The Accidental Book Club

by Jennifer Scott

  But she never did. She flopped around on the bed so much she had to stand up and untwist her pajamas three times. She was too hot. She was too cold. She was hungry. She was weary, so very weary, and scared and wracked with guilt over all the times that Laura wanted or needed something from her and didn’t get it. All the times she’d made a mistake as a mother, the memories of each and every one vivid in her mind. Why did mothers do that? she wondered. Why did they carry their guilt around like a banner?

  Jean sorely wished she could offer a hug or a kiss and make Laura all better now. But mostly she longed for just one more girls-only vacation outing with her daughter.

  • • •

  By the time Jean arrived at the hospital in the morning, her head so foggy with sleep deprivation she worried that she might nod off in the car on the drive from the hospital to the rehab center, the nurses had long since awakened Laura. Her wrist was set in a cast, and she was wearing her work clothes from the day before. Jean noticed grass stains pressed into the elbows of her tan blazer and some other unidentifiable smudges across the front of her blouse, which also appeared to be missing the top button. Laura hadn’t showered, and the places where her cheeks met the undersides of her eyes were deep and bruised-looking. Her hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail, but it looked greasy and stiff. She saw Jean and let out a puff of air.

  “Don’t tell me Curt called you.”

  Jean stepped into the room, careful not to get in the way of the nurse who was removing Laura’s IV. “He did,” she said.

  Again with the puff of air, followed by a wince as the nurse pulled out the needle. “Of course he did,” she said. “He shouldn’t have. It was unnecessary.”

  Jean wasn’t sure what Laura meant by that. He shouldn’t have because Laura didn’t want her mother to be inconvenienced? Or he shouldn’t have because Laura didn’t want Jean there at all? Suddenly Jean felt big and unwieldy, taking too much space in the small room.

  “I want to know when you’re . . . sick,” Jean said defensively. “I’m your mother.”

  The nurse bandaged the back of Laura’s hand and gathered up her trash. “I’ll be back with instructions,” she said, and squeaked out of the room.

  “Yes, but you live four hours away. And I’m not sick. I had too many Bloody Marys,” Laura said, rubbing the back of her hand. “He’s always making such a big deal out of nothing.”

  “But it wasn’t nothing,” Jean said. “You were . . . passed out and . . . your wrist is hurt . . . and you didn’t tell me that you two split up.” Jean realized she was sputtering and not making much sense at all, and once again she wished for Wayne. She always felt calmer when he was nearby, as if he were her voice of reason. He wouldn’t have felt awkward. He would have had no problem making his opinions known. And despite their frequent fights and the cavalier way Laura had treated his death, Laura would have wanted Wayne there; Jean felt sure of it. She would have gathered some strength from him.

  Laura frowned and waved her off, then reached up and felt her hair, gingerly, as if to not mess it up further, if that were even possible. “Come on, Mom—I’m not the first person to drink too much vodka. Curt’s just being a drama queen as usual. I suppose he had Bailey here too.”

  “I never saw her,” Jean said.

  “Oh, trust me, she was here, leaving a path of destruction like always,” Curt said, and Jean and Laura both turned toward the doorway. Laura immediately rolled her eyes and stood up, as if readying for battle.

  “Let’s just go,” she said, bending to retrieve her purse from the chair next to her bed. “I can’t handle being in the same room with him right now.”

  “But you haven’t gotten your release papers yet,” Jean said.

  Again Laura waved her off. “I don’t need someone telling me how to take care of myself. I’ve been doing fine for forty years, and I’ll do fine now.”

  Jean tried not to let the “forty years” part of that comment sting. Did Laura really feel as though she’d always been the one caring for herself? Did she discount everything Jean had ever done? Maybe Jean really hadn’t done enough. Maybe that was part of the problem. Maybe it was all of the problem. Suddenly she wanted to cry—to curl up in Laura’s hospital bed and wrap around a pillow and cry herself to sleep.

  “What about rehab?” Jean asked, and Laura stopped, halfway toward the door, and let her arms droop loose.

  Her eyes flicked from Jean to Curt and back again. “Look. I drank too much on a weekday. It was wrong, I get that. I messed up. Royally. I probably got myself fired. But don’t either of you two act like you’ve never had too much to drink on a Tuesday afternoon. People make lapses in judgment, and that was mine. I’ll fix it. I’m not some street drunk. I’m hardly pissing myself and hallucinating. I don’t need rehab.”

  “Yes, you do,” said a voice from behind Curt, and Jean’s stomach flipped at the sound of it, her weariness and doubt chased away immediately. Curt took a step to the side and there, standing in the corridor right behind him, was a girl Jean instantly recognized as her granddaughter, Bailey.

  “Great,” Laura hissed to the floor.

  “You were supposed to stay in the car,” Curt said.

  “But she does need rehab,” the girl said, her voice ratcheting up a notch.

  Jean gazed at her granddaughter for the first time in years. Thick in the middle, with big bones and fleshy features, a washed-out look as if she too needed sleep, her hair dyed so black it shone blue under the fluorescent hospital lights and cut in blunt, choppy layers. Her jeans were filthy to the point of being crusty, and a rock band T-shirt, black faded to gray, clung to her belly uncomfortably. But underneath it all was the voice, the voice that Jean remembered from the last time she’d seen her. The voice, clear and angelic, was far too young to be saying the things it was saying, and for its owner to be worrying about the things she was worrying about. Jean felt as if her heart split in two as she remembered the sweet little girl who used to climb up into her lap, thrusting books at her with wide, eager eyes, and she tried to pair the image with this strange child who wore her hurt and anger on the outside like a coat.

  “Oh, how very melodramatic of you,” Laura said. “You must be so proud, Curt, turning her against me like this.”

  Curt’s hands flew up to his shoulders innocently. “I didn’t turn anyone against you, Laura. You’ve done that all by yourself. But she’s right. You’re an alcoholic and you need rehab. This isn’t the first time I’ve said that to you. Not by a long stretch. Maybe you’ll listen if it comes from Bailey.”

  “And a sixteen-year-old kid would know so much about alcoholism because of why again?” Laura asked.

  “Is that a serious question?” Curt answered. “I’ll spell it out for you. She knows so much about alcoholism because her mother”—he pointed at Laura—“that’s you, is an alcoholic.”

  “Oh, ho-ho, is that so, Mr. Perfect? Well, let me tell you something about what’s wrong with me, then. It isn’t the booze. It’s not having a husband to rely on. How convenient that you left me right when the parenting got tough. For better or for worse, remember?”

  “It’s been worse for a long time.”

  She leveled hard eyes at him, making Jean feel uncomfortable and in the way. “Boy, don’t I know it.”

  They continued bickering, and Jean watched Bailey, who stood behind her father, her eyes moving back and forth between the two of them, as if she were watching them physically duel, but her face was turned down, her hair obscuring it like a veil, and Jean’s heart just kept breaking into pieces and more pieces because she could see it. Even if they couldn’t see it, she could see it—her daughter and her son-in-law were ruining this little girl.

  Jean took a step forward so that she was between them. “You two need to stop doing this in front of Bailey.” She sensed Bailey’s head tilt up just the slightest at the sound of her name. />
  “No offense, Mom, but you shouldn’t even be here. I appreciate your concern, but this isn’t your business,” Laura responded. “It’s him. If he’d just leave me alone like divorced people do . . .”

  “We’re not divorced. I’d like to save the marriage, in case you forgot.”

  “Why? So you can live off my paycheck while you hang out with your buddies all the time and then come home and belittle me for finding a life while you were gone?”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  Jean didn’t know what to say. As impossible as marital fights were—and she and Wayne had had their share of them—inserting oneself into someone else’s marital fight was even more futile. Her gaze roamed back to her granddaughter, who happened to be looking right at her, a smirk on her face. But it was an unkind smirk, as if she was daring Jean to say her name again—challenging Jean to bring her back into this nonsense.

  Jean looked away, uncomfortable under that gaze. “Laura, I think maybe just a couple days to recover might not be such a bad idea,” she said.

  “So is this an intervention now?” When Jean didn’t answer her, Laura shook her head and stared at the tiles for a few moments. “Fine,” she said. “Fine. You all want to lock me away in some rehab program? Fine. I’ll go. I could use some time off. But when your lives are still shit while I’m gone, you’ll see that I’m the one holding it all together. Not you.” She pointed at Curt, and then at Bailey and Jean. “Not you. Not you. Just me.” She shouldered her purse. “I’ll take myself. Don’t go with me.”

  “You don’t have a car,” Curt said.

  “I’ll take a cab.” And with that, Laura left, pushing past Curt and Bailey and not even bothering to acknowledge Jean at all.

  They all stood in silence, not looking at one another, Laura’s absence filling up the room almost as much as her presence had. Jean could hear her daughter barking orders loudly at the nurse’s station, then the sound fading as she stormed away.

  “Should I follow her?” Jean asked.

  Curt shook his head. “I’ll go with her. Why don’t you head over to the restaurant at your hotel and I’ll meet you there in an hour?”

  Jean nodded and started to say something to Bailey—though she wasn’t sure what. Maybe she should ask her about school or tell her that her new hairstyle looked interesting, or just . . . something that a grandmother should say to a granddaughter. A way to show her granddaughter that she was interested, that she cared. And maybe to bring some normalcy to the teen’s day, if that was even possible. How did you do normal when your mother was huffing off to a rehab center at that very moment?

  But Jean never said anything, and by the time she looked up again, Bailey was gone as if through a magic trick.

  FOUR

  Dear Margaret Wise Brown:

  My name is Bailey and I am six years old. My favorite book in the whole world is Home for a Bunny by you. My mom reads it to me every night. I love how fluffy the bunny is in the pictures. I would like to pet him sometime.

  I only have two questions for you: Why didn’t the bunny have a home? Where was his mommy bunny?

  Love,

  Bailey

  Age six

  P.S. My mom is writing this for me, because I don’t know how to make all my letters yet.

  P.P.S. I also like it when my mommy says the “Spring, spring, spring” part in her frog voice. It’s really funny.

  Bailey watched from the loft above the living room.

  She was curled behind the rocking chair, hugging her knees to her chest, her fingers rubbing against her stubbled ankles, digging harder and harder into the skin until she felt soreness there. She pressed her cheek against her knees, a tattered copy of Anne of Green Gables trapped between her legs and stomach. It was a book that most of the kids from school deemed “lame” and “old-fashioned,” something they were forced to read in eighth-grade English, but it had always been one of Bailey’s favorites—a story she returned to when she felt like her life was slipping out of control. She couldn’t explain it. Not even to herself, really. All she knew was the book was like an anchor tied around her feet, keeping her tethered to the ground, where things were safe and pretty.

  She would turn the pages, the words practically memorized by now, and picture herself as the imaginative and determined Anne. She would run her fingers over the text—Marilla, isn’t it wonderful to know that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?—and try to absorb them through her skin, wishing real life were like that: that you could show up on someone’s doorstep, a mistake, and still end up belonging. Most of the time she felt like she didn’t belong in her own family, if you could still call it a family. Could you still call it a family when the dad was living somewhere else and the mom was living in a bottle and nobody seemed like your kindred spirit anymore? Most of the time, she felt like she was the mistake, and every tomorrow was messed up before it even got there.

  She’d been reading behind the rocking chair for hours, until her eyes got droopy, but now she was just watching. Just waiting for the world to blow up around her.

  After her mother had stomped out of the hospital, and her father had brought Bailey home, she’d “taken off”—stormed out the front door, slammed it behind her angrily, shouted something about how not at all awesome it was that her mom was going to rehab and now she was stuck with him, and no, thanks, she’d rather live on the streets alone. It was one of those speeches that sounded good at the time, even though she knew while saying it that she in fact had nowhere else to go but with him.

  In truth, she’d walked to the next-door neighbor’s back porch and watched until, after way too long of a time for him to ever convince her that he really did care as much as he said he did, her dad barreled outside, calling her name, and then got into his car and squealed away. She’d quietly snuck back into the house, grabbed Anne, and hidden behind the rocker. Because, really, where else did she have to go? There were no mistake-free tomorrows for her anywhere.

  Her father had blown through again about an hour later, shouting her name angrily. His suit coattails had flapped behind him, showing the little potbelly on which he’d been working so hard for all these years by sitting in front of the TV all alone with his beer and his cell phone, texting nobody, saying nothing, doing nothing, a ghost in the house. He’d gone from room to room, slamming doors and cussing.

  He’d never looked up at the balcony.

  Why would he? It wasn’t like he really wanted to find her, anyway. She’d been right in front of him for so long, yet he’d never wanted to find her, not really. How long ago had she learned that if she wanted to disappear, all she needed to do was get in front of his face?

  She’d tried. Oh, how she’d tried. Over the past year, it seemed like she did nothing but try to get her parents to notice her. But they’d been so wrapped up in their own stuff, it was as if she didn’t exist, no matter what she did.

  The day before, when she’d found out about her mom, she’d had her mom’s friend Becky drive her to the hospital and drop her off there. She didn’t know what she planned to do. She only knew that she felt like she needed to do something—something to show them that she existed in this too. That she was there.

  After Becky had dropped her off, she’d stopped at the information desk and found out where her mom was, and five minutes later she was standing next to Laura’s bed, watching her chest move up and down beneath the flimsy hospital gown. Even though she hated Laura Butler, Alcohol-Poisoned Hospital Patient, a part of her felt awash with relief that the woman wasn’t dead. Not today.

  She’d seen her dad out in the hallway, talking on his cell phone. It was sort of amazing that he’d bothered to show up at all. It was so totally unlike him—must have meant things were serious this time.

  What he didn’t know, and maybe what Laura herself didn’t even know, but what Bailey could totally see, was
that her mother had been trekking slowly and steadily downhill since the moment he’d left them four weeks ago. And Bailey’s dad had left her to deal with it. Who did that? Who left a sixteen-year-old to deal?

  Dealing with it was scary. And it hurt. This was the same mother who’d read bedtime stories to her every night. The same mother who’d sewn a Native American princess costume for her for Halloween. How was that possible? How could the same life include both of those mothers? It wasn’t fair. And the unfairness that used to pop up at unexpected times now seemed to rage inside Bailey all the time, which only scared her further.

  Bailey had wandered the hospital room, pulling open drawers and rifling through the rolls of paper tape and stacks of gauze and tape measures and little wooden sticks.

  She considered a glass jar filled with cotton balls sitting on the counter. She ran her finger along the smooth side of it, imagining herself picking it up and throwing it to the floor. Letting it crash.

  She’d been swept over by these strange feelings a lot lately, this need to do something crazy, to be shocking. To make her parents sit up and notice her, even if it was only to complain or punish her once again. At least it was something—a punishment was preferable to being invisible.

  She put both hands on the jar, picked it up, felt the heft of it. But her mom’s blank face was right there, and the sight of it hurt Bailey’s heart too much. She returned the jar and stepped away from the counter. She knew it was best to stop before she did something stupid. These days it seemed like she specialized in stupid. It seemed like her whole life specialized in stupid, and none of it made her feel any better.