Crossing the Street

by Campbell, Molly D. ;

  I didn’t have time right then to process that entirely shocking statement from Bob, but it lodged itself in the forefront of my brain for later.

  We didn’t have to wait long at Dr. Walker’s office. The receptionist was kind, the waiting room wasn’t full, thank heaven, and by the time we got into the exam room, Alex was asleep.

  Dr. Walker, a tall, slender woman with a monkey clipped to her stethoscope, looked Alex over. She listened to his heart, but had to hold a hand up to shush me while she listened. I blabbered on about how I had only turned my back for a second, was he going to be all right, could there be brain damage, etc.

  Dr. Walker finished her exam and smoothed her hand over Alex’s little forehead. She looked up at me and smiled reassuringly. “He is just fine. You know, babies have a way of bouncing. As I tell all my new mothers, it is pretty hard to kill a baby. But you were wise to bring him right in. So you and your kids”—she tilted a head in Bob’s direction—“are in town visiting? You’re Claire’s daughter from Chicago, is it? Claire talks about you in book club.”

  Still shocky, I let her words slide right over my head. All I really heard was the “he’s just fine” part. I nodded, dumbly.

  Dr. Walker put her stethoscope back around her neck and opened a drawer. “Would you like a sticker, big sister?” She fanned out a deck of assorted stickers, and Bob chose a sheet of ladybugs.

  I must have smiled and said thank you, because Dr. Walker said, “You’re welcome. Any time. And you might want to consider changing his diaper on the floor from now on.” With a flip of her lab coat, she left the exam room.

  Relief didn’t wash over me until we were halfway home. I heaved a huge sigh, wiped my damp hair back from my forehead, and remembered that it was past lunchtime. “Bob, when we get home, we can have grilled cheese sandwiches and eat a whole bunch of Marva Davises’ cookies, okay?”

  “Beck, Dr. Walker thought you were our mom. Me and Alex.” I looked in the rearview mirror to see Bob flashing a huge grin, her freckles gleaming. She had one arm flung protectively over Alex in the car seat, and with her other hand, she popped me a thumbs-up.

  Every single nerve in my body sang a happy song.

  ▷◁

  We each had four cookies. Alex had two bottles. He was exhausted. I put him down for a nap, so that he would be nice and fresh for his late night colic session. Bob and I played a few rounds of Uno, and after a healthy late lunch/early dinner of grilled cheese and apple slices for fiber, we put my favorite old movie on the DVD player. I am a sucker for old Hollywood. Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

  About halfway in, after Alex woke up and we brought him down to lie on his tummy on the floor to watch with us, I realized that perhaps this wasn’t the best choice of entertainment for an eight-year-old.

  “Why does she wear an evening gown in the street in the mornings?”

  “How come everybody smokes?”

  “What’s a martini?”

  My explanation was long winded, and involved how “glamorous” Holly Golightly was. So glamorous that she wore evening gowns a lot. Even in the morning. The smoking and martinis were what people did to be sophisticated. Of course, then I had to explain what sophisticated meant. That involved Googling the oldies but goodies: Cary Grant, both Hepburns, and Marilyn Monroe on my phone. Bob and I spent a good half hour looking at Hollywood’s heyday while Alex gurgled.

  “I have an idea. Do you want to be glamorous?”

  Bob jumped up, clapping her hands. “Yes! How can we do it? We don’t have any evening gowns.”

  “No. But we can smoke and have martinis. Watch the baby.”

  In Ella’s kitchen, I opened the cupboard over the sink. Ella, like all good hostesses, had martini and wine glasses in there. I got out a couple of martini glasses and filled them with orange Kool-Aid. Then I pulled open Ella’s junk drawer. Jumbled among the twist ties, two corkscrews, a melon baller, a roll of twine, skewers, notepads, and masking tape, were some pencils. I removed two short-ish ones.

  Setting the martinis and the pencils on Ella’s tole tray, I looked around. Cocktail napkins. We needed cocktail napkins. Of course. Ella would have those. Sure enough, in the top drawer of Ella’s burled oak buffet in the dining room, I chose two small squares, embroidered with the word CHEERS.

  I set the tray down on the coffee table, and handed Bob a martini and a pencil. “Here are the rules. We have to lean back like this,” I tilted elegantly backwards as I imagined Audrey Hepburn would, “and call each other dahling.”

  Bob stood, giggling, and flipped back some imaginary long hair. She took a tiny sip of her martini. “Divine, dahling!” Bob picked up a pencil. “What’s this?”

  I took a drag on my pencil and blew out some pretend smoke. “Cigarettes, dahling. All the elegant people smoked back then.” I stepped out of character for just a moment. “Back THEN. Nobody elegant smokes now, because it gives you cancer. Got that, Bobbo?”

  Bob took a puff. “Of course, dahling. Gran told me that smoking makes you stinky and turns your teeth brown.”

  We both laughed. Elegantly.

  ▷◁

  Bob was exhausted, too. Even though it was Friday, she went to bed early. I was tired, too, but of course the colic was imminent. So I plopped down on the sofa, turned the baby monitor to face me, and called Gail.

  “My God. Today was the worst. I nearly killed the baby.”

  Gail murmured encouragingly at her end.

  “No, really. He fell off the bed. I only turned my back—“

  “For ONE SECOND.” Gail laughed. “All babysitters say that. Was he okay?”

  I told her the whole story, and she laughed. A lot. “You will be fine. This was just a head’s up. You are a very responsible woman.”

  “Ha! You know what Bob and I did while Alex was napping? WE SMOKED CIGARETTES AND DRANK MARTINIS.” I explained about Breakfast at Tiffany’s and our cocktail party. “Yup. Day one of being the surrogate mother, and I nearly kill the baby and then turn Bob into a chain smoker and an alcoholic!”

  “Oh, stop it. You are a very creative and interesting person, and you know how to have fun. It was totally an accident that I am sure happens to a lot of people—you’re exaggerating for effect. My God, I’m sure Bob loved it. It’s not like you’re some kind of child abuser, for heaven’s sake!”

  Then I remembered what Bob told me in the car. “Gail, I have to go. I think Alex is waking.”

  I set my cell phone down. I shut my eyes. In the blackness behind my eyelids, I thought I could hear a little girl crying somewhere in Iowa. I heard a door slam. The crying subsided. But I knew the child was hurt, and she was all alone.

  Damn Rowena.

  Just as Alex began to pull his legs up and wail, I picked him up and began to walk him back and forth, whispering in his ear, “I’m sorry, little guy.” It seemed to soothe him more if I jostled him and whispered. So I whispered the tunes of “Happy Birthday,” “Frere Jacques,” and “Twinkle Twinkle.” I was on about my fifteen lap around the bedroom and the tenth version of “Row Your Boat” when Bob stumbled in, her hair in her eyes, her lids swollen with slumber. She crept up to us and reached for Alex. “We need to stay up with him tonight, to make sure he’s okay,” she rasped in her sleepy voice.

  “Are you sure?” I had to admit to myself that I was so relieved to see her moon white face just then. “Here. I will make us a nest.”

  I pulled the chenille bedspread down, placed all of Ella’s extra pillows from the closet to make an Alex tunnel in the center. “Okay, you lie on one side, and I will lie on the other. That will keep him from falling off. But he won’t do that again, because we will be watching him.”

  Bob tumbled into the bed, and I laid the agitated baby on his back between the pillows. I got in on the other side. Bob and I leaned over the little guy like he was the baby Jesus in the manger.

 
; I will be damned if he didn’t settle down some. His legs stopped churning, and his fists unwound into little pink five-petaled flowers. Bob gently stroked his tummy. Instead of shrieking, he descended into a low hum.

  “Don’t worry, Bob. You can close your eyes. I’ll keep watch.

  I awoke the next morning with one arm flung over Bob’s arm, which was flung around Alex’s midsection. They were both snoring. Alex’s tiny fingers tightly clasped Bob’s thumb. I let the sweetness wash over me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Things calmed down. Thank God. D really did limit her texts to three a day. However, she phoned every night, timing it so I would stay awake until Alex began to scream. She had advised earplugs for Bob, which really helped. Bob slept like a log from then on.

  I mustered up the courage to tell her about Alex the day after it happened. The conversation started out inconsequentially, but then I spilled it. She hardly seemed to hear me when I admitted things.

  “D, did you hear me? I said that Alex rolled off the bed. On the freaking first day of my watch. Jesus, he could have been seriously injured, and I am telling you that it’s my fault and I am so very sorry, but he is okay, and the doctor Mom recommended was really nice, and even though she didn’t tell me to, I woke him up at four in the morning just to make sure he is okay . . . Bob and I kept watch all night . . .”

  D sniffed. “Yeah, I heard you. It’s fine. He rolled off the sofa once here.”

  Bland. Not at all characteristic of my sister. “Diana. What the hell is going on? Normally you would rake me over the coals and never let me live something like this down.” I heard her breathing, so I knew she hadn’t hung up.

  “D?”

  “It sucks here. Bryan has not taken any time off work.”

  Oh, no. I gripped my cell with white knuckles. “Not a tragedy. Gives you time to think.”

  “NOT. It gives me time to work up a head of STEAM.”

  I moaned into the phone. “And then, when Bryan gets home . . .”

  “We fight all evening. I am not joking.”

  Instant anxiety attack. Time spun backwards. I stood in our driveway, Mom’s arm around my shoulders and D’s as Dad drove off. The sourness in my throat. The dread. As we watched his black Mercedes disappear around the corner, Mom’s knees buckled. D and I managed to get her into the house, where she sank into a chair in the kitchen, laid her head down on the table, and cried for what seemed like a week. A huge and happy corner of my life had been ripped off that day.

  I tried to be wise. “Can’t you calm down and make a real effort to resolve things? Come back here and get Alex, then start marriage counseling?” I paused, then decided to just go for broke. “You know, avoid divorce, so that your son won’t be scarred for life for want of a traditional family? Like, you know, YOU AND ME?”

  Diana began to sob at her end. Not a good sign. “Shit, Beck! Last night things got so bad that I threatened to divorce him. So he sneered at me and suggested we split for a while!” More sobbing, some nose blowing, and then a sort of wail.

  My sister was dissolving completely in Chicago. I wasn’t holding up so well in Framington, either. “D. Diana! Are you sure? Did you hear him right? Maybe he said you should, I don’t know—spit? Sit? Sweat? Are you sure you heard him right?” I bit the inside of my cheek, and it started to bleed.

  “Separate! He wants a trial separation! So yeah, here I come, just like Mom—single motherhood.” Profuse wailing.

  Cleansing breaths. I tasted the blood in my mouth. I nearly dropped my cell. “Well, this is good news and bad news. The good news is that even though you were the idiot to bring up divorce, he just used the word separation. So there is some wiggle room.”

  D spluttered at her end. “And the bad news?”

  I stood up, the phone plastered to my ear, making my eardrum sweaty, I swear. I paced back and forth on Ella’s rug, noting that there were little bare areas where generations of folks had worn through it, pacing. Walking back and forth with babies. Decorating Christmas trees. Worrying about dying. Maybe dancing, for all I knew. Good God, if the walls had ears . . .

  “Beck! What is the bad news? Not that I need any!”

  I snapped back into the present. “Isn’t that obvious? We will be living nearly in one another’s pockets! So not only will you have family troubles in Chicago, but most likely there will be trouble right here in River City, if you catch my drift. I am not exactly stress-free myself at the moment. And we are SO not soulmates.”

  Diana laughed, her voice, as I would say in a novel, dripping with sarcasm. “Isn’t that just too bad for you. I am sorry that my disaster might make your life run a bit less smooth.”

  “Smoothly.”

  She hung up on me. I went into the bathroom, splashed water on my face, looked at my sorry, wet, grim face in the mirror, and felt remorse. I swabbed my face with an embroidered hand towel that I am sure nobody had ever used before, counted to ten, strode to the top of the stairs, sat down, and dialed my sister back.

  “Okay, I am an asshole. When are you coming back?”

  So my sister was going to have a trial separation. My God. This meant that I would stay at Ella’s longer than I wanted to, but probably that was better for Ella anyway. Diana and Alex would become temporary residents of my place, and she even offered to pay rent. Diana was coming home in a week “or so.” She had to stay in Chicago to “tie up some loose ends,” which I took to mean quit her job, haggle with Bryan about what stuff in the apartment would be hers if they broke up permanently, buy a car, and pack up way too many suitcases full of stuff than would ever fit in my apartment. Ella was due to return in a few days, but Oakmoor was still not sure when. This would mean that before D came back, Bob, Ella, me, and scream-at-night Alex would be living under the same roof. My God. I would have to get Ella some earplugs, too.

  That night, as I cleaned up the kitchen and Bob kept me company at the table doing math homework, I asked her if she was looking forward to having her gran return. Bent over the table with her lip tucked beneath her top teeth, Bob held up a hand. “Just a minute. I have to subtract.” She erased something carefully, entered in another digit, then looked up at me with shining eyes. “Of course I am! We’re a family!”

  I dropped the sponge and it fell inside my shirt. By the time I wrested it out and blotted my chest, the moment had passed.

  ▷◁

  Ella was coming home with a walker that she almost refused to use. Her hip was healing “not as well as I would like,” according to Dr. Lauren. The physical therapist at Oakmoor was turning her over to the outpatient PT department at Framington General, where I hoped there would be just the right therapist for her. Ella needed a combination of drill sergeant and Mr. Rogers—someone to kick her in the ass and fluff her up at the same time. I wasn’t optimistic.

  Meanwhile, had I spent the few quiet mornings I had left working on my new novel, Summer Child, which made me very happy. I had already written the dedication: To Bob, with thanks and Popsicles. It’s a book about a tired-out, dishrag of a woman, who spends her days locked up in her apartment in New York, writing poems that no one could possibly ever want to read. Her life, after losing her son in a car accident in which both son and husband died, has left her an empty shell. The book centers on her relationship with her ten-year-old niece, who is sent to spend the summer with her. The chapters seemed to pour out of me, fully formed.

  On normal afternoons, I did a little housekeeping while the baby napped. But today, with Ella’s return looming, I pledged to myself that the book needed a rest, and I needed to get the environment at Ella’s whipped into shape. I had to do a deep cleaning, get the “guest room” on the first floor ready (it looked like Charles still lived there—I had to get rid of all sorts of model airplanes, books, games, and sporting equipment), and ask Mom what sorts of things I should get for Ella to eat. Pudding?

 
I vacuumed. Dusted. Put footstools and a few baskets of magazines in the basement—tripping hazards. Ugh. The kitchen wasn’t too bad, until I got out the mop and started washing the floor. With the first swipe, the mop turned black. I realized that Ella’s linoleum hid a multitude of sins. I added a capful of Clorox to the water. When I finished—it took me two buckets’ worth before the water was clean—the floor didn’t exactly gleam, but it looked the way it did when Ella was in residence: unpolluted.

  The bathroom downstairs needed to be sanitized. I used Comet in the sink and shower, and squirted Tidy Bowl into the toilet. Swish. Looking good. I folded some clean towels onto the bar, spritzed some Glade into the air. Nice.

  I put away the clutter in the living room. Not too bad. Bob’s and “my” rooms were upstairs. I hiked up there to straighten up a bit, even though Ella wouldn’t be going upstairs any time soon. It wouldn’t be right to have Ella back, worrying about things upstairs going to wrack and ruin.

  The bathroom. Okay. We had been keeping that pretty clean. I applied Comet liberally to everything.

  Then I moved on to Ella’s/my room, just for a quick once-over. I had to be quiet. Alex was napping.

  Let me pause to describe what it is like to sleep in the bedroom of an eighty-four-year-old widow. The walls in the master bedroom were covered with faded, moss green wallpaper. I loved that wallpaper. It had a tiny repeating pattern of what once were probably red birds, now mellowed to a rusty orange. They sat on Pussy Willow branches. When I got into bed, I imagined them singing, all at once, my own avian lullaby. Ella’s windows faced the street, and I pulled up the new blinds to look over at my apartment building. I wondered what I would be doing over there if I hadn’t met Bob. Probably writing sexy drivel and being miserable.

  Ella’s bed had the softest, whitest chenille bedspread—the one Alex enjoyed before he dove right off. Alex’s porta-crib stood in the corner. Alex snored deeply inside, his hands curled up like tiny seashells. Over his crib hung an antique sampler that said ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL. Ella had an antique dresser, naturally. On top was a china tray with a Havilland “dresser group,” as she called it: a delicate china set with a box for jewelry, a little vase, and something that looked to me like a saltshaker, for powder. All covered with scarlet roses. There was a floor lamp by Ella’s bed that cast a soft glow on my laptop as I typed late at night. I looked around for dust balls. The glossy hardwood floor was covered with an old, nearly threadbare Persian carpet, a beautiful, geometric design of maroons and creams. Thank God it broke Alex’s fall. Ella’s rocker angled out of another corner of the room, where I back-and-forthed, comforting Alex, trying to imagine what I would be like when in my eighties. The room had the aroma of gardenias and BenGay. I absolutely loved it. I wiped off the dust on the dresser with my sleeve, lined up my flip-flops, running shoes, and bedroom slippers just under the bed, and shut the closet door on the mess of my dirty clothes on the floor. Done in there.