Alix Ohlin - Inside

“Well, now we know,” Marcie said.

She wasn’t speaking to Grace, who answered anyway. “Know what?”

Marcie’s gaze was a slicing blade. “Where my husband was before he died,” she said.

In the silence following this remark, Grace sat perfectly still on the sofa, as if this might lessen her emotional exposure. But she couldn’t stop herself from eyeing the front door, trying to plan her exit. What had she wanted from all this? Not a confrontation with his family. She’d had so little of Tug, his presence in her life had been so glancing, that maybe she just wanted a picture of him as a child. Some tiny memento like that. She was like a beggar at this house, panhandling for loose change.

Just then a clicking sound came down the hallway and the Dachshund she had met that first night came ambling into the room, blinking his eyes drowsily. He made straight for Grace’s lap and settled himself there, just as he had in Tug’s apartment, and Grace began to cry quietly, small unstoppable tears.

“Oh, dear,” Joy said again.

“Sparky, come here,” Marcie said sharply.

The Dachshund slowly abandoned Grace’s lap and padded over to his owner.

Was Marcie living here? Grace felt she had no right to ask any questions. With an internal shrug, she let go of everything, including whatever dignity she had left. “I’m sorry I came here,” she said. “I didn’t mean to bother you. I just … ”

She could feel Marcie’s eyes on her, their almost palpable heat.

“I don’t know anybody else who knew him,” she said.

When she looked up, Tug’s mother was crying. There was so much pain in the room, and so little to say about it.

“So you thought you’d come rub my face in it, is that it?” Marcie said, her voice raspy with anger.

“Marcie,” Tug’s father said.

“Come on, Will. She shows up here looking for sympathy? The girlfriend ? What am I supposed to do, give her a hug?”

“Let’s just stay calm,” Joy said, smiling weakly.

Grace couldn’t imagine that he had come from this place, the sad-eyed man of the world she’d known; his cynicism, his lust to see the world, his practicality, all of it seemed totally alien to this house of doilies and chintz. Which, she supposed, was as good an explanation as any of how people became who they were. In reaction to the homes where they were raised.

“When you came and wanted to spend time here, Marcie,” Tug’s father said, “we didn’t question it.”

Marcie’s eyes flashed around the room. “Are you comparing me to her?”

“Let’s have some more tea,” Joy said.

Shaking her head, Grace stood up. With a couple of cookies in her stomach she felt better, stronger, finally able to take command of the situation. “I’ll leave now,” she said, then turned to Marcie and looked her, with some difficulty, in the eye. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

She walked to the front door and opened it, but then Joy was beside her, putting a small, almost weightless hand on her arm. “Please,” she said. “Tell me how it was, at the end.”

It turned out that there were things all of them wanted to know, gaps they all needed to fill. Though of course no one could fill the greatest gap, that of Tug’s absence from their present and future lives. Still, thinking they could tell one another something useful, they forged a tentative alliance. Joy made a pot of tea, Grace thinking that there was comfort in rituals, in places set at the table, the tinkle of china and spoons. Then quietness stole into the room, and everyone took a deep breath.

Except Marcie, who looked at her in-laws as if they were traitors and left the room, taking the dog with her.

Tug’s father brought out a bottle of whiskey and poured a slug into his tea. His wife didn’t scold him. He tipped the bottle in Grace’s direction, but she declined. There was a secret lying inside her, only a few weeks old. Would she tell them? She didn’t know. She lifted a filigreed teacup to her lips and drank.

At first, Joy did most of the talking. Something in her seemed to have been released — whether by the tea, or by Grace’s presence, or by Marcie’s absence. As the three of them sat around the dining-room table, she spoke for almost ten minutes, an undammed flood of reminiscences that, Grace could tell, kept him alive for her.

“Johnny always had his eye on faraway places,” she said, “even as a child.”

For a moment Grace was disoriented, being used to his nickname, which had seemed so fully to suit him, his thoughts and memories always tugging him somewhere else. But of course he had been given a Christian name, had been a little kid, here in this very house, with these parents.

“He always loved maps. And books about pirates, and space travel, and India. His head was full of different facts, things I couldn’t hardly keep track of. I’d be in the kitchen working and he’d come in and tell me these stories about all the places he’d read about, and it was amazing, like he’d been there himself.”

Grace couldn’t help reaching across the table to touch her hand. But Joy didn’t meet her eyes, and her hand was cool and inert; she didn’t want to be touched. Flushing, Grace put her hand back in her lap and kept her eyes on the tablecloth. It felt like a prayer circle, like grace before a meal.

“His sister was always different. She was a little Suzy Homemaker, playing with her Easy-Bake Oven. She never wanted to leave home, not even to go to school. Her favorite thing was to help me cook dinner and then set the table. Mind you, Johnny was good around the house too. They both were. I always said I was lucky with my children.” At this point her voice broke slightly, but she swallowed and composed herself. “It’s been hard on Marcie,” she said.

Grace didn’t look up.

“When they lost the baby she was just heartbroken,” Joy said. “Her parents are good people, but they want her to move on and start thinking about the future. She came to stay with us for a little while, until she gets her feet back under her. You know, it’s brought us all together, I think, going through this.”

Grace would never have considered, at any point in her marriage, moving in with her mother-in-law; then again, she had never experienced any of this. For a moment she remembered playing cards and drinking tea with Mitch’s mother, a thought that made her grimace and smile at the same time. And then Joy’s words resounded in her mind. When they lost the baby . Tug hadn’t told her anything about that.

“I know my son wasn’t perfect,” Joy went on, as if to twist the world even further off-kilter. “Marcie says he strayed more than once. But he helped so many people. He was a good person, a truly good person, I know he was.”

Grace sat knitting her fingers together. She had half a stranger inside her.

Joy was still talking, the words coming slowly and evenly, dripping like an IV into Grace’s veins, regular and numbing. She was talking about having seen Tug and Marcie together a month or so ago, when he came to visit and they all had dinner. She knew he wasn’t happy — he had seen so much and worked so hard — but he was talking about switching careers, maybe going to law school.

He was in this room, Grace thought, maybe sitting in this exact chair. Shivering, she reached across the table for the whiskey and poured some into her tea. Tug’s father nodded at her imperceptibly. Under different circumstances, she thought, they would have liked each other. Or maybe his silence just reminded her of Tug’s, and thus felt familiar.

The whiskey warmed her and settled her stomach.

Joy was looking at her, her eyes pale, watery, and unfocused. “Please, tell me about him.”