Deep Down True

by Juliette Fay

  Connie stared at Dana momentarily, and there was anger at not being chosen and a sort of pleading to keep on top of things. “Don’t rehydrate,” she muttered as she rose. She took Jet by the arm and led her toward the living room. Dana was fairly certain they would listen in and just as certain that Alder didn’t care. She took a seat by her niece.

  The girl looked at her former best friend. “How did you even know where I was?”

  “Your, uh . . . your mom gave me the number. And when you weren’t home, I figured maybe you were still . . . You talk about your aunt sometimes, and I remembered her name, and—”

  “You Googled my aunt?” Her lip curled in disgust. “All right, whatever you came for, just get it over with.”

  He took a breath and held it, as if he were about to leap from a high dive into a kiddie pool right there in the dining room. “First off, I am totally and maximally sorry.” The air came out of him then, his apology staggering him just a little. “Everywhere I go,” he continued miserably, “I, like, reek of regret.”

  Dana glanced at Alder. The stress around her eyes had lessened, and her jaw had unclenched. “Why,” she said.

  “I know, right?” he concurred. “Why would I screw things up so badly with the one person . . . Christ, Alder, I barely even get it myself.”

  She looked away, eyes half lidded in dissatisfaction.

  “Wait,” he said, anxiously. “I think it’s . . . I couldn’t get, like, normal after that. It was so . . . much. . . . All these feelings that totally freaked me out. I almost didn’t want to go to college anymore! I just wanted to stay and be with you every second and be, like, married or something. I’m eighteen years old, for chrissake—I’m not ready for that. Developmentally, I’m an idiot!”

  There was a subtle snort of air from Alder, an agreement, a softening.

  “Also,” he ventured warily, “you know me so well . . . It’s, like, too well.”

  Her eyes narrowed.

  “It kinda spooked me out sometimes, like you could almost read my mind—and believe me, most guys do not want girls to know what they’re thinking.” He stopped for a moment, his eyes softening with remorse. “I knew I owed you an explanation for leaving without . . . But I just kind of figured ... you knew.”

  “Well, I didn’t know!” Alder flew forward in her seat, pointing at him. “I don’t read your mind like a freaking comic book, like all I have to do is flip the page to know you’re going to screw me and take off!” Hot tears sprouted from her eyelids. “I trusted you more than anyone, and you used me for sex! I thought you were good, but I was wrong, wasn’t I? You’re just a user! ”

  A groan came out of him, and the muscles around his spine seemed to disengage. Dana wondered if he might collapse. “Alder,” he said, “if there’s one thing in my life I wish I could take back, it’s that.”

  Alder closed her eyes and turned her head, tears flowing freely down her face. Dana took her hand. It was loose and weak in her own.

  “I miss you so much,” Ethan murmured. “College sucks. There’s no you. I thought that would be a good thing—like, it’d be a relief to be anonymous. And it was. For about a week.” He slumped against the doorway. “But then I got so lonely. I kept waiting for it to pass, like a sinus headache or something.” He gave a listless shrug. “Got a little better after I made some friends. But, Christ, I forgot how much talking you have to do. So much explaining about who you are and what you’re into.

  “It used to make me nervous how well you got me—but I never realized how exhausting it is to have to tell people stuff! To have to say out loud that you hate ham and have everybody comment. Like, they agree and they have to tell you what nasty thing they think it tastes like, or they disagree and have to make some lame joke about it. Who fucking cares! It’s all this tidal wave of stupid words, and I just keep thinking, ‘Alder doesn’t talk like this. She just paints, and we hang out, and it’s all good.’ It’s all so good, it, like, hurts.”

  Alder was crying silently, shoulders shaking. Dana pressed a dinner napkin into her free hand, and she used it to wipe her chin.

  “I just wanted to tell you . . .” Ethan sounded so weary that he might actually lie down on the shiny oak boards of the dining-room floor and slip into unconsciousness. “I just want you to know that I know what I did. I know how much it hurt you. And I’m so sorry.”

  After a moment Alder’s shoulders went still, and she inhaled a sniffle, pressing the napkin against her eyes to dam her tears. “Okay,” she breathed.

  Ethan revived a little. “Yeah?” he said, only half believing.

  Alder shrugged. She gave Dana’s hand a squeeze, released it, and stood up. She walked toward Ethan and motioned him into the hallway, following him out. The front door opened and shut. Dana went to the kitchen window to watch, deputized as she was to monitor the situation. They stood there talking for five minutes or so, each with their arms crossed tightly over their chests to keep out the cold, eyes cast down mostly, but blinking up at each other from time to time. They never touched. Then Ethan walked down the driveway and drove off.

  CHAPTER 42

  “YOU WERE GREAT THIS AFTERNOON, CONNIE,” Dana said as they settled into bed that night.

  “What’s your point?” Connie rolled over, yanking blankets and sheets with her as she went.

  “You let Alder talk about Ethan when she was ready—it was just what she needed.” Dana tugged back a few inches of covers and sighed. “Before I had kids, I never realized how much self-restraint it takes to be a mother.”

  Connie punched her pillow once or twice and burrowed down like a bear getting ready to hibernate. Her breathing slowed, and Dana thought she might have fallen asleep, but then she said, “Why’d you call Dad ‘absent’?”

  “What are you talking about?” Dana grumbled, hoping to sound sleepy.

  “This morning when I asked you if you’d ever had nightmares about Dad, you called him an ‘absent father.’”

  “Well, he is. I don’t see him around, do you?”

  “Don’t get touchy.”

  “I’m not touchy, I’m tired. It’s been a long day, and I don’t need to dredge up ancient issues when I’ve got plenty of current ones to deal with.”

  Connie was quiet. After a moment she said, “You know Dad’s dead, right? Tell me you’re not still cutting out those articles on amnesia and international kidnapping like you did when we were teenagers.”

  “Oh, my God, Connie, can you just zip it? I have to work tomorrow—I need sleep!”

  “You think he’s still out there,” Connie murmured. “Don’t you?”

  Dana sat up in bed. She’d had it with Connie—she always knew what bothered you most, and poked at it until you couldn’t stand it anymore. Anger crackled across Dana’s brain like heat lightning. “Well, we aren’t absolutely sure where he is, are we!”

  Connie propped her head on her hand. “We know he went to Swampscott and left his clothes and wallet on the beach.”

  “Right! So a guy can’t go back to his hometown and take a swim?”

  “In the middle of the night,” said Connie. “He got up in the dead of night, drove twenty miles, and left everything he owned in the sand.”

  “He was low! He needed to take a drive!” It suddenly felt important to defend him, to hang tightly on to the remote possibility, however irrational, that he hadn’t . . .

  “He was clinically depressed,” said Connie quietly. “And he killed himself. His body was probably washed out to sea, they said. Or he could have weighted himself down with something. Suicides do that sometimes.”

  Dana grabbed for the closest thing at hand—a pillow—and threw it at Connie. “Why do you do this!” she hissed between clenched teeth. “Why do you have to be so fucking mean!”

  “Well,” said Connie, “I guess because ‘fucking nice’ was already taken.”

  “GODDAMN IT! I really HATE you sometimes!”

  She sat there, chest heaving in and out, the pulse in h
er neck throbbing as if it might burst. Dad. The word skipped over and over in her mind, like a flat stone out to sea. Dad, swim back! she wanted to say. Get your wallet and put your clothes back on and drive home!

  But he hadn’t. And he never would. He’d never seen her children, hadn’t held their faces in his hands, hadn’t marveled at their wondrousness like grandpas were supposed to do. He might have held her own face when she was little, but it was quite possible that in her desperation to matter to him she had concocted the image, cut and pasted it from a TV show or a magazine.

  Dad killed himself. He had a choice between life with a family who loved him, and death . . . and he chose death. Of course she knew this—always had. It was only that she wanted so much to unknow it.

  “I don’t think you ever told me you hated me before,” remarked Connie. Dana rolled her eyes in annoyance. “It’s kinda weird,” Connie continued, “coming from you, I mean.”

  Dana slid down into the covers, yanking them from Connie and tugging them up over her shoulders. Of course Connie had never heard her say “I hate you.” Dana had never actually said it before, to anyone. She took a deep breath and let it slide out slowly.

  “You know, the thing about you is,” said Connie, “you seem so normal, nobody gets how screwed up you are.”

  “Just shut it, Connie.”

  “You should embrace your own psychosis more.”

  “How about if I embrace my own violence and sock you one? Will that shut you up?”

  “Shutting,” said Connie in mock sweetness, and Dana was tempted to lash out, but Connie put a hand on her shoulder. “Love you, Day,” she murmured.

  “Blah, blah, blah.”

  Connie burst out laughing.

  Dana left them all sleeping on Friday morning. She put a note on the kitchen table: “Went to work, back at five. Love, D.” They knew this, but she wrote it anyway. She preferred to have her whereabouts confirmed.

  The patients were as genially languid today as they had been frenzied on Wednesday. They seemed to be still full of turkey and the relief that comes of having mounted a successful holiday campaign, or at least survived it. The schedule was light. There were no cleanings, only lesser procedures that Tony could handle without an assistant, since Marie had put in for a personal day. Tony confided that he’d heard her on her cell phone during a break between patients, booking a flight to Canada.

  “Wow,” said Dana. “She really meant it when she said she didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving.”

  “I’m thinking she’s on an alternative spiritual path,” he mused, leaning in the doorway to the reception area, waiting for the next patient to show.

  “Aren’t we all,” she muttered. She looked up to see him gazing at her in amusement. It was the look he’d given Lizzie when she said they had better things to talk about than him. A kind of thinly concealed admiration.

  Such a nice face, she thought. The graceful lines of his nose and eyes. The smoothness of his skin peppered by closely shaved whiskers. There was a strange contentment in just looking at him that dusted away drama and disappointment. But after a moment it felt strange to stare at her boss as he stared back, and she blinked and said, “So how did it go? Did all your girls get along?”

  His expression turned wry. “They got along some of the time. The rest of the time they acted like hens at a pecking party.” He described a twenty-four-hour period—from Martine’s arrival on Wednesday to her dramatic departure on Thursday, shortly after her fig tart had gotten burned because Lizzie had shoved it to the back of the oven rather than placed it at the front as had been requested. “They fussed at each other like five-year-olds,” he said. “It was hell.”

  “And where was Abby in all this?”

  He chuckled. “Flying under the radar, as usual. Holed up in her room, studying for the clinical-skills exam of her medical boards. It was the only thing Lizzie and Martine agreed on—that Abby wasn’t helping enough.”

  “Sounds awful,” she commiserated. “Have you talked to Martine since?”

  “Yeah . . .” His expression went flat, and he looked away. “It didn’t go well.”

  “She broke up with you over a pie?”

  “Well, yes and no. I think it was because I didn’t really try hard enough to talk her out of ending it.” He shrugged. “Hey, the girls weren’t on their best behavior, and I told them so. I was pissed. But Martine wasn’t exactly behaving like a grown-up either.” He looked perplexed. “I’d never seen her act like that. She’s usually so smart and self-possessed.”

  “Some situations don’t bring out the best in people,” said Dana.

  “Yeah, I thought of that. But then I was taking Abby to the airport last night, and she said, ‘Dad. Really. Her?’” He shook his head, then glanced at Dana. “What did you think of her?”

  “Oh, um, she’s very . . . tall, isn’t she?”

  Apparently it wasn’t the kind of answer he was looking for. “Uh, yeah, I guess.”

  “Does that . . . did it bother you? Dating someone so tall?”

  “You mean taller than me? Nah. It could, I suppose. But at my height it’d really reduce the options.” He flashed a quick grin, “And where’s the fun in that?” Then he dialed down the light in his eyes. “Seriously,” he said, pursuing his earlier question. “What did you think?”

  She treated me like an orphaned handmaid. Dana jiggled her computer mouse and watched the cursor flick across the screen. “She seemed nice.”

  Tony studied her for a moment. “You’re lying, aren’t you?”

  “Okay,” said Dana. “I didn’t like the way she said, ‘You are the single mother.’ As if it’s a role I play on some TV show.” She returned his gaze. “Is that how you talk about me?”

  “Dana,” he said, shame coloring his smooth features. “I never—”

  The bell on the door jingled, and Mr. Kranefus came in, removing his fedora and fingering the brim as he made his way to the coatrack.

  “Hi there, Mr. Kranefus,” said Dana. “How was your Thanksgiving?”

  “Endless.” He slid off his overcoat and hung it on a hook. “But now it’s over.”

  Dana was just finishing a call with a claim rep when she heard Tony’s drill whine down to silence. A moment later he came into her reception area and pulled down his mask. “I want you to know I never called you that. I talked about you from time to time, and I guess I mentioned you had kids and were divorced, but I would never identify you as The Single Mother.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “I don’t think of you that way. And I’m very sorry she said it.” He put his mask up and went back to Mr. Kranefus.

  At lunch she told him about Jet’s inspired contribution at the McPhersons’ house, the surprisingly pleasant substitution of eggplant parmesan for turkey, and Ethan’s bid for forgiveness.

  “But what happened out in the driveway?” he asked. “Did she ever tell you?”

  “A little. She said she partly forgave him and that the rest of it might come over time. They have no plans to see each other again, but I think they’ll touch base at some point. The most important thing is she’s not walking around with all that pain and rage. Or not as much anyway.”

  “Do you think she’ll go home now?”

  It was a startling thought. But the way had been paved, hadn’t it? Hamptonfield, Massachusetts, was no longer quite so much of a crime scene to Alder, and relations with Connie had definitely improved. Dana stared at him as she contemplated the days ahead without Alder.

  “She’s pretty lucky to have you for an aunt,” Tony said gently. “Giving her a safe harbor while she figured all this out and helping your sister reconnect—that’s a heck of a contribution.”

  “It would just be nice if things could stay the same for more than five minutes in a row.”

  “What planet does that happen on?” He smiled. “My passport’s current, I’m ready anytime.”

  Dana was sitting at her desk, with Tony looking for a patient cha
rt on the shelves behind her, when Connie came in. “It’s colder than a pile of poop on Pluto out there,” she grumbled.

  “Connie!” said Dana, putting on a smile as her heart thumped out an alarm. “This is my boss, Tony Sakimoto. Tony—my sister, Connie Garrett.”

  Connie gave him a transparently appraising look.

  “Nice to meet you, Connie.” Tony smiled. “I hear you make a mean vegan eggplant parm.”

  “And I hear you’re the best boss since Santa,” Connie replied dryly. “She hurries off to work every morning like there’s sleigh rides and free candy canes.”

  Dana’s face went hot. Tony let loose a deep, rumbling laugh and said, “My secret’s out. I said the heck with health benefits, let’s get some reindeer in here!”

  Connie raised her eyebrows at Dana, a look that meant, He’s weird, but entertaining.

  “So listen,” she said, leaning on the reception counter. “I think the girls and I will head home for the weekend. I’ve got a friend at Hamptonfield Auto Service who’ll give me a break on fixing the rest of what’s wrong with Alder’s car, and I really ought to show up for a shift at Nine Muses. Also, I think Jet needs a change of scenery. She’s starting to eat the condiments, and that much soy sauce can’t be good for you.”

  “Oh . . . okay,” said Dana, trying to absorb it all. “When are you thinking of leaving?”

  “Now, pretty much. The girls swung over to Jet’s house to grab some extra clothes. They’re meeting me at the Hebron Ave Shell station, and we’ll caravan, in case her car gives her trouble.”

  “So you’ll be back on Sunday?” Dana’s panic over Connie’s presence was quickly morphing into panic over her absence. It was still another thirty-six hours before the kids got home. And she realized she would genuinely miss Connie.

  “Sunday?” Connie squinched up her face in thought. “Probably not. I mean, some subset of us will be, but I can’t really afford to take off any more time. I’ll call you, though. Maybe tomorrow night.” She gave the counter two little slaps. “Gotta go.”