The fluorescent lights blared, the crowd shifted in their seats, a few people left.
But most of the crowd lingered, shouting out questions.
Was the Pritima Center only for boys? No, but they segregated the sexes to minimize distractions.
Where was the center located? Sorry, but to protect the families involved, they couldn’t release that information.
Erica waggled her arm in the air, eventually catching Rafferty’s attention. She struggled to make herself audible from her perch at the back of the large room. Her voice emerged squeaky and tentative, nothing like the firm, strong voice she heard in her head.
“What are your criteria for sending teenagers to this program?” she asked.
“It depends on the individual situation,” said Dr. Rafferty. “But we find it works remarkably well for a wide variety of young people. Now, if you’ll excuse me,” she said, looking at her watch, “I think it’s getting late, so I’ll turn this program back to Debbie Lassler.”
Debbie announced that cookies and coffee were available at the side of the gymnasium, informational pamphlets at the front. Erica forged her way over to the side and stuffed a couple of cookies in her mouth. Their butterscotch sweetness settled her nerves as well as her stomach; she’d never realized how delicious cookies could be, even these, straight from their Sam’s Club box. She grabbed three more, plus a full cup of black coffee, as she navigated through the crowd to the front. Parents recognizing her as Debbie’s sister nodded sympathetically.
Debbie manned the informational table, straightening a pile of pamphlets. She was wearing white slacks, a nubby teal sweater, and mauve lip gloss. “Thanks for coming, Rikki,” she said.
“That was nervy of you to get up and speak like that,” Erica said.
“I’m getting used to it. I even wrote this pamphlet for Dr. Rafferty on ten warning signs of DDD. It’s funny; I’m so desperately unhappy and worried, but when I do work for Dr. Rafferty, it settles me down somehow.”
Erica guzzled the acrid, steaming coffee. “I gotta tell you, Debbie. That woman puts a pretty gloss on that Pritima Center, makes it sound like summer camp, but it sounds pretty abusive, if you ask me. You don’t know anything about this place except what she’s showing you on those slides! How do you know if the kids get enough to eat, or where they sleep?”
“I respect Dr. Rafferty implicitly.” Debbie’s lips tightened as she corralled all the pens and pencils into a plastic case. “She’s done wonders for Jared.”
“Wonders for Jared! Last time I looked, Jared ran away from home. Some wonders!” Erica crushed her Styrofoam cup with her fist. Remnants of hot coffee dripped through her fingers. She wasn’t quite sure how she’d accomplished that. Styrofoam seemed difficult to crush. She licked her singed thumb.
“Rikki, control yourself. People are listening.” She composed herself in a deliberate way that she’d clearly learned in therapy. “Rikki, I know deep down we both want the same thing. We both want Jared home and safe, don’t we?”
“Of course,” Erica answered, truthfully. A presumption of ultimate safety underlay the ripples of risk in which she and Jared swam. It allowed her to look back at the image of Jared and Ashley disappearing around the corner, and all the lies and evasions that necessarily followed, with a degree of equanimity. But that equanimity was wavering, that high-pitched luster of controlled danger fading. Two months had passed since he ran away. He’d never called, despite his promise. If only she could see his face, and reassure herself, as she’d reassured Debbie, that he was not dead.
“He’ll come back,” Erica said.
“How do you know?” Debbie sobbed.
“I just do.” Jared was no doubt terrified, out there in the world.
Debbie looked at her sharply.
“I mean, he has to.” Erica sucked her thumb, bright red and developing a blister. “I mean, probably Ron’s detective’s going to find him, right?’
“Ron thinks so. That thumb looks scary, Rikki. I think I have a Band-Aid in my bag.”
“I don’t need one.” Sharp bursts of pain were shooting down through her thumb to the base of her palm. The sensation seemed separate from her, an interesting phenomenon. “Promise me, whatever happens, you won’t send him to that Pritima Center?”
“Yeah, yeah, Rikki, I promise,” Debbie said. “Do me a favor. Take this Band-Aid.”
Patti materialized at their side, and when she saw Debbie’s red eyes and Erica’s burnt finger, plus the runny nose that she was dabbing at with a Kleenex, she enveloped them both in a fierce embrace. Her body was a reservoir of competing fragrances: mint, tobacco, an unctuous floral perfume. Erica wangled her way out of the press of skin and jogged back in the cool rain to her home and her children waiting in their footed pajamas.
Ethan called from Florida, telling her he was eagerly anticipating their arrival. He’d rented her a car. They’d love their big suite at the Ritz Carlton. He’d even arranged for her to meet a real estate agent.
Until late in the night she threw summer clothes and bathing suits into suitcases. She pulled the Band-Aid off her thumb, where a large blister had formed. She picked at the thick skin of the blister until it burst, sending a spurt of fluid onto one of Sophia’s cotton stretchies. The pain vanished. Her thumb was already healing, though if Debbie were there, she would no doubt instruct Erica to rub Neosporin on it. Erica looked at the pile of unpacked items in front of her, plus a tilting pile of papers that included their plane tickets and a mass of coloring and dot-to-dot books. Ten hours before departure, the mess on her family room floor represented one thing: escape.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
JUNE 1986
The nice thing about being on a plane is that you are floating above the earth, totally enclosed. No one can call you. You can’t go anywhere. So even if you are tending to the never-ending needs of three restless preschoolers, you are free.
When you’re driving a car that is not your own, where your tush has yet to carve an imprint into the seat, where your tapes aren’t stacked in the center console and the floor is not littered with wrinkled to-do lists, you remain free.
There are no right or wrong highways in a state you do not know. There are only new highways. You rarely check direction.
No one knows exactly where you are, save your children in the car with you. Your husband spends 90 percent of his waking hours in a dreary over-air-conditioned cubicle. He thinks it’s better than his one in Manhattan, but you can’t tell the difference. You will not run into your neighbors at the supermarket or your mother at the dry cleaner’s. A few elderly relatives do live in your vicinity, but you did not notify them of your presence. Besides, the Florida you are currently experiencing bears no resemblance to the Florida you’ve previously known: acres of look-alike bungalows surrounding a golf course; mosquitoes buzzing around overwatered grass, thick and spiky as cactus; the horrible all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets stinking of overcooked cabbage.
This Florida saturates every cell of your body with light and heat.
Your children are very young. Your twin boys have just celebrated their fifth birthdays, and your daughter is all of seven months. If they had their druthers, they would spend their days in your luxurious hotel room, watching cartoons on the king-size bed or, in the case of your daughter, propelling herself on her tummy like a caterpillar over to the electrical outlet by the lamp. The twins are fascinated with the hotel bar and wash down bags of potato chips and M & Ms with cans of soda. Every day the goodies are replaced like magic, and you don’t care, you just sign your name and room number, and your husband’s company pays the bill.
The twins like swimming in the big pool with the slide, and for a time you enjoy this too, plunging down the slide with one or the other in your lap, inhaling sharply right before the cold blueness envelops you. You raise the white flag by your pool chair and a well-built waiter w
ith spiky blond hair, maybe ten years younger than you, brings you BLTs and frothy piña coladas on a tray. He smiles at you, and you can tell he admires your body.
But soon you grow restless, and the backs of your thighs chafe against the plastic strips of the chair as if your muscles were about to burst through your skin and propel you through the air. So you drive.
Your kids are young, so you can pile them in the car and cart them wherever you want to. As long as they are with you, they will be happy. You know this will not last. Already your nine-year-old son asks questions. He seeks privacy. He is developing a life you know nothing about. But he is not with you now. He is back home in New York, staying at his friend’s house and attending his last weeks of elementary school. Meanwhile, these little ones open themselves up to you with absolute trust.
You comfort yourself that you live up to that trust, and most of the time you do. You feed them and clothe them, laugh and play games with them, wipe their noses, press their sweaty, needy faces against your breast. You balance that against the part of you that keeps driving, and the Ziploc bag of cocaine that enables you to transport these children until the sun sinks down in an orange splash, a hazy moon rises up, and the highway empties out until it seems like only you in your private spaceship are sailing through the night sky.
Your kids, or more precisely your baby daughter, have made the presence of that Ziploc bag feasible, if unwise. It’s sitting right in your diaper bag, between a nearly identical bag of rice cereal and a tube of Desitin. The airport personnel gave no more than a cursory look to your diaper bag as you carried it through security and stuffed it beneath your seat on the plane. You were wearing leggings and an oversize flowered sweatshirt, hair in a ponytail, the baby in her stroller, holding your twins by each hand—how innocuous can you get? Nevertheless, you told yourself you weren’t going to take the chance. But in the end, you couldn’t bring yourself not to.
Besides, you tell yourself, the coke is not changing you. You’ve always been restless, a seeker of thrills. Even as a little girl, your mother always told you to settle down, to play with dolls or read a book like your older sister. Your energy has always amazed people. You’ve always been a night owl. All the drugs are doing is potentiating your true self.
This bad habit of yours does not hold a candle to how so many people you know are screwing up their lives, compromising themselves beyond endurance. Your sister lives in fear, your brother-in-law in anger, your parents in a tangle of lies and ignorance. Your friends live lives stultifying in their monotony. Your husband, whose intensity and penetrating brilliance you have always loved, seems to have lost his rudder. Even your nephew, only fifteen, who should be young enough to see more clearly, for the fires to burn stronger, even he seems destined to return to his prison.
They are all in danger. They are in more danger than you. And they aren’t having fun. You are having fun.
At first, when you drive, you don’t stray too far from the hotel. You drive past spanking-new developments, large houses with burnt-orange stucco roofs and oval, jewel-like pools, vast shopping malls, dentist offices, and health clubs. You drive past miles of this until little breaks the flat landscape but produce stands, roadhouse bars, and the occasional sagging frame house. Then even those outposts of construction end. Reedy swamps, housing nothing but alligators and swooping herons, stretch on to the horizon. Only then do you turn around, and drive all the way back to A1A, the coastal road, where you drive through archways of waving palms and fuchsia flowers, catching glimpses of the mansions behind their wrought-iron gates.
Next you venture farther, south to Miami, where you buy a clingy black dress. The kids are restless in the dressing room, but they are very young, and you ply them with lollipops and toys. You stand for a long time in front of the mirror, smoothing the dress down your hips, feeling its rough-hemmed edge, right where the curve of your butt intersects with the top of your tanned thigh. You are tanning despite your lack of pool time from the sun streaming in through the windows of your car. That sickly yellow tone, so obvious under fluorescent lights in West Meadow, has vanished. Your skin is a caramel brown.
Not bad. That thick brown hair with just a touch of a wave to it, cascading past your shoulders, red highlights gleaming in the sun. Despite the heat, you’ve freed it from its ponytail so you can feel the fullness of its weight on your back. Those dark-brown eyes, that nose that’s a mite too long, those high cheekbones—an angular face, but one that ages well. Those full breasts, a little saggy after four kids but still respectable, milk-white against your tan. Those long legs with muscles well honed from a lifetime of track team and aerobics. Your knees are bony and scuffed like a child’s. Your right forearm has a cut on it that you’ve had for a while but don’t remember getting. The scab on it is picked raw. Your nails, too, are ragged: the sparkly red nail polish you painted on your first day at the hotel has worn off in uneven ridges, and your left thumbnail is chipped. You don’t mind these small imperfections. They mean you’re active and alive. Debbie’s fingernails have been perfectly manicured pale peach half-moons for as long as you can remember.
Fifteen years ago you admired yourself like this, in your pink room full of stuffed animals, while your mother unpacked groceries in the kitchen. At any moment she could have barged in on you, as she had the propensity to do, with a pile of clean laundry or a reminder to walk the dog. The night before, you lost your virginity to a guy you didn’t particularly like, whose shallowness was part of his perverse appeal, who had gorgeous sleek hair that hung down past his shoulders and jeans that wrinkled perfectly at the backs of the knees. His name was Max. He wasn’t the guy you truly had a crush on, the one who always strummed his guitar with his eyes closed on the stairs beneath the school auditorium. You were always tongue-tied with stupidity around any guy you really liked. This thing with Max of the sleek chestnut hair was just something that happened at a party, one of those overnight ones at the Mackay estate, but it was time, and you were glad.
You smoothed your hands over your body then like you had never seen it before, and in a way you hadn’t—so much was new over the past year in your lanky, late-to-mature frame. You felt like you’d burst through the tunnel you’d been living in for so long and out into the wide, light world.
The next day, under the auditorium stairs, you would finally speak to Jeff, the guy you really liked. You would tell him that when he played the guitar, you trembled inside. To your astonishment, he would not make fun of you. Instead, he would give you private concerts in his parents’ basement, one block away from what is now your sister’s house.
Several years later, at an MIT frat party, you would initiate a ridiculous conversation with your future husband about his college major. In the early hours of that Sunday morning, you would follow him upstairs and wash his beautiful strawberry blond-ringlets with Herbal Essence shampoo. It would take four cups of an Everclear beverage concocted by one of his fratmates to give you the nerve, but you would do it.
Today in Miami, at the age of thirty-one, while your youngest three children stare at you with eyes glazed over by sleepiness, sugar, and boredom, you realize that despite the birth of these children plus their older brother back in New York, your body still retains its lushness and richness. There was a time in your early teens when it seemed like you were never going to catch up to your sister, but you have surpassed her by far. The weight of her thirty-six years has saddened and suppressed her, but you remain unscathed. You bathe in the light of your good fortune.
The following morning, before sunrise, before your husband straggles out of bed and goes for a run before heading to his dreary office, you load three sleeping children into the car and drive to Disney World. This is a four-hour drive north and east, a ridiculous round-trip for one day.
Unlike the shopping centers or alligator-ridden swamps or pastel streets of Miami Beach, your sons are not indifferent to this excursion. Everyone they’ve met
in Florida has asked them if they are going to Disney World. They have seen ads for it on the plane, on television, on billboards. They can’t wait to meet their favorite characters. Once they emerge from the fog of sleep and you hand them granola bars, they chatter excitedly all the way there.
You arrive right as the park is opening. You fork over sixty dollars for day passes, walk through the gate. The boys are already racing down a preternaturally clean path towards Cinderella’s castle. You swerve around other, slower families to keep them in your sight, maneuvering the baby’s elaborate stroller as if it were your rental car.
You attend Mickey Mouse’s birthday party. The boys sing along, watching intently as Mickey blows out his candles and opens a large pile of presents. They pose for pictures with Mickey Mouse and Goofy. The baby looks on wide-eyed, turning her head rapidly from right to left to catch the next flash of colorful action. And you surprise yourself. You are as jittery with excitement as they are.
Despite the fact that they are tall for their age, often the boys don’t measure up to the forty-five inches of height required for the most exciting rides. Or they qualify, but you can’t go on with the baby, and they are scared to ride without you. No way will they enter the Haunted House. Each ride necessitates at least a half-hour’s wait in line. So you ride around in boats listening to mechanical puppets sing their saccharine song about what a small world it is. And then it hits you. You rode through this very same artificial river twenty-two years ago, your bony knee vibrating against your sister’s soft thigh. Disneyworld is the New York World’s Fair all over again.
Wandering into Tomorrowland, you revisit more clumps of the World’s Fair, transferred here in their entirety, utterly unchanged by passing years. The same moving sidewalks, the same video telephones. In the glaring light of the present these visions of the future look worn and diminished. They are a lie. Seeing them makes you think of your sister, the way she tentatively dipped her leather sandal in the water of the fountain, contemplating for a split-second joining you at its center. And then the way she pulled her sandal off and dried the leather off with the front of her new blouse from Bloomingdales. Something in the water or the leather left a brown stain on the blouse that none of Mom’s miracle cleaners could extract. Mom was furious. Your sister never wore the blouse again.
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