Falling in Love with Natassia

by Anna Monardo

  Fuck him, Mary said to herself. She was sitting out on the stoop of the cottage reading Natassia’s journal. Week five of no smokes—not one—but tonight Mary was tempted. For the first time in nine months, Natassia was in the city without Mary, spending the night with Giulia, who had got tickets for some James Joyce thing at Symphony Space. Natassia’s birthday gift, which had taken a lot of prep work.

  Mary and Natassia, in a session with Heather, had talked the plan through. As Cather pointed out, there were lots of controls in place. Mary would put Natassia on the train, Giulia would meet her at the station. Giulia knew that Natassia was not to go to Lotte’s apartment by herself. Natassia was not to be left to walk around by herself. No hooking up with friends on this trip. Giulia was paranoid enough to make sure there wouldn’t be a slip. Kevin would drive Natassia back upstate the next day. “Do you feel all right in the car with him by yourself?” Mary had asked.

  Heather said, “That is a very good question to ask, Mary.”

  “Kevin? He’s a really good driver.”

  “Natassia, that’s not what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean. No, Kevin’s fine. With Kevin I feel safe.”

  Now, sitting on the stoop with the journal in her hands, Mary felt pretty shitty about herself, but if she didn’t read the journal how else could she find out, really, how the kid was after everything that had gone down? First her grandfather dead, then the deal with Christopher and Nora, now her father disappeared. Mary wasn’t taking any chances. She had a newspaper with her on the stoop, in case somebody came by and she had to hide the journal, which is exactly what she did now as Tomio drove by on the lawnmower. When he saw Mary, he raised his cap and nodded.

  “Hey, Tomio, how’re you doing? Nice night, huh?”

  He nodded again and smiled and left her alone, turned his mower so he could cut a wider swath around the flower gardens. Mary uncovered the journal and read on.

  I try to write, but it’s like we’re always waiting for the phone to ring. And then it doesn’t. Or it does, but it’s not Daddy. This is like, it’s different from waiting for the BF. Maybe I feel different, not so desperate. I want to write about what I’ve been thinking. It’s about context. My dad. HJJ tried saying the other day that he was, maybe, even with all his craziness, using his freedom for a purpose. Maybe all his “acting out” was for “the audience of his father,” a “cry for help,” and now the audience is gone and blah blah. I told HJJ to spare me the clichés. She’s bugging me, even though she’s probably right. I know she’s right. I just hate to hear her saying it. I’d like to take a break from therapy, but Mom won’t let me. It’s so weird to see Ms. No-Vocabulary turn into Therapy Mom of the Year. I think she actually thinks I still don’t know she’s in therapy. Like, who’re you making those private phone calls to all the time, your secret lover? She’s hurting about Dad. She keeps telling me, they all do, that if Dad’s using and drinking was his “cry for help” it wasn’t my responsibility to be the one to hear the call and try to help him. “Tell that to my superego,” I said to Mom, and she said, “Don’t get smart with me.”

  Tuesday, 6:10 p.m.

  HJJ keeps referring to Daddy as “Ross” instead of “your dad” or “your father,” and I told her to quit it. But I get the point. I’m supposed to see him as a separate person.

  Did you see how scared and sacred are the same, just transposed? Scared/sacred. [A poem?] Daddy, I’m scared sacred without you. The sacred/profane scariness of my poppy.

  “Coping mechanisms,” HJJ says.

  Friday…after dinner, 7:13 p.m.

  The words Mom and Dad are both palindromes. Backward and forward, they’re the same; you can’t escape them.

  HJJ told me, “You have to be vigilant. Hold what you know, hold it in your hands. And look at it. This sadness, Natassia, this loss is not the only thing you know in your life, there is your writing talent, your intelligence, your ability to love, your good health, your growing relationship with your mother, your studies, your growing relationship with your creativity. There is all of that. And parallel to it, along with it, there is this darkness and sadness and loss and the damage your father and grandfather experienced, and your mother, too—and Christopher, of course, and Nora—that predated these current losses, predated the damage done to you.”

  I love how HJJ talks. Mom and Kevin love when I imitate HJJ.

  It should have been enough for Mary that she’d arrived at a part of the journal that made her smile. But it wasn’t. Mary flipped forward and read.

  Daddy disappeared one month ago today. Every once in a while, I feel like I’m going to do the little cuts again. I was no way going to tell HJJ, but then, weirder than weird, she asks me, “The impulse to hurt yourself? Is that part of these days for you?” I cried a bunch. HJJ said it’s good I told her. I was wearing a skirt, and she even made me show her my legs and roll up my sleeves, but there wasn’t a scratch. “I’m not doing it,” I told her, it’s just that this pain is so always there. HJJ is teaching me that inside me there’s this pattern that happens when I feel overwhelmed. First sad, then pissed off, then I feel like I hate myself and I turn on myself. It’s a very clear pattern. She says this pattern got set up because I didn’t have anybody really to talk to, and that’s how I’ll continue to handle it until we set up a new way for me to cope. She asked me if I was going to hurt myself in New York. I said no. So she said it was okay for me to go and we’d tell Mom at the next session.

  Mary stopped reading. “Shit.” But she wasn’t surprised. She’d had a sense that’s what she was going to find even before she picked up the pink folder. That’s why she had picked it up. Instinct. Gripping the bowl of an empty pipe, Mary looked up from her lap and took a deep breath. The days were getting so damn long now. She had been sitting on the stoop for over an hour, and still there was light in the sky. In her mind, Mary raced through the list of possible actions: She could find Tomio and get a key to one of the school vans and rush down to the city. She could call Claudia and ask her for a ride to the train—there were still two more trains that night. She could call Giulia, but they were probably at the performance. She could leave a phone message. Urgent. Call me. She could call Lotte and ask her to go over to Giulia’s and wait until Natassia got home. She could call Ross.

  The impossibility of the last idea made Mary see the ridiculousness of the next-to-last idea, then the inappropriateness of all the others. What would she say? I need the school van because my daughter wrote in her journal?

  Natassia had not cut herself.

  Natassia had thought about cutting herself.

  Natassia had talked to HJJ about the impulse to cut herself.

  Then she’d written about it in her journal.

  Tomorrow Natassia would be home. She was coming back in the early afternoon, because she and Mary were scheduled for a session with Heather. All together, they would talk about what Mary had read. Mary would have to confess, finally, that she read the journal, that she’d always read the journal.

  The smell of cut grass was everywhere. In the twilight, bugs were coming out. Mary thought about leaving a message on Cather’s machine. She thought about it a good long couple of minutes. I need a cigarette. But there were none in the house, so Mary went inside to work on her income-tax returns. In April she’d had to file for an extension, but the cool thing was that this year she was able to list her daughter as her dependent.

  MARY HAD FINISHED her taxes and was hitting the sack when the phone rang, and it was Giulia, who said, “Something amazing happened tonight, and I couldn’t wait until tomorrow to tell you.”

  “Where’s Natassia?”

  “She fell asleep on the couch watching a video. She’s fine. I just covered her up with a blanket. It’s nice and cool here tonight.”

  “So what happened?” Mary asked.

  “It’s wild,” Giulia said, “it’s good. Wait’ll you hear this.”

  Apparently, Natassia and Giulia had been walking o
n Seventy-ninth Street from Broadway to Amsterdam, on their way to get coffee and pastries at La Fortuna. They had just walked past the Dublin House, and Giulia was telling Natassia, “Your mom and dad and Nora and I used to spend lots of time in that bar when we all first came to New York. It was so cheap,” and just then this guy standing at the curb, a handsome, shortish, very dark-haired guy eating out of a carton of Chinese food, called over to Natassia. Natassia looked up and said to Giulia, calmly, “Oh my God.” Then she walked over to the guy. Giulia followed.

  He was standing next to a dark-blue Lincoln Town Car with a big number sign hanging in the back window. He was a driver for a car service, and Giulia was wondering, How does she know this guy? When Natassia began talking to him, he tossed his carton of food down into the gutter and wiped his hands with a handkerchief. His accent was Russian. Giulia was taking this all in, and Natassia was conversing with him—she was noticeably taller than he was—and he said something about how she’d just vanished from sight, and Natassia told him, “Yeah, well, I switched schools.”

  And he said, “So—you left the Barnard?”

  And Natassia told him, “No, I don’t go to Barnard now. Listen, this is my mom’s friend, and she’s taking me out, and we’ve got to go.”

  And the guy said to Natassia, “You will call me?” and he pulled a business card out of his pocket and put it in her hand.

  Natassia told him, “Yeah. Right.”

  And she and Giulia walked away, left the guy standing there. Giulia said nothing at first, but when she and Natassia reached the end of the block and were waiting for the light at Amsterdam, Giulia asked, “Who was that?”

  And Natassia told her, “Remember last fall I was all upset about some guy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, that was him.” There was a trash can at the corner. Natassia tore up the guy’s business card, crumbled the pieces, and tossed them. The light to cross Amsterdam Avenue was flashing. Natassia grabbed Giulia’s hand. “Come on, run,” she said, “we can make this light.”

  ALSO BY ANNA MONARDO

  The Courtyard of Dreams

  PUBLISHED BY DOUBLEDAY

  a division of Random House, Inc.

  Copyright © 2006 by Anna F. Monardo

  All Rights Reserved

  Published in the United States by Doubleday, an imprint of The Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Portions of this work appeared in the Fall 2000 and Spring 2004 issues of Prairie Schooner.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Monardo, Anna.

  Falling in love with Natassia : a novel / by Anna Monardo.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Young women—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3563.O5164F35 2006

  813'.54—dc22

  2005053748

  www.bantamdell.com

  eISBN: 978-0-385-51885-7

  v3.0