Before Everything

by Victoria Redel

  But there it was. Good things come in threes.

  First was the confirmation of the show. A twenty-year retrospective, at the Art Institute of Chicago slated for fall 2015, including the negotiated sale of two paintings to the museum.

  Second was last evening. When Helen walked from a Prince Street meeting to join Asa for dinner at Café Select, she took a call from a number she didn’t recognize, and fifteen minutes later, as she heaped horseradish onto an oyster, she swore to Asa, “When he said, ‘Hey, Helen, Larry Page here,’ I had zero idea who Larry Page was, and then after he said, ‘We’d like you to be our 2013 inaugural recipient of the Google Arts Prize,’ I stood on the corner of Lafayette and Prince shouting, ‘A hundred and fifty thousand dollars! No fucking way, Larry!’ But honestly, Asa, I still have no idea who Larry Page is.”

  Asa tipped an oyster into his mouth and shook his head. “Ever heard of the Internet, Helen?”

  So that was one.

  And two.

  Now, with the speedometer well above eighty, it was obvious to Helen that Anna was number three. It made perfect sense.

  In an old-wives’-tale kind of way.

  In a three-is-a-mystical-number kind of way.

  It was obvious—as in inevitable. It didn’t matter that the defib thing had been deactivated or whatever Layla had told her. The proof was suddenly everywhere that Anna was going to have a comeback and be fine. For example, if Helen looked left and watched the light bounce staccato through the trees in sharp diagonals, that was a sign, because Anna always said that it was Helen who taught her to notice light and the play of light and speed. Okay, maybe light and the trees weren’t 100 percent proof, but Helen wanted to fly to Anna’s. Be the first to arrive and share everything. Not share her own good news with guilt but with giddy certainty that Anna was about to feel better.

  Helen might not even have to do any convincing. Maybe Anna woke this morning feeling strong and, without thinking twice, wandered into the kitchen and took all her medications and ate a cheddar cheese omelet. She’d probably find Anna out in the living room. Hey, Helen, Anna will say, looking a little sheepish when Helen walks in. There’s a new plan.

  —

  Helen heard the shriek of the siren before she saw the triplet lights. She was driving almost ninety miles per hour. Helen veered onto the shoulder, the car thumping against the grooved surface.

  Helen unrolled her window, then watched the patrol car in her rearview mirror. She looped through ways to get out of a ticket. How many points was too many?

  The cop was slow getting out of his car. State police, light gray hat with the Connecticut blue band. Matching blue tie. He adjusted his belt. His wide stance, the slow walk were clearly deliberate, as if to provoke more guilt. Helen’s adrenaline spiking, she felt guilty of more than speeding. It seemed he slowed even more, kicking loose gravel with his boots until he’d stopped at the back of Helen’s car. Close up he looked practically pubescent. Helen was probably too old to smile her way out of this ticket.

  The patrolman tucked his head and leaned in to speak. The brim of his gray hat pitched low. His hands were crossed, resting on the wide belt as if for emphasis. He checked out the inside of the car. Took in the bottle of water, the cup of coffee. The overnight bag in the backseat.

  “Where you going, ma’am?”

  “Massachusetts.”

  “What’s there?”

  Helen suddenly choked up. Swallowed hard. “My friend.”

  “Any idea how fast you were driving?”

  Helen managed a weak smile. “Too fast?”

  “Well, ma’am, ninety-one miles an hour. Pretty important getting there?”

  Helen wanted to blurt it all. He’d understand. She’d enlist his concern, and he might even offer a full-on siren escort blazing right to Anna’s driveway.

  “License and registration, please.”

  Helen fished out the registration, the current one at the bottom of five expired, and fumbled in her wallet, tearing a corner of her license, then watched the cop make his slow way back to his patrol car. She was still pumped, needing to get to Anna’s while this child cop made grand theater of her speeding.

  She needed to breathe herself down into calm. She closed her eyes, and she was back in the hospital room, Anna’s third New York treatment, the one when she met Asa. Anna argued she could easily do the same treatment in Springfield, but Helen kind of liked slipping back into their old hospital routines—walking her son to the crosstown bus, stopping to buy Anna containers of fresh egg salad and a soup, a bagel with lox cream cheese, and taking the subway uptown. She’d emerge up the stairs at 168th Street, each day surprised by the acrid tang of fried food, and walk the long block past food trucks where orderlies lined up for breakfast sandwiches and sweet rolls. Early mornings the hospital rotunda was quiet, the security guards nodding Helen past. She ran the five flights, the grocery bags banging against her shins. It was critical to take the stairs to prove she wasn’t also sick.

  Another belief: if Anna died, Helen would die, too. It was the twisted logic of superstition. She’d never been without Anna, thus she wouldn’t exist if Anna didn’t exist.

  “Well, for now you’re the complete winner,” Anna said at the end of treatment. “I stay alive, and you get the guy.”

  But before Helen could find a return quip, Anna said, “Hang on to Asa. He might prove more reliable than me.”

  “Ma’am. Ma’am.”

  “Yes, sir.” Helen blinked her eyes open. The officer was back, and if it were possible, he seemed even younger, a splash of acne along the jawline, the overly wide stance a cover for his coltish body.

  He handed her the ticket. “Your friend’ll still be there if you go the limit.”

  “Yes, sir,” she repeated. She watched his bouncier gait and even the kicked rock as he headed back to his patrol car. He was feeling okay. Doing his job.

  He shadowed his car behind Helen until the next exit. She kept cleanly on the speed limit. Even when he was long out of sight.

  “Yes, sir!” she shouted out loud in the car. “Yes, sir!” she shouted louder.

  She’d done it. She’d shut up. Didn’t say anything, not one stupid thing, so that the kid cop might take pity on a middle-age lady and give her a break, letting her off without a ticket.

  In which case the state police of Connecticut would have used up Helen’s third good thing.

  In which case Anna would have died.

  You owe me, she’ll tease when she describes the speeding ticket. How when the officer said, “She’ll still be there,” Helen refrained from saying, Yes, sir, thanks to this ticket she will be.

  Helen can’t wait to say, You really owe me, Anna. I took points on my license for you. All you’ve got to do is come to my wedding and make a toast.

  —

  Parked at the bottom of Anna’s driveway, Ming was already there. Helen would have preferred to be alone, but she didn’t really care. Anna will be fine.

  Zeus barked from the top stone step.

  “Hey, Zeus.” Helen filled with momentary goodwill toward the dog.

  As she opened the car door, her phone rang. Lucinda. Helen’s eldest.

  “Hey, cookie,” Helen said. She was happy for the call. For the unlikely clear reception, for the chance to hear her daughter’s voice, for the sheer grace that Lucinda has returned to talking to her, for the chance to brag to her kid a little about the Google prize. Maybe she’ll take Lucinda on a trip. Rusty, too. She owed them a whole lot more than a trip.

  Lucinda shouted “Mom!” with such delight that Helen’s stomach instantly constricted.

  Helen wanted to disconnect. Let it roll to voice mail when Lucinda called back.

  She stuffed the ticket into her bag and stood from the car. She slammed the car door and leaned, looking up at Anna’s house. The prayer flags d
rooped along the roof peak. A bit of clothesline dangling from the eaves.

  Lucinda was about to say something wonderful, and Helen, who only wanted everything wonderful for Lucinda, who was grateful every day for the way her daughter generously forgave her, needed Lucinda to stop. To shut up and stop speaking.

  Or Helen wanted to jump in faster than Lucinda, wanted to say, Let me call you right back, cookie. Let me get inside, check on Anna and call you right back.

  But she couldn’t get off the phone. And Lucinda, her beautiful daughter, her daughter who had taken so much time trusting Helen again, was already bursting forth, “Mom, I got it! The job, Mom!”

  Lucinda’s voice bell-like, her joy so complete that Helen felt it. Painfully.

  “You said I would, Mom. Thanks for that faith. It’s like you made it happen, Mom.”

  And there it was. Done.

  The third good thing. Claimed.

  While Lucinda talked about schedules and benefits, Helen wandered over to the side yard. The bucket swing on the rusted metal play set rattled and clanked, the chains twisted so the canvas seats hung sideways. Helen untwisted the seats so they swung freely.

  “I’m so proud of you,” Helen mustered, suitably enthusiastic.

  “The office culture’s super chill,” Lucinda said. There was going to be a conversation about salary. She was going to thrive. And flourish. “Those are words they use, Mom,” Lucinda said. “‘Thrive and flourish.’”

  Her daughter’s voice was a song in her ear. And Helen responded. Out of that most fundamental place, Helen sang the praise that was the mother praise song—the song of praise for crawling, then walking, the praise of all the watch-me-Mom-I’m-swimming-underwater.

  Then Helen made her way to the bottom of the granite-slab steps leading to the front door. But there was no rush anymore, no reason to go inside. Instead she veered to the side of the house where the land hilled up. It was too late to have a take-back, too late to have a full-sweep do-over to untangle this day from her superstitious, idiotic thinking.

  “You deserve this, Lucinda. I knew it would work out.” Helen stood on her tippy-toes. She reached, stretched, then jumped until she snagged the end of the clothesline that dangled from the roof. She tugged. She tugged and watched the arc of rumpled prayer flags unfix. Helen moved below the pitch of roof. Angled back out into the yard so there was traction and momentum to her yanks. She swung and tugged with one hand, the other hand holding the phone to her ear as Lucinda chirped and Helen chirped back.

  “This is such wonderful news,” she said. She jerked hard on the line that held the prayer flags.

  She made her way around the front and sides of the house, pulling and tugging, flicking out when the line snagged.

  “Great things will happen for you. I know this.” She felt awed by the big unknown life still ahead of her daughter.

  Helen was under the last of the flags. They hung flat and limp. She yanked with a final jerky whip and watched the last of the string of prayer flags drift in slow motion, sagging down to the muddy ground.

  Molly, Getting There

  Route 2. Soon after the Concord Rotary, spring had barely arrived. It was like driving back into March, by Fitchburg and then Leominster, where it was February gray and bare, the edges of woods grimed with a last layer of snowplow crap. Depressing.

  Everything near Molly’s house popped and shouted April. Daffodils all funny-faced in the garden bed, clusters of other bulbs poking up. It seemed overnight the furry husks of magnolias have dropped and scattered on the ground, and the tree by the yard swing was a riot of pink flowers in various states of bloom.

  A hawk swooped. Cut low close to the car, plunging down for roadkill. The whole shoulder of Route 2 looked like one long roadkill diner for hawks and turkey vultures. But despite how bleak Route 2 looked, Molly was glad to be alone in the car. She wished the trip to Anna’s were longer. Like North Dakota longer. Even keeping to the speed limit, she was almost at Millers Falls and the turnoff onto 63. On a good day, Molly loved the in-between, the no-one-can-find-me limbo of being on the road. Now there were phones. Now people expected that you were always findable. Everywhere. The car outfitted for hands-free phone usage. But Molly and Serena have made a decision not to talk and drive, modeling behavior for the whole family now that the kids were driving. Molly hated thinking about the kids driving. Especially now.

  The message Molly left on Helen’s phone had been a lie. She wasn’t running three hours late because she’d been called in for an emergency session with a suicidal patient. She’d give anything for the known world of patient emergencies, the calm that settles through her limbs as she manages a crisis, sets up therapy protocols. She’d give anything for that confidence.

  Sitting with Serena and Tessa in Dr. Drake’s office this morning, the principal in a primped voice that tried too hard to sound appealing, too modernly unfazed by lesbian moms and down with the kids, suggested they address the situation. “Let’s really tune in to what’s happening here.” Molly was actually surprised at how little confidence she could conjure in herself. She was hopeful that she didn’t look like a complete shaking mess. But she didn’t look like a health-care professional, that was for-fuck’s-sake certain.

  The car banked on a steep curve. Molly felt heated and queasy. Thin saliva flushed through her mouth. She cracked the windows. She might actually have to pull over.

  Last week when they were at Anna’s, her friends had pooh-poohed her concern. This is what kids do. This is what we did. Kids get high, had been the consensus. They shared the use-and-abuse phase of each of their kids. Then they teased her. Do we need to remind you, Molly, of a certain teenager’s unabashed love of Thai stick back in the day?

  But this situation was different. This was not about Molly’s having forgotten any of the fun and stupidity of sixteen. Or that she had forgotten her own mother’s scotched afternoons of pills and booze. Or that she had to argue with her wife, since for Serena marijuana was practically a nuclear panic button, her having scraped out of a childhood with addict brothers. This wasn’t even because Tessa was such an idiot that she brought weed with her to school. (Thank God, Dr. Drake did not believe in what he called “oversharing” with the authorities.) Or that Tessa sat through the meeting with a not-nearly-hangdog-enough look on her face.

  It was what Molly had seen. Just as they’d all settled into the circle of scuffed plastic chairs, Tessa shrugged off her peacoat and Molly saw the tattoo. Right there on Tessa’s waist. Before Tessa yanked her sweater down and gave it a quick tuck into her jeans. Molly had sat through the meeting straining to focus on the principal, talking about priorities and accountability. She worked to pull herself back into the conversation. “Absolutely,” she said, providing parental-sounding observations, clear and concerned, neither minimizing nor inflating the situation.

  But the whole time, Molly kept sneaking looks at the edge of where Tessa’s angora sweater met her jeans and prayed she’d been wrong. She knew she hadn’t been. A tattoo was bad. A tattoo of a heart with a slash was really bad. But it was the two words Molly had seen in that flashing peekaboo of a millisecond that was killing her. FUCK LOVE. She’d seen that. She thought there had even been a period: FUCK. LOVE.

  Her daughter. Their daughter. That same loving kid who just two weeks ago had spent a whole Sunday flopped on the den couch with her sister, Shana, watching their old favorite videos, crooning along with Sebastian in The Little Mermaid. This same nervous child who freaked at the mention of a shot at the pediatrician’s had gone and gotten a tattoo. And not just that she’d gone off to some ratty tattoo parlor, subjected her perfect skin to the prick of who-knows-how-well-sterilized needles (wasn’t there a law about minors needing consent?). But that the image Tessa had chosen was sad and cynical. The words even sadder. And permanent.

  What was churning in Tessa’s heart that would make her choose that slashed he
art, those dark words? How was it that without any real preparation, in an instant, a child seemed unrecognizable? And how had Molly not understood that something—some sorrow, some something really bad, really dark—had taken hold in her daughter?

  The phone rang in the car. Serena. Molly didn’t pick up. Then she didn’t pick up the second time Serena rang. She’d blame it on reception. If Serena called again, she’d be forced to pick up. Serena didn’t know about the tattoo. Hadn’t seen it. Molly wasn’t going to tell her on the phone.

  There had been agreements made at the meeting. Weekly drug tests. Counseling.

  “Let’s remember that Tessa is actually excelling in her schoolwork,” Molly said, turning to her daughter. She wanted—no, she needed Tessa to smile. To shrug. To do anything that acknowledged their bond, that said, I know I messed up, Mom, and I love that you still believe in me. Instead Tessa glanced back with a don’t-patronize-me look.

  Molly fought an urge, right there in the principal’s office, to stand up and say, Stop. To burst into tears and say, Whoever you are, I want my daughter Tessa back, and I want her back with that stuff washed off her.

  What was so fucking great about being a parent? Why, knowingly, did any right-minded person take on the anxiety and uncertainty? Would anyone do this if it could possibly be foreseen that the adorable baby, that crawling, walking, running, finger-painting, reading, laughing, cuddling, clowning, miracle of a child, this I-love-you-Mommy-so-much of a child became this person who would break your heart with a sullen, nasty, I-don’t-have-time-for-this-bullshit glare.

  Molly swerved off the exit into Millers Falls. It had once been a small but busy mill town, powered by the falls. Now it was scrappy. A dingy place with no industry, no anything but sagging buildings where every shabby last person in the town probably had tattoos. Multiple tattoos. It wasn’t that she and Serena didn’t have friends with tattoos. They had friends who were always finding some occasion to mark with a new tat. But this was permanent. FUCK. LOVE. Could the period between FUCK and LOVE possibly mean a declared philosophical division between sex and love? Hookup mentality? But it’s Tessa who taught Molly that periods are used for emphasis in texting. This body marking was nothing she wanted her daughter to live with for a lifetime.