ONE NIGHT WHEN Jack slept at the fire station, Kate used her key and swaddled her head in white wine and old TV shows in his living room. The Dick Van Dyke Show, her favorite, was on. She’d watched it with the girls years before on Nick at Night. In the introduction to every episode Rob would trip and fall spectacularly over the living room ottoman. They made an alternative beginning, too—at the last second Rob notices the ottoman and steps gracefully around it. Everyone laughs.
“What are you doing here?” Sam said from the entryway. Sam was in her all-black waitress getup. A thief or assassin, Kate thought underneath her wine. Sam’s braided hair hung over one shoulder. Behind her was a tall young man with Civil War sideburns, dressed the same. They’d been groping and kissing in the hallway. Kate had heard them in the dark. “I should go,” the young man said, moving toward the door, but Sam grabbed his arm.
“You two look like you’d steal us blind,” Kate said. “Or slit our throats while we slept.”
“You’re up late,” Sam said, narrowing her eyes at Kate. She readjusted her shirt.
“Insomnia,” Kate said. “My mother had it.”
“Is insomnia hereditary?” Sam said, tilting her head in her funny assassin way.
“Most things are,” Kate said. This girl, she thought.
Kate grabbed glasses from the kitchen and poured the couple some wine, and they sat with her to watch an episode of Dick Van Dyke. Danny Thomas was in it. He was an alien. It was all a dream.
The young man—his name was Lonnie—smiled conspiratorially at Kate and said he’d seen this one. He pulled at his sideburns. A good sport, Kate thought.
Kate asked Sam about their night (terrible, Sam said, someone had stolen half her tips from behind the bar); what they were planning to do for the weekend (camping at Pedernales State Park); the film course Sam was taking (Cassavetes’s seventies work was so interesting); and if they thought she was crazy (Kate only asked this in her head).
Sam played with her braid.
In the dim light of the hallway, Kate could see her own brood gathering there on the wall, filling all the empty space. Their heads bent toward the invisible radio they spoke through.
“How about you and Dad?” Sam looked over at the young man when she said this. He raised his eyebrows, smiled into his shirt.
“We’re such homebodies,” Kate said. Shrugged an exaggerated shrug. “Your dad still has work to do around here. The bead board needs staining.” She tipped her wineglass toward the living room wall.
After a while, the young man’s head bobbed, nodding off. Baby-necking, Kate remembered her girls calling it.
Sam ruthlessly appraised her from the end of the couch.
Lonnie was asleep now, his head back against the cushion.
“He seems interesting,” Kate said, in what she thought was a whisper.
Something softened in Sam’s face. Maybe just a tiredness creeping in, Kate thought. Tiredness made you open to more things. She and Sam had so much in common, hadn’t they? Sam always missing her mother.
“He’s funny,” Sam said, and seemed to remember something Lonnie had said on the way that made her laugh. Color rose in Sam’s face and neck from the wine.
Her girls would be about Sam’s age now. Making all her same mistakes. Everything contingent, everything forgiven, she thought. She wanted the unending worry back. She wanted to hurt in all the right ways.
Her girls called to her from the hallway.
Kate rose off the couch to head for bed. “Good night, good night,” she told Sam in a singsongy voice, and leaned in to kiss her cheek. But she held Sam instead, smelled her hair. Electricity crackled in the room. She would close the gap. She would love her as her own.
Sam pulled away.
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What about the part where a year after they died, late at night, I spray-painted their names on the Lamar Street Bridge? ELIZABETH. ZADIE. MEREDITH. (I’d stopped making her a white space on the wall.) Imagined people passing beneath in cars, speaking their names. Elizabeth. Zadie. Meredith. Kids in the backseat wanting an explanation. Who are these girls? What has become of them? And a story would have to be told, but it would be missing so many things because we’ve already begun to forget, and so we cling to all the half-remembered bits—a line from a song they’d sung, the smell of their skin, small bruises on their arms after a vaccination—and then we find we’ve bound them up in all these half-remembered things, and bound ourselves, too, and our heart keeps beating but only sends itself away and returns to itself, and then it isn’t a story at all but only beads strung along a necklace, a measuring-out of days.
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