Elsey Come Home by Susan Conley

Author:Susan Conley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

· 34 ·

I remember that I closed my computer in the hotel room and stood up from the bed, and the bottom of the computer had made the skin on my legs very hot. I was warm all over my body and unsettled about what I’d read. I put on my one-piece and went back to the pool where the boy named Marcus was teaching the girls a card game called Pounce that involved individual decks of cards for each player. I knew the game would be hard for Myla and easy for Elisabeth and that this was how their brains were wired, and I wanted to tell Myla not to play the game because it would end badly for her, but I was already trying not to be so controlling.

I dove into the water and swam to the shallow end, and my skin was a little tingly when I surfaced. I think a part of me wanted to join Subud, though I can’t say for sure. I’ve had other times in my life when I wanted to belong to something, and I was in a way going through a time like that again in China. I sat on the stairs in the shallow end where the water came up to my waist and stared at Osana. Maybe it was a dangerous cult, but I didn’t see how it could be, because Osana seemed gentle. My husband sat on one of the white couches with Elisabeth in his lap, and the towel I’d wrapped around her head had come loose, and her hair had dried into a weird sculpture on her head that I wanted to paint. I still wanted to paint then, though this was getting close to the time when I lost the painting.

Lukas wore his long surfer shorts and a rumpled linen shirt, and his beard had two days of stubble. I desired him but in a more distant way I was still getting used to since we’d married. That morning the girls had run ahead to the outdoor breakfast by the beach, and my husband turned to me on the dirt path and ran his finger down the middle of my back, and just his doing that made the hairs on my arms stand up.

He showed Elisabeth how to fan her cards properly and hold the cards closer to her chest so Myla and Marcus couldn’t see them. He whispered advice in Elisabeth’s ear, and Myla pouted, so he put Elisabeth down on the rattan mat and sat next to Myla on the couch and reordered her cards and scraped them against his beard back and forth. Myla reached for her cards, but Lukas wouldn’t give them back. He was too involved in the game now, and this happened frequently that we lost Lukas like this. It was endearing to a point—his curiosity. But he was also competitive and wanted Myla to win the card game, or, more accurately, Lukas wanted to win the card game.

What did my husband long for? This was before I learned not to live the way he lives, on adrenaline.

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