“Are you listening to me?” Rey said.
“What?” Charlie asked.
“I don’t think the backpack should be at the dinner table.”
“Ha! Good luck with that.”
“It’s not funny. You seem to think all of this is a big joke.”
“Oh yes,” Charlie said. “A laugh riot.”
“It’s not funny.” He held up the ice pack as evidence of just how unfunny it was.
“Yeah, you already said that. How was class?” Charlie asked in a bid to change the subject.
Rey tilted his head and struggled to guide part of a meatball into his mouth. “I feel like shit.”
Charlie heard her phone ringing. She left it on the counter. She wanted badly for dinner to continue along a kind-of-not-chaotic path, so she let it go. It was either her mom or Melody. Either way, she needed the call to wait. Just ten minutes. That was all she asked. Ten uninterrupted family-time dinner-table minutes. Real quality minutes. They might mean the difference between losing the day’s battle and, not winning per se, but at least squeezing out a stalemate.
“Are you going to get that?” Rey asked.
“I’m sorry about what happened,” Charlie said, continuing to ignore the phone’s jingle. “It hasn’t been the best day, has it?”
“That is the understatement of the decade,” Rey said. “And he’s the one who should be sorry.” He pointed at Abbott with his fork, and some tomato sauce flew onto the table.
“He didn’t mean to hurt you. He freaks out when he gets himself cornered. You know this. It shouldn’t be such a surprise.”
“You always do that. You always defend him. He knows what he’s doing and he knows how to get you to buy him whatever he wants.”
“That is not true at all.”
“Let’s just keep purchasing him toys. How about this? How about every time he gets kicked out of a school, he gets a present! Right? Great idea. I love that. Very American idea.”
“You’re being absurd.”
“Oh, am I?”
“Yes. You are.”
“I think he should apologize to me.”
“Good luck with that.”
“Stop saying that! He has to be accountable for at least some of his actions!”
“Do you even remember one thing the specialists told us?”
“Oh, right, the specialists.” Rey waved his hands. “Who are around him all the time to see what he’s like.”
“We need to give him positive reinforcements. We can’t just retroactively punish him for something that happened hours ago.”
“Positive reinforcements? Such as the Good Behavior chart?” Rey pointed with the ice pack to the chart hanging from the fridge with its hodgepodge of star stickers and columns.
“Yes! You have a problem with the Good Behavior chart?”
“I have seventeen stickers!”
“You’re doing so great, sweetie.”
“I want a pony backpack,” Abbott said.
“You already have one,” Rey told him.
“I make two.” Abbott held up the peace sign.
“You can’t have two.” Rey shook his head. “This is crazy. We’re getting nowhere with him. He’s going to be like this forever.”
“He’s your son and he’s right here. Can you not talk about him while he’s in front of you?”
“He’s like an M. Night Shyamalan movie. That’s what he’s like. All over the place, and not in a good way.”
“That is low, Rey. Very low.”
Rey narrowed his eyes at her, which must have caused sharp pain to his wound because he winced and choked on a lump of meatball. “You have absolutely no control over him,” he said, coughing.
“I think he’s doing just fine.”
“You’re delusional.”
Her phone began to ring again. “Oh, am I? Because I’m so easily fooled, right? I never know what’s going on? It’s just so easy to slip one past me!”
“What are you talking about?”
“Whatever.”
“Shouting!” Abbott clamped his hands over his ears.
Charlie went to see who was calling. It was an LA number. She waited until it went through to voice mail. “Are you done eating, sweetie?” Charlie asked. “Why don’t you go play in the living room while Daddy and I talk?”
“Too shouting!”
“He can’t leave,” Rey said.
“All done!” Abbott said. “Ponies, too.”
“Well, you can’t play with your girl’s backpack until you apologize for hurting my eye.”
“Mm . . . No.”
Rey reached out and snatched the backpack.
“Ernest!”
“You can have Ernest,” Rey said, holding the backpack behind him, “once you’ve eaten dinner.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Charlie said. “First you demand he apologizes, now you want him to eat more. You’re confusing him.” She saw the way Abbott’s face was changing—the curl of his lips and the scrunching of his nose. “Please don’t provoke him.”
“I’m not provoking him, I just want him to say he’s sorry. Does he even know what he did? And I don’t just mean stealing the backpack and almost blinding me—”
“I think that’s an exagg—”
“I’m talking about maiming another—”
“He knows it wasn’t right. He’s sorry.”
“Stop!” Abbott said.
“I want to hear him say it.”
“Okay, enough. This is dumb. Abbott, are you finished eating? Do you want to go play?”
“Ponies. Ernest.” He pointed at Rey.
“Rey, give him the backpack.”
“No.”
“Rey!”
“I will not. Not until he apologizes.”
“He’s the five-year-old.”
“Er!” Abbott screamed. “Nest!” He slithered out of his chair onto the floor, wet-noodle-style, put his hands against his ears, and began to wail.
“Great,” Charlie said. “That’s great.” Her phone rang again. She still had it in her hand. The same unrecognized LA number calling. She answered. “Hello.”
“Is this Charlotte Perrin?”
“Yeah, Westfall, yes, this is she.”
“This is James Miller.”
“Okay.”
“Max’s dad.”
“Oh! James! Sorry, Jesus, it’s loud over here. Let me get out of the kitchen.”
As she left, Abbott stood and ran past her into the living room. Rey screamed after him. “Get back here!”
Things were barely more audible in the dining room.
“We’re at the hospital,” James said. “Your son broke my son’s ulna. Do you know what that is?”
“A bone? How did you get this number?”
“Out of the parent directory. Max is in a lot of pain. Just a whole lot of pain. He’s a trouper, though. I can’t tell you how proud I am of him. He showed us something today, the way he has toughed this thing out. He’s going to be just fine. Just fine. He’s smiling right now, cast and everything, just smiling and putting his best face forward.”
“I’m sure it must have been awful. I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah, well, sorry isn’t going to fix his arm. He might need a permanent pin.”
“Shit.”
“Pardon me?”
“That’s just horrible. I’m very sorry. Abbott feels really really really bad and told me to tell Max he’s very very sorry.”
“Oh, does he feel really really bad? Is that how bad he feels?”
“Yes. He does. It was an accident.”
“Well, my wife said not to call, but I feel like I owe it to myself and to Max to tell you I’m not so sure you’re doing the best job parenting that boy.”
“Excuse me?”
“Your kid can’t control himself. If he’s pushing other children like this.”
“It was an accident.”
“Clearly something is wrong on the home front, Mrs. Per
rin. My wife and I, we’ve given this a lot of thought, and I’m going to talk to Melinda about asking Abbott to leave the Horizon School. He’s a danger to the other kids. I’m not the only one who feels this way, in case you’re wondering.”
“I wasn’t wondering. And for your information, you smug asshole, Abbott is already leaving the fucking Horizon School. He has left! They already kicked him out. So congratulations! None of you will have to worry about crazy Abbott. He won’t be terrorizing your precious children ever again and everything will be perfect for them and for little Max and he’ll have zero problems in his life from now on and also, may I add, Go . . . Fuck . . . Your . . . Self.”
She hung up and threw the phone onto the table and went out into the living room, intending to sit down. What she found was Abbott, nude, standing on the couch, relieving his bowels.
“Abbott!”
Rey was in the doorway with the backpack in his hand. “Not again!”
Abbott’s face was swirled in a mask of perplexity, so Charlie didn’t know whether he was laughing or crying. The couch, a mid-century piece by Danish designer Peter Hvidt, in royal blue and polished maple, had been a wedding present from her parents.
Her phone rang again. There was not a chance in the world she was going to waste any more time talking to James Miller. She darted to the couch and snatched Abbott into her arms. Shit trailed across the couch and onto the end table—another gift from her parents. She kept spinning and now it splatted on the hardwood floor in an arc and onto the coffee table—purchased by her and Rey at IKEA.
“Stop, Abbott, sweetie. Please stop. It’s okay. I’ve got you.”
He sobbed and threw his arms around her neck and wept. Rey thundered upstairs with the backpack and slammed the bedroom door. Charlie stood holding her naked son in her arms, cradling him and stroking his hair while the hot smell of shit bloomed in her nose. The phone kept ringing.
She took him upstairs to the bathroom and ran the water in the tub and got it to the temperature he liked—a tad below scalding. He sat there hiccup-sobbing, asking for his backpack and for Ernest. She washed his hair, his face, his chest. She handed him the pouf and he scrubbed his own private parts. He did not like being touched, but at times like this, when he was in crisis mode, he capitulated. She would not cry. She would not give Rey the satisfaction. She would not give any of them the satisfaction. She felt justifiably indignant. When he was clean, she let him play in the tub for a while, hoping he’d calm down.
“Five more minutes, okay,” she told him.
She set the egg timer and placed it on the ledge. Their nightly ritual. When the bell rang he knew it was time to drain the water. She left him and stormed into the bedroom. Rey had two enormous framed Fellini movie posters mounted above his desk—8½ and Juliet of the Spirits. Above the bed was Fassbinder—The Marriage of Maria Braun (Die Ehe der Maria Braun, he called it). Beside the door, The Bicycle Thief. “The correct title is The Bicycle Thieves,” he noted at every priggish opportunity. She loved film, too, maybe not as much as he did but a great deal, and yet she thought there was something college-esque about having movie posters as wall art at thirty-seven.
He didn’t move when she came in but remained hunched at the desk, headphones on, grading papers. The backpack lay on the bed. She took it and left the door open behind her.
Abbott clapped and laughed when he saw her come back with it. He leaned out of the tub, covered in suds, and lovingly petted the face of one of the cartoon ponies. The timer dinged. She drained the water, lifted him out monkey-style with his wet limbs wrapped around her, and dried him off. For some reason he was okay with physical contact directly following a bath. His head, though, was another story. She handed him the towel and he dried his own hair. In his room he selected pajamas and got into bed. She read him a story about frogs taking flight, and since it was largely without words Charlie got to embellish the story with her own little details.
“Why the frog flies?” Abbott asked.
“Because the frogs know where all the magic ponies live,” Charlie said.
“Frog and ponies friends?”
“Best friends. That’s where the frogs want to go. To see the ponies.”
“Ponies fly next Tuesday?”
“Anything’s possible,” she told him.
He clutched Ernest the Donkey Puppet and she sat while he drifted off. She tiptoed out of the room, leaving the door ajar and the hallway light on. She retrieved Manuela’s bucket of cleaning supplies. With rubber kitchen gloves on, she scooped the turds into the trash bin. She cut up four heavy-duty garbage bags from the shed and draped them over the couch. In the morning she’d call the cleaners. She sprayed the coffee table and the end table with lemon-scented cleaner and scrubbed and dried them with dishcloths. She got down on her hands and knees and cleaned the soiled portion of the floor. When she had done as much as she felt was within her power to sanitize the mess, she concluded with a thorough spraying of air freshener over everything. She checked her phone in the dining room. Her mother had called eight times and hadn’t left a message. The phone started ringing again as she held it. She answered. Her mother was indecipherable. Her sobs were replaced with the ruffled transfer sounds of the phone being passed to someone else.
“Hello? Hello, Charlotte? This is Dr. Karnam. I wanted to give you some details here. Your mother is, understandably, quite upset. I’m sorry to be calling with such bad news. George’s heart stopped. We had been giving him a dose of chemo following the cardiac episode he experienced earlier today. We used the defibrillator but we were, unfortunately, unable to revive him. I’m so sorry. I wanted to let you know also that I’m positive this would have happened no matter what. No matter where he was or who was with him. In the end, there was nothing we could do.”
“Thank you, Dr. Karnam.”
Charlie heard herself saying the words and yet her voice, the nasal sound of it, the room itself, the feel of the phone against her ear, all of it, had turned foreign. Dusk shadows overtook the house. The sun was gone behind the Hollywood Hills, but a tiny array of its colors lingered. She looked at the phone. She hung it up. She didn’t know what to do, and since she had managed to stay in her running outfit the entire day, she did the one thing she could think of that might keep her from collapsing into a quivering mess: she turned and ran.
* * *
The world was a black whirlwind and they made her leave him there at the hospital.
She bent to kiss his still-warm brow and tears fell on his face. His skin had so quickly turned that sallow leather-yellow of the dead.
She was confused as to how the Forester had gotten the sizable dent in the front end and how suddenly Armie was there, soaking wet. Then Minnie and Carl, too, appeared. They put their arms around her. They said, “I don’t know what to say.”
Armie escorted her home.
She went upstairs to the bathroom and took the parcel from the tub. She locked the door. She used cuticle scissors to cut away the tape and bubble wrap. The urn was even more beautiful than in the photos. It had been handcrafted by a group of artisans in a mud-hut workshop outside Nairobi. Or so the website claimed. The dark ceramic was scored with concentric pockmarks. The urn belled at the top, capped by a simple lid and forked wishbone handle. Ana had purchased the urn, believing it would keep George’s remains safe and grant him swift passage to heaven. Father Chukwumereige, at the parish, helped her pick it out. “Where I am from,” he had told her, “this is how we help them make the journey. My tribe, they are Catholic, but not like us. They have the old ways, too. Very old ways. And good ways. Maybe this is a good way for George, who did not like to go to church, as you said.”
Ana had thought they had more time. That somehow he would get his act together, focus his energy, find some magic way to heal.
He was dead.
He’d shown her versions of the letter, and it seemed to change frequently, but certain things she knew it said:
1. He did not want a funeral
.
2. He wanted to be cremated.
3. He wanted her—he wanted them all—to sell the painting.
Oh, there was no use pretending! She loved him so much. She was terrified of life without him, and now it was her reality. She was alone. A widow. The urn, once she put his ashes into it and gave it to Father Chuk and let him say the funeral Mass, would help.
She went downstairs to check on Shadow, who dozed in his bed. She sat on the couch and cried. Armie came and sat beside her. They were alone, the wind still so loud. The room fell to darkness. The house felt different. The study was empty and foreboding, and she would not go in there. Not yet.
“Do you need anything?” Armie asked.
“I have to call your brother and sister.”
“You did. They know.”
“Shit,” Ana said, “we never boarded up the shopwindows.”
“Don’t worry about that now,” Armie said.
Lightning pulsed and flashed, illuminating the room and their tear-streaked faces and the Magritte above their heads. Shadow whimpered from his bed. Ana put her head on her son’s shoulder. The day would soon be over.
- TUESDAY -
The smog draping the city basin was tangible. She took two “emergency” Enabletals before she left the house and stashed another three in her purse—which felt like near-the-end-of-your-rope-type behavior, but fuck all that, because she was near the end of her rope. She couldn’t get to New York because the storm had shut down the entire East Coast. At 7:57 a.m., Melody called demanding immediate emotional support. Charlie arranged for one of Dustin’s friend’s mothers to pick him up and drop him off at school.
The word Charlie saw when she closed her eyes—the word appearing in flame-licked neon letters as big as the Hollywood sign—was Helpless. She couldn’t get on a plane; there were no fucking planes to get on. Trying to console her mother over the phone was like tossing ice cubes at a roaring fire. The idea of staying home with Rey, given the way things were, was the quickest road to a surefire meltdown no matter how many Enabletals she consumed. Her best bet was to stay moving, stay busy, like a shark; like an emotion-controlling levelheaded motherfucking shark. She needed to keep her personal grief and problems in check by holding them up against someone else’s problems, someone with much larger and more far-reaching problems. There was a way: and that way was to willingly enter into, and grapple with, the ever-troubled world of Melody Montrose.
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