Family and Other Accidents

by Shari Goldhagen

  “I’m sure this kind of thing happens all the time,” Mona says, reaching for her panties and bra.

  “Probably.” Jack sits up.

  She hopes he’ll kiss her head once more, but he doesn’t, doesn’t touch her again. She looks away, notices the clock on the microwave says it’s after one thirty, makes a comment about how late it is.

  “You can drop me off and get Ryan,” Jack says, as if he isn’t pulling on his boxers, hopping into his pants. “I’ll be gone through Friday; you can just keep the car until then.”

  “Sure,” she says.

  Jack hadn’t told Kathy he’d call her when he’d gone to help Mona with the police, but three hours go by without any word from him and she tries his cell phone. Her heart pinches with worry as the voice mail picks up. She checks on Ryan, innocent and round, as he sleeps in his race car–shaped bed. As she runs her fingers along his hairline, she wishes it weren’t red. Putting on a pair of Jack’s old boxers and a T-shirt, Kathy goes to the bathroom brushes and flosses. She washes her face and applies unneeded wrinkle cream; this spring she’ll be thirty-two, but she still gets carded in bars and worried looks from clients the first time they meet her.

  She gets into bed, but doesn’t sleep. At two the front door opens and closes, and she peeks into the living room. Ryan is asleep in Jack’s arms, and Mona’s bunched over her son—a family.

  “Do you think he’ll be okay?” Mona whispers. “Should we try to put his coat on?”

  “You’re going from one garage to another,” Jack whispers back. “I’m sure he’ll be fine. If your wrist hurts, don’t try to carry him, make him walk.”

  As Kathy watches, she remembers the first time she met Mona all those years ago when she was a summer associate and she and Jack were not yet lovers. She’d gone to Jack’s office to show him a case she’d found on Westlaw—partly because it pertained to their client, partly because her attraction to Jack had avalanched in the weeks since he’d called Billings a putz. His door had been ajar, and she could see him packing a leather case full of papers, talking quietly with someone hidden behind the office doors. When he saw Kathy, he waved her in. And there, ripped from the photo, had been the redheaded woman. Not as pretty as the picture really—maybe a few pounds heavier, even paler—but frighteningly real in a breezy sleeveless dress.

  “Mo, this is that brilliant law student I’ve been raving about.” Jack had pointed appropriately. “Kathy, my wife, Mona.”

  It was the way he had said “wife,” pride in ownership, that made Kathy double over. Leaning on his desk, she’d felt sweat rolling from her hairline, down her back, to the waist of her nylons.

  “Kath?” Jack had put a hand on her arm. “Are you feeling okay?”

  She shook her head, mumbled she was sorry.

  “You poor thing,” the redheaded woman said. “You should go home.”

  “Yeah, we can give you a ride—”

  She’d said she’d be fine, but Jack and Mona insisted on escorting her out of the building. As he hailed her a cab, Jack slipped a twenty into her palm, as if he were a better father than Kathy’s own.

  And there they are now, Jack and the redhead in the hall with the child that they’d made. Only now everything is different. Kathy has only to walk out and claim Jack, and it will be Mona who has to mutter something about how late it is, about how she should be going. But Kathy says nothing and gets back into bed.

  A few minutes later she hears Jack trying not to make much noise as he undresses and slides between the sheets next to her. Kathy touches his collarbone, and he flips over to face her.

  “Did I wake you?” He kisses her forehead.

  “I was already awake. Is everything all right?”

  “She’s fine, a little banged up. I let her have my car. I can take a service to O’Hare.”

  “I can take you,” Kathy says.

  He tells her it’s too early in the morning, but she offers until he accepts.

  Curling into familiar sleeping positions, Jack on his stomach, arm across her back, they sigh and relax. Kathy flirts in and out of sleep. Though Jack keeps his breathing regulated, she notices he never starts snoring.

  Three hours later the alarm goes off; Jack hits snooze until they have to get up.

  On the ride to the airport Jack drives her Saab, and neither of them mentions the previous night. They toss a yawn back and forth and fill the awkward space with talk about Jack’s client.

  As he follows the signs to passenger drop off, she confirms the time his return flight gets in. Putting the car in park, he gets his roller suitcase from the trunk. She meets him at the rear of the car, where he gives her the keys and a closed-mouth kiss good-bye.

  “Are we going to have kids?” The question is so odd; Kathy can’t believe she asked it. Doesn’t even know what the right answer is.

  “What?”

  “I just figured if we’re going to get married it’s something we should talk about.”

  “Well, you’re right about that, but your timing sucks.” He flips up his wrist and looks at his watch. “I have a plane to catch in thirteen minutes. You decide you want kids now?”

  “Not now, but maybe in five or ten years . . . I’ve been . . . it’s just something I’ve been thinking about.”

  “Jesus, Kath, let’s talk about this when I get back.” He shakes his head, puts a hand on her shoulder, and rubs the back of her neck. “Or call me tonight. We can talk then, okay?”

  She nods and they exchange “I love you”s. The automatic doors to the terminal part when he walks on the floor mat; he doesn’t turn around to look back, but she watches him until he’s through security, until the car behind her honks.

  All morning Mona flounders around the newsroom in a haze of pain, her hand swelling to elephantine proportions. She lets an incomprehensible paragraph by the horrible intern stand, because it hurts too much to retype it. It’s more than her wrist though; there’s an odd lump of something lodged in her throat. She expects Jack to call her at work, but doesn’t answer the phone when it finally rings. The voice mail isn’t from Jack but the horrible intern lost en route to a fire that’s probably extinguished. Her hand hurts too much to call him back. By four she goes to the hospital, where they put her hand in a splint. Then she flounders in a haze of painkillers, somehow driving Jack’s car home without totaling it. She’s at the kitchen table looking at Atlantic Monthly without really reading it when the phone rings. Thinking it’s Jack, she lets the answering machine get it, but picks up when she hears Melanie’s voice.

  “It’s like his wife is here with us,” Melanie says, two time zones away. “Like she’s watching the freaking seals at Fisherman’s Wharf, walking with us across Golden Gate Bridge.”

  “Sure,” Mona says, distracted and high.

  “Mo? Are you even listening?”

  Telling her sister about the robbery and the car, Mona leaves out the sleeping with Jack part. Melanie apologizes for being insensitive and asks appropriate questions.

  “This is my fault, I should have warned you not to go there too late,” she says, and Mona likes that everything—car theft, her gimpy hand, sleeping with her ex-husband—can be blamed on Melanie.

  When the phone rings a few minutes later, Mona answers, assuming it’s her sister again.

  “Hey,” Jack says. “Any word on the car yet?”

  She tells him that they didn’t call, and he asks about her wrist. She says it’s fine.

  “I’m buried under about a hundred feet of snow in Minneapolis,” he says, and Mona wonders if this is his way of saying that Kathy isn’t around, that they can talk.

  “Yeah,” she says. “I think it’s a snow belt.”

  A silence and four hundred miles between them.

  “Is Ryan still awake?” he asks.

  “No, he went to bed early; he was pretty worn out from last night.” Her way of saying it’s okay to talk?

  “Well, I’m here until Friday,” he says. “I guess we’ll have t
o rent something when I get back.”

  “Yeah, I talked with the insurance rep today. It’s a little tricky because it’s still in your name.” Their entire division of property is sketchy—they’d never gotten around to switching titles and deeds. When they’d decided the separation would be permanent, Jack had told her she could have whatever she wanted. It had been the saddest moment of her life because she realized he had no desire to hurt her, he simply wanted to leave.

  “We’ll figure it out. Call me if you hear anything.”

  “Yeah.”

  The big hand on the wall clock makes a half turn before either of them speaks again. There’s a ringing in the background Mona recognizes as Jack’s cell phone, but he doesn’t answer it.

  “Do you hate her?” he asks. “Kathy, I mean?”

  “No.” Mona realizes it’s true as she’s saying it.

  “I was just wondering . . .” He lets the sentence die. And the big hand makes its way from the twelve and back.

  “Are you still there?” she asks.

  “I guess I should go,” he finally says. “It’s late here, and I got like no sleep last night.” The part of the conversation where he used to say “I love you.” And then he hangs up. Mona watches the big hand make seventeen more revolutions.

  Probably the most difficult time in Kathy’s life was the time after she and Jack became lovers before he ended things with the redhead. She’d worked with him every day, felt the white-hot tumor of attraction flare in her gut every time she passed his office or a coworker mentioned his name. Somehow she’d managed to keep it together when she actually had to interact with him, but afterward, she’d find her heart in her ears, racing as if she’d finished a marathon. She feels that way again, when Jack finally answers his phone in a hotel in Minnesota.

  “I’ve been trying to reach you.” She realizes she sounds rushed and panicked, stops to take a breath.

  “Yeah, my phone’s not working so great here.” He sighs, and she can almost see him settling into the bed, closing his eyes, steeling himself for a conversation he doesn’t want.

  “About this morning, I’m sorry,” she says, even though she isn’t and he once told her one of the things that bothered him about the redhead was that she apologized for everything.

  “It was weird, I had to catch a plane. Don’t worry about it.”

  She asks about the transaction he’s working on, and he gives an uninspired account.

  “It would be nice if you were here,” he says. “There’s all this snow, we could just stay in bed and order room service.”

  “That would be fun.” Things seem normal or normalish. “So I was thinking about when we first met, about our first real conversation. Do you remember?”

  “About Billings? Sure.”

  “What did you think of me when we first met?”

  “Great rack, nice legs.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I. You terrified me when we first met.” Jack’s voice is soft, and she wonders if this is all in her head—this worry over Mona and Ryan and their own potential children might just be that thing that people do to screw things up when they’re going well, to sustain drama. “You were this beautiful kid. The joke among the partners was that I’d be sued for sexual harassment by the end of the summer.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, but then you were so grown-up, so capable.”

  Kathy nods into the phone. “Tell me about when you first met Mona.”

  A pause. A siren sounding somewhere.

  “Why?”

  “I’ve done the math,” Kathy says. “She must have been younger than I was when you met me.”

  “I was younger then, too.”

  “I know. Just tell me.”

  “I’ve told you,” Jack says. “I was at the courthouse with my brother for a traffic ticket. Mona was a lackey for the Plain Dealer, getting rec-ords or something, and she bumped into me at the water fountain.”

  “What did you think when you first met her?”

  “I thought she looked cute. And she was really flustered, which was endearing.”

  “Did you think she was smart?”

  “I didn’t think she was stupid.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “I don’t know; I guess not.” Jack sighs. “What do you want me to say, Kath, that meeting you was like meeting her or that it was completely different? I’ll say either. I’ll say it was just like meeting my high school sweetheart, if that’s what you want.”

  “I’m not sure.” The fear bobs in her belly again.

  “I’m not necessarily opposed to more kids,” Jack says from nowhere. “But if you haven’t noticed, no one in my family lives very long. Having babies in ten years wouldn’t be very fair to you or to them.”

  “Yeah, better if we’d met ten years earlier,” she says, but thinks, better if she’d met him first.

  After he hangs up, she wills him to call back, then distracts herself with some non-real reality show. Finally she turns on her computer and Web searches Mona. It’s the kind of thing she used to do all the time before she and Jack were lovers. There’s a cluster of articles Mona did on area museum funding. Kathy reads the whole series as night bleeds into morning.

  The phone rings as she’s putting on her coat to go to work.

  “This is the Chicago police department,” the canned voice says into the answering machine. She jogs back to the kitchen, takes the cordless from its cradle. “May I speak with Mr. or Mrs. Reed?”

  “Speaking.” It seems easier than explaining the truth.

  “We found your Mercedes.” The disembodied voice gives directions to the police station, and Kathy starts to call Jack but hangs up.

  After she and Jack became lovers, after he gave her keys to the condo and let her move her clothes into his drawers, Kathy had only gone with him once to pick Ryan up from Mona’s. The redhead had met them in the doorway and Jack had reintroduced the two women.

  “We met a long time ago.” Kathy had extended her hand. “When I was a summer.”

  “Of course,” Mona said lightly. Neither one of them mentioned that she’d slept with Jack or any of that. And what Kathy was looking for, that symbiotic connection she’d seen in Jack’s office, wasn’t there. In a way that was sadder; if she’d told her father he would have said, See, he was happy with her once, too. After that, Kathy hadn’t had any desire to see the redhead again.

  Until now. Mona’s phone number is on a chart magneted to the refrigerator along with the numbers of Ryan’s doctors and the poison control center. Kathy dials, and Mona answers on the second ring.

  “They found your car,” Kathy says.

  “Who is this?”

  “Kathy Kreinhart, Jack’s girlfriend. The police called, they found the car. They want someone to come get it.”

  “Oh, thanks, I guess I’ll go before work.”

  “Would it be easier if you picked me up and we went together?” Kathy says with more force than needed. “That way you wouldn’t have to worry about returning Jack’s car.” No sound but the hum of central heat. “I was just thinking it might make the most sense. My schedule’s pretty flexible, maybe once Ryan’s at school?”

  “Sure.” Mona sounds like an actress in a high school play who doesn’t know how to deliver the line.

  An hour later Mona pulls Jack’s car into the circular drive, and the doorman opens the passenger side for Kathy, gives a confused look when it’s not Jack behind the wheel. After an exchange of mindless greetings, Kathy tells Mona where the station is located.

  “Did your hand get hurt in the robbery?” Kathy points to the splint on Mona’s arm. On Mona’s right hand is a large diamond, obviously her engagement ring reset in a platinum band with an emerald. And Kathy wonders if Mona is only wearing it on her right hand because her left is in a splint.

  “Yeah,” Mona says. “Nothing’s broken; they said it was just a bad strain.”

  “Do you want me to driv
e?” Kathy asks, realizing she’s never driven Jack’s car before, wonders if Mona used to drive it when she was married to Jack. By the way she cautiously slows into the turns and sits straight and stiff as Sheetrock, Kathy guesses Jack always drove her, too.

  She wants to ask, but doesn’t. She wants to ask if Jack made her feel alone sometimes. If occasionally Jack’s eyes had held all the warmth of a Popsicle for her, too. When Jack had gone out for coffee, had the redhead ever wondered if he might just never come back?

  “I wonder if they’ll catch the guy,” Kathy says instead.

  “I doubt it,” Mona says. “He’ll probably get away with it.”

  The first time Mona met Kathy, she hadn’t really thought about her. In fact, she didn’t even recall their meeting in Jack’s office until a year and a half later when news of Jack’s affair filtered down to Melanie from a friend who worked in the firm’s IT deparment. Then the memory of the blond girl in Jack’s office had smacked Mona in the face, and she didn’t realize how she ever could have missed it. She’d been eight months pregnant at the time, not the best moment to stand in front of the mirror and compare yourself to a pretty woman twelve years your junior.

  Next to her in the car, Kathy is still pretty, with dewy skin and eyes blue and faceted as cut sapphires. But apparently that wasn’t enough to keep Jack from being Jack. Guilt percolates in Mona’s guts, and she wonders if she only slept with Jack as some sort of karmic payback—squaring things up with Blond Ponytail. She hopes it’s something more noble, something about fate and things “meant to be.”

  “I think that must be it.” Kathy points to a low-rise building with a police crest on its side.

  Mona hasn’t been at a police station since her early days picking up arrest reports as a general assignment reporter, but the place feels old hat, not too far a cry from the worn and weathered precincts she’s seen on TV.

  Boy Cop, arm draped around the watercooler in the corner, talks to another blue-uniformed officer. “How’s your wrist?” he asks when they come in, and Mona holds up the cloth cast. “I told you, you should have gone to the hospital.”