from column B.
Of course, that didn’t mean anything. I feel the same way when I read horoscopes – they’re designed to allow the reader to see what they want.
Do I want to see myself in Jack and Molly Went? I wondered. The question came to me by surprise and soon my mind was buzzing with more. Hadn’t Sammy’s eyes been the same deep blue as mine, and couldn’t those chubby legs of hers have transformed into long skinny pegs like my own, and if Sammy were alive today, wouldn’t we be roughly the same age?
Were Jack and Molly Went still waiting for answers? Did every phone call or knock at the door fill them with hope or dread or some bitter mixture of both? Did they see Sammy’s face in every woman they passed on the street, or had they found a way to move on?
The biggest question of all came like a shard of glass to my consciousness: could Carol Leamy, a woman with a background in social work who spent most of her working life as an HR rep for a company that sold and manufactured picture hooks, really, honestly, ever be capable of—
I stopped myself from going any further. The implications were too great and, frankly, too absurd.
The sound of heavy snoring pulled me from my laptop. Georgia had fallen fast asleep in the green armchair, her glass of wine balanced precariously between thumb and forefinger. I took the wine, switched off the television and covered her legs with a fluffy red throw rug. If history was any guide she’d be asleep for a few hours. She’d then wake around three am to use the toilet before waddling back across the hall.
Leaving Georgia where she was, I crept into my bedroom and climbed into bed. When I fell asleep, I dreamed about a tall man made entirely of shadows. The shadow man appeared outside my bedroom window and reached in with impossibly long arms. He carried me away, down a long, narrow dirt path lined with tall trees.
On Tuesday 3 April 1990, Jack Went emptied his bladder in the upstairs bathroom. His wife was in the shower a few feet away. There was something fitting about watching her through frosted glass. The vague shape of the woman he once knew. That sounded about right.
Molly shut the water off but stayed behind the screen. ‘You about done, Jack?’
‘Just about.’ He washed his hands. ‘You don’t have to hide in there. You don’t have anything I haven’t quite literally seen before.’
‘That’s alright. I’ll wait.’ She stood behind the screen with her shoulders hunched forward. Her posture reminded Jack of something from his World War Two books – a Holocaust survivor with a broken spirit, or a simple village girl standing in a field of bodies.
Her clothes for the day were hanging on the back of the bathroom door: a pastel-pink sweater with long sleeves and a heavy denim skirt that fell an inch above her ankles. Pentecostal chic.
Once upon a time, before Sammy was born, Molly had been warm-blooded and tangible, but lately she seemed watered down. Haunting the halls of their home instead of living in them. She was a remarkable woman in that way: even with the family drugstore doing well enough that she didn’t have to work, three beautiful children and the support of her faith, she could still find something to be sad about.
Molly opened the shower screen an inch to peer out. Her shoulders were pinched with gooseflesh. ‘Come on, hun. I’m freezing here.’
‘I’m going, I’m going,’ he said, stepping out into the hall and closing the door behind him.
He found two of his children downstairs in front of the television, engrossed in an episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Neither said good morning. Stu, the lumpy nine-year-old, was getting over a cold. He sat under a woollen blanket with a box of Kleenex, staring at the screen with eyes wide and mouth slack.
‘Feeling any better, buddy?’ Jack asked, placing the back of his hand against Stu’s forehead. He didn’t reply. The Turtles had him transfixed.
Sammy, the two-year-old cherub, was also watching, but she seemed just as interested in her big brother. Her eyes darted from the cartoon to Stu’s face. When Michelangelo made a wisecrack and Stu laughed, she copied him, parroting not just the volume of the laugh, but the rhythm too. When Shredder put some sinister plan into action and Stu gasped, Sammy gasped with him.
Not wanting to disturb the scene of domestic bliss he’d stumbled into, Jack backed quietly out of the room.
His eldest daughter, Emma, was eating cornflakes at the kitchen counter, one arm forming a wall around her bowl, the way he imagined prison inmates would eat.
Is that how she sees this house? He wondered. A sentence she needs to wait out. Sometimes it felt that way for Jack too.
‘Good morning, sweetheart,’ he said, making coffee. ‘Coach Harris came by the drugstore yesterday. He says you had PMS again so you couldn’t participate in gym. Need me to bring you home some naproxen?’
Emma grunted. ‘I don’t know why two grown men think it’s okay to talk about my period.’
‘Isn’t using your period to get out of gym sort of cliché?’
‘It’s not cliché, Dad – it’s a classic. Besides, Coach Harris is a creep. He always makes us climb the gym ropes so he can “spot” us. That reminds me, I need you to sign this.’
She dug deep into her backpack, pulled out a permission slip and handed it to Jack.
‘For permission to participate in the study of science and evolution?’ he read. ‘You need a parent’s permission to take a class nowadays?’
‘You do when half the kids are fucking fundies.’
He lowered his voice. ‘Has your mother seen this?’
‘No.’
He took a pen from his breast pocket and signed the permission slip quickly. ‘Let’s keep it that way. And don’t let her catch you saying the F-word.’
‘Fucking?’
‘Fundie.’
Emma folded the slip and tucked it safely back into her backpack.
While both Jack and Molly were technically members of the Church of the Light Within – Molly through conversion and Jack through blood – Molly took it far more seriously than he did. She attended all three weekly services. That was common for members who found the faith later in life: usually they already had a hole that needed filling.
Jack had started drifting from the Light Within as a teenager and had stopped attending services altogether when Emma was born. He’d justified it by calling it a safety issue: like many Pentecostal fundamentalists, the Light Within handled venomous snakes and ingested different kinds of poison as part of their worship – not exactly a healthy environment for children. So he had stayed home to babysit and let Molly do her thing. He still called
