“Goddamn it,” he mumbles.
Helen stands in the kitchen in her buttoned blouse and skirt, watching her husband’s movements.
“Get your coat,” he tells her.
It is May, of course, and getting a coat makes no sense. Helen does not move.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“Nothing,” she answers.
Her voice is faint, as if coming from a faraway place. She feels strangely weightless, plucked out of time. She struggles to picture her son in a hospital room. With a poor understanding of drugs, of what they might do to a person, all she can imagine is jaundiced skin, chapped lips. She has a vision of the room itself, the speckled gray visitor’s chairs, the glowing green numbers of a heart rate monitor. In her mind, her son lies in a narrow bed, strapped to an IV. He looks at her accusingly through sunken eyes. The eyes of an intruder. She does not, she realizes, want to see any of this.
She continues to stand in place, blocking the little girl in the corner. The thing that Gene has presented her with is too large, like a wall of water rushing toward her. She must be absolved, for the moment, of any responsibility but survival.
When Gene asks, “Are you coming or not?” she shakes her head. No words come.
After he leaves, Helen lowers herself to the chair by the kitchen window. Avis has forgotten her game now, vacated the corner. Helen can only hope that she is still somewhere in the house. She draws back the window curtain, returns it to its hook. The white Toyota is no longer in the driveway next door.
She rises, goes mechanically to the sink, fills the teakettle. While the water is warming, she looks for Avis. The house is utterly quiet, with only the sound of her shoe heels tapping the hardwood floor. She finds the girl in the living room, on her knees, peering into the Victorian dollhouse. Her head is bent sideways, unaware of being watched. It is a perfect picture, a suspended, breathless moment of childhood. Helen stands quietly, guarding it.
There is a sharp knock at the door, a series of hammering raps. The girl looks up and finds Helen in the doorway.
“Hello, Mr. Tanner, Mrs. Tanner,” a voice booms, “Old Cranbury Police.”
The knocking ceases, giving way to an extended pause. Helen stands in place, holding the girl’s gaze. The instinct to answer the door, that forceful inborn decorum, bubbles up in her. There is, however, something in the girl’s eyes, some tunneling, bottomless need, that overwhelms it. Helen feels that she must not look away.
She is conscious of her figure being sheltered from view by the display cabinet. And as long as Avis remains crouched like that behind the dollhouse, she will not be visible from the living room windows. The sound of the doorbell peals through the house, and the hard knocking resumes. Avis begins to stand, but Helen gestures for her to stay down—and, miracle of miracles, she does. The police officer calls out again, less robustly this time, a note of futility in his voice. Then, there is quiet. Finally, the sound of a car ignition in the driveway.
Helen feels a fizz of relief. They will have one more night. It will be best to spend the evening upstairs, she thinks, behind the bedroom curtains.
She will talk to the police, of course, in her own time. When she does, she will simply tell the truth: that the girl was left alone, that she’d taken it upon herself, as a concerned neighbor, to look after her. It is the mother they should be questioning. The mother. This is what she will tell them, what she will repeat and repeat, until they understand.
Gradually, a low whistle comes through the house. Helen startles, then remembers the teakettle. The whistle amplifies, gaining force like a strengthening wind. Avis is still crouched in place. The kettle’s shriek rises, becomes penetrating. Helen takes a step toward the girl, extending a hand to help her.
ELEVATIONS
MARK IS arranging terrier pillows in the back when the door chime jingles. A smartly dressed couple comes into the store, a parrot-faced blonde with a hard leather purse at her armpit and a neat man in clear Lucite eyeglasses—gay, or German. They exchange smiling nods with Harris, who is bent at the window over a vintage watering can display.