It Happened One Night

by Lisa Dale

  “What’s going on?”

  Karin dropped Lana’s hand. “I just got a call from the jail,” she said, not sure how to begin.

  “The jail? Who do we know in jail?”

  “Two guesses.”

  She watched her sister’s face go a shade paler.

  Karin nodded. “He wants us to come get him.”

  Lana closed the lid of the toilet seat and sat down. She rubbed both her palms on the tops of her knees, a nervous kneading, her hands clutching and going slack. Karin waited for her to ask one of the dozens of questions that were at this moment racing around her own brain, but Lana remained silent, asking nothing. She just rocked a little on the edge of the toilet seat, totally immersed in her thoughts.

  “He got pulled over for not coming to a complete stop,” Karin said, unable to read her sister’s blank face. “But they hauled him to the station for driving without a license—or registration—I can’t remember which.”

  “What do we do?” Lana said. Her voice was faint, barely a whisper.

  “Nothing,” said Karin.

  A customer in the store shouted. “HELLO? Is anyone even working here?”

  Karin ignored the voice. She loved the Wildflower Barn, but she wouldn’t dream of putting her work before her family. Especially not now. Her sister was trembling. Karin could only imagine the memories that were sluicing right now through Lana’s veins.

  “We can’t just leave him,” Lana said. “He needs help.”

  “Are you kidding?” Karin folded her arms. “Watch me.”

  “You stay.” When she looked up from her perch on the edge of the toilet, there was a focus, a determination in her eyes that hadn’t been there before. “I’ll get Calvert.”

  “But we’ll lose business,” Karin said. Her sister had completely taken her aback. She’d expected Lana to whimper and cower, not dive headfirst into the fray.

  “People are understanding,” Lana said, her voice soft. “We’ll put up a sign that says there’s a family emergency.”

  “People are not understanding. And we don’t have a family emergency because Calvert is not our family.”

  “We have to do the right thing. Whatever the right thing is, that’s what has to be done.”

  “And what are you going to do with him once you’ve got him?”

  Lana put her head in her hands. “Oh, God, I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m going to do. But I have to do something.”

  Karin shook her head. “I just don’t get you sometimes.”

  “Karin, oh—I don’t know how to say it. Something’s gone wrong…”

  “Fine. We’ll close down the whole store and get him if that’s what you want.”

  “It’s okay. You can just stay here with Meggie.”

  “I’ll come with y—”

  “No! I want you to—I mean, someone has to stay.”

  Karin felt the first hot currents of anger taking shape, burning inside her. Lana was irrational; she never made sense. Karin hadn’t told Lana about Calvert being in jail because she’d wanted to go get him; she told her because she wanted sympathy. Someone to understand.

  Lana stood up. She held tight to the lip of the sink as if she didn’t trust herself. “Eli’s plane got in a few hours ago. I’ll see if he can come with me.”

  “HELLO?” another customer called out.

  “Just wait a minute!” Karin shouted over her shoulder. She turned back to Lana, panic making her stomach twinge. “Just think about this rationally for a second, okay? Who knows what he’s here for? I don’t trust him, and I don’t want you to go anywhere near him. Lana, listen to me. Please?”

  “But someone has to get him.”

  Karin squeezed Lana’s wrist, part desperation, part command. “Please. Don’t do this.”

  Lana wiggled her arm to free it.

  “Fine. Go then.” Karin turned her back.

  “Karin…”

  “Just go if you’re going to go!” Her heart beat hard. The room full of bustling, angry people fell silent.

  Lana nodded once, her face utterly blank and passionless, then left.

  Eli put his car in park and unbuckled his seat belt. Lana sat beside him. She’d called him twenty minutes ago, and now they were at the police station, on the strangest errand Eli had ever imagined. He could count the number of times he’d heard her say her father’s name. And now here they were, picking him up just like they would have done for any old friend.

  Eli glanced toward the woman beside him. The car was tinged lightly with the smell of her, something floral he couldn’t place. She seemed so small and feeble—younger in a way, as if some of the spirit had been drained from her body. She’d said only a few necessary words to him when he’d picked her up. Then she’d looked out the window, turned away from him, and grown silent. In the glass he could see the translucent reflection of her face, ghostly white like the moon at midday.

  He wished she would let him touch her. Not because he wanted something from her—though part of him did—but more because he wanted to give. He could put his arms around her, lay her head on his shoulder, and stay that way until their breathing was in sync. And yet, the distance between where he sat and where she sat seemed as expansive as years measured in light.

  “Are you sure about this?” he asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “We can go back. You can change your mind.”

  She turned toward him now, her eyes glassy and distant. “We’re already here. We might as well.”

  “But why?”

  She closed her eyes for the briefest of moments. “Because. When someone needs help, we have to help them. There’s nothing more to it than that.”

  Eli narrowed his eyes at her, not quite trusting her words. There was something different about her, something he couldn’t put his finger on. But as usual, he had no choice but to take her at her word.

  “Is that him?” he asked, though the question was pointless. He would have been able to pick out Lana’s father from a police lineup, even though he’d never seen the man before in his life. He was leaning against a wide-leafed oak, a black bag at his feet. He was as tall and leggy as Lana, but more gangly than svelte. Even from a distance Eli could see that he shared her fair coloring.

  “Yes,” Lana said. “I think that’s him.”

  He looked at her for one last moment; if he saw the slightest bit of hesitation in her eyes, he would have put the car in drive and ensured that Calvert would be nothing but the memory of a man leaning against a tree in his mind for all time. But Lana didn’t waver. Instead her face was blank, as if all emotion had been drawn out of it, and whatever animated her was less human than machine.

  “Stay here,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  He got out of his little car, slammed the door, then headed straight for Calvert. Lana might be afraid of this man, but Eli wasn’t. And before Eli let him in the same car as her, there had to be some ground rules.

  As he approached, Calvert met his gaze, a cautious question in his almost freakishly blue eyes. Eli stopped walking a few feet away and crossed his arms.

  “You her husband?” Calvert asked.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Lost my house.” He stuck out his chin in a way that suggested the admission had cost him something. “The State took the property for redevelopment. Paid me as little as they could and still have it be legal. I got nowhere to go.”

  “Well, you can’t stay here. She doesn’t want to see you.”

  “I don’t expect she does.”

  Eli was quiet for a moment. What little he knew about this man had come from Karin. She’d explained that Calvert had married their mother, Ellen, because of an unplanned pregnancy when they were both quite young. He took off shortly after Lana was born. Then, when Karin was ten and Lana just six years old, Ellen had died in a car accident one day on her way to the lawyer’s. Apparently some kind of child support–related letter from Calvert had set her off,
and to this day Karin held Calvert to blame.

  For a day or so, Karin and Lana had been wards of the State. Then, for the next twelve years, they lived in their father’s boardinghouse inside the endless revolving door of his tenants, buddies, and girlfriends. Eli couldn’t help but wonder about the connection between the come-and-go population of Lana’s young life and her penchant for come-and-go boyfriends now. But aside from that vague connection, he knew little about Calvert and her past. All he knew was that the only way Calvert was going to bother her again was over his dead body.

  “Here’s how this is gonna work,” he said. “You’re gonna get in the car, say hello, and after that not a peep. We’ll drop you off somewhere you can stay, but then we don’t want to hear from you again. Have I made myself clear?”

  Calvert kicked his bag with the toe of his work boot. “Why’s she helping me?”

  “She always tries to do the right thing and be a good person. Even when she doesn’t want to. But just because she’s nice doesn’t mean I am. And I’m not gonna let you take advantage of her on my watch.”

  “I already done enough of that,” Calvert said.

  “We have an understanding?”

  “I won’t bother her.”

  Eli nodded. Then he headed back toward the car and left it up to Calvert to follow.

  Lana closed the door to her house, closed herself in. Through the translucent white curtain of the window beside the door, she watched Eli walking in long strides down the uneven concrete walkway toward his parked car. She wondered where he was going. Home? Or someplace else? Someplace with Kelly?

  He’d offered to stay with her. She wanted him to stay. But there was no sense in postponing the inevitable. At some point she would have to be alone with herself. With the truth. With the baby that had staked a claim on her body and now demanded a reckoning.

  She pushed the curtain aside, watching him hitch up his dark jeans and then bend his knees to look at something on the hubcap of his old green car.

  She’d always assumed that if she were to get pregnant she would know the moment it happened. There would be some spark, some quick shift in her sense of herself that would alert her that she was no longer alone in her own body. But the revelation hadn’t been a moment of mystical female intuition; it was just a dull and unfeeling fact.

  Of course it was only fitting that the day she’d realized she must be pregnant would be the day Calvert resurfaced. And yet for a moment when she was sitting on the closed toilet seat under the harsh bare bulb in the bathroom of the Wildflower Barn, Calvert’s appearance had felt no more significant than if she’d got the hiccups after having just learned she had nine months to live.

  The pregnancy was what mattered, the thing happening to her body that she could not stop. In a way it was lucky for Calvert that he’d called when he did: The fact that she was so consumed with her missed periods meant that coming face-to-face with him again seemed a bit removed and unreal. She wondered: If his call hadn’t come right at that second—right at the instant when she herself so desperately needed help—would she have gone to him? Probably not. She’d felt such an overwhelming sense of claustrophobia she would have taken any excuse to escape from the moment. The world had gone upside down, and she’d needed to do something—anything at all—to right it.

  Not even her memory of Calvert was safe from being distorted by the heaviness of realizing that she was pregnant. She’d remembered him as being larger-than-life, like some brooding tyrant who could order men dead with only the flash of his eyes. And yet at the police station today, his face was long and gaunt. His hair—once blonde like hers—was mostly gone on top, and his bald crown was pocked with liver spots. His shoulders were thin and bony, and the collar of his shirt had yellowed. She couldn’t find the connection between the shrunken, feeble Calvert who had shown up in Burlington and the terrible, mythic Calvert of her youth.

  Eli had been a godsend through the whole ordeal. He’d taken care of everything, and he did most of the talking. Except to say hello, Calvert hadn’t spoken directly to Lana at all, as if he was afraid to push his luck. She’d sat in the front seat of the car while Eli dropped her father on the doorstep of a run-down former hotel. He hadn’t asked her any questions or tried to make small talk—and she loved that about him, that he knew her so well.

  She wondered, What would he think when she told him what she’d inadvertently done? What would Karin think? She knew they would support her, no matter what, and part of her wanted to call Eli back inside right now and confess. But at the moment, she was far too ashamed and stunned to speak.

  The enormity of the situation was only just beginning to sink in. She knew she was being reckless when she decided to sleep with Ron. But she hadn’t realized just how big the risk was, how far and wide the consequences reached.

  Some of her neighbors and customers would look down on her—another unwed mother with no respect for the sanctity of family. Eli might be affected too—they’d always taken great pains to never talk with each other about their sex lives, or romance, or anything too intimately female or male. But all that was about to change. Lana worried that her best friend would feel alienated when her belly grew big. It would be like flaunting her sex life—and her irresponsibility—in his face.

  Karin and Gene too would be affected by the shock waves—poor Karin, who had wanted her own baby so badly and for so long. How on earth would Lana tell her? She might as well confess that she’d stolen for herself the experience that Karin had wanted all along.

  Ron would be affected too, though she had no idea how she was going to get in touch with him to tell him what had happened. She didn’t have his number or his e-mail address, and she didn’t know where he lived. With the exception of her birthday, their dates had never been preplanned. She’d liked the spontaneity of being with him, of not knowing when he would drop by. He was a nonconformist, a wanderer—and he probably wouldn’t want to parent anyone’s child, not even his own.

  Then there was the baby to consider—it deserved a good and loving home to grow up in. But Lana wasn’t sure she could give a good life to a child, even if she wanted to. She simply wasn’t cut out for the job.

  She banged her fist against the door. She loved her life as it stood right now. She loved the Wildflower Barn and she loved working with her sister. She loved not having a mortgage, or a car payment, or even a dog. She loved that her life was fundamentally good, and she also loved that she stood on the brink of something even better, something out of a fantasy. As a young girl, she’d watched men coming and going—servants of the open road—but she’d never let herself become bitter over the fact that her lot in life was to stay home. Eli was a traveler. Ron too. And Lana had pinned all her hopes on the idea that she could level the playing field—that despite her obligations she was as much entitled to freedom of movement as all her male counterparts. But now… now she was pregnant. Her uterus was dictating her future, doomed her to it in a way.

  She leaned her forehead against the window. Of course, there was a way to end all this doubt, fear, and self-hatred: The prospect of abortion flitted through her mind. But could she go through with it?

  She’d always been a free spirit—an adolescent who had petitioned town hall to permit skateboarding in public parks, a teenager who had loved the Grateful Dead, and a college student who had regularly protested political injustice. It hadn’t been a stretch to conclude that women were better off deciding for themselves whether abortion was right or wrong.

  But in her heart, her personal instinct had always been to protect life in all its forms—whether that meant using organic fertilizers over synthetics, or choosing soy products over meat. Abortion was a choice, but it wasn’t a choice for her. If she gave in to the temptation of abortion, she would lose a fundamental part of her identity—and she would never be able to live with herself again.

  Through the window she watched Eli jerk open the heavy green door of his VW Bug. In the few moments that had passed
since he’d crossed from her door to his car, she felt like she’d aged a thousand years. Yesterday, she’d seen the timeline of her life stretching out before her, bright and clear. Now, she still felt as if she was on the verge of a new beginning—but of what future, she could no longer say.

  June 24

  As Karin pulled into the parking lot of the Wildflower Barn, she saw that Lana hadn’t brought the wicker chairs outside for the second day in a row. Lana was always forgetting things, missing appointments, and showing up late. Karin often joked with customers that Lana was predictably unpredictable.

  But she resolved not to say anything about her annoyance over the chairs. She suspected she was a bit more irritable than normal. Knowing that Calvert was around was like being told someone had planted a land mine in town, but no one knew where. To make matters worse, last week Gene had compared making love with her to taking out the garbage or doing the dishes. Not a good sign.

  She parked the car at the far end of the parking lot, leaving the best spaces for her customers, then walked toward the store. Yesterday Karin had fretted over choosing the right words to apologize about her behavior the other day, about yelling when Calvert had called from jail. But Lana had interrupted her even before Karin got the words out, dismissing the apology so fast that Karin knew she would have been forgiven even if she hadn’t apologized at all.

  As she pushed open the front door she saw that Lana and Charlotte were talking near the gardening DVDs, their heads bent low, their voices hushed. Even from across the room, Karin could tell that their conversation was both intense and intensely private.

  “Hi, Lana. Hey, Char.” Karin smiled.

  “I brought this for you,” Charlotte said. She picked up a small wicker basket with a purple bow tied around the handle. Karin took it with both hands.

  “I had nothing to do with this,” Lana said, laughing.

  Karin grinned and flicked her sister’s arm with the backs of her fingers. “So this is what you two were whispering about.”

  “Go on. Look through,” Charlotte said. Today she wore a violet skirt and a gauzy cotton shirt. She was almost fifty, with a round face and lively green eyes. Lana had met her at a yoga retreat ages ago, and the two had become quick friends. “There’s pumpkin seeds,” Charlotte said, pointing. “An egg candle. Some incense. And a few other odds and ends.”