Kathleen Alcott - Infinite Home

THOMAS SAT on the uneven slats of Song’s wooden porch, observing a lone chicken cross a patch of dirt in a jagged line. He didn’t know where his shoes were. It was morning, and already warm, but with the extended absence of language also vanished observations about things like temperature and time. It had been seven days, although he didn’t know that; he’d stopped counting, or forgotten to measure, at four. When Song emerged and situated herself on the handwoven chair behind him, he reached to squeeze her left ankle, and she patted down the unruly parts of his hair. Pale as the early light, the chicken paused to investigate an unfamiliar plant. Two men appeared at the crest of the hill; Thomas and Song watched as their faces became clear, and nodded. The wood creaked to accommodate two more bodies. Mugs of tea, carried a mile, changed hands. The chicken moved in its rhythmic way, a step and a pause and a gawk, a step and a pause and a gawk, into a patch of cedars. Water rushed nearby: they could hear it.

OWEN WAS A MAN accustomed to administration and power — having most recently developed a circle of debt-collection agencies that took a “modern” approach, hounding their targets through e-mail and social media — but he had long forgotten how to earn it. Adeleine could sense his impatience building, observe how he stored it in his shoulders and forearms. She felt unsure of which role to play, given her lack of concrete theories about Thomas’s precise location and long-term intentions. He had stopped calling several days before, like an appliance that ceases to function without fanfare, leaving memories of its usefulness fresh, its malfunction confounding.

For the twentieth time since Owen had escorted them upstairs, a grandfather clock she’d found and restored rang out to signify the hour. Owen took a blue silk scarf from the closet and daubed it along the back of his neck, plucked a red whistle from a bookcase and slipped it in his pocket. The women sat on the chaise while he moved about the room as though it were a museum, pausing frequently at pieces of interest to lean and squint.

Edith’s command of language seemed to have vanished with the sleep she and Adeleine had shared in the still, dark hours before he’d arrived. The only communication she offered her son was an occasional gob of spit, which she gathered in the back of her throat with visible effort and launched with a quick, deep grunt. After wiping the phlegm away, Owen would retrieve the whistle and blow wearily, a kid bored with a game, producing a shrill note that cowed his mother.

A detainee in her own home, Adeleine paid circumspect attention. She couldn’t determine whether it was tenacity that drove Edith to spit at her son again and again, despite knowing the consequence, or some aspect of dementia that named all moments independent, unsupported and unaffected by those that preceded and followed.

Adeleine had never felt any tug of clairvoyance, had generally lived by passively observing the present and only in the fallout of disaster looking for the parts of the past that had led her to it. But in this instance, the quiet that begged her attention, she sensed the impending: eventually, Owen would swivel his attention upon her.

Losing interest in his mother’s outbursts, Owen placed the whistle on the coffee table in front of them. When she hissed or bellowed, he only closed his eyes and exhaled. Tension played at the pulse points of Adeleine’s body, which felt as though it were filling and hardening.

Owen approached Adeleine and crouched before her, like a gardener inspecting a pattern of decay.

“You and I both know,” he said, “that this way is getting us nowhere. I just need to know exactly where he is, and after you tell me that, we can all part ways.” His gaze fell down her ancient crinoline blouse, the finicky top two buttons that had slipped halfway out of their enclosures. After he frowned and adjusted them, he cupped her shoulders with his supple palms.

“You are a pretty girl. Very strange, but very pretty.”

The phlegm struck his face with the sound of things joining, like the commencement of some dramatic chemical reaction. Edith spoke for the first time in hours, and the words escaped in slow jolts. “Don’t. Owen.” That his mother had spoken his name seemed to touch him, and he looked her over, the wobbly jaw and milky eyes, before he returned to Adeleine.

His index finger stiff, Owen traced the crinoline where it met Adeleine’s linen skirt, the tight line of her waist, then hovered his right hand over her torso, as though waiting for the kick of a baby. “Leave,” he said. “Why don’t you just go?” His palm reached the underside of her jaw, and his eyes closed and his mouth parted, and he looked to her then like a person finally alone. She took his suggestion and stood.

Halfway to the door, Adeleine looked back at Edith, who had her hands folded, her head down. Her recent protest had evaporated: she was swimming in her own head again, immersed in it, far from air.

As Adeleine crossed the stairs’ halfway point, she tried to ignore her nausea, what felt like the revolution of every organ, and ran her fingers across the familiar wallpaper. With the wrench of the heavy front door came the soaring sound of her own blood, and with the descent of the stone steps the refusal of every bone and ligament to cooperate any further. She knew she should develop a plan right then, and tried to remember the order of subway stations on a Manhattan-bound train, just the words themselves and none of the people that would spill from the cars, hurried and hostile. The unmetered air, the confluence of smells, felt like a rough examination of her whole body. DeKalb was first and then was—

Huddled on the last step with her angry temples between her knees and her hands full of her hair, she heard Owen cooing from her apartment’s window. Soon he was next to her, cradling her, collecting her stiff limbs in his arms. “Come inside, now.” A gray-haired woman passing on the street stopped, mulling over the possibility of alarm, and Adeleine heard him say to her, “Bad day. Happens to the best of us.”

The woman clucked her tongue and continued on her way home, satisfied with his answer.

JUST AFTER DAWN, on the walk from the pea-colored emergency room lobby to the parking lot, through the two sets of automatic doors and across the quickly warming concrete, Claudia kept her arm hooked around Paulie’s waist and refused to look back at Edward. Still dressed in the thin motel robe, the regrettably undersized cutoffs, and the orange drugstore flip-flops, Edward gave a range of sighs aimed specifically at the back of Claudia’s head.

She opened the passenger door for Paulie and kissed his forehead as he settled in.

“Hey,” Edward said, before she’d had the chance to slip around to her side. “You really think this is such a good idea, to keep going? You don’t think he’s maybe had too much excitement and change for three days?” He was careful not to gesture in Paulie’s direction, to keep his image through the windshield calm.

“He had a panic attack, Edward, not a total breakdown. His condition comes with the occasional anxiety issue. He used to cry every time the trash went out because he didn’t want us to lose anything.”