Wrong Highway

by Wendy A. Gordon

  “He likes to be outside. He’s indoors all day at work.”

  “Poor baby. You know, I wanted to continue my college education, become an electrical engineer. I was going to when I got out of the service. But then I met Deb, and little Jared came along, put the kibosh on that fantasy. Now I’m stuck playing Loggins and Messina.”

  Erica burped Sophia. Curdled milk dribbled onto Mom’s rust-colored tweed couch. She mopped it up with the fringe of her shirt.

  “Is her little tummy upset?” asked Ron.

  “No, it’s normal,” Erica said.

  “Little children, little problems, big children, big problems. You give everything to these kids, and then they grow up and treat you like crap.”

  “I gotta change her diaper,” Erica said.

  : : :

  By the time she made it back to the kitchen, Mom and Debbie were bundling the last of the leftovers into Tupperware, loading silverware into the dishwasher, and cleaning crumbs out of the crevices of the aluminum containers. Somehow they’d managed to create as much work out of this takeout dinner as if they’d cooked it from scratch.

  “Can I help?” Erica asked.

  “No,” said Mom. “We’re nearly done.” They looked robust and purposeful, a matched pair.

  “I wonder if Jared’s in the bathroom,” said Debbie, as she stashed the last pan away. She followed Erica into the rear hallway. “His wheat allergy gives him terrible diarrhea.”

  “He’s not in here,” Erica noted superfluously, while Debbie looked down the toilet as if Jared might have fallen in. The rear window was open to the backyard, letting in a breath of fragrant evening air.

  “I wonder where he went. It smells like oranges in here,” Debbie said, sniffing.

  In the dimmer light of the powder room, Debbie looked paler. Her upper arms flapped like chicken wings. On the inside of her right elbow, a square flesh-colored bandage stood out, loose at one edge, vaguely menacing.

  Erica pictured blood, scarlet and viscous, pulsing beneath the thin surface of Debbie’s skin. She took a deep breath. “Did you get the results of those tests?” she asked.

  Debbie whispered tentatively, “It’s a blood disorder.” She opened the medicine cabinet as if Jared could shrink and disappear there among the aspirin.

  “You told me it wasn’t leukemia, right? Erica asked, getting that pressure sensation at the back of her head. She followed Debbie aimlessly into Mom’s sewing room, on what used to be the back porch.

  “No, no,” Debbie said. “Nothing like that. It’s some kind of rare disorder. Nobody knows what caused it.” Debbie turned her right hand palm up, revealing one pale, veiny wrist. “My capillaries? Is that the right word? They bleed easier than normal.”

  Erica averted her eyes from Debbie’s mottled skin. She searched her rusty nurse’s brain for names of obscure blood disorders but couldn’t come up with any that didn’t manifest themselves shortly after birth. “That’s really weird,” she said. “Debbie, tell me the truth. Has Ron ever hit you?”

  Debbie recoiled. “How could you ever say such a thing?”

  “Well, I never heard of a blood disease like that, and Ron’s always had a bad temper. And Jared’s said some stuff to me.”

  “Stuff? What kind of stuff?”

  “Oh, nothing. I mean, he thinks Ron is very hard on him. He says Ron has hit him for all kinds of minor offenses.”

  Debbie bristled, her spine erect, her dimpled chin, identical to Jared’s, jutting out of her round face. “Rikki! That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard! I’ll try and forget you ever said it.”

  “You know, Ron’s a Vietnam vet and all. Sometimes they get violent.”

  Debbie’s almond eyes clouded over, impassive and impene­trable. “Rikki, you’ve seen too many movies. Ron is strict. He believes in discipline. But he’s never laid a hand on Jared.”

  “He threw food in his face.”

  “Would you stop bringing that up? I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

  Mom’s fancy Singer with the quilting attachment sat on a specially designed table, protected by a tea-green cozy, crocheted by Debbie. Spriggy flowered cottons, folded and arranged by color, lined the shelves, awaiting incorporation into quilts that Mom no longer found the time to sew. Even in the shadowy dark of the sewing room everything looked sprightly and innocent on the surface, but surfaces betrayed nothing of what lurked underneath. Sparks sputtered in Erica’s belly. If only she could retreat into the shelter of her body and burst into flames. She was starving for air.

  “Do you feel all right, Rikki? You look very tired.” Debbie said.

  “I am tired,” she admitted. “I have a headache.”

  Debbie’s face softened. “I have Advil if you’d like.” She dug into her purse and handed Erica a plastic canister. “Maybe Jared is in the basement with your boys. He always loved those trains.” She scurried into the hall and down the stairs.

  Erica walked out onto the patio where at least she could breathe. Jared sat quietly by the barbeque in the moonlight. Above him, her mother’s hanging pots, overflowing with pansies, swayed in the breeze.

  “Well, hello there,” she said.

  “Hello,” said Jared, smashing an ant with his foot. “Sorry you couldn’t join me in the bathroom for a mood refresher.”

  “That would have been difficult to facilitate.”

  “I meant to ask you, what do you think of Nick? He told me you stopped by for a visit.”

  “Oh, he’s okay, I guess. I went to high school with him.”

  Jared scraped his foot across the concrete, massacring more helpless ants. “He’s a Safe House leader at the family clinic. He leads therapy groups and retreats and stuff. Mom loves him. Isn’t that a kick? I mean, they’re all so clueless.”

  “Did your mom tell you about her weird capillary disease?” Erica asked.

  “Yeah. Have you seen those bruises on her arms and legs? She tries to hide them, and she keeps telling me and Dad that its nothing, but I think she’s lying. I think they’re more serious than she’s letting on.”

  “I don’t believe she really has a blood disorder.” Erica ineffec­tually scraped off chunks of charred detritus from the barbeque grill.

  “Do you think maybe that when she said, ‘Don’t, Ron,’ to Dad, they were just arguing about something? Like maybe that he sprays Roundup on the cherry tree? She doesn’t like it when he does that. It makes me break out in hives.” He twisted the ends of his black T-shirt, which had a skull on it and flowers for eye sockets.

  “Could be,” Erica said. “But I doubt it.”

  “It’s me he hates,” Jared said.

  Ron’s resonant voice boomed from within the house. “Get your tuchas out from wherever you are, Jared! We’re leaving right now!”

  “I have a CD for you. Tomorrow morning,” Jared whispered urgently.

  “Okay,” Erica said, half listening. A robin nibbled at the bird feeder. The pansies gleamed in the creamy light of the full moon. She wanted to bathe in that light, to swallow it whole.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Erica rushed home from aerobics, begging out on further discussion of Dylan’s and Jason Schrabner’s Whispering Wind camp trunks. She didn’t have the patience for mundane conversation. The sun was rising steeply in a vivid blue sky. The haze from the expressway and the parkway had drifted elsewhere, and the mild breeze smelled pure as the Catskills. The impatiens in front of Jeff Russell’s old house glistened purple and pink. The whole world seemed supersaturated. When she arrived home, only mildly surprised to find Jared and Ashley at her doorstep, it only accelerated the sensation.

  Jared looked lankier and paler than ever, his hair devoid of green glue, bleached at the ends and hanging limply over the tops of his ears. He wore tight black jeans and that same black skull T-shirt. She noticed a new stud i
n his right ear. Ashley wore tight jeans too and a clingy flowered Betsey Johnson top. They both wore heavy backpacks.

  Jared handed her the new Robert Palmer CD. “It’s kind of pop, but I figured you’d like it,” he said.

  “Thanks,” she said, standing there with Sophia on her hip, awaiting what might come next. If Jared had warned her last night, she didn’t remember.

  “Well, this is it,” he said. “This is the day. I can’t stand it anymore. I’m leaving home.”

  “But where will you go?” Erica asked, hitching Sophia up onto her shoulder. This was more than she had bargained for.

  “To my friends Roger and Griffin in Philadelphia,” said Ashley. “They were teachers at my old Waldorf School. They’re like, at least forty, but they’re cool, like you.” Ashley tickled Sophia under the chin.

  “He’s got this house where we can stay, and Ashley says he can even get us jobs,” Jared added. “I’d love to earn my own money. Dad never pays me for all those hours I spend slaving away on his stupid lawn.”

  “How will you get there?” Erica asked, unbuttoning her jacket. Underneath her zipped-up cotton jacket, beads of sweat trickled down her stomach.

  “We’re taking the train,” Ashley said. “Don’t worry—we’re not hitchhiking or anything.”

  In high school, on hot days like this when summer seemed close enough to touch, Erica would cut class and take the LIRR into Penn Station and then the subway to the Village or the Upper West Side or even Times Square. Just to walk around through the streets and shops permeated with light and color and noise, breathing in the air filmy with dirt, feeling part of whatever might be going on. Just to open herself to the possibility that something earth-shattering was about to happen. Not that anything ever did. She always caught the train home in time for dinner, telling her parents she’d been studying at the library or that cross-country practice ran late.

  On her square of green front lawn, the earth crinkled and shook. She could dither and second-guess or plunge ahead on blind instinct. Her instinct, in the bright immediacy of the day, repeated the same message as Jared’s: get out while you can. She dug into her wallet and handed over three hundred dollars. “For whatever,” she said. “Call me. Let me know you’re all right.”

  “Of course I will, Aunt Rikki. Thanks so much for everything.” Jared put the money in the zippered pocket of his backpack.

  Ashley poked him in the side. “We gotta catch the train.”

  “Call me. Please.” Erica watched them run down the street, toward the train station, backpacks jiggling, and the way their images were caught in the filtered sunlight made Erica think of a photograph, as if the event occurring right before her eyes had already happened some time ago.

  The street filled with a thick silence. From a distance came the hum of the expressway, the whine of a leaf blower. A bright-yellow bird with red striped wings, so luminescent in color that it looked to have escaped from a cage rather than existing freely in nature, landed on their one tree, a big old maple. Overnight the maple’s leaves had transformed from tentative pastel to full-blown summer green. The bird cawed.

  “Da!” exclaimed Sophia, swiveling to track the bird as it soared up from the branch in an arc across the sky. “Da. Da. Doo. Doo. Da!”

  “‘A da da da. A doo doo da. That’s all I want to say to you,’” Erica sang, cradling her daughter.

  She walked inside, put Sophia down on her play mat, and chopped up a batch of collard greens for Sammy, who had grown a foot since his purchase. He stared at her with his dinosaur face. She was being paranoid, she knew, but those amber eyes seemed to be observing her, rendering judgment.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Erica could not sit still. She folded laundry, paid bills, scrubbed fingerprints off of all the doorknobs of the house, ordered some art materials from a children’s catalog called Strawberry Alarm Clock and swim trunks from another one called Watery Wonderland, and then shopped for groceries and picked up the camp trunks with Lisa.

  Debbie’s inevitable call came after school, as she was leaving to pick up electrical wiring for Dylan’s Lego robot.

  “Oh my God, Rikki!” Debbie screeched. “I went by school to pick Jared up for his allergist appointment, and he wasn’t there! Apparently he never showed up for school this morning! They were supposed to call me if he skipped class! They promised!”

  The photographic image returned to Erica: Jared and Ashley rounding the corner and walking off into the clear perfect morning, their backpacks bobbing behind them. With that action, they’d mutated into bouncing dots, location unknown.

  “Though guess who else is missing,” Debbie’s shrieks dissolved into tremulous, tearful snorts. “Ashley. I’m trying to get in touch with her mother, but she’s such a flake—she could be in Aruba for all I know.”

  Erica pictured tears running down Debbie’s cheeks, streaked with blue eye shadow. A lump rose in her throat, thick and sad; she punched it down.

  Dylan fidgeted by the refrigerator, nibbling on an apricot Roll-Up. “Mom, hurry up,” he whined. “I need you.”

  “I’ll be right with you, honey,” she whispered.

  “Do you have any possible idea where he might have gone?” Debbie pleaded. “Did he say anything to you? You know, he likes you. He told me Sunday that you were the only person in the family who wasn’t a total idiot. Those were his exact words.”

  Even Debbie admitted that Jared knew who was on his side. Erica was protecting the child, and when it came down to the wire, wasn’t that her obligation as a mother? Debbie lied to Erica about her marriage, her bruises, her whole life. Surely she could lie to Debbie about Jared.

  “No, I’m sorry, I have no idea at all.” Erica felt dizzy, her cheeks flushed and hot. “I have to go now.”

  “Are you all right, Mommy?” Dylan asked. “You look all red.”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Let’s get that robot together.”

  That evening Ethan called to tell Erica that he could not fly home that weekend. He’d given a presentation on his nonlinear asymmetric frameworks, allowing for comparisons of non-nested models, and the CEO of West Coast operations, James Ranken, happened to be in the Boca Raton office. He’d told Ethan he was really impressed with his work and invited him and Erica’s buddy Stephan, remember him, out to LA for a meeting Monday. So, as long as he had to fly out West anyway, he thought he’d spend the weekend surfing with his sister Pauline in Mendocino. Erica didn’t mind, did she?

  No, of course not, Erica assured him. “Jared ran away from home,” she added.

  “Jesus,” Ethan said. Erica swore she could hear him picking his ear over the phone. “It’s a dangerous world out there for a naïve kid like him.”

  Jared was naïve, Erica admitted to herself. At his age, she’d routinely hitchhiked with her friends across the Island to Nassau Beach. She doubted that Jared had ever before so much as ventured on a public bus. “Yeah, but—” she started to say.

  “Not to change the subject,” Ethan interrupted, “but something else I forgot to mention. I’m going to be working in the Boca office the first ten days of June.”

  “So,” Erica said. She paced about the kitchen with the cordless, wiping up spills: raspberry jam, cereal crumbles, dirt from Dylan’s baseball cleats.

  “So, but this time they’ve offered to put everybody up, the kids too, in a really nice hotel for ten days. It’s right on the beach. There’s a pool. Everything paid for. They’ll even get you a rental car. You can take the kids to Disney World.”

  “They’re still in school in June,” she said, wiping down the handle to the refrigerator. “Dylan has his robotics fair.”

  “Can’t he stay with a friend or something?”

  Erica thought of Don Johnson and coconut oil. She thought of breezy quiet: no phones, no lies, though, probably, no coke, which already seemed difficult to imagine, s
himmering as it did, consistently, at the edge of her consciousness.

  “Whaddya think?” asked Ethan expectantly.

  “I’ll make it happen,” Erica said.

  : : :

  Sunday night brought the standard family dinner at her parents’, featuring takeout from Taste of Tuscany. Everyone sat quietly, picking at their chicken parmigiana; only Erica’s father, David, ate with any gusto.

  “Mom sold a travel agent a six bedroom house in Westbury Manor, new construction,” he announced proudly. “And not only did she earn a tidy commission,” he said, his arm around her mother, “but she booked us—at considerable savings—on a tour of European capitals for our fortieth anniversary this August.”

  “That’s nice,” muttered Debbie weakly.

  “I’d be so happy now,” Mom sniffled, “if it wasn’t for Jared.”

  Erica arranged her stuffed shells in a spiral as her father detailed the Athens leg of the trip.

  “Oh, David, how can you talk about vacationing at a time like this!” Mom scratched the back of her neck.

  “Life has to go on. As best as it can, babe. Let me show the kids the whole itinerary.” He left the table to rummage around on his desk.

  “That’s a sweet tank top, Rikki,” Ron said.

  Erica ignored him, though she did like her new tank top, a size 8–10, ribbed, with a T-back.

  “Didja see the game last night?” Ron tapped the dining room table for emphasis. “Mookie Wilson got five hits against the Padres.”

  “You know I never watch the stupid Mets.” Erica drizzled tomato sauce in lines across the pasta, like it was one of the twins’ preschool art projects. She didn’t mind Ron’s baseball banter. It perpetuated the illusion he was actually the jovial, all-American fellow he made himself out to be.

  “At least you’re a baseball fan,” Ron said, as if reading her mind. “Your husband is too good for sports. What does he do in his spare time, watch algebra competitions?”