“She’s having it catered. But she asked me to ask you if you could pick up the matzoh?”
“No problem,” Erica said, her sweaty hands scrambling for purchase on the nylon bag strings. She slid off the bag onto the greasy floor of the garage.
Her butt still hurt when she took the boys over to pick out their new iguana after Dylan’s tennis lesson. The pet store, up the street from her parents’ house, was a neighborhood relic, left over from prewar days when West Meadow was a farming village and Meadow Heights was the commercial town center. Owned by a garrulous elderly couple, the Petersens, who remembered Erica from childhood, the shop sprawled sloppily over a two-storied clapboard house. Parrot cages hung on the front porch.
“We only have one iguana now, two months old,” said Mr. Petersen. “He’s used to the name Sammy, if you don’t mind.” Sammy was larger than Erica anticipated, exotic and beautiful Day-Glo green, with a dinosaur face and strangely compelling eyes.
Mr. Petersen led them around the store as they purchased what seemed to be an endless list of supplies: a fifty-gallon tank (only temporary; when the iguana grew to full size it would require a custom-built cage); a heat lamp; branches for climbing; even silk orchids to replicate the jungle. The total cost surpassed eight hundred dollars. No matter, thought Erica as they loaded Sammy and his luggage into Vince’s hatchback, where he took up the entire child bench, forcing Jesse to squeeze illegally against Erica in the front seat.
“They eat collard greens and raspberries,” Dylan pronounced, leafing through a booklet entitled “Iguana Care and Feeding.”
While Sophia batted at fabric birds in her playpen, they set up Sammy’s cage on a card table in the family room, in a corner with plenty of the essential natural light. They arranged climbing branches and orchids, filled his feeding bowl with greens and berries, and hooked up the heat lamp.
“The lamp should be turned on a minimum of ten hours a day,” Dylan read.
“Hi, Sammy,” said Jesse. “Do you want to eat your greens? Let me show you where the bowl is, Sammy.”
The doorbell rang.
: : :
Jared and Ashley stood in the entrance. Jared wore an antsy, sheepish grin and his safety-pin pants. Ashley clung to him, wearing a pair of denim bellbottoms with flowers embroidered on the cuffs and a cotton Mexican blouse with a lace neck, her hair parted into two odd, perky little braids and tied with plaid bows. She looked like she’d wandered out of a couple of different decades and wasn’t sure where she’d ended up.
“I’ve got a CD for you,” Jared said, handing her Fables of the Reconstruction.“Thanks! I love this!” Erica said, scanning the song list. “But what’s up?” she whispered. “It’s kind of crazy around here. We’re introducing a new iguana to the household, and we haven’t even had dinner yet.”
“I guess I should have called and said I was bringing a CD, huh? Sorry.” Jared licked a drop of blood off his chapped lips. A nervous energy radiating from him belied his carefully cultivated air of nonchalance. He reached into his backpack and pulled out a paper lunch bag.
“I brought you a goodie bag too,” he said. “From my good friend Nick Stromboli.”
Ashley giggled. Erica peered inside the bag, where a smaller glassine bag nested inside. Displaying her own brand of fake indifference, she dangled the bag at her side, swinging it casually back and forth.
“Mommy, Mommy, Sammy ate a piece of lettuce!” Jesse cried, dragging Jared by the hand into the family room to meet Sammy.
Jared inspected Sammy with clearly feigned interest. “Cool,” he said, staring past Erica into the backyard.
Erica shoved the paper bag behind some cans of soup in the pantry. “Well, thanks for the goodie bag, guys,” she said, setting water to boil for pasta. “We’re getting ready for dinner here.”
“I can’t go home,” Jared said. “The parental unit doesn’t approve of me. They’re going to send me to the psycho boot camp if I don’t shape up. I heard them talking to Dr. Rafferty about it. She’s the head therapist at the family clinic.”
“A friend of mine got sent to a place like that,” Ashley said. “She was, like, really traumatized. She got bit by a poisonous spider, and they didn’t treat it, and it swelled up and left a permanent scar on her arm.”
“A poisonous spider?” Erica shuddered. “Was this camp in Montana or something?”
“They don’t tell you where they’re taking you,” said Ashley. “They haul you off like you’re a prisoner of war.”
Erica pictured an evil cousin of Camp Whispering Wind. “So, how are you supposed to shape up?” she asked.
“That’s the other problem,” Jared said. His voice sounded weak and reedy, like Debbie on a bad day. “I don’t know what they want me to do anymore. I go to stupid school, I get my green sheet signed, I go to stupid family therapy, I take my meds and eat my wheat-free diet.” He shrugged, his shoulders fell, and he looked very thin under his baggy Mets sweatshirt. “They don’t like my friends. They hate Ashley. My grades aren’t up to potential. I quit tennis. I smoke dope. So what? So do you.”
Dylan ran out onto the patio, waving the cordless. “Mommy, Aunt Debbie is on the phone for you.”
“Hi, Deb,” Erica said. “What’s up?”
“What’s up is I can’t find Jared again. School ends at 3:15. We live three blocks away. He quit all his extracurriculars. So, tell me, where is he? Do you have any idea, by any chance? You seem good buddies as of late.”
“Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“I guess. I did ask you to reach out.”
“Well, actually, Jared’s here. He wanted to see our new iguana.”
“Your new what?”
“Our new iguana. A lizard. I told you we were getting one last night at Mom and Dad’s, remember? To replace the goldfish.”
“No, I can’t remember anything these days.” Debbie sighed. “Send him home, will you? He needs to start on his homework.”
“Okay. Will do.”
But Jared resumed his monologue like the phone hadn’t rung, as Jesse and Jake raced around him throwing Legos, Sammy’s novelty apparently already faded.
“They don’t like my att-i-tude,” he said, drawing out the word. “How do you change your attitude? They say DDD is chronic. They say you’ll suffer from it your whole life if they don’t attack it at the source. And who is the source? The source is me. They’re attacking me.”
“Jared, please go home,” Erica said. The faster he went home meant the faster she could initiate the dinner/bath/bedtime routine, and the faster she could sample from her new glassine baggie. “Your mother is very upset.”
“I don’t want to ever go home. I want to run away.” Jared picked at his chin. There was a raw red scab at approximately the spot where the edge of Ron’s plate had landed. The cut was deep and probably should have been stitched; she wondered how Debbie explained its existence to Jared’s numerous doctors. He kept picking at it as if he didn’t want the wound to heal, as if it reminded him of something he needed to remember.
Erica pulled his fingers away. “Leave that alone. It’ll get infected.” Her arm edged around his thin, tensed shoulders, meeting Ashley’s fingers somewhere on the back of his bony neck.
“I ran away to Times Square once,” Ashley said. “It was gross.”
“Jared.” Erica flipped Fraggle Rock on on the television set, inducing instant, albeit temporary, calm in her chaotic family room. “I need you to go home now. I’ll try and put some sense into your mom, okay?” She dumped a pound of fettuccine into the boiling water.
His eyes probed hers, moist and long lashed, beautiful as a baby’s. “Good luck,” he said.
: : :
When everyone was soundly asleep Erica extracted the baggie of coke from behind the cans of Progresso minestrone and appraised it, as if she were trying to figure out the b
uckle on a new make of car seat. This time she lacked the advantage of Stephan’s jewelry thingie, so she improvised: the plastic mat from Sophia’s diaper bag (sanitized) and a straw from an unused box drink. If it wasn’t transformation this time, at least it was elevation, the ordinary ratcheted up a notch, the knot of fear diminishing. The white tile of the kitchen shone glittery clean; the nectarines ripening on the counter bore a mellow, fruity scent. She listened to her heart thump against her chest.
She played Fables of the Reconstruction on the CD player, softly, but still loud enough to wake Sophia. She rocked her back to sleep, caressing her tendrils of dark-brown hair, kissing her fragile neck, swaying around the family room. The music was moody and slow, depressing even, but it was a dreamy, indulgent depression she enjoyed sinking into. All these hours of the night, previously lost in sleep or hoping for sleep, opened up to her with limitless possibility, as if she were rambling through the rooms of a mansion she’d always known was there but that only now had become visible.
REM’s music felt replete with hidden meaning. The lyrics all sounded like convoluted messages from Jared.
Maybe’s he caught in the legend
Maybe’s he’s caught in the mood
Maybe these maps and signals
Have been misunderstood, been misunderstood
Is he to be reached? He’s not to be reached.
Is he to be reached? He’s not to be reached.
Is he to be reached? He’s not to be reached anymore.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Debbie’s instincts were kind, Erica reminded herself. She’d realized this as a young child. Debbie always waited by Erica’s classroom to walk her home from kindergarten, her dry warm hand in Erica’s, looking carefully both ways as they crossed the street. She cooked nachos piled with cheese and olives when their parents went out. More recently, she’d crocheted blankets for all four of her children’s births. Erica reminded herself of all these things, but all it did was trigger guilt at finding her so exasperating. But then there was the fact of Jared’s round baby eyes. The following afternoon, in between Jake’s speech therapy appointment and Jesse’s playdate, she called Debbie.
“Did Jared come home last night?” Erica asked, simultaneously rummaging through the pantry, extracting a couple cans of clam chowder for dinner.
“Yes. He told me you asked him to, so thank you.” Debbie sighed. “I get so panicked these days. He still won’t tell me where he stayed the night before. I assume someplace with that Ashley. He’s not ready for a steady girlfriend at his age. Especially a troubled creature like that one.”
“He’s fifteen years old! You dated that guy Lewis from auto shop when you were thirteen, and he was already in high school. Remember, you made me tell Mom you were studying at Annie Lachulsky’s house?” Erica needed a crunchy item to balance out the soup. Maybe some carrot sticks. She peeled the carrots, tossing the scraps down the disposal.
“I don’t remember.”
“You must. He had red hair and always wore chambray shirts and lived next to the pizza place that used to be by the railroad tracks? He taught me how to change the oil in Dad’s car.”
“Are you sure this isn’t some story you’re making up, Rikki?”
“Of course not. My point is, teenagers have hormones, and they go out with the opposite sex.”
Debbie snorted, yet another one of her annoying habits. “Jared is a young fifteen. And it’s a different world these days. Scarier. Look, Rikki, I appreciate your concern, but you don’t seem to understand. He’s got severe allergies, and I keep telling you, he’s been diagnosed with DDD! It’s a serious biochemical disorder.”
“He’s very afraid you’re going to send him away to some boot camp.” Erica placed the chopped vegetables in a bowl of water and then in the refrigerator.
“Well, we’re keeping it as a last resort. It’s not a boot camp, by the way—it’s a boarding school, and I’ve heard very good things about it. It took the Marines to screw Ron’s head on straight, and he wants to nip this thing with Jared in the bud right now.”
“You could make up your own mind. You don’t have to listen to Ron,” Erica said.
“But I want to listen to Ron,” said Debbie. “He’s my husband.”
“Uh,” Erica began. This conversation gave her nothing reassuring to report back to Jared, but it was clearly over.
“I gotta go, Rikki,” Debbie was saying. “Listen, don’t forget that matzoh. Go to Rothman’s. Get their egg matzoh—it’s Ron’s favorite.”
: : :
The week sped by, and Erica forgot about the matzoh. She developed a new habit of discreetly disappearing into the bathroom a few times a day, for a little longer than it normally took her to pee. Her day grew brighter, sunnier, and most of all more manageable, as if the zillion disparate points of energy that comprised it coalesced into a single wave. All the extraneous blather fell away. The world glinted like metal in the sun. Rays of light shattered into rainbows on the walls, and every tone of every sound rang sharp and discrete.
The notes of the ringing doorbell lingered in the air like a bell she’d once rung with Ethan on a balcony overlooking Big Sur at one of the Richards family reunions. This time the bell, in the more mundane location of West Meadow, only admitted her four-year-old sons, home from preschool. Still, she remembered how the deep thrum reverberated over the waves.
She tossed a beach ball back and forth with the boys and, when they tired of that, pushed them on the tire swing. The thwack of the ball and the whoosh of the swing took on a rhythm of their own. Erica looked up at the sky, as intensely blue as the Pacific ocean was that day in Big Sur. Her boys clutched the chain of the swing, their curls glittering golden in the sun, so precious and beautiful the day could barely contain them.
She pushed the swing toward that azure sky, a little too high, a little too rough. Jake lost his grip, slipping through the center of the tire, hitting a rock and scraping his knee. Blood oozed out. Erica’s glimmering private space dissipated, blather swirling back, and with it, an inchoate sense of apprehension. Her children broke and bled so easily. And there was no denying it: she was scraping the bottom of her magic baggie.
After cleaning and bandaging Jake’s knee, gritting her teeth and squinting her eyes all the while, she treated both boys to lemon popsicles. Once they were suitably entranced in a video about talking poodles, Erica called the number scribbled on the back of Jared’s algebra homework.
“Are you Nick?” Erica asked.
“Yes.”
“Um, Jared gave me your number. He thought you might have something for me that I want.”
“Jared?”
“Jared Lassler. Um. I believe he knows you from the family clinic?”
“Oh yes, Jared. Great kid.” Nick had a calm, steady voice, not a whole lot of change in inflection.
“Um, he said you have something I might want. Some new CDs.”
“Oh. Well, yes. If you’re interested in my music, why don’t you come over now?”
Now—with the twins in the family room watching TV, Dylan arriving home any second requiring transport to tennis, and Sophia needing a diaper change and milk—was obviously not the right time. In fact, she’d forgotten, she needed to take Jesse to his speech therapy appointment right after tennis. “How about tomorrow morning, Friday?” she asked. “Around 11.”
“I can make that work,” said Nick. “I live at 845 Locust. Right across from the pet store.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
At aerobics Friday, hunky Ari strutted between everyone’s step platforms, shaking his hips to Wang Chung. Maybe Erica was imagining things, but it seemed like her belly felt tauter underneath the spangled lavender leotard, and she could swear her clothing fit more loosely, the thong no longer digging into her butt crack. She lifted five-pound weights in bicep curls while simultaneously performing a V-ste
p. She even found herself singing along to “Dance Hall Days” as Ari circled by and tapped her on the rear. “Looking good,” he said in a move that unfortunately reminded her of Ron.
“He thinks you’re cute,” Justine said afterward, reapplying her mascara. She was wearing a pink lace underwear and camisole set.
“Don’t you think he looks like Michael Bolton?” Erica fiddled with her gym bag, looking for the new patterned leggings she’d bought, but Justine was already pulling on her six-inch heels, paying not a mote of attention to anything Erica was saying.
“You’ll have to excuse me—I’m running like crazy today. I have to go to the dry cleaners, pick up cat food, and then go to the doctor. I may have an infection at the site of my tubal ligation. I’ve been having cramping and bleeding. If I have time, I really should talk to you. Someone told me you were a nurse.”
“I used to be.” Erica patted her thighs, which still rubbed together uncomfortably when she walked, fashionable patterned leggings or no.
“You’ve got bags under your eyes.” Justine brushed her scalpel-like nails across Erica’s cheek. “You should call Housemates and get yourself some help.”
“My mother gave me the number.”
“Well, call them for God’s sake.” Justine clattered out of the locker room, and as she did so, Lisa sidled up from the other side of the locker room.
“Sorry, but I can’t stand that woman,” Lisa said. “Do you think her boobs are fake?”
“Probably. Do you think Ari looks like Michael Bolton?”
“There’s a resemblance, now that you mention it. Do you have time this afternoon to go order the boys’ camp labels?”
Camp labels. She’d forgotten about ordering them, as well as buying something Debbie kept requesting. Her mind felt razor sharp yet pocked with inexplicable holes.
“I can’t make it this afternoon. I have an appointment.”
“Doctor?” Lisa’s eyes clouded over with concern.
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