Jean put her hand on his arm, very lightly. “I’m sorry,” she said, though she wasn’t sure if she was simply expressing sympathy, or if maybe she was apologizing too.
The curtains in Laura’s room were pulled shut—surely to ward off the immense hangover that she would be likely to wake up with—and the room was dim, gray. From the doorway, Jean barely recognized the form in the bed as her daughter. She, like Curt, had also lost weight—a lot of it, from the look of things. She was skeletal. But as Jean stepped closer to the bed, she could see that her daughter’s face had a certain puffy, doughy quality to it, as if she were a Christmas roll ready to be popped into the oven. She was strapped to a monitor, which, from what Jean could tell, the hospital put everyone on, whether they were there for a heart attack or an ingrown toenail, and an IV snaked into the back of one hand. The other hand, wrapped in a cloth bandage, was resting across her chest.
Jean stood next to the bed and simply stared down at her daughter. Alcohol poisoning. It still didn’t make sense. And now separation too? What on earth had happened? And why hadn’t Laura told her?
Laura had been such a pretty child. Everyone commented on it, how pretty she was. Her features were striking, and she had a way about her that was so easily flawless. Dainty. She’d been Jean’s “moon child”—always orbiting around Jean’s legs as she tried to vacuum or shop or cook dinner. She had rarely been more than a few steps away. While Kenny had taken every chance to bolt and explore the world in his bold, fearless way, Laura was more careful, more prone to worries and fears. And she seemed to take everything so personally.
She could do things. Schoolwork was easy for her. So was making friends. She could sing reasonably well, and she was artistic when she wanted to be. She was incredibly organized, even from a very young age—she had a tendency to stack and line up her toys just so—and she seemed only to get smarter, better with age.
She was pretty. She was talented. And she was a perfectionist like Jean had never seen before. She was the kind of child you didn’t worry about. The kind of child who had it all together. Who grew up to have a romantic marriage and a beautiful baby and a high-pressure executive job that she loved—loved!—with everything she had. The kind of child who grew up to be the woman who had it all. And had it all together. The kind of child who allowed you to sit back and be proud of a job well done.
Only now she was lying in a hospital bed. And as Jean looked down into that puffy face, she could still see the shades of her “moon child.” She could still see that pretty little girl beneath.
A nurse bustled into the room, interrupting Jean’s thoughts. “She probably should get some sleep. She’ll have to have that wrist X-rayed when the doctor comes in.”
Jean’s hand wrapped around her own wrist involuntarily. “What happened to it?”
The nurse shrugged. “Nobody knows. Probably never will. That occurs pretty frequently in cases like these. People get drunk, they injure themselves, they black out or pass out, and then the next morning are wondering how their wrist got broken. It’s all a mystery to everyone.”
The nurse left the room, and with her gone and Curt gone and Laura snoozing, the room once again seemed bleak and gray and filled with a sweat-soaked stranger who might have had a passing resemblance to Jean’s daughter. Jean felt a sense of surrealism—maybe she was actually still at home and Dorothy was telling one of her long, complicated stories about her son’s legal troubles, and Jean had simply zoned out. She was imagining this, and would soon snap to, only to find that, frustratingly, she’d dropped a cheese-coated roasted red pepper into her lap. But the longer she stood there, listening to that infernal faint beeping, the more real it became.
Her daughter was in trouble.
Softly she crept forward until her knees brushed the crinkly mattress. Laura’s skin was pale and glossy, and each time she breathed, Jean got a new whiff of acrid alcohol-laced breath. She brushed Laura’s bangs off her forehead with one finger and was transported back in time. It seemed every memory she had of her child was one of achievement—graduations, weddings, brunches to celebrate new jobs, new promotions. But how deceiving had those appearances been? Had Laura gone out after those graduations, gotten smashed on cheap cocktails, and ended up sobbing in someone’s backseat about how bleak her life really was? Had she been an inattentive mother, unable to handle the imperfection, the mistakes that every mother must face over and over again? Why did she need to do this to herself?
To hear Curt talk, it certainly sounded as if there were imperfections with Bailey. That sweet child with the long hair that curled up in little wispy waves at the very ends. The one who sucked on her index and middle fingers so much that she talked with a lisp until she was eight. So adorable, with those big brown eyes and the freckles across her nose. So deep, those eyes. Jean had always felt as if another child were lurking somewhere beneath—another child that nobody would ever truly understand or know.
“What happened, Laura?” Jean whispered, and at the sound of her voice, Laura stirred, chewing out a garbled sentence that made Jean worry that she’d awakened her. She backed away from the bed and left the room, unsure of what to do next. Stay here? Go find a hotel? Turn around and go home? Curt hadn’t made it exactly clear what he’d brought her here for.
She walked a ways down the hall and happened upon a small cut-in that housed half a dozen chairs and a silent but running TV. Curt was slouched in one, a bottle of water in one hand, his other hand holding his forehead. His elbow was propped on the arm of the chair so his face was tipped downward. A man in a pastel pink sweater and khakis sat in a chair across from Curt, leaning over so that his elbows rested on his knees. He was saying something in a low voice, and Curt was nodding. When Jean paused in the doorway, the man stopped talking and looked up at her.
“Oh, excuse me,” Jean said, feeling as if she’d interrupted something important.
Curt looked up. “No, it’s okay. This is Will. He’s our pastor. Or . . . used to be. We . . . stopped going to church a while back.”
The man in the sweater stood up and offered Jean his hand. She shook it and stepped in just far enough to perch on the very edge of the chair closest to the door, even though it had a stain on it that would have normally made her choose somewhere else. “I’m Jean,” she said. “Laura’s mother.”
“Wonderful to meet you,” the man said, his voice gentle and kind with an undercurrent of cheer that Jean found somewhat off-putting in the hospital surroundings. A pastor in the hospital, to Jean, inspired gravity.
“He was just telling me about a program over at Blue Serenity,” Curt said between gulps of his water.
“I’ve had a couple of parishioners get good results there,” Pastor Will added, as if he were talking about a used car dealership or a tanning salon. “We’re confident we can get Laura back on the right path. A little detox, a lot of prayer.”
Jean nodded, but directed her attention to Curt. “Her wrist. You have no idea?”
“Nope. Two months ago it was four stitches on her forehead, another time a sprained ankle. I’m almost afraid to leave her alone with her doing this, getting so drunk she’s falling and hurting herself and not remembering anything.”
“And you say Bailey is misbehaving,” she said. “Is it because of this? Is it because of what’s going on with Laura?”
Curt shrugged. “Who knows why Bailey does anything she does? She never speaks, and when she does speak, it’s lies. When she gets off the couch, it’s to do something unbelievable. Shoplifting ridiculous things like wrenches and shoe polish, shit she doesn’t need—sorry, Will.”
“I understand.”
“Breaking stuff, sneaking out at night, smoking cigars of all things, and then burning holes in my suit coats with them. Just bizarre stuff. I can’t get through to her. I don’t think anyone can. The girl has no friends. Her teachers see her as a problem in the classroom. She’s j
ust a mess. I predict jail.” He took another drink, swallowed. “Soon, if this keeps up.”
Jean’s heart was half-broken, half-frightened. She hated the idea of her granddaughter struggling, her daughter suffering, but dealing with the flailing had never been her strength. She’d barely survived Wayne’s demise. She was just getting her control back. She was just getting to normal again. Even before, she’d never been good at showing emotion. She didn’t know how to fix a broken person. She liked life steady, stable, predictable.
“Is there something I can do?” she practically whispered. “With Bailey?”
Curt seemed to consider this, then shook his head. “She’s such a handful right now. I don’t know what you could do. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ll figure out something.”
“Should I go with Laura? To this Serenity place?”
“She won’t be going tonight, I’m afraid,” Pastor Will said. “They’ve got to X-ray her wrist, and they’re going to keep her for observation since she was unresponsive when her neighbor brought her here. And the vomiting. They’ll want to keep her on an IV at least for a little while, keep her from getting dehydrated. You should go home.”
Jean fiddled with her purse handles. She hated to admit it, but she was somewhat relieved. She ached to get to a hotel, to her quiet sanctuary. She needed to rest her back. And process everything she’d learned—somehow make the pieces fit. She could visit Laura in the morning. Could follow her to the rehab center. Could see if she could get some answers then. She glanced to Curt for confirmation. He nodded.
“I’ll call you in the morning,” he said.
“I’ll just come by,” she offered. “I don’t know where I’m staying yet.”
“Okay, that’s fine. Thanks for coming. She won’t know you were here, but I’m sure she’d have appreciated it. She always said she wished you two had a closer relationship.”
The sentence struck Jean cold. If Laura had wished it, why hadn’t she ever tried?
Jean felt herself nodding and shaking hands with Pastor Will again and felt her mouth move around niceties, but as she walked down the corridor toward the big sliding double doors, her movement felt more like escape than anything. She didn’t even notice the chubby girl in the black ripped pants plowing past her, coming in the doors as she went out.
THREE
Jean didn’t sleep at all that night. Not that she’d been sleeping exceptionally well since Wayne died, anyway. She was not the same woman who had once slept easily. She was the woman who had stayed up into the night feeding her husband ice chips, had moistened his lips for him when he was too weak to even lick them, had pressed a cold cloth to his sweating forehead, had held his hand when he wept with pain. That woman feared she would never sleep well again.
Sometimes it was hard for Jean to believe these things had ever happened to her, that she’d lost the love of her life in just a few, awful, short months. There had been no time to plan or prepare or take that trip to Yellowstone that they’d talked about since before they ever got married.
God. How was that possible? How was it possible that they’d lived an entire lifetime together and had never gotten around to jotting up to Wyoming for a long weekend? What had they been doing with that time instead? Nothing important; Jean was certain of that. As she’d sat there and smelled the foul odor of approaching death radiate off her husband, always smiling that ridiculous don’t-be-afraid-everything’s-going-to-be-fine smile down at him, even though she herself was so terrified, her insides feeling like they were liquefying, she thought about all the things they’d done instead. Pointless chores, or weekends spent in silence over some silly disagreement or running the children to birthday parties of kids they didn’t even know. Why did they choose those things? Why did they construct a life of tedium, always putting off wishes and dreams for another day that ultimately would not come?
These were the things Jean turned around in her mind endlessly, when she should have been sleeping. These were the things she thought about. She’d remember reading books aloud with Wayne, each of them sipping a glass of merlot, their legs intertwined on the couch or his head in her lap, his voice racing up and down the words like a bus on a hilly highway. She’d think about the last book they’d read together—the one she read to him at his bedside—the one they didn’t finish. She’d recall the last sentence she’d read to him—Adele came to him in his sleep that night—and how she’d so often wished that she had kept on reading that night, pressing on until the story was finished. Mostly she’d think just that. Our story was not yet done. In so many ways.
But something about the hotel room made it particularly difficult to sleep. Maybe it was the way his empty half of the bed made her feel sunken into her half, her aliveness shrieking at her every second of the night. They’d rented a bed for Wayne at the very end, had placed it in the unused dining room just off the kitchen. Jean could then tend to him without schlepping up and down the stairs, and she could be close enough to spot the end when it came near (which she did, falsely, about a million times over those last couple of months, always feeling like a grim specter of doom lurking in the doorway, tissues at the ready). But, most important, and Jean knew this but didn’t really know it, didn’t face it baldly—moving Wayne to the dining room meant that he wouldn’t bring death to their bed. They’d loved there. They’d made love there. It was a sacred place, a place where their relationship came alive.
True, he never laid his cancer down in their bed, but his absence was a cancer, one that made Jean toss and turn and wish for morning, even though she knew she’d perpetually face it with swollen eyes and tired limbs.
But she slept in the bed at home immeasurably better than she did in the hotel bed. It wasn’t just the bed, which, true enough, felt like a medieval back-straightening device, or the pillow, which sank all the way to the hard mattress if she so much as put a breath’s worth of weight against it, but it was the realization that this was the first time she’d ever been in a hotel room alone.
At first she’d tried pretending Wayne was in the bathroom, heat light glaring down on him as he took one of his long “vacation showers.” She even got up and turned on the bathroom light, then shut the door, just for the strip of light stretching from under the door across the floor. How many times had she fallen asleep to that light? Colorado, Omaha, Branson, even right here in St. Louis (but not Yellowstone—never Yellowstone). The kids would be snoring softly in their shared bed next to her, the scent of hotel pool chlorine lingering in the room, the window air-conditioning unit rumbling like a jet through the darkness, anticipation of the next day’s adventures heavy in the air. They’d shared so many great times on those vacations. The kids were always too excited to argue, having too much fun to throw fits. And on every vacation, up until Laura went off to college, Jean had always made it a point to do something “girly” with her—get a manicure or visit a doll museum or just go shopping without the boys. It had been such fun. Laura had been such a fun child, even in her precise way.
Jean tossed and turned, the light not helping, and ultimately decided to call Loretta, though it was decidedly past Chuck’s bedtime (Chuck used the “bed” in “bedtime” loosely—most nights he sacked out in his worn recliner, leaving poor Loretta with a stack of inspirational but unrequited Flavian Munney romance novels by her bedside). Loretta answered on the second ring.
“Well, I’d started to think I was going to have to check the ditches on I-70. You got ketchup packets in your glove box?”
Jean laughed. Her friend never could just answer with a simple hello. “Ketchup packets?”
“To survive on in case you’re trapped for days in a tree.”
“How would my car end up in a tree? It’s not a hovercraft.”
“Exactly. No one would think to look for you up there. How is she?”
Jean sighed, closing her eyes to keep from staring at that strip of light coming
from out from under the bathroom door. Had she really thought she’d fool herself with that tactic? “Awful. Just awful. I’m just glad her father wasn’t there. But I don’t want to talk about it. I already can’t sleep. I just wanted to see how the group went.”
“Ah. Well. Nobody found hair in May’s cheesecake bites. Which of course made everyone worry that they’d gone and swallowed it. I swear we all looked like a bunch of cats about to urp on the carpet. I saved you one, by the way. Maybe yours is the lucky one. Sort of like a king cake. I put it in your fridge.”
“Thanks. I’m afraid I’m not much in the cheesecake mood right now, though.”
“Are you kidding? You would not believe the amount of restraint it took for me not to inhale it. Especially once Mitzi got rolling with her ‘die-hard’ this and her ‘bleeding-heart liberal’ that. Someone needs to tell her those phrases are oh-so-1990s. And then Dorothy got a phone call from Elan, and it seems one of her boys apparently set a recycling bin on fire at the elementary school, so we decided to just go ahead and call it a day. Seemed like the right thing to do at that point. You are eating this cake.”
“That’s it? You didn’t talk about our next book at all?”
“Nope. Just didn’t feel right without you. We thought we might meet again in two Tuesdays. Kind of an abbreviated do-over meeting. What do you think? We can do it here if you’re not up for it. The girls are worried, of course. About you, and about Laura.”
Jean made some noncommittal noises. Loretta yawned, and soon Jean was sure that if she didn’t get up and turn off the bathroom light, she would be sick. She cut the conversation short, promising to call the next day to let her know how long she’d be in St. Louis, and hung up, practically diving for the bathroom switch and twisting up the knob on the air conditioner so far it rumbled as if it were going to launch itself into the parking lot. The back of her neck was sweaty. But she was tired. So tired. Tired as though she hadn’t slept in years. Surely she would sleep now.
The Accidental Book Club Page 3