Shelter Me

by Juliette Fay

  The other mothers murmured their solidarity, “Mmmhmm…Oh, yeah…Been there…”

  “They get back a few hours later,” the mother of Barry’s children continued. “They’re sunburned, covered in bug bites, the two-year-old has a massive load leaking out of his diaper, the five-year-old has dried blood on his leg from scraping his knee, and lunch was a half-eaten bag of barbecued potato chips they found on a park bench.”

  There was a short burst of laughter, which was then oddly curtailed, as if the humor had gone out of it suddenly. They’re looking at me, thought Janie. The pity was palpable. Moments of silence followed. I am the joy killer. My life is a cautionary tale.

  When the classroom door opened and Dylan came out, he needed to rummage around in his cubby for what seemed like decades. This gave a mother, whose name Janie no longer knew, a chance to approach. She was wearing tight black biking shorts and a neon orange polyester tank top. Her knife-straight blond hair evidenced a slight dampness around the bangs, but she wasn’t actually sweaty. Her figure was gallingly perfect, no remnant puckers across her midsection, where babies had once rolled and punched from the inside; no breasts drooping from months of expansion and contraction as they ballooned up with milk, only to be sucked flat on an almost hourly basis.

  “Would Dylan like to come over and play with Keane today?” Biking Mommy ventured. “Or, maybe if today isn’t good, some time next week? Or, you know, any time you need a break…?”

  “Uhh,” said Janie, briefly wondering whether Keane was a boy or a girl. Dylan’s arms slipped around one of her thighs as he hid behind her, pressing his nose into the small of her back. “We’re hanging close to home these days. But thanks.”

  “Okay, well, whenever he’s ready,” said Biking Mommy, inching backward toward the safety of her own child’s cubby.

  And your little dog, too, thought Janie.

  AT 1:30, DYLAN LIKED to watch Clifford the Big Red Dog on PBS. What a world, that Birdwell Island, thought Janie, as the theme song rang out from the living room. There was “diversity” but no real cultural tension. There was one not-too-nice girl and her not-too-nice dog, but she always came around in the end. Everyone was, in a word, happy.

  “I can’t play right now, guys,” said John Ritter, the voice of Clifford. “Emily Elizabeth told me not to get dirty before the party.”

  Janie couldn’t watch Clifford. John Ritter’s voice was one of the many things that was guaranteed to make her sob. John Ritter had died unexpectedly several years before, in his mid-fifties. He’d had a heart attack on his daughter’s fifth birthday. These were facts, and Janie had known them before Robby’s death, when they had seemed distantly sad. Now they seemed emblematic of her life. Life in the real world, not terminally happy Birdwell Island. Janie lived in fear of the day that Dylan found out Clifford was actually a dead guy like his dad.

  When the doorbell rang, Janie was sitting on the back of the toilet tank in the dark with a hand towel over her face to keep tears from dripping onto her T-shirt and betraying her to Dylan. Or whoever. She knew that Dylan would not open the front door. He would continue to sit six feet away from the small TV in the corner of the living room, legs crisscrossed in front of him, head tilted back, mouth slightly open. He wouldn’t even hear the damned doorbell.

  Possibly it was Aunt Jude, Janie’s mother’s only sister. Unmarried, retired, and childless, Aunt Jude had found a way to absorb, unbidden, whatever part of motherhood Janie’s own mother seemed to neglect. Where Mum was quiet and, at times, distant, Aunt Jude was never at a loss for words. Or syrup of ipecac.

  If it were Aunt Jude at the door, Janie knew she would ring a second time, and a third. Then she might very well assume that Janie had fallen into a diabetic coma (though she was not diabetic) and the children had drunk bleach, and Aunt Jude would have to heft her sizable bottom through a window and force-feed them all syrup of ipecac to induce vomiting. She carried ipecac in her white vinyl purse at all times. It was her antidote of choice, suitable for any occasion.

  Janie ran one end of the hand towel under cold water and pressed it against her eyes and cheeks; with the dry end, she patted her face. She tossed it into the hamper and stepped into the lighted hallway.

  “Door,” droned Dylan, eyes still captive to the screen.

  It was the contractor, wanting to know if Robby had gone over the papers. Dylan blinked and shifted his gaze to his mother.

  “They look fine,” said Janie, glancing at Dylan. If he hadn’t been sitting there, having broken free of his Clifford-induced trance, Janie would have been able to continue with her “Robby’s not here” tactic. It was not a lie. In fact, nothing could be truer. He was completely not there. This she knew to the core of her being, every minute of the day, in every possible way that mattered. Robby, who was so very much there for so many years, no longer was.

  But Dylan did not understand the utter verity of this simple fact. Even a very mature four-year-old would be confused about the permanence of death, the book had said. Janie had only read a few pages, but she had retained that one thing: kids don’t really get it. They have to talk about it—Janie tried but found it excruciating—and they have to see for themselves that it really is true over time. Her instinct was to shelter his boy-sized heart from the enormity of this loss. But evidently her instincts were wrong. For this one reason, and for the fact that Janie was sure she was failing Dylan in so many other important ways, she made herself say it out loud.

  “My husband died in January, but I checked the papers myself, and everything seems in order.” Actually it was Shelly who had reviewed the contract; Janie had merely stared at the plans until the lines blurred before her eyes. Knowing that Robby had dreamed up this porch, that he had meant to surprise her with it, compelled her toward it as if she were caught in a riptide.

  The contractor’s face fell. “Oh God, I…,” he muttered. “I had no idea.” He shook his head slightly, as if this might dislodge an appropriate response. “You’re sure you want to…? I mean, it’s okay if you don’t—”

  “I’m sure,” she lied, and tried to move the conversation up and out of the tar pit of her revelation. “So, how long’s this thing going to take?”

  “What?” he said. “Um…what?”

  Janie enunciated, “How long will it take you to build the porch?” You think this is hard for YOU? she thought, the rage monster snorting himself awake inside her. You didn’t even know the guy.

  “Oh yeah…” He scratched the red scar on his arm and tried to focus. “Well, lemme think…”

  Jesus H. Christ, it’s a porch, not the Louvre, she silently retorted. Rage monster rattled his chain.

  “First we gotta…you know, dig the footings…” He saw her recross her arms, tighten her chin. “Six weeks,” he said. “Starting Monday.”

  “A porch?” said Dylan, as Malinowski’s truck pulled out of the driveway and the Clifford credits rolled. “Daddy likes that porch, you know the one we saw that time we went to that lady’s house that time? It had that…that…that thing around and around up high?”

  “A ceiling fan. Yeah, Daddy liked that.”

  “Are we going to have a ceiling fan?”

  “I think so.”

  “Good. Daddy will like that.”

  FRIDAY NIGHT

  Cormac, good cousin that he is, came by at 5:30, right when I was starting to slide into my pre-six-o’clock stupor. There are a lot of bad times of the day. I used to think the worst was right when I woke up, that moment before I realized I was alone. Not just alone, but you know, Alone. I think I’m getting better at that one, though. I think I’m starting to handle it.

  Now six is the worst. Six is when he would be walking in the door from work, when I would be handing him the baby and saying “Tag, you’re it” with a big sigh, and he would smile and kiss me and squeeze the baby. And Dylan would come barreling in and hang on the back of his belt until his pants were halfway down his nice, tight butt. And he would swing around,
back and forth, saying, “Where’s Dylan, where is that little bear?” and Dylan would howl with the satisfaction at having stumped him again.

  Six still completely sucks. I am not getting better at it.

  Cormac got me laughing, though. Some crack about Uncle Charlie. Wish I could remember it now.

  Janie stopped writing, pushing herself into a memory from her childhood. She hungered for moments like this, when her brain let itself be distracted with events that had occurred before the day her life had come to a grinding, colorless halt.

  She remembered being young, fourteen or so. She and her twin brother, Mike, were up on the counters in this very kitchen, their feet dangling down, banging occasionally into the lower cabinets. Mike was working the cabinet door by his head, opening and closing it, studying the hinge as if it held a proof for the string theory. As usual, he barely heard the conversation, much less contributed. Cormac was sprawled in one of the kitchen chairs, not the chairs that were here now, but ones that had eventually become so irreparably battered that Janie had given them to Uncle Charlie, her mother’s only brother, to take to the dump.

  Janie had asked Cormac why he had such a thing about his father. He had said it was because Uncle Charlie named him Cormac, Irish for Charles. It was proof that he had had a son for one reason and one reason only—spare parts. “And believe me,” Cormac had said, “he needs ’em.”

  The three of them had laughed at this, made funnier because Cormac and his father did look so much alike—huge, beefy Irishmen with thick black hair and pale blue eyes. Uncle Charlie was always so proud of his size, as if it were a personal accomplishment instead of a genetic outcome. Cormac would do impressions of him, like “Well, at six foot five and 254 pounds, I don’t feel I need any help doing my taxes.”

  Cormac figured out how to keep all his own parts, though, Janie mused. He did whatever Uncle Charlie thought was unmanly. He took ceramics instead of wood shop. Janie couldn’t imagine those huge fingers making anything smaller than a watering trough, but he wasn’t too bad. She still had a little mug-pot-bowl thing he had made her.

  Freshman year in high school Cormac refused to join the football team and played tennis instead. He gleefully reported that you could have heard Uncle Charlie screaming and carrying on in the next county: “No one in the entire history of this family has ever hit a goddamned ball with a goddamned racket of any kind, and I’ll be goddamned if any son of mine is gonna start! I swear to Jesus, if I see you in a pair of little white shorts, I’m not gonna be responsible for my actions!”

  Cormac started playing tennis on the sneak, and as big and strong as he was, he had a serve that blew the briefs off any other kid his age. He started winning tournaments and getting his name in the paper. Uncle Charlie didn’t know whether to blow a gasket or congratulate him. Then Cormac was named team captain, and Uncle Charlie started going to all the matches and yelling at the judges. It drove Cormac so crazy, he threatened to take up figure skating. He told Janie and Mike, “Pop’s so steamed, I’m thinking of joining the friggin Ice Capades!”

  Janie could see Cormac so clearly—the self-satisfied grin, the long, muscular legs splayed out across the kitchen floor. But the chair was wrong. The chair she saw now was one of a set that Robby had ordered from a do-it-yourself catalogue and came in parts. Janie wished she’d kept just one of those old chairs. It was from before, an inducer of memories. She picked up the pen and finished the journal entry.

  Thank God for Cormac at 5:30 with his box of day-olds from the bakery. Thank God for a six o’clock that doesn’t completely suck.

  2

  MONDAY MORNING JANIE WOKE to the sound of torrential rain. And something else. A kind of splatting sound. She unwound herself from the stranglehold she had on Robby’s pillow and sat up. “What is that?” she said to the pillow. “Weird house sounds—that’s your job.”

  But they were all her jobs now. The hunting, the gathering, repair and maintenance of the shelter. The division of labor, discussed and renegotiated countless times over seven years of marriage, had become meaningless in one blown stop sign.

  Janie lay back down and tried to reclaim unconsciousness, but the odd sound jabbed at her until she sat up again and flung the covers off the bed. Marshaling her self-control, she reined in the temptation to stomp her feet, and tiptoed to the landing at the top of the stairs. She peeked into the kids’ room. Dylan was on his side, his face buried in his stuffed bunny’s floppy gray ears. The baby slept on her back, her arms thrown back by the sides of her head, as if she were preparing to dive.

  Downstairs, Janie opened the front door to find tiny waterfalls leaping from the roof above her and splattering onto the front step. Clogged gutters. It was April, after all, and the gutters had waited patiently for Robby to clear the dead sticks and leaves that winter storms had thrown into them, as he did every spring. Except this one. Janie closed the door and made a pot of coffee.

  MONDAY, APRIL 30

  Fucking gutters. Fucking rain.

  ON THURSDAY THE RAIN stopped and the yard glistened radioactive green, a color so strong and loud Janie thought she might fall in and never be found. She gave the grass a good hard cut, wielding the mower like a small cannon. The baby rode in a backpack slung across Janie’s shoulders, squawking at squirrels, clapping at cars, and finally falling asleep to the little engine’s grinding drone.

  The contractor had not shown up on Monday, or any other day that week, nor had he called to say he wasn’t coming. It wasn’t until Thursday morning that Janie had remembered he was supposed to come at all, and the thought instantly infuriated her. The nerve, after all. She had weathered his surprise attack, with all those papers, asking for her dead husband. And she had honored the deal they had cut behind her back, though it would have been easy to say, Sorry, little change of plans. Your deal’s with a dead guy, not with me.

  She had kept up her side of the bargain, though it wasn’t even her bargain, and he had left her at the altar of her porchless house, the egotistical son of a bitch. She fed her fury as she laid waste to the ankle-high grass, imagining a confrontation so full of threats and recriminations that it might actually have come to blows, had the yard not unexpectedly surrendered, fully mown.

  Hopped up on her own anger, Janie was in no mood to stop. She wasn’t finished with him yet, and since she was, of course, winning the imaginary fight, she was anxious for the final showdown. She put the sleeping baby in her crib and cranked up the volume on the baby monitor. Then she hauled a ladder out from the garage and climbed up onto the roof to attack the gutters.

  Sliding her hands into Robby’s sweat-stiff work gloves threw cold water on the hypothetical skirmish. She thought of Robby’s long, gentle fingers, the way they stroked a keyboard the same way they stroked her skin. She realized with horror that there was no record of him at the piano, no video footage that she could show the children of how beautifully their father had played. Dylan would soon forget, and the baby would have no memory of it at all.

  She crawled over the peak of the roof onto the back side to hide from passing cars. She sat on the hot gray shingles and wrapped her arms around herself, the work gloves resting gently on her sides. Sorry I never thought to videotape you at the piano, she thought, and her throat tightened into a painful rope. But I remember it, if that helps.

  After a while the breeze blew refugee drips from an overhanging branch onto her face. She crawled down to the gutter and started throwing handfuls of wet leaves and muck onto her freshly mown back lawn. She heard the creak of metal and wondered momentarily what she would do if the ladder blew down. If she jumped, would she sprain an ankle? Or would she merely feel like an idiot for stranding herself on top of her own house?

  “Hello?” called a man’s voice. Malinowski the contractor appeared over the roof peak. With the sun lighting him from behind, his thinning auburn hair looked almost orange. “Gutters,” he nodded seeing the muddied gloves. “Just did my own.”

  “Nice of you to s
how,” she said.

  “Are you a lefty or a righty?” asked Malinowski, as he squatted and hobbled toward her.

  “What? Righty.”

  “Give me this one then.” He pointed to her left hand. She looked down at Robby’s glove, smeared with muck. Malinowski held out his hand for it. Confused, she slipped the glove off and gave it to him. He dug into the gutter, lobbing a massive handful directly onto her pile below.

  “You’re making a mess of your lawn like this. Better to put something down there to throw it into.”

  Janie picked up a handful and winged some muck out across the yard. “You could have called, at least,” she said, trying to ramp up to the satisfaction of her earlier fury.

  “We don’t call,” he said.

  “We who?”

  “Contractors. We don’t call. It’s in the handbook.”

  “What handbook? There was no handbook…”

  “No, the Contractor Handbook. They give it to you at Contractor School. It’s says, ‘Don’t call. Especially if you SAY you’re gonna call, don’t. And if you have to call, wait a couple days.’” He dropped another glob onto the pile below. “We take an oath. Sort of like the Hippocratic Oath doctors take, except without the ‘Do no harm’ part.”

  “What?” Janie demanded, her face pinched in irritation. Then a slow grin bloomed on Malinowski’s face, and she understood the joke. She rolled her eyes and shook her head, trying not to smile. “Then why are you here?”

  “Well, listen,” he said, scooping and dropping a little faster. “When I saw it was going to rain all week, I started this kitchen rehab over in Weston. That way the footing holes aren’t full of water when the town inspector comes out.”