Wait For Me Jack

by Addison Jones

  ‘It’s been…such a pleasure to raise you all,’ she said, with more certainty. And looked sternly at the six children, one by one.

  But they were all middle-aged people, like herself! Had they caught up with her and Jack? And who was that strange man, sitting next to Elisabeth? And that woman, her arm looped around Sam’s shoulder? Oh yes, the new boyfriend and girlfriend. Odd words to apply to men and women in their forties, but yes, that’s exactly what they were. And there sat Daniel, alone, and his wife God knows where. At least Donald was still with Charlotte, and Billy was still with Maria, thank God. But poor August was entirely alone again and looked neglected – wrinkled shirt, stubble-faced, a slackness to the way he sat. She knew most of her children thought it was pointless to devote a life to keeping a marriage intact, but she was proud today. Proud of her family gathering around the cake, with fifty years in pink icing inside a red heart. She felt she deserved a…well, an adult version of a Girl Scout badge. It had been such a long, bloody battle. This day represented a victory over all the forces of divorce.

  But look at their faces. Still waiting for her.

  ‘I have loved being your mother,’ she said seriously now.

  ‘Milly, honey pie,’ slurred Jack. ‘I think they mean the best parts of our marriage. As today is our fiftieth anniversary. Remember?’

  A second of anger crossed her face, one eyebrow cocked. Some giggles from round the table.

  ‘All good times,’ she said. ‘And I thank God you are not dead, Jack.’

  At this, after three seconds of silence, everyone laughed.

  ‘Here’s to you, Mom,’ they said, raising their glasses. ‘Here’s to love like yours.’

  ‘Here, here,’ said Jack, joining in. He may be mocked by his kids, but knew better than to let them know he cared. He’d had six glasses of wine. Love seemed irrele-vant. It hardly mattered when compared to the fact of their tenaciousness. Hell, they hadn’t killed each other, and that was a miracle worth celebrating.

  Then August put another record on – he was the only child who loved the old music. Harry James oozed into the room.

  ‘Not that old crap again!’

  ‘Sure some of my old Stones albums are still there. Or Grateful Dead.’

  ‘Put on something decent!’

  ‘Leave it!’ commanded Jack, and moved into the seat August had left empty, next to his wife. She was humming softly and Jack was swaying, and clicking his fingers. The music was as fresh, as cutting edge as ever. He couldn’t shake the feeling that their generation had done something no other generation had ever done. He and Milly sat alone on their island of nostalgia. Jack kissed his wife on the side of her head, and then on her mouth. She kissed him back, and August took a picture of them with his phone.

  The next day, Jack was mildly depressed and spent the day hiking. There had been a time he’d felt sorry for himself because his wife could not join him on hikes. The plan had been to be one of those couples who did everything together. He’d adjusted long ago, but today for some reason, he felt sorry for himself again. Not only that, Jaspy and King were very disobedient. Still puppies, but still. They kept running off and he had to resist the urge to not call them back. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ he kept mumbling to himself. He had drunk too much last night. It was so hot, the sky was white, too hot for blue. Everything looked ugly and dirty. He walked till his muscles ached and the sun burned the places not covered by his old hat.

  Milly felt energetic and excited, as if in some delayed reaction to the prospect of having a party. She decided to clean out the hall closet. And the refrigerator. It was satisfying, throwing junk away and creating space. Temporary, of course, since she could easily visualise the clutter accumulating again. But still, it was satisfying.

  Five Years Earlier

  Killing Ants

  July 14th, 1997, Dogtired Ranch, Mendocino County

  2:13pm

  Here they were again: Dogtired Ranch. Would this be the last time? There had to be a last time one of these times. It was a hellish drive, longer every year. They’d both wondered if last summer had been the last time, but here they were again. It seemed to Milly that last times always made that decision themselves. No warning, just the retrospective awareness.

  It was good to be back, she told herself. Flies circling endlessly, yellow jackets buzzing all day and mosquitoes buzzing all night, beer tabs being ripped off. Coconut sunscreen and smoking barbecues. The sandy beach, in the curve of the river. Cold for swimming, but perfect for sunbathing. A timeless place. The sense that, despite all the noise and movement from the beach, all the laughter of the poker-playing men in the shade, the wives’ overlapping gossip about their marriages and everyone else’s marriages, the fourteen-year-old bikini-clad girls pretending to ignore the fourteen-year-old whooping-it-up boys, and above it all the children’s giggles, screams, tears – despite all this humanity, time was not moving here at Dogtired. Or if it was, it was moving like maple syrup on a cold day. The only age group missing was the eighteen to thirty-year-olds. Dogtired was not for everyone.

  They always booked the same log cabin, the same mid-July weeks.

  ‘We always go to Dogtired in July,’ Milly had told the checkout girl in United Market yesterday, as she stocked up on food for the trip. ‘Every summer. It’s an old MacAlister family tradition, every summer,’ she’d repeated proudly, forgetting it had begun as a desperate measure the year her sister, Louise, fell crazy in love with Coffee Enema Bob (he swore coffee enemas cured everything including cancer), and gave her sons to her sister without a backward glance. That first summer had been hell. Four kids crammed into the back seat, and in front, Billy (when he was Willy) on her lap. Louise’s boys had been so pale, so quiet. So polite. Milly remembered washing Danny’s pee-sodden sheets daily. She’d felt as if they were all floating, and she was supposed to tether them to earth again somehow. They’d needed a miracle, and Dogtired had been it.

  There had been a time when Milly had lain awake at night, fretting about the possibility of Louise’s ex-husband emerging, stealing those poor boys from their beds. It made her slightly ashamed because he wasn’t a bad man, but she’d imagined blocking the door with her body. Her dogs would attack his legs and her children would fell him with cast-iron frying pans. She never got further than that, never actually disposed of the body.

  There had been a time she’d yearned for her sister to return, but then one day she realised she’d begun to dread such an eventuality. A secret dread. She’d have to act over the moon, but, oh, it would break her heart. The boys had become, by a process she couldn’t understand, her own children. She could not lose them too, she told herself, then listened to the too and remembered poor cold Charlie.

  Ah, Charlie!

  Ah, Danny and Donald!

  Ah, Louise!

  Her sister could attract nice men, but had never learned the knack of appreciating them. Always chased the bad boys. Maybe a missing gene, certainly nothing she could help. Milly remembered racing down to the train tracks with Louise, their thongs (Were they called that any more? Hadn’t thongs become string underpants?) slapping the sidewalk. Her sister was always going closer to the thundering freight train, and daring Milly to do the same. Louise’s saucy hip and shoulder wriggle to the caboose man, and his amazed look. She always did that, no matter what the caboose man looked like. As if she was the Shasta County Homecoming Queen, served up just for him. She’d had a red gingham skirt that she wore all one summer, the summer she was fifteen – full from the tiny waist, made of the lightest material, so when she ran, or it was windy, anyone could see her underpants.

  It had been almost thirty years, but Milly still couldn’t think of her sister without a clear recollection of her own first reaction to the news. She’d wanted to shake Louise hard. Slap her. Typical no-class Louise. Louise had written postcards and letters over the years, asking for news of her sons, and for forgiveness. One of the early letters:

  Billie: I’m sorry, sis, bu
t I don’t see how I can come back now. I’m a rotten mother. Obviously. Mom was a rotten mother too, we just didn’t get it. Thought she was normal. She was hard, Billie. You don’t like to think of all those times she was drunk and just didn’t care. You don’t even remember feeling scared! That time she fell in the kitchen and just lay there in a puddle of her own piss till we came in for breakfast. But I remember, and I see her in me. I’m OK, I’m not saying I’m a bad person. But I am not a decent mother. Danny and Donald are better off with you. I know you’ll see the sense in this. But I got to say, I miss you more than I can say.

  Love, your stupid sis

  PS. I am crying as I write this. Just so you know it ain’t easy.

  She’d made it sound like her desertion was an act of self-sacrifice – and perhaps it was. Louise and Coffee Enema Bob had split ages ago. (I don’t know why no man is sticking with me, Billie. Or maybe it’s me that’s not sticking with them. Seems like Chuck did something to ruin me that way. He was too nice and I used up all my sticking power on him. Nowadays, I get so I can hardly sit still, once I’m done with a man. And he don’t need to do much to start getting on my nerves. It’s all my fault, I know that. I’m not dumb. Just impossible to live with.) After mentioning various men and various communes over the years, she was living with a woman reiki healer in a trailer park outside Dubois now – though there’d been no letters or postcards for a while. More than two years. Milly tried to picture her funny frizzy-haired sister cooped up in a trailer miles from the coast, but all she could come up with was her sister pacing the bedroom they’d shared in Redding, swearing in that sexy voice: ‘Goddammit, Billie, if I don’t get out of this hick town soon I am going to fucking explode.’ Though when they’d moved to San Francisco, Louise hadn’t settled. She had missed Redding and their mother.

  It occurred to Milly that Louise wouldn’t realise she wasn’t Billie any more. For her sister, she was frozen as Billie – thirty-nine years old, blond hair still natural, figure still marginally intact, husband still faithful. Milly might never see her sister again, might not even be informed of her death. This made her feel guilty for wishing Louise would never return to claim her sons.

  Ah, Loulou! Darn you!

  Yes, it was never pleasant remembering how the Dogtired Ranch tradition began, and so she mostly didn’t. Not while she chatted to the United Market clerk, and not now, while she organised their cabin the same way she’d always done: first putting the groceries on the sticky shelves, then making the bed up, then unpacking clothes. She noticed the absence of Mackie and Jaspy, but was relieved they’d decided to use a kennel this summer. Mackie was way too old, and Jaspy was way too young. Both were work. She wondered when August would turn up with those miniature twin girls of his.

  He was moving into his own cabin right now. His daughters clung to him, sweat-soaked limpets with Asian faces. Their cabin was at the unpopular end of the ranch. It took years to be promoted to the best cabins. He walked through the wall of midday heat to his dad and Milly’s cabin, a daughter glued to each hip. At three, they were still light enough to carry. He was remembering his ex-wife’s words that morning:

  ‘I don’t trust you one bit, August MacAlister. If anything happens to the girls at that stupid Dog place, I’m going to kill you.’ Ah Lam had stood close to him as she hissed these words, so the children couldn’t hear. Some of her saliva sprayed him. This had almost certainly been an accident, but still.

  He arrived and stood on the porch.

  ‘Hey, Milly,’ he called. ‘Hot, eh?’ He unpeeled the girls, walked inside and opened a coke.

  Milly had never wanted to meet, much less love this proof of her husband’s adultery, but the love had come anyway that Sunday afternoon when Jack brought him home to meet his siblings, a skinny five-year-old with Jack’s eyes and cowlicks. She’d kept her distance, but it turned out that loving August was as involuntary as loving Donald and Danny. He brought out her deepest maternal instincts because no matter how tall he grew, how old he got, he always seemed vulnerable. Growing up in a house with no siblings, a series of hedonistic step-fathers, a mother who could make martinis but not cook a hot dog without boiling the pan dry. In addition, though it hurt to admit it, he was the most beautiful child Jack had produced.

  If only his mother hadn’t moved into their town! Milly bumped into her at the grocery store, in the post office, at the beach. It helped marginally that Colette was now married again, was wrinkly like the chain smoker she was, and Jack’s interest in her seemed entirely platonic. Poor darling August, having such a woman for a mother.

  She held her arms open now, inviting his hug, which he duly delivered.

  ‘How are you? Are you settling in okay?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s good. But hot, eh?’

  None of the cabins had air conditioning. In fact, they had no electricity. Food and drinks were kept cool with blocks of ice in iceboxes.

  ‘Where’s Dad?’

  ‘I have no idea.’ Flat toned. Wasn’t she enough? Jack Schmack. She headed to his daughters, both still in the doorway, edging her way round the room holding on to furniture. Her leg was bad today. It came and went. Heat and tiredness didn’t help.

  ‘Come in, girls! It’s…it’s me!’ Jack was Grandpa, but she hadn’t decided what they should call her. Grandma seemed a presumption, but would Milly seem to exclude them from the tribe of their cousins? Milly and Jack had seven grandchildren now, including Louise’s.

  ‘Milly, you should get a cane. It would be much quicker. Much safer.’

  ‘I am fine the way I am,’ she said, teetering as she closed the dangerous gap between a table and the doorway. A moment of no support. Would she make it?

  August, pouring milk for his daughters, watched nervously out of the corner of his eyes. The girls stared at her with identical serious faces. Oh, this was all so ridiculous and predictable. The minute Milly pictured falling, she knew she would. Wham! A cloud of dust rose from where she fell. It was a soft, rolling fall. No damage, just that familiar indignity, and Milly lay there, giggling.

  ‘Oh my!’

  ‘Jesus Christ. Are you all right?’

  Her laugh was like crying. A high-pitched, helpless, soft noise.

  ‘I’m fine. Just give me your hand for a minute.’

  August levered her up, and she swallowed her giggles.

  ‘Where is Ah Lam?’ she asked.

  ‘Ah Lam’s not here this year. We’re not together any more. I told you.’

  ‘Did you? Well, tell her we miss her,’ stubbornly avoiding August’s eyes. She’d only known this wife for a short time, but felt obligated to keep her present somehow, if only in her name spoken out loud. Goodness, it took her long enough just to learn how to pronounce it. She stared at him hard, then looked away when he looked at her.

  ‘Well, it couldn’t be hotter,’ she said. ‘I hope Ah Lam’s not stuck in commuter traffic.’

  August sighed, and the girls clung to him again, their hands sticky.

  ‘Milly, mind if I leave the kids here for a little while?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  He disentangled himself from the twins and let the screen door slam. The girls glared at Milly. She’d never seen such dark eyes. They were all pupil. And their black hair was exactly the same length. Aside from their different clothes, they were identical. And so petite! Like dolls.

  ‘Um…Miho?’ Looked carefully to see which girl responded, but both girls continued staring. She smiled her biggest smile.

  ‘Well, Miho and Chiew, what will we do with you? I know, let’s make play-dough.’

  It used to work, she was thinking. Playdough, the making of it and the playing with it, used to eat up entire afternoons. The salty, crusty texture, squished between fingers.

  ‘Where’s the flour?’ asked one girl suddenly. Milly startled. They didn’t look old enough to talk.

  ‘And a bowl?’ asked the other, looking round the room sceptically.

  ‘Ah,’ said Milly, re
membering she had no ingredients for playdough. ‘I’ll tell you a story instead. Bring me a Coke please. And the cookies. Bring me that bag of cookies.’

  The girls exchanged a fathomless look, did as they were asked and collapsed against her legs. She hoped they wouldn’t make a break for it. She doubted she’d have the strength to hold on to them for more than a second. She looked at their bodies, soft limbed, tumbled together. She wanted them to like her but felt this was unachievable, so contented herself with observing their beauty.

  Jack, meanwhile, was sitting by himself in the air-conditioned resort bar, having a Coors. He’d just reached that state of inebriation where he felt happiness – there was no other word for it – pouring in. He was revisiting the best parts of his life. That big European prize one of his authors won, and Jack had taken the stage too and bowed, and everyone had applauded. Lizbeth’s alabaster shoulders, when she’d worn that green silk dress and moved into his arms to the tune of ‘Moonlight Serenade’. Walking in to Paul Elder’s Books with Milly (when she’d been Billie), on the corner of Sutter and Stockton on Valentine’s Day. Choosing Catcher in the Rye by Salinger and then drinking cocktails in Vesuvio Café. He remembered wanting to ask her to marry him, and then drawing a love heart with their initials on the fly leaf instead. Not even telling her it was there – just giving her the book later. It was only their second date, after all. He had liked himself so much then. Several epiphanies hovered just outside these memories, close enough for him to taste them. Ah, wisdom! Acceptance of imperfection! Clarity! Life was good. He was about to order another beer, when the screen door slammed open.