AIRING THE HOUSE by Karen Nicoletti
Sandy Hughes waits in the armchair by the door like a guest in her own sitting room. She is listening to her home, to its creaks and groans, the old house bending to accommodate the steps of her daughter, who lands heavily on her heels whenever she’s set herself to some task or other. Each sound reports Faye’s whereabouts back to her. Sandy has not left the house in three weeks but today, beneath her terrycloth robe, she wears street clothes. Faye passes through the hallway humming, a basket of laundry on her hip. Her footsteps fade on the carpeted stairs into the basement and Sandy rises, lets the robe fall from her shoulders. She closes her fingers around her keys so they will not jangle off their hook; she grips the knob of the front door to quiet the click of the latch. The thick swelter that washes over her on the front stoop reminds her that it is summer.
She has not been outside since her husband’s funeral. One thing about unexpected loss is that it draws people to you: coworkers, family, and friends abandoning all to come fill up your home. That first week so loud with doors closing and opening, pots clanging onto the stove and oil spattering like saliva at the back of a cat’s throat, her table laden with tureens of food and the cushion beside her on the living room couch always occupied by somebody or other gently filling her ear with memories of Roger, distractions from Roger – apologies, it always seemed, for their own existence as someone other than Roger. And, in the weeks that followed, her children back under her roof as caretakers, managing everything.
Today, she would like to buy groceries.
When she unlocks the car it chirps at her and she looks over her shoulder, flushed, like a runaway child. She expects the slam of the car door or the turn of the ignition to bring Faye out the back door with her arms in the air, but nothing moves. She is not a captive in her own home, but if she told Faye that all she wanted was to buy some eggs and fry them, her daughter would insist on doing it for her.
Heat from the leather seat seeps into her jeans. The ready energy of the idling car vibrates within her. At first she watches the backs of her knuckles on the steering wheel, feels every press and release of the gas pedal, but instinct and muscle memory take over by the time the car rolls onto the main road. To be driving somewhere, in control of a breathing engine, makes her feel more awake than she has in the twenty- six days she’s been a widow. She decides to play the radio. She decides to make a stop at her coffee shop.
When the house emptied out after the funeral – cousins, neighbors, fellow lawyers at her firm, all returning to their lives – Sandy agreed to let each of her three children stay and tend to her for one week apiece. Her agreement was a formality, her grown kids cornering her all together at the luncheon after the funeral, their worry spoken in well- rehearsed turns. Faye would have set the schedule, judging by its precise division of responsibility. Every word from their three mouths had clearly been scripted by Mary, her empath, and surely Dylan was unhappy to lose a whole week at the office but there he was, nodding along in unison with his older sisters, and so Sandy agreed – to satisfy them, she’d said. But also she agreed because here was a chance to burrow inwards for once, away from the world, to let others do the thinking. At the office, they’d covered her caseload for six weeks, said, take longer if you need; and so as decisions were made she nodded along and curled herself into a dormant state.
The air in Galaxy Coffee is frigid, the music loud and peppy and hip. The barista is that short one, twenty- something with hair cropped at her ears, rounded shoulders, skin so smooth you can tell just by looking. She has never asked the barista about her skincare regimen, their conversations friendly but never offering that kind of opening, but she is often tempted to. This barista knows Roger, has served them both daily for over a year.
“How’s it going?” the girl asks, as if only a shift has passed.
Of course, this is reasonable; it is a busy café. Sandy orders her latté, but the unease lingers; she feels obligated to explain her absence to the barista.
“It’s my first time out since my husband passed away. Roger. You know Roger?” The pitch in her voice hits an unfamiliar, high key. “Yes, he was perfectly healthy until he had an aneurysm walking to his car after work. July 11, it was a Friday. By the time the paramedics reached him, he was already gone.”
This vocalization is a test, Sandy the note- taking scientist. Her hypothesis confirmed: speaking the facts, she feels nothing. It is interesting.
And while pastries are pressed into her hand and her latté is given to her for free, it is the look the barista gives her that catches her attention. She doesn’t say more than a soft apology and a word or two of comfort, but her eyes pitch to a brighter green; they hold a steadiness that reads as understanding.
“What is your name?” Sandy asks.
* * *
In the car, Sandy lets the heat soak into her body, grounding her back into herself. There are more veins on the backs of her hands than she remembers, and she does not like the look of the skin that travels up her forearm and inner bicep under the short sleeves of her linen button- up; it seems to make the journey with less urgency these days. Little slackenings at her knuckles and her elbows on this inexplicable body which, after weeks of stillness and quiet, had dressed itself in secret and seized car keys, proclaimed her husband dead to a barista without so much as a flinch. By now, she should feel something. What else is grief?
That first week when Mary, her eldest, had stayed, she’d tried get ting Sandy talking. Instead, they argued about the windows. An entire week spent following her daughter around the house, shutting the windows and drapes after Mary thrust them open. The girl meant well – she was trying to mother by imitation, enacting the ritual Sandy had forced on her throughout her childhood. She would not have been the first: Sandy’s own German mother had a passion for crisp air and sunshine, and Sandy had carried on the habit with her children, repeating her mother’s robust “Wir lüften!” as she aired out the house. A sulking teenage Mary used to whine at the injustice of fresh air, and Mary’s nasal- toned complaints and eye- rolls had taught Sandy what it means to dislike your children. Now, she should have been pleased at the gesture, but this grown version of her daughter who imitated her, thinking it a remedy for her mother’s grief, was just as perplexing as that brooding teen. This was the time to keep the shadows inside her home, the stale air in perpetual cycle from her body to her ferns and back. If Mary couldn’t see that, what else was left to do than snap everything shut each morning and afternoon, and when Mary said, “Mom, this place smells like overcooked turnips,” or, “Mom, you know you need the air,” what else than to disappear into the kitchen, to sink deeper into the armchair by the door and pull the neck of her robe up to her ears?
Thursday that week, after Sandy had re- checked all the bedroom windows, she found Mary surrendered on the couch. Standing in the doorway to the living room, she saw in the sloping of her daughter’s shoulders and the curve of her neck traces of the girl she recognized. Her earnest daughter, the version who settled out between those teenage snaps of irritation into a daughter who lived to delight and appease, was a familiar Mary, one she could join on the couch.
“I miss his breakfasts,” Mary said. “Remember when he promised gourmet pancakes, but put all the wrong things in? Tangerine slices and chorizo.”
They did not look at each other, but sat with their bodies and gazes set forward at no particular thing. A script exists for Roger’s blunders, carefully calibrated to turn all these stories endearing, and so of course his kids would remember his failures fondly. She had kept to the script so well that even grown, her children considered their father’s behavior full of charm, free of consequence, their mother’s impatience with him some inexplicable thing. It should have been easy to continue to honor this script now, in her husband’s death. As the quiet staled, Mary tried again.
“Were you always this mad at him?”
Sandy stood and left the room.
She pulls into the lot at the supermarket without any recollection of the drive from Galaxy. She sits for a moment, tears an arm off a croissant and does not think to brush the pastry flakes from her lap. When Mary becomes a partner to someone, perhaps a mother, will she remember their family imbalances differently, then? Those evenings spent at the kitchen counter, history textbook open, her mother at the cutting board before she’d changed out of her suit, father dozing on the couch with a novel open on his chest? Or will Mary emulate her mother in this way too, quietly swallowing neglected responsibilitiesrather than disrupting the peace of a happy home?
Crossing the parking lot, she keeps her head down. “Would you like to buy a coupon booklet?”
The Boy Scout leader is tall and all bones, early thirties maybe, that young- father age. He stands behind a folding table set next to the supermarket’s sliding doors. A crew of four boys at his side, their bandanas cuffed close to their necks and soaked with sweat, blink up at her.
“Yes.” She fishes through her purse.
“Great,” the man says. “Ten dollars, and you can save up to twenty- five with the coupons in there. We’re raising money for the fall camping trip to Salt Point. We’ll be earning our Resourceful Cooking Badge.”
“I’ll take three.”
He offers her thanks, change, and a handshake.
“My husband was a scout leader, when my boy Dylan was their age,” she says. The man’s smile reveals crowded, slanting teeth. This is going well, she thinks. This is a normal interaction: she is a functioning woman, out in the world.
“He passed away a month ago,” she hears herself say. “My husband. It was very sudden.” Still, nothing stirs within her. She stares at this man – built lanky like Roger, doing the very same job Roger had taken on once, in a rare occurrence of follow- through on a responsible commitment – and still she cannot summon any feelings.
The scout leader’s face, at her words, flashes through emotions. She watches hungrily. His muscles slacken into a kind of shock, his eyes soften: pity. A pen clatters to the ground, slipped from the sweaty fingers of one of the boys, startling him into remembering their innocence, which must be protected. His face darkens, his brows knit closer and lips press taut. It is unfair that he should feel so much in the space of a few seconds.
“I’m sorry,” he says, lowering his voice. He nods towards the entrance to DeCicco’s, shooing her away from the boys in his charge.
Mary was reprieved of her caretaker duties by Dylan, her youngest. Over the course of the week Dylan worked remotely from his childhood bedroom. Each morning she sat at the kitchen counter sipping the strong coffee he’d left out, the day sprawled before her like a project too big to tackle. Absently, she’d press and release the bubbles in her laminate countertop, sticky spots in the places where three years ago Roger had attempted to peel the surface off, intent on a kitchen remodel he lost interest in two days later. She was the one to press the countertop back into place, smoothing its creases with a pastry scraper while Roger sat in the armchair by the door, slowly lacing his new bicycle sneakers.
She listened to the silence upstairs in Dylan’s bedroom. She watched the bars of light across the kitchen tile fatten and shrink. The evening snuck up on her before she was ready, and Dylan appeared at every six o’clock to prepare her a plate of vegetables and rice and kiss her on the head and take a plate to his room. She wanted to stop him with some question, to get him talking; she wanted him to pause his steady march through his day, to offer her an opening. Maybe Mary got to him first, maybe she’d warned him it isn’t worth trying to bother with her.
He was young, he was diligent – two years out of college, his concept of career was still wet with varnish. He had a job in finance in downtown Manhattan that kept him working until nearly midnight each night and often called him back in over the weekend. He seemed to thrive on the intensity, he reminded Sandy of a younger version of herself, a self that was often driven sick by the anxiety and lost sleep it costs to get ahead. He would call home while his father was out on the bike path and tell Sandy at a breathless pace about all the places this job could take him. He would laugh at her warnings, her urgings for self- care, tell her things are different now, Mom. It was hard for her to imagine a boy less like his father. When Roger would return from his rides he would walk around the house, from kitchen to living room to hallway to basement, circling until abruptly he’d reach some limit and there he would lay down on his back, legs splayed out and arms over his head. Sandy would find him there – she’d nearly trip over him – and she would tell him their son’s latest news, her palms turned upwards in supplication to some higher power.
Two months ago, the last time, she watched Roger listen with closed eyes, his ribcage lifting from the basement carpet with each inhalation. Her gaze had settled at the knot in his nose, the point where the bone veered slightly left from a time he was thrown over his handlebars in his thirties. He pulled himself up, hugged his knees inward in a gluteal stretch and said, “Isn’t it lovely?” She had just told Roger that their son was sleeping less than three hours per night, so all she could manage was, “How?” and Roger had said, “No one has screwed the boy over yet.” He was gazing at his toes, recently kicked free of socks and shoes. He spoke gently, a thread of jealousy faintly traceable. “He still looks forward to going to work.”
Her week with Dylan was a blur of its own steady cadence: black coffee, kitchen countertop, those same dinner vegetables wilting in the time accumulated from Dylan’s Sunday bulk- shop. On his last night, Saturday, a flush from the upstairs toilet pulled her from her reverie. A blanket wrapped her shoulders that she did not remember unfolding from the couch – Dylan must have brought it to her while he was cooking. It was loosely crocheted; she slipped her fingers in and out of its patterned holes. She never did ask him that question, whatever it was. She had never stopped him to talk but if she had, she might have told him she was proud he’d turned out so unlike his father. But saying this truth aloud would not have helped any of them.
In the dairy aisle, Sandy stands in front of a wall of eggs. Supermarkets have always had an arresting effect on her, overwhelming her with choice until she finds herself weighing brand options as if they are defensive tactics in one of her divorce cases. Eggs, for instance, have a funny way of speaking to you – whether they’re nestled into pink Styrofoam, chunky- fibered cardboard, or threefold plastic, tells you something. Whether it’s VALUE splashed across the top, or the name of some farm somewhere upstate. Cartons labeled “freerange” versus “cage- free” leave you fretting over the relative concern of each farmer for the life of their hens, and whether it will affect the way your eggs will cook.
A child passes by in that too- close way of a boy of ten. Basketball shorts fall past his knees and his t- shirt is oversized and when he steps in front of her she breathes in his youthful musk instead of the cool, sterile air of the refrigerator case. He bounces a tennis ball, and the thunk of the thing on the epoxy- coated floor draws her eyes to its fresh neon and fuzz, so bright she can nearly smell rubber and nylon.
At the sight of the tennis ball, pain tears through her stomach. Pressure builds in her core as if a balloon she’s swallowed has begun to expand inside her, pressing outwards, jostling the organs in her ribcage. Her cheeks grow hot. She lowers herself onto an overturned milk crate abandoned by the stock boy who, moments earlier, was refilling the bread shelves behind her.
The lights hum overhead, striking a dissonant chord with the ringing in her ears. Her body bends over her knees, the blunt ache within her feels strong enough to crack her spine. She wills her convulsing lungs to slow, sending instructions to her respiratory system: deep inhales, long exhales. She pictures the shriveling and stretching of those strange pink sacks. She wonders at the suddenness of this. After all her attempts to summon feeling, a tennis ball is an unexpected trigger.
The memory comes from the year they moved out of the city, trading their cramped studio space in Chinatown for a refurbished twobedroom condo in lower Westchester. Sandy was pregnant with Mary at the time, and it was the hardwood floors that sold them. After years in an industrially- carpeted apartment, this was a sign of adulthood. Sandy ordered elegant stools, made of steel for their bar- style dinner table, and in the few minutes it took to arrange them they gouged three scratches into the floor. They got down onto palms and knees and pressed their fingers into the lacerations. Roger disappeared into the living room, where the unopened boxes were piled. He returned with three cans of tennis balls.
“They use these in the classrooms,” he said.
That was the year the change began to take hold of Roger. Six months earlier he’d been overlooked for a promotion in his job as a corporate lawyer at the firm where they’d met; for weeks he lost sleep trying to figure out what he’d done wrong, his elaborate theories all ending in the certainty that they were preparing to let him go, any day, until the day he quit on an impulse, without consulting Sandy. After, when he explained, he said that he’d prefer working for himself, working with his hands – he’d always wanted to study carpentry. While he learned his new trade, he took a day job in the neighborhood where they’d moved, as a custodian in the local elementary school. He’d been working there a week when the stools arrived.
“Kids jittery in their chairs all the time, it keeps the floors safe.”
He grabbed a kitchen knife and sliced a mouth into four tennis balls, then flipped a stool and plunged one over the bottom of each of its legs. The stool landed dully onto its new feet and glided into place without a sound.
When Sandy didn’t speak, he stepped towards her and wrapped his arm around her waist. “That,” she said, pausing to kiss him, “is the most hideous idea I’ve ever seen.”
“It was nice knowing you,” he said to their floor, giving it a firm salute. “The stools go back tomorrow.”
Those first few years of parenting, Roger would propose adding them to every piece of furniture they bought, inciting that look of distaste just so he could kiss her into laughter. It was a joke she hadn’t thought about in years.
The glossy supermarket floor is scuffed with the wheel marks of hand trucks. Sandy stares at the residue of a spill, something sticky, just a few inches from her feet. She pictures jam jars shattering.
Someone taps her shoulder.
The face looking down at her is gentle, a young woman with black hair pulled neatly back from her face. She wears a long skirt with delicate flowers painted on it, stems and blossoms curled so artfully around each other that Sandy considers tracing them with a finger. A little girl clutches the woman’s leg, ponytail fountaining from the top of her head. The child’s eyes meet Sandy’s and she buries her face in her mother’s skirt.
“I’m sorry to impose,” the mother says. “I just wanted to make sure you – do you need anything?”
The little girl lets go of her mother’s leg and wanders toward the yogurts. “Thanks,” Sandy says, swiping mascara from her lower eyelids.
“I’m okay.”
“Tina, come back here.”
The child returns holding out a cardboard box. On it, a cartoon skateboarder ollies, a tube of neon- blue yogurt in his fist.
“Let me find you a cup of water,” the mother says.
Sandy hesitates. She should stand, brush off her jeans and laugh; she should tell this woman she is sweet and all is well and thank you anyway. Say something clever to get a laugh out of her little girl. But something in this woman’s face, the way her smile etches lines into her skin, keeps her still. The young mother nods once and turns away.
“Tina, let’s put those back. They’re made of sugar and food coloring.”
Sandy stands. She runs her fingertips along the skin beneath her eyes, the hair at her temples. Scanning the well- lit refrigerator case, she chooses eggs in a cardboard carton without reading the label, then slips a loaf of wheat bread off the opposite shelf by its plastic tail. She is balancing the loaf on top of her egg carton when the little ponytailed girl pops back into view. “Mommy got water,” she boasts, her chest puffed out. “For you because you are sad.”
Sandy’s laugh comes out in a guttural burst from somewhere within her chest. The little girl’s eyes go wide and she draws back, clutching her mother’s skirt as it rounds the corner and drawing it between them like a curtain. The cup of water is beady with condensation, chips of ice buoying up in it – the woman must have asked a manager for help on her behalf. The pair trots off towards the deli.
* * *
Faye was surely given the last caretaker shift out of a mutual fear that her mother wouldn’t be able to handle her any sooner. Her middle girl is a force of energy, bothered by clutter and anything set at an improper angle. Her first day at the house she’d wedged open the door to the den, which had been piled with Roger’s racing medals and unread books and biking gear. The night Sandy had returned from the hospital alone, she’d moved through the house in a fever, collecting anything that was his and spiriting it out of sight, pulling the door to the den tightly shut. But on the first morning of her stay, Faye led her mother back into the room and began to sort. Holding up her father’s racing shirts, she spoke stoically.
“Keep or toss?”
Sandy stood in the doorway and breathed the appropriate syl lable. The den was emptied in three days and on the fourth, Faye spent the morning scrubbing and then led her mother to the empty room. She threw open the door and tasked her to “do something with the space that’s only for you, something you never thought you’d have time for.” Sandy looked at her four clean walls, a window that seemed smaller now that it was unobstructed, and wooden floorboards that bowed in the middle, stain chipping off in large swaths. She turned the knob, pulled the door closed, and led Faye back downstairs.
When Sandy gets home, grocery bags twisting around her fingers, her daughter is waiting. Seeing grown Faye at the dining room table, her mind instead registers high- school Faye, sitting in the same place writing a paper late at night while Sandy works across from her, catching up on billing client hours. She would wrinkle her nose at something in her spiral notebook, drawing her freckles closer together, and if Sandy ever offered help Faye would huff, “I’ll figure it out on my own, thanks,” and Sandy would try to press back her smile. Because she does not want the vision to clear, resolving into the present, she averts her eyes from the dining room as she crosses the kitchen, eases the grocery bags to the floor, and pulls at the fridge door. It opens with the snick of its seal breaking, the rattle of salad dressings in the door.
“Mom.”
The fridge hushes closed again.
Faye stands and walks into the kitchen, leans against the counter. It occurs to Sandy that she does not look good – the lids of her eyes are heavy and shadowed. Her skin is always pale but today if Sandy looks hard enough she could see through it to muscles, arteries, bone. She needs to keep her body in productive motion, so she begins to unload groceries. The absurd thought flits through her mind: she should ask Faye what’s happened, if she is okay. She blinks hard. Perhaps her daughter has looked this way all week.
“We needed eggs,” she says instead. “I figured, you had so much to do today.”
“A normal person tells someone when they’re going out and taking the only car.”
She shrugs. Two weeks ago, Mary flung open the window just behind Faye’s head. “I needed the air.”
“We’re just trying to be here for you.” Faye picks up a can of soup that Sandy has unpacked onto the counter, grips it in her fingers.
“Mary says you refused to talk to her, Dylan says you sat in the same chair all week. You know I’m not as nice.”
When Faye was a teenager, Roger used to call her The Steamroller. Whenever she got caught up in the idea of some injustice she would talk and talk and talk and no one was able to break through her monologue until she petered out and heaved a breath. Roger always laughed. He felt compelled to agree with whatever could stir his daughter into such a passion and his concessions dissolved his daughter’s anger instantly. But somebody had to actually listen to what the girl was saying, someone had to be the parent and point out that at sixteen, their daughter was frequently wrong.
“Faye, I don’t want another fight. Why is it always me that has to have the fight?”
Her daughter’s eyes sharpen into weapons. To raise three children into adulthood is to understand what it’s like to be on the receiving end of looks of hatred from the very person you carried, birthed, nursed, from the person you taught to walk, to drive a car, to grieve, and there are plenty of occasions for this look that Sandy has learned to survive: look of hatred for refusal to lend out the car, look of hatred for grounding a seventeen- year- old for drinking, look of hatred for cheering too loudly at college graduation – but this occasion is not one Sandy is prepared to handle. Still, she meets her daughter’s eyes. Still, Faye ploughs forward.
“Has it crossed your mind yet, Mom, that your three kids lost their father this month?”
She feels light, as if someone has scraped the inside walls of her body with a spoon to carve her like a pumpkin. Wherever those feelings came from, the ones in the dairy aisle that sent sobs rattling through her body, they have gone back again to a place she cannot access. Blankly she stares back at her daughter.
Faye slams the soup can onto the counter and it totters, tips to its side and rolls back against the coffeemaker. She brushes past her out of the kitchen, and the mutter is soft, under her breath, but Sandy catches it. “Selfish bitch,” her daughter has said, and Sandy finds herself nodding, mildly, at her daughter’s retreating back.
On her last night at the house, Faye makes shepherd’s pie and they eat in silence, curtains drawn shut. While Sandy chases the last peas off her dinner plate, Faye sets down her fork. Her daughter has been quieter today, gentler, as an apology for her behavior the day before. Now she looks at Sandy with acute intention.
“Tell me a story about Dad. One I haven’t heard before.”
The day Faye was born, Roger stayed home with the flu. The memory floods all the space in Sandy’s mind. The way she’d secretly relished the time alone in the hospital with this new child, had even encouraged Roger to stay home, telling him that he wouldn’t want to get the baby sick. Later, she’d used those days on her own to win arguments – the guilt in his face whenever she brought it up made her feel a cruel power. She remembers the loud years, when the kids were pre- teens, when he had quit another job, his carpentry forgotten as he continued the search for his passion, as Sandy worked steadily, putting her own law degree to use to support them. How his bike rides were the only thing to excite him, and how during the windows of unemployment he could never seem to meet her eye or answer her questions until he’d taken his morning ride. His paralysis with each new job search, the point when he stopped sending out resumes. She remembers the day when she told him she was sick of doing it all alone, when she opened his suitcase for him and he stood limp in front of the closet. When he grabbed her by the middle and asked to stay and she conceded – not because she felt she could forgive him or believed he could be better, but because to deprive this man of his family, this man who was capable of little else but love, was a cruelty she did not feel equal to.
She sits at the dining room table in silence until Faye gets up to clear the plates.
But later, when the house is dark, Sandy taps on the door to her daughter’s bedroom. She hears a soft murmur and takes it as an invitation. Faye’s room smells of the juniper perfume she wore in high school. An old bottle of it sits on the dresser by the window, and Sandy still comes into this room sometimes to spray the curtains and the bedspread with it. The smell is stronger today – maybe Faye is doing it too.
Faye does not sit up. She blinks at her mother from her pillow, so Sandy climbs over her into the bed and wedges herself between her daughter’s body and the wall.
“We took a trip to the beach,” Sandy says. “At the very end of the summer, we decided to pack up the car and make one more drive to Cape Cod. You must have been six at the time, so Mary was nine and Dylan was four. Your dad spent the morning teaching Mary how to ride a boogie board, and she caught a few good waves. When they got too cold they rode all the way in, and you three started digging one of those holes. Remember how much you all loved to dig holes and build fortresses, just above the waterline? It was all doomed to flood when the tide came in, but you tried so hard. Then you decided, the way you always did, that you were starving at ten o’clock and needed lunch. And it was vacation, so your father and I said schedules be damned. The second you had your deli sandwich open, Dylan, of course, started yelling that he needed to pee.”
So Sandy left Roger in charge of Mary and Faye, setting off down the beach with Dylan. He toddled over the sand, picked up every shell along the way, and asked to stop near the clubhouse to watch the kids competing in a Beach Olympics. Inside the damp clubhouse he announced he didn’t have to go anymore, but Sandy insisted that he keep trying. She listened until she heard evidence of his success.
When they made it back to their towels, Roger and Mary were still digging their hole but Faye was not with them. The patch of unfolded towels where she’d been sitting with her turkey club was empty.
“She ran after you, just a minute after you left,” Roger said.
Lying beside her adult daughter, facing the ceiling, Sandy tries to explain the very particular cold she felt in that moment.
“It was like all the blood drained out of me, through holes in my feet. Maybe you won’t really know until you have kids of your own, but try to understand. When you’re a mom you worry about broken bones, tonsillitis, the daily cruelties of kids on the playground. Anything more ominous than that, you’re talking about an abstract, like God – you believe, maybe, but there’s no way to visualize. But if something forces this abstract into your real world, if you have to consider the possibility of losing your child, you are hollowed out. A hollowed-out woman,” Sandy tries to explain, “is capable of anything.”
So she took off without a word, slipping into the divots in the sand, all the way back to the clubhouse where she punched open every stall and shouted into the face of an alarmed lifeguard. The lifeguard mobilized, fetching his megaphone, and Sandy hurried back to Roger to see if Faye had made it back to their towels. She looked into the faces of every person she passed on the way, scanning for a lime- green swimsuit, wispy brown hair. She didn’t dare look in the water, not yet.
At the sight of Roger without Faye, she froze. He mirrored her own shock back at her. “You let her go,” Sandy said.
“I’ll find her.”
“If you don’t come back with her,” Sandy started, but Roger was already gone.
She spun in a slow circle. The commotion of beachgoers around her was high- pitched and fragmented, as if she was tuning in through the static connection of a radio. She hated every family she saw sunbathing or building sandcastles or splashing each other in the cresting waves. Mary and Dylan stood wordlessly at her side. Staying still was impossible but someone had to remain at their encampment in case Faye returned. She planted Mary and Dylan on the towels and began a spiral outwards from there, repeating Faye’s description to every person she stumbled into and receiving only defeated headshaking in reply. She kept her two remaining children in her peripheral view. In that moment, she began to think of Faye in the past tense. She moved with the frantic energy of cornered prey.
Maybe an hour passed with no sign of Roger. Returning without their daughter was simply not an option.
Two lifeguards approached her at a run.
“You found her.”
“No. We need to start searching the water.”
What they began to describe made her lightheaded. A human chain spread from the shoreline into the surf, scanning the ocean floor for a static body. Volunteers diving down to run their hands along the sand. The beach around Sandy was silent, submerged beneath a steady ringing sound, and she saw but could not hear nearby beachgoers gathering to help. The lifeguard was motioning with his hands to show them where they should enter the water, just as she spotted a figure running toward her down the beach. He was tall and lithe in red swimming trunks, and Sandy assumed he was another lifeguard, but something was draped over his shoulder. She squinted at the figure in terror until it resolved into Roger, the body on his shoulder giggling and holding him around the neck.
He dropped their daughter on the sand and Faye fell to her knees. “I won the sack race,” she said.
“She joined the fucking Beach Olympics,” Roger said.
Now Sandy lies still, looking up into the dark.
“Your father had a hard time being there for us in a traditional way,” she said. “It was easy to be angry with him when I’d work late and he’d be at home, so lost in some project he’d forget to pick you kids up from school. But when your father seemed most stuck, or sad, or helpless, it helped me to think of him on this day, running down the beach to bring my daughter back to me. And it’s not because your father got to be the man, or play the hero, I was perfectly capable of providing for this family. It was the first time in so many years that I could look up into his face and see pride.”
She rolls onto her side to face Faye. The contours of her daughter’s profile, her cheekbones, draw tight in a way that is new, mature. Her stillness and her silence make Sandy wonder if this confession isn’t news to Faye; if, over the course of twenty- nine years she has unwittingly folded her three children into the same covenant she kept, in which certain truths are left unspoken, certain scripts honored more for grace than accuracy. Faye’s eyes search her mother’s face, finding in it, perhaps, her own conception of what grief looks like in the eyes and the nose and the mouth. Sandy could count the breaths, long and slow, between the closing of her daughter’s eyes and the mounting of her soft snores, before this grown woman rolls over, wrapped in the old Winnie- the- Pooh bedspread pulled from storage last week.
Sandy presses her nose into the nape of her daughter’s neck and breathes in.
Faye will leave the following morning, and it will be another week before Sandy will be ready to ask her children how they are managing their own grief. On that day, she will call each of them. She will get Faye’s voicemail and a text reply from Dylan, but she will speak to Mary. Always too quick to forgive, her eldest daughter will spare Sandy the pain even of putting words to her apology, and Sandy will feel as if she’s cheated, her role a ceremonial one now rather than functional.
On the same day she will go down into the basement. The boxes Faye had filled from the den will be there, neatly stacked and labeled. Dad – medals, Dad – racing magazines, Dad – books. She will slide the boxes off each other and tear them open. One by one she will begin to remove items. They will be wrapped in paper and packed snugly, meant for secure, long- term storage. She’ll line them up along the floor, on top of other boxes, on her old sewing table, and let the paper fall into a crumpled heap as the boxes empty. And then she’ll leave the mess behind, carpeting littered with paper. No one here but Sandy to care about the state of her basement. She will climb the stairs and return to the rest of her house.
She will not return to the law firm. She will call to accept their offer for extra weeks of leave, knowing as she speaks these words that she has no intention to come back. She will pass her time calculating the years spent living in a manner designed to support others; she will try to pinpoint the last decision she made that was entirely uninfluenced by another’s needs and she will fail. She will wait for the phone to ring, for her kids to call, inevitably they’ll get caught in some unsolvable problem and be desperate for help. When they call she will listen to their voices for tones of need, and instead she will hear tones of worry. She will wonder if what she’s grieving isn’t the loss of Roger’s person but the loss of Roger’s helplessness, if she is unsure who she is without her steady nagging irritation with him. Every so often, when she needs the release, she will sit down at the dining room table and tear one of his bicycle magazines, page by page, into pieces. A few of his racing medals will wind up launched into the greenbelt in her backyard. She will return to the den, the room Faye scrubbed clean, and she will sit on the floor to overlook the empty space. There she will compose lists in her head, the sorts of lists she made as a teenager – things she’d always wanted to learn, like how to make puff pastry or how to build her own bookshelves, how to play the harmonica, and hours later she will find herself napping, her back aching against the wall. One moment she will be shuffling around the house like a woman fifteen years her senior, feeling useless, a body composed of cobwebs and dust bunnies, and the next moment she will squeeze her own forearms and marvel at how solid she is, how red- blooded and alive. In one of those redblooded moments, she will open all the windows, turn off all the lights, and find a place to lay, on her back, legs splayed out and arms overhead, feeling, as she breathes, the way the hardwood presses up to support her.
“Airing the House” is Karen Nicoletti’s debut short story publication.