The Whole Golden World

by Kristina Riggle

  But Angie wouldn’t get it. She had never understood Rain’s anxiety, invoking “live and let live” and “give it time” as her favorite meaningless expressions, though she herself felt free to have a screaming conniption fit over someone eating the last of her favorite cereal if she so chose. Rain closed her eyes, pictured her beloved grandmother, and imagined herself sitting at her worn, wooden kitchen table, saying, Oh, Gran, can this finally be it?

  Her mental Gran only smiled and patted her hand.

  She wanted to text TJ, even though he wouldn’t be able to answer, just for the simple act of reaching out to him in her anxiety and distress. It’s what a wife was supposed to do, after all. They were supposed to lean on each other, like two sides of a triangle. Wasn’t that one of the strongest shapes in architecture? Rain had read that somewhere.

  Babies were everywhere in this Gymboree. In carriers worn on a mother’s chest, in slings, in strollers and in baby seats.

  Angie squealed and held up a blue pajama set with puppies on it. Rain gave her a tight-lipped smile and a thumbs-up.

  A toddler in front of her dropped his stuffed clown toy on the floor. Rain bent to pick it up and hand it to him. The mother turned in that moment and snatched the toy away from her son. He reached and wailed, flexing his fingers.

  “It’s been on the floor, it’s full of germs, and he’ll put it right in his mouth,” the mother said in the clipped tones of the irritated and superior. She was digging around in the diaper bag slung on the handles of the stroller, finally coming up with a snack cup of Cheerios, which appeased the little boy.

  Rain shrank away, back to her mother’s side.

  “How’s this one?” Angie said brightly, holding up a tiny three-piece suit.

  “Seriously? For his formal diaper changes?”

  Angie frowned. “How did I give birth to such a spoilsport?”

  “Yeah, that’s me. Everyone’s favorite killjoy.” Rain fingered a price tag. Hardly stuff Angie should be buying on her salary.

  “I’m kidding. Lighten up.”

  “You think she’ll be okay?” Rain blurted. “Fawn, I mean. Can she really do all of it alone? I mean . . . ?”

  Angie cocked her head at Rain. “Oh, she’ll be okay. She’ll have moments where she’ll want to throw him out the window, all mothers do, but she won’t actually do it.”

  “You wanted to throw me out the window?”

  Angie was back to ogling baby clothes. Little socks this time. “Sure! All three of you. Sometimes at once,” she chirped. “But I’d just shut myself in the bathroom and cry instead and come back out and carry on.”

  “Wow. That’s . . . inspiring.”

  Angie put down the socks and turned to Rain, flipping her long, permed hair out of her face. “Sweetie, there ain’t no sense in telling fairy tales about being a mom. It sucks sometimes. Sucks hard. And it never stops. Even when the kids sleep you’re just on call. Someone might start barfing anytime or wake up scared. God, I remember one time Stone walked in on your daddy and me having sex. I was up there riding him like a cowboy—”

  “Mom!”

  “I’m just saying you’re never off duty. Never. Even now, I’ve got Fawn and Stone still at home, and now Brock.”

  Rain suppressed a smirk at her mother’s self-sacrificing tone. Angie never bothered much with rules or supervision. It’s not like she was running a military school. Though, Rain had to allow, she was attentive in her way. She was known to join them in a spontaneous game of hide-and-seek or coax them into building a fort out of couch cushions. She once started a shaving-cream fight when Ricky had bought a case of the stuff on sale.

  The next day, just as likely, she would shoo them away from her all day so she could talk on the phone to her girlfriends or give herself a home perm.

  Angie continued, “I’m just saying, it’s not like a Hallmark card. And if all mothers go around saying it’s the best thing ever and it’s one hundred percent wonderful every minute, then it will just make everyone feel like shit for being normal. Am I right?” She addressed this last to a young mother with a newborn dozing in a front carrier, holding the hand of a toddler wearing head-to-toe pink.

  The young woman scurried away, and Rain cringed—for the hundredth or maybe thousandth time—for how her mother looked to outsiders: a middle-aged woman wearing the hairstyle and clothes of her prime—curly perm, shoulder pads, and all—smacking gum and issuing her pronouncements to the people around her whom she assumed were there to be her audience.

  Her phone!

  Rain fled from the store and stopped next to a fake tree, in view of a carousel full of children going round and round.

  Dr. Gould’s number glowed up at her from the display. She froze in the last moments of not knowing, then slowly raised the phone to her ear, screwing her eyes shut like a frightened child.

  24

  Morgan warmed up with some scales while staring at her phone, which she’d balanced on the edge of the music stand. Her bow angled wrong, and the resulting squeak bounced all over the empty school band room. She slumped over her instrument.

  School had begun again, which provided an agonizing mélange of pleasure and despair. She could see him every day, but he was in the front of the class, pretending she was no one. The classroom felt foreshortened, as if the few rows of kids between them represented miles of unassailable distance.

  She’d stopped visiting him after school. He’d told her to stop; they had to avoid any appearance of unusual connection.

  Their time together was extremely limited now. They were both in school all day. Most evenings he was at home and unavailable, and she herself had the drudgery of homework to slog through.

  She’d hit upon a way to communicate safely, at least. She’d written in a simple code on the back of her homework and dared to send him a cryptic text about the code, knowing he’d be clever enough to figure it out.

  Translated, it had said this: Call me after school, 3 o’clock. She figured he’d have a classroom or an office to himself by then, or maybe he’d be on his way home in the car.

  It was ten after three, and the waiting was agony. But there was something exquisite about the agony, knowing what awaited her.

  Twice they’d met up in the practice room. She had relived those stolen moments countless times, especially the second time, which was more gentle and slow. And afterward they’d gotten dressed—it was cold in the room—but lain back down in each other’s arms, using their coats as pillows, and talked like a regular couple might about what movies and music they liked. They’d seen a lot of the same movies, in fact, due to the movie nights with Morgan and her mom. Dinah always tried to expose her daughter to the classics of her own generation. Morgan had thus impressed him by quoting The Blues Brothers.

  “It’s 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark . . . and we’re wearing sunglasses,” she’d deadpanned.

  “Hit it,” he’d answered, and his delighted laughter fell like warm rain on her skin.

  The phone rang. She gave a quick glance around the empty band room and picked it up.

  Without preamble, he said, “What’s going on?”

  “Are you alone?”

  “In my car.”

  Morgan’s shoulders relaxed. At last they could talk freely, though she had to keep her voice down because band room acoustics could make even a quiet statement ring loud. “This is killing me not to see you. I mean, to see you but to have to act like we’re nothing to each other.”

  “I know,” he said, in the same reassuring tone he used with kids struggling over their homework. Lately he’d just been marking her own work all with an A whether she’d gotten the answers or not. She noticed because she flubbed a couple on purpose to see what would happen. He continued, “I had an idea the other day.”

  A delighted shiver ran through Morgan from her fingers inward to her core, and she curled her toes inside her shoes. “Yeah?”

  “My bro
ther is on vacation this week, Barbados or something like that. He asked me to look in on the house and water his plants.”

  “Oooh,” Morgan replied.

  “Think you can get away Saturday night?”

  Morgan’s breath was so shallow she feared she might faint dead away off her chair, her cello clattering to the floor. She gripped the instrument’s neck to steady herself and cleared her throat. “Yes. But how will we meet without being seen?”

  “I’ll give you the address. His car has a big garage. If you park inside, no one will even know anyone else is there by a quick glance. I’ll watch for you and open the garage. I better hang up. I’ll text you the time and address. But don’t text me back unless you absolutely have to, like, if you can’t make it, just text ‘never mind,’ no other details.”

  “Got it.”

  “Gotta go. I have to get home.”

  Morgan hung up and was swamped with giddy excitement. She wanted to put her cello down and run ecstatic laps around the edge of the band room and screech until her throat was raw.

  Instead, she tackled the concerto with an exuberance she’d never felt before.

  The music rang in her ears and her fingers tripped lightly across the strings, her bow skating over the instrument, drawing the notes out into the air. Too bad her solo competition wasn’t here right now, in this room. She would have nailed it.

  The best part of their plan was that it was almost entirely risk free. An empty house! No chance of a barge-in. And her mother never questioned her evening plans. Dinah would have been horrified to learn her smart, wise daughter had spent New Year’s Eve drinking keg beer at a drunken party and walked a trashed Britney back to her house where they snuck in through a sliding door. They both had hangovers in the morning: Morgan’s was minor, Britney’s was epic. But Dinah never questioned her, not even when someone tagged a picture of Morgan on Facebook with a plastic cup in her hand amid the crush of people, and it popped up on her profile. Her mother had not noticed it on Facebook, or it had not registered as cause for concern, at least not compared to Jared’s new pothead tendency.

  Morgan had untagged the photo and then scolded the kid who posted it via a private message. Some kids could be so careless.

  Morgan yawned as she pulled open the local library’s door, yesterday’s giddiness over her upcoming romantic weekend already dulled by the heavy shroud of insomnia. Her nightmares had even begun to pick up in frequency.

  He was starring in her nightmares now, something that unsettled her waking hours more than the old dreams ever had. In the latest, he pinned her to the floor in a passionate embrace, until she dissolved under him, disappearing completely.

  She nodded to Kat, the librarian, and went to hang her coat in the break room. She had two hours of shelving and general assisting to do as part of her National Honor Society volunteering quota. Since she liked to read, the library had seemed like as good a choice as any.

  Kat blocked her path coming out of the break room. “Oh, you have some help today! And he’s cute, lucky you.”

  Kat was about thirty. She dressed in funky clothes out of vintage stores and used little-girl-style hair elastics with the big beads on them. She seemed to love to encourage Morgan to flirt with the teenage patrons checking out graphic novels.

  As Kat led the way, Morgan muttered, “Live vicariously much?”

  Morgan was rubbing her eyes—they felt so tired, almost gritty—and nearly bumped smack into Ethan.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Kat blurted, “Oh! You know each other. Fabulous. Morgan, show him what to do to help us with the shelving. Then maybe you can help me organize this craft for preschool hour tomorrow.” Kat scurried away, no doubt imagining young love blossoming in the stacks.

  Ethan said, “I get extra credit in government if I volunteer.”

  “You don’t need extra credit in that class. A monkey could pass that class.”

  “Oooh-ooh, ah-ah,” Ethan said, sounding not at all like a monkey.

  Morgan laughed and felt her embarrassment ebb. Just a touch. “Seriously, though? This is getting all stalkery. You’ve gotta knock it off.”

  “Then answer my texts. Call me once in a while. Don’t shun me for something I can’t help.”

  Morgan flushed. “That’s not the problem. Okay, now listen, since you invaded my territory here, you have to work.”

  Morgan explained the procedure and Ethan listened very seriously, as if she were explaining the secret to life, the universe, and everything.

  They pushed the wheeled cart over by the little kid chapter books. As they began work, Ethan said, “So let’s do something Saturday. Wanna go bowling?”

  “Can’t.”

  “Oh, plans with Britney? Where you guys going?”

  “No, not her. Some orchestra friends.”

  “Yeah? Like who?”

  “Geez, what’s with the twenty questions? You going to follow me there, too? Hide in the dark and leap out of the shadows?”

  Ethan glowered and shoved a book harder into its spot than necessary. “Christ, I was just asking. And I’m fine by the way, thanks for your concern about how I’ve been doing all these months of your silent treatment.”

  “Did you come here just to make me feel bad? I said I was sorry.”

  Ethan stopped, a book in his hand, and tossed his shaggy dark hair out of his face. “Actually, no. You didn’t.”

  Morgan felt hot tears pooling behind her eyelids and fought to keep her voice steady. “Well, I am. I’ve missed having you around.”

  Ethan slammed a couple of books and then looked at Morgan fully. “Hey, hey. C’mon, I didn’t want to upset you. Geez, don’t do that. You know girl tears are like kryptonite to guys.”

  He folded her into his arms. Morgan stiffened, remembering their last embrace, but she made herself accept his kindness. He really was being just sweet, and at least, since he was gay, she could be sure this guy had no secret agenda.

  They jumped apart at the sound of a throat clearing. Kat was leaning around the end of an aisle. “Hate to break it up, guys, but if I’m going to sign your form for volunteering, there should be more shelving and less snuggling.”

  Kat waggled her fingers, giggling.

  Ethan chuckled, and Morgan joined him, wiping the dampness off her face. She sniffed and intoned, “Librarian matchmaker misfires wildly.”

  Ethan finished for her. “Film at eleven.”

  25

  Morgan pulled out of her driveway and had to force herself to breathe so she wouldn’t pass out at the wheel.

  Though the occasion felt momentous to her, the lie required to make it happen was pathetically simple. A brief, “Hey, Mom, I’m gonna spend the night with Nicole, okay?” And she was off to—dare she think of him this way?—her boyfriend’s house. Her lover’s house. Morgan giggled out loud.

  Nicole was an orchestra friend she’d drifted away from in senior year. But it was believable enough she’d spend the night there. To Dinah, anyway. And unlike Britney, whose mother was friends with Dinah, Nicole’s mom and her mother never even saw each other. Nicole’s mom, in fact, commuted to Royal Oak to work, and no one ever saw her in town at all, hardly.

  Morgan motored away from her house and indulged herself in a giddy squeal. She winced as her old car’s buzzing exhaust messed up her sophisticated rendezvous.

  All she would have to do was check her phone now and then for texts or calls from her parents. They’d have no way of knowing where she really was when she answered.

  Morgan had committed his directions to memory, so she drove with confidence, while being careful not to speed.

  She felt briefly self-conscious about her old beat-up Chevy in the fancy neighborhood, then reminded herself that no one would be paying attention, not really. Her car was just another car on just another street.

  She pulled into a long driveway that ran down a hill, the garage mercifully out of the view of the road. The garage opened just as planned; he
must have been watching for her. This gave her another delighted shiver.

  Once the garage door closed behind her, she squealed again, unable to help herself. She’d done it! She was inside and unseen. She opened her car door to see him standing in the doorway of the garage, a big gorgeous smile on his face.

  “Hey, handsome,” she said, stepping out of the car in her skinniest jeans and a shirt she’d unbuttoned down to her cleavage on the way over.

  “Hey, yourself,” he’d said, appreciating her body from top to toes.

  It took all her willpower to saunter over with a sexy swing in her hips, and not fling herself into his arms in one ecstatic leap.

  The candlelight made him look like a movie star.

  This time, there had been no frantic clutching on a cold floor. He’d ushered her inside and showed her a table set with two plates, and candles lit. Jazz was playing from somewhere. She couldn’t see any stereo or speakers. Maybe rich people had ambient sound they could pump anywhere in the house.

  The music-from-nowhere made the whole thing feel even more like a movie.

  As he’d served the pasta, Morgan had worried aloud over making a mess. He’d assured her that he could clean up so well they’d never know the difference, and the wine and dinner he’d brought in himself. He couldn’t cook, he admitted sheepishly, so he’d ordered from Amici.

  Now they were still sitting in the chairs at the corners of the table, the crumbs of dinner and dessert still scattered on the tablecloth.

  Morgan toyed with the stem of her wineglass, something she’d seen women do in movies. She’d had wine before, but it was always some awful fruity stuff that made her queasy, and only in plastic cups. This red had a strong and difficult flavor but that made it easy to sip slowly, and with each sip she’d acclimated to the acrid boldness and was detecting the berry flavor underneath. Eventually, she was able to drink it without even a shiver, like a Frenchwoman or some other species of sophisticated adult. He’d refilled her glass with what she imagined was an admiring smile.