MARY AND O'NEIL by Justin Cronin Page B

can’t find her children; the birds are responsible, the birds have taken them away. Arthur is beside her now.
See?
he is saying.
It is all so simple. The children are gone; they have flown away from you
. She turns then but it is no longer Arthur beside her; her father is there now, wearing a white shirt and suspenders to hold up his gray trousers. She breathes him in, a smell like the color blue. Pure happiness fills her, as if she has stepped into a beam of light. Daddy, she says, Daddy, I thought you’d died.
Oh, baby girl
, he says, and touches her wet cheek;
oh, baby girl, I’m sorry, I did
.
    She awakens then in the half-dark room, a room she doesn’t remember at all. Her mind is adrift, unfixed; she feels almost afloat. Across from her she sees a bureau with a porcelain washbasin and pitcher, and on the nightstand, a telephone, with instructions taped to the dial. The hotel, she remembers. She is at the hotel, in New Hampshire. It is Saturday. O’Neil has run his race—a sudden pleasure fills her, not only for his victory but the fact that she knew, in advance, that it would occur—and she and Arthur had lunch together after, and wine besides, and returned to their room for a nap. The clock on the table says that it is just past four; at six they will meet O’Neil and Sandra for dinner. Beside her Arthur softly snores.
    What is wrong with me?
she thinks.
Why can’t I like this girl?
She reviews, in order, O’Neil’s girlfriends of the past: sweet little Ellen, whom he used to buy Cokes for at school dances; the vaguely Asiatic, exotically named Ione, almost certainly his first kiss (she had caught them, or nearly, standing too close and blushing at the bottom of the basement stairs); the girl who she has always thought of as “ninth-grade Nancy,” plump and funny and without question the smartest of them all (at MIT now, she’s heard, and
thin
); the blur of Betsys and Danielles and Sarahs and Elizabeths in the last two years of high school, when there was always some new voice in the kitchen on Saturday evenings and O’Neil, in so many ways, had begun to hit his stride.
Why can’t I?
    She finds herself thinking, then, not of Sandra but of Kay, realizing that she hasn’t spoken to her in at least two—three?—weeks. (Though if Kay wanted to talk, she could have called herself. And isn’t silence, in its way, a good sign? That everything is well, that the ship is still steaming safely away from shore?) Disapproving, moody Kay. How like Kay to make Miriam feel so awful, suddenly, about everything, by doing nothing, by simply existing at the far end of a telephone line running from this hotel room to the apartment in New Haven that she shares with her husband, Jack—dreary, low ceilinged, and filled with obscure, unreadable books and rickety graduate-student furniture. What has Kay ever wanted except to be left alone? Even when she imagines Kay now, when she goes to the past to think of her child, she sees her at a distance; this little girl with curly brown hair, frowning at her dull and meaningless toys, waiting only for the moment when she could leave them all behind. It was as if Kay was born with a secret she was determined not to share, the secret of who she was. Of all the difficulties Miriam had imagined, this was the one she had never anticipated: that her child should seem not to love her, to acknowledge her as important and real. Other parents complained about their teenagers, how these sweet, cuddly children who had doled out love in generous heaps had, almost overnight, been reborn as intense and gloomy strangers who shrank from their very touch; how their bad hair, bad skin, bad moods, and bad friends were a symptom of some deeper, but one had to believe temporary, badness. On paper Kay was the daughter any mother would be proud of, a trouble-free honors student who spent her weekends reading fat Victorian novels and won a full ride early to Yale, tidy and polite, with a nugget of loyal