Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

I hope my sons have forgiven me now for the strange barking nasty man I was for the year after Betty died. I wouldn’t blame them if they haven’t. I was an angry father. I can hardly remember what I was thinking, though I can recall my actions, the things I said.

Not everything got me mad. My temper took them by surprise; me too. Lies always enraged me, though now I know that children always lie: in fact, they lie because they’re afraid of their father’s anger. Then, though: whose muddy footprints were these? Not mine, said Jake, though we were a movie family and knew a detective’s ways: here’s the print. Here’s the shoe. Here’s the foot that fits that shoe. Who left this ukelele out on the sofa? I held the neck of the uke and swung it through the air. Only Nathan played the ukelele, and yet he swore he didn’t do it. He believed that I’d believe him. I flung it onto the ceramic tiles in the entranceway so it would shatter. I remember the pleasure in my shoulder as I overhanded the uke into the foyer; I remember Nathan, curled into a ball on the sofa, as though I’d go for his neck next.

“Natie,” I said. He had his head pressed into a pillow, sure I meant to do him harm. Never. The anger itself was the point, the scrim of flames the magician draws to hide himself. But really, why did he lie?

“Go to your room,” I told him. He ran at top speed.

Suddenly it was June again. In two weeks it would be the Baby’s yahrzeit, the anniversary of her death. We all could feel it coming. I came home one day to what I thought was an empty house — the boys were at a birthday party — and found Jessie in bed, two o’clock in the afternoon. She was weeping. I’d known her seven years and I’d never seen her cry like that. Our bedclothes were heirlooms: pillow shams trimmed in lace made by Jessica’s mother, a quilt stitched by an aunt. Lillian, Rock’s wife, was scandalized. Surely we could afford new sheets.

I sat down. Jessica did not look at me. “I’ve been in bed three hours,” she said. “I don’t think I can get out.”

“You’re missing her, that’s all.”

“No. I mean yes, but I’m in bed because I miss you .”

“I’m right here,” I said.

“But you know, my darling, that I have to leave you.”

I knew no such thing.

“I feel like a bad person,” she said. “I used to think I was a good person. I prided myself on it. I thought, no matter how mean someone is to me, I won’t be mean back.”

“Who’s mean to you?”

“You are. I don’t care about that. People have been mean to me before. But not the boys. Not the boys. I need to take them someplace where people won’t be mean to them.”

“People,” I said.

“You can’t forgive me, that’s obvious, but they haven’t done anything to anyone, and now we have to go.”

“No, you don’t—”

“Yes,” she said. “We’re going to Des Moines. My studio’s still there, Joseph hasn’t changed a thing. It’s a big house. You’ll come and see them.”

“Jessica,” I said. “Jessie.”

“Maybe you can stay with Rocky and Lillian for a while. It’ll take me a week to pack. To arrange things.”

She was still under the covers. I tried to get beneath them too. She wouldn’t let me. I lifted one of her arms.

“Mose,” she said, “I can’t.”

I could feel her hand trying to make up its mind. She hadn’t opened her eyes. I stared at her, trying to will her to look at me. She had something gray caught in her hair, and I brushed it out with the tips of my fingers. She had stopped crying, and I was about to start. “Where did you find a cobweb?” I asked.

She gave a swallowing smile. “Before I was in bed, I was under it.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I thought it would make me feel better. All day long I crawl into places, beneath the sofa cushions, under your desk. There isn’t a closet in the house small enough. I can’t bear to live here and I can’t bear to leave and everywhere I go I turn around and see myself and pretty soon I’m going to try to sleep in dresser drawers or in the sink and it’s time to go.”

I held her one hand in my two hands. “Things will get better!”

“Sweetheart, if I believed that for a moment, would I feel this way? You think I don’t miss her.”

“I never said that.”

“I don’t do anything else. I love her. And I love Jacob and Nathan. I love them all the same, still, and I can’t do anything for her. And I can’t do anything for you, the way you hate me now.”

“I don’t—”

That’s when she finally turned her head and opened her eyes. “Go to Rocky and Lil’s,” she said. “I’ll call you when we get settled.”

I did. She’d already packed me a little suitcase.

First, though, I drove around in my car. Should I go back? There had to be something I could say, even though I now understood the whole past year from her point of view: she’d been waiting for me to say something to her forever. I laughed, thinking that Rock had told me years before that I should come to him if I wanted divorce advice. You’ll fuck around, he’d said, and I hadn’t. I’d figured that was the only rule.

I drove past our house again. What should I do? I could go back in and put my foot down, You will not leave me, you will not take my sons, but that was what had gotten me into this trouble in the first place. I could cry, but I already had. I could plead, but I’d done that too. My fault, I told myself, my fault, and every time I tried to split the blame between me and someone else — Jessica or God or even Rocky, who’d told me that work would solve my problems — I realized again it was my fault.

In the morning I would know what to do.

The Lodger

Lillian and Rock took me in right away; Jessica had called them ahead of time. They moved me into a guest room that overlooked the swimming pool. I crawled into bed. The sheets were still warm from the iron.

That whole week might have been comic, if I had been in a laughing mood. Actually, that first day I often laughed, inappropriately. Every time I saw her, Lillian was wearing one cosmetic mask or another, blue or brown or surgical white. Her vanity in such things was double, I think: she wanted to improve her complexion, but she also knew that for some reason those masks suited her. They highlighted her two best features — large light brown eyes, and lovely full lips — and minimized her puggish nose and her wide wrinkled forehead. In fact, she always looked quite beautiful that way, a strange apparition bringing me tomato soup, tomato juice, pitchers of lemon-clogged ice water.

I felt pretty bad that first day, but I believed I would live. In the morning I realized I was one of those people who’d been kicked in the head and managed to get up and walk around for twelve hours, rubbing his noggin and saying, A little headache, that’s all, only to wake up an invalid.

“You want to call her?” Rocky asked.

I shook my head.

“We’ll call her.” He sat on a chair by the bed, his knees up against the nightstand. The phone was a confection that Lillian had installed, all gold scroll and black inlay, better suited for a pinup to hold to her ear, saucily shocked at her caller. The receiver looked too small in Rocky’s hand. “No answer,” he said.

“Didn’t think so.”

“Buddy,” he told me, “you need to do something.”

Our radio show was on summer replacements — our bandleader, West Thompson, had taken over — and we weren’t shooting a picture.

“We’ll go out,” he said.

I shook my head. Actually, I did nothing so athletic, I just stirred the air in front of my face lightly with my nose.