“Great.” John dug into his bowl. “Did you talk to her about hiring somebody to help out at the farm?”
“Sort of.”
John put down his fork. “Meg, we agreed you can’t do it all yourself.”
“I know. But money’s a little tight for my parents right now.”
John nodded. “Medical bills.”
Oh God. “No.” I didn’t know. My parents were both self-employed, but surely Dad had veteran’s benefits or something. “I haven’t asked.”
“You know, if your folks need anything . . . Anything at all,” Trey said.
“Oh no, they’re fine,” I said. Although I wasn’t really sure. “It’s just Mom always sees her biggest sales around the holidays, and since she can’t go to the farmers’ market . . .” I took another sip of wine, for courage. “I thought I could do it. Just for one weekend.”
“You? Why not your father?”
Because he doesn’t do a damn lick around the farm. But I couldn’t say that. I was his daughter. Growing up in a minister’s family, in a military family, you learned not to air your dirty laundry. “He sees clients on Saturday.” I forced a smile. “Anyway, do you really see my dad selling cheese at a stall?”
“Not really,” John admitted. “But it’s not your job.”
“Somebody has to do it.” And there was only me. Doing it all. I swallowed again. “I’m the only one here.”
John sighed. “Honey, I appreciate you wanting to help your parents. But your dad’s not the only one who has commitments on Saturday.”
“Oh.” I bit my lip. “Of course.”
“You’ve been busting your ass,” Trey said easily. “Take the day off. The dealership can manage without you one more day. Assuming you don’t have to be somewhere else.”
I blinked, confused. Where else would John be?
John’s jaw set. “I guess that’s all settled, then.”
I knew he didn’t want special treatment from the boss. I admired his independence. But Trey was like my brother. “I’ll get dessert,” I said hastily. “Miss Hannah made cookies.” Cookies made everything better.
And I should check on the twins anyway. Ten minutes ago, I’d left them coloring happily at the table. Now they were . . .
Not at the table.
The flour canister I’d used to make dumplings was on the floor, along with the empty sugar bowl. Daisy stooped and then straightened, flinging fistfuls of flour into the air above her head. Flour and sugar were everywhere, a gritty mix dusting the cabinets and counters, caking the floor.
“Daisy! DJ?”
My little boy turned his white face to me. White hair, white clothes, white eyelashes, all of him, white.
A bubble rose from my chest to my brain, making me light-headed with laughter. Or hysterics.
“He a snowman, Mommy,” Daisy chirped. “I make it snow for Kissmas.”
Trey, behind me, started to laugh. John chuckled.
“Who wants to make snow angels?” Trey asked.
The bubble swelled. Burst in a laugh. “Don’t encourage them.”
“Honey, relax.”
Like I was at fault. “John, look at this mess!”
“So? We can clean it up,” he said reasonably.
Irrational tears stung my eyes. “I’ll do it.”
His gaze fixed on my face. “Right,” he said slowly. “Bath time, kids. Up to bed.”
“No!” Daisy said. “Want snow!”
John scooped her up, flour and all. “We’ll make bubbles,” he promised. “Snow bubbles in the tub.”
“Bubbows,” DJ said happily.
“Snow! Snow! Snow!” Daisy said, patting her father’s shoulders, leaving little white handprints against the blue cotton.
“Make sure you stay with them,” I warned. “Don’t let DJ play with the faucet.”
“Meg, I know,” John said.
The impatience in his tone tightened my throat. I was only trying to help. How did that make me the bad guy?
I opened the hall closet to get the vacuum. I’d be finding flour in the cracks and corners for weeks. Ants, too, probably, with all that sugar.
“Let me give you a hand,” Trey said.
I blinked hard. “I’ve got it.”
“At least let me clear the table.”
“Trey, I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not. Your mom is in the hospital and you’re wound tighter than a clock.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Hey, it’s okay.” He caught me in a one-armed hug, his body lean and comforting. He gave my shoulders a little shake. “You know, it’s okay to accept help sometimes.”
“Unless your last name is March,” I mumbled into his chest.
I closed my eyes, leaning my head against Trey’s shoulder. He smelled like starch and beer, with a whiff of some expensive cologne. The sound of the children’s laughter floated light as soap bubbles down the stairs. I sighed. “I don’t want to be selfish.”
“You’d rather be overwhelmed?”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Miserable?”
I gave a watery chuckle. “Maybe.”
“How about bitchy?”
I opened my eyes. Glared. “I am not . . .” Oh.
Trey grinned. “Gotcha.”
I smiled back reluctantly. “Fine. Just for that, you can load the dishwasher.”
“That’s my girl,” Trey said.
It was nice having his company in the kitchen. And maybe he had a point.
For the next three days, I tried extra hard to be patient and cheerful. To be my mother, baking cupcakes at eleven o’clock at night, rehearsing songs with the twins in the car, collecting pinecones at the farm to make Christmas tree ornaments.
On Thursday, when John came to the twins’ program at school, he sat beside me, his right hand holding my left, making the diamond twinkle in the light. Part of a row of parents and grandparents, side by side.
The kids filed in from the hallway holding hands as the teachers half led, half herded them into a ragged line facing the chairs. Miss Julie turned on the music. Miss Nancy passed out jingle bells. Three-year-old Kaylee Upton’s thumb crept into her mouth as Chris Murphy’s dad squatted in the aisle, holding up his cell phone to record.
My mother would have loved this, I thought with a pang. She would have admired the children’s costumes, complimented my nut-free, gluten-free carrot cupcakes.
In the front row, DJ stood stock-still beside Kaylee, hands thrust into his little pockets. Daisy spotted us and waved. Behind her antler headband, her bangs stuck up in every direction.
“Pretty damn cute,” John murmured.
I squeezed his hand.
“Jingle bells, jingle bells . . .”
I leaned forward with the other mothers, nodding encouragement, mouthing along.
“Jingle all the waaaay . . .”
My phone rang, garnering dirty looks from everyone around us. I flushed and dug in my bag, glancing at the caller ID. Mom.
Anxious anticipation tightened my chest. I hit MUTE. “I have to take this,” I whispered to John.
“Can’t it wait?” he murmured.
Little Kaylee, overwhelmed by attention, broke down and had to be led to one side. Chris Murphy sat down and began taking off his shoes. “. . . one-horse open sleigh-aaay!”
I shook my head. “It’s my mother.”
“Honey, she’s fine.”
Miss Nancy coaxed Chris Murphy back into line.
“You don’t know that,” I said.
John gave me a patient look. “If something was wrong—something important—the rehab center would call you.”
Doubt made me pause. At the front of the room, Daisy jumped up and down, vigorously shaking her jingle bells.
/> But as soon as I met John’s eyes, I knew—he knew—what I was going to do.
“I’ll be right back,” I whispered.
And left my husband and children and went into the hall.
* * *
I can’t believe the case manager didn’t call me,” I said to John.
Parents and children eddied in the hall around us, spilling out of the classroom toward the parking lot.
“Honey, your mother fell. She’s fine,” John said with heavy patience. “Maybe next time she wants to go to the bathroom, she’ll remember to use her walker. Or wait for help.”
“I did bells, Mommy,” Daisy said.
“I heard, sweetie. Wonderful bells. So loud!” I smoothed her bangs under her reindeer headband. Turned back to John. “They still should have notified me.”
John plucked Daisy from the current, hoisting her in his arms. “What do you think you could have done?”
I didn’t know. Something. She’d cried on the phone. My mother, who never cried about anything in her life. High, weak, gasping sounds that tore my heart. “I’m her daughter.”
“Right. Not her doctor. Or her husband.”
“Daddy didn’t even answer his phone,” I said. My father had been counseling a client in his storefront office when my mother fell. “Careful, DJ.”
I plucked him back from bumping into three-year-old Matthew Mackay. “Sorry,” I mouthed to Matthew’s mother. That’s how we identified ourselves in Bunyan. As somebody’s mother, as somebody’s wife.
She smiled. “They’re fine. Merry Christmas. Oh, your husband’s here. Aren’t you lucky.”
I took a breath. Released it. “Yes. Merry Christmas.”
John waded into the stream heading for the exit. “To be fair, your dad didn’t know anything was wrong.”
I grabbed DJ’s hand. “That’s no excuse.”
John looked back at me over his shoulder, Daisy in his arms. I flushed.
“Give the staff some credit for handling the problem, Meg,” my husband said quietly. “They’re trying to take care of her.”
“Then they should do a better job,” I said, frustrated by my own helplessness. I was supposed to be the good daughter. What good was I if I couldn’t protect my own mother? “What if the fall damaged her spine?”
“Then we’ll deal with it,” John said.
I was irrationally encouraged by that “we.” “We’ll deal with it.” Like we were a team. Like the early days.
I looked at him, seeing the tired lines in his face, the oxlike set of his shoulders. He’d been bringing work home this week, staying up late in his office, making up for the time he’d taken off so I could be with my mother.
How could I ask him to do any more?
“Thank you, honey.”
CHAPTER 7
Jo
When I moved to New York, I started running again. I memorized landmarks, learning my way around my new neighborhood: the brown spire of the Episcopal church, the plywood construction barriers, the Greek produce stall, the Korean dry cleaner on the corner. I ran in the early morning, before or after the sun came up, when the air was cool and full of promise, after the garbage trucks came through. Alone, except for Dan the Homeless Guy on his cardboard patch in front of the bodega, and a few people walking to the subway or waiting for the bus. The thump of my running shoes measured my progress, claiming my territory.
In those early days, I was in love with the city, like Joan Didion, drunk with adulthood and freedom. Five years later, my affair with New York was what I imagined marriage might be—inconvenient, sometimes disappointing or exhausting. But I was committed now. I kept running after I lost my job at the paper, staying a few steps ahead of panic.
It was cheaper than paying for a gym membership. Or a shrink.
After I was hired at Gusto, it got harder to force myself to stumble out of bed in the mornings. But on Friday, I laced up my shoes and ran through the Meatpacking District to the High Line, the old elevated freight rail turned public park beside the Hudson River. The path was clear of tourists and of snow. The cold quiet was an antidote to the noise and smoke of the kitchen, the stress of orders rattling in, the bodies bumping in tight space. The grease that coated everything like the miasma of failure. The fear that I wasn’t measuring up. That I was letting people down. That I wasn’t, in my father’s words, “fulfilling my God-given potential.”
Between the blocks of buildings, the pale sun sparkled on the distant water. The pressure to succeed, to perform, built in my chest, knifing my lungs like cold. I ran, chasing . . . something. A dream.
As far back as I could remember, I’d wanted to write. Stories scribbled on notebook paper, stitched with yarn or stapled along the edges to resemble the real books I borrowed from the library. Plays on the parsonage porch performed with my sisters.
The first Christmas our father was in Iraq, I’d written him a letter. More of a journal, really, day-to-day stories about our family and the farm, complete with pictures. Like a blog, only there were barely any blogs back then. I worked on it for ages, adding and polishing, taking pages to Mrs. Ferguson, my AP English teacher, for feedback.
And then . . . Nothing. All my effort, wasted. All my work, gone.
All my fault.
* * *
It was one of those warm North Carolina days that happen sometimes in winter. The trees stood like sentinels along the bank. Our footsteps rustled as Trey and I picked our way to the dock, the slope to the water littered with decaying leaves and fallen pines. The brown river reflected the blue sky, like a child’s landscape decorated with puffy white clouds.
Our family had two boats, an old johnboat we used for fishing and swimming on summer days, and my father’s canoe that he’d made himself at summer camp in Maine. Very Hiawatha.
Trey rowed the flat-bottomed johnboat out to the middle, away from the weeds and mud and encroaching trees. Away from everything. A blue heron hunted motionless in the shallows. The wind wrinkled the glassy water. I tilted my face to the sun, breathing deep, trailing a hand over the bow. Beneath the sunny surface, the water was winter cold.
“Jo! Jo!” Amy cried from the dock. I turned my head away. “Jo, I’m sorry!”
Trey lifted the oars, raising an eyebrow in question. “Go back?”
I glared, annoyed he’d even suggest it. My grievance burned inside me. I was so mad at Amy.
How dare she delete my letter to Dad?
Meg said I could write another. Mom said I needed to forgive. Even Beth—my baby, my ally—suggested wistfully we should make up after Amy had apologized.
They didn’t understand. I’d worked on that letter forever, one day, one page at a time, making it the best I could, polishing it like a college application. And Amy deleted it all out of spite because Trey and I wouldn’t take her with us to a stupid party at the Gardiners that she was too young for anyway. Before I sent it. Before I printed it. Before I backed it up.
I couldn’t forgive myself for being so stupid.
Or her, either.
“No.” It was easier to be mad at Amy than to blame myself.
“She’s got the canoe.”
I looked indignantly toward the dock, where our NO TRESPASSING sign was stapled to a tree. “She can’t take that. It’s Dad’s. Anyway, she can’t get it into the water by herself.”
We both watched as Amy half lifted, half pushed the upside-down canoe from its rack and dragged it to the splintery dock. Squatting, she gripped the gunwale on both sides. I felt a moment’s unease. Amy was not an experienced canoer. Or a strong swimmer.
“She’ll give up when she figures out she can’t paddle solo,” I said. To Trey? To myself?
But Amy, undeterred, shifted her weight over the boat’s centerline and put one foot, then the other, into the canoe. Without a life jacket.
I cupped
my hands and yelled, “Don’t! It’s not safe.”
“So come back!”
“Go away!”
She pushed off from the dock. “I want to talk to you!”
The canoe wobbled into the current. Amy paddled ineffectively, digging too deep. She was sitting, not kneeling, which made her center of gravity too high. The canoe turned sideways, scraping close to a gnarled log jutting out of the water.
“Be careful!” Trey shouted.
“Go back!”
She grabbed for an overhanging branch. The abrupt shift in weight tipped the canoe. It flipped, dumping her into the freezing water.
Amy shrieked. Trey swore.
“Amy!” I cried. She thrashed. Splashed. The cold water sank into her clothes, darkening them. Amy sank, too. “Grab the canoe!”
She reached for the hull. The upturned boat spun, bumping her. Her head went under. Resurfaced. Trey was rowing, pulling powerfully toward Amy, who was gasping and struggling in the water.
I fumbled with the buckles on my life jacket. “Don’t hit her.”
“Take an oar. Quick, quick!”
I scrambled to hold the boat steady with one oar while he stretched over the side, trying to reach Amy with the other. Her hands kept sliding off the paddle. She was clumsy with cold. Her lips were blue, her eyes wild.
I sobbed. Pulling off my life jacket, I threw it at her. She struggled to raise her arm.
Trey jumped into the water beside her. She gripped him like a monkey as he hauled her to the rowboat. I grabbed her under the arms. Together, we pushed and lifted her over the side; she was sputtering, freezing, crying.
My heart constricted with fear and shame. It was all the fault of my shitty temper. My fault my sister almost died.
I should have gone back.
* * *
My chest burned. My breath made little clouds in the air as I ran along the High Line. Ha ha ha. Hee hee hee.
I pushed harder, my heart pounding, my soles pounding the path. Two miles and turn. A combination of cold and sweat stung my face like tears. Three miles. Four. My emotions tangled, my brain on some stupid treadmill, covering the same ground over and over again, spinning and spinning and going nowhere.
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