by Jesse Karp
It wasn't as though her entire college career, and thus her entire future, rested on this interview. It wasn't as if her parents had chosen the worst possible time to take their annual long weekend in the city. It wasn't like if her mother had been at home this morning she would have been certain to rouse her on time. Come to think of it, had she slept through her parents' good-luck phone call? If not, this would mark the first time in her life that her parents had not kept their full focus on her until the very last second before an important event. And strange timing, if they had chosen this moment to ratchet up her independence: just when she didn't want them to.
Laura sat down and did what she could with her hair in the camera app of her cell. The receptionist let two others in while Laura stewed and shuffled through the files on her cell: high-school transcript, application form, recommendation letters. Attached to one of them, on the Post-it app her father used for these small surprises, a message: "Don't forget to tell them about the college courses!" A little more than half an hour later, the receptionist deigned to look her way again.
"Laura Westlake," she said, "you can go in."
Laura rose, absently touching her hair, and went into the office. It was larger and brighter and greener than the reception area, thanks to the lime carpeting and matching trim. The man behind the desk was as slim and sharp as a razor, polished with a cold fastidiousness, right to the stiffness in his collar. It was just plain remarkable, she thought as she took a seat across his desk, that some people looked exactly like the part they played in life. The plaque on his desk said he was "Martin Stett."
"Ms. Westlake," he said, fingering the touchpad of the screen on his desk that contained all the information Laura had sent along. He looked at the screen with his eyes but didn't turn his head toward it.
"Yes, sir." She smiled, willing her already bright blue eyes to light up even more.
"I like your grades and extracurricular activities," he said, clearly scanning them for the first time. His eyes found her suddenly. "You know, our last intern was a young man."
She looked back at him, more surprised that he paused after the statement, waiting for some kind of response, than she was surprised at the statement itself. Well, a man will do in a pinch. She almost said it.
"That's interesting," came out instead.
"Mmm." His eyes flicked back down to the file.
He was quiet long enough that she began to tussle with the idea of offering an excuse for her tardiness. She opened her mouth with the first word of it just as he looked up and spoke. As they interrupted each other, he stopped and actually scowled at her.
"I'm sorry." She motioned with her hand for him to continue.
"I see you've applied to Yale," he said. "My son attends the law school. Why Yale?"
"Their psychology program is ranked among the ten best in the country, and I'm very serious about pursuing psychology as a career." Did she sound too proud about it? How could she soften it a bit? "It's also just a few hours away from home."
"Yes, I hear it's an excellent program. Do you suppose they particularly mind if you're thirty minutes late for all your classes? Or, later, when you have a private practice, do you think your patients will mind if you show up after half their sessions are through?"
Shocked by his unpleasantness, she blinked very slowly and reigned in the response held just behind her lips.
"I'm terribly sorry, Mr. Stett." It sounded just a little tight. "My father is out of town, and my mother came down with something very harsh last night and I had to get her to the doctor rather unexpectedly." Too many details, she scolded herself. Cramming in details always weakened a lie. "I'm really never, never late like this."
"Well," he said, taking his eyes off her once again, "that's provably false, isn't it?"
She held her tongue for a moment longer, debating whether or not her entire future actually did rest on this interview.
"You understand this is a six-month internship," he said, "specifically for our hospital statistics study. What do you think you could contribute to this study?"
"I've done three years of advanced placement work in psychology," she said without preamble, prepared to move on if he was, "and last summer I took a psychological statistics course at SUNY Stony Brook."
His eyes began to wander as she spoke, to a note on his desk, a picture on the wall.
"I've been a volunteer at the Stony Brook Medical Center for three years, too," she soldiered on, "and I know they figure prominently in your study. And I believe very strongly in the purpose of your research." He was through. He didn't want her from the beginning, either because she was late or because she wasn't a young man. It was plain now as he considered her flawless qualifications with squinting unkindness.
"I don't think so, Ms. Westlake." He finished it like a hit man firing a bullet into the back of a head, quick and cold and without a glimmer of remorse. "We're looking for someone with a more dynamic variety of interests."
"More dynamic. I see," she said to that stream of nonsense. She stood, but rather than strolling casually out, held her position.
He stared silently, waiting for her to disappear and the world to resume its natural order. She had so much to say to him. She could feel it bubbling in her stomach and trembling at her jaw.
"Was there something else?" he asked, begging her, begging her to say it.
She didn't.
Sitting in the car, numb, she called her parents. She was shocked to have the call go straight to her mother's voicemail. They knew exactly when her interview was. Why would their cells be off now? Why, in fact, had there not been a message from them waiting on her own cell?
But it was their long weekend, and if that was more important than her interview, Laura could grudgingly, albeit confusedly, grant them that. She voice-texted something artfully vague and drove herself home.
Mookie bounced around manically as she came into the house. In Laura's rush this morning, she had failed to feed him, and now she paid the price as he whined and slobbered at her feet. She stripped off her nice clothes and stuffed them angrily into the hamper, then pulled on the frumpiest sweatpants and sweatshirt she had. Then, and only then, did she saunter into the kitchen and unload a can of the meat slop Mookie favored into his bowl.
Standing in the kitchen, she began to fume again. Despite wanting to yell at Mookie for no reason, to scream at her parents for good reason, to jump up and down and throw a fit, her reputation as the calming voice of reason and harmony among friends and family haunted her even when she was alone. She pulled out the soothing peach tea instead and opened the cabinet to fetch her mug. As she pulled it out, her eyes caught on the long jagged crack that had formed, spontaneously it seemed, down its side. The mug, shaped into a lumpy surface by her own eight-year-old fingers once upon a time, had the words "I LOVE YOU MOMMY," with hearts standing in for all the Os, carved into its rusty brown surface beneath a shiny glaze. She had created it in art class as a gift for her mother, but by the time she got home and spent a month hiding it, it became clear that it had to be her own. Finally, tearfully, she confessed her terrible secret. Since then, it had been holding her milk, orange juice, and tea every day of the intervening nine years. But not anymore. The crack was so deep, she could see light through it if she angled it properly. The glaze was flaking away around it, and shards of hard clay were already crumbling from the surface.
So Laura cried it out, leaning over the sink, the poor maimed mug hanging shakily off her finger, with Mookie dumbly munching away by her feet.
If her parents had been here, this would not have happened, that was for goddamned sure. Even her mug would probably be okay if her parents had been here, because then she would have been up on time and had orange juice this morning and that would somehow have saved her mug; it wouldn't have felt abandoned, forlorn, and thus given up the ghost.
Of course, didn't her parents always take this long weekend on their anniversary every year? Hadn't they, in fact, had their rese
rvations long before the appointment for this interview had even been a possibility? Had it not been Laura herself who insisted they keep their date when they realized it would mean their absence during the interview? It had been a mad push for the independence they sometimes seemed so reluctant to give her that had now blown up in her face.
And what was more frustrating, really: that her parents weren't here or that she so desperately wanted them? It was as if no accomplishment was real until they had acknowledged it; no failure could be confronted without them to hold her hand. All this talk about giving her the independence to make her own way ... when was she going to learn how to forge that path?
As the last tears began to dry on Laura's face, Mookie started thumping against her shin with his shaggy head.
She knelt down and rested her forehead on his and rubbed the sides of his belly.
"Sorry, dude. Just because the rest of the world is filled with assholes doesn't mean you have to live with one."
She got his leash and put on sneakers and let him lead her, racing, out of the house and onto the road.
She called her parents again while she was being tugged along, and though the phone was clearly on, because it rang several times before the message this time, she still got no answer. Amid the shadowed trees, the familiar houses snug behind their neat lawns were a hallmark of the quiet affluence and security of her life. She passed them by unnoticed as she checked her own messages and found not only that her parents hadn't replied to her text, but that there were no messages from Rachel or Cheryl, either, who both knew she'd had the interview this morning, though they at least had the excuse of being in school today. Laura had taken the day off as one of her allotted college days, with the assumption that it would be noticed by her interviewer as a sign of her commitment. So Rachel and Cheryl would be at the end of pre-calc now. She could voice-text them, or wait the ten minutes until lunch and call them. But she felt hollow at the idea of talking to them before talking to her parents about this. For all their double-checking, their last-second notes, their wholesale and often frustrating investment in practically every step she took, wasn't this exactly what parents were for? She didn't need them to tell her how to do everything right; she just wanted them there when things went particularly wrong. Which, as she recalled, was where they had always been until now.
Back at home, she took a real shower, dressed in a tight light-blue T-shirt and her jeans skirt, and put her black hair in a ponytail, tugging her father's old Mets cap around it. She sat at her dad's desk and unfolded the cell screen to its largest size. She enlarged the touchpad and spent the next hour web-numbing her brain.
By the time she was bleary-eyed and bored, her parents hadn't called back in three hours, and it was surely enough to worry a person. Given that her mother still told her to put her seat belt on every time she got into the car, was it any wonder that dreadful thoughts would spring to Laura's mind? Not that the other explanations were so wonderful, either: that they had forgotten her interview was today (not possible, given how long she had been blathering on about it) or that they didn't care (not possible, given how long they had been blathering on about it).
What the hell was it about New York, anyway? After all the crap that had been heaped on that place, why would two people want to spend a vacation there?
"Screw this," she said out loud.
She turned music up louder than ever would have been permitted in a parentally supervised house, cleared her mind of this useless nonsense, and got down to work.
Just because the internship she'd been planning on—had, in fact, assumed she'd be getting, given her much-vaunted credentials—had fallen through didn't mean there weren't a thousand others waiting for her elsewhere. She started looking and found that, in not having bothered to look around, she had missed others that interested her just as much. Two of them were even through the Medical Center, where she already knew people who would, she assumed again, be happy to help her out.
Her eyes wandered to the message indicator.
Still no call.
She put the music back on louder still, too loud for Mookie, anyway, who darted out of the house through his dog door and started rooting in the yard. She retreated to the laundry room and ironed what was waiting in the dryer while the next load was going, then ironed the new stuff. She folded it and brought it to its proper places and had the knob of one of her dresser drawers crack off in her hand as she slid it open. Like the mug, it was done, but unlike the mug, it could be replaced.
Still no call.
With a high-pitched shriek of frustration, she gave in, snatched up her cell, and keyed her parents. Expecting to be frustrated once again, and not sure whether to present herself as happy or furious if she did get a response, she was immediately surprised to have the screen brighten with her mother's face after one ring.
"Hello?" Claire Westlake said, looking quizzically at the screen.
"Mom!"
"I'm sorry?" her mother said. She was focused right on the screen, and Laura could see the generic décor of a hotel room behind her, so the cell was clearly working properly.
"Mom, it's me." She took off the Mets cap; though, if anything, the hat should have made her more recognizable.
"I'm sorry," her mother said. "Who's 'me'?"
This whole day of not calling and refusing to answer in service of some half-assed joke? That was not like her mother, and it was definitely not like her father.
"Mom, what are you doing?"
"I'm sorry, young lady, but I don't know you. Have you"—her mother stumbled, obviously troubled by this exchange herself—"have you checked the number you're dialing?"
"What's wrong, Claire?" her father's voice came from off the screen, and her mother shook her head without looking away.
"Mom," Laura said again, because, really, what else was there to say? "It's me. Laura."
"I'm sorry, Laura," her mother said. "You seem to have the wrong number."
"I..."Laura's voice trailed away, her mind suddenly stupid and her fingers numb.
"Try again," said her mother, not unkindly. "I'm sure you'll get who you're looking for." She looked at the screen quizzically for one more moment, then keyed off, leaving behind a scrolling ad for reduced train fares to New York.
Laura stood immobile in the middle of the living room, her body stiff and her eyes dizzy. Dazed, she looked down at the empty screen.
"Mom?"
ANNIE
MAL'S EYE WAS PURPLE and yellow. It didn't hurt as much as his knuckles, which always stung fiercely the day after a fight; nor as much as the back of his torso, where he'd taken a kidney punch; nor his wrist, which had hyperextended in a clumsy block. Nevertheless, it was the eye that Sharon noticed.
"What do your new parents say about that?" she asked, and maybe her voice was smug, or maybe that was how she always sounded. Mal couldn't remember. "I'm sure they love it, knowing you're coming into their home with other people's blood on your knuckles."
"They get me an ice pack," he said, "and ask me if I'm okay." A lie. He had gotten out of the house before the Fosters had even seen him.
Sharon was a tired woman, washed out and wasting away, scrubbed at by a rough and bristled life. It was the same thing Mal thought he saw in the mirror; something strong in his face worn away, the defining and striking sharp edges dulled until strength had become sorrow and a gleam in his eyes had become a dull flatness.
"And do they care that you aren't in school?"
"If they do, that's their business now. Not yours. I'm here to talk about Tommy. Or are you finished with him, too?"
Her jaw hardened. She bit something back, then nearly spat out her next words.
"I told you already, I haven't actually seen him in months." As she sat on the edge of her couch, her face wasn't softening, but her fingers wouldn't stay still, searching for a smoke, or something more powerful. "Tommy always talked a good game and dropped the ball as soon as things got hard. He barely graduated, then
he couldn't find work." She snorted. "I hounded him about it, but what the hell good did that ever do? He'd make a halfhearted try, then never follow up. George arranged an interview for him; more than one. Tommy didn't even bother showing up for the last one. George yelled at him, said it made him look bad; said Tommy had to pull his weight if he wanted to stay. Tommy said he'd pull his weight." She laughed, her eyes looking inward. "Pull his weight right out of George's house. And he did. Only solid decision he ever managed to stick to."
Mal nodded. He had never been to this apartment, tiny and crowded with the objects of a life he had nothing to do with anymore. No light found its way in here, through the grimy windows. A bulky shadow loomed outside, cutting off the sun. He had not been in the same room with his mother more than three times since his father had marched out, pulling Mal behind him. But his mother still had the same harshness in her look, a look of perpetual accusation.
"So he got a job, found a place," Mal supposed out loud.
"I guess so," Sharon said. She didn't sound convinced.
"You don't know what he was doing, nothing like that?"
"Christ, Mal, at least I had his address. When's the last time you saw him?"
"I didn't mean it like that." He had meant it like that. "What about his friends? Do you know any of them?"
"Well, sure, there's Danny and Miles and Tony. Oh, you mean their last names, don't you? So we could, like, look them up and ask them about all this?" Her unpleasant sarcasm was also something he remembered well about her. "You're not the only one with a brain in your head, Mal. I never spent much time with his friends. I doubt I'd have been welcome to if I'd wanted to."
Mal nodded. She was steamed, and he was only making it worse, which was their classic dynamic playing out beautifully to form. He saw it among guys at the gym again and again. Some climbed into the ring just because it meant a couple of bucks or some recognition or a chance to punch an anonymous face. Other fighters had it in for each other specifically, and it had nothing to do with a shared history. It was purely chemical. Mal and his mother had a history and they had that chemistry. They suffered through it, at each other's throats for the first eleven years of his life, when Sharon was sober enough to pitch a fight and wasn't bothering to have one with Mal's father.