Untethered

by Julie Lawson Timmer

  “Morgan will understand,” Char said now, glancing in the rearview mirror at the dark circles under Allie’s eyes. “Your mom’s right. No one will expect you to be at school this week, or at tutoring, including her. And a few days of rest might be a good idea.”

  “Exactly,” Lindy said. “Sleep in, and then have a relaxing spa day with your mom. It’ll be fun.”

  Allie shook her head. “Tomorrow’s Monday. I’m going to school.”

  “But I flew all the way up here to be with you,” Lindy said.

  “Well,” Allie began, and Char peered out the windshield to see how far they were from the hotel. She pressed the accelerator, trying to get them to their destination before Allie could say too much. She wasn’t keen on witnessing the fallout after Allie made the obvious argument that her mother had some nerve complaining that they wouldn’t get to spend time together, when she had had the entire day to see her daughter, yet hadn’t bothered to show up until late afternoon. Lindy didn’t take accusations well, whether they were grounded in truth or not.

  Allie leaned forward, between the seats, and put a hand on her mother’s forearm. Char winced in anticipation. It wouldn’t be beyond Lindy to change her flight and leave the following day in response to being called out by her daughter.

  But instead of challenging her mother, Allie asked her, “Why don’t you come? To tutoring, I mean. You could see Morgan again, and the place where I spend my Monday afternoons. You could borrow Char’s car, I bet. Or take a cab, if you don’t want to drive in snow. We could ride back to the house together for dinner.”

  Char turned to her side window and pretended to take a long moment checking her mirror so the others wouldn’t see her face. In all the months Allie had been tutoring, Char had always picked her up after. The community center wasn’t terribly far from the house—certainly a distance a teenager could walk on her own. And Allie had many friends who were already driving, and could easily have given her a lift.

  But Char had never been willing to give up the chance to hear Allie rattle off every last detail of her session with Morgan. She would say more about it over dinner, to fill in her father, but she was never more animated about it than in the car. Some of the magic wore off once they pulled into the garage.

  Bradley had mentioned many times how envious he was that Char got to hear the “first-look tutoring report-out,” as he called it. A few times, he had teased that he was thinking of leaving work early on a Monday to hear the initial account himself. But he wouldn’t dare follow through. She had earned it, he told her.

  Never had Allie gotten a ride from someone else. It had always been Char.

  Char swallowed hard and made herself turn her head to regard the fatherless girl in the backseat. “Always” and “never” didn’t have a place in their lives anymore.

  Lindy chuckled and patted her daughter’s hand as though she were a toddler asking to be flown to the moon. “I hardly think I need to see her for the third day in a row, as nice a little girl as she seems to be. And I’ve been inside the community center more times than I care to remember.”

  “They totally renovated it,” Allie said. “Last year. You won’t recognize it.”

  “Mount Pleasant–quality renovations?” Lindy asked, still chuckling, “I think I’ll pass.”

  Allie sat back.

  “And anyway,” Lindy said, “I’m not sure that continuing this tutoring situation is such a good idea. Char tells me you only got credit for it for the fall semester.”

  Allie found Char in the rearview mirror. Char lifted her shoulders: She asked.

  “With everything else you’ve got going on,” Lindy said, “all of your advanced placement classes, and soon you’ll be starting field hockey—”

  “It’s soccer in the spring,” Allie said. “Field hockey’s in the fall.”

  “Oh, of course,” Lindy said. “I knew that. The point is, I’m not sure you have time to waste on something like this—”

  “Waste?”

  “You know what I mean, darling. Colleges are a lot pickier now than they were when I was your age. You have to be very careful about how you spend your time if you hope to get into a good school.” To Char, Lindy said, “A friend of mine was telling me about it. It’s really gotten so much more competitive.”

  Char nodded as though Lindy were telling her something new. As though Char hadn’t spent two hours in the fall with Allie, Bradley, and the high school guidance counselor discussing Allie’s college options and what it would take for her to get into her top choices.

  Lindy turned to the backseat. “We need to think about what the best use of your spare time is, that’s all I’m saying. It seems it might be wiser to spend those hours studying for the SATs, or—”

  “Those aren’t until next year, Mom.”

  “Or doing extra math problems, or something.”

  “I have an A in math! And I can’t just quit tutoring, now that the new term has started. If you didn’t want me to do it, you should have said something before I signed up again.”

  “Well, I didn’t know you had signed up again,” Lindy said. “Now that I’m going to be more involved, I think we need to discuss it. We don’t have to make the decision now, but—”

  “What do you mean, you’re going to be more involved?”

  “I’m your mother, aren’t I?” Lindy asked, as though that answered the question.

  When they reached the hotel, Lindy and Allie embraced outside the car before the teenager climbed into the front passenger seat. Lindy started walking toward the hotel, but then turned back to the car, came closer, and motioned for Allie to put her window down.

  Leaning in, Lindy kissed her daughter on the cheek. “I don’t mean to suggest you’re not doing fantastically well. You are, and I’m very proud of you. You didn’t hear the women talking today at the house, but Morgan’s mother was telling the rest of us how impressed she was with you and”—she closed her eyes—“your friend . . . ?”

  “Sydney,” Allie said. Char heard the annoyance in the girl’s voice at her mother’s failure to remember the name of the girl who had been her best friend all her life.

  Lindy either didn’t recognize her daughter’s irritation or she ignored it, and her response was breezy, unapologetic. “Right,” she said. “How impressed she was with you and Sydney. How mature you both are. How responsible and well-behaved. She’s right, of course. You are all those things.

  “And I told her that it’s precisely because you’re so mature and responsible and well-behaved that I can work away in my office in Hollywood without having to be distracted by thoughts about the trouble you might be getting into up here. I can’t tell you how lucky I feel, to be free of that kind of concern, and to be able to concentrate on my own life down there.”

  Lindy glowed at her daughter, completely missing that she had just admitted to being relieved to not have to spend time thinking about her when they weren’t together. Char didn’t miss it, and she winced as she studied Allie, hoping the girl had heard only Lindy’s intended compliment and not the presumably unintended confession.

  No such luck—Allie’s shoulders lifted and her upper body stiffened. She took in a breath and turned her face to her mother. Char prepared herself for the blast.

  Lindy spoke before her daughter had a chance. Kissing the girl again, she said, “And I’m sorry if I upset you by mentioning the tutoring thing. We can discuss it later. Let’s not worry about it for now.”

  “But Mom,” Allie said, “I need to know. I need to give them some warning if there’s a chance I might have to—”

  Lindy straightened and reached a hand inside the car to stroke the girl’s hair. “Shhhh. I just told you, there’s no need to worry about it for now. We’ll put a pin in it, and talk about it later.”

  “No, but—”

  Lindy waved to Char, blew a kiss to
Allie, and turned toward the hotel.

  Allie let out a long breath and pushed the button to raise her window.

  They drove in silence for a few blocks. Allie leaned against the passenger door, her head on her arm, her mouth turned down. Char couldn’t decide if patting the teenager on her knee would help or set her off. To be safe, she kept her hands on the wheel.

  It was the right decision. Seconds later, Allie turned narrowed eyes toward Char. “I don’t know why you had to tell her I’m not getting credit for it anymore.”

  “I didn’t just come out with it. I responded to a question. What was I supposed to do? Lie?”

  “Right,” Allie scoffed. “Because the better choice is to get me in trouble.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “I mean, what business is it of hers anyway?” Allie said.

  “She is your mother.” It sounded lame to Char when she heard herself say it.

  Evidently, it sounded equally lame to her passenger, who tsked and turned to the window, her back to Char. “So, you’re just going to tell her anything she asks about me, I guess. Never mind that you know how she is, how she gets these ideas in her head and won’t let go, like tutoring is going to completely destroy my chances of getting into college. You’re going to feed her the information anyway, so she can get carried away and start telling me to quit this and stop that and start this other thing, when she really has no clue at all about any of it.”

  “I don’t love the attitude, Allie,” Char said. “You need to cut me some slack. I’m on your side, but it’s not like I have a choice here. If I refuse to answer her questions, how do you think that’s going to go over?”

  “My dad knew what to tell her and what to hold back,” Allie muttered.

  “I don’t have the same freedom he had to make those decisions.”

  Allie puffed air out her nose. “Right. So, good luck to me, then. She’s going to ask, and you’re going to tell. And I’m going to be screwed.”

  Eleven

  Later that night, after Allie went to bed, Char crept down the stairs and into Bradley’s office. She eased herself into his chair and put her hands on the gleaming surface of his desk. She had given Will all of the work papers, and now she wished she had made copies and sent those instead, so she wouldn’t have to look at the empty spaces where the stacks of presentations had been. She lifted a paperweight from a pile of professional journals and redistributed them, filling the vacant spots.

  She was about to return the paperweight to its rightful location but changed her mind and held on to it, enjoying the weight of it in her hand, the coldness of its smooth glass. Lifting it to eye level, she squinted to peer inside the glass dome and the exploded dandelion seedpod suspended within.

  “Einstein trapped in crystal,” Bradley had said when he saw it. She had brought it for him the second time she made the trip from D.C. to Michigan.

  On her first visit, about eight months after they met, she had seen his house, toured his hometown, visited his office. Met his daughter.

  They drove together to Doozie’s, an ice cream place near the CMU campus, and a young Allie ran off to investigate a large puddle that had formed on a nearby field while Bradley and Char took a seat at one of the picnic tables in front of the ice cream stand.

  “It’s beautiful here,” she told him. “I love it. And I adore her.” She gestured to his daughter, squatting now and tossing bits of her cone to two ducks wading in the puddle. “She has the best heart of any kid I’ve met.”

  “Have you met many kids?”

  “No. But if I had, she’d have the best heart of any of them.”

  He laughed, and she asked him if that was a terrible answer. He told her it was the best answer he could think of. Anyone could believe in something they had tested and verified. People did that all the time. It was a rarer thing to believe in something—or someone—on faith. Allie would be lucky to have a person in her life who believed in her that strongly.

  Char had reddened, nervous suddenly about the direction the conversation had taken. She didn’t know what to say, so dumbly, she repeated that she loved it there, and loved the girl feeding the ducks.

  “Do you love it, and her, and me, enough to stay?”

  “I . . .” she stammered.

  “Wait,” he said, holding up a hand. “Don’t answer that. Yet. Take some time to think about it. It’s a lot. We”—he indicated his daughter—“are a lot. A package deal. In a tiny town. In the Midwest.

  “I don’t want you to answer fast, without thinking it all through, and then give an answer you don’t really mean. And I’m not sure I should be asking this way. In this place”—he swept an arm to include Doozie’s and the graffiti-and-bird-poop-covered picnic table at which they sat—“with nothing but this to give you.” He gestured to his ice cream cone.

  She nodded, grateful to be released from speaking. The heat that had reddened her cheeks was moving down her neck and inside her throat, and she wasn’t sure she’d be able to squeeze out an answer, even if she knew what answer to give. She was overwhelmed. By the proposal, or the allusion to a proposal, anyway, and by what it would mean for her if she said yes.

  A husband hadn’t been a central blip on her radar lately. And when the idea of a spouse did flit across her consciousness, he certainly didn’t come with early retirement from her career and a nine-year-old daughter.

  But mostly, she was overwhelmed by what she felt for this man, and for his little girl, after an absurdly brief time knowing both of them. In the prior eight months, she had seen him sixteen times, for two days each—his mother was still living then, and could take Allie for weekends while Bradley traveled to D.C. That was only thirty-two days together, not counting that first night. Only two days with Allie. Wasn’t it far too soon for her to be feeling this way?

  She had flown back to D.C. that Sunday night, after telling him she would return to Mount Pleasant in three weeks. But she returned the following Friday instead, and arrived at his doorstep with Einstein trapped in crystal.

  She held it out to him as he opened the door. “I saw this and thought of you.”

  He lifted his hands to his head and smoothed down his hair. “Do I always look that bad?”

  She laughed. “You always look wonderful. It made me think of you because I find it fascinating. And it made me think of Allie because of all those seedpods she was so enthralled with on our hike in the state land.”

  He pulled her inside and kissed her. “You’re back early.”

  “I’m back forever,” she said.

  Now Char set the dome in the middle of the desk.

  “I miss him,” she said to the cherry surface. “I miss him so much.”

  She drew a circle around the dome with an index finger. Moved the dome aside and drew a heart in its place. She drew a second heart, a smaller one, using the tear that had landed. A third one, larger, using the next tears that fell.

  After a while, she stopped making hearts and watched her tears as they splattered on the wood below. She lay her cheek on the desk and breathed in the scent of the wood.

  Earlier, Will had produced a can of lemon spray and offered to polish the surface. Char wouldn’t let him. She didn’t want the scent of fruit to mask the wood, or Bradley.

  “You can smell Bradley in the wood?” Will asked. But immediately after, he said, “Never mind. Sorry. The switch on my smartass setting isn’t used to being in the ‘off’ position. I need to start holding it in place.”

  If she had the energy right now, Char thought, or knew where her cell phone was, she would text her brother: Actually, it turns out I can’t smell him in the wood. So, no harm/no foul.

  She smiled at the thought until it hit her: she couldn’t smell Bradley in the wood. She lifted her head from the desk and watched as her tears dropped faster. She could no longer see the hearts.

 
A cough from the doorway made her snap her head up. Allie.

  “Oh!” Char reached for a tissue but there were none in her usual spots: the cuffs of her sleeves, the waistband of her pants. She had changed into pajamas before coming downstairs, and had forgotten to resupply. Ducking her head so Allie couldn’t see her face, she swiveled in the chair, away from the door, away from the girl, and wiped her eyes with the sleeves of her shirt. “I was . . . um . . . I was . . .”

  Allie made a noise, somewhere between a tsk and a grunt. “How stupid do you think I am?”

  Char froze. “What?”

  “I’m fifteen years old! Do you think if you don’t cry in front of me, it’ll make me think he didn’t actually die? Or is it just that you’re more embarrassed to be seen crying than you are upset that my father is dead?”

  “No! That’s not—” Char swiveled around to face Allie.

  But the doorway was empty. Seconds later, she heard thumping up the stairs, and after that, a slamming door.

  She stared at the empty space where Allie had been standing and told herself she should follow the girl upstairs. Knock on her door and ask to be let in. Barge in, if that’s what it took. But when she tried to picture herself rising from the desk and walking all the way to the second floor, she couldn’t see it.

  That was something bio parents did—running after the kid, rapping on the door, saying they weren’t going to go away until they had been let in and the two of them talked it all out. Insisting that nothing go unsaid between them, that every misunderstanding be cleared up. That every night end with a hug and a kiss and a “Good night, I love you.” It wasn’t a stepparent thing. It certainly wasn’t a formerly-stepparent-and-now-no-role-at-all thing.

  Plus, Allie’s room was so far away, and Char’s bones felt so heavy. So she tipped forward and lay her arms on the desk, resting her head on a forearm. She could see Einstein peering at her from several inches away, and she reached out and pulled him into the small space between her head and her folded arms.