A Happy Catastrophe

by Dawson, Maddie

  “Mom, wait—”

  But it’s no use. Now she’s back to being Brisk Mom, the one who used to make us clean our rooms on Saturday morning before we could watch cartoons. “No, no more. Anyway, you’re at work, so I’ll let you go now. Just . . . wanted a nice little chat. Maybe someday you’ll really explain what you do. I can take it, you know. I’m open to magic. Might even need a little for myself. But you take care. I love you.”

  “Mom?” I say again, but she’s already hung up.

  I wander back to the Frippery, and because I’m a hopeless oversharer, I flop down on one of the beanbags and tell Lola and Kat and the Amazings about my meat loaf–making mama and that she’s saying she’s done with putting up with her life as it now stands. They make sympathetic noises about how my mom is probably just going through a little bad spell, and that she’ll be okay, which is what I think, too.

  And then, now actually high on oversharing, I tell them all about how I might be pregnant, and that I’ve been googling symptoms of pregnancy, and already I think I have at least three of them. Including some very nice shine to my hair, even if I do say so myself. And yesterday I was craving a chicken taco with sour cream, which I hardly ever want.

  “You should start taking folic acid like immediately,” says Kat.

  Ariana eases herself right side up and looks at me, squinting a bit. “Your hair does look phenomenal,” she says. “My friend Janelle just found out she’s for sure pregnant, and her hair is, like, gorgeous. Really super shiny.”

  Charmaine says, “Ariana! You’re not supposed to be telling people!”

  “I can tell people because Janelle is telling everyone. Besides which, Marnie doesn’t even know Janelle.” She looks at me. “It was supposed to be a big secret because Janelle is in our grade, and so when she first found out, there was a lot of drama around what to do about it, but now she’s decided to keep the baby and she’s even super excited about it. I think she’s crazy, frankly, but she’s got all that mystical stuff going on—you know, bringer of new life and all that. She says she feels like a goddess.”

  Lola clears her throat. “Well, Marnie dear, how is Patrick feeling about you and him having a baby?”

  “Possibly having a baby,” I say. “It’s definitely not anything official.”

  “Have you taken a pregnancy test yet?” she asks kindly.

  “Oh! Oh, no. It’s waaay too soon for that.”

  “Oh,” she says. She lifts her eyebrows.

  “Yeah, it’s just since Monday,” I tell her. “Four days ago. Not that pregnant yet. Even if I am. You know.”

  “I see,” she says kindly and looks down at her knitting again, probably embarrassed for me.

  “This is a very premature announcement,” I say, clearing my throat. “A lot of people probably would have kept quiet about it at this stage.”

  Kat says, “Say! Not to change the subject or anything, but did that woman with the kid ever come back? The one from the other day? Remember? She was from Great Britain, and she so wanted to talk to you.”

  “Nope,” I say. “Can’t say that I talked to anybody like that this week.”

  “Weird. She seemed so downtrodden. It was like nobody ever needed a matchmaker more. I was sure she’d come back.”

  “Well,” I say. “She didn’t.”

  When I look up, all of them are looking at me with pity in their eyes. Like maybe I’m hopelessly misguided or something.

  And here we are: there’s been a little shift in the atmospheric conditions. Nothing really, really major, you see, but before long, I spill my cup of tea and my favorite mug breaks, and then later, Lola’s knitting unravels when she puts it down. The Wi-Fi goes down, and the cash register stops working. A customer comes in and complains that some flowers she bought last week aren’t still fresh, like she would have expected.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  MARNIE

  All the way home on the subway, I try different techniques to keep myself from feeling bad. It’s like there’s a dark mood hovering over me, waiting to settle into my bones and tissues. Maybe it’s hearing about my mom’s unhappiness, or maybe it’s talking about the might-be pregnancy with my Frippery friends and realizing how much I want this to be true and how sad I’m going to be if my one-time-only condom breakage didn’t miraculously lead to a pregnancy.

  Or maybe—although I hate to admit it—maybe sometimes there can be a mood heading for you, and you have to simply stand there and face it down.

  Blix would say to make friends with it, not to fight it. She’d say moods have something they’re trying to tell us, and to let them come over you and settle into you, unflinching. That’s what she did with her cancer, I’ve heard. Which is a much harder thing to do than simply avoiding a bad mood. She didn’t go in for all those warrior metaphors about fighting cancer, not Blix. She did some spells to suggest it might leave her, but when the cancer gave her a sign that it was staying and that this was the end of her life, she didn’t fight anymore. She lovingly gave her tumor the name Cassandra and meditated on the fact that eighty-six years might be the life span she was allotted here on this Earth, and that death was simply a change of address anyway, and she was ready for some new digs.

  Anyway, just in case there was something I could do to head it off, before I left Best Buds, I took a peek in Blix’s book of spells. For good measure, I put some eucalyptus leaves and rose petals in a little silk sachet and tucked it into my bra. A little protection spell. Couldn’t hurt.

  I text Patrick when I get off the subway and am turning onto our street.

  Almost home, I write. Any interest in a chicken from Paco’s for dinner?

  The three dots show up like he’s writing to me, but then they disappear.

  I wait. Nothing for a long time, and then they show up once again.

  And disappear again.

  Oh, for heaven’s sake, I think. Is he so upset about this baby talk business that he can’t even send a proper text? I cross the street and go into Paco’s and grab a chicken from the rotisserie oven. Paco is in the back, so Dunbar rings it up and gives me a smile.

  “Paco wants me to tell you that if you need more food tonight, we can bring some over,” he says. He has a funny look on his face. (Of course he does because everything is a little weird today.)

  “No, this will be fine, I’m sure,” I tell him.

  It’s seven thirty when I get back outside, and the sky is looking threatening. The last rays of the sun are breaking through some fairly ominous clouds. The weather is in a mood, too.

  I’ll go home, I think, and I’ll try not to bring up babies or condom breakages or teacher conferences. I’ll be chill. Patrick and I might have enough time to eat the chicken up on the rooftop before the storm hits. Maybe I’ll phone my mom later and see if she’s really okay. This day needs to shuffle on out of here. I should go to bed early, call an end to it.

  It’s dim in the hallway when I open the door, and I hear the soft murmur of voices. When I go into the living room, a silence falls. It takes my eyes a moment to adjust. And then I see: there, sitting on the living room couch is a woman with curly black hair and a serious look on her face, wearing a frilly sundress and stiletto high heels.

  And Patrick is standing by the fireplace looking pale and rather like a specter of himself, formal and uncomfortable. He casts me a miserable look, but I can’t study him now, because my eye is caught by a little girl who is sitting next to Bedford on the floor, a child wearing a blue sunsuit and a backward Yankees baseball cap, who now leaps up and starts jumping up and down, rather like there’s an invisible pogo stick attached to her, and she’s singing some tuneless chanting thing.

  A little girl! I love little girls.

  But this one. It takes me a moment to realize that there’s something even more interesting about this one, and then it hits me that—oh my God, she is the spitting image of Patrick.

  I can’t stop staring at her, and I’m smiling so hard my cheeks are hurting. I m
ight be just about to drop the rotisserie chicken. I actually feel a bit wobbly, I think, and Patrick moves swiftly across the room, and he takes the chicken out of my hands, and he puts his mouth next to my ear.

  “This is the very craziest thing,” he says. “You’re not going to believe . . .”

  He stops talking because the little girl is hopping over toward me on one foot, and Bedford follows her, wagging as hard as he can.

  “Hi, hi, hi!” she says, jumping up and down, her cap flying off. A bunch of Patricky brown hair flops against her forehead just like his does. “Are you Marnie, the matchmaker lady? Do you want to see me do a cartwheel? I can do twelve in a row! And guess what we just found out: Patrick is my real bio-daddy! And that’s why we’re in Brooklyn, which I so did not know until one hour ago. I thought we were here to go to Coney Island and see the Statue of Liberty, but that was just what we were doing while my mom figured out what to do! So that means I have known for one whole hour that I have a real daddy who is alive! And I already texted my friend Gaia and she texted back NO WAY all in capital letters because that means she’s yelling.”

  “Fritzie,” says the woman on the couch. “Sit down.”

  I swivel my eyes over to the woman, and she looks back at me without smiling.

  “This is Fritzie,” she says with a dry little laugh. “And I’m Tessa. Sorry for the surprise here. I’m from the past.”

  “Would you like some chicken?” I say.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  PATRICK

  Why, yes, just as Patrick suspected, they would like chicken. That would be so nice, Tessa said.

  And oh, she then wanted to know, had Marnie gotten that chicken from across the street, by chance, because she and the kid had just been over there. Such nice men running that store. They’d told her which house was Patrick’s.

  Patrick couldn’t believe all this was happening, all this comfortable chatter. Chicken? Seriously? This proved what he’d always suspected, that women were four steps ahead of men when it came to knowing what to do, even in untenable situations. Like this one.

  So apparently, when you were facing your former accomplice from a meaningless two-night stand and her daughter, it was food that was needed. Chicken, then.

  He was almost always clueless. When the doorbell rang, he’d actually thought maybe Marnie had forgotten her key, or perhaps Paco was running over, as he sometimes does, with some new creation for Patrick to taste.

  Instead, he’d flung open the door—he might have even been smiling—and there was Tessa Farrell standing in front of him, looking at a kid who was hanging off the side of the stoop, swinging her bare, mosquito-bitten legs back and forth and fighting to hold on to a small pink rolling suitcase and a piece of dirty white fluff.

  “Patrick!” Tessa said. She turned and smiled at him. “Surprise!”

  He was caught off guard. He said hi and then didn’t know what to say.

  “Do you know who I am?” she said. She crinkled up her eyes at him, enjoying her moment of power here.

  He nodded. But would he have recognized her if he hadn’t heard from Elizabeth that she was in Brooklyn? He’s not sure. Their association had been so brief, after all. And mostly in the dark. He remembers the curly black hair and thick eyebrows that looked like they might have been painted on with a magic marker, and the English accent. She still had all that, of course. But she’d changed. She looked more upholstered somehow, and older. Perhaps a bit gloomier. She hadn’t changed as much as he had, of course, a fact that he saw in her face even as she tried to hide it.

  “You’re in shock,” she said. “I’ve startled you. But—well, here we are. This is my daughter, Fritzie.” She smiled and gestured to the little girl to come over to her. The little girl—a blur of blue with a slim pale face and straight brown hair—stuck her fingers in her mouth and leaned against her mother and regarded him seriously.

  “This is Patrick, honey,” Tessa said. She was giving him an appraising look, followed immediately with a big, artificial smile. It was Reaction Number Four of the reactions he could not bear: the one that said, You look absolutely tragically horrifying, and I feel so sorry for you that I’m simply going to pretend that everything is normal, and I hope you will, too. But there was another way, too, that she didn’t seem shocked by his features. That’s right: Elizabeth said she’d told Tessa.

  They seemed to expect to be invited in, so he let them inside, which meant that he had to pick up the little pink rolling suitcase and guide it over the step. It had a decal of the Little Mermaid on it.

  “Do you like The Little Mermaid?” he asked the little girl. Frisky? Frenzy?

  “No,” she said and looked right in his eyes. Unlike her mother, she didn’t seem sorry for him, not in the least. “I think she was very stupid, what she did.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She gave up her whole voice so she could get a pair of legs.”

  “What?” he said, startled. “Why would she do that? I thought she was a Disney princess and therefore smart and beautiful.”

  “Yeah, the Disney princesses do dumb things. She gave up her voice just so she could get some guy to like her.”

  He led the way into the living room and placed the suitcase near the door. “Well,” he said, amused in spite of himself. “Disney has some explaining to do on that one. Voices or legs? You don’t hear of guys having to make that kind of choice, do you?”

  “No, you don’t,” the kid said. “Lots of Disney stories are like that. I’ll show you them if you want.”

  He felt a little pulse of alarm. Were they . . . staying? Had he missed something in the conversation with Elizabeth, zoned out at the part maybe where it was being explained that Tessa had a kid, and that both of them were intending to stay with him and Marnie? Or maybe he had somehow been signed up to take them around Brooklyn. He absolutely would not be a tour guide. No way. He’d explain, if necessary, that he is in the first stages of working on a painting, and now he needed to go back across the hall to the apartment containing his studio and get back to it. But here they were, in his living room, looking at the books on the shelf, the art on the wall (much of it his). Bedford came out from the kitchen, wagging all over, but wise old Roy made a beeline for one of the bedrooms. He hated company almost as much as Patrick did.

  “Sit down, sit down,” Patrick said, because it was unbearably awkward just having them stand around looking at stuff, and Tessa plopped down on the couch, saying something teacherly to her daughter about famous Brooklyn brownstones and the granite they’re made of. She seemed a little grayer and tireder than he remembered. Having a kid could do that to a person. She’d be, let’s see, forty-nine by now. Forty-eight? He felt a little flick of embarrassment, remembering that night, those two nights. He’d been so full of himself over getting a write-up in the local paper and having his work displayed in his hometown. “World premiere art opening of a brand-new talent!” That’s what the poster said.

  “Have you been living here long?” she said and looked around the room like maybe she was totaling up how much money a person would have to earn to live here.

  “Over seven years,” he said, clearing his throat. The kid put down a porcelain orange he made years ago. It made a sound when it went back on the shelf, and he tried to hide the shudder he felt.

  “Since the accident, then?”

  He turned his eyes back to her, and she said, “Oh, I’m sorry, are we not supposed to talk about the accident?”

  “No. It’s fine,” he said. “I talk about the accident nonstop. It’s my favorite topic.” Let’s see, he thought, if she understands sarcasm.

  The child—really, was she called Frisky?—was walking around the room picking up objects, and several were, like the orange, pieces of actual art that Patrick had made and which were very delicate. And which he could not duplicate. On account of the accident and his hands.

  “I’m sorry, but you shouldn’t . . .” he began, and hoped that Tessa would get t
he hint.

  “Mommy said you were in a big fire,” said the child.

  “Elizabeth told me,” said Tessa.

  The kid pointed to her own face. “It looks like it kind of melted you a little bit, right around your eye. Does it hurt?”

  “No,” he said. He never minded when children asked him about the accident. That was so much better than when they just looked scared out of their minds. This girl, however, regarded him with a coolness he found unnerving.

  “It doesn’t hurt,” he said, “but you’re exactly right. It melted me. That’s very perceptive.”

  She nodded solemnly and then started dancing around the room—humming and spinning herself in a circle. A whirling dervish of a human. He was staring at her long tangled brown hair, hanging straight down her back in a way his sister would have said was messy and needed to be tamed. And then she stopped spinning and fell down on the floor, laughing, and he saw there was something about her eyes—the shape and the size and the color—and except for the fact that both of hers were exactly where they were supposed to be, and the skin around them was a healthy pink color, he saw that he could have been looking right into his own face.

  She looked just like school pictures of him. He did a little math in his head. Nine years ago . . .

  He swallowed hard and looked up at Tessa, who was watching him with a kind of satisfied smile on her face.

  “Yep, she’s yours,” she said.

  He didn’t want to meet her eyes, to see her slightly supercilious expression, that knowing smile that came from seeing him be shocked. But he couldn’t look away.

  He didn’t know what to say. The top of his head seemed to be growing warm. He wanted to excuse himself and go outside. Maybe start walking and just continue on, perhaps take a little discreet vomit break over by the tree on his way out of town.

  The child had been petting Bedford, who had lumbered over to see what the fuss was about when she fell to the floor, but now she got up and came over and stood close to Patrick. He could smell her breath and her shampoo and some undefinable kid smell that made him uncomfortable. How is it that all children manufacture that certain smell—sort of a mixture of socks, hair sweat, crayons, macaroni and cheese, and something close to slightly rancid butter?