The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [42]
When finally her mother rose straight again, she seemed to have coughed away fear and hysteria both. She faced Phoebe calmly. “You’re right,” she said. “You’re right, I let her go. But it wasn’t then.”
Phoebe listened in dread.
“I let her go when I let him crush her. Because that’s what he did.”
She looked at Phoebe evenly, a kind of strength in her face.
“I watched it happen,” she said. “It started as soon as she was born. He loaded her down. I knew it was wrong, all that time. But she seemed to thrive. Still, I should have stopped him.”
She paused, gazing at Phoebe, full of calm. “Do you hear this?” she said. “Are you listening?”
Phoebe just stared.
“Well, there it is,” her mother said, breathing deeply. “There it is.”
But Phoebe felt nothing. Only when she found herself outside in the hallway, her mother’s white door shut behind her, was she conscious of having left the room.
eight
All morning Phoebe debated whether to leave a note. She debated while mailing her letter to Berkeley, then waiting in a pink-and-orange booth at Zim’s in Laurel Village for Gibraltar Savings to open; she debated while walking home in the soft gray fog with the entire contents of her bank account—$1,538, saved from a year of work at Milk and Honey—in traveler’s checks. The round-trip Laker Airways standby ticket would cost almost $500. How long could you manage on a thousand dollars? Phoebe wondered. Well, as long as possible, and after that maybe she would find a way to get her $5,000.
Phoebe had lain awake for much of the night. At times she’d considered calling someone, asking to borrow money. Barry had plenty, of course, or her friend Celeste, who worked at a travel agency. But everyone seemed at such a distance, as if Phoebe had known them years ago and had no claim on them now. As if she’d already left.
Her mother slipped from the house well before seven. From her bed Phoebe listened to her faint steps, the front door swinging softly shut. Her mother wanted only to escape her. She would get her wish.
Finally Phoebe did write a note, on a sheet of her mother’s thick, creamy stationery. Dear Mom, she wrote:
I’m sorry.
I love you.
I’m going away now which is the best thing.
I will be careful.
Love,
Phoebe.
It was done. Everything was done. She had only to get to the airport.
The shuttle bus left from O’Farrell Street, in the Tenderloin. Phoebe called De Soto Cab, which lately had edged aside Veteran’s in the hierarchy of her affections. She’d been calling cabs for years from parties she wanted to escape, foggy phone booths above Ocean Beach. But she was always headed home. It felt strange, giving the address as her departure point.
Phoebe set her backpack inside the front door and sat on the love seat to wait. From the kitchen she heard the ringing phone: Art, no doubt, calling to find out why she hadn’t shown up for work. All morning it had rung. But finally it stopped, and as Phoebe waited for the taxi she began, for the first time since seeing her mother with Jack, to feel a sense of hope. Finally she was going, heading into the world. Phoebe stood, anxious to take a last look around the house, fix it in her mind. She circled the living room, gazing at an ostrich egg on its onyx stand, a hand-blown glass horse, the marble eggs from Florence—and all at once she felt a faint pulse from deep within the house, beneath the floorboards, beneath the earth below, and it came to Phoebe that she wasn’t leaving after all, she was merely sinking deeper within this house, entering its hidden world. As if, after years of nudging and prying and tapping, a wall had at last swung wide and she were stepping through.
part two
nine
London felt tropical. Dense, steamy air filtered the sunlight to watery yellow. The sound of church bells was everywhere.
With a map she’d bought at the airport, Phoebe guided herself through the tangle of streets. She was exhausted. She’d arrived this morning on the overnight Laker flight, after her second night in a row without sleep.
She