by Nancy Rue
Maybe the rock gave me the insane burst of courage to call Rich. Or maybe my concern for Jayne just overrode anything he might say to me.
Almost.
He gave me monosyllabic answers at first, until I said I was concerned about her spending so much time alone.
“You had to rub it in, didn’t you?”
I stopped.
“You’re the reason I’m working nights, Demitria.”
“This is not about you,” I said. “I’m trying to talk to you about our daughter.”
“She’s fine. We’re working it out. Anything else?”
I cramped my fingers around the phone. “Just because I was an unfaithful wife doesn’t mean I’m not a good mother.”
“Oh, you’re a great mother.” The serrated sarcasm sawed through me. “Only, great mothers don’t lie to their kids so they can go off and sleep with somebody who isn’t their father.”
“Rich—for Pete’s sake!” I said. And then I heard the click of me hanging up on him.
Sullivan torqued a head bolt down and thought it was too bad he couldn’t do family therapy with the whole Costanas clan. He glanced at the manual he had propped on a cart. The head bolts had to be torqued down in order . . .
Rich would probably require years of extensive healing help. Sully had people who could do wonders with him.
And then there were the two children.
Sully torqued the wrench.
First get them out of that hole of a house with the despondent father—then shake the attitude out of that Christopher kid.
Dang, was the bolt stripped or what?
Typically kids that age turned against the offending parent, but these two didn’t seem to have considered for a second what their mother had gone through with a depressed husband—especially since they themselves had obviously suffered in his silences too.
Sully wiped his hands and frowned at the manual. He was as stuck with those heads as he was with the ones on his car.
He tossed the rag and went into the office, where a cold frappuccino waited for him in the tiny refrigerator he’d picked up at a church yard sale. He’d offered one to Demi at their session yesterday, but she’d been too busy pacing—until he asked her the question that had catapulted her out of there like she was on the end of a large rubber band.
He was enumerating, with her help, all the things she’d lost in this crisis—including the ego boost she’d been getting from Zach. She gave Sully a death stare on that last one, but she didn’t leave. Not then.
“You feel like you’ve lost everything,” Sully said to her. “Including yourself.”
“I have.”
“So, then . . .”
He hesitated, but she stopped pacing and motioned him on.
“Then, if Rich divorces you—so what?”
He was sure the brown eyes would implode.
“Did you just ask me so what?”
“I know it matters, Demi. But you say you’ve lost everything already. Some of that you may not be able to get back. Some of it you can, with or without Rich.” He held his breath.
She folded her arms across her chest, eyes swimming. “You’re asking if I’m worth salvaging if I don’t have my family back.”
Sully ran his finger along his nose.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“That’s better than no.”
“Is it?”
“It’s the only question you need to answer.”
The slim shoulders strained. “Do you have a game show for this one?”
Sully nodded slowly. “I think it’s Survivor, Demi.”
“I hate that show.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I hate this show.”
“I understand.”
“I have to go.”
There had been no desperation in her eyes, so he’d let her go to wrestle with herself.
He hoped she was winning.
He downed the rest of the frappuccino and headed back to the garage. When he leaned over to pick up the manual that had slid to the floor, he noticed the front door was slightly ajar. A paper bag printed with DAILY BREAD lay inside.
Bread? A stink bomb? A thanks-for-every-thing letter?
Actually, it was more than one letter Sully discovered as he emptied the contents onto the tool table. There were at least twenty, all folded neatly and each with a name printed in a different color ink. A single sheet floated on top of the pile.
Sullivan,
Who was that who left you in a huff ? I don’t even know who I am anymore. Maybe that’s what I need to find out. These letters are who I think I am. It’s a start, huh?
Blessings,
Demi
Sully unfolded a few with the tips of his greased fingers. There were several to Rich. As many to Christopher. There was even one to Ethan Kaye. Most of them, though, were for Jayne—all in purple ink and written in curly cursive.
He turned to the Impala and gave her a grin. “Well, holy crow, Isabella,” he said. “Holy crow.”
CHAPTER TWENTY - ONE
Asiren screamed me out of a coma-sleep early Friday morning. I came up on the window seat, straight into the covers-clutching, cardiac-arresting position of the fireman’s wife, like I’d done for twenty-one years. The prayers cried out before I knew I was awake.
God—don’t let it be Rich!
I squeezed everything so the fear wouldn’t take me into places no one who loves a fireman should go: into suffocating smoke and flesh-eating flames and beams-turned-to-tinder crashing onto heads even helmets couldn’t protect. Some wives didn’t want to know anything about the fire-beasts their husbands fought, and most wouldn’t have a scanner in the house. Others went to as many fires as their husbands did, cameras in hand. I always lay still and listened to the siren wail its agony and waited for the call.
Only tonight, there would be no reassuring ring from my husband. The thought that there might never be again drove me into the kitchen, where I flooded the room, and my spiraling psyche, with light.
Four AM. An acceptable hour to make coffee and start the day.
Another siren broke in, shrieked through our sleeping burg, faded to carry its fear to the crisis. A two-alarm.
I found myself cursing Sullivan Crisp with his, “If Rich divorces you, so what?”
This was “so what.” I’d never know what was happening to him. I would be cut off from his breathing and his burping and the assurance of his still-existence at any given moment.
I snatched up the coffeepot. With or without him, I would keep breathing, keep making coffee.
So what if he divorced me? I would go on living. But who would I be?
I looked at the tangle of covers I’d dumped on the floor below the window seat. I was enmeshed in Rich even in my sleep. Whatever “premise” had claimed me and told me to risk that by giving a chunk of myself to Zach Archer—it was gone now.
So what if Rich divorced me? There would be an emptiness in my soul I could never fill. I put my head all the way down onto the cool counter tile and wept—because I might lose my husband.
It was a Mickey-cry I decided, when I was done and had all manner of gunk and tears to wipe off my face and the countertop. It was one of those cleansing cries that left me knowing something.
I loved. Wasn’t that goodness in me, that I could love like this?
I wasn’t the rotten excuse for a woman I’d named myself. I didn’t know what to do with that. I only knew it.
Which was why I got dressed one more day and climbed into the car and drove through the morning mist toward the Daily Bread.
I realized halfway there I hadn’t drunk that cup of coffee I’d poured. I flipped on the blinker and swerved into a parking lot, headed for the ubiquitous strip mall java shop.
As I pulled up in front I could see a line of people inside, waiting to order their lattes, so I leaned back to close my eyes—until the Jeep’s plastic window rattled and I jerked up to a hooded figure, one brazen hand salu
ted over his forehead so he could peer in.
“What?” I said.
“Is this what you do all day?” a familiar voice said.
“Christopher?”
I fumbled to unzip the window.
“You just hang out at coffee shops?” he said when I got it open.
I looked around me. “No—what are you doing?”
He pushed his tailbone out so he could rest his lanky arms on the Jeep door.
“I saw you in traffic,” he said.
“And you followed me?”
“I thought I’d see what you do all day.”
I gripped the steering wheel. “I’ve told you in my e-mails that I’m working on Main. I even gave you my schedule—”
“I don’t open your e-mails.”
I gripped harder. “But you’ll follow me into a parking lot to find out what I’m doing.”
It was ludicrous, and I would have laughed, except that I saw his eyes dart away. It was the look he used to get as a little boy when he knew I was about to discover his ulterior motive for sharing a cookie with his sister or dashing off from the dinner table to do his homework without a cattle prod involved.
I sat up straighter. “You’re checking up on me to make sure I’m not with someone.”
“Should I be checking up on you?”
“You obviously think so.”
“Why wouldn’t I, Mom? With your record—if it looks like a tawdry clandestine meeting—and it smells like one—and it sounds like one—”
“Christopher,” I said. “I want you to shut up—now.”
He was startled enough to let go of the door. His next words were stiff. “I thought you should know what you’ve done to Jayne.”
His words started through me like an ice pick, but I flung open the passenger door. “Get in.”
“I don’t—”
“I said get in.”
He smacked my door frame with both hands, his version of having the last word. My mind raced as he crossed in front of the Jeep, shoulders hulking forward. How could I do anything to Jayne when I couldn’t even talk to her?
Christopher folded half of himself inside the car. The other leg hung out in the drippy rain.
“What about Jayne?” I said.
“This is totally messing her up.”
“Enough with the guilt trip. What’s wrong?”
“She’s grounded until, like, her sixteenth birthday. I told Dad to take her cell phone away, which he did.”
“She’s alone at night, and he’s not letting her use her cell?” I scraped my nails through my hair. “What if something happens?”
“I’m there.” His mouth went into a grim line.
“Why is she under all this punishment?” I said. “What could she possibly have done?”
“She’s turning into you.”
“What?”
He squinted one eye, as if I’d blown his eardrum. “We went to see her play.”
I knew that. I’d spent that entire weekend looking at my watch, picturing her on stage writhing under the imagined grip of witchcraft, and swelling to her curtain calls. And I’d sobbed my gut out.
“She played this—well, basically, whore.”
“She played Abigail Williams,” I said. “She was a confused, messed-up teenage girl!” I shook myself. “It was a character, for Pete’s sake.”
“Yeah, well, Dad was ticked off at you for letting her take the role.”
I chomped down on my lip. I wouldn’t get into the fact that I’d tried to discuss everything Jayne did with Rich, and he’d grunted, “Whatever you think.” I waved Christopher on.
“So afterwards, she comes up to us in the lobby and asks Dad if she can go to a cast party.” Christopher gave the Rich-hiss. “She didn’t notice he was already having a hernia. He said no, and she freaked.”
“And he grounded her for that?”
“No, he grounded her for e-mailing her boyfriend about what a jerk Dad was.”
“Her boyfriend?” I said.
“Oh, it gets worse,” Christopher said.
He was nearly licking his chops, dispensing, at a maddening pace, information he obviously knew would shred my heart.
“What boyfriend?” I said evenly.
“The kid who played John Proctor. Josh somebody.”
“Josh Elliston?” I said. “They’ve been friends since sixth grade.”
“They’re more than friends now. She told this kid everything about our current family ‘issues’ in an e-mail—so who knows who else has found out by now.”
“Wait.” I smeared my hand across my eyes. “How did your father find out what she wrote online? He can barely turn the computer on.”
Christopher didn’t have to answer.
“You told him,” I said. “You got into her account—”
“Somebody’s got to—”
“Not you!”
“Then who? Dad’s barely functioning. He wouldn’t eat if I didn’t cook. He wouldn’t shower if I didn’t hose him off—”
“But you are not Jayne’s father. She has another parent.” I drove my thumb into my chest. “I am still her mother, Christopher. Now you tell me—” I got closer still, until I could feel his breath catch against my chin. “What have you told her about herself? Tell me you have not used the word whore with your sister.”
“What do you think I am?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “At this point I do not know. Now you tell me.”
He pulled back, far enough for me to see that some of the arrogance had seeped from his eyes. “I haven’t said anything to her. She holes up in her room all the time.”
“Are you feeding her ?” I said. “Hosing her down?”
“It’s not that bad.”
“I can’t see how it could not be.”
I squeezed the steering wheel to keep from screaming. Christopher closed in on himself, the way Rich did.
“Listen to me,” I said. “I am going to pick Jayne up from school today. Do not try to intercept me, and do not call the school and tell them not to let her go with me. You have no right to interfere with my seeing your sister. Am I clear?”
“Whatever.”
“Christopher. Am. I. Clear?”
He gave his head another jerk, this time away from me. “Yeah,” he said.
He wrenched himself out of the car and bent over to glare in at me. “I don’t see where you get off being so self-righteous,” he said. And then he walked away.
I didn’t see it either. I only knew what I felt—what I heard—what I knew—because I loved.
“It’s on the house today,” Tatum said to Sully when he ambled into the bakery that Friday afternoon.
That wasn’t the bad news it might have been if he hadn’t chewed a half dozen Tums on the way over. “What’s the occasion?” he said.
“A thank-you for helping me with Van.”
“The ex-boyfriend?”
“The freak show.” She slid the knife cleanly into the quarter of a pink champagne she’d removed from under a glass dome. “With you here, he didn’t get all dramatic. You want your usual sugar and milk with a shot of coffee?”
Sully grinned. He settled at a table and pulled one of Demi’s letters out of his jacket pocket. Who said men couldn’t multi-task? Tatum disappeared into the kitchen and emerged carrying a stack of cookie sheets dotted with Easter-egg shaped cookies. While she fanned them out on the display racks, Sully read.
Dear Christopher,
I don’t know why—with everything that’s going on, you’d think this would be the last thing on my mind—but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about you and me on 9/11. I’ve been wondering if you remember the way I do, like every detail is etched into the glass of my brain.
When I heard the first tower had been hit, I canceled classes and went to your school. You remember? I picked you and Jayne up, and we were on our way home when the second tower came down, and we’d hardly gone through the front door when the Pentagon was
struck. A flawless, blue-sky day, and yet the world was coming to an end.
I will always have the picture of your face in my mind, son. You’d led a life full of love and safety and security, with your Mama and Papa Costanas and your Uncle Eddie whom you loved almost as much as you did your dad. I’d never seen panic in you before. You went deathly white and your eyes were absolutely wild, and I couldn’t hold you. Jayne crawled into my lap and rubbed my arm over and over, as if she were more afraid for me than for herself and her dad. But you—you kept saying, “Dad’s in there. Uncle Eddie’s in there. We have to do something!”
A phone call from the ombudsman confirmed that. Everybody had been called in. I could hardly keep you from running out the front door and all the way to the World Trade Center. The three of us huddled in front of the TV in that bright little living room in our row house in Queens. I tried to keep my voice low and level as I interpreted what was happening to the two of you. I thought it pointless to try to distract you. You were firefighter’s children. You’d always known the dangers. You’d always known what the sirens could mean for us. Your bloodline told you to keep a vigil until everyone returned safely to the station.
Would you agree it was the longest day either of us could remember? Every siren call made me want to scream. My neck was strained from trying to catch a glimpse of your father on the TV screen. I gave up trying to keep you on the couch. You wanted to sit directly in front of the television, and every few minutes you’d touch it, as if you could feel your father’s life there. You were only twelve, son. You were still such a boy, and yet your face started to take man-shape that day. The angles of fear cut away the softness, and I knew you would never be completely innocent again. That broke my heart as much as anything else.
When the phone rang, you got to it before I did. I could hear Captain Reardon’s wife’s voice, and I grabbed the phone from you. I know you remember this—you screamed at me, “I wanna know what’s going on, Mom!” It was a voice I didn’t even know. We had turned into versions of ourselves neither of us recognized.
Lydia Reardon didn’t have any news, except that both your dad and Uncle Eddie were on the scene. She invited us to her house to watch with all the other wives, where there would be plenty of sleeping room for the kids. I wanted to go—we needed to be with the others who were suffering as we were. But I knew if I tried to move you from that house—where you had to be when your father came home—it wasn’t going to happen.