After dinner, Erica bleached raspberry stains out of the kitchen counter. More people were looking at the house Monday morning. Ethan stuck glasses in the dishwasher. “Anders wasn’t at the tournament,” he noted.
“Maybe his son quit soccer.” Erica picked at her cuticles. They looked gross. She needed a manicure. “Carson,” she added for good measure. “His son’s name was Carson. He wasn’t there either.”
“That’s weird, given that Anders was so involved with the scheduling and all,” Ethan said.
Erica didn’t respond, only scrubbed harder.
“I’ve got to help Dylan with some quadratic equations,” Ethan said.
Sophia clattered pot lids across the floor. As Erica leaned over to pick them up, she felt Ethan’s hair brush against her shoulder, and she lifted up her head, hoping for affection—a kiss?—but instead he whispered in her ear. “And another thing,” he said. “You should eat better or sleep more or something. You look like crap.”
: : :
Every day Debbie exhibited incremental improvements. The best the medical establishment had to offer had brought their skills to bear, and they’d succeeded: Debbie would live. She wiggled her fingers and toes and, with the diligent efforts of the physical therapist, sat up with the support of a wheelchair. Erica wheeled Debbie around the halls, taking her to the glassed-in walkway to view the fall leaves. She fed her applesauce from a spoon. Her guttural mouthings began to resemble comprehensible speech. Back in her room, Debbie ran out of steam and closed her eyes; she snored softly. Erica watched more baseball. The Yankees swept their last four-game series but still could not catch the Red Sox.
At aerobics, Lisa and Justine expressed concern over her sleep, her skin, her mental state.
“You need a manicure,” said Justine. “And a massage. You have to take care of yourself.”
“Maybe you should see somebody,” suggested Lisa.
“I’m fine,” said Erica. “Leave me alone.”
Debbie’s doctors transferred her to a rehabilitation facility. It smelled better there, like air freshener, and the walls were covered with generic prints of summer meadows and seascapes: Debbie’s favorite art, in truth. The atmosphere of false cheer remained unchanged. Patients of varying capabilities struggled through the hallways with walkers or lolled in chairs, nodding like heroin addicts. All the aides were young, with lilting Caribbean accents. If Erica didn’t know better, she’d think they’d been hired by Housemates.
After Debbie had been there about a week, one of them greeted Erica by name as she walked into the common room.
“Debbie’s so lucky to have such a loving family, Rikki,” she gushed. “I see how you visit every day, how you treat her. And that husband of hers—what a sweetheart! Come with me. Debbie’s learned a new trick. She’s playing Scrabble.”
“Scrabble” involved helping Debbie correctly identify the letters and then form the words. Debbie’s hair, combed by the aides, stuck out in wavy bristles so unlike her usual pixie cut, streaks of gray showing at the crown. She was wearing pink stretch pants and a matching scoop-neck shirt—easy to get on and off—that Erica knew the real Debbie wouldn’t have worn to take out the garbage. Confined indoors, her skin was reddened and mottled, puffy with medication.
“Can you find me an A, Debbie?” Erica asked. Debbie studied the wooden letters with an intent but bland expression. After mistakenly picking a T and an E, she successfully located the A. They went through the same routine for an I and an M. Erica put the word “AIM” down on a double-word space.
They played until the board was almost filled, when Erica detected a presence hovering over her. She turned and saw the chatty aide, and then behind her, Ron, well ahead of schedule. She expected him to shoo her out, maybe even follow her into a hallway and press her against a wall, but he merely nodded curtly.
“How ya doin’, sunshine!” he crowed.
Debbie blinked in the fluorescent light.
“You look beautiful, sweetie,” Ron said.
“Hell-o Ron,” Debbie slurred.
“Who’s sitting next to you?” Ron prompted.
Debbie’s brow wrinkled in concentration. “Rik-ki,” she finally said, in a voice lacking both anger and forgiveness.
Ron evidently tolerated her presence now, but it had nothing to do with respect for her power, rather, the opposite. Erica was no longer dangerous. She was supposed to accept this situation for the rest of her life: Debbie’s diminishment of self and this perpetuation of lies.
When she got home, she called Officer Scratchy, whose real name was Aaron McCloskey. Officer Scratchy was at a meeting. She left a message on his machine, but the rest of the week went by, and he never called back.
The following Monday, after aerobics, instead of going to the rehab facility, she drove over to Ron and Debbie’s for the first time since that fateful August afternoon.
The front door was unlocked. She walked into the living room. Debbie’s absence was palpable. The rust-colored blood stains were still there. A layer of dust covered the furniture. There were magazines scattered everywhere. She peeked into Jared’s room. The sheets still lay crumpled from the last night he’d slept there, his bedspread fallen to the floor. His posters were still on the wall. He’d taken his record collection. She was about to peek under the bed to see if his dope stash was there, when she heard Ron walking down the hall.
“Hello?” he called out. He was wrapped in a towel, his nubs of thinning hair gleaming wetly. He smelled of shaving cream. His eyes narrowed when he saw her. “What are you doing here?” he growled. “Get out of my son’s room.”
“We have to talk,” Erica said.
“What about?” His voice sounded soft and tired. “Haven’t we talked enough?”
“We have to talk about Debbie.” She followed Ron into the kitchen.
Ron stuck a strawberry Pop-Tart in the toaster oven. “Rikki,” he said, “she’s getting better every day. You saw her yesterday. She called you by name.”
“She’ll never be the same,” Erica said. “You know that.”
They stared each other down for a minute or so, then Ron took his Pop-Tart out of the oven. As he bit into it drops of steaming red liquid dripped onto his chin. His nose still looked pink and swollen. “I got laid off last week,” he said. “There wasn’t a market for my musical taste, they told me. And they want a younger voice for adult contemporary. More humor. More outrageousness.”
“I’m sorry about that,” Erica said.
“Want some coffee?” he asked, pulling out a jar of freeze-dried granules.
“No, thanks,” Erica said. “Honestly, I’m sorry about your job, but we need to talk about August. You hit Debbie. That’s why she tripped. That’s why she fell. And you hit her lots of other times. Jared told me.” Dizzy, she leaned against the counter.
“Get real,” Ron said, putting down his unfinished Pop-Tart. His voice betrayed a trace of the old vehemence. “I didn’t hurt Debbie. You heard the doctor. She had a stroke.”
“You knew she was taking Coumadin. You knew she was taking blood thinner.” Erica stood up. Leaning made her look weak, and that she could not permit.
“I did not!” Ron said.
“Don’t lie to me,” Erica hissed, closing in on Ron, as face to face as she had the other time, the time before. “I’m so sick of your lies. You knew she was taking Coumadin, and you hit her anyway. She had bruises all the time; she hid them under her clothes. She gave me all that bullshit about a blood disease, but I never believed her.”
“She did have a blood disease. That’s why her doctor prescribed the Coumadin.”
Erica grabbed his wrist, digging into his tender skin, still damp from the shower.“The Coumadin caused the blood disease! It wasn’t treating it!”
His staggering illogic left her reeling, without purchase. He was gaining his equili
brium back, she could tell. His shoulders stiffened. If he dared throw another punch at her, she would smack him in the temple. No wimpy nose punch this time. She would take him by surprise. She would knock him out.
“You’re a murderer!” she snapped.
“Come again?” Ron asked. His eyes remained as impassive as ever, but his hands shook.
“You killed my sister! You think I don’t know it? You can fool the doctors, and the social workers, and the police, and my whole damn family, but you can’t fool me. I’m going to make you pay for this like you deserve!”
“Now, look here,” Ron said, his voice cool and steady. “We’ve all been through a horrible tragedy. We need to be there for Debbie whether we like each other or not. Why don’t we let the rest of this go?”
“Because it’s a lie!”
“Speaking of lies,” Ron said, “I know what Jared told the police. But he’s a storyteller, that young man. His story could change.”
“Jared told the truth,” Erica said.
“Testimony can change,” Ron said. “And you’ve got a lot to lose. Your rich little scheming hubby for one. Your four children for another. Maybe you’d better stop now. You always thought I was so stupid. You and your hubby both. You always looked down on me. You always made fun of me. You made fun of my musical taste. You made fun of my military service. You made fun of the fact I know how to screw in a lightbulb without calling a repairman. You think I don’t know what you’re about?”
Erica wanted the last word. She wanted at least that pitiful morsel of satisfaction, because she didn’t trust in divine judgment, and that seemed the only other option left. But as she stood there, searching her brain for the knockout comment, she saw something new: Ron’s eyes, swollen with tears.
“I love my wife,” he said. “You think I don’t love my wife? And I used to like you too, Rikki. You were so feisty. So sexy.”
Those tears rendered her impotent in a way his threats never could.
“Your love,” she finally choked out, “your love is not the kind of love I want.”
: : :
That night, Erica watched the seventh game of the World Series. She’d been ignoring the series, a battle between two evils: Ron’s horrible Mets and the despised Boston Red Sox. But she had to root for someone. For the first time in her lifetime as a Yankees fan she threw her loyalties to the Red Sox. She’d attended college in Boston, she told herself, only a mile from Fenway Park. Maybe this small shift in her alliances would serve as compromise, her bargain with the fates. In the ninth inning, with two outs and two strikes on the batter, the Red Sox held the lead. Erica allowed herself, prematurely, the pleasure of this small victory, and then Bill Buckner, at first base, let Mookie Wilson’s baseball roll through his legs, and Ron’s stupid Mets, his undeserving Mets, won the World Series.
CHAPTER FORTY
The sun continued shining relentlessly through an unusually warm November. Erica packed her family’s life away in boxes. With each box, the house looked lonelier and sadder, deprived of its character. Before the real estate agents arrived with potential buyers in tow, Erica baked rolls of chocolate chip cookies and put Phil Collins on the stereo. Strangers paraded through her home, admiring the flowered accent tiles and marble vanity in the powder room.
For the first time in many years, Erica frequently skipped aerobics class. There didn’t seem to be much point. No matter how much she kicked her legs or swung her arm weights, her legs still crinkled with cellulite and her upper arms hung thin and limp from their bones. No one complimented her anymore. Instead they treated her with a sincere, but nervous and distant, kindness. They all knew about Debbie and her stroke, and Jared’s DDD troubles, and how Ethan, beset by scandal, had been forced out of town. Worse rumors circulated, Erica was convinced, when she wasn’t around. Even loyal Lisa didn’t expect her to look her best.
She did the coke in the basement. At first she restricted it to the cedar closet, but then she stopped bothering. It was not like Ethan was ever home anymore, and if the boys were off at school, or their multitudinous activities, or sleeping, who would be looking? Only Sophia, and Sophia, thank God, still napped.
The week of Thanksgiving the weather finally turned gray, raw, and wet. Even inside the house Erica shivered, wearing one of Ethan’s baggy Irish sweaters all day long. Her nose ran. Her muscles ached. She put on the new Van Halen CD she’d bought at Tower Records. She remembered how Jared had loudly insisted that Eddie Van Halen was the best guitarist in history, that he put Eric Clapton to shame. Maybe. He certainly smashed and pulverized the strings. He made her eardrums tingle like she’d dunked her head into an icy lake. Whereas when Eric Clapton sang “Layla,” his chords stretched out and thrummed and floated, taking her back to the day when she first heard the song on WNEW radio, taking her back to those mossy bricks of the Mackay estate, all those days when she couldn’t get the melody out of her head. The woods were always impenetrably dark when she snuck out of her parents’ house and walked through the trees, but when she lay down on the damp ground, her body suffused with heady anticipation, she watched the outlines of the limbs and leaves reveal themselves.
Van Halen only took her back as far as last spring on her parents’ patio, her mother’s pansies blooming in clay pots, the robin nibbling at the bird feeder, and Jared leaning intently forward, wearing his favorite black T-shirt with the skull on it. She’d felt remnants of that heady anticipation reawaken then, spread their tentacles and adapt to new air: a nascent, fragile conceit.
She should stop. Now. Today. She should file Anders’s number away with her memorabilia, like a ticket stub from a concert, a trace of a vanished thrill.
Down the two flights of stairs and over the screech of Van Halen she heard Sophia’s voice. In her high burble, she named objects in her room: “Birdie! Duckie! Bear! Blankie!” and then, her voice rising, a sense of urgency intruding, “Mama, Mama!” She rattled the rails of her baby gate.
This was the saving grace of Erica’s life, the incessant demands of her children. They never allowed her more than a few minutes to brood. Marked and dirty she might be, but never purposeless.
: : :
The restaurant in Port Jefferson had leather-bound menus but smelled institutional, like Debbie’s rehabilitation facility. Erica’s mother had originally broached the idea of suspending Thanksgiving altogether, but her father, unhappy with that plan, made reservations at this inn that specialized in stuffy family dinners. Ron was coming, ruining Erica’s resolution never to see his face again. Jared was flying in, released from the military academy for the weekend. And Debbie was coming. For Debbie’s first excursion outside institutional walls since her “attack,” as her mother continued to refer to it, Ron was hiring a special handicapped van. They hadn’t arrived yet. Ethan, Erica, and the kids settled in next to Mom and Dad at the long rectangular table.
They would fit in: all the other families eating there looked sad in some way. Across from them sat an ancient couple, the husband in a wheelchair, his wife assisting him in cutting up his food. An obese boy sat with his lumpy-looking parents and a sharp elderly woman in a Chanel suit. Next to them sat a Japanese family: a father in slacks and a sports jacket; a petite mother in red skirt and matching sweater; two silent little girls in flowered party dresses. They stared curiously at the cheese crust on their onion soup.
“I don’t like onions,” declared Jesse.
“Let me see if I can get you something else,” said Erica. She raised her hand for the waiter.
Mom shook her head. “It’s a fixed menu. I don’t think they do substitutions, do they, David?” She looked at her husband for affirmation, but he merely shrugged.
“Where are Ron and Jared? They’re late.” Dad looked out at the circular graveled driveway, where a wind-whipped rain was driving the last shriveled leaves off a thick oak tree.
“They were meeting up with Debbie
at Shady Oaks. They’re all coming together in the van.” Suzanne spooned onion soup into her mouth, wrinkling her nose in a gesture that reminded Erica of Debbie. The old Debbie. “Too salty,” she complained.
“I hope the roads aren’t too dangerous in this weather,” David said, drumming his fingers on the table.
“We drove here perfectly safely,” noted Ethan, leaning back in his chair. He and Dylan were passing a handheld electronic game back and forth.
“Iz everzeething satisfactory?” the waiter, evidently an immigrant from some Eastern European country, asked Erica.
“Can we get a replacement for this soup for my son? He doesn’t like onions.”
The twins crashed their Matchbox cars into the plastic turkey centerpiece.
The waiter nodded amiably. “I am sure. I will ask chef.”
A large white van pulled up outside the bay window of the inn. Erica watched Ron and Jared step out to assist the driver as he slid open the door of the van and extended a ramp. Ron pushed Debbie’s wheelchair down the incline. Debbie, dressed as if ready for skiing, sunk deep in her down hood and woolen scarf. Ron laid a blanket over her lap while Jared rushed ahead to open the inn’s heavy wooden door. The wheelchair rocked from side to side as Ron steered over the gravel.
“I sure hope she doesn’t catch cold. I sure hope this wasn’t a mistake.” Suzanne scratched the back of her neck. Both she and David stood up, making room for the wheelchair at the end of the table, pulling out chairs for Ron and Jared.
Jared remained standing, clearly uncomfortable with the forced intimacy of this family gathering. His hair was shaved into sidewalls just like his father’s, and his whole body looked harder, stretched and taut.
Wrong Highway Page 32