“Oh my God,” he says, burying his face in his hands, “this is fucked. This is so fucked.”
She looks to her daughter for some kind of support, but all Alice does is finish her glass of wine. Donna crosses to the sink, where two pounds of boiled potatoes steam in a colander. After fetching a pot and a carton of cream, she starts mashing them. Anything to distract herself, she thinks, anything to keep her from looking at Paul.
“You did this because you hated him,” he says. His ribs heave and expand with each breath.
She doesn’t say anything. Instead, she runs cool water over a bunch of carrots and watches it splash against the counter, making a mess. She wonders if her son can tell that her pulse has quickened, if he can hear it thumping against her temples. She wants, desperately, to tell him the truth. She wants to explain how, once the pain of Bill’s death had subsided, the only thing she could focus on was getting rid of him and the terrible lies he left in his wake. She wants to explain that her reason was him, was Paul; that after surviving her second disaster of a marriage, all that she had left was what actually mattered: her children. And she almost does—she almost tells him all this. After pummeling the mashed potatoes to a milky consistency, she almost lays everything bare, and saves herself the horror of falling on her sword. Her mouth opens, and she has it all there, stored in the base of her lungs. But then, suddenly, she stops. She doesn’t. Her own devastation has been enough for one lifetime, she figures; there’s only so much disappointment one family can be expected to take.
She says, instead, “Your father wasn’t the man I thought he was, and we needed a change.”
A half-finished glass of water sits next to the stove, and Paul hurls it against the wall.
Alice stands up, steadies herself, and leaves the room.
“Bullshit,” Paul says. “You’re embarrassed by him. That’s why you did it.”
Donna stirs an extra tablespoon of butter into the potatoes and watches it melt.
“You always thought you downgraded when you married Dad,” Paul says. “Just because he wasn’t some rich French asshole.”
Reaching for a knife to chop the carrots, she cuts her finger.
“You’re right,” she says, and closes her eyes.
“I knew it. You married Dad so you’d have someone to pay the bills, and now that he’s gone you can go back to pretending you’re special. Well, guess what, Mom, Dad was special to me. And now you’re … what? You’re trying to erase him from our goddamned lives.”
She wraps a paper towel around the cut.
“He should be erased. I was young and desperate. It was a mistake to marry him, and an even bigger mistake to waste thirty years of my life with him.”
Her finger throbs, and she feels her anger pulse with it. Finally, she bursts. She stares at Paul and says, “There, are you happy now?”
Ten minutes later, her son is gone.
June 10: Present
She presses the phone to her ear. “Paul?”
Her throat still burns from the pot, and she coughs.
She says, “Is that you?”
“Who the hell else would it be?”
Her mind gets wrapped up in the question; she’s thinking through a screen.
“How are you, sweetheart?”
“I just assaulted my boss and lost my job.”
“That sounds lovely.”
She realizes immediately that was the wrong response, and she should probably correct herself, but she doesn’t—she’s just so happy to hear his voice again.
“If you’re going to be a bitch, I’ll just hang up.”
Donna stands up and knocks her knee against the coffee table. Pain radiates up her thigh.
“Ow, shit,” she says. “No, honey, wait. Please don’t hang up. I’m so sorry about your job. It’s just…” She searches for the words. They’re there somewhere, she knows, hiding behind a wall of smoke. “It’s just so good to talk again.”
“I know why you’ve been calling.” He’s curt, unfriendly, transactional. It’s not good to hear him again, she decides. He’s acting like an asshole.
“You do?”
“Eloise’s wedding.”
She reaches down and rubs her knee. “Well, that’s one reason. But also it’s been two and a half years since—”
“I’ll go, all right? So you can stop calling from random Indiana numbers to beg me. Because I’m fucking going.”
PART TWO
Everybody has a heart.
Except some people.
—BETTE DAVIS, All About Eve
Mark
June 11–July 1
Paul’s a wreck. Mark looks on from the kitchen as, in the living room, Paul slides farther down on the couch and rubs his face, panicked. He taps his forehead before kicking his feet up, the muddy heels of his loafers slamming down on the coffee table. Or, specifically, on top of the first edition of Irving Penn’s Moments Preserved that Mark had unexpectedly (and ecstatically) stumbled upon last year at Cappelens Forslag in Oslo. He’d bought that book with the money he was given when he won the Gunnar Myrdal award for the paper that put him on the map at Penn: a study of risk distribution and reindeer herding among Swedish Sami populations, with a particular focus on the two winter cycles of that peoples’ eight-season calendar: Tjakttjadálvvie and Dálvvie (the Season of the Journey and the Season of Caring, respectively). In fact, now that he’s remembering, he paid nearly a thousand dollars for that book (which was roughly half the price of the coffee table, which he’d also bought), and now he watches as dirt and grime and guilt and whatever else Paul’s tracked home from Main Line Philadelphia smears across its glossy jacket.
He opens his mouth to say something, but he stops himself. Generations of observation and experience have taught the Sami that the risks of startling a reindeer when it’s confused or straying from the herd far outweigh the rewards of correction; a startled reindeer will often stumble or fall while fleeing along high, steep slopes, resulting in death or injury.
“There was blood everywhere,” Paul says. “Like, everywhere. I guess I hit him pretty square-on, because I swear he was bleeding out of his eyes.”
Mark says, “Can I get you anything?”
“A whiskey, I guess.”
He wrestles two ice cubes from a tray and pours some Knob Creek into a tumbler. Typically he’d keep it to two fingers—Paul gets irritating and needy when he’s drunk—but given tonight’s circumstances, he fills the glass a little more than halfway.
“Here you go.”
“Thanks.” Paul takes a long sip and sinks farther into the couch. “I had to pinch his nose and help him hold his head back while we waited for the ambulance.”
“I still don’t see why an ambulance was necessary.”
“Too many people at the clinic are terrified of blood. Germs, you know? Didn’t stop them from pressing their faces against the window and gawking as Goulding ripped me a new one, though.” Another long sip. “In any event, it was humiliating.”
“And then you got fired.”