Betty hadn’t seen the girl for a couple of weeks. During the last visit, the girl had mentioned something about going to Washington state to visit with her grandparents, so Betty assumed that was where the girl was. Betty missed her and looked forward to the girl’s return. The help in the garden, the impromptu concerts, but most of all the conversations about Harry. Having the girl gone revealed to Betty just how accustomed she had become to the company. She had begun to crave it, and some days she found herself standing by the window, as though she were a maiden waiting for her beloved to appear galloping over the mountain.
She was in the kitchen sorting through a drawer of mismatched Tupperware when she heard the girl’s footsteps padding up the gravel path.
“Betttyyyy!” the girl’s voice rang out, bright and impatient as a nest of newborn starlings. Betty stood up a little too fast, leaving the drawer open, and hurried past Rosella’s daughter, who sat quietly on the couch reading a Judy Moody book in Spanish while her mother finished up her cleaning in the bathroom.
Betty threw the door open and groaned as the girl collided into her with the force of a bullet. She threw herself at Betty and circled her midsection with her tiny slender arms.
Betty laughed and stroked the girl’s head. “There she is!”
“Did you miss me?” the girl asked. “Did you wonder where I was? Did you think I got took by robbers?”
Betty’s eyes burned with emotion. She discreetly wiped the corners with her pinky.
“I did not think you were taken by robbers,” she said. “I would never think such a thing.”
She held the girl’s hand, and together they walked into the house.
“But robbers take kids like me all the time,” the girl insisted with a pout. “My daddy says never to talk to strangers ’cause they might really be a robber.”
“Your daddy is absolutely correct, and you should listen to him, but you told me that you were going to visit your grandparents. . . .”
Betty stopped talking as she took notice of the girl standing frozen in place. She was staring at Rosella’s daughter on the couch, squinting with an immediate and visceral dislike. She dropped Betty’s hand.
“Girls,” Betty began tentatively, “let me introduce . . .” But before she had the opportunity to say anything more, the girl ran out of the house, slamming the screen door behind her. Rosella’s daughter stared up at Betty with large, frightened eyes, sensing that she was somehow responsible for the girl’s sudden departure.
Betty emerged from the house just in time to witness the girl decapitating the last of her Dahlias. She hurled the deep-red oversized flowers in a pile and stomped on them with fury.
“Young lady!” Betty called out to her. “Just what do you think you are doing?”
The girl ignored her and kicked the pile with her small sandaled foot.
“You stop that right now!” Betty hobbled down the steps and made her way to where the girl stood glaring at Betty with her hands balled into little fists by her side.
“Are you going to tell Harry?” the girl asked. There was a glint in her eye that Betty had not seen before. “Are you?”
Betty’s breath became short, and she brought her hand up to her chest. She held it there, feeling the frenzied rhythm of her heart.
The girl’s eyelids lowered halfway as she stared up at Betty with a coldness that reminded Betty of a carved marble statue perched atop a grave.
“He’s dead,” the girl said.
It was cruel, and it was true, and Betty felt something inside of her break into tiny sharp pieces. She staggered backward in stunned silence.
“He’s dead and you just pretend that he’s here.”
When Betty finally found her voice, it was because she was screaming.
“Get out!”
She did not stop screaming even after the girl had fled for the refuge of her own home, in search of her mother’s arms.
Betty had no idea how she had ended up in the hospital. She woke to find a Hispanic male nurse checking her vital signs. When asked, he cheerfully explained that her housekeeper had heard screaming; when she ran outside to see what was happening, Rosella found Betty unconscious on the driveway.
Betty looked down and felt the thin hospital gown she was wearing. She lifted her head off the pillow and felt it throb.
“You lay back, girl. You ain’t going nowhere tonight.”
“Where are my clothes?” Betty asked.
“We got ’em, don’t you worry. You just rest your pretty head and I’ll let the doctor know you’re awake. Okay?”
Betty took a deep breath to temper the anger she could feel rising. She was seventy-three years old, with a lifetime of experience and wisdom and pain, and yet with each passing year, more and more people spoke to her as though she were a child. The indignity of being condescended to by people a third of her age made her want to howl with rage. “Just snub ’em, Betts,” Harry used to say to her with his smile. “We used to be that smart, remember?”
The nurse gathered up his supplies, and as he drew the curtain back, Betty was horrified to see a body lying in the bed adjacent to hers. The patient’s face was shriveled and gray and put Betty in mind of a trophy on a headhunter’s stick. If she hadn’t seen the chest moving up and down, Betty would have been sure the woman was dead. Turning her head away from the sight in revulsion, Betty stared up at the darkening sky visible through the tiny window.
“Your daughter says she be back after she go get something to eat,” the nurse said on his way out. “Okay now? You just rest.”
“My daughter?” Betty lifted her head again, but the man disappeared on his rounds, whistling. Surely he must have been mistaken. Betty hadn’t spoken to Mandy in years—she probably didn’t even have a recent number. When Betty tried to conjure up an image of her daughter, she could only recall her as a teenager, just before she and Harry decided to send her back east to boarding school. Her beautiful dark hair had been bleached so many times that it practically disintegrated if she ran a brush through it, which she rarely did. And her eyes were caked with so much makeup that Betty wondered how Mandy could even see through the curtain of mascara. She remembered all of the mascara running down Mandy’s face as she begged not to be sent away. That night Betty dreamed that her daughter had been killed in a plane crash, and they woke up to find that Mandy never made it to school—she ran away upon arriving at Logan Airport. She turned up at Harry’s mother’s in Maine, where she remained for the rest of her high school years. Her mother-in-law would send Harry pictures from time to time and they couldn’t help but notice how much better Mandy looked: her hair short and dark, her body lanky and strong. It was as if the old woman was taunting Betty with every image. “This is what you couldn’t do,” she seemed to be saying. Betty closed her eyes and tried to push away the regret. When she opened them again, it was Mandy’s face that stared down at her.
“Hi, Mom.”
Betty blinked at her, unsure if she was still dreaming. She tried to sit up and noticed for the first time that she was attached to an IV.
“Don’t sit up. Just rest.”
“I don’t understand,” Betty said. “How did you . . .”
“Your neighbor found an old number in your phone book,” Mandy said. “Luckily, I rented my old apartment to a . . . friend, and she called me.” Betty noticed the way her daughter hesitated when she said the word “friend,” understanding that she was more than a friend.
Mandy looked good. Better than she had years ago when Harry was sick. Her dark hair had a few gray strands running through it, but her face was more relaxed than Betty could remember ever seeing it. “I talked to the doctor and helped them sort out your insurance information,” she said.
“The doctor was supposed to come speak to me. Why didn’t he come speak to me?”
Mandy reached out and touched her on the arm. “He will, Mom. Don’t worry. You’re fine. You just took a fall, and they want to rule out seizures or stroke.”
>
She smiled at Betty as though to offer reassurance, but then her eyes filled with tears. Mandy rummaged in her bag until she found a tissue. “It seems that you were upset about something before you took the fall, or that’s what your housekeeper was trying to tell your neighbor,” Mandy said. “I didn’t get the full story, third-hand, you know.”
Betty shifted in the bed at the thought of the girl kicking the pile of Dahlias across the yard.
“Did something happen?” asked Mandy, leaning forward.
The girl’s face came into Betty’s mind as her expression changed from fury to fear when Betty screamed at her.
She shook her head. “I don’t remember.”
Mandy nodded and ran her hand through her hair. Betty noticed a thin gold band on her ring finger.
“You know, Mom, I’ve been meaning to call you. I dialed your number so many times. . . .”
She seemed to be waiting for Betty to say something. When Betty didn’t speak, Mandy continued, though her voice sounded as if it had lost some confidence.
“I know that it wasn’t so”—she took a deep breath, searching for the right word—“peaceful. When Daddy died.”
Betty closed her eyes to refrain from commenting on Mandy’s understatement.
“But I want you to know . . . that I’m happier now.” She looked at Betty and Betty saw Harry’s eyes looking back at her. She had never realized how much father and daughter resembled each other. Like Harry, Mandy’s irises were the color of polished maple, and with age she had acquired the same wrinkles finely etched around the sides. It gave her face a softer look, almost maternal.
“I’m pleased,” Betty said.
Mandy laughed a great big guttural laugh. “Well, I’m pleased you’re pleased, Mom. I really am.”
Betty heard the opening bars of the Goldberg Variations. Abruptly, Mandy reached for her enormous handbag. She withdrew a cell phone and answered. “Hi,” she said, with a secret smile on her face. “I’m at the hospital. Fine, fine.” She half turned away from Betty as she spoke to the person on the line, from her tone obviously an intimate acquaintance. Betty observed how her daughter kept her answers short (yes, yes, no) so that Betty would not be able to ascertain the content of the conversation. It was a strategy that she and Harry had often used when Mandy was in the room. That and speaking Latin (O pro poena ut subsisto).
When Mandy hung up the phone, she sat down on the chair beside the bed and looked at Betty. Then she laughed and threw her head back with a groan. It was an exasperated noise that expressed everything she was unable to articulate with words, a lifetime of the stifled conversation between mother and daughter.
“Stop it,” Betty said. “You’ll wake the dead,” she added, jerking her head toward the neighboring bed. She meant it to be funny, but the word “dead” spooked her. It was lurking everywhere now, behind every corner. In every conversation. In the evening news, every reunion with old friends—it seemed always that someone was dying. Soon, very soon, Betty knew, it would be her. If she were a religious woman, she would have been comforted by this fact. She would have suffered through any illness gladly, no matter how long and protracted—cancer, dementia, all of the insults of old age—if she could only do so with the assurances of being reunited with Harry. But she was not a believer, and as much as she longed for the comfort of an afterlife with Harry, where she would be joyfully reunited with her beloved, she knew that this was not, could not be so. The moment the light went out of Harry’s eyes, he was gone forever. The room went cold. And if she was to survive in this world, she would have to learn to live with that shift in temperature.
Betty drifted to sleep that night with Mandy seated silently beside her. In the morning, the hospital discharged Betty and she sat in the passenger seat of Mandy’s hybrid car while her daughter drove carefully, under the speed limit, minding all of the safety signals, as if to show her mother how she had grown up. Together, they tentatively began the long, arduous process of stitching together the remnants of what remained. Betty leaned her head against the seat and gazed at the familiarity of Harry’s face in her daughter’s profile.
She’s all that’s left of him, she thought. The blood of my own. The first little one.
Betty brought the cup of tea to her lips and realized that it had gone cold. Yet another example of the fractious and intractable properties of time and how it accelerates with age. She imagined the impatience of the girl in the rosemary bush and wondered if she was still there at all. A quick glance out the window answered her question. The girl was still there, only now she was seated cross-legged, peering up at the house with a look of stubborn hopefulness on her face.
In a few hours, Mandy would be picking her up to take her to the hospital for some bothersome follow-up tests, but for now Betty’s time belonged to her, to do with as she pleased. She put the kettle on again and walked to the sink, staring for a moment into the mystery of the drain. She could feel the heat of the sun coming through the window. Lifting Harry’s cup, she watched the trickle of liquid fall into its depth. She washed the cup carefully, dried it with a dishtowel, and placed it facedown back in the cupboard.
And then Betty walked to the door, opened it wide, and let the girl in.
MEA CULPA
PHILLIP HAD LOVED THREE WOMEN in his life and had betrayed every one of them. This was noted with interest by his new therapist, Gerald, a man he guessed to be maybe ten years his senior.
“So, Tammy was when you were in high school?” Gerald asked as he scribbled on a notepad without raising his eyes.
“Right,” Phillip said. “Junior and senior year.”
“Virgins?” Gerald held his pencil above the paper.
“I suppose technically, yes.”
Gerald looked up from his notebook.
“Yes, we were virgins,” Phillip said, waving his hand forward. His mind had flashed to the nineteen-year-old waitress who had taken him back into the pantry of his parents’ restaurant when he was fourteen and given him his first blowjob. It was a one-time thing that had occurred when the waitress, Crystal, was in between boyfriends. Not long afterward, she took up with a twenty-five-year-old unemployed mechanic—a “bum,” Phillip’s mom remarked. Phillip hung around the restaurant after school for months, pining and hoping for a repeat performance, but Crystal barely acknowledged his existence, except to offer him a bored smile now and again.
Around the holidays, his parents suspected her of using some kind of drug. “An upper,” his mom said, in place of the actual term—meth, speed, coke. “She acts just like I did when I was pregnant with your brother and you. You know, the doctors put all of us on diet pills, until they finally figured out it wasn’t good for us.” His mother laughed, lifting her blond hair off the back of her neck and fanning the nape before letting her hair down. “It’s a good thing you kids turned out so normal!”
After the new year, they suspected Crystal of fiddling with the register, which was more or less confirmed when she didn’t show up for work one day. She never returned, not even to pick up her paycheck.
“It’s that bum that got her hooked,” his mother insisted. “She never would have done anything like that before she hooked up with that good-for-nothing. She was a good girl.”
Phillip nodded, imagining what his mother would have thought if she knew what the good girl had done to her good boy in the pantry back in August. And how he would have given his entire comic book collection—a thousand comics individually wrapped in cellophane, lovingly alphabetized by title and needlessly color-coded by company (red for Marvel, blue for DC, and yellow for the independents)—for it to have happened even one more time.
Phillip was not a particularly developed fourteen-year-old. His voice wavered across the registers, his face had only just begun to sprout peach fuzz and acne in equal proportions, and no matter how much he let his hair grow out like the surfer burnouts at school, his blond hair never looked cool and bedraggled—it just seemed to get fuller and puffier.
His older brother, Tony, whose looks more closely resembled their father’s Mexican heritage than their mother’s Norwegian coloring, taunted Phillip, calling him “Little Lord Fauntleroy” or “The Little Prince.” When Phillip came after him, Tony always laughed and ducked out of the way, amused by the attempt. He was four years older than his brother and, at that age, at least a foot taller.
“At least no one calls me a beaner, beaner!” Phillip yelled after Tony, who cackled as he sprinted out back into the parking lot.
“Go wash your mouth out right now.” His mother had pointed to the restaurant bathroom with a long manicured finger. “And just be thankful your father wasn’t here to hear that.”
Phillip walked to the bathroom and turned on the water, locking the door behind him. It was doubtful his father would have cared had he even heard him. His father had little pride when it came to being a Mexican American. He changed the family name from Perez to Parris—correctly assuming that the name change would garner more respect or, at the very least, lessen the ire reserved for Hispanics and African Americans back then, before it was transferred to Middle Easterners. After his abuelita died, the Mexican restaurant that they inherited from Phillip’s grandparents changed its menu to continental cuisine, and Parris Restaurant became known in the area as that place that served Belgian waffles all day long.
“Where did you go?” Gerald asked.
Phillip snapped his head up and then looked over at the clock Gerald kept on his desk. They had fifteen minutes left; fifteen interminable minutes with which to examine how and with such messy imprecision Phillip had ruined his life. He leaned forward and held his head in his hands.
When It Happens to You Page 13
