The Real Mother

by Judith Michael

  “It was so awful,” Abby gasped between sobs. “We watched it, watched the fire, Carrie said it was eating up our house, the flames were huge and they got bigger, and moved so fast, it took forever for the firemen to put them out…And all our things,” she wailed, “and our rooms and my new rocking chair and our whole lives, it was like watching our lives burn up, watching us burn up, it was so awful …And it was my fault!” Her voice rose again. “I was supposed to take care of everything! I was in charge and now you’ll never trust me—”

  “Hush,” Sara said, more sharply than she intended. She softened her voice. “Don’t even think that, Abby, you were wonderful, you got out in time, you saved three lives. What could be more important than that? Some furniture, some possessions… how could they be as important as the three of you? You were smart, and alert, and you took charge. It could have been a tragedy but you gave it a happy ending. I’m so proud of you, and I love you, and I’d trust you with anything.”

  Abby looked up, her face shiny with tears. “Really? You mean that?”

  “You know I do. You’re my heroine.”

  “Oh. Thank you.” She shook her head. “It was so terrible, you know, it felt like I was always doing things wrong instead of—oh.” She saw Reuben standing a few feet away, and shrank back into Sara’s arms. “I thought…I mean, I know he was with you, and we talked on the phone and everything, but…I thought it would just be…you know… us.”

  Not ever again, Sara thought, but this was not the moment to say it aloud. And then Reuben said quietly, “I’ll try not to get in the way, Abby.”

  Abby met his eyes for a long moment, struggling to adjust to a new order of things, a new definition of family, even in the grip of fatigue and shock from the fire. “It isn’t you,” she said at last. “I mean, not you particularly.” She sighed; she wasn’t doing this right, either. “I mean, I wasn’t trying to insult you, Sara told me on the phone that you were going to get… that you were together. It was just…”

  “You didn’t insult me.” He smiled. “You wanted Sara and you were waiting for her and I didn’t fit the picture.” He thought for a moment. “Maybe it will be easier for you if I tell you how I feel about Sara, and what I hope, for all of us. You have a right to demand that, so do Doug and Carrie. I love Sara, Abby; I cherish her and respect her and admire her, and I want to do all I can to make her life as complete and happy as she has ever dreamed. That means making you and Doug and Carrie happy, because Sara can’t be happy if you’re not. And I couldn’t be, either, because I’m absolutely sure that, when we get to know each other, I’ll love the three of you almost as much as I love Sara.”

  “You mean you hope you do,” said Abby, with a spark of mischievousness.

  Reuben laughed. “It definitely will be awkward if I don’t.”

  A brief hesitation, and then, tentatively, Abby stretched out her hand. Reuben came up and took it between both of his. “We’ll have a family and we’ll all be very proud of us. And if ever there’s another crisis like this one—” Abby looked instinctively toward their house. “We’ll rebuild it,” he said. “We can make it exactly the same as it was. We can even duplicate the furniture.”

  Her eyes wide, Abby searched his face. “Is that true? We can make it like it was?”

  “Exactly. Do you have photos of the rooms?”

  She nodded. “Sara said we should have them in case of…oh. Fire.”

  “Wise Sara. I don’t suppose you have blueprints?”

  Abby looked at Sara, who said, “If they existed, I have no idea where they would be. Maybe the basement. More likely the third floor.”

  “Which is gone. But we can get blueprints made; some of my best friends are architects. And, Abby, you and Carrie and Doug should give this a lot of thought. We can make changes, too. Any changes you’d like. Maybe you’d like your rooms bigger, or smaller, or maybe round or triangular. Who knows?”

  Abby broke into laughter. “You can’t make them round.”

  “We can do almost anything, within Chicago’s building codes. We have to be a little practical, but we’ll have a lot of fun—”

  “Sara!” Carrie and Doug were running from the house. “Why didn’t you wake us up?” Doug yelled. They threw themselves at Sara as Abby had, and once again Reuben stepped back. And then Mrs. Pierce was on her front porch, inviting them in for breakfast.

  Later, Sara thought of that breakfast, when Mrs. Pierce finally left them alone in the breakfast room, as their first family meal. It began with a squabble, even before they sat at the long, narrow breakfast-room table, when Doug and Carrie raced for the chair with its back to the window and the view of the burned ruin of their house. “I don’t want to look at it!” Doug shouted as he pulled the chair away from Carrie. “Neither do I!” she cried, “and I was here first!”

  “Cut it out,” Abby said crossly. “Reuben’ll think you’re incorrigible.”

  “What?” Doug demanded, momentarily distracted.

  “I know what it means,” Carrie said. She yanked the chair from him and sat down.

  Sara set another chair beside Carrie’s. “You’ll be crowded, but you’re such good friends it won’t matter.”

  Abby laughed and sat at the long side of the table, turning her chair so that she was almost sideways, her back toward the window.

  “Sara and I get the view,” Reuben said with a smile. “I think we can handle that. Carrie, may I cut you a piece of coffee cake?”

  “I could handle it, too,” Doug said angrily. “I just didn’t want to. And we don’t need a father, you know. We already have one.”

  “Doug!” Abby exclaimed. “That’s really rude. Anyway, we don’t have a father.”

  “We do, too,” Doug declared.

  “Then where is he?”

  “How do I know? Somewhere.”

  “How do you know he’s not dead? You don’t know anything about him. He’s gone. We haven’t had a father for years. And you were really rude to Reuben and you ought to apologize because he wants to love us.”

  Doug looked at his lap. “People keep leaving,” he said, so low they barely could hear him. “Dad left, and I hardly knew him, and Mom left, I mean, she doesn’t live with us anymore, and Mack left, and now he’s gone again, and he wasn’t always nice but he was, like, a man in the house, and… nobody stays with us.”

  Sara knelt beside his chair. “We stay. We stay with each other.”

  “It’s not the same,” Doug muttered.

  Reuben leaned forward, folding his arms on the table, looking straight at Doug. “I’d like to stay, if you’ll let me. I think it would be a lousy idea to leave.”

  Slowly, Doug looked up. “Why?”

  “Because I love Sara.” Faintly amused, Reuben wondered how often he would be repeating this. It’s a good thing I like to say it. “And I want to be with her for my whole life, and make a home and a family with her. And because I haven’t lived in a family since I left home for college and I’ve been hoping for one all that time. And because I don’t believe in giving things up when they’re really good; I’d have to begin again from the beginning, and that would be stupid and exhausting and maybe not even possible, so why in the world would I leave?”

  Carrie was scowling at Reuben. “Are you going to have a baby?” Reuben was so startled it made Carrie giggle. “I mean, Sara doesn’t have time, you know, she’s really busy taking care of us, so it would be too much to have a baby in the house.” Her face fell. “Except, we don’t even have a house anymore.”

  Reuben grasped at that. “We’re going to build a new one.”

  “We are?” Doug cried. “Here? In the same place?”

  “The exact same place.”

  “And it’ll look the same?”

  “It will look any way you want it to look.”

  “But what about a baby?” pressed Carrie.

  “We might,” Sara said quietly. “We haven’t talked about it. There are lots of possibilities.”

 
; “Like medical school,” Abby said. “You could be a doctor after all. And quit your job. I mean… Reuben could…uh…”

  Reuben smiled. “Earn enough for all of us. Yes, I could.”

  “Would we tear down our old house?” Doug asked. “I mean, all of it?”

  “I’m pretty sure we’d have to,” said Reuben. “It’s the first thing we’d ask the engineers and architects.”

  “But do you want a baby?” Carrie demanded of Sara. She frowned. “I guess you do. Then you’d be a real mother.”

  “She’s real now,” Abby scolded. “She does everything a mother does, better than a lot of other mothers, and that’s what makes a mother. How can you say that? Shame on you.”

  “Ionlymeant…”Carrie’s eyes filled with tears. “I didn’t mean…”

  “It’s okay, sweetheart.” Sara put her hand on Carrie’s. “It’s only a word, you know. It’s what we do and feel that counts. As long as we feel like a family, that’s all that matters.”

  “We are a family, but, you know…” Carrie shook her head helplessly. “It’s so mixed up. Mom’s in that nursing home, and Dad isn’t anywhere that we know of, maybe dead like Abby said, and Mack…I can’t figure him out even though he’s my brother, and now he’s somewhere, we don’t know where, and…”

  “But where would we live?” Doug asked. “I mean, while we build our house.”

  “What?” Carrie asked. “Are you still talking about that?”

  “Where would we live?” Doug repeated anxiously.

  “I have a house,” said Reuben.

  “Live with you?” Doug asked suspiciously. “So you’d be in charge of us?”

  “Doug, that’s enough,” Sara snapped.

  “What does that mean?” Reuben asked Doug. “If I’m in charge of you.”

  Doug scowled at him. “You know.”

  “I guess I don’t. I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me.”

  “You’d boss us around. Make us do things your way, clean our rooms and help in the kitchen and …do our homework…you know, all those things.”

  “You do all those things now,” Abby said pointedly. “Sara tells you to.”

  “She’s in charge of us!”

  “And I’m not,” said Reuben, “so I wouldn’t be giving orders. I might ask you to come to dinner; would that be all right?”

  Doug was still scowling. “It’s not a joke.”

  “I know it’s not. I’ll tell you what. If you decide to live in my house for a while, you and I will sit down and make a list of what you want to do there and what you won’t do. We’ll have to coordinate with Sara and Abby and Carrie, but I’m sure we can work it out so nobody feels bossed around. Does that make sense to you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Reuben,” said Carrie solemnly, “I think it would be fine if you live with us. I mean, if you live with us in our house or your house, or wherever. I’ve been thinking about it, and I think it would be fine.”

  Reuben felt an amazing sense of triumph. A thirteen-year-old girl had said she approved of him, and it made him feel victorious. “Thank you,” he said, just as solemnly.

  “What’s your house like?” Abby asked. “We’ve never lived anywhere but our own house. And we always had our own rooms.”

  “And you would in my house. Our house. It has bedrooms upstairs, the same as your house, only there are five of them, and a basement with a Ping-Pong table and a billiard table, and a small movie theater—”

  “A what?” Doug cried.

  “Why don’t we go there now?” Sara asked. “It’s very beautiful; you’ll like everything about it.”

  “A movie theater,” Doug whispered. “Cool.”

  “But what about school?” Abby asked.

  “That won’t change,” Reuben replied. “My house is about a fifteen-minute drive from here, so you’d still go to Parker and see your friends as much as before. And I have an office at home with a drafting table, so we could be planning the new house while we’re there, and we’d drive over whenever we want to supervise the construction. It would take about a year and a half, I’d guess, before we could move back here.”

  “What if we like yours better?” Doug asked.

  “Better than our house?” Carrie demanded.

  “It has a movie theater,” Doug said.

  “We can choose when we see both of them,” said Reuben.

  “But ours will be special,” Abby put in. “Reuben said we could make it any way we want. We could make a movie theater! We could even make our rooms round.”

  “Round?”

  Sara felt herself relax as the voices rose and fell around her, as if she were floating on the comforting waves of their chatter, so familiar but so new with the intertwining of Reuben’s deep voice. All night long she had been tense with driving, and then with nightmarish images of the children trapped in the flaming house, overcome by smoke, unable to find the doors, screaming, clinging together then leaping from upstairs windows, running back to retrieve something precious from the blaze… Carrie’s journal or Doug’s carvings or whatever Abby most prized at the moment.

  And a question had kept intruding: How would she bring Reuben into the tight little group the four of them had created, for protection as much as for love, when Tess was taken to the nursing home? In fact, she had done almost nothing: Reuben had managed it himself, by being himself. A kind of magic, she thought, and watched his face as he answered a question of Carrie’s. He really likes them, she thought. More magic.

  And then, finishing the last crumbs of the coffee cake, Doug asked, “What if Mack comes back?”

  There was a pause. “He won’t,” Carrie said flatly. “He did a dumb thing, smoking in bed, he’d be too embarrassed to come back.”

  “He left his duffel,” Doug pointed out.

  “That is his duffel?” Reuben asked. “Sara and I wondered.”

  Doug nodded. “I saw it in his room”—he looked quickly at Carrie—“one like it, anyway, but it looked like his clothes.”

  Sara looked up. “He packed? He packed and took his duffel outside and then fell asleep in bed, smoking?”

  “Weird,” Carrie said.

  “But it’s all ripped,” Doug said. “It wasn’t ripped when I saw it in his room.”

  “Maybe it fell out of his window,” said Carrie.

  Sara and Reuben exchanged a look.

  “Anyway,” Carrie insisted, “he can’t come back, we don’t want him.”

  “But what if he does?” Doug asked.

  “We’ll have to tell him he can’t live with us,” Sara said. “He could visit us, but he’d have to find his own place to live.”

  “But he’s …I mean, he’s, like, family.”

  Another silence fell, and stretched out. Sara sighed. With both parents gone, she had worked so hard to give them all a sense of family, and now they were faced with the dilemma of being forced to modify it. “Do you think,” she asked carefully, “he behaved as if he wanted us to be his family?”

  Doug mumbled something.

  “I’m sorry; I didn’t hear that,” Sara said.

  “I guess he didn’t, not all the time anyway, but… I wanted to be his family.”

  Sara’s heart sank. Damn him for doing this, for making them love him and then dumping them as if they were toys he didn’t need anymore. She went to Doug and hugged him. “I know you did. You were the best kind of brother he could ever want, and he let you down. He let us all down, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe we didn’t try hard enough.”

  She thought about it. “Maybe we didn’t. You and Carrie seemed to be trying as hard as you could, as far as I could tell. I’m not sure what else we could have done.”

  “Maybe,” Reuben said thoughtfully, “being part of a family has to be earned.”

  Doug looked puzzled. “Like money?”

  “Like respect.” He looked at Sara to make sure he was not intruding, and when she smiled at him, he went on. “I’m
not an expert on families, but I always thought people had to work at being good family members to get respect and admiration, maybe even love.”

  “That’s stupid. You like people in your family—respect and all that stuff—because they’re there. I mean, a family isn’t like, you know, people at school or somewhere.”

  “That’s true. But it’s hard to keep any group happy unless all the people in it feel responsible for each other.”

  “Sara said I should learn to be responsible for me.”

  “She’s right. But at the same time shouldn’t we feel responsible for helping our family, maybe people everywhere, feel good about themselves? That helps any group of people stay strong. Look, suppose one day you go up to Carrie and tell her she’s not pretty, or her writing stinks, or something like that. Would that help your family or hurt it?”

  “Why would I tell her those things? They’re not true.”

  “Thanks,” Carrie said.

  “Maybe you stopped being nice that day. I don’t know the reason, but for some reason, you were mean to her.”

  “She’d beat me up.”

  Reuben looked at Carrie with interest. “She would?”

  “Sara doesn’t let me do it anymore.” Carrie sighed.

  Reuben felt he was getting tangled in a discussion that might have no way out. Sara was watching him with rapt attention, waiting to see what he would say next. “Okay, look, if somebody in a family down the street was cruel to his sister or brother, or played tricks on them, or never thought of anybody but himself, the people in that family might begin to think he doesn’t want to be part of them anymore, that he doesn’t care about their feelings, that he doesn’t feel any responsibility to help them have good lives. If you were in that family, what would you do?”

  “I don’t know. Tell him to shape up.”

  “Or what? Would you say, ‘Shape up or else’?”

  Doug saw where this was going, and shrugged.

  “ ‘Or else you can’t live with us anymore.’ You might say that. It’s hard to talk that way to someone in your family, but maybe that person has forfeited the right to stay there. If he doesn’t treasure you, or help make your family better or happier or more comfortable, in fact, if he does things to make your family unhappy and less comfortable, would it be fair to say he shouldn’t live with you anymore?”