The Arrangement
Page 24
“It’s sticky with blood!”
“Are you feeling sad, sweet boy?” said Lucy. “It’s okay to feel sad, buddy. It’s okay to feel sad about Fat Black.”
“Fat Black is extinct!”
“Let’s get you into the bathtub,” said Lucy.
“No bath! No bath! I don’t want to take a bath!”
Owen and Lucy looked at each other. It was like a million moments they’d had together with Wyatt and yet completely, utterly unique.
“Wyatt, you’ve got blood all over you,” said Lucy. “You have to take a bath to wash it off. I’m going to take you upstairs.”
And with that, Wyatt was off. He bolted into the playroom, screaming and now crying too, “No bath! No bath! I don’t like baths! I don’t like baths!”
“You do like baths, Wyatt. You love baths,” said Lucy.
“I hate baths! I hate baths! I don’t want to take a bath!”
“You can play with your bath guys. We’ll just go play with your bath guys,” Lucy said. Then she turned to Owen and said, “I can’t handle this. He’s covered in blood. It’s going to get all over the house.”
Owen walked calmly into the living room. “You don’t have to take a bath, Wyatt. It’s your choice. But I was thinking something.”
“What?”
“What if I do something super-silly,” said Owen.
“Like what?”
“What if I get into the bathtub with you with all of my clothes still on!”
Wyatt stopped running around the couch and looked at his dad.
“All of your clothes on?” Wyatt asked, flapping his hands.
“Yes, all of them.”
“All of your clothes on?” He flapped harder, faster, higher.
“Yes,” said Owen. “But only if you go take a bath with me. I’ll only do it if you’re in the bath with me.”
Wyatt looked at his dad, seriously weighing this intriguing offer. “I’ll go start the water!” he finally said, and he darted up the stairs.
Owen took his wallet out of his back pocket and pulled off his suede belt. He took his phone and spare change and his watch and heaped everything on the kitchen counter and then followed Wyatt upstairs.
“Thank you,” Lucy said.
“It’s what I do,” said Owen, smiling back at her. “It’s what we both do.”
My husband is pretty great, thought Lucy, for the first time in a long time. There weren’t a lot of men who could handle Wyatt. Certainly not many who could do it as kindly and creatively as Owen did. There was a statistic that floated around on the message boards online, about how many parents of special-needs kids end up divorced, and the percentage was truly staggering. Lucy didn’t know if it was fair to blame it on the kids’ fathers being assholes, but in her gut, well, she thought it was probably true. Owen is sort of amazing, Lucy thought. So why did I let myself fall in love with somebody else?
* * *
Gordon was upstairs in his office, lying on the couch with his eyes closed. He was listening to a live police-radio stream from his laptop. It was his newest hobby.
Gordon had to use a considerable amount of self-control to reserve his Simka-viewing for late nights only, during those all-too-frequent times when he couldn’t fall asleep. He’d read about the police-radio feeds and was trying to use them as a substitute, and while they didn’t give him goose bumps—quite the opposite, really—they were pretty interesting. He liked to listen to Phoenix and Chicago, depending on what sort of people he was in the mood to hear getting arrested. Sometimes he’d mix it up and listen to Los Angeles. Still, it was weak methadone compared to the heroin that was Simka.
Rocco grabbed his black-socked foot and squeezed it.
“What?” Gordon said. He pulled off his earphones.
“Maria wants to talk to someone.”
“Go get your mom.”
“Mom said she doesn’t want to be disturbed.”
“Well, I don’t want to be disturbed either,” said Gordon. He put his earphones back on. “Tell Maria your mother will talk to her later.”
“Okay,” said Rocco.
Rocco just stood at the foot of the couch, looking at his father.
“Fang ate a chicken.”
Gordon pulled off his earphones again. “What?”
“Fang ate a chicken inside the church.”
“Inside the—why was Fang inside a church?”
“You told me I could bring him to get baptized, remember?”
“Jesus Christ.”
“That’s a swear, Dad,” said Rocco. “If it’s not at church, it’s a swear.”
Gordon walked down the main staircase and found Maria standing in the entry hall and wringing her hands. The front door was wide open, and Fang was outside, tied to the antique lawn jockey Gordon had been given a few years back by a prominent senator from Alabama. Fang was hunched over and retching.
“Ees not a good dog,” Maria said when she saw Gordon. “I tol’ Miss Kelly, I can’ control the dog.”
“You told her you can or you can’t?”
“I can’ no. I can’ no,” said Maria, shaking her head emphatically. “So, no my faul’.”
Gordon rubbed his forehead with his hand. “So, let me get this straight. Fang ate somebody’s chicken?”
“Eet attack, Mr. Allen. Eet attack the chicken.”
“Whose chicken was it?”
“A leetle boy. Kind of a”—and here Maria did some sort of spastic flapping movements with her hands to indicate…what? A disability of some sort? Epilepsy? Gordon couldn’t really understand—“a boy weet som pro’lems. You know, som reel pro’lems.”
Oh, wonderful, Gordon thought. This is just great.
* * *
It was dark before Susan was able to leave St. Andrews, and she was both physically and emotionally exhausted. She and Evelyn Bullard and a handful of old ladies from the garden committee had spent the afternoon cleaning up the feathers and the blood, along with some dog diarrhea and what Susan was convinced was a llama shit. The llama shit was on the brand-new red carpet in the vestibule, right in plain sight, an enormous dump that Claire had clearly ignored and left for someone else to deal with.
Colleen and Arlen Lowell had volunteered to catch the two surviving chickens, which were perched on the rafters, terrified. After two hours with a stepstool and a broomstick and one of those gentle green plastic rakes and an old sheet, they’d gotten them safely into a cat carrier. The Lowells seem really happy together, Susan found herself thinking as Colleen and Arlen laughed and joked and chased the two scared chickens around the church. It would be nice to be that happy.
Arlen told Susan they would drop the bloody chicken off at the vet (“The bill will be our treat”), and they’d bring the other one back to the McIntires’ house the following day, once Wyatt was safely at school. They didn’t want to retraumatize him.
“Do you think they’re going to want the carcass?” Colleen asked Susan.
“Why on earth would they want the carcass?” Susan asked.
Colleen wrinkled her nose and said, “To bury it?”
“I don’t know,” said Susan. She sighed a huge sigh. “I don’t understand people with chickens.”
“Well, we’ll put it in our trunk just in case,” said Arlen.
Once everything was clean, and the church doors were locked, and even poor Evelyn Bullard had gone home to her house filled with nobody, Susan remembered she still had to deal with the three baby Nubian goats.
The goats had spent the day behind the church, tied to a tree, gorging on the bushes and the grass, and they were covered in mud. Susan suspected they’d eaten too much, but she didn’t have the energy to worry about it. She untied them and led them across the graveyard to the parking lot.
She and Rowan had traded cars. Rowan took Charlotte and the boys out for pizza and a movie in the minivan, and Susan had Rowan’s Cherokee for the goats. She heaved the muddy goats into the back through the window one by one, wish
ing she had some help. Then she got behind the wheel, turned on her lights, and headed for the cheese lady’s house.
* * *
Later, after Owen and Lucy dried their son off with towels warmed in the dryer, and let him watch an hour of Pocoyo, and gave him back scratches and sang him songs, and listened to the telling and retelling of what they would come to refer to as “The Tale of the Death of Fat Black” approximately three thousand times, Wyatt finally fell asleep.
Owen came into the bedroom. Lucy was sitting on the bed, brushing her hair.
“That,” said Lucy, “is why I didn’t want to bring three chickens to church.”
“You foresaw this?” said Owen.
“I said one chicken. I’m just saying, I thought bringing more than one was going to cause a problem.”
“So you’re implying you foresaw this,” said Owen. “You foresaw carnage, and Wyatt yelling Fat Black at the top of his lungs? While the entire town, including one of the four black people in Beekman, the only one who could conceivably be described as fat, looked on?”
Lucy smiled a small smile, the first one in what felt like days, and then she asked, “Just out of curiosity, why did you bring Fat Black?”
“He walked into the box first,” said Owen. “Just out of curiosity, why did you name a chicken Fat Black?”
“I also named one Fat White and one Fat Red. It’s not racist,” said Lucy. “It might be fat-ist. You try naming nineteen chickens.”
“I’m not sure bringing the chickens was a great idea,” said Owen.
“Ya think?” said Lucy.
They both started to laugh.
“It was pretty fucking horrible,” said Owen.
“It was completely insane,” agreed Lucy.
“I’m not sure we can live in this town anymore,” said Owen.
“We definitely can never go back to that church.”
“Never, never.”
“Which is unfortunate, because they have a nice tag sale every spring.”
* * *
When Susan finally got home, she decided to do one last thing before she went inside. She pulled up the mats from the back of the car so she could hose them off. They snapped on and off, the mats in Rowan’s car, so you could do things like haul goats. I might as well do it now, Susan thought. She was covered in blood and shit and feathers and mud, but if she didn’t do it tonight, the car would never get cleaned. God knew Rowan would never do it. Tomorrow might be the last sunny day for a while. If I hose the mats off now, they can dry tomorrow in the sun, and he’ll have a nice clean car for the winter.
She found them in the wheel well, tucked under an emergency tool kit nobody ever used. Copies of letters, in Rowan’s handwriting, addressed to someone Susan had never heard of, some slut named Juliette.
Nineteen
We think we know who we are, particularly those of us who think we are committed to emotional and spiritual growth. But deep within us, just out of reach of our hard-won self-knowledge, is the cauldron of the dark unconscious. When it boils over—and it will—we find ourselves absolutely lost, groping for the familiar in an unfamiliar and terrifying universe.
—Constance Waverly
The Eros Manifesto
Gordon was thinking he wanted a snack and headed toward the fridge, hoping Gherardo had made those samosas with dipping sauce he liked. If not those, maybe he’d settle for a leg or two of Oprah’s Unfried Chicken. Gordon had tasted it at a fund-raiser, and now Gherardo had standing orders to always have it waiting for him, any time of day or night. He licked his lips and had just opened the fridge when he heard the screams.
“Gordon! Gordon!”
It was Kelly, out on the back deck. Gordon sighed, let the fridge door close, and walked outside. Kelly was hopping from foot to foot and covering the right side of her face with her hand.
“It stung my eyeball! One of your fucking bees stung my eyeball!”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“It did. I swear. It stung my actual eyeball!”
“That’s impossible. Maybe, maybe it stung your eyelid,” said Gordon. “Maybe it stung near your eye. That’s perfectly normal bee behavior.”
Kelly took her hand away and shrieked, “Does this look normal to you?”
Gordon looked at her face. He suddenly felt hot and dizzy. Kelly’s left eyeball was bulging out of its socket and the white was swimming in blood. It was like one of those special effects you see in a horror movie that make you think, Okay, now that’s taking things a little bit too far.
Dirk, who’d been at work camouflaging Gordon’s Hudson River golf-ball-driving hide—according to a friendly local cop, there had been complaints from some old-timers who had nothing better to do with their lives than hang out at the marina and stare out at the river all day—appeared on the deck just in time to take charge.
“Come on,” said Dirk. “I’ll drive.”
* * *
Dirk was at the wheel of Gordon’s Range Rover, roaring down Route 9 at speeds approaching a hundred miles an hour, steering perfectly into the turns and accelerating out of them like a NASCAR champion. For a guy who’s basically a step up from a dirt farmer, the bastard can drive, thought Gordon.
Gordon was in the backseat, holding an ice pack wrapped in a cream-colored Frette guest towel to Kelly’s face with one hand and his phone with the other. He was talking to a golf buddy of his, the dean of Weill Cornell, and having him arrange for a helicopter to medevac Kelly to the city and for a top eye surgeon to meet them there. Gordon figured the local hospital could handle a sprained ankle, maybe a broken bone. A rapidly expanding eyeball? Highly unlikely. Meanwhile Kelly was slumped against him, moaning, tears streaming from her one good eye.
Kelly howled as Dirk made a sharp turn into the hospital entrance and pulled the Range Rover straight in the ambulance bay, leaning on the horn. Two orderlies rushed out, wrested the doors open, grabbed Kelly, and frog-marched her inside. Dirk leaned back in the driver’s seat and exhaled. Gordon followed Kelly and the orderlies into the ER, where a doctor was calling out for a bed and an IV.
Just then Gordon’s voice rose over everyone’s like a crack of thunder. “Where is my fucking helicopter? Get her on a rolly thing, a whatchamacallit, and get her out, we’re not staying here. You two”—he pointed at the ER doctor and an orderly—“help her and follow me.”
“Sir, she needs treatment immediately,” said the doctor.
“Not here, she doesn’t, you idiot. She’ll end up blind and dead. Where is my fucking helicopter?”
A nurse—whose nonchalance indicated years spent in the ER—gave the doctor a look that said, Not worth the fight; let’s just get this jackass out of here.
As fast as Kelly was walked into the hospital, she was rolled back out. Gordon was blinking into the setting sun, scanning the sky, yelling at anyone in a hospital uniform, and barking into his phone. He heard a thwop-thwop-thwop sound and hung up his phone mid-tirade.
Once settled in the helicopter, with Kelly strapped in a gurney beside him and sedated with a shot of Ativan, Gordon felt back in his element. He’d summoned a helicopter with a phone call; they were on their way to one of the top hospitals in the world; they’d be met by the best eye guy in New York. His sense of well-being was confirmed when, after they’d landed on the helipad at Weill Cornell, the staff treated Kelly as Mrs. Gordon Allen. She was rushed into surgery and, afterward, given a room on the exclusive fourteenth floor, with its sweeping views and lobster dinners, the floor reserved for celebrities, Arab sheikhs, and shady foreign billionaires.
* * *
“Fat Black was attacked!”
Wyatt was lounging in the big red chair with his feet dangling over one of the arms, talking on Owen’s cell phone. He looked like a teenager.
“We were in church and a dog ate his entire head off! Fang,” Wyatt said into the phone. Then he started laughing and said, “Yeah, you shouldn’t name your dog Fang! Fang is a very bad name for a dog!”
“If it’s not yours, it’s mine.”
“Fat Black is dead as a doornail!” Wyatt said. “Yep, that is very dead! Dead as a doornail means totally, totally dead!”
“Who is he talking to?” Lucy asked.
“I have no idea,” said Owen. “Maybe my mother?”
“It’s good for him to talk about it,” said Lucy. “He’s going to have to process it somehow. I wish I could live inside his brain for a while and feel how it works.”
“You’re as close to the inside of his brain as anyone could be,” said Owen.
“But you’re better with him than I am,” said Lucy. “Getting into the tub with him with your clothes on. I never think of things like that. I’m too busy being the bad guy.”
It was one of those things that get said in a marriage, something that starts out as a genuine compliment but then turns into a criticism without either party noticing or caring all that much. It was true, though; among the various parts of her life that she was tired of, Lucy was tired of always being the bad guy. The one who got spit at and bitten and scratched till she bled, the one Wyatt said that he hated because she said no to the second bowl of ice cream, the seventh trip on the escalator, the iPad in bed.
One chicken, not three.
One chicken would have fit into the old plastic cat carrier, the one with the swinging mesh door. Lucy had woken up at two in the morning with that thought rattling around in her head. It took a lot for Lucy not to wake up Owen and point it out to him right then, point out how this entire situation could have been avoided if he had just listened to her in the first place. It took a lot for her not to say it to him now, but she didn’t. Instead, she stared down wordlessly at their American Express bill, which was, as usual, surprisingly big. For people who didn’t buy expensive things or go on fancy trips or eat at nice restaurants, they sure managed to spend a lot of money.