Who Makes Up These Rules, Anyway?

by Stevi Mittman

  “I thought he was breaking into the house,” I say, only my voice seems slightly slurred, almost as if I am drunk.

  “You all right? Did you sleep?” she asks me. “You think you’re up for a session?” She waits for me to nod and then holds the door, motioning for Rio to leave us alone. Before he leaves, Rio signals for her to come out into the hall with him. She tells me she’ll be right in and closes the door behind her so that I can’t hear what my husband is no doubt telling her.

  What? I can’t guess? Teddi’s out of control. She tried to kill me. She’s a danger to my kids. She’s losing her mind. She’s blah, blah, blah.

  “Can I tell you my side?” I ask her when she finally extricates herself from Rio and comes into the room. She pulls out the chair from the little desk by the window and perches on it facing my bed.

  “There aren’t any sides here, Teddi,” she says, gesturing for me to hop up on the bed rather than just stand there with my arms folded over my chest.

  I sit reluctantly, refusing to lie down.

  “You didn’t mean to shoot him, did you?”

  “Of course not,” I say. But there must be something about the way I say it that surprises her, because I can see her filing my answer in the back of her mind. “Did I ruin your weekend? I told Dr. Cohen not to—”

  She dismisses my concern with a wave and starts recapping the story as though she’s been there and I haven’t. When she gets to the part about how Rio told me that he was on his way home, I stop her. I tell her that I am hurt that she is taking Rio’s version of the events for the truth.

  “Rio was shot,” she says. “Only you and your mother were there. Are you saying it was your mother who shot him?”

  “Would you believe me if I said it was?”

  I can see her struggling with the answer, wanting to say she’d believe me, but she can’t. And she tells me as much.

  “I see,” I say, turning away and pretending to busy myself with the items in my nightstand drawer. There is only so much a person can do with a mustard-colored plastic bowl, a tube of toothpaste, a cheap comb and a sample tube of Neutrogena moisturizer. I put the moisturizer on my hands and then climb up onto the bed.

  “Do you want to rest?” she asks me.

  “I want to quiet the chaos,” I say. For a few minutes neither of us says anything more. Then I tell her about Rio leaving without his gun, about suspecting that he was having an affair with Bobbie, about the Mafia, and being terrified and shooting at Rio when he came through the door.

  She tries to appear unfazed by all the revelations—especially about the Nose.

  “Had you taken any medication? Valium? A sleeping pill?” she asks, probably hoping that my imagination or my recollection could have been altered by drugs.

  “No. I was in perfect control of my faculties. I mean, I was scared to death, but it was normal. I mean considering.”

  “Considering?”

  “The lights in the yard were out. There was a car that kept going up and down the block with its lights off. There was a scratching….”

  “I follow all of this,” she says. “What I don’t understand is why after speaking to him moments before, you didn’t know it was your husband coming in the door.”

  “Because he was three hours away when he called. I spoke to him, he said he’d come home, and then he was there. It seemed like it was only moments, minutes.”

  “But it was hours after the first call. And the second one was blocks from the house. Your husband says that there will be phone records to corroborate his story.”

  “I’m already here. What does he need corroboration for? Does he think I’ll sue him for getting in the way of my paint ball?”

  CHAPTER 26

  When I hear the footsteps in the hallway, I turn my back to the door and pretend I am asleep. People nap all the time in this place, from all the drugs, I suppose. Or maybe they are all pretending to, avoiding their husbands or wives or who-evers. I pull the blanket over my jeans and T-shirt and scrunch down as the doorknob turns.

  “Honey?” I hear my father whisper. “You asleep?”

  I roll over lazily and let my eyelids flutter open. “Dad,” I say softly, so relieved that it isn’t Rio that I forget I’m angry with him. “Shouldn’t you be at the office?”

  “What? I can’t take off a little time? There’s got to be some advantage to being the boss, besides the privilege of worrying twenty-four hours a day.”

  I ask if Rio is covering for him. Instead of answering, he asks if Rio’s been to see me.

  I say I think so, but that the doctor has given me very strong tranquilizers and I’ve been sleeping on and off, so I haven’t really spoken to him.

  “You hiding from Rio now, Teddi?” he asks. “Like you did from me? What’re you gonna do when the kids come home at the end of the summer? You gonna be in here when they get back?”

  “The kids,” I say, shaking my head sadly. “Whatever am I going to tell those sweet, innocent kids?”

  My father gets up and looks out the window. My room has a nice view of the grounds. People are sitting under trees, patients with their visitors, two nurses taking a smoking break.

  “Whatever you tell them, it’ll be smart. You’ve got so much more seyckel than me, Teddi. You’re smarter than I ever was. You’ll do a hell of a lot better than I did.” This he says offhandedly. Then, sadly, softly, he adds, “I know I failed you, somehow.”

  “Dad,” I start, but it’s clear he has something to say.

  “You do know I tried, don’t you? I really did, but they don’t give out instruction manuals when they hand you your kids. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with a little girl…and your mother…well, she wasn’t much help.

  “When Angelina came along, she tried to show me. Remember those times I took you to that ice cream parlor in New York City? And to the circus? Those were Angelina’s ideas. I didn’t know what a girl liked.”

  “Dad, I—” I start again, but he’s rehearsed and he waves me quiet.

  “I’m not saying that you should forgive me and her. I want you to understand…see that I’m not such a mamzer and Angelina’s no slut. It sounds bad, honey, but it wasn’t the sordid thing I know you’re thinking. It came so naturally, after a while, her and me mothering you like we were, that we began to feel like your parents, like a couple.

  “And then we were.”

  I am sniffing, rubbing at the corner of my eye, and he should be happy for the sympathy, but he doesn’t look it.

  “If any of this is my fault…if I wasn’t the kind of father you needed, if what happened with Angelina, and you finding out, made this happen…”

  He sits down in the chair by the desk and loosens his tie.

  “It’s all right, Dad,” I say softly. “I’ve been growing up a little in the past few weeks, and I don’t think things are as black and white as I did this spring.”

  “I always tried to protect you without smothering you. Whatever I did, your mother said I was wrong. When I objected to your boyfriends, she said I was jealous. I wanted you to have a happier life than we had.

  “When you brought Rio home…” He stops to open the top button on his shirt. It looks like he is suffocating. “I tried to scare him off. He ever tell you that? He didn’t scare. Not even when I presented him with that little agreement that everything you brought to the marriage, everything I gave you both, was really a gift to you. Signed away his right to anything you ever had, any inheritance, the house, any money I ever gave you. And he’s been a good worker, Teddi. And a good father…”

  “He signed some sort of prenup?” I am staring at him as if he’s grown an extra head.

  “He didn’t tell you?”

  I cock my head. This is all news to me.

  “Well, I didn’t trust him from the first, but you had your heart set on him. I thought about a prenup, but the lawyer told me you’d have had to sign it, so we did it instead as a contract between him and me. We called it an outsid
e-nup, which made the lawyer laugh. He said it was a separate-property agreement or something like that. What it amounted to was that Rio would take out of the marriage exactly what he brought into it.”

  “Which was nothing,” I say.

  “That was why I bought you the house in my name and then signed it over to you—”

  “But you didn’t tell me because…?” I ask.

  “Because you’d have made me change it,” he says.

  “And Rio didn’t tell me?” I ask.

  He looks surprised and says he figured that by now Rio had, actually.

  I tell him that Rio has never breathed a word of it.

  Apparently my father, fearing I would somehow undo it, or hate him for the rest of his natural life, had made Rio promise not to. It sounds good, but I suspect that Rio had his own reasons—like he was content to let me think that half of everything I owned was his.

  “And no matter what happened in our lives,” I ask him, “no matter how many children we had or how long we loved each other, if we split up he’d still get nothing? Even if I died and he had to take care of the kids?”

  My father says that no one is dying, but he sees it doesn’t satisfy me. “Pretty much he gets nothing,” he admits. “Unless you were incapacitated or something like that. To be honest, I never expected him to stay around long enough for it to matter.”

  “Nice confidence, Dad,” I say, wondering if it was Rio he was doubting, or my own worth.

  CHAPTER 27

  I am waiting near the lobby when Bobbie and Diane come through the front doors, and I run into Bobbie’s arms as if I have returned from a war. The Hundred Years War.

  Bobbie and Diane flank me as we walk back to my room. We walk down the hall in silence, nodding cordially at anyone we pass, Diane and Bobbie no doubt wondering what is the matter with each of them.

  “Probably a jumper,” Diane whispers when a man on crutches limps by, his leg in a cast.

  “Slicer,” Bobbie say of the woman with gauze around her wrists.

  A young man in his twenties who stands facing the wall whips around suddenly, exposing himself to us.

  Diane starts to say something, but Bobbie interrupts her. “Forget the caption,” she tells her sister. “I saw the picture.”

  “And you’re in here,” Diane says sadly, shaking her head at me.

  “Yeah, I am,” I say, “so a little respect for the shell-shocked if you please.”

  “Well, you look fine,” Bobbie says, taking in my jeans and T-shirt as if what I’m wearing in here matters. I swear she would be busy telling people what to wear as they were getting into the lifeboats on the Titanic.

  “It’s still me,” I say, and hold out my arm to reveal a plastic hospital band with my name on it. “The jewelry’s a little tacky, but then, I’m not going to a cotillion at the Meadow-brook Country Club, now am I?”

  “The what?” Diane asks.

  “Nowhere,” I say. I perch on the edge of my bed, leaving the desk chair and the easy chair for my guests. “I’m going no place, slowly.”

  “That beats getting no place fast,” Bobbie says.

  I ask if Bobbie has spoken to her girls, and if everyone is all right. Bobbie assures me that she’s spoken to hers and mine and that everyone everywhere is fine. That I ought to pack my bags and come home.

  “She can’t do that,” Diane says, and her gaze keeps returning to the window in the door.

  “You on surveillance or something?” Bobbie asks. “What’s with the window?”

  “I hate that window,” I say. “I hate that anyone passing by can look in here.”

  “It doesn’t seem fair that you’re in here,” Bobbie says. “I mean, what about goodness and kindness and all? Shouldn’t they take that into account? Isn’t that like mitigating circumstances?”

  Diane pulls the chair out from the desk and plops down in it. “She’s not in prison, Barbara!” That’s Diane’s polite way of calling Bobbie stupid. She pronounces it in two syllables like Barbra Streisand, drawing out the first one overly long. “She’s somewhere that they can help her.”

  “I don’t need help,” I say. “I need to turn back the clock. Go back to before Mike left you and my mind left me and Dana got her period.”

  “Dana got her period?” Diane asks. “No one told me Dana got her period.”

  “It isn’t a crime, Officer,” Bobbie says. “We don’t have to report to you on every little thing.”

  The light bulb goes off over Diane’s head. “She beat Kristin and Kimmie, huh?”

  “It’s not a race,” Bobbie reminds her, the same way she’s reminded her kids.

  “Yeah, right. Save that for the Ks.”

  I look at my watch. Almost eight-thirty. Visiting hours will be over in a few minutes. “I think I’ll give Mike a call,” Bobbie says, reaching for my phone and ignoring the look Diane and I exchange. “I think he’s coming home tonight, is all.”

  “Mike,” she says into the phone, “listen to me and don’t say a word. I’ve given it a lot of thought. I’ve decided that I was crazy when I fell in love with you. That’s why I’m calling from South Winds. Because I’m crazy. I must be. Because after everything I still want you back.”

  “Bobbie!” Diane shouts and lunges for the phone, but Bobbie climbs up on the bed and continues.

  “I will do anything you want…. Just please come home. Please love me again. I have no pride left. “ She has fallen to her knees, and Diane seems frozen with horror.

  “It doesn’t matter…nothing matters but you.…”

  I am not frozen. I am furious. “Bobbie!”

  She nods at me. “Teddi is yelling at me. She’s right, of course. Forget everything I said. I didn’t mean it…really, I didn’t. I mean, do you really think I’d let you screw me again? You already screwed me but good, didn’t you?

  “I hate you!” she screams into the phone before slamming it down.

  There is dead silence in the room. Finally Diane says, “You scared the crap out of me, sister. I can’t believe you told the SOB off. You were great!”

  “Yeah,” Bobbie says. “Imagine what I could have said if he’d picked up the phone!”

  “You left that message on his answering machine?” I can’t believe she’d do that. I mean what if Phyllis hears it?

  “And risk him hearing it? You’re the one in here, not me,” Bobbie says. “Two rings and I pressed down the off button. But believe me, when I make up my mind what I want, he’ll be the first to know…after me, that is.

  “You weren’t talking to him?” Diane asks. Obviously she is as disappointed as I am confused.

  “Not for a second,” Bobbie says. “You knew, didn’t you, Teddi?” she asks, but I am in outer space, counting on my fingers, putting up one hand, putting up the other. The girls are staring at me as if I’ve taken a nosedive off the deep end. And the pool is empty. “Teddi?”

  “Give me a sec,” I tell them, biting a fingernail and studying the nubs in the carpet. “I’m thinking.”

  “I knew I smelled something burning,” Bobbie says, trying to make a joke out of my short circuits. But I don’t care. Pieces of the puzzle are coming together. If only I had the box top I’d know what the picture was supposed to look like in the end.

  “Remember when the satellite went out at our house and Rio wanted to watch that Indie whatever race?” I ask. The sisters exchange a look, but Bobbie says she remembers.

  Bobbie resists saying, “So what?” and instead says, “I had to crawl up on the freakin’ roof to fix it.”

  “You did?” I say to be sure. She raises her eyebrows at me as if to ask if I think I did it. I drop it and ask instead if they are going home together. Bobbie tells me they are.

  “Are you gonna watch a movie?” I press.

  They don’t have a plan beyond pizza.

  “Could you do me an enormous favor?” I ask. “A favor for your confined, paranoid, psychotic friend?”

  “You’re not—” Bobbie
starts, but my hand is up. I’m not sure whether I am having an epiphany or tripping out, but I am totally in the zone.

  The Twilight Zone.

  “Go home, now. Go in your basement and find your Ingrid Bergman tapes—”

  “‘Your mission, should you choose to accept it…’” Bobbie starts, trying to lighten the atmosphere, but I grab her arm and she realizes that I’m serious.

  “And watch Gaslight.”

  CHAPTER 28

  When Dr. Benjamin comes into the room, the bed is strewn with bills and papers and notes. I am pressed up against the headboard with my feet tucked under me. I am sober, clear-eyed and seem to be in charge of what must look like either Command Central or a nesting party. I quickly introduce Bobbie, who is kneeling on the side of my bed, and Diane, who is beside her, rifling through my papers.

  “Try to catch up,” I tell the good doctor.

  “You are joining a show already in progress,” Diane says, and we all turn our backs on her and go on with our discussion.

  But Dr. Benjamin isn’t having any of it. “I don’t think so,” she says firmly, opening the door widely and asking Bobbie and Diane to give her a moment with “her patient.” When they don’t hop-to, she bullies them, threatening to restrict my visitors to immediate family.

  I tell her she can’t do that. She raises an eyebrow implying that she not only can, but will.

  Diane grumbles something at her, but Bobbie, as she walks past her, nose in the air, is quite clear. “We are family,” she says with great authority.

  “Sly and the Family Stone?” Dr. Benjamin responds, giving her a bar or two of the song “We Are Family.”

  Bobbie looks at her with disgust and points to herself. “Sister Sledge.”

  “What if Sister Sledge married MC Hammer?” Diane asks me over her shoulder.

  “She’d be Sister Sledge Hammer,” Dr. Benjamin says. “Now, out!”