Karolina Waclawiak - The Invaders

If she had died, I wanted to know where it had happened. Was it in here or was she doing something mundane like shopping at the supermarket? There had been no mention of her in the papers; I’d checked. Maybe she wasn’t dead. Maybe she just got up and walked out of her life one day. I left the kitchen and walked through the living room and stopped. The furniture was the same, musty nubby chairs and a faded leather couch. Something new and strange inhabited the house, though. Dozens of Virgin Mary statues crowded the mantel. Some were large like you would find in someone’s yard, paint chipping off the delicate noses, and some were small and plastic. When we were young, my mother’s religious ferocity was just beginning. She used to pray the rosary defensively, her wrists flicking back and forth as she counted the beads, as if she was at war with the cosmos instead of in charge of her own fate. Seeing all these Marys together made me realize how intense it had become. It was as if she had filled her life by looking for redemption but never thought to ask us for forgiveness. I took one of the smaller statues and put it in my purse.

I knew where the dark corridor led — our room. I was not ready to venture there yet, so I sat on the leather sofa, touching the worn-down parts, trying to channel memories of where I came from.

The light was fading in the house. How long would I wait for her to appear? I made my way down the corridor, past the bathroom, past the stairs to the room I had shared with my sisters. I could still smell a hint of the winter wood-fire smoke. I could almost feel the heat of it. I went to open the window for air. The window was jammed shut and I struggled with it, desperate for air. When it did finally come loose, I could see the flurry of dust spiral through the bright light. I stepped away from the window and waited to hear the familiar crackle of gravel, but it never came. I gulped in the outside air.

I don’t know if I expected it to have stayed the same as I had left it, but it wasn’t the same at all. There were more Marys in this room, crowding every flat surface. There was a sewing machine on the table, dusty and old. Rolls of fabric sat in a pile next to the old wood-burning stove. There was no sign of me or my sisters. The room was filled hip-high with Home Shopping Network boxes, unopened packages from QVC, receipts from religious shopping channels. Is this where all my checks had gone? I couldn’t even bring myself to open the boxes. Each unopened package was an insult, an endless array of still-boxed pots and pans and Jazzercise equipment labeled “As Seen on TV.” She had wasted all the money I was sending her. I had thought maybe she had no money to eat or pay for gas, and here she was spending it on garbage. She did not have one reminder of me. Just all this stuff.

I walked into my mother’s room, angry at her erasure of me. Angry at Jeffrey’s desire to start erasing me. Her room was spotless. A quilt that I remembered my grandmother making covered her bed. I touched it and the wool was rough. There was not a single picture of any of us on her walls or on her nightstand. We were ghosts, all of us. I opened her drawers, hoping to find something, anything that would feel intimate. I saw a pile of my letters. The early ones where I tried to make amends, asked her if we could see each other. She never responded. Some weren’t even opened. I didn’t want to see what I had written over the years. The ways I tried to explain how I felt about her. I wondered if she ever even read the opened ones or if she just plucked out the checks. I crawled under the quilt and waited for the sun to drop. I sniffed the pillowcases, but the smell was unfamiliar to me. There was no sign of her anywhere and she was never coming back. I couldn’t live here. And I didn’t even know her.

• • •

The next morning I drove home and I knew time was running out. Everything was exactly the same: lawns, manicured flower beds, American flags waving. I was searching for some kind of change that could right my trajectory. I couldn’t find my gloves or my small trowel. I got down on my hands and knees in the yard and started looking under the bushes as the waves crashed nearby. People had been stealing things from my home. Steven, most likely.

The September Sadness golf tournament would mark the end of summer and it would get cold again; the summer people would leave and the houses around ours would be empty. I wouldn’t be living here anymore, either.

It all seemed like too much: the desolation of winter, the fence barricading everyone in, Lori being so gleeful about it. I got up and tried to pull at the fence. It was a plasticky metal. I heard someone coming up behind me and I hoped with all hope that it wasn’t Jeffrey.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“What are you doing?” Steven asked.

I turned around and he had his hands in his pockets.

He stood against the fence, next to me, and it was the first time I had seen him so up close since the nature trail.

“I don’t know.”

We stood leaning against the fence, side-by-side. He reached out his hand and put it over mine. I looked around at the other yards and they were empty. I didn’t move my hand.

“Why me?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. I had hoped for more intent.

He interlaced his fingers with mine and I let him. He moved closer to me and I let him.

“Can you act surprised?” he said.

“What?”

“Look at me with surprise.”

“But I’m not,” I said.

He turned his face toward me and I stared at the pink and shiny scars and drew my finger along his cheek, along the biggest scar, and slid my fingers into his mouth to feel if his teeth were fixed or still jagged. He parted his lips and let me run my fingers over the smooth enamel of his front teeth; he smiled as I did it, showing them all off to me. His eyes were pools of black and brown and I could feel the soft hair on the farthest part of his cheek.

We stood, leaning up against each other, breathing on each other, and he finally kissed me. His lips were chapped and full. He reached out and touched me next, felt the skin of my arm, then the skin of my stomach just below my shirt. I felt his breath against my shoulder.

“Whoa,” Tuck said. Holding up his hands. I moved away from Steven and he pulled himself together and took off across the lawns. Tuck nodded knowingly.

“Don’t,” I said.

Tuck shrugged his shoulders and disappeared into the walkway between the houses and I stood against the fence, considered running after him and explaining myself, but why? Instead, I turned toward the water and stared at the faraway summer storm clustering over Long Island. I felt the humidity weighing everything down.

TEDDY

IT WAS NICE HAVING a break from my father, I had to admit, but all I wanted to know now was when he was coming back. He hadn’t answered his cell in days. I was starting to think something had happened to him and I didn’t know why I wasn’t doing more about it.

I ducked behind the parking lot and then the bushes that ran along the snack bar and stood there for a while. Kids with swimmies looped around their arms were walking with their babysitters and the babysitters were mediocre-looking. I was itching to see Jill. I thought a dip would feel nice because I hadn’t showered in days and a crust of salt had formed on me.

I didn’t feel like talking to anyone at the pool, any of the young girls who looked at me above their stupid books that had young girls in sunglasses on the covers. They wore small white bikinis and were toned and blond and thought they looked really hot. All the men around them, old enough to be their fathers, thought so, too. They golfed with the fathers of these girls and jerked off about them in the clubhouse bathroom. I knew, because I could hear them, alone in the stalls. These girls crossed and uncrossed their legs, layered Hawaiian Tropic oil on themselves to glisten brighter and attract attention to their boobs and that thin ridge in between their boobs that I liked a lot. These girls didn’t look at me anymore. I was invisible to them now, with my limb hanging limp at my side, muscles eating themselves minute by minute. My other arm was already dwarfing my dead arm in size and it made me look lopsided. I hated them then — those girls pretending to read and really just hoping to be another image in the family friend’s spank bank.