Subdivision, p.13
Subdivision, page 13
“You know where we’re going, I presume?” I said.
He didn’t reply. We walked in silence for a little while, the boy veering off in this or that direction, always returning to the middle of the street. At one point, a dog crossed the road up ahead, turning to gaze impassively at us, and the boy took my hand. His fingers were greasy from the muffin, and a bit cold. When the dog disappeared into the shadows, the boy yanked his hand from mine, as though I had been the one who had initiated the contact and he couldn’t wait to let go.
Our destination turned out to be a charming house with a wide porch and a brightly illuminated front window. Inside, adults and children in conical party hats could be seen gathered around a table with balloons tethered to its corners. I could make out a pile of confetti-sprinkled, colorful gifts and a cake, and heard the faint strains of “Happy Birthday.”
“Hurry!” the little boy said, grabbing my hand and pulling me up the stairs.
I might have politely knocked on the front door, but the little boy barged right in. No one seemed bothered by the intrusion. He ran up to the table and added his gift to the pile, then launched into the song, which had entered what I recalled was its third or fourth verse.
Happy birthday, my dear
Here’s a respite from fear
As you blow out the candles
Thank the fates you’re still here
Happy birthday, my friend
All good things must end
Let these gifts help you salve all
Of the wounds you can’t mend
Happy birthday, loved one
Time for compensation
For the way you’ve been treated
And your suff’rings to come
We were well into the verse about the possibility of peace, at last, in the next world, before people began to roll their eyes. “I’m bored!” a child shouted. “I want cake!” screamed another. At last, the song collapsed into its traditionally ragged strands, and a comely woman in a gingham dress, presumably the birthday child’s mother, began to serve large wedges of cake.
As the children ate, the parents broke up into small groups to chat. Many of them held paper cups of fruit juice, and a man handed one to me. I sipped from it and listened in on their discussion, which seemed to be about the state of construction on the road to the City. Some of them stole glances at me as they talked, as though attempting to gauge my reaction.
In truth, the subject did interest me. I wondered why these repairs weren’t more of a priority for the Subdivision—surely some of these people made their living in the City, or had friends or family there? At the very least, I thought it must be an appealing contrast to the sleepy goings-on of the Subdivision. The more I thought about it, the more I longed to go there, and the more irritated I became at the construction delays.
I wanted to join in, but couldn’t seem to find an opening. Eventually the conversation shifted back to the party itself, the cheery confetti and balloons and the delicious juice, and I asked, “So, who’s the birthday boy or girl?”
My little group laughed, as though I’d just made a whimsical joke.
I felt a bit put off—my question hadn’t been unusual in any way, I didn’t think, and deserved some kind of answer. Instead of asking it a second time, though, I decided to come at it from a different angle. I turned to the woman beside me—tomboyish, with large eyeglasses and a fringed suede jacket—and said, “Which one is yours?”
The woman, who had smiled at me when I turned to her, now frowned in evident puzzlement. “I’m sorry?”
“Which child? Is it the one in the eyeglasses there? She’s adorable.”
The woman looked at me with an expression somewhere between pity and mild alarm, as though I might be making fun of her, or even issuing some kind of threat. She elbowed the man standing beside her, a placid-looking bald fellow wearing a plaid shirt. “She wants to know which of the children,” she said, “is ‘mine.’” And she punctuated the “mine” by forming her fingers into quotation marks.
“Well,” the man said, “they’re children! They’re just … the neighborhood children.”
“I mean, it’s their house,” the woman added. “Haven’t you been here before?” she asked me.
“I try to come to Birthday every few weeks,” the man interjected.
“Have you never been to Birthday before?” the woman asked me. Her expression harbored the beginnings of relief, as though she’d at last divined a possible cause for my peculiarity.
I sensed that an explanation was in the offing, but at that moment, our conversation was interrupted by a loud cheer. We turned in time to see all the children, cake- and ice-cream-smeared, lunging for the giant pile of gifts. In their eagerness, they clawed at the plastic tablecloth and it began to slide, sending paper plates, juice cups, and other debris crashing to the floor. No one seemed particularly concerned by the mess, so I began to laugh and applaud along with the other adults. “Take! Take! Take! Take!” we all shouted, as the children savagely tore the presents open, and bows and ribbons and scraps of gift wrap flew through the air.
The children seemed uninterested in the gifts themselves, which, from where I was standing, didn’t appear to have the novelty or charm of typical birthday surprises. Through the scrum of celebrants I could make out a stained plastic travel mug, a creased and dog-eared road atlas, half a bag of hard candies, and a pair of sunglasses with one broken lens. But the gifts’ lack of appeal hadn’t dampened the children’s enthusiasm. One little boy pushed another down and kicked him; two little girls were pummeling each other over what appeared to be a quart of motor oil. I was pleased to note that “my” child, the little boy who had accompanied me here, was keeping to the edge of the mob, avoiding conflict with the other revelers. But his face was anxious and determined, and he repeatedly extended a hand toward the gift pile, only to snatch it back when another fight broke out nearby.
I was distracted from the gift frenzy, though, by a scene that was unfolding on the other side of the table. In the back corner of the room, withdrawn somewhat from the action, a man and a woman stood close, deep in conversation. The woman was smiling shyly, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear; the man had his hands in his pockets and was leaning over her, nodding. The woman looked familiar, and it took me a moment to place her: it was Justine. I hadn’t recognized her, because her expression was so unfamiliar: sleepily seductive, like some starlet in a romantic film. She wore her now-familiar sheer white coverup, stained with green at the knees, and as I watched, she smoothed her hand over it, as though to emphasize the contours of her body.
The man also looked vaguely familiar; his lanky frame and broad shoulders struck a chord in me. He spoke to her, nodding, and they both broke out into peals of laughter, which I could barely hear over the mad rending and shouting going on between us. The man had his back to me, so I couldn’t make him out clearly, but as he threw his head back to laugh I took note of his angular features and thick brown hair, and thought I’d go over there and try to throw a wrench into their flirtation.
The little boy gazed mournfully from underneath his birthday hat as I edged around the table. He was pointing at the gift pile imploringly, as if asking me for help. The nerve! Clearly it was his job to seize and unwrap the presents, and mine to prevent Justine from seducing this handsome man. I frowned and shook my head at the little boy, and, dejected, he returned to pawing ineffectually at the gift pile, after dodging an elbow from a nearby scuffle.
I felt an itching sensation at my hip as I approached the insufferable couple in the corner, and reached down to scratch it, then realized that it was just Cylvia, issuing some irritating notification or alert from inside my bag. I was forced to suppress a wave of anger. Why had I brought her, if she was just going to interrupt my fun?
Ignoring her, I strode up to Justine and her suitor and tapped him firmly on the shoulder. Justine’s face registered my presence with a smirk and a roll of the eyes.
The man turned to me. I was right—he was very good-looking. I said, “Can I talk to you for a minute, please?”
“Sure,” he said sullenly, motioning to Justine to please excuse him.
“You’re embarrassing me,” I said. “Everyone can see what you’re doing.”
The man held up his hands. “Hey, we were just talking.”
Cylvia’s alert had sped up and was now turning into a solid, unceasing buzz. I smacked my bag to shut her up.
“You weren’t just talking,” I said. “You were flirting. I’m the one who has to work with her! How am I supposed to do that every day, knowing how she behaved with you?”
“You’re blowing this all out of proportion. You’re the one embarrassing yourself here, not me! Nobody even noticed me talking to her until you came over and made a big deal of it.”
I said, “Everybody noticed.” I pointed to the birthday table, where the children had nearly reached the bottom of the gift pile. “Things are bad enough already. You’re making them harder for me!”
“You’re the one who made me come here,” he said. “I wanted to stay home.”
“You haven’t left the house in weeks,” I pointed out.
“There’s a reason for that. I’m on medical leave. I’m sick. You can’t just cheer me up.” His fine features were curling into an expression of disgust. “If you can’t recognize that, then you’re sick too. You’re sicker than I am.”
Behind him, Justine was pretending to be distracted by something out the window, but it was clear that she heard everything. At my side, my bag was shaking like a washing machine, and emitting an earsplitting alarm, which the handsome man didn’t seem to hear. The lurid light that dimly illuminated this corner of the room flashed red on my party shoes.
“It’s a terrible world,” he said, barely audible beneath the screeching from my bag. His face was hard and his eyes were unfocused. “And we’ve made terrible choices. Forgive me for taking a moment’s respite to talk to somebody who makes me feel good about myself for a change.”
I was about to respond to this bizarre escalation in our argument when the man, Justine, and the entire party around us grew hazy in my sight, and began to smear and distend. At the same time, the voices around us slurred, then dropped in pitch, and then stopped entirely, as though time itself had ground to a halt. The only persistent sound and motion came from my bag. At last, I zipped it open and peered inside. Its interior was bathed in blinding red light.
“Would you please stop that!” I screamed. “You are interrupting an important and serious conversation!”
“You must focus on your work.”
“I’m not at work! I’m at a party! Why can’t I just go to Birthday for an hour and be free of your petty concerns?”
“You are always at work,” Cylvia said, cryptically. “Step away from the bakemono. You must help the child find the gift. You must escort Mr. Lorre home. You must abide by your hosts.”
“What? Which gift? Where is Mr. Lorre?” But Cylvia was right: he was sitting on a wooden chair at the dining table in the next room. The room’s shadows had deepened, and I could barely make out his face, which looked pale and mournful in the darkness. In his lap lay a new bouquet of red roses. Unaffected by whatever had frozen the other partygoers, he rocked in place, mumbling to himself. “Anna,” he said. “Anna.”
My eye was drawn to a motion at my left—it was the little boy. He’d finally gotten a leg up on the now-frozen children, and was using one of them—a bruised and bloodied red-haired boy, lying paralyzed on his back on the floor—as a step, to try to reach a gift that lay in the center of the table, surrounded by the detritus of revelry. Its paper was torn at the corner, and it looked a little dirty, but I recognized it as the gift he himself had brought.
Exasperated, I leaned over the table and plucked up the present. I handed it to the boy. “There,” I said. “That wasn’t so hard, was it. Now get down off that child!”
The little boy climbed back down onto the floor. He extended the present to me.
“I just grabbed that for you!” I said. “Open it!”
“No,” the boy said, shaking his head. “It’s for you.”
“How could it be for me? It isn’t my birthday!”
He shrugged, glancing at the seemingly random collection of objects that lay scattered on the table and floor. “They’re all for you,” he said.
I didn’t understand, but I accepted the gift. I noticed now how carefully he had wrapped it: the folds were sharp and precise, the cuts tidy; and the whole was beautifully accentuated by a pink ribbon and bow. The torn corner revealed that there was a book inside.
“Open it,” the boy said again. Inside my bag, Cylvia pulsed white.
I unwrapped the gift and let the paper and ribbon fall to the floor. In my hands lay what appeared to be a heavily used self-help book, its back cover facing up. A placid-looking woman smiled sympathetically in a photo in the corner, beside a biography that read, “Jane Lowe, LCMFT, is a licensed family and marriage therapist and the author of the best-selling self-help books Loving Is Giving, Out of the Doghouse, and Lost and Found.” I turned the book over. It was called Her Way: Recovering Yourself from His Demanding Love. Its cover illustration depicted the shadow of a man, his arm raised in anger, looming over the silhouette of a woman, confident, her arms crossed, outlined by an aura of gold. A blurb at the bottom of the cover, attributed to a “Roberta Klarman,” read, in an elegant script, “This book saved my marriage—and my self.” Many pages were dogeared, and sticky notes stuck out in several places.
Furious, I turned to the little boy and snarled, “Where did you get this?”
He appeared nonplussed. After a moment, he sighed, and turned his head to peer into the darkness, toward Mr. Lorre, still muttering over his roses.
“What happens in my marriage is none of your business, do you understand!”
The little boy shrugged again.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said, exasperated. I shoved the book into my bag, pushing Cylvia aside, and roughly took the boy’s hand. I dragged him over to Mr. Lorre.
“It’s time to go!” I shouted. “Stop your blubbering and come with me!”
“Anna …,” he said, trying to get to his feet.
I took his elbow and pulled him up. He stumbled, and the roses scattered on the floor. Mr. Lorre bent over, as though to pick them up.
“Forget about those!” I said. “It’s late! Who even invited you here? Birthday isn’t for people like you!”
He whimpered, stumbling, as I pulled him toward the door. To his credit, the little boy kept up, his little legs pumping in their pinstriped suit pants. Around us, the party was grinding slowly back into motion.
I flung the front door open, and we marched down the steps and through the now-dark streets toward home.
Fifteen
The little boy let go of my hand just as we approached the guesthouse; he ran out of sight around the corner, and a moment later I heard him clambering up the downspout to his room. I guided Mr. Lorre to the door, then stole a glance at the dining room table as I led him up the stairs to bed. Bathed in lamplight, it seemed to beckon to me. Once Mr. Lorre was safely in bed, I deposited Cylvia in my room and headed back downstairs.
I took a good, hard look at the puzzle. A great deal of it had been filled in—only a small part of the lower-right quadrant remained to be solved, with the as-yet-unplaced pieces scattered about the tabletop. The overall scene was fairly clear now: on a curving road that ran alongside a river and through a masonry arch bridge, a car had lost control and crossed into the oncoming lane. It was about to smash into one of the bridge abutments. A delivery truck of some kind, in an effort to avoid the errant car, had swerved, and was tipping over; from its driver’s-side window spilled a bouquet of red roses, some drifting in the air, some already striking the pavement. The truck’s driver, a stocky man in late middle age, was rising up out of his seat and appeared likely to follow the flowers onto the road. A few bystanders observed the scene: a heavyset middle-aged man carrying a folded newspaper and a paper cup of coffee; a woman in her thirties pushing a baby in a stroller; and a third figure, a man in his twenties with a beard and uniform—some kind of paramedic—who was running toward the crash with a stethoscope dangling around his neck. In the background, an ambulance waited, as though the accident had been foretold, or perhaps as though time itself were compressed, or layered.
The image—which I now recognized as a reproduction of a hyper-realistic painting rather than a photograph—was unusual in perspective: the viewer beheld the incident through the rear window of the crashing car, which was canted to one side at a terrifying angle. At the far lower left and right of the puzzle, the car’s occupants were posed in states of intense drama. The driver, a man, scowled in apparent determination, his hands gripping the steering wheel. His eyes were unfocused, slightly misaligned, as though affected by the medical condition known as nystagmus. Beside him, his passenger, a woman, raised her arms in fear. Her mouth was open in a scream. She looked familiar, with a wide nose and neat bangs, but it was hard to identify her without a puzzle piece that was missing from her face: an irregular shape, framing a bit of the walnut tabletop below, where an eye ought to have been.
I had not forgotten, of course, that I possessed a puzzle piece with an eye on it, and I dug into the pocket of my skirt until I found it. I seemed to remember it having an unusual shape, that of a bell or cartoon ghost, but now it was more like a crooked diamond, with a strange little spur bulging from one side. I laid it down over the gap in the puzzle, but, unfortunately, it didn’t fit. It looked like solving the puzzle was once again beyond my abilities.
A noise from the living room: someone was coming. I returned the puzzle piece to my pocket and turned to find Clara approaching.
“Hello, dear,” she said, resignedly. “I thought that might be you.”
“I was,” I told her proudly, “at work.”
