She often sees her mother sigh at the house, stand in the middle of the great room, a gray, damp dishtowel over her shoulder. She looks for more dishes, but stops and sighs. She looks at the ceiling, rubs the toe of her canvas shoe against a spot on the floor, joggles the loose plate of an outlet set, inexplicably, in the middle of the floor underneath the edge of the Ping-Pong table. Libby is suspicious of her mother, of these lingering looks around the house, of a casual comment about new wallpaper in her room. Their hands go back and forth.
“Mama, you don’t really want to change the wallpaper in my room. It is my new room. My room, no more nursery. I like it like it is.”
The paper is like a fairy tale, each little scene a story, the boy finds the lost girl among the rose bushes in June. They skate together in January. In July the girl and her sister wear bonnets on their way to a picnic, small baskets dangle from their wrists. December there is a puppy in a box with a bow. April there is a storm that is no match for her sturdy umbrella. May there are blue ribbons around a small bouquet set in her lap as she reads her lessons. March there is a muff around chilly hands. This is a story that continues, she is still learning it, the months stretch on for years, above her porch door, the chimney, the bit between the light switch and servant bell that no longer works. Like a doorbell in her room. Funny that there was a bell and it is gone. She wonders what it sounded like, big and tolling, a church bell, or the buzz like the doorbell at her nana’s apartment in the city. She wonders if the bell is buried in the meadow like an arrowhead. A relic, a treasure.
“The paper is stained,” her mother says.
Her little hands are growing cold, but she washes them, agitating the little creatures.
“The paper is old and faded,” her mother continues. “Let’s paint it, simple and white.”
This makes Libby cry. Simple, cover the stories of years with a great white storm? Blot it all out, bury it like a bell in the yard?
“No. No,” she says.
Her mother sits back. “It is just wallpaper.”
The tears come fast, Libby stands quick, no stages, just up. Her little hands bleeding cold water into her pant legs, her shirtsleeves.
“I love it, though,” she cries. “I don’t want it to change.”
And it is this word that she holds on to. Change. It is this word that makes the tears come faster, the breath hiccup in her chest, her hair sticking to her face, her hands too wet and cold to pull the strands away.
“We’re painting all the rooms,” says her mother. “Ours is already done.”
“Not mine. Not mine.”
The word rings in the air around them. She is cold now, wet arms, no sweater. She is having trouble breathing, so much crying. No more change. Her father has been away most weekends this summer. He even has started traveling for work, gone for a week here or there. She sees him less, hears her mother’s sighs more. This house is the place that is the same. Not the new school that she had to start this past year, where kids left her low and heavy alone on the seesaw. No, she would put her little six-year-old foot down. Wallpaper is where she draws her unsteady line. Wallpaper is a thing that can stay the same. Wallpaper in her big-girl room, her alone-without-her-sister room (though she is right next door, so no need to be scared in the night). Wallpaper. The calendar of a fairy tale.
“Fine.” Her mother wraps her arms around herself, rubs her shoulders with her own wet hands. Fine. Wallpaper.
Her mother does not have the energy to fight this littlest of battles, with this tiny general aflame at her feet. Fine. One room can remain stained and veined and peeling at the edges. It’s one less room to do. She has already started on the kitchen, painting the floor a bright yellow. Then the back hall and bathroom, periwinkle. The new color brightens things, but still there are things that can’t be fixed. The hair was painted into the bathroom floor, a small twisted J of a hair. Something that she looks at each time she uses the room. Something she can’t get away from. Whose is it? It is thick and wiry, not the downy plume that her two older children have started to bear, much to her dismay. Is it mine? His? Someone else’s? This is not a question she wants painted into her bathroom floor, to ask herself before each meal, after her morning cup of coffee, between swims with a wet, sticky bathing suit drawn around her ankles. This is not a question she wants her son, who uses that bathroom most, to ask as he brushes his teeth, as he bathes, as he fills the compound bucket in the tub to aid in flushing because the chain tank stopped working last week. This uneasiness is not something she wants her children exposed to. But clearly, it is upon them too, a ringing suspicion that things are changing.
Let her have her wallpaper. That is one thing I can protect, one thing I can preserve. The rest I must fortify against, she thinks. For each time he leaves she pulls herself further away. Soon he will come home to an ocean in the rug room, a cold expanse across which she will be under a dim lamp with a dog-eared book. She will grow that ocean. If he must be in a boat, she will give him a great empty plane to sail through.
She hustles Libby sniffling up the gangway, the pier light a lonely bulb in a cage. She will leave that on. She still wants him to cross that ocean. To come home to her.
SIXTEEN
LIBBY
July 8
Libby noticed almost immediately. But she wasn’t able to approach Danny for some time. Not until she kneeled in the flower bed by the front porch pulling up all violets that threatened to suffocate the peonies. Danny sat in a chair, his feet up. After each sip his beer bottle left a growing wet ring on the arm of his chair.
His eyes were dark, and he had lost weight since she’d seen him at Easter. It wasn’t anything specific, but she saw the signs. When their father returned the summer she was ten, after he had left without saying good-bye, after weeks away sailing, he looked like this. Almost. He was gray and dragged. But there was a relief to him too—like a runner at the end of a marathon, or a passenger saved from some North Sea ferry disaster—the look of a survivor. The summer she was ten, she was still so young, still living in the tiniest details of things. She had noticed the scars on her father’s wrists that he kept covered, one under a tight watchband and the other tucked beneath a long cuff. One sleeve rolled up, the other always down. But still pink ends crept from beneath the leather band, peeked out from the keyhole above the buttoned cuff. She knew what this meant. Had seen it in TV movies. The scars were the sign of something wrong that, thankfully, was past, moved beyond, healed over. Almost immediately she had put the sight of those scars away in some deep strange little drawer inside herself. It wasn’t that she forgot it but that she chose never to think of it again. So that it became as far away from her as the moon, deep inside her internal universe.
Looking at Danny, the drawer had sprung open. With Danny there were no visible scars. She knew if it hadn’t happened already, it was in the works. He was still running his race. He was still treading in those icy waters.
“Why don’t you stay up here with me for a while, Dan?” she suggested. “You don’t need to be anywhere, right?”
“Where would I need to be?” He said this drawn and slow, like it tired him to even think of obligations, of places or plans.