So he sleeps on the couch and Lena and I take the bedroom. He wakes us up by coming in to open his closet; Solly’s a sluggish awakener and every morning he stands there tousled and half-asleep, swaying faintly and staring at his row of shirts on their hangers. The shirt indecision paralyzes him.
I promised we wouldn’t stay for long, this is a quick visit, but he waved away that promise when we arrived and said we could stay forever, if we wanted to. Lena nodded solemnly.
“Forever, Uncle Solly,” she agreed.
Forever means two weeks. I feel safe in this prewar ziggurat with its thick walls and overheated air. I don’t love the city at this time of year—the way white snow turns to gray slush, how the freeze of the sidewalk reaches right through your boot soles. But it’s good to see Solly, and I need a break before we go back to Maine.
Whenever I call Will he brings up his worry about Ned, his fear that Ned’s going to have me hurt or killed. It makes the conversations strained. I was so pleased by his quiet bearing when I first met him, his calmness that had an almost mystical quality. But now that quality is gone, its glassy surface has been broken and doesn’t seem to be smoothing out again. He’s still soft-spoken and kind, but there’s wariness when he talks to me. I know he feels he should be here—whether he wants to or not, he believes he should be near enough to guard me, that it’s somehow his responsibility, which is preposterous.
Conspiracy theories are a mostly male hysteria, it seems to me. That style of paranoia isn’t my own—it has a self-importance I don’t relate to. Even now, when I know for a fact I’ve been conspired against, it’s hard for me to believe in conspiracies.
Ned acted against me not because of who I am but because of who he is—I’m just the one he happened to marry. And the kidnapping was only a conspiracy in that he hired some people and used others.
Without Will in front of me, though, the attraction is more abstract. Was it only a wishful idea? It was my idea, I know that, I asked him out and brought him in—but the newness of knowing him and Don makes them feel less like fixtures in my life and more like bystanders. Only the Lindas, with their earthiness, seem concrete and reliable.
Lena and I need relief from the closeness of the small apartment, so we do her lessons in a coffee shop. After the morning rush has subsided the place is colonized by mothers and their goggle-eyed toddlers, who stagger around banging plastic toys on the backs of chairs and gumming them; the women chatter to each other, brooding on nests of scarves and coats. Lena takes the roaming toddlers under her wing, holding their hands and showing them colorful objects. She’s popular with the mothers for this.
Most days when Solly gets home from work the two of them go out to a nearby playground; she doesn’t mind the creaking freeze of the swings, the burn of the icy slide. Sometimes I walk out of the lobby with them, wave goodbye as they cross eastward to the park and then veer west myself. I walk to the Hudson River, past a bagel shop, bodegas, some kind of pretentious cigar lounge, and an opaque window whose neon sign reads HYPNOSIS. QUIT SMOKING LOSE WEIGHT MANAGE GRIEF.
YESTERDAY IT WAS the Lindas first on Skype, then Kay. When Lena and Kay had finished singing together, a tuneless song about a mermaid, she ran off to build a LEGO castle and I slid into Solly’s desk chair in her place.
I was dismayed at how Kay looked. She had the same hollow-eyed face she’d had when she first arrived at the motel—ghostly pale. She and Navid hadn’t reconciled; after her meeting with the linguistics scholar Navid had spun off, his behavior erratic. He said he couldn’t trust her again because she had concealed too much.
But we don’t know how much we know, she said unsteadily, or we don’t know how little other people know. None of us ever possess this knowledge. We can’t know what others are thinking.
“It’s like a kind of instinct we go on, right? After we get reassured we’re not crazy. You know what Don told me?” she asked.
It was hard to hear her so I raised the volume on the laptop’s speakers.
“He told me there are crowds of people who never get to that point, they never cross that barrier. People who hear and never stop thinking they’re just insane, spend their whole lives on Thorazine or getting ECT. Living their lives all alone. And sad. We’re just this small fraction of people who, basically, refused to believe in our insanity.”
She hadn’t meant to keep secrets, she just hadn’t talked enough, she guessed. And now Navid was gone, flown back to Los Angeles. If all this was, he’d said, was some kind of off-brand encounter group, he might as well bite the bullet and do the real twelve steps. And when it came to AA, he had said, or NA or GA or CA, L.A. was the nation’s capital.
“I’m sorry,” I said, watching her cock her head to one side in the jittery connection. I had the fleeting illusion that she was preparing to keel over sideways in slow motion.
But she didn’t say anything, just gazed at me, so I kept on talking.
“I don’t think you were holding out on us, but I still want to know everything you know.”