House of Wonder

by Sarah Healy

  We each ordered another drink, the mood turning again toward the jovial as we exchanged stories about Gabby and Rose. “Gabby is pissed because she doesn’t have a flower name,” Bobby said, his affection for his daughter deep and clear. “She says she wants to change her name to Hydrangea.” I let my head fall back in laughter. By the time our entrées arrived, we had moved on to talk again about our families, about growing up on Royal Court. “Do you remember Howard Li?” asked Bobby.

  “Of course I remember Howard!” I said. “He used to be friends with Warren.”

  “Did you hear that he won the Nobel Prize in chemistry?”

  “What?” I asked, shocked. “The Nobel Prize?” I was astounded that I hadn’t read about it in the papers. Though Howard’s family had moved away soon after he finished high school, I would have thought that the human-interest-story-starved Star-Ledger might have picked it up. “Oh my God,” I said, picturing Warren and Howard, shirtless and skinny and wonderfully weird. “Howard and Warren used to spend hours together in our backyard.”

  “I remember that,” said Bobby, smiling fondly, his hand on his chin. “They’d be whipping those . . .” He snapped his fingers, searching for the name.

  “Forsythia branches,” I said, my eyes on the rim of my glass as I pictured the yellow flowers bursting from the bark. When I was Rose’s age, I wove a single one of those pliant branches around and around until I had a small hoop, looped with gold. Mom, look! I had said. It’s a crown! And she took my chin in her hand and tried to smile. But she didn’t speak a word. “It’s funny,” I said, looking at Bobby as I took a sip of my water, “what stays with you from growing up.” It seemed it was the small moments that made us who we were, the moments that were supposed to be insignificant, the ones that we didn’t know quite why we remembered. They were the ones that mattered, those that were like messages in a language we didn’t yet speak.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Surprises

  “How was it?” Maggie’s voice was sleepy; she had been waiting up for my call.

  “It was good,” I said, watching the taillights from Kimmy’s car retreat back down the driveway. “Really good.”

  I heard rustling on the phone line, as if Maggie were moving to a more discreet location. “Did you guys kiss?” she asked.

  I smiled, knowing my answer would madden her. “Not really,” I said.

  “Not really?” asked Maggie impatiently. “What is that? What is ‘not really’?”

  Not really was the honest answer. Bobby had walked me to the door and we could see the bluish flashes from the TV through the transom above. Kimmy was just inside, watching a show full of beautiful young kids with dramatic and tortured relationships, a contemporary version of the sort of thing I used to watch when I was her age. And Bobby and I both just stood there, not wanting to break the seal of the night, not wanting to open the door.

  “I had a good time,” I said to him. But he didn’t answer. Instead, he reached for my hand and rested it on his lower back, pulling me into him. I looked up at him, our faces inches apart, our hips angled toward each other. But when he leaned in, his lips landed lightly on my forehead, resting there until I closed my eyes and felt my heart become still.

  “He kissed me on the forehead,” I said to Maggie.

  “Your forehead?” asked Maggie, with disbelief and worry, afraid that all my protests about my evening with Bobby not being a date were well-founded. You kiss your sister on the forehead, I imagined her thinking. But it was actually that moment, standing on my doorstep with his hand gently holding mine in place on his back, when I knew that I was, in fact, on a date with Bobby Vanni.

  “It was actually really . . . nice.”

  Maggie asked me a few more questions, but I found myself volunteering the answers, glad to talk about the evening I had spent with a man I liked very much. “What did you guys talk about?” she asked.

  “Oh, God,” I said. “Lots of stuff.” I thought about the way my laughter had seemed magnified by his, my concerns diminished by sharing them. In fact, the only subject we avoided was Mia. And Duncan.

  • • •

  The phone rang just after six thirty the next morning. I sat up with a sudden breath and fumbled for the receiver, wanting to silence it but fearing what I was about to hear; good news never came this early.

  “Hello?” I said.

  There was a brief delay.

  “Jenna!” It was Duncan’s voice.

  I closed my eyes and sank back in bed. “Hi, Duncan,” I said unenthusiastically.

  “What time is it there?” he asked.

  I lifted my hand and let it fall back down on the bed in exasperation, letting it make a muffled thump on my soft, white comforter. “It’s not even seven, Dunc.”

  “Hey, listen,” he said, without an apology. “I wanted to talk to you about some stuff.” I remained silent, knowing that the “stuff” he wanted to talk to me about was his move back to the States. The one Miriam had mentioned weeks ago. The one that he had been planning for who knew how long. “Jenna,” he said. “Are you there?”

  I took a breath, letting my head sink into my pillow. “Yup,” I said. “I’m here.” I’ve been here all along.

  • • •

  “Hey, Rosie,” I said as I stirred brown sugar into her oatmeal. “Would you like it if you got to see your daddy more often?”

  I kept my eyes on my task as I waited for her response. “Yeah,” she said lightly, as if I’d just offered her something moderately tasty. Something like oatmeal. “I’d like it.”

  I nodded and set her big red bowl down in front of her. My conversation with Duncan had become strained rather quickly. As I had anticipated, he’d announced that he was moving back to New York.

  “When?” I’d asked.

  “In about a week. I’m going to spend a couple of days in L.A. on my way back.”

  “That’ll be nice,” I said, and I wondered if he detected the resentment in my voice.

  “So anyway,” he began, “I was thinking that it would be cool to spend Christmas with Rose. Up at my parents’ place.”

  “You were thinking that would be cool,” I said flatly.

  “Yeah, I mean, she’s my daughter.” It was clear that he intended to hit the tricky spot between indignant and contrite.

  Oh, now she’s your daughter?

  Sensing the trajectory our call was taking, I ended it quickly after that. I told him that I had to go, but that I’d think about it. Then I congratulated him on his move. I had promised myself that when it came to Rose’s relationship with Duncan, I would always put her interests before my own. But as I stared at her now, as she lifted her nose and looked down into her bowl to search for the very best bite, the one that promised to hold a treasure trove of barely dissolved brown sugar, I realized that her best interests might not always be so easy to determine.

  “Hey, can we go see Uncle Warren later?” asked Rose suddenly, her legs starting to kick under the table, the spoon erect in her hand.

  I chuckled. “We actually do need to go out there today.”

  Rose’s eyes widened gleefully. I watched her for a moment. “You like your uncle Warren, don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” said Rose, with a cool shrug, an affectation she may have gotten from Kimmy. “Uncle Warren is awesome.”

  I smiled and took a sip of my coffee. During our recent visits to Royal Court, I had seen the affection Rose and Warren were developing for each other. And I often heard them engaged in the sort of animated conversations that I used to have with him when I was younger, when I used to sneak into his room at night and lie next to him on his bed. He’d tell me wonderful, fantastical things. Talking and talking, he would move his hands with his words, and his mind would skip from thought to thought, following a fluid path that made me feel as though I were on a ride. Did you know that the Mil
ky Way is spinning? he’d ask me, not waiting for my answer. It’s moving at something like—he’d lift his hand, as if he were about to make a random guess, as if he were about to estimate the number of candy corns in a jar—two hundred twenty-five kilometers per second. I’d ask him if that was fast. He’d think about it and tell me that depended on what you meant by fast. Then he’d tell me that not only is the galaxy spinning, but it’s also traveling through space as it spins. And then, if you factor in the rotation of the earth. He’d rest his hands under his head and laugh softly, having officially blown his own mind.

  “I’m surprised we’re not all dizzy all the time,” I’d say.

  Warren would look up at his ceiling, as if he could see the cosmos through it, spinning and rotating and orbiting in a most miraculous dance. “We’re all moving even when we’re standing still.”

  And I would close my eyes and almost feel it: the universe’s teacup ride.

  But such conversations had grown more infrequent as I had aged and become less and less able to see the things that Warren did. As I became less and less able to let myself.

  Rose was about to dig into her breakfast, her spoon cocked, when she looked up at me. “Hey, did you know that I’m an Aurotite?” she asked.

  I looked at her with mock skepticism. “Says who?” as if I didn’t know.

  “Uncle Warren. He says you can tell by my spot.” She pointed at her birthmark. “I told him that Tucker said it was ugly, but Uncle Warren says it shows that I’m an Aurotite and that only Aurotite princesses have spots.” Her eyes grew wide with delight as she declared her royalty.

  And at that moment, I couldn’t have loved my brother more.

  • • •

  I felt Rose’s feet kicking the back of my seat as we sped down the highway toward Harwick. Maggie and I had had a rare unproductive day at Wonderlux, one in which we each kept our respective files open, but would constantly call over our shoulders to each other with confessions and observations and questions. She had asked me more about my date with Bobby. “You really like him,” she said.

  I do. Whatever was between Bobby and me was too vulnerable and new to speak about freely. Like something beautiful and wild, something I might spook and send running. I cleared my throat, acquiescing in my silence. I did it again now as I looked back at Gordo, who was panting and taking in the view.

  “Did you know that Uncle Warren is making me a plane?” asked Rose. She had been talking nonstop during the drive, and I had been enjoying a lull in the conversation.

  “He is?” I said casually, unsure of the veracity of the claim.

  “Yeah,” she said. “He asked me what color I wanted and I told him red.”

  “Red looks nice on planes.”

  “Me and Uncle Warren are on the same team,” she said. Rose had just learned about the concept of teams in her weeklong soccer peewee day camp this summer.

  “What team is that?”

  “The Good Team,” she said. “You can be on it, too.”

  Glancing at her in the rearview mirror, I smiled. “Thanks, Rose.”

  “Uncle Warren is the leader, though,” she said, as if breaking difficult news.

  “Okay.”

  “But that means if you need him, all you have to do is rub your ear and say his name and he’ll come.”

  Again I looked in the rearview mirror, more alert this time. “Did he tell you that?” I asked, remembering all the times I had needed him. All the times he had come running.

  • • •

  As I turned into King’s Knoll, I glanced at the sky through the windshield. The clouds looked as though they had been raked across the faded blue, leaving long wisps as they hurried to some great meteorological disturbance, some churning of air hundreds and hundreds of miles away. The high tomorrow was supposed to be only in the low forties, and it was going to get progressively colder after that. It never used to get this cold this early, I thought. And I wondered how much of adulthood was spent benchmarking the present against the past. Thinking about how things were so very different from what you remembered, so very different from what you’d expected.

  I let my eyes flitter only briefly to Lydia’s lawn signs. When I was a child, I never ever imagined that Lydia Stroppe would be my stepmother. And yet she was. I never imagined that my parents would be divorced or that I would be a single mother or that Warren would come home one night, his nose broken and face cut. But I had also never imagined that I would have Rose. Or Gordo. Or that one day, I’d turn onto Royal Court and see Bobby Vanni standing on a stepladder on my mother’s front porch with a paintbrush in his hand.

  And yet he was.

  I felt a sudden surge in my chest, an overflowing.

  “Who’s that?” asked Rose, aware of my attention. He wasn’t dressed as usual, in his jacket and jeans. Instead, he was wearing a pair of battered khakis and a sweatshirt, the hood of which was pulled over the thin wool cap on his head. He had a paint bucket at his feet, and his arm was lifted above his head, the brush concentrated on a spot on the column.

  I swallowed and then opened my mouth to speak, my smile shaky and unsure, like something just born. “That’s Gabby’s daddy,” I said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  A Conversation

  M y eyes didn’t leave Bobby as I pulled into the driveway. One side of his face lifted into a warm smile as he saw me. Wiping his paint-covered hands on his pants, he stepped off the ladder. I shifted the car into park and opened my door. “Hey,” I said, as I stood, crossing my arms over my chest.

  We walked toward each other, and met on the dry grass of my mother’s front yard. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said, jerking his thumb back at one of the columns. “Your mom’s at work, but Warren said he thought it would be all right.”

  “I don’t mind,” I said, shaking my head, my words soft with gratitude.

  We stood looking at each other for a moment until I heard Rose’s muffled voice coming from the confines of the car. “Hi, Gabby’s daddy!” she called, waving.

  He lifted his hand. “Hi, Rose!” he said back.

  “Why are you painting my nana’s house?”

  Bobby looked at me, as if that was his answer. As if I was. We stood there for a moment, something silent but clear passing between us. Then I tilted my head back toward the car. “I’m just gonna get her out,” I said, and Bobby nodded in affirmation.

  I unstrapped Rose and set her feet on the pavement, then rounded the back of the car, lifting the gate to free Gordo. He lumbered down, exerting great effort and grunting as his front paws made contact with the ground, letting his hind legs follow. His tail spun with joy as he rubbed the side of his face against Bobby’s leg in greeting.

  I lifted the two additional gallons of paint that I had bought from the trunk. “I got some more,” I said, raising them for Bobby to see as I crossed back toward him.

  “I was wondering about that,” he said, running the wrist of his paint-covered hand back and forth against his chin.

  Gordo plodded up the steps and sat on the welcome mat, staring at the front door. As if on cue, it opened, and there was Warren in his gray sweatshirt and his pleated khaki pants. Gordo stood and wagged wildly, his whole body curving from one side to the other and back again as his tail thumped against my brother’s leg. Warren said something in Dog and patted Gordo’s head, chuckling as he did so.

  “Jenna got some more paint,” said Bobby casually, as he stepped back up onto the ladder. It was the way he might tell a buddy that there was another six-pack in the fridge. Then he pointed to the farthest column. “You could start giving that one its second coat.”

  I was ready for Warren to turn on his heels and head inside without a word. Instead he looked at me. And with his wounds nearly healed, his stitches gone, our eyes met just long enough for me to see them flicker with something familiar, something I ha
d longed for. Then Warren walked slowly toward the far end of the porch, poking me lightly on the stomach as he passed, and picking up one of the new cans of paint by its thin metal handle.

  I watched him as he popped off the lid and submerged the stirrer into the opaque white, watched him carefully dip his brush into the paint. With slow up-and-down strokes, he let his eyes follow the brush, watching as the column became pristine and new, almost magically so.

  “Is there an extra paintbrush?” I asked.

  “We got this, Jenna,” said Bobby. “Right, War?”

  “Yeah,” said Warren, sounding both pleased and surprised by his answer. Then he let out his quiet chuckle. “We got this.”

  For the next half hour, Rose and I sat inside coloring while Warren and Bobby painted my mother’s front columns, with Gordo supervising. From the dining room where I had set us up, I could hear Bobby and Warren make bits of conversation that was sparse but comfortable sounding. They talked about the gas mileage of Warren’s Civic and the battery life on his AC planes. They talked about D’Antonio’s bakery closing and how the town was supposedly paving that small stretch of dirt road that ran between Harwick and Montborough.

  Then I heard my mother’s car go over the dip in the beginning of the driveway. Gordo let out a few high-pitched, clipped barks. I drew a big smiley face on the yellow construction paper. “Nana’s going to be happy,” I told Rose.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Because you and me and Uncle Warren are all here. And because Gabby’s nice daddy is helping her paint her house.” I stood and peered out the window, wanting to see the look on her face when she saw Bobby and Warren. And I didn’t understand at first why it wasn’t her white Camry that was in the driveway. Why it was a car I had never seen before. I felt my whole body seize as a man in a blue shirt, tan pants, and a green jacket got out of the car. I realized that even without any of the dressing, the car parked in our driveway still looked a whole lot like a police car, in the same way that a cop, even without the uniform, still looked a whole lot like a cop.