Crossroads

Grant B. 2607 Via Rivera.….….……962–3504

She produced a kind of humming sigh, like the first note of a cello that had sat for decades in an attic. How much a phonebook entry could suggest! The hours and days and years of being B. Grant, alive in a specific house on a specific street, reachable by anyone who knew his dear number. She couldn’t be sure it was Bradley, but there was no reason it couldn’t be. All the weekly visits to the library, all the idle browsing of its shelves, and she’d never once thought to look for him. A key to her heart had been hidden in plain sight.

She took a pencil and a card from a wooden tray, copied the address and the number, and put the card in her coat pocket with her cigarettes. In her rush to escape the dental office, after three-plus hours with Sophie Serafimides, she’d neglected to hand over her twenty-dollar bill. The money, ill-gotten in any case, had come in handy when she passed the town drugstore and recalled a more effective means of losing weight and managing anxiety. She’d procured the means, and now she had a motive, too. In her mind, she’d already lost thirty pounds and was writing a chatty, warm letter to Bradley, letting him know that she was very well, telling him something specific and vivid about each of her four children, tacitly assuring him that she’d made the fullest of recoveries, had built an ordinary good life for herself, was no longer a person he had to be afraid of hearing from. And you? Do you still write poetry? How is Isabelle? How are your boys? They must have families of their own now …

Outside the library’s rear entrance, on a patch of snow made mangy by unevenly scattered salt, she lit another cigarette. It turned out that she’d been wanting one for thirty years. Making her confession to Sophie had rolled the stone from a tomb of emotion, inside which, miraculously intact, she’d found her obsession with Bradley Grant. Describing it to Sophie in proper detail, reliving the sins she’d committed in its grip, had brought her back into contact with its contours, and she’d remembered how perfectly they fit the shape of who she was. If anything, her desire for Bradley felt stronger for the thirty-year rest she’d given it, stronger than any over-flogged sentiment she had for Russ. Bradley had excited her at levels deeper than Russ ever could or ever would, because only with Bradley had she been her entire, crazy, sinning self. Standing in the snow behind the library, inhaling smoke on a cold Midwestern night, she was carried back to rainy Los Angeles. She was a mother of four with a twenty-year-old’s heart.

As she’d recounted to Sophie the events leading up to her destruction of the unborn life in her, the filthy bargain she’d struck with Isabelle Washburn’s former landlord, she’d had a growing sense of dumpling–patient disconnect. She might have imagined her story emerging with much guilty gasping, much reaching for Kleenexes, but confessing her worst sins to a psychiatrist was nothing like her Catholic confessions. There was no terror of God’s judgment on her puny self, no pity for her sweet Lord’s suffering on the cross for what she’d done. With Sophie, a female layperson, a maternal Greek American, she felt more like very naughty. The mental switch she’d flipped as a teenager was still there to be flipped Off. She told her story crisply, her spirits rising with the resurrection of the reckless girl who’d loved Bradley. Sophie’s expression, meanwhile, grew ever sadder, to the point of amusing her. The satisfaction of showing the dumpling how bad she really was recalled the pleasure of taunting her guardian uncle, Roy Collins, with her misbehavior. By the end, as she related how a Los Angeles police officer had been obliged to tackle a raving girl in pouring rain, she went so far as to snicker at the memory.

Perhaps it was the snicker that brought out the dumpling’s frown.

“I’m very sorry for what you went through,” Sophie said. “It explains so much, and it makes me even more impressed with your resilience. But there’s still something I’m not understanding.”

“We both know what that means, don’t we.”

“What does it mean?”

Marion caricatured the therapeutic frown. “You disapprove.”

“By your own account,” Sophie said, unamused, “you were seduced by a married man when you were very young. Then you married a man you weren’t allowed to be yourself with. And now you tell me that you were atrociously abused by a sexual predator. Doesn’t it seem—”

“I knew what I was doing,” Marion said proudly. “In every case. I knew it was wrong, and I did it anyway.”

“I’m sorry—what did you do to Russ?”

“I lied to him. And now he’s lying to me. So what?”

“You offered him your life and he took it. Now he’s tired of it and wants something new.”

“I admit I’m not very happy with Russ at the moment. But you’re way out of line if you’re comparing him to that landlord. Russ is like a little boy.”

“I’m not comparing them. That landlord—”

“And you’re even more out of line if you’re comparing Bradley. Bradley was honorable—he wanted the same thing I did. We fell in love, and he never lied to me. It wasn’t his fault I went crazy.”