A Happy Catastrophe

by Dawson, Maddie

  But now he just sits there in his pitiful white plastic lawn chair, looking out at the palm trees in their pots and the leaves from the ficus tree falling on the patio, and he says, “Yeah, you’re right. I’m going to have to figure out how to listen to her better. Head this off so it doesn’t happen again. I didn’t even know she was unhappy.” He looks up at me and laughs. “Not until that Thanksgiving dinner, that’s for sure. I came back in the house after putting her in that taxi, and I sat there with that turkey leg, and I thought, ‘Ted MacGraw, what the actual hell is this? Buddy, things have gone terribly, terribly wrong here. There’s nobody sitting across the table. No smiling. No joy.’”

  “Maybe this will usher in a whole new phase for you,” I say.

  He smiles and squeezes my hand. “It could, ducky. It could,” he says. “I guess I gotta face that I’m in repair. Undergoing some renovations, both in my body and my personality. Gotta suck it up.”

  We both look up just then because there’s a commotion at the door, and Natalie’s arrived with her two kids. Amelia, who’s four and perfect, runs over and climbs up on my dad, and Natalie swoops down and picks her up. “I told you, honey, you can’t climb on PopPop. He’s had an operation.” She’s got Louise on her hip—Louise chewing on a big plastic teething toy with little hard plastic bumps all over. Like a mace. Yet another thing I’ll probably never need to know: why babies’ gums require a medieval torture device.

  “Well, nice to see you,” Natalie says to me. “Good of you to bring Mom back.”

  I don’t know why everything she says to me always seems hostile. We used to be best friends—or at least I thought we were. Patrick—and this is one of the reasons I loved him—says that I was never, ever, ever Natalie’s best friend. At best, he says, I was her slave, sidekick, victim, and oppressed opposition. He’s seen her operate—the former award-winning beauty queen/science champion/princess/overachieving mom/cancer researcher—and he points out that even today, when we’re both adults, I regress in her presence to being a tongue-tied, unappreciated waif.

  “And you’re a million times nicer and smarter and more intuitive and prettier than she is!” he said once. “Why she thinks she’s so much better is one of the great horrifying mysteries of modern life. It will be written up in textbooks, and scholars will puzzle over it in the centuries to come.”

  But I know the real answer. Natalie knows she’s so much better because she has the paperwork to prove it. She’s the one who, for our whole lives together, won all the awards, captured all the good grades, got her homework done on time, kept her room clean, ran around with the popular crowd, and dated all the great guys that everyone else wanted. I was the little sister in the corner, trying to design costumes that the neighborhood cats would wear for the weddings I was intent on staging in the backyard for them.

  Now even as an adult, she has everything, all the showcase toys and rewards the universe hands out to its favorites: a husband who loves her and goes off to work at a well-paying and probably boring-as-hell corporate job that he is willing to do every single day, year after year after year, just to support her and their lifestyle, and she has two adorable little daughters, a 401(k), a house with a swimming pool, and a great job researching drugs that cure diseases, and . . . well, let’s just say that no man is telling her that he doesn’t quite see himself in the same life she’s picturing. No man in her life is sitting up late at night making sculptures of a woman who died.

  And if anyone happened to call Natalie’s husband a hero—I know this guy—he would swell up with pride, and he’d tell everybody in the whole world who’d listen that hell yeah, he saved somebody’s life, did everything he could, and he deserves whatever acclaim and applause and medals people might give for that. There would be medals on the mantel and hung on the walls. The situation would come up in at least 40 percent of all his conversations.

  What it comes down to, it occurs to me, is that Natalie and Brian know they’re awesome, while Patrick and I . . . well, we were still feeling our way along, like two blind people in a cave, using rusty instruments to try to figure out where we were and where we were heading.

  And now, looking at my glorious blonde sister scolding our father for not taking better care of himself, and then turning her dazzling but angry smile onto me, asking where Mom is hiding out—I realize that Natalie has never had to ask a single question in her life about who she is or what she wants. Everything has simply come to her, and so she doesn’t even know how the rest of us live and fret and struggle.

  But then I realize something else, just as true. She’s got plenty of insecurities and fears of her own. When I look at her talking to my dad and juggling her two children, I see behind her eyes that she’s somebody who’s so tense most of the time that she could chew off her own leg. Maybe she’s got a successful marriage and a job she loves, but she doesn’t get to hang out in the Frippery like I do, talking to people about love and helping them puzzle over what to say to the people they love and yearn to connect with. She’s not seeing sparkles and running after people in restaurants because she’s seen they belong together. And she hasn’t gotten to hold Patrick’s scarred, sweet hand at night or look into that luminous, but humble face. She hasn’t seen what life looks like in the face of a person who’s been broken a time or two.

  In fact, now that I think about it, everybody I know and love has been broken a time or two. They’ve all had to climb out of darkness, to push back against the overwhelming, seek out the unknown comfort in a crisis. And sometimes they do it better than other times. Sometimes, like Patrick, they’ve had to stop moving forward temporarily and go back into the darkness. And we who love them have had to just wait outside the cave for the sight of their faint little light to come bumping along through the darkness and shine straight and steady again.

  I feel my eyes fill up with tears, and I wipe them away. Patrick has decided not to come through the darkness. He wants to remain in the alcove of doom.

  God, I have a pang of missing Patrick so much that I get dizzy for a moment. But I miss the old Patrick, the texting Patrick who resisted love and then fell so hard in love with me that I was bowled over with the sheer force of it. Before he started taking it all back.

  And I miss Fritzie.

  What will happen to us? I don’t know. Maybe I have to bring myself to the point of loving Patrick enough to let him be wherever it is that he decides is home for him. It’s his choice: the alcove of doom may be what he picks for good.

  And I may just stay here in Florida, the place where my DNA knows all the home ground. I have to admit that, when I let myself stop being all angsty, I love how this feels. The sun shines on my skin, my father and I sit outside every day, drinking healthy smoothies and chatting about mundane things, and the humidity frizzes up my hair even while it’s softening the dry-skin lines on my face.

  A lot of people don’t know that Florida is an old Spanish word that probably means “there are lots of flowers here even in winter, so just shut up and rest.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  PATRICK

  Two weeks in, and with no end in sight, Patrick thinks his life as a father resembles a game of Whac-a-Mole.

  Just as he thinks he’s making some headway, that he’s got this single-dad thing down, trouble flares up in a new place.

  Fritzie has broken all the rules multiple times. Everything is subject to discussion, nothing simply gets taken care of without an argument: hair, homework, friends, playdates, as well as basic human things like getting clean and getting dressed. She makes everything an ordeal, and as far as he can see, she is doing it all out of a sense of glee. For fun. He comes to the conclusion, seeing the little quirky half smile on her face when she is torturing him, that she is having the best of times.

  As if the hair-cutting incident thing wasn’t bad enough, then a friend of Marnie’s named Emily Turner called to tell him a story about Fritzie letting kids rub her head for good luck—and charging them a quarter to
do it. Apparently he is supposed to find this hilarious.

  “She’s a bold one,” Emily Turner says, laughing. Then when he doesn’t join in, she says, “Are you doing okay? Come for a drink sometime and meet my long-suffering husband. We’ll commiserate by telling you all the vile and mercenary things our kids have done.”

  Of course he will not go. He intends to soldier on without reinforcements. Except for the repairing of Fritzie’s haircut, he has resolutely not asked anyone else for help, even Ariana again, even when she pops in and out, offering assistance. It’s just that he doesn’t want to depend on anybody else. He needs to do this.

  Still, he suspects he is losing more ground every day. Everything is so much more work than he ever imagined. Fritzie dances around the kitchen, teasing Bedford while Patrick is trying to get dinner ready. She goes on binges of asking him “Why?” after everything he says, until he’s so exasperated he can barely think. And then she laughs at him. “Patrick, I’m just trying to see how many questions it takes until you get back to the whole creation of the universe as the reason,” she says.

  Then occasionally she’ll declare it’s Opposite Day, and with everything he says, she pretends he means just the reverse. “Oh, so you don’t want me to take a bath then!” she’ll crow. And, “Oh, you hope I’ll stay awake all night and talk to you!”

  And then there are the clingy times. She doesn’t want to do her homework unless he agrees to sit there at the table with her the entire time. She says she shouldn’t have to do it because it’s boring unless he stays with her, and what if she started working on it and fell asleep and slid off the chair, hitting her head on the floor and dying of brain stuff?

  All this companionship makes him crazy. He doesn’t remember needing his parents to hang out with him for every little chore. She requires him to sing some nonsense song while she brushes her teeth. Sometimes he has to put a hand towel on his head—no, not that one, the blue one—and then he has to pretend to chase her down the hall to her room where he must pick out three stories to read to her before bed. And to sing her a song. And to tell her a story from his own life.

  By the time he staggers back to the living room, he is exhausted, and then nine times out of ten, she’s popped up again, saying she needs a glass of water, or she needs a new pillowcase because hers smells bad. Or she needs to talk about whether cats and dogs speak each other’s languages. Something. Anything!

  He doesn’t get it. Why can’t he just be allowed to be his old sad and incompetent self? Why does he have to talk to her all the time? He feels like his brain is being poked by sharp sticks about three-quarters of the time.

  But worse—far, far worse—is that by the time February comes to an end, and Marnie has been gone for six weeks, Fritzie has neglected on five separate occasions to mention to him that she made other plans after school. He has been left standing at the bus stop while the bus discharges its non-Fritzie passengers.

  Why, he wants to know, does she do this?

  “Oh, I forgot. Sorry!” she’ll say, looking surprised that he’s mad, or maybe she’ll come out with, “What difference does it make? I know where I am and how to get home!” And lately there’s the more effective, “Well, Ricky, I did tell you where I was going, but you weren’t listening to me! You never listen!”

  Ricky?

  Yes. Another baffling thing is that she has taken to giving him nicknames. Ricky! That one took him a bit to figure out. Then, of course: it’s the last syllable in Patrick. Besides Ricky, she calls him Dude, Sad Guy, Art Man, Bio-Dad, and Spaceshot. He almost can’t stand it.

  “I was listening. I am always paying attention to when and where I’m supposed to pick you up,” he says. “I know you didn’t tell me.”

  She puts her hands on her hips. “The problem is, I need a phone,” she says. “That way you won’t have to worry that you lost me or that I died like that lady you loved, the one that was in the fire. Because you can’t take it if anybody else dies, can you, Ricky?”

  He must look shocked, because she comes over and stands next to him, breathing on him, and touching his face.

  “If I have a phone, I will always be where you know I am,” she says.

  He pulls away and rubs his face. A phone! Ay yi yi. What universe is he living in where an eight-year-old should have a phone? But Emily Turner says they all have phones, and so he knows he is doomed.

  One evening they go out and get her a phone. It’s like a little rectangular insurance policy. Maybe now he can keep from waking up in the middle of the night terrified that somehow he has lost her.

  This is no way to live. A phone is a small price to pay.

  Tessa calls to FaceTime, as she does very occasionally, on Sunday morning. Patrick puts her on speakerphone because he’s making pancakes. Behind her, he can see a café and some old-looking buildings, and all around her people are talking, which makes her have to lean into the phone at times. Suddenly her face fills the whole screen, scrunched up, trying to hear him.

  He calls Fritzie, who comes charging in, bouncing around in excitement, spilling out all the news. “Mama! Hi, Mama! Listen, I got a phone! And Patrick bought me some new leggings with stars on them, and—oh, I got a sweatshirt and guess how they spell girls on it! Mama, it’s G-R-R-R-L-S. And Marnie’s gone because her dad got sick so it’s just me and Patrick, and it’s been sleeting here, even though it should be snowing instead. And did you know that sleet is like rain but it’s ice at the same time? Kind of like when we had hail that time in England, remember, Mama?”

  Patrick flips the pancakes over. He can’t hear what Tessa said, but now Fritzie is demonstrating some incredibly complex gymnastic move on the floor, something involving spinning around on her butt and throwing her arms and legs in the air and then jumping up into place. “I’m practicing doing a headstand flip, do you want to see me try to do that? Come on, watch me try to do that. Sometimes I can’t do it, so it’s suspense.”

  He sees in the phone that Tessa is looking elsewhere, gesturing to somebody. Not so interested apparently in the gymnastics displays or the breathless news from Brooklyn. Her eyes swerve back to the camera. She says, “Patrick? Are you still there?”

  “Yes!” he calls.

  “How’s fatherhood treating you?” she says, and she smiles at the camera.

  “Fine,” he says. “You should watch Fritzie do this trick!” he says.

  But Fritzie is shaking her head at him. She oozes her way along the wall, humming some tuneless thing, and then plops down on her back on the kitchen floor and puts her arm over her eyes. Bedford comes over to lick her face. Roy shows up, too, and Fritzie manages to pet both of them at the same time, still humming.

  “Is she being good?” Tessa’s voice rings out on the speaker. “Because—well, Richard and I were sort of interested in taking a bit more time when the semester’s over, you know? Just feeling this out preliminarily . . . maybe . . . ?”

  The phone signal glitches, but then Tessa starts talking again, midsentence, about a trip to Greece. Until the fall semester, he hears. And can they talk? Would he and Marnie be amenable to—

  Fritzie scrambles to her feet and leaves the kitchen.

  “Tessa,” he says. There’s a taste of iron in his mouth. How could she have this conversation in front of Fritzie like this? “I have to go. We’ll talk soon.”

  And when he clicks the phone off, he goes off to fetch Fritzie, jolly her up, tell her funny jokes until he can get her to come back and eat her pancakes. He promises her a trip to ice-skate in Prospect Park. He feels like he’s wearing his heart on the outside of his body, and every little breeze stuns it and makes it ache more.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  MARNIE

  My father has gotten to the depressed stage of heart attack recovery. The internet thought that might happen.

  “After a heart attack, even a mild one, many people experience depression and an awareness of their own mortality,” it says on one website. “Contact your doctor
if this becomes extreme.”

  Thank you, World Wide Web, for that piece of advice. I wonder if that description was written by Patrick, back when his job was to caution the world about the perils of being alive.

  Speaking of Patrick and depression and the perils of being alive—he is being very circumspect about how things are going with Fritzie.

  When I call his phone, Fritzie is the one who answers, and she is buzzing with news, all of it—complaints, announcements, gossip, exclamations—tumbling out accompanied by sighs and laughs and snorts and the kind of heavy breathing you only get when you’re talking and jumping off of a bed at the same time. She’s going to be in a spelling bee, she has to write a report about recycling, she went to a movie with Blanche Turner and it was sooo boring, she lost her hat but Patrick bought her another one, they had chicken for dinner again, Ariana has been too busy to come upstairs very much but it’s very loud down there and Patrick thinks more people than just her are living there, but he doesn’t want to go down and see, he says, because he’s not the police. “That’s what he said, Marnie. He is not the police.”

  “Well, that’s true . . .” I say.

  “So I went down there on Saturday. I wanted to know what was going on, and so I knocked on the door, and they let me in, and there were three girls there. Ariana, Charmaine, and that girl, Janelle, the one who’s going to have a baby. And they had just gotten out of bed and they were still in their pajamas with their hair all messy, and they were drinking coffee and they were all doing some fortune-telling cards, they said, and they asked me if I wanted my fortune told, but I said no and went upstairs.”

  “Why didn’t you want your fortune told?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Maybe you didn’t believe in it?”