I Wish You Happy: A Novel

by Kerry Anne King

  Somehow, working here, I’ve managed to shut out all of that.

  Nancy is the one who crystallizes it all for me. She’s still wearing her party dress, rumpled now, stained by dinner spills and nighttime sweat. She’s obstinate as ever, but her resolve is wearing thin, and she allows me to check her blood sugar without putting up a fight. She’s only nibbled at her dinner.

  “I take it Mason hasn’t showed up yet.”

  She turns her head away, and there’s an unmistakable quaver in her voice. “Maybe he moved back to Chicago.”

  I know better than to comment on that quaver, or on the sadness and guilt and loneliness I’m picking up like radio static.

  “He was here last night,” I tell her, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “Outside. He was late and didn’t want to come in.”

  “Coward,” she says, but there’s no corrosive energy behind the judgment. “Let me guess. He started drinking and lost track of time.”

  “Maybe you should call him.”

  She glares at me. “He owes me an apology. And dinner. Why would I do that?”

  “Because you’re his mother, that’s why. It’s your job to be the grown-up.”

  “He’s thirty-eight years old. It’s his job to take care of me by now.” But the absurdity gets to her, as I’d hoped it would, and she laughs. “I could apologize for being a shitty mother. Maybe that cancels out a dinner date.”

  Nancy is one of the few residents who uses a cell phone. I pick hers up from the bedside table and hand it to her.

  “Now?”

  “Yes, now.”

  “You are a martinet.”

  “And you are a diva. Call your son. And then buzz me, and we’ll get you out of that dress.”

  I’ve already taken a step down the hall when she calls me back.

  “What now? Did you forget his phone number?”

  She waves that away. “You might, maybe, bring the kittens back in sometime. I could do penance by helping to feed them.”

  “You’re allergic.”

  “Or not.”

  I open my mouth to tell her the kittens are no longer living with me, and then change my mind. “Maybe I will. Call. Now.”

  All of my intentions to get back to her are swept away as the evening devolves into chaos. A fall. An ambulance and all of the paperwork that goes into that. One of the residents taking a serious turn toward death and the need to notify the family. It’s like everything and everybody is on a mission to show me the dark side of life tonight.

  By the time I get back to check in on Nancy, she’s asleep, still wearing that damned dress, the phone on top of the covers right beside her hand.

  I don’t see the blinking red light on my answering machine until I’m into my second cup of coffee. Tired as I was, and deeply as I slept, I’m pretty sure if the phone had rung during the night I would have heard it, which means that light has been blinking since sometime yesterday evening.

  Generally nobody calls me, except for my parents during the regularly scheduled Sunday-afternoon obligation chat. Maybe they’re switching things up again. Or not. I can’t make up my mind whether this is an ominous red glow, or a happy surprise, or maybe nothing at all.

  As long as I don’t push “Play” or look at caller ID, it’s a sort of Schrödinger blink, signaling neither good nor bad. Clearly, I need more coffee. I pour another cup and add in cream until it’s the perfect tawny shade. Fortified and shielded by my favorite mug and a fair bit of caffeine, I finally push the button.

  The voice on the other end isn’t any of those that have played through my imagination.

  It’s Katya’s Tom.

  “Hey, Rae. I did some thinking about what you said. I figure if Katya wants to see me, I owe it to her—to us—to do that. I was hoping to talk to you before I headed that direction, but what the hell. I’m driving up to Colville from Richland tonight. Please call me in the morning and let me know where I can find my wife.”

  He leaves a cell number and the call clicks off.

  I can’t move. I can’t breathe.

  Tom is here. In Colville. Because I told him to come. What kind of idiot does something like that?

  Denial rushes to my defense.

  Maybe he didn’t come. He might have changed his mind. There could have been road closures. A massive wildfire, a multicar pileup, an unprecedented visit from the president to rural Washington. I wasn’t fully awake when I listened to the message; maybe I heard it wrong.

  I poke at the machine and press “Replay.”

  Tom’s voice fills my kitchen again, calmly expressing his intent to head up to Colville.

  With a little groan I slump into one of my chairs and set my cup down on the table, before leaning over and giving my forehead one swift whack against the wood. Hard enough to sting, not hard enough to bruise.

  If I go through with this stunt, I’m pretty sure Cole will never speak to me again. It’s a little difficult to deny codependent tendencies when you’re caught in the middle of this kind of machination.

  Maybe it’s not codependency, a little voice whispers. It’s not like you’re trying to make Katya dependent on you. It’s sort of the same thing as finding the kitten a surrogate mother. Tom is her person. Maybe this will be a good thing.

  Doubtful. Very doubtful. But the thought rallies me enough to finish my coffee and then return Tom’s call.

  “Oh good,” he says, sounding entirely too bright-eyed and hopeful. “I was worried I’d driven all the way up here for nothing.”

  “Sorry about that. I was at work and got in late.”

  “No worries. If you’ll just tell me where I can find her, I’ll let you get back to your day.”

  I swallow hard, picturing Tom showing up unannounced and unexpected at the crisis house. As tempting as it is to stay out of what I’ve started, sending him to her while she’s locked up is like sending a toddler to dismantle a bomb. I’m already up to my ears in alligators, and I might as well stay the course.

  “I’m not sure about visiting hours at the crisis house.”

  “Give me the number, and I’ll call and find out.”

  The best lies are mixed with a little bit of truth, so I go for the gold.

  “Here’s the thing. She doesn’t want to talk to you there. No privacy, with all the prying eyes. I’ve got permission to take her out, so let me set up a time, and maybe you guys can talk in the park? It’s going to be a beautiful day, and she hates being cooped up.”

  “Sounds fair. Listen, could I have your cell phone number? Just in case we need you later.”

  “Sure. But I should warn you that my battery always dies, so if you can’t reach me, that’ll be why. I’ll call you when everything’s set up, okay?”

  He agrees, although I can almost hear him wondering what sort of person his wife has gotten hooked up with. And then I surprise myself with laughter at the absurdity of my own thoughts. I’m worrying about what he’ll think of me. Like that even matters.

  I’m not the one who has tried to kill herself repeatedly, or the one who came up to visit the wife he planned never to see again, because of the lies of a stranger. Maybe I’m messed up, a little, but I’m not the only one.

  Still, when I call the crisis house my heart races with apprehension. If they don’t let me talk to her, then what?

  I need not have worried. Kat has listed me as a person with whom it’s okay to share information. The pleasant woman who answers hooks us up before the second hand ticks all the way around the clock.

  Kat’s voice is subdued.

  “I didn’t think you’d call me back.”

  “I said I would. You ready to get out of there? Just for a couple of hours,” I add hastily, before she can misinterpret my words. “I was thinking you need a little sunlight.”

  “I have become a vampire,” she says. “Truly. It’s dark in here. I’m avoiding mirrors.”

  “Then an outing in the sunshine will be perfect. Eleven a.m.? I’ll pack lunch.”
>
  “Make it a cake with a file in it. Yes. Great. Eleven a.m.”

  We hang up, and I call Tom back and give him directions to where we plan to meet. “Can you keep your phone charged? This has so much potential to go wrong. What if I get lost?”

  “This is Colville. You won’t get lost. Trust me.”

  I hang up with a sinking feeling in my stomach. Only an idiot would trust me. But the wheels are in motion, and I’m going with the flow. I promise myself that after this I’m going back to animals. Human relationships are way too complicated.

  Kat is waiting for me outside the crisis house. She’s still pale and washed-out looking, but her hair is clean and shiny and she’s wearing makeup. This is good. Whatever her response to the surprise I’m about to spring on her, she wouldn’t want Tom to see her looking disheveled and unkempt. She’s also wearing a long-sleeved sweater that covers both arms.

  We hug, lightly, and only for an instant before awkwardness sweeps us away from the house and into the car.

  “You make vampires look sparkly,” I tell her, trying to ease the tension.

  “I make vampires look healthy and vibrant. You, on the other hand, look fabulous. Let me guess—you have slept since I last saw you.”

  “Yeah, I shipped the kittens over to Jenny. Except for Wish. That’s the little gray one. He has been adopted by a pretentious mama cat and is learning a lifestyle above his station.”

  We’re both trying too hard, and I can feel that bringing up Wish was a bad idea.

  I’m grateful that I’ve chosen a location about two minutes away by car, because our repertoire of safe conversational topics doesn’t last even that long.

  “That’s it?” Kat asks, as I park. “That’s the extent of our excursion?”

  “Is it my fault they built the crisis house beside the park? The excursion is sitting in the sunshine, not driving miles to get there.”

  “You and sunshine. You’re trying to kill me off.”

  “I left the stake at home. Come on.”

  Already her sadness is a heaviness that weighs me down. Even the light seems dimmer as I get out her walker and watch her struggle to get out of the car. In the brighter light I can make out a greenish-yellow stain that marks the bruise on her cheek, even under her makeup.

  I almost tell her right then about Tom. This is a horrible mistake. I don’t want to witness any more of her pain. I don’t want to watch the crash of a surprise encounter with her husband. If I fess up right this minute, she’ll blow up at me, insist I take her back to the crisis house, and probably never speak to me again.

  Of all the possible endings, this seems the easiest, but it’s too late for that. I’ve already stirred the pot.

  I match my pace to hers over the short distance to a picnic table and help her get settled with her back to the road, positioning myself across from her where I can watch for Tom. I charged my cell before leaving home, but as expected it’s already signaling the one-bar battery warning.

  We pick at the sandwiches and nibble on baby carrots, mostly in silence. Neither of us is adept at small talk, and I can’t imagine any conversation starting out with Oh my God, you almost killed my kitten, not to mention yourself. What the hell was that all about?

  But I also can’t stand this constrained half silence between us.

  “You can take off the sweater,” I tell her, finally, after choking down a bite of sandwich as dry as the Sahara despite the nearly half a jar of mayonnaise I spread on it. “It’s not like I haven’t seen your arm.”

  “It’s not you I’m worried about.”

  A clump of tuna plops out of my sandwich onto the table. Does she know about Tom? How could she? Unless he called the crisis house after all. Of course. He has Cole’s number . . .

  Kat gives up the pretense of eating and shoves her sandwich away from her. “I don’t like to see the evidence of my own sins.”

  “It wasn’t a sin, exactly . . .”

  Her voice takes on a singsong tone, as if she’s reciting something. “I have trespassed against myself, my neighbor, and my neighbor’s ass. Or in this case, kitten. Not to mention my husband and my family, and oh—let’s not forget God.”

  “Haven’t we all,” I say, into the toxic waste of her words.

  She shakes her head, avoiding my eyes. “Not you. Not like this. Here’s the thing you won’t believe. It seemed to make perfect sense that night. Somehow it was all lined up in my head as logical and right. Maybe even heroic. Save Rae from ongoing heartache and the expenditure of energy.”

  “Kat, don’t—”

  “It was totally selfish, not heroic. I see that. I can’t even make sense of what I was thinking, and it’s my own brain that thought those things. Like one of those weird-ass dreams that makes total sense at the time, but when you wake up you want to know what the hell was going on in your head. You know?”

  “I know. Like the dream I had where it made sense to clean the carpet with a giant fish. Not a dead fish. It was sort of sucking up the dirt with its fins. I think.”

  Kat stares at me, and a tiny bit of the tension eases out of her jaw. “You’re making that up.”

  “I’m not capable of making that up.”

  “All right,” she says. “What I did made sense at the time, like cleaning the carpet with a fish. My new counselor suggests my behavior stems from a traumatic response to stillbirth, combined with postpartum depression. The same sort of mind-set that makes a woman kill her baby.”

  “Postpartum psychosis.”

  “Something like that.” Her fingers worry at a loose splinter on the table. “You’d think it might help with the guilt, to say, ‘Oh, I was psychotic. It’s not my fault.’ But it doesn’t. It only makes me feel weak.”

  Of all the things I can think of to say, none of them are right, so I say nothing. The sun is punishing, straight overhead. I’m roasting, and Kat in her sweater looks miserable.

  “Can we move?” she asks. “Out of the sun? My sandwich is turning into a tuna melt.”

  Of course we can’t move, because I told Tom we would be here, and because my battery is now predictably dead.

  “You are turning into a tuna melt.” I stall. “Sun is an antidepressant. Strip off a layer, get some vitamin D.”

  “I don’t tan. I burn.” But she starts to shrug out of the sweater. I’m so focused on her that I forget all about Tom, who of course shows up the minute I stop watching for him.

  Of all the versions of him I generated in my head, not one of them comes even close. I got the olive skin and the dark hair right, and that’s as far as it goes. He’s small and wiry, not much taller than she is. He has a round, sensitive face and wears glasses.

  Kat freezes, staring at him like he’s a ghost.

  Tom crosses the distance between us. He reaches out his hand to her, as if he’s going to touch her hair or cup her cheek, but instead he removes her half-discarded sweater. Kat lets him, as if she’s suddenly boneless and incapable of resistance.

  He turns her hand over to reveal the row of black stitches, ugly and harsh against her pale skin. His face spasms as if the pain of the wound is his.

  “I should have looked for you,” he says. “Right away, as soon as I realized you were gone. I thought you’d just left me. I thought I was right to let you go. I didn’t . . .” His Adam’s apple bobs. He turns her arm back over to hide the stitches and lets it fall into her lap. His fingers graze the bruise on her cheek while his eyes fix on the walker. “Jesus, Kat.”

  His tone makes the words a prayer, not a curse.

  “Why did you come now?” Kat doesn’t move, her arm lying exactly where he placed it.

  “Because I didn’t come then.”

  “Guilt,” she whispers, glancing up at him and then away. Her face hardens, and the tone of her voice is cold when she speaks again. “You should know I can’t have any more babies, Tom. They took my uterus.”

  “Thank God.”

  “What did you say?” Kat’s expression
says she thinks he’s lost his mind.

  “It was making you crazy, this thing with the babies. I’m glad it’s off the table, so you can get on with your life.”

  Her mouth works as if she’s about to speak, but nothing comes out. My presence feels wrong and faintly shameful, like I’m peeping in through a window on a private moment. Slow and quiet, I begin to detach myself, edging up from my seat.

  “Don’t you dare leave me,” Kat snaps, her eyes crackling with an energy I’ve never seen from her. “You set this up. How dare you?”

  “I think—” Tom begins, but she cuts him off.

  “She called you, I’ll bet. Dragged you up here. Don’t deny it.”

  Tom glances at me, confusion clear in his eyes, and then back to her. “She called me, yes. I did my own dragging.”

  “But you wouldn’t have come if she hadn’t called.” The implications of abandonment are naked in the space around her words.

  “I came because I thought you wanted me. I stayed away because I thought you didn’t.”

  “Even when . . . after. I almost died, and you didn’t come.”

  The pain that twists his face at her words feels like glass in my heart. I remember all of my misconceptions, the anger I directed at him. It wasn’t my place to judge. It certainly wasn’t my place to bring him here, rub salt in both of their wounds.

  “I couldn’t,” he says. “I was a coward. Every time I tried to even think about you under the tires of a car I ended up puking. I told myself you were better without me. Was I lying to myself? Or was it true? Are you better off without me, Kat? Tell me.”

  She shakes her head. “I can’t do it anymore. I can’t.”

  “It would be different now.” He leans toward her, his outstretched hands closer to her side of the table than his own. “No more babies. I don’t care about that. I never did.”

  Kat slams her hand down, her voice rising. “Don’t lie to me! You said you wanted a baby. Our baby. You said it over and over. I saw you with . . . with the little one that died . . .”