A Happy Catastrophe

by Dawson, Maddie

  I put my arms around her rounded, sad shoulders. I would like this to be one of those moments, when she sees she can let down her guard, that we can maybe trust each other. I’m even thinking words like sisterhood and co-parenting and I know that any second those words are going to come leaping out of my mouth. Then, thank goodness, her phone rings. It’s Richard, and she gives me a longing look.

  “Talk to him,” I say. “It’s fine.” And Bedford and I go in the house. When I look back, I see the sparkles around her, almost dazzling in their brightness.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  PATRICK

  Patrick has never been one for houseguests. Even before the fire, even back when he was an up-and-coming, promising sculptor who moved in regular social circles, he liked it best when everyone he knew mostly stayed at their own lodgings. On the subway, in airports, he’s happiest when he’s assuming that the people he sees are all on their way back home.

  Mainly this has worked for him. His parents are long deceased, and his sister never ventures out of Wyoming, and Marnie’s mom and dad have come to visit only once, staying for two very polite days before they obligingly vanished back to Florida. Her sister Natalie came with her husband and two kids one time and stayed at an Airbnb and came over only for meals.

  But now here is a whole new category of houseguest: an interloper who considers herself already home. And this is the kind of person who calls his name a thousand times in a row, with escalating intensity—as in “Patrick! Patrick! Patrick! Patrick!”—and when he finally can take it no longer and says, “What? What do you want?” this person says, “If dogs could talk, do you think they would speak English?” or “Do you think it’s true that squirrels can fly?” or “What’s that thing on your throat that goes up and down when you talk?”

  She’s up before him every morning and sticks by his side as much as possible throughout the day. Clearly, she’s on a campaign to win him over. She wants to go into his studio and use his oil paints and would like to tell him a million stories that have no point to them whatsoever, some of which may even be the plots of obscure television shows that are only shown on the internet and involve characters named Dora and SpongeBob. He doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about most of the time.

  Aaaaaand . . . she is going to be here for nearly a whole year. Which is unimaginable. He feels the life force seeping out of his body whenever he thinks of it. His teeth hurt. His hair follicles ache. He feels the beginnings of an ulcer forming somewhere.

  He has accepted that she’s his daughter, which really, if you want to be technical about it, only means that she shares some of his DNA. Frankly, he has never felt sentimental about his DNA. He may be missing some basic drive, he thinks, the one that makes humans want to spread their seed and track their progeny, some nebulous force that sees creating family as the be-all and end-all of human endeavor.

  Not Patrick. Having contributed some chromosomes to Fritzie is strictly a chemical kind of thing in his mind, not something that makes somebody a dad. How could he be connected to her, when he hasn’t awakened with her when she was a baby and walked her around the house through earaches and bad colds? He hasn’t put Band-Aids on her scraped knees or comforted her when she’s sad or done any of the twenty kazillion things he would have done had he planned for her existence and participated in raising her over the last eight years.

  He. Does. Not. Know. Her. And yet everyone acts like he should be so amazed to find himself a father. Even Paco said to him yesterday, “So you’re one lucky duck! This is sure the easy way to being a father, eh? Ehh?” And he actually came out from behind the counter to give Patrick a good-natured poke in the ribs, like he’d really pulled off something of a coup.

  “I am not a father!” he wants to scream about ten times a day.

  He doubts he can turn into one either. Oh, he knows what Marnie is imagining. If his life were a movie, he’ll be the sad, hopeless guy who is taught the Meaning of Life by a grimy-faced, obnoxious little street urchin who happens to be his daughter, and by the time the final credits roll, he finally throws off the shackles of his unhappiness and learns to embrace life and love.

  He loathes that particular plot. If he has to keep her for a year—and apparently he does—then he will do it. He will spend the year the way prisoners do: marking off the days until it’s over. And then he will hand her back to her mother and resume the life he’s come to love: dabbling at art in a nonserious way, heading over to Paco’s once or twice a day for chips and cheese, reading the paper for hours on end, sitting on the couch watching television game shows with Roy on his lap and Bedford at his feet, taking Bedford out for long walks, baking pastries when it suits him, waiting for Marnie to come home from work so they can go up on the roof together and make a fire in the firepit, drink some wine, and then head off to bed. He is fortunate in that he doesn’t have to work; the settlement from the fire made sure of that. So in a very real way, he has earned—with his sorrow and his scars—this carefully curated way of life. And he intends to maintain it.

  But in the meantime—well, it’s not great. He feels as though a hive of bees has moved into his head. Instead of watching Wheel of Fortune and Family Feud with Bedford and Roy, he is forced to ponder whether anteaters should be called eatanters. And whether he thinks there is another solar system where another Fritzie and Patrick are doing the exact same thing, only he is Fritzie on that planet, and she is Patrick. And how would that be, huh? And did he ever hear that he could turn into a girl if he kissed his own elbow?

  Then one day he’s home and he’s just made lunch for Fritzie when the Pierpont Gallery phones him.

  Would he like to have a gallery showing of his work in January?

  Well, you see, he would not. God, no.

  But it’s a fine, prestigious gallery, and Philip Pierpont himself is on the phone, doing the asking, in his cultured tones. He’s up-front about the request, too: there’s been a cancellation. Another artist was scheduled for the month, but something came up.

  Of course, Patrick thinks. He wasn’t their first choice. Someone more famous and well-adjusted, someone without burns on his face was supposed to take the slot, but couldn’t—and all because a writer from Inside Outside magazine knows somebody who knows somebody who’s an admirer of Patrick’s past work, the gallery owner is wondering if perhaps Patrick has some work he could show.

  Patrick says he needs to think about it. He’s pretty sure he doesn’t want to do this. After all, he doesn’t really have much work he could show. Any, really. But after he hangs up, there is Fritzie, sitting there at the table, swinging her legs and eating a peanut butter and marshmallow sandwich with her mouth open, and she has a strand of marshmallow in her hair, and she’s saying, “Oh, you’re off the phone now. Wouldn’t it be funny if you had a whole bunch of kids you didn’t know about, not just me, and we all showed up at your house one day, and—”

  “Fritzie,” he says. “Trust me. I don’t have any other kids.”

  “Well, but you might. I mean, you didn’t know about me, so you might have some others, too. What if all the other moms showed up, and they said, ‘Here is your son, and here are your twins, and here is a little girl . . .’ Wouldn’t that be funny if you had, like, eight kids?”

  He doesn’t let her see how much this thought makes him shudder. “There aren’t any more. Maybe you should go and wash that marshmallow out of your hair.”

  Later, Marnie calls and he can’t seem to help himself: he tells her about the gallery. She thinks it’s a fantastic idea, just as he knew she would. She is all for forward motion, for progress, for life, for stretching oneself. For Getting Back Out There. She doesn’t even care that he was the second choice. “So what?” she says. “It’s an opportunity.” Marnie loves opportunities.

  He says he’s not sure. “It’s going to mean I’ll be really busy, and, wellllllll, we do have Fritzie now . . .”

  “It’s fine, Patrick. We’ll all pitch in to make it work. Even if
you need to do a whole bunch of paintings, we can manage. She’ll be in school, and she can join me at the shop if there’s no after-school program she’d like . . .” She is off and running, just the way he knew she’d be. “And, if there’s going to be another baby, then it’ll be good for you to have your art career back in gear.”

  Oh yes. The other baby.

  That’s right; Marnie still hasn’t gotten her period. The doctor she called yesterday said she’d give her a blood test for pregnancy if it hasn’t come in another week. So . . . there’s that little bug of uncertainty buzzing about in his head, too. He’s kept swatting it away. He closes his eyes for a moment, feels the blackness pressing against his eyelids.

  “Do it,” she says.

  “January is not that far away. And so I’m immediately behind. For it to be worthwhile, I’ll need to get right to it.”

  “Of course,” she says. “But I think it’s worth it. This is your chance to be in the art world again. You owe it to yourself.”

  Later, Fritzie comes into his study and does three cartwheels before she plops herself down on the floor and stares at him.

  “Hiiii, Patrick,” she says after a long moment of unrelenting eye contact.

  “Hi.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m thinking. What are you doing?”

  “I’m thinking, too. Are you thinking about whether you and Marnie are going to get married?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, then, what are you thinking about?”

  “Nothing you need to worry about.”

  “Oh. Well. Do you want to know what I’m thinking about?”

  “Yes.”

  She laughs. “No, you don’t.”

  “Okay, I don’t.”

  She wiggles her toes and inspects the bottoms of her feet, which are filthy. She points that fact out to him, and he gets up and goes into the kitchen. But she follows him.

  “One day my toenail fell off. Did you ever have your toenail fall off? And I thought—you want to know what I thought? I thought it was like baby teeth. That I had baby toenails and now I would get a grown-up toenail. But that’s not right.”

  Oh God. He can’t take any talk about toenails. He did not know that toenail talk came with the fatherhood territory.

  “Fritzie, I am actually trying to make a big decision right now, so maybe you could go and play with Bedford or something. I’m going back in my studio now.”

  “Can I come in and paint?”

  He looks over at her face. All shining and animated and all he can see is her mouth moving and moving and moving.

  “If you can be quiet.”

  He gets out the watercolors and sets her up in the corner with a pad of paper and a bowl of water, and he pulls a chair over to the table, and she slides into the seat without looking at him. “I’ll be very quiet, Patrick, and you can think.”

  “Thank you,” he says. He looks at her as she dips her brush in the water and starts making bold strokes across the paper. How does she cope with the fact that her mother is just willing to walk away and leave her for such a long time? He tries to remember what his life was like when he was eight years old, and he can’t even imagine what he would have done if his mom had said she was checking out. His mom—she was the whole deal! She knew how everything in his life worked. She made it all happen.

  He shakes his head. Pitiful.

  “Just so you know, I am very good at decisions. What are you deciding about?” she whispers.

  “Nothing. Just something I have to figure out.”

  “But what is it?”

  “You know, it’s still interrupting me even if you’re whispering.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  He feels bad. This kid’s mom is leaving her. “I’ve been asked to show my work in a gallery.”

  “Oh. And you don’t know whether you want to?”

  “Right. And I’m not sure I have enough paintings.”

  “How many do you have?”

  “Fritzie.”

  “Oh, sorry.”

  “It’s going to be a lot of work.”

  “And are the people scary?”

  “What? What people?”

  “The ones who asked you. Are they scary? Like, if you don’t have enough paintings are they going to be all, ‘Grrr! Patrick! DO SOME MORE PAINTINGS! WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH YOU?’” She makes her hands into monster claws. He stares at her.

  “No. No, probably not that.”

  “Okay,” she says. “Then what are they going to do to you?”

  He doesn’t answer. Instead he paces around and looks in a cabinet at some paintings he’d stored away. Some oils that he remembers liking. Portraits.

  “There’s just one thing I want to tell you, and then I will be very, very quiet for the whole rest of the day,” she says, whispering again.

  “What?”

  “When I was in the basement about an hour ago, I saw that my mom had packed her suitcase. I think she’s going to go soon.”

  He looks over at her, and she gazes steadily back at him. There’s nothing in her face, except perhaps just a little trembling of her lip. Just a little, and then she looks down at her painting and does a wide swipe of black across the front of it.

  God, he is so in over his head. Maybe he should go over to her and give her a hug, but that would be awkward when he’s never hugged her before, and maybe she would be freaked out by a man hugging her, especially one with scars all over his arms and face.

  “Okay,” he says, and even to his own ears, his voice sounds gruff. “Well. It’ll be all right. Don’t you think so?”

  “Probably,” she says cheerfully. “Also, Patrick, why aren’t you married to Marnie?”

  “You said you had only one thing to tell me.”

  “But I just thought of this one, too.”

  He sighs.

  “Don’t you want to get married to her?”

  “Look, it’s complicated,” he says. “We’re just not ready yet. Okay? Now stop asking questions.”

  “You should get married.”

  “There are things you don’t understand.”

  “What?”

  “Fritzie, your limit of questions is up.”

  “Okay, Patrick. But I hope you’ll tell me when you’re ready.”

  An hour later he calls Philip Pierpont and says that he’ll do the gallery show. Because, as he has just figured out, there are going to be worse things than needing to be stuck in his studio painting and painting and painting.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  MARNIE

  September 5 is the first day of school, and the lady who runs the office of the Brooklyn Kind School, Maybelle, is the picture of red-cheeked, delighted frazzlement. “The chaos will settle down in a few days,” she says and comes from behind the counter to scoop two first graders into her ample arms at one time, while she’s yelling out a cell phone number to a woman in the doorway. A bald, smiling school bus driver ducks in to say good morning and how glad he is that he’s back because that foot surgery threatened to derail him. It’s been a heckuva summer, he says. But here he is, wanting her to admire his limp.

  “Yonatan, how the heck are you? You know how the first day of school goes,” she says to him. “Come back and limp for me tomorrow. I’ll have time for true admiration then.” Then she turns back to me, giving Fritzie a wink as she hands her a name tag and a hall pass. The door to the office keeps opening and closing, with people running in waving pieces of paper and shouting hellos. Somebody drops off a plate of brownies for Maybelle, and Fritzie licks her lips and looks at me longingly, so Maybelle gives her one.

  “Now who’s filling out the health and emergency forms?” says Maybelle, and Tessa steps forward. Her face is smudged this morning with eyeliner gone awry, and her masses of curly hair are shoved up into a messy cloth scrunchie. Really, if you ask me, she looks sort of sexily disheveled, like somebody who just fell out of bed after staying up all night having sex. She’
s lugging along a carpetbag that she keeps adjusting over her shoulder and tottering along on boots that seem just a tad too high to be safely manageable. She’s only coming along with us because I made her.

  “Okay,” Maybelle says to her, “you sit over here, hon, while I go over these and make sure we’ve got all the information we need. And let’s see, Fritzie is assigned to be in Karen and Josie’s class. And that is . . . yep, room 115. Just down the hall here, on the right. Almost at the end.” She stops to smile at Fritzie. “Oh, pumpkin, you are in for such a good year! Karen and Josie know all the best jokes.” Then she taps her temple and says to me, “By the way, if you need anything, I’m your go-to. By the end of the day today, I’m going to know where everybody is supposed to be, what their full name is, where their parents work, and the cell phone numbers of every single babysitter and grandparent. You’ll see.”

  I look over Tessa’s shoulder at the forms, where I learn that Fritzie’s real name is Frances Elizabeth Farrell, and that Tessa Farrell is really Tessa Johanna Farrell, and that she will be residing in Rome, Italy, for the school year. Patrick is listed as the father and the main emergency contact.

  And then, just before she’s handing the papers over to Maybelle, I see Fritzie poke her mother, and Tessa grabs them back and with Fritzie standing over her, she crosses off the name Frances Elizabeth Farrell and writes in the name Fritzie Peach Delaney.

  “Thank you,” says Fritzie in an urgent whisper. “You said. I’m Patrick’s now.”

  Tessa turns and looks at her, bites her lip. Then she says in a low voice, “All right. I’ll go along with Peach. But legally you are not Fritzie Delaney.”

  Fritzie shrugs, and Tessa purses her lips and writes Patrick’s last name on the form.

  I want to say, Wait, what? What exact kind of thing is being perpetrated here?

  Fritzie Peach Delaney? Are they kidding with this? I don’t know which part jolts me the most—that Fritzie is choosing her own name, and it’s a fruit, or that Tessa is now handing her over to Patrick symbolically. Taking his name. Of course, she is his child. She should have his last name. Probably. Maybe.