“It’s going to be hard for the boys. You’ll have to help me make it easier for them. They’re my first concern. I’m not going to tell them until we get back to Vermont.”
Mia nodded. “Of course.”
“I don’t see the situation as in any way your fault, Mia. You’ve been a great help to me, and to this family. I want you to know that.”
Mia nodded and crossed her arms. Her eyes swelled with tears, though her face was firm. She swallowed once, then exhaled sharply through her nose. “But still, I am fired.”
“Yes. I’m sorry to say it, but yes.”
After Mia had gone to her room, Kay dressed in a skirt and blouse and sandals, brushed her hair, and looked in on the boys once more. They were asleep in a jumble, the sheets of the double bed they shared twisted around them in the heat. She watched them breathe and sleep, as she had done for hundreds of hours since each had been born, then wrote them a note to tell them where she was, and left it on the table where they could see it.
She was two months pregnant. She had figured it out that morning, or begun to, when she had awakened on the beach and heard the band playing on the ship. She had skipped her period again, but she hadn’t taken this absence seriously, not until she’d heard the music. She knew there was no such band; the sound was coming from inside her. Crazy, but that was how she’d known with Sam and Noah. She tried to imagine this new baby, hoping for a girl, but all she could see was a tiny face pressed to her remaining breast, a child who would never know there had ever been two.
Carrying her shoes, she walked across the sand to the casino. She found Jack at the table, and knew at once that he had lost it, lost it all. The eighteen thousand was gone, and more; he was down three grand. It was poker that had done it. Bored with blackjack, he had decided to sit in a few hands, and lost it all fast. For two hours he had tried to recoup his losses at the blackjack table, and watched more dribble away. He’d hardly slept the night since they’d arrived, three days ago. His eyes were wild and desperate.
“Help me,” he said.
“Goddamn it, Jack.” She took him to a quiet corner. “How much cash do we have left?”
“Three thousand.” He put his face in his hands and began to weep. “Kay, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
She computed rapidly. Three days left; they could get by on a thousand if they had to, two to play it safe. The rooms were paid for. How much had they charged for meals, the boat, the trip to the fort to give a whale to Noah? She took his wallet from him, heavy and warm from his pocket.
“We’ll talk later,” she commanded. “Go back and sleep now.”
The casino was quiet; only a few tables were running. She cashed five hundred dollars in travelers checks and took her place at one, stacking her chips on the green felt before her. A waitress approached her and she asked for a glass of water, no ice. It was 2:00 A.M.; she had a van to catch at nine. Seven hours to win back three thousand dollars. She rolled up her sleeves.
“Ma’am?”
She met the dealer’s eye. Others were waiting for her bet before the cards could be dealt. In a moment the game would begin again, but still she paused. In the condo her babies were sleeping; all around she felt the blueness of the sea. It was all real, it was this world and no other, and she was in it. She pulled a fifty-dollar chip from the pile.
“Deal,” she said.
GHOSTS OF WINTER
January 1995
MARY AND O’NEIL: they were like any couple. She, just thirty, her figure slender, her beauty pale and Nordic, not striking but sensible; he, two years older, with large, soft hands and a web of creases just taking hold at the corners of his eyes. Homeowners, voters, employees; the provisional adulthood of their twenties was over. They were both teachers, work they told themselves was honorable, though it was, in reality, a career each had chosen by accident, a temporary arrangement made permanent when bolder plans drifted away. Their house, in an older suburb outside Philadelphia, was trying to bankrupt them; the wiring was bad, a spring rainstorm sent them scurrying with kitchen pots, there was lead paint everywhere, chiseled with cracks fat enough to wedge a dime into. Its history was obscure. Prying away a piece of rotten window trim, O’Neil had discovered a Christmas card, dated 1879, with these words, written in schoolmarmish hand so precisely shaped that O’Neil first thought they were typed: “You mention the knife which arouses my curiosity as to whether you received the calendar. I should be much obliged to you to advise me in this regard. I received for Xmas anything and everything from stiff-backed handkerchief to coil-spring ear laps.” They passed their weekends in dust masks and tool belts and old clothes spattered with paint-blue for the bedroom, linen for the living room and hall, a buttery yellow for the guest room that seemed cheerful in the store but turned out to be a bad mistake, the color of electrified lemons-and on Monday mornings emerged from the front doorway to begin another week of teaching, crescents of paint under their battered fingernails, their shoulders bent below the weight of textbooks so fattened with underlines they seemed to have been left out in the rain. In the evening, half watching a television program or listening to music, they graded tests and essays on the sofa, breaking the silence of their earnest work only to ask small questions of each other, or solicit an opinion: Would you like tea? Could I borrow your Hi-Liter? Now, does this sentence make any sense at all? Sometimes, beneath a blanket they had brought from upstairs, their still faces grazed by the glow of the television, they fell asleep right there, slipping into an unconsciousness that was somehow deeper for having occurred by accident, and awakened hours later to the flow of images on the television screen-a gangster loading a pistol, a woman in a leotard pumping a ski machine, a flight of birds above a grassy field-that they had swept into their dreams.
And yet, there was something uncertain about them. It was hard to say why. Their love was eclectic and sensual-O’Neil, for instance, sometimes placed his nose against Mary’s cheek simply to smell her skin, or bathed in the water she had just used-and their lovemaking surprised them with its ease. So many years of nervousness; why had no one told them that sex was meant to be funny, and that they could say the things they wanted to and ask for what they liked? They were happy, it was true; they had reached a point of happiness in their lives, a place of rest after a journey of some difficulty, and they frequently marveled at this fact: how, of all the people in the world, and all the lives they might have led, they had somehow found this one together. O’Neil had been raised in upstate New York, Mary in Minnesota. How unlikely was it that they would have ever met at all? They had told the story many times, retracing their steps from the private school where they’d come to work (French for Mary, English for O’Neil), through a maze of time and space to the snowy towns of their youth. They recounted it all with pleasure, chiming in to finish one another’s sentences or highlight some detail to keep the telling fresh, but didn’t this simple exercise, good natured though it was, testify to the fragility of their good fortune? O’Neil’s parents had died when he was in college, killed in a car wreck; Mary’s family was far away, a race of chilly Germans on the plains. Wouldn’t such people regard any human attachment, the possibility of happiness itself, with skepticism? So perhaps that was it; perhaps it was their very happiness that made them afraid.
For a while the challenges of their house distracted them, its insatiable appetite for their labors. They pleased themselves by working hard, and then, later, with the idea that the house was haunted. The notion delighted them at once, even as they knew it was foolish; but once the idea arose-it was Mary, over dinner, who first suggested it-evidence bounded into view. There was, of course, the Christmas card O’Neil had found. (Coil-spring ear laps? What unfinished business with the knife?) And there was no question that the house at times hinted at some benign inhabitation. Lights blazed and dimmed; ceiling fans reversed themselves of their own volition; doors swung open and closed without warning, pushed by unaccountable drafts. Hidden lines of connectedness seemed to snake through the structure; they had discovered, for example, that the toilet lid in the second-floor bath would sometimes slam when they turned on the kitchen disposal. In the basement-an inhospitable, gravelike hole where they stored old boxes and did the laundry, with crumbling plaster walls and miles of sketchy wiring stapled to the joists-pockets of frigid air lingered, and once, mysteriously, the washing machine had overflowed. Later, O’Neil found a tube sock stuck in the basin drain, and certainly it was possible that it had found its way there by accident, but wasn’t it also true that this occurrence, like all the others, bore the qualities of a prank?