The Most Fun We Ever Had

by Claire Lombardo

  “Perhaps our most entitled member, who refused to even look at him when he was born. You couldn’t even make sure he was alive and you’re throwing around the word sociopath?”

  “Don’t ever talk about that to me,” Violet said. “You have absolutely no— It’s not yours, okay? That experience isn’t yours. It never has been. Just because you were there doesn’t mean that you get to add it to your fucking—your—”

  “My what?”

  “The—your—the roster of suffering you keep. It’s pathetic, Wendy. We get it; your life sucks. So does everyone else’s. That’s just life.”

  “Roster of suffering?”

  Had this been a different conversation, they might both have laughed.

  “It’s not a game,” Violet said. “None of this is— You treat other people’s lives like they’re— Not everything is about entertaining yourself.”

  This, for whatever reason, filled her with a hot purple shame.

  “I want nothing to do with you,” Violet said. “I want you to stay as far away from me as possible, okay?”

  “There’s something profoundly wrong with you, Violet,” she said, because she had always found combat easier than crying. “Like, for whatever reason you’re able to pass as a normal human being but there’s something deeply fucked about you, like core-level fucked.”

  “Coming from you,” Violet said, before she hung up, “that’s actually a compliment.”

  PART THREE

  FALL

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “This isn’t anything personal,” Wendy said to him. They were stuck in traffic. She wasn’t looking at him. He had his ugly flowered duffel in his lap, a bag someone sadistic had donated to Lathrop House. He shifted to look out the window. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Wendy glance over at him. What the fuck did he care? She didn’t owe him anything.

  “It just makes more sense,” she said. Then: “I’m really sorry, Jonah.”

  She actually sounded sorry, but he just rested his head against the window, staying silent, because he was sick of telling people that he was willing to settle for their shitty behavior.

  * * *

  —

  Marilyn watched the boy—whom she could not quite bring herself to call her grandson—shuffling around their house, poking his toe tentatively against the floorboards whenever he stopped, breathing in that phlegmy way he had, and she was reminded—problematically—of when they’d brought Loomis home from the shelter, of how reluctant and skittish he’d been, surreptitiously sniffing their scents when he thought they weren’t looking.

  “So this is it,” she said, throwing her arms out expansively. She colored. She’d meant it as a joke but she realized, standing in her kitchen, amid its disarray and utter familiarity, that their house must seem huge to him; that—without four girls sharing the space anymore—it was huge. “It’ll be nice to have a teenager in the house again,” she said, and she meant it, though the idea of uttering such a statement back when she’d had teenagers in the house was laughable.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked. “What could I make you? A sandwich? Some—” She opened the refrigerator and faltered. She knew only the culinary catalogs of her own children—Liza liked strawberry jam but not grape; Violet liked peanuts but not peanut butter; Wendy, for all those dark years, refused to touch anything white; Gracie favored grilled cheese sandwiches cut into four vertical strips—most of which had been rendered obsolete by the maturation of their palates. What did teenage boys eat?

  “I’m good for now,” he said.

  “Well, help yourself whenever. There’s—you know, whatever’s in the fridge, and we keep snacks in the pantry.” They’d kept snacks in the pantry when the girls lived at home. Now it was mostly full of Loomis’s accessories and frightening, expensive bits of other animals, livers and lamb shanks, that had been freeze-dried and sold to them by an upscale “canine marketplace” in downtown Oak Park. She would send David to the grocery later for human snacks.

  At the dinner table that evening, they eyed each other warily, exchanged shy smiles over the salad. Loomis watched them, forlorn, from the doorway, sequestered there behind a baby gate because she didn’t want him scaring Jonah away from his dinner. The boy didn’t look malnourished, exactly, but his skin had a mushroom pallor and she couldn’t tell if it was because of his diet or the fact that he, like many kids today, spent all of his time indoors.

  “I never had a dog growing up, either,” David said. “But they really— You’d be surprised how they grow on you.”

  Jonah smiled tightly, examining Loomis out of the corner of his eye.

  She checked on him later that night, stood in the doorway of Liza’s old room. She had the strange impulse to tuck him in, though he was neither in bed nor of an appropriate age.

  “So sleep well, okay?” she said. He swiveled back and forth in the desk chair. “There’s extra blankets if you get cold. Can I wake you for school?”

  “I have an alarm on my phone,” he said.

  “Well, what time do you normally get up, just in case?”

  “In case what?”

  “In case your alarm doesn’t go off. Or you sleep through it.”

  Suddenly, blurred beneath the contours of his face, she saw a familiar amusement, the same exasperation with which the girls used to regard her when she tried to coordinate their morning routines.

  “Mom, it’s not like a NASA mission,” Violet had said once, and David, later, when they were alone, had supplied gently, “Well, honey, it’s just that you have a tendency to overplan.”

  “Seven-thirty,” Jonah said.

  “Do you snooze? Is there an absolute latest time you want to be woken up?”

  “I don’t snooze,” he said. There was the hint of a smile again.

  “Seven-thirty, then.”

  “Thanks. But I’ll set my alarm.”

  “Sure.” She nodded. “Yes. And David can drive you to school, if you want.”

  “I’m fine to walk. Thanks.”

  “Well, you can decide in the morning.” She looked around the room, the biggest bedroom in the house besides hers and David’s. It still smelled like Liza, still featured the most tasteful of her Smashing Pumpkins posters and the antique dresser that she had painted a garish shade of acrylic green during a fit of teenage rebellion. “You should make the space your own. Let me know if there’s anything you’d like. A different desk. Or a reading chair.”

  “No, this is all good. Thanks.”

  “You don’t have to thank me,” she said. “I think you’ve filled your quota.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t—”

  She smiled, and—at once unthinking and entirely calculated—she bent to kiss his forehead. He smelled waxy, like old bar soap.

  “Nobody in this family credits me for having a sense of humor,” she said, “but it’s my personal opinion that I’m far funnier than the rest of them.”

  * * *

  —

  His grandparents were doing something in the kitchen that it seemed like he shouldn’t be watching. He’d just gone to get a snack. The house was, suddenly, filled with snacks, the good kind that Hanna would never buy, granola bars with chocolate chips and fresh pineapple in clear plastic vats of juice and non-gluten-free pretzels and unfathomable varieties of Little Debbies—oatmeal creme pies and the chocolate-covered wafers with peanut butter. He could have snacks whenever he wanted, though if Marilyn caught him while he was looking she would offer to make him something healthier and more substantial, and he had trouble saying no both because he felt awkward and because she made good sandwiches, cut up apples in a triangular way that made them taste better. He’d just wanted some sesame sticks, maybe, or a can of seltzer, but when he reached the doorway he saw them together, having what seemed to be a normal conversation—he heard David say, “They seemed like weeds b
ut I wasn’t sure so I just left them”—except Marilyn was leaning against the sink and David was pressed into her, closer than he ever saw Hanna and Terrence get.

  “Aster, probably,” Marilyn said. Her arms were looped around his back. “Or maybe white snakeroot, but I’ve never really seen those around here. There are some in Columbus Park, I think. Never in our yard. But you never know.”

  “We can look together tomorrow.”

  Their mouths seemed uncomfortably close. He thought of Wendy in bed with the redhead and felt his face get hot. David bowed his head and kissed Marilyn’s neck, not like the goth couple in his gym class but just quickly, once.

  He was frozen in the doorway, unsure of whether he should hightail it back upstairs or go into the kitchen or just stand there until someone noticed him. The back stairs creaked conspicuously. The hallway to the front stairs creaked too. He was stuck, watching, and a weird part of him didn’t want to move, wanted to see what happened, wanted to understand this new faction of human life where people willingly stood so close to each other, consciously chose to talk about weeds with their crotches touching. They were old, definitely, but they didn’t seem old.

  “The martyred saint, shouldering the burden of the weeds,” Marilyn said. He was glad that he couldn’t see David’s hands.

  “What does that mean?” David’s hands were suddenly at his sides, and he took a step back so Marilyn’s arms straightened a little at the elbows.

  “Oh, God, honey, I’m kidding.”

  “I was weeding your garden for you.”

  “I know that. Lord. Sweetheart, I know. You’re an excellent weeder. It’s a huge help. Knock this off. I didn’t mean anything. I was joking.”

  “An excellent weeder?”

  Now Marilyn unlocked her hands and crossed her arms in front of her chest. He wished he’d made the decision to leave sooner. Walking in on a fight was way more awkward than walking in on whatever had been happening before it.

  “I think I’ve earned a little bit of credit,” she said. “You know what I meant. You’re deliberately misconstruing what I said because you’re in a mood.”

  “I’m not in a mood.”

  There was a silence, a moment during which Marilyn reached her hand up and ran it through David’s hair.

  “You know I appreciate everything you do during the day.” Jonah tested his weight backward to see if he might still be able to sneak upstairs. “And at night.” Her voice had changed. She tilted her face up to kiss David, and this time it lingered, and he watched as her knee appeared through the line between David’s legs, and at that point he knew he had to go but when he actually made the leap the floorboards creaked louder than he thought possible and he froze again and when he looked up they’d pulled apart and were staring at him, wide-eyed.

  “Oh, honey,” Marilyn said. She picked up the dish brush from beside the sink, holding it weirdly in her hand like a wand. “Hi. I didn’t see you. Did you need something?”

  “No,” he said. “No, I just— I was looking— I was going to get a snack.”

  “Sure,” Marilyn said. She turned on the tap and started scrubbing at one of the pans from dinner. “Don’t mind us. Just catching up. Can I make you something or are you—”

  “No,” he said. “No, I—just wanted—some fruit or something.”

  “There’s apples,” Marilyn said. “Or plums, but I’m not sure they’re ripe yet.”

  “An apple’s fine,” he said, going to the fridge, just trying to get it over with.

  “How’s the homework coming?” David asked. “Chemistry’s good?”

  “More or less.”

  “If you’re having any trouble, you’ve come to the right place,” Marilyn said. “Someone in this room got me through a couple of brutal physics exams.” Jonah turned from the fridge just in time to see them looking at each other again in this sort of dazed, goofy way.

  “Not sure how much help I’ll be, but I’d be happy to take a look,” David said.

  “Thanks. I’ll let you know.” In fact his chemistry homework was going terribly; the only thing he remembered from the semester was the day his teacher turned vials of liquid a bunch of different colors while playing “The Rainbow Connection.”

  “I have a feeling you’re both downplaying your strengths,” Marilyn said.

  He exerted a single, forced heh before he hightailed it back upstairs with his apple.

  1992–1993

  It was David’s suggestion; they were sitting up in bed and Marilyn had presented him with a gamut of boys’ names, and he said, “How about Grace?” It came to him, his mom’s name, surfaced from the repressive caverns of his memory, and Marilyn, who had just suggested Christopher, smiled grudgingly at him and said, “He might get made fun of at school.”

  “We should have something on the back burner. Just in case your ability to see the future proves faulty. Which of course it shouldn’t, considering your glowing track record.”

  She laughed, leaning into him. The pregnancy was making them both feel youthful and giddy. “Fine,” she said. “On the off chance that I’m wrong—which I’m not, ye of little faith—you can choose a girl’s name.”

  “Grace.” His grief over his mother cropped up only occasionally, usually at the most bizarre and least opportune times, and saying her name aloud then felt weighty and sad. His early memories were composed almost exclusively of sterile hallways in state hospitals; of his mom, toward the end when they’d deemed the cancer inoperable, reaching out a stick-thin arm to touch a hand to his forehead. His own children, extant and as yet unborn, aroused this kind of nostalgia—the ability to look beyond the day-to-day and see the inextricable ties that looped back generations, like dipping wires between telephone poles. Marilyn picked up on it immediately, her intuitive wifely radar kicking into high alert. She kissed the side of his head next to his ear.

  “I love it.” She rested her head against his shoulder. “It’s a beautiful name.” She allowed them both a moment—she knew he felt more comfortable when she was the one commandeering their collective ability to emote. After a minute she squeezed his knee. “It’s a shame we won’t get to use it on our little accident.” It was his turn to laugh at the joke that neither of them dared to make unless they were alone in their bedroom. Their secret: that this baby had not been an accident. Everyone assumed so, considering the nine years that had elapsed since their last child, considering Marilyn’s age. It was assumed—reckless Catholics—that they had simply had an accident. He didn’t like the word, had been glad when his wife started to make light of it, but of course Liza had been an accident. Violet, conceived when Wendy was only two months old, had been an accident. And Wendy—well.

  But this baby—Grace—had not been a slipup. The idea of her had been conjured between them as they sat on the front stairs, a late summer evening when the girls were playing basketball together in twilight. He watched his daughters getting along, playing Horse. These little almost-women. Even Liza, their baby, seemed to have awakened one day suddenly sporting long coltish legs and the wide, knowing eyes of an adult. He felt an indistinct sadness.

  “They’re all so tall,” Marilyn had said, and he knew at once that it was a loaded declaration; her voice was both woeful and contemplative. “I don’t think I’m ready for them all to be so tall.”

  “Me neither,” he’d said, and she’d turned to look at him. They had, over time, developed this sophisticated secret language in which his simple declaration of me neither actually meant I agree, let’s have another baby, kid, and neither of them had to say the words.

  “Really?” she said, and he shrugged.

  “Yeah. Let’s give it a go.”

  In bed, now, beside his wife, their twelve-week-old new baby in her belly beneath his palm: the result of their giving it a go. And he felt unprecedentedly unburdened, blessedly solvent. Unworr
ied, not like he had been any of the previous times. They had a big house. He’d settled into a spot in a private family practice in the neighborhood, regular hours and appropriate compensation. The lines in his wife’s face had receded—were beginning to be filled in by her pregnancy, though she, for the first time, had been sick in the mornings—and they were old enough, finally, at a comfortable enough station in life that they could reasonably make decisions like this one. A tiny baby, one who would keep her parents young and unite her older sisters. Grace. He imagined his mother proud of him, father of daughters, stable provider. His most tangible memory of her was the smell of the hospital: lemon cleanser, human secretions, and rot. His kids would have more than that, and he knew she would be glad for it.

  “Oh, lord,” Marilyn said, tensing suddenly next to him as though privy to his olfactory memories. She rose from the bed, hand over her mouth, and made her way to their bathroom. He followed, squatted beside her and held back her hair.

  Their joy over the news was tarnished somewhat the following week, when they sat down to tell the children.

  “A baby?” Liza asked. “I don’t—get it.”

  Beside him on the couch, Marilyn gripped his hand. There was a ludicrous book in the waiting room of his office called How You Were Made, which contained startlingly graphic depictions of female anatomy—blood-red uteri and a cervix like a gash—alongside utterly cartoonish renderings of the male counterparts. Could they show that to Liza, those bow-tied sperm with optimistic smiley faces journeying valiantly into the depths?

  “Some gross tadpoles came out of Dad’s penis and swam in between Mom’s legs,” Wendy said casually, “and that’s what makes a baby and then it grows really big like a watermelon and Mom has to push it out of her butt and there’s all this blood and stuff.”

  “Wendy,” he said, just as Marilyn was saying, “Oh, gosh, honey, no.”

  “Aren’t you kind of old?” Violet asked, her gaze on them narrow and sharp.