It occurs to Laine that she’s happy her husband is trapped in the bathroom, because if he could get out they’d have to have the same fight her parents always had, the fight she thought she’d never have to have because she’d chosen someone like Connor.
“I called the maintenance guy,” she says to the door. “I’m going to go somewhere.”
“Wait.”
“Daddy?” Jorie reaches for his voice with dimpled fingers. “Come out.”
“I’m working on it, cheesefry,” Connor says. “Lainey, please just wait until we can talk.”
“I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to know all the reasons why you did this.”
“Whatever you want, but don’t take off.”
The room shakes as he throws his weight against the door in a poor attempt to knock it down. She tells him to stop before they lose their security deposit.
“I’ll leave the front door unlocked so the super can get in,” she says, glad she doesn’t have to look at him, because he has that heartbreaking twelve-year-old-boy look that skinny guys in their twenties sometimes have. “I’m taking Jorie with me.”
“Lainey, wait. At least tell me where you’re going.”
“Somewhere.”
But behind the wheel of the Jetta, a business school graduation gift from her father, Laine isn’t sure where to go. She suspects Steve Humbolt, the only real friend she has at work, might have a crush on her, so he’s out of the question. More than anything she wants to go to her father, wants to inhale his scent of Lagerfeld and leather from the car dealership. She wants to cry on his shoulder and have him threaten to kill her husband or at least have his legs broken. But she can’t go to her father, not for this. He’d made a second career of fucking around on her mother; anything he could say on the subject would be pretty hollow.
So she gets on 95 South and heads toward her mother’s house in Providence, even though her mother forgot Jorie’s last birthday and told Laine not to marry Connor when she got pregnant. In movies, women go to their mothers when their husbands screw around, and that sense of sisterhood seems right.
“Want to go see Grandma?” Laine looks in the rearview mirror at Jorie strapped in her car seat.
“Want Daddy.”
On cosmic cue, Laine’s purse starts ringing in the passenger seat. The caller ID on her phone shows the number for their Cambridge apartment.
“Lainey, don’t do this to our family,” Connor says in a rush, knowing there’s a finite amount of time he has to say anything. “Please, let me explain.”
“I take it you got out of the bathroom,” she says, and turns off the phone.
Two months before Laine found Beth Martin’s note crumpled in his coat pocket, Connor was floating in that place between awake and asleep, where he thought he was having conversations with people who weren’t in the room.
“Baby,” Laine shook his shoulder, definitely a real person, a real person home from work hours later than she’d promised. “Get up, you did that thing where you fell asleep with water again.”
That thing—drifting off with a glass of water in his hand—had been happening a lot since their babysitter dropped out of MIT to follow Phish and Laine had started going to her office at noon till all hours of the night so Jorie only spent afternoons at day care. Connor always tried to wait up for Laine, but rarely made it.
“I’m sleeping,” he said, though that was becoming less and less true, and the sheets were wet and his contacts had dried to his eyes. “Just lay on the dry parts.”
“Come on, get up so I can change the bed before we get sick.”
Connor moaned. Laine was a superevolved human who functioned on three hours of sleep, no food with faces, and decaf coffee; she didn’t get sick, or tired, or unproductive. While she yanked off the bedding, he went to the bathroom. He couldn’t find his glasses, and everything was fuzzy when he came back sans contacts. Tall, blond, and in her underwear, Laine looked good, even fuzzy. He touched the pointy bone of her shoulder.
“I almost forgot to tell you,” she said. “Beth Martin called.”
“Who?”
At the University of Colorado, Connor had almost married a Beth Martin, but Laine had to mean some other Beth Martin, perhaps a Beth Martin graduating from college and looking for an AmeriCorps placement in Boston, maybe a Beth Martin who’d seen their ad in The Crimson for child care. He hadn’t heard from University of Colorado Beth Martin in nearly four years and couldn’t fathom a reason she’d contact him. Even so, his heart flopped against his chest at the thought of his Beth Martin.
“She’s doing her internship at Mass General.” Laine got into bed and the pulled blankets up to her chin. “She heard you were in the area and wanted to get together for coffee.”
“My ex-girlfriend called here and talked to you?” Connor asked; Laine nodded. “How’d she even get the number?”
“We’re in the book.” Laine shrugged from under the covers. “She seemed nice. I told her you’d give her a call. I figured you’d want to see what she was up to.”
Laine talking about Beth Martin had an unsettling nightmare quality of things being off. Not that he hadn’t told Laine about Beth. In that part of a new relationship where you tell each other the reasons why you are the way you are, it was one of his sugar-packet stories—dead father, dead mother, living with his brother, and a brief engagement to his college sweetheart. What Laine didn’t know were the details—that for years after breaking up with Beth Martin he’d start sweating at the mention of her name, that the thought of her made his fingers shake.
“I guess coffee would be okay.” His hands weren’t shaking per se, but his heart was pounding blood furiously enough to make him wonder if his eardrums might explode.
“Are you coming to bed? I thought you were tired,” Laine said, and curled her body into his when he lay down beside her. “So I have a question. When you proposed to Beth, was she pregnant, too?”
“You know you’re the only pregnant girlfriend I ever married.” He patted Laine’s hip, wondered if she could feel the blood in his ears. “Beth and I didn’t even have sex.”
“You never told me that.” Laine propped herself on her elbow. “You never had sex with her? And you dated for two years?”
“Three and a half.”
“You didn’t have sex for almost four years?” Laine was incredulous. “Was she religious?”
“Not really. She just wanted to wait until she was married,” Connor said. That wasn’t the whole truth. Initially Beth had wanted to wait, but after they’d been together a year, she’d wanted to do it. By then Connor was convinced he would marry her, and it had seemed silly to compromise her beliefs. That didn’t seem like something he should tell Laine—Laine who’d picked him up at a bar, Laine whom he’d gone to bed with when he still thought her name was Jane. “There are other things you can do.”
“You got by on hand jobs and hummers for four years?”
“If you want to have these heart-to-hearts maybe you should try getting home before midnight.” Connor sighed, mad at Laine for bringing the whole thing up in the first place. “Why is this so important anyway? I never hold it against you when I find your name scribbled in bathroom stalls.”
Laine laughed, mock smacked his shoulder.
“So these bathroom messages,” she said, “do they promise wicked good times?”
“A great lay, sound financial advice, that kind of thing.”
“Wanna fuck?”
“That’s romantic.” He turned on his stomach. He’d wanted to fuck a lot three hours ago when Laine was supposed to have come home, before she mentioned Beth Martin. “We’ve got to be up in like four hours.”
Laine crawled on his back, aligning her arms and legs with his, reaching for his big hands and feet with her big hands and feet.
“Come on, baby, we haven’t all week.” She licked the back of his neck, making his shoulders bunch.
“Whose fault is that?” he asked, but Laine’s
hands slid beneath the waistband of his boxers—it was a lost cause.
“Baby, a little longer,” she said ten minutes later, as he held her long, lean torso, and she rocked back and forth on top of him. “I’m almost there.”
But he just let himself go, not entirely on purpose, but not really an accident either. Halfheartedly, he apologized.
“That was a shitty thing to do,” she said.
“I was sleeping, what do you want from me?”
“Sorry I bothered you.” She rolled away from him, sounding like she might cry.
Then he did feel horrible. It wasn’t Laine’s fault they were on a weird crepuscular schedule, wasn’t her fault Beth Martin had a copy of the white pages. Reaching over Laine’s hips, he tried to open her thighs, but she swatted his hands away.
“Go to sleep if you’re so tired.”
“Let me make you happy, please.”
“It’s fine.” Her voice was marginally softer. “Don’t worry about it.”
“I am really sorry.” He kissed her dishwater blond head. “Can you get off work one night this week and come with me to meet Beth for coffee? I’d really like it if you came.”
“I can try.”
“I’ve never met anyone who needed a family more than Connor,” Laine’s mother says. “I never thought he would do this to you.”
Even though she’s saying the exact opposite, Laine is pretty sure her mother means This always happens; you just thought you were special and it wouldn’t happen to you. The two of them are in the kitchen of the house where Laine grew up, and everything looks the same as it did then, only not as clean.
“That makes two of us,” Laine says, missing her father’s quiet understanding, wishing she’d gone there.
“And he just left the note in his pocket,” Caroline says. Still thin and blond, an older Laine. “It’s almost as though he wanted you to find it.”
“I really don’t want to talk about it,” Laine says, and she doesn’t. Because the note was so sad and chock-full of regret, Laine almost felt sorry for the woman fucking her husband, the short, dark-haired girl she’d talked to once on the phone and met briefly last week when she and Connor had bumped into her at the grocery store. She just can’t shake the feeling that if it were a movie, she’d be rooting for Beth Martin and Connor to be together.
Laine opens the pantry and stares inside, just like when she was a kid. Even though she isn’t hungry, just like when she was a kid.
“There’s leftover spaghetti,” Caroline says. It’s Friday night, but her lesson plan book is open on the table—the same red vinyl kind she used decades ago, probably the same grammar lessons she used decades ago. Caroline became a teacher because all women of her generation became teachers; a mother because all women of her generation became mothers.
“With meat sauce?”
“I didn’t know you were coming.”
Taking out a box of oyster crackers, Laine funnels a few into her mouth and wishes she had gone to her father’s condo in downtown Providence. But then she feels the same shot of guilt she felt as a kid each time her mother kicked her father out and her father asked Laine to go with him. Before she was old enough to understand why her mother was sending him away, to understand spare shirts her father kept in his office, the little square packets of condoms. Laine knew it wasn’t right to leave her mother, even though she wanted to.
“Do you know what you’re going to do?” Caroline takes a fistful of crackers from the box, shuffles them in her hand. “Leaving him could make things hard.”
Laine fakes a yawn. “Do you want to watch Jor tomorrow, or should I take her back to the city with me? I’ll only go into work for a few hours.”
Her mother says of course she wants Jorie to stay with her, of course she wants to see her granddaughter, if it’s really only a few hours, because she does have things to do, things Laine and her father never understood.
In Laine’s old room, Jorie sleeps in one of the twin beds. The reading lamp casts a weird glow over Laine’s awards and plaques from the debate and cross country teams, her honor cords and photos of friends she hasn’t heard from in years. Her mother’s school crap has taken over the desk and the surface of her dresser, but otherwise the room is the same as when Laine left for Harvard eight years earlier. A picture from her senior prom is even tucked in the corner of her dresser mirror. She’d gone to the dance with a twenty-four-year-old architect, and he’d been one of the younger men she dated in high school. Since Laine was thirteen, when she stopped eating to eat and started running to run, there’d always been men and they’d always been older, men like her father and Steve at work, serious men with serious plans. They were the ones who appreciated her graceful collarbones and the way her mind worked.
Five months her junior, Connor was the only younger person Laine ever dated, and it wasn’t a great “how they met” story. She’d picked him up in a bar. Out for a friend’s bachelorette party her first semester of business school, she’d been annoyed by the other girls—the bride-to-be was wearing a “Suck for a Buck” shirt, and everyone was doing body shots with BU frat boys. Connor was eating cheese fries and watching the Indians–Red Sox game at the bar. She asked if he went to school in the area, which was pretty much Boston slang for “wanna fuck?” The sex was good but forgettable; she was tall and skinny, and he was tall and skinny. But the next morning when her alarm clock went off, he pulled her back to bed, said, “Don’t leave, lovely lady,” and log rolled with her across the mattress onto the floor. He’d pretty much had her there. It turned out he was getting a master’s in social policy from the Kennedy School, though she realized his getting in probably had a lot to do with the teaching he’d done with AmeriCorps and the fact that he was an orphan by fifteen. He seemed to be chilling out in graduate school because he couldn’t think of anything else to do and his brother was footing the bill. When Laine got pregnant (how she could graduate at the top of her class and not remember to take a little white pill was one of the world’s greater mysteries), she waited until she was sure she was keeping the baby before she told him. She knew he’d want it, having a child with her was better than any plan he had. At least that’s what she’d thought.
Since Laine turned off her cell phone three hours earlier, Connor has left seven messages on the voice mail. Lainey, please pick up. Will you at least tell me where you’re going? I’m calling C.J. and Dan to see if you went there. Are you still going to work tomorrow? I’ll get Jor if that helps you. She stops listening when she hears a sob in his voice, because it makes her feel sorry for him, and she’s furious at herself for feeling that way. The phone rings in her hand, and she clicks the talk button before it wakes Jorie.
“Can you at least let me say good night to Jor?”
“She’s already asleep,” Laine whispers and turns the phone off again.
Pulling down the blankets of the twin bed opposite Jorie, Laine changes her mind and crawls in the bed beside her daughter.
“Daddy?” Jorie murmurs, sleepy and perfect.
She looks almost exactly like Laine did as a child, fair, with wide-set gray eyes, more her daughter than Connor’s, even if she does love her father more, even if she wants him more than she wants her mother.
A year before he would even meet Laine, at the top of a double black diamond slope in Vail, Connor got down on one knee and presented Beth Martin with a velvet box from his ski pants pocket.
“I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone and can’t think of any family without you,” he said, squinting against the sun—he thought he should take his goggles off while proposing. “Beth, will you marry me?”
Saying yes, she hugged him through the layers of their down ski jackets and took off her glove so he could put the ring on her finger. They raced down the hill and when they got to bottom, he tackled her and they rolled around kissing and laughing, snow wet and cold on their cheeks and the slivers of flesh between their coats and gloves. It was Beth’s twenty-second birthday
, and he’d made reservations at the four star restaurant in the lodge. They were the youngest couple in the dining room, drawing attention to themselves by being giddy, giggly, and drunk from the cheapest wine on the menu.
“We’ll have lots of kids, right?” Connor asked, dipping a two-dollar pomme frite in a pool of mustard and hot sauce he’d swirled together. “I want a whole gaggle of kids.”
“No more than nine.” Beth smiled. “Just enough for our own softball team.”
When he went to the bathroom that night, she wrote him a note on the lodge stationery. It said she was better expressing herself in writing and she wanted to make sure he knew she couldn’t wait to start a life with him. She signed it “Cheesefry,” and he actually kissed the paper.
Five weeks later, a month before his twenty-second birthday, a hyperventilating Beth Martin handed Connor back the ring and another note, this one on loose-leaf paper, blue ink smudged with tears, saying she was going to medical school alone.
“I’m so sorry. It’s just that you’re the only boyfriend I’ve ever had,” she said over and over again, crumpled on the cheap carpeting of his apartment. “We’re so young, and you don’t even know what you want to do yet. I’d never forgive myself if I let you make my plans your plans.”
He never told anyone, not Laine, not his brother, all of what happened after he finished reading Beth’s note and she walked out. Guts mangled, he’d spent days on the toilet shitting out everything that had been a part of him for the previous three and a half years. One night he washed down a bottle of aspirin with a fifth of Gin and slept for twenty-nine hours. He didn’t shower; didn’t eat; swam laps at the U of C pool until he couldn’t feel his limbs, then walked home in the March air in nothing but wet swim trunks. After twelve days, when he hadn’t shown up to their child psych class, Beth timidly knocked on his door.
Family and Other Accidents Page 12
