by Laura Hankin
Their mother was standing at the food table, dishing potato salad onto a plate for her brother, Gwen’s uncle Steve. (Her mother never seemed to fill up her own plate at these sorts of gatherings. “Aren’t you hungry?” Gwen had asked her once, and Gwen’s mother had said, “Oh, no, darling! I’m saving my calories for special treats.” Gwen’s mother was full of knowledge on how to save calories. The first three bites of any sweet were the best, so there was no need to have anything more. You should chew each mouthful of a meal twenty-five times before allowing yourself to take another.) Uncle Steve had come to the Labor Day gathering with his arm around the waist of a new lady, not Gwen’s funny, loud aunt Jill, but a petite woman who stared at everyone with wide, scared eyes. Uncle Steve was a few beers in and correspondingly loose-lipped. “Jill had really let herself go,” he was saying to Gwen’s mother as she served him up some string beans. “You saw it happen. You understand.”
“Mmm,” Gwen’s mother said. “It’s a shame.”
(Years later, as Gwen watched Joanna’s deterioration over the course of her time in playgroup, the phrase “let herself go” kept ringing in her ears.)
“We hadn’t been intimate in so long—” Uncle Steve began as Gwen tugged at her mother’s sleeve, and Gwen’s mother startled.
“Oh, darlings!” she said. “What’s the matter?”
“We’re having some grown-up talk,” Uncle Steve said. “Run along now.”
Gwen’s mother pursed her lips, then smoothed Gwen’s hair. “Do you need me, or could you talk to Daddy instead?”
So Teddy and Gwen went to find their father. They knew exactly where he would be—at the bar.
Alcohol was her father’s most-cherished hobby. Her young, devoted mother was always an eager passenger on the drinking train for as long as she could manage to ride it—the “special treats” for which she saved her calories tended to be glasses of champagne—but her father was the engine that propelled it along. He was a solid man in his mid-forties who had played football in prep school, yet when he was crushing ice, shaving orange peels into delicate garnishes, and pouring out the perfect amount of whiskey into a glass, he became somehow lighter, almost a dancer.
While he had a sizable liquor cabinet in their town house in New York, the Connecticut house was where he truly indulged. He had hired men to block off a rectangular part of the basement and turn it into a wine cellar, complete with temperature control to keep the air cool. Beside the kitchen, in an area that had once been the breakfast nook, he had installed a wall of burnished, glass-fronted cabinets that held a collection of bottles. Gwen liked to put her nose to the glass, studying how the liquids changed in the shifting light, from sparkling gold to deep, deep brown. Near the cabinets, there was a freestanding mahogany bar, about four feet long, with little wells in it for ice buckets and the like.
Her father stood there in a light purple polo shirt, considering an empty glass, and the sight of him filled Gwen with the sort of relief that finally allowed her to burst into the tears she’d been biting back.
“Daddy,” she said, the words spilling out as Teddy stood beside her, his eyes also welling up like deep blue lakes. “Daddy, Peter was telling us about Aunt Alice, and . . . and . . . it can’t be true—it can’t, can it? That it happened like that, in the playroom?”
Her father’s lips tightened, and he shook his head. Then he put the glass down on the bar, knelt down, and opened his arms for them to run into. “I wouldn’t trust Peter,” he said into her hair, holding them tight. “He’s a little weasel.” He drew back and contorted his handsome face into a silly, rodentlike mask. Gwen managed a smile.
Teddy wiped his nose with his hand. “But what if she’s a ghost?” he said. “And she haunts the house and comes to suck out our souls?”
“I don’t happen to believe in ghosts,” their father said. “However, if Alice were a ghost, she would be a nice, fun one. She’d bring you cookies from the kitchen as a gift in the middle of the night and help you play pranks on your mother and me. All right?” He straightened up and looked at his two sniffling children. “So, no more tears, eh?”
“I’ll try,” Gwen whimpered as two more teardrops slid down Teddy’s cheek.
Her father glanced around the room to make sure they were alone. “Brave children,” he whispered, “can get a very special treat.”
Brother and sister looked at each other and swallowed their tears. “We’re brave,” Gwen said.
Their father appraised them and nodded. “So you are,” he said. “Now, don’t tell your mother.” He took two small glasses from a cabinet and filled them with ice cubes. Then he pulled a bottle of a clear liquid off the shelf. There was a drawing of a man all in red on the front of the bottle. Gwen thought he looked noble, like a character from one of the princess movies she liked so much.
“Guess what this man is called,” her father said, pointing at the picture.
“What?” she asked.
“A beefeater! Isn’t that funny?” He splashed the smallest amount of liquid into each glass, barely enough to cover their dimpled bases, and handed one to each child. Then he poured a heftier splash into his own glass and held it out. Teddy stayed back, but Gwen stepped up. “Cheers,” their father said, clinking with her. She took a sip, expecting the liquid to taste like water. The bitter bite of it made her recoil. Her father laughed at her body’s shudder, at her prune face. “Sourpuss!” he said. So she took another sip, masking her disgust, forcing the rest of it down. It made a fiery trail into her stomach. Little sparkles lit up her limbs.
“Hold on now. Leave some for the grown-ups,” her father said, and whisked the glass out of her reach. Encouraged by Gwen’s example, Teddy took a sip and gave a similar shudder. Gwen put her arm around him. (Once, she’d overheard her father, five drinks deep, tell her mother that Teddy reminded him of Alice. “No,” her mother had said. “No, it’s just a phase. He’ll grow out of it.” It wasn’t that Gwen tried to eavesdrop. She knew it was wrong, and she wanted to be a good girl. But at the Connecticut house, the grown-ups always got extra-chatty at a certain point in the night, and it was hard not to listen.)
“Our special secret, remember?” their father said, putting a finger to his lips and winking. His woodsy scent, his fresh-combed hair, that contagious smile—how she loved him, the P. T. Barnum of her childhood. Gwen was flying, and then she and Teddy went tumbling, chasing, out through the hallway and onto the lawn, where her grandparents and their guests sipped at fizzy drinks in the golden late-afternoon light, where nothing bad had ever happened or could ever happen. They sprinted past stupid weasel Peter, and Gwen knew Teddy wouldn’t punch him, so she did it herself, slamming her small fist against his cheekbone, watching his mouth open in surprise and pain, and then running on, faster, until she collided with an older man with a kindly, handsome face, one of her grandfather’s friends who picked her up when she fell backward on the grass (how green it smelled, how it prickled the backs of her legs).
“Are you all right, little lady?” he’d asked, and she’d nodded before running off again. Later, her grandfather had taken her by the shoulders, the veins standing up in his hands, and said, “That man used to be the president of the United States, Gwen girl. Go apologize like a nice little lady.”
Her whole childhood seemed to take place in that golden afternoon light, where everything felt safe and warm, where she never doubted for a moment that her mother and father loved her, where her mother made her elaborate breakfasts in the morning and taught her piano in the afternoons (never yelling, always encouraging) and read her L. M. Montgomery books before bed, where they all took trips to Istanbul and Paris, and sunned at Caribbean resorts, and her parents drank and laughed and drank some more.
And she wanted nothing more than to give her own children a golden childhood too, where she cooked breakfast and taught piano and read them Anne of Green Gables, where they could gather wi
th their grandparents on the lawn and know that they were loved.
Twenty years later, at the Connecticut house, her father poured himself a few drinks. (Was it three or four or five? She wanted to imagine him drinking each one, to sit with him in her mind, as if maybe she could pull his hand away and change things somehow.) She assumed her mother drank too, although perhaps not, given that she’d been trying to cut back her caloric intake even further, telling Gwen about a new fad diet each time they spoke on the phone. (Her obsession was sad. Gwen never wanted to be one of those women.) It was mid-January, a couple of days after a snowfall, and some of the back roads still hadn’t been entirely plowed. Gwen’s mother and father got into their car and headed toward a friend’s house. Gwen’s father always drove, just like he always managed the investments and always hired the handymen.
Five miles from their destination, the car hit a patch of black ice, spun out of control, and careened into a tree. Gwen’s father died on impact. Gwen’s mother died a couple of hours later in the hospital while Gwen was at a party, her phone on silent in her purse.
Could one really consider oneself an orphan at age twenty-six? Gwen didn’t think so, and yet she hurt as if some childhood innocence had been yanked away. Her mother would never help her plan her wedding. Her father would never walk her down the aisle. She was alone in the world except for Teddy, and Teddy was not doing well.
It turned out, when she went through the family’s finances with a lawyer, that they were less solid than she’d always thought, a result of some bad investments on her father’s part, a frittering away of resources that they’d all assumed were endless. She arranged to sell the Connecticut house. The ghost of Aunt Alice would have to bring midnight cookies to some other children, not Gwen’s.
A few months later, wounded, aching, she met Christopher at a wedding of a mutual friend. He laughed easily and danced with all the grandmothers. He reminded her of her father: that same charm, that same sweetness, that same lust for what the world had to offer. There was one difference, though—he didn’t drink. She didn’t realize at the time that he might have other vices. She only saw the golden life she could have with him. She reached out and took it.
Chapter 10
The great thing about having sex with strangers, Claire thought drunkenly as a guy she’d met earlier that night bent her over the cheap Ikea desk in her apartment, bills and junk mail falling to the floor around them, was that it was an excellent ego boost.
The bad thing about having sex with strangers, Claire thought the next day as she stared down at the toilet bowl in Whitney’s bathroom, where a clear deflated balloon floated in the yellow, was that you had to deal with the consequences all by yourself.
She flushed the toilet, holding the handle down an extra few seconds, and splashed water on her face, hoping to disguise the red in her eyes. What a dumb ass she was. She’d been ten minutes late today, because she was so hungover, and she’d had to get a random guy out of her apartment even though he seemed insistent on making her an omelet, as if knowing how to cook eggs made him a feminist hero. She had choked out some gravelly songs for the babies, hoping that none of the mothers had noticed the rattle in her voice, waiting for the moment she could head home and go back to sleep. And now this disaster. She hadn’t realized it had come off last night. She hated that something could live inside her body for twelve hours without her knowledge. She hated that more strange things were living inside her body still.
Amara was in the hallway waiting for the bathroom, using the moments of privacy to swipe at some game on her phone, when Claire came out of it.
“Sorry. Here,” Claire said, holding open the door, but her voice caught on the last word.
Amara looked up, her eyebrows furrowing. “What’s wrong?” she said.
“Nothing.” Claire shook her head.
“All right,” Amara said, stepping forward, one foot into the bathroom, before turning back around. “What’s wrong?”
“I peed out a condom,” Claire said automatically, all in one breath. She put her hand to her mouth, her eyes beginning to smart again. “Shit. Forget I said that. I was kidding. Everything’s fine.”
Amara stared at her for a moment, then nodded once briskly. “I’ll be down in the lobby in ten minutes. Wait for me.”
“What?” Claire asked.
“Perhaps I’m incorrect, but from every impression I’ve ever gotten from you, I assume you don’t want to be a mother right now.”
“Well, yeah—”
“So I’ll meet you in the lobby in ten minutes.”
“Really, I don’t need—”
“It’s nicer to have company for this sort of thing,” Amara said. She stepped farther into the bathroom and began to shut the door, catching it at the last second before it closed. She leaned her head against the doorframe. “Besides, Gwen and Whitney have started planning Reagan’s birthday party, and I’m bored out of my mind.”
* * *
—
So twenty minutes later, Claire walked through the rows of toothpaste and shampoo to the counter in the back of a CVS as a Katy Perry song pulsed through the air, Amara pushing her stroller beside her. The guy behind the counter was even younger than Claire (when did she get older than people with real responsibilities?), and briefly, she imagined the version of her life where she’d majored in something besides music and then straightaway slid behind a counter and into a world of benefits and nine-to-five schedules and stifling yawns behind a hand when she thought no one was around, like the pharmacist was currently doing.
“Hey,” she said, stepping forward, as Amara lingered by the rack of trashy romantic paperbacks, smirking at a cover of a shirtless man next to a motorcycle.
The pharmacist startled and hastened to close his jaw. “Sorry,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
“I need Plan B,” she said, staring straight at him. The only other time she’d needed it, after an ill-advised night celebrating her eighteenth birthday with a boy who could have convinced her to do anything short of murder (he had promised her he was going to pull out, and then he hadn’t), the two of them had driven two towns over so they wouldn’t be recognized. While he waited in the car, she had stared down at the counter at the pharmacy while she’d asked, and then when she’d looked back up, she’d seen the accusation Slut all over the pharmacist’s face, clear as if he’d tattooed it on. At least this guy’s bovine face remained placid. And, Claire thought, Amara had been right. It was nicer not to have to do it alone.
“Sure,” he said, and pushed himself off his seat to poke around in the back. He moved sloth slow. The Katy Perry song ended, and a new song began piping through the speakers. Claire’s lungs constricted. As Marlena’s yowling vocals began, Claire counted down very slowly from ten in her head, an incantation to bring cow-faced sloth-speed man back. Instead, Amara wheeled her stroller over to her side as an elderly man thumped his way down the aisle and got in line behind them.
“This is the song Ellie and Meredith love so much,” Amara said, pointing into the air. “The ‘Idaho Eyes’ one.”
“Oh,” Claire said. “Oh, okay.” Amara gave her a weird look as the pharmacist returned, walking in time to the beat of the music.
He plunked the box of Plan B down on the counter. “Do you want a bag?”
“Yeah,” Claire said.
The corners of his thick mouth drooped down in disapproval. “Are you sure? We’re encouraging our customers to be environmentally conscious.”
“The ozone is disappearing!” the old man behind them piped up.
“Give her a fucking bag, please,” Amara said.
The pharmacist and the old man exchanged glances and shook their heads as the pharmacist slid the package into a plastic bag and tapped at his register. As he tapped, he bobbed his head to the song, humming along with the chorus. If she could get out of here before the bridge starte
d, she’d be fine. “That’ll be forty-nine ninety-five,” he said.
“Do you know if insurance covers this at all?” Claire asked, trying not to look at Amara as the song’s second verse began. The members of the new-and-improved Vagabond were probably partying in thousand-dollar-a-night hotel suites nowadays, and she was haggling over the price of birth control.
“Hmm,” he said, screwing up his face in concentration. After a minute, he said, “I’m not sure. I could ask my boss.”
“Okay, yeah, that would be good,” Claire said.
“He’s not in today,” the pharmacist said. “And I’m not in tomorrow. Could you wait until the day after?”
“I— What? No,” she said. Well, too late—there was the bridge of the song, Marlena’s voice soaring on those familiar words. “That’s not how Plan B works.”
“Oh, really?” the pharmacist said.
“Good Lord,” Amara said. She pulled her credit card out of her wallet and plunked it down on the counter. “Here, just use this.”
* * *
—
Outside the pharmacy, they lingered in the afternoon’s gray light, Claire’s body turned in the direction of Central Park, Amara angled as if ready to head the other way.
“I’ll pay you back,” Claire said as Amara waved a hand dismissively. “Well, thanks. You really didn’t have to do . . . any of that.”
“I know,” said Amara. “But the other option was going back to my apartment and staring at Charlie for hours, so in a way, perhaps you did me a favor.”
“Then you’re welcome,” Claire said. A cold drizzle started up around them. Claire hugged her jacket closer. In the street, a taxi swerved in front of a car, setting off a symphony of honking. The pedestrians around them began to walk faster in anticipation of the drizzle becoming something worse while a man appeared from out of nowhere and set up on the corner, hawking ten-dollar umbrellas.
