They rounded the corner, and he picked up each girl’s hand. “Should we set up the telescope tonight?” he asked.
“Sure,” Polly said, sounding unenthusiastic.
“Is that lady going to come again? With her kids?” Callie wanted to know.
“No, I don’t think so.” he shook his head. “Maybe another night.”
“Is she your girlfriend?” Polly asked.
He considered this, liking the sound of the question even though the answer was definitely no. “I don’t have a girlfriend,” he told her.
“Good,” Callie chirped.
They rounded the corner, and Rex saw a large white SUV he didn’t recognize parked in front of his house. Drawing closer, he felt a stirring of hope. Maybe Jane had taken her parents’ car and driven back to see him. But then, from two houses down, he saw it was Kristina and a dark-haired man, sitting side by side on his front step, and Rex’s stomach began to twist into a gnarled mass.
“Mom!” Callie shouted and ran toward her. Polly stayed close, and kept his hand in her own, a gesture that made him exceedingly grateful.
Kristina and the man both rose as he crossed the lawn, and she gave him a small, apologetic smile and a shrug. “I forgot my key and I need something.”
“It’s my night,” he said.
“I know. I just need something.”
“What?” he asked, wanting to say—what the fuck could possibly be so important that you’d ruin our entire evening by showing up?—but he restrained himself.
She shrugged again and mumbled, “Just a dress for this thing.” Then she nodded toward her new boyfriend and said, “This is Peter. Peter, Rex.”
The man held out his hand, and Rex considered not taking it, then decided there was nothing to be gained by acting childish and shook it quickly, noting with satisfaction that it was sweaty and petite. Everything about the man was small. He was Kristina’s height, his hair was short, and his features were all undersized so that his face seemed to possess too much empty skin. Still, the man managed to be handsome. He was young and unblemished, with bright eyes and shiny teeth.
“We’re going to a gala for my office,” Peter explained. “And she needs a gown. I said we should just buy one, but she really insisted on coming by to get the one she already has.”
“What can I say? I’m thrifty,” Kristina said.
“That’s not a word I would use to describe you,” Rex said.
“I know, right?” Peter laughed.
Rex wouldn’t even smile or meet the man’s gaze. He was not going to compare notes about Kristina.
Rex unlocked the door, and everyone filed inside. The new smudges on the white couch were satisfying to Rex, as was the pile of Barbies under the buffet, but Kristina didn’t notice anything, just walked quickly into the depths of the house toward his bedroom. Rex followed and waited in the doorway as she searched the almost empty closet. The sheets were on the ground from his afternoon with Jane, but other than that, he detected no signs that she had ever been here. He wished a silky undergarment of some sort were slung over a pillow for Kristina to see.
“It’s not here,” she said, turning to him. “I thought I left it hanging right here.”
“Oh, I put it in the bottom drawer,” he told her, remembering.
She retrieved a long, sage green gown from the dresser and shook it out. “This has to hang up. You can’t just shove it in a drawer,” she scolded.
He didn’t bother to reply.
“I guess I will have to go and buy one. This needs dry cleaning now.” She brushed past him, holding the balled-up dress to her chest.
They found Peter and the girls in the kitchen, where Callie was showing him a series of volcano drawings she’d been working on. They hung on the side of the fridge and Peter was only half looking at them. The man was obviously distracted, or maybe just bored. Rex didn’t imagine that he had any children of his own. “Nice,” Peter said, when Callie was done explaining the series.
This word filled Rex with a hatred he thought he’d banished days ago, when Polly broke her finger, but here it was again, steaming through his skin so forcefully he imagine he might catch fire. “Please leave,” he told the man with more force than he’d intended. “I need to get dinner ready.”
“Rex,” Kristina chided. “No need to be rude. We’re going.”
“No,” Peter raised his hands as if in surrender. “That’s cool. I understand. It’s your night. We’re in the way.”
Rex crossed the room to the volcano drawings, and aimed a finger at them. “Nice,” he mocked. “These are fucking brilliant drawings for a six-year-old, but of course I wouldn’t expect you to know that. Look at the detail here.” He pointed to the varying shades of the lava, the way Callie had made it seem to bubble and spark, to come alive. “Nice. That’s just fucking rude.”
“Rex,” Kristina hissed. “Stop it. You’re acting crazy.”
“Hey,” Peter held up his hands in surrender. “I meant no offense. They’re great drawings.” He stepped back to the fridge and inspected them again. “Really amazing.”
The man’s tone bordered on sarcasm, and this made Rex angrier. The children were watching him, wide-eyed. He’d never cursed in front of them before. What he wanted to do was take this man’s face and slam it against the volcano drawings, to make him feel the intense pain he was feeling right now, but he took a deep breath and closed his eyes, willing them to leave.
“Let’s go,” Kristina said softly.
Rex opened his eyes to see her hug each daughter good-bye. Peter stood motionless, looking at the ground, then turned at Kristina’s touch and they walked out of the kitchen. When the front door clicked shut behind them, Rex sighed and sat down at the kitchen table, then lay his cheek on the cool, white surface.
A hand on his shoulder. Polly. “Dad. Are you okay?”
“Yes,” he said, then closed his eyes. “Sorry about saying those bad words.”
“It’s okay,” Callie told him. “We don’t mind.”
“It was actually sort of funny,” Polly said, then giggled.
He sat up and looked at her, then pulled his older daughter onto his lap. Polly curled herself against his chest and he stroked her hair, pale and soft as corn silk. Callie leaned against his shoulder, and Rex looped an arm around her waist, drawing her into the circle. “He wasn’t even paying attention, that’s all,” Rex said. “It just made me mad.”
“I don’t like him very much,” Polly admitted.
The words infused his entire body with warmth, and he smiled. “He’s not so bad. He looked closer at the pictures, once I told him to.”
“True,” she admitted.
“He bought us both Groovy Girls,” Callie added.
“And those twisty suckers,” Polly said.
“See, he can be nice. And your mom seems to like him, so I guess we’d better give it a try.” Even as he said the words, he hoped the girls would both grow to hate that man. He hoped Kristina would break his heart, though Rex guessed she didn’t yet have the power over him to do that. Soon she would. It wouldn’t take her long.
He made spaghetti and baby carrots for dinner, and the three of them sat around the kitchen table and ate while the sun disappeared behind the fence and the light turned somber. He wondered what Jane was doing right now and guessed she was eating dinner with her kids and parents at this exact moment. Kristina would be at a department store with Peter, picking out a dress.
He looked out at the telescope, surrounded by beer bottles. After dinner he would clean that up and begin searching the sky, then tell his girls the same stories about the stars he’d already told them many times before.
SATURDAY
IVY
When she woke up much later, it was completely dark outside, and Lucky was no longer beside her. She sat up in a panic and checked the floor around the bed, the crib, the closet, before opening her door and walking down the hallway toward the living room.
Frank was asleep
on the couch, and Lucky was strapped into his portable car seat and set on the ground nearby. Her baby was also sound asleep, and the sight of him, safe and peaceful, enveloped her in cool relief.
She noticed then that the living room was strung with blue and white streamers, so many looping from the edges of the room and meeting at the light fixture in the room’s center that it created a canopy effect. Green balloons were hung in clusters at the edges like giant bunches of grapes, and a silver HAPPY BIRTHDAY sign hung over the entrance to the kitchen. All this had been done while she was asleep, and it disturbed her to think she could be that unconscious. What else might have occurred during the many hours of her slumber?
Ivy turned off the reading lamp beside the couch, then carefully removed the magazine from Frank’s chest and set it on the coffee table. She considered taking Lucky out of his seat and transferring him to his crib, but he was content, so she decided it was better just to let him be.
In the kitchen, she poured herself a glass of pinot grigio from the fridge to settle her nerves, then tightened her robe and checked the clock on the microwave: 2:43. She hadn’t taken any pain medication since early afternoon, and her leg was beginning to ache around the stitches, but she decided to try the wine first, hoping it would relax her enough to ease back into sleep without additional drugs.
Wandering through the house with her glass of wine, she found Ramona asleep in the back bedroom, her long black hair spread out around her on the yellow pillow. She was deeply asleep, but then Ivy noticed her frown and twitch and she guessed she was having a bad dream. Would it be better to wake her, Ivy wondered, or let her pass through it and remain asleep? She sat on the chair beside the bed and waited for several seconds, sipping her wine and watching her friend’s face shift and change. When Ramona’s expression settled back into calm, Ivy quietly left the room.
Jane’s bed was empty, as was the air mattress beside it. Ivy sat on the twin bed that should have held her best friend and worried about their earlier exchange. Maybe she had been too harsh, too black and white in her views of marriage, but that had always been her way. The world was clear-cut, for the most part, and if you understood its rules and boundaries as vividly as Ivy did, it felt like a duty to explain those rules to your friends.
It must have been Ivy’s own upbringing that had made her this way, she decided. Her parents had not been good parents. Her mother had abandoned her. Her father had drunk his way through her high school years and basically ignored Ivy other than to yell at her for bringing home Jeremy or to put the occasional meal on the table. Since then, he had reformed, but when she had most needed him, he had not been available. It may have been this lack of rules, of moral guidance, that had turned Ivy in the opposite direction.
She was not particularly bitter about her parents’ flaws anymore. Well, at least about her father’s. He had been deeply wounded by his wife’s departure and uncertain what to do with a teenage daughter. He had done, as people say, the best he could.
A light came on in the house next door and illuminated Jane’s room with a gray-blue haze, so that Ivy felt as if she were sitting underwater, looking at her friend’s belongings at the bottom of the sea. An open suitcase beside the bed spilled out clothes. Two small swimsuits hung over a stool to dry. A glass of water sat on the nightstand beside a half-eaten banana and the wrapper from a granola bar. The detritus of small children.
Ivy imagined that Jane was at Rex’s house this very second, curled against him in a big bed several blocks away. If this turned out to be true, Ivy didn’t want to hear about it. She wouldn’t listen to any details or offer any advice other than what she’d already said in the bedroom today, about returning to Adam. There would always be other people around to lure you into doing something wrong. Ivy knew this from experience, but she wasn’t sure Jane did. In many ways, she decided, her friend was naive.
Ivy rose from the bed and finished off her wine, then set the glass on the bedside table beside the granola wrapper. Since she had not eaten in many hours, the wine seemed to have gone directly into her bloodstream, making her limbs feel light and heavy at once. She weaved slightly as she crossed the carpet and left the room.
In the living room, she reassured herself that Lucky was still sleeping, then slatted the blinds by the front window and peered out at the dark neighborhood. A white car was parked across the street that Ivy didn’t recognize, and she thought she could see a person sitting in the driver’s seat, but couldn’t be sure.
As she sat there, watching the car, Ivy became filled with the absolute certainty that this was her mother, watching the house. It had to be her. Who else would sit in a car outside in the middle of the night? She closed the blinds and stood in the dark, uncertain about what to do next. The only sound in the room was Frank’s deep breathing, and she considered waking him up and showing him the car, but then decided against it. She would go outside and see for herself.
She still had on the blue robe she’d worn all day but she didn’t care. Her hair was a tangled mess, and she guessed her face could use washing, but she did not want to do a single thing to improve herself for this meeting. Her mother could see her at her worst. That was all she would offer.
The air outside was cooler than she expected, and she tightened her robe as she stood on the front step, trying to get a better look at the car. It was a white sedan, a generic looking car that Ivy couldn’t identify and would never recognize if she saw it in a lineup. Now that she was out here, it became clear that there was, indeed, a person inside the car. The front seat was tilted back but she could see a profile, leaned against the headrest in slumber. It was impossible to say from this vantage point if the person was her mother. Ivy walked to the sidewalk, then crossed the street and stood in front of the driver’s window.
Ivy’s heart jumped and she stepped back, suddenly nervous. This person was not her mother, but a man, asleep. She was in the middle of the road now, several feet away from the car. Her heart was beating fast, and beneath this feeling of mild fear, she was soaked through with disappointment. She realized how much she had wanted this person to be her mother, how much she wanted to see her again.
As if sensing her presence, the man lifted his head, and Ivy was about to turn and run inside her house, when she realized that she knew the person in the car after all. It was Jane’s husband, Adam.
JANE
A noise outside woke her, and she sat up in bed in the dark and listened. It had been a glass breaking on the street, she thought, or maybe the raw screech of tires. The sound had been ominous, foreboding, and she lay down and tried to find her way back into her dream about The Muse but couldn’t.
The shapes of her old room loomed around her like ghosts in the dim light from the street. Here was her white dresser with the pink flower knobs, a relic from the third grade. Here was her lavender butterfly chair, her bookshelf, her rolltop desk. A mobile of gauzy dragonflies hung over her bed. She could still remember picking it out at the Boulder City Art Fair one summer in elementary school.
It struck her now that she had grown up in the room of a goody-goody. Where were the hidden stashes of cigarettes? The circular tray of birth control pills concealed in the underwear drawer? Sure, she’d worn strange clothes—ripped up fishnet tights and black boots, wide-brimmed hats and red lipstick—but the only colors in the room were pink, yellow, white, and seafoam green, and these colors told the truth about her life more than what she’d worn. Her wardrobe had been a feeble attempt at another persona, but these pastel colors were who she actually was.
There was nothing wrong, Jane knew, with being a good person, but this past year she could feel a rising craving inside of her to do something bad. It had begun with the editor at work and reached some sort of height today on that sunny bed with Rex. It may have something to do, she thought, with not getting enough wickedness out of her system in high school or college, but there was more to it than that. It was the mere act of being a mother that sometimes made her want to r
ebel against her better judgment.
One of the most difficult parts of having kids was that when you screwed up or failed there was an audience, an audience that was watching you in order to learn how to live, or how not to. Sometimes Jane just wanted to fuck up and be done with it. Watch me, kids, she might say, this is what you’re not supposed to do.
She tried to recall when the shift had occurred, when she had slid from merely wanting to do something wrong into actually doing it. The editor had started it. One afternoon over lunch at the coffee shop down the block from the paper, he told her she had a sensual mouth. Jane had felt herself immediately drawn toward this comment, as if the simple words were a magnetic force. She was ashamed by how easily she had been wooed, but the truth was that she had never been a woman who men showered with compliments, and to receive one like that in the middle of the day after a difficult morning of making lunches and dragging the kids to day care against their will—Fern had cried and clung to her legs, infusing her with black guilt, then Rocky had pushed another boy off the climber, and she had been given a stern look by the kid’s mother, all this making her late for work where Adam called asking her in a sleepy voice where she put the coffee (in the freezer, as she had for all eleven years of their marriage)—had lifted her up in a way nothing else had in a long time.
When she thought about the moment this way, it hardly even seemed like her fault. She had been on the verge of starvation, and this ordinary-looking, middle-aged man had offered her a plum.
Sleep was no longer possible, so she sat up, put on her robe, and wandered out to the kitchen for a drink of water. It was 3:01 a.m., and the yard out the window was as dark as she’d ever seen it. Hot tea seemed like a better idea than water so she filled the kettle, but when the teapot whistled several minutes later, Jane realized her mistake and waited for her mother to round the corner, which she did a minute later, tying her white robe at the waist and rubbing her eyes. Jane poured hot water into two mugs, then dropped in the bags of chamomile and set them both on the table.
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