“And it made her happy to work. I saw that the more money she made, the prettier and happier she got. I wasn’t going to fight success like that. Only one thing we disagreed on and that was the way she made you look after Simone. I didn’t think it was fair to you, and I never thought it was very good for your sister either.”
Roxanne folded her check in half, lining up the edges precisely.
“But the more I pushed one way, the harder your mom pushed the other. She said you were the only one who could handle her. Made a list to show why.” He counted off, using his fingers. “She had slow motor skills, of course. She was moody and hated water and threw a fit when she had to have a bath. And she had that thing with her feet. Remember? She wouldn’t go barefoot or wear sandals. Refused to take off her shoes unless you promised not to look at that funny little toe of hers.”
A broken toe had healed crookedly and for a couple of years afterward, Simone had sworn it wasn’t her toe at all. She swore someone in the ER had pulled off the old one and given her a new one that never fit right.
BJ drained his glass, and without being asked the waiter brought him another. “I told Johnny you’d be around to help out, but I don’t think that’ll happen much. Basically, I think their wedding is going to be the Fourth of July for you. Independence Day. And to celebrate and say thank you…” He tapped the check with his index finger. “I know you want to buy one of those houses on Little Goldfinch. They’re a good investment. This oughta help you make the down.”
Roxanne unfolded the check and smoothed it out on the white linen cloth. She stared at the figure written in BJ’s almost illegible hand. The number five with four zeroes after it.
It rained most of Friday and all day Saturday at the lake. Occasionally there was a break in the weather and a flash of sunlight when the clouds opened up, but these lasted just long enough for the family to look up from their books and jigsaw puzzle and board games with quickly swamped hope. The only one whose good humor did not seem dampened was Franny. Her stores of creativity and energy were apparently unlimited. She made bowls of popcorn and pots of hot chocolate with an inch of melted marshmallow on top. She produced long forked sticks for roasting hot dogs in the fireplace, and graham crackers, Hershey chocolate bars, and a fresh bag of marshmallows for s’mores. There were extended games of Chutes and Ladders and Monopoly. When the charms of these faded, she set up a crafts table and brought out several new boxes of brightly colored clay that excited the twins.
In the great room Roxanne lay under a comforter reading a mystery that didn’t require much concentration, and Johnny, stretched in a recliner in a far corner, played a game on his phone with Merell hanging over his shoulder, watching. Restless, Simone moved from chair to couch to another chair, stared out the window, and thumbed through celebrity magazines. She wasn’t interested in clay, she said, the smell turned her stomach; but Roxanne joined the girls and Franny and altogether there were four of them at the table, modeling monster faces meant to terrify. The twins poked their scary creatures at Simone, making her fake-scream and pretend to faint; but in the way of small children they didn’t know when the joke went stale. They giggled and danced until Roxanne, who could see her sister’s cheer unraveling, got them back to the table. Franny produced yarn for hair and buttons for eyes and they were all having a good time when Olivia, who had been asleep upstairs, began to cry.
Throwing her monster head on the floor, Victoria announced, “I hate that baby!”
A short, hard laugh and then a sigh escaped Simone’s lips. Olivia’s cries rose to the octave of screams. Johnny’s fingers froze on the keys of his phone and Merell stepped away from him to a place in the shadows. The screams changed again, becoming sharper and shorter as if Olivia were being repeatedly stabbed. Roxanne met Franny’s gaze. Victoria hummed as she retrieved the head of her monster and began to reshape it.
Finally, Simone put down her magazine and left the room.
Franny called after her, “I’ll make a bottle. I’ll put some of her medicine in it.”
Simone returned with Olivia, red-faced and sweaty, crying in her arms. She took the milk from Franny without thanks and settled on the couch. For a few minutes the only sounds in the room were the baby’s gentle slurping and the rain hitting the awning over the terrace. Valli and Victoria made lips for their monster heads, fat kissy lips prompting sound effects and fall-off-the-chair hilarity. Franny shushed them gently; simultaneously they looked over their shoulders at their mother.
Olivia shoved the bottle away and it fell to the carpet and rolled under the couch. She stretched, arching her spine like a gymnast doing a back bend, widening her eyes as she twisted and squirmed and began to scream again.
Roxanne said, “I’ll take her for a while.”
“No.”
“Simone, I’m stiff from sitting. Let me walk—”
“I’ll do it.”
Franny said, “I’d be happy, Simone—”
“Are you both deaf? I said no.”
The house throbbed with rain, a toneless roar beneath the baby’s cries.
Simone walked to Johnny and stood in front of him. “Why doesn’t it stop?” she asked, raising her voice to be heard.
“You know she can’t help—”
“Not Olivia.” She spoke as if Johnny were stupid for misunderstanding. “I mean the fucking rain.”
Olivia burped loudly. There was a second of silence, followed by laughter. Valli and Victoria began a burping contest.
Simone said, “You told me it would be beautiful up here, Johnny. You promised me.”
He put his phone aside. “What do you want me to do? Do you expect me to control the weather?”
“It’s global warming, isn’t it?”
Johnny said, “You don’t have to worry about global warming.”
“Of course I do. We all do. Do you think I’m stupid?”
The room shrank with tension.
“Simone—”
“I know that by the time our babies grow up the world won’t be worth living in.” She spoke to Johnny as if he personally were to blame for the catastrophe. “Why don’t we all just kill ourselves and get it over with?”
Merell said, “Mommy, I can help.”
“Omigod, Merell, will you stop trying so hard? It’s not your job—”
“That’s enough, Simone.” Johnny put his hand on the small of her back. “Let’s go upstairs. Franny’ll take Olivia.” His voice had the kind of false calm Roxanne associated with police dramas, the officer on the street trying to talk a jumper off the roof.
“I want to go home.”
“We don’t have a plane here and even if we did—”
“We’re trapped.”
Franny tried to take the baby.
“No!”
Simone jerked away and as she did, Olivia slipped from her arms and fell. The twins screamed and Roxanne dropped to her knees beside Olivia, who lay on the floor on her back, stunned into silence.
“Shit,” Johnny said.
“Bad Daddy!” Victoria began to cry.
Roxanne did a quick examination. “She’s okay. Just surprised.” Franny took the baby.
Johnny said, “Go upstairs, Simone. Now.”
From Franny’s shoulder Olivia, temporarily more curious than unhappy, looked at her family with wide, wet eyes.
“She hates me.”
Johnny reached for Simone, but she jerked back as if his hand carried an electric current.
“You all hate me.”
She began to wail, a half-human sound that rose and grew thin and splintered into racking sobs. Roxanne knew she should do something to help her sister but like the rest of the family she was spellbound by the scene playing out before her and waiting to see what would happen next.
“Well, go ahead and hate me.” Simone’s eyes were huge and black. “The more the fucking merrier! You can’t hate me more than I hate myself.”
* * *
Late Sunday afternoon th
e mountains of cloud cover began to break apart, revealing ponds and lakes and eventually oceans of blue sky and finally the sun.
Daddy said, “Come for a walk with me, Roxanne. I want to go to the general store down the road. Bring Chowder. Do us good to get the kinks out.”
“Can I come too?” Merell asked. “I could ride my bike.” The mountain bike was black with a silver stripe and the lake was the best place to ride it.
“Let her,” Roxanne said, laying her hand on Johnny’s arm. “She needs a break too.”
In the sunlight the forest seemed enchanted, like in a book. Every leaf and needle, the trees and shrubs and even the surface of the mulch that lay deep on the ground, sparkled as if, just seconds before Merell rode by on her bike, a wizard had passed among the trees and sprinkled everything with gold dust and diamond bits. She liked that idea and wished there were such things as wizards who could cast spells and grant wishes.
Chowder gamboled ahead of her, ranging into the woods and back to the road, checking on his humans every few minutes, his tail whacking with joy. Merell enjoyed the wet dirt smell of the woods and the quiet broken only by Chowder’s thrashing and the sound of water rushing down every gully, dip, and furrow of land. Water after a storm was like laughter. Merell squinted and imagined the forest populated by gleeful elves and fairies no bigger than her hand. She wished for a wizard to make Mommy happy, then whooped and sped through a deep puddle, throwing up a rooster tail of water that drenched Chowder from head to tail. He stood where he was, barking rapturously.
She biked on the road most of the time, ahead of her father and aunt, occasionally falling behind when she detoured up a private road to one of the houses already boarded up for the winter. None of these houses was as handsome as the cottage and some looked shabby and neglected. Chowder went crazy, smelling mice under every porch and deck. A red plastic toy in the weeds, forgotten, no longer favored at the summer season’s end, meant kids had once spent their holidays there. The fishing pole against a shed wall was probably a man’s. Merell got off her bike and spied through a window into a roomful of boxes and furniture covered in sheets. She pretended the window gave her a view into the future and it was the cottage at the compound that was closed up, its toys and fishing gear abandoned.
She wondered if other people could feel two things at the same time the way she did: happy to be out in the enchanted woods, but at the same time melancholy. Melancholy was one of her favorite words. She’d found it in a book and looked it up, and immediately she’d understood exactly what it meant. Sad in the head and in the heart and in the bones.
* * *
Johnny walked with his head down, and so fast that Roxanne barely kept up with him. His stride was half again as long as hers and he seemed determined to reach the general store as fast as he could; but once it was in sight he slowed down and stopped. He stood a moment, staring at the CLOSED sign in the front window.
“The twins are going to be disappointed.” He’d promised to bring them a special candy only sold in this store. He shrugged and confessed to Roxanne that the walk to the store had been an excuse to get out of the house. They watched Merell turn down a side road that led to the water, one of the lake’s few stretches of beach. They followed her for a few steps and then Johnny stopped again. In the fading light he looked like two men, their faces superimposed on each other, one young and handsome, the other haggard and old.
“What am I going to do? Tell me, Rox. Help me.” He sank back against a tree and covered his face. “I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”
He wanted her to sympathize, but she couldn’t although she knew exactly what he meant. Trapped in the house, Simone’s tormented spirit was contagious. But how could she feel sorry for Johnny when it was he who insisted on more and more children in pursuit of the ideal, a son?
He said, “She wasn’t always like this. Remember? At first she was perfect. I was the happiest man on the planet.”
They watched Merell bounce along the potholed road with Chowder loping close by, the first child of a perfect wife and the happiest man on the planet.
He said, “I know a side of Simone that no one else does. Even you, Rox. She and I, we had so much fun together. She made me laugh….”
He walked back to the main road, where they waited for Merell to catch up.
“You’ve got to get her help, Johnny.”
“Help? She’s got a housekeeper and I pay Nanny Franny more than I pay my secretary.”
“I mean she needs to be in therapy. Someone good.”
He shook his head. “No, that’s out of the question. I told you, when we were talking about Merell, I said—”
“I know what you said, but that doesn’t change the facts.”
“I am an old-fashioned man, Roxanne.” She could tell from the way he said this that he thought old-fashioned and superior were synonyms. “I don’t want to fight and I don’t want to be the bad guy and I am so fucking tired of worrying about Simone. I could send her to all the therapists in the world and they wouldn’t do her any good. Psychology isn’t a science. Mostly it’s just professional nosiness.”
She might as well run head-on into the Great Wall of China as hope to change his point of view.
“Listen,” she said, going at the wall from a different direction. “Here’s something I’ve been thinking about. Did you know that Simone used to sail?”
“There was some kid who chased her all over the boat until she had to give it up just to get rid of him.”
Shawn Hutton’s history rewritten.
“I think if you told her she could—”
“Sail? Her?”
“She and Merell could take lessons together.”
“Merell, sure. But Simone, no way.”
“Why not?”
“I love my kids, Rox, but I don’t want to raise them alone. Besides, I’ve taken her out on the boat up here, and she sits in a corner like a scrunched bug.”
“She doesn’t like fresh water.”
“Water’s water. If she really liked sailing, if she wasn’t just talking, she’d do it anywhere.”
Off in the woods Chowder barked at something. Johnny looked toward the sound, suddenly irritable.
“You better call that dog. Get him on a leash before someone complains.”
“Sailing would empower her.”
“She doesn’t need power, she needs you. You keep her level, Roxanne, you’re the balance she needs.”
“Johnny, that’s not fair!”
He said, “If you didn’t work, or maybe if you worked part-time…”
She walked back toward the compound, using all her self-control to keep from running. Chowder tumbled out of the woods and ran circles around her, wet from scrambling through the undergrowth. Ahead, Merell was trying to ride with no hands. Roxanne couldn’t drag enough oxygen into her lungs. After a moment she stopped in the road and bent over double. Johnny’s hand touched her shoulder.
“Don’t do this to me,” she said. “Don’t make this about me.”
“I don’t know what it’s about anymore,” he said, embracing her. Though she wanted to tear away from him, though she despised him at that moment, she was grateful for his arms around her, holding her up. “I just know what I can’t do. And this therapy stuff—”
“It’s not magic or witchcraft. A therapist is just someone to talk to, a neutral third party.”
“You’re someone, Rox. Why not you?”
“I have a life, Johnny. I have a husband and we want to have a family before I get too old. I have a job I love. I can’t be Simone’s caretaker for the rest of my life.”
“But it wouldn’t be the rest of your life. Just for a while, until she gets through this rough patch.”
“How long do you think it’ll last? Until you have your son? It might take years, it might never happen. Meantime my clock is ticking. Hear it, Johnny? Tick-tock, tick-tock: it’s telling me I’ll be forty before long. I don’t have much time.”
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He interrupted. “You’re wrong about a therapist being neutral. Whoever she is—and they’re mostly all female, I know that, it’s a female kind of business—she’ll take Simone’s side and she’ll shove a wedge between us. You know what they’ll talk about? Me.”
A therapist might give Simone the courage to stand up to him and refuse to have more children. Of course, he feared that.
“Simone and I talk about you, Johnny. What’s the difference?”
“You don’t want to turn her against me.”
“Honest to God, Johnny, I’m not that neutral. If I could teach Simone to stand up to you, I would.”
It might be too late for that.
Chapter 8
The family returned to San Diego on Monday. The next day Simone got out of bed at nine a.m., drank six glasses of water, put on a loose blouse and a skirt with an elastic waistband, and took a taxi to her obstetrician’s office, leaving Merell, Olivia, and the twins with Franny.
After sitting in the waiting room for twenty minutes trying not to think about her full bladder, she was shown to an examination room and directed to lie down. A nurse wearing scrubs patterned with Disney characters asked her to pull down her skirt and on Simone’s exposed stomach she applied a clear gel, warning her first that it might be chilly. The woman spoke as if by rote and Simone knew what she was going to say before the words were out of her mouth. She warmed the transducer between the palms of her hands before she laid it on Simone’s abdomen. Again she warned of chilliness. After listening a moment she grinned and said, “That’s a good strong heartbeat. I’ll call the doctor.”
Simone had been with the same obstetrician since her first pregnancy. Dr. Wayne was in his early sixties, a white-haired man with warm pink hands and a daunting confidence that Simone assumed came from having brought so much life into the world. He treated her with a proprietary manner she found reassuring at the same time she was certain he knew virtually nothing about her apart from her medical history.
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