Helen leads Avis to the master bedroom, where she closes the curtains and puts on the television. The girl sits on the bed in the draping Block Island shirt, a thumb in her mouth.
Helen searches the channels for a suitable program. She skips over the animated shows with their exaggerated colors and frenetic blinking. Whatever has become of the educational shows of Rufus’s youth, she doesn’t know. Everything seems frivolous now, designed to stimulate quickly and cheaply, to dazzle the eye and ear. Helen finally stops at a nature show about meerkats, a wholesome, slow-moving program that she herself finds tremendously calming. She appreciates the earnest faces of the animals, their clean, careful manner, the hushed, expert voice of the female narrator. Avis seems similarly transfixed, watching a mother meerkat shoo a snake out of the family den. A wordless emotion rises in Helen’s heart. While the pack forages for food, one animal takes sentry duty, standing erect on its hind legs, exposing itself for the good of the group. Gene does not understand her fondness for this show. He accuses her of forcing human values onto nut-brained rodents. Perhaps this is true. But, she thinks, it is hard to ignore the light in their liquid eyes that suggests something more, an inner province of emotion. It seems to her that they really do mourn their young, that a mother really does wither when a predator enters the burrow in her absence.
Of course, Helen is unable to watch without thinking of Rufus. When he visits, when Helen can persuade him to drive the twenty minutes home, he greets her with the old teenage grimace. He rails against the changes in town, the renovated homes, the refurbished street signs, the expensive new high school building. The town was always bad, he grumbles, but has only grown worse. Everything has been scoured and polished to a cold, slick finish. The few warm shadows that used to exist, the only furrows where authenticity could hope to take refuge—the weedy alcove behind the high school science wing, the concrete-benched town plaza—sacred places to smoke and skateboard—have been expunged. Helen rankles at the moral superiority in his voice. She feels compelled to defend the town, insist that it is a good place to raise children. He does not respond to this, but looks away from her, a cloudy film over his eyes.
At such moments she is overtaken by a nebulous sense of regret. She is revisited primarily, curiously, by contrition for having discouraged his interest years ago in the professor-neighbors’ daughter. At the time, Helen had considered the girl unfeminine and coarse-featured, of mediocre breeding. Now, she would be delighted, overjoyed—she would give almost anything—to see him with a woman like that.
She and Avis watch television on the bed until the sun goes down. At the start of a show about whales, Avis begins to wiggle and whine. Helen realizes she has eaten nothing more than an apple since noon.
“Would you like to help me cook dinner? What should we make?” Helen asks, hearing the nervous edge in her voice. She hasn’t thought this far, hasn’t considered dinner. She hasn’t considered Gene’s return from work.
Hastily, she helps Avis change back into her own clothing. Downstairs, they look in the kitchen cupboard together. Avis selects an ancient box of wagon wheel pasta, and Helen finds ingredients for brown gravy. She allows herself a glance at the house next door, sees the windows lit yellow. There is a falling feeling inside her, a kind of accelerating confusion, that she attributes to hunger.
When Gene comes in the door, Helen flashes a smile. She stirs the gravy with one hand, gesturing with the other to the girl standing stone-faced beside her.
“This is Avis from next door,” she says brightly. “Her mother asked us to watch her tonight. Just a little favor.”
Gene pauses in midstep, hugging a paper grocery bag. “What next door?”
“That house.” Helen gestures briskly to the side. “We’re making pasta for dinner. Right, honey?”
Avis stares dolefully at Gene, who comes in and puts the grocery bag into the refrigerator, minus one bottle. He loosens the cap with a claw-shaped toggle and takes a drink.
“What’s this now? We’re babysitting?”
“Just for tonight.” Helen looks at Avis. “We’ve been having a lot of fun, right?”
Gene grumbles and retreats to the den. A moment later, Helen hears the sound of the television, rough male voices and gunshots.
When Helen turns around again, she sees that Avis has climbed onto a chair and is looking out the window toward her house. Helen comes up beside her, for a moment expecting to see police cars next door, and reaches to unhook the curtains.
“Come, honey, let’s make the gravy together.”
“Where’s my mommy?”
Helen puts a hand to Avis’s shoulder, feels the warmth of skin beneath the shirt. The girl flinches, pulls away.