by Ann Hood
“Well, I’m sick of you,” Dana told her.
Caitlin took her hand and squeezed it. “I know. That’s okay.”
“That’s okay?”
“I met this guy,” Caitlin said. She seemed to choose her words too carefully. She looked up at the sky then, but not as if she was waiting to see meteors rain down on them. It was more like not wanting to look at Dana. “I can’t stop thinking about him. Sometimes, after we’ve been together, you know, made love, I feel like he’s burned an imprint on me. Like I can still feel him.” She hugged herself and smiled. “I was going to tell you but it’s complicated.”
“Is he married or something?” Dana said. She was thinking about those words—“made love.” They sounded too serious. That wasn’t how they usually described sex. Her throat felt dry and she too stared hard at the sky.
Caitlin laughed that weird new laugh again. “No,” she said. “It’s not like that.”
“Good sex is making you weird,” Dana said. “When he comes to visit you in New York I’ll wait in the diner on our corner. I’ll dress all in black and drink bad coffee and read John Donne’s love poems while you reach new sexual heights. Then the three of us will walk through rain-soaked streets together and watch the sun come up.”
“You are such a romantic,” Caitlin said.
Off in the distance, the sky lit up.
Dana pointed east. “One more month,” she said.
Caitlin didn’t answer.
“Roald is hitchhiking cross-country,” Dana said. “It could take him years. He wants to stop in little towns in Montana and Colorado and work at weird jobs. Isn’t that exciting?” Dana said.
She was starting to feel that things were really going to happen now. The oil can on her bureau was almost full of money. Her cap and gown were hanging on her bedroom door. She had a box of books to bring with her and a poster of Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac that Roald had given her.
“Our life,” Dana said, “is around the corner, waiting to happen.”
She grabbed Caitlin’s hand and squeezed it in her own. Despite the warm weather, Caitlin’s hand was ice cold.
“Cold hands, warm heart,” Dana said. She squinted her eyes, as if their futures would reveal themselves to her right there on the roof of Pizza Pizzazz.
The postcard from Nadine said simply, “Wish you were here. Love, Nadine.” Not very original. The postcard wasn’t either, just a sunset on a beach in Florida. Still, Troy could feel her watching him from all those miles away. He even double-checked in the Rand McNally Road Atlas, tracing Route 95 with his finger from Massachusetts to Miami, to reassure himself that she was far away from him. He wondered if he’d ever feel safe again when someone like Nadine was roaming around, knowing him even from this distance.
He looked over his shoulder too much, watched cars that drove behind him for a familiar face. He kept the postcard folded into a tight square in his wallet, like the St. Christopher medals the Catholic kids carried around for safe journeys. Nadine told him that once she’d taken a crowbar to some guy’s car windows. She’d smashed every one because he’d treated her bad. Troy tried not to think of that story. He tried not to think of any of Nadine’s stories. They all made him shiver.
The only time he felt safe now was when he met Caitlin, late at night. It was true that they had sex, but what he thought about more was the talking they did. He always brought the plans for the house and she brought magazines—House and Garden, Country Living, Elle Design. They argued about things like what color a kitchen should be and the benefits of wall-to-wall carpeting versus hardwood floors. But Caitlin always ended up by saying, “It’s going to be a beautiful house.”
And when she said it, Troy knew it was true. It would be. He could see the years unfold neatly, the way one room opened onto the next on his blueprints. He’d work for his father and save money and slowly build the house. It would take years to get it right, but he could live in it pretty quickly. He’d only need a couple of rooms. When he was with Caitlin, naked and stretched out on a blanket in the woods, he could close his eyes and see all of it as clear as the moon and Big Dipper overhead.
“I never thought I’d like a black bathroom,” Caitlin was saying, “but it’s very chic. And then you could change the accents to any color. You know, red or white or hot pink.”
He traced her ribs, silently counting them, the same way he sometimes traced the road to Miami on the map.
“Bathrooms,” he told her, “should be green or turquoise. Water colors.”
“No,” Caitlin said.
“Blue maybe.” Her hipbones were sharp. “And it should have a Jacuzzi and a bathtub big enough for two people.”
“A round one,” Caitlin said.
“Right.”
She sighed. “Well, really, a house needs more than one bathroom. One could be black.”
Troy closed his eyes and saw it, the years ahead of him, the house. He smiled and held Caitlin tighter to him. He wanted to tell her not to go to New York, to stay right here with him. But he didn’t. He just pressed her to him, feeling the goose bumps that ran up her legs, and her sharp hip digging into his thigh.
“It will be the most beautiful house ever,” she whispered.
Renate came home from work with brochures of faraway places. Club Meds on South Pacific islands, villas for rent in Spain and Portugal, ruins in Greece and Turkey.
“A family vacation,” she said. “You and me and Millie. I’ll use every penny I have so we can go.”
She had not talked to him, not really, since she’d heard him on the phone with Libby. At night and on his lunch breaks and in the early morning they’d made love harder and more frenziedly than ever. She whispered things to him then. Do anything, she whispered. Do everything. But in daylight, out of the bedroom, they hardly spoke at all.
Until today when she spread the travel brochures before him like an exotic smorgasbord;
“Every kid should see the world,” Renata said. “We’ll pretend we’re a real family,” Renata said. Her voice was rushed, as if she didn’t have time to explain. “We’ll buy tacky flowered shirts. Identical ones. And Instamatics. And Bermuda shorts. Millie can start a souvenir collection. You know those plastic domes? When you shake them fake snow falls? She can collect those.”
She dropped onto the chair beside him and covered her face with her big square hands.
“Oh God,” she said. “What if they didn’t get it all?”
When she started to cry, he still could not think of anything to say to make it any better.
Sue looked surprised when she saw Troy at the door.
“Something wrong?” she said.
In the bright morning light, he could see she had lots of freckles, like Caitlin.
“No,” he said. “I just came to take Caitlin for a ride.”
He followed Sue into the house. It was small and run-down, but somehow the place managed to be cheery. There were yellow curtains on the windows and plants everywhere. Caitlin had told him that her mother had fixed it up when she first got married and never changed a thing.
Caitlin was in the living room and when Troy walked in she looked up and smiled and blushed.
“Hi,” she said.
Sue frowned. “What’s going on?”
Caitlin wore baggy jeans and a sleeveless black bodysuit. She looked beautiful, Troy thought.
“I want to take you for a ride,” Troy said.
Sue touched Troy’s hand lightly. “When you were born,” she said, “I thought, Wouldn’t it be great if these two ended up together. Your mother, on the other hand, had different ideas.”
Troy laughed. “She always had different ideas.”
When Sue looked at him then, she knew. “Your mother,” she said, “is not always right.”
Troy and Caitlin went to the land every day. They marked off rooms. They told each other “I love you” constantly. “Say it again,” Troy whispered to her. And when she did, he’d whisper, “Again.”
/> “To think,” she told him, “all this time you were right there in front of me.”
“I was smarter when I was five,” he said. “I knew then you were the one for me.”
But then at night, alone in his room, Troy worried about the summer growing nearer and Caitlin leaving him behind. For as long as he could remember, Caitlin and Dana had been making plans to go away together. And lately those plans seemed even more definite. Dana had started to buy the Village Voice and circle apartment and job possibilities. She sat with their father at the kitchen table and discussed the best, the shortest route to New York from Holly. It was a short drive, really, but still their father pointed out to her things of interest along the way, scenic routes, a possible place to spend the night. Dana listened but her foot tapped as he spoke, as if she were already on her way.
Troy knew that Dana did not care about battle sites, museums, or factory outlet stores. She only cared about leaving. And beside her would be Caitlin, the Voice open on her lap so she could read the classified ads out loud as they drove. The thought of it made Troy crazy. Caitlin would find someone there who knew things he did not—how to order the right wine, what books were on the bestseller list, how to find their way on the subway. He couldn’t stand the thought of it. He had to find a way to make her stay.
“What’s the rush?” Troy asked Caitlin. He had several tactics to try. “You could work all summer and save even more money.”
They were at the land, stretched out on a blanket. Caitlin’s face was pointed at the sun, smeared with sun tan lotion.
“I suppose,” she said. “But we’re sort of ready. You know.”
Troy moved on to his next idea. “I noticed that the new … uh … Scott Turow book is on the bestseller list again.”
Caitlin opened her eyes. “What?”
“It’s even number one.”
“Who cares?” she said. And she closed her eyes again.
“You know how my dad has all those maps? He collects them? I happened to notice this New York City subway map. And I think you should probably consider living near an express stop. It seems to me that would save you a lot of time in the long run. Maybe Forty-second or Thirty-fourth—”
Caitlin sat up. “Troy, I don’t want to frown. It will give me weird tan lines. So could you just tell me what you’re talking about?”
In the sun like this he could see the flecks of color in her eyes, topaz and jade.
“Besides which,” she said, “those are terrible neighborhoods. Times Square and something else equally scary.”
“Don’t go,” he said, surprising himself. That had not been on his list at all.
“Don’t go?”
“Stay here with me. We’ll build a house right here and be together.”
“You want me to stay?” she said.
Troy groaned. “I really messed up bad, didn’t I?”
Caitlin started to laugh. “Messed up? Are you kidding? You said the exact right thing.”
Renate saw Tom differently now. She could not decide if she had wanted him—loved him even—to make Millie’s wish come true or if it had been real. She liked to think it was real for at least a little while, maybe even just one night. But now she saw Tom Harper for what he was—a once handsome boy going paunchy, who still loved his wife.
Sometimes, when Millie slept, Renata thought about other things too. He had not read a book since high school. He ate potatoes with lasagna. His fingernails were always dirty from fixing cars. It was good to think of these things. The others, she knew, would do her no good. So she pretended not to know that he was also kind, liked Sinatra, made her feel special for a time.
She was glad he was there now when she had to meet with the doctors after Millie’s follow-up MRI. That she could lean on his strong arm. Even if she was already beginning the process of leaving him, standing there in the hospital hallway she was happy he was beside her.
The doctor shook his head. “You can never tell with this disease. With kids. We want to keep her a few days—”
“What?” Renata said, digging her fingers into Tom’s arm.
“Molly,” the doctor said, “shows a small shadow at the base of her brain.”
“Millie,” Renata said. “You mean my daughter, right? You mean Millie?”
He glanced at his papers.
“Of course,” he said. “Millie.”
Renata felt her heart start to rise, to soar.
“It could be scarring or it could be a return of the mass,” the doctor was saying.
But Renata had stopped listening. She let go of Tom’s arm and rushed back into the room where Millie sat waiting for her.
“Let’s go, Millie,” Renata said.
The nurse looked up at her, startled.
“I want to take her now,” Renata said.
The nurse patted her hand. “That’s all right,” she said. “Illness makes people do and say the strangest things.”
“Yes,” Renata said. She felt she wasn’t really there, that she was flying above this room, this town, the entire state of Massachusetts, looking down at it all. “Yes,” she said again.
Doctors, Renata decided, used words like survival rate and radiation and CAT scan and MRI. They put on stern doctor faces and talked statistics. They handed out copies of medical journal articles and pills for pain. But they did not talk about hope or victory or little girls. They did not know Millie.
She could no longer count how many times she had sat in an office like this one—posters of some body system on the wall, large neat desk with paperweights and Cross pens and silver-framed family pictures, white-coated doctors talking to her, saying the same things.
This time, Renata could not concentrate on what it was they were telling her. Instead, she thought about Millie, the way she looked when Renata had left her at the hospital yesterday. “More tests!” Renata had said, her voice as bright as a stewardess’s. “Will you bring my penmanship notebook?” Millie had said. “So I can practice.”
“Millie is such a funny kid,” Renata said.
She saw the way the doctors looked at each other. One more mother over the edge, that look said. Humor her.
“I told her she didn’t have to go to school anymore,” Renata said, surprised at the calm in her voice. The poster across from her showed the flow of blood, from veins to arteries to heart and back out. “Do you know what she said?”
It was the female doctor who spoke. “Mrs. Handy,” she said, proving they weren’t really listening to Renata who kept telling them she was not Mrs. Anybody. “Statistics show—”
Renata held up her hand. “Wait,” she said. “Let me finish. Millie insisted I send her to school. She wanted to learn to write in cursive. Can you imagine? You’re all educated, right? You all know that penmanship is not really important. Not in the bigger scheme of things. But Millie practices hers all the time. She has notebooks full of perfect looped letters. Qs and capital Ls. The kid has beautiful penmanship.”
“Mrs. Handy,” the woman doctor said again.
“That’s another thing,” Renata said, standing, edging toward the door, wondering what exactly that smell was that filled every doctor’s office. Did they bottle it? Sell it in air fresheners? “I’m not Mrs. Handy. I’ve never been married. Ever. And I’ve told you that.”
“I’m sorry,” a different doctor murmured.
“Miss Handy,” the toughest doctor said. He even had a serious waxed mustache that he twirled when he spoke. “We cannot offer Millie a high survival rate—”
Renata was shaking her head and opening the door. She had heard this enough. What about faith? she was thinking. There was even a doctor—a famous doctor—who believed in the power of faith in healing. He’d written books about it. Didn’t these people know that? There were new examples every day.
She was in the hallway now, pushing past nurses in their marshmallow white shoes and gaggles of more doctors conferring. She was thinking about Lourdes, where people bathed in its healing
waters and were cured. She and Millie could go there. They could learn French. Eat escargots. Wear berets. In fact, she would buy Berlitz tapes and when Millie felt better they would both listen to them. Ecouter et parler. Renata smiled. That was the name of her French book in school. To listen and to speak.
Outside she paused to catch her breath. A florist’s delivery truck pulled up and the driver began to remove flower arrangements. He took them from the truck and placed them on a portable cart that he had carefully unfolded. Daisies and gladioli and roses. Dozens of them. They all had the same message. Held on a sign by a smiling BUNNY or written in glitter across white fake satin or painted on a wooden stake, GET WELL.
But none of those doctors believed that Millie would get well. Only Renata believed it. Somehow, though, that seemed enough. There were endless possibilities, she thought as the delivery man loaded coleus plants and a small cactus garden onto his cart. A plastic man in a sombrero peeked from behind a succulent, GET WELL was written on the sign he held, GET WELL was written in pink on an entire bouquet of silver heart-shaped balloons.
Didn’t these doctors ever read the National Enquirer in the grocery line? People were always getting healed in that. Two-headed babies and eight-hundred-pound men and even children eaten by alligators or attacked by pit bulls, everyone in there survived. Why, Renata had even read about a woman presumed to be dead who came to life just as the undertaker prepared to embalm her. These things were miracles. These things happened.
When Tom came to the hospital from the graduation ceremonies, dressed in a blue suit that was shiny at the elbows and pulled across his middle, Millie was asleep and Renata was leafing through an old Redbook. She held up the magazine.
“I’m learning Dolly Parton’s secrets,” she said.
She watched as he went to Millie’s side and lightly touched her cheek. Like a father, Renata thought.
“How was all that pomp and circumstance?” Renata said. She kept flipping the pages of the magazine, nervously.
Tom shrugged. “Weird,” he said. “Watching your kids graduate from high school. I kept thinking, Wait a minute. I just did this yesterday myself.” He hesitated, then said, “You’ll come back to the house with me, won’t you?”
