“Have what? A terrifying sandwich served by a pregnant teenager named Kimmi? You just did.”
“Once I go back,” she continued, “everything is going to be different. I’m going to do what I should have done and make sure he’s always taken care of. I have to get Paulie and me a place together, build a client list and work from home. I have to keep him safe. Drew is losing his shit—who leaves someone not even two years into the marriage, he said, which, who can blame him—and that was him on the phone. He cries in some messages and swears in others. About every third one there’s some kind of threat.” She spit the words out low and hard, gnawing a tiny crescent of skin from her thumb, and he tugged the digit away from her mouth’s nervous bite, held it between two of his fingers.
“Okay. If you need me to support you in your no-holds-barred Spring Break-a-Thon, so be it. I’ll attach a boozy IV to your arm once we get to the Smoky Mountains. We can act out a commercial for herpes medicine, go white-water rafting and high-five on mountain peaks. But I have to ask you here to be a little bit cautious, and not drive so goddamn fast, and not start believing this is your very last shot at living. If you don’t start being a little more careful with yourself, I’m hailing the first Greyhound back to New York City.”
Claudia had never been known as beautiful. She had always dressed in high, flattering waists and dull gold ear studs, kept her brown hair tied and clean, her life small in the service of others. There, however, in the combination Subway-KFC, she loosened. His teasing coaxed her orthodontically corrected teeth into a smile that curved under her still-wet cheeks, and her hair fell tangled around her face, protesting a lifetime of imprisonment. She closed her eyes and began to nod, as though envisioning the cleaning of many rooms, the stacking and sweeping and mopping and finally, the space around her, gleaming.
HOW LONG HAD he been cross-legged on the stiff cowhide rug by the darkened fireplace? What was Jenny’s intention, sitting up in the wide sun-bleached bed, looking impossibly old? The tattoo on her arm was the same as that in the newspaper photo—a faded black circle that he recognized now as a snake eating its tail—and the line of the freckled jaw was similar to that of the little girl in Brooklyn, but she looked as though her body had been systematically deserted, memory by memory emptying out in single file. He kept searching for evidence of her taking in or releasing air. The room seemed a near-total void of history or evidence or yesterday or tomorrow: the sheets white, pristine in the way of nothing else on the property; for a nightstand, a slab of unpolished tree trunk; the curtainless window. Just beyond her, a doorframe revealed a small, low-ceilinged room, within it a black woodstove and two simple chairs stacked together. The smells of food, of things warmed by time and by bodies, were absent.
Finally, without opening her eyes, she spoke.
“Edith sent you.”
“Well—not—you see—” he answered, although it had been clear this wasn’t a question. The woman, once a child on the steps of the building Thomas had come to need, stopped him before his unorganized mumbling achieved any pattern.
“I’m afraid I can’t help.”
“But your brother—”
She put a palm up with the patience of someone directing the weak and hospitalized.
“That person is named Owen.”
Thomas sensed Jenny’s language was one half-forgotten, its structure uncharted, the pressure of the tongue against the palate to make a sibilant sound uncomfortable.
“I should not need to say that these people you mention are not part of here.
“However,” she continued, “I can and will give you the same option I give others who come to me. You can stay here for a week, and stay quiet. If you still have the same concerns then, you may pose them. But I find”—and here she readjusted the pillow behind her back and put a hand to her jaw—“the questions tend to change.”
—