Sleepwalking Page 20

  Things ended there. Her mother walked slowly upstairs, her palm pressed to the side of her face. She went silently past Claire and Seth. Downstairs her father went into the kitchen and got out a tray of ice cubes from the freezer. She could hear the dry cracking as he bent back the plastic spine. He carried the ice upstairs to his wife. As he passed by Claire and Seth, he too was silent. There was no more noise that night.

  After the bridge game, the argument was short and ended without resolution. There was no slapping this time, no throwing of objects. Claire imagined that her parents must have faced each other in the living room and suddenly thought, My God, what are we doing? There was such rage inside them—only when it surfaced could anyone know the extent of it. They were furious because they realized that trumps and dummies and contracts could not change anything, could not take away their sadness. Release did not come from diversion.

  Did it come from replacement, though? That was what Claire was at the Aschers’ house. She was a substitute—if you squinted hard and did not listen too closely, she could almost pass for Lucy Ascher. She knew it. She sat huddled in the chair in the corner of the den. This was her morning break from cleaning the house—sitting in the easy chair where Lucy must have sat countless times. The sea played shadows on the wall that faced the windows. Claire sat underneath these shadows, letting them pour over her. Helen and Ray Ascher went out on a day trip that morning. “We’ll be back by three,” they said to her. “See you later.”

  “See you,” she said, turning away.

  The Aschers were springing slowly to life like those crumpled crepe-paper balls you drop into water and watch as they open into flowers. Paper flowers.

  Claire was not sure she trusted this change in Helen and Ray, this new bloom. It was too quick, she thought. Helen and Ray had come together, had collided, it seemed, surprised at finding themselves so close. She sensed that they had not really talked to each other in a long time. She wondered if they ever made love anymore.

  As they left the house for their drive they laughed softly, sharing some private joke. What was funny, Claire wanted to know. She looked around her and she saw darkness, all the trappings of a dark world, another death landscape.

  Before, she had felt sorry for the Aschers because of their grief. Now she felt sorry for them because of their twinges of hope. Claire knew it was wrong to deny anyone hope. Hope was everything. Hope pulled the most hopeless cases up and out of their deathbeds. That was what people had said about Seth. “Have hope, have faith.” This was uttered so often that it was like a litany, a jump-rope song. Claire could not go through that another time. It had taken too much out of her; it had sapped her completely. The antidote lay in becoming a part of what frightened you most, so that you would not be discernibly affected by it.

  A few months after Seth’s death Claire had found herself walking in a seedy part of New York City. She had not been paying attention to where she was going. She had walked without stopping for an hour, and it was then that she realized she was no longer in a good part of the city. The block was empty except for a few men walking toward her from across the street. There was something strange about them; they were making weird noises and calling out things to her. Claire was frightened. The day was growing dark, and there was no one around she could call to for help. As the group approached her, she simply pretended to be one of them, twitching and muttering and looking for trouble, and so they left her alone. She had never forgotten the lesson.

  —

  The Aschers were gone for most of the day. In the middle of the afternoon, when she had finished a load of laundry and was stretched out on the living-room rug, floating in and out of a light sleep, she heard footsteps coming up the front path and assumed the Aschers had returned. But there was a knocking on the glass instead of a key turning in the door. Claire sat up and shook herself awake. “Who is it?” she called, but there was no answer.

  She had not been alone in the house for a significant length of time before. Helen usually went out of the house only when she had to. Today was the first time she had decided to go out for no real reason. Ray had been elated. At breakfast that morning he had asked her where she would like to go. “We could take the ferry to Shelter Island,” he said. “Or we could go to Montauk. Whatever you like.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she answered. “I just want to get out; that’s all I care about. It’ll feel good to be somewhere else.”

  The only other place Helen had gone to recently was the supermarket. She did her grocery shopping on Tuesday afternoons, and she had asked Claire to accompany her the previous week. They did not say a word to each other during the drive to the store. Helen switched on the radio, and a concerto came in faintly. They both sat and listened to classical static. At the supermarket Helen seemed at ease. She wheeled her cart gently up and down the aisles, and she plucked things off the shelves without thinking about it. Claire tagged along behind her like a child. Helen hadn’t really needed her there, Claire knew. Helen was lonely, and she wanted company. She wanted Claire’s company.

  Claire had come to the Aschers’ house so that she could have the time and place to reflect on things. On the train out to Southampton the first day, she had let herself branch off into some crazy thoughts. She imagined Lucy’s dreams hanging in the air of the house like old laundry, waiting for someone to come along and dream them all over again. She imagined that she would be able to enter into Lucy’s thoughts, into the heart of her fears.

  It had not happened. But what had happened was nebulous. She had derived something from living there, but she was not at all sure what it was. She knew only that she felt at home. At first she had felt close to Lucy, to the ghost of her. But then, as the days passed, Claire had taken over, and Lucy was gone. Claire had never meant that to happen.

  The knocking at the front door was persistent. Claire stood up and walked across the living room and out into the hallway. She saw him then. It stunned her that he was there. He was wearing the blue parka with the zippered pockets and the jeans with the hole in one leg. He had his knapsack slung over his shoulder, and he was waiting for her.

  “Oh, Julian,” she said through the glass, her voice soft, “you shouldn’t have come.”

  “Please let me in,” he said. She could not hear him; she could just see him mouth the words.

  For a long minute she did not do anything. She had been startled by him, and she was not sure what he wanted from her. She opened the door cautiously.

  They stood facing each other in the hallway. He did not make a move to touch or kiss her. He stayed perfectly still, watching, and she stared back at him. He seemed to want her to explain herself, and she thought, The nerve of him. He was the one who would have to explain himself, if anyone did. He looked very handsome. Since she had last seen him his hair had grown longer. It now touched the tops of his shoulders.

  She remembered a time when they were making love, and he rose up over her, supported by his arms on either side of her, as though he were doing push-ups. His long hair was hanging straight down and grazed her neck and face as he centered himself to find a position where he could watch her. He often did that—stopped everything as though it were a single frame of film, a still. She had been moved by this, by the fact that he wanted to look at her in the middle of making love, that he did not rely solely on some obscure, unrelated visual image in his mind. She had read in a sexual survey in a women’s magazine that many men have fantasies during sex that have nothing to do with their partners.

  Julian shifted his knapsack to his other shoulder and finally spoke. “Look,” he said, “I guess you’re probably angry with me for doing this, but I think you should let me explain.”

  “Okay,” said Claire.

  “This has been rough on me,” he said. His stance had changed slightly; he looked as if he might cry. Claire felt her old, peculiar affection for him. Julian was a good person, and he reached
for her in a way that no one ever had before. She had not made herself appear accessible in the past, but this had not mattered to Julian. He had been intrigued by her. She had known it from the start and had been pleased, but still, it put her off. She could not accept such closeness; she needed distance. She needed to see the world through glass.

  “I’m sorry,” said Claire.

  Julian stepped closer. “Claire,” he said, “can we talk?”

  She didn’t move away from him. “All right,” she said at last.

  They went into the den and Julian sat down on the couch in an oblong of sun. Claire sat in her chair in the far corner, under an eave of shadows.

  “I can hardly see you,” Julian said. “It’s so dark over there.”

  She remembered the first serious conversation they had ever had, in the dark, up in the stacks of the McCabe library. They had been on equal footing then; he had been in the darkness with her. Now he sat by himself in the light, and she had to concede that it wasn’t really fair. She stood up and moved over onto the couch. She sat at the opposite end from him.

  “Claire,” Julian began when she had settled herself, “I came here for only one reason.” He watched her warily; he expected her to resist, to break in and argue at any given moment. “I want to take you out of here,” he said. “I’ve talked this over a lot with Naomi, and she agrees with me that it’s the best thing. We both think you’ve gone too far, and we’re worried.” He took a breath. “There, that’s my whole spiel.”

  She continued to look at him. The sun picked up all the reddish lights in his blond hair. He sat with his hands in his lap, waiting for her response. “Julian,” she said, “you don’t understand what’s been going on.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked. “I know exactly what’s been going on. I’ve been talking to Naomi—she’s showed me your letters. You’re living in Lucy Ascher’s house; you’re trying to go through what she went through. What more is there?”

  Claire shook her head slowly. She told him about the first day at the Aschers’, how she had just walked into their lives and stayed. “I’m very important to them,” she said quietly. “I remind them of Lucy. I remind myself of Lucy. I’m a death girl, and they need me.”

  “There is no such thing as a death girl,” Julian said, pronouncing each of the words carefully. “I mean it. Death girls don’t exist.” He told her about Naomi, how she was on the verge of giving up being a death girl, how her dark hair was growing in again. He told her how Laura had become very withdrawn and troubled, and was having some sort of breakdown. Things had changed, he said.

  Claire was feeling light-headed. Julian had shown up at the house and disrupted everything. She tried to summon real anger but couldn’t. She had begun to feel placid as she sat with Julian. He had come to retrieve her, to whisk her away. People had been doing that to her for years. Was this any different?

  She knew suddenly, that it was. She had felt this way one other time in her life, when she had left home for college. It was four in the morning and she stood in her parents’ driveway, loading the car. After the last carton had been stowed in the back she realized something: she had outgrown her parents. In a way, she had now outgrown the Aschers. She didn’t want to believe it, but there it was, a little revelation.

  Julian was watching her closely. “What are you scared of?” he asked in a soft voice.

  The sea was making a racket outside. It seemed to Claire that there was no place you could ever go to isolate yourself from the world—there were always peripheral noises, distractions calling you back. There was some irony in this. Claire realized she didn’t even like being by herself that much. She was frightened of it, frightened of sinking into sleep all alone. That was how Lucy had been, she knew.

  Claire looked at Julian, and her façade quietly collapsed. Something broke, and she wanted to be with him again, back in her bed at school. Her down comforter leaked, and sometimes when they made love, feathers flew out of the split in the seam and gently landed on the two of them. It was like being inside one of those glass paperweights that has a miniature winter scene inside. When you shake it hard, a flurry of snow comes down lightly over the little village, covering rooftops and trees. It would feel nice, being underneath that layer.

  “I’m scared of everything,” Claire said.

  “Me, too,” he said, reaching for her.

  They both drew back after a moment, and then moved toward each other again. Claire brought her mouth to his, and his lips were warm and ready for her. They stretched out in the length of the sunlight and kissed for a while longer. She ran her hand up under his flannel shirt and easily found the flicker of his heart.

  “Claire,” he said in a voice from underwater, a voice that implied she was overwhelming him. “Claire.”

  “Shh,” she said, her finger lightly touching his lips. He did not say anything more.

  They lay pressed together side by side for half an hour. She played with the fine hair on his arm, moving it back and forth between her fingers, the way she used to. He seemed to shudder as she touched him.

  “I guess we have a lot of talking to do,” Julian said finally.

  “You figured you could just come out here and pick me up,” Claire said. “I can’t believe it.”

  “Well, yeah,” said Julian nervously, “but I was going to wait a little while before I pressed it.”

  “I’ve been thinking of leaving,” said Claire. “Even before today. It’s always on the edge of my mind. I’ll be in the middle of cleaning, and I’ll suddenly stop dead and wonder what I’m doing here.”

  “So you’ll come?”

  “I guess I will,” said Claire slowly. He smiled then, as if her leaving were a coup for him. “I’d better go home first,” she added. “I have to face my parents.”

  They sat up on the couch. Julian’s hair fell over his eyes, and she smoothed it back. “I still want to know why you hung up on me,” he said.

  “That was so long ago,” Claire said. “I needed to get away. I’m sorry I acted like that. I don’t know what else to tell you.”

  “Talk to me, Claire,” Julian said. “Tell me anything.”

  As she sat there with him, she began to think of Seth. It was the vulnerability that did it every time. She remembered the day they got very stoned and lay on her parents’ couch. She had wanted to save him, and she knew she couldn’t. Afterward she let herself drift into the shadows. She had felt close to him there.

  “I had a brother,” she said to Julian, and the words came easily, as though it were natural for her to say them. “His name was Seth, and he died when I was fourteen.”

  She started to talk, telling him random things. She told him about the time Seth and some of his friends had gotten wasted on Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill, and how she took care of him when he threw up—washed out his clothes and put him to bed before their parents came home. “Claire,” he had slurred, looking up at her, “you are the best sister in the world. No, I change that. The best sister in the cosmos.”

  “He always felt like a leftover,” Claire told Julian. “He was very sad that he was born too late, that he was too young to have enjoyed the sixties. He wanted to go to Woodstock very badly.”

  She told him about a photograph she had found in his room after he died. It was a picture of Seth taken at Old Sturbridge Village, with his arms and legs secured in a fake pillory. He was smiling wildly at the camera. “Any time I see people smiling in photographs,” she said, “I always wonder what they are smiling about—what they were thinking of at the time.”

  She talked about her parents, about the stillness and rage that had fallen over her house since the death. She talked about those early days, when she lay in bed and read Lucy Ascher’s poetry each morning and evening. “It wasn’t even an escape, I guess,” she said. “It was the opposite. But there was nothing else I could do.” She wondered
what kind of person Seth would have become as an adult. Would he have outgrown T-shirts with rock-band logos printed on them? Would he and Claire have remained close? She didn’t know.

  “Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?” Julian asked her.

  “I just didn’t,” Claire said. “You remind me of him; you always have. I couldn’t say anything.”

  The Aschers came home. Claire didn’t even hear them come in. She looked up, and they were standing in the entrance to the den, their coats still on. Ray was holding a basket of something in his arms. Their faces were flushed from the outdoors, their noses red. Did they need her anymore? She thought of them dancing in the living room. They had been off in their own world, away from everything else. Helen and Ray’s sorrow had moved them together, finally, and she knew that she had been the catalyst. As she looked at them she realized that that was all she had been—the spark, nothing more. You cannot replace children who have died. You can fill in for them for a while, but then you have to step back, gracefully.

  Julian stood up and introduced himself, and Helen and Ray shook hands with him. “He’s from my college,” Claire explained. She did not know what else to say.

  They remained in an awkward circle for a few minutes. “We picked these up at a roadside greenhouse,” Ray said, fumbling to show them the basket he was holding. They peered down into it. Inside were half a dozen tiny, pearly crocus bulbs. “The first ones of the season,” Ray said. “They’re kind of premature.”

  “We’ll plant them tomorrow in a pot in the window,” Helen said, “and see what happens.”

  —

  It was Julian who told the Aschers that Claire was leaving. It was later, when they were all sitting around the kitchen table drinking coffee. He said it simply, telling them Claire needed to get back to school, back to her life. Claire could not gauge their response—they nodded after a moment and said they were sorry she was going, but they would not let on more than that. It seemed as though they had been expecting it. I am sitting in Lucy Ascher’s chair for the very last time, Claire thought, and she ran her hand along the grain of the arm so that she would always remember what it felt like.