A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [88]
“I remember everything,” Sasha said.
She had stopped before one of the seedy palazzi, its coat of arms painted over with a yellow smiley face that Ted found macabre. “This is where my friends live,” she said. “Good-bye, Uncle Teddy. It was so nice running into you.” She shook his hand with damp, spidery fingers.
Ted, unprepared for this abrupt parting, stammered a little. “Wait, but—can’t I take you to dinner?”
Sasha tilted her head, searching his eyes. “I’m awfully busy,” she said, with apology. And then, as if softened by some deep, unfailing will to politeness, “But yes. I’m free tonight.”
It was only as Ted pushed open the door to his hotel room, the medley of 1950s beige tones greeting him after each day he’d spent not looking for Sasha, that he was rocked by the sheer outlandishness of what had just happened. It was time to make his daily call to Beth, and he imagined his sister’s dumbstruck jubilation at the landslide of good news since yesterday: not only had he located her daughter, but Sasha had seemed clean, reasonably healthy, mentally coherent, and in possession of friends; in short, better than they’d had any right to expect. And yet Ted felt no such joy. Why? he wondered, lying flat on the bed with arms crossed, shutting his eyes. Why this longing for yesterday, even this morning—for the relative peace of knowing he should look for Sasha but failing to do so? He didn’t know. He didn’t know.
Beth and Andy’s marriage had died spectacularly the summer Ted lived with them on Lake Michigan while managing a construction site two miles farther up the lake. Apart from the marriage itself, the casualties by summer’s end included the majolica plate Ted had given Beth for her birthday; sundry items of damaged furniture; Beth’s left shoulder, which Andy dislocated twice; and her collarbone, which he broke. When they fought, Ted would take Sasha outside, through the razor-edged grass, to the beach. She had long red hair and blue-white skin that Beth was always trying to keep from burning. Ted took his sister’s worries seriously and always brought the sunscreen with him when they went out to the sand—sand that was too hot in the late afternoons for Sasha to walk on without screaming. He would carry her in his arms, light as a cat in her red-and-white two-piece, set her on a towel, and rub cream onto her shoulders and back and face, her tiny nose—she must have been five—and wonder what would become of her, growing up amid so much violence. He insisted she wear her white sailor hat in the sun, though she didn’t want to. He was a graduate student in art history, working as a contractor to pay his tuition.
“A con-trac-tor,” Sasha repeated, fastidiously. “What’s that?”
“Well, he organizes different workmen to build a house.”
“Are there floor sanders?”
“Sure. You know any floor sanders?”
“One,” she said. “He sanded floors in our house. His name is Mark Avery.”
Ted was instantly suspicious of this Mark Avery.
“He gave me a fish,” Sasha offered.
“A goldfish?”
“No,” she said, laughing, swatting his arm. “A bathtub fish.”
“Does it squeak?”
“Yes, but I don’t like the sound.”
These conversations went on for hours. Ted had the uneasy sense that the child was spinning them out as a way of filling the time, distracting them both from whatever was going on inside that house. And this made her seem much older than she really was, a tiny little woman, knowing, world-weary, too accepting of life’s burdens even to mention them. She never once alluded to her parents, or to what it was she and Ted were hiding from out on that beach.
“Will you take me swimming?”
“Of course,” he always said.
Only then would he allow her to doff her protective cap. Her hair was long and silken; it blew in his face when he carried her (as she always wished) into Lake Michigan. She would gird him with her thin legs and arms, warm from the sun, and rest her head on his shoulder. Ted sensed her mounting dread as they approached the water, but she refused to let him turn back. “No. It’s okay. Go,” she would mutter grimly into his neck,