The Wrong Family

by Tarryn Fisher

  She came out of the bathroom a good deal later and stumbled over to her side of the bed, feeling moderately better. She’d glanced at herself in the mirror on the way out of the bathroom and had seen a gray waxy face bearing two dark holes instead of eyes. Her hair was matted down and stringy, stuck to her face. She swept it back into a low ponytail as she walked slowly toward the bed. Her phone lit up on the nightstand and she grabbed for it as she pulled down the covers, hesitating briefly when she saw that it was Dakota who was texting her. Dakota, who’d been staying with their mother, was getting worse instead of better. Despite all of her brother’s grandiose efforts to win back his wife, Manda wasn’t having it this time. He’d left message after message, begging each of his sisters to reason with Manda. Winnie set the phone facedown on the nightstand and crawled into the bed, already beginning to shake from fever. It was as she gazed longingly toward the bathroom, wishing she’d drunk straight from the faucet, that she spotted the sweating glass of water next to the bed. At the sight of it, Winnie started to cry. Nigel had brought it to her; Nigel had not abandoned her despite how cold he was being. She lifted the glass to her lips and drank it all.

  Nigel, who’d been sleeping in his precious den, hadn’t apologized as much as he’d shown concern. He brought her toast once, carrying it into the room on a tray with a glass of water and tea. Winnie had only been able to stomach a few bites of the toast, but felt soothed. There was no room for grudge-holding when it came to their marriage. Nigel had stuck it out with her and she would stick it out with him. They may not have signed on for the type of marriage that turned up, but here they were, somehow living it.

  The virus worked its way out of the house three days later. Sam took the least of it, though he spent a full twelve hours in front of his own toilet and the other twelve in his room, playing on the computer. Winnie still wasn’t feeling herself when she accepted Shelly’s invitation to join them at their cabin for Christmas break. But before the plague hit, she vaguely remembered deciding that they needed a vacation. She also vaguely remembered other things she didn’t want to think about at the moment. Being anywhere with Shelly immediately eliminated the possibility of relaxation, and that’s exactly what she needed—to be distracted, to keep her mind off things. Mixed with the holiday mania and a house full of loud kids, it was exactly the type of distraction she needed. She accepted with forced gratitude, then texted Nigel to tell him the plan.

  Can’t, he texted back. I have that work conference.

  Winnie vaguely remembered something about a work conference, but he’d been complaining about going.

  Get out of it

  Can’t

  Can’t or won’t?

  Both...?

  She was furious at him for that question mark because she could see his expression as he typed it—stick it to the wife, it said.

  Where is the conference?

  His answer came back impressively fast, so fast that he couldn’t have made it up on the fly...or could he? If he’d planned it...

  Puyallup

  Wow. Okay. Priorities.

  Winnie was so angry she tossed her phone in her purse and didn’t look at it again until lunchtime. Didn’t he understand that they needed this? It was like he wasn’t making any effort at all to be a family lately. When she finally dug her phone from underneath all of her crap, she was sitting in Lola’s with two of her coworkers, sipping coffee and working on a pastry.

  Just seeing his name made her feel angry all over again, but after reading his text she excused herself to the bathroom to read it again.

  I’m really trying here, Winnie. I can drive you up. Spend Saturday and Sunday with you before I have to head back. That’s the best I can do for now.

  She nodded at the empty stall. Okay...she could work with that. She’d pack her pot, of course, she’d need it up at the cabin with Shelly.

  21

  JUNO

  In the sixties, Juno’s mother had owned a beauty salon called The Slick. Back then, women drove from all over the county to visit Hoida Pearl at her salon for a Vidal Sassoon cut, incredibly radical for the time. The salon was in a strip mall with a five and dime, a laundromat, and a butcher. Salon, chores, dinner, the women in the community joked—all in one! Juno spent many weekends and afternoons at the salon, washing and folding the towels for her mother, listening to the ladies talk. She learned that if they noticed her presence they’d share looks, pointing her out with their eyes. “Young ears in the room!” one of them would sing, and then her mother would sashay over to the register, her heels clipping on the tiled floor. Juno would hear the whoosh of the money drawer as it opened, followed by the clink of change as Hoida scooped some out. It was then that Juno understood that she was being dismissed and bribed all in one.

  “An ice cream for you, mija, and cigarettes for me.” The change was cold in her palm.

  To argue would have been pointless, and Juno wanted the ice cream. From then on she’d learned that by staying out of sight—say, by the towel closet—they’d be more apt to spill their guts, dirty laundry tumbling out of their mouths a mile a minute. She’d known things about everyone in their town—the local Baptist pastor and her pediatrician, Dr. Mynds, included.

  At this moment, she was grateful for the skills she’d honed in the salon.

  Juno vibrated with something like anticipation as she lay in her nest. Above her, in the house proper, Nigel pulled open the door to the closet and tossed his work bag inside. She listened as his footsteps clambered up the stairs, calling out for Winnie and Sam. They were going away for a week to ski with Shelly’s family; obviously, Shelly was speaking to Winnie again after the Dakota episode. Though from what Juno had gleaned, Dakota was anything but okay with what had gone down in the Crouch residence that night. He’d left two messages on the house phone, threatening Nigel in gruesome detail, and accusing him of ruining Dakota’s life, in the slurred tones of a man who’d lost his family and was rapidly drinking himself to death.

  Drunks seldom looked inward, and when they did, they usually ended up drinking more. Dakota was obviously looking for someone to blame and Nigel was the winner winner chicken dinner. Juno knew a ticking time bomb when she saw one. But Nigel had deleted both of the messages without Winnie ever catching wind of them.

  They’d collected their snowsuits and skis from Hems Corner yesterday, loading everything into and onto Nigel’s Subaru. Now she heard all three of them come down the stairs, their voices loud and excited. Juno would have the house to herself, and she had plans.

  She’d spent days lying in the crawl space thinking of nothing but her growing suspicions. While her body throbbed around her, she withdrew into thoughts, accumulating theories into an overflowing bin in her brain. It wasn’t good when she got like this; she couldn’t sleep, couldn’t focus on anything else. She ate aspirin (it was aspirin these days), chewing it to a paste and swallowing with a slight gag. She’d taken some of Winnie’s marijuana, too, from a little Altoids tin she kept in her toiletries bag under the sink. Juno had laughed out loud when she saw the six little joints rolled to perfection. She’d taken one without even thinking about it. Her pain these days superseded her caution. With the aspirin still coating her throat, she slipped into a haze of dull pain and unwelcome remembering.

  Kregger was telling her that enough was enough. He was angry and he rarely got angry. Juno was fighting back, defending herself. This was her job, she insisted; everyone took their job home to some degree. Kregger looked at her in bewilderment. You cannot be serious, Juno, you cannot...

  The vibrations from the door slamming roused her slightly. The alarm was beep-beep-beeping as it prepared to arm. She breathed deeply, the smell of the marijuana mercifully covering the other smells in the crawl space. She lit the joint again, dragging on it heavily, the paper sizzling. It hit her where it mattered—all around her pain, body and brain. Leaning back, she edged the join
t out on a Coke can to her right, then propped it inside the pull tab.

  As the pain abated, Kregger came back, his voice so clear it was like he was down here with her. She laughed at that: Kregger living in someone’s crawl space like a rat! Her laughter was short-lived, though; the rawness in her throat from the pot sent her into a fit of coughing that brought up blood.

  It’s your career or me and the boys.

  She spat into the dirt, out of breath, and leaned back. Her career or her family—that was the ultimatum her husband had given her. Entirely unfair, since Kregger got to have both. She’d said it, too, and he’d given her that look that said, you are crazy, and I don’t know who I married. You’re obsessed, Juno, can’t you see what this is doing to us? You’re sicker than your clients, you know that? You’re the one who needs help!

  She hadn’t understood at the time, hadn’t been able to spot in herself what she could so easily spot in others.

  She’d known he’d wanted to leave her for years, in the same way she knew Nigel wanted to leave Winnie. When they began, they were in love, but problematic partners had a way of dissolving love faster than it could regrow. One step forward, two steps back. And then one day there wasn’t enough love left to cover the sins. He’d taken their boys and left. Juno didn’t feel as if she deserved that part. Sure, she’d fucked up her marriage, fucked up her career. She’d gone to prison for it, too, paid her dues. But they hadn’t visited her once, and there had been no one there to greet her on the day she left those prison walls, a little bag of her things clutched to her chest. She’d stumbled into the bright sunlight, her new reality hers alone to face. She’d tried to find them for a while, living in a halfway house. She’d called every single one of their friends, people who’d eaten her food, babysat her children. None of them would talk to her. Kregger was gone and so were her sons.

  A few months after getting out of prison, Juno had once taken a bus to her old neighborhood and knocked on a neighbor’s door. The surprise on the woman’s face when she saw Juno standing there, wearing too-big blue jeans and a Reebok sweatshirt from Goodwill, had been so painful, Juno had recoiled, ashamed. Her hair was now a wiry burst of gray that she’d tried to wind into a bun with no luck. From her temples and crown, Juno’s hair burst forward in unruly coils. Did she look as alien to this woman as this woman looked to her?

  “Juno, I’m not going to tell you anything.” Her old friend wouldn’t meet her eyes. Juno wasn’t surprised by this; she’d once had a client who’d come to her because she had a panic attack every time she saw a homeless person. “They make me feel guilty and vulnerable,” the client had said.

  “Please, Bette, he took my boys...”

  Bette’s face had clouded over, and for a split second Juno entertained the thought that her old coffee date, her girls’ night partner, was going to help her. Juno, after all, had been the one to start calling Elizabeth Brown “Bette” when they first met. It had caught on, and then suddenly everyone else was calling her Bette, too. And here was her Bette, with the high, round moon cheeks, looking at Juno like she was spoiled cheese. The thought was indulgent; Juno knew what she’d do in the same situation. Someone you’re ashamed to know shows up on your doorstep demanding information they really didn’t deserve.

  Bette’s eyes filled with ice. Juno was familiar with that look, but not from Bette; Bette had always been a little lamb. Now she suddenly seemed like something else. Had Kregger called to tell Bette that Juno was getting out and to keep an eye out for her? Of course he had; Juno knew Kregger just as well as he knew her. She took a little step back, which seemed to embolden the new Bette.

  “Those aren’t your boys, they’re Kregger’s. You had your chance with them, Juno, and you blew it. Leave them be, they’ve started over.” And then Bette shut the door in Juno’s face.

  Juno had a key to Bette’s house once; a just-in-case key that she held on to in case they ever got locked out, or Juno needed to go inside to water a plant while they were on vacation. The pain Juno felt in that moment was unbearable; they were her boys. She’d raised them. They’d left Alaska after Kregger’s ex-wife, Marnie, overdosed in her apartment in Albuquerque. A neighbor had found the toddlers, both wearing sagging diapers and wandering the corridors of the building. The worst part was, they hadn’t even been crying; that’s what broke Juno’s heart the most. She and Kregger had taken the first flight back to New Mexico with no thoughts of returning to Alaska. They had sons now, and Juno had taken the boys willingly—of course she would raise them, of course she would love them as her own.

  The boys had had nothing to do with her mistake; she just hadn’t been thinking about them. That’s how it always was when it came to mistakes; no one was doing any thinking. During Dale’s freshman year of high school, Juno had an affair with his swim coach. She could say all of the regular things about how “it just happened” and how “she wasn’t that type of person,” but...if you did it, sorry, you were that type of person.

  His name was Chad Allan, and the first time he’d walked into Juno’s office for therapy it was with his wife, Julianna. They all startled when they recognized each other, and then, somewhat awkwardly, sat down. Juno went by her maiden name professionally, and the Allans had been a referral, so none of them had realized they knew each other until the day of the appointment. They had sons in the same grade; Chad and Julianna’s son Michael was not an athlete and drifted toward the arts, separating the boys into two circles.

  Juno was shivering. She needed to get up, move to where it was warmer. Hems Corner, she thought. No, the blue room; she could sleep in the blue room right off Nigel’s den. When was the last time she’d slept in a bed? She groaned as fresh pain erupted in her stomach. She’d stay here for a little while longer, until she was strong enough, even if the memories were bad.

  Chad Allan wasn’t the reason her marriage and her motherhood ended, no. He was just at the ugly end. The whole thing had felt like a roller-coaster ride to Juno, one that she realized she didn’t want to be on until it was too late. The adrenaline of secrecy paired with an angry woman. And Juno was angry—at Kregger. Mostly. Hadn’t she put her life and career on hold to raise his sons? She’d done everything right, everything to benefit him—and yet by the time she met Chad, it seemed that Kregger barely looked at her. He looked at everything but her, in fact: the television, the paper, his laptop.

  Chad’s son had seen them together, walking out of a Motel Six hand in hand as he drove to his part-time job at the art store. Chad’s wife, Julianna, filed a civil suit against Juno for sleeping with Chad, her client; and, compounded with the criminal charges brought against her, she didn’t stand a chance and neither did her marriage. Good ol’ Chad had played victim to save his marriage, the poor, wounded target of a predatory therapist who took her own issues out on her clients. While Chad reconciled with his wife on a trip to Tahiti, Kregger moved into an apartment with the boys. With the house in foreclosure, Juno slept on a friend’s couch and waited for her sentencing. Kregger would never forgive her; she knew that. She forgot herself, as people often do. She forgot herself for three months of mediocre sex with a man whose favorite catchphrase was “No soup for you!”

  She reached for her water, her throat starting to tickle and her mouth filling with the dust of the crawl space; Juno felt like it was choking her. She was tired enough to sleep again, but her thoughts were keeping her wired. Chad Allan had come for a visit.

  All these years later and Juno could still feel his lips on her neck, the little circles his tongue would trace across her pulse and down the steep incline that dipped into her collarbone. He was funny; that’s what she liked most about him. He made her laugh and he made her come: win-win. They hadn’t loved each other, and they hadn’t needed to because it was all for fun. She was in a fever then, crossing the line, wanting more, more, more.

  And she was in a fever now, too—literally this time. Throwing off her nest of
blankets, she let the air hit her damp skin. She was really sick, she realized. With whatever they’d had up above. The air was sharp, dragging its nails across her skin. Juno had been sick like this twice before: once, in prison, where the women passed around their illnesses like they did their cigarettes in the yard. That had landed her in the med wing for a week with pneumonia. And then once on the street, shortly after she’d moved to Washington, and that had made her stint in the prison hospital look like a spa retreat. She’d picked it up at the shelter, no doubt, and a day later, Juno was shivering so hard she could barely catch her breath. She hadn’t known where to go, only that she needed to lie in place until whatever it was passed through her body. She’d been thirsty, too, but there was no way her legs would hold her up long enough to find water. She’d walked toward a bench near the water; there was a little park on the hill.