Untethered

by Julie Lawson Timmer

  “Oh, Allie, I’m so sorry. I wish there was something I could do.”

  “I miss my dad,” Allie whispered. “Nothing’s the same without him. Everything is all . . . wrong.”

  “I miss him, too,” Char said.

  “Could I come home?”

  “I’m at Will’s. Remember?”

  “Oh, right.”

  “And I couldn’t agree to that anyway,” Char said. “You know that.”

  “Because my mother calls the shots.”

  “Well . . . yes.”

  “CC?”

  “Yeah?”

  “How fucked up is that?”

  Char laughed. “Language, young lady.”

  Allie laughed, too, and Char felt her chest expand as her heart swelled at the sound.

  • • •

  Idon’t get it,” Char said to her brother over dinner that night, after repeating the conversation she had had with Allie. “As many times as I’ve told myself I get it, told you the same thing, and Colleen. I mean, I just bragged to Sarah Crew about how much I get it. But the truth is, sometimes I really don’t get it. Why it is that she’s still so desperate for that woman’s attention. I mean, she’s not Morgan Crew. She’s not ten years old, living in a fantasy world about a mother she barely remembers. She knows Lindy. So, why—?”

  “You know why. Because you do get it. As frustrating as it is sometimes, you get it.”

  Char looked at her plate. “You’re right. I just find it so aggravating. Especially now. I mean, I’ve been the one who’s been there for her since her dad died, but here she is . . .” She looked from her dish to her hands and back while she considered whether to finish. It made her feel childish, what she was thinking. And dishonest. She had made it sound so final, when she was doling out her advice to Sarah Crew: I used to think the way you’re thinking, but now I’m over it. What a liar she was. She had been in remission, that’s all, yet she had bragged to Sarah about being cured.

  “Here she is, caring so much about a woman in California who doesn’t appear to give a damn, when there’s one in Michigan who does?” Will finished her question for her.

  Char said nothing, but made a mental note to tell Sarah never to listen to her advice again.

  “You feel like it’s a rejection,” he went on, “this loyalty she has to Lindy. Like she’s somehow saying you’re not enough.”

  Char nodded.

  “Lindy’s her mother.”

  “But she hasn’t acted like it for years. If ever. And meanwhile, all this time, I’ve been . . .” Her voice broke and she couldn’t finish. Will started to rise, to come to her. “I’m fine,” she said, and he sat and waited patiently while she stood, searched for a tissue, and, finding none, went to the bathroom for a strip of toilet paper. She blew her nose, returned to her seat, and took some deep breaths to compose herself.

  When her breathing returned to normal, Will spoke. “Do you remember that school play I was in?” he asked. “You were in fifth grade, I was in third. I had about four lines, and I made you practice with me every night for a month. Remember that?”

  Char stared past him, at the wall, calling up the memory. “Yeah, I remember.”

  “And then the big night came, and I looked over to where Mom and Dad were sitting. And there was Dad, smiling up at me and nodding. And Mom was turned completely around in her chair, talking to that friend of hers, uh . . .”

  “Rita Mixom,” Char said.

  Will snapped his fingers. “Right, Mrs. Mixom. She wasn’t even looking at me. She was whispering with Mrs. Mixom about something, and she missed every one of my lines. I was so upset, and my friends knew it.

  “And someone said, ‘Don’t worry about it. She’s just a big, stupid old whale.’ Before we got into the car to go home, I told you I was going to tell her what they’d called her, to get back at her. You made me promise not to. When we got home, I was lying in bed crying, and you came into my room, and you sat with me until I stopped. I asked why you wouldn’t let me call her a whale, when it was so clear that our mother was a big, stupid old whale. And you said . . . do you remember what you said?”

  “I said, ‘Because that whale is our mother.’”

  They were both quiet for a moment. Finally, Char said, “You were such a little brat that night. What kid even considers calling their mother something like that? She struggled all her life with her weight, and you knew that. You even said, at her funeral—”

  Will raised his hands, palms out, defending himself. “I know, I know. Tell you what: tomorrow night at dinner, I want you to tell a story that makes me look like the saint and you like the devil.”

  “Oh, so you want me to make something up?”

  He laughed again, and then became serious. “Charlotte.”

  “What?”

  “Lindy is Allie’s whale.”

  “Yeah, Will. I got it.”

  Twenty-one

  Oh, everything’s fine,” Sarah said when Char saw her at tutoring the Monday after break and asked how things were going. “Our break was fine. We’re all fine.”

  “That’s so nice to hear,” Char said. “I was worried after we spoke the last time.”

  “No need, it’s all fine,” Sarah said, in a tone designed to end the discussion.

  “Good,” Char said quietly.

  Char regarded Sarah as she watched Stevie, who was lying on the floor on his stomach, pushing a toy car through a figure eight he had made with a crumpled piece of paper and a gum wrapper. Char waited for the other woman to snap an order for the boy to get off the dirty floor and come over so she could dust off his pants, clean his hands with wipes.

  But Sarah turned to Char without a word to her son. “I mean, the weather wasn’t great, but there’s nothing to be done about that, right?”

  Char struggled for a response while Sarah turned to watch her son again. He had kicked off his boots now, and was tapping one socked foot into the large puddle his boots had made. Char looked from the boy to his mother expectantly, but again, Sarah didn’t react.

  It was then that Char noticed the globs of liquid rouge on Sarah’s cheek. It looked like she had put it on with her eyes closed—the blotches of pink were too low, and she hadn’t taken the time to blend it properly. She wore no eyeliner or earrings—two things Char had never seen her without. Her lips, like her cheeks, were dotted with clumps of color that she hadn’t made the effort to even out. Her hair appeared not to have been brushed, or washed, in days.

  “Sarah,” Char whispered, putting a hand on the other woman’s arm. “Is everything okay? You don’t seem like yourself.”

  “Everything’s fine,” Sarah said, looking down at her hands as Stevie, who had rolled over onto his back, let out a loud burp. Raising his head warily to see if his mother had noticed, he locked eyes with Char, who stifled a smile at his “Uh-oh” expression. But Sarah only wrinkled her nose at him before turning back to her hands.

  “Should I call you later?” Char asked. “So we can talk without”—she gestured to the child on the floor—“little ears?”

  “No need,” Sarah said, “but thank you. I’m totally . . .”

  Fine? Char wanted to ask. But she smiled instead, though Sarah didn’t notice, having apparently lost interest in the conversation, and in Char. Stevie stretched his arms overhead and spread his legs, making a snow angel on the dirty linoleum floor. Grime angel, Char thought, and waited for his mother to shriek for him to stop.

  Sarah said nothing.

  The boy’s socks, which had been in the puddle before he started his angels, picked up dirt from the floor as they traveled up in their arc, creating a curved line of gray-black as he opened and shut his legs again and again. After his third angel, he let his feet rest in the puddle before raising one, then the other, and smacking them down to the wet floor. He giggled as the dirty wate
r splashed onto his light-colored shirt, a few drops hitting him on the chin.

  “Don’t get that bandage wet,” Sarah said.

  Stevie lifted his left arm, which Char now noticed was thicker than his right. A sliver of white gauze stuck out of his shirt cuff. He patted his sleeve gently. “Dra!” he said, raising his chin so he could see his mother.

  Sarah didn’t answer, and Char wondered if she had even heard. “I think he’s telling you it’s dry,” Char said. “Poor kid. What did he do to his arm?”

  Sarah flapped her hand as though it weren’t a story worth telling. Char considered asking Stevie, but she didn’t have the energy to interpret, so she went back to observing and said nothing more.

  Stevie brought his other arm close to his face, studied the layer of sludge that had built up on his sleeve from the floor, and wiped his mouth, leaving a brown smudge across one cheek and both lips. Before Char could tell him not to, he darted his tongue out and licked the brown off.

  “Gross,” Sarah said, more to herself than her son, and Stevie put his arm back on the floor and resumed his grime angels.

  Twenty-two

  The following Monday was the second in April. Allie had been home for a little over a week and the weather had changed dramatically since her return. It was spring at last and the dirty strips of snow along the sides of the roads had melted. Lawns were turning from brown to green. The wood deck off the family room was no longer stained dark and wet with melting snow and ice but had been dried and baked into a soft caramel color by the spring sun.

  Around eleven, Char rose from Bradley’s desk and put on more coffee, then carried the deck chairs and their cushions up from the shed. Colleen was coming over for a visit, and Char planned to stay outside after and continue editing on the deck. One of the best things about working from home was the freedom to move her operations outside. For most of the past five summers, she had done her editing from a lawn chair. The view of the sloping yard, the ravine at the bottom, the state land on the other side was all so lovely. Especially at this time of year, when each new burst of green on branches or spray of color on shrubs was a thrill.

  For Char, the coldness of Michigan winter was only half the problem. It was the gray that really got to her. The monochromatic dullness that bled from the sky into the landscape, as though the entire atmosphere had gotten depressed and given up. Bradley, sympathetic to her plight, loved to point out the smallest bits of cheerfulness in the yard and the state land.

  “Look, Char! A cardinal!” he would yell, and she would come running to the window, squinting to find the tiny dot of red among the stands of leafless, charcoal-gray trees beyond the ravine.

  Springtime gardening had become one of her annual rituals, even though she had never been a gardener before. “You’re not so much a gardener as a coaxer,” Bradley used to tell Char. And it was true. She had little interest in keeping up the chore once summer was in full swing. It was only in those early April days that she was eager to be out there, clearing fall’s last leaves from the front garden to let the daffodils peek through, inspecting the shrubs and pruning out any parts that didn’t seem to be greening up as fast as the others.

  “Nature has a schedule,” Bradley joked to Allie once as they tossed a baseball in the backyard while Char threw every last bit of brown into the compost bin. “But so does Char. Once she’s decided it’s spring, any part of the garden that disobeys is subject to . . .” He drew a finger across his throat.

  Char crossed to the deck railing and found the spot in the yard where Bradley had stood that day, tossing and catching the ball with his daughter while he heckled his wife, the impatient gardener. She could see him, leaning forward as he threw, his running shoes and the bottoms of his jeans splattered with mud from the spongy spring grass that spit up flecks of dirty water each time he planted his foot. Tossing back his head with laughter as Allie held the ball up like a major league pitcher, looked left, right, left again before winding up, bringing her left leg so high she lost her balance and fell over.

  A tear trailed down Char’s cheek as she smiled at the image, the sound of his voice, the feel of his five-o’clock shadow when he jogged over to kiss her as he waited for Allie to run inside for a glass of water before they resumed their game. Tilting her face up to the sun, she felt another tear slide and wondered if she should abandon her idea of sitting outside. She had cried through too many visits with Colleen over the past few months.

  No, she told herself. Bradley would be appalled to know she had given up the first lovely spring afternoon because of him. If she cried through coffee with Colleen, so be it. If she had to edit all afternoon through tears, that would be fine, too. And later, after her work was finished, if she sobbed as she trimmed the hedges out front, she would deal with that as well.

  Normally, she would force Allie around the property to show her the progress she had made. She did it every year, dragging Allie and her dad by the wrists, pointing out all she had done, the colors she had uncovered. Allie would politely pretend it was exciting. Char wasn’t sure Allie would play along today, though.

  Things hadn’t changed much since the teenager’s return from California. The tearful call from Lindy’s hadn’t signaled a return to normalcy, as Char had hoped it would. Allie was cool in the car on the way home from the airport, and whether it was because she was still angry with Char for telling Lindy about Justin or because she was still upset that her mother hadn’t spent time with her, the result was the same: one-word responses to Char’s questions and, the minute they had parked in the garage, a quick “Thanks for getting me,” before Allie darted out of the car and ran up to her room.

  Allie was still spending too much time with Kate and the boys. Char was still avoiding a confrontation about it. As upsetting as things had been for Allie since her father died, they had gotten even worse during her stay in California. If the girl felt better, easier, around these kids than she did around Sydney and her other friends, Char didn’t want to dismiss that.

  But avoiding the issue hadn’t dissolved the tension between the two of them. “Maybe she wants me to argue with her about it,” she said to Colleen as they carried their coffee out to the porch along with the box of doughnuts Colleen had picked up on the way over. “Do you think that could be it? Is she annoyed with me because I’m not saying anything about it?”

  They settled in their chairs. “I mean, all this time, I’ve been trying to be respectful. Do you think I’m coming off as uncaring? Does she think I’m the same as Lindy?” She took a bite of a doughnut. “Mmmm. I love these glazed sour cream ones. You’re the reason my diet always fails, do you know that? And I love you for it.”

  “Nothing about you is the same as Lindy,” Colleen said, reaching into the box. “Anyway, here’s a newsflash: Allie might be annoyed with something that has nothing to do with you. I mean, this whole thing between her and Sydney? It’s major. Last time I asked Sydney about it, she said they weren’t even sitting together at lunch anymore. I know it’s made things at our place a little tense.

  “Or it could be that she’s fifteen. I can’t tell you how often we suffer through the whole I-can’t-tell-you-why-I’m-angry-with-you-and-I-don’t-even-know-myself-but-I-am-so-I’m-going-to-my-room-and-don’t-bother-trying-to-talk-to-me thing at our place. And of course, you can’t rule out grief. Both of you have been so amazingly stoic. I’ve wondered if one of you would crack at some point. Maybe this is Allie cracking.”

  “I’m not so amazingly stoic,” Char said, thinking of the many nights she had cried herself to sleep, Bradley’s pillow clutched tightly to her chest. “If you were in my room late at night . . .”

  “Well, you put on a pretty good show for the rest of us,” Colleen said.

  “Wait,” Char said. “Do you think that could be it? Is she still upset because I’m not falling apart over her father in front of her? I told you about the night in his office, right? S
he’s never mentioned it since, so I assumed she let it go. Or that she decided maybe it does help after all, to not have to watch me bawl.

  “I really do think that’s one of the best gifts I can give her right now, you know? I don’t want her to feel she has to comfort me. And I don’t want her to think I’m, I don’t know, swooping in on her life, somehow, by being so upset about a man I was married to for five years when she spent three times longer than that with him.”

  Colleen narrowed her eyes. “What?”

  “In a first family,” Char explained, “you’re all free to grieve the same amount when you lose someone. In a blended family, you have to allow for the fact that there might be an unspoken seniority rule in some people’s minds. I came in at the end. I’ve been trying to be sensitive to the fact that Allie might think I don’t have the right to be as upset as she is. For a while, I wasn’t even sure I should be as upset as Lindy.”

  Colleen opened her mouth to protest and Char said, “I know. Will set me straight on that one. The thing is, I haven’t wanted Allie to get the idea that I think my relationship with him was more important than hers was. Or even as important. I mean, the bottom line is that I could marry again. She can’t get a new father.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Colleen said. She set down her coffee cup and held up her hands. “Why can’t you be as sad as you want to be about the love of your life, and let Allie be as sad as she wants to be about her dad, and leave it at that? Do you really think she’s running these measurements in her head, gauging how broken up you’re acting in any given moment, and assessing that against some Stepmom-O-Meter in her brain?”

  Char angled her head as if to say, “Duh, yes.”

  Colleen lifted her cup again and waited, her expression expectant.