by Margo Catts
“I don’t know. I just don’t know what to tell the children and I’m afraid to leave the phone. If I do the wrong thing right now—” I swallowed. “I guess I wanted you to tell me this was something normal for him and I don’t need to worry.”
“Oh, honey, you never need to worry.”
“You mean, about Paul? It’s okay?”
“No. The worrying—what does it do? It doesn’t make a single thing happen. Look at yourself. You’re saying you’d keep the children cooped up in the house all week just because you’re afraid something awful has happened—something you can’t do anything about—and you’ll miss hearing about it. Is that right?”
“Not all week.”
“Till when, then?”
“Until I heard something.”
“So, maybe all week.”
I shrugged.
“And that doesn’t sound crazy to you?”
Lacking a better answer, I gave another shrug.
“Well, that’s pure bat shit crazy, is what it is. Staying here, waiting by the phone, that doesn’t do anything. If something has happened, sitting here isn’t going to change one thing. You’re just going to make those children miserable and nervous and fretful, and more misery is the last thing they need. Go on, now. Give them a good day. And have one yourself while you’re at it.”
In one motion she put her arm across my shoulders again, squeezed, and planted a kiss on my temple.
“You’re all right now,” she said as she moved her hand to the center of my back and pushed herself up. “Sometimes folks just need a little help to flush out the crazy. That’s what friends are for.” She looked down at me, then waggled her first two fingers toward the door behind me. “I’ll expect you and the kids to come see the puppies as soon as that show’s over,” she said.
From inside, a bell rang and the audience cheered.
17
Like a child, I did as Poppy told me. I pulled a brush through Sarah’s hair, ignoring the yelps and flinches, ordered Kevin to dress, then eased them into cooperation by asking for their input on a grocery list. They had come to accept our un-reviewed shopping, and when I suggested we put Ding Dongs on the list, the mood brightened instantly.
With the paper tucked into my back pocket, I led them across the road to Poppy’s. We laughed as the puppies stumbled over each other, but before long, one balled itself into Sarah’s lap and two into Kevin’s and fell asleep. I’d found one that seemed sleepy when we arrived, and had already withdrawn to a chair in the corner, under a mobile of tropical fish and beside a collection of turtle figurines. Sugar snuffled around my shoes for a moment, then clicked away across the kitchen floor and disappeared toward the bedrooms. The warm body against my legs felt as soothing as a heating pad on sore muscles. Poppy, who’d left the room to take Mama Ruth a sandwich, eased herself into a chair beside me when she returned.
“You ever wonder why people give stuffed animals to sick kids?” she said quietly.
“Uh—for presents?”
“Yes, but why that? Why not cars or Barbie dolls or games?”
I thought. Why would I give a stuffed animal to a child? “I don’t know. Just because children like them.”
She shook her head. “It’s instinct. We just know that taking care of another creature makes us feel better.”
I looked at the children, their backs to me, stroking the sleeping dogs in their laps. I supposed people gave stuffed animals to victims, not perpetrators, or else I might have had more experience with the phenomenon myself. Kevin pointed toward the remaining puppies, kneading their mother’s belly in their sleep, and said something to Sarah.
“What happened there?” Poppy whispered to me, tilting her head toward Kevin and pointing at her own eye.
“Fight.”
She nodded. “Ah. I see.”
She probably did. Better than I did.
She eyed me for a moment. “You’re worried about him, aren’t you?”
I looked at Kevin now petting the two sleeping puppies in his lap in methodical, simultaneous strokes. I nodded. She nodded in response.
“You need some coffee?”
“That’d be nice. Not much sleep.”
“I figured.” She pushed herself out of her chair but stopped and looked down at me before going any further. “You figured out the collection yet?”
I’d gotten so accustomed to the chaos of items covering the walls and surfaces that it took me a moment to understand what she was talking about.
“No.”
She nodded. “You’re getting there.”
*
As we stepped out into Poppy’s overgrown front garden a half hour later, I discovered that under the full sun, my fears turned pale and shrank away. Other than this morning, Paul had yet to call during one of his trips, and I now couldn’t explain why I ever imagined he would today. If everything was fine, he had no reason to make a special effort to tell me so. And if anything had gone seriously wrong, someone else would’ve called right away. So I told Kevin and Sarah to get in the car, then after we passed Mr. Fousek and let him know we were going to the store, I turned and asked if they’d like to go boat racing instead. They stared at me. I couldn’t tell whether they were unsure what I was talking about or surprised I’d suggest we do anything fun. Perhaps they suspected I was trapping them into a chore.
“No, really,” I said. “We’ll go to the river and build boats and race them.”
“How do we build them?” Kevin said.
“However you want. Use leaves, sticks, anything. They’re just going to float away, so you don’t want anything great. What do you think?”
“Who do we race?” Kevin again.
“Each other. Or nobody. It doesn’t matter. There’s no prize or anything. Come on—it’s just for fun.”
“I wanna go!” Sarah said, kicking the back of my seat and bouncing.
“Well?”
“Okay,” Kevin said.
I drove them past the edge of town, to a place where the Arkansas River was shallow and wide, tumbling across the rocky streambed. Clumps of willows crowded the shore, and a sandy island split the river into twin cords that twisted together again past its tip. I parked the car along the side of the road, and we walked together to the bank.
“Here,” I said, bending over to pick some of the long, thin grasses at my feet. “You find some sticks and leaves. Use the grass to lash them together, any way you want. Then we’ll let them go.”
They were unsure of themselves at first, asking whether it was all right to use this leaf or that, to use a stick this big or that small, to try to make a sail or a mast. I agreed to everything. After she understood how to lash, Sarah adjusted quickly and started tying things together in any way that pleased her—four sticks bundled together with a leaf for decoration, a cluster of leaves joined at their stems and arrayed like a fan, a cracked Styrofoam coffee cup she’d found behind a rock, with a twig for a sail.
But Kevin struggled.
“Will this work?” he would ask at every design decision point.
“I don’t know,” I would say. “Try it and find out.”
The answer frustrated him. For some reason, he needed to know exactly what result would come from his actions before he took them. He would turn away from me, wrestle a while longer, look at Sarah squatting at the river’s edge with her strawberry-print shirt riding up her back, launching yet another craft, and then—though he surely knew he’d get another unsatisfactory answer—turn to me and ask my opinion again.
“Kevin,” I said at one point as he frowned over a raft platform that had, for the third or fourth time, collapsed in on itself. “Lots of stuff won’t work. That’s okay. You have to see what doesn’t work to find what does.”
“This is shit.” He froze momentarily, as if the word had escaped him by surprise, then flung the wad of sticks into the weeds.
My heart squeezed tight around the base of my throat. The sensation startled me. I was only a tick
away from tears welling up over this bottled-up, earnest, anxious, angry boy at the intersection between adulthood and childhood, suffering in his grief the pains of both and therefore suffering more intensely than either. I wanted to pull him into my arms, tell him not to worry, to never mind about these dumb boats, that I was sorry I’d brought them here and would think of better things for him to do from now on.
“Lookit that one!” Sarah squealed, jumping up and pointing at the river. I could just make out something sticking upright from the water, bobbing along at a steady ninety-degree angle to the surface. She turned back to look at me, eyes round with delight and surprise. “It’s my best ever!”
“That’s great,” I called back. She ran to a nearby clump of grass and doubled over to forage for raw material for another. I looked back at Kevin. No, avoidance wasn’t the best strategy.
“Forget about the boats for a minute,” I said. “I need to tell you a story.”
He gave me a dark look, then started plucking grass from between his thighs. Perhaps he was relieved to not be in trouble over the profanity and therefore willing to listen.
“I had a friend a while ago.” I cleared my throat. “A musician. A piano player.” Kevin didn’t need to know that the friendship, or whatever it was, had ended when I’d slept with Carlo. “He was a really, really good piano player. I used to watch him play, the way his fingers just seemed to feel the music. He could play the piano like other people sing. The music just came straight out of his fingers. Have you ever tried to play a piano?”
He snatched a fistful of grass. Nodded.
“‘Chopsticks’?”
He nodded again.
“Anything else?”
A pause. “‘Jingle Bells.’”
“Did you play it perfectly the first time?”
He shook his head.
“Me neither. My friend tried to teach me to play. But I was scared. I wouldn’t let him.”
Kevin looked up at me. Finally. “What were you scared of?”
“Mistakes. I was so afraid of making mistakes I wouldn’t even try. My friend didn’t understand that at all. He got kinda mad at me, actually. ‘What’s the problem?’ he used to say. ‘A mistake won’t kill you.’ He said he made mistakes all the time but he’d just keep playing straight on through. He said perfect wasn’t real—painters made flubs, and actors forgot lines, and writers couldn’t find words. The mistakes make things worth looking at.” I squinted up toward the sun. Good God, I was an idiot. I looked back down. “But I still wouldn’t do it.”
Kevin had returned to plucking grass. Rip, toss. Rip, toss.
I picked up a stick and flicked it at him so that it grazed his neck. Startled, he looked up at me. “Listen,” I said. “I was wrong. I missed out on a chance to learn how to play piano. How stupid was that?”
It’s possible the corner of his mouth twitched. “Really stupid.”
“Thank you. Now don’t you be stupid. I don’t care whether they’re shit, but we’re not leaving here until you’ve launched at least ten boats.”
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then pushed himself off the ground and walked, gangly and stiff at the same time, toward a willow bush that leaned over the water like Narcissus himself.
I wrapped my arms around my knees and rested my chin on them, smelled the marshy tang of the water’s edge mixed with the clear scent of sun-warmed grass. Kevin’s first effort was a four-stick bundle, similar to one of Sarah’s first but without the ornamental leaf. But she shrieked and cheered for him as if he’d just launched the Queen Mary. It bobbed briefly, then got sucked under in an eddy and emerged as four separate sticks. Sarah only clapped harder. Kevin glanced back at me, then set to work on his next one. His humility astonished me.
Mistakes are what make things interesting.
Sunlight glinted on the water as it tumbled over the rocks, icy and clear. After a few more efforts, Sarah and Kevin made a pair of boats they launched together, chasing them downstream and cheering them on until one came apart. I couldn’t tell from their reactions whose it had been.
A mistake won’t kill you.
Sure it might. Or worse, others. But I had to admit that being governed by that possibility hadn’t served me especially well, either—expecting the worst from everything I touched, believing my actions would do only harm, then not accounting for my deliberate acts of sabotage in measuring the carnage around me. I hadn’t been making mistakes all these years; I’d been trying to prevent unintentional disaster by taking paths I knew would end badly, in predictable ways, rather than those that only might. Calculated, manufactured, anticipated disaster would always be preferable to an accidental fire raging away from some misbegotten effort to enjoy myself.
I should have left Carlo alone.
I should have tried to play the piano.
I should have been willing to try something, anything, and allowed myself to make honest mistakes. Small ones. Maybe seeing small mistakes resolved would have made me less paralyzed by the fear of making another big one.
I lifted my hand to brush tears off my cheeks. Kevin stretched a hair beyond his reach to retrieve something from the current, slipped, and landed spread-eagled in the water. Sarah squealed with laughter, then Kevin pulled himself to his hands and knees, scooped a handful of water, and threw it at her.
At the far end of the valley, white mountaintops capped the steely blue of the lower slopes. The river’s colors flowed from them—white ripples, blue water—like paint from an overloaded brush. It tumbled toward us, interrupted by rocks and plants and children at play, then carried on past no matter what they did in the midst of it.
I shouldn’t have taken up with Carlo, whom I knew to be toxic and chose because I thought I could predict exactly how it would turn out. That was sabotage.
Now I was going to have a baby. That was a mistake.
But in time, it might not turn out to be the worst thing in the world.
*
After we got home and the children changed into dry clothes, I sent them outside to picnic on butter-and-sugar sandwiches and potato chips. They asked for Ding Dongs, and I gave them those, too. I even had one myself, and if it wasn’t as good as I remembered, it was good enough. I took it outside and sat in a circle of sun on the back steps, watching the children peel the foil wrappers back from the cake to make little hats just as I used to. In fact, I got so absorbed making a foil airplane out of mine that it wasn’t until the doorbell rang twice that I remembered how anxious I was to hear from Paul. Or news of him. I jumped to my feet, dropping the airplane onto the concrete. By the time I got through the house I had already placed the sheriff on the front step—the sweaty uniform, the hat in hand, the pursed lips. I yanked the front door open.
“Well?” Mindy said. Katy held a fold of her pants and the car idled in the road behind her.
“What?”
“Didn’t you get my message?”
A chill touched my chest. “What message?”
“I called this morning. Hours ago. Have you been gone all this time?”
“Mostly, I guess.”
“Look—could Katie stay while I take Alex to the doctor? I’ll be back in an hour.”
My shoulders relaxed. “Oh—sure. No problem.”
“Are you positive it’s okay? I tried Joan first, but she’s at the dentist with Ben. I just thought for sure you’d be here.”
“Of course.” I looked down at the little girl. “Sarah will be really excited to see you. They’re having a picnic in back. You go ahead, and I’ll bring out some more food.”
Without an answer, Katy darted past me and disappeared into the house. I figured she knew her way to the back door.
Mindy took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. You’re saving me. I would’ve taken her if you weren’t here, but she’s horrible when Alex is getting all the attention. This is huge.”
I heard the back door bang and a shriek of joy from Sarah. “It’s nothing. Go.”
&nb
sp; “Thank you!” she called again as she turned back to the car.
I waved, and she blew me a kiss from over the hood. Was I missing something? The gratitude seemed out of scale. Perhaps there was some protocol for help-giving and help-receiving that I didn’t understand. Or was this just honest adult friendship?
When everyone had finished eating, the girls shut themselves in Sarah’s room, and I shooed Kevin away on his bike to go find some action somewhere. After yesterday’s disaster at the pool, I thought it was important to get him back on the social horse. And maybe this morning’s small success would make him a little more willing to just try something.
Mindy was back before the hour was out.
“Well, that was quick,” I said as I let her in. “Is everything okay?”
“Yeah, I thought he was sick, but it’s just teeth.” She dropped her bag at the foot of my rollaway bed and switched the silent, staring, snot-nosed baby to her other hip. “Look, I’m really sorry about the way I just dumped Katy on you like that. It never occurred to me you wouldn’t get the message. I’d been gone, too, so I thought I must’ve just missed you calling back.”
“Not a problem. They’ve been playing the whole time. What message, anyway?”
“There’s an answering machine. You need to check it.”
“Are you kidding? That’s none of my business.”
Mindy rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on. You’re the one who’s here all the time. Nobody’s leaving private messages for Paul. What if somebody wanted one of the kids to come play? Or if Paul wanted to tell you something, like he’s been delayed for a day?”
Oh, God. Had I been missing it all along? “But I don’t know where it is,” I said.
“Can’t be that hard. It’s by one of the phones. Where are they?”
“I dunno. The one in the kitchen is the only one I use.”
She looked at the phone hanging on the kitchen wall. “Well, it sure isn’t there. Bedroom. Come on.”
As reluctant as I felt about prying any further into personal Kofford spaces, I was even more uncomfortable having Mindy lead me around the house. And more uncomfortable yet about how to say so, so I followed silently.
