All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

by Janelle Brown

Surfacing. “…don’t be angry at me for…”

  For. “Mom needs us to…”

  More. “…a family, dammit, despite…”

  Air. “…are you doing?!”

  On Lizzie’s sixth trip to the surface, Margaret is gone. Lizzie gasps in the summer air, breathing deep into her belly, hoping that this will make the pain go away. The knot there tightens and tightens, and she wonders whether God is punishing her. She is going to die here in the pool.

  Your Lordness, she thinks. Tell me what to do. Am I a sinner? Am I going to hell? What do I have to do to be happy again? What do I have to do to make everything in my family right? How can I be loved? How can I be good? She recalls the photograph in her Bible of Mary, virtuous Mother of God, a beam of yellow light illuminating her from heaven, her face suffused with the joy of righteousness. Suffused with the forgiving love of Jesus. Please Lord, she thinks. Give me a sign. Show me what to do.

  She opens her eyes and looks around. The pool water slaps against the tile. A dead dragonfly floats by her. Overhead, in the sky, there is no heavenly shaft of light, just a feathering white plume of exhaust trailing a private jet. She swims toward the air mattress, which bumps uselessly against the wall in the deep end like a prisoner with no chance of escape.

  Halfway there, the knot in her stomach convulses and contracts. It feels as if someone has stabbed her. Lizzie chokes on the pain and closes her eyes. She paddles frantically toward the edge of the pool with one hand, the other clutching at her belly. Water churns and roils and splashes up her nose and she thinks she might drown.

  Behind her, a trail of dark blood inks and spreads, marking her path through the water.

  thirteen

  janice feels the crunch of the gravel through the thin rubber of her slippers, the slap of the purse against her satin bathrobe as she jogs toward the car, the dimple of the remote lock under her finger. She is behind the wheel of her SUV and then—just like that—she is out the driveway. Her pulse races, almost as fast as when she took too much It, but this is just adrenaline. She presses the pedal to the floor, the Porsche leaping forward like a thoroughbred released from the gate (zero to sixty in 4.8 seconds, the salesman had told her, but she’d never considered trying), and skids out as she rounds the corner down the street, crushing some poor azalea bushes in the Upadhyays’ front yard.

  Who had made the decision to leave? It was as if some invisible hand had jerked her forward, propelled her out and away from her house. She passes the Gossetts’ home and the Brunschilds’, drives past Lizzie’s old nursery school and toward downtown, before she realizes that she doesn’t have a destination. It, she thinks. I want It. And she has none. She should never have let James leave like that, a drastic mistake. Could she chase him down?

  Reeling the car around—a U-turn, right in the middle of the street, nearly taking out a Porta Potti that sits in front of a freshly bulldozed home—Janice turns back toward her neighborhood. James was headed to Mexico, which means that he must be making his way toward the highway. She accelerates along the streets, keeping her eyes peeled for a red truck. He already has a fifteen-minute head start, but perhaps he stopped for gas or coffee? She can still catch him. She’ll buy the entire contents of his glove compartment and maybe even talk him into sticking around for a while longer.

  Lizzie is pregnant. Her initial shock and dismay has given way to anger. Lizzie is pregnant. How could her daughter have been so foolish? Was this somehow Margaret’s influence, that magazine filling Lizzie’s mind with sex talk and propaganda about vibrators? Was it Paul’s fault, for never having given Lizzie the attention she deserved? Was it her own? What did she do wrong? She imagines her daughter, her swollen watermelon belly, waddling down Centerview Avenue, and swallows down the horror of it all—her poor baby girl will be shunned, her life will be ruined. And Janice, Janice too will be judged. A middle-aged woman abandoned by her rich husband, with one daughter in debt and living back at home and a second one pregnant before she even has a driver’s license. Janice knows this town well enough to understand that they will see her at the center of all this disaster and find her somehow lacking. It is always the mother’s fault, isn’t it? It is not fair.

  It. She needs It. Janice had worked so hard to give It up, had locked herself in her own bedroom like a patient in a lunatic asylum, a cell padded with silk wallpaper and wall-to-wall pile carpeting but a cell just the same. She had persevered through the most difficult week of her life—a week of sweaty nightmares in which she was chased by faceless monsters with grasping claws, an excruciating week of insomnia and nausea and anxiety so overwhelming that she thought she would suffocate, a week in which she was finally and totally consumed by her own failed marriage. She’d committed herself to quitting with the same perseverance with which she’d tackled a six-course dinner party, and she had succeeded despite what she now knew were impossible odds. When she woke up this morning without that feeling of want, she knew she had somehow kicked It, but this moment wasn’t as victorious as she’d imagined it would be. Instead, it was as if she had committed murder, killing off the better version of herself—the more spirited, more interesting, more adventurous self—that she had only recently met. But that was all right; she had done it because she’d thought she had to.

  Now, though, she wonders why she’d bothered to go through that hell. She had relinquished the one thing that had brought her relief, and why? For her ungrateful, deceitful, irresponsible children? For some sense of obligation to a community that’s rejecting her despite everything she’s done to earn a place in it? For fear of being found out by her philandering, deceitful, soon-to-be ex-husband? It was an unjustifiable homicide, and she is thankful now for the chance for resurrection.

  Affixed to the sun visor is a laminated photograph of her family, a picture snapped three years ago during a Christmas vacation in Hawaii, the last they’d all taken together. She’d always loved the photo: They sit in a foursquare formation on a ledge overlooking the ocean with leis around their necks, squinting into the sun, the sea impossibly turquoise behind them, and, for once, everyone is smiling. The Millers in paradise. And yet. She remembers, now, the awkward dinners, during which Janice and Margaret bickered about whether the luxury resort Janice had so carefully selected was causing some local ecological disaster, and Lizzie took five trips to the sundae bar, and Paul left the table before dessert to call the office back home. Janice sees now that she had invented the whole thing—the solid marriage, the happy children, the cozy family unit. None of it had ever existed. Instead, it was all just a horrible mistake. Janice yanks the photo down and tosses it in the back seat’s footwell.

  “To hell with them,” she says out loud, just to clear the ringing in her ears. Then she yells, even louder, “To hell with them!” It sounds marvelous, and huge. She loosens the bathrobe, letting it slip down her shoulders to expose the straps of her nightgown. She is giddy with the madness of it all—driving recklessly through town in her pajamas, hunting for drugs, not even wearing a seat belt! It is insane, and she shivers as she realizes that this pleases her. Could she let it all go, once and for all? All the control and the stability and the need to do the best thing? Why not?

  But first she must find It. She can feel a residual surge in her veins, a faint lift, compelling her forward. She drives by the gas station, but James’s truck is not there, and it’s not parked in the Starbucks parking lot. By the time she arrives at the highway she realizes that he is surely well on his way, headed south toward the border. The on-ramp looms ahead, and she has to choose whether to merge with the accelerating cars and let their momentum carry her onto the interstate or to turn around. For a moment, she is tempted: Onward, toward James—she can still overtake him! But already this is starting to feel like a wild-goose chase, and that is what ultimately causes her to brake and turn right, back toward town. Is she really going to pursue him all the way to Mexico in her nightgown?

  Besides, surely James isn’t the only drug dealer in San
ta Rita! Doesn’t one find such a thing at a bus depot (this is the first faint vision that pops into her head) or in a dark alley…and yet there are neither in the tidy streets of this town. Perhaps the train station? She turns sharply to the right—driving straight through a stop sign without slowing down—and backtracks toward the center of town, where the commuter trains stop every thirty minutes during rush hour. She pulls into the parking lot, lined with late-model German luxury sedans waiting for their owners to return on the 6:10 express, and peers into the tiny brick shelter that serves as a station. It is deserted, just a copy of the Wall Street Journal on an empty bench, riffling in a faint breeze.

  What now? She starts the car and turns it back toward the east side of town, toward Millard Fillmore High. She has a hunch that this is where drug dealers would likely be lurking, where their customer base is most concentrated. The irony is not lost on her that she and Paul had moved to this town precisely because it didn’t have drug dealers, because it seemed a nice, safe, wholesome community in which to raise a family. And yet of course they’d been deluded; no town is really safe anymore, is it? The insidious creep of social decay has reached here anyway, has breached the fortress walls, because otherwise how could Lizzie have ended up pregnant, how could Paul have left her for another woman, how could Janice herself have ended up hunting for a drug dealer on an overcast August afternoon?

  The high school comes up on her right, and she circles the block, surveying it from every angle as she considers her options. Summer school has ended, the parking lot is empty, the grounds deserted. She drives through the front gate, under the LED display sign that reads, CONGRATS SENIORS! SCHOOL STARTS SEPTEMBER 3 and past the auditorium, prepped for the fall term with a coat of fresh paint. A teacher exits the door of the main building, carrying an empty fish tank, and scurries across the parking lot toward one lonely green Passat with a dent in the front passenger door. Worried about appearing conspicuous, Janice drives away, circling back around the school toward the athletic fields.

  There, on the edge of the freshly reseeded turf, she sees what she’s come for. Two teenage boys are sitting on the edge of the field, their feet in the dust of the track, smoking. The boys are black and—she hates herself for the racial profiling but isn’t there some truth in all that? don’t the stereotypes exist for a reason?—they look faintly dangerous, their hair worming tight against their skulls in corn-rows, their baggy jeans hanging so low that she can see the dimpled crescents of their behinds, like bruised fruit, rising over their belts. They hunch under the weight of their own arrogant attitudes, against the chill of the fog coming in over the foothills, and pass the cigarette back and forth. Janice suspects that if she were to roll down the window, she would smell the now-familiar reek of marijuana. If anyone in Santa Rita knows where to get It, she recognizes, it would be them.

  Janice parks at the far end of the lot, just on the other side of the chain-link fence, and watches the boys’ backs. One of them glances up, registers the presence of her SUV, and leans over to say something to his friend, who immediately cups the joint out of view inside his palm. Janice tightens the robe around herself and pulls her purse into her lap in preparation. Her pulse has accelerated until she can hear it in her ears, a high-pitched rush like the sound of wind screaming against an airplane. What will she say? What will they think? It doesn’t matter. She can feel herself forsaking everything—her family, her identity, the entire life she used to want so badly—and she is relieved to finally relinquish that tight grip, to unpeel her fingers and just slip away forever.

  She thinks of van Gogh, of the exploding fury of his starry night sky—hinting at some entirely new, enraptured reality—and remembers that in the end, he cut his ear off and then shot himself. Is that the endgame of her own madness? And yet she can’t quite let go of her grip on the door handle. If she can open it, she thinks, and walk toward the boys, she will somehow be free of all this. Freedom. She has never really had it, she has walked away from it every time it presented itself, and it finally sits right there, so close at hand, with so many possibilities. Can she surrender to its thrall, and give herself up as a selfish mother who just doesn’t care anymore? Can she walk away entirely, leave her lost children to fend for themselves, leave Santa Rita altogether and start a new life somewhere else? Paris, all these years later!

  She pushes the door open and looks down from her driver’s-seat perch. The asphalt seems two miles away, and she is suddenly dizzy, as if she were about to step off a precipice. She is rejecting everything she’s ever worked for, is risking her children’s lives and her own, but instead of feeling like she’s falling into a void, when she finally does swing her legs around and slip down—her satin robe sliding against the leather of the seat, the key in the ignition emitting a warning, ding ding ding—she instead senses that she is being lifted safely up, as if by a current of warm air. No, she doesn’t care anymore. She doesn’t care! A low laugh erupts from the back of her throat.

  Janice steps out onto the field, the fresh turf giving slightly under her slippers, her purse hugged in tight against her side. The boys are just yards away, and from here she can definitely smell the marijuana smoke, the tang of unwashed bodies and fresh sweat. She walks eagerly toward them. But the sound of her car door slamming has startled them, and, without turning around, they are standing up and wiping the dust off their jeans, preparing to walk away. The shorter boy tosses the joint on the ground and grinds it under a white basketball shoe the size of a loaf of bread, then pulls the hood of his black sweatshirt over his hair, as if to avoid being identified.

  She sees herself suddenly as they must—a middle-aged white woman in a fancy car, not their usual customer, surely. They are avoiding her. And she hurries to close the gap between them, too intent on catching up to consider what she is going to do when she does. The boys start to walk down the track, and she picks up her pace, perspiring with the effort despite the chill in the air. She trips on her slippers in the tall grass and falls on one knee, but she bounces back up immediately, too focused on her goal to pay attention to the pain that flares out from her hip.

  Finally, the two boys break into a run, and she realizes that she is about to lose them. She chases after them, the purse knocking against her side, the robe falling open to expose her nightgown. “It’s okay!” she calls at their backs, growing panicked. “It’s okay! Don’t run!”

  At the sound of her voice, the shorter of the two boys turns his head and looks back at her. Their eyes meet and when they do, she cannot breathe. He is astonishingly young—Lizzie’s age, maybe even younger, his features still softened by baby fat, his skin as yet unscarred by adolescent acne. She recognizes the fear in his wide eyes before he turns back around and runs even faster, thin adolescent limbs pumping frantically inside oversized jeans. He is not yet a hardened criminal—perhaps not a criminal at all, just someone’s child, smoking pot in the afternoon—and this, for some reason, breaks her heart. She looks at him and sees Lizzie, sees Margaret too, young and lost and afraid.

  She stops abruptly and watches the boys run away, scaling the chain-link fence and tumbling out toward the street, and she begins to cry. She cries because despite everything, despite all the years of obediently following the rules and trying her hardest to be the wife and mother she had chosen to be, she has not been able to protect her children. They are sad, they feel pain, they rail against the world and come up short and it hurts. She has failed. She hasn’t even been able to protect herself. Her tears begin as a sniffle and then turn into a wail, mucus dripping out of her nose and crawling, thick and salty, over her upper lip, rivulets of tears collecting in the crease of her nose before darting down to her chin, a pool of moisture collecting in her nightgown cleavage.

  She stands, weeping, in the center of the open field, the tender new turf spreading out in every direction, the dull gray sky low above her. She is unable to move, unable to walk away, unable even to fall to her knees in the grass. For a moment, she thinks tha
t time has stopped altogether and she will remain here for all eternity, in this field, exposed and alone.

  It takes a few moments for her to realize that her cell phone is ringing. She reaches blindly for it, digging into the purse that she still has clutched to her side. When she flips the phone open, she is surprised to see that the caller ID has identified her own phone number. HOME, it flashes. For a minute, Janice is confused, as if she has been split in two, leaving one Janice at home to call the other. She lifts the phone to her ear and waits to see what she is going to say to herself.

  But it is Margaret on the other end. Her voice is high-pitched, and even though she is trying to speak slowly, Janice can hear the fear in her daughter’s words. Instinctively, Janice’s heart lurches.

  “Mom,” says Margaret, “I just found Lizzie bleeding in the pool.”

  “Bleeding?” Janice echoes. Her throat, already constricted with phlegm, closes further until she can hardly breathe. She looks out at the street. The boys have vanished completely, and now all she can see is the afternoon traffic, driving slowly by. “Did she hurt herself?”

  “I don’t know,” Margaret says. “There’s a lot of blood. She says she’s got terrible cramps, too. She’s freaking out!”

  Janice experiences an electric shock of memory—herself, hunched over a toilet, screaming with the pain. “It’s a miscarriage,” she says, remembering. “Lizzie’s having a miscarriage.” She takes a deep breath and turns back toward her car, parked at the edge of the field. She feels a curious sense of relief as the possibilities that lay before her only minutes ago fly away, one by one, until there is only one option before her. As she jogs back to the parking lot, she is surprised by her own calm. She can see exactly what needs to be done, each act—summon the ambulance, retrieve the insurance card from her desk, call Dr. Brunschild, pack Lizzie’s nightgown—flashing in sequence before her.