When I shut off the shower, I heard Jake talking in the bedroom. I grew very still, and in trying to eavesdrop, I thought of Mrs. Castle coming by the night before, how the water had seeped from the sponge and run down my arm until it hit my elbow, the drops falling from me back into the pan of soapy water.
“I don’t know how long yet.”
I reached for a downy white towel from the towel rack. I had bought half a dozen three years ago in a splurge at the mall. Three for me and three for my mother. I had thought that if we used all white towels, we would suddenly be sunnier individuals, bright and happy, desperately clean.
“Just use the Science Diet and wet food on the weekend. Grace likes the beef, and Milo the lamb and rice.”
He was talking to his dog-sitter. Giving him the facts.
“Yes, you know I’ll make it up to you, babe. This is old business, and I need to be here right now.”
I saw myself wrapped in the deceitful towel. Old business.
I heard him say his good-byes and the beep of the phone being hung up. I had managed to keep myself in good shape, but nonetheless I could see that through the eyes of the world, not just Jake’s, I was indeed old business. I had come to treat my body like a machine both for the sake of my job and for the sake of my sanity. This had paralleled the increased physical maintenance my mother required. Everything between us was best as regiment. Habits were comforting in a way that love wasn’t. Mrs. Castle, I thought, was somewhat daunted to find that I kept my mother’s cuticles in tip-top shape, or that I buffed her calluses while her warped feet lay on a tufted footstool, or that I still indulged her belief in cellulite creams at the age of eighty-eight.
“Fuck! Helen!” I heard Jake scream.
I opened the door. He held the braid. I had removed it from its Ziploc bag the night before, as if it might suffocate.
“What the… Why would you do such a thing?”
I looked at him. He seemed more horrified about this than he was that I had killed her.
“I wanted a memento,” I said. “A keepsake.”
“I can’t… I mean. My God,” he said. Realizing what was in his hand, he threw it back onto my unmade bed. “You slept with this?”
“I brushed and braided it every week. I loved it.”
I felt humiliated, standing there in my towel, my hair wet and spiky. I thought of my mother pleading with me to make a concession in my no-makeup existence. “Just a spot of lipstick, please,” she’d said, and in my bathroom cabinet I had the tubes of vivid color she’d encouraged me to buy: Honeydew Frost, Maximum Red, Mauve Mayberry.
“I have to get dressed,” I said.
“What do we do with that? You can’t keep it,” Jake said. The braid lay in the jumble of my bedclothes.
“I know.”
I stood in a towel on the small rug in front of my dresser. I felt, in front of him, as I never had-ugly. I wanted to call Hamish.
“I’ll wait downstairs for you. Is there a phone down there? I looked for it but couldn’t find one.”
“That’s the number my mother had.”
“And this one’s different?” he asked, indicating the small black phone on my desk.
“Yes, it was Sarah’s idea. The phone downstairs is inside the liquor cabinet, under a pillow. Sarah calls it the Bat Phone.” I had never had to stand in my own house, half nude, and explain myself before. Certainly not since I’d begun to do things like hide my phone. “And there’s a slogan on it about opportunity, which you can feel free to ignore.”
“You know I’m here to help you, right?”
“I do.”
The moment he was out the door, I felt relief. I liked hiding in my own darkness. I liked it to the point that I’d neglected to realize it was what I’d been doing more and more. Crouching with my mother in her house and ignoring the raucous, wild, demanding world. Even Natalie and I now saw each other mostly at Westmore. We would drive to the nearby Burger King in the afternoons and drink the brown-colored water they called coffee, groaning as we got out of the car.
I walked to the phone and dialed her house, not thinking what I’d do if she picked up. But it was Hamish.
“Hello?”
I found myself unable to speak.
“Hello?”
I hung up. I wanted to drive out to Limerick in my car and fuck him again.
A moment later, the phone rang.
“It’s called ‘star sixty-nine,’ ” he said. “Who is this?”
“Helen.”
He paused and then echoed my name back to me.
“Good morning, Hamish,” I said.
“When can I see you again?” he asked.
To think, even if for the wrong reasons, the feeling was mutual made me smile as if I were half, as opposed to closer to twice, his age. I tucked my chin down but saw my painted toes and quickly looked up. Reminders were crowding in on me.
“Maybe tonight,” I said.
“I’ll count on it,” he said brightly.
“I can’t promise. I have a lot to get done, but maybe.”
“I’ll be home,” he said, and hung up.
When Jake started leaving the studio we’d fashioned behind a drape in the living room and going out into the cold, I didn’t question it. At first he went alone for an afternoon and hurried home in the pale-blue Bug, the car shaking up to the outside of our temporary-faculty-housing Quonset hut and sputtering to a sudden stop. We were not too far from town, and I could walk if I needed to run chores. Besides, I had Emily and then Sarah to attend to. He would return half frozen and amped up, talking about ice on leaves and the way an underground stream meandered at the base of a tree.
“And berries. These dark-red berries. If you crush them, they make this sort of thick viscous dye!”
Now I put down the phone and turned to where my mother’s braid throbbed on the bed. Even I knew it was too damning to keep. I took my orange-handled shearing scissors from the pencil cup on the dresser and walked over to the bed.
In the bathroom, I leaned over the toilet, squatting down so no hair would fly away. I began to slowly slice the braid into bits small enough to flush.
For her colon surgery, they had had to shave what hair was left from her pubic area. Tucking her in at night, I’d think how we had come full circle. “It’s like handling a giant baby,” I said to Natalie. “When she’s too tired to fight, she just collapses onto me, as if we hadn’t been battling each other for half a century.”
Natalie listened to me and asked questions. Her parents were younger than mine by a decade and had moved into an assisted-living community on the edge of a perpetually flooded golf course. Her mother had stopped drinking and become the leader of the community’s pep step class. What will I tell Natalie? I wondered.