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Lorraine hated when she could feel how much she was weighing down the air. She hated making Ed move through it, sit in it, have to feel her self-flagellation over the center console as he tried to merge around the right highway exits. She kept her despair quiet for as long as she could. At least until they were across the border into Massachusetts.
She adjusted her hands in her lap. Her fingers shook, tangled around each other.
Ed’s cautious gaze drifted from the highway to her hands and up to the expertly-controlled tears trapped in her eyes. He slid one hand off the steering wheel to touch her elbow with the back of his thumb.
“What’s going on, hon? You’ve been breaking my heart since we left the house.”
She sniffled and blinked. “Sorry.”
He fished a tissue out of the pocket in the driver’s-side door and handed it to her. “It’s okay. Are you still thinking about Judy? And the newspaper?”
“Yes.” Lorraine had to swallow to keep herself from instantly crumbling. She breathed through her mouth and settled the lump in her throat. “I’m – I’m scared.”
“Of what?”
Shaking her head, she said, “I’m scared that she’s having a hard time. And that it’s because of us. She’s been acting differently, after school. I can’t explain it. She’s just – She’s different.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him look at her and felt the wave that came off of him when he desperately wanted to give her more comfort than he could, behind the wheel of the car.
Ed touched her arm again. “I’m worried, too. But she’s a smart girl and she’s got her mother’s strength.” When Lorraine stayed in her still silence, he added, “We’ll talk with her about it, okay? When we get home. We’ll talk with her.”
She nodded. Meeting his eyes for a moment, she managed to lift her mouth in a tiny smile. She wasn’t reassuring either of them.
—
The case was sorted quickly. Lorraine couldn’t believe her relief when she realized how easy of a haunting it would be to resolve. Sometimes with spirits, it’s just about politely asking them to leave, she sometimes said to students when she and Ed lectured at universities. It was a rare occurrence that her optimistic simplification actually reflected in reality.
By nine, they were back to their motel room. While Ed set their things down across the room, Lorraine pulled the pins out of her hair, kicked her shoes to the corner, and peeled off her stockings in rapid succession. She sat on the edge of the bed and fell backward. The springs of the cheap mattress creaked.
She closed her eyes and heard Ed say, “How about some dinner? There’s a little drive-up back down the road.”
She just shook her head.
“You’re not gonna eat?”
“No.”
She knew he was itching to look her in the eyes but she couldn’t bring herself to open them; her head hurt at the base of her skull and she didn’t want to process any input that she didn’t have to. She heard him slipping off his tie.
“I think you ought to have something. We had lunch eight hours ago.”
Lorraine brought her hands to her face and held them there. Voice sharper than she intended, she insisted, “I want to rest, Ed.”
He was silent for the few moments that he always took when he wanted to ensure he didn’t ignite a spark that he couldn’t quite see.
“Alright, hon,” he said calmly. “I’ll go out, then. You rest up.”
He rounded the bed to grab the car keys from the little table. Lorraine opened her eyes and darted her hand out far to touch his. He looked down at her, looping their fingers together.
“Sorry,” she murmured. “I’m being difficult.”
Ed smiled tenderly and leaned down to kiss the soft skin at the inside of her wrist. “Don’t sweat it, honey. You’re entitled.”
When he returned to the room twenty minutes later with a paper-wrapped grilled cheese for her, she was out of her skirt and bra and makeup and curled up around a pillow in bed. He stripped out of his pants and overshirt and encouraged her to sit up and eat with him. He switched on the little radio that sat on the nightstand.
When he finished eating, he sat back with the newspaper crossword and played with Lorraine’s hair. She sat with her sleep shirt unbuttoned, hugging her knees to her chest. She rested her temple on her arm.
Ed leaned his head back and looked up at her. He stroked his finger against her cheek.
He smiled. “Sweet girl.”
For a moment, she met his eyes, and she saw the warm way he looked at her and her stomach turned. She blinked away, turning her head to look forward, pressing her mouth against her forearm. Her breath shook.
Ed flattened his hand and rubbed her back. “What is it?
Her gaze moved around the room. “There’s so much in my head.”
“Tell me about some of it.” He twirled a lock of her hair around his finger.
Lorraine’s eyes glistened, looking at nothing in the distance. She looked small, with her knees and arms folded up together like this.
“In school once – I must have been twelve, or thirteen – I was hiding in a changing stall in the locker room.” She blinked and two big tears dripped onto her arm. She spoke slowly, like every next word hurt her throat on its way out. “I – I had a vision, during gym class, and I heard two other girls come into the locker room while I was trying to calm down. I heard them saying things. About me, about how – how I clearly shouldn’t be in school. I should be in an asylum somewhere.”
As she spoke, her lower lip slackened and Ed knew her well enough to know she was fighting against falling into it, doing her best to hold herself away from the black hole of the memory.
“They must have heard me crying,” she said. “They walked over and yanked the curtain open and I was – I was there in the corner and they stared at me. And then –” She roughly swiped her hand under her nose, sniffling. “And then one of them shouted at me, so loudly.”
She inhaled deeply, breath shaking, and hid half her face in her arms again. Barely above a whisper, she said, “I think they just wanted to see me scared again.”
Ed slid his hand higher up her back, thumb moving back and forth.
Sinking her head down to hide her eyes, she squeezed her knees tighter. “I don’t know what I would do if our girl was feeling anything that awful.”
She buried her tears in her elbow but Ed wouldn’t let her hide herself away, impossible feelings included. His arm wrapped around her shoulders. Gentle lips kissed her head.
“We take care of her,” he whispered. “And she’s so lucky to have a mother who understands. You had to take care of yourself.”
His words swelled up the memory from school until it burst and scattered, flinging pieces to the far corners of Lorraine’s mind. The one that struck her lit up into her parents’ broad white kitchen, where her seven-year-old hands trembled inside each other while her gaze darted rapidly between her mother and father, deep in their hushed discussion of what to do with her during church that morning.
She remembered that the household had been on edge since she lost it at a piano recital earlier in the week. All the people crowded into the Bridgeport community center came with too many ghosts clinging to their shoulders and they closed in on her until she couldn’t stand the congestion of her little white nylon tights on her skin and her tautly-braided hair.
She had yelled Momma through her tears while a teacher and her father carried her by her arms out to the parking lot. Someone tossed her into the backseat of the car. The door slammed.
They ended up leaving her at home that Sunday, alone with a cursive list of neighbors to go to in case of an emergency. In the living room, she played through her entire piano repertoire without error to pass the time.
When she clawed her way out of the sliver of memory, she tore right through whatever screen had been containing her devastation. The swelling pain she felt, for her own daughter who was so much like herself. For the broken girl who lived in her own chest and always would.
With Ed’s arms still around her, she became very still, then shrank into herself and started to sob, loudly, painfully, choking on every comfortless void in her throat. Turning out of his grasp, she grasped at the plasticky motel bedspread and fell – or threw herself – onto her side. She curled up, facing away from him, covering her face with her forearm.
It wasn’t Ed that made her crumble and he knew that, though he would never avoid the stomach-turning rush of guilt that came when he said something that prompted such a rush of painful realization. He hated himself any time he made her cry. But he reminded himself that her tears weren’t a burden, and he would never let her feel like they were.
The worry was another monster to wrestle and she always knew why – her track record of coping in the midst of intense waves was as wide a spectrum as it could be. He must have managed the fear, though, because he steadily laid behind her and rubbed his hand up and down her shuddering back.
“I’m sorry, honey,” he whispered. His fingers gently brushed her hair out of her face. “That was too much at once. I’m sorry.”
The whisper of his fingertips drifting over her arm, in rhythm with the quiet guitar on the radio, soothed her enough to breathe. She let her forearm relax away from her face, letting her tears feel the open air. Ed’s arm, gentle and steady, settled around her and gave her a firm foundation to tremble against. His chest was warm on her back.
Somewhere in the haze, her sobs mellowed to sniffles and then to soft inhales and exhales when she drifted to sleep. She didn’t feel Ed’s kiss to her shoulder or hear his near-silent little prayers, murmured into her hair.
He managed to switch the bedside lamp off without waking her.
—
Some hours later, Lorraine woke at the roar of a truck out in the motel parking lot revving up its engine. She felt Ed’s presence still surrounding her and she wiggled her shoulders to turn in his arms. The radio was playing still, smooth and whispering.
She held tight to his waist, tucking her head close into his chest. She knew Ed had stirred awake too when he inhaled deeply and tightened his grasp around her, pulling her in like a kid hugging their teddy bear. She felt unusually small in his arms.
“I love you,” she murmured, or whimpered, into his shoulder. “Thank you for loving me.”
Even in their sleepiness, Lorraine felt Ed share in her tired sadness. When he held her like this, he held together the woman and the little girl who thought her goodness was conditional. He would always lament that he couldn’t take care of her then, when the hurt first started.
They both knew that he reaffirmed his vow every day to do it for her now.
He cradled her head. Somewhere in a kiss, he whispered, “As if I could have been made for anything else.”