Wasn’t that the vision? Wasn’t that the dream? Wasn’t that everything they’d ever wanted in the first place? They were a team, ever since their father had died, helping each other muscle through, filling in for the other’s weakness. They’d split up their homework in high school: Hannah did the art and English; Hillary did the science and math. Together, they had made the dean’s list and gotten scholarships to colleges ten miles apart. And whenever Hannah faltered, even as she faced her inevitable divorce, Hillary was there to remind her of their childhood chant: rock, paper, scissors, Sawyer. The Sawyers were the hardest, sharpest substance of all. Always. Hannah, a year and a half younger, always behind; Hillary teaching her, taunting her to keep up, with her schoolgirl rules and tests. Hannah shuddered sometimes, thinking of the stupid shit they used to do. The cocoa test. The bathtub pledge.
As she stepped back onto her porch, she heard the distinct sound of a box cutter ripping through duct tape. She thought at twelve and a half, Miles was too young for knives and tools, but she had made an exception for the move. It seemed absurd to make him ask for it; how would anything get put away?
Pocket knives were just one of the things she and Mike had fought about, bitterly. Mike built furniture and wanted Miles to learn to whittle. He also hunted for ducks and wild turkey and had always imagined a son by his side, field dressing, bird-dogging. No, she’d said. But a boy needs some wild in him. A boy needs adventures, he’d said. Miles likes books about adventure, she’d told him. Not actual adventure. And Mike had looked at her as if she was insane.
Miles was inside unpacking, just as he’d been told to. But still, something told her to go. To check. To linger in the doorway and watch.
He crouched low over the box, all angles, elbows and knees, thin and folded like a grasshopper, and it was only when he stood up, his back to her, that she was surprised, once again, how tall he was getting, almost her height, how old he sometimes looked. How particular he was now about his hair, the length in front always so much longer than she liked, falling into his eyes. Suddenly, he reached back with one hand and put the box cutter in the back pocket of his jeans, blade up, practiced, just the way the moving guys had. Her breath caught for a second in her throat.
The box he’d opened was color coded for her bedroom, not his. Had he carried it into his room, knowing? Or had she made another mistake, one of many, one of thousands, and told the movers to put it there?
He stepped toward the back of the room, carrying something, brushing pale packing peanuts onto the floor. Then he raised the scope of Hannah’s green binoculars up to the window, his pale wrists exposed, his arms too long for their sleeves. She was certain she heard something in his throat, aching and small, like the jawing sound cats made when they watched birds.
“Miles,” she said in a low voice.
He hesitated for just a second. “I know,” he replied. His voice half an octave deeper, cracking.
She didn’t know what he saw in the backyard; she didn’t ask. He handed the binoculars to her behind his back, not turning to her, not meeting her eyes. Even when she leaned over and yanked the box cutter from his jeans pocket, he did not turn around and look at her.
But when she went to her bedroom window later and held her binoculars up to the darkening sky, she saw something flutter around the corner of the house, between her property and her sister’s.
Iridescent, lifting, like the pearly butterfly wings worn by children on Halloween.
Or perhaps just the passing sweep of a hawk or owl, catching the last glimmer of sunset.
Two
Eva
I love my daughters equally. I’ll go one further: when they were little, I sometimes didn’t think of them as two. I considered them one entity, a unit, as if my lyrical naming had fused them together.
If someone had interviewed them in high school instead of now, stuck a microphone in their faces the way I watched those shameless news people try to, they would have told the truth instead of lying. They would have said they once thought of themselves the same way. Two halves of the same whole, damaged apart, perfect together. They would admit as much now, wouldn’t they?
Do they think I didn’t know they split up their homework, cheated for each other? If I hadn’t been racked with grief over Joe’s death, the debts, the deceits, I suppose I would have confronted them about it. I would have told them that despite their father’s issues, it was okay to be flawed, to be bad at something. That no one would love them less.
But that would have been a lie. Because although I love my own children equally, I can’t say the same for my grandchildren.
Did I know what no one else knew?
Is that why my jaw clenched when I saw one of the children first and only relaxed when the other ran into the room?
Maybe it was fortuitous that I hadn’t bought the carriage house next to Hillary after all. (Although I still, even now, have trouble bringing myself to call it Hannah’s house.) Oh, I’d had my eye on it for years, had gone back and forth with an agent and the owners but had never said anything to my girls about the possibility because, well, didn’t a mother want to be invited, so she didn’t feel like she was intruding? And didn’t it take approximately forever for an adult child to recognize her mother is getting older and might need assistance nearby? Wasn’t that why neither of them thought of me first? Oh, I hope it was. I do hope.
Margot, my real estate agent, had been furious over the whole thing. She’d spoken to the couple a year beforehand, and they’d promised to let her know if they ever considered selling, even directly. They’d bandied ridiculous numbers about, but Margot didn’t blink an eye or try to tell them they were dreaming (which was what she told me). She told them she had the ideal buyer, highly motivated, no contingency, that would more than make up for her reduced fees and that I was family. Family! I was one of those stories you put in someone’s mailbox with pictures of your children that persuade you! Margot was a few years behind Hannah in school, a beautiful girl, but she could be aggressive. I’d wanted someone aggressive. Was that my mistake? Was it her mistake?
I may never know.
I had to laugh the way it all went down. Outbid by my own child? How on earth did that happen, when Hannah was not exactly flush? Margot was decidedly less amused, was furious, threatening. Her face on the signs swinging from so many homes I’d admired did not show this side of her! She said she had a few other ideas, not to panic. She told me to sit tight. I told her not to ever say anything to anyone, ever, lest my daughters be angry with me.
Or believe that I had caused all the events in some minor, odd way.
That was the last thing a mother needed. More blame.
I tried not to let this disappointment keep me from being happy for my daughters and from swinging by that first evening Hannah and Miles moved in. I was curious what color she’d painted the rooms. How she’d arrange her furniture. If she’d hang curtains or blinds. I’d always thought it was a curtain-y house, a cottage, soft. But my dreams for it wouldn’t be her dreams, I knew.