She heard Nora’s voice downstairs, low and unintelligible, and a crowing sound from Sammy. A moment later there was a scratching at her door. She opened her door and Clarence slipped in. “I know, sweetie,” Abby said. “It’s very noisy down there.” He circled on the rug a few times and then lay down. Good old Clarence. Brenda. Whoever. Abby did know this was Brenda if she bothered to stop and think about it.
“It’s like when you’re drifting off to sleep and a gear sort of slips in your head,” she would tell Dr. Wiss. “Have you ever had that happen? You’re having this very clear thought, but then all at once you’re on this totally other illogical, unconnected thought and you can’t trace it back to the first one. It’s just tiredness, I imagine. I mean, once about five or ten years ago—oh, long before I was old—I had to drive home alone from the beach late at night to keep an appointment the next morning, and I suddenly found myself in this very scary neighborhood in Washington, D.C. And I could swear I’d managed to do it without crossing the Bay Bridge! I don’t know how I did it. To this day I don’t know. I was tired, was all. That was all it was.”
Or last December, when the McCarthys had invited her and Red to a Christmas concert along with a bunch of their other friends, and she had been so chatty and confiding with the man who happened to be seated next to her but then discovered, by and by, that he was a total stranger, had nothing to do with the McCarthys and no doubt thought she was a lunatic. Just a skip in the record, that was. You can see how it might happen.
“And time,” she would tell Dr. Wiss. “Well, you know about time. How slow it is when you’re little and how it speeds up faster and faster once you’re grown. Well, now it’s just a blur. I can’t keep track of it anymore! But it’s like time is sort of … balanced. We’re young for such a small fraction of our lives, and yet our youth seems to stretch on forever. Then we’re old for years and years, but time flies by fastest then. So it all comes out equal in the end, don’t you see.”
She heard Nora climbing the stairs. She heard her say, “No, silly-billy. Cookies are for dessert.” Her footsteps proceeded at a stately pace toward the boys’ room, followed by Sammy’s little sneakers.
Was there something wrong with Abby, that she didn’t fall all over herself to spend every waking minute with her grandchildren? She did love them, after all. She loved them so much that she felt a kind of hollowness on the inner surface of her arms whenever she looked at them—an ache of longing to pull them close and hold them tight against her. The three little boys were such a clumped-together tangle, always referred to as a single unit, but Abby knew how different each was from the next. Petey was the worrier, bossing his brothers around not out of meanness but from a protective, herding instinct; Tommy had his father’s sunny nature and his peacemaking skills; and Sammy was her baby, still smelling of orange juice and urine, still happy to cuddle up and let her read to him. And then the older ones: Susan so serious and dear and well-behaved—was she all right?—and Deb who was Abby herself at that age, a wiry knot of inquisitiveness, and poor clumsy, effortful Alexander who could wrench her heart, and finally Elise who was just so different from Abby, so completely other, that Abby felt privileged to be granted this close-up view of her.
But it was easier, somehow, to reflect on them all from a distance than to be struggling for room in their midst.
The upstairs hall was quiet again. Abby turned her doorknob by degrees, opened the door a bare minimum, and slipped out. The dog shoved the door wider open with his nose and plodded after her, snuffling noisily and causing Abby to wince and glance toward the boys’ room.
Down the stairs to the front door she went, and out onto the porch. Then she stopped short, struck by an idea. She reached back into the house for the leash that hung on a hook just inside. Clarence made a glad moaning sound and shambled onto the porch behind her, while somewhere in the depths of the house Heidi gave a yelp of envy. Eat your heart out, Heidi. Abby was not a fan of overexcitable dogs.
She paused on the flagstone walk to clip the leash to Clarence’s collar. This was the old-fashioned, short kind of leash, not the permissive retractable kind that people nowadays favored. Strictly speaking, Clarence didn’t need a leash; he was so slow and stodgy and mindlessly obedient. But he did have a willful streak when it came to very small dogs. They seemed to bring out all the old feistiness of his puppy days. He never could resist pouncing on a toy terrier.
“We’re not going far,” Abby told him. “Don’t get your hopes up.” From the stiff-jointed way he moved, she suspected he wasn’t up to more than a block or two in any case.