Davy slammed his hands on the table. "Enough already! I'm so goddamned sick of fighting!" He got up suddenly, and Jessica followed him as he took off for the stairs. "We're not finished here," she called out. "You wouldn't be so miserable if you didn't run away all the time."
Davy stopped at the landing and turned around. "Oh, is that so?"
She was going to tell him how sad she felt the other day thinking of Teresa on the train to Cleveland. She remembered that moment she decided to go to Oregon with Blane; she had felt reckless, free, yet as she threw her duffel into the back of his van, she already knew when she would call her mother—hours later, after they'd crossed the Mississippi into Iowa. Jessica had intended to stay in Oregon for a week or two, but after a while she found that it was easier just to remain there, and so she did. "I guess all of us are runaways," she said to Davy. "Seems to be a family trait."
After a while Davy came back downstairs.
"Sorry." Jessica was scratching Bedlam, who cowered at her feet.
"So do you feel better?" Ivan asked.
"I'm fine," Davy said. "You should ask Jess."
She thought of telling her brothers that she was applying to graduate school, that in fact she had been thinking about it for some time. She didn't know where she'd be next year, but it felt good to have the beginning of a plan. As much as she wanted them to know about it now, she didn't want to make any promises until she was sure. Stay tuned, she wanted to say. "Yeah. How about you, Ivan?"
"I'm all right, a little beat."
Davy cleared the table and put the dishes in the dishwasher. "When Mom comes home, let's let her do the talking. No need to drag an explanation out of her."
Jessica agreed, and they all went into the living room to talk the rest through.
25
LYDIA WAS SITTING on the sidewalk patio of the Acorn Café in Royal Oak when rain clouds moved overhead, sending everyone inside. After the open house she had returned to her car, sat in the driver's seat for a few minutes, then decided to walk into town to let more time pass. She ordered a seltzer at the café and sat in the shade, trying not to think about the alarm incident. She was sure that she could come up with something to say, and the more she lingered in Royal Oak, the less she worried about it. Instead, she found herself thinking about Dream Machines.
She took out a notepad from her purse and began to fill it with memories about her father. It had been a long time since she had sat down and actually worked. Now it was all she wanted to do, no longer just an idea or a way to escape her disappointments.
The rain caught everyone by surprise, and she waited it out huddled with a group of strangers under the café awning. Looking toward the sidewalk, she watched a young girl in a sky blue dress rush to the door of a parked car; a large woman, probably her grandmother, trundled behind her with a newspaper over her head. The woman opened the door, and the child yelled at her as she went around to the driver's side.
It occurred to Lydia now that her whole idea—luring her kids home in the hope that they might stay—had been crazy, almost as crazy as the lies she had told and the trouble the lies had gotten her into. But now with all her children home again, gathered together for her sake, she realized that it was far too much to ask. She didn't know if she even wanted it anymore.
When the summer shower abruptly ended, Lydia walked back to her car in the damp heat and drove home.
Besides the FOR SALE sign now closer to the curb and the tamped-down front lawn, there was little evidence that the yard sale had ever happened. The garage door was closed, the fence back up, and the Spiveys' rented van nowhere in sight.
Lydia ran her hands over her hair before going into the house.
"Over here," Jessica called from the living room, more pleasantly than Lydia had expected.
She went in and sat down on the rocking chair. "I found my keys," she said weakly.
"Quite a day." Jessica seemed contemplative, as if she'd been on the living room couch all afternoon. She sat between her brothers, the three of them in a row, like a jury. Lydia waited for Where have you been? or What was that all about? But her daughter remained quiet. Lydia wondered if her kids already knew everything and were ticking like bombs, waiting for another white lie to set them off.
"Did you have a chance to meet Norm?" she asked, and almost hoped that Jessica would blow up right now, just let her have it and put an end to the charade, once and for all. But Jessica said, "Not really. We'd only just begun to say hello when I heard the alarm."
"So you didn't talk to him?" she asked again.
Davy shook his head.
"I wasn't even sure who he was," Ivan said.
Lydia couldn't stop herself, knew that she was going to make something up again. "Sorry I flew off like that. Norm found an open house in Royal Oak. We had just that small window of time."
Nobody asked a follow-up question: What about the alarm? Why did you take so long? Where's Norm now? What about the problems you said you two were having? Jessica looked at her like a therapist, stoic and unblinking. Ivan and Davy would not quite meet her eyes. To fill the space Lydia went into a long description of the open house: "The place is just perfect for two. Bright and open. It has a lovely writing studio in the back."
"Sounds nice," Davy said. None of the kids seemed angry, just quiet and depleted.
Lydia changed the subject. "So, how did the yard sale go? It almost looks as if it never happened."
Davy and Ivan had calculated how much they'd made: sixteen hundred and thirty dollars. "Dad's not a bad salesman, either," Ivan said, in what seemed a genuine compliment.
"People will buy anything," Davy added. They'd sold the one-eyed camel, the pink wicker furniture, the Evel Knievel Stunt Action Play Set, even the office partitions. "Your friend Walter stopped by after everyone had gone home. We told him not to worry about it, but he insisted on helping clean up. He really wanted to see you."
Jessica leaned forward and broke in. "You got a phone call, Mom," she said, then casually, as if it were just another message she was passing on, "Someone wants to buy the house."
"Who?" Lydia sat up.
"That family you showed it to."
"What did they say?" Lydia asked.
"They want to come by tomorrow."
"Gosh. I hadn't realized this would happen so soon." Here was a good opportunity to remove herself from the jury's gaze. "I think I'll go upstairs and take care of some things before I call them."
No one said anything as she hurried up the stairs. Lydia closed her office door and sat down.
She was startled to find that the idea of selling her house— something she had never seriously considered—did not seem so far-fetched after all. Not just because she'd overspent fixing it up and had gone so far as to put a sign in the front yard. Not for practical reasons. Even before she saw the bungalow in Royal Oak today, she had somehow imagined herself in such a place. It was as though just picturing another possibility, with or without the apocryphal mate, had eased her away from here. In the past six weeks, she had begun to let go of this house.
It would be easy, she realized, to continue with her invented story. She saw now that her children would let her. All Lydia had to say was that she and Norm had broken up and that she was moving on with her own life.
But the thought of this seemed, finally, unbearable. She knew there had to be an end to her inventions. How could she expect her book to be true if she couldn't tell the truth herself?
She sat at her computer picturing her father typing out his letter, thinking of what to say. "Dear Norm," she began. She wrote a few lines, deleted them, wrote a few more, until finally:
I started this message apologizing for my behavior this morning, but it occurred to me that I've spent much of our correspondence apologizing to you. I have no idea why I should be saying I'm sorry when, ever since we met for lunch you've been rude, selfish, and petulant. Ultimately I have nothing to apologize for, though perhaps I ought to say that you've been ca
ught in the crossfire of some family issues.
As for the Tucker situation, I wish you hadn't betrayed my confidence the other day, especially since I have now discovered that what I told you was untrue.
If you want a more detailed explanation, you can read my next book.
Lydia
***
After sending the e-mail, she flipped through the pages of the notepad she'd been writing in, and found the realtor's business card. As she set it down she saw, amid some loose change on her desk, the gold coin with the number 7, her lucky chip from Walter. She turned it over and rubbed her thumb on the horseshoe embossed on the other side. She thought about how generous Walter had been, helping with her research, getting her such a deal on the Corolla, stopping by to help out with the yard sale. She would go by the library, tomorrow if she could, and take him out to lunch, thank him for all he'd done for her. She slipped the lucky coin into her purse, picked up the phone, and dialed.
It was five o'clock when she went back downstairs. The kids were in the kitchen reading the newspaper. The room seemed still, as if no one had spoken for hours. "So do you want to see the new house?" she asked.
They looked at each other as if caught unprepared. Jessica folded the paper and laid it down on the table.
"The new house?" Davy said. "Okay."
Soon they were all piled into the station wagon, driving across Woodward through the main drag of Royal Oak. The car was silent as a temple, which made Lydia partly grateful but anxious all the same. She turned left at Plymouth, the first residential street, and four blocks later pulled up to the curb by the OPEN HOUSE sign: number 313.
Davy finally broke the tension. "It's nice," he said, getting out of the car.
Ivan followed him up the steps.
"And I like those trees in the front," Davy added. "What do you think, Jess?"
She stood on the sidewalk looking as if the short flight of steps were a mountain she wasn't about to climb. "Looks small."
Lydia stepped onto the porch. "It goes a ways back."
Ivan pulled on the door handle. The house was locked. He and Davy peered into the windows. "Good floors. High ceilings."
They stepped aside as Jessica made her way up to look. "I thought you said the house got a lot of light."
"It does, honey, the studio in particular."
"Are you sure you're both going to fit in there?" Jessica asked, almost contemptuously. She had her back turned. Still the emphasis on the word both was undeniable.
"So. There's something I've been meaning to tell you all." Lydia spoke quickly; any delay might make her lose her nerve. "Maybe we can sit down and talk before the realtor arrives."
Jessica turned around and took a deep breath, almost as if she were the one about to make a confession. She glanced at Lydia, a look that seemed to tell her that she already knew—then joined her brothers on the steps. Ivan and Davy, like patients in a waiting room, looked guarded.
Lydia sat down next to them. "I'm buying this house," she announced. "I'm buying this house," she repeated. "Just me."
The kids didn't say a word. Again she knew she could save the story, tell them that she'd had a terrible fight with Norm and hadn't had the courage to admit that the relationship was not working out. She could say she'd been furious when he'd shown up at the yard sale, that she'd set off the alarm in a frustrated rage.
"Jessica, when I told you that I'd met a man—you seemed so incredulous that I could meet someone new. I wanted to prove you wrong." Lydia noticed that Davy had dark circles under his eyes. Ivan's mouth was turned down. "I know that I told you I'd made an instant connection with Norm, that we planned to move in together, and then that we were thinking of getting married. I said he'd done a great amount of work to make the house look better than it ever has."
She fixed her eyes on Jessica, and recalled something M.J. had said about children being mirrors for their parents. When Lydia had looked at her kids growing up, she saw her own reflection and when they left she had felt diminished. But now when she looked at her daughter she didn't see herself anymore, only someone who shared a certain resemblance.
"Norm did none of that work," Lydia continued. "He's never even been inside the house. I hired a handyman—Chickie Paterakis, the guy who bought the Nomad—he did all the fix-up." Jessica nodded and looked at her brothers, and Lydia was suddenly sure that they'd all figured it out. "So you know already?" she asked. "How long have you known?"
But they wouldn't answer her question. This time not even Ivan would help her. His face had turned sharp and expectant. "Go on," Jessica said.
"I met him at the museum the day of your father's wedding," Lydia continued, and went into the whole story, from the message board to the e-mails to the disastrous date. "I left him in the Renaissance Center. That was the day I called you, Jess."
"But why?" Her daughter looked caught between anger and bewilderment. "Why did you do it?"
She thought of telling them what M.J. had said about her father's betrayal of Tucker, and the letter she had found. But now was not the time—she would tell them that story later—because there was no point in blaming M.J. or Norm or Cy or anyone else for something she herself had done. "My excuse was loneliness, I guess. I've missed you all more than you can understand. And when I saw that my lie might bring you back home, well, it was hard to stop." She realized then that she had gotten her life back, only a different one than she'd imagined.
"What about us?" Jessica asked.
"Remember at the orphaned-car museum when you put your hands over my eyes and said, 'Emergency rescue'? That was the best I'd felt in a long time, just knowing that you all came to get me. I know I told you I was desolate here, and I'm sure I made you feel awful about it," she said. "I went too far. I don't know what else I can say."
"You went way too far." Ivan shook his head. "I've never known you to lie before, Mom. Can you imagine if we pulled a stunt like this with you?"
Lydia wondered how, after today, she would ever regain their trust. How could they see her the same way when she had staged this elaborate drama and made them unwitting players? "I would never do anything like this again."
Ivan looked defeated.
Davy stood up and walked down the steps. "I don't know what we did wrong, but it must have been something."
"No, it wasn't your fault."
Jessica grabbed Davy's hand, led him back to the steps, where they both sat down. "What I want to know is what you were afraid of," she said. "Did you think that after Dad left we were just going to write off the whole family?"
"I worried that the next time you all came home to pack up the house and go through our stuff, I might not be here. I saw you so seldom, and I'm not trying to be dramatic this time, but I didn't want what happened to my mother to happen to any of you. I thought we could go through the boxes together and settle estates. I know I've been difficult. Particularly with you, Jess."
Nobody said a word for several minutes. Then a breeze blew in, scattering leaves and blossoms across the yard.
Ivan tilted forward to see the trees rustling above them.
"Look at the balloons," Jessica said, nodding toward the OPEN HOUSE sign. The balloons leaned to the right, then snapped up and back as the wind shifted.
"That's July in Michigan," Davy said.
Lydia was grateful that the talk had turned to something so simple as the weather. It seemed a good place to start.
The kids stood up, and as Lydia rose to join them the realtor came up the steps.
"What a picture," she exclaimed, adjusting her sunburst brooch. "The whole family out on the porch."
She shook everyone's hands and took out a huge ring of keys from her purse. Jessica, Ivan, and Davy huddled behind their mother as the realtor tried different keys in the lock. At last the deadbolt clicked, the door opened, and Lydia stepped into her new, empty house.
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