by Zoe Kane
Except that either it hadn’t, or she had decided to behave as though it hadn’t – the net impact of which was very much the same.
“Now at least we’ve gotten to the truth,” he told her. “This was never about Linnet or my job or whatever mental picture you have of my rich asshole life. It’s not even about what happened last night. This is about you. You decided to resent me the minute you learned that all of this hadn’t been left solely and completely in your hands, like you thought you deserved, and you’ve been finding things to criticize about me ever since. But I haven’t done anything, Annie. I showed up and I said yes and I’m doing the best I can. You don’t have a real reason to hate me – except that you want to. Because you can’t be angry at the person you’re really angry at.”
“Which is who, exactly,” she said coldly, “if you know me so well?”
“Danny,” he said, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world, and she reeled back as though she’d been struck in the chest. “He asked for me. He’s the reason I’m here. He took sole responsibility off your shoulders. He did it to be kind, he did it because he cared about you, and because he was thinking about what was best for his kids. But you hate him for it. You’re so angry at him you don't even know it. You’re so angry at him, you’re angry at me. Because Danny took away the only piece of him you had left to hold onto after he was gone – the chance to martyr yourself for him. You’re not thinking about what’s best for the kids, Annie. You think you are, but you’re not. You wanted to be the one he leaned on. You wanted to be able to tell yourself that you were the most important person, that he trusted you the most. And you can’t do that if someone else is carrying half of the burden too.”
“Get out, Marcus,” she said after a long, cold silence, opening the door and standing aside for him to walk through it. He stepped out onto the porch, then turned back to her suddenly.
“I don’t know why it’s not enough,” he said, his voice suddenly sad. “That he cared about you so much. That you were so important to him. That he loved the Walters so much that he changed his own last name. That wasn’t just for Grace. You know that, right? It was for all of you. It was for you too.”
“Marcus, leave. Now.”
“I know so little about you,” he went on, as though she hadn't spoken. “I don’t know your middle name or where you went to college. I don’t know your favorite color, or even what your job is, except that you used to be a doctor and now you teach. I know almost nothing, really. But I know that my brother went up and down the street knocking on doors and rallied half a dozen neighborhood dads out of bed to collect boxes and tape and stacks of old newspaper and pickup trucks to spend a whole night packing up all your things so you never had to go back to your old house and see your ex again. And I know that you didn’t ask him to do it. Grace didn’t either. Grace was going to hire movers. Danny went himself. Because he wanted to look at the guy, he said. Because he wanted to tell him never to speak to you again. Because he was planning to punch the guy in the face, until he saw him and realized you’d beaten him to it. He liked that. That was his favorite part of the story.”
Annie could not look at him, could not move or breathe. Marcus made his way down the porch steps and towards the driveway where he’d left his car last night, then turned back to her.
“By the way,” he said. “You wouldn’t know this, of course, because you’ve never asked me anything about my relationship with my brother, about our childhood or our life. But it might interest you to hear that Danny Walter never hit a guy in his life. Never threatened to. Never even wanted to. Except that once.”
Annie looked at him then, looked him straight in the eye, startled and a little shaky, her heart pounding strangely in her chest.
“It’s not an insult that he wanted you to have someone to lean on when things got hard, Annie,” he said. “It’s because he knew you better than you know yourself.”
And then he climbed into his car, and was gone.
Chapter Eleven: Doctor Megan
“I’m Doctor Megan,” said the very pretty woman in the green dress, kneeling down to eye level with the children. “Did your Aunt Annie talk to you a little bit about why you’re here today?”
Isaac and Sophia nodded. Lucy was murmuring quietly to Princess, the stuffed kitten, and didn’t hear.
“Lucy?” said Doctor Megan gently, and Lucy looked up. “Is it okay if we put the kitten down for a little bit, and maybe we can all just talk?”
Lucy gave the doctor a skeptical once-over and leaned over again for a hasty, whispered exchange with Princess. Princess seemed to think all of this was above-board, but they hadn’t had time for a full conference, so Lucy leaned over and tapped Sophia on the shoulder and whispered in her ear.
“Dolphin says it’s okay for now,” Sophia reassured her. Lucy passed this information on to Princess, who agreed to be set down on the floor at Lucy’s feet.
There was a little kid-sized couch with room for all three of them. Doctor Megan sat across from them in a chair, and Aunt Annie was by the door. She had explained in the car on the way over that they would be visiting Doctor Megan every Tuesday but for this first visit only, she would come in with them.
She spent the rest of the drive explaining that this was not the kind of doctor’s visit where you had to get a shot.
“Are you sure?” pressed Isaac. "Are you sure we don't have to get shots? I hate shots."
"Megan Sharma is a therapist, not a psychiatrist,” said Annie from the driver’s seat without turning around. "She can’t legally offer you any medication."
"Huh?"
"Besides, it's irrational to hate shots, it's one second of pain in exchange for herd immunity preventing the country from undergoing another polio epidemic."
"Huh?"
She sighed. "No, Isaac," she said as calmly she could muster. "I promise, you do not have to get a shot."
“Are you double triple quadruple sure?” asked Sophia.
“I am quintuple sextuple septuple octuple sure,” said Annie, which sent Lucy into paroxysms of giggles. Sometimes Aunt Annie made up the silliest words.
Doctor Megan didn’t use big words. She used regular words, and she sat in a low chair so they could look at her face, and she asked them questions that didn’t all make sense but seemed to be about The Thing That Happened. Lucy and Sophia did not like to talk about The Thing. Neither, really, did Isaac, but he had been born nine minutes before Sophia which made him the oldest, and his sisters were his responsibility. Sometimes he did the brave things so the girls didn’t have to.
Their aunt sat quietly in the corner watching them. Aunt Annie didn’t smile very much and she was sometimes a little scary, she didn’t give good hugs like Nana or tell good stories like Uncle Mike, and sometimes she talked to the children like they were tiny grownups, which was very puzzling. But it made them all feel safer that she was there.
Doctor Megan asked questions for what seemed like a long time. Some of them were weird questions, like asking each of the children to describe what Mommy and Daddy were wearing when they left the house that day before The Thing happened. And some of them were questions that seemed important, for reasons the children couldn’t quite understand. Like she asked Isaac if he felt like he needed to take care of his sisters now, which was silly, because of course he did. He always had. But Doctor Megan asked it in a Serious Grownup Way, and it made them all wonder.
Then she asked Lucy if she understood where Mommy and Daddy had gone, which made Isaac and Sophia sit up straight and tall and squeeze each other’s hands. Lucy sometimes understood, and sometimes didn’t, but she was little. She was only four. They were seven, and in school, which made them big kids, and they tried their hardest to explain everything to Lucy. Information tended to stick a little better in her brain if conveyed from Dolphin to Princess and then to Lucy. But Princess was sitting on the floor and Dolphin and Murphy were in Aunt Annie’s purse which meant they had no idea what Lucy was
going to say.
They looked over at their little sister, who was busily chewing on the ends of her hair. Isaac sighed. She didn’t used to do that, and now she did it all the time. He leaned over and pulled the hair out of her mouth.
“Lucy?” said Doctor Megan again, very gently, “did you hear my question?”
“They’re in space,” said Lucy, and Sophia – overcome with the anxiety of having to keep explaining this to her sister over and over and over again – began to cry a little bit. Aunt Annie moved like she was going to get up from her chair, but Doctor Megan shook her head and she sat back down again.
“It’s okay,” whispered Isaac as he squeezed her hand, and then Doctor Megan looked at him.
“Isaac,” she said, in a very gentle and pleasant voice, “what would happen if when Sophia started to cry, you let her cry without trying to make her stop?”
This was a ridiculous question, so he didn’t bother hiding his disdain. “Then she’d be sad,” he explained, very patiently.
“What if it was okay that sometimes Sophia is going to feel sad?” was her response, which wasn’t a question Isaac was sure how to answer.
But the most surprising and difficult question of the day was directed, a little while later at Sophia herself. She had introduced Doctor Megan to their animals, and Doctor Megan looked straight at her and asked a very strange question.
“Sophia,” she said. “Dolphin knows things, doesn’t he?”
This was not a concept that grownups were usually swift to grasp, so it made Sophia like Doctor Megan a little better, and she forgave her for not letting Isaac give her squeezes when she had wanted him to before. She nodded.
“Is Dolphin the boss of the other animals?” she asked. “Does he tell Murphy and Princess, sometimes, what to do?”
What a relief, a grownup who gets it, Sophia thought. They’d had an impossible time getting this concept through to Aunt Annie.
“Yes,” she said. “He’s the leader.”
“Okay,” said Doctor Megan. “What would happen if Dolphin wasn’t there?”
They all stared at her.
“What do you mean?” asked Sophia suspiciously.
“If there was no Dolphin,” said Megan, “then could you tell Isaac and Lucy the things that Dolphin tells to Murphy and Princess?”
Sophia shook her head. “Only Dolphin,” she said. “He finds stuff out, and then he tells me.”
“How does he find stuff out, Sophia?”
“I don’t know,” she said helplessly. “He just does.”
Doctor Megan gave Sophia a long, unreadable look, then turned to Aunt Annie. “All right,” she said pleasantly. “I think that’s enough for today.”
* * *
"So what's the deal with Dolphin?" Annie asked them once they were all back in the car. Lucy was drawing pictures with her finger on the window and not quite paying attention, but Isaac and Sophia tensed up slightly.
"He's a dolphin," said Sophia carefully, not quite sure where this was going.
"Well, right," she said. "I mean, I know that. I just meant - how come he's the leader? And not Murphy or Princess? Well, Princess is the youngest, probably, so I guess that make sense. But isn't Murphy the oldest? Since Isaac's the oldest?" In the rearview mirror, she saw them nod. "Plus, you know, a T-Rex in real life is a lot bigger than a dolphin," she added. "In the wild, you realize Murphy would be eating Dolphin and Princess right now."
This struck all three children as hilariously funny.
"Anyway, all I'm saying," she went on, "is that I question the internal logic of this animal kingdom democracy you have going on here. That's all."
"Why do you use big words?" asked Lucy, tuning suddenly into the conversation, and making Annie feel ever-so-slightly like she'd committed a social faux pas.
"Because I'm smart," she said, a trifle defensively, "and I think you're smart too, and I see no reason to talk down to you in a patronizing tone of voice and create the impression -"
Lucy's expression in the rearview mirror was dubious. Annie sighed.
"Because I like using big words," she said, and Lucy nodded happily like that was the correct answer and returned to drawing on the window.
Later, as they were walking back up the steps to the house, Isaac lagged behind slightly, letting the girls run on ahead, and tugged at Aunt Annie's hand. She stopped and looked down at him.
"It's because of Daddy," he said, and was startled at the stricken look that came over her face, so he hastened to explain. "Murphy came from Uncle Mike," he said. "For my birthday. And Lucy got Princess from Nana. But Dolphin is from Daddy. That's why he's the boss of everyone. That's how come he knows things everybody else doesn't know."
Aunt Annie looked down at him for a long moment, with a very strange expression on her face before she said, in a calm voice, "Thank you, Isaac, that's very helpful. You can go inside now."
He scampered in after his sisters to the kitchen, where Uncle Mike and Nana were cooking. Aunt Annie went straight up to her room and didn't come back downstairs until dinner.
Chapter Twelve: Advent
As promised, a truckload of boxes arrived at the house before the end of the week. Boxes from Marcus, addressed to Marcus, packed with the belongings that Marcus would now need, because he lived here – a fact Annie was still trying mightily to adjust to.
She had spent a few days clearing out the guest room for him. The closets were packed full of spare bedding and board games which all needed to be rehoused, and he’d be bringing his own books and lamps and things to hang on the wall. Annie wasn’t quite ready to throw anything out, so she simply boxed it all up, hauled it up to the attic, and left Marcus’ room bare of everything except a bed, dresser and bookshelf.
She had given up fighting the inevitable, and had begun very slowly to move her own things into Grace and Danny’s bedroom. She resisted as long as she could, but the longer she pretended like she was a visitor the worse it would be. She would simply have to make the best of it.
The gray and dismal weather – Portland's typical mid-December damp chill – was beginning to take its toll on Annie's spirits. The sparkling white snow, which had created such a false sense of serenity the night of the accident, had long since dissolved into hideous brown slush and then to rain. Oregon winters were rarely pleasant. Annie felt chilled all the time in the old creaky house, and missed her well-appointed downtown loft with its spare modern furniture and gleaming kitchen.
Grace and Danny’s house was large and rambling and beautiful, a classic Portland-style Craftsman with a porch swing and a back yard and big bay windows in the living room. But inside all was chaos. Two weeks after the accident, Annie had altered very little. There were still papers all over Grace’s desk, sweaters tossed over the backs of chairs, half-finished books on end tables. There was even a load of clean laundry she had not been able to bring herself to take out of the dryer. The house was in many ways just as its true owners had left it that day when they went early Christmas shopping and never came back; a snapshot of one moment in time, captured forever and endlessly repeated in every single room.
And then there were rooms with new, equally unsettling ghosts floating about, thought Annie, who could not enter the guest room which now belonged to Marcus without memories flooding back through her mind, uninvited, of the way he had felt inside her and the sound of the rough moans he had breathed into her skin and the way he had slept all night with a protective arm around her body. And that did not make anything easier.
Unsure quite how to proceed without traumatizing the children, Annie had at first only brought over one suitcase and her laptop, taking up as little space as she could – until Aunt Vera pointed out to her that this was futile.
“You’re not a guest anymore,” she pointed out. “You live here. It’s time to start taking up some room. The sooner you begin adjusting to your new normal, the easier it will be on the children.”
Annie did not agree. She felt them watching
her warily, reproachfully, as she moved from the guest room to their parents' bedroom. She was so aware of their discomfort, and so singularly uncomfortable with them herself, that she had not yet quite begun to broach the subject of Uncle Marcus. They had watched the boxes being loaded in and piled away, but if they wondered what was inside them they did not ask. Which was a relief. One strange adult, she thought, was plenty for the moment.
And maybe, if she was lucky, Marcus would change his mind and stay in New York.
* * *
She could not have been more wrong.
“You’re going to be sharing a house with these kids until they’re eighteen,” an exasperated voice at his side was, at that exact moment, explaining to Marcus. “You really, really, really don’t want to buy them a drum set.”
“But it’s awesome,” he complained to the dark-haired girl who was extracting a pair of wooden drumsticks from his hands and shoving him off the bench of the giant toy drum set he had just sat down to play.
“It would be, if you were their cool uncle from New York who came to visit for Christmas and then left again,” she pointed out, “but if you buy loud presents for kids who live in the same house as you, then you’re literally just paying good money to annoy yourself.”
He sighed. Linnet was right.
As usual.
If you had asked him directly, Marcus would not have been able to articulate quite how it was that the Christmas presents had become so suddenly, vitally important.
Maybe it was because today was the 8th of December, and he had flown home on the 3rd, and had not heard from Annie since – except a brief memorandum with information about the shared checking account, which she had sent him through Charles Miller’s office.