Looking for the Museum of Science, Jack, Mona, and the girls have driven by the same White Hen Pantry three times. Connor took Laine, hand swaddled in dish towels, to the hospital and left Mona and Jack with the kids, keys to the minivan, the museum membership card, and directions that didn’t include Big Dig detours. Normally a human compass, Jack has somehow led them to a residential neighborhood, and Mona notices he’s driving awfully near to the curb.
“Jack,” Mona says. “You’re kind of close on this side.”
“It just seems close because this is twice the size of your car.”
The White Hen Pantry appears again.
“Is Mommy going to die?” Jorie asks. It’s the first thing she has said since Mona and Jack found her in the shower.
“No, sweetie.” Mona looks over the seat. “Your mom just cut her hand.”
“Is Daddy going to die?”
“He’s going to be fine,” Jack says.
“But he’s sick?”
“He’ll get better.” Blue veins bulge in Jack’s wrists because he’s squeezing the steering wheel like he’s trying to juice it. The side mirror next to Mona flirts with low-hanging sycamore branches.
“If Mommy and Daddy die, would Keelie and I live with you, like Daddy did after Grandma and Grandpa Reed died?”
“No one is going to die,” Jack says; the car inches closer to the curb. “So we shouldn’t worry about it.”
“But if they did die, would we live with you?”
“Sure,” Mona says.
“In Chicago?”
“Maybe.” Mona wonders what the right answer is. “Or maybe we’d move here.”
“No one is dying,” Jack says again. “I don’t think your parents would like this conversation.”
“There’s a lot of car on this side—”
“Mo, it’s fi—”
On cue, the passenger-side mirror cracks against a black metal mailbox. Both objects spiral behind the van like flying saucers and land on the sidewalk. Jack pulls to the side of the street, rubs his eyebrows, as Jorie opens her lungs for more of the magnificent screaming.
And Mona understands the wounded impulse to make the loudest noise in your power, to break the silence that so often follows something bad. Why shouldn’t Jorie scream? Her mother’s blood is still smeared on the clean floor, and her father’s blood turned against him in a way that even a seven-year-old who can write a haiku can’t make sense of because no one can make sense of it. She’s stuck in a car with an uncle she knows only as a grouchy onetime guardian of her father and he’s just wrecked their car. As Jorie’s screams crescendo, Mona actually feels a swelling of respect for her niece, because Jorie shouts out, doesn’t wait for someone else to make the first sound.
“I’ll go see if they’re home.” Jack shakes his head—not good when he’s not in control.
While he knocks on the door, rings the bell, and waits, Mona says mindless things to soothe Jorie, but Keelie repeats the tail ends of Mona’s phrases—an echo of her ridiculousness.
“We can fix the car. . . . It’s not hurt too bad. . . . It will be okay.”
“They’re not here.” Jack opens the driver’s door, which starts the van beeping because the key is in the ignition. “I’ll leave cash for the mailbox.”
“You can’t just leave money.” They’re yelling over Jorie and the car. “You need to write a note.” Mona rummages through her purse for pen and paper, but pulls out a bank envelope and a tampon. She digs back in her bag.
Jack leans over the front seat. “Can you girls please be quiet?” he asks, but Jorie screams louder, and Keelie joins her. “Please stop, please.”
“Here, Jorie.” Mona swivels around in the seat, reaches for Jorie’s slender shoulder. “Help me write the note for the people who live here. We can make it a haiku. How does that work again? Is it nine, five, seven?”
“Five beats, seven beats, five beats.” Jorie’s voice is bruised and raw. She sniffles. “My haiku about Mouse is on the class bulletin board.”
“Okay.” Mona writes on the envelope. “How’s this:
“Sorry for your box,
Uncle Jack didn’t realize
The van was so big.”
Together she and Jorie count the syllables on their fingers. Jorie nods.
“That’s good,” she says.
“You missed your calling, Mo,” Jack says. “You should have been a Japanese poet.”
They drive in silence, passing the White Hen Pantry again. Jack turns on the CD changer, and Bruce Springsteen’s raspy voice fills the vacuum of the van.
“Ohh Ohh Thunder Road, Ohhh Thunder Road.”
Jack reaches to adjust the controls, and Mona grabs his fingers.
“Don’t change it,” she says, far more forceful than necessary.
He looks at her, and he looks forty-something. Still bushy as ever, his hair has lost its blackness—not the jet paint of Keelie’s and Connor’s. He’s heavy, the lines in his face settled. In five years he’ll have jowls.
“It’s a really good song,” she says.
“I was just going to start it from the beginning.”
She’ll take that. She’ll take it because being bored wasn’t a good reason to get pregnant, and they won’t make good parents. She’ll take it because Connor is sick, Laine is going nuts, and the Big Dig construction makes it impossible to get anywhere. So Mona will take “Thunder Road” as a sign that maybe it’s not that bad.
“This is Mommy and Daddy’s song,” Jorie says from the backseat, and Keelie repeats her.
“Mommy and Daddy’s song.”
Mona is still humming it under her breath an hour later when they’re shuffling through the museum exhibits among all the real families. There’s the complete units where both parents are present and the kids have similar features. But there are also the families that have splintered and cracked. The dads with joint custody trying to cram whole weeks into a Saturday visit, the moms who don’t have men to carry around the jackets and activity bags.
Mona thinks that she, Jack, and Keelie, propped on her hip, make a convincing enough family. Keelie could easily be Jack’s daughter, but fair-haired Jorie throws them off. Standing apart from the rest of them, she still looks placid and haunted. She’s the reason they get second glances from other museumgoers and the staff in costume for Halloween, the reason they’re not fooling anyone.
Jack must see it, too, because he turns to Mona in front of a perpetual motion statue where plastic balls hurtle through gadgets designed to keep them going.
“I’ll respect whatever decision you make,” he says quietly. “I’d never ask you to do anything you didn’t want to. But you know who I am.”
Mona nods, Keelie’s fingers in the spirals of her hair. She does know or she thinks she does. She also knows he isn’t going to pack his monogrammed luggage and leave her in the obvious way, they’ve tried that before and it didn’t work. But there are other ways to leave someone, and in some of them he’s already gone—if he was ever there at all.
Connor and Laine, her hand and wrist in white bandages, are spooned into each other asleep on the couch, while the Soup Nazi Seinfeld episode plays on the TV. Mouse, at the foot of the couch, picks up his golden head when Jack and Mona and the girls get back. Mona hushes everyone, but Connor props himself on his elbow and massages unfocused eyes crusted with sleep. Both girls run to take his big hands.
“Let’s let Mommy sleep for a while,” he says. He still looks pale and blue and thin. “Then we can all go trick-or-treating, okay?”
“How is she?” Jack gestures to Laine.
“Ten stitches, no permanent damage.” Connor shrugs. “They gave her Vicodin, and she’s been out for hours.” He nods at the girls. “These guys give you any trouble?”
“No,” Mona and Jack say in unison, utterly unconvincing.
“Did you like spending time with your aunt and uncle?” Connor asks the girls.
“They broke the car,” Jorie says
.
“Broke car,” Keelie says.
Mona feels a stab of betrayal. Even after “Thunder Road,” after the haiku, her nieces still hate her.
“I knocked off your side mirror.” Jack shakes his head, his hands deep in khaki pants pockets. “I’ll take it in for you.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Connor smiles, eyes crinkling into Jack eyes. “I hate that car.”
Easing out from under Laine, Connor starts to get up, but winces because he’s stiff from sleeping or because what makes him blue and pale hurts.
“Go back to sleep, kid.” Jack looks as though he might cry.
“Naw, my girls need food and stuff,” Connor says. “Mouse needs to go out.”
“We can handle it,” Jack says with absolutely no conviction. “We’ve got it under control.”
Connor looks to Mona.
“We’ve got it under control.” She borrows Keelie’s technique, as if repeating it will make it true.
it’s really called
nothing
At 36,000 feet, Jack’s wife tells him she’s keeping the baby. He knew she would from the moment in her doctor’s office last week when he found out she’d secretly gone off birth control, the moment he realized he’d been wrong about her for fourteen years.
“Really, I’m at the last safe age to have a first child.” As Mona talks, she stares out the oval window. All Jack sees is her curly red hair, always the first thing anyone notices about her. “More than anything, I want this, us, to work.”
She is crying, but there’s a metal edge in her voice. Because she constantly apologized for things not her fault, didn’t get pedicures, and voted Democrat, Jack hadn’t understood that edge was selfishness. But in the doctor’s office, everything had snapped into focus so clearly, he couldn’t fathom how he ever missed it.
“But if you don’t want to be a part of it,” she says. “I have to respect that.”
Something between a chuckle and a snort comes out of Jack’s nose. It’s not the right response considering he may get divorced, not right considering they’re on their way back to Chicago from Boston, where Jack’s kid brother has a wife, two daughters, and freshly diagnosed stage III Hodgkin’s disease.
“I’m sorry, Jack.” Mona turns to him with mascara streaks on the apples of her cheeks, her nose red.
Laughing again, he takes her pale, cold hand, gives it a squeeze, and meets her confused amber eyes. Only five weeks pregnant, she looks like she always looks, but he barely recognizes her. It reminds him of a line in that Talking Heads song that was big when he was in law school—And you may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful wife.
“I’ll understand either way,” she says, but Jack suspects she’s counting on him to stand by her, cemented with a glue of inertia, joint finances, and the fact that he walked around a world thick as Jell-O when they briefly broke up eight years ago.
The plane jerks, and everyone gasps and shuffles and grips the armrests as if they can keep course through sheer will. As the “Fasten Seat Belt” light dings, the pilot’s smooth-jazz voice comes over the intercom, assuring “everything’s fine, just a few bumps.”
Jack has always thought the pilot would tell you things were peachy keen even as all four engines died and the tail fell away like bird poop—keep the passengers docile with pretzel sticks and soda as the plane goes down. And he’s always envisioned a plane crash as an awful way to go, with those horrible last minutes of g-forces fighting against you, lungs exploding, nose squirting blood. But today a plane crash doesn’t seem half bad. Better certainly than having your body turn against itself, than having doctors pump in poison so you puke and shiver and fight with your pretty wife about whether or not you can stomach steamed rice. In fact, Jack wonders if he’d mind if the plane belly flopped into a dramatic descent right now. Maybe not if it meant he wouldn’t have to watch his brother’s body break or deal with the giant mess of trial for his big firm’s biggest client waiting for him in a high-rise office on Lake Michigan. Perhaps plummeting to the ground would be easier, too, than having to make decisions about his selfish wife’s plan to screw up their selfish lives.
But the plane doesn’t crash. The pilot takes them higher, and when he finds smooth air, everyone sighs in unison.
It makes Jack chuckle-snort again.
“Say something.” Mona’s brow scrunches, and she appears truly terrified. “Please.”
“Well.” He looks beyond her head to the window, where beads of rain ride the thick glass panel. “I guess I have nine months to decide anything, right?”
No decisions have been made eleven weeks later when Connor, his immune system Swiss cheese from chemo, is taken by ambulance to Massachusetts General with pneumonia and a fever of 103. His sister-in-law calls, and Jack, upset but not surprised, flies in to watch Connor sleep and sleep, thin sheets and thin gown blurring as though everything were a part of him. While Connor dozes, Jack and Laine speak a language of blood counts and lung function, frustrating the actual doctors by demanding to know about every bleep and drip from Connor’s monitors and tubes, by bringing up clinical trials and experimental procedures they’ve read about online or heard about from nondoctor acquaintances.
“Can we not discuss the color of my snot anymore?” Connor asks when he rolls awake. Coughing a slimy cough, he tries to hide that it hurts. “I feel a billion times better. Where are the kids?”
“With my dad.” Laine runs long fingers across Connor’s smooth forehead. All his black hair is gone, as are his eyebrows; strangely, his lashes stuck it out—long and full. “He took them to the new Jungle Book movie.”
“I wanted to see that with them.”
“You’ll have to watch it over and over again when it comes out on DVD.” Laine’s voice is gentle.
“Sure, in the summer.”
Connor takes Laine’s hand, and Jack turns away because it’s teeth-gnashingly unfair that his brother is the one who got sick. Connor’s the one who taught with AmeriCorps and works for the Massachusetts reading program, the one who occasionally remembers to recycle and doesn’t wear sneakers made by Indonesian children. It’s unfair because though he’s a decade younger, Connor cares about his family more than Jack has ever cared about anything, and there’s no guarantee that he gets another summer to watch sappy Disney cartoons. Jack would gladly hand over his stock portfolio and car keys to anyone who could make his brother better or even happy. And suddenly he realizes that even though Mona’s pregnancy is something he has been trying not to deal with, it has the potential to raise Connor’s spirits.
“Actually, I have some news.” Jack licks his lips, and his heart hurries as it does whenever he lies. “Mo’s pregnant.”
“What?” Connor props himself on his elbows, jostling the IVs jammed in his purpling forearm. “This is huge. Why didn’t you say something earlier?”
Shrugging, Jack tries to smile and not think of his wife, whom he has scarcely spoken to since their flight back to Chicago.
“Congratulations,” Laine says.
“You’re going to be the greatest dad.” Connor is excited, his eyes bright and almost lucid for the first time since Jack arrived. “I tell everyone you’re the only parent I ever had.”
Heat floods Jack’s cheeks and he nods, even though all he actually did for his brother after their mother died was sign a few checks, fill out a few forms. Connor left Cleveland less than three years later.
“We’ll see,” Jack says.
“Naw, you’ll be awesome.” Connor smiles, coughs, smiles again. “How pregnant?”
Wanting to keep his brother glowing and distracted, Jack makes up answers to Connor’s questions—a combination of quick math, sitcom plots, and Chicago magazine articles. The baby is due in the summer, they think they’ll turn their condo’s second bedroom into a nursery, Mona wants to be heavily drugged during labor, “R” names are their favorites.
“Has she been sick much?” Connor asks.
“Constantly.”
This Jack does know because he has been helping Mona in the bathroom, while she throws up and they don’t talk. “She hasn’t spent a whole day at the paper in forever.”
“That’s rough.” Connor wrestles sleep, eyelids closing and springing open like crazed garage doors. He looks at Laine. “You never got sick.” Blinking, he shakes his head. “Can you tell them I don’t need this much pain stuff, all it’s doing is knocking me out.”
Laine leaves to find a doctor she knows is already frustrated by her.
Connor looks at Jack. “I appreciate you helping out with Lainey and the kids, but you should be with Mo if she’s not feeling well.” He closes his eyes, and Jack thinks he’s asleep. “All those hormones and stuff; it’s really hard, makes girls crazy.”
“I’ll go home soon.”
“At least call her.” Connor waves Jack out with the back of his hand. “I’m sure she’d want to know you told us. It’s a big deal.”
“Sure,” Jack says.
But in the hall he automatically starts toward the vending machines and searches his pockets for change. He absently slips coins in the coffee machine without thinking; it’s probably his ninth cup of the day. Smoldering and bitter, it rouses the heartburn he has had on and off, mostly on, for weeks. He shouldn’t ignore it, his father’s ticker hadn’t outlasted his fifties, but Jack can’t decide if he cares enough to pay a doctor to tell him to change his diet and start working out. Like a plane crash, it’s not a bad way to go, quick and easy, flicking off a light switch.
Then guilt socks him in the gut as he thinks of the question-mark curve of his brother’s bald head. Jack reaches into his pocket for his phone. Mona left a message, but as he starts to call her back, one of Connor’s doctors waves her hand in the universal “stop” motion.
“You can’t use that in here.” She’s a short brunette in blue scrubs who only cares about Connor because it’s her job. “There’s a pay phone down the hall or you can go outside.”
Family and Other Accidents Page 16