The Children

by Ann Leary

  Joan looked at Everett and then looked at me. She saw my wet hair and his. She saw what was going on. Like I said, she didn’t love the noncommittal thing we had.

  “What have you two been up to tonight?” she asked casually. She grabbed a fork and sat down next to Everett. He moved the pie pan over so she could reach it, and they both ate the foul old pie with gusto. “Looks like you’ve been in the lake,” Joan said, her mouth full.

  Yes, she’d had a little wine.

  “We had a visitor,” I said, leaning back against the counter.

  “Oh yeah! Joan—damn, this is good pie—guess who just left?” Everett said.

  “You know, it’s those strawberries from the farm stand that make it so yummy, Everett. It’s worth it to make the extra trip. I always buy fresh when I can; it makes such a difference,” Joan said. Because it was her trip to the farm stand, not my baking, that explained the pie’s deliciousness.

  “Laurel,” I said.

  Joanie froze.

  “Laurel Atwood was here,” I said.

  “NO!” said Joanie. “Laurel and Spin were here? I wish I’d known they were coming.”

  “It was just Laurel,” Everett said. “She was driving around. I guess Spin’s working. She just stopped by to introduce herself.”

  “Well?” Joan asked. “What was she like?”

  She looked from Everett to me and then back at Everett. He was grinning and shrugging, shoveling the pie into his mouth.

  “We barely said hello, but she seems friendly. She’s coming back tomorrow,” I said.

  “How strange that she just showed up like that,” Joan said.

  “I think people do that in Utah,” said Everett.

  “What?” Joan asked, laughing at him. “Utah? She’s from Sun Valley, which is in Idaho, Everett.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Right.”

  “I’ve always been great at geography,” Joan added, taking one last bite of pie.

  FOUR

  I get paid to do a blog post every day. It doesn’t matter how long it is; I just have to post something so that the diaper people think they’re getting their money’s worth. I knew I wouldn’t have much time to blog over the next few days, so I explained that I was sick, that some sort of plague had nearly annihilated my family. First little Wyatt woke up with a fever. He’s always the first to catch any cold or virus, due to his compromised immune system. Then Mia caught his bug, and now Topher was rolling around on the couch, acting like he was dying. That was yesterday. Now everybody else was recovering and I was puking my brains out. I asked my blog readers if they knew the symptoms of Ebola. I was pretty sure that’s what I had, since I had consulted with WebMD. Within minutes of posting the entry, I had four comments. Two were from regular posters, two from people whose screen names I didn’t recognize. They each had amusing stories of how they had solved their own medical mysteries by using the Internet as their diagnostician.

  I posted a comment from Kate Madison. She told me she was going to drop off some soup at our house later. Kate is one of my sock puppets. When I started the blog and began accumulating a lot of followers, I worried that readers might become suspicious. I worried that they might want proof that I was who I said I was, proof that I actually was a suburban mom. So I created JennyPenny, MrMom, and Katemadison. These are my IRL people, the people I’m supposed to know in real life. Jenny and I went to college together. Mr. Mom and Kate have kids who go to school with Mia. They live in my town. They’re always careful to be discreet about where we live. We all want to protect the privacy of our children. The truth is, I never really needed to create them. Nobody has ever questioned the veracity of my blog. People tend to believe what you tell them.

  I was just finishing up when I heard a car crunching along the gravel driveway. It was Spin’s Jeep. I looked out the window and saw him and Laurel climb out of the car. Then I heard their steps on the porch.

  My attic room is above the porch. The porch roof blocked them from view, but I could hear their conversation as clearly as if we were in the same room. Spin did his customary three little knocks on the door and then I heard Laurel say, “You knock when you come here?”

  “Yeah, usually. Why?” Spin asked.

  “I don’t know, isn’t it your house?” Laurel asked.

  “Yeah, well, now that my dad’s gone, I just, you know, sometimes knock,” Spin said. “I don’t always knock.”

  And then I heard their footsteps in the house.

  “Hello?” Spin called. “Anybody here?”

  I stood in the center of the hot attic room, my shadow pinned to the wall. Sometimes I’m stricken with dread. Panic attacks, Dr. Alter calls them.

  “Hello?” said Spin.

  “Yeah, hi, Spin. I’ll be down in a minute,” I called back finally. I tiptoed downstairs to the bathroom. I was wearing shorts and a tank top. I have wavy brownish hair that turns slightly blond in the summer. But it wasn’t quite summer yet; I wasn’t tan. My hair was a mess. I didn’t get a lot of exercise over the winter. Some of my clothes were a little snug. I changed into baggy jeans and a light T-shirt. I took a pill that Dr. Alter prescribes for my dread. I was just about to go downstairs when I heard, with great relief, Sally’s old Subaru pull up. She was honking the horn, clearly thrilled to see Spin’s Jeep. I heard the commotion of her running into the house, Riley barking, Spin laughing and making introductions. When I could tell they were all in the kitchen, I walked downstairs.

  At the bottom of our stairs is the front hall. There’s a table there, and even though it’s a valuable antique—a Whitman supposedly brought it here from Paris over two hundred years ago—it’s really a living monument to clutter. On the table, and scattered on the floor around it, is always a jumble of newspapers, dog toys, tennis balls, dog leashes, and that day, the empty pie plate from the night before, which had been pushed underneath it by Riley. I grabbed the plate and walked into the kitchen.

  Spin and Laurel were standing in the middle of our kitchen, holding hands, while Sally filled the coffeemaker.

  “When did you get in, Laurel?” Sally asked, darting around the kitchen. “When did you get into New York—you flew into JFK, right? Where the hell does Joanie keep the coffee filters? Was it last night, or what?”

  I was a little concerned about Sally’s energy. She was wearing the same clothes she had worn out the night before. She looked like she hadn’t slept.

  “I got to New York the night before last,” Laurel replied. “Spin picked me up at the airport and we stayed at Perry and Catherine’s. What a beautiful house they have.”

  “We’ve never seen it, have we, Charlotte?” said Sally. I was standing in the doorway, and I smiled awkwardly when Laurel and Spin turned and noticed me. “Laurel, that’s Charlotte. Charlotte, stop trying to be invisible, for God’s sake.…”

  “Lottie,” Spin said. He grabbed me, like he always does, and planted a kiss on my cheek. “This is Laurel.”

  “I know,” I said, blushing wildly. “We met last night.”

  “You did?” Sally asked. “You guys were here already?”

  “I stopped by, just for a few minutes,” Laurel said, moving in between Spin and me. “I actually had a dream about you last night, Charlotte,” she said in a sort of flirty voice.

  “Oh yeah?” I said. What the fuck?

  “Don’t worry, you had all your clothes on.” She laughed, nudging me playfully with her shoulder. “What a cute kitchen, so quaint.”

  I moved closer to Sally, reeling from Laurel’s comment.

  “This place must seem kind of shabby after staying at Perry’s,” Sally said. “Jesus, Lottie, stop shoving me.”

  Laurel said, “I love old houses.”

  Now Sally caught my eye. We knew what Laurel was thinking. From the outside, our house still looks quite grand, with its porches and gables and porticos, but the inside, well, it’s a little past its prime. We have the same refrigerator and dishwasher that were here before Joan and Whit married. They
were once white, but the decades have mellowed them to the color of putty. The dishwasher leaks. The refrigerator hums a few bars, rattles, hums, and then rattles again. It’s been playing this sad tune for years, but it still keeps things cold, so Joan sees no need to replace it. The cabinets were painted bright yellow sometime in the 1970s, but now the paint has chipped and they’re dotted here and there with old grease stains. The kitchen floors are worn-out linoleum. The old butcher-block countertop is so scarred by decades of chopping and slicing, so stained from spilled red wine and the blood of countless rib eyes, that you could scrub it all day and it would still look like a body had been dismembered on it.

  “You need to sand the counters down, the way they do in butcher shops,” Sally tells Joan whenever she visits, especially when she brings friends with her. This is when Sally and I most acutely see all the afflictions of the aged house, all the clutter and disrepair—when we have company. We really only notice it when we look at it from the perspective of others.

  “I’ll sand it down for you before I go back to the city,” Sally always promises. “I’ll get Everett to help me. And let’s get rid of some of this clutter.” But she never does, because after a day or two at Lakeside, it all looks normal to her again, too.

  I saw Laurel staring up at the space above the old sink. Joan was drying a batch of plastic bags. I hadn’t noticed, or I would have taken them down the night before. Joan washes out old plastic bags and hangs them to dry above the kitchen sink. She fastens them to a long piece of twine with clothespins. Joan has used the plastic bags countless times, and plans to reuse them until they dissolve. She and Whit were into recycling long before it became common practice, when it was just considered being thrifty. You could call them cheap (most people do), given Whit’s millions. They just can’t bear to get rid of anything. Or they couldn’t. (I often do that—refer to Whit in the present tense, even though he’s gone.) Joan and Whit’s mutual abhorrence of the ephemeral, their need to hang on to things, their love of coupon cutting, tag sales, dollar stores, their borderline hoarding tendencies—these were the very things that had originally attracted them to each other.

  Sally and I were assessing our kitchen through the eyes of this stranger and we shared a sense of indignant pride: Our house is a great house, a Vandemeer house. How dare she judge it?

  “Well, I like old places,” Laurel said.

  Sally gave me a look. How dare she patronize us so?

  Laurel kissed Spin. He pulled her closer and then they were really kissing. It wasn’t a terribly prolonged thing, but it was a little longer than I’d kiss somebody in front of others. In the kitchen. Before breakfast. I moved over next to the sink and pulled the Baggies from the line.

  I was relieved when Spin and Laurel stopped kissing, but then she started sucking on his ear. I turned my gaze to the floor and started across the kitchen, where I managed to crash into Sally, who also appeared to be staring at the floor. “Oh, oops,” I said, laughter hissing from my nose. We clutched each other. We were trying so hard not to laugh openly. Then Joan trotted into the kitchen, wearing a little tennis dress.

  “Well, hello! You must be the famous Laurel. I’m Joan,” she said, pushing her damp bangs away from her forehead with her wrist. Laurel was no longer latched onto Spin’s earlobe, but I was certain that she was going to hug my mother. I was dying to see her do this, actually, but she seemed to pick up on Joan’s taut vibe and just extended her hand.

  “So great to finally meet you. I’m sorry, I’m all sweaty,” Joan said, shaking Laurel’s hand.

  “Hi, Joanie,” Spin said. He gave my mom a little hug, as he always does, and she pushed him away playfully. “No, Spin, really, I’m absolutely drenched.”

  She smiled at Laurel. “I so wish I had been here last night when you stopped in, Laurel.”

  “No, no problem,” Laurel said. “I didn’t call first.”

  “Sorry, I’m such a sweaty mess. I know you’re an athlete yourself, Laurel, so you understand. Sit, sit down! Charlotte will make us all some breakfast. I would have brought home some muffins if I had known you were coming. I had tennis this morning and then went for a run. I run every day.”

  Sally grinned at me and then at Spin, and we all tried not to laugh, thinking, Here we go, the five-mile brag. And sure enough, as Laurel and Spin sat at the table and Joanie guzzled a Gatorade, she began what Sally and I like to call her “Joan-a-logue.” I knew that this would be the extended version. Our mother was slightly in awe of Laurel.

  “I run five miles, every day,” she began, wiping her forehead with a dish towel. “I’m sixty, but I still run every day.”

  This is actually a setup, and sure enough, Laurel replied, “No, you can’t be sixty.”

  “I’ll be sixty-one in August,” Joan declared. She acknowledged that this must be hard for Laurel to believe, but she’s never lied about her age. She thinks it’s exercise that keeps her so young. She runs every day, even if she also plays tennis, as she had that morning. Yes, five miles every day, unless the temperature is over ninety or below twenty degrees. Her resting heart rate is fifty-five. She ran the Boston Marathon several times, but that was long ago. She should have been a bi-athlete. She loves to swim as well. Her great-great-grandmother was one of the first female lifeguards in Massachusetts; that’s where her family is from. They’re an old Boston family. She was a Garrison. The Garrisons came to this continent on the Mayflower, which is probably why she and her family have always been so healthy and live so long. She comes from hearty stock—not many people survived that first winter in Plymouth. Joan believes in exercise, and she asked Laurel if she knew that exercise is what keeps your brain sharp. Before Laurel could reply, Joan informed her that indeed it is. It only makes sense, she explained. You need to keep pumping oxygen into your brain, or it will atrophy like any other organ. All Joan’s friends complain of declining memories, but Joan never forgets a detail. She asked Spin if it isn’t a fact that everyone knows her to be the one among their friends with the keenest memory, and Spin sort of shrugged, winked at me, and nodded. Yes, Joan assured us all, she’s as sharp as a tack. Well, her bridge games help, too, and her volunteer work. She likes to keep busy, and she’s competitive. She’s not ashamed of admitting that. It seems that being competitive is out of vogue these days, but why? Isn’t that, after all, what a capitalist system is based upon—healthy competition? Her father, William Garrison, was the headmaster at Holden Academy for twenty-five years. When she was eight years old, she was playing sports with kids twice her age, and these were boys, not girls—the school hadn’t become coed yet—

  “Joan,” Sally interrupted. “Laurel was training for the Olympics, so I think she knows about being competitive.”

  “Oh yes, yes,” said Joan. “How exciting to be on the Olympic ski team.”

  “I wasn’t on the actual team. I was short-listed. I tore up my knee during the trials,” Laurel said. “Then, later the same year, I had my accident.” Her voice trembled a little when she said the word accident, but she smiled bravely.

  “Oh, that’s right, dear. Spin told us about that,” my mother said. “What a horrible thing.”

  “No, everything happens for a reason. I didn’t realize it at the time, but if it hadn’t been for the accident, I probably never would have gone to college, let alone graduate school. And I’m fine now. I can’t ski as fast, of course, but I actually enjoy skiing in a way that I never did when I was competing.”

  “I’m so glad. I can see how skiing would become more enjoyable once it became a pastime rather than a profession,” said Joan, who has only ever known pastimes, never a true profession.

  “Yes, and I never would have met Spin if I hadn’t turned into a recreational skier. So it was all for the best.” Laurel turned to Spin, who looked at her lovingly.

  I glanced at my mother. She was smiling. She was starting to like Laurel. I was, too. I couldn’t help myself. She’s pretty hard not to like.

  “I’m gonna
run over and say hi to Everett,” Spin said.

  “I’ll make some breakfast if you want, Spin,” I said. “Want some pancakes? Eggs?” But he didn’t hear me. Everett’s truck had started, and Spin ran out so that he could catch him before he left.

  “I’ll help you, Charlotte,” Laurel said. “I’m starving.”

  “I never eat anything but toast for breakfast,” Joan said, as if any of us had asked. “Toast and a banana.”

  “Is that right?” said Laurel.

  “How about scrambled eggs?” I asked Laurel.

  “Perfect,” Laurel said.

  Joan went upstairs to shower and Sally came and stood next to me. She was leaning against the counter, drinking her coffee and gazing at Laurel.

  “So you stayed at Perry and Catherine’s, huh?” Sally asked.

  When I didn’t hear a reply, I looked over my shoulder at Laurel. She was tapping something into her cell phone and frowning.

  “We don’t have cell service on this part of the lake,” Sally said.

  “Oh no,” said Laurel. “I’m expecting an important e-mail. Do you have Wi-Fi?”

  “Yeah, Charlotte, what’s the password here, again?” Sally asked. She pushed her elbow into my side.

  “Banjoguy, no caps, two three,” I said.

  Laurel tapped away at her phone. “It doesn’t seem to be working.”

  I was breaking the last egg into the bowl. I repeated the password. She couldn’t get it to work.

  “Here, let me try,” I said. “Let me wash my hands. Sally, hand me the phone.”