“Throw when I tell you to this time,” the doctor says. “Let’s try to minimize the chances of this being yet another failure.”
He thinks of Wendy standing in the trash can, her ankles sinking into wet webs of spaghetti and linguini. He thinks of her fleshy arms trembling as he cajoled her into hugging the thing she detests the most. Or, better yet, he thinks of Rick Erwing. He thinks of how his fingers must ache from gripping the steering wheel so hard; he thinks of the synthetic pine smell leaching out from the felt tree that dangles from the rearview mirror. He thinks of limbs bouncing off the windshield, of heads lodged between tires.
The doctor says, “All right, fairy, let’s see what you’ve got.”
He thinks of his own awful thoughts, launched like naked plastic bodies assaulting his consciousness.
“NOW!”
Paul spins and throws the baby as hard as he can, squarely and exquisitely at Goulding’s face.
Donna
June 10: Present
The joint’s end burns uneven and ragged, like loose cloth hanging from a Molotov cocktail. Donna squints at the embers, willing them into focus as she slowly rotates it in a lazy circle. For the past hour and a half she’s been mindlessly reading an old copy of Architectural Digest, and now ash and charred weed scatter across the foyers and bedrooms printed on the magazine’s pages. She blinks once, twice, savoring the cosmic and heartbreaking way the earth pauses each time she closes her eyes. An ember lands between her first two fingers, and she watches it burn a speck of skin for a few seconds before the pain registers. How many house fires start with a scene like this, she wonders. A divorcée-cum-widow, wearing a ratty pair of jeans and one of her daughter’s old sweatshirts, sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, toking on pot. Toking. Do people say that anymore? She hopes they do—it’s too ridiculous a word to retire.
“I’m toking on a blunt,” she says aloud, and laughs. Toking. How delicious.
She cranes her neck around to look at the empty couch behind her. Since she took her first hit off the joint she’s had the very real sense that someone’s been sitting there, listening to her and her thoughts. So much so that when she says something clever—something like “I’m toking a blunt”—she instantly turns to see if her faceless guest is enjoying her wit as much as she is. But then—no. She’s alone. Just her, and her magazines, and her glass of Shiraz, and her joint. Her joint on which she’s toking.
She laughs again, and takes another hit. The smoke curls around her insides and she feels that marvelous burn in her lungs and, finally, she exhales a shape-shifting cloud. But something strange happens as her lungs empty: deep within the kangaroo-ish pocket of Alice’s old sweatshirt, she feels a faint vibration. At first Donna’s sure she’s hallucinating; her faceless friend from the couch, the one who’s wily enough to disappear every time she turns around, is pulling a fast one on her. But then, she feels it again: a vibration just above her hipbone. With the hand that’s not holding the joint, she digs into the pocket until her fingers graze something solid: her new cell phone. She holds it tightly, and a lazy eternity passes, but then, then—yes, she’s sure of it—it buzzes again.
“Fuck.”
She yanks it out into the open air and sees Paul’s number blinking on its screen.
November 22, 2012
Swinging the oven door open, Donna leans over to peer inside. Heat sears her cheeks; she blinks away the dryness. Using a small brush, she starts basting the turkey, painting strips of melted butter onto its puckered skin. Fat oozes and spits in the pan, and she makes a face. She hates turkey. Stuffing it, cooking it, eating it. Washing down its dusty aftertaste with gulps of sauvignon blanc. If she had her way, she’d serve a filet mignon for Thanksgiving. Pair it with some asparagus in a hollandaise sauce, instead of the mishmash of croutons and apples and giblets that passes as stuffing in America. But then—her son had been insistent. It was the first holiday they were celebrating since Bill’s death, and so help them God, they were going to have turkey. “He loved it,” Paul had said the week earlier, when he called from New York to give Donna his flight information. “The dark meat especially.”
Donna tries to remember if this is true, and she can’t. It seems to her like one of those memories that she’s become all too familiar with during the past several months—an inflated recollection exaggerated after the fact to give a life more character than it may have actually had. Still, she hadn’t wanted to upset Paul, particularly now, when he seems especially prone to getting upset. So, on the way home from the airport, they’d gone to the store. Had picked out a bird. And then, while Paul squirreled himself away in his old room upstairs, she’d buried herself in every cookbook she owned, trying to find the most painless way to prepare the damned thing.
“Alice?”
Her daughter’s lying down in the living room; Donna’s head is still in the oven. It’s questionable whether Alice heard her. Donna takes in a breath of oil and brine, and calls out again:
“ALICE!?”
“You can stop yelling. I’m right here.”
She stands in the kitchen doorway, holding a glass of red wine with two hands. It’s the same glass that appeared a week ago, when Alice first arrived from Los Angeles, and which has remained attached to her (almost anatomically, Donna thinks, the glass melding into skin) as it refills itself with a sort of quiet and autonomous frequency. She wears slippers and black mesh shorts and an old high school track shirt, and draped over the whole mess is the long gray knit cardigan that Donna had bought her for her seventeenth birthday. The same sweater that Alice had proclaimed to loathe before shoving it to the back of her closet.
Alice takes a sip of wine and swaddles herself in the cardigan, pulling it across her shoulders like it’s woolen chain mail.
Donna wipes her hands against her apron. “I didn’t know if you could hear me.”
“Well, I could.”
Donna smiles. She reminds herself again that this is nice. That even though Eloise is spending the holidays in London with Ollie’s family, having at least two of her children home is nice. A blessing, particularly now that she spends so many days in this rambling, falling-apart house, alone. Yes, all right, Paul has warned her that he’ll have to spend much of his time in his room, working on his thesis. And maybe Alice isn’t really Alice—the drugs the doctors prescribed her after she returned from Mexico City have whittled away her personality in ways that Donna is still trying to understand, sharpening some corners while dulling others. Still, though: nice. The warming sound of footsteps as someone other than she moves around upstairs. Coming into the kitchen in the morning to discover, happily, that Paul or Alice has made coffee. For these peculiar comforts, she’s happy to entertain the strange ghosts of her children’s other lives.
Donna hears Paul open and close a door.