How Lucky You Are (9781455518548)

by Kusek Lewis, Kristyn

  The people around me are like ghosts, changing shape every few hours. First, an elderly woman and her adult children talk in hushed whispers about her husband’s—their father’s—heart attack. Then a husky, bearded man in carpenter’s pants, who paces in circles while he growls on his phone to his insurance company. Then a young married couple who don’t utter a single word to each other during the entire ninety minutes that they sit across from us, but hold each other’s hands so hard that I can see the whites of their knuckles.

  I stare past the images on the flat screen across the room—Pat Sajak and Vanna White, a sitcom with an endlessly repetitive laugh track, the teaser for the eleven o’clock news. There could be a breaking news report about a medieval mob of club-wielding maniacs about to storm the hospital and it wouldn’t faze me. I can’t move. My mind is stuck on one image that replays itself over and over again like a skipping record: Amy, her head cracked open on an operating table. And the very real possibility that none of this might have happened had I called somebody, done something, when Amy first told me what was going on in her home. She kept saying that everything was fine. I never should have believed her.

  I force myself off of the scratchy couch in the waiting room only after Amy’s mother calls from the parking area outside. I wait for them in the hallway, and when they appear behind a janitor wielding a floor buffer, I realize that I haven’t seen them in at least a year. My nerves start to make my insides turn like something is crawling around in my stomach.

  Amy’s mother leads the four of them like a majorette in a very somber marching band, her shoulder-length silver hair the same color as her silk blouse and flapping behind her like wings. Amy’s sisters, Celia and Claire, in lockstep just behind their mother’s left shoulder, are holding hands. They look so much like Amy that it’s as if they are a pair of paper dolls whose third has been torn away from them. Celia, with her pregnant belly, looks so much like Amy did when she was expecting. Amy’s father follows behind them, taking one step for every two of theirs, as if by moving slowly enough he might never have to confront the situation. Even though I have seen him only a handful of times since Amy’s wedding—we chatted about fly fishing at one of Emma’s birthday parties, and about his mother’s biscuits when Amy brought them to visit the bakery—I feel like I can sense everything that he’s thinking just by watching him walk toward me. His slumped shoulders and angry, anxious fists look just like what I’m feeling inside.

  When Amy’s mother sees me, she rushes toward me and hugs me hard, as if by holding me she might reach through to Amy. I know there is no way to comfort her, and I bite hard on the inside of my cheek to keep myself from breaking down.

  “Waverly, how did this happen?” Claire says, her voice warbling. “I just don’t understand how this happened,” she says again.

  The four of them are looking at me wide-eyed. Now I have to tell them what put Amy here, and it occurs to me, standing across from them in the goddamn hospital, that if I’d just been brave enough to call them when Amy first told me—instead of letting her convince me that she was “fine, just fine”—it would be a whole hell of a lot easier to explain what I am about to now.

  “How long has it been happening?” Margaret suddenly says, her eyes narrowing. She puts her palm to her chest and takes a deep breath, pursing her lips before she continues. “He’s been hitting her for a while, hasn’t he?”

  It is so hard to look at them that I feel like I have weights attached to my eyelids, but when I finally do, I can tell that they’ve been talking about this very possibility and that they might not be surprised by anything I’m about to say after all. They have the determined look of people with a plan, and it comforts me somehow. How long have they known? Did it only occur to them tonight when I called, or have they been speculating for longer, all of them wishing away the same anxious thoughts that I’ve been battling?

  “Yes,” is all I can get out. “She told me several weeks ago.”

  Margaret steps forward and wraps her thin, graceful hands around my arms. She pulls me toward her and looks at me with the kind of compassionate steadiness I haven’t seen since I gazed into my own mother’s eyes. “Tell us everything you know,” she says.

  I look down the long hallway toward the room where Amy is fighting for her life. Then I clear my throat and start talking.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Around six the next morning, Larry brings Emma to the hospital and picks up Amy’s two sisters and me, and we drop the three of them off at the Holiday Inn near the hospital. Amy is in the surgical intensive care unit, or SICU, and we won’t know how successful her surgery was until after her sedation wears off.

  “How are you doing?” he says as soon as they’re out of the car, putting his hand on my knee as he slowly pulls away from the entrance. When I open my mouth to speak, I burst into tears. He veers left, pulling into the parking lot in front of the hotel, and shuts off the engine. I bend forward, my head in my knees, and sob so hard that I nearly vomit. I don’t think I’ve ever cried like this, not even when my parents died, when I’d wail in the shower so that Babci wouldn’t hear me. Everything I’ve been holding in overtakes me, and no matter how many times Larry purrs that it will be okay, no matter how gently he rubs my back, I feel like I’m falling deeper and deeper. When I eventually catch my breath, I keep my head locked in my lap and listen to the soft murmur of the newscaster reporting the weather on NPR. “Clear blue skies and lots of sunshine,” he says.

  Larry puts his hand on the back of my head and softly runs his fingers through my hair. “How did it go with her family?” he asks.

  I tell him that it was every bit as horrendous as I’d imagined it would be. I trudged through each detail with the same candidness as when I’d given my statement to the police. It was almost easier that way—to just spit it all out like a confession, which, in a way, it felt like it was. As I pushed through, I watched the kaleidoscopic way that their faces shifted from shock to worry to anger and to fear. They hadn’t actually known anything. “She kept assuring me that they were working it out,” I’d finished, not able to look at them when I said it. Nothing could have sounded more ridiculous. I keep replaying the scene in my head, as if by forcing myself to relive the humiliation, I might be able to somehow change things.

  Larry has a morning meeting, so he starts the car and we head home. It’s rush hour, and even though we’re headed away from the city, this is D.C. The traffic on the Beltway is hardly moving. Neither of us says much. I wonder if he’s still angry with me. We inch down the highway, the green exit signs flipping by slowly, and I people watch, trying to lose myself: an Indian woman in a business suit driving a Saab, sipping a venti-something out of the telltale cup; four carpoolers, all men around my age, laughing raucously; a couple staring vacantly out the windshield, bored or tired or both. Everyone looks so normal. So responsible in their trudge toward work. So well-adjusted. So fine. A week ago, I might have envied these strangers, projecting my vision of their perfect lives onto them. How nice that she can buy a giant coffee like that every day and not worry about her budget, I might have thought, looking at that woman. How lucky for those guys to be able to ride to work each day and laugh. How sweet that that couple gets to start and end their day together. But now—now I just see nightmares: That woman needs her giant coffee because she was up all night worrying about her impending divorce. Those men are all laughing to make up for the fact that they know their department at work is about to be cut. That couple isn’t speaking because he hit her before they left for the office. I glance at Larry, then grab his hand.

  He squeezes back.

  I look out the window, at the driver passing by on the right. He’s handsome. Navy suit. Singing along to something. Where is Mike?

  When I get inside the house, I see what Larry’s left for me on the kitchen counter: An old box of Unisom that he must’ve dug out of the shoebox of medicine that we keep in the linen closet. Next to it, there’s a note: “Get some
sleep. Will call you after mtg. I love you.”

  I walk to the living room and collapse into one of the faded floral armchairs I inherited from my grandmother. I can see myself in the mirror on the wall across the room. I look like I’ve plunged my fingers into an ashtray and wiped wide swaths of ash under each eye. The whites of my eyes are fissured with red, like the fragile insides of an old china teacup. I look just as I should.

  I trace my finger along the pattern in the upholstery and wonder when Kate will get here. Shortly after Amy’s family arrived last night, she left the hospital, saying that she’d text in the morning and come by. I could tell that she felt like she was intruding. She chatted briefly with Amy’s mom, offering to call one of the doctors her family knows.

  I touch my fingertips to the swollen pads under my eyes. I’m so puffy from crying that I can feel my eyelids when I blink. I remember a Sunday afternoon years and years ago—I must have been fifteen or sixteen—when my mother and I got in a fight about something. I can’t even remember what it was now. I came to Babci’s and sat in this very room and bawled my eyes out. She brought me a bag of frozen peas from the kitchen to bring down the swelling. I’d asked her if I could come live with her and she’d laughed. “Maybe someday,” she’d said. I can’t believe that I almost let myself lose this place.

  There’s a black-and-white picture in a frame on the table next to me. I’m probably around ten or eleven, at the beach with Mom and Dad. My swimsuit has a rainbow running diagonally across the front like a sash, and I’m kneeling in the sand at the edge of the water. Mom is on one side of me, deeply tanned, with a rare cigarette in one hand. Dad is on the other, in a faded T-shirt, cutoffs, and what looks to be the very first pair of Nike sneakers ever made. Our smiles are identical, wide and spontaneous, like we’re all laughing at the same joke.

  The doorbell rings.

  “How is she?” Kate says when I answer.

  “No news yet. Margaret said she’d call as soon as she could.”

  She drops her bag on the worn Oriental rug and holds her arms out to me. She’s dressed in expensive-looking jeans and snakeskin cowboy boots, like she’s on her way to a hoedown at the Four Seasons. I wrap my arms around her. She smells powdery and perfumey like a department store makeup counter.

  We walk to the living room, plopping down on either end of the couch. I hug a throw pillow to my chest. Kate does the same. It occurs to me that we’ve sat just like this, on this very sofa, countless times over the course of our friendship: in high school when Babci would have us over for Polish tea cookies; after my parents died, on Thanksgiving and Christmas Day, stuffed from the feasts that Babci and I cooked together; and now, this.

  “How’s her family?” Kate says.

  “About how you would expect.” I rake my hands through my hair. “Her father didn’t say a word the whole time I was there.” After I’d finished telling them what I knew, he’d turned away from us, breaking away from our huddle like he was quitting the team, and retreated to a chair in the corner of the waiting room, where he sat with his head in his hands until the doctor came to give us an update.

  “And what about Mike? I still can’t believe you saw him at the police station.”

  “The police came to the hospital and talked to Amy’s family. He’s being charged with something called ‘malicious wounding’ because her injuries are so severe. It’s like an attempted murder charge. He could get serious jail time.”

  “Good. How serious?”

  “Five to twenty years.”

  “Well, that’s good!” Kate’s face lights up. “Isn’t that good?”

  I shrug. “To be honest, I can’t think positively about much of anything until I know that Amy’s okay. And the police were quick to explain that even with a known history of abuse and what Amy’s just been through, Mike could plead not guilty when the charges are read against him today. And he could hire a good defense lawyer and be out on bond as early as this afternoon.”

  Kate’s jaw drops. “That’s the most asinine thing I’ve ever heard.” She pinches her bottom lip between her thumb and forefinger, thinking. “I can call someone,” she says.

  “We really can’t do anything until Amy wakes up. Until we know—”

  “Yeah,” she interrupts before I have to say more.

  For several minutes, we’re both lost in thought. I can’t stop imagining Amy in that hospital bed, and every time I remember what put her there, the thought sneaking through the back door of my brain like an uninvited guest, my heart leaps as if I’m just learning it again for the first time. I’ll never get used to this. I’ll never, ever get used to this.

  Kate starts tapping her boot angrily against the coffee table. “It’s just unbelievable,” she says, her voice exploding into the room. “That this could happen to Amy. To someone like us.”

  “Happens every day, Kate.” I’m tired. I’m mentally done. The past twenty-four hours is catching up with me.

  She shrugs. “Not to women like Amy. Not the doctor’s wife. The preschool mom. The potluck organizer in the cul-de-sac.”

  “You know, you’re wrong about that, though,” I say, dipping my head back on the chair and studying the pattern of a water stain on the ceiling. “It’s women like us…it’s women not at all like us. It’s anyone. It’s everyone. It’s women in bad neighborhoods with alcoholic boyfriends and it’s pop stars and movie stars, too.”

  “Yeah, but would you ever have expected this? Dr. and Mrs. Michael Rutherford?”

  “No.” I shake my head. “No.” I shake it again. “I mean, it had been going on for years before it ever crossed my mind. The whole thing completely bewilders me. I think it always will.”

  Kate pulls herself up from the collection of throw pillows on the couch and pushes her shoulders back. “Well, it seems like this is the year of surprises.” She chuckles, not really meaning it.

  “Kate, how are you really doing? Aside from the jokes.”

  “How am I doing?” Kate raps her fingertips against her cheek, considering the question. “I guess I should have expected it. That’s what I think.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I say. “I certainly never thought that Brendan, or anyone, could do this to you. When people looked at the two of you, they saw this picture-perfect example of everything we’re supposed to want: You’re both gorgeous, well educated, poised, wealthy. And I say that because I’ve done my fair share of envying, too.”

  “Oh, please,” she rolls her eyes.

  “Well, I have,” I say, locking my eyes on her so that she knows just how serious I am. “Your life always seemed so easy, Kate. You have to know that. Meanwhile, mine…”

  She sighs. “I know what you’re saying. You don’t have to say anything else.”

  “I guess the bottom line is this,” I say. “I don’t think anyone ever expected that this would happen to you.” I pause for a moment, weighing whether to say it. “Including you.”

  Kate crosses her arms over her chest and sinks back on the couch. She gazes across the room, her mind far off somewhere, and rolls her tongue against the inside of her cheek.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have said that,” I venture. “But you know? If there’s one thing that this situation with Amy has taught me it’s that it’s stupid for us to just sit quietly by while we watch each other suffer. You seem good, Kate; you really do. I don’t know anyone with your backbone, with your strength. But are you really okay?”

  Kate looks at me. “I’ve told you. I got rid of the excess baggage and I’m moving on.” She smiles wide, her eyes crinkling as she does it. “Life is good.”

  I raise my eyebrows. “Really?” I say. “I am your oldest friend in the world—in fact, let’s be honest; I’m your only true friend. And you’re going to give me a T-shirt slogan to explain how you’re feeling about your husband’s infidelity?”

  She tilts her head to the side and considers me, slack jawed. I can’t tell whether she’s about to get up and walk out or finally start talkin
g. “Okay, the truth,” she says, slapping her palms against her thighs and sitting back up.

  I smile at her.

  “The truth is that I feel like an asshole. For not seeing it sooner, of course, and for not catching him before it got out the way that it did. But, more than anything, for being a part of the whole charade in the first place.” She rubs her hands over her eyes. “I knew what I was getting into with Brendan. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it over the past few weeks, wandering around alone in that big stupid house, and I don’t know why I ever did it. He was everything I’ve always hated about my life. All of that showiness. The dinner parties with people you can’t stand to socialize with but feel you have to, the life dominated by what the newspaper writes about you. God, I felt like a fucking fraud every time I stepped up to a podium.” She daintily presses her pinky to each tear duct. “I don’t know how it happened, Waverly. I’ve always been so sure that I wouldn’t grow up to be like my mother, and yet, the second I met Brendan, I just completely abandoned myself. When I was traveling all of the time, I was so in love with my life, but I hated the way that my mother constantly told me to grow up and settle down. And then…” She glances at me. “It’s embarrassing to admit.”

  “What?”

  “Well on one side, I had my mother telling me that the vagabond sort of life I was leading was childish. Then on the other, I had you and Amy, both coupled off. I guess I felt like settling down was the only option. And I wasn’t getting any younger.”

  “Brendan was familiar,” I say. “It was what you knew. It’s easy to see why it happened.”

  Kate nods. “Why didn’t you stop me?” she cracks.

  “Because you said you loved him, Kate.”

  “I did,” she says. “I do.” She’s quiet for a moment. “And you know, in the beginning, he really did seem to love me, without all of the…” She waves her hand in the air. “You know.”