Kathleen Alcott - Infinite Home

Eventually she rose, retrieved white towels from the trunk of the car and carefully set them on the table to warm. She began unpacking the supplies they’d brought, stackable rubber dishes and nectarines bundled in starchy linens and a heavy, ovular cooler of water that thudded when shifted. When Paulie and Edward approached, twenty minutes later, shaking the moisture off with the subtlety of feral dogs, she wrapped each of them in the stiff new cotton, and then they ate, surveying the landscape and discussing the very best position for sleep.

AFTER DRIVING twenty miles south to the nearest town, the last place his phone had picked up reception, Thomas cruised the main drag of square wooden buildings, seeking a parking place where he might gather the confidence to make the call.

In the lot of an abandoned drive-in diner, he got out and sat at one of the metal tables, the type covered in waffled plastic and bolted to the earth. The figure of a giant wooden boy biting into a hamburger cast a horrific shadow over the lot; when the hot wind blew, it quivered at its tenuous point of attachment atop the boarded-up kiosk.

Thomas looked at the phone and willed enthusiasm. Though it had been less than a month, he found he could no longer envision Adeleine’s shape. He saw the nape of her neck and the arch of her back, as from behind her in the afternoon, and remembered her hand as it held a fork, her hair as it grabbed light, but he could not force the fragments into concert. He considered the possibility that he no longer produced the hectic energy that he had transferred so effectively into loving her. His brain fed him images of cartoon firemen, holding out a trampoline, looking up at a curling orange window, dancing into different positions, bracing to catch something impossibly large.

Thomas prepared for, even anticipated, the number of rings — it generally took Adeleine at least four to tear herself away from the fabric of her thoughts and answer — but then she was on the phone almost instantly.

“It’s me,” he said.

He could tell, solely by the way she paused before she spoke, and then by the dull theater of her questions— Where are you? How are you? — that their language, one that had taken so long to grow, was lost. Until he began to ask her the same, he didn’t consider the alternative: that their dynamic had not been relinquished, but plundered, thieved of the little optimism that had made it possible.

“Her son was here again.”

“Did he put up some new eviction notices? Adeleine, I can’t really believe it, but Edith’s daughter is giving me—”

“He knew I wouldn’t leave the house, and he took advantage of that.”

It was here that Thomas faltered, and did not pose the inquiries that he surely would have, had he somehow divined the cramped shape of her posture, seen the ragged chew of her fingernails. Across the country, Adeleine sat on the floor with her body coiled as tightly as she could manage, her knees pressed up against her chin, her arms around her shins, the telephone held against her cheek by her left shoulder. Edith, on the couch behind, occasionally placed a hand on the top of her blond-red head and sighed.

“What happened?” he said. “Are you all right? Did he try to inspect your apartment?”

When she brushed away his questions and assumed a hardened, mostly monosyllabic conversational position, he found he didn’t have the focus to chip at it, find his way inside.

“Adeleine. I’m going to ask you — I need you to agree to something. It’s not what I expected. Jenny won’t come. She’s going to sign over the property, but we have to bring Edith here. I don’t know how to ask any other way — you need to walk out of there, and you need to bring her with you. Time doesn’t give us any alternatives.”

“Talk to Edith,” Adeleine said. The voice he heard was scrubbed of her, as though she were hours into reading a manual aloud. “Tell her you found her daughter. Tell her Jenny still exists.”

“Well—” The phone was already in transit.

“Good day?” lilted Edith.

“Edith,” he said. “It’s Thomas.”

“…”

“From upstairs?”

“Mm,” she said, without much commitment. “We could certainly use your help around here, then!”

“Edith. Your daughter. Jenny? I’m here with Jenny.”

“You are ?” said Edith. A grin moved across her face, touching all parts of it. “How are her grades? Jenny,” she continued, “is such a storyteller. I always say, you could hand her a tissue and an orange and she’d give you back a whole world built around them.”

“She’s — she’s certainly built a whole world here.”

Adeleine moved to the couch and laid her head in Edith’s lap, tried to isolate all the tiny sounds of the body moving breath outward and taking it in.

Thomas looked up at the peeling colors of the hamburger boy, at the blue shirt that had faded unevenly over the uncooked pink color beneath, so that it appeared something was eating away at his clothing.

“Jenny is doing well,” he said, too quickly. “She wants you to come visit. She wants to show you her life. Jenny missed you, Edith.” To assuage a wave of guilt — the mention of her mother had not exactly filled Song with longing — he tried to convince himself of its truth, recalled how it had been Song’s idea and not his. He wished desperately that Edith were there with him so that he could take her warm hand and assure her, see the flicker of recognition as it came, even as it went.

“Will you come, Edith? Will you come visit?” Thomas heard a muffled clatter, then a distorted car horn. He had not broken through her fog, all of its shape-shifting, its short-sighted convictions, and she had put the phone down. He repeated Adeleine’s name with increasing volume, begging her to remember him from wherever she’d retreated to.

Edith had gingerly placed the phone at the base of a plant, so that his voice lost itself in the waxy yellow-green leaves, and Adeleine didn’t realize the sound as coming from outside of her head for a full three minutes.

“The strangest thing,” she said. “You were obscured in my arrowhead plant. I thought for a moment it was finally talking back. You know, you’re supposed to talk to them.”

“Okay. Sweetheart? This is it. This is the last thing you have to do. I’ll make all the arrangements for you. After that—”

“All right,” she said, her agreement stopping his voice dead-on. “How long do I have to pack?” It was moments like this, when questions of poor odds dissolved and an improbable outcome came into fruition, that he could nearly sense the lost parts of his body tingling, preparing to wake up from their long sleep and feel again.

DOWNSTAIRS IN EDITH’S APARTMENT, the two women surveyed the clothing laid out on the bed, some of it removed from the cherrywood wardrobe for the first time in decades: a buttermilk angora cardigan beaded at the collar, a silk dress of peachy violet with a sash at the waist, camel linen slacks dotted with greens and grays, high-waisted denim shorts with a golden five-button fly, a brick plaid shirt with pearled snap enclosures. Edith sat near the foot and moved her hands over the pieces as though caressing a sleeping child awake, touching the grain of her former lives.

Standing with her arms crossed and lips pursed, imagining coordinated pairings, Adeleine envisioned Edith embracing her daughter in these clothes, linking an arm with hers and beginning a long walk. That her own life was missing from these fantasies, hardly considered by the plans at hand, felt like a generous gift from someone who knew her well.