Kathleen Alcott - Infinite Home

“It’s the house,” he said to Song. “She left it to you.”

“To the person I was, once, a long time ago.”

“Okay, yes, to who you were. But Edith is sick, and Owen is trying to put her in some retirement facility against her will. He wants to get rid of her and take over the property, push us all out of our homes and rent them for six times as much.”

Song’s face had not turned. Her peace rivaled a houseplant’s.

“He’s rough with her, Song. He herds her around like she’s his inmate.”

“Oh.” Her eyes closed briefly, and he could sense her muffling a response, pushing memories down as they surfaced, like things in a basin of water not yet clean. She gripped the arms of the chair, and a bellicose purple stood out in the veins of her throat.

“Please present your purpose.”

Thomas went to Song and knelt, as if positioning himself like that might let him catch some of the unwanted, unhappy recollections that spilled from her.

“You have to take the house, Jenny,” he opened gently, careful about how he called out to her past, careful not to send it scurrying away from the light. “You have to save her like she wanted to save you.”

She released a ragged sound, as though some long-struggling part of her body was trying to open.

“Jenny,” he said.

“ Jenny ,” she said.

Almost as soon as her moan filled the room, it seemed replaced, eliminated by the atmosphere’s familiar muting of extremes — the structure never too cold or warm, the sun always filtered by trees, only the necessary words spoken — as if snatched up by some invisible maid who didn’t prefer the messiness of suffering, and swept back out into the wild. Thomas couldn’t locate the moment before, the split second when he’d connected her to who she had once been, and her eyes, placid again, revealed nothing.

“A sweet person,” she said, with apparent regret. “The girl you’re looking for doesn’t exist, don’t you see? I gave up my past when I came here. I made a commitment. I was born after , do you understand? I don’t have any right to that place. In fact, the system we built here precludes ownership.”

“But—”

It felt as though his blood were moving through him at a perilously slow rate, but he continued, even knowing how little power he held. “But she was your mother. She was your mother and—” His voice broke as he thought of the photo, of Edith on the lumped and sun-strewn bed, holding up the tiny new human to the concentration of light; then he recalled his own mother, throwing an arm across his chest at sudden stoplights, the bashful smile she always gave him after.

“She never stopped missing you, do you understand? She was sorry her whole life. She never stopped looking .”

Song turned away with a long gaze, taking in the horizon in no hurry, but Jenny’s mouth softened and quavered. In an expeditious series of motions Thomas wouldn’t have thought her capable of, she was up and at the door, lacing up her boots, reaching for a hat.

“I’m going for a walk,” she said without affording him a glance. “I have some listening to do.”

AS HE MOVED through her home, picking things up and letting them drop like some machine sent to methodically dismantle, Adeleine practiced her ability to live remembered moments in full detail, to focus on the greens and whites of other days and forget her current circumstances completely. After he had carried her up from the street, he had arranged her back on the chaise and flashed a palm across his mother’s field of vision, as if to alert her to his upcoming performance. He pulled the curtains open, one by one, with his thumb and forefinger. Although Adeleine had bucked as he placed her there, sent her legs up in a few frantic kicks, her body, spent from its failed escape and stunned by the brightness and volume of the outside world, soon collapsed. Adeleine had not replied when Owen had asked her whether she would let him borrow a few things, had not watched as he approached the bowed bookshelf as though it were an infestation he intended to eliminate. She was already recalling a former life, sinking into another time.

He tapped out a jar of skeleton keys, and the rusted browns and grays fell like birds that dive into water; he held up records to read their labels, then sent them into flight; he removed a stack of age-bloated postcards, their backsides filled with tight, extinct cursive, and he flicked his thumb across each as he dealt them onto the floor. With a fine moisture growing on his upper lip, he shifted his focus to the rows of books, lower down: he took some poems by A. A. Milne and tore off leaves of the plain ink drawings, the verses about introverted mice, the place halfway up the stairs, the vanishing of glamorous mothers. His vision snagged on the stacked Pyrex and skillets of the kitchen, and he crossed to touch them.

With a snap, the stuck knob of the oven reached its highest setting, and on the middle rack he placed her ceramic coin banks, tiny dachshunds that leapt through hoops with pennies in their mouths, hand-painted golfers forever poised to putt. In a brief, cheerful stretch, he bent his knees, then moved to the bathroom, where he raised the toilet seat, pissed for a full minute, and jiggled himself dry. He turned on the bathtub’s hot water with a flick of his wrist as purposeful as a plumber’s, and he made several trips to the living room, forming aslant stacks of novels and journals that he wedged under the stubble of his chin.

Submerged under the steam, the books resisted a minute before releasing inky gasps of black and gray.

Adeleine, ankles crossed, eyes closed, was visiting a place she had been with her parents as a child on vacation: a summer cottage in a small Massachusetts beach town — a modest structure, made mainly of windows, that stood on stilts above an overgrown lawn. To counter the sounds of her life combusting, she replayed the moment when her mother finally pronounced the dusky light insufficient and flicked the switch, spilling yellow through the mesh windows and out onto the uneven grass. Adeleine had insisted on sitting outside to watch this, the whole house suddenly so bright, as if built then and there, the round wooden dining table and blue painted chairs and overstuffed couch appearing as if summoned by a magician.

She could sense Owen growing still, surveying the room he had laid to waste, but she remained in the tall blades of grass, eleven years old and very thin, devouring the smell of wet dirt, an odor that was in equal parts the determination of growth and the languid pace of rot. She knew that soon she would stand, say good-bye to the chorus of fireflies that lingered in the bushes below the house, make her way up the uneven stairs, past her parents where they sat reading, down the low hall to the bed with a time-softened quilt. She would lie quietly with childish dreams of bicycle rides, of the pink-cheeked boys who might kiss her.

By the bell she had hung there with a brief, fleeting optimism for a future full of comings and goings, she heard the apartment door of her adult life close. Adeleine sat up from the twin mattress in the wood-paneled room, heard the laughter of her family nearby, saw the clear rubber sandals and fluorescent-thread bracelets of girlhood. She put them away in her past, and returned to the vestiges of her home.

Adeleine could smell her books, the aged scent of them more pungent with moisture, like a futile weapon dispatched to combat their drowning; she could feel the heat of the oven, her precious items roasting and cracking. Around her feet were pieces of things she’d loved, the gilded circular plate of a rotary telephone, the wheel of a wooden airplane, splayed strings of violet and oak-colored yarn unspooled from their perfect globes. A herd of marbles lolled, mapping the slant of the floor. Next to her, Edith repeated the ends of sentences, pieces of conversations that twirled in her head like wind chimes, revealing one glinting part and obscuring another. “… About two blocks down,” she said. “Expensive side,” she said. “And what a view.”