“Okay. I guess you can go. But be careful out there. Where do you live?”
“Seriously?”
“Ariel, please. Things are slipping away. We need to stay calm. Work with me.”
“Fuck. You. I quit.”
“You don’t mean that. You’re emotional. This storm or whatever. I understand. I get it. Everyone’s overreacting if you ask me, but I get it, you’re scared.”
“You’re such an asshole.”
“I’ll allow that. Get it all out.”
“You’re just going to pretend nothing happened?”
“Do you understand the pressure I’m under? If we don’t make this thing happen, we’re fucked. Everything down the drain. The company, the software, everything.”
“Goodbye, Josef.”
The connection went dead. Thunder pealed again and rainwater dripped off his hair onto his face. The door to the office opened and Dr. Hammerstein poked her head out.
“Everything all right out here?”
“Just talking to my secretary. I’m ready.”
“Well then, let’s do it!”
What he wanted to do was go to the bathroom and jerk off. This would solve a lot of problems, chiefly taking his mind (for a moment) off the swirling visions of fucking Nora, Dr. Hammerstein, and now Ariel. He stood up. His phone started to ring in his hand. He held his finger up to Dr. Hammerstein and answered.
“Sorry I haven’t called,” he told his mother. “Things are nutty.”
“I explicitly told him not to bother you but he can’t stop himself from calling and bothering you. It’s like he doesn’t listen to anything anyone says. Me or the doctors.”
“Mom, it’s okay. I have to call you back. I’m about to go into a meeting.”
“The meeting?”
“No, no, no, not that meeting but an important one”—here he winked at Dr. Hammerstein. “I promise I’ll call as soon as I can.”
“We love you, Josef! Make a lot of money!”
* * *
If George did not want to get better, if he did not want to go to the hospital, she would not force him. She had begged enough.
No one could accuse her of being a bad mother or a bad wife. She would not allow it. No one could look at her life, the choices she’d made and say, “Ana Westfall should have done more for her family.”
Back when Charlotte called from Paris to “break the news” that she was marrying a man, a much older man, a man who was not even a citizen of the United States, a man she’d known for less than a year, and that on top of this, there would be no formal wedding ceremony, that in fact they had already married—eloped was the word Charlie used to make it sound romantic—Ana bottled up her anger and attempted to view the upsides, if there were any to be viewed. She wanted her daughter to be happy, and her daughter was telling her that this decision to “elope” with the Frenchman made her happy. While it pained Ana that her daughter had decided, without consulting her in any way, to forgo the picturesque wedding she’d been mentally planning since Charlie had been a little girl, she did her best to remain positive and encouraging. She’d envisioned specific lives for her children and it stung to see reality dash those grand designs.
“It was a financial decision,” she told everyone in her social circles. “They’re planning to be bicoastal. You know, LA and New York. Reynaldo’s in the film industry.” He was in actuality an adjunct professor of film, something about “documentary ethics.” Ana didn’t see the usefulness in such a class or how teaching that class might provide financial stability for her daughter and the family they claimed they were planning to start. “You are planning to start a family, aren’t you?” she questioned.
Charlie had attempted to elaborate numerous times why film studies were “useful, as you put it, Mother,” all with diminishing returns. Her daughter’s foreign husband had since failed to achieve a full-time, tenured position, but Ana left these details out when answering questions about him. As she told it, Reynaldo (she always referred to him as Reynaldo, never the colloquial Rey) was a mysterious and robust European dreamboat. The housewives of Hudson left her company picturing an Antonio Banderas–esque hunk with lush chest hair covering sculpted pectorals and olive skin. Little did it matter to her that at some point they might meet the man and see that with his thick glasses; slicked-back hair; angled, Romanesque honker; and penchant for jeans and elbow-patched blazers, he looked more Israeli Elvis Costello than haut Castilian stud.
In private moments, usually while listening to George’s rattled, apnea-stifled breathing as he mumbled and half-slept on the study sofa and she lay awake in their bed—his adenoidal moaning audible to her all the way upstairs—she admitted to herself that she was better off abandoning any dreams she held for her daughter. No matter how she spun the situation to her friends, the reality defied subterfuge. She’d always pictured Charlotte marrying a doctor or lawyer. A tall, muscular, “all-American” man, one who looked equally handsome in a well-fitting suit or a pair of khakis; someone with liberal tendencies when it came to his outward persona but who, like Ana herself, possessed a conservative outlook on the important things in life, such as family stability, financial security, and “functioning as a meaningful member of the community.” And faith! A man with attachments to Columbia County and to the Church. To the greater New York metropolitan area. Certainly not someone who called a place like Los Angeles home. She went once, when Abbott was born. She found the traffic and abundance of plastic surgery troubling. Everyone appeared to bask in moral imperfection. LA did not strike her as an appropriate place to raise a child, especially one like her grandson, who required rigid structure and support.
Ana knew she looked good for her age. Most mornings she ran five miles with the rising sun. Out the front door and up the winding trails along the river. Before George’s health had nosedived, her gym attendance was at a self-imposed weekly four-visit minimum for either CrossFit or Pilates or Spinning or just to throw some weights around. Such a schedule was nearly impossible now that she had been left at the helm of the shop, ostensibly alone. She had Armand, but she only counted on him to cover one or two days, if she needled him. She was mindful not to press him too hard. He’d been through a lot. She was glad he was home, no matter what George said about it. In this way, too, she felt she was the better parent. She wanted her children to know that the doors of the Warren Street house—the family house—would always be open to them. No matter how old they were. No matter how bad things got. No matter what they did. They were always welcome to come home.
She went into the living room and turned the lights on. The house was so dreary in the storm and George was content to lurk in the dark all day.
“He’s a failure,” she heard him say.
“What?”
“We need to get him out of here,” George said. “For his own good. He’s a weirdo and he’s getting weirder down there.”
“He’s doing fine. Just give him some breathing room.”
“He needs a job.”
“He needs solid ground. He needs to know you don’t hate him.”
“Of course I don’t hate him.”
Ana walked to the study. George sat hunkered in his chair. He’d pulled a book of family photos down off the shelf but hadn’t opened it. She left him there.
Stability was key, she argued. And Armie was doing much better. Everyone saw that. He volunteered. He went with her to church. He did technically help out at the shop, however infrequently. And for what it was worth, he’d taken up woodworking again, and this was a major step as far as she was concerned. He even spent time with her and her friends and joined them when they played bridge.
George had always been partial to Josef and she faulted him for that too. Josef was easy to love. Salutatorian at Hudson High School, nineteenth in his class at Yale. Successful at everything he got involved in. First Wall Street, then two of his own companies. A true entrepreneur. Now the third start-up, designing a computer program, was about to
take off and, by Josef’s estimates, yield “millions.”
He’d married a lovely girl—even though she was Jewish, which Ana refused to hold against her—who came from a good family, and together they’d produced two beautiful daughters. George forgave Josef when the marriage fell apart, but she knew he was sad it hadn’t worked out. He liked Natalie from the start and continued after the split to be a large part of his granddaughters’ lives. Never one to say a bad thing about Josef, George insisted that it was “no one’s fault,” that sometimes these things just didn’t work out. Ana had a harder time with it. Her feeling was, a person stuck by their commitments, no matter how hard it got. Marriage was not easy! She wanted to scream this to every young person she saw. Had it been easy for her and George, living in the city, their kids practically sleeping in dresser drawers, traveling up and down the East Coast buying antiques at flea markets, auctions, estate sales, out of church basements and farmer’s barns, while she was pregnant? No. It had not been easy. She’d had her doubts. The impossible times when it all threatened to unravel. When she felt she couldn’t go on. Couldn’t change another diaper. Couldn’t suffer another winter when no one was buying and the stock just sat there and they didn’t know if they would get through it. Her convictions held that a strong person stayed in it for, if nothing more, the benefit of the children and providing the proper environment in which to raise them. Josef had already made the inexplicable decision to rear his family in New York City. He should have, in her opinion, at least had the temerity to make the marriage work.
Let’s face it, she concluded. Her offspring had veered along such wild and disparaging paths. How was a parent expected to anticipate, let alone cope with, so many curves and hairpin turns? It was a roller coaster without brakes. Ana never would have predicted being the parent of a divorcé, but there was Josef, being divorced on grounds of adultery. This detail she left out when answering questions, although she knew the whole town knew. There was Charlie, moving all the way across the country and abandoning her. There was Armie, unmarried, unfocused, demoralized, penniless, sitting next to her at Mass like a child.
How had they all ventured so far from what she’d seen for them? Had she instilled nothing? They never responded to her texts. They never called her back. Well, Charlie did. But Ana suspected that her daughter’s communications were guilt-driven. And George was the biggest disappointment of them all. Refusing to take any responsibility for his illness. Stubbornly wasting away in that goddamned study. And on top of this, something was wrong with Shadow? Or so she just noticed after returning to the kitchen. He hadn’t touched his bowl of Nature Creek All-Natural Organic Premium Science-Diet Dog Food and lay listless at the foot of the fridge. She knelt beside him and rubbed his head. His eyes were fixed on the ceiling. He whined and stood and wobbled to the screen door. He butted it with his head. The doorbell rang. Ana shot up straight. “I’ll get it!” Shadow opened his mouth wide, made a horrible sound, and vomited. “Shit!”
She did not want George seeing what was being delivered. She hurried out into the foyer, adjusting her kanga as she went. A UPS cap hovered in kaleidoscopic color through the stained glass insert. She saw George slumped in the chair at his desk. He looked asleep. She stepped onto the porch, closing the door behind her. Eddie the UPS guy held out a medium-size rectangular box affixed with a slew of customs decals. He was soaked. So was the box.
“I can’t believe you’re out in this.”
“Yeah, they called us in, but I wanted to get these last packages out!” he hollered over the wind. “Something good for the shop?”
“This is for me. Well, for me and George.”
“Glad I made it. I have a feeling I’m about to get a few days off.”
“Get home safe, okay?”
“Will do, Mrs. W.”
She signed the electronic pad and ran down into the yard, clutching the package under her arm with one hand and shielding her head with the other. She ran onto the low back porch and through the screen door and into the kitchen, where she slipped on the puddle of Shadow’s vomit. She landed on her ass and the kanga was splattered with partially digested salmon chunks. And was that blood? “Shit!”
Shadow paced over to the fridge and stuck his head between the wall and the garbage can. She set the package down and went to him. He shook and she noticed more vomit against the baseboard and it was indeed streaked with crimson.
“Armie!”
Shadow turned around and looked at her, his ears pressed back against the side of his head, his tail tucked between his legs. He was old but had always been in good health. She went to the top of the stairs. She heard Armie’s hammer.
“Armand!”
The hammering stopped and he appeared, dust on his face, hammer in hand, safety goggles covering his eyes and wearing the frayed pink cut-offs George hated.
“What’s happening now?”
“Something’s wrong with Shadow.”
“With Shadow?”
“There’s blood in his vomit.”
“The dog?”
“Yes, the dog.”
“Not Dad?”
“Your father is asleep, I think.”
“What’s in that box?”
“There’s nothing in this box. Are you going to help me or not?”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Can you try the vet? I need to change my clothes.”
“I don’t know the number,” Armie said.
“It’s right on the Important Numbers list!”
“What?”
“On the fridge, Armand. Do you walk around here with your eyes closed? It has all the doctors’ numbers in case of an emergency!”
“Okay, jeepers, I got it.”
Ana ran upstairs with the package, threw it in the bathtub, drew the curtain, tossed the soiled kanga in the hamper, donned a black skirt and button-down, and ran back down. She poked her head out into the living room.
“George! Wake up! Shadow’s sick!”
The study was quiet and he was no longer seated at the desk.
Armie came out of the kitchen. “Dr. Ashworth says he’ll meet us in ten minutes.”
She crossed the foyer and half of the living room. “George!”
She saw him at the bookshelf in the study, his hands on his knees, stooped and wraith-like, his face beet-red.
* * *
Rey held Abbott sideways as he squirmed and batted his legs and screamed and just kept screaming. The boy he’d pushed off the climber had broken his arm, or so the EMTs had proclaimed when they carted him away. The kid’s parents showed up and Rey said some things he shouldn’t have said. All of this transpired in the parking lot during midday drop-off/pickup, in front of other parents and children. The father of the wounded child kept threatening to sue. Charlie was mortified. Melinda McCarthy asked all relevant parties to please try to remain calm. “This is a preschool,” she pleaded.
The child was driven off to the hospital with his parents in the back of the ambulance. Rey lurched with Abbott to the Volvo. As he shoved him into the car seat, the strap on Abbott’s backpack snagged and the side tore open, spilling plastic horse toys. Charlie tried to keep her composure.
There was nothing to do but leave in disgrace and shame and drive home in tandem. Once they got back, her gambit to calm him down involved letting him pick whatever flavor ice pop he wanted.
“Gape!” he shouted through flailing, hiccupping howls. “I want gape!”
A lamp was dislodged from an end table. A plant overturned. Toys were hurled against walls. Five minutes later he sat at the kitchen table licking the pop. Manuela made sandwiches. Rey paced the kitchen. “This has got to stop!” he kept saying. The sun shone high above the Hollywood Hills and threw him in a dark, stalking silhouette. Up there was Griffith Park and the observatory, the Hollywood sign, tourists posing for photos. The world moving on, while down here on the ground, Charlie felt as though she were in the trenches of some protracted war, exposed a
nd vulnerable, laid bare for everyone to see. But she could always run. Just turn and run out the door. She was dressed for it. Run to the Volvo, crank the Tom Waits playlist, drive out to Topanga, and pound the trails until she went so far off the grid, not even the hippies up there would find her.
She checked her phone. Five texts and a voice mail. Three of the texts were from Melody. The photo shoot was going poorly.
Melody: I look fat!
Melody’s last text was quite lengthy and Charlie skimmed it, took note of “asshole,” “Patrick,” and “cocksucker.” The fourth and fifth texts were from her mother and so was the voice mail.
Mom: CALL WHEN U CAN. NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT DAD IS IN ICU. LOW PRSSR
Mom: KARNAM GOING TO TRY DLYSIS, CHGING MEDS. WILL KEEP YOU POSTED
She called right back without listening to the voice mail.
“Everything’s fine, dear!”
“You don’t have to yell, Mom.”
“It just shocks me how rude your father can be.”
Charlie knew the loud voice was for his benefit.
“How’s he doing?”
“Karnam says not to worry so I’m not worrying.”
“Okay. Well, what else did Karnam say?”
“You can never get a straight answer out of these people.”
“Things are bad here.”
“Yes, the storm is very bad. Haven’t spoken to Armie, but I hope Shadow is okay.”
“They asked Abbott to leave school.”
“Again? Oh, goodness. What is it now?”
“I don’t want to get into it. I just got him settled. Mom, it was awful.”
Her mother embarked on a lecture about parenting and the need for rules that Charlie didn’t hear because Rey was yelling in Abbott’s face.
“What were you thinking? Huh? You can’t just go around pushing everyone!”
Her mother was talking, a tiny rabbit’s voice in the background. Had her mother mentioned something about the dog?
“Shadow?” Charlie asked.
“Shadow isn’t well. Your brother is with him at the vet.”
Rey was waving his arms. “You can’t keep acting like this!”
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