It was never clear to Josephine how much of what Theresa told her was for effect. She was always taking things back, or adjusting them after she succeeded in shocking Josephine initially. Like the time Theresa said she suspected Richmond had secretly killed his own dog so that Theresa would think his dog died naturally and feel sorry for him. The next day she retold the story so that Richmond had put the dog out of his misery because he was old and sick. Whether Theresa was telling the truth or simply trying to restore order didn’t seem to make a difference. Either way it was about taking the world by the throat. Theresa pushed her voice and her body against life in an effort to leave an imprint. Her relationship with Richmond revolved around the drama of their bodies as much as their minds — sex and the potential for violence intertwined. “Sex was best after a fight,” Theresa told Josephine yesterday over coffee. “At least we put our hostility to good use.”
That first night, Theresa fell asleep sitting up on Josephine’s couch, her tea balanced perfectly in her lap. Josephine watched her and was suddenly willing to throw all her training as a social worker out the window for the possibility of having her own friend — someone apart from colleagues or Eli’s friends. She and Eli had moved to this town a year ago because Eli had gotten a position at the university teaching psychology. Josephine had difficulty making friends, and here was someone who lived right next door, and — she hated to admit this part — someone whose fucked-up life might distract her from the feeling that had started as a seed a year ago and grown and grown, headed for today, the feeling that there was a genetic tidal wave coming her way, that there was no escaping from the undertowlike sorrow that had waited all her life to drag her out to sea. But that was ridiculous, her own hyperbolic nature. It was as ridiculous as reading into the spiders dancing across her eyes, believing they were a wake-up call. And still, they danced. Get ready.
“What is going on with you today?” Theresa waved a hand in front of Josephine’s face and Josephine batted it out of the way. “You’re starting to freak me out.”
“I’m sorry. I’m tired — weird dreams. I’m out of it.” She waved a hand dismissively in front of her face. The spiders were doing a polka on her eyeballs. “I should really get going.”
“I wish I had a broken leg so I could have a cast,” one of the girls across the street said to the other. They were sitting in the dirt now, rebuilding the pile they’d just kicked over. “We could draw on it with Magic Markers and people would sign their names and draw hearts on it.”
“I wish I was in a wheelchair,” the other girl said. “Like, just for a week or a month.” She cupped a handful of dirt, letting it pass through her fingers like a sieve.
“What if you were paralyzed from the waist down?” one girl asked, arranging the other girl’s hair in a ponytail. “What if you were paralyzed all over?” the other girl asked back. The high thin pitch of their voices was the music of Josephine’s soul.
“How’s Eli’s father?” Theresa asked. “Eli is such a wonderful guy. You’re lucky.”
“His father is much better,” Josephine said. Eli’s father lived alone out west and a week ago had fallen down the stairs. Eli had gone to stay with him, though he felt awful about missing Josephine’s birthday. “Eli’s a wonderful guy,” Josephine said. And he was—a wonderful, attentive, devoted son and a wonderful, attentive, devoted boyfriend after almost eight years. “I am lucky,” she said, reminding herself out loud.
“I’ll make sure you have a terrific birthday,” Theresa said. “Richmond and I throw great parties.”
That’s what Josephine was afraid of. She couldn’t think of anything worse than a house filled with relative strangers, one of whom might or might not be wielding a knife, serrated or not. But Theresa was a big believer in quantity over quality. She’d insisted on the party.
“Don’t go too wild,” Josephine said. “It’s not as though I’m turning a significant age. I’m fortysomething, remember?”
“All the more reason,” Theresa declared, as if that were that.
The girls across the street, with their flat chests and legs too long for the rest of their still-growing bodies, kneeled on their knobby knees to build another pile of dirt. They kicked this one over too, as though, even years from now, that would be all that mattered. They reached down and touched the stone in their walkway. “For good luck,” the one girl said to the other, and they seemed charmed, filled with good luck that would let them lead wild, uncharted lives.
“Where are their parents?” Theresa asked. “They should really be in school.”
“I think it’s a holiday,” Josephine said, having no idea whether or not that was true.
“Knock, knock,” Theresa said.
“Who’s there?”
“Happiness.”
Get ready. The spiders jumped for joy.
“I’ve got to go,” Josephine said.
If Eli had been there, he would have told her to take the day off, but Josephine couldn’t sit home all day alone with herself. Her mother hadn’t so much died as faded into the sheets. But Josephine had made a career out of the belief that the choices people made changed their lives, prevented them from making the same mistakes their parents made.
So she would go to Christine’s house, though Christine was no longer her client. Christine was a resident in one of the shelters where Josephine had worked when she first came to town. Josephine had been in private practice for several months, now in an office she shared with an acupuncturist, but she had recently read an article about a doctor in Haiti who tracked down patients with AIDS who couldn’t make it to the clinic for their meds, hiking out into the mountains to make sure they received the doses they needed. Josephine would go to Christine’s house and check her refrigerator to make sure there was enough food for the kids, confirm that her murdering ex-husband was no longer living with the family he longed to murder, prevent whatever little she could prevent. Or was it that Christine comforted her, helped her feel her own life more acutely? Josephine was suspicious of herself; she told no one that she went to see Christine, not even Eli, partly because it was highly unprofessional and partly because she wanted the visits to be hers alone. Christine and her two boys made Josephine think of an abrasion where there was no skin at all. That struck Josephine as better than feeling nothing.
When she arrived, Josephine pounded on the door because Christine was deaf in one ear, a broken eardrum from her recent boyfriend, James. The TV was turned up as loud as it could go. Joe, Christine’s youngest boy, appeared in the doorway with a fistful of uncapped thick felt-tip markers that smelled like twisted versions of their colors — sweet grape for purple, chemical-apple for green, fading-cinnamon for brown. The dog, Stan, was at Joe’s side, the boil on his stomach skimming the ground.
“I was so happy then,” Josephine’s mother had said to her once, referring to an unspecified time long ago. She said this as she lay in bed wasting away, refusing to eat even broth. Was now the happy part of Josephine’s life, or was she living the mythic then?
She walked into the empty living room and turned off the TV just as Christine emerged from the kitchen, waving hello with a splinted finger.
“James?” Josephine asked loudly.
Christine didn’t answer and went to the refrigerator. She returned with two glasses of iced tea, holding her splinted finger out daintily from the glass, a tea party for invalids. “You can’t know everything about someone,” Christine said. “Even someone steady.” Christine nudged a red dump truck out of her path with her toe. “Especially someone steady.”