“‘I was so expecting it to happen, I saw later, expecting it while also not entertaining the possibility, that when the truck pulled over in front of us my first thought was that I was in a dream. Only a dream could so perfectly bring forth the object of an unconscious fear. But what I think now is that dreams may simply be preparation for those moments we have to float away from ourselves. A man got out of the truck, a thin man, not quite old, unshaven. Greasy. I remember him glistening in the faint light. He smiled at us, a sneering smile, and I glanced at Rhea, expecting to see my own dread mirrored on her face. I was shocked instead to find her smiling, a smile that today I would call coy but that then I experienced as a kind of annihilation. It’s difficult to explain … There was no place for me in that smile. “John,” she said. “Hello there, girlie,” the man said. He grinned and reached out his hand for Rhea’s, which she gave him, and he helped her up into the truck. He turned to me. “We want company?” he asked, at which point Rhea, in really the most bored voice you can imagine, said, “C’mon, I’m thirsty. Let’s go.”
“‘The man gave me a last look, laughed, and turned to leave. It was only once the truck had pulled away that I realized I’d peed myself — just everywhere, pee soaking my shorts, running down my leg … The night had turned cold and I was shivering as I started to walk, stumbling along. I felt, not terror, but something beyond terror, a numbness or stiffness — that even if the kindest stranger stopped I would be unable to speak. I had the sudden strange jealous thought, which I’ve never understood, that trucks would always stop for Rhea and never for me. I wanted — it’s an ugly feeling, but true — I wanted to be at one of Papa’s cocktail parties, to stand around and smile and have nothing to do. I thought this the whole way home, shivering. I will wear the prissy dresses, I thought. Anything you ask me to.
“‘I have never known how to act, you see. I lack the gift of pretense and am incapable of lying, even those little half-truths with which we affix a story to our lives. Papa says I can be literal-minded to the point of idiocy, and the next morning when they asked me where Rhea was I said I didn’t know. Which was true, but hardly comprehensive. I was terribly sick. God, was I sick. For weeks. I soaked through the bedding constantly. I had visions of my mother singing to me, stroking my hair. Only very gradually did I get better.
“‘One day, quite a while after, Rhea came into my room. I hadn’t seen her since the night we’d run away and I was surprised to find her looking so happy and well. She had a nasty-looking scar on her arm — quite long, perhaps you’ve seen it. I ran my finger over it, but I didn’t ask. Later she said to me, or maybe she said it in a dream, or who knows, but I’ve always connected the two things, she said, “Someone is always afraid. So just make sure it’s never you.” Honestly, there are days when I think an alien ship must have come down and put Rhea in Mother’s belly because any other explanation seems less likely.’
“We were in Duane Reade by then, paying for what Elena called ‘Mother’s pills.’ I walked her home and when we got there she said, ‘Here,’ took out a notecard and pen, and wrote her name and phone number against the wall of the building. ‘I don’t get out much,’ she said, ‘but you can call me.’
“Well, the weeks went by. I had coursework to do, but I couldn’t be bothered. I was following Rhea around. She was always heading off to neighborhoods I’d never been to, reading books to old women, running intake at free clinics, helping set up stalls for street fairs. I hung around like some mooning poet on the foreshore. I had no clue what I was doing. I just knew there was something essential here, something I had to keep exploring. Rhea and I were sleeping together, but it wasn’t love. No. I kept sleeping with her, I think, to reassure myself that I still could. I feared terribly that one day she would say we had to stop or say something crushingly banal like Where is this going? or Would you say we’re a couple now? but she never did.
“So I felt stable—just—felt perversely that this held me together when the rest of my life was fraying at the seams. A ludicrous feeling, this security, and if I’d known then who Rhea was I wouldn’t have managed it. Because of course I still believed, on some shadow level, that sex was a ritual of possession, a covenant, as insane as that is … And why Rhea? Your guess is as good as mine. I had never felt this compulsion about anything. I had been a person drifting across the surface of life without realizing that at some point you fall in. And Rhea was my plunge, I suppose. Maybe because she was my opposite — someone who didn’t believe life had any surface, for whom each person and every moment was an alluring depth. I don’t know. All I can say is that in her ingenuousness I saw, I felt I saw, that everything I had been before had been some fraction of a lie.
“Not long after, Rhea told me Elena was hurt that I never called. So I did. She had her own line and picked up every time at the end of the second ring. ‘Hello?’ she’d say, like it might be anyone calling. And she was never busy, never had to do something or get off the phone. She told me stories about her family, mostly, vaguely fantastical things set in Denmark, which I came to imagine full of bright painted buildings by the water, caught in the low, slanted light of suns that took all day to set.
“‘Mother and Papa should never have happened,’ she said. ‘They were like ridiculous proud beasts who encounter each other on a path: each is still waiting, I think, for the other to step aside. But then it’s also true that it was Papa’s foundation that brought Mother over from Chile. She was an artist, see — a good one, I don’t know. Papa says she hasn’t worked in all the time he’s known her, and what she did during her fellowship is a mystery to all. She stayed on in Copenhagen afterward, that we know.
“‘Papa would see her around, sitting in parks, staring out to sea. One day he went up to her and asked how she was and where she was staying. She shrugged, and to make himself clear, because they had only broken English in common, he said, “Where do you go at night?” She shook her head in incomprehension. “Where do you go?” she said.
“‘When he realized what she was saying he decided to take her in. I doubt he could have said why. Frankly, the idea of my parents even speaking to each other is beyond me, but somehow, over the weeks, a romance developed. They really couldn’t have been less alike. Papa was always ambitious, successful. Mother is like a lost creature from the spirit world. Nevertheless, in two months’ time, Papa had stopped showing up to work, quit his job, and the two moved to a cottage in the north overlooking the sea. To hear Papa tell it he spent the years up there writing poems. That’s where they had Rhea and me.
“‘Who can say what finally made Mother go crazy. Maybe she was always crazy, or maybe crazy is just the simplest word for something else. We moved back to Copenhagen when we were young. Papa returned to work and Mother went away for a time, then came back to us very different. She had her own room, which she never left, and after dinner Rhea and I would play there for an hour or so, on a thick rug with gold tasseling, while she sang to us. Chilean folk songs or so I’ve had to assume. Neither of us speaks the language.
“‘Our parents’ relationship remained a mystery. Papa ignored Mother so completely that I sometimes thought only Rhea and I could see her. Then one night we mysteriously awoke together with the same premonition to creep through the apartment to Mother’s room. The door was ajar when we got there, and I’ll never forget what I saw. Papa was crying in Mother’s lap. She had his head on her knees and was stroking his hair, humming something soothing, staring out the window at the moon. We watched for a while, transfixed, before finally tiptoeing back to our room. In the morning it was as if none of it had happened. Papa continued to ignore Mother and to tease the help in his airy, caustic way. We moved to the States not long after.’