How Will I Know You?

by Jessica Treadway

  “Sorry, guy,” Doug said, the same words he’d uttered at the house that day when they were all so disappointed, except for Alison, who only pretended to be. The difference was that this time, he didn’t really sound sorry at all. If he felt chagrined that his own daughter, the Mother Teresa of Chilton Regional High, could do such a thing—put her husband though such grief again, and make him think she was suffering with it, too—it didn’t show.

  This was what whiplash must feel like, Tom thought. He was barely aware of saying to Doug, “You probably think I had this coming.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Doug held up a hand as if to say Stop right there, if you know what’s good for you.

  “You always thought I was the one to blame the first time. But you’re wrong.” Tom refrained from describing, as he’d always wanted to, Alison’s drunken fall down the stairs a few weeks into their marriage. She’d hidden from Tom the fact that she was drinking, of course; she was pregnant, and on top of that, how many times had she told him she didn’t want to be like her own mother, who spent Alison’s childhood in a vodka and cranberry-juice haze? The night she fell, he found her stash of nips in the canister labeled FLOUR. When he brought her home from the hospital and confronted her with it, she promised she’d never drink again. That fall had kept her abstinent ever since then—or so Tom had thought.

  Neither of them had ever told Doug and Helen why they lost that first baby. Tom wasn’t sure why he felt loyal to Alison now, when she’d deceived him again, but he did. He wouldn’t mention the cause of the first miscarriage. Did it even matter, now?

  Doug’s eyes narrowed further, so much that Tom almost couldn’t see the blue. “Don’t tell me what I think,” he warned Tom. “Or thought.” He was already moving in the direction of where they’d left Alison and her mother. “We have to get back. And you won’t let her know we’ve been talking about this.” It was more a directive than a request.

  “What’s she going to think, you dragged me off so you could have company while you took a piss?” Tom knew that every word he said now added to his risk. But he’d withstood too many hits today to care about that. He’d deal with the fallout later.

  “Whatever it takes.” His father-in-law put a hand on his shoulder, the same gesture he’d made to Hal Beemon when Hal promised to erase Alison’s arrest. Tom shrugged it off as they approached Helen and Alison, who was getting instructions from the doctor for her release. The doctor used the phrases “vaginal pain,” “heavy spotting,” and “obstetrician,” and Alison’s eyes darted toward Tom for an instant before she returned her glance to the floor. Her face was red, her body bloated with more than the life he now knew was inside it, and he thought, What happened to her? What happened to us? It wasn’t the first time he’d asked this of himself. But this time it felt like more of a call to action than a helpless wish for the truth to be something other than what it was.

  Doug offered to drive them home, and Alison appeared eager to accept, but Tom refused and said he was perfectly capable of taking care of his own wife. “Of course you are,” Helen told him, leaning in to kiss his cheek, and the false faith of her words was obvious to them all.

  Tom helped Alison up into the truck, where she sat staring ahead of her as he climbed into the driver’s seat beside her. He would have liked to have the conversation right there, but Doug and Helen were watching, so he started up and drove out of the hospital lot, away from their sight, before pulling over.

  “Stop,” he heard Alison say, her voice sounding both tight and tired.

  “I am stopping.”

  “Don’t, I said. Don’t stop.”

  But he ignored her; there was no way he could keep going. He had been going and going, without stopping, for far too long, a fact he recognized only now. “What the hell, Al.” If he’d had more time to think about it, he could have come up with something better than that. Or maybe not: What the hell kind of said it all.

  “I was going to tell you.”

  “You were? About what? Which part?”

  She shot him a sharp look, then must have realized that she had no right, as her eyes settled into remorseful slits. “The baby. I was going to tell you today,” she said, placing a hand on her own belly; he couldn’t tell if it was a gesture of tenderness or regret. Or maybe there was a pain there she wanted to press so she’d feel it more. “Tonight. I was going to make a special dinner. Right after you left this morning, I went out and got things for shrimp scampi.” He made a sound she mistook for doubt. “Go home and look if you don’t believe me—it’s all in the fridge! Tarragon was the only ingredient I couldn’t find.”

  “It’s not that I don’t believe you.” But they could both hear in his voice that this wasn’t true, and he twisted in his seat to look at her straight on. “But really, Al—why should I? You lied that day after you saw the doctor—to all of us. How could you do that? It’s been more than a week. How could you keep that from me?” Without even identifying the fear that fueled the words, he said, “What, were you going to have an abortion?”

  Her face went so white he thought she might be on the verge of passing out. “I can’t believe you just said that to me.” She turned away from him to look ahead through the windshield. “You don’t know me better than that?”

  “I thought I did,” he said, wishing he could retract the accusation; he didn’t actually think she would have gotten rid of their baby, let alone without telling him. But now that it was in the air between him, there was no calling it back.

  “I was afraid,” she murmured. “I was afraid if I told you, it would happen again. I wanted to wait until the first trimester was over.” Her face crumpled, and she brought her hands up to cover her eyes. “It’s so close, now. I wanted to celebrate.” With a sudden motion, she punched the dashboard in front of her.

  “Al.” He reached out instinctively to grab her hand back so she wouldn’t hurt herself. “They said you were drunk.”

  She winced at the sound of it. “I wasn’t drunk.”

  “And you had one of your students in the car.”

  She nodded. “Keith. His father went after him.”

  “Tell me what happened.” The truth, he would have added, but at the last minute he refrained from accusing her again.

  She closed her eyes, as if replaying the scene inside her head. “Okay. After I bought the groceries, I went into the liquor store to buy some champagne so we could have a little toast tonight. I thought one little glass wouldn’t hurt. I mean, look at my mother.” She gestured out the window as if Helen might be waving from the side of the road. “She drank the whole time she was pregnant with me, and I was fine! Right? The chances that anything bad would happen, now, are pretty small.” She wrung her hands together. “I brought everything home, and I don’t know what got into me, but instead of waiting until tonight, I opened the bottle and poured a little glass for myself. Tiny—Thomas, I promise.” The first words of her wedding vows, which had always made both of them smile until now. “It was kind of a private celebration. I thought, I’m doing it, it’s finally going to happen, I’m going to be a mom.” The word “mom” seemed to choke her. “Anyway, it hit me right away—I guess I don’t have any tolerance anymore.”

  “So then what?” Tom closed his eyes, knowing it was his own fault that he had no choice but to hear the rest.

  “So then Keith called.”

  “You give those kids your number?”

  “Well, not all of them. Only a few. Two, really. Keith’s one of them, his father’s out of control sometimes, he never knows what’s going to happen.”

  “So he asks you to come save him? And you rush right out?” When she didn’t correct him, which was essentially his answer, he said, “You know what could have happened here, right? You could have killed yourself, or him. Or lost the baby, or your job. If your father wasn’t looking out for you. If he wasn’t the chief.”

  “He was in trouble,” she said tonelessly, as if reciting line
s from a script. “Keith.”

  “I don’t give a shit about Keith!” It was all he could manage not to shake her, to make her understand. “You’re in trouble. We’re in trouble. How are you not seeing that?” When again she didn’t respond, he reached to turn her face toward his and saw that she was staring at something beyond him, which he guessed didn’t actually exist except in her own mind.

  She mumbled, “I would never drive when I was drinking. I’d never drink with a baby in me.”

  He did his best not to shiver as another chill buzzed through his blood. “Alison. What? You just did both of those things.” The measure of shock in her face as she registered his words exceeded any he’d ever seen there before. It was only then that he comprehended how far gone she was—how incapable, in that moment, of anything resembling a reasonable exchange. “It’s okay,” he told her, drawing her close even as the word that kept repeating in his mind was “betrayal.” Of course it was anything but okay, but he didn’t know what else to say.

  “Mom said she would take me to a meeting,” she whispered, her voice muffled against his coat.

  Tom made a face before he could stop himself. Before too long (although now was not the time), he would have to tell Alison what had happened back in July, the night after Helen accepted a medallion for her tenth year of sobriety. They’d all gone to the meeting, clapped for her, shared the anniversary cake.

  Not twenty-four hours later, at Doug and Helen’s house for their usual Wednesday-night dinner, he walked into the kitchen and saw Helen drinking wine straight out of the bottle. He was so stunned at the sight that he stopped short, then must have made a noise he wasn’t aware of, because Helen slung the bottle back down on the counter with a glass thump and turned toward him, wine snaking down her mouth’s edge and onto her blouse collar.

  “Tom,” she said, drawing out the pronunciation of his name to such an extent that he assumed she was trying to buy time. But what could she say? “This is not what you think.”

  But of course, it was. It was exactly what he thought. He realized right away that he wished he hadn’t caught her. What was he supposed to do now? She begged him to keep it a secret between them: it wouldn’t do anybody any good, she said, if he told.

  In the truck, to avoid responding to the notion of Helen leading her daughter to the sober flock, Tom eased Alison back against her own seat and went to start the engine again. But she put a hand on his arm and said, “What was Daddy saying to you, when he took you away in there?”

  “Nothing. He just told me what happened.”

  “He wasn’t mad?”

  “He’s never mad at you.”

  “Not me. Mad at you.”

  “Well, of course he was. He’s always mad at me.” He said this instead of asking Alison what she suspected he might have done, this time, to inspire her father’s anger. “What else is new?” Then he was amazed to feel a wet heat crowding behind his eyelids. “I’ve tried everything I know,” he told her, blinking the tears back before she could see them. “I joined the rescue team, I learned how to dive. I’m turning my family’s business around. But all he sees is the douchebag he thinks kicked his daughter down the stairs.”

  “It doesn’t matter what he thinks,” Alison said. This was so obviously inaccurate that Tom almost laughed. He wouldn’t bother arguing with her; he was grateful she hadn’t laughed when he referred to the shack as his family’s business, as if his father had owned a real company instead of a shithole that sold mostly cigarettes and beer.

  At home, Tom eased the truck into the driveway, then helped her into the house. Despite the injuries Alison had inflicted on herself, he couldn’t help feeling hopeful; maybe today had been the wake-up call she needed, what Helen would have referred to as a blessing in disguise. And maybe it would bring them all closer—the disaster that might have happened but hadn’t, the shared anticipation of a new life among them, one they’d all been waiting to welcome for a long time. He settled her into bed, surprised to find that despite the deception she’d committed against him, he didn’t have to fake tenderness in his touch as he pulled the covers over her, confiscating her cell phone while he was at it so that at least for a few hours, her parents wouldn’t be able to get to her.

  In the kitchen, he looked for the champagne bottle she told him she’d opened for a taste before she received her student’s call. He checked the fridge, the cupboard, the recycling bin, and the trash bag—nothing. Had she poured it out, then discarded the bottle on the way to pick up Keith? That was the only explanation. He’d ask her about it when she woke up. For now he just wanted to sit down and think about the other surprise of the day, which he hadn’t had a chance to focus on until now: he had another shot at being a father. The pleasure of it, the profound exhilaration, carried him into a sleep as sound as if he’d spent the day climbing a mountain, which (it occurred to him the next morning), in a way, he had.

  As Needed for Anxiety

  On Halloween—the day after the disastrous party at the condos—Harper was so sure that her connection to Joy had been completely severed that she was shocked almost to the point of exclaiming when Joy stopped by. Truman answered the door and let her in on his way out, calling “Hey” into the kitchen, where Harper, feeling the remnants of her first hangover, finished making the seven-layer bars she owed him. Not having any information about what awaited her, she stepped into the living room with some apprehension. Seeing Joy standing there with her hands thrust deep into the pocket of her hoodie, she said, “I’m sorry I said that about your mom,” regretting the words immediately when she realized how stupid it was to remind Joy of how she’d betrayed her. But she was waiting for Joy to apologize, too—for starting the whole thing by laughing at Delaney’s joke about Harper’s own mom being mental.

  Joy shrugged, which seemed to be her default gesture these days. “Why? It’s not your fault, it’s my mother’s. You didn’t say anything that wasn’t true.” She put her hand on the banister post and ran her finger over the wood. “Can we go up?”

  “We don’t need to. There’s nobody here.”

  “Even your mom?”

  “It’s her group time. My father took her.”

  “Oh.” Joy nodded. She was the only person Harper had ever told about her mother’s being a member of a therapy group. “I forgot.”

  This meant something. For going on three years now, Harper’s mother had spent two hours every Saturday afternoon—between one and three o’clock—in group therapy at the community health center. Until Joy and Harper stopped going to the mall together over the summer, Joy had often been in the car when Harper’s father or, more recently, Truman dropped her mother off or picked her up from the session. The fact that Joy could forget something so primary to Harper’s life felt like the closing of a door Harper had been trying to hold open, by herself, against a wind that would inevitably blow it shut.

  “I’d still rather go up to your room,” Joy said. “It’s easier to talk there.”

  “Well, okay.” Only then did Harper realize that she was wearing her apron, which said IF CUPCAKES ARE WRONG, I DON’T WANT TO BE RIGHT across the front. Joy had seen her in the apron numerous times, but feeling vulnerable today, Harper removed it in a hurry as she followed Joy up the stairs. Without taking her hoodie off, Joy headed for the window seat and began tossing Addy’s plastic doll-head from side to side.

  “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” Harper told her. “That’s always bothered me.”

  “It has?” But Joy appeared more amused by this than perturbed. She twisted Addy’s head back on and folded her hands in her lap, an exaggerated show of manners. “You actually did me a favor,” she said. “My mother doesn’t deserve me keeping her secret. Maybe now my father will find out, and she’ll get what’s coming to her.”

  “Why don’t you just tell him?”

  “I thought about it.” Joy stood abruptly, seeming agitated at the turn of the conversation. “But she’d just deny it, and then he wouldn’t
believe me. Why put myself through that?” When Harper didn’t answer right away, Joy asked if there was anything to eat and said she had to go to the bathroom.

  “I don’t have anything without sugar,” Harper said, but Joy shrugged and said sugar was fine, she was through caring about it anymore.

  Harper went down to the kitchen and put three of Truman’s seven-layer bars on a plate. When she returned, closing her parents’ bedroom door on the way back to her own (her mother never left it open, wanting to keep her refuge sealed; her father must have forgotten, which meant he must have been distracted because he knew what a big deal it was), Joy was standing at the window looking out. “It’s shitty out there,” she said.

  “Really?” Harper put the plate down. She could see sun lighting the houses up the hill, where Joy lived. “I thought it was kind of nice out today.”

  “I don’t mean the weather.” Joy murmured it as if to herself, and Harper waited for her to elaborate. When she didn’t, she held the plate of bars out, but Joy shook her head. “I have to go,” she said, looking not at Harper but beyond her. She flipped her hood up around her face and jogged down the stairs toward the door without another word, and Harper tried but failed to avoid recognizing that Joy had not only left her, but escaped.

  That night she stood at the stove stirring a blueberry compote when she heard her mother cry out from her bedroom. Rushing to the stairs, she called up, “What? What?” expecting her mother to call and say Come help me, I need you.