Bad Things Happen

by Kris Bertin

  A number that lets you do things like drink enough wine that your girls laugh at everything you say and marvel at your purple mouth. That lets you show them your tongue and teeth, tell them that you’ve gone purple. Lets you consider (only for a moment) giving the oldest one a half a glass when she says she wants to be purple, too.

  Lets you tell them—in a half-assed effort to impart some wisdom—that purple ladies don’t get anywhere in life (though it’s okay to be purple once in a while, on special occasions).

  Crystal and I have coffee and don’t say much, because more and more things are rising up and bobbing on the surface. There’s a conversation that we don’t have, and the one that we do tiptoes around the list that stacks up between us, between our hands and coffees. The list is long. A list of things I shouldn’t have done.

  Last night was fun, I say.

  It was funny. Mostly funny, she says.

  Agreeing to let the girls stay up way past their bedtime, and giving into their totally nonsensical requests to wear my clothes over their pajamas.

  Leading all of us through the backyard, the girls back with Dad. Walking barefoot and in flip-flops down the cliffside to the big hole with caution tape around it. Down to the place where the girls aren’t allowed to go. Shouting things down into it. Things meant for Dad’s ears, just inches away from my mouth. Is Ronette down there?I’m so happy for you guys, I tell her.

  I know you are.

  I can’t wait until the summer. It’s going to be beautiful.

  Responding to Frank’s announcement that he and Crystal are engaged by interrupting mid-sentence and saying she’ll make an excellent first wife and bursting into uncontrollable laughter right in front of everyone, including the girls. Including Dad.It’s nice that I can start to think about having a family in the next few years, she says. I almost thought it wouldn’t happen.

  You’ll make a great mom, I can tell. And I’ve always thought Frank would be a really great father.

  Allowing the girls to cut up a Barbie with wire cutters that Michael has left on the table from fixing something. Telling them that it’s not a big deal because Barbie is a pretty shitty female role model anyway. Telling everyone that promiscuity already runs in our family, that we don’t need to encourage it further. Realizing too late that I actually said these things out loud. Realizing a second later, and still too late, that Kelly has already sliced and diced Barbie before I could stop her. The limbs, the two hands, the feet, and the blonde, severed head resting in a pile, and me seeing and knowing that Emma, little Emma, hasn’t moved on yet. Still had a few more years to go with her toys.Crystal smiles. I don’t know her well enough to know how good a liar she is.

  Did you like dinner? I ask.

  It was so good, she nods. It was really good.

  Confronting Dad in front of everyone at the table for showing up, uninvited, to the house. Explaining how I think he showed up to my house because I’m a woman, and he arranges the women in his life as a chain of hideouts from other women. Explaining (while simultaneously developing terrible hiccups) that I never forgot the thing he said—sorry—wrote and delivered to me on my wedding night, on robin’s-egg-blue parchment: that it’s important to move forward with my education and not end up a woman and nothing else. That I should be a woman with goals, not just a bearer of children and a keeper of a household. Explaining (now hiccupping even worse) that since I didn’t live up to his goals, I must now officially be a lesser being—relegated to the keeper of some burrow he can run to when his tail’s between his legs and everything’s gone wrong again.

  Getting into a totally absurd fight with my husband and brother about nothing. My brother calling me a crazy fat lady. My brother throwing little pink body parts at me and telling me to go cry somewhere else.

  Me, doing exactly what he says. Running to the bathroom with a whole bottle of Dad and Seline ’03 to hang half my body out of the window like a Muppet and drink it. Waiting for someone to come and get me, and throwing my arms around Crystal and thanking her when she shows up. Hugging her and crying and laughing all at once even when she sits on the toilet and starts to pee.

  I had fun, Crystal says.

  Later, everyone else is up. Frank and Michael are covered in scratches and bruises, but aren’t embarrassed about it. They saw that family of raccoons march across the fence in the backyard and chased them down the hill, through the bushes and brambles. The both of them slid on flat, wet rocks and rolled down the embankment to the empty lot below. On top of whatever wine was consumed, the two of them got into a quart of Scotch whiskey that had been in the cupboard since Michael first got certified as an engineer. If nothing else, the two of them seem closer, but I decide, looking at their eyes, that they might just still be drunk.

  Frank and Crystal aren’t ready to drive anywhere and so they stay the rest of the morning and afternoon and the four of us watch Disney movies with the girls, four in a row, until we can finally get up and stop them from sliding another tape into the slot. From one movie to the next it dawns on us that Dad hasn’t come in yet, and eventually I go out to the camper around four o’clock, after Quasimodo dies.

  I can see him in the back, his belly rising and falling, hands behind his head. When I call his name, his eyes open, but he doesn’t say anything, doesn’t respond. I ask him if he wants dinner, or wants to say goodbye to Frank and Crystal.

  I see his eyes move towards me through the screen and glass, then move back to the ceiling. They close. He clears his throat, but not to say anything to me. Closes his eyes like maybe he’s trying to find his way back into a dream I shook him out of. I didn’t realize until later that I was wishing or praying that the neighbourhood would drop down into itself right then and there. It only came when I sat down on the toilet to take my pills and realized I was sad that everything was still the same, even after all that.

  When the noise starts, I’m out of bed instantly, and then I’m in and out of each of the girls’ rooms.

  Then there’s more screaming and windows rattling and explosions. I’m halfway down the stairs before I realize I’m carrying both of the girls by their pajamas, my tits flopping up and down in my t-shirt. My movements are perfectly timed and in sequence: get down the stairs, drop the girls, grab the keys, open the door, grab the girls again, get to the car.

  But somewhere along the way there’s a voice shouting my name. Shouting MAGGIE MAGGIE WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

  And another saying whoa, whoa whoa.

  The first is my husband—naked—and the second is Frank—who has somehow dressed himself in jeans—the both of them coming down the stairs after me. There’s a quick minute where I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror by the door and everything slows down.

  There is no big Hollywood rumble, no shaking, or groaning and roaring as the house separates and the mountain eats us.

  Emma is crying, but Kelly is not. When I let them go, Emma runs to Michael, but Kelly stands up next to me. The fabric of my shirt is ancient, and it feels like she can see through me completely.

  What are you doing, she says in the same tone as Michael.

  And then there’s another bang, and this time a window flashes. That’s when I realize it’s a gun, Dad’s shotgun. The one mounted up in the camper wall by the cupboards. It’s like I’m drunk again, and none of the decisions I’m making have meaning anymore. I still feel like there’s something going on with the ground itself, and my first thought is that Dad is shooting the ground, that he’s making real one of Michael’s terms. Using demolitions to blast slope areas or exerting non-static forces. So when I open the door and go out and the girls follow me and Michael says my name again, I’m still operating under the assumption that we’re all going to die anyway.

  Dad’s shirtless, with a smear of blood across his stomach. He’s holding his gun, but something else too, trying to juggle them both. At first I think it’s Suzanne, but t
he fur is too dark. Then I see that big, cartoonish tail, black-and-white rings when he tries to open his shotgun, and drops its broken body. I look at the fangs in its open mouth as Dad reloads.

  He fires again, through the driveway and into our backyard, and this time I snap out of it, pick Emma up and hold her against me. When I take her upstairs, she’s pressed against my nipple and it’s like I’m feeding her again, except now she can say my name and walk around on her own. When I get up to bed, Michael’s there with a sweater wrapped around his waist like a skirt without a back. He’s got an expression that I saw the other night, like he’s wondering if he needs me in all of this.

  I focus on putting Emma to bed instead, and it’s only when she asks me if I’m okay that I realize I’m not, and I try not to start crying then and there. Instead I tell her everything’s okay.

  Later, in Kelly’s room, she tells Michael that she hates Grandpa. It’s dark and I can’t see him but I know that he’s looking at me, or else is going to look at me and give me some kind of ultimatum. I can feel it, and I swear it’s coming.

  But it doesn’t.

  Don’t say that, Michael tells her. He can’t say that’s not true, or no you don’t. But he says she shouldn’t.

  That’s your family, he says.

  I took it for granted that Frank and Crystal would use the raccoon attack as an opportunity to finally leave.

  Instead, it was decided that Frank’s muscle car was the fastest way to get Suzanne to the twenty-four-hour veterinary clinic. There were two, one in the city (which didn’t have room for us) and one a half-an-hour away and outside of town (which did). I was there, too, wearing clothes this time, helping Dad hold the cat on the way there, keeping pressure on the beach towel she was wrapped in while she screamed in that horrible baby voice that cats can have.

  The things had torn out big pieces of her hind legs so that big chunks of meat were hanging off her, but the worst was where they had gotten under her, torn open her stomach so that all her guts came out. After shooting and killing two of the raccoons (and picking their bodies up as he went—later telling us that he knew you need to keep their heads to find out if they’re rabid or not), he shoved Suzanne’s bowels back into place and wrapped her up in one of those elastic sprain bandages, then swaddled her in a green-and-pink towel right there in the yard. He had deep gashes in his arms and hands from her claws and teeth, from when she was crazy with pain and trying to kill anything that came near her before they killed her. I was covered in cat blood, but he had at least three kinds on him, including his own. The raccoons were in a garbage bag in the trunk.

  Frank smiled and told Dad that he probably had rabies now.

  In your bloodstream, right now. Like a werewolf.

  And despite the mean look on his face when he said it, Frank didn’t say anything about the heavy red pools forming on his cream-coloured upholstery. Didn’t say anything, though I could see his eyes darting around in the rear-view, thinking about how much it was going to cost to get it back to car-show perfect.

  Then it’s just Frank and me, in the waiting room, looking at a faded mural of sick cats and dogs lined up like a group mugshot, with bandages and eyepatches, thermometers in their mouths and ice packs on their heads. Nothing to read but fake magazines printed up by Pedigree foods and Whiskas. Dad had used his booming voice on the sleepy veterinarians to say he would not leave his cat’s side, and so he’s in there wearing one of Michael’s old t-shirts (a giant one that says Sunday Fun Run and features a clown in jogging shorts) that barely fits him. He’s in there like that with the pet doctor, the pet surgeon, and the helper.

  You think Suzanne’s gonna make it? I ask.

  You think Benjamin’s gonna make it? He raises his eyebrows.

  He’s always called him Benjamin, never Dad, even when he was a boy. He smiles, and my hand instinctively twitches.

  Fuck you.

  Come on, he says.

  Did you see him? Because I did. I was sitting next to him back there.

  And then he smiles again and says

  You’d think he’d be used to—

  But before he finishes and says whatever the rest was (used to losing women or used to relationships ending prematurely or something), I actually grab his face. I grab his smirk, right on the laugh line, where the corner of his mouth meets his cheek, and I twist, hard. He sort of moans and has to wrench his whole head backward to get it out of my hand. When he does I hear myself bark.

  Why are you even here?!

  Instead of answering, he just holds his hand over where his smirk used to be, and looks at me. My hand remains curled into a claw between us.

  The last time this happened, the last time I wasn’t on board with him and got this upset, I was sixteen. I’d put a dent in the car after my first drive and after crying for maybe an hour straight, he came up to me and said it looked like I’d been in the Indy-Tard 500. And I punched him in the mouth. We were roughly the same size back then, so he didn’t hold back, and we had our first real fight on the olive-green carpet. I scratched and bit and tore his thin little earring out of his lobe, and he folded my nose over with his fist and left me with a funny bump that’s been with me since.

  This time, he sits in silence, and looks at the floor for a while, his mouth and cheeks reddening. Then he gets up, and pours us coffees from the little station by the dog-food magazines. He hands me a paper cup, and only when I take it can I see that my hand is trembling, and that his is too.

  I’m sorry, he says.

  He looks at me for a while. Takes a sip and sits down next to me again.

  I knew he was coming.

  Dad told you he was coming here?

  I’m the one who told him it was okay to come stay with you in the first place. I mean, I wanted to come, so I could announce—you know—getting married and all that. And then I thought, well, maybe it could be a family reunion.

  And you didn’t tell me this, why?

  Well, I did it wrong, he says. Boy Wonder is supposed to come, but he was already leaving on his trip. I told him we’d have a family reunion next summer.

  Great, I say.

  I know it didn’t work, and I know now it was a bad idea, but it was supposed to be a surprise.

  What makes you think I’d want a surprise?

  You’re right, he says. But I mean. When’s the last time you saw me try to do anything like this?

  I think about it. There’s a deep red mark in the middle of his cheek, blooming.

  I don’t know.

  I’m trying to be nicer.

  Well, I tell him, thanks.

  He rubs his face, and rotates his head. Puts his hand on his neck.

  You know what Allan told me?

  What?

  He said when you and I left for college, Mom cheated on Benjamin.

  I look at him. He stresses the key difference in his statement using his hands:

  Mom cheated on Dad.

  Then he tells me.

  Allan came home one day—early, of course—and there was a man at the top of the stairs. Naked except for his head. Crouched up there, wearing Frank’s motorcycle helmet. And when he saw Allan, the guy ran and hid in my old bedroom. Locked himself in there. Allan found mom under the covers, and she made him promise not to tell.

  I think about it for a while. And then I ask him why he’s telling me.

  Allan asked me to. He said that when he saw that it changed everything for him, and that we both needed to know about it. He said it was like looking at a different person altogether. That he felt like if he took the covers off her, she’d have a Martian’s body or something.

  Frank, what could that possibly change in my life?

  He looks at his reflection in the coffee for a while, trying to choose his words.

  I think it’s maybe that there are no good guys or bad
guys in our family like we thought there were?

  Then there’s another long pause, and I can’t decide if this is means something, or if it’s just another thing he’s throwing off the roof. I decide to take him seriously:

  Who thought that? I’ve never thought that.

  I know, but I thought you thought I did, he says.

  I don’t think like that, I tell him.

  Me neither, he says, and the two of us look straight ahead at all those animals.

  They want to keep Suzanne overnight, but Dad refuses, says that if she’s stabilized, she needs to be home with him. They say she isn’t stabilaized, and he says like hell she isn’t. So he has them construct a kind of container for her body with a hole that her head sticks through. Give her one of those cones, so that she looks like a crazy household appliance. Then they send Dad home with this liquid medicine that he has to use an eyedropper to feed her with. He won’t tell us how much it cost, but we saw him give them all the cash in his wallet, and then his Visa on top of that. The next day, Dad stays on the couch with his cat contraption in his lap and feeds her that brown stuff while the whole neighbourhood rattles.

  Then Mom comes to visit while I’m making pancakes because Frank wasn’t exaggerating, the only person who couldn’t come was Allan, and this basically is a family reunion. Her gay-best-friend-ex-husband-poet Marcus is with her, and they’re in full-blown platonic mode, their arms linked and wearing matching plaid like they’re going to a barn-dance. We’re having breakfast and Crystal has to pull out the table leaf and sends Frank for more chairs to accommodate them.

  She has an envelope of pictures that she printed off of Allan’s Facebook, and they travel around the breakfast table. They’re all pretty boring, him on a Tarzan rope on some lake, him and a bunch of girls, him and his girlfriend.

  When it gets to Dad, I hear a sound I haven’t heard since before the girls were born. He’s laughing, and it’s that deep, hearty laugh. The one you’d hear coming out of his office when the dean or Marcus was visiting. The old-boys-club laugh. We all look at him but he doesn’t pay attention to any of us. And even though his cat is in a bucket fighting for its life, he’s grinning and all those lines and creases are in the right place again.