“As I recall, all the right questions were raised back in the seventies,” Nikki replied. “I just don’t remember anyone coming up with the answers.”
“Well, I certainly don’t have any. I don’t even have the energy anymore to think about it. Just getting through the day is hard enough.”
“My problem is that lately I’m feeling so darned bored. As if nothing interesting is ever going to happen to me again for the rest of my entire life.’’
Suddenly, Jessica perked up. “Hey, now that you mention it, here’s something interesting that happened a few days ago. A little bit too interesting, in fact. It’s really been upsetting me, but you’re such good company I forgot all about it. There was a murder in Sea Cliff. Somebody I knew, too.”
“A murder? What are you talking about?”
“Our real estate agent was murdered. The guy who found us our house. His name was Lloyd Nolan.”
“Oh, yes. I remember your colorful descriptions of the man all too well. Just hearing his name conjures up images of cigar breath and the unmistakable glint of polyester.’’
“That’s the one. As a matter of fact, a couple of detectives from the Nassau County Police Department came to my house the other day to ask me how come I’d been telephoning him lately.”
Nikki’s eyebrows shot up. “Why were you?”
“Oh, he owed us some money, that’s all. A screwup from the closing on the house.”
“Not a lot of money, Jess?” Nikki teased.
“Give me a break. Nick. Besides, it’s not fanny.”
“Sorry, Jess. You’re right; it’s not. Gosh, murder. How does that make you feel, actually knowing somebody who’s been murdered?”
“It’s creepy. I thought we moved out to the ‘burbs because it was safe. And now it turns out there’s some crazy person running around Sea Cliff.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry. It was probably somebody who knew him. A jealous lover or something. Maybe a business partner who got shafted. Or—I know—maybe some angry home owner who was seeking revenge on the man who set him up in a house that turned out not to have enough closet space.’’
Jessica laughed. But there was something about what Nikki said that gave her pause. Suggesting that the murder might have been committed by someone who was angry. Yes, it made sense. People did get angry, sometimes even angry enough to kill. She hadn’t really thought about it before, but that was undoubtedly the reason behind most murders. And yet anger was something that everyone was capable of feeling. Did that mean that everybody was capable of killing, given the right circumstances?
It was a frightening thought, and Jessica was relieved when Sammy let out one of his war cries. Someone was prepared to do battle with him over a piece of turf, and it looked as if this time a referee was definitely called for.
Chapter Five
It was a nightmare Jessica had frequently, one in which she was about to give a speech she was totally unprepared for. Predictably, she met up with disaster every step of the way. She put on her gray business suit and found it was streaked with finger-paints. Her pantyhose had rotted so badly that when she attempted to push her foot through them, the fabric disintegrated before her eyes. Then, when she finally stood up in front of her audience, she couldn’t make out the writing on her notecards because Sammy had scribbled all over them with Magic Marker.
Jessica awoke with her heart racing and her stomach in knots. She didn’t calm down for a full five minutes, not until she had told herself over and over again that she wasn’t really giving a presentation this morning. In fact, the most difficult demand she would face was accompanying Sammy on his first day of nursery school.
She glanced over at the glowing red figures of the digital clock on David’s side of the bed and saw that it was just past six. That meant there was time to go back to sleep, to relish the luxury of not having to get up and go off to a real job. She rolled over, curling up in a fetal position and tucking her pillow under her neck just so. But her relief was short-lived.
“Mah-mah-ah!” Sammy caterwauled from his bedroom. As always, his timing was precise. The child was tied into his mother’s time clock in an almost mystical way. Whenever Jessica woke up, it was only a matter of seconds before he did, too. Her theory was that he instinctively sensed a change in the vibrations in the air whenever she returned to consciousness.
“Mah-mah!” Sammy shrieked once again. His voice was growing louder as he became irritated at having gotten no response the first time around. “I want water.”
“Okay, Sammy,” Jessica replied. Her voice was as hoarse as a frog’s, or at least Glennis Johns’s.
“In the green cup,’’ Sammy amended his order.
“Okay, Sammy.” One leg was already out of the bed, reaching for the floor.
“Cold water. With ice.” Then, just in case she forgot who his demands were being directed at, there was one more “Mah-mah!” just for the fun of it.
“Coming, coming.” Jessica tried to sound upbeat as she dragged herself out of bed, desperately craving more sleep but knowing that there was not even the slightest possibility of grabbing even five or ten winks, much less a whole forty, before eleven o’clock that night. She had at one time wondered how medical students got through their days on so little sleep, being on call all the time and working all those thirty-six-hour shifts. By now, after almost three-and-a-half years of motherhood, she finally understood—only too well. And she didn’t even have an M.D. after her name to show for it.
Sammy was sitting up in bed, ready for action. “Look, Mama!” he chortled, pointing toward the window. “Time to get up. The sunshine came!”
A farmer. I had to give birth to a farmer, Jessica was thinking as she picked him up, automatically catering to his refusal to get out of bed in the morning without a personal escort. Carrying him downstairs, however, much of her cynicism lifted. Cuddling his sturdy little body against her chest, burying her face in his soft neck and silky hair, feeling his pudgy arms curling around her ... it was all so delightful and so sweet that she stepped back and noted that this was one of those moments to be cherished, the kind the Kodak film people were always pretending they had to be a part of in order to make them count. But she didn’t need anything of the kind. He was hers, this tiny, little innocent who needed her for his very survival. This, she reflected, unable to resist being at least a little bit melodramatic, was what the love between mother and child was all about.
Her romanticism was only temporary, however. As soon as she brought Sammy into the kitchen and settled him into a chair, already thinking Maxwell House, he was catapulted out of pliant sleepiness and directly into fourth gear.
“I wanna go outside.” Without any warning, he jumped out of his chair and began running toward the back door.
Jessica glanced out the window, looking for an excuse to remain in the same room as her coffeepot at least a little bit longer. In her estimation, the canopy of hostile rain clouds up above provided her with a perfectly legitimate reason for staying inside.
“No, Sammy. You can’t go outside. It’s raining.”
“Just a short time,” Sammy pleaded.
“It’s raining,” she repeated, not yet fully awake enough to realize that trying to reason with a three-year-old was like trying to explain how the stock market worked to a bull terrier.
“I stay on the porch,” Sammy insisted.
One day he would make a great lawyer. Or perhaps the leader of a Reverend Moon-style cult. Jessica found herself glancing out the window once again. She was weakening. “But you have no shoes on.”
“I stay on the porch, Mama. Just a short time.”
After all, she reasoned, what difference did it really make, in the grand scheme of things? A few minutes out on the porch ... she didn’t want to be the next Joan Crawford, for heaven’s sake. She could let the kid have a little fun.
She poured herself some coffee, keeping one ear cocked toward the screen door as she stirred in milk and sugar and wo
ndered if this would be a good day to break open that box of Equal she had been saving, hoping some conclusive research on its safety would come in so she could finally launch full speed ahead into one of those diets she was always clipping out of magazines. She remained on the alert for sounds of imminent disaster as she sat down at the kitchen table and took that first rejuvenating sip, thinking of herself as a sentry on a coffee break.
She could vaguely remember a time when breakfast meant leafing through that morning’s edition of the New York Times, chuckling over the “Hers’’ column or reading up on home computers or gardening tips, meanwhile savoring that second cup of , coffee made from Zabar’s special blend. Now, she considered herself lucky if she managed to drink half a cup without the rest being abandoned in favor of more pressing pursuits.
Sammy, she suddenly noticed, was just a little bit too quiet. She glanced over at him and saw that he had climbed up one side of the porch and was standing on top of the wooden plank that would one day be the bottom ledge of a window. He was precariously balanced three-and-a-half-feet off the ground, reaching for the wind chimes. Down below, six feet underneath him on the other side of the elevated porch, the menacing concrete patio waited.
“Sammy, get down!” Jessica scrambled toward him. “My God, what are you doing?”
Sammy looked over at her and blinked. His clear blue eyes showed neither remorse nor fear; indeed, with his glowing round face, full cherub-like lips, and halo of wispy blond hair, he looked like he belonged on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. “I climbing, Mama. Watch. Big guys do that.”
“Big guys do not do that.’’
She reached out her arms, ready to rescue her son. In the movies, he would have grabbed at her gratefully, resting his head on her shoulder and perhaps even sobbing a bit. Here in real life, however, he swatted at her like a prize fighter in training.
“No!” he screamed. “No, no, no!”
At this point, Jessica was still on a fairly even keel, someone whom the editors of Parents Magazine would have been proud of. “Sammy, come down now. Mommy’s afraid you’re going to fall.”
“No! No!” He began hitting her with such ferocity that he was almost certain to lose his balance. Her eyes instinctively clamped nearly shut, the muscles of her face tensed against the possibility of a heartfelt left hook, Jessica reached up for him once again, determined to get him down no matter what.
“Stupid!” he screamed, his high-pitched voice nearly a shriek. “Stupid, goddammit! Bullshit! Bullshit!”
“Sammy, you know I don’t like those words,” Jessica said, her tone more pleading than commanding. “Besides, our neighbors are still sleeping—”
“Bullshit! I don’t like you! I gonna throw you in the garbage truck.’’
Even as her blood boiled, Jessica attempted to remain calm and in control.
He’s only a baby, she said to herself, repeating a now-familiar litany. He doesn’t know what he’s saying. He’s angry, and he’s too young to know how to handle it.
“I hate you!”
“Sammy, please. Just come inside and—”
“Bullshit!”
She managed to haul him down and back into the house, the heavy back door closed so that the McAllisters’ neighbors, their opinion of the new people on their block not yet fully formed, could be spared this tirade of verbal abuse delivered in a voice that would have been much better suited to singing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.’’ Jessica set him down on the kitchen floor, then strode toward the living room.
“I’ll tell you what. Why don’t we turn on the Mr. Rogers video, and we can ...”
She snapped on the TV and the VCR. And then the clatter of plastic against wood reached her. She whirled around to see Sammy standing in the doorway of the kitchen, his face twisted into a furious pout, glowering at her as he hurled his red and green and blue Duplo blocks across the room, one at a time-perhaps not actually at her, but definitely in her direction.
“Sammy, stop it! Look, you’re going to have to sit in the chair.”
“No! No chair!’’ he wailed, turning around and heading back toward the kitchen door. But Jessica was fast on her feet, even at this hour. She scooped him up, fighting off his kicks. After pulling out one of the dining room chairs, its legs scraping abrasively against the wooden floor, she plopped him down in the middle of it.
“Now you stay there,” she commanded through gritted teeth. “You sit there until you calm down.”
Determined not to let this opening scene for the new day get her down too much, she returned to the kitchen. Her coffee was by now considerably colder than she preferred it, but she gulped it down. It hardly mattered because she didn’t taste it anyway. With Sammy screaming, his voice shattering the air, she would have been a fool even to try to turn what was left of this meal into anything even vaguely resembling a pleasant experience.
“Mah-mah!” He sounded as if he were being tortured by a band of terrorists with black ski masks over their faces. “Mah-mah! Mah-mah!” he wailed, over and over again.
There had been a time when Jessica’s desire to hear the word “Mother” or some variation on it uttered by someone borne of her own gene pool had bordered on a craving. She remembered the feeling she had gotten as she peered into a small glass test tube, squinting in the early-morning light. It was part of the home pregnancy test kit she had picked up on her way home from work the evening before, not really believing she would test positive. Yet there it was, the unmistakable brown ring that told her it was more than job-related stress that was responsible for all the sudden changes in her body.
“David,” she said softly, sitting on the edge of the bed and shaking him, “wake up.”
He let out a loud groan. “Hey, it’s Saturday, remember? I thought we were going to sleep late.”
“It might not be such a bad idea for us to start getting used to weird hours.” She was trying to sound matter-of-fact. “Just do me one favor, David. Promise me that eight months from now, you won’t start addressing me as ‘Mother.’ “
And then she let go, succumbing to a fit of giggles. She and David had felt as if they’d just won the lottery.
Right now, that moment—and the mood—seemed very far away. It was only six twenty-three, yet Sammy was screeching at the top of his lungs and she was totally wiped out, exhausted from having been put through an emotional wringer.
“Hey, what’s all this?”
David suddenly appeared in the doorway, dressed in nothing but his turquoise Calvin Klein bikini briefs, his bulging tummy detracting considerably from the intended effect. He rubbed his eyes, looking puzzled and a little bit dazed. He glanced around at the blocks strewn about the living room, those little plastic forms that had been designed to be playthings but had instead been turned into weapons. His son was standing on a chair in the middle of the dining room, screeching. His wife, meanwhile, sat hunched over the kitchen table, her chin resting on the rim of her ceramic coffee mug, looking miserable. In the background, Mr. Rogers was tying his shoe and smiling in an eerie way, like someone who knew a secret you’d rather he didn’t share with you.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Oh, just the usual,’’ Jessica replied, trying to keep her voice light. “Sammy decided it would be fun to go outside and use our half-built porch as a gym, and I dared to intervene.”
“Poor Jess.” David sauntered over and gave her a pat on the head, much the way he might have greeted their golden retriever, had they owned one. Then he turned his attention to Sammy, who had slightly altered his wailing, changing it from a general banshee-style cry to a whiney, “Dad-deee! Dad-deee!’’
“Hey, sport, what’s the matter?” David asked in a gentle voice. “Are you giving Mom a hard time?”
The little boy sniffled pathetically, reaching his arms up toward his father. “Dad-deee, hug.”
“You can get off the chair now, Sammy,” Jessica offered halfheartedly.
The ensuing scene was l
ike something out of an advertisement for life insurance. The sweet blond child grasping his father, gaining reassurance from his strong arms and broad shoulders; the eighties man revealing his loving, sensitive side as he comforted his distraught son.
Jessica would have loved to crawl back into bed, curling up into a fetal position and staying there for the next week or two. Instead, she stood up and picked David’s favorite cup off the drain board, where the dinner dishes from the night before were sunning themselves in the early light of day.
“Coffee?” she offered in a defeated voice.
“So what’s on for today?’’ David asked cheerfully a few minutes later. Sammy, now an entirely different person, sat in front of the television, taking instruction from the surreal Mr. Rogers, meanwhile building one of his “baseships” with his Tinker Toys.
“Today is Sammy’s first day of nursery school,” Jessica reminded him, wondering why a man who was capable of making twenty-story buildings stand up, a man who truly understood logarithms, couldn’t manage to keep a simple fact like that within his consciousness.
“Oh, that’s right. Well, that’ll be a nice break for you.’’ David leaned over his cereal bowl and began shoveling shredded wheat into his mouth. “What are you going to do with your time off?”
Jessica felt the anger rising up inside her. All around her she saw tasks that needed to be performed: putting away last night’s dishes and dealing with this morning’s, contending with the growing pile of bills, retrieving runaway plastic Fisher-Price people out from between the refrigerator and the stove. Those were just the immediate ones. Then there was the ongoing frustration of trying to find places to put the things that didn’t actually belong anywhere, the toys, papers, shoes, magazines, pieces of junk mail, telephone numbers scribbled on small scraps of paper, stray crayons, rubber bands, paper clips, and all the other artifacts of their day-to-day existence. These were the invisible tasks, the ones that weren’t noticed if they were done, only if they weren’t.
Close to Home Page 7
