The Second Home

by Christina Clancy

  “I don’t want to know what happened. All I know is we’re going back home.”

  “Milwaukee?” Michael said, confused and shocked.

  “Good,” Ann said. “I want to go home. I never want to come back to this place again.”

  FOURTEEN

  Ann

  In October, Ann was painting the homecoming window on a restaurant called Shahrazad on Oakland Avenue for the cross-country team. Their mascot was a tiger, and they were competing against the Whitefish Bay Blue Dukes. Ann was painting their tagline. It said, “It’s a bad day to be a Duke.” That was Nell Finch’s idea, and it was OK, but not great. Usually Ann would come up with something better, but she’d been distracted. David Simons, her homecoming date, was painting a crown on the tiger’s head. Keisha Brown drew the duke. She was a great artist, and had depicted a wimpy little duke standing in the middle of the field, looking terrified. “Do you like it?” she asked Ann and David. All Ann could do was nod. She was suddenly overcome with nausea and threw up right there, right in front of them. It splattered on David’s Adidas.

  “Oh gross,” he said, while Keisha rubbed her back and pulled back her hair.

  “You OK?”

  “I drank too much at Evan’s last night,” Ann said, but that was a lie. She hadn’t even gone to Evan’s party. She’d been too tired. All she wanted to do lately was sleep. She wondered if she had mono.

  But the next week, she threw up again when she ate one of the candy corns that Mrs. Brennan, her guidance counselor, kept in a bowl on her desk. They were talking about her college applications and SAT scores, and what a good shot Mrs. Brennan thought Ann had at getting into a good East Coast school, but Ann was calculating the best route to the bathroom, so overtaken with nausea she couldn’t focus.

  She tried to convince herself she wasn’t pregnant. She went to the bathroom so often to see if she was bleeding that her classmates began to notice. She prayed she’d find blood in her underwear—God, she never thought she’d want a period this badly. She looked back through calendars and counted backward to that awful night. She couldn’t remember when she’d last used a tampon.

  She’d thought about taking a test but put it off. It was just one time, the first time. What were the odds? Homecoming was next week. She couldn’t be pregnant on homecoming court—this sort of thing couldn’t happen to school royalty. It happened to other people.

  * * *

  NOT UNTIL AFTER THANKSGIVING did Ann finally muster the nerve to go to the Planned Parenthood next to Shank Hall, the place where she’d heard that the girls from her high school got their birth control and had their abortions, and where the glassy-eyed protesters held up giant signs of bloody fetuses. She filled out paperwork, peed in a cup, read brochures asking “Is a seed a tree?,” and looked around at the other girls in the waiting room. Were they also pregnant? Why did they all seem so calm?

  The counselor confirmed her suspicion. “You’re pretty far along,” she said. “We need to perform an ultrasound to confirm the dates.”

  Was she too far along for an abortion? Ann thought about her alternatives: Drinking bleach. Throwing herself down the stairs.

  He put some cold jelly on her stomach, and there, on the black-and-white television screen, she saw it: a baby, not just the idea of a baby but a real, perfect little child. It seemed so alone inside her there, so vulnerable. So alive.

  The pregnancy reminded her of something Michael had taught her about gardening: that if you want a ripe tomato early in the season you can slam a shovel into the roots and throw the plant into a shock, enough shock to produce fruit before the plant would otherwise be ready.

  Shock was what she suffered from after that afternoon appointment. It made her blurry and distracted, unable to focus on school, much less her plans moving forward. She didn’t know how to process it all: the idea of this life inside her, and the end of the future she’d planned for herself. College out East. A great job. The kids at school would take gossipy delight in her situation. Now she was that girl: the one who got knocked up, the one who got in trouble. She was stupid and careless. She’d blown up her own bright future as if she’d dropped a hand grenade at her feet.

  But that baby! That perfect baby. It was floating inside her, innocent. Her child, not Anthony’s. He’d already taken too much from her. This baby would never be his. She’d never think of it as the product of that awful night on Duck Pond. She’d think of it as fate.

  She started to resign herself to her new situation. Not knowing was hard. Now that she knew, she felt strangely focused. Ann always preferred certainty over ambiguity. She was amazed to discover that she was capable of tapping into a deep inner calm.

  Somewhere in all the fear and ambivalence, she realized that she could do this. It would suck. It would be hard. It would throw off all the plans she’d made for herself, but she would be fine.

  She knew it.

  What she wasn’t so sure about was Anthony.

  She couldn’t tell him. His threats, his voice, his clammy skin, the smell of whiskey on his breath, the way he moaned, the fiery pain between her legs, how she’d tried to bite through his fingers …

  And yet. As wrong as Anthony was to do what he did, she felt that telling him was the right thing to do. Strange as it might sound, she also wanted to talk to an adult, someone who could see their way through the situation. Why would she think Anthony could offer her any kind of assurance? Mostly, she knew she’d need him to help pay to raise the child. She didn’t make much money at Lisa’s Pizza. Her parents would help. They’d be disappointed, but she knew they’d be cool about it. Well, eventually.

  She still had the Shaws’ “backup” number at their house in Marblehead. Maureen had given it to her in case of an emergency. If only Maureen had known the full range of emergencies Ann might experience! She called a few times, using the star-key combination to suppress her number, and Maureen answered the phone in her singsong voice. Ann hung up.

  Finally, the next day, Anthony answered with his usual distracted gruffness. “Hello?” His voice set something off in her; her body flushed with adrenaline the way it did when her car hit black ice last winter, and for a few seconds—seconds that might as well have stretched into days—she thought for sure she’d end up in a ditch.

  “It’s Ann.” Her hand shook as she held the receiver.

  He paused, as if he had to mentally scroll through all the possible women named Ann who might call him. “Ann,” he said. “Ann, Ann. How’s Wisconsin?”

  What a stupid question. “I’m pregnant.” It was the first time she’d said those words out loud to another person. They sounded leaded. Permanent.

  She could hear him breathing into the phone, saying nothing. His breath—she remembered the sound of it in her ear, heavy and wet. That night she’d tried so hard to forget might as well have been happening all over again.

  “Are you waiting for me to congratulate you? It’s not mine,” he said. “If that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “It could only be yours.”

  “I don’t have time for this.”

  “You don’t have time? I told you I was a virgin. You are the only person I’ve—who’s—the only one. Believe me, if I thought it was someone else’s kid I wouldn’t contact you.”

  “Oh, come on. You were no virgin.” His voice lowered to a whisper. “Besides, I had a vasectomy.”

  “That’s a lie!” Ann wished she could kick him. She’d never felt such rage. “You are lying, but I don’t care. I know I can prove it.”

  Was Maureen within hearing distance? The thought made Ann feel sick.

  “What do you want?”

  What did she want? She wanted to feel less alone, less scared. For Anthony to be the man she thought he was when she first met him. To go back in time and burn that babysitting ad she’d posted on the bulletin board. She was so low at that moment that she even wished he could make it so she’d never been born.

  “How much does an abortion co
st these days?”

  Ann was shocked by the coldness in his voice.

  “It’s too late.”

  Ann banged the back of her head against the Third Eye Blind poster on her wall. She looked at the track trophies that lined her bookshelves, the framed corkboard pinned with ribbons and concert tickets and photos with her friends on hayrides and waterskiing and late nights at Ma Fischer’s. She looked at the pile of college brochures from Harvard and Boston College and Amherst, schools that wouldn’t want her now, and even if they did, how could she possibly make college work, or at least college so far from home?

  “How far along?” he said.

  “Can’t you do the math?” She’d been so angry since that night on Duck Pond that she felt she was manufacturing rage in her own body, when really, she was manufacturing his child; part of Anthony was inside of her, his cells wildly multiplying and dividing with her own. How could that be? She wished like hell that she’d never met him. She liked to think of Anthony as an apple core she could toss out of a car window, something that could be forgotten, left to rot into nothing.

  “Do you show?”

  “I’m starting to.” She used a large safety pin to extend the waist of her pants, and wore long flannel shirts to cover her belly.

  “And does anyone know?”

  “Just you. You and the doctor at Planned Parenthood.”

  “Just keep it quiet. For now. Let me figure this out. I’ll come up with a plan. Does Michael know?”

  “No,” Ann said. “Not yet.” She wanted to tell him, and came close a few times, but she knew he wouldn’t take it well. His feelings for her weren’t exclusively brotherly, a fact he couldn’t hide no matter how aloof he tried to act around her. She remembered Michael’s kiss as if it had been exchanged between two people totally different from who they were now. That one perfect moment of sweet adolescence she hadn’t known would, in a matter of weeks, dissolve into this shitty version of adulthood.

  “I need to tell my parents,” she said. “I’m telling them tonight.”

  “Not tonight. In a week. Give me a week to think.”

  “They’re going to figure it out on their own.”

  “Just give me a week, Ann.”

  “I don’t have a lot of weeks to give.”

  “Let me handle it. You’re confused, this is a hard time. Look, you can’t make good decisions right now. You normally can, I know, but you’re under a lot of stress. Everything is going to be OK. I know you don’t have any reason to believe me, but I’ll make sure of it. Just hold tight.”

  This sounded almost reassuring. She started to think she might hate Anthony just a little less until he said, “And don’t breathe a word of this to my wife.”

  The line went dead.

  FIFTEEN

  Michael

  Thank God school was over for the holidays. In Michael’s last class, they watched an Alistair Cooke Letter from America episode on pork barrel politics. Mrs. McCarthy must have shown that video a hundred times. He wasn’t a big fan of school, but ever since that last night on the Cape, when Ed found Ann in his bed, he’d tried hard to focus and get back in Ed’s good graces. Michael was pulling decent grades—passing, at least. He took the AP chemistry class Ed thought he should take, joined basketball, and started playing chess at lunch. Ed talked to him about college, and he’d sent an application to UW–Milwaukee, but he didn’t want to go to college, at least not right away.

  He and Ann had denied that anything had gone on between them, but Michael wasn’t at all convinced that Ed and Connie believed them. They seemed distant and wary. It felt as if the spell had been broken, and in the four months since their abrupt departure from Wellfleet, the Gordons had gone from being a model family to being a bunch of people who shared a house. He’d been lonely before he met Ann, sure, but he felt even lonelier now, because he was so acutely aware of what he’d lost.

  Michael had always done his best to keep his distance, but now Ann was totally off-limits; she might as well have been wrapped up in police tape. She was a different person, too, only her perfect grades weren’t so perfect, and she’d become dramatically less involved, abruptly quitting the cross-country team and forensics. She even skipped homecoming, even though she’d been elected to the court and had a date. She was always in her room. She’d been distracted, not rude or mean. That is, until that morning. She’d been in the small bathroom they all shared for fifteen minutes. He worried he wouldn’t get to school on time, so he knocked gently on the door. “Will you be done soon?”

  Ann threw the door open and stormed out. “I can’t get any privacy in this house!”

  “What’s your problem?” he asked. He sincerely wanted to know the answer. He felt like he didn’t even recognize her anymore.

  “My problem,” she said, “is that there are too many people in this house thanks to you. You aren’t the only person with shit to deal with. Take your shower and go. Just go away. Get out of my life.” She ran into her bedroom and slammed the door.

  Ann could have said anything, but to tell him to get out of her life? Nothing could have hurt more. He nursed that hurt all day at school, his stomach a mess. He walked home slowly, his backpack heavy from textbooks, his mood as low as the heavy clouds that hung over the lake. He used to be able to turn to Poppy, his former ally, but she was just as distant as Ann, stoned all the time and doing God knows what. She was never home. She’d finally found her group, a new crowd in his own grade that Michael didn’t approve of: Chris Bonner, Priscilla Madden, Leah Bagnoli, people with runny noses and long pinkie nails. They hung out at Fuel Café instead of Coffee Trader, went to the Grateful Dead tape night on Thursdays at Thurman’s, got high and played hacky sack on the UWM concourse. Poppy even dressed differently, in oversized burlap harga shirts, ripped jeans, and Birkenstocks. She snuck out at night, and snuck back in. She reeked, and her pupils were dilated.

  The wind off Lake Michigan was strong and damp. He turned down Newberry Boulevard. The Gordon house, with its Victorian turret, was visible in the distance. A car with tinted windows pulled into a driveway just in front of him, practically rolling over his feet. The window rolled down slowly, like in rock videos on MTV when limousines slow down and musicians invite someone to join the party.

  Only this was no limo, and it was no party. This was Anthony.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Get in, Michael. Let’s go for a ride,” he said. “We need to talk.”

  * * *

  THE CAR SLID THROUGH THE STREETS on the East Side toward Lake Michigan, where it turned south to head downtown. Stately mansions lined Lake Drive, huge Tudors and Colonials, homes that were bigger, nicer, classier, and more solidly built than Anthony’s place on the Cape. Ann once told Michael that she thought it was a bad omen if the lake and the sky were the same color. On this day, they were the same flat dark gray.

  “Milwaukee isn’t bad,” Anthony said. “Parks, the lake. Old houses. I expected factories, Laverne and Shirley. Happy Days.”

  “Why are you here?” Michael asked.

  “I’ll bet this does seem curious.”

  What a pompous ass, Michael thought. “Curious”? More like wrong. To see Anthony in Milwaukee was about as normal as seeing the waves crash sideways. “What is this about?” Michael asked.

  “It’s sensitive. And it concerns you. Me. And Ann. Your sister.” He put special emphasis on that word. “It’s important to her that we talk. But let’s not discuss it now, not while I’m driving.”

  It didn’t take long to get downtown, maybe ten minutes. By then, the insides of Anthony’s windows were covered with moisture. Downtown Milwaukee could sometimes seem abandoned, aside from the few grim-faced workers on Wisconsin Avenue walking with their arms crossed in front of them, bracing against the cold. Wreaths with big red bows hung from the electrical lines on each block. With the holiday just a few weeks away, Michael had hoped against hope that the festivities of the season might bring the Gordons back to
gether. Last year, his first Christmas with the family, Connie had put up the nativity scene even though they didn’t go to church. It was a family joke to move Mary’s figurine closer and closer to Jesus each day of Advent. Ed resurrected the model train set he’d used as a kid. He’d spent a lot of time showing Michael how it worked. Once they propped up the tree (they’d driven out to a farm and cut it down themselves, which seemed impossibly quaint compared to the Charlie Brown trees his mother used to buy at the gas station), Ed set the train in motion around the base. Christmas morning was like a scene from a cheesy after-school movie. It wouldn’t be like that this year.

  “Here we are.” Anthony pulled up in front of the classic old Pfister Hotel. The valet opened Michael’s door at the same moment he was about to open it himself. He almost fell out of the car, right at the valet’s feet.

  They walked inside. Anthony took off his camel coat and draped it casually over his arm. He was dressed in pressed khakis and a soft, expensive-looking beige sweater. His leather shoes were shiny, free of scuffs. His tan was gone and so was his beard. His face was pale, which only made his black hair and dark eyelashes all the more striking and blunt, more startling than handsome.

  Everyone at the hotel, including Anthony, was dressed nicely, expensively. It made Michael wish he’d given his outfit more thought, but how would he have ever known that morning when he was getting dressed in such a hurry that he’d end up here, at the Pfister? He wore jeans and an open jacket over the T-shirt Poppy gave him for his birthday last October. It said CAPE COD but looked like the Coca-Cola logo. He felt like everyone in the hushed lobby was staring at him.

  “Follow me,” Anthony said, and walked to a mahogany table with plush gold chairs in the bar area, away from where most everyone else was seated. Michael walked several steps behind him. They sat down, practically hidden next to the base of the huge Christmas tree. The tree was as out of place as Michael felt; he was suddenly struck by the oddness of the grand piece of nature brought indoors. It was decorated with tasteful, classic ornaments, tinsel, and little lights that looked like old-fashioned gas lamps. There were gold foil gift-wrapped packages around the base of the tree. From a distance the gifts looked nice, but up close he could tell they were old, overused props. The foil was dented and there were small tears on the sides of the packages. Fake presents were the worst.