by Sue Halpern
To compensate, I guess, Cal bought a sailboat. It was a sleek beauty, twenty-two feet long, porcelain white with yellow-and-blue-striped sails, and enough room to sleep two on benches that lined that cockpit, port and starboard. “Port” and “starboard” were about the only sailing terms Cal knew, but he threw himself into his new hobby as if it were a brain that needed to be mapped before it could go under the knife. There was another doctor who sailed, Jens Jahron, an anesthesiologist Cal worked with, whose idea this was. He sold Cal the twenty-two-footer that had gotten too small for his growing family, then turned around and bought the forty-foot double-hull catamaran he’d had his eye on for a long time but couldn’t buy until he unloaded the smaller boat. The deal was that he’d teach Cal to sail, which turned out to mean that when Cal wasn’t at the hospital he was, more often than not, down at the marina.
You don’t have to go far out from shore before Lake Huron looks like the ocean. When the air pressure drops and the wind picks up, fifteen- and twenty-foot waves rake the water and crash hard against the pilings at the pier, sometimes taking them out. Cal, at the helm, was a risk-taker, only he didn’t see it that way. To him, the gusts and gales of the natural world were another force to be bested, like mitosis and neuronal atrophy. The few times we went out alone together, I had to beg Cal to keep the boat close to land so we never lost sight of buildings and promontories. Terrestrial life seems so steadfast and solid when you are seesawing side to side on liquid rollers, and it was reassuring to see trees, rooted to the ground, and houses secure on their foundations. When the boat started to heel, all I could do was close my eyes and hold on to the lifeline with both hands and listen to Cal trash-talk the elements.
Jens couldn’t sail his cat boat by himself, and his wife had her hands full with their three kids, so he often asked Cal to crew for him, usually on Sundays if neither of them was on call. Cal had started going to church again, a large Pentecostal congregation that I found cloying and in-your-face, but Cal said it was “centering” for him. That was his word. He said that when he was back in Atlanta, researching genes and drug therapies in the lab gave him the energy and hope he needed to go into the clinic and tell people they had glioblastomas or Parkinson’s or any number of lacerating diagnoses that cut them to the quick. He said that without that, his clinical work would have been excruciating. But now, with no research to balance out the harrowing diagnoses or feed his hope and that of his patients, he was at least able to find comfort in those bleak hours knowing that the resurrected Jesus had a personal relationship with him. It struck me that Cal’s ego, having been fed a nonstop diet of exaltations over the years, had become so expansive that he imagined Jesus having a relationship with him, not the other way around. I could have said something snarky, but who was I to try to take church away from him when the reason he started going in the first place was that he had been deprived of something he found so crucial.
In the very beginning Cal urged me to join the congregation, too, which I think had more to do with the pressure he was feeling to conform to church norms (husbands had wives) than anything to do with my salvation, though the way he seemed to think he’d convince me was to make an oblique reference to my infertility. “You’ve lost something central to your self, you know,” is how he put it. I told him that yes, that was true, but I didn’t believe for a minute that even the most loving God could fill that hole. “Love is love,” Cal said, which struck me at the time as obvious, true, and inscrutable.
Sunday mornings, Cal would go to church and I’d sleep in, and then we’d take different cars to the marina because he didn’t want to waste time driving back to get me. We’d meet up with the Jahrons, and the guys would get ready to sail, and Sally Jahron and I would lay out food for a picnic in the galley, and the kids would play hide-and-seek while Sally tried to make sure none of them fell overboard or got caught up in the ropes and lines. Then we’d set out, motoring away from the dock until we were past the last set of buoys, and the sails would go up like flags of a proud nation, and we’d all cheer as the wind carried us forward. The kids would sit, legs dangling, at the bow. Sally and I would lie on the deck, me with a book, she with her eyes on her children, ever ready to haul any one of them back from the brink, while the men stood downwind in the back, talking shop and occasionally interrupting themselves to let us all know that we were going to come about.
If you had asked me then, I would have said that my marriage was neither bad nor good, neither hot nor cold. Without the ballast of children, we bobbed around each other, frictionless. Cal had his work, his church, his boat, and he had me. I was the constant. I was the one who was always there and always had been. I thought that that was what mattered. In math, the constant variable stays the same, while the other variables have no fixed value. But in life, as those variables take on more precedence, the value of the constant diminishes. I didn’t understand that. I was the constant—loyal and accommodating, fitting my schedule and my aspirations and my needs to his, year after year—and as I say, I was certain that that, above all else, is what counted.
When Sally found out she was pregnant again, she signed up for a mother’s helper for the summer from one of the countries that used to be in the Soviet Union. Slovenia or Slovakia—we were all getting them mixed up. The agency placed girls who had grown up in orphanages with American families that could use help, which was supposed to be a win-win all around: the girls would get to be part of a family, and the family would get an au pair. But as the Jahrons found out as she came off the plane, calling Beata an au pair was stretching it, since she appeared to be not much older than the oldest Jahron boy, who was twelve. When Sally called the agency in a panic, because that boy was already precocious when it came to girls, and because she was angry that instead of a mother’s helper she’d gotten another child to mother, they explained that the date of birth on Beata’s passport was a best guess. “She’s an orphan,” Sally was reminded more than once.
“You like fiction. Her age is a fiction,” Sally complained to me, but the girl had already moved in. What was she going to do?
Beata, small as she was, spoke accented English sternly, with a gravelly tone that gave her an air of authority that brought even the rambunctious eight-year-old Jahron twins into line. They brushed their teeth when she told them to brush their teeth, went to bed when she told them to go to bed, picked up their toys before she asked, didn’t ride their bikes in the street. “It’s like they are on drugs,” Sally told me. “I love it. I love her!”
As a bonus, Beata was a homely girl, of no interest to the twins’ older brother, whose idea of feminine beauty was in the process of being formed by certain sites on the Internet. In contrast, Beata, at fifteen—the stated age on her passport—was skinny and pale with a band of pimples straight across her forehead like points on the X axis of a geometry problem. She had limp brown hair, ragged at the shoulders, that might have been chopped to that length with a butcher’s knife. Sally took her to Supercuts, and when Beata came out of the shop, her hair was still limp but the ends had been evened out and curled naturally under her chin. Did she like it? Hard to say. Beata wasn’t quick to smile, though when she did, you could catch a glimpse of the little girl she could have been. Sally bought her a stuffed bear, and at night, Beata clung to it like a life preserver.
When Beata came back the next summer to help with the three Jahron boys and their new baby sister, she was still the authoritarian she had been the year before, but instead of looking twelve, she looked twenty. She had grown a few inches in height, styled her hair with bangs that ensconced her pocked forehead, and filled out in her hips and chest. Beata was now the heritor of breasts that rivaled Sally’s, and Sally was nursing. The girl still had tiny ears, close-set brown eyes, and a narrow, rodent-like face, more mole than dormouse, but when you looked at her, your eyes were instantly drawn downward to her breasts, as if the magnetic poles had been reoriented east and west. Jens and Cal claimed not to notice, which incited Sally
to spring into action, hauling Beata to the mall to refresh the girl’s wardrobe with loose tops and a one-piece bathing suit that appeared to shove all that flesh back where it came from.
“Men are pigs,” she said to me when we were out on the water and she was nursing her infant. “Men are babies.”
“So you’re saying men are piglets,” I said lightly, trying to divert this conversation. The kids were around, and Cal and Jens were nearby, too.
“Come on,” Sally said. “Think about it for a minute. Why are men obsessed with women’s breasts?” She pointed to her own, which were leaking milk. “That’s why,” she said. “It’s a mommy thing, plain and simple.”
Beata had not only gotten breasts in the months she’d been gone, she’d gotten God. This was somewhat disturbing to Sally and Jens, who were, they said, “practicing atheists,” so it fell to Cal to pick up Beata on Sunday mornings and take her with him to church. He put on a tie and shined his good shoes and made sure that his car, which the rest of the week was filled with empty soda cans, moldering coffee cups, and muffin liners with scraps of blueberry or corn bread still attached to them, was tidy. When I asked him what they talked about on their rides together, he said, “Not much, just humdrum stuff,” or stuff about her school, or their work, or about life in the United States, which she, apparently, aspired to. Sometimes, he said, she’d be quiet and sullen, and he’d catch a glimpse of what it would have been like to be a parent to a teenager, which made my heart beat fast for a second and reminded me that Cal, too, was hurt by what had happened to me. So it made me happy for him that he could play that role, if intermittently, in Beata’s life. They joined the choir, the two of them, and I’d hear him humming hymns in the shower. She had a good voice, he said. Robust. A second soprano, not the alto I would have pegged her for. Choir practice was Thursday nights, and Thursday was when the library where I worked was open late. So I’d stay there, and Cal would have dinner with Beata and then take her to choir practice. It was sweet. It was wholesome. It was church, for God’s sakes.
Chapter Twelve
8.23.10—
Sunny/home
As soon as we left the police station and were back in Kit’s car, I burst out crying. “Why would he do those things?” I must have said a million times, but I knew, or at least I knew what Steve would say, which was “How could I not?” I could see that Kit was trying to figure out what to do, but I told her I was fine, not to worry, I was just scared, and she said of course I was scared, and that maybe she shouldn’t tell me, but that she was scared, too, for Steve and me and Willow.
“I don’t want to live in the wilderness again,” I howled, and that’s when Kit started up the car because she was worried that one of the policemen—they are all men in Riverton and the dispatchers are all women—would see me and want to know what was going on. As we drove, I told Kit about the time we lived at #3, focusing on the hard parts, since I didn’t want her to get the idea that it was even a little bit fun, even though it was a lot of the time.
“Where are we going?” I asked when I realized we weren’t going back to Kit’s house. That’s when she told me we were going to my house, to talk to Steve and Willow.
“Willow probably won’t be there,” I said. “It depends on how well she did at the mall. When she gets to five hundred dollars, she stops and comes home. But that doesn’t happen very often, so she’s probably not there.”
The Subaru was in the driveway when we pulled up, and Steve was bent over the engine. He waved and came over, and Kit rolled down her window, but he came to mine and asked if I’d had an accident or something since I’d left on my bike and came home in a car. As soon as he said it I realized I’d totally forgotten about the bike. Riding the nine miles to Riverton that morning seemed like it had happened in a different century.
“I’m going to go now,” Kit said to no one in particular. “Unless you want me to stay,” she said to me.
“Why would she want you to stay?” Steve asked. It was a question neither of us bothered to answer.
Instead, in my most mature voice, I said, “We need to talk,” to Steve. And to Kit I said, “I think it would be better if I did this alone, but maybe you could just stay in the car?”
So Kit stayed in her car, and Steve and I went into the house, the whole time with him saying, “What is this about Sunny? What is this about?” Rather than answering him directly, I went into my room, found the hist binder, and pulled out the Angus Parker passport and held it up to him.
“Where did you get that?” he asked, even though he’d just seen me take it out of the binder.
“No,” I said to him, “where did you get it? It’s your picture.” And then I rooted around in my backpack and finally found the photocopy of the newspaper article about Parker and what he’d done in Pennsylvania. “You need to tell me what’s going on,” I said.
“I can’t,” Steve said. “I just can’t, Sunny.”
“Why? I’m not a little kid anymore!” If I wasn’t yelling, I was definitely close to it. Steve, though, was pacing around, tugging on his chin, getting engine grease all over his face, and talking very softly.
“I’m not a little kid and you can’t just cart me off into the woods to live in a tent for months and months,” I said.
“No one is going off to live in the woods,” Steve said, his voice still calm and gentle, as if he were channeling Willow.
That’s when I told him about what they’d been saying at the Riverton police station, and when I said that they said they were closing in on Angus Parker, Steve’s grease-stained face became ghost white and he started pacing more quickly, back and forth from my room to the kitchen and back, still unwilling to tell me about Angus Parker.
“What have you done?” I yelled at him, even though it was pretty clear what he had done.
He didn’t answer.
“And just so you know, I want to go to school!” I shouted at his back. “Real school, with real teachers, and desks, and lunch in the cafeteria.”
“No, you don’t!” Steve said as he made the turn, walking back toward me. The vein on his forehead that pops out when he is angry was more prominent than I’d ever seen it. “No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do!”
“You wouldn’t last a day in one of those—one of those government schools.”
“First of all,” I said, “they are public schools, not government schools. Public, as in ‘we the people.’ Second of all, even if I only last a day, I want to have that day.”
“And then you’ll turn out just like everyone else,” Steve said, walking away from me again. “Why is she still here?” He was pointing to Kit’s car through the window.
“She’s here because I am going to go live with her!” I said. “If you are Angus Parker, then you are not my father! And even if you aren’t, you’ve been lying to me all my life!”
I was pretty worked up. Before he could stop me, I walked out the front door and started trotting toward Kit’s car.
“Let’s get out of here!” I said, panting.
“Are you sure?” Kit asked. She looked confused.
“Can we just leave, please?” I said.
I could see Steve, still walking in circles around the house. He wasn’t even coming after me.
“He’s not even trying to stop me!” I said to Kit as she turned the car around and headed down the driveway.
“Stop you from doing what?” she asked.
“Coming to live with you,” I said.
* * *
Lose something every day.
—Elizabeth Bishop
When Sunny went inside the house to talk with Steve, Kit turned off the car, slid the seat back, closed her eyes, and tried to sleep. She was bone-tired but couldn’t turn off her brain, couldn’t block the stampeding memories of the fire, the police station, the funeral, the library, couldn’t shutter the mind’s-eye view of her house, this morning, waking up next to Rusty, couldn’t pull back from the swirl of events—th
e vortex—she’d been drawn into. The images were not orderly, nor were her thoughts. She felt like she was falling, jerked herself up, and realized that she’d been asleep for an instant, in spite of herself. So much drama, and so much to come. There was drama unfolding a few yards away, as Sunny talked with Steve or Angus—or whoever he was. There was drama adhering to Rusty like neon-yellow Post-it notes: unemployment; homelessness; an unsettling family history. She had organized her life to be as uneventful as possible, and now this.
“Someone should write a poem that rhymes ‘drama’ with ‘trauma,’ something with a repeating rhyme scheme, so we can hear it over and over,” she remembered saying to Dr. Bondi. She said it for laughs, but he didn’t hear the humor—or if he did, chose to ignore it. Everything was fair game for analysis in that room, even her jokes. Maybe especially her “jokes” she imagined him saying, curling the first two fingers on both hands into quote marks. She also remembered telling him that she liked her life better when it was routine and predictable, before the dramatic events she hadn’t even been aware of rose up from the deep like an underwater volcano and spewed it to bits. And she remembered him lifting an eyebrow and looking at her skeptically and saying, “Really?” and “Why?” and then listening to her explanation, which sounded pitiful, even to herself. “Because that life was easier,” she said, and he said, “But was it better? Was it a good life?” and she said, “That’s not the point,” and he let that sit with her for a long, uncomfortable minute.