A haunted place. An angry place. An achingly gorgeous place.
It used to be only storage. A space for half-finished projects and pieces that didn’t sell. Until the day that Ted came into the kitchen with a suitcase and confessed to Mara that he’d slept with the Psych Department secretary at Wicker. That she was pregnant now. That he was leaving us both. I was young at the time, only on the cusp of double digits, and what shocked me most was not that he was leaving—Ted always felt temporary to me; the unpredictable bursts of his attention had trained me to see him that way—but that he said the phrase “slept with.” I only knew what it meant because Cooper tossed it around whenever I hung out with Kyla. I slept with Jenny Musgraves last night, he once bragged. Then he looked sharply at us, and we stared wide-eyed up at him, the pieces to some board game clenched in our hands. That means sex, you prudes.
It shocked me, then, to hear one of Cooper’s phrases come out of Ted’s mouth. Ted, who chose his words as precisely as numbers on a lottery ticket. Ted who loathed euphemisms—“language dressing and word curtains,” he hypocritically called them. Mara was equally shocked, though for very different reasons.
Her eyes were stormy. Lightning hot and turbulent. She looked at Ted, and then at me, as if I’d somehow betrayed her, too, and she spun around, stomped to the front door, and slapped the screen open. Ted followed her, carrying his suitcase, and I followed Ted. We marched behind Mara as she marched to her studio. Then she bolted for the door to what was about to become her Break Room. There, she picked up the nearest piece of pottery—a bowl with an eggshell glaze—and hurled it at the wall. It shattered. The shards plinked onto the floor like hail.
After that, a few moments of stillness. Nobody moved. Nobody seemed to breathe. The second hand on Ted’s watch ticked and ticked, and I thought we might stay in that room forever. Surrounded by broken pieces. But then Mara grabbed a mug. She thundered out a shout and she smashed it. Picked up a plate. Shouted and smashed it, too. This went on for so long that the concrete floor, once only gray, began to resemble a mosaic.
I looked at Ted. He looked at me. And he laughed. First in his throat. Then in his mouth. Finally, out into the air, where the sound squeezed us tight.
“You think this is funny?” Mara demanded.
Ted sobered then. He closed his mouth and seemed to consider her question before answering. “No, not funny. Perfect.”
Mara’s nostrils flared. “Excuse me?”
“Don’t you see what fear does to you? It makes you believe almost anything! Why would I sleep with Rebecca? And even if I did, why would I pack up my life to be a father to her child? This was wonderful, though. Really. The smashing. The screaming.” He circled his fingers around her wrist. “Let’s go to my office. We need to begin the interview while all this is fresh.”
He tried to tug her toward the door, but Mara didn’t budge. Her feet seemed glued to the ground. “This was an Experiment,” she said. Not a question. A realized-too-late fact.
“Yes, of course,” Ted said. “Was my reveal not clear?” He continued without her answer. “What a shame. Revealing the Experiment is my favorite part.” He tugged her wrist again. “Let’s go. You know this can’t wait.”
“No.”
“Mara, we don’t—”
“No, Ted.” She almost yelled it. But still, there was an eerie calmness to the sentence that made Ted and I stare. She took in all the pieces of pottery at our feet, her eyes glittering as she absorbed the brokenness. Then she walked into the studio, rummaged in a drawer for a moment, and returned with a tube.
Mara knelt onto the floor. Picked up a piece of what had once been a plate.
“What are you doing?” Ted asked.
She squirted something onto the back and pressed it into place, exactly where it had landed.
“I’m gluing,” she said. She picked up the shards, added adhesive, and stuck them to the floor. “You might as well leave. Both of you. I have work to do now.”
“But—so do I,” Ted said.
“I respect that,” Mara said. A small square of cobalt sat in her hand. “I’ve always respected your work. And you’ve always respected mine. And as you can see, I’m working right now.”