by Deb Caletti
She almost told him her secret right there in the Italian Room and then again on the lawn. But she didn’t. Now she’s soaring so high, she almost forgets how much it’s going to hurt to crash.
“Mads? Dinner!”
“Be right down!”
She tosses on a sundress. The backs of her elbows are green. They feel raw. They throb a rug-burned beat. She lathers them with a pump of hand soap, hurries to dry off the evidence.
“Look at you,” Claire says. “You look beautiful. You look so . . .”
“You look happy, Mads,” Thomas says, setting plates on the table, silverware politely beside. “What’s up with the happy? I love it.”
“It’s a suck-face face,” Harrison says.
“Harrison.” Claire narrows her eyes.
“Your lips are big.”
Thomas hands him the napkins to pass around. “Hare, sucking face is a great thing. One day you’ll see.”
“Don’t make me barf.”
“Well, you’ve got to invite Ryan over for dinner,” Claire says. “We’re dying to meet him.”
“Who’s Ryan?” Harrison says.
“You guys want soy milk, or just water?”
“Chocolate milk,” Harrison says. “Ryan who?”
“A friend of mine?” Mads should lock the kid in his room.
“Ryan Plug, the young man Mads has been seeing.”
Harrison snorts. “Pppplug.” He makes his lips flubber. “Yeah, right.”
Mads wants to squeeze the flesh on the underside of his arm, where it would really hurt. Everyone sits down, the way Claudia and Jamie’s family would in The Book. They’re having spaghetti and meatballs, made from lean turkey. Back home, people still ate Cheetos, and even that bean dip that comes in a can. Right now, Mads could eat every bit of that spaghetti and finish it off with apple pie. She’s starving. She’s so hungry, it turns to a big metaphor. She wants so much, all, everything. Her face feels sunburned from where Billy’s chin rubbed against her face.
Mads’s phone buzzes in her pocket, and she thinks, Billy. Thomas scowls at the sound. He doesn’t like phones at the dinner table, so Mads ignores it. Harder to ignore is her own warm buzz at the thought of him. Oh, she’s in deep. She is way, way over her head.
“Dog boy,” Harrison says. Mads kicks him under the table.
“We showed the Wilkens couple the plans today, and—”
Her phone interrupts Thomas again. “Mads,” he says. “Can you turn that off?”
“I’ll just . . .” She takes it out of her pocket. Maybe she can shoot him a quick text, Thomas be damned.
“Please. How much uninterrupted time do we get in our lives, huh?”
She looks down. Mads is almost shocked—not at who’s calling, but that she’s practically forgotten all about her.
“It’s Mom.”
“She can wait,” Thomas says.
The phone buzzes and buzzes in her hand.
“I’ve got to get it.”
“She can wait.”
“What if it’s an emergency?”
“She’s a grown woman. She can handle her own emergency.”
Claire tries a softer approach. “This just happens too much, Mads, you know?” Harrison balances his spaghetti on his fork with the fixed gaze of a scientist formulating the laws of gravitation.
Buzz. Buzz, buzz. Mads can feel the urgency screaming through the phone. It vibrates, angry and ignored. Maybe Thomas has a great invisible shield against people who need him, but she doesn’t. Maybe Claire can coolly remove herself from someone’s disappointment and fury and need, but not Mads. The membrane between Mads and what people expect of her is thin as the translucent wall of a soap bubble.
“Excuse me.” Mads shoves her chair back.
She interrupts the ring as she’s halfway up the stairs. “Maddie? Thank God I got you.” There’s the half-sob exhale. Mads shuts the door of Thomas’s office/her room.
“What’s wrong, Mom?” She hopes they can’t hear. If they do, she’ll only prove them right about herself and her mom. This is what’s called being caught between a rock and a hard place. She’s so used to the rock and the hard place that calluses have practically formed on her elbows and knees, but not on the places she could really use them.
“It wasn’t a date. None of the dates were dates!”
“It’s all right. What happened?”
Her mother starts to cry. “James. I thought he really liked me. From that first time I met him. And he kept calling. Who calls like that? He took me out for drinks. A lot of drinks, too. He drank like a fish. He took me out to dinner! Who takes a person to dinner that many times just to weasel their way into a person’s business? He wanted to partner up, all right. With my listings. What an asshole!”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“This is, like, more than sorry. He walked me right up to the door. I thought he was finally going to kiss me. I leaned in, and he put his hand on my chest, like No. Like I was some . . . He couldn’t even stand to touch me. Who is he not to want me?”
“He’s a jerk, Mom. He’s not even worth your time.”
“A jerk? He’s a fucking psycho. You know what I should do? I should call every one of his clients. Every single one, and tell them that a man who drinks like that has no place handling the biggest investment of their lives.”
She would do it, too. It’s not just a thing a person says. Mads remembers red scratch marks up her father’s arm, and those family photos in shreds. Mads paces. She doesn’t know how to manage all this from here. She paces a circle—toe, heel, toe, heel—around the room, and starts again. “You should call Paula. Go have a girls’ night.”
“I can’t stand Paula. I could never be friends with Paula. I wish you were here.”
“I wish I was, too.”
The lie is molten; it blisters as it pours through her. Mads does not want to be there. There is the last place she wants to be.
“If you were here, you could help me call. He’s got a website. I can see every single person he deals with. Jim Beam. Talk about perfect.”
“He’s not even worth a second more.”
“I don’t know what I’d do without you. What would I do? God, I wish your class was finished so you could be home.”
“I’ll be home soon.”
“If you were here now, we could binge on thrillers, like we did when you and Cole broke up.”
“Maybe you can call that woman, Julie. The one you went for drinks with that time.”
“All she did was talk about her son. In a weird way, too, if you ask me. Something was going on there. God, I can’t believe that fucking Jim Beam.”
There’s the crickle of static and that’s all. Downstairs, voices murmur and silverware clinks against plates. Mads stops pacing, sits on the floor with her back to the bed. She feels old, and suddenly tired. Exhausted.
“I better go. I should do some homework.” It’s a lie. She’s barely glanced at her homework in weeks.
“You know what else? He had small hands. You know what they say about a man with small hands and what’s below the belt.”
Mads is silent.
“I’m better off alone. Why do I even want a man?”
“Forget about him.”
“I have you, that’s the important thing. You’re my family. You’re the only family I have. I love you so much.”
“I love you, too.”
After they finally hang up, Mads’s suck-face face is gone. Some strange, bad feeling gusts in. She is a small, awful someone who lets people down. Alone makes her think of their too-big house with its jammed gutters and peeling paint, the sound of the TV on in an empty room, a single chicken breast. Mads’s father lives in a beautifully furnished two-bedroom apartment with views of a canal, and meets friends for drinks in the historic district.
On the desk is Mastering Real Estate Principles, 7th Edition, and on the bed is From the Mixed-up Files. Her old life, her new—she sits between them. But new doesn
’t seem actually possible. New never does when old grips you so hard. Any stupid dream she played around with in her head vanishes in a flash. Thomas and Claire and Harrison stare down at her from the photo on the desk. What is she doing here, really, sleeping in Thomas’s office, using Thomas’s truck, pretending that this is her real life? This won’t end well, because she is lying to them, to Billy, to everyone, and when you lie like that, it’s usually in the service of one big, insurmountable lie you are telling yourself.
What is true? She can’t stay here. She has to leave these people—Claire, and Thomas, and Harrison, and Billy, Billy, Billy—and the sooner, the better, because she will only become more attached, and her secret will only become more destructive. Nothing and no one will ride in to save Ivy, either—she’ll have Suzanne and Carl as parents her whole life long. Mads curls her body into a comma on the floor. Actually, as far as punctuation marks go, she feels more like dot dot dot. An endless ellipsis, pointlessly waiting for something that will never come. The day she just had with Billy is gone like smoke.
Well, well, well, the ogres chuckle. It’s so much fun for them to sit back and watch everyone else do their heavy lifting. Self-loathing, that obese ogre with the fat fingers, he points and laughs and spills gross stuff on the front of his shirt. He’s been waiting around, so patient, through the kissy-kissy-happy drivel, but now, finally, he’s back in the game.
There’s a soft knock at the door.
“Mads? You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Can I come in?”
“I guess.”
Claire sits down on the floor next to Mads. “You were talking to yourself in here.”
“I was?”
“Yep. What were you saying?”
“I was saying I need to go home.”
“You don’t, though.”
“I do. I want to.”
“Really?”
Mads studies her fingernails. White crescent moons, pink lunar landscapes. “I’m just struggling to be here, Claire.”
“You know what I think? You aren’t struggling to be here. You’re struggling to be away from there.”
“I could do my licensing in Wenatchee. So what if it takes longer. It’s pointless to be away.”
“No.”
“What do you mean, ‘no’?”
“I mean, ‘no.’ Thomas and I won’t allow it.”
“You won’t allow it. Are you forgetting that I’m eighteen?”
“I haven’t forgotten that. Thomas hasn’t. But we won’t allow it. You need to at least finish the class. Here. Then we’ll figure out what happens next.”
“Claire. This is ridiculous. You can’t allow or not allow.”
“The decision is out of your hands.”
They stare at each other there on the floor. Mads feels some bizarre relief.
“Fine,” she says.
“Good.” Claire stands. She actually brushes her hands together, as if some important business has been concluded. When she shuts the door behind her, it’s another punctuation mark. A period.
That night, Mads can’t sleep. She hears Thomas downstairs, arguing on the phone. It’s awful. Getting mad at her mother won’t help anything.
She folds the pillow over her head. She wishes she could stay forever in a feather-dark bed cave where no one could come in. A thought drifts in—that missed follow-up appointment with Dr. Bailey—and drifts out again. She should roll over, press the pillow to her face. Can a person smother herself? Or would you just fight and thrash, in spite of your wishes? She forces herself not to listen to Thomas’s loud voice downstairs. She grasps the handle of her own violin case, but an ogre has his meaty grip on it, too. They yank it back and forth. Inside, there’s the rattle of a credit card and a phone, all you really need if you leave home.
• • •
“What was I thinking, buttercup? How could I forget your Binky? A girl needs her Binky. Let’s make that rule number two. The road is rough; take comfort where you can. Cute little giraffe or baby elephant? How about elephant?” Mads snatches it off the hook, drops it into the basket on her free arm.
It’s an old Bartell Drugs—no swooping automatic doors here, just the regular kind that bing-bong in case the clerk is somewhere in the back. At the sound, Ivy suddenly leans backward like an Olympic gymnast. It’s an alarming new trick, and Mads worries she’ll flop right out of her arms.
“Give a girl some warning,” Mads says. She supports Ivy’s silly neck so she can see the upside-down diaper packages and upside-down lotions. She walks down the aisle, showing her upside-down shampoos and shaving lotions, upside-down toothbrushes and dental floss.
Mads helps Ivy right herself in the medicine aisle, just past the cough syrups. Ivy’s cheeks are red. Her face is sticky when Mads kisses it.
“Gee gow.” Ivy points. It’s possible she’s fluent in Chinese.
“Almost done.”
Almost, but not quite. Because there is Ivy’s missing pacifier, but there is this, too. Mads’s eyes slip past the Tylenol and ibuprofen and settle—there—on the sleep aids. It sounds so soft and comforting, sleep aids. So reassuring and helpful. Twelve count, twenty-four, thirty-six. The boxes are all primary-color efficiency. How many would it take? Two boxes? Three? The ogres say: Lots. They say: Easy. They croon gentle words like slip away. They keep quiet about the violent ones like stomach pump and destroy. It’s all soft-rescue-lies. It’s peaceful-dream-violence.
“Mads?”
It’s funny, really, because, before now, Mads has always been the lifeguard.
“What are you doing here?” She flinches, nearly drops the boxes like she’s been caught.
“What do you mean, what am I doing here? What are you doing here?”
“Are you following me?”
“Why would I be following you? No, I wasn’t following you! This is the only drugstore around. I came to get some—”
Billy waves his arms around a little. He blushes. The bag of Cheetos in his hand crinkles in the gesture.
“Cheetos? People eat those in Seattle? I thought they only ate dried kale rounds or something. Yam chips. You’ve probably never even heard of bean dip in a can.”
“I’ve heard of bean dip in a can.” He’s mad. He’s staring at her hard, and he’s spitting his words, and she’s never seen him like this. “I like bean dip in a can. What are you doing, Mads?”
“Gog,” Ivy says.
“Dog! Did you hear that? She said it again. Good one, Ives.”
“Stop this bullshit, Mads.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I can see your face.”
“This face?” She pulls her mouth down, makes big eyes, tries to look silly, but the timing’s all wrong. It’s beginning to dawn on her. He’s not just mad. He’s furious.
“Stop it.”
Billy’s jaw is clenched. There’s only one reason he’d be this mad. She feels suddenly sick.
He’s found out.
“Do you folks need some help?” It’s the Bartells man in the red vest. He grips his price checker like a pistol.
“We’re fine,” Mads lies.
“Ching gow,” Ivy says.
Billy grabs Mads’s arm. His grip is firm. The basket bangs between them, and then he yanks it from her. He tosses the pacifier on the counter. “Just this,” he says, and throws down a ten. The Cheetos bag has been ditched somewhere.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“We’re getting out of here.”
The cheery bell sings wrongly. Outside, Billy’s mother’s truck is parked right next to Thomas’s.
Billy’s steering her out of there. He holds her arm so tight, it almost hurts. “We need to talk.”
“No stern voices around Ivy.” She shakes him off, puts Ivy in her seat. She gives Ivy a little tub of her favorite fish crackers. All the windows are down so she won’t get too hot, and now Mads leaves the door open, too.
Billy looks like he’s pacing w
hile standing still. He’s breathing hard.
“I can’t believe it. Goddamn it.”
Mads has no idea how to explain, or where to even start. He’s found out, and he’s so angry, his eyes blaze.
“Don’t let her hear!” It’s all she can think to say. She’s trying not to throw herself at his feet and weep. She wants to beg for forgiveness. Ivy watches, like there’s a crisis on Sesame Street. She pounds those crackers like movie popcorn.
“Fine! I’ll be quiet!” Billy whispers. “But just so you know. I saw what you were thinking in there.”
“What?”
“I know what you were thinking.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I could see it on your face. Those sleeping pills. Don’t tell me otherwise.”
She’s stunned. This isn’t what she expected, not at all.
“Promise me. Don’t ever . . . If you even think it, you need to tell—”
“I wasn’t thinking—”
She was, though. Billy nails Mads to the ground with his eyes. They take her in, and they see. They really see. She’s struck. Maybe no one has seen her like that, ever.
He takes her face in his hands.
“Promise me,” he says.
Chapter Sixteen
“I promise,” she whispers back. Her face is red, and her eyes fill like she might cry.
“A person . . .”
Jesus. He can’t believe how the day’s turned. He went over to Bartells to get—he feels like an idiot admitting this now—condoms. Yes, condoms! No glove, no love! What a fool. In spite of Gran, he was high with the thought of Mads and where they were heading. That kiss in the park spoke. That kiss told the future. If that kiss could talk, it would say, Tomorrow, and the next day and the next. He wanted to be ready, because all he had was a leftover pack from when he and Zoe were together. So he goes to Bartells after work, and when he sees her truck in the lot, he can’t believe his luck. It’s like everything is going his way. He thinks she’s there to buy, he doesn’t know . . . lip gloss, whatever a girl buys in a drugstore, and he jogs on in and grabs the Cheetos because he sure as hell isn’t telling her the real reason he’s there.