All Is Beauty Now by Sarah Faber

Author:Sarah Faber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction / Coming Of Age, Fiction / Contemporary Women, Fiction / Cultural Heritage, Fiction / Family Life, Fiction / Literary
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2017-08-08T04:00:00+00:00

HUGO

In the morning, Hugo wakes early, but Dora has already left the house. Quietly, he goes into the office, locks the door behind him, and again forces open the drawer to retrieve the letter he first found almost two weeks ago. He heard her arrive home late last night, but she didn’t come into his room like she usually did to say goodnight. They’ve been in separate bedrooms for several years now—it makes things easier, they tell themselves, when he has trouble sleeping, which is often—but he can usually count on a ‘goodnight’ at least, and a chat about the day, however brief. He shouldn’t be surprised by her gradual pulling away—he’d all but dared her to do it.

Once, a few years ago, when she’d turned to him in the night, wrapped her arm around him from behind, and reached for his cock, he could only cry quietly. With all the medication, he was motionless, insensate, but he couldn’t bring himself to tell her the truth. Instead, he told her to go ahead and find someone else if she needed to, never believing she really would. So many moments, he sees now, when he should have confessed to her, should have at least touched her, he absolved himself. Once his medication was sorted out, once his treatment was successful, he told himself, they would come back together. Once he was better. But then the doctors said there was no better, there was only symptom management. And so he pretended that if she did turn to someone else for a time, he could live with that—maybe it would distract her from his failings. But love? Did she love this man the way he said in the letter he loved her? He hadn’t truly believed that possible. And he is surprised, he is. In all the years since he’s been sick and the girls were young and a thousand tiny interstices widened between them, even during the periods of separation, he still imagined the other side. A future point when he would recover himself and she would again sit astride him, her skin blotchy and vivid, whispering fuck fuck fuck, a word she never otherwise said—

Suddenly, the girls come bounding through the doors of his office, waving sheets of paper in his face. Permission slips. A parent needs to sign. They want to attend a month-long day camp at the YWCA in Rio with the new girl—the one staying across the way with the Cavanaghs. She’s related somehow. Can they? Can they? Today is the last day to register. They have to drop off the forms today.

‘But you’ll be leaving soon, my pets.’ A slip. Be more careful. Say we. ‘Do you want to start and then have to stop early when we leave?’

They stare up at him; equal parts silent challenge and indulgence. This is what they’ve been hearing for months: we’re leaving soon. And yet here they stay, in Eden-cum-limbo. Now he must shine, be a giant to them, conceal all aftershocks.

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