The Hazards of Sleeping Alone by Elise Juska - PDF

OceanofPDF.com  Praise for The Hazards Of Sleeping Alone “In this poignant and often funny novel, Elise Juska does the work of an archaeologist; she digs deep to uncover subterranean truths about loneliness, the mysteries of human connection and the...

OceanofPDF.com  Praise for The Hazards Of Sleeping Alone “In this poignant and often funny novel, Elise Juska does the work of an archaeologist; she digs deep to uncover subterranean truths about loneliness, the mysteries of human connection and the delicate push-pull of mother-daughter relationships. She excavates, she reveals, and she gets it exactly right.” —Carolyn Parkhurst, bestselling author of The Dogs of Babel “Elise Juska writes of real people and her voice rings true. Charlotte is an utterly original character: at once fearful and hopeful, honest and funny, naive and wise. This is a wonderful novel.” —Lisa Tucker, author of The Song Reader and Once Upon a Day “Juska’s portrait of [Charlotte] is an exacting one and hews, however uncomfortably, close to the truth…. A powerful success.” —Kirkus Reviews “[A] revealing and realistic portrait of a woman who’s always been so afraid of what she can’t see that she’s never realized what she can become.” —Romantic Times “Read The Hazards of Sleeping Alone yourself and then pass it on to your mother or daughter.” —BookLoons “Anyone who has awakened in the night alone and afraid will rejoice at Charlotte’s transformation.” —Booklist OceanofPDF.com  Praise for Getting Over Jack Wagner “Clever structure, swift pacing, emotional insight, and an ultimately charming voice make this one a standout.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Funnier than a hair-metal band.” —People, Critic’s Choice “Juska’s voice—fresh, clever, and sometimes hilarious—pulls you through swiftly to a refreshingly atypical ending.” —Philadelphia Magazine “Juska’s first novel is as light and winning as a 1980s love song—and in its own way, as earnest.” —Booklist “A very funny book—and I’m flattered to be in it!” —Jack Wagner “A wonderful debut…. A fresh, endearing, witty story of a young woman trying to find her place in the world.” —Romance Reviews Today “Juska’s wryly imagined story—which happily ends up being more about Eliza than Eliza’s needing a guy—is a highly entertaining trip back to the good old days.” —Miami Herald OceanofPDF.com  Also by Elise Juska Getting Over Jack Wagner The Hazards of Sleeping Alone OceanofPDF.com OceanofPDF.com This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Copyright © 2007 by Elise Juska All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020 ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-6178-1 ISBN-10: 1-4165-6178-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available. POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Designed by Mary Austin Speaker Visit us on the World Wide Web: http://www.SimonSays.com OceanofPDF.com for my sister sally OceanofPDF.com  Acknowledgments I wish to thank editors Christine Weiser and Carla Spataro at Philadelphia Stories and Henry Israeli at Dragonfire for publishing early excerpts from this book in their great magazines. For helping coax the final manuscript to light, I am very grateful for the quick reflexes of Shana Kelly at William Morris and the efforts of many creative people at Simon & Schuster, especially Lauren McKenna, Louise Burke, and Megan McKeever. Louise McLeod, Laoise Hogan, Sharon Clancy, and Maura Mulligan provided generous and patient fact-checking on many Irish details, from Limerick street maps to grilled cheese sandwiches. Thank you to Shelley Barber at Boston College Library for her helpfulness in researching Yeats and to real-life crossword puzzle constructor Jonathan Schmalzbach for his enthusiastic insights into the cruciverbal world. I am grateful to many friends and readers for their comments on this manuscript in various stages: Allison Amend, Tanya Barrientos, Tenaya Darlington, Derek Dressier, Melissa Dribben, Greg Downs, Diana Kash, Clark Knowles, Emily Miller, Laura Miller, Michele Reale, Kerry Reilly, Eric Rivera, Shauna Seliy, Curtis Sittenfeld, Elizabeth Thorpe, and especially my mom, who read portions of this book an outrageous number of times and never wavered in her patience or her insights.  Many thanks to Whitney Lee for her hard work and enthusiasm, Ann Kimmage for her healthy perspectives on writing and life, and Shawn McBride for emails that kept me laughing. Maureen Gillespie, Kieran Juska, Amanda Strachan, and Emily Woods provided last-minute advice and old friendship. Christian Barter gave me perfect words in many forms. My family, especially Mom, Dad, and Sally, has always been my most consistent and important source of support. Thanks to my grandmother, Muriel Juska, for getting me hooked on quick-n-easy crosswords at an early age, and to my cousins for their expertise on many subjects, from bugs to school uniforms to the rides at Wonderland Pier. Finally, I could not have written this book were it not for the memorable months I spent, and for the friends I made, in Galway, Ireland. Go raibh maith agat.  Contents Acknowledgments 1. Bugs 2. Bob 3. Guts 4. Eire 5. Noelle 6. Blarney 7. Smart 8. Bold 9. Clare 10. Sadness 11. Genes 12. Limerick 13. Walking Stick  Chapter One: Bugs The fascinating thing about bugs—all living creatures, really—is that they are designed to save themselves. Nothing is extraneous, nothing decorative; every feature is part of an intricate mechanism of survival. Some disguise themselves as thorns or sand, others as dead leaves or tropical flowers. The damselfly poses as a blade of grass; the golden wheel spider rolls into a ball and tumbles away. The walking stick can assume different forms. Sometimes it looks like a twig: thin, mottled brown, a cinnamon stick with feet. Other times it’s gold or green, splayed open like a ragged leaf. When the bug is sitting on a tree branch, it’s impossible to know it’s there. As Claire looks at her hand resting on the kitchen counter, a walking stick appears in her mind’s eye. Her pale skin is the same shade as her Formica. The freckles sprinkled across the back of her hand merge with a smattering of dots the color of sand. Claire raises a finger, slightly, then lowers it. She has become indistinguishable from her kitchen. She crosses the kitchen and pushes open the back door. It’s been raining all morning, a steady rain, the temperature hovering just above freezing. She steps into the backyard—half-mown, half-ragged—and shuffles across the long side, wet fronds darkening her slippers like paintbrush tips. She is wearing her bug slippers, a gift she received from Bob shortly after they moved to New Hampshire. They are difficult to walk in, like shuffling inside two couch pillows. A year ago, the beetles’ heads were bright yellow; now they are faded, their antennae limp, chins angled toward the ground in defeat. She grips the handle of Bob’s garage-turned-office and heaves the door open to the screech of rusty metal. Bob looks surprised to see her there; rarely does she interrupt his work. Claire is equally surprised by this vision of her husband. Whenever she pictures Bob in his office, it’s with head bent studiously over research. Instead, he is just sitting there, slack-jawed, eyes trained not on a slide or book or specimen but gazing into the dull vortex of his office, a nest of computer wires clustered at his feet. “Claire?” Bob says, sitting up straight. “What’s—” “Nothing’s wrong,” Claire says. She pauses a beat. “I need to go.” “Okay,” he says. “No. I mean, I need to—leave.” Bob’s lips, at rest, are always slightly parted. Claire drops her eyes from his face. She focuses on the long, low cabinet behind him: a card catalog of insects, a hundred tiny coffins, glass-flattened, toe-tagged, angel-winged. The wall above it is covered with important papers in brown frames— diplomas, citations, their wedding photo, a merit certificate from YES, the Young Entomologists’ Society. “Maybe just for a while,” Claire says. “I just have to. I need to get away.” Bob has taken off his glasses and is rubbing them with a satiny red square, plucked from his pocket like a magician’s scarf. It’s one of his signature habits, reverted to in moments of disorientation: as if by cleaning the lenses the problem on the other side will become clear.  “But,” he says, pushing his glasses back on. “But, ah, where would you go?” Bob is a rational man; it is a large part of why Claire married him. He is steady with his emotions, realistic in his expectations, quick to unclog a sink. He is the kind of man who would never do a crossword puzzle in anything but pencil, who will always cut bagels in half before he freezes them. But when it comes to life’s more complicated moments, situations that demand emotion—in which another husband might ask why or how or what had he done or, my God, what could he do to change her mind—Bob’s first priority, always, would be logistics. Claire tightens her arms across her chest. She feels disengaged from herself, her mind from her mouth, hearing her own words as if spoken by someone else. She must hold herself in place carefully—too much talk, too much motion, and she might splinter apart. Then Bob stands up and takes a step toward her. “I’m sorry,” Claire says. Her voice is trembling. She unclasps her arms, slides her wedding ring off, and drops it in an empty kill jar on the end of Bob’s desk. OceanofPDF.com  Contents Acknowledgments 1. Bugs 2. Bob 3. Guts 4. Eire 5. Noelle 6. Blarney 7. Smart 8. Bold 9. Clare 10. Sadness 11. Genes 12. Limerick 13. Walking Stick OceanofPDF.com OceanofPDF.com Chapter One: Bugs OceanofPDF.com  Chapter Two: Bob When they met, Bob was studying entomology and Claire was studying etymology. This seemed, if not predestined, at least cute. It was only fitting that Claire would meet her future husband this way: standing in the middle of a university campus on a crisp fall afternoon. It had always been through school that Claire experienced the world. She loved school, loved learning, though even by first grade she knew better than to admit it out loud. She got straight A’s, but this never felt like an effort. Secretly, she even liked homework: the sense of a task needing completion, the satisfaction when it was zippered into her book bag and waiting by the door. To Claire, the inside of a classroom on a rainy afternoon was the most comforting place in the world: a roomful of girls and boys sharing a common space, chins lowered over pulpy yellow paper, sniffling, breathing, pencils scratching, the rain pattering the windows, and the teacher rubbing the eraser in slow, thoughtful circles across the board. She preferred school days to weekends, and felt a heaviness whenever another summer stretched before her, hot and empty and endless. Nothing important would happen to her over the summer. Even her bedroom as a child was less an extension of home than of school. The shelves were clogged with books, the nubbly red bulletin board papered with certificates—PERFECT ATTENDANCE. BOOKWORM. LITERACY CHAMP! Her desk drawers were filled with lists of words she’d learned and loved. Galaxy. Bubblicious. Cashmere. Cacti. Acquiesce. She dismantled her spelling and vocab lists sound by sound, syllable by syllable. She cared less about the meanings than the feelings, and sometimes whispered the words just to feel them in her mouth. Whatever slight interactions Claire had with boys were, like most of life’s pivotal experiences, a function of school. The first time she danced with a boy was in gym, during the exquisitely humiliating square dance unit. In health ed, while practicing taking one another’s blood pressure, she touched the soft inside of a boy’s wrist. It was in earth science, sixth grade, that Claire first held a boy’s hand. While Mr. Frick pressed his finger to the buzzer on Lab Table One, the class clasped hands in a sloppy, sweaty chain of electrical conductivity, brave smiles frozen to their faces, compelled in the name of science and their precarious spot in the pecking order to not let go. It wasn’t that Claire was unpopular exactly, just unremarkable. She was sturdy, more big-boned than chubby, with red hair she wore in a single braid and freckles that bloomed like constellations of stars on her round cheeks. Each of her elementary school pictures was essentially this: a thick fringe of bangs, a tentative smile, a missing tooth. Jennifer Kelly, who was popular, once told Claire that she looked like a Campbell’s Soup Kid; this was a compliment at the time. Claire wasn’t made fun of by the popular kids, nor was she invited to their parties. She had a few equally shy, unremarkable friends with whom she discussed the popular crowd so thoroughly she felt a part of their world, even if they wouldn’t have known her name.  What small but increasing notice Claire attracted at school was because of schoolwork. She had the highest GPA in the class. She set the annual record for the MS Readathon, collecting several Pizza Hut gift certificates. By middle school she had discovered a quietly fierce competitive streak, evident in her grades and awards and propensity for games like Merlin, Simon, and Boggle. In eighth grade she made it to the finals of the schoolwide spelling bee, broadcast to all the classrooms by closed-circuit TV. On the day of the finals she wore her hair unbraided. A sticker on the front of her uniform said Homeroom 19. The bee came down to two spellers; Claire’s final word was sciatica, the winner’s was balloon. The sense of humiliation and mild injustice that trailed her from the broadcast booth was unalleviated by her return to language arts, where the class offered a dribbling of applause and her teacher whispered fiercely, “You were robbed.” At St. James Catholic High School, Claire thrived on AP English classes, the literary magazine, the yearbook copyediting team. In her junior year, she agreed to go to her first dance with a boy not because she liked him, or even really knew him, but because his name was Percival Percivont. When she was accepted to college (Ivy League, early decision) she ordered a stack of trendy sweaters based on color names alone—sassafras, sterling, lawn, lime. In college, she harbored an unoriginal crush on Professor Collins, who taught her freshman romanticism seminar, wore lambswool sweaters, and spoke in iambic pentameter. At a keg party, she met a rugby player, Leo, who confided that he was “secretly shy” and working on a novel no one knew about. Claire instantly imagined herself in the role of Leo’s girlfriend: quietly supportive, a book lover with few good friends to tell. She lost her virginity to Leo that night after several rum and Diet Cokes. He left her room before dawn, and when they passed each other on the quad, they didn’t say hello. When Claire graduated (Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude) her parents and little sister attended the ceremony. Her father kissed her dryly in the middle of her forehead. Her mother kept loudly referring to her as “Beta Kappa Claire,” which had the effect of making Claire feel dumb. Noelle, just finishing her junior year of high school, told Claire she was crazy to keep going to school when she didn’t have to—Claire would be starting a PhD program in linguistics in the fall. Claire had smiled down at her sister. The truth was, she wouldn’t have minded staying in school forever. Academia—how she loved this word, the forward march of it, the two genteel vowels bookending the sophisticated nut in the center. Higher education agreed with her; it confirmed her. Within the firm structure of brick buildings and twelve-credit semesters, she was at home. In grad school, Claire drowned happily in her schoolwork. She began smoking occasionally, lost ten pounds (not to be confused with the fifteen she dutifully put on her freshman year in college) and got straight A’s (even if no one said “straight A’s” in grad school). It wasn’t until the beginning of her third year that, as Claire was leaving the library, she noticed a blond man with a backpack crouched awkwardly outside the Social Sciences building. He seemed as choreographed a part of the academic setting as the hallowed gong of the clock on the steeple or the trees with their leaves gently turning or the group of high school students drifting in a small, nervous cloud across the quad. As Claire drew closer, she saw the man was peering at his hand. A thick, bright stripe of a worm lay across his index finger, mint green, like toothpaste on a brush. “Beautiful,” he murmured. The man had on a green barn coat, thin-rimmed glasses, and wrinkled khakis. A shock of thin blond hair spilled across his forehead—he was handsome, in a scholastic sort of way. “Black swallowtail,” he said. Claire paused. She had never looked at a worm up close, except for the one she found curled up next to the crispy prawns in the $3.99 college student all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet. But she had to agree: In the world of worms, this one did seem unusually attractive, leaf green with dramatic black stripes and yellow splashes. “Papilio pofyxenes,” the man said. Claire stepped closer. Though she never initiated conversations with strange men—or any men—she heard herself ask, “Is it a worm or a caterpillar?” The man looked up in surprise. $he wondered if he had been speaking to the worm all along. “Oh, ah, a caterpillar,” he said, pushing himself up from the ground. He was tall, his knees plastered with a few dewy strands of grass. “Also called a parsley worm.” “Parsley worm,” Claire repeated. “Soon it will go into its, ah, chrysalis.” “Chrysalis.” The word slid between her teeth like liquid gold. “And then what?” she asked. Maybe it was his fitful speech that was making her feel braver. “Well, then, it becomes—” He tugged on one ear. “It becomes a butterfly.” The metaphorical undertones were absurd. But in that moment, the very idea—that this chubby, sluggish creature nestled on this man’s finger would go into hiding and emerge with wings—struck Claire as the most poetic thing she’d ever heard. The man leaned down and placed the caterpillar gently on the pavement. Like proud parents, they watched as it inched away, dragging itself behind itself stripe by stripe. Then, just like parents, left alone after the kids leave home, they stopped communicating. She pinched the air with her thumb and forefinger, wishing she had a cigarette. He pulled his glasses off, one wiry arm snagging on his ear. They were the kind of glasses that were spindly, unbreakable, the kind Claire associated with professors and violinists, the end of each arm curved like a teacup handle. She watched as he began to clean them, massaging the lenses with a satiny red cloth. As he coaxed each arm snugly around each ear, Claire realized she craved this kind of care. Then his hand was waiting before her. “Bob Wells,” he said. As his hand folded around her hand, Claire felt a profound calmness start in her chest and travel outward, the kind of contentment she felt in a classroom in the rain. This man felt steady, safe. She found herself smiling at his every detail: his damp, grass-stained knees, his unintentional metaphors, the sunlight glinting off his glasses, and his serious, pale-blue eyes. “Claire Gallagher,” she said, and even though she’d spent four semesters studying linguistics, she managed to overlook his most pressing, most ominous detail: His first name was spelled the same way forward and back. Bob, it turned out, was the pride of the Entomology Department. His research on environmental toxicology had won him the Handelman Award for Excellence two years running. True, he wasn’t a writer; he wouldn’t dazzle her with his words. But, Claire reasoned, he didn’t have to. From Bob’s brain to his lips, every sentence seemed to undergo a patient process of internal editing, an effort to express himself rightly—as close to truthfully—as he could. “I love…” Claire was sitting on his lap, in the brown leather chair that swallowed half of Bob’s tiny office. It was late October, one of those perfect fall evenings when a college campus was at its finest and walking across a quad felt a little bit like falling in love. Everything was right with the world, every detail in agreement—the golden light warming the dorm windows, the purplish afterglow of an early sunset, the sounds of feet shushing through red-gold leaf piles and snatches of laughter from some unseen conversation. The feeling was equal parts joy and sadness, hope and nostalgia; impossible to look forward without looking back. “…your nose…” Bob was wearing only his glasses and boxers, his legs stretched beneath her like a lanky seesaw covered with light blond hair. Claire hooked her legs under the insides of his knees. There was something thrilling about it, the proximity of flesh and academia, the body and mind sharing the same four-by-ten square of rough mulberry carpet, Bob’s baggy tweeds and Claire’s sassafras sweater mingling with the dusty brown hardcovers that littered the office floor. “I love your nose…” He was older, thirty-two to her twenty-four, and this implied maturity, yet it was always Bob who seemed more nervous. He often dissected her this way, breaking her body down into its carefully adored parts. Claire had always hated her freckles—as a child, she’d scratched at one until her skin turned black—but Bob traced them slowly, like the coordinates of some delicate constellation, so genuinely enamored of her that Claire couldn’t help but feel pretty in his arms. “I love your nose”—he concluded, cheeks flushing spectacularly —“because it’s, ah, attached to your face.” The following winter, Bob was offered a job at the Institute for Biological Sciences, a research training facility in Roan, New Hampshire. Claire was still a year away from finishing her dissertation. The plan was for her to put it on hold until after the move. To delay finishing a crucial paper—much less an entire degree—went against every grain in Claire’s body, but she reminded herself that she had a move to organize and a wedding to plan. Plus, saving her dissertation would give her something to do in New Hampshire. What more perfect place to write a dissertation?  That spring, she and Bob huddled over the fax machine in his office, watching as rental ads came inching through. Bob scrutinized them like chemical formulas, circling the “AC” and “utils incl.” Claire found herself charmed by descriptors like “sun-filled,” “cozy,” and “unique space.” Though Claire was immersed in words on a technical level—phonetics and semantics, morphologies and roots—she was still prone to falling into ill- advised love with them. She told the linguistics department that she was excited about New Hampshire because this position was “a great opportunity for Bob,” but the real reason, which she told no one, was that he had described it as “sylvan.” She had focused on that droplet of a word —sylvan, sylvan, sylvan—not just its meaning, but the fact that Bob chose it. So he could be a little dry, a little clinical, but deep down where it mattered—sylvan! Eventually, it was a “2BR/1B+” that caught both their eyes. Claire was charmed by the “homey” and “secluded” and unabashed “little slice of heaven.” Bob approved of “near highway” and “W/D.” Both were enticed by the “+” dangling off the end like a dripping cherry on a fork. As a symbol, it satisfied both of their most basic instincts: It had a mathematical quality that appealed to Bob, and a suggestiveness that played to Claire’s powers of imagination. When the realtor explained that the “+” was a partially renovated garage set twenty feet from the main house, they decided Bob could adopt it as his office. The realtor sent Polaroids and they took it, sight unseen. A month after the wedding, Claire and Bob pulled into their new driveway with a U-Haul groaning behind them. As she walked through the empty rooms, Claire felt giddy, hopeful. She didn’t see the house; she saw the life they would have inside it. She lingered on the fireplace and pictured snowy winter nights, foreign films, good wines. In the kitchen, she conjured scenes of hyperliterate dinner parties, complicated appetizers, and witty, erudite conversations. She imagined herself adopting a look of sloppy buns and embroidered ponchos, becoming well versed in olives and cheeses. She imagined herself worldly—though this, she would learn, is the trick of academia. It lets you believe you’re engaged with the world even if that world exists only theoretically, even if the very word academia begins to sound like some sort of disease. Even if what you really are is not worldly, but wordly—concocting realities that exist only in your head. That first night, lying among the stacks of unopened wedding gifts and cardboard boxes, Claire listened for what she’d counted on being a clean, perfect, rural silence. Instead it was a cacophony of buzzing and chirping, grasshoppers and field crickets and katydids. “It’s loud,” she said. She was staring at the ceiling, at a long thin crack running through the plaster. Bob’s arm felt warm beneath her neck. “That’s because most predators sleep at night,” he whispered, as if to not disturb them. “So the insects can afford to be noisy.” Claire pulled the comforter to her chin. Her face was itchy. “Listen,” he said. “Hear that?” “What?” “That.” Claire listened. The chirps sounded in threes, a thick, drowsy waltz; gradually she distinguished one set as louder and faster than the others. “It’s a love song,” Bob said excitedly, as the chirps rose in pitch. “Someone caught his eye. Or his wing.” Claire smiled. As the sound peaked and softened, she asked, “What’s happening now?” “She came over,” Bob said. “She likes him too.” Claire rolled toward him, pressing her face into his warm chest. This man, her husband, was a romantic. It may have been accidental, but he was a romantic all the same. Closing her eyes, she listened as the world outside sang and serenaded. What was she complaining about? This place was their very own sleep machine—people paid good money for these things! She was drifting off as she heard another chirp grow louder. This one sounded arrhythmic, agitated. “What’s wrong with that one?” she asked. “He attracted an enemy,” Bob said. “They’ll fight to the death.” For a while, the arrangement seemed as ideal as it appeared. Claire stored her books and laptop in the spare BR, Bob worked outside in the +. This separation seemed healthy, even necessary. No matter that the backyard was crawling with ticks and blackflies—“Think of it as Wild Kingdom,” the realtor had said—a discouragement to anyone else, but to Bob, a windfall. Claire outfitted her study with new file cabinets, made colored labels, and arranged her dissertation notes in three-ring binders. She filled the shelves, built into New Englandy nooks and crannies, sometimes sliding books on top sideways for a haphazard, distracted effect. Out in the garage, Bob laid carpet and installed space heaters. He bought a “bug hat,” a netted helmet that made him look like an insect superhero (The Exterminator, Claire thought). In the interest of experimentation, Bob kept one side of the backyard cut short while the other grew wild. The split extended from the back door to the woods at the edge of their property, like a stripe of duct tape bisecting the bedroom floor of siblings who don’t get along. In mid-September, Claire and Bob attended their first interdepartmental potluck, a monthly gathering hosted by a different institute researcher and spouse. The researchers Claire found smart and serious and, surprisingly, not unsocial. She would have preferred—understood—unsocial, but Bob’s new colleagues were gregarious in a way that felt specialized and strenuous. They played a game in which everyone was required to guess the name of the famous scientist written on an index card and taped to his or her back. Claire spent three hours trying to come up with ALESSANDRO VOLTA while researchers poked her in the arm, flailing as if electrocuted.  “Ben Franklin?” she guessed. One scientist shook his head. Another bent toward a floor lamp pretending to jab his finger in the socket. “Watt?” She felt a hard poke on the shoulder and turned to see another one on the floor convulsing. “Bacon?” she guessed. “Francis Bacon?” The room regarded her, pasty and concerned. It was the only word game Claire had ever despised. “Claire?” She felt a hand on her arm. It was Terry, one of the faculty wives. She was holding Claire’s elbow in one hand and a paper plate in the other. “Did you make this quiche?” Claire had in fact made the quiche, and had spent an embarrassingly long time doing it, despite the fact that the slice on Terry’s plate looked disturbingly wet. “It’s delish!” Terry approved, and Claire smiled, because Terry was trying to be kind, but inside she felt her first flicker of despair. She had hoped the wives might be her friends, women with whom she could roll her eyes and sigh, maybe share an ironic laugh now and then. But this, she could tell already, was not to be. These women had no irony. They wore only earth-toned sweaters and squelchy, sensible boots. Most of them, like Terry, were older than Claire by at least a decade. Claire was twenty-six, and even though so far in life her age had recommended her—marked her as “impressive for someone so young”—here it rendered her inexperienced, adorable, her quiche a puddle of spinachy water, and her open-toed sandals a rookie mistake. As Terry gamely dug into the crust, it struck Claire forcibly that she did not want to become this woman: grazing the outskirts of academia hooked to her husband’s arm. It was her first surge of edginess, near-meanness, though this was a feeling she would come to rely on soon. Anger was easy.  “Yes,” entered another woman, a plant biologist named Julia. She wore narrow, rectangular glasses and, maybe by virtue of her faculty status, had arrived with a store-bought ham. “Very nice quiche.” “Did you make the crust yourself?” Terry said, but the way she asked, she might have been referring to an imaginary pie cooked by a child in a sandbox. “I don’t even know how to turn my oven on,” Julia said. Claire felt the smile tense on her face. She wanted to set the record straight, to let these women know she had four-fifths of a PhD and had scored a perfect on the logic section of the GRE. She sought Bob’s gaze across the room, silently imploring him to jump in and preserve her dignity. But Bob just smiled. Her husband did not detect the subtleties of human behavior, especially female human behavior, or the behavior of anything, really, unless it molted and ate its own skin. “I’m writing my dissertation,” Claire blurted, turning back to the quiche eaters. Terry looked at her in kind, crumpled confusion. “I thought you were Bob’s wife?” “I am. But I’m still writing my dissertation.” “What field?” Julia asked, gripping her glasses by one corner and straightening them on her face. “Linguistics,” Claire said. “Language acquisition. Dialectology and phonology. The way a language is acquired, evolves, and varies depending on social and cultural contexts.” Terry smiled. Julia said, “And you still have time to cook!” before dissolving politely into the party, an index card marked LOUIS LEAKEY stuck to her back.  That night, driving home after the party, Claire waited for Bob to tell her how much he’d hated it. She was dying to commiserate, to talk about the people—as she saw it, one of the best parts of being a couple was leaving parties and talking about the people—but Bob said, “I had fun. Didn’t you?” In the darkness, Claire couldn’t see his face. “Sure,” she replied, and stared out the window, half a quiche heavy in her lap. She was afraid her real opinion would sound too critical. Or worse, that Bob just wouldn’t understand. To find something funny no one else did, be saddened by something other people shrugged off—under normal circumstances this felt lonely, but trying and failing to explain it to your husband would feel even worse. Then Bob asked, “Want to know something?” Claire turned, feeling a spike of hope. “Yes?” “It’s fifty-one degrees.” She surveyed the world out the window: an empty road, a slivered moon, a row of bagged leaves lined up on the curb. “How can you tell?” “Male snowy field cricket,” Bob said, then went on to explain that this insect functioned like a natural thermometer—count the number of chirps in fifteen seconds, add thirty-nine, and you had the degrees Fahrenheit. It wasn’t what she was looking for, but Claire had to admit she liked this nugget; it seemed like it could come in handy, maybe be useful at parties. That night, and every night thereafter, she would lie in bed listening for the male snowy—in her version, there was only one—watching the second hand and counting chirps until she fell asleep. But as the nights got colder, the chirps got slower. The cricket was winding down as winter approached. It was poetic. Unbearable. Bob, meanwhile, was experimenting with increased vigor, sometimes getting up to check his traps in the middle of the night. The inside of their house had become a minefield of organic pest control: bay leaves, mint leaves, garlic cloves, cucumber slices, jagged green chunks of Irish Spring soap. Claire once found Bob kneeling with his nose to the baseboard in the kitchen—the ants’ “point of entry,” he explained—sprinkling a mixture of cayenne pepper, cinnamon, and coffee grounds in a spicy, militant line he swore no ant would cross. Claire tried to work on her dissertation, but couldn’t seem to get traction. She told herself this was temporary—new house, new husband, garden-variety growing pains—and occupied herself making address labels, compiling wedding albums, composing group e- mails that sounded thrilled and witty. She would make this life work; it was inconceivable that it wouldn’t. Until the afternoon Claire opened the refrigerator and found dead ladybugs inside—hundreds of them, boxed in pale green Tupperware, bookended by lunch meat and cream cheese. Bob had heard her scream from across the yard. “It’s okay,” he said, stroking her hair and panting slightly. “I put them there, Claire. This, ah, morning. It’s fine.” “It’s not fine! How is it fine?” “They’re ladybugs. Insect control. They eat more than five thousand aphids a year.” She stared at him. “But why are they in my refrigerator?” “Storage,” Bob replied. This, she realized, was a man she did not understand. This was a man who had reduced her to a woman who said “my refrigerator.” “It’s okay,” Bob repeated. “No reason to get, ah, alarmed.” But ladybugs! Claire knew it was too illogical, too unscientific an argument to admit out loud. She was embarrassed to even be thinking it, but there it was lurking inside her, a flaw in her biology, like a lazy eye or a dead tooth. Ladybugs are good luck! You don’t mess with good luck! “It’s just that it’s better to let them out after nightfall,” Bob added. He was trying to reassure her. She recalled him once explaining that the reason ladybugs were so brightly colored was to warn other bugs they didn’t taste good. “They’re perfectly safe. Just as long as the temperature doesn’t go below freezing.” “What?” Claire paused. She yanked open the door again and peered inside. Sure enough, the ladybugs were still alive, twitching, as if crippled. She wrested away from Bob’s hands. “Are they dying?” she whispered. She felt suddenly on the verge of tears. “They look like they’re dying.” “They’re not dying. I glued their wings so they can’t fly. Ginger ale and soda water.” When she looked at him, his proud smile faded. “Claire,” he said. “It’s just science.” “But ladybugs,” she said, unable to control herself. “Ladybugs are good luck.” The look he gave her then was the kind you give a crazy person, equal parts bewilderment and concern. As Bob put his arms around her, promising to free the bugs by dinner, Claire felt her panic evaporate, replaced by something hard, absolute. Her husband didn’t get her. It was so clear; it was devastating. After the first frost, the male snowy field cricket vanished, like everything else, under a heavy coat of white. As the snow mounted, so did Claire’s restlessness. Antsiness—though she banished this word from her repertoire. This house, this entire sylvan state, was making her sharp- cornered, nervy, the kind of person who chewed her nails and spat them on the ground. She discovered twin pockets of flesh at the backs of her thighs. She hadn’t noticed them before—easy to miss under all that wool!—but suddenly they felt like sandbags. She blamed her dissertation. She blamed New Hampshire. There was nothing to do in this place but eat! Then one evening in November, at an environmental fundraiser, Claire was introduced to the mayor of Sylvan County. She froze, her hand clasped in his. The mayor was short, fat, and balding. As Claire fought to keep smiling, she realized “sylvan” was not Bob’s description of the area —“sylvan” was the area. From then on, Claire knew that when her husband said “sylvan,” what he really meant was Sylvan, and this discrepancy summed up their new life in New Hampshire: the difference between how a thing seemed and how it truly was. As winter took hold, Bob published an article on integrated pest control. He attended the annual convention of the Entomology Society of America and returned with a pair of souvenir bug slippers and a hangover. Claire went to all his campus lectures, smiling and absorbing compliments on his behalf. She had given up trying to make real friends; once the possibility was gone, it was easier. She became surprisingly adept at mingling, her absorption in the role so convincing that sometimes she could step outside herself, look at her and Bob standing together, nodding and laughing, and see them as likable as everybody else did. “Still working on my dissertation,” she piped up, if anybody asked. The reality was, the dissertation was stagnant. For the first time since kindergarten, Claire was not in school; without the structure, she was useless. Really, what was the point? She began to resent the very idea of writing a dissertation, that she should be expected to sit here, trapped in the middle of nowhere slaving over this paper like it might change anything. No one in Roan knew if she was working on it, no one cared. And once it was written: What then? As long as Claire was still working on her dissertation, she was in a state of working on her dissertation, and this was something she vitally needed to be. If she was sinking into disuse, Bob didn’t seem to mind. This struck Claire as a sign of, if not weakness, at least obliviousness beyond repair. Maybe she was wrong about Bob. Maybe he’d never taken her work seriously. Maybe he didn’t mind if she was pathetic—wanted her to be pathetic! Claire tried to quash these thoughts, but sometimes a triple wave of doubt and guilt and resentment blindsided her out of nowhere. Other times it rose gradually, from prickles of annoyance over Bob’s mint leaves or netted hat to amazement that anyone could get a sweater quite so wrinkled to moments of despair that her degree was unfinished, that she felt so purposeless, that she had followed her husband to fucking Roan, New Hampshire, and her husband would never say “fucking.” “I love you,” Bob said. Every night and every morning, the endearments seeming to increase in proportion to her duress. Was he just trying to make her feel better? Was that pity in his voice? Secretly, Claire had begun to suspect Bob didn’t love her. Not that he was lying on purpose, but that what he said and felt didn’t mesh and, whether from lack of intuition or experience, he didn’t know the difference. There wasn’t enough intensity behind his words—the “love’s” drifted down like snow in a plastic globe, light, barely there, the way he inexplicably kissed her over her padded bras. He would claim to love her unfailingly, and maybe this was his failing. He would love her, in spite of anything and in spite of everything. But what kind of love was that? How was she supposed to trust it? She could do nothing, and Bob’s feelings for her wouldn’t change, and sometimes this felt more like an insult than a relief. Claire was overjoyed to see the end of that first bleak winter, only to find herself in the middle of an itchy, wet, endless spring. Mentally, at least, she still kept herself limber. She worked her way through the shelves of the Roan Public Library. She played Jeopardy! every night and did the syndicated crossword in the Roan Gazette every morning. For dessert, she polished off the cryptogram, and if desperate, the seek-and-find. Sometimes, hungry for more, she went out and bought an easy puzzle book —or more accurately, EZ puzzle book—the pulpy paperbacks sold in the Naber Market for ninety-nine cents. The covers boasted words like Presto, Quickie, Jiffy, and Jumbo, sometimes cartoon pictures of magicians or bunnies. She felt covert buying them, a junkie in need of a cheap fix. She got a rush speeding through the downs and acrosses, filling up the empty boxes to arrive at an unambiguous whole. The EZs were instant gratification, the street crack of linguistics, and in the messy world of life beyond school, by God she needed this. On campus, she kept the puzzles tucked out of sight, though it wouldn’t have mattered had anyone seen. Her life was merely a function of her husband’s. When she went to campus, people smiled, but she knew how they saw her: the bug guy’s wife. When she ran into women in the supermarket, she would nod at their comments about sale prices or winterizing or the scandal spattering the cover of the National Enquirer while inside she shouted: I was valedictorian in high school! When the cashier asked if she’d found everything she needed, on the inside she railed: Lady, not even close! Only after she was strapped in her car would she yield to the rage inside her. She sped home, flying through the potholes. Take that! She liked the satisfyingly hard bounce in her seat. And that! These rural potholes were awesome, otherworldly, huge and untouched as craters on the moon. Andthatandthatandthat! Back at home she swallowed her anger, tossing the groceries in the refrigerator and tearing through an EZ until she heard the bang of the garage door that meant Bob was on his way inside. The March morning a pothole ripped open her front tire, Claire found herself stranded at George’s Auto Shop—not so much a shop as it was George’s front yard—and walked a mile to the Naber, bought a pack of Merit Lights and a Jumbo Puzzle Fun, and binged. Sitting on the curb, she filled up grid upon grid, smoking one cigarette after the next until her stomach was queasy and her head pounding so hard she could barely see. When she finished the last puzzle, she found herself staring at the inside back cover like the bottom of a ravaged cake pan: WRITE PUZZLES FROM HOME! Despite her nausea, she felt a faint stir of something. Claire didn’t believe in signs, but if she had, this would have come close. To not just finish puzzles, but to make them—create them. A crossword puzzle writer.  Better yet: A cruciverbalist. It wasn’t steady pay, wasn’t even a steady job, but this wasn’t about the money. You submitted a puzzle and, if published, were paid a small fee. Creating them, she found, came easy. Most of the puzzle consisted of tiny, EZ words, with two or three long ones bracing the middle to unify title and theme. Claire’s first puzzle was titled BUGGED! The long words were: Honeybees (Sweet stingers) Butterfly (Ex-caterpillar) La Cucaracha (Roach, south of the border) Grasshopper (Drink with crème de menthe?) It appeared in Deluxe EZ Crosswords, Volume 53, Number 8. Claire bought a bulletin board and tacked it above her desk. Gradually, she began to fill her life with words again. Short words mostly, three and four letters. She became well versed in suffixes, prefixes, state abbreviations, compass points. She grew obsessed with short, vowel- bloated words like nee, roe, oleo, olio, ewer, era. Old English: ne’er, e’er, o’er. Celebrities: Erma, Pia, Ella, Mia, Etta, Lou. She dismantled words to consider all their possible permutations, examining the hairline differences between relieve and relive, martial and marital, fall and fail. She grew increasingly aware of the fickle nature of language, how easily it could mislead. Bug, for example, could be a flaw or a flea. Pest or pester, eavesdrop or annoy. In her head, she was constantly dissecting new words, boiling them down to their elements, scrutinizing every angle, every atom, all the many ways a thing could be defined. BOB:  Mr. Newhart Female haircut Wobble Pageboy Aim for apples It was in May, the end of the academic year, that it was Claire and Bob’s turn to host the potluck. When Bob mentioned it one night after dinner, Claire’s stomach sank. “But,” he added quickly, “they said we don’t have to.” “They?” “Only, ah, if we want to.” “Why wouldn’t we want to?” Claire snapped, and stood up to clear the table. More alarming than the prospect of hosting the faculty potluck was the possibility that her uselessness had become so visible, so known. Maybe this was her chance to start over and impress these people: to throw the perfect party she’d imagined when they first moved here. As this plan took root, Claire felt a faint but determined excitement. The next day she went out and bought new dishes, heavy blue earthenware. She got online and found recipes for organic cheesecakes, provocative salads with chickpeas and pears. The night of the party, she wore chandelier earrings and a long skirt that nearly grazed the floor. But by ten after seven, her attempt at a more sophisticated potluck had already devolved into just one more big fat bug joke when Terry arrived with a “dirt cake” (chocolate pudding mud, crushed Oreo dirt, gummy worms) that prompted so much strenuous laughter Claire felt like crying, like saying, “I married an entomologist— you think I’ve never seen a dirt cake before?” By nine, the guests were gone. Claire stepped back into her bug slippers and laid her earrings on the windowsill. She faced the sink, piled high with earthenware, and stared out the window. The night sky was deep black and filled with bright stars, but they were just that: no shooting, twinkling, wishing. Her unhappiness had never looked clearer. “Claire?” It was the concern in Bob’s voice that made Claire’s eyes fill, the sound of her own sadness confirmed by someone else. When she turned, Bob was standing close but not touching, four earthenware goblets caught in his hands. Claire stepped forward and pressed her face to his neck. It was the closest she came to telling him—what? This thing, whatever was making her unhappy, wasn’t small and fixable. To say it out loud might set in motion something she couldn’t undo. Once she admitted she wasn’t happy, their marriage became an unhappy marriage, and one of two things happened next: It fell apart or became the source of constant fear and stress and scrutiny, and she wasn’t ready for either of those things. “I’m just tired,” she said, knowing he wouldn’t push harder than this. Though in his work Bob was constantly posing questions, in life he always seemed to defer to what was happening around him, as if accepting that people behaved in ways he didn’t understand. He didn’t examine the life he was in, didn’t analyze what he had or long for what he didn’t. Even their relationship seemed like something he had tumbled into contentedly, and with little struggle, by virtue of looking up on the quad that October afternoon and seeing Claire standing there. Claire lingers in the quiet. The only sound in the kitchen is the sprinkling of rain, a patter so delicate it’s almost insulting. She stares out the window, caught in the pause between what just happened and what will happen next. The world outside is touched with a soft gray light, the light of dinners being almost ready and backyard games ending, the beginning of the day’s end. When you love your life, this light may be the day’s most comforting; when you don’t, the most depressing.  Claire’s gaze veers toward the garage, her heart pounding. One of them will have to be the first to emerge. She wonders what Bob is doing, if he’s still standing in the spot she left him—the thought is too much to bear. She turns from the window and surveys the kitchen, hunting for some small acknowledgment of what just happened, but everything looks impossibly the same. The breakfast dishes in the sink, the last murky inch of coffee in the pot. The chicken she was making for dinner simmers in the slow cooker, languishing in a soy-sesame marinade. On the floor beside the oven, four cucumber slices perch on a dish, glaring up at Claire with their rubbery green eyes. She looks away, toward the cookbook still splayed open on the counter. It was a wedding gift she and Bob received right before they moved here, along with a fondue set, cappuccino maker, snow shovel, flannel sheets, movie rental certificates— gifts for living together and, in retrospect, living together somewhere far away and cold. Those first few valiant months, Claire had started working her way through the recipes, even penciling comments in the margins, TOO FRUITY, NEEDS DIJON! Seeing it now, she cannot imagine ever having been the kind of woman with the energy or the optimism to write something like NEEDS DIJON! The room swells toward her. Claire leans back against the counter as a hail of small white spots bursts before her eyes. She closes them, tries to breathe, but the breath gets stuck in her chest. She remembers her college roommate, Erica, who once told her it was always smart to break up outside —that way the memory doesn’t stick to anything, it breaks into particles, floats. Now Claire senses the minefield of memories lying in wait around her, jostling each other like children in the fading light. She opens her eyes only to see insects swarming the refrigerator door—magnets. Brown and green, generic-looking, interspersed with snippets of the Magnetic Poetry Book Lovers series. She scrapes the Love from the refrigerator door and stares down at it. What is a woman supposed to do in the moments after she decides to leave her husband? Take an aspirin? Heat some chicken soup? Pull down a suitcase and start to pack?  Where would you go? Bob had asked. There was more than curiosity in his tone—there was incredulity too. He didn’t say “will,” but “would,” and in the world of verb tenses Claire knew what this implied. It was the second conditional: the hypothetical conditional, the “imaginary” conditional. It meant that Bob didn’t believe she would actually go through with it. The assumption makes her angry, but the tiniest bit tempted. The prospect of figuring out what comes next feels terrifying—all the dismantling, the explaining, and worst of all, the shame she would—will—feel when admitting to the world that her life wasn’t what it seemed. Claire feels her throat tighten. She crosses the room, picks up the cucumber dish, and dumps it in the sink. The slices land with four disgusted splats. As she turns the water on, dish still in hand, she spots something moving. A spider, trundling its way across the sink floor. She jerks the faucet off and leans down, peering at it. Bob once told her that the spiders found roaming sinks are males who have fallen off their webs looking for mates, and this story struck her as so tragic, so undignified, that from then on whenever she saw one, absurd as she felt, she guided him onto her fingertip and set him free. This one is navigating an obstacle course of unwashed coffee mugs and milk-stained cereal spoons with admirable tenacity, skirting the four mossy craters that just came plummeting from the sky and nearly ended his life. How valiant, his efforts to survive. Entomology, Claire thinks, is not just science. Like everything else, it boils down to love and death. “Claire.” She turns so quickly the dish slips from her hand and shatters on the floor. She stares at Bob, and Bob stares back, their eyes locked in surprised silence. Neither makes a move to clean up the mess. “When did you come in?” she asks. “Just now,” he says. Bob looks defeated: shoulders sagging, hands limp at his sides. Claire is struck suddenly by how much he has aged. It’s easy to miss, living with a person, but now she notices the thickness in his face, the hair receding at the temples, blond yielding to gray. Next month, he will be thirty-six. For a moment, she is overcome with regret that she didn’t wait a few weeks so he wouldn’t celebrate his birthday alone. “I thought maybe you’d already be packed,” Bob says. “Oh, no,” Claire says quickly. “I wouldn’t do that.” It is weak reassurance, given the circumstances. Bob sits down at the table. Claire crosses the room, sidestepping the broken dish, and sits in the opposite chair. She wishes now she’d turned off the crockpot. The sound of chicken bubbling and smell of dinner cooking seem sad. “So are you really, ah, are you—” Bob fumbles, then stops, letting her finish the thought, but all she can come up with is, “Yes.” “Just for a while?” “I think so. I don’t really know.” Claire folds her hands in her lap. She wishes she hadn’t taken her ring off with such a flourish; to put it back on now, though, might seem unfairly optimistic. “So you’re just leaving,” Bob says, with a sudden bitterness. “Just like that.” “No,” Claire says. “Not just like that. I—I’ve been feeling this way for a while.” He pulls his glasses off and sets them on the table, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. “I know. I should have said something. I guess I just thought that it would go away. That it was me.”  “So it’s me,” he snaps, and Claire has the incongruous thought that finally, Bob is angry, and she likes him better this way. “I don’t know if it’s us,” she says. “Or this place. Or both.” He drops his hands back to the table. His eyes, without the glasses, look vulnerable and small. “I guess I need to find out if it feels different,” she says. “Somewhere else.” “Don’t forget, wherever you go, there you are,” Bob says, and it is completely uncharacteristic, but then so is the spiteful tone of his voice, and the trembling hand raking through his hair, and the fact that they are sitting here at all having this conversation. “I know,” Claire says. “I know that.” She hears her voice catch. She will not cry; it would be unfair to cry. Then Bob is reaching for her hand across the table, and as sweet and selfless a gesture as this is, it makes her feel unbearably lonely. He is quiet for a minute. “If you want,” he says, “we can have a baby.” Claire has to bite her lip to keep from sobbing. “That’s not it,” she says. “I’m not sure I want to be married anymore.” Outside the window, a tree branch snaps, unleashing a flurry of snow. Minutes pass. Claire doesn’t know if he’s still holding her hand on purpose or has forgotten it’s there. Finally he says, “How long will it take? Before you know?” and it is such a classic Bob response that it might be funny, even endearing, if it weren’t so exactly indicative of what the problem is. She shakes her head. He lets go of her hand.  “I love you,” he tells her, but it sounds flat and formal, a last attempt at a remedy that’s failed many times before. When she doesn’t respond, he scrapes his chair back roughly. “Why don’t you call me when you get where you’re going,” he says, and starts toward the door. Halfway across the room, he turns. Claire looks up—was there more? Please, let there be more. Without meeting her eyes he walks back to the table, grabs his glasses, then crunches back across the kitchen, and slams the door. Claire keeps her eyes on the table. She listens to the engine rev and the anxious spin of tires on snow. She stands, watching out the window, as the car pulls off down the street, faster and jerkier than usual, white exhaust pluming behind it like a cape. Sound dissolves. The ticking of the oven clock emerges from the quiet. She turns again to face the kitchen, heart pounding. When Bob gets back, she needs to be gone. First, she retrieves the broom and dustpan from the closet and kneels on the floor, sweeping up the broken dish, and tries, calmly, to review her options. She could stay in a hotel tonight, just for a night, but it seems too sad, too desperate. She can’t bear the details: the plastic key card, the drinking glasses topped with pleated paper crowns. She could call one of the wives, but isn’t close enough with any of them; it would trigger too much gossip, require too much explanation. She wishes she had an old close friend, one with a big house and a warm heart. With a bearish husband who would welcome Claire inside, taking her suitcase and giving her elbow a reassuring squeeze. He’d say something corny like, “I know, time to make like a tree and leave,” then carry the kids upstairs while the friend steered Claire to the kitchen, poured her tea or bourbon, and told her she was absolutely doing the right thing. Her last close friend was Erica, but that was back in college. The truth is, Claire has no friend close enough to call at a moment like this. Claire stands. A few splinters of broken china stick to the knees of her jeans. She could drive to her parents’ house, sitting empty in Philadelphia, but even in a crisis this is the last place she wants to be. She considers her father, in his new Jersey shore condo, and imagines pulling up there in the middle of the night: the soft crunch of tires over pink pebbles, the tinge of salt in the air. For a moment the prospect is comforting, the two of them sitting at the kitchen table tomorrow morning, quietly drinking coffee and trading sections of the paper. But it isn’t the condo’s kitchen she’s imagining; it’s a different kitchen, and a different father. These days her contact with Gene is infrequent enough that the prospect of staying with him is awkward, not to mention depressing: some attenuated version of their former family in some attenuated version of their former home in some attenuated version of their former summer vacation. Claire spent Christmas there, convincing herself the Jersey shore off-season might feel blustery and dramatic. Instead it was near-deserted and freezing, a fossil of its summer self. The amusement rides were frozen, the boardwalk stores sleeping under dead signs and chain metal. But the worst was the condo itself, sparse, scary-clean, furnished with the few things Gene had decided to bring with him. Two rocking chairs, three plates, a cuckoo clock—there wasn’t enough there to constitute new rooms; they felt more like tributes to old rooms. When Claire asked why he didn’t take something more comfortable he said, “I didn’t bring anything I couldn’t carry,” which sounded like the rationale of a man with too much pride, or an emergency evacuee. The room is darkening at the edges, the rain lashing the window in sharp, icy flecks. Claire empties the dustpan into the trash, then pulls off her bug slippers and shoves them on top. As she scans the floor for any missed shards, something on the far side of the room catches her eye—a tiny black squiggle. Could it be the spider? Escaped from the sink and running for his life? She practically runs across the room. It isn’t the spider, of course. It’s the magnet she must have dropped on the floor. LOVE: Valentine catchphrase Makes the world go ‘round TV’s Boat  Term of endearment “Crazy,” acc. to Van Morrison Placing it on the tip of her finger, Claire closes her eyes, makes a wish, and blows. When she opens them, the Love hasn’t budged. She returns the magnet to the refrigerator door, next to the gaping maw of a magnetic spider. Outside, the sleet is turning to snow. The ruts from Bob’s tires have disappeared. Claire moves quickly toward the phone and flips through her address book. Cradling the receiver under her chin, she dials. The ringing on the other end sounds as far away as it is. “Hello?” It is her voice, no question about it. “Hi,” Claire says. “It’s me.” A pause: “Claire?” Then: “Oh my God. What’s wrong?” It is then that the tears spill over, the first Claire has cried all day, because she realizes her sister would instantly, and correctly, assume a call from her means that something must be wrong. “What happened?” Noelle is saying. Her voice is crackling. “Are you okay?” “No.” Claire waits for the explanation to assemble itself, but when it does, the words are simple. “I’m leaving Bob.” Claire waits, pressing the receiver hard against her ear, and despite the bad reception she can hear the moment a smile cracks her sister’s face. “I never thought you’d have the guts.” OceanofPDF.com  Chapter Three: Guts No—, no glory Abdominal workings Beer-drinking casualty (pl.) Easy college courses Courage Nerve So you’re bugging out,” Noelle says. The joke catches Claire off guard, and she’s laughing and crying at the same time. “It isn’t funny,” she says, even though it kind of is. “Well, I give you props,” Noelle tells her. “I mean, I know I barely knew the guy, but I mean, the bug thing? It always sounded kind of gross. And was he bad in bed? It kind of seemed like he’d be bad in bed—I can stay this stuff now, right? Is this helping?” Claire feels a pinch of defensiveness, though it’s not like Noelle’s candor should surprise her.  “I’d rather you didn’t,” she says. “I mean, it’s more like a break. I don’t even know what I’m going to do yet.” “Oh. Sorry.” Noelle pauses. “Well, how did he take it? When you said you were leaving? Was there a big blowout?” Claire shakes her head into the phone. “Did he cry?” Has she ever really seen Bob cry? His eyes had watered sometimes, near onions and in strong winds. “Did he try to, like, win you back? What did he say?” The line crackles. “Are you still there?” “Where would you go.” “What?” “That was the first thing he said—where would you go.” “Oh.” Claire can hear her disappointment, and she is right to be disappointed. Had it been Noelle’s story, it would have been better. For all her love of words, Claire could never tell a story like her sister. Even if the reality of a situation was underwhelming, Noelle could cobble together some drama from its ruins, exaggerating this detail, inventing that one. “Then he said we could have a baby,” Claire said. “Because you wanted one and he didn’t?” “No. Not really.” “Oh,” Noelle says, clearly confused. “Well, so, back up. Where will you go?”  “What?” “Where…will…” “Right.” Claire had heard her the first time. Though she is grateful for the implied confidence of will instead of would, she doesn’t want to admit she has no answer. “I guess I’m still figuring it out.” “Well you don’t have to. You’re coming here.” “Where?” Claire pauses. “Ireland?” “Why not?” Claire turns toward the wall, as if not wanting to be overheard. “Because it’s a different country, Noe. Because I have nowhere to live there. I have nothing to do there—” “What are you doing where you are? Like, cooking and cleaning?” “I’m working on my dissertation.” “Can’t you put that on hold until you get back? “And also, I write crossword puzzles.” The word cruciverbalist wriggles in her jaw. “I construct them.” “But you’re just a freelancer, right?” Claire closes her eyes. She reminds herself that not everyone chooses words as carefully as she does, as Bob does. “Seriously, and I know this goes against every responsible bone in your body, but you shouldn’t think, just act. Do you have a passport?” “Of course.” Claire thinks fleetingly of her honeymoon in the Caribbean. Even that vacation had seemed a function of Bob’s research: a bioluminescent bay, a swath of mosquito netting.  “So grab it. Fly standby—to Shannon, not Dublin—and call me when you get here. The timing is perfect. We’ll drink some pints and figure this all out.” “Wait—” Claire presses the phone tight to her ear, as if doing so will tether her sister to the line. “I would have nowhere to stay.” “What’s that supposed to mean? You’d stay with us.” By us, Noelle means herself and Paul, the boyfriend, the reason she moved to Ireland in the first place. “I’d feel like I was imposing,” Claire says. “Oh my God, please. Haven’t you heard of the Irish hospitality? Making tea and having guests—they live for this shite.” Claire stalls, submerged in the static. She imagines the distance between herself and her sister—a snowstorm, an ocean, five time zones, God knows what else. “Listen, I’m not going to beg,” Noelle says. Her voice is getting flat, impatient, maybe bored. “If you don’t want to come, don’t come. But I think it would be good for you.” Claire throws a panicked glance around the kitchen. The reality, she reminds herself, is that she has no other choice. “Fine,” she says. “Seriously?” “But only for a few days—” “Brilliant!” Noelle says, already not listening. She affects a thick brogue and sings out: “May the road rise to meet you!” The last two times Claire saw her sister were for sacraments—marriage and death. The marriage was Claire’s, two summers before. Against her better judgment, she had succumbed to superstition about the groom not seeing the bride the night before the wedding and agreed to stay at the house. Noelle was home for the weekend, prepared to wrestle her way into a pale blue bridesmaid dress she openly despised. It wasn’t unusual for Noelle to be home on weekends; she went to college less than an hour from there, at a state school she despised too. On this visit, she had announced her arrival with a new metal-rimmed hole in each earlobe: round as a hubcap, wide enough to drop loose change through. Noelle had a reputation for empty threats—she’d sworn many times to get a tattoo, become a vegan, a Scientologist—but that day, her recklessness felt earnest. There was the proof, yawning in her earlobes. Even their mother winced, telling Noelle to wear her hair long for the wedding so she could pick up boys. “I don’t want to pick up boys,” Noelle said. She was sprawled on one end of the sofa, Deirdre on the other. Claire and her father were sitting in the rocking chairs. The TV was tuned to the Home Shopping Network, which they weren’t watching so much as letting fill up space. Only Deirdre was paying attention, sipping a can of Miller High Life with eyes fixed on the screen. “I already met one,” Noelle reminded them. This was the romance proving to dominate the wedding weekend, not Claire and Bob but Noelle and Paul, the Irish bartender she’d spent the summer with on the Jersey shore. Now that the summer was over, Paul had returned to Ireland, for which Claire was secretly thankful. She didn’t want a stranger in her wedding pictures, and it was just the kind of thing Noelle would have insisted on. “I won’t ever want to meet another boy again,” Noelle said. “Swear to God.” “Watch it,” said Deirdre.  Though she wouldn’t hesitate to swear in fifty different Ianguages, their mother got nervous whenever God was involved. It terrified her that Claire wasn’t getting married in a Catholic church, so much so that she’d called her in the graduate dorm. “What did you say he is?” Deirdre asked, when Claire picked up. “An atheist?” “Mom?” It was rare that Claire and her mother spoke on the phone, something Claire’s college roommates had always found sad and fascinating. Claire made the obligatory calls home to check in now and then, but spoke mostly to her father; Deirdre often didn’t feel well enough to get on. “What are you talking about?” “Your bug man.” Her mother’s voice sounded smaller than it did in person, her puff-chestedness almost cartoonish. “Who won’t get married in a church. He’s an atheist?” “It wasn’t just his decision. It was both—” “Atheist?” “No,” Claire said. “He’s an agnostic.” “A snot?” “An agnostic.” “Never heard of it.” “It means someone who believes—that we can’t know what to believe,” Claire said. “That it’s impossible to prove either way. That God exists, or doesn’t exist.”  Claire was glad she didn’t have to see the expression on her mother’s face. If pressed—say, in multiple-choice format—she would have labeled herself an agnostic too. In her mind, it was the only logical way to go. But she had so far avoided having to admit this out loud, and was grateful, plagued as she was by the faint but nagging fear that if she did she might be damned to hell. Sitting in the living room the night before her godless or possibly Godless wedding, Claire shot Noelle a look of warning. The last thing she needed was to reawaken the church debate. When it came to religion, like most things, Noelle had aligned herself with Deirdre. She had sung in the children’s church choir, helped make floats for CYO parades, claimed to sacrifice something for Lent every spring. She had worn a cross on a chain around her neck since her First Communion, though over the years it had morphed from a delicate silver necklace to a variety of cheap, chunky pendants bought at the mall, attached to plastic backings labeled FASHION JEWELRY. Unlike taking the Lord’s name in vain, this never seemed to worry Deirdre; if it wasn’t explicitly a commandment, she let it slide. “Sorry, Mom,” Noelle said. “But I’m telling you, this guy is the one. The man I’m going to marry.” Deirdre s eyes didn’t stray from the TV. “Noelle Conneely,” Noelle mused. “Noelle Conneely…Mr. and Mrs. Paul Conneely…” “Noelle,” their father said. “What?” Noelle pounced. “You didn’t think I’d take his last name?” “Let’s just take this one wedding at a time.” “I bet I’m way more traditional than you think, Dad. Did I tell you Paul goes to church? Every week? Like, voluntary? Last year he gave up beer for Lent.”  This news had seemingly no effect on Gene, though of course it wasn’t him it was intended for. “I know he’s the one. I just do. I feel it in my bones.” Noelle glanced again at Deirdre; this was one of their mother’s signature lines, though in Deirdre s case the feeling was literal too. Deirdre was still fixed on the TV, where a coiffed saleswoman was peddling aquamarine anklets. “Maybe I’ll drop out of school,” Noelle said, fingering the metal in her ears. “Noelle, please,” from their father. “Why not? It didn’t hurt Mom any.” She reached behind the couch for Deirdre s cane. “I bet you a million dollars I’m not learning anything I’ll need to know in ten years. I mean, bio? Algebra? Proofs? Proofs? Dad, seriously, in your entire life, have you ever sat down to do a proof?” “You just don’t like your school,” Claire said, unable to help herself. “Yeah,” Noelle said, throwing her a glance. “Thanks for reminding me.” “I’m just saying, there are alternatives—” Claire began, then stopped. She had given Noelle college advice before and sworn never to do it again. Noelle had laid the cane across her knees and was holding her hands under her chin, chipping polish from one thumbnail with the other thumbnail. “I think I’m more like one of those students of the world types,” she said, flecks of pink polish drifting into her lap. “Dad, think of it this way—if I drop out, I save you money. You and Mom can take that cruise you always wanted to.” It was hard to tell if Noelle actually believed this or had performed some mental manipulation to convince herself it was true. Gene and Deirdre had absolutely never mentioned wanting to take a cruise.  “I’ll go live in Ireland,” Noelle said. “Paul already invited me. I can stay with him for a while, travel around and soak up the culture—” “No you don’t,” Deirdre cut her off. Noelle paused. It wasn’t like their mother not to support her unconditionally. That was their deal. “But Ireland, Mom,” she said. “My whole life you’ve been saying I should get in touch with my roots—” “I don’t mean not ever,” Deirdre said. “Just not now.” Noelle had her mouth open to protest, but the look on Deirdre’s face was enough to make her reconsider. Their mother’s eyes were hard, bright with fever, or fervor, Claire was never sure. “I couldn’t be prouder to see you become an Irish barmaid, honey,” Deirdre said, eyes still on the TV. “But I could drop dead any day. Do your traveling on your time, not mine.” In the silence that followed, tears began slipping down Noelle’s cheeks. “For God’s sake, Dee,” Gene said, standing up and knocking his rocking chair backward. He stalked from the room and left it there, like a beached animal, curved claws pointed toward the ceiling and rolled helplessly onto its back. From the corner of her eye, Claire watched Noelle. Still crying, she had turned her attention to the cane, on which she had started writing, in blue nail polish, MOTHER OF THE BRIDE. Later that night, after Gene and Deirdre had gone to bed, Claire went looking for her sister. Maybe it was the scene in the living room, the quietness of Noelle’s crying, the undeniability of those holes gaping in her ears, or the finality of this, Claire’s last night as a single woman, but she had the urge to offer her little sister some advice. She found Noelle facedown on her bed, paging through a magazine and attacking a Charleston Chew. The marshmallow fudge stretched from her mouth like a lavish white tongue. “Can I come in?” Claire asked. “You are in.” Noelle didn’t look up. Claire looked for a place to sit, bypassing the foot of the bed in favor of the floor, where she lowered herself to an orange beanbag that crunched when she sat on it. “So,” she said, struggling to sit up straight. “How are you doing? Are you doing okay?” “I’m doing fucking awesome,” Noelle said. She tossed her magazine in Claire’s lap. “According to this.” Claire let the magazine unfurl. It was a quiz. Are You Settling Down—or Just Settling? The photo was of a couple sitting on a couch, the guy pointing the remote at the TV, holding a bowl of cheese curls in his lap and draping a loose arm across the woman’s shoulders. She was looking away and biting her lip, her face a mask of doubt and oil-free foundation. “I got an eighty-eight.” Noelle balled her candy wrapper and aimed for the wastebasket, hitting it in a perfect arc. “You try.” “I’m not really in the mood, Noelle. I just came to make sure you were —” “Oh, come on, tonight’s perfect Brink of being a grown-up and all that. Are you afraid of what it’s going to say?” “No.” Claire picked up the magazine. “Fine. Give me the pen.” Noelle tossed her pen on the carpet, leaving a blue smear on the fuzzy orange thread. As Claire picked it up, the mere weight of a pen in her hand poised over a list of questions was enough to give her confidence. She was good at tests. Tests were her thing. She’d scored a perfect 800 on the logic portion of the GRE. But as she began wading through the questions, she found all of her check marks falling in the “no” column. No to skydiving, no to karaoke, no to sex on a beach. For the first time ever, she was thankful for that one-night stand in college. As she moved down the list, the experiences grew progressively more adventurous. Bungee jumping: no. Sex in an elevator: no. No. No. No. No. Claire began to panic. It wasn’t a real test, she reminded herself, it was in a fashion magazine. It was designed to make you feel you needed self- improvement, which translated to buying more magazines. Who cared that she hadn’t had sex on her parents’ bed—who would want to? She was marrying a smart man, a smart and well-respected man. It was actually horrifying to know Noelle had scored so high. Claire’s score: nine. Her prescription: Girl, loosen up! Her sound inside: a faint alarm. “So?” Noelle said. She was slicking her nails a garish blue, to match the cane and clash with the bridesmaid dress. “What’d you get?” Claire pushed herself up off the floor. “Sixty,” she said, and as the word came out, she felt justified stretching the truth. The test was unfair in the first place.  Noelle looked up. “Really?” Claire looked pointedly at her blue nails. “Could you not wear that tomorrow, please?” she said, and walked out, taking the magazine with her. She tossed it in the bathroom trash can, but minutes later fished it out and stuffed it in the back of her dresser drawer. Bob, Went to Ireland to visit my sister. I’ll call when I get there. I’m sorry. Claire reads her note once more before turning off the light. She picks up her suitcase and walks across the kitchen floor, treading lightly, carefully, the way you treat a thing as you’re leaving it. Outside, the snow is falling steadily, the stripe of garage windows silvery in the moonlight. Claire pictures her wedding ring, sitting on Bob’s desk in the bottom of the jar and, as she shuts the back door, feels the judging eyes of a hundred dead bugs. For the first time in a long while, Claire is grateful Bob is a scientist. Even though when he took his vows he meant them literally, she knows Bob knows marriage is an inexact science; he understands its likelihood of success. Her husband is woefully realistic, and if it’s part of what made their marriage difficult, she hopes it will be part of what makes her leaving, if not easy, at least easier for him to understand. The cab is waiting by the curb. As Claire starts across the moonlit snow, relief and fear collide in her chest. It is the dead of winter. The woods are silent, except for her footsteps and breath. OceanofPDF.com  Chapter Four: Eire To make a crossword puzzle, you begin with the theme. Fill in the long crossbars up and down the middle—these words should be cleverly, conceptually related and, if parallel, contain the same number of letters. Most EZ freelancers download the grids from crossword software. At first, this seemed to Claire like cheating, yet there was something about starting with an empty grid she found irresistible: preset, prelettered, ghost words waiting to be filled. Some software programs also offer suggestions for the words themselves but these, she promised herself, she would never use. After the theme is in place, the long words spawn small words, and small ones spawn smaller ones—ibids, eons, okos—like a branch growing twigs. Claire is careful to avoid anything too negative. Curse words, obviously. References to illness, politics, war. She tries to be original and come up with fresh three- and four-letter combinations, but sometimes, out of necessity, she must revert to one of the standbys. O’er, ore, e’er, ewe, stet, eke, eire. It’s good to know words like these are out there—bite-size, full of vowels, useful in a pinch. They are words rarely used in actual conversation, their primary function crossword filler, to bridge the gaps between awkward consonants or plug an empty corner of an unfinished puzzle like spackle on a hole. EIRE: Ireland Erin Emerald Isle Bono’s homeland Where eyes are smilin’! Sitting on a plane headed to Eire, Claire stares at her crossword notebook sitting open on her plastic tray table. When she is anxious, her mind usually lapses instinctively into puzzle mode, but tonight she can’t concentrate. She is imagining Bob’s surprise when he finds her note on the kitchen table. Once, before they were married, Claire had overheard him explaining her family to his. “Claire’s mother has, ah, a chronic sickness,” Bob said. Claire was in the next room doing the dinner dishes, but when she realized what they were talking about, stepped closer to the door. “But it isn’t, ah, fatal,” he said, followed by a long pause. Claire tried to imagine what Bob might be doing—miming a bottle raised to the lips? A pill tossed down the hatch? Twirling a long finger beside his ear? “Her father’s a carpet salesman.”  “Are they still married?” asked Bob’s sister, Susan, and Claire was grateful that he could answer that one with a firm yes. But in describing Claire’s relationship with Noelle, Bob hesitated again. “They’re, ah, estranged.” On autopilot, Claire walked briskly into the living room, asking, “Anyone for coffee?” Later she told Bob estranged was the wrong word: It implied some kind of horrible betrayal, some hidden family secret. It wasn’t accurate, she said, and this was true. No dramatic rift had come between Claire and Noelle. They were seven years apart. When Claire left for college, Noelle was still wearing braces and selling Girl Scout cookies. As siblings go, they just weren’t close. The month after Deirdre died, when Gene retired abruptly and bought the condo, Noelle made good on her promise: quit college, took off for Ireland, and hadn’t been back since. Claire stares at the empty grid. The squares are beginning to blur. On the screen in the seat back in front of her, a little digital airplane is painstakingly tracking her journey from one country to the next. She closes her eyes, wishing for sleep, but her mind is alert, racing. Her anxiety isn’t just about seeing Noelle. But to see her here, of all places—the country her mother had made impossible to love. The country responsible for all her broguing and dancing and, what the hell, drinking. “May the road rise to meet you!”—do real Irish people even say that? Deirdre had been born in Ireland, but lived there only thirteen months; nonetheless, they were the months that most defined her. She claimed to remember a few choice details: a fog that blanketed the streets like soft yarn, a pink house with a red door, uncles who played violins in the evenings, and an aunt who ate a pound of chocolate and a scrambled egg for breakfast every morning. An only child of dead parents, Deirdre had no one to confirm or deny her stories, and though the precision of the details belied her age no one dared suggest they weren’t true. The only real proof was the birth certificate— Deirdre O’Hanlan, County Limerick, 1952—hanging in the living room, like a diploma, in a cheap gold frame. More than evidence of her mother’s birth, it was proof of her very self: her claim to an entire country, a heritage, a history. It was permission to be who she was.  In Claire’s opinion, most of that heritage had amounted to accessorizing —the CDs, the green sweaters, the sinks and showers stocked unironically with pungent bars of Irish Spring soap. Deirdre even professed to love Yeats —her sole concession to “literature,” though she still managed to undermine it by holding her nose to affect a pinched, snooty tone. Several volumes of his Collected Works lurked under the glass-topped coffee table in the living room, his face staring up from the top of the stack: thin, craggy, bespectacled, carved from rock and shadow. Under the warped glass, his features looked muted, as if underwater, their dignity chipped away by the remote controls and wadded tissues and soda cans. Only on Saint Pat’s did he experience a brief, voracious freedom. Hours of eating and drinking and dancing culminated, with a kind of sloppy inevitability, in reading. Deirdre would hoist up a heavy volume and brogue her way through one or two or four or eighteen poems, depending on how many cans of High Life she had had. “Let us rise and go now!” she would recite, voice cresting and faltering, blue eyes pooling in her rough, red face, and Claire had to fight the urge to look away. She had always felt dubious, and somewhat embarrassed, about her mother’s Irish nostalgia. Even Deirdre’s rigorous Catholicism seemed to rely heavily on the accents: rosaries wound around bedposts, dramatic arcs of palm stuck in mirror frames, snippets of manger hay tucked in wallets, and plastic spritzers of ocean water collected every summer in Ocean City. Every August, their family vacation was timed to coincide with the fifteenth —the Feast of the Assumption, a Catholic holy day of obligation and old Irish tradition. It was, for Deirdre, a fantastic convergence of her own holy trinity: Ireland, Catholicism, and the Jersey shore. The morning of the fifteenth, Deirdre would head to 8:00 a.m. Mass, alone with an empty plastic soda bottle clamped under her arm. When Mass ended, the priest led all the parishioners to the beach, where he blessed the ocean and the crowd waded in up to their knees, dunking their containers under and letting the “miraculous water” fill them. Claire and Noelle sat on the porch of their rented house, nibbling doughnuts, waiting. Gene read the paper, keeping one eye on the shore. Much as having Deirdre at home felt turbulent, stressful, not having her there was a different kind of unsettling— even Noelle sensed it, staying uncharacteristically quiet—like the uneasy tension that befalls a town after a storm. Eventually, the group appeared in the distance, making their way along the boardwalk from the beach. They made an unusual pilgrimage, a small mob of what were clearly vacationers, sporting various degrees of suntans and sunburns, T-shirts and sweatshirts that said OCBP, carrying their heavy, sloshing jars and bottles in front of their bellies. Noelle would be the one to yell, “I see them!” and scramble to the porch railing. When Deirdre arrived, she didn’t say a word, but went upstairs to bed, setting the bottle of miraculous water on the kitchen counter. Claire could not keep her eyes off that bottle. In the light from the window, salt and silt swirled like a glittery, holy fish tank behind the most mundane of labels: Birch Beer, Black Cherry Wishniak, orange stickers that said NICE PRICE or 99c! It seemed not unlike her mother, common on the outside—lowbrow even—but possessed of some mysterious, elevated inner workings. It intimidated Claire like the smudge of ash that appeared each year in the middle of her mother’s forehead. It was her mother and not her mother. It was a soda bottle and something more. I know more than you do, said the bottle, majestic in the sunlight and somehow morally superior to the wrinkled, fleshy jelly doughnut they’d saved for her on the plate beside it. Back in Philadelphia, Deirdre would transfer the water into plastic plant spritzers she labeled MW—not to be confused with regular, nonmiraculous water—to spray on their foreheads when they were sick. Sometimes she even spritzed her own joints, like an oilcan. Whenever Claire went back to college, Deirdre followed her to the car and doused the windshield, broguing, “May the road rise to meet you!” She claimed that she used it to boil the potatoes on Saint Patrick’s Day, but of this there was no proof. Claire presses the Off button on the screen, the little airplane evaporating blissfully into dark. She turns to the little window, scraping back the shade to look out at the empty sky. She can practically hear her mother’s triumphant chuckle. I know more than you do. Deirdre had never gone to college, worked the same Sears jewelry counter for twenty years, but spoken or unspoken, those six words were the addendum to every sentence she delivered: her stamp of wisdom, earned through age or chronic sickness or simply maternal rank. She’d always sworn Claire would one day come to Ireland, a prospect Claire thought about as likely as her moving back home. Now it feels as if her mother has won something—a double victory. Not only is Claire running to the country her mother loved, she’s running from the husband her mother never liked. “What does he do?” Deirdre had asked, cornering Claire in the kitchen the first time she brought Bob home. It was Saint Patrick’s Day, and though Deirdre wasn’t feeling well, nothing would keep her out of commission. Every year, she cooked the traditional corned beef and cabbage. She smothered the house in gaudy green decorations, paper leprechauns—LUCK O’ THE IRISH!—and withered green streamers that looked like the stems of dying plants. In the background, musical Irish brothers—the Makems, the Clancys—played jigs and reels and mournful ballads. Like Deirdre, the music of Ireland could swing from cheerful to melancholy in a blink. When Claire was small, before Noelle was born, Deirdre used to play her the Clare Reels, a series of step dances from County Clare, clasping her hand to her chest and swinging her in giggling, dizzy circles. Years later, Claire could remember the beer on her breath, the firmness of her grasp, the warmth that emanated like an oven from beneath her skin, like cooking and sweat and the deodorant that wore off under her sleeves in pasty white half- moons. In the car with Bob, on the way there, Claire had heard herself quoting her father: “The only thing predictable about lupus is its unpredictability.” This was Gene’s party line whenever they had to cancel plans at the last minute because Deirdre felt a flare coming on. Even as a child, Claire had never needed to be told. She was seven when Deirdre was diagnosed, and from then on, their house was dictated by the ebb and flow of the disease: fever and fatigue lurking and leaving, a constant game of attack and retreat. She grew attuned to the shift in the air as the “impending flare”—that’s what her father called it, like a foreboding weather system—approached their house, a cloud crawling over the sun, the shadows in the house growing darker and longer. “Impending flare?” Claire would ask, and her father would nod, and she would nod back, solemn as an army nurse. For years, Claire clung tightly to that word: flare. It was one of only a few words she had to explain her mother, even if she didn’t fully understand it. She knew flares were the names of the flaming sticks set up around car accidents, and flair was something her mother praised Blanche on The Golden Girls for having. These colliding definitions confused her, yet also made a certain sense, for the same quality that existed in funny, fearless Blanche and the bright drama of those flaming sticks were qualities she sensed existed somewhere in her mother too. On this particular Saint Pat’s, Deirdre had a temporary shamrock tattoo on her left cheek, a green plastic top hat perched on her head, a green streamer wound around her cane like a barber shop pole. But beneath the jauntiness of the costume, Claire saw that the joints in her hands and feet were swollen. Her skin was flushed, her red hair sweat-flattened. A butterfly rash spread like a stripe of sunburn under her eyes and across the bridge of her nose. Her attempts to conceal it had only made it more conspicuous, liquid base several degrees darker than her skin tone spackled on so starkly it looked like war paint. And yet, behind her cane and hat and thick, botched makeup job, she had never looked more formidable. “What’s his job again?” Deirdre asked. She was holding a Miller High Life in one hand, leaning on her cane with the other. As she spoke, she screwed up her face as if she smelled something rotten, something besides the warm, cabbagey fog that filled the kitchen and, Claire knew too well, would linger there for days. “Something with bugs?” “Yes.” Claire lowered her voice. “He studies insects.” “He’s an exterminator?” “He’s an entomologist.” They had covered these details before, but Claire knew to expect this from her mother. Despite her air of superiority, Deirdre was ornery in any situation that highlighted things she didn’t know —books she hadn’t read, references she’d never heard. She dismissed any movie with subtitles as “artsy fartsy” and had long ago forbidden Gene to join the neighborhood book club. When confronted with an unfamiliar word, Deirdre made a great show of bungling it, reducing it to something unglamorous—“What’s that you said? Hypocrite? Oh excuse me, I heard hippo shit.” “Bob is very well respected,” Claire said. “He’s very smart.” Deirdre rolled her eyes and took a swig of beer. “Smart, shmart,” she said. Claire looked at the floor. She reminded herself that Deirdre’s condescension was about her own discomfort. And on that particular night, as Claire took in her mother’s knuckles gripping the head of her cane, the rash sprinkling her face, pain flashing in her eyes, Claire saw, too, that she couldn’t begin to appreciate how real, how literal, that discomfort was. Suddenly, Deirdre set her beer down on the kitchen table. She crossed the room slowly, leaning on her cane, and reached for a bottle of painkillers from the windowsill. It was a new bottle, the cap screwed tight; because of her weak grip, the caps were usually left on loosely, sitting on top of the bottles at odd angles like jaunty sailors’ hats. Claire watched her mother’s pinky finger crumple as she struggled with the lid. “Here, let me—” Claire said, just as she heard the top pop off, followed by the sound of rain, the fleshy silence. “Hand me my beer.” Claire reached for the High Life on the table and passed it to her mother. Deirdre dropped a pill on her tongue. Claire kept her eyes on the row of bottles, interspersed with jars of spices—Naprosyn, Red Pepper Flakes, Plaquenil, Daypro, Italian Seasoning. With her back still turned, Deirdre tilted her chin back and poured the rest of the beer down her throat. Claire dropped her eyes to the floor, said nothing. Her mother was sick, had always been sick; she had learned to say nothing.  “Does he make you laugh?” Deirdre said. Claire looked up. Her mother was heading slowly back across the room. “Does he write you love letters?” Deirdre wiped a stripe of foam from her top lip. Her eyes were wet. “Does he give you butterflies? Does he make your heart go pitty-pat?” Then Deirdre was standing in front of her, reaching out to cup Claire’s cheek. Claire stiffened, then the hand was gone, so quickly Deirdre might have been picking off an eyelash. Deirdre looked at her evenly. “I want you to fall in love,” she said. Claire held her gaze and replied, “I am.” Looking out the window at the dark, endless sky, Claire imagines her mother lounging on some paunchy celestial cloud, dressed in her favorite fake-silk bathrobe and chugging a can of High Life. In the background, an Irish jig blasts from some hidden sound system, until Claire realizes that it’s coming from a real sound system, and that she is about to begin her descent. Shannon Airport feels oddly leisurely, more like a shopping mall than a center of international transportation. People are dressed in the colors of dirt and oatmeal. On a television mounted to the wall, newscasters laugh and sip tea. Across the lobby, travelers are lined up at counters raising glasses, dipping spoons in soup bowls, spearing sausages the size of rolling pins with forks gripped in left fists, all of it so casual they could be sitting