“I’ll bet you’ve been busy.” Cynthia laughed. “Guess what a little birdie told me about you? In fact, all the little birdies are talking about it.”
Arlie disliked Cynthia more than she would have thought possible. Everything about Cynthia was repellent: her tan, her white T-shirt, the blue running shorts, her dark hair pulled back into a ponytail.
“I guess you’re not the good girl you pretend to be,” Cynthia went on. “Even if we’re not friends anymore, I didn’t think I’d be the last to know.”
“You’re clearly mistaken.” Arlie could feel something inside her quicken. A panic, a flutter, a lie.
“Am I? Everyone’s seen George Snow’s truck parked at your house. You’re lucky I haven’t told John.”
“Don’t act as though you’re so above it all,” Arlie said. “You’ve been after John from the start. Do you think I’m stupid?”
“Actually, I do. All we’ve done is flirt. Unlike you and George. I heard you do him in his truck in a parking lot down at the beach.”
Arlyn felt dizzy. Had this really been her best friend, the woman she’d confided in, invited to her home each and every Friday?
“If I got my windows washed as often as you did, the glass would be worn away,” Cynthia said. “Sooner or later you’re going to get caught, baby girl.”
She wouldn’t want to face off against John in divorce court. He might try to take away everything she cared about for spite. Even Sam. Then what would she do? Arlie must have turned even paler, her freckles standing out like a pox. She thought of the sort of war John might wage if he was angry enough, if Cynthia stoked his fury. Arlie began to imagine a custody battle, a lost little boy.
“Don’t worry. I haven’t told him.” Cynthia seemed able to see right through her. “He’s not home enough to notice anything, is he? But all of us gals on the road have been keeping track. We meet once a week to discuss your progress as a liar. Who would have thunk it? Little Arlie. Enjoy it while you can. I plan to be there for John when he needs me. Whenever that happens, I’ll be right next door.”
“I have to get home.” Arlyn turned and started walking.
“Go right ahead,” Cynthia called. “Fuck your window washer however much you’d like. But don’t come crying to me when it all comes crashing down.”
THE FIRST CRASH CAME WITH A CRACK IN THE WINDOW. One night rain came pouring into the upstairs hall. “Nobody noticed this!” John shouted. “What the hell are those window washers paying attention to?”
There were breaks in several of the roof panels, one in Sam’s bedroom, as a matter of fact. It was a dangerous oversight. John fired the Snow brothers the next day, even though Steven Snow insisted they hadn’t been hired for structural work. After threatening the Snows with legal action, John engaged a team to replace the broken windows, then found a new cleaning service, one that would be responsible for the yardwork as well. George’s truck could no longer be seen near the house. Still, he continued to come around, even though Arlie told him to phone instead and she’d meet him at the beach. He couldn’t stay away. Once he arrived on a bicycle borrowed from a neighbor’s child, another time he was waiting behind the boxwoods, so that when Arlie went out to get the newspaper a hand reached for her, and pulled her into the hedges. There he was, George Snow.
Arlie began to worry. Fate had a funny way of getting back at you when you were selfish and thoughtless, and maybe that’s what they’d been.
“Isn’t that the window man?” Sam asked when they passed George’s truck parked on their corner on the way home from the bus stop one day.
“He must be working for someone else,” Arlie said brightly.
“He’s looking at you funny,” Sam said.
Cynthia had been completely wrong in her assessment of the boy; there was no child smarter than Sam.
“Maybe he’s wondering why we’re not waving,” Arlie said.
She and Sam turned and waved with both hands.
“Hello, window man!” Sam cried.
The truck pulled away from the curb and made a U-turn.
“He didn’t wave back.” Sam looked up at his mother.
“Let’s have hot chocolate,” Arlie said. She was crying, but it was windy and she didn’t think Sam could see. She would have to make up her mind, she realized that now. It was stupid to think she could have it both ways. But if she left John did she risk the possibility of losing Sam?
“You don’t like hot chocolate.” Sam wondered if that was why she was crying.
“Sometimes I do,” Arlie said.
How could she be someone’s mother and be so selfish? After Cynthia, her eyes were opened. She saw the way people were staring at her at the market. She hurried through her shopping; then in the parking lot, Sue Hardy, who lived down the street, came up to her and said, “I’m just telling you as a neighbor — everybody is talking about that George Snow lurking around. I’m just warning you, Arlie. He’s not the invisible man.”
Arlyn called George that night, after John had gone off to bed. Sitting in the dark kitchen lit only by stars, she told him she thought they should take a break.
“Why would we ever do that, Arlie?”
“Don’t come around,” Arlie finally told him. “I can’t risk this anymore.”
In bed, watching John sleep, she became frightened of who she’d become. She had never been the sort of person who lied and cheated; she felt such actions were poisonous and wrong.
“What is it?” John said when he woke to see her sitting up in bed. Arlie looked a hundred years old.
“Did you ever wonder if we were really meant to be together?”
“God, Arlie.” John laughed. “Is that what’s keeping you awake?” He had stopped wondering about that. He’d made a wrong turn and here they were, years later, in bed. “Go to sleep. Forget things like that. That kind of thinking doesn’t do you any good.”
For once, Arlyn thought John was right. She closed her eyes. She would do what she had to do, no matter the price.
She stopped answering the phone when she knew George was the one calling. She looked out at the sky and after a while the phone stopped ringing. She kept busy. She took up knitting. She made Sam a sweater with a border of bluebirds. One day she came home from the market with Sam to see George’s truck in the driveway. George wasn’t behind the wheel. He was right up by the house, sitting beside the boxwoods. Arlie felt her heart go crazy, but she calmly said to Sam, “Can you take one of these packages?”
She handed Sam the lightest grocery bag, and grabbed the other two from the backseat.
“There’s the window washer,” Sam said. He waved at George and George waved back.
Arlie took the bag of groceries and told Sam to go play ball. George Snow got up. There was grass on his clothes; he’d been sitting there a long time, waiting.
She told him she couldn’t see him anymore. If she had to make a choice she would always choose Sam. Sam was throwing a ball against the garage door. She thought that his presence would keep the conversation with George on an even keel, but when she told George it was over, he got on his knees.
“Get up! Get up!” Arlyn cried. “You can’t do something like this!”
Although Sam rarely paid attention to adults, he was certainly watching now. A tall man was on his knees. The ball Sam had been playing with rolled down the drive, then disappeared beneath a rhododendron.
“We can just take off and go away,” George Snow said. “We’ll leave right now.”
He made it sound so easy, but of course Arlyn was the one who had something to lose. What about the child in the driveway whom she loved above all others? What about the man she had foolishly promised her future to?
“George,” she said. “I mean it. Get up!”
He stood to face her. His coat billowed out behind him. It was too late. He saw it in her face. He wiped his eyes with his coat sleeves.
“I can’t believe you’re going to do this to us,” he said.
He kissed her before she could tell him no. Not that she would have wanted him to stop. He kissed her for a long time, then he went to his truck. Sam waved to him and George Snow waved back.
“What was wrong with that man’s eyes?” Sam asked later, when his mother was putting him to bed.
“Soot fell into them,” Arlie said. “Now go to sleep.”
That night when John came home he called her name in a loud voice. Arlyn’s first thought was, He knows! Someone has told him! Cynthia did it! Now I can run away! But that wasn’t it at all. She went into the kitchen and John was holding out his closed hands. It was Arlyn’s birthday. She’d completely forgotten. She was twenty-five years old.
“Is this for me?” Arlyn said.
“I can’t imagine who else it would be for,” John said. “Let’s take a look.”
He opened his hands to reveal a strand of creamy pearls the color of camellias. The first beautiful thing John ever bought for her. He’d waited until now. Until she didn’t give a damn.
“I should have a birthday more often,” Arlie said.
It wasn’t until they were in bed that John told her he’d found the pearls.
“Oh, don’t be mad,” John said. “You know I can never remember dates. At least you have good luck on your birthday! It’s not every woman’s husband who finds a treasure. They were under the boxwood. Maybe they’ve been there for a hundred years.”
It was as though the pearls had grown outside their house, seeds planted in the earth, to arise milky as onionskin. Arlie looped them around her neck. Let that fool John think they’d appeared like magic, springing out of the earth or dropped from the sky by a red-winged hawk. She let John fasten the clasp even though they were most certainly a gift from another man, the one she’d loved. Not that it mattered anymore. She’d made her choice and if she herself lived to be a hundred she would never regret it.
Her choice would always be Sam.
SAM MOODY WASN’T LIKE OTHER PEOPLE. THE THINGS HE most often thought about were dishes, bones, vases, model planes, buildings made of blocks — things that could be broken. He secretly did things no one knew about. He broke things to hear how they sounded when they split apart. He put soot and glue into his father’s good shoes. He collected dead things — beetles, mice, moths, a baby rabbit. He picked fallen sparrows off the lawn, ones that had crashed into the windows and dropped to their death. He watched them all change into their last element — dust or bone — and then he put them into a cardboard box in the back of his closet. He sprayed some of his mother’s perfume around so that everything smelled like decay and jasmine. At night, to get himself to fall asleep without thinking scary thoughts, Sam stabbed his fingers with a straight pin. Having pain was easier than having bad thoughts.
He tried to dream about dogs — they were comforting; so was holding his mother’s hand. He had the feeling that something terrible was about to happen. Did other people think that way, too? During the hours he spent in school it was with him: the terrible, unknown, encroaching thing. He searched for it in the playground while the other boys and girls were on the swings or playing ball. He kept looking for dead things. Moths, worms, the foot of a chipmunk so shriveled up it looked like a bow from a girl’s ponytail. He believed in signs. He was certain that if one good thing happened to him, everything else would be good, but if he found one more dead thing, it would be the end of him in some deep and unknown way.
The good thing happened unexpectedly. He and his mother had often gone on adventures together when he was younger; then his mother got too busy. Now she was available again. All of a sudden she asked him if he’d mind skipping school and of course he said he wouldn’t mind at all. In no time they were driving to Bridgeport. He hoped they were running away forever. Nothing he ever did was right in his father’s eyes. His father didn’t even have to say anything anymore. The bad feelings had sifted from John Moody’s head into Sam’s head. Once they were on the ferry his mother let her hair down; it was so red and beautiful people turned to stare. The water was wavy, and Sam’s mother went to the railing; she excused herself and vomited into the Long Island Sound. A whoosh and a wrenching noise. Sam felt bad for her. If his father were here he’d be huffy and embarrassed because people were looking at her. His father wouldn’t understand that people weren’t only staring because she was sick; they were doing it because she was beautiful.
“I just need a drink of water,” Sam’s mother said. She was so pale the freckles stood out on her face the way they did when she was upset or hadn’t slept. He thought they might be telling him something if he could only understand the language of freckles.
When his mother felt better they went inside, to the snack bar; Sam’s mother had a glass of water and he ordered French fries. His mother reminded him that they used to take train trips when he was a baby, and he said he remembered, though he didn’t completely. A passing man asked his mother if she was feeling all right, and she said, Yes, thank you for your kindness, and for some reason Sam felt like crying when she said that. He was in kindergarten now. Too old for such things. Much too old to cry. He lay down on the bench seat with his head on his mother’s lap. Halfway across the sound the ferry’s foghorn echoed and they went out and stood on the deck.
“Lick your lips,” his mother told him. When he did he tasted French fries, but he told her he tasted sea salt.
They got off at the ferry terminal, then walked down the street hand in hand. Sam’s mother told him that his grandfather had been the captain of the ferryboat, and that he’d been brave and strong. The houses here seemed run-down. When they stopped and she said, We used to come here all the time. Remember?, he didn’t. The house where Arlyn had grown up had been sold several times since her departure; each time it became a little more ramshackle. Arlyn had always kept her distance, but now she had an overwhelming desire to see inside. She went up the path and knocked on the door; she introduced herself as Arlyn Singer to the woman who lived there now, even though Sam knew his mother’s name was Moody, just as his was.
“I used to live here,” she told the woman, who was old and wearing her slippers, but who invited them to take a look around all the same.
They wiped their feet on a mat. It was a little house, with white woodwork halfway up the walls and wallpaper the rest of the way. There were peacocks on the wallpaper, blue and purple and green. Sam stared at them up close; when he blinked they looked as though they were shaking their feathers at him.
“That was my mother’s dining-room table,” Arlie said. The mahogany one they never used. “I left it behind. She died when I was very young.”
Sam didn’t like the sound of that one bit.
“We’d better go home,” he told his mother.
“I suppose we should.” But when Sam grabbed her hand and pulled she didn’t move. “Gee,” she said to the woman who now owned the house, “seeing my mother’s table makes me feel like I’m seventeen again.”
“Look, if you want that old table, take it,” the homeowner said. “It’s junk anyway. But don’t expect me to pay you a cent for it if that’s what you’re after!”
“Oh, no! That’s not why I came here!”
Arlie sat down and started to cry, right there in front of a stranger. The mahogany chairs were rickety and creaked under her slight weight. Arlie was making sobbing sounds that frightened Sam and he started to cry right along with her.
“Go outside and play,” the woman who owned the house told him. “Stay in the backyard.”
Sam went out, but he looked back through the window. The woman they didn’t know might be a witch, after all. You never could tell. The inside of something was often so different from the outside. But through the glass Sam could see the woman bringing Arlie a cup of water; Sam thought it was probably all right. He could wander a bit and his mother would still be safe.
The yard bordered a large field of tall grass and buttercups. It was pretty, prettier than the dirt-and-cement backyard, so he went to have a look, d
eep into the grass that was as high as his head. He was looking for something, but he didn’t know what it was. He thought the same was true for why his mother had come here. Searching for a message no one else could understand.
He saw it out of the corner of his eye. A little thing, curled up. If it was dead the message was clear: the terrible thing was about to happen. Alive, and he might have a chance. It was a baby squirrel, a tiny thing that had wandered away from its nest. Sam bent down and breathed in the smell of dirt and grass. He touched the squirrel and it made a mewling noise. It was still alive.
“I found you,” he said in a whispery voice. Maybe he’d be lucky, after all. Maybe terrible things wouldn’t happen.
He heard his mother calling for him, first in a strong voice, then in a panicky one, as though she thought he’d floated into the air on the west wind, off to sea, back to Connecticut. He didn’t want to speak until he had finished up with his good luck. He carefully picked up the squirrel and put it in his jacket pocket, where there were cracker crumbs and an old grape.
“Sam!” Arlyn screamed, as though she were dying without him there.
She was standing in the yard behind the house, not so very far away, but the field was bigger than Sam had thought, the weeds and grass so high he couldn’t see her. Just the roof and chimney of the house that used to be hers. He ran back through the grass, confused at first, but managing to follow her voice. He had a huge smile on his face, but when he reached his mother, she grabbed his shoulders, angry.
“Don’t you ever do that to me again!” she cried. Her face was red and hot and streaked with tears. Her hair was tangled from the wind and Sam could tell she hadn’t found what she was looking for inside that house. Not the way he had.
Arlie sank to her knees and held him tight. “You’re everything to me.”
Sam patted down the hair that looked all tangled. She always wore a strand of milky pearls around her throat. She always loved him no matter what.
They walked back to the ferry and found their seats. While they were going home, he showed her what he’d found. The little squirrel seemed dazed.