by Juliette Fay
Alder was on the passenger side and leaned over to hug the driver, then sprang from the car, which started to roll before the door was completely shut. The driver leaned out her window and screamed, “CALL ME LATER!” Dana caught a fleeting glance: a girl with short, spiky black hair and rings of eyeliner that seemed to creep down to her cheekbones.
Alder cocked her head as she took in the sight of Dana’s puffy lip. “Tough day?” she said.
Dana was still processing the green station wagon and its loud, blackened occupant. “You have a new friend,” she said, hoping she sounded happy about this development.
“Maybe,” said Alder, and she started for the house.
When the kids were in bed, Dana pulled the dental-insurance binder from the desk in Kenneth’s office, a square little room on the first floor he’d claimed when they bought the house. On the wall by the desk, he had taped the children’s pictures and notes. “TO DADY,” one declared in uncertain crayon, “A BG LLYN.” Dana had written in pencil along the bottom, “a big lion.” It was drawn in slashes of orange, with red for the tongue, teeth, and eyes. Inexplicably, its tail was green. Under the Scotch tape at the four corners, the paper was several shades lighter.
“Dad, Your The Best!” gushed a pink-and-purple birthday card from Morgan. It was almost two years since she’d written it, the most recent addition to the wall. Now the collection served as a sort of two-dimensional time capsule from the days when his fathering was a daily occurrence.
Why didn’t he bring their pictures with him when he moved out? Dana wondered, saddened and a little annoyed. Should she take them down? If she did, would it be a harsh indicator of his removal from their lives? But if she didn’t, their arrested development would become more and more blatant. Which was worse?
Through the open door, she heard Alder say, “Connie.” The silence after that one brief utterance seemed to go on for minutes.
“Are you done?” Alder said, annoyed. More silence. Then, “Fine, just let me know when it’s my turn to talk . . . How you look? When have you ever cared how you look to other people? . . . It’s Dana, for godsake. She’s, like, the least judgmental person on the planet. She loves everybody.” The words seemed complimentary, but the tone was not. Dana frowned.
“I’m fine . . .” Alder went on. “Yeah, despite all that, life here is totally great . . . Well, you don’t—. . . You don’t—. . . Could you stop interrupting me for once? . . . Okay, I just called to say could you please have my car fixed? . . . Because it’s not her responsibility, and besides, she can’t afford it . . . Because I just know . . . You say I’m so intuitive, and you’re all proud of it until I pick up on something you don’t feel like knowing . . . No, it is true . . . Like the time you were dating that chiropractor guy? I told you he was a loser . . . Okay, whatever. Can you please get my car fixed? . . . I’m asking you nicely . . . Nice does too count for something . . . Forget it, then . . . Good night, Mother . . . No, I’m calling you that because you’re my actual mother . . . Good night.”
CHAPTER 12
BY FIVE O’CLOCK ON FRIDAY, MORGAN HAD HUNG streamers in the dining room, taken them down because they looked babyish, and put them back up because the room looked boring without them. She was thinking of removing them again because boring was better than babyish when Alder strode past. Morgan flagged her down with, “Did you have streamers at your twelfth birthday party?”
“Oh . . . um, no. Connie doesn’t do store-bought stuff. She thinks it’s unimaginative.”
“Well, what did you have, then?”
“She let me and my friends paint anything we wanted on the living-room wall. But she got kind of disgusted with all the rainbows and ‘Girls Rule,’ and she painted it over the next day.”
Morgan glanced at the streamers. “These look bad, don’t they?”
“They’re okay.” After a moment Alder said, “I like those china cups your mom has with the handles that curl up at the bottom. When we’d come here for holidays, she’d always use them.”
“You haven’t been here for a long time. Since Grandma died, I think.”
Alder’s eyes went unfocussed for a moment. “Yeah,” she said.
“Are you going to be around tonight?” Morgan asked hopefully as she yanked at the streamers.
“No, I’m hanging with a friend.”
“Does Mom know?”
“Yep,” said Alder. And then she was gone.
At 5:20 the doorbell rang. Morgan gave her already sparkly lips one more dab of gloss and ran for the door. Dana knew to stay put, straightening the napkins and adjusting the teacups.
“Hi!” Darby’s breathless voice sounded from the mudroom. “I came early!”
“I was hoping you would! ’Cause I’m, like—” A high-pitched squeal erupted from Morgan.
“I knew you wanted me to! Also, here!” There was a rustle of paper. “Do you love it? Isn’t it so sophisticated?”
“Totally! Here, do the thingy. I’m so excited my hands are shaking!”
The girls ran into the dining room, matching manic grins electrifying their faces. “Mom, look!” The necklace had a rhinestone-encrusted heart with a tiny pink bead in the middle.
“Isn’t that pretty,” said Dana, smiling more about the girls’ excitement than the necklace.
“It’s my first piece of real jewelry!” said Morgan. She turned to Darby. “Now I have to change my shirt—help me pick something.” The girls sprinted for the stairway.
Dana thought about her mother’s pearl pendant, which she’d given Morgan when she’d turned ten. That was real jewelry. This sparkly heart would be broken, lost, or considered boring in six months. But she was happy for Morgan’s excitement, however impermanent it might be.
The party was a success, at least as far as the guests knew. They arrived emitting squeals of social bliss, which subsided and erupted throughout the evening—when the pizza arrived, drinking Sprite from Dana’s heirloom teacups, and when Tracey laughed so hard the Sprite came out her nose. They went to Morgan’s bedroom, where they gave one another new hairdos and plastered themselves with strawberry-kiwi-smelling glitter. Two came down for another bowl of popcorn, then scurried back up to the inner sanctum of girlitude. No one traveled alone.
Dana was on her way to ask if they were ready for the cake when she heard two girls whispering to each other on the second-floor landing.
“Can you believe Kimmi came?”
“She didn’t commit till the last day of the RSVP.”
“Do you think she felt . . . you know—what’s the word—sorry for Morgan?”
“Because her parents split up? No, that was, like, months ago.”
“Why would she come, then? There aren’t even any boys here.”
“No clue.”
“Maybe she thinks Morgan’s, like . . .”
“Even though she gets all awkward sometimes.”
The tinny thumping of a ringtone sounded, and one of the girls giggled and said, “It’s Jason. Should I text him back?”
“Tell him we’re too busy partying to talk.”
Dana heard the door to Morgan’s room open and voices wafting out in ribbons of sound: “No way!” and “Eww!” and “I SAW it!” Then the door closed again. Dana didn’t go up. They’d let her know when they wanted cake.
And they did, swarming down the stairs, a glittered, made-up flock of motion and drama. They were starving, they said, though several girls ate only a bite. Morgan had a lick or two of the bright pink frosting and pronounced herself stuffed. It was dark by then, and they decided to play manhunt in the woods behind the house, rising like startled birds from the table, swooping toward the mudroom, and grabbing their fleece North Face jackets and Ugg boots.
Grady gaped at them as they buzzed by on their way into the cool, dark yard. “They’re playing manhunt like that?” he asked Dana. “Everybody can see that sparkle junk a mile away.”
Dana was about to return some washed teacups to the safety of the chi
na closet in the dining room. From the shadow of the hallway, she saw Morgan and stopped short, stunned. Morgan was systematically eating all the leftover cake from the other girls’ plates. She barely chewed but seemed to swallow each sugary lump whole. It was the practiced economy that shocked Dana most of all, each movement like a surgical strike on unsuspecting prey.
Morgan gathered the plates and strode toward the doorway. When she caught sight of her mother, she flicked a finger to the corner of her mouth, pushing a crumb between her lips. “I was just cleaning up,” she said, and put the pile of plates on the kitchen counter. Before Dana could respond, Morgan zipped her jacket and headed back outside.
The party went on. No longer satisfied with racing through the darkened corners of the yard, the girls went to the basement. Morgan ejected Grady, and they took turns playing a video dance game, howling with hilarity at one another’s gyrations. Grady stomped upstairs, declared his sister a buttface, and Dana let him watch TV in Alder’s room.
Dana sat down at the kitchen table. At last she had a moment to think. It wasn’t so much thoughts, but images that came to her. Morgan pretending to be full in front of her friends, then bringing forkful after forkful to her mouth, expressionless. Expressionless! She had seemed so happy with the party. What would make her do that?
I know my own daughter, Dana told herself. This thought hovered around until it seemed like a taunt, as if someone were in her head mimicking her with her own words.
The front door opened and shut. Dana looked up at the clock, thankful it was only eight. She hadn’t set a curfew for Alder, because she had no idea what a reasonable time was these days. Besides, Alder had always seemed so mature, needing such constraints as much as she might need a bib or a pacifier.
As Alder moved across the kitchen, Dana noticed a difference in her gait. Her joints seemed less tightly hinged. “Hey . . .” She grinned at Dana. “We’re so . . . we’re just so . . . hungry!” Her eyes alighted on the remaining birthday cake “Can I have it?” she asked.
“Of course,” said Dana, rising. “I’ll cut you a piece.”
“That’s okay.” She picked up the cake plate and started for the mudroom. “I’ll be home . . . I don’t know . . . later. But not too, too late, okay, Dana?” The word “Dana” came out slowly, as if hyphenated. “Bye,” she added, and the door slammed behind her.
Oh my God, what do I do? Dana thought, but the avocado station wagon was gone before she could organize her thoughts and act. I’m not ready to parent a teenager . . . Maybe Kenneth was right. She considered calling her sister but knew that Connie would be disgusted with her—for taking it either too seriously or not seriously enough. Dana could imagine her saying, Kids get high, don’t freak out, as easily as How could you let her leave the house!
It wasn’t that Dana had never seen anyone high before. At the University of Connecticut, she had tried marijuana while dating a boy named Billy who never went a day without it. He once demonstrated at a party how taking a bong hit while standing on your head gave you the most massive head rush. Dana smoked only the very thin joints he rolled especially for her. He called them “dolly doobies,” and he loved the way her face scrunched up when she tried to inhale.
Billy wasn’t remotely her type. But he’d pursued her with a determination she found compelling in someone who seemed so completely lacking in any other form of ambition. He was cute and popular and intelligent in a wasteful sort of way. And people’s reactions to seeing them together gave her private shudders of delight. She hoped it made them consider there might be more to her than a nice smile and an A-minus average.
Eventually they broke up, because their relationship never normalized. Dana wanted to understand him but never quite did. Meanwhile, every time she smoked a “dolly doobie,” she became certain that people were conspiring to steal her carefully written class notes. Without them she was sure she would flunk out, become unemployable, and have to clip free trial coupons in order to eat. “Keep your hands off my notebooks,” she would tell Billy and his friends in a haze of smoke, as they laughed at her in convulsive gasps, “and clip your own coupons.”
In retrospect her foray into the world of pot smoking had been silly and harmless. But now, with her beloved niece wandering around high in the darkened town of Cotters Rock, the possibilities for disaster seemed countless. Dana dialed the phone.
“Is it over yet?” Polly wanted to know. “Did you survive?”
“Survive?” asked Dana.
“Isn’t Morgan’s party tonight?”
“Oh, right. But listen, I need your advice on something.” Dana barely knew where to begin. “Do . . . did . . . have you ever had to deal with kids smoking pot? Not your kids, of course, necessarily . . . but, you know, maybe their friends?”
“Are those girls smoking pot at Morgan’s party?” Polly was immediately furious on Dana’s behalf. “Because you’d better call up all those parents right this minute and—”
“Not Morgan’s friends. But I think Alder might have been . . . possibly a little bit . . . high. She came in a few minutes ago and left again so quickly I didn’t react fast enough. She’s not even mine, Polly, and I have no idea what to do.”
“All right, first you call her and tell her to get her little butt home.”
“I don’t know where she is,” Dana was embarrassed to admit. “And she doesn’t have a cell phone.”
“She’s sixteen and she doesn’t have a cell phone? What is she—Amish?”
“I should have gotten her one,” Dana chastised herself. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Stop that! You’re nice enough to take the kid in, and if she comes without accessories, well, that’s your sister’s department.”
“I don’t even know her friend’s name! How could I be so irresponsible?”
“Do you want me to come over?”
It was tempting. Polly’s signature certainty was such a comfort it was almost as good as home fries. But Dana knew it could also be a liability. “Oh, Polly, that’s so nice of you—but I think maybe I should give this one a try myself and see how it goes.”
As the call ended, the doorbell rang, and Dana hurried toward the mudroom, knowing that Alder would never ring the bell but hoping all the same it was her. When she opened the door, a woman stood on the porch. She had shoulder-length auburn hair that fell away from her face in such a casually perfect way it reminded Dana of a magazine ad. She wore a tight-fitting blue-striped T-shirt above her low-rise jeans. Morgan had the same shirt in purple.
“Nora Kinnear,” said the woman, glancing into the mudroom. “I’m here to pick up Kimmi?”
“Oh, yes, come right in! Nice to meet you. I’m Dana, Morgan’s mom.”
Nora Kinnear followed her into the house but lingered in the mudroom strewn with fleece jackets and muddy boots. “I’ll wait here for her,” she murmured.
The scuff marks on the mudroom walls from lacrosse sticks, art projects, and flying shoes seemed suddenly very noticeable to Dana, and she had a momentary notion that she should have had it repainted before the party. “I’ll just run and get her,” she said.
The girls trooped up the stairs, escorting Kimmi to the door. She had caramel blond hair that seemed to glint even indoors and a sprinkling of freckles across her nose that maximized her cuteness without looking overly ethnic. “This was so, so fun!” she said to Morgan. “Thanks for inviting me. I hope you have the best birthday ever.” And she laid her long, thin arms—younger copies of her mother’s, Dana realized—around Morgan’s neck for a brief, airy embrace.
Morgan said nothing for a moment, her eyes wide. Then she cooed, “Thanks for coming. See you at lunch Monday?”
In quick succession the other girls were picked up, and then Dana and Morgan were alone in the mudroom. Morgan slumped against her mother.
“Was it fun?” asked Dana, cupping a hand around her daughter’s flushed cheek. I know you, she said silently. I know my daughter.
“It
was a total blast. And Kimmi was really, like, next to me the whole night—it was almost weird! Like when we played manhunt, she hid with me and sat in my lap! I think Darby’s mad.”
“She’s probably worried she’ll get left out. Make sure you’re extra nice to her at school.”
Dana’s hand remained on Morgan’s cheek, stroking it with her thumb. Something needed to be said, but Dana had no idea of how to begin. I saw you stuffing your face with other people’s leftovers, and I just wanted to know . . . What exactly? What was the key question?
Morgan heaved a dramatic sigh and smiled wanly.
“Time for bed,” said Dana, hating herself for the relief she felt. She would talk to Morgan tomorrow, she vowed, when they were both more alert.
It was eleven o’clock when Alder came in with the empty cake plate and handed it to Dana, faint stripes of pink frosting running across the ceramic finish. It appeared to have been licked. “Sorry,” she said, her eyes clear and focused.
Dana released a breath she’d held captive all night. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I don’t usually do that.” Alder got a glass, filled it with water, and drank the whole thing down. She filled the glass again and turned to lean her back against the counter.
“I was so worried about you, honey.” Dana struggled to keep her voice from breaking.
“I know. It was bad, and I knew that, but I just couldn’t sort of... control it. If you need to punish me or anything, go for it.”
“I don’t want to punish you, Alder. I want you to be safe and healthy!”
Alder’s chin dropped down to her chest. “Really, really sorry,” she whispered.
“Okay.” Dana sighed. “All right.” Perhaps there was more to say, something else she should do, but if there was, she couldn’t think what. “Just please don’t do it again.”
