The Shape of Desire

  No possibility seems too outlandish. And I would not blame any of them for refusing to spill their secrets.

  I have hesitated too long in answering Kathleen’s question. It’s possible my eyes have watered; at any rate, they’re burning. Kathleen’s delicate face puckers into a worried frown. “Maria?” she says uncertainly. “I’m sorry. Did I upset you?”

  “Oh—” I say, and I can hear the thickness in my voice. Fucking tears. I’m scrambling to think of a story that will explain my sudden despair while not giving anything away. “There used to be this guy, you know? And every once in a while he—he e-mails me. Or sends a birthday card. And it’s hard. Maybe I’m still in love with him, but he’s moved on. And for a while I think I’m over him, but then, there it is, another e-mail in my in-box.” I rub a finger over my eyelids. “I don’t really like to talk about it.”

  So briefly it’s as if it doesn’t happen, Kathleen touches the back of my wrist and then drops her hand in her lap. “I’m sorry,” she says. “That must be really hard.”

  “Yeah, well, sometimes life sucks,” I reply. I grab my Coke and take a few swallows just to clear my throat. “God, please don’t tell anybody I acted like this. I feel like such a loser.”

  “You’re not a loser,” she says. “Love is impossible. I mean, even when you have it, it hurts you. So you know—” She shrugs. “You just get through the day.”

  I nod. “Yeah, that’s what I try to do.”

  She hesitates and then says in a rush, “But if you ever need someone to talk to—you know—I mean, you can tell me anything. I wouldn’t repeat it.”

  Not only is the offer sincere, I think, but it’s a good one. Kathleen probably would be excellent at keeping secrets, and my guess is that her sympathy would be boundless. I could pick worse confidantes—though I don’t want even this one.

  “Thanks, Kathleen. I can’t tell you how much I genuinely appreciate it. But I really feel better if I don’t talk about it.”

  “I know,” she says. “That’s the way I feel, too.”

  When the day finally limps to a close, I head out to the parking lot without lingering in the hall to say good-bye to Ellen and Marquez, as I usually do. In traffic, I am impatient and reckless, passing cars when I don’t have quite enough room, keeping the speedometer at a good ten miles above the speed limit. I am desperate to get home, almost able to convince myself that Dante will still be there waiting for me, on the verge of leaving, perhaps, but unwilling to melt into the shadows without giving me one last kiss. At the imminent risk of death, I run a red light to make the final left turn into my neighborhood, and my tires protest as I turn too fast into my driveway.

  I run up the walk, fumbling for my house key, and waste a good sixty seconds at the door because I drop the key ring twice as I try to unlock the door. “Dante?” I call before I’m even across the threshold. “Dante? Are you home?”

  Nothing answers me but silence.

  He might be sleeping; he might have left to run an errand, to buy another pair of shoes, perhaps, or a snack food for which he had an irresistible craving. But he’s not lying in bed; he’s not in the bathroom. I can hardly bring myself to take the short walk from the bedroom back to the kitchen.

  As always, he has left a note lying on the counter. Apparently, all he could find was an envelope rescued from the recycling bin. Had to go are the only words he has written in his thick, nearly indecipherable scrawl. He hasn’t even signed the note.

  It’s as if someone has sliced me in two with a scythe so keen I didn’t even feel the blade bisect my body. Yet I am staggering with the knowledge of a pain that will soon be fatal. I open my mouth, as if to wail, but no sound comes out and no air makes its way in. My lungs have shut down, and my heart, and now all my muscles fail me at once. I drop to the floor, still silent, completely unseeing, unable to weep or even breathe. I can feel the cool linoleum against my cheek. The substrata of the floor makes a hard, unforgiving platform against my shoulder and hip. My mouth is still open, still producing no noise. My right hand is stretched out before me as if I am reaching for…something. A phone, perhaps. As if I could call for help. A shot of epinephrine to restart my heart. An oxygen tank. Something that will keep me alive.

  None of those will help. Dante is gone.

  I lie on the floor, unmoving, until all the light is gone from the world.

  Tuesday I claim that I’m still feeling the ill effects of food poisoning, but by Wednesday I’m more or less recovered. I always follow this cycle when Dante leaves: a day of mourning, a few days of disorientation, and then I return to my normal routine. As his visits grow shorter, that normal routine has expanded. I have learned how to fill my days.

  Over the weekend, I drive up to Springfield, Illinois, to celebrate my cousin Beth’s birthday. My mother, my aunt and uncle, and Beth’s sister, Sydney, all live in Springfield, which is where I was born and where my mother returned three years ago after my father died. Despite the fact that my father and my uncle were present for every holiday, every birthday, every summer camping trip that my mother and her sister planned, I grew up in a family that was utterly dominated by women. Two of my great-aunts are still living, still characterized by boundless energy and strong opinions. And the only member of the next generation—so far—is also a girl, Beth’s three-year-old daughter, Clara. Already she shows every tendency to be as strong-willed and outspoken as the rest of the women in the family.

  All of us share a certain olive-toned coloring inherited from my great-grandparents, who emigrated from Mexico, though a certain amount of intermarrying with light-skinned European descendants during the past two generations has definitely modified the gene pool.

  We all gather in Aunt Andrea’s house on Sunday afternoon, stuffing ourselves on homemade quesadillas and tamales before lighting candles and singing “Happy Birthday.”

  “I can’t believe I’m thirty-five,” Beth laments. “In my head I’m still eighteen and I don’t have to wear a bra to look good in a tight T-shirt.”

  Even the older women burst into laughter at this remark, but Aunt Andrea puts her hands over Clara’s ears.

  “Don’t listen to your mommy,” she says. “She shouldn’t say such things in front of little girls.”

  “Hell, Clara already spends more time than I do thinking about clothes,” Beth responds. “You better believe she’ll care what she looks like when she turns my age.”

  Both of my cousins are tall women with athletic builds and waves of dark curls. Beth, the oldest, wears her hair short enough so that it makes a wild frothing mass around her face. Sydney, who is two years younger, keeps hers long, but ties it back with scarves and scrunchies so that her face is uncluttered and severe. Sydney is the more beautiful and sophisticated of the two, but Beth is my favorite. Always has been. We were born eight months apart and were inseparable as children. As adults, we remain close. Her house is about twenty minutes from mine, so we get together fairly often and rarely go more than a week without talking.

  Though naturally there are things we don’t talk about.

  “I’m getting a boob job when mine start to sag,” Sydney announces. “And then a face-lift. Or maybe a face-lift first. Whichever body part needs the most work by then.”

  “It’s the sags and wrinkles that show who you really are,” says my great-aunt Vannie. “Don’t be trying to smooth those away.”

  “Well, I won’t if I look as good as you do when I’m eighty,” Sydney says. The easy flattery makes everyone smile.

  “Who wants more cake?” Aunt Andrea asks.

  “Me!” Clara exclaims.

  “Me,” adds Beth. “Then I can get a tummy tuck along with my boob job and face-lift.”

  As we redistribute ourselves for the second round of dessert, my mom settles beside me on the couch. I’m always struck by her serenity. She can be high-spirited in certain moods—a trait that is enhanced when she’s around her sister, Andrea—but her default mode is relaxed. When I was a tee
nager, I found her calm so maddening that it could incite me to hysteria; but as an adult, I find her presence soothing even on my most frazzled day. I wish I could live my life with equal grace, instead of being rocked by transient emotions and hopeless desires. On the other hand, I have often wondered if behind my mother’s smooth skin and dark eyes some hidden fire burned. She might be the person who had unwittingly taught me the art of living with secrets.

  “How’s work?” my mom asks as she balances her cake plate on her knees and sips water from a paper cup.

  I shrug. “Fine. Boring some days, actually kinda interesting other days.” I take a bite of cake. “Still better than working in a coal mine.”

  That was what she always said to my father whenever he complained about his job as a delivery driver or to me when I commiserated about her own work as a waitress. I’m not sure she ever knew anyone who did work in a coal mine, but the message was clear: Life could be worse. Don’t whine.

  “Well, you look good,” she says. “Very pretty.”

  I bat my eyelashes. “New makeup. I bought a whole pile of new stuff at the Clinique counter a couple weeks ago.”

  She transfers the water cup to her other hand so she can reach up and rub a thumb across my cheek. “You’ve got good bones,” she says. “You’re beautiful even without makeup.”

  “Oh, way to give yourself a compliment,” I scoff.

  You have to look for a moment to see how much we resemble each other, because in superficial ways we don’t: Her hair is now a coarse gray, while mine is still deep brown and my eyes are dark blue. And, of course, our styles differ, since I tend to favor bright colors and she is most often in black. But our cheeks, jawbones, and pronounced noses—those indisputably prove that we are linked by blood.

  “It’s true, Maria. All you girls would look perfectly fine without makeup,” Aunt Andrea calls from across the room.

  “I wouldn’t,” Sydney says. “I’d look like a hag.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Beth says. “I’ve never tried to leave the house without lipstick and mascara. And usually blush. And some eye shadow. And fingernail polish.”

  “And perfume,” Clara adds. “I want perfume.”

  After about an hour of the food and the banter and the laughter, Beth and I find a few minutes to slip outside and talk in private on her mother’s screened-in back porch. The weather has turned sharply colder for this last weekend in September, and our breath hangs in the air for a second or two as we speak.

  “So how are things going with Charles?” I ask. Charles is the man she has dated off and on for the past five years. He’s not Clara’s father; it was during one of their breakups that Beth met Enrique and had a brief fling. So brief that she had already broken up with him, and decided she never wanted to see him again, before she discovered she was pregnant with Clara. She told him he had a daughter, but made it clear she wasn’t interested in his interference or support, and he’s been only too happy to keep his distance.

  Charles, meanwhile, has two kids of his own, and he shares custody of them with his ex-wife. The divorce was amicable enough that he occasionally still sleeps with his ex-wife, even though she’s remarried.

  Beth rolls her eyes and leans against one of the flat beams that stand sentry along the perimeter of the porch, holding up the roof. “We had a fight last night.”

  “Well, that’s too bad. On your birthday.”

  “I think that’s why we fought,” she says humorously. “He thinks if I’m mad at him around my birthday and Christmas, it means he doesn’t have to buy me a present. You watch, we’ll make up in a week and then break up again right around December fifteenth.”

  “That’s pretty sucky.”

  “That’s Charles.”

  Which about sums it up. She loves him, despite his childishness, his emotional unavailability, his complicated relationships. Who am I to counsel her to seek out a lover who will treat her better, behave more like an adult, and buy in to her hopes and dreams?

  “What about you?” she asks.

  I shake my head. “Nothing new on the romantic front.” From time to time, just to stave off more questions, I manufacture blind dates, occasional short-term boyfriends, cute guys at the office I have a crush on, just so my family doesn’t start worrying that I am completely incapable of normal social interaction. Once I used Marquez as my template, just so I could make the details feel particularly real. I must have been successful because Beth still asks about him once in a while with an intense and knowing tone, as if she suspects he is the real love of my life.

  She shakes her head and crosses her arms over her chest, hugging herself against the chill. “Well, aren’t we pathetic,” she says. “Let’s go do something fun! I’ve been thinking about driving up to Chicago someday. You wanna go with me? Mom or Sydney will keep Clara. We can get a hotel room on Michigan Avenue and spend three days shopping. And drinking margaritas.”

  “Oh, that sounds great!” I exclaim. “When did you want to go?”

  “I don’t know, sometime in October? Before it gets too cold. Though, you know. Chicago. There could be snow on the ground before Halloween.”

  I calculate rapidly. Dante left my house seven days ago. That means he’s not likely to be back for two weeks or more. I simply don’t want to be gone if there’s any chance he will be around. It’s really only safe to make future plans when he’s actually in my house and I know he’ll be gone soon.

  “Can we be kind of flexible about it?” I say. “There’s this project coming up at work in a couple of weeks—this big client we’ve been trying to land—and I know we’re all going to have to work through the weekend to get a proposal ready. I just won’t know which weekend that will be until the project comes through. Can I let you know when I have a better handle on it?”

  “Sure. All I know is that I can’t be gone next weekend, but after that I’m clear for a while.”

  “I’ll call you.”

  I drive home in a nasty rain, my car loaded with Tupperware containers of food and my heart lightened by conversation with loved ones. I’ve promised my mom I’ll send her a book I enjoyed, given Sydney the name of a website that sells dress pants for tall women, and signed up to sponsor Beth’s walk for the food pantry. I’ve remembered that most of life is about small, essential connections, so unobtrusive, so elastic, that you scarcely realize they’re actually holding you together. The big ones—the great, grand emotional bonds—those are the ones that break, the ones that fail you, the ones that give way and send you careening toward the foot of the bleak and jagged canyon. It’s the tough, gnarled, unadorned ties that really do bind, that never let you fall all the way down into darkness.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I’m getting ready for work the next morning when a news item on the radio causes me to freeze before the mirror. All I’m wearing is underwear and a robe; I’ve just started to sweep mascara on my right eye when the announcer’s voice stops my heart.

  “Police are investigating the murder of a woman whose body was found early this morning in the northwest corner of the Mark Twain National Forest, not far from Rolla. She appears to be in her mid to late twenties and she may have been carrying an infant. Police have found a diaper bag at the scene, but no evidence of a baby.”

  The professional voice pauses to make way for another man to speak, this one in the hesitant and nasal tones of someone not trained for radio. “It’s too early to say what might have happened, but there is some speculation that the woman was killed so that someone could steal her child. We’ll know more once we identify the body.” There is the muffled sound of a reporter asking an indistinguishable question, and the sheriff—or whoever he is—answers. “We haven’t determined cause of death yet. No, not a gunshot wound. No, not blunt force trauma. I’m afraid I can’t be more specific than that.”

  I stop listening. I put down the mascara brush, my left eye still unenhanced, and go straight for my purse to dig out Christina’s number. When she sleepi
ly answers on the third ring, I almost collapse to the floor. My hands suddenly begin to shake.

  “Oh, thank God,” I whisper into the receiver.

  “Hello? Who is this?” she says, sounding more alert and more annoyed.

  “It’s Maria Devane. I’m sorry, did I wake you up?” It’s only seven in the morning, and she’s still on maternity leave; she might not have planned to get up for hours, especially if Lizzie kept her awake all night crying. But I don’t care if she’s tired, I don’t care if I’ve ruined her morning, I’m just overwhelmingly relieved to realize that she’s alive.

  “Dante’s Maria? What’s wrong?”

  “There was a story on the news just now. A woman murdered near Rolla and her baby missing. I just thought—I mean, there must be thousands of women in Rolla who have babies, but I—just for a moment I—and it’s not like either of your brothers is likely to notice right away if you go missing—”

  “You were worried about me? Oh, Maria, that’s so sweet. But I’m fine. Lizzie’s fine. She’s sleeping here in my room in the bassinet.”

  “I’m so glad. I heard the story and I—Well, I wouldn’t have been able to relax all day until I knew you were all right. I’m really sorry if I woke you up.”

  “What time is it?” Over the phone line I hear the rustle of bedclothes and then her little eek of dismay. “Crap, it’s after seven! I have a doctor’s appointment at eight thirty! I must have slept through the alarm.”

  I attempt to laugh but the sound is more like a whuffle. “Good thing I called, then.”

  The timbre of her voice changes. I can tell she’s out of bed, moving around the room, probably putting slippers on or sorting through an underwear drawer. “I was thinking about calling you anyway. I’m coming to St. Louis on Friday, and I was wondering if you’d be able to watch Lizzie.”