Julia Pierpont - Among the Ten Thousand Things

As well as she knew the voice, Kay wasn’t prepared, rolling over, to see the body that belonged to it. Jack, strangely occupying the corner of her bed, depressing the mattress, taking up space and blocking the light where there had been only light, and air.

“Hey, kiddo.”

“Hi,” she croaked, throat dry from disuse. “What time is it?”

“You slept,” said Deb, sitting with Simon on the other bed. “I’m glad you slept.”

Jack asked small questions that she answered smally, with her mother’s help: about the cat they’d found, the fishing trip. It all sounded so nice, like someone else’s life.

“Don’t act like you care about all this stupid stuff,” Simon said. The first thing he’d said.

“I care.” Jack leaned close to her, “Sweetie? I want to know what you’ve been up to.”

“Why don’t you ask her what she was doing following me?” Simon stood. “Huh? What’s the matter with you?” Kay blinked once, then several more times, shuttering as if to keep something out. Or rather to keep something in. “Here we go again,” he said, as the tears started streaming.

“Sy, cut it out,” Deb said, pulling at him. “None of this would have happened if you hadn’t been sneaking off.”

“None of this would have happened if you both had just minded your own business,” he said. “Seriously, what is your deal?”

“Simon,” Jack shouted, but Deb had shot to her feet.

“Seriously, my deal is that you’re my kid and I say where you go.”

Simon waved his arms. “You’re, like, obsessed. You know I’m not him, right? That I’m not Dad? I’m not actually doing anything wrong.”

“Simon!” Jack tried.

Deb looked at her son, her husband, her son. Then she sat, and it was like something in her folding. “Do what you want. We go home tomorrow.” She crossed her legs. “Just, wear a fucking condom, would you please?”

Simon looked at her, hard. It was the most adult thing she’d ever said to him. She might have said more, softened it, if they’d had more time. He was already out the door.

There was still some pottery on the lawn, but the sign (TAKE ALL!) had been brought in or thrown away. Simon made his charging way across the straw grass, treaded the matted carpets on the front porch. He’d armed himself with what to say to Mrs. Dignam, but around back the hammock lay with no one in it. His foot knocked a beer bottle, which rolled and tapped another. There were several, stood in a row, dark amber empties.

Teagan’s room felt changed from the last and only time he’d been there. It had filled with sick. Almost noon, but she was in bed, a mound of flowered sheets softly breathing.

“Hello?” he said, like answering the phone. She shifted in her half cocoon. Crumpled tissues scattered and bounced to the floor, landing like origami cranes. “It’s me. It’s Simon.”

There emerged the tangled blonde, and anyone could tell she had been crying. She wore the puffiest version of her face.

“She didn’t see me,” he said.

Teagan pulled him to the bed, on his back, and her body curled over him, eclipsing his.

“So, we’re leaving tomorrow, my mom says.”

“I can’t be here alone. I can’t be alone with her.” She breathed into his neck.

“No, but it’s okay though,” he went on. “I mean you really only have, what, another year here?” She began to sound and feel, in his arms, more upset. “Then you can go live wherever you want. Wherever in the world.”

It seemed anything he told her could only stir up what sadness had settled. He let her shoulders shake into him and watched the ceiling as it bounced. “Don’t, cry,” he added, very quietly. She could opt out of hearing it.

Deb and Jack were still on the bed, still around their daughter. The first moment of levity had come in the form of the cat, of Wolf, who’d filled a quiet moment when Kay was all cried out, trilling strange meows from the closet. Jack had gone over and hovered his hands over the small gray body. “Not gonna hurtcha.” He’d swept forward — something balletic in the way it was all one motion — and scooped the cat up around the middle, where its arched back made a handle for holding. Kay had smiled a little then, and her father had pounced, saying, “He wants to know what all the hubbub’s about out here. Thought maybe he heard a can opener.”

Yes, fathers have a way with daughters.

“Hey, what do you want to do today?” he asked. “It’s going to be beautiful out, beautiful day. We’ll get pancakes. Sun’ll be shining, we can go out on the water. That sound good?”

“Good,” said Kay, who noticed her father kept using the word we.

Deb had noticed it too, and that Jack had put his hand over hers on the hill of their daughter’s hip.

Simon and Teagan slept an hour or two, or he slept them. Everything was changed from before; of course it was. The mattress so sinking he could feel the bones of it. She rewrapped her fingers around him, held him so tightly he felt pressed past her. He tried looking down, but her head was tucked high under his chin.

“I’m hot.” He felt his heart against her, how it wanted to beat her away. “You hot?” He rolled off the bed and went to the window. “Probably from all the covers.” Flattening his hands against the glass.

“Just, please,” she said, and nothing followed it.

“Hang on — here.” He pushed but the frame stayed stuck to the sill. His palms slipped and skidded squeaking up the glass.

Teagan made a soft wilting sound behind him. “There’s a thing.”

There was a thing, a little white lever in the middle of the frame, which revealed itself to him now. He flipped it and the window sailed open. “There. Duh.” A portal to the feeble breeze and slightly louder trees.

He wiped his hands on his jeans and found Teagan rolled away, toward the wall. The sheets had rolled with her, baring the longbow of her spine, the white nightgown bunched up around her waist. Sweat sharpened each of the fine, light hairs dusting her back’s lower notches.

“Hey, what?” He knelt down by the bed, pulling her to him. She sat up but wouldn’t look him in the face. “It’s okay. You’ll come to New York, in the fall.” He felt he had only so much love, and for a brief moment, the scales had tipped in her direction. “We’ll go to the Chelsea Hotel,” he invented. “We’ll go to the Statue of Liberty,” where he had never been. “We will. You’ll come stay with me there.”

Then she hugged him, and if she didn’t believe him, at least she was trying to.

When he left, she walked him out, down the stairs in case her mother was around. She even smiled a little, gentling the door open and drawing the beaded curtain aside so he could step out. There, on the welcome welcome welcome, thinking about whether it would be all right to kiss her. He didn’t.

He took the back way, veering onto the street again when he judged himself far enough away. At the point where the hill began, he stopped and looked, the last place he thought he’d be able to see her, ghostly on the porch in her starchy nightgown that filled a little with air. But he could see her, too, hours later, lying awake in the sleep-soaked room he shared with his sister, waiting for morning, and much later, when they’d gone back to New York, and for a long time after that. The little white sheet of her swaying. From the breeze, he thought, or from her feet, unsteady beneath her. And he did not know how he’d been so brave, or so weak, to leave her there.