by Sarah Healy
“Ellen has no trouble attracting men.” I heard the innuendo in Jill’s voice and looked at her again, begging her not to do it.
“I didn’t mean to imply that,” oozed Parker. “I just think that most men aren’t enlightened enough to get past that sort of thing. Even my Philip has said that starting a family was hugely important…”
“Yes, your Philip is quite the family man,” interrupted Jill, with a caustic smirk.
“Jill…,” warned Greg, sensing the danger of the ground on which she was treading.
Parker’s face spasmed as she tried to remain calm and in control. “I’m sorry, Jill—what?” She enunciated every syllable, the threat in her voice making it clear that the question was not to be answered. She had intended to intimidate Jill, but Parker no longer knew the woman who was standing in front of her, the woman who had been emboldened by unconditional love.
Jill raised her chin. “Let’s just say that Philip sure can be enlightened when he wants to be.”
“What are you implying?” hissed Parker. Greg wrapped his arm protectively around Jill.
“Like I said, Ellen has no trouble attracting men.”
With that, Parker’s face twisted free of its mask, and every muscle that had struggled to contain her hate, her humiliation, was now free. “What?” she demanded louder than was comfortable, her lower jaw jutting out aggressively. There was no answer but silence. “What?” she repeated, even louder this time.
Philip, now alerted to the exchange, came walking quickly up. “Parker, sweetheart, what’s going on?” Though his words suggested his concern was for Parker, his eyes darted nervously around the room, taking stock of who was watching, of who was present.
But Parker was now focused on me, her eyes boring into mine with unadulterated fury. “What is your fat fucking friend talking about, hmm? What did you tell her?”
Greg was trying to lead Jill away, but she shrugged him off. “She didn’t have to tell me anything, Parker. Everyone knows.” It was a cruel thing to say, and probably untrue, but Jill wasn’t concerned about fighting fair.
Parker whipped around, shaking with rage as she looked at Jill, who up until now had been frightening in her calm. Only a hint of emotion crept into Jill’s voice as she asked, slowly and with clear purpose, “Married a guy just like dear old Dad, didn’t you, Parks?”
I took a reflexive step back, realizing immediately that something deep and poisonous had been unearthed. Greg said Jill’s name emphatically and took her hand. “Come on. Let’s go,” he said.
But Parker couldn’t be so easily contained. “Fuck you,” she spat, her eyes filling with acid tears as she looked at Jill, then at me. “Fuck you both.”
Murmurs erupted from the handful of couples around us as discreet glances were cast over shoulders. “Parker…,” scolded Philip through gritted teeth, as he firmly took her upper arm.
I stepped between Parker and Jill, resting my hand on Jill’s back to help Greg guide her out of the room.
“Stay away from my husband,” I heard Parker say, though I didn’t turn around.
Once in the foyer, Greg immediately took charge. “I’ll take Jill to the car. You go tell your mother that I’m driving you home.”
I nodded gratefully, then headed back to the living room, peeking through the door to confirm that Parker and Philip were gone.
Mom was still chatting obliviously, part of a large group on the opposite end of the enormous room. As I slid quickly through the crowd, past the absorbed conversations and engaged discussions, I realized that what had gone on between Jill, Parker, and myself was in actuality a quiet implosion, registering only with those directly around us.
I tapped my mother’s shoulder. “Mom.”
She turned around, her face pure light. “Oh, hey, honey!” The group parted slightly to make room for me, and my mother gestured to the tall man in front of her. He had gentle eyes and dark brown hair that was graying at the temples. It was Eugene White. I recognized him from church that morning. “Pastor White, this is my daughter Ellen.”
He reached out to shake my hand, grasping it between both of his. “Hello, Ellen,” he said. “It’s nice to meet you.”
The moment he touched my hand, I felt tears spring to my eyes. “You were overwhelmed by the spirit,” my mother would say. But I think that in Eugene White’s quiet confidence, in his strong but gentle nature, he reminded me of someone. Someone I missed. “You as well,” I managed before I turned back to my mother and he was reabsorbed into the fold.
“Are you all right?” asked Mom, scrutinizing my reddened eyes.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said dismissively. “But I’m actually going to head out. Jill and Greg are going to take me home.”
“Well, all right, honey,” she said.
. . .
I flew through the front door and down the stone steps to the driveway, where Greg and Jill were waiting in Greg’s idling tanklike Mercedes.
I got in and fell against the backseat. None of us said a word for several minutes. Then it was Jill who spoke first.
“I’m sorry, Ellen.”
I paused. “What happened, Jill?” Jill knew that I didn’t mean tonight.
Her head rested against the cold glass window. “Remember when I went to Parker’s house in Nantucket?”
Of course I did.
They had been out on one of Parker’s family’s boats and were going to go water-skiing on the sound. “I had never been before, so I was nervous,” said Jill. “And Mr. Collins was being so nice.” Parker’s father wasn’t supposed to have been there that week; he was supposed to have gone back to New Jersey after the weekend, but he had stayed. “It was Mr. Collins, Parker and her two brothers, and her mother. Her brothers were both in the water, and I was going to go next.”
“Go grab a wet suit, Jill,” said Mr. Collins, pointing to a locker from his post behind the wheel. He was younger then, but his blond hair was still nearly white. He had those muscular calves you sometimes see on active middle-aged men and his chest hair peeked out from the neck of his navy blue polo.
Jill began digging through the thick black skins, trying to look like she knew what she was doing. She didn’t want the Collinses to know that she had never worn a wet suit. She didn’t want the Collinses to know that her summers weren’t full of clambakes and yachts and madras.
“I don’t think we have one that’ll fit,” said Parker. “Stephen and Chris both have the larges.” Jill felt herself redden, self-conscious enough already in the new bikini her mother had bought her for the trip.
Mr. Collins ignored Parker and hurried to help Jill, who heard the squeak of his boat shoes on the deck behind her. “Let me help you, sweetie,” he said.
He pulled out a short suit and held it up, then unzipped it and bent down, holding the neck open for Jill. “Just step right in,” he said.
Mr. Collins’s back was to his family, and over his bent form, Jill looked at Parker, who was eyeing her intently, as tense as a cat ready to spring. Parker’s mother was staring deliberately out to sea, her blue eyes vacant and fixed on the line where ocean met sky.
Jill placed one foot, then the next, tentatively in the leg holes, and Mr. Collins jerked hard on the wet suit, pulling it up over Jill’s thick thighs. Jill grabbed a railing to steady herself. Holding the waist of the suit, Mr. Collins tugged it again and again, until it stretched over the lower half of her body. Then, as if checking for fit, he cupped his hand between Jill’s legs, holding it there for a moment, then slowly moving it back and forth. “Good,” he said, giving Jill a wink.
“It was like it was nothing,” said Jill. She stared helplessly at Parker, who just looked coldly back at her, watching their every move.
Mr. Collins then guided each arm into the suit with quick, efficient, no-nonsense motions. His eyes were on his work as, one at a time, he ran his fingers inside her bikini top and over her bare breast, pulling the fabric back into place like he was just making a minor adjustm
ent before finally hauling up the zipper.
“And do you believe that I actually got in the water and tried to water-ski?” asked Jill. She didn’t know what else to do. No one else reacted, so neither did she. But the next day, after lying awake in her bed all night, petrified that he would come in, she called her mother and told her that she wanted to go home. She never told anyone what had happened.
“What do you even call it, what he did?” asked Jill when she had finished. Had he molested her? Had he sexually assaulted her? What was it that he had done, in full view of his wife and daughter? What?
Jill didn’t see Parker for the rest of the summer. Though Jill wasn’t aware of it for weeks, by the time school had started, Parker had already begun her campaign against her. I could see it now, the way Parker’s mind had worked. Who would believe that my father would touch that fat pig? So the Jillie Jelly picture was circulated as a cruel, childish way to discredit anything that Jill might say. Jill had become a pariah so that she couldn’t become a victim.
Greg took deep, angry breaths while Jill told the story, and he was still unable to speak as he pulled up to my parents’ house. I imagined that he, like Jill, was incapable of feeling what I unexpectedly now felt: deep and unqualified sympathy for Parker. Parker, who watched her father touch her friend, watched her mother ignore it. Parker, who endured God knew what herself. Parker, who was desperately trying to become a fine Christian wife, thinking that maybe, maybe, if she was good enough, Philip wouldn’t stray.
From the backseat, I wrapped my arms around Jill’s neck. “I’ll call you, okay?”
“Ellen, I really am sorry. I know I screwed things up for you.”
I shook my head. “Don’t worry.”
I took my time walking up to the house, opting to go around to the back and taking slow steps as I assessed the damage of the evening. There was no way I could continue working for Philip; that was clear. But that should have been clear days ago. I thought about Parker and Philip, and what, if anything, this meant for them. I suspected nothing. They were probably on their way home right now, riding in silence. Once at the house, Parker would go right to bed while Philip sat in his office, slowly draining a bottle of liquor. The next morning Philip would make pancakes for the kids while Parker slept late, and that would be that. Swept right under the rug.
As I walked in the house, I thought that the worst was over.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
I don’t know what made me knock on his office door. And I don’t know what made me open it when there was no answer. My father had left his desk lamp on, but on countless nights before I had walked past the dim light escaping from the gap above the floor without a second thought. Tonight, though, I turned the knob.
At first I couldn’t move; I was frozen for three interminable heartbeats with blood roaring through my ears as my mind worked furiously to scroll through the possible explanations for why my father was lying facedown on the floor: heart attack… stroke… aneurism. Then I saw the vomit and I knew. I ran to him and knelt down. “Dad!” I said loudly, with my face next to his. He didn’t move. There wasn’t even a rise and fall of his chest.
I know that I grabbed the phone; I know I dialed 911. But those memories are vague and cloudy. What I do remember, what I can still replay in my head with absolute clarity, is picking up my father’s hand, closing my eyes, and praying. Stripped of everything else, every pretense, every shred of pride, I had nothing left in me but my desire for my father to live. With my eyes closed, all I heard were my whispered pleas to God, and my breath. I don’t know how long it was before the paramedics got there, but when they came rushing in I told them what had happened.
“My father’s tried to kill himself.” It came out so matter-of-fact.
I didn’t know what he had taken, but I knew what he had done. Only later did we find the bottle of vodka, along with an empty bottle of tranquilizers, placed neatly in the wastebasket under his desk beneath a stack of papers. On his chair was a note written on his monogrammed stationery. It had the name of his insurance company, where he had a sizable life policy that he had purchased decades ago, a policy that didn’t have a suicide clause.
I rode in the back of the ambulance, still holding my father’s hand and still praying as the paramedics moved about, communicating with each other in a brisk, austere language all their own. At the hospital I called my family. I found a secluded corner of the waiting room and turned against the wall. I called my mother at least a dozen times, but her phone was in the pocket of her mink coat, vibrating mutely in the catacomb of the Arnolds’ foyer closet. Luke answered right away, sounding tipsy and relaxed. Get Kat and come to Allen Memorial. It’s Dad.
I weighed the phone in my hand for a few moments, pretending to debate doing what I had wanted to do all along. Then I called Mark. I was always going to call Mark. I called him because I knew he would come; I called him because I never should have left him. And tragedy has a way of delivering a brand of clarity all its own.
“Ellen?” he said tentatively.
When I heard his voice, feeling rushed back into my numb heart. I couldn’t formulate words over my tears.
“Ellen, what’s wrong?”
“It’s my dad,” I wept. The veins in my neck felt like they were strangling me.
“Where are you?” he asked, urgent but calm.
I told him.
“I’ll be right there.”
Though I never intended to admit it, waiting for Mark to arrive was more excruciating than waiting for the ambulance. As the automatic doors of the hospital silently parted, he rushed through. Our eyes met and he came to me. With vomit still on the knees of my black panty hose, I fell into him. His body yielded slightly but was tense.
At first, he was gentle but clinical, asking questions. “What did he take? Have the doctors been out yet? Where is your mother? Should I go and get her?”
I clung to his jacket like a child. “No, please don’t go. Please.”
He was next to me when I told my mother. She had gotten all the way home before she checked her phone. She had seen the state of my father’s office and the note on his chair and she knew. “He’ll be okay, Mom,” I whimpered. “I promise he’ll be okay.”
My mother arrived before Luke and Kat. Perhaps it was the shock, but when she saw Mark, it was as though she had expected him to be there. Like he belonged there, next to me. Luke was the same way, nodding in acknowledgment before asking about Dad. Only Kat, whom Mark had never met, recoiled a bit when she saw him, her tear-streaked face suspicious and wary. But as we all sat together on the immobilized blue pleather chairs, waiting for news, even Kat let her guard down.
It was the middle of the night when a tired-looking doctor in blue scrubs came out and told us that my father would live. “He will be unconscious for a while still,” said the doctor, seeming a bit put out by the wastefulness of it all, the needlessness of this entirely preventable event. There are blessedly few moments like that in life, when you see someone you love teetering on the stark line that separates life from death, light from dark. And when I found out that my father had landed in the light, it was as if the hand that had been twisting my chest suddenly released its grip, and I could breathe.
After relief flooded our bodies, after we thanked, thanked, thanked the doctor, after we wrapped our arms around one another in shared gratitude, it became quiet. Mom and Luke both stepped aside to make phone calls—Mom to Aunt Kathy and Luke to Mitch. Mark excused himself. I collapsed into a chair. Kat, who had stayed on the fringes of the group, pushed away from the wall against which she had been leaning and walked toward me. She took the seat next to me and rested her elbows on her knees, the look on her face ancient and sad. Her full lips were cracked and peeling, with a hairline strip of dried blood forming in one of the ridges. She had been uncharacteristically silent as we held our vigil, even when she learned that my mother and I had been at the Arnolds’ party when it happened.
“It was Christian
Arnold,” was all she said. And there, under the buzz of the fluorescent lights, in a waiting room surrounded by strangers whose loved ones were hidden behind those steel doors, I finally understood. I understood the anger that had surfaced in Kat that night when she walked into my parents’ house to see the Arnolds at their table. We had all betrayed her without even knowing it.
I breathed a sound of recognition. Christian Arnold, I repeated to myself. I had long ago stopped wondering who the father was. I sometimes even doubted that Kat herself was sure. But while Kat was wild, she hadn’t run rampant. Though she neither confirmed nor denied it, I had heard hushed conversations between my parents about the overnight trip that Kat had taken with the boys’ and girls’ varsity lacrosse teams, and its coincidental, suspicious timing with her pregnancy. Christian played lacrosse. I believe that he went on to be captain, the spring that Kat officially dropped out of school.
“I never told anyone,” she said. “Only him.”
“Oh, Kat.” I took her hand. And she let me. Then she rested her head on my shoulder and closed her wet eyes.
. . .
When my father regained consciousness, Mark waited while my mother, Luke, Kat, and I went in to see him. I imagined that we would cautiously surround his bed, whispering our greetings like lullabies. We love you, Dad. We are so glad you’re okay. But as soon as my mother saw him, her jaw clenched and her hands formed tiny fists and she rushed his bed, beating at his legs like they were snakes under the blanket. Her admonishments were strung between sobs. “How dare you? How could you? How could you try to leave me?” She wept and wailed and pounded at him until he caught her hands and their foreheads met and they cried, their tears mixing.
Kat knelt by the foot of his bed, weeping in the silent, muffled way that Kat sometimes did. My father’s hand reached down and tried to find the top of her head. “I’m so sorry, Kat, my little girl. I’m so sorry.” His words came out in sorrowful sputters, and I knew that his apology extended far beyond the events that had brought us all here.