Juno's Swans Read online

  Then when we were walking down the street to the vintage clothing store, I reached for her hand, and Sarah instantly slid her hand out of mine. Not here, she said, frowning, not looking at me.

  I looked around but I couldn’t see anything. A distracted mother with one child in a stroller and another tugging at her pant leg. Two older men in conversation in front of a hardware store. Why not? I asked. Because, she said, just because.

  After we had crossed off most of the list, she turned to me with a half apologetic smile. “I’m hungry,” she said, “and cranky. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I’m hungry too. We should eat.”

  As we were sitting eating our sandwiches, I asked her tentatively about her mother’s visit and she shrugged me off, her face closing. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.

  I was tired and without meaning to, I began sniffing into my sandwich.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Sarah said then. “Nina. Really. It’s okay.” She reached out for my hand and brought it lightly to her cheek for an instant.

  “No, I know,” I said. And we did manage to smile for real at one another then, for the first time that day, mine a little wobbly. I was so focused on Sarah that I didn’t notice a dark-haired woman who had come up beside our table. She was smiling at both of us, gently and warmly, so I smiled back but I couldn’t make sense of what she was saying.

  “It’s a sin,” she said again. “I’m sorry?” I said, but Sarah’s left hand gripped the table hard and her right hand crushed the bones in mine. Her face was chalky.

  “Go away,” she said.

  “I just want you to know the Lord loves you.”

  “What?” I said. “What are you talking about?”

  “Go away,” Sarah said again and this time her voice was thick. She was furious, but she also looked on the verge of tears.

  “I know that it’s easy to be confused,” the woman said kindly, “but you can turn away from each other. You can be saved.”

  “Oh, you don’t understand,” I said. “We love each other.” My nose was still running and there were leftover tears on my cheeks that I wiped with the back of my sleeve.

  “I know you think you feel that way, but it’s a sin. I want you to know that if you listen to God’s word, you can be saved.”

  She set a leaflet on the table between our plastic cups, and turned to go. As she did, she touched my shoulder lightly and said, “I’ll pray for you.”

  I felt exposed, defiled, ashamed. Everything seemed dirtier and uglier after she left, the café’s concrete wall and its peeling mermaid mural, the plastic spoons and paper napkins, the salt and pepper shakers in the shapes of anchors, the top of the metal lattice table. People around us were pretending not to have heard, were turned toward one another, their eyes slipping toward us and away again. My face was very hot.

  Sarah said, “Bitch,” fiercely but too late, and without complete conviction. Her chin was trembling, and she did not reach out for me. She had pulled her hands under her side of the table.

  But the woman hadn’t been a bitch. I felt caught by the net of her gentleness, which trapped us in some cloying, ugly, confounding haze, like it had made it impossible for us to see each other clearly. The pamphlet between us read Christ is Coming. Well, let him come. We weren’t stopping him. I couldn’t grasp how someone could have looked at us and responded the way that she did. I thought again, she just doesn’t understand, and I said this, but Sarah snapped back at me, “Oh, she understands. And it’s not like she’s the exception. She’s the norm.”

  For what felt like the umpteenth time that week, I said, getting teary, “Why are you mad at me?”

  “I’m not,” she said exasperated. “But you don’t have any idea about this, you don’t understand.”

  “What do you mean I don’t understand?” I was hissing at her now, furious too. “What are you talking about? Why are you talking to me this way? What’s wrong with you? You think I don’t know we can’t hold hands everywhere? I’m not stupid, Sarah.”

  She looked at me, from a million miles away.

  “I think you haven’t had a lot of experience with the kind of ugliness people have against people like you and me,” she said, finally, evenly. “That’s all.” But even though she had put us back together syntactically, I didn’t feel better. I didn’t feel united. I didn’t know how to get back to that place.

  We drove all the way back to Wellfleet in silence, and she left again immediately to drop off the props she’d found at the gallery. But when she came back to the apartment, she walked directly up to me, put her hands on the sides of my face, and kissed me as hard and long as she ever had, with her eyes closed. Then she cupped the back of my head and looked into my face with so much naked love and remorse that there wasn’t anything to do but kiss her back.

  CHAPTER 27

  The MP called again,” Titch said when I saw her a few days later. She was frowning at a collection of paintbrushes spread out in the breakfast area, some drying on towels on the floor. It smelled of turpentine, even though the sliding doors were pushed back so that she was surrounded on two sides by screens. She didn’t sound as unfriendly as she had recently; she was totally immersed in the art project in front of her, speaking to me as though from a great distance.

  “Did you tell him I was eaten by a great white shark?” I said, lightly, my stomach dropping. I had come to Truro for the afternoon, skipping the workshop, nursing a sunburn, and feeling very tired. I was hoping to be alone. Sarah’s apartment had no bathtub and I had an idea about having a nice cool bath, maybe with baking soda in it—a recipe of my grandmother’s for soothing just about any ailment in the summertime (hot milk with honey was her wintertime remedy). Sarah and I had napped on the beach at Duck Harbor the day before and I had a swath of itchy hot pink skin down my left side, where my shirt had slipped off while I slept.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Titch said, not looking up, but still with no outright hostility. “That was Martha’s Vineyard, not Cape Cod. Ripmip is no fool. I think you better call him back this time though. He sounded funny.”

  “Technically, cinematically speaking, it was Amity Island, and I don’t know what he is, but he’s something worse than a fool,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “You should call him though.” She looked over, distracted, and then seemed to register me for a minute.

  “You look terrible,” she said bluntly.

  It might have been an opening, but I didn’t have the heart for talking. I pushed on through to my bedroom where I climbed onto the bed and lay there, shoes and all, staring up at the ceiling, getting sand on the bedspread, watching the shadows shape-shift.

  He answered the phone as though he had been sitting beside it, waiting for it to ring.

  “I did it,” he said, “I quit my job.”

  “You what?”

  “I wrote you. I wrote you I was going to.”

  I didn’t remember reading this, but then, what had I actually read? I was silent.

  “I bought a truck. I’m going to Alaska. “

  “You’re what?”

  “Going to Alaska. I’m leaving tomorrow. That’s why I’ve been calling. I wanted to talk to you before I left. I wanted to hear your voice. And I wanted you to know before I left.”

  “Does Mz. Hiller know?”

  “This isn’t about her.”

  I noticed he hadn’t answered the question.

  “Listen, I don’t care if she goes.” (This was not entirely true. I felt bad tempered the instant I said it. I wanted to thump him or kick him, jab him in the ribs with a sharp stick or stab a fork into his thigh. I wound the phone cord around my thumb until it turned white.)

  He didn’t say anything.

  “You’re joking, aren’t you?”

  “No. I handed in my letter of resignation.”r />
  “Really?”

  “You told me you couldn’t be here in school for your senior year if I was here too. And now I won’t be.”

  I thought for a moment. I had said that.

  I said, lamely, “But you were the Teacher of the Year.”

  He said nothing.

  I tried again, still not believing him. “You’re really quitting because I said to?”

  “Absolutely. It’s the right thing to do. I’ve rented out my place, packed up the truck, and I’m headed out.”

  “What are you going to do in Alaska?” I asked politely.

  “Hike, see everything. I’ve always wanted to go.” It was like talking to a stranger. Something was running underneath the conversation, something dark and cold. Or maybe I was just imagining Alaska, the thought of which made me shiver.

  “Is Jason going to go with you?”

  “No, he’s got soccer camp. I don’t have him in the summers anyway, remember? He’s with his mother. His mother has him.”

  I knew that and had forgotten. He sounded weary, not as aggressive as he usually did on the subject of his ex-wife and the custody of his youngest son.

  “What about a job? What are you going to do after Alaska?”

  “I’ve applied to a number of good private schools to start either in the winter term or the following year.”

  He paused and then added, almost hopefully, “I won’t be too far away.” He said this as though it had something to do with me.

  “I’m seeing someone,” I blurted, but firmly, to set him straight somehow, to get him off my heels. “I’m in love.”

  He was quiet for a moment. Then, “That’s great,” he said, tenderly. He began to talk about how anyone who got to be with me—my future boyfriend or husband—was terribly lucky, that I was a gift, that he wished he could be that person but he knew that great love would come to me. He had gone down this road before, and I generally didn’t listen while he was talking, which under other circumstances he would do while stroking my hand. He always managed to sound paternal and wistful all at once, which really creeped me out.

  “Right,” I said abruptly. “Well, it’s a done deal now.”

  There was a long pause.

  Then he said, a little quavery, “I know you can never love me as I love you,” which made me cringe.

  What is there to say to this? Who thinks it’s a good idea to speak this way?

  We sat in silence. Chester the cat pushed open the door to my room, sat down heavily on the braided rug, and began washing his white waterbed of a belly, vigorously, as if he had really let things go and needed to make up for lost time. He made small, reproachful, grooming growls, snatching at the fur with his teeth. His pink skin was shining through the fur.

  “Okay then,” I said eventually, attempting brightness and finality. “Have a safe trip.”

  The MP sighed and then cleared some phlegm from his throat. The noise was kind of disgusting, although I felt a little bad about being repulsed. Later I thought he might have been crying. But all he said then, after a minute, was, “Thank you.”

  I went out to find Titch, who was still squatting on the tile floor cleaning her brushes. Chester had joined her and was sprawled on the sunny tiles on his back now, all his legs spread out, underbelly completely exposed, in a vaguely obscene pose. I looked away from him.

  “The MP is quitting,” I said. “He’s going to Alaska.”

  “Roger Peters is quitting teaching high school? For good?”

  “He’s leaving our neck of the woods anyway.”

  “Well, that’s dramatic.”

  “I asked him to,” I said, feeling a little sick. “I just didn’t ever think he would actually do it.”

  She looked up at me, almost impressed. “No shit.”

  Later, in her basement, she would ask, with hesitation, “Did you really not care what happened with the MP?”

  My head ached and I said, with difficulty, “It’s not that I didn’t care. I don’t know. I thought I was out of it. I thought I was on to the thing that mattered.”

  “And now?” she asked.

  “Now it seems really sad. Like maybe I should have known or something.”

  She rubbed her nose. “Yeah, I can see that,” she said, finally.

  CHAPTER 28

  Sarah and I were both busy and preoccupied during the day, but we were spooned next to one another at night. I had pretty much recovered from the terrible visit to Hyannis, when, a few days later, over dinner out, I said, “What’s the plan for the weekend?” and Sarah said, “Plan?” As if it were a word she had never heard before. As if I had invented it.

  Then she said, “Oh right, sorry. I thought I’d go into the city and take care of some things. You have to be at work, right? And I have to meet with my agent on Sunday.”

  “She works on a Sunday?” I said, surprised, and just then, when I reached for the bill, she made an ugly face at me, sucking on her teeth, and I pulled my hand back. I felt like I’d been slapped.

  We drove in silence toward Wellfleet until without warning she pulled right across Route 6 and turned down the David­sons’ sandy road.

  I said, “Why are you taking me here?”

  And she said, “Isn’t that what we planned?”

  “No,” I said, taken aback, “we have no plan, remember?”

  “Right,” she said, smiling as though we were sharing a joke. But she kept right on driving through the undergrowth.

  “Sarah?” I said. But she didn’t answer.

  She didn’t talk to me again except to say, “Okay then, I’ll call you,” as she pulled up to the house.

  I got out of the truck and shut the door, mechanically. I watched her reverse, and drive away, the truck tires spitting gravel and sand. I felt a little stunned, a little fuzzy about the edges, a metallic humiliated taste in my mouth, almost as though I’d had too much to drink and gotten my signals crossed with a complete stranger.

  When did you know? Never. There was no moment that I knew.

  Also: I could not have imagined it.

  I would have liked to talk to Titch about what was happening, but that wasn’t possible anymore.

  That same day that Sarah dropped me off in Truro so abruptly, I looked up late in the night and saw Titch standing in the doorway. The light was behind her so her face was in darkness. I realized that she was saying my name and I struggled to wake up. I thought for a disoriented moment that she had come to tell me something about one of the cats.

  But it was nothing like that at all. Titch had to go home. Her mom’s cancer had returned and she was going back into the hospital for surgery the very next day.

  “Do you need a ride?” I asked, completely groggy. But she said no, tight-lipped. There was a cab coming to take her to the airport. She was leaving the car.

  “Is Ruby going with you?”

  “No. She’s staying. I just talked to her. She’ll come later if she needs to.”

  “Are you okay?” Saying this was a mistake. Her eyes welled for a moment and then the tears drained right back into their ducts and her pupils were dilated, hard black points.

  “Are you coming back?” I asked, but she didn’t say anything. She was as still and tense as a lightning rod. We sat in the living room in silence, punctuated only by the sound of Jack’s claws shredding the couch.

  “Don’t forget about the plants or the birdseed,” she said, finally, when the lights of the cab cut across the house, and, dragging her duffel bag after her, she went out into the night. She looked really small all of a sudden, walking away.

  “Call me when you get there,” I called after her, but she didn’t turn around.

  I told Sarah about Titch’s mom and said, “It’s just so sad, it’s so wrong and sad.” We were tucked into a sand dune on Ryder Beach the following evening
, sitting on chilly, damp grey sand. I thought about how much I loved Lois with the waves of dark hair springing up from her forehead, and I could feel the drumbeat of dread in my pulse. But I was conscious too of being snug in my own well-being, unperturbed, of affecting sadness. I was so glad to have Sarah back after her strange departure the day before, to have so soon a pressing reason to cleave into her side, that I was almost light-headed with relief and gratitude.

  Sarah said, lightly, kindly, “Grief comes to us all, Mary Margaret.” Then she swung her knees over my outstretched legs and huddled in. We put our salty wet noses together like dogs. Her hair blew over me, stinging at the tips. There was no way not to feel safe and loved in that place. I asked for it, I wanted it, I gave over to it: the greatest state of grace I had ever known.

  It felt like I should be at the Davidsons’ more, now that Titch wasn’t there full-time, and Sarah came over a few times, but she had to walk Biscuit, who couldn’t visit because of the cats. And I knew she preferred staying at her apartment. I did too. Without Titch—and even though she hadn’t really taken anything more than a suitcase of clothes with her—the Davidsons’ house seemed both enlarged and empty, almost echoey. When I turned the television on for company, the reflection jumped in the glass door behind my bed. I had never noticed how much glass there was around the house, all the windows and skylights and the sliding glass doors I needed to lock in every room, all the ways to see into the house, its distressing exposure.

  “Chester got out,” I told Titch, when she called from home.