Julie and Romeo Get Lucky

by Jeanne Ray

  “Listen, anybody is going to go crazy over this arrangement, even your pregnant and slightly self-involved older sister.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “It’s so different raising boys,” Romeo said from the comfortable vantage point of the bed. “When they were growing up, one of my boys would get put out with one of his brothers and he’d just walk right up and punch him. Bang. No discussion. Then they’d roll around on the floor like a couple of rabid squirrels until someone got tired or hurt, and the whole thing would be over. Nobody could even remember what started it.”

  “So that’s when they were kids. What about when they were adults?” Sandy was interested in conflict resolution.

  Romeo said, “That’s when they were adults, too.”

  “Well, you can’t throw a punch at a pregnant woman who’s lying in bed, even if she is your sister. It’s simply not done.”

  “I respect that,” Romeo said.

  “But if you’re curious, come downstairs and I’ll show you what will happen.” Sandy picked up her slender, splendid vase.

  “I can’t come downstairs,” Romeo said. “Take your mother.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sandy said. “I keep forgetting.”

  “I’m like the crazy wife Mr. Rochester kept in the attic. I live up here.”

  “What was a tough Italian boy doing reading Jane Eyre?” I asked.

  “I was a tough Italian boy who worked in a flower shop. Now go on downstairs with Sandy.”

  I had never worried about Romeo being lonely before, and now I suddenly felt bad about leaving him. I must have had some sort of hangdog expression on my face because Romeo pointed firmly at the door, and said, “Go!”

  No one gave a second thought to moving things around anymore. People pushed and dragged the furniture into new configurations depending on the size of the crowd. Tonight we had a full house, and everyone was just trying to find a comfortable place to sit.

  Alex and Nora were in the hospital bed eating Chinese food out of paper cartons. It was not beneath my notice that Nora demanded only the purest, healthiest, and most expensive food from me, then would joyfully devour all the pizza and Thai food and cheeseburgers that Alex brought home for her at night. “It’s a craving,” she would explain. “I’m entitled.”

  Big Tony and Plummy and little Tony squeezed in together on the sofa while Sarah stretched out on the floor, watching the screen with all the intensity of a first timer. It was Plummy who saw us come in. After only a few minutes she had been able to figure out how boring the movie was going to be, the genius girl.

  “Nora, Alex, look. Look at Sandy’s arrangement I was telling you about.”

  “We’re watching the movie,” Nora said.

  “Of course you are,” Sandy said, and put the vase down on the table.

  Dear Alex, eternally oblivious to undercurrents, over currents, or repetition, lowered his chopsticks from his mouth. The flowers caught him off guard. “Sandy, you made that?”

  “I did,” she said. Big Tony looked up and smiled at her.

  “Nora, you’ve got to see this.”

  “I’m watching the movie. Be quiet.” She kept her eyes on the screen as if it were the final moments of a close presidential election, and not a shot of poor Charlie Bucket being humiliated in his classroom for only being able to buy one Wonka bar.

  In Nora’s defense, she was not such a monster when Sandy wasn’t around, nor was Sandy as needy and pathetic when Nora wasn’t around. Quite often when the two of them came together they could be thoughtful and kind, or they could simply resume a fight they were having in the backseat of the station wagon thirty years ago: Her finger is on my side! She won’t stop looking at me! Mom, she’s making faces at me! She took my doll (book, coat, Oreo, whatever)! She’s touching me! She said a bad word! Mom, MAKE HER STOP!

  “Nora, for God’s sake, you’ve seen the movie about a million times. Now turn your eyes to your sister’s spectacular achievement.” Alex’s voice had an edge of incredulity. “I feel like I could dive into that thing and just swim in it.”

  No one was used to seeing Alex rock the boat. He was a tax attorney, after all, not a litigator. He was also the most devoted of husbands, but the flowers held him in their sway. The longer Nora went without looking, the more he insisted that she look, and the more he insisted, the more lockjawed she became.

  At that point Nora was the only person in the room still watching the television set, and even she knew she was acting crazy, but she was in too deep to stop. Nora had no personal experience in backing down.

  Still, if it were a boxing match, I’d have to say that Sandy won. She got her big compliment from Alex, while also proving her point that she was clairvoyant where her sister was concerned.

  “I’m going home,” Alex said, and swung his legs off the bed. “Nora, good night. Everyone, good night.”

  Then Nora’s eyes finally did break free from the picture. “Why are you going home?”

  “I’ll call you later,” he said, and got his suit jacket from where it was hanging off the back of the bed.

  “Is this because I didn’t look at Sandy’s flowers? There, I’m looking. Gosh, they look nice. Now will you just sit back down?”

  “Let’s not wreck everybody’s evening,” Alex said.

  “I didn’t wreck the evening. I’m not the one who came in here when everybody was perfectly happy watching a movie and demand that they all stop what they were doing so they could praise me.”

  “What?” Sandy said.

  “It’s always about Sandy and her feelings. I’m the one who’s pregnant!”

  Sandy came around to the side of the bed. Big Tony took her hand, but she shook him off. “And when I was pregnant, I wasn’t even allowed to talk about it in front of you. It was too boring. I was too conventional. But when you’re pregnant, that’s another story entirely, isn’t it? When you’re pregnant you build a shrine to yourself in the middle of the living room, where every single person who walks into the house has to come by and pay honor to your fertility.”

  “Okay, girls, that’s enough.” I said it in my mother’s voice, the one I used when I looked back in the rearview mirror and threatened to pull the car over to the side of the road.

  Nora was crying now. In some unimaginable world of hormonal high jinx, Nora had started crying before her sister. “I’m the one who’s sick,” she said. “Everything was easy for you.”

  And just as Sandy opened her mouth for a hot retort, Sarah produced a sound so bloodcurdling, so beyond terrifying, that I thought there must be a stranger in the room with an axe and he’d chopped off Sarah’s foot. She screamed and screamed and screamed.

  Sandy leapt for her, and Nora sat up. We made a tight circle around the child, but she could not stop, no matter how many questions we asked.

  “Where does it hurt?” “What did you see?” “Tell us, Sarah, tell us!”

  She screamed and screamed again, and Sandy tried to hold her, but she could not be held. She flailed and fought and screamed. It couldn’t have been more than thirty seconds, but it felt like days.

  Then suddenly Romeo was in the room. He had run down the stairs without a thought when he heard such screaming. When his eyes searched the room, they landed on the television set. Willie Wonka was gone, and in his place there was Dawn Hayes with her perfect serene smile, an outline of the state of Massachusetts, and a row of numbers. It was Romeo who knew what had happened.

  “Sarah, you won,” he said.

  With those words, he broke the spell. The screaming stopped, and she flew across the room to him, so grateful that finally someone had understood what she meant. In a single bound of joy, she leapt up into his arms.

  And he caught her.

  Chapter Twelve

  EVERY LIFE IS A ROAD FULL OF FORKS: YOU CHOOSE and you choose and you choose and so your life is shaped. I married Mort Roth when I probably could have married someone else, someone I could have loved more and been happier with
, but with that man I never would have had my daughters. Of course there could have been different daughters, but I have to say that whatever difficulties my girls have presented me, I have never been interested in trading them in. Since I cannot wish away Mort without wishing away Nora and Sandy, I will not wish away Mort.

  Take Sandy. She could have married Tony in high school the first time they were in love, but instead Romeo and I broke them up and Sandy went on to marry the very dull Sandy Anderson and have Little Tony and Sarah, only to have a second chance to fork back to Big Tony in the end.

  Nora waited until forty to get pregnant, but who knows how everything would have changed if she’d gotten pregnant twenty-three years ago (when I used to sit up nights worrying about exactly that)?

  Leave the house at 9:00 in the morning and meet the love of your life at the T-stop. Leave the house at 9:05 and get run over by a car. There’s simply no way to know in advance what the long-term outcome of a decision will be, no way of knowing how things might have turned out had you taken the other path. All the choices you make are knotted together, and you can’t throw out the mistakes, and even if you could, you’d be unraveling the fabric of time. All the wonderful benefits that came as a direct result of an error would vanish as well. Live without regret, that’s what my father taught me, and I believe him. You get one life, and every day you make a million choices, most of them too small to notice, but they shape you, all of them, and there’s nothing you can do but go with it.

  I wasn’t supposed to buy another lottery ticket. I had made a solemn vow. But then Sarah felt so crummy and I felt so crummy for her that I turned the cart around. Was that fate? Only in retrospect.

  Sarah had stopped screaming and Romeo had started. When she jumped onto his chest, propelled by the joy of the winning ticket, he went down like a house of cards.

  Maybe the thing to do would have been to leave him there on the floor, at least until somebody called Dominic, or maybe we could have put him in the hospital bed next to Nora. Not a good solution long-term, but for that instant it would have been a reasonable choice. Nobody knew what the right thing was. We were all in the throes of our own separate, multilayered panics. So when Big Tony spoke clearly, we listened.

  “We have to get him into bed,” he said. “Alex, help me.” And in two seconds they had lifted him, wracked and writhing in pain, and taken him right back up the stairs to deposit him in my bed. Poor Romeo had made his big escape only to end up exactly where he started.

  When Tony ran in with the pain pills and a glass of water it was clear that swallowing was not an option. Before there was time to think of what to do next, Alex was on the phone calling Dominic for a shot. He was completely calm—unlike Big Tony, who was trembling as he stroked his father’s head: unlike me, who was weeping as I held Romeo’s hand: unlike the entire crowd who followed up the stairs and into the bedroom, leaving only Nora behind to float on her solitary raft in the living room.

  “Daddy?” Plummy said, great tears balanced on the edges of her dark lashes.

  In came Sandy, who had in less than a minute shifted gears from thinking Sarah was dying to discovering Sarah won the Mass Millions (a fact that was completely lost in the shuffle, but I imagined would reemerge at a later time) to thinking Romeo was dying. She was wild-eyed, breathless.

  “Romeo?” she said. She put her hand on one of his feet. There was so much tenderness in her voice it made me cry harder, remembering those far-off days in which she had hated him.

  But Romeo wasn’t answering anybody. He had retreated into his vertebrae, focusing so purely on his pain that I doubt he heard us at all. He was rigid again, gray again, once again his eyes rolled back.

  Little Tony put his arms around his mother’s waist and sobbed. Romeo had let him lie beside him in the bed every day, and together they’d read the sports page by holding it directly over their faces. They talked about baseball and planned a trip to go see a cave in New Hampshire once Romeo was up and around again. Tony cried like Romeo was dead.

  “He’s going to be fine,” I said, trying to pull myself together. I wiped my eyes on the sleeve of my shirt and sat up straight. “This is just like the last time. He got better the last time, and he’ll get better this time, too.”

  Sarah stayed a safe distance away from the bed, but her eyes were fixed on Romeo. “Did I kill him?” she finally asked her mother.

  “You didn’t kill him,” Sandy said. “You just forgot not to jump up.” The children, like puppies, had been drilled on the hazards of jumping up, and like puppies, they never remembered when they were excited.

  Little Tony removed his face from his mother’s shirt and turned to look at his sister. I thought he was going to say something awful, but after a minute all he did was look away from her, which seemed worse.

  Plummy put her hands on Sarah’s shoulders. “Come on, we should go downstairs. There are too many people in here, and we’re sucking up all the air.”

  “I want to stay,” Sarah said.

  “Well, so do I, but that’s not what’s best for Daddy, so we’re going to go. Anyway, we can’t leave Nora down there all by herself.” When Plummy and Sarah got to the door, they noticed that nobody was following them. “Come on,” she said. “He’s fine with Julie. We’ll all go downstairs and wait for Dominic.”

  Despite her irrefutable logic, no one in the room was moving toward Plummy. Finally, there was a very small, very strained voice in the room, and Romeo said, “Go.”

  The oracle had spoken. The oracle, though damaged, was not dead. Alex and Sandy and Big Tony and Little Tony filed down the stairs behind Plummy and Sarah, and for a minute Romeo and I were alone. I lay down very carefully in the bed beside him. I had become something of an expert at stretching out without causing the slightest bounce in the mattress. I put my hand very gently on his wrist.

  “I have to tell you I’m feeling a little guilty about this,” I said. “I felt guilty enough the last time, what with you carrying me up the stairs, but this time is almost as bad. I wanted you to stay with me. You kept getting better and better, and I was glad you were getting better, I was thrilled, but at the same time I didn’t want you to go. I know if you were talking, you’d tell me that it wasn’t my fault, but I don’t know. I think I’ve been hanging out with Sarah too much. This whole business of wishing for things and wanting things is starting to catch up with me.”

  Romeo moved his fingers and I slipped my hand beneath his so he could press down on it. As bleak as things looked, I wasn’t afraid this time. I’d seen him pull out of this before, and I had no doubt that he was able to do it again.

  Then I remembered something crazy. Sarah had won the lottery. Or maybe she didn’t win. No one had checked the numbers. It seemed completely possible that there had been a mistake.

  I closed my eyes for a minute. There were just too many things to hold in my head, and all of a sudden I felt unbelievably tired. We stayed just like that on the bed, me and Romeo, our hands not exactly holding but certainly touching, until Dominic arrived.

  “You two been at it again?” he said.

  “It wasn’t me.” I opened my eyes and saw Dominic at the foot of the bed holding a syringe.

  “They told me he made it downstairs. It must have been a big night.”

  “You could say that.”

  “I don’t know whose bright idea it was to bring him back upstairs. If he was downstairs it would make some sense to take him into the hospital.”

  “There was a lot of confusion at the time. You should just move in. It would save you all the driving back and forth.”

  Dominic swabbed Romeo’s hip and pushed the needle in. “If you asked on the right day, I’m sure my wife would be very pleased.” He capped the needle and threw it back in the bag. “How’s your head?”

  “My head’s fine, why?” I asked.

  “Because you fell off a chair a couple of days ago. Do you remember that?”

  “Oh Dominic, you know how it is—on
e crisis just obliterates the one that came before it. If it didn’t happen today, I don’t remember it.”

  “That’s probably a very smart way to live,” he said.

  It looked as though no one had said anything to Dominic about the ticket, and when I walked him to the door the entire family was still sitting in the living room, looking like they had each swallowed his or her own individual mouse and were trying to keep their mouths closed for fear it would pop right back out again.

  “How are you feeling, Nora?” The question seemed at once both neighborly and doctorly.

  “Oh great,” she said, giving him her best smile. “Super.”

  “Well, my hat’s off to you. I’d have a hard time staying still.”

  “Romeo’s my role model.”

  “He certainly should be. He’s not going anywhere for awhile.”

  Big Tony stood up and came toward us. “Is he any worse?”

  “Worse than where he started from? Probably not. It would be impossible to tell without an X-ray, but my best guess is that he reinjured the same spot. He’s just going to have to wait for it to heal, and when it does heal he needs to stop picking people up.”

  Sarah dropped her head and looked very earnestly at her fingers.

  He turned for the door, but no one said as much as good-bye. “You’re an awfully quiet group tonight,” Dominic said.

  “We’re just worried about Dad,” Plummy said.

  “Your father’s going to be fine. I’ll send Al over in the morning to check on him.” He gave us all a wave and was gone.

  “We have to send him some flowers,” Plummy said.

  “So who bought the ticket?” Sandy said. I had a feeling it wasn’t the first time she’d asked the question. She was looking right at Nora.