She glided down the Jones Falls Expressway, conscious of the Mercedes’s power. She actually missed the Outback. The Mercedes had just been another exercise in triumphing over her stepmother. Felicia was banal, if not benign. But she usually knew better than to try mothering. Alanna had put a stop to that early on, pointing out that Felicia was only fourteen years older than she was. “And although there is a fine tradition of teen motherhood in Baltimore, it’s not generally practiced in our set.” Our set was pure affectation, the kind of Gossip Girl/Pretty Little Liars dialogue that Alanna never heard in real life, much less used. But Felicia, ruthlessly normal Felicia, didn’t get that, and she had been hurt.
“I’m from Cumberland,” she had said.
“Is that like Middle Earth?” Alanna had asked.
Anyway, Felicia from Cumberland had decreed that if a seventeen-year-old girl was to be given a car, then it must be car with no style or cachet. If the point was transportation, then get something with four wheels that went forward and backward. Blah, blah, blah. Alanna had taken the Outback and waited for her first opportunity to wreck it. That had required time and planning, but Alanna never minded executing a plan. She studied the intersections near the new house, found a blind curve, observed that one could hear a car coming before one could see it, even estimate its speed. She sat behind the wheel of her shiny, innocent Outback, listened to a car wheezing up the hill, then pulled out just in time to take the hit on the passenger side. Her timing was slightly off; the car struck hers farther back than she had wanted. And, boy, did it hurt when the air bag deployed. There had been a moment of panic when she thought her lungs might be damaged. But the accident did the trick, and the Outback was replaced by a Mercedes, so—she won, she won, she won. Alanna cared nothing for status, and besides, few material objects could confer status at Roland Park Country School. She liked to win, though.
Being Stephen Dawes’s daughter wasn’t a big deal either at RPCS. But being Melisandre’s daughter—that had its advantages. Alanna got away with a lot. Leaving school in her car, for example. She’d be in a lot of trouble when she got caught, but her father would make a call and say whatever he said—Alanna’s so troubled, blah, blah, blah, let’s just get her to graduation whatever it takes and how about a big donation for the latest capital project—and the trouble would go away.
Except the trouble never went away. And now her dad was double-dealing, pretending one thing to Ruby, telling Alanna something else. You’re old enough to handle the truth. Ruby isn’t. She could live to be ninety and she might not be old enough to handle the stuff her father had been laying on her.
Why had she never made this particular drive before? She wasn’t a scaredy-cat suburban kid. She was a city kid, a real one, who had grown up in Bolton Hill. She could parallel-park, a skill she kept polished by visiting the old house, which she did all the time. Yet she had never before considered heading to the foot of the highway and making five simple turns toward her own past.
But when she turned on Waterview Avenue and saw the boathouse—for the first time in her life, actually saw the place where everything had begun and everything had ended—she panicked. No, she couldn’t go down there, look at the water, that fucking tree. Instead of pulling into the parking lot, she drove on, blindly. Before she knew it, she was lost in a worn-down neighborhood of check-cashing stores and “lake trout” restaurants and what even Alanna could tell were drug corners. She drove slowly, looking for someone—a middle-aged woman or even a really old man would be okay—to ask for directions. She could feel the weight of strangers’ gazes. Not menacing, but definitely curious about the girl in the red Mercedes.
She was about to pull over and activate the GPS in her phone when she heard a woop-woop and saw a whirl of red-and-blue lights. She hadn’t noticed the cop. If she had, she would have asked him for help. But surely she hadn’t been going over the speed limit? Had she failed to signal, run a stop sign?
She offered her license and registration to the officer, giving him her best smile, but he was no Gilman boy.
“What are you doing in this neighborhood, Miss Dawes?”
“I got lost.”
“Going where?”
What business was it of his? Could police officers ask such questions? It was a free country, right? He should write the ticket and get on with it. But a ticket—no, she couldn’t afford a ticket. A ticket would tell her father where she had been today. She could get away with cutting school, leaving campus. But she didn’t want her father to know she had gone to the boathouse, that she was searching for answers to questions she wasn’t supposed to ask.
“I—I—” She was too slow, she could not come up with a lie that sounded plausible. “Officer, the truth is, I wanted to see the place where my mother intended to kill me.”
“Funny.”
In all seriousness, without thinking how it sounded: “Do you know who I am? It’s right there on my license. Alanna Dawes. DAWES.”
Perhaps the family name was not as well known as she thought.
They impounded her car and took her to the Southern District police headquarters. Hours later, when her father came to get her at the station house, no charges were filed, and Alanna was elated to find out the cop thought she was just a stupid suburban kid, trying to score drugs; that was pretty cool in a way, and a better cover story for her dad—the officer apologized to her.
“I just, you know, thought you were mouthing off,” he said. “I didn’t know—I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”
Felicia had driven Alanna’s father into town and he drove Alanna’s car back to their house, making threats all the way. He said she was going to be grounded, and she assumed she would—for three or four days, tops. Besides, she still needed to drive to school and then drive home after cross-country practice. In the end, it was too much of a hassle for Alanna to be grounded.
They were about a mile from home when he finally said: “But why, Alanna? Is this because—because of what we talked about the other night?”
Given how little time they had left in the car, he couldn’t possibly want the truth. The truth would require miles.
“Oh, I just wanted to get it right for the college essays.”
“You have until next fall to worry about your essays. We haven’t even started visiting campuses yet. And I think you can find better topics.”
“There was a girl—do you know this?—a girl who killed her mother and she got into Harvard. Of course, Harvard didn’t know. And they rescinded the acceptance because she was lying. So it’s lying that gets you in trouble.”
He didn’t get it. Or, if he did, was smooth enough to roll past it.
“That was a long time ago, before you were born. How do you know that story?”
“They told us at one of the sessions on how to apply. I think it was supposed to be an object lesson in not lying. But, hey, she came pretty close to committing a perfect crime at age fourteen. If that doesn’t qualify you for Harvard, what does?”
“Don’t be morbid, Alanna.” He was turning in the driveway; their time alone together was almost over. They were seldom alone, Alanna and her father, and this made twice in one week. Whee!
“What did you think you were going to see, anyway?”
The tree. The parking lot. The pier. Her past, the destiny averted. But what she really wanted to see what was what in her mother’s head that day.
And if it was coming for her.
“Maybe I really did go to Cherry Hill to buy drugs and the boathouse is the cover story. Did you ever think of that?”
She couldn’t quite see her father’s face in the dark car. But she was pretty sure that his expression was almost one of relief. Drugs? He could deal with drugs. Her mother’s legacy was what made him nervous. Even her father expected her to lose it one day.
“I know you don’t take drugs, Alanna.”
“I think I want to see her, Dad.”
“But yesterday—”
“All our troubl
es seemed so far away.”
“What?”
“Forget it, Dad.”
“If you really want to see her, it’s up to you. I said as much. I took you into my confidence because you need to know the whole story. I just wanted you to be prepared, Alanna. For what it could be and what it will never be. You’re my only concern. We’ll talk, okay?”
But that was the one thing Alanna and her father never did. Oh, they used words, made sentences. Put them together like little rafts to sail across the surface of things, just like the boats her mother had taught Alanna and Ruby to sail down the gutters. But they never really talked. Because he knew and she knew it was Alanna’s fault that her mother had gone crazy and killed Isadora.
6:00 P.M.
Tess arrived home to a tender scene: Crow and Carla Scout were entwined on the chaise longue in the sitting room, still napping. Father and daughter looked so much alike—dark hair, light eyes, fair skin. They were particularly beautiful asleep. Did Tess look pretty sleeping? Crow said she talked in her sleep. Argued, instructing various people to “cut it out” and “don’t tell me that.”
“Do I at least win the arguments?” Tess had asked. If she was going to fight in her sleep, she wanted to win.
But Crow and Carla Scout were serene in sleep, his face almost as lineless and smooth as the baby’s, as Tess still thought of their daughter. The three dogs, also napping, had arranged themselves in a pile on the rug. They were twitchier sleepers. Esskay and Dempsey, both greyhounds, chased prey, hind legs rabbiting, while Miata, the world’s sweetest Doberman, sniffed the air. If a stranger walked in, Miata would be the dog on her feet instantly.
It was, all in all, a lovely tableau, one that made Tess want to go in the kitchen, pick up a frying pan, then whack Crow on the head.
The problem with these naps, which Crow and Carla Scout took almost every weekday, was that they often lasted until Tess came home. Then Crow went to work, leaving behind a hyper child who, understandably, would not go to bed until ten o’clock. Tess had asked him repeatedly to put Carla Scout down earlier in the afternoon, in her own bed, or forgo the nap altogether, now that she was three. But Crow said he was simply following Carla Scout’s natural rhythms and she was a night owl like her father.
Unlike her father, Carla Scout didn’t run a bar with live music.
Tess stood in the doorway, aware that she was polishing a little grudge—and aware that her temperament required such grudges, that she needed to stockpile any evidence of Crow’s flaws. Because—surprise, surprise—Crow was an exemplary father, a natural parent. The perfect postmodern boyfriend, as her friend Whitney Talbot had once dubbed him, had segued seamlessly into the perfect postmodern father. He had standing to make pronouncements about Carla Scout’s needs because he was with her for a good part of the day, supervising her diet, arranging her playdates, channeling her energy in all sorts of creative and nurturing ways.
Crow’s only real failing as a hands-on daddy was that the house was never as neat as Tess would like. He said he had read something somewhere about how clean houses were never happy houses. To Tess, this sounded like the kind of aphorism offered by an actress or a model, someone pretending to lead a normal life while employing a phalanx of factotums. Their house wasn’t dirty, not quite. Given its population of three humans and three dogs, it was relatively clean. But there was always something somewhere that needed to be put away. Toys, laundry, another load of dishes in the dishwasher. Tess should have taken advantage of this quiet moment to have a glass of wine or start dinner or—in the great tradition of mommies everywhere—have a glass of wine while starting dinner. Instead, she busied herself with the Brio trains and tracks that had been left in the middle of the sitting room.
She dropped a wooden train on her foot and said a very bad word. She knew it was a bad word because Carla Scout opened her eyes and told her so.
“Don’t say that, Mama.”
“I won’t.” She held out her sock foot. “I have a boo-boo. Do you want to kiss it?”
“No.”
Carla Scout yawned, grabbed the hideous stuffed clown that was her constant companion—a kangaroo in a clown suit, known only as Clownie, for Tess had not wasted any effort on naming him, figuring the ugly thing for a short-timer when it was presented to Carla Scout on her first birthday. Naturally, Clownie became the toy, the boon companion, the One That Must Never Be Lost. If Tess had charged her hourly rate for finding and retrieving Clownie, Carla Scout’s college tuition fund would be much more robust than it was.
“How ’bout a show?” she asked, sliding from the chaise without disturbing her father.
“How many did you have today?”
Her daughter was not really capable of lying—yet. But when she wanted something that she suspected she was going to be denied, she could and did launch into rambling arguments. “Daddy said, Daddy said, Daddy said—we watch MY show. A daddy show. We watched the show with the horsies. But that was a daddy show. I didn’t get to watch my show.”
“Horsies?”
“Horsies. ON DADDY’S SHOW.”
“Black and white horsies?”
Carla Scout thought about this. “Yes. And the men came and they said go and the horsies and they run. They run!”
Go? Let’s go? But Crow would never have shown her The Wild Bunch. Tess had a brief pang, remembering how much her friend Carl, who had inspired Carla Scout’s first name, had loved that movie.
She also remembered how his death had been almost too much like a scene from it. If her hands hadn’t been full of trains, she would have stroked the scar on her knee, the reminder that she had survived that ghastly night while Carl hadn’t.
“Crow?”
He didn’t open his eyes, but he replied. “We watched She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. It was fine.”
“Would it kill you to watch something kid-appropriate with her?”
He opened his eyes and smiled at her. Tess used to think Crow had no idea how charming he was. “No, but it won’t kill her to be subjected to good things. You don’t advocate letting her choose what she eats every day. Why do you want her to consume the cinematic equivalent of Fruity Pebbles and Chicken McNuggets? All those bright colors and lessons. What a racket. What did you grow up watching?”
“At three? Probably reruns of Yogi Bear and the Flintstones. Whatever they showed on Captain Chesapeake.”
“See. You were entertained by the antics of a petty thief stalking pic-i-nic baskets and an animated version of a series that celebrated domestic violence.”
“Fred never threatened to send Wilma to the moon.”
“No, but his size, his manner—I don’t think all was well in that household. And Fred clearly had a crush on Betty.”
Tess laughed, and the tension of the moment—her frustration over the late nap, an afternoon spent watching a Western, the long evening ahead of her—dissipated.
Carla Scout Monaghan—Crow was so evolved that he had insisted their daughter have Tess’s surname—had not been planned. In hindsight, it was almost fortunate that preeclampsia had kept Tess here, on this very chaise longue, for the last trimester of her pregnancy. The forced rest had given her a little time to prepare herself mentally for something she had never assumed she would do. It was not that she had decided not to be a mother, just—not now. She and Crow weren’t even married when she got pregnant.
They still weren’t. They had said they would marry after their child’s birth, in the new modern style, but Carla Scout’s arrival in the world had been tumultuous, life-threatening to mother and child. By the time the baby left the neonatal care unit and came home with them, a wedding seemed like too much to plan.
Now three years had gone by and it was just too embarrassing to have a wedding. It would seem as if they were trolling for presents. When, Tess thought grimly, starting on dinner while Crow went off to the shower, the last thing they needed was more stuff. The house, so perfect for two, felt cramped with three. Six, if one counted the
dogs, who jumped on the chaise the moment Crow vacated it. Carla Scout climbed up with them and giggled as they licked her. Well, Miata, the Doberman, whose maternal feelings toward Carla Scout rivaled Tess’s, was licking her. Esskay, the greyhound, was gently kicking her with her hind legs, forcing the child to yield territory to her, while Dempsey sniffed her delicately. Dempsey, an Italian greyhound, was definitely working an Evil Queen vibe with Carla Scout: Every day, he seemed to weigh the evidence before him as to which one was the fairest of all. So far, Dempsey seemed confident he was winning.
Tess shooed the dogs off the chaise, set Carla Scout up at the kitchen table with a semihealthy snack. Crow recently had informed her that yogurt was now being vilified for its sugar content and that dairy products in general were suspect. He had even started sneaking almond milk into Carla Scout’s cup, which she left untouched. Throughout her life, Tess had always had her share of feeling overmatched and incompetent, but nothing made her feel like more of a failure than being a mother. Especially when she compared herself to Crow, who made perfect meals and never left the house without a well-stocked diaper bag. Whereas Tess often found herself with a diaper bag that had everything but diapers.
Those days were behind them. Almost. Carla Scout was down to one overnight diaper. Of course, diaper changing was one thing at which Tess excelled. She could even do it in a moving car, as they had found out on one memorable trip to the Delaware shore last summer.
Crow headed out to work. No music at the Point tonight, but he had to be there Tuesday through Saturday. The restaurant had become as important to the Point’s bottom line as its lineup of bands and PBR on draft. They were doing the whole locavore thing, a challenge in March. But while the Point’s location in West Baltimore enhanced its reputation with the hipsters who loved out-of-the-way discoveries, it made it hard to get as much traffic as they needed. Crow’s partner, who happened to be Tess’s father, couldn’t imagine finding a place of similar size in a more desirable location. Crow, for his part, worried that some essential gestalt would be lost if they relocated. Tess had heard about this when her father called her to ask what the hell gestalt was.
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