The Fixer Upper

by Judith Arnold

  She was nearly fourteen, for God’s sake, and she was with a bunch of friends, including three boys, including one boy who was as tall as a man, and it was the middle of a sunny afternoon. She’d been to Greenwich Village with her father and it was no big deal. Lots of college kids, some stoners, musicians…regular New Yorkers, just like in Central Park. Traveling downtown was no big deal. And Reva was not going to be a loser.

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  Thirteen

  Eric wanted to spend Saturday afternoon at the Museum of Natural History. “Okay,” Ned said, “but you’ve got to bring along a friend.” It was already mid-October. The kid should have connected with a few classmates by now. If he didn’t get into the Hudson School, he would have to survive in the public school system, and he wouldn’t survive if he didn’t have friends. Ned had made a new friend last night, and while Eric was way too young to be developing friendships like the one Ned was embarking on with Libby, he needed some pals he could call on a Saturday and say, “Hey, wanna go to the Museum of Natural History with me?”

  Eric accepted his father’s edict without protest. After five minutes on the phone, he announced that Gilbert would be joining them.

  “Gilbert? Isn’t he the boy who pushes everyone?”

  “Yeah, but he doesn’t push me,” Eric said.

  Gilbert arrived at their apartment twenty minutes later. A scrawny boy with short hair, coloring that implied that an assortment of races had swum in his gene pool and trousers featuring more pockets than any human being could ever possibly require, he didn’t appear hefty enough to push anyone. He had a friendly smile, and when he called Eric “Monty,” he did so good-naturedly. And he called Ned “Mr. Donovan,” which Ned took to mean that someone had taught him manners.

  Before they left for the museum, Eric showed Gilbert his bedroom. “Wow, look at that!” Gilbert’s voice drifted out to where Ned waited in the living room. “You sleep up there?”

  “Yeah. It’s a loft bed.”

  “And you can hang out underneath it? That’s so cool.”

  “My dad built it,” Eric boasted, making Ned’s chest puff up a little. “He’s a fixer upper. He fixes things up.”

  “That is so cool,” Gilbert repeated. “You could hide stuff under there that you didn’t want your dad to know about.”

  Ned’s grin waned, and he made a mental note to peek behind Eric’s desk and bookcase, which were wedged under the loft bed, to see what he might be hiding. Eric was probably too young to be interested in hiding anything really dangerous, but Ned could imagine uneaten food, broken toys and important notes from his teacher vanishing into the darker recesses of his bedroom.

  “Let’s go, guys,” he hollered toward the door, deciding to get their outing under way before Gilbert gave Eric any more good ideas.

  The museum was crowded, as it always was on Saturdays. Ned didn’t mind, even though the throngs meant he had to remain extra vigilant not to lose track of the boys. He maintained a particularly close watch on Gilbert to make sure the boy didn’t shove any of the other gazillion kids shrieking and giggling and racing around the exhibits, but Gilbert kept his hands to himself, usually tucking them into various trouser pockets. He and Eric insisted on visiting the Hall of Fossils, which was jam-packed and echoing with strident voices yakking about the dinosaurs, and then moved on to the Hall of Ocean Life, which was much less crowded. Gilbert darted from showcase to showcase, shouting, “Hey, Monty, check this out!” and, “Hey, Monty, you ever see a shell this big? Man, you hold that shell up to your ear, you don’t just hear the ocean. You hear the New York Philharmonic!”

  “And it’s playing that thing they always play on the Fourth of July, with the cannons and the church bells,” Eric elaborated.

  “Yeah, and all the fireworks, too. You could get fireworks out of a shell like that.”

  All right. Eric had a friend.

  In the relative quiet of the Hall of Ocean Life, Ned felt safe resetting his attention on the boys at seventy-five percent, which left him twenty-five percent to devote to his own interests. Interest, singular.

  Libby Kimmelman.

  You could get fireworks out of a woman like that, he thought with a private smile. They’d lit a few sparklers last night. He wouldn’t mind igniting a Roman candle or two with her.

  A school administrator. Well-groomed, mature, not terribly self-involved. Nothing flashy about her, although she’d look damn good in those boots she’d contemplated buying for her daughter.

  The hell with her daughter. Ned wanted to see Libby wearing those boots—and nothing else.

  All right, so her life wasn’t exactly simple. Any woman past the age of thirty whose life was simple wasn’t fully engaged in the world. You reach a certain age, and of course there’ll be a little wear and tear, a couple of scars, a few chapters of history. That was what made a person interesting.

  Libby interested him, even more than her fireplace did.

  “Dad, we’re starving,” Eric announced, planting himself in front of the bench where Ned sat, right across from a display charting the evolution of algae. Gilbert nodded in vigorous agreement.

  “How about some seafood?” Ned joked, waving at the display.

  The boys wrinkled their noses. “We were thinking of ice cream,” Eric explained.

  Ned stashed his thoughts of Libby in a safe nook of his mind and led the boys to the Big Dipper Café in the food court, where he treated them both to Stellar Sundaes and bought himself a lemonade. While they shoveled sticky spoonfuls of ice cream and toppings into their mouths, they evaluated their classmates, their ratings accompanied by assorted snickers and guffaws. This one always sounded as if she had the hiccups when she talked. That one was always trying to borrow stuff. A certain young fellow named Peter had a habit of eating his own boogers, which, Eric pointed out, was better than if he ate someone else’s boogers. This observation prompted so much laughter that the boys had to put down their spoons, rock in their chairs and bump knuckles a few times.

  Ned sipped his lemonade, grateful that he hadn’t bought any food for himself. If he’d been hungry, the conversation would have made him lose his appetite.

  Libby had raised a daughter. Did little girls discuss boogers?

  He wondered about Libby’s divorce. What idiot would leave a woman like her—and their daughter? Ned had had his share of arguments with Deborah, but even when he’d been angry enough to want to throw things—he usually resorted to throwing his socks against a wall, which allowed him to let off steam without damaging anything—he couldn’t imagine ever leaving her. Not if leaving her would have meant leaving Eric.

  Booger jokes notwithstanding, the boys polished off their sundaes without any difficulty. They announced they wanted to do the lizard hall—reptiles and amphibians—and Ned downed the last of his lemonade and chased them out of the food court.

  Museums were tiring, he realized an hour and a half later, after he and the boys had stormed through the lizard exhibit, the primates exhibit and the North American Birds Hall. Ten-year-old boys fueled on ice cream and enthusiasm were tiring, too.

  “How about it, guys?” he said. His watch informed him it was a quarter to five. The museum would remain open for another hour, but he was too weary to stick around and help the janitors lock up. “I think we got our money’s worth.”

  The boys insisted on visiting the gift shop, where they oohed and aahed over a variety of toys and Ned repeatedly said no. By five they were willing to let him tear them away from the shop. Outside, twilight lay golden over the Upper West Side. In another couple of weeks, with the end of daylight savings time, the city would be dark by this hour.

  Ned and Eric walked Gilbert home, the boys frequently nudging each other and pointing out objects worthy of ridicule—“Get a load of that stupid baby stroller!” “That dog is ugly!” “This is the grossest garbage pail I’ve ever seen!”—and laughing uproariously. Ned felt a light pain tapping at his forehead from
inside his head, but he knew it was nothing a couple of aspirin couldn’t handle. A couple of aspirin and a phone call to Libby.

  He just wanted to say hi to her, maybe tell her about the afternoon, maybe discuss a time he could get started on her fireplace. He wanted to hear her voice, hear her laugh, water the seeds of their friendship so it would grow. He didn’t want to rush into anything with her.

  Like hell. He’d be real happy to rush into sex with her.

  But he was a responsible adult, and waiting would only make the sex better when it happened, if it happened. Last night’s kiss gave him hope that sex with Libby was a matter of when, not if.

  Gilbert lived in a boxy modern building near Lincoln Center. He and Eric said goodbye by bumping knuckles again, and then he vanished into the building. “Did you have fun?” Ned asked as he and Eric headed west toward their own building.

  “Yeah. Those stuffed eagles were cool. The ice cream was good, too,” Eric said.

  “He seems like a nice kid,” Ned commented, angling his head back toward the building where they’d left Gilbert.

  “He’s okay.” Eric shrugged. “I think I’d make more friends at the Hudson School.”

  So much for that plan, Ned thought wistfully. The kid still had his heart set on Hudson.

  Which meant the woman Ned had kissed last night, the woman he would be phoning in just a few minutes, the woman who had occupied every bit of brain power he didn’t have to devote to Eric and Gilbert today, the woman he wanted to see naked except for a pair of colorful boots, held his son’s happiness in her hands.

  He led Eric into their brownstone, and they climbed the two flights to their floor. Eric bounded up the stairs ahead of Ned, manifesting far more energy than anyone should possess after a long afternoon at a museum. He reached their door while Ned was still trudging up the last few steps, and Ned tossed him the keys. Eric caught them and unlocked the door. “What’s for dinner?” he asked.

  Ned groaned. Takeout was for dinner, he decided. One of the wonders of New York City was that so many restaurants delivered. Chinese, Italian, Indian, Thai, Greek, deli, sushi, pizza, kosher pizza—a simple phone call could bring to his door more cuisines than existed in the entire state of Vermont. “We’ll figure out dinner in a few minutes,” he said, following Eric inside and locking up behind them. “I want to make a phone call first.”

  “Okay.” Eric charged down the hall to his bedroom. Ned paused for a minute, contemplating what treasures the kid might have stashed under his loft bed, then shook off the thought and strode to the kitchen. He picked up the phone and punched in Libby’s number.

  She answered on the first ring, her voice sharp. “Hello?”

  “Hey,” he said. “It’s Ned.”

  “Oh.” She sounded disappointed.

  He cleared his throat to buy a minute. Why would a call from him disappoint her? She’d been there last night, just like him. She’d kissed him every damn bit as much as he’d kissed her.

  “I really can’t talk,” she added. “This is a bad time.”

  It was fast becoming a bad time for him, too. Dreaming about this call had sustained him throughout the long, exhausting afternoon. Had he been crazy to think she might be pleased to hear from him? He’d sure thought talking to her would make him happy, but happy was the last thing he was feeling right now.

  He sank against the counter and rubbed the back of his neck, where the pain from his forehead had migrated. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s Reva. She’s in a bathroom in Greenwich Village. At least, that’s where she was when she phoned. Now she’s turned the cell phone off and I have no idea where she is.”

  “A bathroom?” Did the girl phone her mother when she had to pee? Or was she kidnapped? He’d seen more than one movie in which a kidnap victim had insisted on using the bathroom, and then she’d left a message—lipstick on the mirror, a scribble on a square of toilet paper—alerting the world to her plight. In the age of cell phones, he supposed a phone call would work even better. “Is she okay?”

  “Who the hell knows? She’s with friends. She didn’t have permission to go downtown, and I don’t know where they are now, and I swear she’ll be grounded for life the minute she walks through the door.” Libby issued a mumble that might have contained a few curses, then said, “She hasn’t walked through the door yet.”

  “If a lifetime grounding is waiting for her, she may be putting that off as long as she can,” Ned pointed out.

  Libby clearly didn’t appreciate his wry humor. “I’ve got to leave the line open. Maybe I should call her father. He lives downtown.”

  “What’s he going to do? Search bathrooms for her?”

  “What is wrong with you?” Libby roared. “My daughter is in the Village somewhere with her damn cell phone turned off! Don’t you get it?”

  Actually, Ned didn’t. He and Eric had gone to Greenwich Village a couple of times and it didn’t strike him as a particularly hazardous place. “I’m sure she’s fine,” he said helpfully.

  “You have no way of guaranteeing that. I’ve got to go.”

  “Call me when she gets home,” he requested, partly because he’d like proof that his claim about her being fine was true, and partly because once Reva was home Libby’s mood would improve and he’d be able to have a more rewarding conversation with her.

  “Goodbye,” Libby said abruptly. Hearing the phone click dead, he lowered the receiver and cut loose with a few pungent words.

  What the hell was her problem? Reva was fine. She was an eighth-grader and she was with a group of friends in Greenwich Village. She would come home, Libby would chew her out, they’d scream at each other, and eventually the smoke would clear, the dust would settle and all those other postbattle clichés would kick in.

  So why was Libby taking out her rage on him? Because he was a convenient target for her anger? Because he’d dared to call in the middle of her crisis? Or because maybe she didn’t want his friendship after all?

  I am a bitch, Libby thought, staring out the living-room window as if she could will Reva to materialize on the sidewalk below. Ned Donovan was the most exciting thing to happen to her since Reva learned how to say Mama, and Libby had just blown him off.

  Screw it. He deserved to be blown off. Making jokes about Reva’s disappearance? Teasing that she should ask Harry to search the bathrooms of Greenwich Village for her daughter? The asshole!

  Just wait until his golden boy hit adolescence. Just wait until earnest Eric got whomped by a barrage of hormones and went on a tear. Ned wouldn’t be making light of the situation then. He’d know just how devastating it felt to realize that your child was out there in the world, doing foolish things, and you couldn’t protect her.

  Not that Libby would wish this kind of distress on Ned. She wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

  How could Reva behave so recklessly? How could she go traipsing off to Greenwich Village without asking permission? She wasn’t even with Kim. Of course, if she had been, Kim would have talked her out of traveling down there against her mother’s wishes. Kim was a well-behaved child.

  Reva most definitely was not.

  She’d phoned ten minutes ago—nearly an hour after Libby had started checking her watch and feeling the first flutters of anxiety in her gut. Reva knew her mother expected her home from Central Park before daylight started to fade, but Libby had tried not to worry as the minutes ticked by. But by five, daylight was fading and Reva hadn’t come home.

  Libby had dialed the cell phone, but Reva didn’t have it turned on. This had led to a frantic parade of worst-case scenarios in Libby’s imagination: one of Reva’s pals had brought along an illegal substance, and the kids were all shit-faced somewhere, oblivious to the time. Or Reva had gotten separated from the group, and she was lost, and she was too proud to phone her mother and ask for help. Or Reva had been kidnapped, and the kidnappers had tossed her cell phone into a Dumpster, and they were holding her somewhere in New Jersey and subjecting her to
God knew what horror. Or Reva had gotten hit by a car and was lying unconscious in an emergency room, and her idiot friends—the not-Kim group—had freaked out and abandoned her there. Or they’d gotten hit by cars, too, and all of them were lying unconscious in an emergency room.

  When the phone had rung, Libby’s panic had formed such a dense knot in her throat that she hadn’t been sure she’d be able to speak. But she’d answered, and when she’d heard her daughter’s cheerful voice saying, “Hi, Mom, it’s me,” she’d wanted to use language she generally reserved for maniacal cab drivers, hypocritical politicians and Harry during the early years of her divorce.

  However, she’d remained composed, figuring she could spew her rage once Reva was safely home. “It’s late,” she’d said. “Where are you?”

  “I’m in this bathroom in the Village,” Reva said. “We’re having a really good time. I’ll be home later.”

  “What do you mean, later? When?”

  “I don’t know. Whenever?”

  “I want you home now,” Libby had demanded.

  “Yeah, well, nobody else is ready to leave yet. I’ll see you later. Bye!” A click as the phone went dead, and Libby had heard nothing from her since.

  Ned had sure chosen the wrong time to call.

  She felt her hair turning gray. Her scalp itched; her roots ached. Her daughter, Reva, her sweet, beautiful, smart, talented child, had turned into a monster. A demon. A teenager—and an AWOL one, at that.

  Where the hell was she? A bathroom in the Village? What bathroom? In a restaurant? In an NYU building? In some fleabag apartment where a stranger was plying her with illegal substances?

  The phone rang again. Libby flinched, then sprinted across the living room, through the dining room and into the kitchen, where she grabbed the receiver before the second ring. “Hello?”