It’s Not What It Looks Like
I wake up next to Seth with an almighty crick in my body. When I look over at him, I suppress a laugh. He’s fallen asleep with the book he was reading across the bridge of his nose, his book light still on. I guess it’s a measure of how tired we both were that we slept despite the cramped quarters and illumination.
I lift the book from Seth’s face as gently as I can and leave his room, letting him sleep in, sleep yesterday off, if that’s possible.
Beth’s already up and downstairs, sitting at the kitchen table, working away on her laptop. Amazingly, there doesn’t seem to be anyone else here, only their detritus, which I’m sure my mother will be here to start cleaning up as soon as she gets my father out the door.
“There’s coffee,” Beth says, not looking up.
I put the book down on the table and help myself to a large cup, keeping it black, though I generally don’t drink it that way. Yesterday feels like it’s clinging to my brain, and Beth’s black tar might scrub it away.
“You don’t have to stay,” I say to Beth, “if you should be getting back.”
“Ha!”
“What?”
She grins at me. “You don’t really mean that. At least … I hope you don’t.”
“I don’t, but I’d understand if you have to. If you’re needed elsewhere.”
“I can’t think of anywhere else where I’m needed more than here.”
“Are you trying to make me cry?”
“Little bit.”
I reach for a Kleenex. “That’s not really a challenge these days, you know.”
“How about making you laugh?”
“That might be harder.”
“I’ll work on that.” She picks up the book from the table. “What’s this?”
“What? Oh, it’s the book Seth got that poem he read from. Jeff had it.”
Beth starts flipping through it and I read the title again. Just This Side of Childhood by Zoey Underhill. Why did Jeff have this book? Underhill, Underhill …
“Who’s Tish?” Beth asks.
“She’s … she worked with Jeff. She was here yesterday.”
“Why would she give him this? Were they good friends?”
“I don’t … I don’t think so. She gave it to him?”
Beth holds the inside cover of the book open to me. Written on it, under a date from three weeks ago, are the words To Jeff, I’m a proud mama! Tish.
“This must be her daughter’s book.”
“Okay.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Forget it.”
“Beth.”
“Don’t you think it’s … weird that she’d give it to him?”
“They worked together. Maybe she gave them to a bunch of people?”
She stays silent.
“You don’t think—”
She shakes her head. “No. I really don’t. I’m sure it’s fine.” “But that might explain a few things. Like how distracted he’s been. And I found her crying outside—”
“No,” she says firmly. “Don’t go there.”
“Why? Rick did it. Why not Jeff?”
“Yeah, my asshole ex-husband cheated on me, but it was only a one-time thing. It’s not like he was leaving me for her or anything. He only told me because he wanted forgiveness.”
“As if.”
“I know, right? Only …”
“What?”
“When he’d moved out and I’d calmed down, I missed him. And I got to thinking that I wished I didn’t know about it. If he could’ve kept it to himself, then we’d probably still be together.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because sometimes it’s better to leave well enough alone.”
“You really think that?”
“Yeah, I do.” She rises, taking her dishes to the sink. “I guess I should get started on this mess.”
“You don’t have to. I’m sure Mom …”
“I asked Mom and Dad to cool their heels for the day. For the weekend actually.”
“And they agreed?”
“Yup. I think there’s some big golf tournament on or something.”
“The Masters.”
“The whatsit?”
“The Masters? One of the four majors …”
She smiles. “Jeff knowledge?”
“Yeah. I bet he’s pissed as hell that he’s missing it.”
“You mean, up in heaven.”
“Ha, ha.”
She hugs me quickly. “I’m only poking fun. Besides, if there really is a heaven, I’m sure they have cable.”
Amazingly enough, my parents keep their word (or the golf is so riveting they’re sufficiently distracted; either scenario is just as likely), and it’s only the three of us for the weekend. Even Tim seems to have fallen off the face of the earth, but since that’s hardly new, I don’t remark on it.
Monday rolls around as Mondays always do, and it’s back to work for real now. Not that I couldn’t take more time off if I needed to, but Playthings made me feel more like myself the other day. It always has.
I get there in time for morning drop-off, marvelling, as always, at the long line of SUVs waiting to disgorge the tiniest of cargoes. Our parents had a Ford LTD growing up, and the back seat was just big enough for Beth and me to have to lean slightly to land a really good blow on the other during the cross-country family vacations my parents insisted on taking. If ever there were two people (or four, for that matter) who didn’t need to be cooped up in a four-door sedan, we were those people. But my parents have never been the most self-aware of couples.
Outside my office, Mandy Holden’s got LT firmly by the hand, the sweater of her pale blue twin-set knotted over her shoulders.
“Oh, Claire, hello. Great to see you.” She says this like the last time she saw me wasn’t at my husband’s wake.
“You too, Mandy. What can I do for you?”
She holds her finger to her lips, then points down at LT, who, as far as I can tell, is plotting how to get the fruit roll-up out of Sara Kindle’s little paw and couldn’t care less about whatever it is his mother wants to keep quiet.
But I nod and motion for her to enter my office, our pantomime confirming that she’ll come see me when she’s done depositing LT in the toddler room and giving whatever today’s instructions are to the way-too-patient staff.
The message light on my phone is still blinking away like it was last week. I can’t believe it still has the energy. I dial into my voicemail and skip through the messages. All sympathy, all the time. It occurs to me after I erase the tenth one that I should be keeping a list for the thank-you cards my mother’s going to start bugging me about writing any day now, but I can’t be bothered. Instead, I hit the buttons to erase them all; if someone wants to say something other than how sorry they are, they’ll call back.
Mandy enters my office as I hang up the phone.
“So, um, sorry, again, for your loss.”
“Thank you. What’s up?”
“We haven’t found a way to tell him yet, but it’s important that the staff know, and you’ll probably have to implement some new food guidelines—”
“What are you talking about?”
“LT’s gluten sensitivity, of course.”
“LT has celiac disease?”
“Of course not! It’s only a sensitivity. I told you on Friday.”
She sounds genuinely annoyed that I don’t remember this. As if something she told me after I put my husband in the ground should be top of mind, or in my mind at all.
“Right. Of course.”
“So you’ll make the changes?”
“No.”
“We’re talking about LT’s health here, Claire.”
“We went over this when you found out LT was allergic to pollen. We can’t implement a whole set of rules because of one child’s sensitivity. Not unless it’s life-threatening.”
“But—”
“LT’s no
t the only child who isn’t eating gluten. I’ll let the caregivers know and we’ll make sure he only eats what you provide him with, but that’s as far as we can go.”
She holds her enormous purse to her chest. “But on Friday you said—”
“You’re not seriously trying to hold her to something she said on Friday, are you?” Tim says from the doorway.
Mandy looks startled, then smiles brightly at Tim. “Well, I … No, I guess, I understand.” She turns back to me. “But, Claire, I want to continue to dialogue about this.”
“Why don’t we see how it goes this week and we’ll take it from there, all right?”
“Sounds reasonable to me,” Tim says.
“Oh, well, yes …” Mandy stands and I can see the blush creeping up her cheeks. Tim is throwing her off her game, but not completely. “And who are you?”
“I’m Jeff’s brother, Tim.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“It’s all right.”
“Pleased to meet you.”
She holds out her tanned hand, diamonds flashing. Tim takes it briefly, and I swear she’s batting her eyelashes at him. Maybe those rumours of LT’s father sleeping on the couch are true.
“You have a minute, Claire?” Tim asks.
“I’m sure she does. I’ll be running along. Ta.”
Tim watches her leave, shaking his head. When she’s maybe out of earshot he says, “‘Ta’? Does she think she’s a queen?”
“In the furthest reaches of her mind? Probably.”
“What did she ask you to do when she found out her kid was allergic to pollen?”
“Cancel all field trips. Have the windows sealed. Have special HEPA filters installed in the ventilation system.”
“Why not just put him in a bubble?”
“I thought about suggesting that, but I think it would’ve been too much trouble for her. I mean, if someone came to the house, and LT wasn’t in the bubble, or there wasn’t even a bubble, people might talk.”
“She’s a piece of work.”
“She is. How come you’re here?”
He frowns. “I hadn’t seen you for a couple of days, and I thought … I wanted to see how this place turned out in the end.”
I wave my hand around. “Here it is, in all its glory. What do you think?”
He does a full 360, taking in the primary colours, the handprints on the wall from every class I’ve had since I started the place, the massive jar of pennies the kids are collecting to buy books to send to kids in Africa, then back to me.
“I like it very much,” he says. “Very much indeed.”
When I thought of the idea of Playthings, I clung to it like a piece of driftwood that crosses the path of someone lost at sea, just about to give up. And then, because more pieces floated by, I started constructing the pieces into a raft that would take me back to myself, home.
It didn’t really surprise me that Jeff was skeptical about it. I was skeptical myself. Was I really ready to give up something I’d worked towards for years? Do something that was going to disappoint so many people, my father in particular? Losing the baby had nothing to do with my job. Why was my brain connecting the two and making it impossible to disentangle them?
But six months of haunting playgrounds and feigning normalcy hadn’t given me any answers. My brain was playing tricks on me, sucking me inwards, away from my life, my family, myself. I might’ve clung on to anything that floated by. If I’d been hanging out in a coffee shop instead of a playground, I might be the proud owner of a Starbucks knock-off right now.
All I knew is that I could see land for the first time in months, and if the wind didn’t change, I’d be ashore soon.
So I threw myself into the project. What it would’ve been prudent to take six months to do, I did in one. I scouted locations, researched licensing requirements, started seeking out disgruntled staff at other daycares to steal them away when the time was right. I even fomented dissent among parents I knew about their current daycares. Did they have a sign-in system? No? Really? Oh well, I’m sure it’s fine …
There was a sense of unreality about the whole thing. I might’ve been on the raft, paddling in the right direction, but I didn’t expect it to last. Like a fat person who’d gotten thin, I couldn’t see the real me in the mirror yet. And also, Jeff wasn’t on the raft with me. I wanted him to be, he wanted to be, but I didn’t know how to make any room, and he didn’t know how to climb onboard.
The reappearance of Tim made it more complicated. Things were so tense between him and Jeff and me. As far as I knew, they hadn’t talked since the wedding. And it had never really been normal between Tim and me since we broke up and he left.
Our breakup had been sudden. Or maybe that’s not right. Maybe the truth is that the seeds of it had been there the whole time, but we were concentrating on the bright blooming things and not the choking weeds that were getting bigger by the day. But I’d promised my father I was going home, and Tim wanted nothing to do with it. So when he proposed Australia or Phuket or anywhere but Springfield, we’d finally said the things out loud that we thought we’d said before, but never had.
“I always told you I was going home,” I said.
“And I always told you I wasn’t.”
“But I thought—”
“I thought it too, but I guess neither of us is going to compromise, are we?”
There were other words. Angry ones. A few desperate weeks where we argued, and were silent, and had frantic sex where I’d cry afterwards, trying to muffle my tears with my pillow while Tim pretended to sleep. Neither of us would bend. Each of us expected the other to.
In the end, that’s really all it came down to. And if we regretted it after, neither of us was willing to be the first to say so. Maybe it was for the best. No, it was. It was.
Tim seemed to be making an effort this time. He spent a lot of time with his parents. He took an interest in Seth, filling in when Jeff and I were absent. He made overtures to Jeff. They shared a beer, went on a night out with the boys, played a round of golf. And he kept his distance from me. He acted like a polite, distant brother-in-law who barely knew me. Which was, on many levels, the truth.
Then I found the perfect place. This place where I am now, where the children are laughing in the other room, where despite the Mandys of the world I was able to paddle my raft to shore, get back home and almost forget what it was like to be at sea.
After all the papers were signed and I got the keys from the realtor, I left a quick note for Jeff on the kitchen table telling him where I was and made a beeline for this building. It had been a gymnasium before and the previous tenants had left lots of useful equipment behind. An enclosed space full of balls for the kids to jump around in, bright colours on the walls, those mats we used in high school for sit-up drills, which would be perfect for the kids’ naps.
I walked into what I already knew would be the toddler room, pulled a couple of the mats to the middle of the floor, and sat lotus-style, letting the room tell me what it wanted to be, letting it become my home away from home. It was pelting rain outside, the drops making a soothing hum as they plinked against the metal roof.
“Are you meditating?”
“Jeff, you came!” I opened my eyes. “Tim. Sorry—”
“I sound like him?”
“You do.”
He motioned to the floor. His hair was wet from the rain and he carried a sodden jacket over his arm. “There room enough for two on there?”
“I guess.”
He draped his jacket over a tiny plastic chair and sat next to me. He tried to emulate my position but stopped halfway, grimacing.
“Not as flexible as I once was.”
“No way you could ever do that.”
“You don’t know, maybe I could.”
I shook my head. “How’d you know I was here?”
“Saw your note for Jeff. Thought I’d take a spin by. See what all the fuss was about.”
“What
do you think?”
He looked around him. Not a cursory look, but really taking the place in.
“You going to have two kids’ rooms?”
“Yes, exactly … how did you know that?”
“Makes sense.”
“Right.”
“The place is awesome, Claire. I’m really proud of you.” I don’t know what it was, his tone, the word proud, but in an instant I was crying. Crying like I hadn’t in a long time.
“Claire? Are you all right? Claire?”
I couldn’t speak, could only shake my head. Tim’s arm went around me and he held me to his chest. He smelled like he always smelled, like a boy at bath time after he’d been playing in the rain. His other arm went around me and I gave in to his embrace, burying my face in his chest, soaking his shirt.
I don’t know how long we stayed like that, but at some point the tears dried up, as they always do, as they have to.
Tim kept holding me, though, stroking my hair, making small comforting noises like I did when Seth needed them after a skinned knee, a toy taken away, a bad childhood day. And then, I don’t know why, or how, or why, but then I was looking up at him and he was looking down at me, and his lips brushed mine, once, quickly, and then again, for longer. And though my brain was screaming that I should pull away, that I had to stop this now, immediately, I didn’t.
The clang of the front door did it for me. We sprang apart and I bolted to my feet, knowing, somehow, that it was Jeff, that he had seen, oh God, that he had seen.
I rushed to the front door. It was still rattling on its hinges, but when I got it open and made it outside, all I found was the driving rain and the certainty that I was too late.
CHAPTER 23
Let’s Pretend You’re at the Beginning of Your Career
Zoey comes around before the ambulance gets to our house, but two fainting spells in two days is enough to worry the most sanguine of mothers, which I am not, and send Brian into a worst-case-scenario level of hypochondria that I haven’t seen in him since I was pregnant.
We spend the weekend ferrying Zoey back and forth to the hospital, where she’s put through a battery of tests. She has a headache that won’t go away, and her vision’s a bit blurry she says, but each test tells us nothing, only scratches one more archaic possibility off the list, like on an episode of House. And maybe it’s the influence of television, but I keep expecting Zoey to get worse, for more symptoms to appear. Instead, all she does is submit to each blood sample, body scan, and pupil-dilating exam with an uncharacteristic silence, and no answers emerge.
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