Where Love Goes

by Joyce Maynard

  Tim calls Claire very early the next morning. “She loved you,” he tells her. “I knew she would.”

  “She’s a very dear little girl,” Claire says. “I just wanted to scoop her up and take her home with me.”

  “How about me?” he says. “You want to take me home with you?”

  “You know what I want to do with you,” she says.

  The next call is Mickey. It’s almost always Claire who calls him, but he hasn’t heard from her in a few days and he wonders what’s up. “So, Slim, what have you got?” he says, same as he always does.

  “This one might be a keeper,” she tells him. She reaches for her coffee cup and settles into her chair.

  “No kidding,” he says. “That’s great, Slim.” He has a recording of Timbuk 3 playing, one she has heard often. Like so many bands, this one has become inextricably linked with thoughts of Mickey. She can’t even listen to the Beatles anymore, clean.

  “He’s crazy about me,” she says.

  “Well, why wouldn’t he be?” Mickey says. “And how about you?”

  “I think I might love him,” she tells him. She doesn’t say she’s “in love.” That one’s harder to figure.

  “Sex good?” he asked her. This is all familiar stuff for them. He always wants to know if she’s had an orgasm. He always inquires about a new lover’s attitudes concerning oral sex.

  “If you don’t mind,” she says, “I think I’ll keep that private.”

  “Oh,” he says, with a sudden faint coolness in his tone only Claire would recognize. “I see.”

  She asks him something about the Red Sox. He mentions a new player the Sox have brought up from Pawtucket and a Pat Metheny recording he’s just heard. She mentions that Pete wants to go to baseball camp this summer, but Sam won’t contribute any money, although she and Mickey both know Claire will find a way to send him, anyway. Sally’s taking driver’s ed this summer. If she does well she’ll get her license in the fall, when she turns sixteen.

  “What does he look like anyway?” Mickey asks her. He’s talking about Tim.

  “Big. Football player build. Friendly kind of face. Red haired,” she says.

  “No fun at the beach,” Mickey tells her.

  Mickey took Claire into the recording studio in his barn this one time. “We’re going to record your single,” he said. “What’s it going to be?”

  She knew right off. It was a Townes Van Zandt song called “If I Needed You.” She has a recording of Emmylou Harris singing it as a duet with Don Williams. She wanted to sing the song with Mickey.

  This was not really Mickey’s kind of song, but Mickey can sing anything. She wrote down the words for him. She hummed the tune. “You were almost on key that time, Slim,” he said.

  First he laid down the lead guitar track for her. Then the bass. He set up his drum machine and laid down a rhythm track at this one place near the end. Then he picked up his banjo and threw a little of that in as if it were jalapeño. Mickey has all sorts of odd, gourdlike Brazilian instruments whose names Claire didn’t know. He ran through the song using a couple of those.

  “Okay, Slim,” he said. “You’re on.”

  He put the headphones on her. He adjusted the microphone.

  “Give me something to test your sound levels,” he said.

  “I adore you, Mickey,” she said. She couldn’t think of anything funny or silly at the moment. Just that.

  “Slim singing. ‘If I Needed You,’ ” said Mickey into the machine. “Take one. Rolling.” She leaned into the microphone.

  “If I needed you,” she sang. “Would you come to me? Would you come to me and ease my pain?” Singing these words, she looked into his broad freckled face that she knew so well and at his hands on the guitar strings, hands that had touched every inch of her skin. Could a person ever feel more love?

  “If you needed me I would come to you,” Mickey sang back to her. “I would swim the seas to ease your pain.” And he would, too. She never questioned that for a moment. He looked into her face, too, as he sang.

  “In the nights forlorn, the morning’s born,” Claire sang. “And the morning’s born with the lights of love.” Claire was almost beyond singing, she was so overcome with love. For all the times in her life she has wished she could sing like Emmylou Harris, she never wished it more than she did right then. She wished there were more notes, more words, more places to put all the things she wanted to give him, all the things she had to say.

  “If you close your eyes, you miss the sunrise,” he sang, reading off the paper. “And that would break my heart in two.” Then they sang it one time through together and she felt as if they were making love.

  They did it in two takes. Mickey recorded a harmony part after that and another track with a wailing harmonica coming in at one point. Claire said she couldn’t do good enough harmony, but Mickey said no, it’ll sound good if it’s a little off-key. “Just hum.”

  Remember this, she thought as she hummed her part on that last track. Remember this room and this man singing into the microphone and that fiddle line.

  Remember the plucking of the mandolin, and the way it feels right now, at this precise instant, which will never come again.

  How it felt was as if this wasn’t a mandolin at all he was plucking but her heartstrings—as if his hand had reached deep into her chest and plucked them.

  It felt as if no moment she would experience would ever be so perfectly happy as this one. She was right too.

  Because she didn’t want to make too big a deal of this, Claire decided on hamburgers for dinner, although she has also made potato salad and grilled vegetables and strawberry shortcake with homemade biscuits. It’s the first time all year that she’s barbecuing, and she has asked Pete to set out plates on their patio. “Two extra,” she told him. “Tim and Ursula are coming.”

  So far her children have never laid eyes on Ursula, and they have only met Tim in passing. The first time their dad was picking them up for the weekend. Sam was just loading their bikes in the back of his truck and Tim was getting out of his car, carrying his overnight bag. “This is my friend Tim,” she told them. What is she supposed to say, “This is my lover”? “This is the man who makes love to me virtually without interruption from ten minutes after you leave Fridays till ten minutes before I head out to pick you up on Sundays”? “This man treats me well, unlike your father”?

  A few of the men she has gone out with over the years shook hands with Sam when they met him. One or two actually struck up a conversation. “How do you like those Celtics?” That sort of thing. Claire loves it about Tim that he didn’t do that. He has heard what Sam said about her on the witness stand during their custody hearing. “Her father was an alcoholic, you know. Perhaps you’re familiar with the ACOA personality type …?” Tim knows about Sam’s affair with Melanie, the babysitter, and his attempts during their divorce negotiations to get a half-interest in the money her father left her in his will, and the accusation he made, after she slapped Pete one time, that she was a child abuser. “Of course my former wife loves the children,” he told the judge. “She just doesn’t have the emotional stability to care for them.”

  Claire knows Tim would like to pin Sam against the door of his truck and choke him for those things. She knows he would like to kick him in the balls for that remark he made, make him get down on his knees and apologize to her, but he doesn’t. For the children’s sake and nothing more, he nodded in Sam’s direction when they met, but they didn’t speak.

  Pete and Sally have seen her talking on the phone with Tim. They’ve seen the flowers and the windchimes he brought her that hang on their front porch now. One time when Pete was home on a Saturday he had suggested that they shoot some hoops at the school down the street. “I guess not,” Pete said. “My dad’s coming by soon.” Tim told Sally, who has her learner’s permit now, he’d be available to take her driving sometime.

  She looked at him blankly, almost witheringly. “My parents do that
stuff,” she said.

  “Don’t worry,” Tim told Claire. “I can take it. They don’t know me yet. They’ll come round.”

  You weren’t thinking we were going to hang around all night entertaining his kid, were you, Mom?” Sally asks her now as Claire’s chopping the onions. “I mean, playing Candyland with some eight-year-old is not exactly my idea of a fun time.”

  “I was thinking you’d stick around awhile and get to know her, if that’s what you mean,” Claire says. “She’s a shy, insecure little girl who has had a lot of hard things to deal with in her life. This is your territory she’s coming into. You have your brother and all your friends around. She’s all by herself. I’d like you to show a little interest and compassion, yes.”

  “Sounds like fun,” says Sally grimly. Over by the sink, Pete has begun to sing the theme song from “The Brady Bunch” in a high, awful voice.

  “You’re also almost ten years older than she is,” says Claire. “You’re supposed to be the mature ones. If you don’t want to do it for Ursula, you could do it for me.” She hopes there isn’t a note of desperation in her voice.

  “Listen, Mom,” says Sally. “Whatever you want to do with your life, that’s fine with me. You can pick your friends. I would just prefer if you wouldn’t drag me into it. I have my own life now.”

  “Yeah, well, I had this crazy idea that I might be part of your life,” says Claire.

  There was a time—and it lasted for years—when Sally used to beg her parents to provide her with a little sister. Even after they split up, she and Pete would see news reports from Romania and suggest that they adopt a toddler. Sally even had her name picked out: Rose.

  “And just where would we put her, this sister of yours?” Claire asked her. It scared her how excited the idea made her. She acted like it was the craziest thing in the world, but the truth was she thought about those Romanian orphans, too.

  “She could share my room,” Sally said. Pete said he’d teach her how to ride a tricycle. Sally would give her all her old Barbies.

  “And I’d read to her every night,” she said. “Madeline and stuff.”

  They’d be in a store and see these little sneakers or patent-leather party shoes. Pete and Sally would make this moaning sound and call her to come see. “Don’t you just want to die, Mom?” Sally would say. “Have you ever seen anything so cute in your entire life?”

  “Yes, actually,” Claire would say. “You used to have shoes like that. You also had chicken pox and food allergies and tantrums in supermarkets. You liked me to read you Strawberry Shortcake at the Perfume Factory twenty million times a day. There’s more to having a little kid around than buying cute shoes, you know.”

  “We could handle it, Mom,” they said. “You’d see.”

  Maybe it was a way for them to deal with the divorce, she figured. If they adopted a little girl, there would still be four places set at the table. There would be a bigger pile of presents at Christmas. They might feel more like a whole family again.

  Whatever the reason for all their talk about adopting a baby, it passed. The kids never mentioned their little sister anymore. Their new phone book didn’t have Rose’s name scribbled all over the cover the way their old one had. And it certainly didn’t have Ursula’s.

  They arrive on the dot of six. Tim has brought deviled eggs—something Claire’s children would never touch—and marinated asparagus. He’s wearing a shirt Sally will think is dorky, the kind golfers wear. “I brought this for Pete,” he says. It’s a baseball signed by Whitey Ford. “My dad caught this for me at Yankee Stadium back in 1964. I was probably just the age he is now.”

  “I’m so glad we could finally get everybody together,” Claire says to Ursula. Claire bends to give her a hug. “Just look at your dress.”

  Ursula is wearing the jumper Claire helped Tim pick out at The Gap the other day, but not with the turtleneck she chose. Why did I let him buy a size ten? she thinks. He should have got a twelve.

  She has put a striped rugby shirt on over the jumper, and a lot of those necklaces they throw out onto the streets during Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Although it’s a warm evening, she’s wearing cable-knit tights and sneakers.

  “I made these for your kids,” says Ursula. She holds out a couple of friendship bracelets made of thick yarn.

  “This is for you,” she says. She is speaking almost in a whisper as she hands the box to Claire. Inside is a blown-glass bunny and a broken robin’s egg and something else Claire can’t identify.

  “One time When I was little, a hummingbird flew into our kitchen when the door was open,” she says. “My dad and me tried to catch it but it moved too fast. It just kept bumping into the windows. We tried every day to catch it, but we never could, so we just had to sit there and watch it trying to get out. Finally we got up one morning and it was lying on the floor. Dead.

  “So we put it in the box,” she’s saying. “It was so little it didn’t smell. My dad said all the skin part just dried up and turned into dust.”

  “It’s beautiful,” says Claire, brushing one finger very softly over the little pile of feathers and dust that used to be the hummingbird. “I never had anything like this before.”

  “It’s a treasure box,” she says. “You keep it in your room. If you feel sad you can look in it.”

  “You shouldn’t give me this,” says Claire. “It’s too special.”

  “No, that’s okay,” says Ursula. “I was finished with it anyways.”

  “I understand you like to pitch,” Tim says to Pete as Claire sets out the ketchup. “Football was my sport in college, but I was a pitcher myself, back in high school.”

  “Great,” says Pete in a flat voice.

  “So what kind of a season did you have last year?” Tim asks. He knows from Claire that Pete struck out ten players in his last four innings on the mound in last summer’s championship game.

  “It was okay,” he says.

  “Maybe sometime I could show you my slider,” he says. “My dad used to play triple A ball. He pitched to Jimmy Piersall one time.”

  “I like your necklaces,” Sally tells Ursula, after a long silence.

  Ursula keeps chewing.

  “So,” Sally says to her, “what grade are you in anyway Ursula?”

  Ursula whispers something to Tim. “She’s in second,” says Tim. “Of course, she’ll graduate in just a few weeks, won’t you, Urs?” Ursula is silent.

  “Remember your second-grade teacher, Sal?” says Claire. “Mrs. Foskett? Only you called her Faucet for the longest time.”

  “I already know how to throw a slider,” says Pete. “My dad taught me.”

  “Why don’t you take Ursula up to your room and show her your trolls while I whip the cream for the strawberry shortcake?” Claire asks Pete when dinner’s over. She’s afraid he might roll his eyes, but he actually puts a hand on her shoulder to show her the way.

  She shakes her head and whispers something to her father again.

  “Come on, Urs,” he says to her. “You’ll have fun. He’s got this one troll that’s dressed like a wizard and one that’s a karate guy.” Pete looks at Tim suspiciously when he says this. Tim has been in Pete’s room before evidently. When Pete wasn’t there.

  “That’s right,” says Claire. “Pete even made them their own little house. It’s really neat.”

  “I’ll show you,” Pete says. Claire wants to kiss him.

  Ursula says nothing.

  “I guess she’s staying down here with us, Pete,” Tim says. “But thanks for asking.”

  Pete shrugs and heads out of the kitchen.

  Alone in the kitchen with just the two of them, her father and Claire, Ursula is a different person. Chatty and funny. She is telling a story about a goody-goody in her class who always tells when this boy that sits next to her picks his nose. “The only thing is, she picks her nose too,” says Ursula. “I saw her. She even eats it. She just does it in the cubby room, when she doesn’t know anybody
sees her.

  “Your daughter is so pretty,” she tells Claire.

  “She used to think she was fat for a while there,” says Claire. “You’d be surprised.”

  “Did kids ever have a club about her at school?” Ursula asks her. “Where they sit around and tell how they’re never going to invite her to their birthday party? And every time she tried to sit down in the lunchroom the kids at that table would say, ‘Sorry. That seat’s taken’?”

  “Do they have a club like that about you?” says Claire. She doesn’t have to look at Tim’s face to know what it must look like.

  “Not only that,” says Ursula. “They make fart noises when I go up to the board.”

  “What do you do about that?” says Claire.

  “I tell the teacher and get them in trouble,” says Ursula.

  Claire doesn’t groan but she feels like it.

  “It doesn’t matter anyways,” says Ursula. “I hate all those kids. I don’t even want to go to their parties and play Pickle with them. I’m lucky, because I get to have lunch with the teacher.”

  They are clearing away the dishes. Claire has told Sally she can go out with Travis now. Pete is up in his room listening to his Counting Crows album. After finishing off her second dish of strawberry shortcake and licking the plate, Ursula is in the living room rearranging Claire’s dollhouse. They can hear her making voices for the dolls.

  “I think it went fine, considering,” Tim says to her. He runs his hand down Claire’s back as he says this, very lightly, as if he isn’t completely sure it’s okay.

  Claire doesn’t say anything. She reaches to open the dishwasher.

  “What is it?” he says. “Tell me.”

  She stands at the sink scrubbing the same dish for a long time. She doesn’t say anything.

  “What did I do?” he says. “Whatever it is, I’m sorry.”

  “There’s just so much that has to be fixed,” Claire tells him. “I didn’t expect it to be this hard, I guess. The kids barely spoke with each other.”