Aaron explained to me that making a fuss would only make me look guilty. I flirted with him instead of letting him know just how pathetic Thea’s accusations made me feel.
“Me? Maybe they think it’s you,” I said.
“Nah, you’re the guilty girl.”
“I’ll show you guilty,” I said, biting his neck.
And I knew he was seething, too, that he held his own fury inside. It wore away at him like a stone in a sock, blistering soft skin. I wanted to forget, to excuse her, but it wasn’t in my nature. Our houses were just too big, I thought, too cavelike, dark with nights and our body heat, and we became fierce mama bears, feral, protecting what was ours with blind intensity.
I thought about collecting our own dead animals, or roadkill, of packaging them neatly in a gift bag. I’d rest tissue paper over the corpses. I’d deposit them on her mat and ring the bell.
Or maybe it would be more effective to pack them in bakery boxes, retie that thin white-and-red string that came from a metal roll dispenser at the back of Wyckoff bakery and always smelled as though it, too, were made of butter and powdered sugar.
Finally, I had to stop imagining and do something. I wasn’t someone who could contain actions for too long without letting them spring out of me somehow, without giving in. But it couldn’t be traceable; it couldn’t make me seem guilty when she was the only one who ought to feel ashamed.
That was it. I strolled Malena to the post office in town on a damp Saturday when Aaron was working and the streets smelled of impending rain. I bought one of those prepaid postcards, anonymous and innocuous by itself, but when I took it home, I scrolled it into my typewriter from high school, the one I’d moved from apartment to apartment as if it might someday have reason to express its letters again despite the computer age. I typed Mrs. Thea Caldwell and her address, thinking I couldn’t blame Caius, after all, with his rummy mouth and dazzling eyes.
On the message side I typed a single word: SHAME.
It took twenty minutes to get a sleeping Malena back into her stroller, but I knew I had to do it before I changed my mind. My heart hurt with effort as I put the card in my coat pocket and buckled Malena in—she was awake now and bucking with protest. I carried the stroller down the front steps and started down the street, my heart still hard at work. I thought of all the arteries and veins at work keeping me moving, alert, all the motion required internally just to stay alive. Malena was crying as I reached the mailbox on the corner, the only mailbox for blocks and blocks. What had become of them all? Did they disappear with the addition of a second car in each driveway? As I pulled open the mouth of the big blue box Malena stopped fussing and began to croon, a sweet, quiet singing that reminded me of Thea’s singing to my daughter. I’d seen the way she’d watched Malena, greedy. Her love was possessive. She was someone who attached herself to those she loved like a parasitic orchid. She bloomed only on the crowns of others. I wasn’t ever going to be like that—to attach from crown to root. Nor would I be like my mother, always keeping a distance to prevent excessive attachment. I couldn’t let a night go by without checking my daughter after she was asleep. I needed the last sweep of softness—my finger on her cheek, or if I dared lean over into the crib, the breathing of her breath, sweet, apricots and almonds.
I imagined bringing the card back home, tearing it into a dozen pieces, stuffing it into the empty milk carton already in the trash. I imagined Thea’s face as she read it, puzzled at first, then red with recognition. I remembered how pale she was, almost fishlike. How had I ever thought her beautiful? She had an asymmetrical nose and too-thin lips. She had a hard heart, a suspicious mind.
I wasn’t sure I could ever let it go. I looked at it again, my note, my retribution. She was religious at heart. I was giving her back her sin—sinner that I was myself. It was a damp day, and the drizzle was about to start as I let the card fall into the wide mouth of the mailbox. Going. Gone.
July
2001
21
Amanda
“Oh a very happy birthday to our country,” said Aaron, stroking the edge of my Mother’s Day silk robe as if it were part of my skin.
“I’m sleeping,” I said, though I’d been listening for Malena, of course, even when Aaron and I were tangled like branches in a stream. I was on vacation with relatively little controversy, since almost no one was at work for the long weekend anyway. Carole was on vacation, visiting her mother in Boca. And wonder of wonders, after two straight months of working Saturdays and half of Sunday, Aaron was home for four whole days in a row. We hadn’t had sex for so long I had wondered whether I liked it anymore. Whether he liked me anymore. Whether he was getting some somewhere else, though I knew better, because even his kisses good-bye at five-thirty in the morning or kisses hello at nine at night when I was already beached on the couch were so abrupt and hard I knew he was trying not to want me.
“Liked that,” he said, grinning ridiculously.
“Me, too.” Frankly, it had taken about half an hour for me to warm up. I used to be able to switch off, or switch on, as it were, to move easily from the ordinary body to the body at play. But since pregnancy, it was more complicated, like a whole house full of signals and fuses. It was worth it, though; when I finally came, I’d cried with the relief of letting go. Then I’d fallen asleep and drooled on Aaron’s arm. Now he was assembling himself, that familiar body, hardly changed since we’d married, the lean curve of his shoulder as he pulled on his T-shirt, stepped into his jeans. He hadn’t shaved yet, so he looked like a college kid, and I touched my face where his cheeks had scraped mine with pleasant abrasion.
“I’m going out to survey the grounds,” he said.
“I’m going to continue sleeping,” I said. “Don’t wake her.”
“Right,” he said. Since he’d been home, Aaron had been buzzing around the house with purpose, painting the peeling portion of fence by the garage, planting impatiens in undivided clumps by the front walkway, fiddling with the leaky faucet in the powder room until we had to switch it off and leave a message for the plumber. I adored his handyman mode, though I resisted the urge to make him a list of things that actually needed repair.
“I’m going to tear out that poison ivy in back by the Martins’,” he said.
This was actually on my mental list. “Wear gloves,” I said, imagining my husband dotted with welts.
I meant to fall asleep again, but I kept hearing Malena stir, though each time I checked she was still asleep, obliging us with a three-hour nap for the first time in months. Of course, I picked at the notion that Carole was training her to sleep all day so she wouldn’t have to play all the games she listed on her little My Day sheets we read like Torah when we came home. At least I did. Shape-sorter play. Water play with dishpan and spoons. What floats?!?! Having come home from work, I couldn’t help thinking, Shit floats. Shit and witches. But then I shed my jacket and held my girl and let myself believe in wonder for a while.
I crept downstairs in my robe and poured myself a glass of apricot iced tea, then tried to stir the sugar in, but instead of melting it swirled like a sandstorm in the sun-orange liquid. I could hear Aaron thumping around outside and I sighed, wondering whether we should get Malena a water table for the backyard or whether it would attract wasps. Some kids were screaming outside, the sounds of summer play. I’d gotten used to it, to Thea hollering for her kids across the lawns, to all the chatter and argument and the striking sounds of basketballs. Sometimes Oliver had a friend over and they used the fence as a backboard for a soccer ball. Aaron had asked them to stop just yesterday. I could never bring myself to say anything; I just seethed, calculating the cost of the broken slats.
I couldn’t imagine going back to work when my respite ended the next day. Of course, once Aaron was gone, it would be easy enough to imagine. He hadn’t let go of the office so completely for years. But now the house stuff was filling his empty hands. I realized Aaron didn’t know how to sit still anymore. When
he sat on the floor to play with Malena, he always had a cup of coffee, a newspaper, a New Yorker, a crossword puzzle, and a jiggling leg. His best attention was divided, and I wondered what else he had been thinking about while he ran his tongue down the back of my knee. Had he been mentally measuring the surface area of the shed, which he wanted to paint? He only had one more day; he would never finish. He’d have to come home after work and go out to paint in the dark.
“Aaron?” I called out the open back window. “She’s still asleep, come inside for some iced tea, Aaron. Aaron?”
As I stepped over to the back door, I saw his form, backing up, oddly bearlike, his bare arms stained with something, the green of his law school T-shirt splattered. Had he started painting the shed? Was he retarring the driveway?
He thudded against the door, so I stepped down to open it, and he was saying so quietly I almost couldn’t hear him, “Nine-one-one, please. You need to call nine-one-one.”
My husband wasn’t splattered with paint or tar. He was bloody, even his hair had a streak like highlights. There was a bloody hand-print on his arm, and he held a girl in his arms, a girl who was clutching her hand even as he gripped it, too, his hand over hers, and the source of the blood seemed to be that embrace of fingers. Someone was coming up behind him, a boy. He was tall, hollow looking, and oddly clean, gripping a red bandanna as if it were proof of something. Had the boy cut the girl? Had my husband bloodied someone? Why was it so quiet? Why wasn’t there ominous music to warn me that Something Very Bad had happened?
“Give me that,” barked my husband to the boy. “And Amanda, please call,” he said, as he tied the bandanna around the girl’s wrist.
It wasn’t until I was explaining to the operator that the emergency was medical, that I didn’t know what had happened, that someone was bleeding, a lot, that I realized the girl was Carra. She was a horrible gray color, but her lips looked stung, fat and worried. I wondered whether one’s lips grew fat just before death. My heart was slower, my own limbs tingled.
“They’re sending an ambulance,” I explained, as I hung up the phone and jogged back to them. She wasn’t crying so much as moaning, and the boy touched her bare leg as she lay across my husband’s lap on my living room floor. The rug drank up blood like spilled wine.
“She put her hand through the glass on your shed door,” said the boy, his words staccato and very, very quiet.
“Why were you by our shed door?” It wasn’t meant to sound harsh, but the boy just stood there with his baby mouth and hard eyes. I still didn’t understand. It wasn’t an accusation. Was there some reason they needed to be in our backyard? Were they rescuing a hurt bird? Stealing sunflowers? What the hell?
“We weren’t trying to steal anything,” he said. “We were just, um, making out.”
Carra looked at me. “Just leaned…,” she started, but couldn’t finish. I was half-afraid blood would come out of her mouth, that she’d been so sliced by our window she would start to leak and spout from every part of her body. She was still awake, and it would help no one if I panicked. I winced as Aaron retied the bandanna, wrapping and tugging fiercely, his face almost angry, his hands slick with her blood.
What the hell was this girl doing with her boyfriend in our yard—did thirteen-year-olds have sex on their neighbors’ lawns?
“Go get her parents,” Aaron said to the boy, but he just stood, stunned. I looked at her long face, the lovely cheekbones, her mother’s lantern jaw. Was this the kind of people we were, blaming a bleeding girl for her own mistake? I had the quick ugly thought that it wasn’t her mistake, it was Thea’s—this happened on Thea’s watch. We were horrible. No, I was horrible. Aaron was good. I could learn from my bloodied husband.
“Should we take a look at it?” I asked. “Maybe wash it off? Do you think it needs stitches?” Carra was horribly pale, almost blue. Her bruised lips opened and shut without producing words.
“Did you guys do any drugs?” I asked the boy.
“Fuck no,” he said, looking away.
“It matters,” my husband said.
“We just cut through the woods and made out. I smoke, but she doesn’t,” he said. He touched her sneaker with his own, afraid of any contact of skin. I guessed they’d licked and sucked each other, that they’d pressed against each other’s bodies as if feeding their starving selves, and now he couldn’t even touch her. What would I do when Malena became one of these, a dangerous, beautiful creature, protowoman? Why were boys always so afraid? Carra looked limp, one arm atop the other, her legs akimbo in my husband’s lap on the living room floor.
“I think it’s an artery,” said Aaron. “It’s gushing.” And to illustrate his point, blood poured through the bandanna and onto his lap, a river of blood. Aaron, who usually passed out at the sight of blood, gripped Carra’s arm as though he were holding her together. His other hand supported her back, and I couldn’t help thinking that just minutes before he’d been pushing into me, holding my back as he moved. God, this was real. This was no ordinary two-stitches-and-go-home cut. This girl was really damaged.
“It just cracked into two pieces,” said the boy, not looking at Carra, not comforting his girlfriend.
“Go get her parents,” Aaron repeated, and the boy finally went.
“The pane was loose,” I said starting to feel panicky. “I kept meaning to get it fixed.”
“Never mind,” said Aaron. “Never mind.” And then the sirens came close and Malena, upstairs, began wailing along with them.
22
Thea
“It’s not that I’m litigious,” I whispered to Caius. “It’s just—nerve damage, Caius. She probably won’t swim next year. What if she can’t write?” It was either fury or terror; I wanted to choose fury.
“No one’s suggesting that,” said my husband. He wore the hospital bracelet that had allowed him to spend the night. I wanted to do it but he’d insisted, and at home, curt and exhausted by my own fear, I had made Oliver and Iris macaroni and cheese from a box and frozen peas, which Iris pinched with her fingers and didn’t eat. I felt as though Carra were dead, all night, as though I were with my new family, the family in the gray lens. As though Caius were dead, too. I practiced the dull motions of mourning.
But no one died. Carra was sedated; a hand surgeon had reattached a ligament while Caius stood by in scrubs. She was stitched and sent to recovery, then to her own private room in the same hospital where she was born. Caius slept on a chair. I wanted to be there, but someone had to be with the other children, and as usual, I was that someone.
“The surgeon said scarring and temporary loss of sensation. Temporary,” Caius repeated. He finally looked tired, but calm and pressed nonetheless. There was a small stain on the cuff of his blue-striped button-down that could’ve been coffee and could’ve been blood.
“She said she’d been meaning to fix it, the boy told me. Mitch.” I still had trouble calling him that, the toddler I’d seen babbling in Wolof in a stroller back in the days of his nanny’s reign. “It was an accident waiting to happen.”
I wasn’t going to tolerate accidents. I wasn’t going to let someone else’s negligence ruin my daughter. The bandage swallowed her entire arm. She was plugged into a bag of blood, for God’s sake, Caius’s blood. He’d donated just before her surgery, in case she needed it, and she did, she needed us, blood and bones. Her eyes were bruised and her skin looked pallid. My girl felt cold under my hands, and I asked for blankets twice, but the nurses just gave me a look. I would tell Caius, he would make them bring blankets. Embarrassingly enough, now that I knew she was going to survive, my selfish thought was that now I couldn’t go away to Outward Bound in September. I was that egocentric, and I wanted to repent, wished I could ask God to forgive me, wished I knew what I believed.
“I think, actually, Aaron saved her from much worse,” said Caius, cupping my hand, then squeezing a little too hard. I pulled away. I couldn’t tolerate being soothed. Coddled. I thought of coddled eggs: m
y mother made them, in six aluminum cups that the spoon scraped in a shivering sound that hurt me even more than the bleedy yolks.
“I need a shower,” he said. “I’m going home. Did you call a sitter for this afternoon?”
“No,” I said. “I did not call a sitter. I left Oliver at camp and Iris with Mrs. Chen, but we have to pick her up by noon. We don’t have a sitter, they all have summer jobs. We don’t just up and go to the hospital. We don’t have backup,” I said, almost weeping.
“Fine,” said Caius. “We’ll just come in shifts.”
He ran a tired hand through his uncombed hair. He looked ready to be free of me, and for a minute, before I remembered why we were here, that he’d been up all night, that we were both raw nerves disguised by a thin layer of parenthood, I couldn’t wait for him to go. I was scared.
She was home the next day, bandaged, doped. Mitch had come to visit. He was wearing a dress shirt even though it was July. He was so thin in his jeans I wanted to reach out and test to see if there were legs in there or just sticks. Mostly, she slept. I felt vigilant, as though I were supposed to be doing something now, after the fact. I hadn’t given up on the idea that it was somehow Amanda’s fault. She’d been the one to say it; she’d said the window needed fixing. And if I couldn’t keep my daughter from exploring the woods of her own adolescence, at least I could reprimand those who left bear traps on their lawns.
The Other Mother Page 24