Richard Ford - A Multitude of Sins

Marjorie takes a deep breath and lets air go out smoothly through her nostrils. “Jane’s asleep,” she says.

“And how would you like to go back to bed?” Faith whispers. Possibly she hears a soft tap on the door — the door she has dead-bolted. The door she will not open. The door beyond which the world and trouble wait. Marjorie’s eyes wander toward the sound, then swim again with sleep. She is safe.

“Leave the tree on,” Marjorie instructs, though asleep.

“Sure, okay, sure,” Faith says. “The tree stays. We keep the tree.”

She eases her hand under Marjorie, who, by old habit, reaches, caresses her neck. In an instant she has Marjorie in her arms, pink coverlet and all, carrying her altogether effortlessly into the darkened bedroom where her sister sleeps on one of the twin beds. Carefully she lowers Marjorie onto the empty bed and re-covers her. Again she thinks she hears soft tapping, though it stops. She believes it will not come again this night.

Jane is sleeping with her face to the wall, her breathing deep and audible. Jane is the good sleeper, Marjorie the less reliable one. Faith stands in the middle of the dark, windowless room, between the twin beds, the blinking Christmas lights haunting the stillness that has come at such expense. The room smells musty and dank, as if it’s been closed for months and opened just for this purpose, this night, these children. If only briefly she is reminded of Christmases she might’ve once called her own. “Okay,” she whispers. “Okay, okay, okay.”

Faith undresses in the Master Suite, too tired to shower. Her mother sleeps on one side of their shared bed. She is a small mountain, visibly breathing beneath the covers. A glass of red wine, half drunk, sits on the bed table beside her molded neck brace. A picture of a white sailboat on a calm blue ocean hangs over the bed. Faith half closes the door to undress, the blinking Christmas lights shielded.

She will wear pajamas tonight, for her mother’s sake. She has bought a new pair. White, pure silk, smooth as water. Blue silk piping.

And here is the unexpected sight of herself in the cheap, wavy door mirror. All good. Just the small pale scar where a cyst was notched from her left breast, a meaningless scar no one would see. But a good effect still. Thin, hard thighs. A small nice belly. Boy’s hips. The whole package, nothing to complain about.

There’s need of a glass of water. Always take a glass of water to bed, never a glass of red wine. When she passes by the living-room window, her destination the tiny kitchen, she sees that the hockey game is now over. It is after midnight. The players are shaking hands on the ice, others are skating in wide circles. On the expert slope above the rink, lights have been turned on again. Machines with headlights groom the snow at treacherous angles and great risk.

And she sees Roger. He is halfway between the ice rink and the condos, walking back in his powder-blue suit. He has watched the hockey game, no doubt. Roger stops and looks up at her where she stands in the window in her white pjs, the Christmas tree lights blinking as her background. He stops and stares. He has found his black-frame glasses. His mouth is moving, but he makes no gesture. There is no room at this inn for Roger.

In bed, her mother is even larger. A great heat source, vaguely damp when Faith touches her back. Her mother is wearing blue gingham, a nightdress not so different from the muumuu she wears in daylight. She smells unexpectedly good. Rich.

How long, Faith wonders, has it been since she’s slept with her mother. A hundred years? Twenty? But good that it would seem so normal.

She has left the door open in case the girls should call, in case they wake up and are afraid, in case they miss their father. The Christmas lights blink off and on merrily beyond the doorway. She can hear snow slide off the roof, an automobile with chains jingling softly somewhere out of sight. She has intended to call for messages but let it slip.

And how long ago, she wonders, was her mother slim and pretty? The sixties? Not so long ago, really. She had been a girl then. They — the sixties — always seem so close. Though to her mother probably not.

Blink, blink, blink, the lights blink.

Marriage. Yes, naturally she would think of that now. Though maybe marriage was only a long plain of self-revelation at the end of which there’s someone else who doesn’t know you very well. That would be a message she could’ve left for Jack. “Dear Jack, I now know that marriage is a long plain at the end of which there’s etc., etc., etc.” You always thought of these things too late. Somewhere, Faith hears more faint music, “Away in a Manger,” played prettily on chimes. It is music to sleep to.

And how would they deal with tomorrow? Not the eternal tomorrow, but the promised, practical one. Her thighs feel stiff, yet she is slowly relaxing. Her mother, the mountain beside her, is facing away. How indeed? Roger would be rehabilitated tomorrow, yes, yes. There will be board games. Changes of outfits. Phone calls placed. She will find the time to ask her mother if anyone had ever been abused, and find out, happily, not. Unusual looks will be passed between and among everyone. Certain names, words will be in short supply, for the sake of all. The girls will again learn to ski and to enjoy it. Jokes will be told. They will feel better, be a family again. Christmas takes care of its own.

On the drive over to the Nicholsons’ for dinner — their first in some time — Marjorie Reeves told her husband, Steven Reeves, that she had had an affair with George Nicholson (their host) a year ago, but that it was all over with now and she hoped he — Steven — would not be mad about it and could go on with life.

At this point they were driving along Quaker Bridge Road where it leaves the Perkins Great Woods Road and begins to border the Shenipsit Reservoir, dark and shadowy and calmly mirrored in the late spring twilight. On the right was dense young timber, beech and alder saplings in pale leaf, the ground damp and cakey. Peepers were calling out from the watery lows. Their turn onto Apple Orchard Lane was still a mile on.

Steven, on hearing this news, began gradually and very carefully to steer their car — a tan Mercedes wagon with hooded yellow headlights — off of Quaker Bridge Road and onto the damp grassy shoulder so he could organize this information properly before going on.

They were extremely young. Steven Reeves was twentyeight. Marjorie Reeves a year younger. They weren’t rich, but they’d been lucky. Steven’s job at Packard-Wells was to stay on top of a small segment of a larger segment of a rather small prefabrication intersection that serviced the automobile industry, and where any sudden alteration, or even the rumor of an alteration in certain polymer-bonding formulas could tip crucial down-the-line demand patterns, and in that way affect the betting lines and comfort zones of a good many meaningful client positions. His job meant poring over dense and esoteric petrochemical-industry journals, attending technical seminars, flying to vendor conventions, then writing up detailed status reports and all the while keeping an eye on the market for the benefit of his higher-ups. He’d been a scholarship boy at Bates, studied chemistry, was the only son of a hard-put but upright lobstering family in Pemaquid, Maine, and had done well. His bosses at Packard-Wells liked him, saw themselves in him, and also in him saw character qualities they’d never quite owned — blond and slender callowness tending to gullibility, but backed by caution, ingenuity and a thoroughgoing, compact toughness. He was sharp. It was his seventh year with the company — his first job. He and Marjorie had been married two years. They had no children. The car had been his bonus two Christmases ago.