by Megan Hart
“What do you think she was doing there?” Ethan looked at a series of Polaroid photos, yellowed with age.
In them, Mom was sitting at a table, her hair in pigtails. She was grinning, missing her two front teeth. Her hands were above her head and blurred, as though they were moving. In the last picture, Grandpa was sitting with his arm around her. Mom was laughing into the camera. In most of the earlier pictures, she looked unhappy, but not in these.
“I don’t know, monkey. But she looks happy, doesn’t she?”
“Yeah. She does. I like it better when she looks like that.”
“Me, too.” Kendra flipped the page. More pictures. They weren’t labeled, so they could only guess at what’s going on.
“She was in the hospital,” Ethan said. “Do you think she was sick?”
Kendra shrugged. “I don’t know. If she was sick, I guess Grandpa was taking care of her. But...what kind of little kid is sick like that?”
“Whattaya mean?” Ethan rolled to look at her. “She hardly ever gets sick.”
“Grandpa was a psychiatrist like Daddy. Which means that if Mama was sick, it was in her head.”
Ethan looked at Kendra with a frown. “You mean like crazy?”
She looked again at the pictures.
“What kind of little kid is...crazy?” Ethan asked.
“I don’t think she was crazy.” But even as Kendra said it, she thought of all the strange things her mother did, the stuff other mothers didn’t. “I think she was just...different.”
“I don’t care. I miss her. I want to go back home. To where Mama is,” he added, even though Kendra hadn’t reminded him again that they couldn’t go back to the house in Philly until the end of the summer. “Make Daddy let us go back, Kiki. Please?”
“I can’t, brat—he already said no.”
“We should run away, then.” Ethan said this so matter-of-factly it was clear he meant it.
“Right.” She nudged him with her elbow.
“Can you at least call her?”
“Her phone must be turned off. She isn’t answering or can’t get a signal. Or maybe she just doesn’t want to talk to us,” Kendra said.
Ethan’s face screwed up into a frown. “No way. Mama would never not want to talk to us.”
Kendra wanted to believe that was true. “She’ll call us when she remembers she turned off her phone. Then we can tell her we want to come home. Okay? But until then, we just have to hang in there.”
“I don’t like it here,” Ethan said like a confession.
Kendra pulled him closer. “No. Me, neither.”
FIFTY-TWO
MARI REMEMBERS CRACKING open eggs and letting the yolks drip raw into her mouth, but she scrambles them now with butter and some crumbled bits of bacon. She makes toast, too, thick slices of it she spreads with more butter and strawberry jam. The food’s so simple it’s almost not a meal, yet when she sets it on the table and sits across from Andrew to eat it, he looks at her as if she’s set the table with gold.
“I’m an adult, Andrew.” She’s annoyed at his look of wonder. “I’m married. I have children. I can drive a car. I’m not that grotty, silent child who hid under the table.”
“I know you’re not.” Andrew lifts his fork and tilts it from side to side like he’s trying to catch the light with it, but then he pokes it into the fluffy mess of eggs and bacon on his plate. “It’s just nice to have someone cook for me, that’s all.”
Mari thinks of that tiny house high up on the mountain. A doll’s house, but this man in front of her is no doll. Time has dug lines around his eyes and streaked his hair with just a strand or two of silver. She sits across from him with her own plate, though she’s not hungry. Instead, she sips from a mug of tea she really only wants to warm her hands with.
“So. What now?” she says.
Andrew pauses, mouth full. He chews and swallows. He looks into her eyes. “Did you think about me while you were away? Ever?”
“Honestly, I...forgot about you.” Until she came back here.
Andrew’s mouth thins and his eyes narrow. “Thanks.”
“I was eight years old when they took me out of here. They put me in a psych ward with children who were so disturbed it wasn’t that they didn’t know how to speak, it was that they simply couldn’t. I spent months being poked, prodded and tested every single day for hours at a time.” Mari paused to swallow the bitter taste of those memories. “I think I repressed a lot of what happened here. You included.”
“They were cruel to you.”
“No.” She shakes her head. “No, Andrew. They weren’t. But they were doctors, and they were determined to fix me.”
“You weren’t broken,” Andrew says.
Mari laughs at this. “So says you, with your eco-friendly house and your wireless internet connection and your work-from-home job. You grew up in a house. Went to school. You had parents who took care of you.”
Andrew tilts his head to look at her; he gives her a slow, knowing blink. “You think it was so easy for me?”
“I think you didn’t go hungry or cold. I think you had a normal family.”
It’s his turn to laugh. “Normal. Right. That’s what you think?”
“Wasn’t it?” Mari takes a piece of toast and chews it, the jelly rich and sweet but doing nothing to push back the ache in her gut.
“If you call being raised by a pair of fundamentalists who thought the devil’d already taken my soul and it was their duty to save it normal.” Andrew puts an emphasis on the word that shows what he thinks of it. “If you call being made to kneel on grains of rice while I recited bible verses by rote normal. They never beat me, but they didn’t really have to. When you hear every single day how your soul belongs to Satan, you begin to believe it.”
Mari had grown up without religion. In their house, they celebrate Christmas with Santa and presents, Easter with candy, because it’s what Ryan had grown up with as a child. She doesn’t believe in Satan any more than she believes in God. Still, hearing the loathing in Andrew’s voice, she can understand some of what he felt.
“I’m sorry.” She reaches for him. Their fingers link tight. This feels so familiar it’s like holding her own hand.
“They never took any part of the blame for my sinful state.” His face twists. “By the time I figured out why, exactly, I was so doomed to burn in the everlasting fires of hell, my old man was dying of cancer. It might’ve been the perfect time for him to say he was sorry, to at least explain to me that none of it was really my fault, but nope. To his dying breath he blamed the world, he blamed my mother, he blamed me for looking like her. I was with him when he died, and the only thing I regret was that he didn’t hold on longer so he could suffer more.”
Mari’s glad she didn’t eat much, because at Andrew’s flat, solid tone her stomach twists so much she’d probably be sick. “I’m sorry.”
His laugh is as twisted as her guts. “So don’t talk to me about normal, Mari. Normal is what I tried so hard to save you from. From the first moment I saw you, I knew there had to be a better life for you. I was only six years old, and I knew it.”
She means to ask him how that had happened—how he’d seen her when she was just a baby. Her memory of childhood is patchy and she only remembers meeting him in the woods when she was older, but she’s curious now how long he knew her before she was taken away. How he came to be her protecting prince. Before she can ask, Andrew’s pulling his hand from hers and standing. He paces along the kitchen floor, his bare feet scuffing it.
He goes to the sink and draws some water into his cupped hands and drinks, then splashes his face. He turns to her, dripping, mouth working on words he can’t seem to force from off his tongue.
“You are so beautiful,” Andrew whispers over and over. “I knew you would be lovely. I didn’t know you’d break my heart with it.”
This is the sort of prayer she understands. She studies his face and thinks hard about what this is. What it was
.
What it might become.
She’s never entertained even the thought of being unfaithful to Ryan. Now she sees again how the stage was set for her to love Ryan by loving this man in front of her. And she wonders, did she ever have a choice in loving Ryan at all, or was she destined to marry him because of something that had set itself in her childish brain?
Their current issues aside, how will she know if she would have chosen her husband if she’s never had any other options to choose from?
She brings Andrew’s fingertips to her lips. She kisses each one until he cups her cheek with his hot palm and draws her closer. She feels his heart beat beneath her cheek and the soft sigh of his breath against her hair.
“Come upstairs with me,” Mari offers.
FIFTY-THREE
RYAN GOT BACK to West Chester from Philly later than he’d planned, but hell. After those depressing-as-shit meetings with his lawyer, he’d needed a few drinks. The bright spot of it all was that it turned out he wasn’t the only one being named in the suit by Annette’s husband, and that he hadn’t been the only one previously sued by the guy, either. The malpractice insurance company apparently had a thick file on Mr. Somers and they were inclined to settle out of court just to get rid of him.
It didn’t get Ryan his job back. Kastabian and Goldman had never liked him, anyway, and were just looking for a reason to get rid of him from the practice. But he wasn’t going to lose his license, and they weren’t going to go after him for breach of contract or anything ridiculous like that, so even though he’d have to look for a new place to work, at least he could work.
Which was a good thing, he thought as he pushed open the door to his mother’s house, because the book was going to shit.
He’d emailed query letters to twenty different literary agents, promising them the book was a guaranteed hit, perfect for Oprah to tout on her show and Dr. Phil to base an episode on. He’d listed his credentials, which were pretty damned impressive, and made sure to let them know the project was based entirely on his dad’s work. He’d even sent along the first fifteen pages he’d managed to get down so far—who knew writing could be so much freaking work?—with the explanation that they weren’t completely polished, but that’s what editors were for. Right?
So far, not a single one had wanted it. Several of them had sent form rejections, a bunch hadn’t answered and one rude bitch had even replied with a letter suggesting he take a few writing classes to improve his “skills.”
“Eff that noise,” Ryan muttered, digging in his mother’s fridge for something to eat.
It wasn’t as if he was going to be a writer, for Chrissake. He pulled out a plastic container full of what looked like chili and lifted the lid to sniff it. At the sound of the voice behind him, he let out a shout and whirled, sending the chili spattering all over the floor.
“Oh, Ryan!” his mother cried in a voice thick with disgust. “Are you drunk?”
“Jesus, Ma. No. You just scared me.” Ryan blinked in the bright light from overhead, then at the mess on the floor.
She was already bustling to the closet to pull out a mop. “You smell like a liquor store.”
Liquor stores, in Ryan’s experience, hardly smelled like anything. But compared to the time in college when she’d said he smelled like a bum someone had rolled in an alley, he guessed this was better.
“I had a couple drinks. Not a big deal.”
She sniffed loudly to show what she thought of that, and to Ryan’s surprise, handed him the mop instead of setting to the task herself. “Here.”
He took the mop and looked again at the mess. His stomach growled. “You have more chili?”
“No. Your son ate most of it, then was up until long past bedtime with a stomachache.”
Ryan looked up at her. “Is he okay?”
“Nothing a little Pepto-Bismol couldn’t fix. What?” his mother added, affronted. “You think I can’t take care of a little bellyache?”
Ryan leaned the mop against the counter and stepped over the splatter to grab the paper towels from the holder. He tore off a few and used them to scoop up most of the muck, including the plastic container that had split and chipped. He tossed it all in the trash, then looked again at his mother, who watched from the doorway with her arms crossed.
“What?” he said.
“Has she called you yet?”
He didn’t have to ask who she meant by “she.”
“No. I’m sure she misplaced her phone or something.”
He didn’t mention to his mother that Mari had been righteously pissed off with him. That maybe she was ignoring him on purpose—that even though he could easily imagine her doing that to him, he was getting a little concerned that she wasn’t at least calling to talk to the kids. He wasn’t going to give his mother any more ammo against his wife. Hell, even if this all ended up with Mari being his ex-wife, he wasn’t going to give his mother the satisfaction of having one more thing to snark about.
“Your children are missing their mother.”
Ryan straightened with another handful of messy paper towels. “Ma, don’t.”
“What?” she cried, all wide eyes and innocence.
“She’s my wife. She is their mother. Of course they miss her. I miss her, too.” He dumped the paper towels in the trash and washed his hands. He paused, recognizing how this all could go and not wanting to get into it with her. “Are they okay? The kids, I mean. Have they been saying stuff?”
“Your daughter barely says a damned word, and your son just keeps saying he’s bored,” his mother said, and Ryan knew this was more than her usual irritation with anything related to Mari. She was pissed off. She’d never have referred to her beloved grandchildren by anything but their names, otherwise. It was the same as when she said “your father” instead of Leon or even “your dad.”
“Bored!” she continued. “Despite the hundred dollars I dropped like it was change from the bottom of my purse at that video game store. Despite the trips I’ve taken them on! Bored, Ryan. And I have to tell you, as a child, you were never bored.”
Ryan, in fact, could remember long and horrid stretches of boredom on the endless car trips his mother had insisted on taking instead of a fun vacation, like a trip to the beach. He’d never understood how a woman who spent so much time getting ready in the morning could claim she loved camping and cross-country road trips so much. She’d spent a huge portion of the time in the car either haranguing his dad about his driving, complaining about the poor service they got at hotels and in restaurants or demanding her husband and son “appreciate the natural beauty” they were passing on their way to some touristy spot.
“What are you saying, Ma? That my kids aren’t perfect angels?” The mop was going to be worthless without a bucket and cleanser. Ryan didn’t have to be a housekeeper to see that. He yanked open the cupboard under the sink and looked in vain for a bottle of spray cleaner and some dishcloths. Mari kept them under the sink, but it seemed his mother had some complicated system of where she put her cleaning products. Irritated, he turned to her. “Where’s your cleaning spray?”
“I’m saying, Ryan, that they could use a little talking-to from their father about gratitude. You’ve spoiled them dreadfully.”
“Spoiled?” Hands still empty, Ryan went to the closet from where she’d pulled the mop and yanked it open so hard the fuzzy kitten calendar hanging from a nail on the door swung wildly. “You think my kids are spoiled?”
“I think they’ve been indulged. Yes. I think they’ve been let to run—” she paused until Ryan half closed the door to look around it at her “—wild.”
“Oh, for—” He couldn’t quite bring himself to drop the f-bomb in front of his mother, no matter how much she might’ve deserved it. “Enough, okay? Would you just stop, Ma? I know all about Mari. I know you hate her because you think she stole Dad away from you, but the fact is you probably had more to do with it than anything else, you just don’t want to admit it.”
Shit. Too far.
Ryan’s mother gasped, one hand to her heart. He felt immediately guilty and closed the closet door.
“How dare you?” she managed to say through quivering lips. “How. Dare. You.”
“You think I don’t remember, Ma, but I do,” Ryan said as gently as he could. “I was away at college, but I remember when he started talking about bringing her home. You didn’t support the idea at all from the start. He was talking about giving a lost soul a home....”
His mother’s bitter laugh stopped him. “Is that what you think of her as? A lost soul?”
Truthfully, he didn’t. Mari was one of the least lost people Ryan had ever met. If anything, he’d thought of her as a curiosity at first, before seeing her as a woman he could love. He shook his head now. “No. But Dad did.”
Another bitter laugh. “Well, that was your father, wasn’t it? Trying to fix things that couldn’t be repaired? Everything except our marriage.”
Ryan had spent countless hours listening to the litany of complaints of spouses toward each other. He’d spent a good portion of his career counseling people on how to deal with the problems in their marriages, often by first helping them to turn toward their personal issues and solve them. He’d learned to tune out his mother’s complaints about his dad because he didn’t really want to either counsel his mother or be privy to the endless sniping she seemed helpless or at least unwilling to stop. He wasn’t any more interested now than he’d ever been.
“All I’m saying is that it takes more than one small thing to end a marriage.”
“One small thing? You think the hours he spent with her, away from me...away from you, for God’s sake, Ryan! The hours and hours of time he gave to her instead of spending them with his family. You think that was one small thing? Or how he used to talk about her endlessly, as though she were some magical creature, some fairy-tale princess. My God, it was disgusting. And ridiculous,” she added. “And then to have him say he wanted to bring her home, into our house, that wild, uncultured, uncivilized...thing? She was an animal, Ryan! And he wanted to bring her to live in my house!”