by Juliette Fay
But she didn’t move right away. Some thought came to her, and she smiled at it and looked up at Dana. It was almost a thank-you. Then she turned to Tony, said, “See ya, Santa,” and left.
CHAPTER 43
DANA PULLED INTO THE DRIVEWAY AFTER WORK and looked up at her darkened house. No one home, she thought. She flicked on lights as she made her way from the garage up to her bedroom, but it only seemed to confirm her aloneness.
It’s temporary, she chided herself. They’ll be home tomorrow night. She pulled off her slacks, unbuttoned her blouse, and hung them both on hangers to avert an unnecessary trip to the dry cleaners.
It wasn’t the empty house. It’s me, she thought as she tugged on a T-shirt and a battered pair of jeans. Everything’s changing, and I’m not keeping up.
A swirling, nauseating sense of exhaustion swept over her, and she lay back on her bed, legs dangling over the edge. The swirling and a hopelessly dislocated feeling reminded her of the miscarriage she’d had before Grady. She had lain in that very bed when she’d gotten home from the hospital after “the procedure.” That’s how Kenneth had repeatedly referred to it. “Do you need me to drive you to the procedure? . . . How long will the procedure take? . . . Thank God the procedure’s covered under our insurance.”
“Yes!” she’d finally yelled at him. “Let’s thank God for that!”
And he’d looked at her as if her unseemliness affronted him, but that he would disregard it given the circumstances. She had read that in his face and knew it was true. He would grant her the favor of disregarding her. And so she knew she was alone in it. The loss would be hers to carry by herself for the rest of her life. She still missed that baby from time to time, but she never told anyone. Not after the look he’d given her.
I miss all my babies. It seemed so weak—to yearn for two children who’d been gone only six days and for another who’d never even arrived. And Alder, a child who wasn’t hers to begin with. She thought of calling Connie to see how Alder was doing, back in the town she’d fled two months earlier. And had Jet stopped eating condiments? Poor thing. Missing her mother, Dana realized.
She thought of calling Polly—making up just to have someone to talk to. She even thought of using the home number that Tony had programmed into her cell phone. But she didn’t make any calls, partly out of exhaustion, partly out of not wanting to put her weakness on display. And because, most important, in the end she knew it wouldn’t help. It might anesthetize the wound for a short time, but it would not suture it. Things were changing, and the life she’d had with her children constantly and happily tangled around her was shifting into the past.
Not like it wouldn’t have shifted eventually anyway, she reminded herself. If the parenting books were right, Morgan and Grady would soon become secretive teenagers with social lives she’d only glimpse from the driveways of their friends’ houses. She wasn’t ready for them to have whole pieces of their existence that didn’t revolve around her, that she wasn’t even privy to. But what choice did she have? She could hear her mother saying, You play the hand you’re dealt.
Ma, she thought. A woman with vastly different daughters to raise and a husband who couldn’t get up off the couch—until he got up and drove to Swampscott and left his life on the beach. Mary Ellen McPherson came to mind, and Dermott with his gallows humor and wasting body. And three little children.
A mismatched thread shot through the fabric of her pondering, a memory of something she’d neglected—dishes. The serving platters she had instructed Mary Ellen not to wash, that she would retrieve on Thanksgiving night. But then Ethan had shown up and the dishes had slipped her mind. They were probably clogging the counters, plastered with the remnants of yesterday’s meal, annoying Mary Ellen when she had bigger issues to deal with. Dana reached for the phone.
“I haven’t given them a thought,” Mary Ellen told her. “Isn’t that awful? I should have washed them, but we had such a nice time—the kids went crazy for the marshmallowed sweet potatoes. And Dermott is feeling . . . well, not great, exactly, but pretty good! He’s finally starting to get his strength back.” She was elated. “We’re going out tonight, just the two of us.”
“That’s wonderful! And you have a baby-sitter?”
“My neighbor’s daughter is coming over. It’s perfect. Well”—she laughed—“if I can find anything remotely decent to wear. Everything I own is so tired and ugly.”
“I have something.” Dana sat up. “It’s not right on me, but it would look fantastic on you.”
Dana got home from the McPhersons’ with an armload of crusty platters and a satisfied grin she couldn’t seem to get off her face. The perfect blouse, the perfect recipient. Mary Ellen had looked amazing in it. And Dermott had smiled the half-dazed, half-hungry smile of a man in love with his wife.
Dana was filling the sink with soap suds when Morgan called. “Tina’s pregnant,” she murmured tightly. “They’re getting married.” And she broke into gasping sobs.
“Oh, honey,” Dana soothed. “I know it’s hard. This isn’t what you expected.”
“You knew?”
“Dad told me just before you left.”
“I can’t believe this! You knew they were . . . and this was all . . . and you didn’t tell me?”
“Sweetie, it wasn’t mine to tell.”
“Oh, my God! Are you, like, happy about this? You don’t care at all!”
“Of course I care. This is a big adjustment for all of us, but—”
“Mom, he used to be your husband! How can you be so cold?”
Cold! Dana wanted to say. I nearly erupted into flames when he told me! I wouldn’t mind if they both vanished into thin Orlando air!
“Morgan,” she said firmly, “I know this is hard, and it’s not what any of us—and I mean any of us—planned on. But you cannot go accusing me of not caring. You have no idea how I feel, and it’s not your business to know. But trust me, I care.” Morgan fired off another round of sobs. “Sweetie, where are you?”
“In the bathroom,” she choked.
“Does Dad know where you are?”
“Sort of. Him and Tina told us, and then I tried to, like, smile and sound happy and stuff, but it was really hard. And then Tina said, ‘Maybe you want to talk to your mom,’ and I started to cry a little—I couldn’t help it. And Tina gave me the phone, and she told Dad they should go down to the restaurant by the lobby and he could have a beverage. That’s what she called it—a beverage! Like I don’t know it’s beer or alcohol or something!”
Poor Morgan, trying to hold it together. And Tina saying call your mom. It was either a complete cop-out or remarkably sensitive—Dana wasn’t sure which. And had she taken Kenneth to the bar for his sake or to give Morgan privacy for a good weep?
Dana swallowed, pressing against the tension in her throat, hoping she could sound normal. “Morgan, I really think this is going to be okay. I know it’s a lot to handle, honey, but we’ll manage. Dad and I—and Tina—we’ll all do our best to make it work. And you’ll do your best, too, right?”
“Yeah.” She sniffled. “Mom? Are you mad at Dad?”
Dana almost laughed. Oh, just a little. But that was only part of her. Another part knew he just wasn’t her business anymore. “You know,” she told Morgan. “It kind of caught me off guard. But Dad and I talked about it, and we think it’ll be okay. We’ll all have to get used to it at first, but then it will just be normal.”
Morgan inhaled—a damp but valiant effort—and let it out. “Okay,” she said.
“Honey, where’s Grady?”
“Watching TV.”
“Can you get him?”
Dana could hear them fussing with each other. “Take the phone . . . Why? . . . Just take it . . . No. I like this show . . . It’s Mom! . . . Can she call back? . . . You’re such a—. . . Ow! You don’t have to throw it . . .”
Grady put the receiver to his ear. “Hello?”
“Hi, honey. How are you?”
&n
bsp; “Okay.”
“I guess you got some big news, huh?”
“What big news?”
“About Dad and Tina getting married and having a baby?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“How’s that sound to you?”
“Okay, I guess.” He turned away from the receiver and said, “Hey, I was watching that!” Morgan’s distant voice responded, “Well, now you’re not.”
“Grady,” said Dana, “we can talk about this another time, but I just wanted to make sure you were okay with it.”
“Well, it doesn’t sound too different. Except for the baby part. That’ll be kinda weird. But he’ll be little, so he’ll mostly be with Tina. Dad and I can still do stuff.”
“That’s true. In the beginning babies mostly sleep and eat. And maybe when it gets older, you might even want to play with it.”
“Yeah, maybe.” His breath whooshed across the mouthpiece for a moment. “Mom? Did anyone call you from school?”
Dana had a sinking feeling. Had he been getting into fights again? “No, why would your teacher call me?”
“Not my teacher. The custodian. I thought maybe he found my golf ball. He goes up on the roof sometimes. We were watching the Weather Channel, and it says it’s going to snow in Connecticut on Sunday. So I was hoping he found it.”
“I haven’t heard anything, but you can ask when you get back to school.”
“But the snow’s on Sunday. I really need it.”
Why? she wanted to ask. You have your father right there with you. You’ve been together all week.
“Well,” she said, “we’ll see what we can do.”
When Dana woke early in the morning, she knew she’d been dreaming of Ma. She could smell her perfume, like roses and fresh-mown grass. What did she do after Dad died? It was difficult to conjure a clear picture, limited as she was by the long distance of the memory and the self-absorption of adolescence. She couldn’t remember her mother saying anything. The clichés and platitudes stopped for a while—Ma seemed to smoke more and talk less. This unexpected silence was disorienting, and Dana remembered making plans to be elsewhere every day, even trying out for a small part in the school play so she would have practices to go to. She’d had only one line: “As you wish, Dr. Wallenquack.” Connie had taunted her with it for months. Anytime Dana asked her for something—a barrette, a dish towel, a lick of her ice cream—Connie had answered with that line. (“Pass the salt.” “As you wish, Dr. Wallenquack.” Dana had wanted to kill her.)
Eventually Ma’s friends had convinced her to join their card night, rotating from home to home every Tuesday, playing pinochle and euchre. “We just don’t have the attention span for bridge!” Dana remembered a woman saying when her mother hosted one night. The rest of the ladies had laughed as if she were Lucille Ball.
Then Ma started waitressing the lunch shift at Friendly’s, and her daughters got used to seeing her in her polyester uniform when they came home from school. Ma would be sitting sideways in the kitchen nook, her ice-cream sticky sneakers hanging off the end of the bench, smoking a cigarette and turning her head to blow the smoke out the window behind her. She’d be tired, but a purposeful kind of tired. And that became normal, the new normal without Dad.
Dana lay in her bed a while longer, plans forming and dissolving like sugar crystals in water. It was a sharply sunny day; she could tell by the way the light knifed in around the edges of the drapes. She wasn’t sure she was up to the challenge of such brightness, but she rose and put on the jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt she’d taken off and thrown over a chair the night before.
An idea came to her, and she followed it blindly, willing herself not to think too much. She got onto I-84, then the Massachusetts Turnpike, and drove toward Watertown. Soon she was parked in front of what used to be Friendly’s. It was a Starbucks now, and she went in to see if there were any vestiges left of her mother’s former workplace. There weren’t. The spattered chrome shake machines, the vinyl-clad booths, the hanging sign that looked like a window shutter listing the ice-cream flavors were all gone. She bought a latte and got back into the car.
Then she was driving down Belmont Street, past the Oakley Country Club and the Armenian markets, merging onto Mount Auburn and turning right into the protective shade of the cemetery. The last time she’d glided slowly down these winding, narrow lanes, a little over a year ago, Kenneth had been driving, hands clenched at ten and two on the steering wheel. They’d sat in their somber clothes, the kids staring unhappily out the windows.
“Is this where Grandma’s gonna live now?” six-year-old Grady had asked.
“She’s not alive anymore,” Morgan had reminded him.
“Yeah, but is this gonna be her address?”
Now it was Dana driving to her mother’s new address. CATHERINE GARRETT, BELOVED MOTHER. It had been Connie’s job to order the stone after the funeral. Dana had never returned to see it installed, so it was a surprise to see engraved below her mother’s name JAMES GARRETT, BELOVED DAD. There had never been a marker for him, because there had never been a body over which to place it. There’d been no funeral or burial. He was just gone.
Beloved dad. Connie had opted for “dad” instead of “father,” a role he’d filled solely by virtue of his DNA toward the end. It was a kindness toward him, Dana realized. Connie’s kindness was rarely so obvious; Dana would call and thank her.
She knelt on the grass, still frosted with ice crystals, and ran her fingers across the chiseled names. So many memories of Ma—her smell and her words of advice, her utter delight in each grandchild, her bravery at the end. And almost no clear memories of him.
A golf ball would come in really handy about now, Dad.
At a stoplight on the way home, she flicked through the contacts on her cell phone and hit the “send” button. “You don’t happen to have a really long ladder, do you?” she asked when he answered the phone.
CHAPTER 44
DANA WAS WAITING ON THE FRONT STEP WHEN Tony pulled in to her driveway with a metal ladder tied to the top of his Toyota RAV4. She got in on the passenger side. “Okay, now you know for sure I’m nuts,” she said.
“Just a little,” he said. “But it’s the quirky, harmless kind, so I’m not afraid for my life or anything.”
On the way to the elementary school, she told him about her trip to Watertown. “I guess I have a new appreciation for the little meaningless things that mean something.” They pulled in to the empty parking lot, and she asked him, “Did you keep anything special of your wife’s?”
“Well, I still live in the same house, so there’s lots of stuff she picked out—furniture and things. But I tried not to make a shrine of it. At first I couldn’t help it, but then I started letting things go.” His fingers, resting on the steering wheel, began to tap a little tattoo. “There is one thing, though—a scarf she made for our first Christmas together. It’s just awful—she never knit another thing, and if you saw it, you’d understand why.” He shut off the engine and looked out over the playground. “I don’t wear it anymore. But it’s the one thing I’d never give up.”
They got out and hoisted the ladder down off the roof of the car. From Grady’s description they picked a spot in back of the school where Jav might have stood when the golf ball went flying, and they set up the ladder. Tony went first and held it from the top as Dana climbed. Their quarry was nowhere in sight.
The wind coursed across the top of the flat building, making it hard to talk if they wandered too far from each other, so they kept within hearing range. He told her about Lizzie’s apology for being catty and unwelcoming to Martine. Much to Dana’s surprise, she found herself telling him about how the kids’ being gone and all the changes that were happening had reminded her of the miscarriage.
“I once had a patient come in for a cleaning,” Tony said, “and when I asked her that standard question about health changes, she burst into tears. She told me she’d just lost a baby.”
“Ohh,
” said Dana. “What did you do?”
“I sat there with her while she cried. She was in no shape to have anyone poking at her, so we rescheduled. And, you know, when she came back, she acted like nothing happened. I asked her how she was feeling, and she put on a smile and said, ‘Perfectly fine.’”
“It’s so personal,” explained Dana. “Such a dark, empty feeling. It’s really hard to talk about.” And yet here she was talking about it with him as they scoured the rooftop of a public building for a critically important golf ball . . .
She felt such affection for this man, such gratitude. And when he found the treasure they’d been looking for wedged between a vent pipe and a generator of some kind, she couldn’t help but put her arms around his shoulders and kiss his wind-reddened cheek.
He slipped an arm around her waist and raised the ball high with the other hand, and they stood there for a moment grinning success at each other. The breeze blew a wisp of hair across her eyes, and he brushed it back behind her head, his hand resting at the nape of her neck. And then, slowly, his face came closer and pressed gently against hers, the faintly minty smell of his breath penetrating her own as he kissed her, lips traveling across each other until she didn’t know where his ended and hers began. Her chest flooded with warmth, and her heart started to pound, and she had a sort of unbuckled feeling, as if she were careening through space at warp speed without benefit of an air bag or a passive-restraint system. It was terrifying.
When his lips came away from hers, he kissed her on the cheek, then pulled back a little. “Wow. That was completely inappropriate,” he murmured, without a hint of regret. He had that same dazed/ hungry look she’d seen the night before on the face of Dermott McPherson.
“We’d better go back down before someone sees us,” she said. And he released her.
