“Would you make it up?” he said. “Would you mind?”
He slipped around me and into the apartment, dragging Suzie by her leash. He sat at my little table and began to roll out a joint, the pot spilling to the floor by the chair legs. His hair was wild and gray around his ears. He wore a camel overcoat with soiled elbows that smelled of the cigarettes I’d seen him smoke furtively, like a teenager, at his cracked window.
“Maybe you shouldn’t smoke that in here,” I said.
“The tea?” he said. He reached over, cracked the window, and lit his joint anyway. His eyes were wide and dark, and I got the impression he was simply looking for someone to tend to him. In his youth he might have been the Heathcliff type—black eyes and hair, a rogue.
I put the water on the burner and stood over him in my coat.
“Sit down,” he said, taking a long drag. “Tell me about yourself.”
Suzie lay flat out with her noble head in her paws. I’d grown to accept that she would keep clear of me, and she no longer frightened me. Geoff held the joint toward me, sodden from his lips, and I hesitated, but only for a moment. I sat at the little table and he began rambling on, telling me about London and the chest of drawers he was making in his little shop on Ithaca Street, and how the woman who had ordered the chest was a ruthless bitch with a big house on the lake. Then he stopped and gave me a long look.
“Your hair is pretty in this light,” he said.
I was flattered, even if he was nearly my father’s age, and even if it felt slightly unsettling to be the object of his attention. I passed him the joint, the room sunny and filled with a languor that followed me to campus, late for class.
*
MY MOTHER SENT checks on a bimonthly basis and phoned regularly, ready with details of Leanne’s and Sarah’s perfect lives. Once in a while I’d get a call from one of them, and I’d hear the real story—arguments over a husband’s inattentiveness, a car accident after too much wine at a luncheon. I continued to send letters to Del care of the Ashley Manor facility. I’d gotten used to this method of navigating the distance between us. Like the woman at the porch party, I felt guilty, and I had been prevented from living my life by my guilt, but the more I heard about Del’s life away from me at the Manor, the less guilty I felt. Ashley Manor was a place from which she was free to come and go on a daily basis. It was also a structured environment that offered meals and medication supervision—a place she might graduate from once she felt more in control. She sounded happy in her letters and full of her usual plans to find an apartment on her own, to start classes at the University of Connecticut—all things she’d talked about before but that now seemed imminent.
I received a letter from her one day in September telling me about her new boyfriend, Rory. I was sometimes envious of her boyfriends—though she’d cycle through them so quickly, it was hard to keep track, and sometimes I wondered if, like me, she’d invented most of them. Rory, she claimed, was different. I think he is going to pop the question, she wrote. Mother is all sorts of upset, and thinks I’m crazy for considering it. But who doesn’t want a little house and a hubby and a garden full of vegetables and Peter Rabbit peering out of the shrubbery, and maybe a cat sleeping on a rug by the hearth.
Unlike my mother, I didn’t entertain the possibility of any of this. The Peter Rabbit reference meant she wasn’t really considering it, and she found it all outlandish. Then I received another letter, two weeks later, in October. The leaves of the elm had brightened and had begun to litter the sidewalk and the porch. I’d find the leaves tracked into the vestibule, and sometimes Geoff would bring one, stuck to his shoe, all the way up the stairs. It had gotten cold; the grass, the windows, and the windshields of cars were sometimes stamped with frost. I was leery of winter, its portent like a trap about to snap shut around us. Del’s letter arrived on a day the temperature dipped to thirty degrees. Rory and I are running off together, she wrote. We’re going to get married in Maine, where he has a cabin, and a friend who lives on a commune who is a religious figure in some church or other. I thought apprehensively of the Theosophists who’d penned my great-grandfather’s manuals. Del detailed the dress she was going to wear, peasant style, with smocking and wide sleeves, and the bouquet of mums she would carry—a fall bride, she said.