by Liz Tuccillo
Serena, as I mentioned before, knew that part of her normal job description was to be as unobtrusive a presence as possible in their home. But now she was trying to be invisible. This family, with whatever hardships they were going through, at least deserved some privacy. This seemed to be exactly what Joanna and Robert wanted and fortunately, they seemed to be getting it. The press didn’t have a clue what was going on. There were no friends, no family traipsing in and out. Their loft was a solemn yet tranquil oasis. So Serena attempted to be the invisible sprite floating on the outskirts of their suffering. She wanted to feed them, nourish them, keep them going, perhaps without them even remembering she was there. She would try to bear no witness, leave no footprints. Instead, she attempted to put all her “presence” into the food. Some of her yoga training remained, and she began preparing the food as if doing a meditation. She began visualizing her healthy life force pouring into the food; she pictured all her healing energy radiating out of her fingers and imbuing the raw food with magical curative powers. In her own small way, with her zucchi-getti and her sunflower seed patties, Serena was trying desperately, quietly, to save Robert’s life.
But as far as Serena could tell, none of it was working. From her perspective, all the medical equipment that started getting wheeled in clanged and banged like a death knell and the beautiful loft now looked like a hospital ward. From what Serena could tell, as she drifted like a ghost in and out of their home, Robert was going in for chemo once a week and it seemed to be making him incredibly sick. Any other normal person going through this would be in the hospital right now, but because of who he was and how much money he had, they had managed to bring the hospital to him.
And at eight o’clock every morning, Serena would use the key they gave her and let herself in. Joanna would invariably walk out of her bedroom and greet Serena with a bright “Good morning!” Serena would smile and meet her with as cheerful a “Good morning” as she could muster, and then she would cast her eyes down and walk to the kitchen and get to work. They both had it down to a science. Serena would prepare lunch and dinner and snacks for Robert and Joanna (who was also on the raw diet to support Robert) and then a different dinner for Kip. She would stay all day in the kitchen, which was a big open one that everyone had to walk past to get anywhere, but Serena always kept her eyes down, never acknowledging that anything was even happening for her to see.
But that day, around two thirty in the afternoon, as Serena was moving her hands over some broccoli sprouts, praying over them, meditating on them, Joanna walked up to her, looking ashen, her voice shaky.
“I’m sorry, Serena, I would normally never ask you this, but Robert’s having a hard time breathing. The nurse is on her way, but I don’t think I should leave now to pick up Kip. I know it’s not your job, but I was wondering if you could pick him up from school? Just this once?”
“Of course, I can go. Of course,” Serena said, immediately taking off her apron. “It’s Tenth Street, right?”
“Yes. He comes out the front door usually right at three. But if he sees you, he might…he might get nervous, so if you could…”
“I’ll make sure he knows everything is okay, and you just got busy.”
“Thank you. Thank you so much, Serena,” Joanna said, closing her eyes in relief.
Serena took this opportunity to actually look at Joanna straight in the face, which she almost never did. She was a beautiful woman, the kind with naturally jet black hair and white, porcelain skin. She had just a few absolutely adorable freckles dotting her nose. She also looked very tired. Serena quickly got on her coat and left.
As she walked over to the school, Serena thought about having to make conversation with Kip. She really didn’t understand eight-year-old boys and would have to say she didn’t really even like them all that much. Every seven-to thirteen-year-old boy Serena had ever come into contact with had seemed to be a maze of uncommunicativeness and superhero obsessions and video games. Really, who could care less, except their mothers, whose job it was to blast through that crap with maternal goodness and feminine tenderness so they could rest easy knowing they weren’t raising the next generation of hazing frat boys and date rapists.
Kip was no different. He was all Xbox and Club Penguin and boredom. He was impenetrable and somewhat spoiled and Serena was always more than happy to be invisible around him and he was more than happy not to notice that she even existed. Especially now with her crazy short hair. The only person in the whole world who could get him to light up, giggle, act silly, and talk nonstop was his father. When he wasn’t working, Robert would pick Kip up after school, and they would burst through the door, sounding like they were in the middle of an outraged debate, both refusing to back down from their impassioned positions. It might be about who they thought it would be better to be, Flash or Batman, or which they would rather eat, dirt or sand. They might take off their shoes and try to settle the argument by seeing who could slide the farthest in just his socks. Robert would tickle Kip and reduce this stoic pre-man to fits of squirmy laughter.
Now, Serena was standing in front of the school practicing the casual, cheerful, but not too cheerful expression on her face that she would have when Kip first saw her. An expression that immediately showed him, before his stomach could leap anywhere near his heart, that everything was fine, there was no emergency, and this was just a pesky little deviation from an otherwise normal day. The doors opened and teachers and children started streaming out of the school. Kip took one look at Serena and his eyes grew wide, his normally impenetrable face filled with fear. Serena got to him as quickly as possible to allay his fears.
“Your mom’s busy but everything’s fine. She just got tied up with a few things.”
Serena hoped to God that she wasn’t lying. She knew there were probably a million reasons why his breathing was labored and was sure the nurse was there right now taking care of it. Even though Robert was sick, even though things looked very bad, still, from her narrow perspective she couldn’t imagine Robert would actually die. Movie stars don’t die of cancer. Name one young, handsome movie star who died of cancer. None. They just don’t.
“Let’s go home and you can see for yourself,” she said as she put her arm gently on his shoulder.
As they turned the corner at Watts Street, they both saw the ambulance at the same time. Serena instinctively went to put her hand on Kip’s shoulder but he was already running. They were only half a block away and Serena could see Joanna coming out of the building next to a stretcher. Serena began to run, too, to catch up with Kip. Her greatest fear as she watched the stretcher come out was that there would be a sheet covering his head. Please make it not covering his head. As she got closer, she saw Robert on the stretcher with an oxygen mask on his face. Alive. Joanna was crying as she walked quickly behind the EMS workers. She looked up and saw Kip. She tried to return her face to that of a cheerful mother, but she couldn’t. Kip was now right by her, crying, too.
“What happened?” Kip screamed, his voice childish and raw.
“Daddy was having a hard time breathing,” Joanna said, the one sentence she was able to get out calmly before she started to sob again. Serena didn’t want to intrude, but she went to Joanna and put her arm around her. Joanna then turned and buried her face into Serena’s shoulder. She began to sob deeply.
Serena looked over at Kip. He was staring at his mother with enormous confusion and terror in his eyes. He turned away the minute he saw Serena look at him.
Joanna quickly picked her head up and looked at Kip as well. She wiped her eyes and went over to him. She crouched down to talk to him.
“I have to go in the ambulance with Daddy…” she began to say. Kip didn’t let her finish her sentence; he just started screaming.
“No! No!” he wailed, as he stomped his feet and flailed his arms around.
It was then that Serena noticed something out of the corner of her eye. She looked up and saw it and it started moving before she had ev
en a moment to think about it.
The “it” was not an object, it was Steven Sergati. Steven Sergati was a man who proved that sometimes you can indeed absolutely judge a book by its cover, because he looked like a weasel. Or a rat. His long, slicked-back black hair slid down his back, ending in a long little rodent tail. His pointy eyes hid behind a pair of five-dollar glasses, bought cheap because they had gotten broken so often. His four front teeth jutted out into a little point that would be perfect for gnawing on phone wire, which he had probably done at some point in his life for some nefarious reason. He was the most beaten-up, sued, spit-upon snake of a cockroach of a paparazzo in all of New York City. You weren’t a VIP bouncer in New York City if you hadn’t given, at some point, Steven Sergati a beat-down. Preferably in some alleyway where no one saw you do it. This man was infamous for disrupting film shoots, breaking into buildings, frightening young actresses, and stalking one particular celebrity for so long and so relentlessly that the celebrity had to get a restraining order against him. He had been seen screaming at a young television star as she walked down a lovely tree-lined New York street with her newborn, shouting that she had a fat ass and no one was going to want to fuck her anymore—just so he could get a photo of her being a new mom and scowling like Medea.
Serena recognized him from a news article Robert had shown her about him last year. Robert had his own grudge against Steve, since he had picked Robert and Joanna to stalk for a period when Kip was two. But six-four Robert, a former college football player who had just finished playing an action hero, was not someone who was going to wait for a judge. And there happen to be a few little alleyways on this one strip of Tribeca. So Robert was one of a group of celebrities, which included Sean Penn, Bruce Willis, and George Clooney who had been known to issue Steve a beat-down of their own. That was the only restraining order Mr. Sergati needed and he left them alone after that.
But there he was. He had been waiting for the right moment, when he knew his enemy was vulnerable, to stage his next attack. Joanna was about to get into an ambulance with her dying husband as their son Kip, his face red and contorted, was stomping his feet and shrieking in full view of the snapping camera. Even Serena, who was not media savvy in the least, knew that a photograph of Robert’s son wailing as Robert was whisked away in an ambulance would fetch a great deal of cash.
Before she knew what she was doing, she placed Kip behind the ambulance out of view and marched across the street. Not a march, really, more like a stride that sped up as she got closer to him—the way a lioness would move just before she caught an antelope and tore its rear legs off.
Steve, who was used to this sort of thing, stood up straight, raised both his hands in the air, and said, “I’m not doing anything illegal. You can’t stop me!”
The only good thing about Steve Sergati was that he was painfully skinny. So it was easy for Serena to shove him down, grab his camera, and then smash it on the ground, but not before she got the digital card out of it.
“I’m going to call the cops!” Steve shrieked, in his high-pitched rat squeak. “I’m going to sue you, you bitch! You can’t do that to me! I know everyone! Everyone.”
Then Serena, the former swami, leaned down and got right in his face, her nose practically touching his.
“Listen, motherfucker,” Serena growled in a voice that was no longer hers, “I own a gun. And if you come anywhere near this family ever again I swear to God I will blow your fucking head off.” And then Serena stood up and just looked down on him lying on the ground and added, “Please. Try me.”
Across the street, Joanna and Kip were looking at her as if they’d just seen a ghost. But, in fact, it was the exact opposite. For at that moment, Serena was no longer circling on the outskirts of their lives like a mist. She had plunged right into the middle of it all. She walked back across the street to the stunned Joanna. Right now there was other business to attend to.
“I haven’t had time to call anyone…” Joanna stammered. “Do you mind staying with Kip until…”
“I’ll stay as long as you need me. Please don’t worry.”
Joanna looked at Kip. “I’ll call you the minute I get there, okay, sport?”
Kip nodded. The doors of the ambulance closed, and Joanna and Robert were whisked away. Serena turned to Kip, this distraught eight-year-old male creature, and didn’t know what to say to him. He took care of that for her.
Kip watched as Steve Sergati got up and rambled shakily away. Then the boy looked up at Serena, his big eyes filled with awe.
“Wow. You kicked that guy’s ass.” This was the first time in all the three years that she knew him that Kip had actually spoken to her directly.
Serena smiled. “Yeah, I guess I did.” And then Serena, the superhero, took Kip back upstairs.
The afternoon after her canceled insemination, Ruby decided to go visit her mother in suburban Boston. Every now and again, a girl just needs her mommy.
On the train north, Ruby tried to figure out why she was going. What did she want to get from her mother? As the train rode through Connecticut, and she looked out at all the little houses with their covered-up pools, and their doghouses and their plastic jungle gyms, she decided that she needed to know if her mother really was as miserable back then as Ruby remembered her to be. Maybe it wasn’t such hell raising her and her brother. Maybe her mother wasn’t as unhappy as Ruby’s childish memories made her out to be.
She rang her mother’s doorbell. She lived on a quiet little street in Somerville. No one answered. She rang again, surprised—Ruby had called and told her she was coming. She walked down the driveway, around to the back of the house. Shelley was in the back raking leaves. She was now sixty-eight years old, with dyed light brown hair, which had streaks of gray in it and was cut in a short, curly little bob. She had Ruby’s body—round, voluptuous, but with the added weight that comes from deciding to grow old gracefully rather than spending every spare moment at the gym. Unseen, Ruby watched her mother for a moment; she looked hearty. Comfortable in her own skin. She wondered how happy she was these days. Her mother looked up.
“Ruby!” she said, coming over and giving her daughter a big hug. “It’s so wonderful to see you!”
Of course it is, because you’re my mother and I’m your daughter and all mothers are always happy to see their children. There must be a reason for that.
“You look great, Ma,” Ruby said, meaning it.
“So do you! So do you! Let’s go inside!”
After Ruby showered and changed, she walked into the kitchen, where her mother had the tea ready. “I made some cinnamon toast, too! Just like the old times!” Ruby smiled, thinking that was such a nostalgic thing to do. Every time it snowed, there would always be cinnamon toast waiting for Ruby when she came inside. It was her mother’s little tradition, one that was passed down from her own mother. The tea for them was an adult tradition, one that they shared down to the idiosyncratic detail. They both liked weak American tea—Lipton will do just fine, thank you very much—and when together, like today, they knew implicitly that they would share a tea bag between them. She sat down at the table.
“Tell me all about New York. What’s going on?”
Some people have sophisticated mothers, ones they can talk to about their abstract thoughts and who can tell them where to go to buy the one bra they’re looking for.
That was not Shelley, which never bothered Ruby a bit. Because what you got instead of someone who might have seen that documentary about Sudanese refugees was a mother who reacted to everything you did with complete wonder and glee. You got someone who wanted to hear everything about Manhattan and your business and your life because it was all still so exciting to her.
“Well, a new restaurant opened in the Village,” Ruby said, “but no one can get in because it’s always filled with the owner’s friends. It’s pissing everyone off.”
“Really? That’s so interesting. Are there a lot of celebrities there all the time?”
“Every night.”
Ruby’s mom just shook her head. “That’s not right.”
Ruby smiled. “It’s not.” She sipped her tea and picked up a piece of cinnamon toast. She took a bite.
“Mom. I’ve been wondering. About what it was like for you.”
“What it was like how, dear?”
“Well, you know, as a single mother.”
Shelley rolled her eyes. “Oh, it was hell. It was awful. I had a miserable time.”
“Were you lonely?”
“Honey, I was so lonely that I thought about killing myself on a number of occasions. I’m not joking. It was horrible, it really was.” Shelley sipped her tea. “So who is the owner of this restaurant? Is he famous, too?”
“Yeah, sort of. He runs a magazine.” Ruby tried to get her mom back on track. “So, it really was just as awful an experience for you as I remember?”
“Oh, I’m sure it was worse than you remember. It was the worst time in my life,” she said, with a little laugh.
Ruby took another sip of her weak tea and burst out crying. She put her elbows on the table and her head in her hands. “I’m sorry, Mom.” Ruby looked up at her mother. “I’m sorry you were so unhappy. I’m so sorry.”
Ruby’s mom put a hand on Ruby’s arm and leaned in close, smiling. “But don’t you see? I’m fine now. I’m happy. I have friends and my garden and I go out all the time.”
Ruby started to sob even harder. “It’s too laaaaate! You needed to be happy back then! So I could think it was okay to be a single mom! It’s too late!”
Shelley looked at Ruby, trying to take this in. She didn’t feel attacked, just terribly sad. She touched Ruby’s shoulder. “But honey, you’re not like me, you’re nothing like me! If you want to be a single mother, you won’t be like me at all!”
Ruby leaped out of her chair, with tears streaming down her face, her voice choked and trembling. “But I’m just like you. I like tea and I’m depressed and I stay in bed and I cry a lot and I’m really, really lonely.”
