Off Season

by Jean Stone

  So now Rita was trying not to throw up, wondering if she’d become a masochist for the sake of her best friend. And if her attempt to drag Jill back was even going to work.

  They were laughing on the way back to Jeff’s apartment, Jill and Jeff, Amy and Mick. They’d been telling Mick about Addie Becker, and Jeff had done an imitation of her that he’d perfected back when the woman had been a daily presence in their lives.

  “I can’t believe you’re going back to work with them,” Jeff said, and Jill’s laughter slowly subsided.

  “Think of it as a means to an end,” she said. “A door opening for my new career.”

  Jeff shrugged, and they turned the corner onto the street where he lived.

  Amy put up her umbrella, though today it hadn’t rained. “Have it your way,” she mocked beneath it, twirling the handle as if it were a movie prop. “And I’ll have it mine.” Mick laughed, but then, he laughed a lot when he was with Amy. It warmed Jill to think her daughter had that effect: to bring laughter into life, to share joy.

  She also hoped that Amy’s lightheartedness indicated that she was headed toward acceptance of Good Night, USA.

  “Oh, no,” Jeff interrupted her thoughts. “A vagrant on my step.”

  Her eyes moved to Jeff’s front door stoop where a woman sat slumped. But it was not a vagrant. It was Rita.

  “Rita!” Jill shrieked. “What the hell are you—” She helped her best friend to her feet, then saw how pale she looked. “Rita, are you okay?”

  “No,” Rita moaned. “I’m sick as shit. And I’m not altogether sure, but I’m either in labor or in the middle of a miscarriage.”

  Rita did not have a miscarriage. She experienced “premature labor,” according to the doctor, who stood on one side of the hospital bed now, while Jill was on the other.

  “We’ve done an ultrasound,” he said, “and it appears that everything is fine. But you must take it easy. Both for yourself and for the twins.”

  Glancing from the doctor, Rita looked at Jill, then back again. “What?” she asked.

  “You must take it easy. Flying all night without sleep is not healthy for you or for your babies.”

  Rita frowned. “That’s the second time you’ve mentioned something in the plural form.”

  “Surely you know you are having twins.”

  Rita looked at Jill again, who had broken into a big fat grin. “No, I did not know.”

  “This was your first ultrasound? Didn’t you have one with the amniocentesis?”

  “I didn’t have either. I’ve been too busy.”

  The doctor looked puzzled. “Well, then, let me be the first to congratulate you.”

  She did not dare look at Jill again. “Thanks. Now when can I get out of here?”

  “I’d like to keep you overnight.”

  “Fine. I could use the rest.”

  He left quickly.

  “Well?” Jill asked, sitting down on the side of the bed. “This changes things, doesn’t it?”

  “Changes what?” Rita asked, as if she didn’t know.

  “It’s time, Rita. You have to tell Charlie now. You’re going to have twins. His twins.”

  She turned her head on the pillow away from her best friend. “I can’t.”

  “Rita, don’t be a jerk. You get seasick on a forty-five-minute trip across Vineyard Sound, but you flew all the way across the ocean because you wanted to haul me back to the man who loves me and who I love. Isn’t that why you’re here? Well, this is no different. Charlie loves you. And whether or not you know it, you love him. Own up to it, for once in your life.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “It wouldn’t work.”

  “Why? Because you’re afraid of a commitment? That’s not fair to those babies, Rita.”

  “It’s not because of commitment, Jill. It’s because I don’t trust him. I don’t trust any man.”

  Jill laughed. “Excuse me, but that’s my line.”

  “No,” Rita said into the pillow. She wished that Jill would leave. The ache in her stomach had moved to her chest. “Maybe you’d better go,” she said. “Come back tomorrow. We can talk then.” Maybe by tomorrow, she would have had time to think. Maybe by then she wouldn’t feel so—vulnerable.

  Twins?

  Twice blessed?

  Her?

  “Why did you come, Rita?” Jill persisted.

  From the corridor came hospital sounds: footsteps on tile, low-talking voices, a couple of dings from the call button of someone in more distress than Rita.

  Jill’s voice grew low. “He told you, didn’t he? Ben told you. About Mindy.”

  “Yes.”

  A few more footsteps passed, and another call button dinged.

  “I don’t think he did it,” Jill said. “Most days I don’t think he did. But he’s not fighting it. Sometimes I think this is harder on me than on him.”

  “That’s because he was there, Jill. He knows he didn’t do it.” She shook her head. “And so do I. I know what happens to a kid. I don’t think it happened to Mindy. Call it a gut feeling. But I’m speaking from experience.”

  “Make sense, Rita.”

  The room in the hospital—in hospital, the Brits called it, without the the—grew eerily quiet as if even people in the hallway waited for an answer. Rita closed her eyes. She could almost taste the bleach that had been used to launder the pillowcase. “When we were kids,” she said, “there was a man named Mr. Blanchette. Remember him?”

  “The one who read the girlie magazines in the corner store?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about him?”

  “One summer when Hazel rented out our house, we bunked in with Blanchette and his wife and their two sons and three dogs.”

  “And?”

  She felt Jill’s hand against her back, as if her friend knew what was coming next. “And I slept on the porch, and the bastard used to come out to my cot at night and feel me up.” There. She’d said it fast to get it done. For the first time ever, she had said it.

  “Rita …”

  “He never raped me. But he touched me, Jill. He touched my breasts and my butt, and he ran his fingers between my legs.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “And he jerked off across my sheets.”

  Jill was quiet for a moment. “Did you ever tell your mother?”

  “I was too afraid. We needed to stay somewhere. We needed to rent the house so we could survive. I was afraid if I told Hazel, we’d have nowhere to live.”

  Rita felt the weight of Jill’s long body lie gently down beside her, then her arm on her shoulder.

  “That’s why I doubt that anything happened,” she said. “Even today, I’ll bet most kids are too scared to tell.”

  “I’m not sure I agree,” Jill answered. “Today I think most kids are aware. They know it isn’t their fault.”

  Rita shook her head. “I know when a kid’s lying, Jill. I built my life on a lie. Besides, awareness or not, truth or lies, I think when it comes to hurting a kid, everyone is scared. Hell, I’m still scared after almost forty fucking years.”

  Jill tucked her head against her hair. “Oh, God, Rita,” she said. “My poor, poor Rita.”

  They lay still like that for a long, long time until Rita fell asleep, her pillowcase damp with tears.

  Jill shivered a little as she stepped into the cab an hour or so later, after Rita had drifted off to sleep. She gave the driver the address of Jeff’s apartment, settled back against the seat, and began to think about secrets. Damn, godforsaken secrets.

  It was not the first time Jill had learned how damaging secrets were to a family, to a life, to many other lives. Her mother’s secrets had caused Jill to leave the Vineyard, and always to struggle to be “someone” because her mother’s seeming indifference at home made her feel unwanted there. Her own insecurities, brought on by those secrets, had affected her kids, had shaped and skewed and probably screwed up their lives.

  It had been because of Rita’
s secret that Kyle had not known his father, that his father had not known him. It had been because of Rita’s secret that Rita herself had been cheated out of love, cheated out of a better life.

  And now it was because of Ben’s secret that Jill had run off to England and huddled her children together, not to protect them but to protect herself from the pain bottled up inside her, from the sense she’d been betrayed.

  Looking out the window, she knew how wrong she’d been. If she’d told her children, perhaps they could have gotten through this mess together. After all, her children were not children anymore: They were adults with sound judgment and level minds. It had only been because of Ben—because of his fear and of his shame—that Jill had not told them yet, that she’d been racing in small circles, trying to keep things glued together, living behind a mask.

  As the driver pulled to Jeff’s front door, Jill knew the time had come to stop living the facade.

  It was morning in England but the middle of the night in Florida, which did not stop Rita from picking up the phone on the bedside table and dialing the number in area code five-six-one.

  She had to do it, after all, before she chickened out.

  Thankfully Charlie, not Marge, picked up the phone.

  “Charlie, it’s me, Rita,” she said. Her eyes were closed, as if that would make this easier.

  “Hey,” he said groggily but not unhappily, “did you make it? Where are you?”

  “Yes, I made it.”

  “What happened? Is Jill there?”

  “Well, yes, of course she’s here. Well, not here, exactly. She’s here in England, but not here with me right now.”

  Charlie chuckled. “I have no idea what you’re saying.”

  Rita sighed. “She’s safe and sound at Jeff’s apartment. As for me, I’m safe and sound, too. But I’m not at the apartment, I’m in the hospital. Excuse me, that’s in hospital.”

  There was a pause, then he said, “Wait a minute, let me sit up.”

  She guessed that he sat up.

  “What happened? You’re okay?”

  “I’m just peachy, Charlie. But there’s something I need to tell you.”

  She paused.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said.

  The time between the dialogue grew further spaced apart.

  “Yes,” he said, “you told me.”

  She opened her eyes and looked around the room. It was interesting that hospital rooms looked the same here and in the States, as if there was an international hospital consultant who’d specialized in wall-mount TV stands, plastic bedpans, and disposable, gripper-bottom slippers.

  “I didn’t tell you everything.”

  Running her fingers alongside of the metal bed table, Rita wondered if the consultant specified one global manufacturer, the Microsoft of hospital bed tables. She wondered why the company had not been split up.

  “It’s mine, isn’t it?” Charlie asked.

  “Well,” she said, holding out her hand and examining her fingernails, “actually, yes.”

  There was another pause, a pregnant one, Rita thought with a small smile.

  “Rita,” he said. “Rita.”

  His voice choked up as if he were going to cry.

  “Jesus Christ, Charlie, don’t go crying on me. This doesn’t mean I’m going to marry you or anything.”

  He did not answer, then he said, “Rita, I don’t give a shit if you marry me. I love you. I always have. You don’t have to marry me, but I hope we can be a family.”

  “You’d better lower your voice. I’m not sure Miss Margie would be pleased to hear what you just said.” When she said “Margie,” a damn lump showed up inside her throat. She tried, unsuccessfully, to swallow it away.

  “Marge isn’t here,” he said.

  She wanted to respond, but she did not know what to say. She did not know if he meant she wasn’t there, as in she wasn’t in the room with him, or wasn’t in the state of Florida.

  “She went back to the Cape,” he said.

  “Oh,” Rita replied. So. She wasn’t in the state.

  “It wasn’t working, Rita.”

  “When did she leave?” Rita asked.

  “A couple of weeks after we came down.”

  “So you’ve been there—alone? Through the holidays?”

  He laughed. “You rented my apartment!”

  “Bull. You could have come back!”

  “I needed to think.”

  “About what?”

  “About my life. I was looking for some answers. Now, I think I have them. You don’t have to marry me if you don’t want to, but can’t we be a family? You, me, the baby—”

  “Excuse me, that would be babies.”

  “What?”

  “Babies. There are two of them.”

  That pause returned. Then, “What?”

  “Stop repeating yourself. I said babies. Two. Twins.”

  “OhmyGod,” he said without pausing this time.

  She played with the corner of the sheet a bit. It was clean and white and stiff from starch. In another second she was going to cry. “Is that okay?” she asked. “Are you happy we’re going to have twins?”

  “OhmyGod,” he said again. “Rita, I love you so much.”

  The tears began. “Me, too,” she said, “I love you so much, too.”

  “Lunch,” Jill announced as she walked into Rita’s room, carrying a tray. “Steak and kidney pie.”

  Rita plumped her pillow. “You’re going to make me puke if it’s the last thing you do.”

  “Never.” She set down the tray and whipped the plastic dome off a plate, atop which rested a bowl of thick clam chowder and a dish of what looked suspiciously like blueberry buckle. “I did some cooking this morning,” Jill said. “We have to keep up your strength.”

  If she’d had to get sick, this had turned out to be as good a place as any. “Bless you,” Rita said, fluffing her red-gray, matted curls. “Pardon my appearance, but my stylist and makeup woman haven’t arrived as yet.”

  “There’s still hope. Amy will be here shortly.”

  Rita laughed and gestured to the edge of the bed. “Sit down and watch me eat. I need to watch you gloat when I tell you I told Charlie.”

  If Jill’s mouth dropped further open, she’d have to scrape it from the floor.

  “You did what?”

  “I said sit down. Before you fall down.”

  Jill sat down, and Rita told her, and Jill gave her a hug. “It will be good,” Jill said. “Whatever happens, it will be good.” Her grin was sardonic, as if she were mocking herself. “I have to believe that now. Because I’ve done something, too.”

  “Oh, no,” Rita groaned. “What?”

  Jill patted Rita’s knee and looked off toward the window, her mouth set in a grin. “Last night when I went back to Jeff’s, I was determined to face the music, to tell the kids about Ben. I was upset about it, though. And I was anxious.

  “Then when I walked through the door, something happened that made me realize life can be beautiful.”

  Nibbling on the blueberry buckle, Rita watched Jill’s grin grow wider.

  “When I walked through the door,” Jill continued, turning her gaze back to her friend, “Amy was there with Jeff’s roommate, Mick. They were standing in the doorway into the kitchen, and Mick was kissing her. And she seemed to be liking it.”

  Rita dropped her spoon. “No shit.”

  “So you see? Nothing stays the same.”

  “No shit,” Rita repeated.

  “Then I asked if Mick would excuse us, and I called Jeff from his room. Then I sat down my two kids and told them everything.”

  “No shit” seemed to be all Rita could say.

  “No more secrets, Little Red. The cat’s out of this weary bag.”

  Rita picked up her spoon again. “How did the kids react?”

  “Amy wants to ‘wring Mindy’s twerpy neck’—that’s a quote. Jeff, of course, was not so animated. But he did look at me an
d say that no matter what problems he’s had—and is trying to work out—about Ben and me, he does not believe Ben is capable of anything of the sort.”

  Rita took a spoonful of the chowder. It tasted wonderfully like home. “So now Charlie knows about me and the kids know about Ben and so do I. And Amy let a boy kiss her and did not run away. So what’s next?”

  “Next,” Jill said with a big, deep breath, “next we go home. I’ve thought a lot about this, and I know I need to forgive Ben. I found out for myself how easy it would be to turn to someone for physical solace when you’re in emotional pain.” She cleared her throat. “So you and I will go home. Amy asked if she can stay here a little while. In England with Jeff. And Mick.”

  “And you said yes?”

  Jill smiled.

  “No shit,” she said again.

  “So you and I will leave my daughter here and go home as soon as you’re able. Then I do my stint in February—hopefully the only ramification of which will be a career boost. And enough money to pay Ben’s attorney. After that, we sit and wait until the trial.”

  Rita nodded but did not say that Jill could do all the waiting she wanted, but Rita had no intention of sitting around. Not when, surely, there was something she could do.

  Chapter 28

  Mindy wondered where she and her mother were going to go and if they’d live in a house or an apartment and if they’d be on an island or on land. She looked at the real estate brochure that Rita Blair had brought and studied the picture of Grandpa’s house—her house—on the cover. Then she shoved it under her bed and wished that red-headed woman would stop meddling in their lives.

  “Hi,” Rita had said this morning when Mindy was outside cleaning the snow off Grandpa’s old rowboat as if he’d be using it today. “Is everything okay?”

  Mindy had not known how to answer, so she’d just said, “Sure.” Then she told Rita that Fern had gone into town, so if she wanted to tell her anything, she’d better save her breath.

  Rita dug into her purse and pulled out the brochure. “Hot off the press,” she said, and pushed it toward Mindy, who took it the way people take a summons they’ve been handed. She’d seen that on Law & Order, too.