I think you should come back with me to Colorado, Grant said.
Why?
You don’t seem very happy here.
Am I supposed to be happy?
Grant looked at him.
The boy took hold of the brace he wore over his jeans, the steel bars to either side of his knee, and gave an abrupt, adjusting jerk. What about Mom?
What about her?
She needs me here, remember?
Grant nodded, absently. I think it would mean more to her right now if you came back with me, he said. To help look.
For a time the boy said nothing. Then he said: She bought me something, out of the blue. Guess what.
What.
A model airplane.
Grant studied his son’s face—grown thin in the last year, like the rest of him. The soft blond mustache he ought to just shave. His son had lost interest in model planes years ago, he knew, though dusty fighters still patrolled the skies of his room.
Sean, he said. Did Mom ever tell you about her sister, Faith? Her twin?
The one who drowned.
Yes.
No. Caitlin did.
What did she tell you?
That mom had a twin sister named Faith who drowned when they were young.
Grant nodded. They were sixteen, he said. Your age. Their folks, your grandparents, would rent a house on the lake for two weeks every summer—swimming, suntanning on the dock. One day they left the girls alone to go into town. They left little Grace with them. Grace was walking by then and she walked right off the end of the dock. Do you mind if I smoke?
No.
He lit the cigarette and went on, describing the day as Angela had described it to him one night just before their own daughter was born (long wretched night of no sleep, of fears bursting all at once from his wife’s breast): the two teenage girls on the porch painting their toenails, talking to a boy on the house phone, accustomed to their mother watching the baby. The moment when something splashed and they looked at one another—each seeing in the other, in her twin, her own face of immediate comprehension. Immediate fear. Two girls running as one to the end of the dock and diving in. Angela could see little Grace down among the rocks like a sunken doll. The water wasn’t deep and she quickly had her in her hands and she came up kicking, reaching for the dock, calling out, I got her, I got her. But Faith hadn’t come up. Was still down there looking, she thought. She got Grace onto the dock and turned her on her stomach to push the water out and then turned her over again and as she blew into the tiny mouth, filling the tiny lungs, she was thinking about both sisters: the one she was trying to save with her breath and the one who wasn’t there, who wasn’t coming up. She had this feeling that, as a twin, her twin self ought to be able to dive in after Faith, her actual twin. She thought she ought to be able to be on that dock and in the water again, both places, at the same time.
The ember of the cigarette flared, and he let the smoke out slowly.
Finally Grace coughed and began to breathe, he went on. And as the life came back into her baby sister, your mom told me she felt another life going out. Going out of herself. She dove back in the water and searched, and she came up to make sure Grace was still on the dock, still crying, and dove under again. It took too long. She could feel that other part of herself slipping away. Just slipping away.
Grant stared into the distance as if into those waters. Faith had misjudged her dive, he said. She hit a rock on the bottom and her lungs filled with water and she drifted under the dock, into the shadows.
He took a last drag on the cigarette and crushed it out.
The boy had found photo albums in his aunt Grace’s garage, the plastic pages separating with a loud kiss of time on the twin girls as babies, as blonde birthday girls, as teenagers who with their pure, rudimentary features looked more like daughters of the grown woman he knew than his sister did. After sixteen, it was one blonde girl alone, and to study pictures of his aging mother was to wonder if, in some other, ongoing world, some divergent world, that identical sister once so happy and pretty remained happy and pretty, or must she grow as well into the same tired, beclouded woman who went on in this one?
He didn’t know what to say. He understood that his mother grieved not only for a daughter but for the lost half of herself.
But it didn’t change anything.
School just started, he pointed out, and Grant said they would get him into school up there or down in Denver; they’d have to look into it.
You’ve got your license now, don’t you?
Yes.
And you can drive all right? He glanced at his son’s knee.
Yes.
He handed him a key and took three twenties from his wallet and handed these over too. He told him to go over to the house after dinner and get the old green Chevy and gas it up and drive it back to Aunt Grace’s. Pack up his things. Be ready to go at 7 a.m. sharp.
Your mother knows the plan, he said.
16
It was a modest but handsome house, gable-roofed, with large ground-floor windows that caught both the morning and evening light. There was a time, pulling up to it, when her heart would fly out of her, like seeing the ocean, like seeing the mountains. Here was the shape of her life, of all she loved. A solid house. Nothing in disrepair. The house of a carpenter. Grant had done the bedroom over the garage himself when Angela was pregnant with Sean, and when it was finished, Robert and Caroline across the street, who’d watched the whole process, said they couldn’t believe it hadn’t been there all along.
It was late and the sun was dropping through the washed and dripping trees. Above her reached the long arm of the sycamore where her children once swung. She became aware of a dog barking but only when it ceased. Lights coming on in the houses. Yellow-warm lights in houses where once they’d gone for dinners, drinks, to see new babies. Birthday parties in the backyards. She was almost surprised to see no lights in her own windows. No boy doing homework at the dining room table. No woman at the kitchen sink.
A minivan rounded the corner with its lights burning and Angela went up the walk fishing in her tote bag for keys. Finding them and getting the right one in the lock and opening the door as the car prowled by and stepping in and shutting the door as if casually behind her.
In that first moment, that silence, she heard the clicking of little toenails as Pepé came skating around the corner. But Pepé was years ago, his crooked little body buried out back under the elm in a pine box that Grant and Sean had built. Such a profound absence for such a small creature. Days of grief and Sean lobbying for replacement.
We’ll see.
When? When will we see?
After Colorado.
She stood looking up the stairs into the shadows. The absolute stillness of the house. Silence like a pulsing deafness. Smell of some depleted candle perhaps but otherwise nothing, not even the smell of dust.
She poked at the thermostat and listened for the furnace to kick in, and then she went into the kitchen and turned on the light and ran water in the sink—something to do with the traps, you had to keep water in them. In the basement she filled an old plastic pitcher at the utility sink and poured water down the washing machine drain and into the floor drain. Finally there was nothing to do but go up to the second floor. Three sinks up there. Two showers. Two tubs. Two toilets.
We need to talk about the house, Angela.
All right, let’s talk about it.
Neither of us has worked in over a year.
That was the point of the second mortgage, I thought.
It was. But we’re burning through it. All these flights back and forth. The bills. The hospital bills.
Grant.