Noah scoffs quietly, in a way that makes her think of his father, then lowers his eyes again. “All I mean is that it’s not like it’s helping her, living here.”
Rosalie feels the floor spin beneath her feet. She has a momentary flash of the school board meeting, feels that whirlpool wanting to tug her under. She lifts her chin, breathes in.
“Why did you lie?” she asks firmly.
“I told you, she’s making it up. Why would you believe her and not me?”
Rosalie does not answer. All at once, she wishes that Nayana had never come. She wishes she had never volunteered her home to any stranger.
“What difference does it make, anyway?” Noah says. “It might as well be true.”
“What might as well be true?”
“You know, about my birth father.” Noah’s voice lowers, trembles. “He’s never here anyway. It might as well have been him.”
“Pardon me?”
Noah is silent, holding the jar to his eye.
“What did you say?”
Noah shrugs, and his mouth squeezes to the size of a button.
Rosalie stands dumbly in the doorway for another second, a wax mold of a mother. Then, as if enough applied heat has melted her joints, she moves swiftly. In one fluent gesture, she takes the jar from her son’s hand and catapults it to the wall. She is surprised by the momentum. The thick glass cracks cleanly on impact and shatters upon the hardwood floor, radiating shards onto the rug where Noah sits. His hand is still aloft, cupping air, and he raises his eyes to his mother in pale alarm.
The floor whirls as she turns and goes back through the door, closes it behind her and makes the latch snap shut.
When Michael comes home from the hospital, Rosalie sits mutely beside him as he watches the news. He leans back into the couch cushions and assumes a pose of relaxation, of a neuro-surgeon having met the demands of his day. She will never know what his eyes witness within hospital walls, what scans of clotted lobes they examine, what eddies of blighted tissue. She does not presume to fathom any of it, has learned not to ask. Tonight, he has disrobed to a black T-shirt. Sitting beside him, the spinning feeling, which had subsided during dinner, returns. There is something disruptive about his presence, as if he were a dark magnet with alternating charges, first attracting, then repelling.
Michael turns his head and looks at her. She wants to speak, to force the moment into normalcy, but her larynx is constricted. She should, she knows, tell him about their son’s transgression, but there is something in the way he looks at her, something blunt in his eyes that muffles her. She scrambles to rationalize this. There are, of course, many things that she does not talk with Michael about, things too complicated to discuss in the short time they have together, things not worth unloading, not worth confusing or burdening him with. All she wants to do now is stand up. She just wants to stand from the couch and go somewhere else, into some other room. But she is strangely unable to move.
Sinking into the cushion, captive, she thinks of Thomas Callahan. She hadn’t known him when he was alive, but had seen his photograph and obituary in the newspaper. A kind, competent face. A father of three: a boy and two girls. His face comes to her now, in the colors of life, and she pictures him here on the cushion beside her, an unborn moment. She thinks of the phone call he might have made from his desk in the last clear seconds before the world caved. For a moment she wishes she’d been the one he’d called, the wife who’d heard his warm breath in the mouthpiece. She feels the collapse as if it were happening inside her. She feels a plunging grief for his children. A plunging grief for Noah.
The television news purrs on, and she remains in place beside her husband, pinned in his shadow. The collapse is still happening, always happening. She feels herself shrinking, becoming infinitesimal, a cone of dust. The children are in bed in their rooms, their little hive cells, asleep or awake. Rosalie sits far apart from everything, disintegrating.
She opens her eyes and looks at the television, a car commercial. An American couple achieves the top of a mountain, commanding a vista. She breathes in and breathes out. It is all right to retreat. She will pull back, she will redraw her boundaries. She will find her balance. When she emerges again, she will be refreshed, reenergized. She will be the best Rosalie she can be. The best and only.
AFTERGLOW
HAROLD’S WIFE is up on a stepladder, doing something to the drapes. A pattern of leaves and vines, framing a point-blank view of the sound.
“How strange,” she says, “I’m having such a sense of déjà vu right now.”
“To do with the drapes?”
“Yes, to do with the drapes. And also you saying that. And this right now, too . . .” She turns from her perch on the stepladder and looks with wide eyes at Harold. “Now it’s gone. But it felt so real, like I knew what was going to happen next.”