Maybe she could be in love with Danny again. Maybe that was it. She could fix whatever was broken, get married, learn how to fold socks and make casseroles or whatever normal wives did. She tried to imagine living with Danny, staying with him, but could call up nothing but an image of his bedroom when they were teenagers—the rumpled NY Rangers sheets and plastic blinds, the mason jar full of sea glass he’d had on his windowsill since he was a kid.
Just like she couldn’t really picture screwing him. She’d decided she would screw him, she should; it was only right. Like old times, except in the old times they’d never done more than kiss and fumble around. But he wasn’t gay. He was recently separated; he had a daughter a little older than Amy. So that was okay; he could obviously get it up.
But she just couldn’t picture it. Whenever she tried, she imagined only a blur of flesh, and an amalgam of various men and places and bedrooms: pink fleshy stomachs and sweating hands and the sounds of panting.
“What happened, anyway?” Danny moved away from her. “It looks like something . . . exploded.” He craned his neck to look at the hole in the roof. “Nice view, at least.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Trenton wouldn’t give me a straight answer.” She felt it again, the steam pressure of anger with nowhere to go.
(I was with a friend, Trenton had said, and Minna had said, What friend? You have no friends. And he’d shut up and stared at her, wounded and reproachful, as if she’d done something wrong.
After a minute, he’d blurted, It was a séance.
And she had felt a fist in her chest, in her throat, everywhere. How long had it been building up? She couldn’t keep track. A séance, she repeated, and he looked away. For what? For that stupid ghost story?
It’s real, he said, his voice getting high-pitched. It’s real, Minna.
You almost killed Amy.
Well, I didn’t, did I? I got her out.
She’d slapped him then. Hard. But it didn’t help the tightness, everywhere, like she would explode. Maybe this is what a spark felt like, just before it became fire: like it could destroy the whole universe.)
“Poor guy,” Danny said. “He must be lonely up here.”
“We’re all lonely up here,” Minna said quickly, without intending to.
“Hard to believe you’re ever lonely, Min,” Danny said. He touched her hand quickly. “You were always the most popular girl in town.”
Minna turned away from him. She felt nauseated, looking at the ruins of the attic and the sky and all the cottonseed floating down. She was always lonely. That was the problem. It was like a hunger.
She’d thought having Amy would help and it did, for a while; but Amy was growing up now.
Danny squatted and began sifting through the mess. His jeans were a little too short, and she could see his socks—athletic socks, a little yellowed—but she pretended not to notice. He looked older than he should have; he was only twenty-nine. But she felt older than she was—she felt so tired.
“Look at this.” From the ashes, he extracted something colorful. It was a pink sweatshirt with black skulls all over it. One of the sleeves was burned away. “It isn’t yours, is it?”
“No.” She thought about what Trenton said, about being with a friend. But where could he have met anyone? He had barely left the house. “It’s probably been there for years,” she said. “Trash it.” But the sweatshirt had reminded her. “Any luck on the girl—Vivian? The one from Boston?”
“Ongoing.” He shuffled over, still squatting, and began sorting and bagging, sorting and bagging. It was nice to watch his fingers work. He’d always had nice hands, and long thin fingers that seemed to belong to someone different. “Her parents are back from Africa, so we should have more luck soon.” Minna could tell he enjoyed talking as if he belonged to the investigation, as if it were his. All men liked to feel important. Her father had demanded it, insisted on it, squeezed it out of every interaction and conversation like someone wringing water from a towel. “It’s no accident she came up here. Her parents spent two summers in this area when she was a little girl. Who knows. Maybe she kept in touch with some people. Maybe a boy.”
“How long has it been now? Two weeks?” Minna didn’t know why, but she suddenly had a vicious urge for him to say it: she was dead, she was obviously dead. “You don’t really think she’s still alive, do you?”
He didn’t answer, and he didn’t look at her, either. There was a long moment of silence. “I remember your dad, you know,” he said abruptly. “What’d he do again? Paper, right?”
“Cardboard, mostly,” she said. “Cardstock, cereal boxes, things like that. But he sold the company ages ago.”
“He was a nice guy,” Danny said.
“He was an asshole,” Minna said.
He acted as if he hadn’t heard her. “I remember sophomore year we were all hanging out in the living room. Your parents were upstairs. And we were being so careful to hide our beers . . . O’Malley was putting the empties in the trunk of his car. Then your dad came down and we freaked. We thought he was going to be mad. But he poured out some scotch and gave us all a try.” He laughed again. “He just wanted to be part of the fun.”
“He wanted to show off his scotch,” Minna said. Everything she saw, everything she was turning over was trash. They would need more bags. Danny was moving too slowly.
“I thought it was nice. He let us sleep over. Like, fifteen kids in the living room. I remember the Miller twins didn’t want to crash, so he drove them home. It was probably two in the morning and freezing cold. Remember that?”
“No,” Minna answered honestly. She tried to picture her dad starting up the car, breath condensing, wearing his old down jacket over his striped pajamas, maybe an old pair of waders he’d grabbed before starting out the door. Breaking off ice from the windshield in the middle of the night, hands chapped, the wind blowing hard pellets of snow over the yard. So he could drive her friends home. She didn’t like to think about it; it made her feel she had missed something critical, something elemental, about him.
“I remember how he showed up at my mom’s house every day for, like, two weeks after your parents split and you were crashing with us most of the time. You wouldn’t talk to him. But he kept showing up.”
She wished she could tell him to shut up. Her hands were shaking.
“And how proud he was at graduation. He must have taken a million pictures. Look for the most beautiful girl in the room, and that’s my daughter.”
She didn’t remember any of it. She felt a sudden wrench of grief. She realized, horrifyingly, she was on the verge of tears.
“Do you think—” Her voice broke a little and she swallowed. “Do you think some people aren’t meant to be happy?” She didn’t even know what she was going to ask before the words were spoken.
Danny shuffled a little closer. They were still squatting, both of them, among the drift of ashes. It would have been funny if it didn’t feel so awful.
“Hey,” he said. “Hey. Look at me.” She managed to. His eyes were nice and brown and unremarkable, like the rest of him—one hundred percent normal. He might be the only normal person she knew.
“You’re going to be happy, Minniemouse,” he said, his old nickname for her; then he put one hand on her cheek and brushed away the dampness with his thumb, which was calloused and comfortable feeling.
Suddenly she could imagine it, and she knew that this was the answer; and she was kissing him, hard, pushing her tongue onto his, trying to get deeper, to push into him, to find the softness of that big black space where she could disappear.
“Wait,” he said, pulling away, gasping a little.
“No.” She grabbed his face, straddled him, pushed her breasts against him. Down, she wanted to go down, into a place of quiet and breathlessness and heartbeats, into a place where she was alone and at peace.
“Wait. Wait.” This time he put both hands on her shoulders and pushed her backward. He wiped his mouth with his hand, like she was contaminated, and Minna saw pity in his eyes and felt suddenly cold. “Stop.”
“What’s the matter with you?” Her voice sounded like a stranger’s, or like a voice heard from far away: small, strangled. “Are you gay or something?”
“I’m married, Minna.” He was still looking at her in that pitying way, like she was a child and he was breaking the news about a dead kitten.
“You said you were separated.”
“Minna . . . ” He sighed and rubbed his forehead, where he was going bald. “That’s not how things work.”
She stood up and felt the floor seesaw underneath her. She wanted to crush him, to humiliate him, to let him know how little she cared about him. She wanted to reach inside him and find what was soft and twist, and twist. “It’s okay. Everyone thought you were gay in high school, too.”
Something flickered in his eyes. Anger. Minna felt triumphant.
But instead of yelling, he simply stood up. “See you later, Minna,” he said, in a tired voice, and made for the stairs.
“That’s why I fucked Peter Contadino,” she burst out. She wasn’t thinking straight. It was like being drunk, like falling into a long tunnel of unconsciousness. “At prom. Because you wouldn’t. Because everyone said you were gay.”
He paused at the top of the stairs. His spine went rigid. Now he would turn around. Now he would come back, yell at her, look at her.
But he didn’t. He didn’t say anything at all. Minna’s whole world teetered on the edge of a long second. Then Danny continued downstairs, leaving Minna alone.