A Perfect Wife and Mother

by Peter Israel

  “It” turns out to be an IHOP, a brightly lit square in the darkness, free-standing next to two gas stations and a small shopping center. As we drive in and park, I do my “famous restaurant” number again. I tell him how their pancakes are the best anywhere, and how it’s called International House of Pancakes because the pancake batter is flown in daily, fresh, from many different parts of the world, places like Poland, India, France, even China. The Chinese, I say, are famous for their pancakes. Inside, we sit across from each other in a booth. I can see the entrance, and I keep my purse, with Harry’s little gun in it, on the banquette next to me. I let Justin order all by himself. He chooses pancakes à la mode, with french fries and ketchup, milk—I still insist on milk—and he digs into the food again as though I really have been starving him. I hardly touch mine. Instead, getting it together for what I’m about to say, I drink mug after mug of black coffee.

  And now it’s time.

  “It was very dangerous,” he says.

  “Well, yes, I guess it was.”

  “’arrit very brave.”

  “Thank you. You were too.”

  “Y’welcome.” Then: “Are you really a ’itch?”

  “Me? No, of course not.”

  “You told him you was.”

  “I know. The witch’s daughter. Well, I had to tell him something, didn’t I?”

  He grins back at me. Then: “Is your momma a ’itch?”

  I hesitate. “No, not really,” I say. “She’s just a bad person.”

  “Me thought her is dead.”

  I shake my head, flustered. This was just something I told him and Georgia. “No,” I say, “she’s alive.” I watch him take in the information. It’s the first time, I think, that he’s caught me in a lie. “I don’t mean bad in every way,” I add hurriedly. “Not necessarily. It’s just that she did bad things to me.”

  “To ’arrit?”

  “Yes,” I nod.

  “When?”

  “We just never got along. Sometimes that happens. I guess I did bad things to her too.”

  He struggles with this. Or maybe I’m the one who’s struggling. He’s too young to understand about bad mommies. I look away, unable to deal with his disapproval.

  “Was him a oarlock?” he says.

  “Was who a warlock?”

  “The man at the motel.”

  “I told you, Justin. That’s just pretend stuff. But he was a bad man.”

  “Him chase us?”

  “Yes, maybe. Or the one on the telephone.”

  “Him catch’d us?”

  “No, we’re not going to let anyone catch us.”

  “You got his gun.”

  “Yes, I took his gun. But I’m not going to use it.”

  “Can I see it?”

  “No. You know how I feel about guns.”

  Almost immediately I see his lower lip quiver and I guess what he’s thinking about—not Harry’s gun, but the plastic Colt .45 he wanted at the discount store. But then he says, “Me brave too.”

  “I know that, Justin. You’re one brave dude. I’m very proud of you.”

  But now’s the time, Becca, like it or not, and like it or not, I know I’m going to hurt him.

  “There’s something I’ve got to tell you, sweets,” I say, gazing across at him. “I think maybe you know it already. It’s over. The quest, the whole thing. All over.”

  He doesn’t react. I repeat it.

  “Over, done, finished.”

  He hears me, but if he understands, he doesn’t seem that devastated.

  I want to tell him these are genuinely bad people, that it is dangerous, that we can’t go on in the middle of it. At least not the two of us. I want to tell him that it was all craziness on my part, a bad idea. Instead I say, “Quests are just pretend anyway. Maybe a long time ago people did real quests—knights—but they don’t anymore.”

  “Do too,” he says.

  “No, Justin. All that was a very long time ago. Knights and ladies and dragons, witches, warlocks, all that stuff, we don’t have them anymore.”

  “Do too,” he insists stubbornly.

  For God’s sake, can’t he understand that I’m trying to find an easy way? For both of us?

  No, I guess he can’t.

  “Okay,” I say. “But I’ve made up my mind. We’re going home, Justin. That’s where we’re going tonight.”

  No response. I can’t read his reaction at all.

  “Yes, home,” I say. “To your mommy and daddy. I’m going to take you there. We’ve been away a very long time. I think they must miss you very much by now. I think you must miss them too.”

  He turns his face away, but I see in profile that particular pinched look he gets when he’s distressed or in trouble.

  “’arrit come too?” he asks.

  “Of course, silly,” I say. “Who else do you think is going to take you home?”

  “But after?” he asks.

  “After what?”

  “Will it be just like …? Just like …?”

  I take a deep breath. Leave it to him to find the loophole.

  “Just like before, you mean?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well,” I say, “sometime or other I’m going to have to decide what I’m going to do with the rest of my life. Like going back to college? And do it. We’ve talked about that before.” But I can see it doesn’t help him, and I rush on, lie a little more. “Of course, it wouldn’t be forever,” I say. “For one thing, college isn’t all year. Maybe next summer’s not such a bad idea, what do you think? Once you’re finished with Group, you’ll have plenty of time for adventures. Maybe we could go off together next summer? Just the two of us?”

  But he doesn’t believe me, I can tell.

  “Well?” I plunge on. “What do you think?”

  “’arrit don’t love me anymore,” he says.

  It stuns me.

  “But that’s ridiculous, Justin! I … I adore you! You’re my best friend!”

  “Me don’t want to go home yet,” comes his answer.

  “Look, sweets,” I say, reaching across and holding his chin, “let me tell you something about Justin Coffey. Maybe you won’t even understand it, but the other night, when you woke up—I think you’d been having a bad dream—you called out, ‘Mommy, Mommy.’ Remember? You didn’t call out ‘Becca’ or ‘Harriet.’ You said, ‘Mommy.’ I think you miss your mommy a lot. And what about your little sister, Zoe? For God’s sake, you haven’t even seen her yet. If you don’t get a move on, she’ll be all grown up and you won’t even have seen her as a little baby!”

  It makes no difference though. Nothing I can do or say will make him believe me. Instead I see the betrayal in his dark eyes. I want to tell him: Please, Justin, I’ve got us in a terrible spot, the least I can do is try to get you out of it, please don’t do this to me.

  “I do too love you, Justin Coffey,” I say. “I swear to God I do.”

  I let go of his chin. I want to hold him, hug him, but he’s turned his head away. He listens in silence while I talk on, making promises I know I’ll never keep.

  Not another word out of him.

  I pay the bill. Cash, MasterCard, what the fuck difference does it make anymore? I take him to the john, then I bundle him back into the car seat. Within fifteen minutes—I can tell by his breathing—he is asleep. I wait a few more minutes, then stop on the shoulder of the interstate and turn off the headlights.

  This stop is for me. I’ve never had an easy time crying. Sometimes I feel like I’m going to—just now, at the Pancake House—but usually the tears won’t come at all and what I get instead is a dry, burning sensation. Now they well out of my eyes, and I let them flow, feel them rolling down my cheeks, taste their salt. I take deep breaths, swivel and arch my neck. After a while, I climb into the backseat, rummage for Justin’s snowsuit, manage to get the pants half on him, the jacket draped and wedged around him like a blanket. Then I drive off again. A half hour later, I get
off the interstate one last time, to top off the gas tank and buy NoDoz and two Styrofoam containers of black coffee.

  5 January

  I expect to have to fight to stay awake, but it’s not a problem. Maybe I’m too strung out. Every pair of headlights in the rearview, every red taillight up ahead, could be him. Only the trucks, all lights blazing, are my friends. The land grows hillier as I go, and the winding strip of road cuts through dark rock and snowdrifts that loom down suddenly out of the shadows, and I know he could be anywhere, behind or out in front of me, even sitting quietly around the next bend in a dark car parked on the shoulder.

  I see no dark cars parked on the shoulders.

  I have to plan carefully, down to the last detail, but my mind keeps drifting off, to the familiar rhythm of the “if onlys,” starting with if only I hadn’t let myself get talked into the snowman, and once started—it’s an old habit—I can’t stop. They mark my life backwards like telephone poles on a train ride. If only I hadn’t answered Georgia’s ad. If only, that last day at Looney Tunes, when I came downstairs and there was this distinguished-looking man rising out of the couch in the parlor—really very elegant—I’d had the guts to say, “But I have no Cousin Robert. I’ve never seen this man before in my life.” And if I hadn’t slept with too many men, including Uncle Mark, which is what really freaked the Witch out; or if I hadn’t gone to St. Jude’s Obscure College for Women in frozen Minnesota, or if—this is where it always starts—my father hadn’t died.

  In fact, as the “care-givers” at Looney Tunes liked to point out, it didn’t start there. But I remember the funeral in Bernardsville, the rain, black umbrellas, Uncle Mark holding her elbow. My own dull dread. And thinking: tough shit, Becca, the wrong parent died.

  The Witch wore black, with a veil. I wore my high school coat.

  And then we were stuck. Beefeater’s by the case and the closet for me.

  People—the care-givers included—have always thought I exaggerate how bad she was. They can’t believe the closet story, that a fifteen-year-old girl would, from time to time, “let” herself be locked in a closet stuffed with old clothes, a steamer trunk that had once belonged to her grandmother, boxes jammed below the shelves as well as on top, or that every time I tried to hide a light bulb there, so much as a flashlight, a box of goddamn Fig Newtons, she found me out. They can’t or won’t believe that it had been going on for as long as I can remember. You fat little pig I can’t stand to look at you anymore. Or that I learned, early, not to scream, or fight, certainly not to cry, just to sit, squeezed in the dark, knowing that sooner or later I’d hear her footsteps outside, curses sometimes, knocking into stuff, her clunky key in the keyhole.

  I got out as fast as I could. Not the closet, I mean, but Bernardsville. In frozen Minnesota, where the sky gets dark in October, I fell in love. Once I met my Johnny Oakley, I spent more time at the university than at St. Jude’s, and I was going to transfer there my sophomore year, until the Witch found out about it. The next thing I knew, if I wanted to go to college at all, it would have to be in New Jersey. Johnny sent me a letter, which I read once and threw out, and a dozen farewell roses, which I buried. Then I went to see Uncle Mark, in the city. I knew they were sleeping together by then, but he was also my father’s lawyer, and if he wasn’t my real uncle, at least I’d known him since childhood. I called him. He said, “Come on in, Becca,” and in I went, to these sensational offices downtown, with the views of the harbor and his name on the door, Lambert Laughin Spain. I showed him the papers I’d stolen from her. Legally, he said, I didn’t have a leg to stand on. Yes, the education trust was for my benefit, but didn’t I see, it named my mother sole trustee? Empowered to act in her sole discretion?

  I took off. Minneapolis by thumb, three days. I guess I wanted to hear it firsthand from Johnny, and I did. Just like his letter said, he couldn’t deal with me anymore. We were too young; there was my mother; it was all too complicated. I refused to leave, though. I was abject, I begged, I prostrated myself. I even got a job, waitressing, for two days. But when I found out the real reason—that his new girlfriend was already living on the top floor of the house that had been intended for us—I drew blood. Johnny threatened to call the police, but he must have called the Witch instead. The next thing I knew, I was on a plane home, accompanied by good old Uncle Mark, whom she’d sent out to get me.

  Maybe you could say we deserved each other, the Witch and I. As for Mark, afterward he liked to say I seduced him. Maybe I did. I know that plane ride started in tears and ended up with him undressing me, button by button, at the Marriott Hotel at Newark Airport, which led in turn to other venues, including the Witch’s bed, where she discovered us one memorable afternoon, Mark with his hands raised in self-defense, I convulsed in giggles. And other vices, other men, the year I finally went crazy and ran away twice, twice retrieved, and became, at home and away, the evil promiscuous bitch of her prediction, which led, eventually, to Looney Tunes, last known address of the congenitally antisocial and mentally unstable, and, last spring, to “Cousin Robert” steering me by the arm out to the gleaming black Jaguar in the driveway.

  I never found out how he found me. He wouldn’t tell me. I never found out who he really was either. Not a damn thing. I tried for a while, but he was far too careful, too clever. And too charming too, in the beginning. He said, that first day, “The truth would only disappoint you, my dear. It is much too banal. Think of it that I fell out of the sky, an accident of nature. Take advantage of it. Let me invent us.”

  Harriet Major. Robert A. Smith.

  By the time I understood what he wanted of me, it was too late.

  I guess with me it always is.

  I run out of if onlys around four in the morning. I’m blinking my eyes against the uniform darkness, and the beams of my headlights, the blink-blink-blink of the white dashes marking the lanes. I straddle the dashes but even the sounds work against me, the regular seams in the road underneath, the drone of the engine, the steady breathing, when I listen hard for it, of Justin in the backseat. And the soft bluish lights from the dashboard. And the lulling warmth of the heater …

  I just jerked awake again.

  If I try to keep going, I’m going to kill us both.

  I pull off at the next exit. I park next to a closed gas station. There’s a phone booth outside. I undo my seat belt, lock the doors, check Justin, then stretch sideways in the front seat, pulling my knees up under my parka.

  “I do too love you, Justin Coffey,” I say.

  A little after seven, I wake up and call Georgia.

  5 January

  “Since when are you calling the shots?”

  “Since right now. One-thirty A.M.”

  “Hey, you’re paying me to keep you informed, Mr. Spain. That’s all.”

  “No, you’re wrong. It’s changed now.”

  “What’s changed?”

  “I’m paying you double. Whatever you bill him, you get twice as much from me. And that’s retroactive to day one.”

  “Holy shit. And what am I supposed to do for it?”

  “Find the boy. The only difference is, once you find him, you call me first.”

  “But I can’t do that! He’s my client. I’ve got a professional reputation.”

  “Exactly. And you’d better protect it.”

  “For Christ’s sake, you don’t have to threaten me! What do we do about the girl?”

  “That’s your lookout.”

  “Yeah, but she’s armed now. She put one of my guys in the hospital. I’m not risking their fucking lives. What do we do if she puts up a fight?”

  “I said: That’s your lookout.”

  “That’s not what my client wants. He wants the girl too, in one piece.”

  “I said: Find the boy. Don’t blow it this time. And call me first. Do I make myself clear?”

  Georgia Levy Coffey

  5 January

  I fumble, pick up in a headachy daze. It is barely light outside
. I’ve been dreaming, I can’t …

  “Hullo?” I manage into the mouthpiece.

  “Georgia?”

  “Yes? Who’s this?”

  But I know! Unless I’m still dreaming?

  “It’s me, Harriet.” The voice is clear as a bell in my ear. “Please listen carefully. I’ve got Justin with me. I’m bringing him home today. It’ll take me a while, and nobody can know. I don’t want the police there, anybody. He’s in great danger. You’ve got to guard him with your life.”

  I’m still babbling after she hangs up, after I know she’s hung up. I sit up in bed, babbling, shivering, and Zoe is squalling from the crib. I’ve no idea what I’m saying. Maybe the police do if it still records after one side hangs up. I’m crying, I discover. I’m crying because it was Harriet, and if she says she’s bringing Justin home, then, God, I believe her.

  Justin is coming home!

  I wake up Larry to tell him. Then I call my parents. I wake them up too. I can’t imagine Harriet caring about them knowing. They’re coming as fast as they can get dressed. I feel the need for people around me, for warmth if nothing else. I can’t stop shivering, even with the heat turned up.

  It must be just me. My hands are like ice.

  I repeat the whole conversation for the police. No matter what she said, I can’t keep them from knowing. They have it on tape. Did I have any impressions, listening to her? Any idea where she might have been calling from?

  No, none.

  All I know is, she’s called. She says my boy’s coming home!

  Now the whole world knows it. I don’t know how it happened, but it’s driving me crazy. My parents are here. There’s been no further word, but the road outside is like outside a church on Sunday, cars bumper to bumper, and I can even see a cop in uniform. Directing traffic? Except it’s not Sunday, it’s not a church, it’s my house!

  What will Harriet do if she sees all the cars outside?

  It’s the goddamned media. Somebody—who else but the police?—must have tipped them off. CHRISTMAS KIDNAPPING OVER, now there’s a headline. I confront Capriello, confront his boss, the St. George chief of police. (What is he doing here, if not to make Section B of the Times?) I’m crazed. Harriet insisted nobody else be here. She was very specific about it. But she’s a fugitive from justice, they tell me, she’s committed a serious crime, the police have every obligation to try to catch her. And as for the media, the road is town property; there is no basis for banning them from town property.