Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [94]
It was not until later, hurtling down an expressway with four lanes and more cars than Olive had ever seen moving together, that Christopher said, “So, how is he?”
“The same,” she answered, and said nothing more until they had taken an exit and were moving through streets lined with uneven buildings, Christopher lurching the car around double-parked trucks. “How’s Ann?” Olive asked then, shifting her feet for the first time since she’d gotten into the car, and Christopher said, “Uncomfortable.” Adding, in a didactic, doctor-ish tone, “It gets very uncomfortable,” as though entirely ignorant of the fact that Olive herself had once been pregnant, uncomfortable. “And Annabelle’s waking up in the night again.”
“Ducky,” said Olive. “Duck soup.” The buildings were lower now, all with steep stoops in the front. She said, “You indicated little Teddy’s become quite a handful.”
“Theodore,” said Christopher. “God, whatever you do, don’t call him Teddy.” He pulled the car up sharply, and backed into a space near the sidewalk. “Honestly, Mom?” Christopher ducked his head, his blue eyes looking straight into hers, the way he would do years ago. He said softly, “Theodore has always been a little piece of crap.”
Confusion, which had started the moment she had stepped off the plane and not found anyone waiting for her, and which had then grown into an active panic on the airport’s escalator, changing into a stunned block of perfect oddness the whole drive in, now, as Olive stepped from the car onto the sidewalk, seemed to cause everything to sway around her, so that reaching to get her bag from the backseat, she actually stumbled and fell against the car. “Easy, Mom,” said Christopher. “I’ll get the bag. Just watch where you step.”
“Oh, goodness,” she said, for already her foot had landed on a crusty roll of dog mess there on the sidewalk. “Oh, hell.”
“I hate that,” Christopher said. He took her arm. “It’s the guy who works on the subway and comes home early in the mornings. I’ve seen him out here while his dog takes a shit, looking around to see no one’ll catch him, just leaving it there.”
“My goodness,” said Olive, because adding to her confusion was the additional factor of her son’s loquaciousness. She had seldom heard him speak so passionately or so long, and she was quite certain she had never heard him use the word shit. She laughed, a false, hard sound. The earlier clarity of the young pilots’ faces came to her as something she had dreamed.
Christopher unlocked a grated gate beneath a large brown stoop of stairs, and stepped back to let her enter. “So, this is your house,” she said, and gave that laugh again, because she could have wept at the darkness, the smell of old dog hair and soiled laundry, a sourness that seemed to come from the walls. The house she and Henry had built for Chris back home in Maine had been beautiful—filled with light, the windows large to show the lawns, and lilies, and fir trees.
She stepped on a plastic toy and almost broke her neck. “Where is everyone?” she asked. “Christopher, I’ve got to take off that shoe before I track dog mess all through the house.”
“Just leave it here,” he said, stepping past her, and so she slipped off the one suede sandal, and walking through a dark hallway, she thought how she had forgotten to bring another pair of panty hose.
“They’re out back in the garden,” said her son, and she followed him through a capacious, dark living room, into a small kitchen that was cluttered with toys, a high chair, pots spread over the counter, open boxes of cereal and Minute Rice. A grimy white sock lay on the table. And suddenly it seemed to Olive that every house she had ever gone into depressed her, except for her own, and the one they had built for Christopher. It was as though she had never outgrown that feeling she must have had as a child—that hypersensitivity to the foreign smell of someone else’s home, the fear that coated the unfamiliar way a bathroom door closed, the creak