that it was only a friend.