Elsey Come Home Read online

  Also by Susan Conley

  The Foremost Good Fortune

  Paris Was the Place

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2018 by Susan C. Conley

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Conley, Susan, 1967– author.

  Title: Elsey come home / By Susan Conley.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017058737 (print) | LCCN 2018001187 (ebook) |

  ISBN 9780525520986 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525520993 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Man-woman relationships—Fiction. | Domestic fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3603.O5365 (ebook) | LCC PS3603.O5365 E47 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017058737

  Ebook ISBN 9780525520993

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover illustration by Oamul Lu

  Cover design by Jenny Carrow

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Susan Conley

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  To Tony, Thorne, and Aidan

  · 1 ·

  About a year ago my husband handed me a brochure for a retreat in a nearby mountain village. We were standing in our Beijing kitchen while the girls played make-believe dog at our feet. The brochure was more like a handmade pamphlet—four pieces of white computer paper folded in the middle and stapled three times along the crease. There was a grainy photo of a cement terrace on the cover, and a more alarming photo of people sitting in a room with their eyes closed, and text under the photos that explained something called “a day of silence” and yoga and the chance for participants to reinvent themselves. My husband, Lukas, told me these things would make a good week’s vacation for me, and he smiled while I looked at the photos, but it was a distant smile.

  He went back to his bowl of rice, and I pressed myself against the edge of our stove until my lower back hurt, and I felt so lonely I almost cannot say. I knew if I went to this village, the week would pass slowly and I’d be changed, and that this was the point of him sending me there, but also that Lukas and I might not ever find each other again.

  I’d recently had a small surgery with my thyroid, and the Chinese doctor said I would get better, and he was right and so I did. But I’d been in and out of hospitals that previous winter, and when I was home I lay on the couch while Lukas and the girls continued on with their lives. Myla was eight. Elisabeth was seven. They sweetly cleared their plates and cups from the table and put them in the dishwasher upside down. Lukas often read the bedtime stories, and I saw he was trying hard to help me, but that I wasn’t needed as much as I thought, and that I must learn how to be a different kind of mother. A different kind of wife. It still feels like that now while I write this. That I cannot go back to the way I was before.

  I will also say that when Lukas handed me the brochure in our kitchen I didn’t know how to be in a marriage. A real marriage. I’m not sure he did, either. He was from Denmark and had lived in Beijing for fifteen years, making music, and he stormed about the government’s crackdown on journalists and rising nationalism, but I’m not sure he’d ever learned how to really listen.

  The day before I left for the retreat we took the girls downtown to a Japanese restaurant called Hatsune, which is lined with dark wood and tatami and serves large ceramic bowls of ramen and a sweet, sticky white rice Myla and Elisabeth love. After the rice got served I told the girls I was going away for the week to a tiny village called Shashan, and they stared at me with their grave eyes and clouds of hair. Then the fresh lemon sodas arrived, and neither of them seemed to register my announcement again, even though it was a rare announcement because I hardly ever left them. They played tic-tac-toe with a small pad of paper and pens I’d brought in my bag, and got up to look at the oversized catfish in the aquarium.

  During the meal Elisabeth politely asked for a mayonnaise sandwich even though Hatsune was her favorite restaurant in Beijing, and she has always hated mayonnaise and refused to eat anything with mayonnaise on it. When we got home, Lukas made her the mayonnaise sandwich, and I stayed with her in the kitchen while she ate it so Lukas could put Myla to bed. There are two steel stools with black matt
e leather seats at the end of the stone counter, and Elisabeth and I sat on these while she ate the whole sandwich, which became, I think, a kind of statement. Her long hair was tucked behind her ears, which saved it from getting in the mayonnaise, and she didn’t say anything else about my leaving for the mountains.

  · 2 ·

  When Elisabeth was done with the sandwich, I walked her to her room and she lay on her bottom bunk, and I hadn’t closed the curtains yet, so we could still see the skyline and the enormous Chinese TV building so famous people come from around the world to look at it. From our apartment it resembles a pair of gray pants. So big I cannot even begin to explain it, and Elisabeth is often in awe of this building. Me too. How could people even get inside that building?

  We live downtown in a high-rise near the most gigantic train station. When we moved here just before Myla was born, I circled the train station on my map with indelible marker so when I got lost I could take out my map and try to find my way home.

  Elisabeth rolled over on her stomach in the bed. “Imagine,” she said, “if you spoke wolf language. I mean really spoke it. Would you live with the wolves and leave your mother and father and never come back?”

  She often asked me questions that involved leaving our family, and I didn’t want her to leave our family, and I told her this. Then I said, “Living with wolves would be exciting, and if you didn’t like it you could come back.”

  She looked at me like this was an acceptable answer, and I felt I’d passed a test, which is how I often felt with Elisabeth. Like she was administering a series of small philosophy exams, which were essential I pass in order to be allowed to continue being her mother.

  I stood and pulled the blue curtains closed. This was more curtain than I’d encountered in a room, because the picture window was that big. A sliver of light from the noodle house below cut through the gap between the curtains and fell on the rug, and Elisabeth often said it looked like the scar on Harry Potter’s forehead.

  The rug was hard like turf because it was laid down over concrete, and I’d never seen so much concrete before in my life until I lived in China. Elisabeth asked me what God I believed in, and I’m not sure if this interrogation was already happening before I had the thyroid surgery, but it threw me, because I often asked myself the same question privately. I told her I believed in the God of Family. “You know. The God who keeps families together forever and ever, so they are never apart.” Lying was the thing she disliked most of all, but I used to believe it was a way to spare her.

  “But what do you really believe in, Mom?”

  I smiled for how well she knew me. She’d already changed into the blue sweat suit, because she required being fully dressed for school before she got out of bed in the morning, and I no longer argued with her about this. But it was quite hot in her room and her face was flushed.

  “Because I believe when you die,” she said, “you go to heaven for thirty years and then you come back as a cheetah because you want to be that fast.”

  “Okay. Well, what I believe in is my love for you. That’s what I believe.”

  I was trying to calm her mind so she’d be able to sleep. I could still mostly get away with naming my emotions for her explicitly. Maybe they were emotions I couldn’t fully name with my husband. I feared once she got just a little older, it would be over and she wouldn’t let me speak these things any longer, which has turned out to be mostly true. But there was this sweet time when I got to say them, and it has meant a lot.

  Sometimes the streetlights outside her room flickered, and they began doing it then—blinking on and off, and the light landed on the strip of rug underneath the gap in the curtain and made the shapes. “Let’s go to sleep now,” I said.

  I wanted her to sleep so I could pack. I also wanted a drink. I’d begun wanting one every night that winter after I put the girls to bed. I can’t fully account for it, but I will say that it didn’t feel like anything really happened during those days until I had a drink. I wasn’t painting, and I wasn’t with the girls doing what some people call parenting, because I was so often on the couch after the surgery. The girls tested me, and I tired more easily. They were still young and wanted things from me, as they should. Food and kisses. I gave them all of this.

  I’d certainly drunk before my surgery, but never with intention. And now I thought I might be sicker than the doctors had said, and I was too in a hurry to return to my private conversation with the world about this. It sounds odd. My fear. I was slowly getting better but I couldn’t stop the worries, and I thought it was a secret how afraid I’d gotten.

  You hear it and don’t understand when women say they lost themselves, because it seems overdone, and there are four hundred million people in China living on a dollar a day, so cry me a river.

  There’s a small, fetid canal outside our apartment where a handful of old men from the hutong fish for carp and catfish. Elisabeth became fixed on these men out our window and often made us walk to the canal to watch them. She was a willful child like this and could take up a lot of the day, but I had no excuse for not painting in the two years leading up to my illness. What I will say is that I couldn’t understand how to be obsessed with my children and obsessed with my painting at the same time. I thought both called for obsession. I had a narrow view of the world and I was younger then, but really I was naïve.

  · 3 ·

  That night I kissed Elisabeth all over her smooth face and went into Myla’s room, which is across the hall and painted tangerine and looks out over the playground with the shoddy trampoline the maintenance men recently put up. Myla is older than Elisabeth, and I used to think older meant easier, but now I see what you think is hard about your children changes, and you never have a chance to fall into a pattern of response. If you don’t remind yourself almost every day, you’ll focus only on the hardness and soon their childhoods will be over. Poof.

  I lay down in Myla’s bed with her, and she twirled her hair and asked if she could come with me. Her hair is the color of caramelized sugar and shorter and finer than Elisabeth’s, and it may be the one thing that gives Myla power over Elisabeth.

  I said I didn’t think it would work for her to come.

  “What if I can’t find you there?”

  “It’s late,” I said.

  “What if it snows and you get stuck?”

  “It hardly ever snows in Beijing. And not in April.”

  “But you’re going to the mountains. What if there’s a blizzard and I can’t get to you?” Myla wore a cotton nightgown with white ruffles and a Peter Pan collar like the nightgowns my sisters and I used to wear, and this made me softer with her.

  I began doing pai-pai, which is the method of Chinese backrub that our ayi, a middle-aged former tour bus guide named Sunny, taught me to do with the girls before I went out at night. We rarely went out, maybe twice a month, but for several years this was enough to send Myla into a fit.

  It got so that she’d ask me every morning if I was going out, and when I was honest and told her yes, I was, it made things worse because she’d perseverate on my leaving. Then I tried not telling her I was leaving until I walked out the door, and she’d shriek and throw herself at me so violently I wanted to lie down on the floor with her and cry. I know it’s not uncommon for children to fixate on a parent like this for a time, and it’s better now and I can see it more clearly, but I wonder what was so important about going out back then that I couldn’t stay home.

  I told Myla she could always get to me, but I meant it in an abstract way, which is problematic with an overly rational child. I kept doing pai-pai—lightly patting the space between her shoulder blades until I could feel her drifting to sleep, and I repeated myself. “You can always get to me.”

  I’d lost weight by then, and the tendons in my neck seemed to protrude because my neck was too thin, and I thought I looked much older. I h
ad low confidence, and when I got a small cut on my finger or a scrape on my leg that seemed like nothing at first, it wouldn’t heal and this worried me, too. In the photo taped to Myla’s bedroom mirror, we’re riding a metal chairlift up a mountain east of the city with the Buddhist temple and five hundred stone stairs on top. Myla’s head is in my lap, and I hold on to her shoulders with both hands, and even though I was afraid of the height and worried she might fall, I look happy. I am smiling.

  “But what if you die there? In the mountains?” she said before she moved fully into sleep. “What if you die and I can’t find you?”

  I didn’t answer except to tell her I loved her, and I kept doing pai-pai. When I left her room, I wanted to sleep the sleep of ten thousand thousand years.

  · 4 ·

  Our Chinese bed was hard like a bed of wood, and when Lukas climbed in after me he had to bend at his waist and sort of slide in, because he was tall and the bed low to the ground. He had dark wavy hair and a close beard, and the girls’ olive skin. He reached his arms around me, and I asked him why he wanted to send me away.