“Not like me. I’ll always have to tell people that I knew my dad only when I was eight. And if he gives me back to my mom, then I will also have to say that I only knew him for one year.”
I type tomorrow’s date into the computer. My mother wanted to go today, but I don’t see how that’s possible. And Natalie says it’s fine. He’s stable.
That word again: stable. It’s only a word you use when somebody isn’t really, really okay. I’m stable, for instance, but if I answered stable to the question How are you? people would think that I wasn’t doing well at all.
American Airlines has no flights in the afternoon, just at 5:45 a.m., when I would rather not go.
“Are you making a reservation for me, too?” Fritzie asks.
“Honey, I can’t. I’m sorry. Just my mom and I are going this time.”
“I told you I wanted to go. Please take me.”
“I know you did, and I’d like to, but it’s just not going to work out. We’re going to be spending so much time in the hospital, and it’s not a place they let children come. And we’ve got things we’re going to have to decide and all.”
“Like what?”
Why did I say we had to decide things? “I’m not sure.”
“Like whether he’s going to die?”
“No. He’s going to live.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Well, I’m pretty sure.”
“Pretty sure is not the same as sure. Just like I’m not sure if my mom is still alive in Italy. She probably is, but I didn’t talk to her since Christmas because I don’t like to talk on the phone with her, so I don’t know. She could be dying right this minute, and I wouldn’t know about it. Do you ever think of things like that? I think about that sometimes.”
“Well,” I say. “You’re right. I suppose a lot of things in life are like that, you know. Things are probably good, because they’re mostly always okay, but . . .”
“But we don’t know for sure.”
“I guess we can’t.”
“That’s why I do my little things.”
Sunday, 1:10 p.m. Delta from JFK. Only fifty million dollars. Sixty million if you want to check a bag. My mother is going to need to do that, but I probably don’t.
“Let me see what you’re doing,” she says.
“Here, you can sit on my lap. See? I press this button here, and then it already has my mother’s credit card information because she recently flew here . . . and . . .”
“So your mom is paying?”
“Yep. She’s nice that way. So I press this, and voilà! We’re reserved.”
She hits me on the arm five times.
“Why do you always hit me?”
“It brings you good luck.”
“Wait. Your hitting me brings me good luck? I think it brings me bruises.”
“Nope.” She smiles self-consciously. “I do that to bring you good luck for flying in the airplane. And last night I jumped on the bed five times so Patrick would have a good show. And sometimes I jump off the couch three times to help Ariana with her videos.”
“Ah, Fritzie, Fritzie, Fritzie, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I’m going to miss you when I’m gone. But it’s only for a few days. You know that, right?” I hope it’s only a few days. I probably shouldn’t have said that, setting up expectations.
“I know.”
“And you’ll help Patrick take care of you?”
She nods and looks down at her hands.
Later, as I’m tucking her in bed after a tiresome argument about her theory that you can actually damage yourself by washing your hair two times in one week, she bursts into tears and clings to me, and tells me that my mom is nicer to her than I am, and that she hates the way I cook eggs, and that she didn’t ever want to mention this but I look totally fat in the jeans I love the most. And for good measure she says, “And I hope you stay in Florida and never come back.”
When I go out into the living room, to my surprise, Patrick is sitting there, scrolling through his phone. We haven’t been talking, except for me to tell him about my father, which I managed to do in three short sentences before I turned on my heel and left the room. And now I say to him that he has his work cut out for him, keeping Fritzie.
“Does anyone really think I can do this?” he says, without looking at me.
“Who knows? You’ll probably do better than I do with her,” I say. “At least she won’t tell you that you look fat in your jeans.”
“Yeah, well. We’ll see how it goes when I’m the only one she has left,” he says.
It makes my heart hurt to look at him. And when I get back, I’m going to have to start planning for a life without him living here. Eventually it will be just me in this big old brownstone—and what then? Maybe I’ll start renting out the apartments again—his studio and the basement. Get some new people. Invite some chaos in.
But no mental picture comes to mind.
My future feels blank. A scary, lonely blank canvas.
The next day Patrick rouses himself enough to be able to kiss me on the cheek, and he tells me that he’s sorry about my dad and that I shouldn’t worry about anything back here, and he’ll call if he has any questions about the care and feeding of Fritzie. But I know he won’t, so I tell him what she likes to take for school lunch and that he does not have to tolerate her walking backward on the low stone walls on the way to the bus stop, and also that he should call Maybelle if he has any questions about school. Ariana is also a very helpful person. For good measure, I tell him a parenting tip I’ve picked up on the playground: children kind of like it when you tell them no. Something about how it makes them feel more secure.
And then he hugs and kisses my mom, while I go upstairs to give the sullen and furious Fritzie a hug, and then the Uber is here, and it’s time to go to Florida.
Patrick walks us out to the curb, carrying my mother’s bags. “Call me and let me know how your father’s doing,” he says to me, and he gives me a limp hug.
“This is not the way I wanted to leave here,” says my mom as we climb into the car.
“Me neither,” I say, and I get a chill at how final everything sounds.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
PATRICK
The first thing that Fritzie does on Patrick’s watch is go into the bathroom and cut off most of her hair.
She comes into the living room afterward nonchalantly, as if she’d always had hair that looked like patches of it had been unevenly chewed by raccoons to within an inch of her scalp. She goes over to where Bedford is lying on the floor and lies down on top of him, humming.
Patrick, who has not been able to settle into doing anything in the half hour since Marnie and Millie left, has basically been pacing around the apartment, straightening the artwork on the wall, thinking about how much work he should do now that he’s officially back to being an artist, and also wondering what the hell is wrong with him that he doesn’t want to do any of it. He flops down onto the couch to contemplate the ceiling and find out if it has any answers for him, and that’s when he looks over at her.
At first he wants to burst out laughing, but then he realizes the true weirdness of the situation. Marnie has been gone for exactly thirty-five minutes and Fritzie already looks like a cross between a prisoner of war and Sinéad O’Connor. This is obviously a cry for help, and it’s obviously outside of anything he knows how to handle.
“Fritzie?” he says mildly. “What have you done to your hair?”
“It’s art, Patrick,” she says. “I arted my hair. I’m surprised you don’t know that. You’re an artist, aren’t you?”
Okay. So it’s art. Fine. Statement hair. But oh God.
He supposes there’s no point in yelling or getting hysterical. What’s done is done. He’ll have to watch her more carefully, that’s all he can do, before she decides to art anything else. Add it to the list of things he can’t fix.
This may be when he realizes something fundamenta
l to his life in the near future: he must go it alone. He knows that Marnie would say that Ariana would be willing to help him out and that he should avail himself of her kindness and smarts. But he is not going to do it. He steels his jaw and makes up his mind to endure. He has plenty of practice at enduring, and endure he will.
They are at loose ends all day. He thinks he should clean out his studio a bit, but when he goes in there, he can’t bear to tackle any of it. The sun coming through the windows is watery and noncommittal, and the studio is cold and he doesn’t feel like making a fire in the fireplace. He doesn’t feel like doing anything.
He wanders back into the apartment. He should probably return to sleeping over here now, now that he’s in charge of Fritzie. The bedroom he and Marnie share, when he goes in there, feels off-limits somehow, like it’s not his place anymore. The bed’s unmade, which makes sense. Marnie’s way of letting him know he should change the sheets. That’s exactly the project he should take on now. Forward motion. He strips the sheets off and then the pillowcases. For a moment he is stopped dead in his tracks when he discovers that Marnie’s pillow smells like her, the way her hair smells when she’s lying next to him—kind of a floral scent, and something else that’s just her. He’d know it anywhere.
“What are you doing?” Fritzie says from the doorway.
“I’m changing the sheets.”
“No, you’re not. You’re smelling the pillow.” She comes in, followed by Bedford, and the two of them get up on the bare mattress. She starts jumping up and down, higher each time, until Bedford can’t take it anymore and gets down. Patrick can’t take it anymore either, but he knows that if he asks her to stop, it’ll end up being a whole discussion. She’ll have facts at her disposal that prove mattress-jumping is good for the environment or for health or, God knows, even for mattresses. Living with her is like living with a pint-sized, eagle-eyed, hypermanic lawyer, somebody who knows where all the loopholes are and where all the bodies are buried.
Later he talks to Philip Pierpont on the phone. The numbers were good for the weekend. Successful show. Maybe now he’ll do more work? People want to buy the sculptures.
“They’re not for sale,” says Patrick. “I want to keep them.”
Pierpont starts in with wanting to negotiate. “None of them?”
None.
“Then do more, my good man. If you don’t want to let these particular ones go, can’t you copy them and do more of the same? You’ve got real feeling in these.”
No. He can’t even listen to this kind of talk. Copy them? Like he’s some kind of hack? Doing this just for the bucks?
He takes Fritzie and Bedford to the park, and that feels almost like a hero’s journey, just getting the two of them ready and then making their way along the sidewalk. Fritzie argues about wearing a hat, and he insists, especially now that she doesn’t have any hair. He trudges along while the two of them—Bedford and Fritzie both—leap and cavort their way along in front of him. He’d never particularly thought about the word cavort, but there’s no other description for this half skipping and half jumping they do. It starts to snow while they’re at the park, the sky suddenly letting loose of all the cold it’s been holding on to, and he stands shivering while flakes fall on his head and shoulders, and he watches while Bedford and Fritzie run back and forth, chasing a tennis ball, going further and further away. He walks along the path, sees them in the field, jumping and throwing and barking and running.
How many Januarys ago was it that he’d had to rescue Bedford after he got hit by a car, and then come to this very spot in the park to find Marnie to tell her? She’d been out searching for that mutt, who for some reason only known to his insane doggy mind, had left her at the park and headed for home by himself and then had gotten hit by a car. Patrick had been on the verge of leaving Brooklyn. Everything was ending for him here. That day he was packing up the truck. And yet . . . that day had been the turning point for them, he’s heard her say when she tells their story. And it may be true. Certainly that was probably the day he figured out that he wasn’t going to be able to live without loving her—or at least admitting it to himself. No other force could have pried him loose from his plan to stay a hermit and move to Wyoming. Nothing but love would have made him go out into the street and pick up her bleeding dog and carry him to a veterinary hospital, insist on them fixing him, and then go search for her when he couldn’t reach her by cell phone.
It was love. He didn’t choose it, he hadn’t wanted to fall in love with her, but forces beyond his control seemed to set the whole love thing in motion, and he’d gone along. He had let life unthinkingly sweep him up in its moving current. Later that week, after the park incident, after he’d kissed her there in public, he’d moved upstairs to live with her, and he’d settled into the yin and yang and normality and laughter and strife and brooding and making up and kissing that comes with being part of a couple.
It turned out that love took over everything in life: who came to his house, what made him laugh, what his sleep was like. Love turned out to have power over even the sweatpants and shirts he wore, the smell of his sheets, over his opinions about cats and dogs, the pastries he baked and the music he listened to, his breathing and his heartbeats, the things he thought about in the shower . . . and the fears he kept secret because of how big they grew.
Now look at him. He’s all out of love. Who knew it was a commodity and you could use it up?
He’s cold. He stamps his feet and calls Fritzie and Bedford back. They’ve gotten yards and yards away by now out in the middle of the soccer field, and it’s snowing harder.
“Patrick! Patrick! Patrick!” Fritzie is calling and jumping up and down.
He cups his hands around his mouth. “Come back!”
“Patrick! Patrick! Patrick!” She must say it seventy billion more times. Has any human ever used his name so many times in one day? He doesn’t think so.
“Come! Back!” he hollers.
He looks for Bedford and doesn’t see him. Shit. Is that damn dog lost again? He’s going to have to go running through the field, isn’t he, and into the woods, and out to the avenue to see just where this idiot mutt might have gotten himself to. He can’t bear it. He simply cannot relive any of that.
“Patrick!” She is screaming it now, cupping her hands around her mouth.
“What?” he calls back. He starts to run toward her.
“I WANT PIZZA FOR DINNER!”
This is what she wanted to tell him? He slows down, catches his breath. He sees Bedford, galloping in that inelegant way of dogs, heading toward Fritzie with his ears flying straight out, looking like they could take him happily airborne if they had just a little more curve to them, a little bit of lift.
“PATRICK, CAN WE HAVE PIZZA FOR DINNER? CAN WE HAVE PIZZA FOR DINNER? CAN WE? CAN WE? CAN WE?”
There are going to need to be rules, he thinks. This sort of thing can’t keep happening.
They decide upon some rules while they’re eating dinner. And yes, it’s pizza—takeout pizza. Patrick insists on taking it home, above all her objections. He knows he cannot sit in the brightly lit pizza parlor, which pretty much consists of a long counter and two tables. The place is taken up with teenagers, rough-talking kids milling around in knit caps and sweatshirts, cruising for things to point out, constantly saying variations of the word yo, while they share a paper plate filled with greasy garlic knots. Patrick does not want to be the subject of teenaged attention while he eats a pizza with a pint-sized POW.
She argues and argues, but he wins.
“It’s because you’re afraid the teenagers would talk to you,” she says as they’re walking home with the cardboard box of pizza, which is leaking grease onto his gloves.
“No, it isn’t.”
“Yes, it is. You hate talking to people, and you hate it more when people talk to you.”
He makes himself stay silent. He wonders if he can make a rule that she is not to make any comments or observ
ations about his character. She is stomping along next to him, with her jaw set in that way she has when she feels she’s been wronged.
“Okay, we’re going to have some rules,” he says, once they’re home at the kitchen table. Even though it’s six o’clock, he’s made himself a pot of coffee to try to give himself a modicum of energy to make it through the next few hours until her bedtime.
She slouches further into her chair and sticks out her tongue at him.
“Number one. No running away from me when we’re out together.”
“Okay, but what if—”
“Nope. You have to stay with me. At all times. I must be able to see you.”
She slumps over, puts her head on her arm.
“And in the mornings, you need to get yourself ready for school. Clothing, shoes, homework, backpack. Can you do that?”
“What are you going to be doing?”
“I will be making your breakfast and your lunch.”
“What if I want school lunch that day?”
“Then we’ll talk about it, and you probably can. Now, next. What do you do after school? You go to an after-school program, am I right?”
“No. I got kicked out of it.”
“Kicked out? What did you—never mind. So what do you do after school?”
She laughs. “You know literally nothing about my life, do you?”
“I’ve been a little preoccupied . . .”
She stands up and comes around to his side of the table and sticks out her hand to shake his. “Hello. Let me introduce myself. My name is Fritzie Peach Delaney. At least that’s my new name for while I’m here. My real name, if you want to know, is Frances Elizabeth Farrell. And I’m eight years old, and I have two bio-parents who don’t know anything about me. Thank you very much, and now I will sit down again.” She takes a bow and goes back to her seat.
Fritzie Peach? The kid is named Peach? How did that get by him?
“Oh, and after school, I usually get met at the bus stop by a nice lady named Marnie MacGraw—maybe you remember her? And she usually takes me to her store, where they sell flowers and Marnie knows a lot about love, so she talks about love all day with people. People are always coming in and hugging her and kissing her and telling her things, and she tells them things, and sometimes everybody dances. There is a lot of talking. And yoga.”
A Happy Catastrophe Page 27