Skipping a Beat

by Sarah Pekkanen

  After we hung up I lay there for a minute, then stood and stretched my arms over my head, scanning our living room as if seeing it for the first time. I tried to imagine what my life would look like if I left Michael. I’d decorate my own house, cook my own meals, take my car to Jiffy Lube to have the oil changed. Maybe I’d start dating, and fall in love again. I might even remarry. Michael and I would become nodding acquaintances, the type of people who exchanged holiday cards but didn’t talk for the rest of the year.

  I was surprised by how much the thought hurt. I pictured myself running into Michael decades from now—his dark curls gone gray, a different wedding ring gleaming on his hand as it closed around the handle of a cane—and I squeezed my eyes shut against the image.

  “Hi.”

  I turned and saw him standing there. I’d been so lost in my thoughts that I hadn’t heard him come in. We stared at each other for a moment, and I could feel him gauging my mood. But I only felt numb, and very, very tired; my turbulent emotions seemed to be giving me a temporary reprieve.

  Then my stomach rumbled. “You said something about dinner?” I asked.

  Michael nodded. “I’ll even cook, unless that scares you away.”

  “Okay,” I finally said, and I smiled despite myself. A temporary truce it would be. “All I’ve had since breakfast is a handful of potato chips, and I’m starving.”

  * * *

  Nineteen

  * * *

  THE SECURITY BUZZER RANG at 9:00 the next morning, taking us both by surprise.

  “Are you expecting anyone?” Michael asked, and I shook my head. He stood up and walked to the video screen hidden inside a closet by the front door. He was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, and his feet were bare. Michael had, without a doubt, the world’s ugliest feet—big and knobby and stark white—and he’d always been embarrassed by them. He had drawers full of expensive socks, and he even wore them to bed. But apparently now he was embracing all of God’s creations, even the ones with unsightly bunions.

  “Is it a Jehovah’s Witness?” I asked brightly. “Hang on, let me get you a tambourine and you two can run off together.”

  Michael gave a laugh-snort, then pressed a button and spoke through the intercom: “Can I help you?”

  I stood up and walked over to look at the screen. It was a woman driving a small four-door car that looked like it had seen better days. “Oh! Sorry! I, um, made you these,” she said, struggling to thrust a wicker basket out through her car window and holding it up toward the camera. “They’re homemade. Oatmeal chocolate-chip cookies. I hope you aren’t allergic to anything. I didn’t put in nuts just in case. I know it isn’t much, but I just … I wanted to give you something …”

  “Do you want to come up to the house for a minute?” Michael asked, and she nodded.

  And why not? I wondered. Why not act as if it was totally normal to have a stuttering stranger show up on your doorstep with a basket of cookies? In Michael’s world, maybe it was, just before unicorns started high-stepping in a chorus line and the skies rained down lollipops.

  Michael held open the front door as the woman got out of her car and approached us. She appeared to be in her early thirties and was plain-looking; her face was round, and her eyebrows were so blond they seemed to blend into her white skin. She looked around our entryway as her mouth hung open like a B-list actor expressing surprise. I knew just how she felt; I’d done the same thing the first time we walked in here while the real estate agent hid a smile and started mentally spending her commission.

  “My twin sister died,” the woman blurted. “I’m sorry, I didn’t even tell you my name … It’s Sandy.”

  “Come sit down for a minute,” Michael suggested.

  “I don’t want to bother you.” She hesitated.

  “You’re not. Please, come in.”

  He led her to our library, which was smaller and cozier than our living rooms. It had walls of bookshelves and a cluster of furniture forming a half circle around a slate fireplace. She sat down on a buttery yellow leather couch, and Michael sat across from her. I followed them in; it felt disrespectful to do anything else. But I sat as far away from him as possible, on the other end of the couch.

  “I’m—um—I used to work as a paralegal, but I quit when Shannon was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. I took care of her. Now I’m a substitute teacher.”

  Michael nodded and kept his eyes trained on her face.

  “Shannon and I felt like twins—we were almost twins,” Sandy said. “Irish twins, I guess you’d call it, since we were born eleven months apart, and the funny thing is, we really are Irish. But that’s not what I wanted to tell you. It’s just still hard, you know, to talk about it. Her. To talk about Shannon.”

  Sandy took a shuddering breath. “I’m telling this all out of order, aren’t I? Our parents died when we were in college. It was a small plane crash. Dad was a pilot in the Air Force before he retired, and he kept a little plane for weekend rides. It was their twenty-second anniversary, and they were out by themselves. After that, Shannon and I just had each other. We were always close before, but … then, we were the only family we had.”

  “You must miss her terribly,” Michael said, his voice gentle.

  Sandy nodded and squeezed her eyes shut. “I ache with missing her. I’m not married or anything, so … I don’t know, sometimes I think it makes things worse that I’m not married and don’t have kids, but then other times I don’t think anything would help.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Michael said.

  “Thank you,” Sandy said. She didn’t try to stop the tears this time. They overflowed and slid down her soft-looking cheeks. “No, I mean, thank you. All that money you’re giving away … I read you were giving some to cancer research. I can’t believe you’re doing this. You’re going to help so many people, people like Shannon. You’re going to save lives.”

  Michael reached over and took Sandy’s hand. “I hope you don’t mind my telling you this,” he said. “But I believe your sister is safe and loved.”

  Sandy’s head snapped up, and she held her breath for a moment, and suddenly, I realized this was the real reason she’d come.

  “You do?” she whispered. “You think she’s still … around … somehow? And that she’s okay?”

  “I do,” Michael said. “With all of my heart.”

  “Is that—is it because that’s what happened to you?” Sandy asked. “After your heart stopped?”

  “Yes,” Michael said simply. And the honesty and the—well, I guess you’d call it the faith—filling up that one word didn’t make Sandy’s tears stop. But something in her eyes changed, softened.

  “I just wish I could tell her I love her,” Sandy whispered. “I wish so bad I could hug her one more time.”

  She was crying even harder now. I stood up and found a box of tissues and put them down next to her.

  Michael nodded. “You will,” he said. “Someday. I really believe you will. After you’ve lived a long time, and maybe had those kids, and done all the things you need to do here.”

  Sandy put her face into her hands and her shoulders shook, but her weeping was different now. Softer. After a moment, she stood up.

  “Thank you,” she said again, quietly this time, and she left without another word.

  After a few moments I went into the kitchen for some chamomile tea, but I couldn’t get Sandy’s face out of my mind.

  She believed Michael. She didn’t even know him, but she trusted him completely. Yet I couldn’t. I’d never believe Michael had gone to another dimension, or heaven, or whatever he wanted to call it. How could you go to a place that didn’t exist?

  But maybe the other things he’d said had a hint of truth, I thought as I stirred honey into my tea. Like that I cared so much about money that it had somehow warped me. He hadn’t used those exact words, but I knew what he meant. It hurt, I thought in surprise. I wasn’t a pampered snob—if anything, I felt more insecure now than I ever had be
fore in my life—but others might see me that way. My shyness in fancy social situations could look like haughtiness: Did people watch our driver open the car door for me to slide inside and sneer, not seeing me flush with embarrassment as I tried to pull the door shut behind me, having forgotten once again I was supposed to let the driver do it?

  Suddenly I remembered a client named Margaret, for whom I’d thrown an eightieth birthday party at the request of her family. It was a big bash—she had seven kids and twenty-four grandkids—and I’d handed her a glass of golden, bubbly champagne as she stood there, surveying the room full of smiling faces and getting ready to slice into a giant coconut cake.

  But the knife had stayed still in her hand as she’d turned to look at me.

  “Inside, I still feel sixteen,” she’d said, almost in wonder. “How can I be eighty years old when I’m still a girl?”

  I’d looked into her faded blue eyes with the deep wrinkles bracketing them, and suddenly felt a kinship with her. Secretly, that was exactly how I felt: What people saw when they looked at me didn’t reflect who I was inside. At my core, I was still a girl without money, a person who worried she didn’t fit in, someone who walked around with a silver sliver of fear buried deep inside her, like a bit of shrapnel even the most skilled surgeon would never be able to remove. Whenever I woke up at night, it took me long moments to reorient myself, to realize that we weren’t in our old apartment with the roaches and peeling linoleum floors, and that I didn’t have to cook spaghetti three nights a week to save money.

  I shook off the memory and took a sip of my tea. It was too hot and it burned my tongue, but I barely felt the pain. Because by then I was walking back toward our library, and I saw Michael still sitting on the couch.

  Something about the way a shadow darkened his face, the tilt of his head … All in a rush, the day came back to me when I’d come home to see my father sitting on a couch in the exact same position, confessing to my mother how he’d thrown away everything we owned.

  Michael thought I cared too much about money, but he didn’t understand, I thought, gripping my mug so tightly my fingers hurt. Why couldn’t he understand? Yes, it was horrible when my father gambled all our money away. But even worse, so much worse, was everything else I lost when my father abandoned me. When he stopped loving me.

  * * *

  Twenty

  * * *

  WEST VIRGINIA WAS ONLY a few hours away, but I rarely went back home to visit. Shortly after Michael and I eloped, though, I made the trip—mostly out of guilt over not inviting my parents to the wedding. They’d just moved out of my aunt and uncle’s place and were living in a house owned by an elderly woman who had vacated it to move in with her daughter. In exchange for rent, my father, who’d always been handy, was fixing it up after years of neglect.

  Those twenty-four hours were among the worst in my life. The shabby little house couldn’t contain the tangle of feelings swirling around inside it, and although we all tried to be upbeat—to gloss over the anger and hurt in our shared past, if only for a day—we kept stumbling. Every conversation felt stilted, every memory held a hidden land mine, and the distance between my parents and me seemed to have grown exponentially since I’d left, leaving a gap that felt impossible to traverse.

  It was obvious my father was trying, in his own awkward way, to fix things between us by repairing tangible problems: He changed the oil in my car, hurried out to buy a box of Lipton’s when I asked if there was any tea in the house, and insisted on carrying my overnight bag up the stairs to the guest room.

  “I just painted it last week,” he said, and I smiled and pretended that I loved the rose petal pink shade on the walls. It had been my favorite color, but that was when I was sixteen—the last year my father and I had really known each other.

  My dad seemed to feel the need to constantly stay in motion, as if by doing so, he could find relief from the heavy emotions pressing in on us. “After I change the oil, I’ll put a little air in your tires,” he said as he wiped my car’s dipstick on his old canvas work apron.

  “That would be great,” I said, not letting on that I’d filled them up at a gas station before I left D.C. I sat on the grass next to him and chatted a bit about my job and Michael’s new company, but it felt strange. My father did odd jobs around town, cleaning gutters and repairing leaky sink faucets, and here I was talking about the dinner for a hundred people that I’d organized at a fancy country club. My successes only seemed to put his failures in stark relief.

  After a while my voice trailed off and I stood up. “I should check on Mom and see if she needs help with dinner.”

  She’d cooked a pot roast along with steamed carrots and baked potatoes—the kind of simple, hearty food she’d always made while I was growing up—and the smells brought my childhood rushing back. I remembered the countless times I’d banged open our screen door after school and had caught a glimpse of my mother turning around from the stove, a long wooden spoon in her hand and a smile washing over her gentle face as she caught sight of me.

  Now she was scrubbing dishes in a sinkful of soapy water. When I went to help, I saw how red and chapped her hands had become, and the sunlight streaming in through the window over the sink highlighted the sharp new lines creasing her face. Even the pan she was holding looked crummy and old. Suddenly a rush of fury at my father overpowered me, even though by now I understood more about his disease. He was probably genetically predisposed to having a gambling addiction, I’d learned by reading a psychology journal. The traits I used to admire in my father—his constant chatter, his loud, almost forced laugh at gatherings, even the way he scarfed down food—were tied in to an anxious disposition, which was often an underpinning for the illness.

  But understanding my dad’s addiction didn’t make it easier to accept. My mother had worked so hard all of her life; she should be retired by now, sitting on a porch and working on the knitting projects she loved, even planning a big trip for the first time. Instead she stood for eight-hour shifts, hustling for tips.

  “Sit down,” I ordered my mom. “Let me wash that.”

  She shook her head and kept scrubbing at a stubborn spot. “It’s fine, honey. You just relax.”

  But none of us could.

  Our initial unease only deepened as we exhausted our superficial chatter, and every time a silence fell over the dinner table, we all began talking animatedly at once, which only made things more awkward. At one point my mom asked about Michael’s new company.

  “He’s sorry he couldn’t come. He’s working crazy hours, trying to get it off the ground,” I said. Back then I could laugh about it, imagining it would be a temporary thing. “But hey, I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you come visit for a few days? I could show you around D.C.”

  “That sounds like fun!” my mom said. “Steven? What do you think?”

  I let only one syllable slip out—“Oh!”—but those two letters conveyed so much: surprise that my mom had invited my father when I’d intended the invitation for her alone, and a hint of disappointment, too.

  Dad quickly took a bite of pot roast.

  “You should go alone,” he finally said, dabbing his mouth with his napkin. “Go have fun.”

  “Of course you can both come,” I said. “You should. It’s just with Michael working all the time, I thought it could be a girls’ weekend. That’s all.”

  “Sure,” my dad said lightly, but he didn’t meet my eyes.

  That night I went to the bedroom and lay in the darkness as memories flashed through my mind: Dad stocking shelves in our general store and juggling cans of soup to make me laugh. Dad flipping me in my pink footsie pajamas over his shoulder and carrying me around the house, shouting, “Where’s my Julie-girl? I can’t find her anywhere!” Dad coming home late at night to my aunt and uncle’s house, his face drawn and dark, while I lay on the thin, stained mattress of a rollaway cot, feigning sleep.

  Around midnight, I heard the stairs creak and realized some
one else was awake. I could tell by the heavy tread that it was my father. I impulsively threw back the covers and hurried after him.

  I caught up to him in the kitchen.

  “You couldn’t sleep either?” he asked, and I nodded, suddenly feeling tongue-tied. He went to the refrigerator and pulled out a carton of milk, then filled a saucepan and put it on a burner.

  “This always did the trick when you were little,” he said. He opened a cabinet, took out a box of cinnamon graham crackers, and put a few on a plate, then folded a paper towel into a perfect triangle.

  “Here you go,” he said, tipping the milk into a mug and setting everything on the kitchen table.

  “Aren’t you going to have some?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I’m not hungry.”

  I wasn’t either, but I couldn’t reject his midnight snack. I dipped a cracker in warm milk and began to eat.

  “I’m glad you came home,” he said, settling into the chair next to mine. He gave a half smile. “Your mom brags about you all the time. The way you put yourself through school and started your own company. I always knew you’d do something special, Julie.”

  I shook my head and started to tell him I wasn’t special; the other young people who lived in our apartment building all seemed to be doing bigger things. One was a legislative assistant to a U.S. senator, and another worked at the World Bank and spoke three languages.

  But then I thought about my parents’ life: this small kitchen with the linoleum peeling up in a corner of the floor; this crappy little house that they didn’t even own; this tiny town, where the big news was the grand opening of a new building for the bank next summer.

  “Thanks,” I said. The soggy cracker seemed to expand in my mouth, almost choking me, but I forced it down.