The children would wake up in the morning to crabs and starfish on their front steps! the other woman says.
An adventure. No need for alarm. Right, Ellie? the father says, looking at his little girl, who gives him a pinched smile, then a sigh.
The mother says goodbye but thinks, Fuck you and your space-time, too, as she picks up her perfectly lovely and gentle and normal son. He wraps himself around her torso. She backs away. The bad feeling in her lasts until they reach the house, where the garbage has been taken from the cans, but the glass, all the wine bottles, the jars, have been set out on the step. There is no room for the mother to stand to put the key in the door. Her face burns. Once they are in, she starts up a movie on the iPad even though the boys haven’t asked for one yet, and puts all of the glass in plastic sacks, and hides them behind the bookshelf near the front door. She doesn’t think her boys have noticed, but when she finishes and turns from the sink, drying her hands, the older boy is watching her through a part in his bangs.
* * *
—
She is drinking champagne out of the bottle. It tastes better that way, bubblier and colder, and after a week here, she wants the cold all the way inside her, to the center of her bones.
Down at the little cluster of tin shacks beside the boardwalk, a band is playing not-bad cover versions of the Eagles, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd, though the singer’s accent makes the words go rubbery and bounce.
The sunset is so excessive it fills her with nostalgia. A hot burn, everything shot red, even the skins of the slate roof tiles. The color feels like youth.
One by one the seagulls line up on the opposite peak. The giant seagull flaps to a stop on the chimney and basks there in the light.
They’re just birds, she tells herself.
In the long row of gulls, there is a mangy tiny one at the center. It struggles its shoulders against its neighbors, too skinny to be at ease like the rest of the birds.
They’ve gone quiet again. And she doesn’t know what she is watching at first when the seagull to the left of the mangy one seems to bow its head at the shivering thing, and then the one to the right does, both of them bowing and bowing. Perhaps the little one is some kind of prince bird, perhaps they are paying their respects, she thinks, confused, and then the other seagulls nearby move in on the bowing, and only then does she understand that they aren’t bowing, they are killing the skinny tiny gull, pecking it to death.
Surely, if she hurls the bottle at them they’ll stop. But she has frozen, and the murder is over so quickly, a heap of bloody feathers that slides out of view.
It has all been done in silence, though a high buzzing has risen to her ears from inside. The little seagull didn’t even scream; it accepted meekly, it seemed to offer itself to the others. Surely it had a right, at least, to a scream. Even if it couldn’t avoid the outcome, it had the luxury of protest.
The band on the boardwalk has slid into Kashmir.
I am a traveler of both time and space: I yam at raveler of boat I’m and spice.
She winches the skylights shut, puts plugs in her ears and presses pillows against them, and the furling music and the sudden screaming of the seagulls at the loss of the sun becomes only a small hubbub at the very center of her brain, where the heat pulses on and on, and won’t stop.
* * *
—
The road curves, and as it does, the mass of cornstalks chest-high in the fields separates into clear rows, as if a comb has passed through. Deeper into the curve, the corn masses together again.
The boys want to talk to their father in Florida. It has been more than a week. She keeps meaning to fix the wifi or ask the owner to do so, but she keeps being distracted. It is early in the morning, five-thirty in Florida, but August means that her husband works from dawn to midnight, and even if she and her boys had been in the house, they’d have been an irritation to him. She knows her husband will be awake by now and worrying his coffee.
They are going to the giant Carrefour up the road, a kind of massive grocery store with a cheese store, an in-house optometrist, a media section, a café. Surely, they will offer wifi. She can buy prepackaged meals; she is growing tired of what she could make with the single saucepan and skillet at the house. She can buy DVDs in French for the boys. She can buy wine so the lady at the épicerie won’t twist her tight lips in and out and look at the mother calculatingly when she rings up the bottles. She can buy socks, because she brought none for her sons and their sandals add a new thick layer of stink to the house. An invasive species from America, the megastore.
Once inside, she tries Skype on her phone, but it trills and trills and her husband doesn’t answer.
Where is he? the little one says.
Out running! she says brightly. She buys them a chausson aux pommes to share.
Up the aisles. Jam, brioche, eggs, cheese.
Down the aisles. Wine, pickles, packaged carrot salad, fruit. It is comforting, this cleanness, the neatness here.
They try again and again and again, bleeping until the call trails off.
In the backseat, the older boy stares at his hands.
What’s wrong, Monkey? she says.
He doesn’t want to talk to us, he says in a low voice.
That’s not true, she says. He loves you. He’s always happy to talk to you.
Then he doesn’t want to talk to you.
That’s not it, either. She thinks quickly. He’s probably out for breakfast. You know he won’t make himself breakfast if we’re not around.
Not even cereal? the older boy says skeptically.
He’s probably skinny, she says. Wasted. A skeleton of his previous self.
No. I bet he eats burritos like three times a day, the older boy says, and he brightens. I bet he’s superfat. Like when we get home, we won’t even know who he is. He’s smooshing out of his clothes.
I bet he’s dead, the little boy says. He gives a little chuckle.
Hey! That’s not nice, she says.
I didn’t say I wanted, I said I bet, the little one says.
I bet he’s at Bill and Carol’s right now, the older boy says. I bet he has an omelet and a stack of pancakes and a biscuit with butter and honey and toast and coffee and orange juice and hash browns, and is just like shoving it all in like a steam shovel. It’s like falling all out of his mouth.
Yuck, the little boy says.
And a milkshake and a banana split and vegan chocolate cake and corn nuggets and a tempeh Reuben and french fries and hot sauce. And lobster soup and baked potatoes and broccoli and bean tacos.
When her bigger boy is like this, almost smiling, she wants to fold his triangular fawn’s face in her hand and keep it warm there forever.
The little boy throws up into his lap.
* * *
—
In the morning, the glass bottles are again on the steps, so many, ghosts of her nights. Someone is trying to tell her something. She heaps them inside, behind the front door. The pile makes her desperate.
There is too much noise and fog in her head to leave the house all morning, and she lets the boys stay in their pajamas after breakfast and they watch Tintin.
She feels obligated to attend to Guy. She can’t bear the biographies, the sour ugly man in them makes her feel sick, so she returns to the Guy she likes, the young man who wrote her favorite of his stories, “Histoire d’une Fille de Ferme.” The prose is beautiful, simple. It begins with a servant girl on a farm, on a torpid day, going out to a sweet-smelling little hollow full of violets to take a nap.