photographs of people I didn’t think I knew, into a living room where a fire crackled in a plain brick fireplace and not a speck of ash marred the dappled marble surface of the hearth. Heavy maroon drapes were pulled shut floor to ceiling, and all the lights were on; the room was stifling.
Startled and confused, I paused in the arched doorway while Kelly went on ahead of me. I saw her pull the white fur jacket closer around her, as if she were cold.
“We haven’t lived here very long,” she said over her shoulder. She was apologizing, but I didn’t know what for.
“It’s nice,” I said, and followed her into the nightlike, winterlike room.
She gestured toward a rocker-recliner. “Make yourself at home.”
I sat down. Though the chair was across the room, the part of my body which faced the fire grew hot in a matter of seconds, and I had started to sweat. Kelly pulled an ottoman nearly onto the hearth and huddled onto it, hugging her knees.
I was quickly discomfited by the silence between us, through which I could hear her labored breathing and the spitting of the fire. “How long have you lived here?” I asked, to have something to say.
“Just a few months. Since the first of April.” So she was aware it was summer.
“How long will you be here?” I knew it was sounding like an interrogation, but I desperately needed to ground myself in time and space. That was not a new impulse, though I hadn’t been so acutely aware of it before. I was shaking, and the heat was making my head swim. It seemed to me that I had been floating for a long time.
I understand now, of course, how misguided it was to look to Kelly for ballast. She had almost no weight herself by that time, no substance of her own, so she couldn’t have held anybody down.
Abruptly, as often happened to me when I was invaded by even a hint of strong emotion—fear, pleasure, grief—I could feel the slight weight of my father’s body in my arms, the web of his baby-fine hair across my lips. I closed my eyes against the pain and curled my arms into my chest as though to keep from dropping him.
Almost tonelessly Kelly asked, “What’s wrong, Brenda?” and I realized I’d covered my face with my empty hands.
“You remind me of somebody,” I said. That surprised me. I wasn’t even sure what it meant. Self-stimulating like an autistic child, I was rocking furiously in the cumbersome chair. I forced myself to press my palms flat against its nubby arms, stopping the motion. “Somebody else who left me,” I added.
She didn’t ask me what I meant. She didn’t defend against my interpretation of what had happened between us. She just cocked her head in a quizzical gesture so familiar to me that I caught my breath, although I wouldn’t have guessed that I remembered anything significant about her.
Absently she picked two bits of lint off the brown carpet, which had looked spotless to me, and deposited them into her other palm, closing her fingers protectively. I noticed her silver-pink nails. I noticed that her mauve stockings were opaque, thicker than standard nylons, and that the stylish high-heeled boots she wore were fur-lined. I wanted to go sit beside her, have her hug me to warm us both. I was sweating profusely.
I think I was on the verge of telling her about my father. I think I might have said things to her that I hadn’t yet said to myself. I’m still haunted by the suspicion that, if I’d spoken up at that moment, subsequent events might have turned out very differently. The thought makes my blood run cold.
But I didn’t say anything, for at that moment Kelly’s sons came home. I flinched as I heard a screen door slam, heard children’s voices laughing and squabbling. It was as if their liveliness tore at something.
Daddy had died while I was out. He hadn’t wanted me to go, though he would never have said so. He hadn’t liked the man, any man, I was with. When I came home—earlier than I’d intended though not early enough, determined not to see that man again—I’d found my father dead on the floor. If I’d been there I could have saved him, or at least held him while he died. I owed him. He gave me life.
Struggling to stay in focus when the boys burst in, I kept my