Over her grandmother’s shoulder Annali saw Jimmy Roy, who’d been hanging back, outside the door. Patsy saw him at the same moment. Her mouth turned down as if she’d bitten into something unpleasant.
For a moment, Annali hesitated, uncertain. “Do you know who that is?” Nadine asked her, quietly. Annali nodded, then scrambled out of Nadine’s arms.
“Daddy!”
Jimmy Roy crouched and Annali came flying at him. As she slammed into him, his face flooded with relief. She’d only just learned to talk, the last time he’d seen her, he’d told Pru in the cab.
Jimmy Roy let Annali knock him clean to the ground, his motorcycle boots flying up in the air. “How big you are, Peach!” he said.
Pru’s mother was beaming, acting as though she didn’t notice Patsy glaring at her. “Isn’t this nice,” she said in her gentle voice, wiping her eyes. “Everybody together again.”
Pru had to agree. Already it felt less desperate, and although maybe not festive, at least things were looking up.
She opened the cooler to look at the turkey her mother brought from Ohio. It wasn’t about to fit in her oven.
ANNALI WANTED CHOCOLATE CHIP PANCAKES AT THE Korner. Patsy stayed behind, saying she had a headache. She’d barely exchanged two words with Jimmy Roy, who seemed to be taking her coolness in his stride.
Her mother shook hands with John, smiling at him warmly. John showed them to a table by the window, took their jackets, and brought over the box of toys for Annali. Was he being particularly solicitous of her mother? Pru wondered. Maybe. Unless she was just imagining it. There she was, spiraling into weird. Stop, she told herself. Just stop it. Then John brought their food, too, Pru noticed, even though Ludmilla was hanging around doing nothing.
Jimmy Roy and Annali were pretending to be deposed royalty from another country, which Annali called “Acobia.”
“Patsy did the same thing when she was little,” Nadine was saying. “Some kids had imaginary friends, Patsy had imaginary resorts.”
Annali was, of course, the Princess of Acobia, and Jimmy Roy was her bodyguard, both of them disguised as ordinary American tourists. Annali and Jimmy Roy jabbered at each other in a nonsense language that nobody but them understood. It sounded eerily convincing.
When John gave them the check, Nadine and Pru were still talking about the problem of the turkey.
“Why don’t you eat here?” he said. “It’ll be closed, you’ll have it all to yourselves. I have a six-burner Viking,” he added. “The oven is huge.”
“My mother had one of those!” said Nadine. Before Pru knew what was happening, her mother had accepted the invitation to use the diner and had made John promise that he’d eat with them. Before Pru could calculate whether this was a good idea or a disaster waiting to happen, John said that he’d love to.
Annali didn’t want to let go of Jimmy Roy when it came time for him to leave for the night. He and Nadine had gotten rooms at a little hotel in Dupont Circle, as Pru’s apartment was so over-occupied that it probably violated fire and safety regulations.
“I’ll come back later, Peach,” Jimmy Roy said, kneeling to kiss her. “Don’t worry, we have a lot of time together. I’m here for a long time.”
“Daddy will come back,” Patsy said, holding out Annali’s hat and her sippy cup of milk. “Bedtime for you.”
“I want Daddy to put me to bed!” Annali shrieked, clinging to him.
Jimmy Roy looked at Patsy, who said, blandly, “Of course, Daddy can put you to bed. I think I’ve done it enough these past two and a half years.”
“To Acobia!” Annali shouted, charging off to the bedroom. She could be Wendy, Pru thought, flying away in her white nightgown.
After Annali had fallen asleep, Pru walked her mother and Jimmy Roy to the hotel. It had been renovated in sort of a faux art-deco style, with reproductions on the wall of vintage ocean liners and the Empire State Building. Jimmy Roy and Pru saw Nadine to her room, then went for a drink in the hotel’s bar. It was dark, lit by blue neon lights.
“You were so great with Annali,” she said. “Your timing couldn’t be better.”
“She’s great,” said Jimmy Roy. “Patsy looks like hell. What’s going on?”
“Jimmy Roy, you’ll have to ask her. I really don’t know what she’d want you to know.”
He nodded, drinking his beer. “I get the picture.”
“But, tell me about you, Jimmy Roy. You look good.”
“Thank you, Pru.” He said this so seriously and politely that she had to hide her smile in her beer. “As a matter of fact, I’ve been on a campaign of self-improvement.” He looked her in the eye and said, “I’m sure Patsy told you I was an addict.”
She shook her head. Worthless, loser, burnout, yes. Addict, which implied needles and desperation and dangerous friends, no.
“I could say that it was just because of the painkillers, after the accident. But that wouldn’t be totally truthful. The painkillers just happened to be in my hand at the time. I’d take anything anybody wanted to give me. I didn’t care. So, when I was in the hospital and they gave me those pills, it just seemed natural to want more. It could have been anything, though. Anything that made me feel better than I was feeling at that moment. I’m not saying it’s not what most people do. It is what most people do. But for me, you know, getting stoned or watching TV, taking a few pills or going shopping—it was all on the same order.”
He took a long sip of his beer, then said, “I was living in my mother’s basement. I wake up one morning, and realize it’s January the fourth.”
“Annali’s birthday,” said Pru.
He nodded. “I hadn’t sent a present. I didn’t even have the money for gas, so I could drive up and see her. I called and sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to her on the phone, then I hung up and flushed all the pills and my last dime bags down the toilet.”
Pru listened, fascinated. She’d always wondered what it would be like to completely give in to something like that, some impulse that took you over. She wanted another beer, but it seemed a little odd to order one. She was relieved when Jimmy Roy ordered another one for her, and a soda for himself.
“One’s my limit,” he said to her. “I’m allowed to feel a little better, then I have to go back to feeling whatever I didn’t want to feel in the first place again. It’s not much, you know. It’s not like I had some traumatic childhood. Just regular old boredom.”
The father of one of his former band-mates was piloting a research boat to the Antarctic, Jimmy Roy explained, so he had offered himself as a crew member. His mother loaned him the air-fare to Argentina and he signed on as an assistant cook. For weeks and weeks the boat made him sick, and his injured back gave him constant pain. He saw penguins and elephant seals and jagged mountains of green ice. He thought about his place in the universe, the stray speck of time that was his allotment in life. He calculated how many hours of it had been passed nearly comatose in the dark basement of his mother’s house. When he returned, just two weeks ago, he came with the understanding that he had been given three great gifts: his mother, Annali, and Patsy.
He rolled the label off the bottle of beer he’d drunk while he talked. Pru watched the bar’s neon blue light play in the rings he wore on every finger. “The whole time I was on that boat, I kept thinking about being in the hospital with her. Watching her give birth. How her body knew what to do, even after all those hours in labor—I mean, it was amazing. And I started to think about how God was right there, in Patsy’s body. If God isn’t there, then where?” He looked up at her with his liquid, satiny eyes. “You know what I mean?”
Pru remembered Jimmy Roy the night after Patsy gave birth. Pru had flown in for the birth, and had been standing next to Jimmy Roy when the baby came out. There weren’t any complications, and Patsy had even gotten up and walked around. All day, she nursed the baby, made phone calls, and in general enjoyed herself. Then, for reasons nobody could figure out, she’d started bleeding, a full twelve ho
urs after Annali was born. Jimmy Roy was helping her to the bathroom when the first blood clot slid right out of her. They all stared at it as it trembled on the floor like a jellyfish. Then Patsy moaned, and went as white as a sheet. Pru ran out into the hall and called for a nurse, who followed her in, took one look at the clot quivering on the floor, and ran to call another nurse.
Jimmy Roy didn’t leave her side all night. They had to put in another IV and change the thick pads under her almost constantly. Each time a clot passed, Patsy turned deathly white and shuddered to the tips of her fingers. They ran a line into her arm and gave her Pitocin, to control the postnatal hemorrhage. She missed one nursing, then another. Finally, the medication contracted her uterus and slowed the bleeding, and color slowly returned to her face. Pru and Jimmy Roy both fell asleep in chairs on either side of the bed.
“Pru,” Patsy whispered the following morning, as soon as Pru had opened her eyes. “Was that as bad as I thought it was?”
Pru went over and took her hand. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said lightly. Patsy’s eyes were already closing again. “Not compared to, say, the prom scene from Carrie.” And Patsy had smiled as she drifted back off to sleep.
Jimmy Roy stayed in her room at the hospital for days. He fed the baby with an eyedropper so that Patsy could sleep. He wouldn’t let the nurses give the baby any more bottles, knowing that Patsy would be crushed if she couldn’t get the baby to nurse.
Now Jimmy Roy said, “You know what else I realized? The day that Annali was born was the happiest day of my life. And not just because it was the day she came into the world. But because it was profound. Profound, Pru. Everything after that was just anti-climactic. Even Antarctica. I want to live a profound life, you know? That was the day that I found my purpose.”
Pru nodded. “Being Annali’s father.”
“Yes. Absolutely. And a nurse-midwife,” he added.
“Oh,” she said, practically yelping. She breathed deeply, hoping he couldn’t see how desperately she wanted to laugh. He was, she could see, completely serious. “Wow. Ah. Okay. Gee, a midwife.”
“I want to deliver babies,” he said. “I want my hands to be the first thing they touch in this world. My hands. Can you imagine anything more profound than that?”
Jimmy Roy’s hands were nice enough hands—she’d been admiring them as he played with the label on his beer—but they did hang on the ends of heavily tattooed arms. She had a little trouble seeing them, say, at Fiona’s knees.
She decided to focus on the process. “So, how does one become a midwife?”
“Nurse-midwife. I’ll have to go to nursing school. I’ve already started the application process.” He took a drink of his soda. “I thought I’d check out University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins while I’m here,” he added. “Just in case Patsy stays in this area.”
“Oh,” Pru said again. “Hm.”
“I know what that means,” Jimmy Roy said. “That means, don’t get your hopes up.”
“Listen, you have a right to be in Annali’s life. But Patsy’s in a terrible place right now. It’s not the right time to spring this on her. Just wait awhile before you say anything. That’s my totally unsolicited advice.”
He looked sad, but nodded. “I know I have a lot of amending to do,” he said. In her mind, Pru crossed out “amending” and wrote in “making up.”
“I’m glad you’re here,” she said as they hugged good night. She really meant it. “I’m really glad, Jimmy Roy.”
WHEN SHE OPENED THE DOOR TO HER APARTMENT, Patsy’s head popped up from the other side of the couch, where she was, as usual, watching TV. Pru saw the opening credits for Beverly Hills 90210.
“He’s not here, is he?” Patsy said.
“Jimmy Roy? No.” She stooped to pick up Big Whoop, who stood to put his front paws on her shoulders. It was a new trick they’d been working on.
“Lord,” Patsy yawned dramatically. “What did I ever see in him? Be careful who you have a baby with, Pru. You’re stuck with them for life.”
“I like Jimmy Roy.” She puckered her lips and Whoop touched his nose to them. She smiled, thinking of McKay seeing her do that.
“How did such a perfect kid come from that guy?” Patsy shook her head. “I’ll never know.”
“She must have gotten your genes,” Pru said dryly. She stood up with Whoop now cradled in her arms. “I’m going to bed. Are you staying up much later?”
“I have to see if Dylan picks Kelly or Brenda, don’t I?” Patsy said, stretching out on the couch.
Pru crawled, utterly exhausted, into bed. On one side of her, Annali turned and threw a leg over her, and Whoop settled himself on the other. Then Jenny nosed open the door and scrambled up on the bed, curling herself at Pru’s feet.
Thank God she’d gotten the queen-size bed. It wasn’t exactly the activity she’d imagined for it, she thought ruefully, shifting her leg to reclaim an extra half-inch of space. But she liked having all the breathing things around her.
She thought again of Jimmy Roy as a nurse-midwife. She smiled in the dark. Maybe that was exactly what Patsy needed right now: a steady pair of hands to ease her passage back into the world. She knew she was watching the worst suffering her sister had ever known. But it was also true that Annali had saved Patsy. If it hadn’t been for her, Pru was certain, Patsy would have shut herself up in that beach house, and never come out again.
THE NEXT DAY WAS THANKSGIVING. AS EVERYBODY GATHERED around the large table John had put in the middle of the Korner, Annali counted out loud the number of chairs. Jimmy Roy, delighted, said, “Peachy, you can count to six? I didn’t know that.”
“She can count to twelve,” Patsy said. “Where the fuck have you been?”
Nobody said anything. They all froze, rather ridiculously, thought Pru, in various stages of seating themselves.
“I was wondering when we would get to that,” said Jimmy Roy. He was wearing a belt with silver studs all the way around it, his hair pulled in a topknot that made him look like a samurai.
“It’s a fair question,” said Patsy, buckling Annali into her booster seat.
Pru’s mother was the first to recover, and as she eased herself into her chair, she turned to John and asked, “Have you lived in D.C. long?”
“Seven years,” John said.
Where the fuck have you been? Pru wanted to add. She was in oddly high spirits. The past two weeks had been depressing, despite her efforts to keep everybody cheerful. Sometimes she felt like shoving Patsy and Annali out the door and curling up under the covers. But having her mother and Jimmy Roy there had buoyed her. Even if Nadine seemed content to watch the proceedings with a detached air, as though she were thinking of happier times. Or perhaps she knew something Pru didn’t. Perhaps she had seen enough to know that all you had to do was sit back and wait for everyone to come to their senses. Pru hoped very much this was the case.
“I’m here now, aren’t I?” Jimmy Roy said, to Patsy. Pru’s heart sank. Dumb move, she thought, as Patsy rolled her head dramatically.
“Oh, you’re here,” Patsy cried, mockingly. “Okay, it’s your turn! Here’s the kid. I’ll see you in a couple of years!”
“And where did you grow up, John?” Nadine turned her smooth face in his direction.
“New England. Maine, actually.”
“Is your family there?”
“I have two sisters, both in New Jersey. My parents died years ago.”
“Mommy,” said Annali, nervously, “where are you going?”
“I don’t know, honey. Maybe the North fucking Pole?”
Nadine issued a soft “Patsy.” As if in response, Annali’s mouth turned down and she began to cry.
Patsy threw down her fork. “Annali, hush. Jesus, I can’t even be ironic anymore.”
“I don’t want you to be ionic!” Annali sobbed.
Jimmy Roy pushed his chair away from the table. “Thanks for dinner,” he said, addressing John. “But this isn’t good.
I think I should just go.”
At his words, Annali let out a howl. She began kicking and yelling. “No!” she cried. “No!” Instinctively, Jimmy Roy turned and reached for her.
“Don’t you touch her!” Patsy cried. Her voice was steely, but underneath there were unmistakable notes of panic and fear. Instantly, Annali stopped crying.
Patsy was holding Jimmy Roy with her gaze; Jimmy Roy had his hands under Annali’s armpits. He was only going to comfort Annali, but the panic in Patsy’s voice had startled everybody. Suddenly Pru realized what Patsy was afraid of, what they were all afraid of: There was very little to stop Jimmy Roy from picking up Annali and running out of the café with her. And like that, they’d be in a whole new world, a world where “state lines” and “court order” and “kidnapping” and “suspect” were part of the everyday language. Of course, Patsy could do the same. Pru saw, in that moment, what a narrow channel they had to navigate. Rocky shoals stood on either side. It would be nothing, her absolute gut instinct told her, for Patsy or Jimmy Roy to try to turn Annali against the other. Annali was the little wishbone in their Thanksgiving turkey, how easily she could snap; and how much provocation would it take to reach out and start pulling? In Annali, Patsy and Jimmy Roy had the perfect tool with which to torment each other for the rest of their lives.
Pru closed her eyes. Her bright mood vanished. How had this happened? One step further, she thought, and we’ll be throwing chairs at one another on a cable television show.
Even Annali understood that something very serious was up. She gave a loud hiccup.
Pru opened her eyes to see Jimmy Roy sitting back down. It felt like he was lowering a gun he’d been pointing at their heads.
“You’re the boss,” he said easily. “Don’t be scared, sweet girl.”
“It’s over, everybody,” Patsy said, reaching for the platter of turkey. “Let’s go back to feeling awkward for other reasons.”
Pru looked up and saw John watching her. They exchanged weak, uneasy smiles.
Nadine touched John’s arm. “That looks like a lovely wine. Let’s have some. Let’s all drink a toast to Daddy.”
Nice to Come Home To Page 20
