by Julie Paul
The conversation might have continued in this manner, but Jenny came in. She handed each of them a piece of her puppy-edged paper. In her nearly illegible script, like doctor’s writing, except in purple ink, she’d written three names: Doctor Goldstein, Doctor Bergeron, Doctor Reed. Phone numbers beside each of them.
“They’re shrinks,” she said. “Call them, and work it out.” She looked like she’d been crying again. “Please. But not right now. I’m starving.”
Vicki laughed as if nothing had just happened. “I always get that way when Aunt Flo comes a-calling.”
“Mom!” Jenny said. “Don’t say things like that. God, you’re so bourgeois.”
“Jenny, go slice the cake,” Lawrence said. “We’ll start with that.”
“Really? Really?” She reached to the sky, asking for a high-five, and he gave her one before she bounded out to the kitchen.
“Dessert before dinner?” Vicki said.
“You’re the one who wanted a party, remember?”
Vicki wiped at the dust on the headboard.
“I can’t talk about this now,” Lawrence told her. He stood up and walked toward the door.
“Fine,” she said and looked down at the list. “Where on earth did she get these names?”
“Google,” he said. “She’s no dummy.”
“Le gâteau!” Jenny called from the kitchen.
“Should we order in?” Vicki asked.
“No,” Lawrence said. “I’m cooking what I bought today.”
“Okay, but you don’t seem to be in the best, um, state, to create a meal.”
He glared at her. “I better go meditate, then.”
Vicki smiled and shrugged. “It wouldn’t hurt.”
ABBA was wailing from the radio on top of the fridge. Vicki didn’t move to turn it down, as she normally would have. She and Lawrence stopped to stare at the table. Jenny had sliced the cake in three pieces, but not from the top down. Instead, she had divided it in layers onto dinner plates, separated it back into its original single layers. Her new blue dress had flecks of cherry and cream and chocolate all over it.
“The top is mine,” Jenny said. “I stuck my finger into every bit of it. And neither of you want my germs.”
Lawrence watched Jenny watching Vicki for a reaction. Jenny no doubt wanted to know how far she could take things, how much longer the calm around Vicki might last. He wanted to know, too. It was a good test, what Jenny had set up. In fact, it was brilliant.
In the rose-and-chocolate-scented air he and Jenny looked at Vicki, trapped in that small kitchen, her eyes darting around, still smiling that new smile. “Dancing Queen” blared its way into the picture as Jenny stood behind her bouquet of sunflowers, swaying to the music; she looked like a war bride getting married in her best dress. What was that idiom about necessity being the mother of invention? Lawrence had done what he’d had to do. He’d become the mother-father, and made it this far. But in this standoff, stare-down moment, despite losing his daughter today, and miraculously, finding her again, he felt a kick of energy return to him. He stood in front of the radio, to block Vicki from shutting the party down. She stepped toward him, smile atrophied, then changed her course. Vicki walked the three steps to the counter and picked up Mia’s bouquet. She buried her face in it, seeking solace in the face of chaos, like any visitor might.
Damage
Mornings were heavy. Jim had time on his hands and didn’t know how to spend it. This morning there had been a funeral in his dream, a problem with finding the casket of a relative he’d loved. He’d been wearing a decent suit, running all over town, and he awoke exhausted and worried. The day, so far, had brought no phone call to give him any news.
Maybe he was mourning the loss of news. No longer any letters, no phone calls, just an inbox full of stupid emails about the country’s bad politics and deals on more junk he didn’t need. What did he need?
Maybe it was nature. There was a wind strong enough to slam shut the windows that he’d opened to freshen up the place. Stuff built up in the night; whatever the body didn’t need, it released during sleep. That was a lot of shit to remove. Last night, like most nights, he’d sensed a change in the air once Fran, his wife, fell asleep. He’d lain for hours with her beside him, snoring lightly, her back toward his back, and waited for sleep to take him, too.
Outside, Jim found a corner where he could set up his lounger out of the direct wind. The weather had been strangely hot during the past few days, so he was glad of the breeze, but the sun was still out, and he was also glad of that. All this gladness should have made him satisfied.
He lay in his chair and watched the clouds racing across a book-blue sky as if being hounded by salesmen. These clouds seemed to have internal desires, changing as they passed, from animal to gargoyle to spirals, a bit of pure blue above him before the next morphing creature came along. They made him feel useless, inert as a stick. He closed his eyes. Jim knew it was the wind against his eyelids, but it felt like the clouds were brushing him as they streamed past. Better if he kept an eye on them, to know where they were.
He heard someone yell, “Get out of the car.” His neighbour, Carl. “Go and sit on the porch and do not move.”
Then he heard whimpering.
Carl shouted, “Are you stupid?”
Crying.
“Go. Sit. On. The. Porch. Now.”
Jim waited to hear a slap. Fran had told him that he would have to wait until there was something concrete to report before he called in a complaint. The system was designed to fix what was broken. What could be seen, like physical damage, damage that left nothing to dispute.
“Owen! For fuck sakes, did I not tell you to bring your bag in?”
Jim closed his eyes and concentrated on the wind. On clouds pressing in on his eyelids. On going deaf.
Jim’s wife was “still in the market for a kid,” as she liked to say. He knew that she thought this kind of teasing was funny, that if she made her longing seem light then he would lighten up, too, and they would get going. This was the thing: he couldn’t come without pulling out. He’d tried—good God, he’d tried—but every time he was close, a bodiless face began to hover over Fran, like one of those baby angels with the big cheeks.
Not just any baby. The baby he’d pulled from the car just before the explosion, eight months ago. He hadn’t thought about spinal cords or brains or anything other than getting the baby out. He’d seen the baby, he’d acted.
They told Jim the baby would’ve died anyway. Of course she would have; the car exploded. But she’d been alive in his strong arms and then he was running as fast as he could, away from the bomb of a car that was about to go off and toward a house with a big white porch.
He tripped. He fell. He fell on her.
Carl and his wife had two kids and an ancient white dog they kept tied up to their back porch. The dog spent most days in the shade cast from the shed, in a hole he’d dug into the lawn, and barked whenever anyone passed, and Carl yelled whenever the dog barked. “Jasper! Shut up!” Jim heard the pattern at least a dozen times a day.
More recently the older boy had started yelling at the dog, too. Little voice, big voice, both of them carried easily over their chain-link fence, the back lane, and Jim’s fence.
The neighbours lived kitty-corner across the shared back lane. Their windows were uncurtained, even at night. When Jim couldn’t sleep, he liked to walk in the darkness, and every time he passed Carl’s house, there were lights on, and Carl was in the dining room, sitting at a table, concentrating. It didn’t matter what time, Carl was there.
So, insomnia was one excuse. He imagined a child could try a sleep-deprived person’s patience. He knew what not-sleeping felt like, knew the sandy feeling in the brain, the cells responsible for common sense eroding with every wave of fatigue.
Money didn’t seem to be the issue. Carl’s house looked like it was trying to be Italian; they had the Tuscan colours, burnt orange, mum yellow, that deep ocean blue. They had a
new boxy vehicle, the kind that was supposed to be both safe and good for the planet. Carl’s wife wore nice clothes, on the rare occasions Jim saw her.
What was odd was that Carl didn’t act like he cared about what people heard or saw. He wanted to be noticed, as if he were proud of it all, big man with the family and the house and the pretty wife. Like he had nothing to hide.
About three weeks ago, Jim had started keeping a journal of the things Carl said.
The kids and Carl had gone inside. All was quiet. Jim opened his eyes to a pair of hawk-eye clouds swirling past. He felt naked out there, stared at by a sky full of menace. The wind was overriding the sun to the point of him feeling cold. He would have to go in soon, and make some lunch, and put the morning behind him. He would write: Called his son stupid. Said fuck sakes. He had already filled four pages.
At 12:30 PM, Fran phoned. Fran’s thing: she had her half-hour of chit-chat and lunch with the girls at work, and then called her useless husband to check in. Checking in meant asking how he’d slept, if he’d eaten breakfast, how he was feeling, and a question or two that changed from day to day: Would he like chicken for dinner? She could pick up a rotisserie bird on the way home. Did he want to go see a movie? Was it okay if she went to the gym straight after work?
He always made sure to switch on the radio before 12:30 so she’d hear the background noise. She didn’t like the thought of him all alone in a silent house. She’d told him she would go crazy in all that empty space, all that quiet. He couldn’t explain to her that silence was what he wanted, because she would get worried again. She would take it personally and think she was too noisy.
She was too noisy, but he couldn’t hold that against her. Before, he’d loved the sound of her voice. He’d wanted to hear her singing in the bathroom while she put on makeup. Before, he was a regular husband who could carry on a conversation without crying or going mute. He was a man who’d worked. He was a husband who could make love to his wife and not see dead babies floating in the room.
Today she told him about a craft fair she was thinking about going to on the weekend. “They might have those handmade dishcloths we can’t seem to find anywhere else.”
He knew she loved him. She wanted to involve him; that was the prescription. “Good idea,” he said into the phone, without a trace of sarcasm or himself in it at all.
After lunch—a sensible bowl of tomato soup and a slice of brown toast—Jim went into the backyard to check on his garden. He’d never been the type, but gardening had turned to therapy, to sticking things into the muck and seeing what good came out of it. He had to admit there was a thrill in watching the first leaves emerge from the soil in his little raised bed or in the flower beds alongside the house. He liked to get down on his knees to get a really decent look at the pea shoots, their leaves still tucked tight against the stems. Today the onions were at least two inches tall, which made him feel better than he had all morning. A lightness was starting to replace that stony weight.
“Get your goddamned shoes off my goddamned pants,” Carl yelled.
Jim stood up in time to see Carl carrying his younger son toward their vehicle. He was carrying the child as if he were a bag of stinking garbage. Jim caught a glimpse of the boy’s face before Carl shoved him into his carseat. The kid was grimacing.
“Wait for me!” the other boy called, racing around the car.
“Owen!” Carl said. “Get back in the yard until I tell you.”
“But you’ll leave without me!”
“I wish I could. You’re such a little shit.”
Owen started to cry.
“Oh great,” Carl said. “Another baby. Just get in the fuckin’ car already.”
Jim walked back toward the house before Carl noticed him. The seedlings around the other side of the house needed some attention.
Reframing the situation was supposed to help. Jim tried this trick from therapy, now and again: he wrote down what had happened and how he felt, and then he tried to spin the experience into a positive. But when he tried, I killed that baby, he couldn’t find anything positive. Or else he took the present tense approach—I am here, this is now, nothing else exists. None of it worked. That was the thing about brains: they were as stubborn and unpredictable as drunks.
Maybe that was Carl’s problem. Or was it drugs? Jim had been given so many prescriptions since the accident that he could’ve raked in some serious cash as a salesman. Not one pill had worked, at least not in the five-day trials he’d allowed each of them. Overall, he felt no worse just letting history and time battle it out.
He reframed in other ways. He put Carl and his family in olden-day situations, for example, to see if he was overreacting. Would they be shouting if they were all piling into a covered wagon? Jim tried to imagine kids from a hundred years ago, and wondered if complaining had been an option. Then again, parenting was a different beast back then, too—children were farmhands, servants, mouths to feed so they’d take care of the livestock at dawn.
He put Carl in a hundred different scenarios, trying to find a place where he would fit. Prison guard came up roses, or overseer of slaves at a diamond mine, a punishing sun turning everyone mean.
Jim also tried to imagine a situation in which those boys were in the wrong. But even if they wrote on the walls with their own shit, or pulled the antique china down from the shelves, didn’t parenting come down to supervision, rules, boundaries?
Boundaries. Man, he’d never used that word before. Fran would like his learning, the way she loved to see him caring for the garden. She’d never seen that side of him, she said.
It was sexy, she said.
He guessed she’d thought he was only his work self—when he was working—and the working man had not been able to show anything close to what he gave to his plants. Tenderness was not a part of the municipal worker’s world. Gentleness was something seized upon, laughable; his job-site self had been as leathery as his skin, out there all day, roadside, keeping the whole city running. Keeping the roads as safe as possible.
The baby’s name was Kaitlin. Her mother’s car had met another head-on. No one from the accident was still alive.
When Fran got home, his heaviness had returned. She found Jim in the spare room with the journal in his lap, the growing list of Carl’s infractions.
“A bad Carl day?” she asked him.
He nodded.
She sighed. “We could move, you know.”
He looked at her.
“It’s not impossible,” she said. “You know he’s not going to move, and we can’t live like this. Plus, that’s the good part about renting. We can pick up any time we like.”
“You’ve thought about this,” he said. So had he, but every time he did, the thought of leaving his garden kept him from getting too far down that road.
She nodded. She blushed a little, even. “I just get so upset by all of this, and I don’t know what to do, so I . . . search Craigslist, seeing if there’s anything better.”
“They don’t put who the neighbours are, do they?”
She pulled her lips in, the way she did when she was holding something back. “No, they don’t.”
“Let me call someone,” he said. “Someone has to help. He just can’t get away with this.”
Fran didn’t want to meddle. Didn’t want to stir the pot. She wasn’t at home, listening the way he was. She only heard a fraction of what went on.
What he wanted to do was watch time-lapse videos of plants growing, over and over. There was goodness in this pastime, being mesmerized as each plant reached for the sun. It was inevitable: they were meant to strive toward light. Their cells went about their business freely, no parents to steer them the wrong way, to mess anything up.
Some days, what Jim saw in those videos made him cry. Every kind of plant he watched moved up from the earth in a slow, waving dance. The petunias had made him sob once, their blooms opening and closing like trumpets of hope. The tomato plant responded to water so
dramatically, it was abusive to keep it away; when the plant was dry, it stopped growing. The plant just stopped and waited.
Maybe some people could do it, bring babies up the right way. Maybe parenting did involve studying, although he found that hard to believe. Shouldn’t raising a child be innate? Shouldn’t it be second nature, animals bringing up their own? Survival of the species, all that?
More than anything, Jim was afraid of messing everything up.
But children were resilient, weren’t they? He’d seen that before: a young girl with a double leg cast had crawled past him on the ferry, on her way to getting her hip dysplasia corrected, and her father had seemed unfazed. Jim saw young kids with glasses, too, and shaved heads from lice, and gleaming heads from chemo. They survived way more often than they didn’t. The odds were with them, because of age and their ability to bounce back—the imperative to keep living. A tree was the same: it could grow around a pretty substantial gash, callous over, just keep growing, as long as its roots were intact.
Jim awoke the next morning to the dual alarms of screaming and barking. Nothing new. But this morning, Fran had already gone to work, and he’d slept in—and the screams from across the back lane were louder. His heart felt like it was already at a hundred beats a minute before he even moved a muscle.
“I’ll do it,” he heard Carl shouting. “One more word and I’m doing it!”
The boy—or boys—didn’t answer. He heard bawling. A syllable. A few more. Nothing recognizable as English.
The day was already hot; Jim had been sweating, drooling, dreaming of a day from when he was a greasy teenager, cooking French fries. Shake, dump, scoop, load, cook, shake, dump . . . There had been satisfaction in the routine, even though his acne had grown worse and the kitchen was hotter than Hades—
He heard a chainsaw. He leapt from bed and grabbed a pair of shorts and was at his back fence in twenty seconds.