A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [108]
The first few days Theresa brought my lunch in a sack when she picked up the girls in the morning. She’d just leave it on the table. It wasn’t too long before she said I should come to the house and eat with them. She said it was oppressive, that it wasn’t healthy to be working in the heat without taking a real break. I said I couldn’t, that she’d already done enough. She lowered her eyes while she spoke. “I don’t want to stand still, Howard. I don’t want to stand still to think. But I don’t want to have to go out and be social either. I’ve gone to lunch with my co-workers, and my sisters, and some old friends, and my mother, and we talk about redecorating our kitchens, and we laugh, as if choosing wallpaper is very, very hilarious. You need the same thing I do, to move and not think, and you need the silence and the talk that is not circling the pain. Please, just come up for twenty minutes, get something to eat, tell me about your morning, about the crops, and I’ll talk to you about the girls.”
Her recognition of my need was not unnerving. I found her perceptiveness consoling. She might just as well have put cool compresses to my forehead. I said that I’d stop over, that I’d like to. I did miss Emma and Claire during the day. I missed their noise. It was always a relief to lay eyes on them at lunchtime, to see that they were playing happily. I needed to have that check, to see for myself that they were still with me. During the day I’d get to feel as if there wasn’t much that was alive, that everything was drying up and dying. I used to praise the cats for their cunning, and now they seemed vile. They tossed the young rabbits, and the chipmunks, into the air, swatting and pummeling long after the animals were crippled. Every morning another few sheep were cast, the muscles in their bodies useless. I was killing one or two each day. Theresa said it wasn’t right to be alone so much, to have time to brood.
At noon I climbed along the dusty cornfield. I’d go through Mrs. Klinke’s backyard, down the treeless street, Rhode Island Court. I’d walk right up to the front door of the Collinses’ house. I always knocked. We didn’t speak about risk—the threat of neighbor’s talk. Dan was always at work and we rarely mentioned him. I was aware that my every action had to be beyond reproach, and also sure that I no longer had much of anything to lose, that I was pretty well damned. The one time I started to wonder if it was worth my putting Theresa in danger she turned on me with a ferocity I had never seen in her. She asked me not to bring it up again. I think we both understood that for a certain grace period she was exempt from community censure. She was safe because of Lizzy.
The girls always came rushing from a far corner. They climbed all over me for just a minute and then they scattered as quickly as they had come. There were good smells coming from the kitchen. Theresa had thick hunks of warm homemade brown bread already buttered in a basket, and watermelon and cantaloupe cut in slices in platters. There’d be a spread of cold cuts, tomatoes, lettuce, radishes, fresh pea pods, a glass pitcher of icy lemonade. She made chilled soup with strawberries, or cucumbers. Although I have always stuck up for old houses with history and bad plumbing, every day I looked forward to stepping inside that 1982 ranch house with a garbage compactor and central air. I often had the urge, in those weeks, to stretch out on the chaise lounge in my dirty rock-gathering clothes, to sleep in a place where you needed a blanket.
I had not let it out of my mind since that first night we spoke that Lizzy was dead. Theresa always