by Ann Hood
“Libby?” Jeremy was saying.
Her name always sounded funny coming from his mouth.
“If it says Libby Libby Libby on the label label label you will like it like it like it on your table table table,” Libby sang.
“What?”
“It was a theme song for canned fruit or something. Libby. Everyone in school used to tease me with it.”
He touched her hair softly. “My little small-town girl. The things you’ve endured.”
“It was funny,” she said. “When they did that. It was like my name was special or something.”
“Having fruit cocktail named after you?” Jeremy laughed.
She took a deep breath. “Anyway, I thought maybe I could read you one of these. A sonnet I wrote.”
He agreed, reluctantly, to listen.
In an oral presentation, she knew, you should lower your voice, articulate, and read ten times slower than you think you should. Libby did. She read softly and slowly, careful to stress her iambic pentameter. She did not look up until she was finished.
“This is a joke, right?” Jeremy said.
She did not blink, afraid that if she did tears would start to come.
“Who really wrote that? Someone from Von’s? Or that teenage daughter of yours?”
Libby rolled the poem into a ball and threw it, basketball style, across the room. “Yes,” she said. “Dana wrote it. She actually thought it was good.”
Jeremy laughed. “Save the poor darling. Get her out of Massachusetts and away from the mechanic fast.”
Quickly, Libby turned off the light.
“For a minute,” Jeremy said, “I thought you were serious.”
She closed her eyes. Maple, she said to herself. Maple, birch, pine, and elm.
Spring
SPRING IN NEW ENGLAND meant rain and mud. Renata started to think of it as monsoon season. There were leaks in all the rooms. The house was damp and began to smell like a cellar. But she reminded herself how she used to hate having to walk all those blocks to the subway in the rain in the city. This is better, she kept telling herself.
And then Millie started to lose her balance and drop things again.
And Renata blamed the cold night air. The constant rain. How Millie came home from school wet every day. How one night the ceiling in her room had leaked and she’d slept the entire night on wet sheets.
Renata called the school.
“Millie has the flu,” she told the teacher. “I guess it’s going around?”
“No,” the teacher told her. “Everyone’s fine.”
She went into Millie’s room and sat beside her on the bed. “It’s the same thing everyone’s got, honey.”
It was amazing how quickly it came back. In twenty-four hours her skin had grown pale and warm. Her eyes seemed to shrink into her skull. Her new growth of hair, soft and downy, seemed to get sparser. Renata stroked her daughter’s head. Wasn’t it just a few days ago she was admiring Millie’s hair? Commenting on how the color was even more vivid than before? Shinier and healthier?
“Too bad we weren’t ducks,” Renata said. “Then we’d love this weather, right? And no one would get sick from it.”
“Mama,” Millie said, “people are people and ducks are ducks.”
“Well, I know that. It was just a game. Just a silly game.”
When Millie fell back asleep, Renata went to the kitchen and made chicken soup. She cut carrots and celery. She made homemade stock. Soup makes people better, she told herself. Chicken soup cures everything.
The next day, when Millie said her head hurt bad, Renata called the school again.
“Millie won’t be in today,” she said. A chant had started in her head—the tumor is gone, the tumor is gone, the tumor is gone.
“I hope she feels better, Mrs. Handy,” the teacher said. Her voice was sympathetic. “Millie’s such a frail thing—”
Renata hung up the phone before the woman finished her sentence. Millie is not frail, Renata thought.
Out loud she said, “Frail? Ha!” Millie could run very fast. She could dance like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. Exactly. And she didn’t even get out of breath. Why, she ran up and down the stairs all the time. She was not frail. She just had the flu. Who wouldn’t get the flu with weather like this?
Renata sank into a chair, suddenly exhausted. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. She could feel the chair’s broken springs pressing into her back and neck. She moved against them, returning their pressure until they felt more than uncomfortable, until they actually hurt. Renata let out a gasp, not of pain but of realization. She could not pretend. Her little girl had a tumor in her head.
Lately Tom liked being home alone. He could play his old scratchy records without anyone complaining. He could sing along with them, with Frank Sinatra and Mel Torme, the songs that made Libby roll her eyes whenever she heard them. The songs that made Dana and Troy groan. He could dance and sing in his underwear and pretend he was with a beautiful woman. A stranger. He’d sing “Strangers in the Night” in her ear. He’d hold her close. Spin her around a few times.
He knew he was a terrible dancer. But alone like this, with his invisible partner, he felt like Fred Astaire. There was something to be said for time to yourself.
“Doobie doo doo doo,” he sang, imagining long hair, a small waist. He twirled her. He pulled her back toward him.
When the phone rang, he considered not answering it. Boys were always calling Dana. Different boys all the time. Then there was Troy’s old girlfriend who was always calling and hanging up. Why bother answering the phone?
But it just kept ringing and ringing. There was always the hope that it would be Libby. He pretended the feeling wasn’t hope. He called it dread. But every single time he picked up the telephone his breath caught and there would be a split second before the person spoke when Tom thought, Please. Be her.
“Hello?” he said. He told himself the feeling was dread. He did not want her back, he told himself. She had walked out on him and never even left him a note.
When he heard Renata’s voice he told himself he was happy, not disappointed.
Renata was not making sense. Behind her he heard the static and voices of people being paged.
“Whoa,” he said, feeling conspicuous in just his Jockey shorts. “Where are you? What’s going on?”
“Millie,” she said, her voice flat and distant. “She’s in the hospital in Albany. I’m calling from there.”
“I’m on my way,” he said. “Hold on.”
“You think you can make your child safe,” Renata told him. “But school buses run off the road. Crazy men shoot up people eating hamburgers. Just last year, in New York, a tornado hit an elementary school and killed children.” She looked at him, her eyes wide. “A tornado,” she said. “In New York.”
Tom nodded. He really wanted a cup of coffee, but he didn’t want to leave Renata. This was too bad to leave her even for a minute. Millie had gone into convulsions. She was in intensive care.
“Every day,” Renata was saying, “in New York City, children are killed by stray bullets. Asleep in their beds, or playing on the swings. And a bullet hits them and kills them. Just like that.”
Tom nodded again. He wished the doctor would come and talk to them. Outside, he heard a clap of thunder.
“When Millie was first born,” Renata said, “this woman who lived down the hall from me had a baby just a little bit older. The woman’s name was Lakeisha and her daughter was named Krystal, after this character on Dynasty. And Lakeisha and I would take the babies to Tompkins Square Park in their strollers, you know. And we’d sit there and talk about how much they ate and if they slept through the night. Things like that. So one morning I dress Millie and I go and knock on Lakeisha’s door and see if she wants to take Krystal to the park and she opens the door and says right point-blank, ‘Renata, my Krystal’s dead. She’s gone.’ And I thought I’d misunderstood. I said, ‘Pardon me?’ like I
was in charm school or something. ‘My Krystal,’ she said. ‘My little baby girl. She’s dead.’” Renata said, “SIDS.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Crib death. She nursed her and put her down for her nap and next thing she knew she was dead. I mean, how much safer can a baby be? And it still didn’t matter.”
A doctor came in finally. He looked exhausted. He wore a dingy blue coat and his eyes were bloodshot.
“We’re doing an MRI,” he said.
Tom wished the guy would look at them. Make eye contact.
“An MRI?” Tom said.
The doctor glanced at him with his red eyes. “You the father?”
“No.”
“Is the father here?”
“I’m all she’s got,” Renata said.
The doctor glanced up again, then looked back down. “Magnetic resonance imaging scan,” he said. “MRI.” He started to leave.
“The big doughnut,” Renata said. She did not look at Tom or the doctor. And then, as if she was surprised that she’d talked out loud she did look up at them, her eyes red-rimmed and puffy, and said, “That’s what Millie called it last time. The big metal doughnut.”
By the time they left, the hospital, it was raining hard. Tom had forgotten to turn off the stereo so when they got to his house, Sinatra was singing “Witchcraft” at the top of his lungs. He didn’t turn it off. Instead, he poured Renata a big glass of scotch.
She was staring straight ahead. She did not even have a coat with her, so he had wrapped his around her shoulders. But they were both drenched.
“Drink this,” he told her. “And then you’ll take a hot shower and try to sleep.”
She emptied the glass in three big swallows.
“She has something real bad,” Tom said. “Cancer or something?”
Renata didn’t answer him.
So he led her gently up the stairs. Dana and Troy were on the senior class trip to Boston and wouldn’t be back until Sunday night. He had imagined a weekend of Sinatra and working on an old T-Bird at the garage. But now he was wishing the kids were home so he could see them, see that they were all right.
He handed Renata a clean towel, turned on the shower for her. But she didn’t move.
This is shock, he thought.
And carefully he undressed her. Her blouse was buttoned crooked, as if she’d gotten dressed in a big hurry. No bra. No panties. No jewelry. No socks. Just old jeans and a pair of boots. Your kid goes into convulsions, you know she’s got cancer or something, and you get her to the hospital as fast as you can, he thought. Harp kept that idea in his mind so he wouldn’t think of the other, more obvious thing—the way Renata looked standing there naked like this. He adjusted the water temperature and helped her into the shower.
“We run out of hot water fast here,” he said, although he knew she wasn’t registering anything he said. “It’s a very temperamental heater.”
He shivered in his wet clothes.
“The hell with it,” he said, and undressed down to his underwear then got right in the shower with Renata.
Even with the water streaming over her, he could tell she was crying.
“Hey,” he said.
Her shoulders and chest started to heave, big jerky motions that broke his heart.
“She could die,” Renata said.
“No,” he said. “No.”
But of course she could. He had known all along that something was wrong with Millie. And now that’s what the doctor had been trying to say. It’s why he couldn’t look them in the eye.
Tom wrapped Renata in a towel, and quickly dried himself off. He got the bottle of scotch and brought it into bed with them.
“Little kids shouldn’t die,” he said.
He put his jeans on, and a sweatshirt, and got under the covers with her. She didn’t bother with a glass. She drank right from the bottle.
“Did I tell you about this school in New York?” Renata said. Her words were slurred slightly. “Upstate? Hit by a tornado. All these little children were killed.”
“I know,” he said.
She rested her head on his chest, and that’s exactly how they fell asleep.
At some point in the night she whispered to him, “Don’t leave me alone. Please.”
And he whispered back, “I won’t.”
“I just think black walls are creepy,” Dana said.
“Not just black,” Caitlin said. “Black with like Day-Glo painted stuff and a black light. It’ll be cool.”
They both looked at the clock beside Caitlin’s bed, and then at each other.
“Three more minutes,” Dana said. She squeezed Caitlin’s hand.
Caitlin nodded. “We could paint cartoon characters and stuff.”
“Sure,” Dana said. “Now I see what you mean.”
They kept holding hands, waiting. In the bathroom, right down the hall, on the counter near the sink, sat a tube of Caitlin’s urine mixed with some chemical from an early pregnancy test kit. If she was pregnant, their lives, their plans were over. No New York, no great careers, no nothing.
“Ninety seconds,” Dana said, and she squeezed Caitlin’s hand again.
“I could get an abortion,” Caitlin said.
“Five minutes ago you said you couldn’t.”
“I couldn’t.”
Dana tried to picture Caitlin married to Kevin, having a baby with him, living in some dumpy house in Holly with pantyhose drying over the shower rod and empty beer cans everywhere. She shuddered.
“You don’t even know how to cook or anything,” she said.
Caitlin rolled her eyes. “You can buy premade stuff. Anybody can figure out macaroni and cheese or tuna casserole. Cooking is beside the point.”
“I know.” In New York, they were going to have Chinese food delivered, the way people in movies always did. Handsome men would take them to fancy restaurants. At sunrise they would eat bacon and eggs in diners, still dressed in their evening clothes. “Anybody can read directions,” Dana said.
“I think it’s time,” Caitlin said. “You go and look.”
Dana walked as slow as she could to the bathroom. She crossed her fingers. She thought about how Caitlin’s period was two weeks late. Caitlin had read from a book called What to Expect When You’re Expecting. “Nausea. Vomiting. Food cravings.” Last night, after work, she’d made Dana examine her breasts for telltale signs—darkened nipples, swollen veins. But they looked as small and flat as ever.
Our lives are over, Dana had thought.
But when Caitlin said almost those exact words, Dana had laughed. “Don’t be so dramatic,” she’d told her.
She could not imagine a baby inside Caitlin. If it was her, she’d get rid of it without blinking an eye. She did not want a preppy kid with nice teeth smiling back at her the rest of her life, reminding her every minute of all those nights with all those boys. She shuddered thinking about it.
“Why aren’t you saying anything?” Caitlin called to her.
“I didn’t look yet,” Dana said. Then she walked into the bathroom and took a breath.
“It’s fine!” she yelled. “You’re fine!”
To herself she said, soft and fast, Thank you thank you thank you thank you.
Caitlin came running down the hall, screaming as loud as she could.
Dana held the tube out to her. “No brown ring. No baby.”
Caitlin didn’t even bother to look. Instead she sang “New York, New York” real loud.
Dana threw her arm around her friend’s shoulders and together, like two girls auditioning for the Rockettes, they kicked their legs high, out of sync and off beat.
It was spring. For the first time in months, Tom felt, finally, alive. His body and mind tingled constantly and that fog he’d been walking around in finally lifted. If someone had told him that someday he would have Renata Handy move into his house, that she would be his lover, he would have laughed. It would have seemed like the funniest thing in the world. Yet here it
was, happening to him and not funny at all. I’ll just stay one more night, Renata kept saying, until now her clothes were hanging where Libby’s used to be, her car was parked in the driveway, and her alarm clock sat glowing at him from the night table.
Tom did not love Renata. This was an entirely new feeling for him, almost primal. He was startled to see her in his bedroom sometimes, dressing for work or to visit Millie in the hospital. Sometimes he felt guilty as he watched her. His heart would race and his mouth would go dry. She needs a place to stay, he’d tell himself. She needs to be around people until Millie is better. But he knew those were just excuses. The truth was, he liked having her here. He liked the sense of feeling that fog lift away.
Sometimes, as he lay beside Renata, both of them sweaty and worn from their lovemaking, Tom felt as if that foggy feeling had descended on him long before Libby ever left. It sounds to me, Renata told him, like you settled for a lot less than you should have.
And “settled” described his life to this point perfectly. His routine at work, with Libby, everything had a downward feeling when he looked back at those days. Even his weight had settled around his middle. But Renata changed everything. He had never felt so sensual with someone. When he was away from her, at the garage, he could not concentrate on mufflers or transmissions. He could only think of the way her skin felt, of her long fingers on his back, her strong legs around him. She was a noisy lover, and this still startled and excited him. I feel like I’m a teenager, he told her. Like I’m in high school.
In one week, Millie would be home from the hospital. This thing she had, this neuroblastoma, was hard to treat. No one could agree on what was best. But since the radiation hadn’t worked, the doctors had decided to operate and do still more radiation. The surgery had been tricky, but Millie had pulled through. Her head looked like a road map and she’d lost most of the use of her right arm and leg. “If we got it all this time,” the doctor had said, “that’s a small price to pay.”
