There’s something about seeing a person taking care of a child, she said. I’d see the tender way Josh was with your brother, and imagine what it would feel like to have someone be that way with me.
She looked at Wendy, as if she was checking to see if it was okay to go on.
We were both so sad, she said. There was that most of all. There didn’t seem to be anything that could ever make it better. And then it started to seem like maybe there was. This one small thing.
One small star shining down on them, Carolyn called it.
I didn’t ever kid myself he would feel about me the way he did about your mother. I knew there were certain records they used to play, a restaurant they went to. Places I’d never go with Josh.
But I thought maybe there was enough left over to make something worthwhile out of, she said.
Remember that amazing cake he made for your mom last year when he threw that goofy party in honor of National Secretary’s Day? The one holiday she hadn’t celebrated yet. And right when he was setting it on the table, he dropped it. But Josh scooped up the layers and fitted them together on another plate. A smaller one. And slathered a bunch of leftover frosting on top to cover up the ruined parts.
It wasn’t beautiful like the original one, she said. But it was still way better than average.
They didn’t need to say more. Wendy might have told Kate that maybe it could still work out. Just because Louie said he hated her that didn’t mean he really did. Look at all the terrible things she’d said to her own mother. Just because Josh might never write her Post-it notes or do fancy dips with her in the kitchen didn’t mean they couldn’t have a nice time watching old movies with Louie on the couch.
But she also knew Kate was right. Every time Josh looked at her or heard her voice he would know who she wasn’t. When she pushed Louie on the swings, he would know the swing-pushing rhyme she wasn’t saying.
I hate it that your brother got set up for thinking he could wish your mother back home, she said. I would give anything if that hadn’t happened to him.
But maybe it’s a good thing for me that I finally got to see things clearly. I probably should have left New York a long time ago.
After, Wendy invited her to come back to the house and have dinner with her father and Carolyn, but Kate had a plane to catch out of San Francisco at midnight. Tell Garrett not to take it personally, she said. The last time I saw him, I wasn’t that friendly. It’s probably about time to let all of that old stuff go. If you spend all your energy thinking about the past, what’s left to put into the future, right?
Wendy had been getting her period for a year already, when September happened, but after, she stopped. Amelia told her she’d read in her You and Your Body book that sometimes when a person was under a lot of stress, that happened to them, especially if they hadn’t been menstruating that long, where their body already had much of a rhythm established. Her period was just one more thing that went away, along with so much else.
It came back in March, a little while after Kate’s visit. She woke up feeling something wet and looked on the bed: blood. The first time she’d seen it, a year and a half earlier, she’d felt scared, but this time she was almost glad. It felt like a small sign that some kind of natural order was coming back to her life.
She thought then of the day it happened, the first time. Her mother had been out at yoga. Josh and Louie were at the park. She was home alone, drawing.
When her mother came back she had felt shy at first, telling her. Even though this was her mom, it was hard getting the words out.
I guess it finally happened, Mom.
Her mother had put her arms around Wendy. Oh, honey, she said. This is a big day.
I don’t know what to do, Wendy said. Her mother had told her a little before, but it hadn’t seemed to apply until now.
Back when I got my period, we all wore sanitary napkins, she said. But really, it’s so much easier if you can use tampons, and it’s no big deal.
She and her mother had shut themselves in the bathroom until Wendy figured out how to put the tampon in.
You have to relax your muscles, her mother told her. Think of the nicest thing you can imagine.
That would be getting a dog, Wendy said.
Well okay then, think about a dog. What kind are you picturing? her mother said.
A Boston terrier puppy.
See what I mean? That was easy, right?
They went for ice cream after. Her mom had taken out of her purse the old paperback copy of The Diary of a Young Girl that she had read when she was Wendy’s age. She opened the book to the part where Anne talks about getting her period.
“I think that what’s happening to me is so wonderful,” her mother had read, leaning close so only Wendy would hear. “And I don’t just mean the changes taking place on the outside of my body but also those on the inside. . . . Whenever I get my period, I have the feeling that in spite of all the pain, discomfort and mess, I’m carrying around a sweet secret.”
A sweet secret. Wendy knew her mother would have loved to have a real mother-daughter talk then, about sex, and boys, and love, but she didn’t feel like it. She couldn’t think of anything to say.
I never knew you wanted a dog that badly, her mom told her. I guess now every time you get your period for the rest of your life, you’ll think of Boston terriers.
Thirty-Three
She was playing her clarinet a lot now, sometimes by herself, sometimes with Henry, in the band room during study halls.
Maybe you could come over after school, she said. We can do our homework, and I’ll play you some music.
She played him Louis Armstrong first. The starting point, Josh liked to say. Then they moved on to Miles Davis, Kind of Blue. Now they were listening to her CD of Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto—another of the all-time classics, without which, Josh said, a person couldn’t claim to have a real jazz collection.
In the middle of “Corcovado,” Henry looked over at her and set his pencil down.
You ever have a boyfriend? he asked. She could tell he had been preparing to ask her this for a few minutes, minimum.
Sort of.
I never had a girlfriend, he told her.
They drew a little more.
I was wondering if you wanted to be my girlfriend, he said. If you weren’t still seeing that other guy.
I’m not exactly seeing him, she said. We’re still good friends, but he doesn’t live around here.
This is probably where the hero in the comic would sweep the girl up in his arms and carry her off someplace, he said.
That’s okay. I might be a little heavy for you. Though the name Garrett had given her, Slim, actually fit now, to her surprise.
His kiss was more the way she had expected it to be the other time, with Todd. Sticking on the postage stamp. She saw that she would have to show him.
She moved her chair closer so it wouldn’t be so awkward. She put one arm around his neck and put her mouth against his. Two clarinet players, she thought, working on their embouchure.
They kissed like that for a few minutes. My dad will probably be coming home soon, she said. Carolyn was getting home later than Garrett now, due to all her new jobs.
You know, you’re the first girl I ever really got to talk to, Henry said. Not having a sister or anything.
A picture came to her then, as Henry was packing up his clarinet and zipping up his backpack. It was of herself and Louie, but years from now. She was in her twenties, living in some city, going to music school, or studying art maybe. She had her own apartment. Maybe she had a boyfriend, maybe she didn’t.
Her brother would come to visit for the weekend. He would be fourteen years old, the age that Henry was now. His voice would have changed, and he might have started shaving once in a while. He would look a lot like Josh, but when he danced, which was often, the person he would remind her of would be her mother.
They’d be in her little studio apartment, listening to
music, sipping hot chocolate, or who knows, she might even let him have a little beer. He would be telling her about a girl he liked. The first one. She would have had a number of boyfriends by this time, though not so many that she didn’t remember, still, what it was like to be fourteen, and kissing someone for the first time.
If you ever have any questions, she would tell him, I hope you ask me.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was a wonderful book, but she didn’t like Lord of the Flies, she told Alan. It could be true that kids would do terrible things like that, she said. But I myself believe more along the lines of Anne Frank. That people are basically good.
And how do you explain it when terrible things happen? Alan asked her. And it’s the fault of some human being? Or a whole culture of human beings? The book he had given her most recently was called Night, by Elie Weisel—the story of the author’s days as a young boy in a concentration camp. Of all the people in his family, only he survived. And there he had been, fifteen years old, with practically his whole life still to lead, trying to figure out whether it even made sense trying.
But he did in the end. Not only did he go on living. He wrote books. That one, and others. And though the books told of terrible, unbearable things, they were beautiful, too. Out of the most unspeakable horror, he had found something hopeful and good.
I’m still trying to figure it out myself, Alan said. How it is that for some people, a terrible tragedy can happen and it seems to make them stronger and more determined than ever to make their life mean something. And for other people it just flattens them. They never get over it. They aren’t less good people. They’re just missing some kind of survival instinct.
Carolyn calls me a cactus girl, Wendy said.
Linda is not a cactus girl, he told her. His wife had been gone two months now. It didn’t look like she was coming home.
Luckily, he said, I’m something of a cactus man myself. If Borders doesn’t kill me, nothing can.
Henry was coming over to Wendy’s house regularly now, and bringing his clarinet. The best thing about him wasn’t the kissing. He hadn’t gotten the hang of that. The best part was playing duets.
Henry had been playing a couple of years longer than she had, and he was really good at sight-reading. He had a book of Beatles tunes that they worked out parts for, and another of old-time jazz ballads like Josh might play. They would sit side by side in the backyard for hours sometimes, flipping through the pages, picking out songs to work on.
Who would have thought? Garrett said one time, when he came home from work, a little after six, and found the two of them there, in the near darkness, leaning in to study the sheet music. That this is how I’d find my daughter and some boy, who’d been home alone all this time. Playing their clarinets.
She might have been embarrassed, but she wasn’t. Henry had turned out to be more of a friend than anything else. They had long conversations, walking home after school, but the best part was definitely the music. When she played her clarinet, she discovered, nothing existed but the notes. There was no New York and no mile-high mountain of rubble, no flyers taped up in the subways, no Josh even, hunched over the photograph albums, no Louie, staring at the TV set that wasn’t even on, no ache in her chest at the thought of her mother. The music filled her whole brain, and not just her brain but her body. Everything else might have changed, but the music hadn’t.
I’m playing again, she told Josh one night on the phone. Not just for practicing and band. I play for myself.
You know something? he said. I wouldn’t have thought I could, but I’ve started to do that, too. Times when I’m playing and I lose myself in the music, I almost feel like my old self. Your mother used to say the same thing about dancing—that no matter what was going on in the rest of her life, when she was dancing, she could always count on being happy. I don’t feel that way yet, but I can begin to imagine the day might come.
Louie was not doing well at the moment.
He went to school, Josh told her. He even went over to Corey’s now and then to play. Also, strangely enough, he had given up sucking his thumb. After all that time that she and her mother and Josh had worked on it—the chemical her mother had dabbed on his thumb to make it taste bad, the retainer they’d gotten from the dentist that made it harder to suck, all the talks they’d had, lying on his bed with him, about not wanting his teeth to grow in crooked, being a big boy now, getting ready for the first day of preschool—he just woke up one day and stopped. Right after his terrible birthday.
But in other ways, Josh told Wendy, he was worried about her brother. It seemed to him as if Louie was putting on a big act the whole time. Even when he would smile or laugh, it was as if he was trying to figure out how a boy might behave if he was happy. One time at the park, he had said to Josh, We sure are having fun, right, Poppy? We sure are having a good time, huh?
He had nightmares a lot. He didn’t call out for his mother, but sometimes he said the building was falling down. When a plane passed overhead, he would look up and say, That’s just a regular plane, right? The good kind?
Then there was this: He never dressed up in his costumes anymore. He never wanted to be a wizard or a pirate or a lion anymore. All he ever was now was Louie.
Josh had started taking him to the therapist again. He mostly just played with blocks there, but he didn’t pretend to her anymore that his mother was off on a trip.
My mother is dead, he told the therapist. My mother’s never coming back. It doesn’t matter how good I am.
Louie, she said to him. It was their Saturday morning phone call. I have a school vacation coming up. I was thinking maybe I could come see you.
Okay, he said. His voice sounded flat.
We could play your new games, she said. I used to have Operation, but I forget how it goes. You’d have to teach me.
It’s a dumb game.
Fair enough. She realized, hearing her voice talking to him, that she was sounding like one of those adults she always hated when she was little, who say things to kids that they don’t really mean. The truth was she still knew very well how you played Operation. The truth was, it was a dumb game.
So maybe I’d come stay with you and Josh for a while. For a visit.
And then you’d go away again, he said. Weary.
My school’s out here now, Louie.
I know.
Wendy hadn’t been over to Violet’s for a few weeks. With school now, it was harder. For a while there, Carolyn had been getting together with Violet and Walter Charles almost every day, to work on the cactus garden installation, but for the last week Carolyn hadn’t been able to reach her, so they’d decided to drive over—Wendy and Carolyn—to make sure everything was all right.
When Carolyn pulled her station wagon up in front of Violet’s building, there was a pile of trash on the street. A couple of Huggies boxes full of odds and ends, but something else: Walter Charles’s changing table, and, hanging over the edge of the trash can, his musical mobile.
When they got to the top of the stairs, the door was open, music playing. The place was mostly cleaned out, except for Violet’s boom box and a suitcase. She was sitting on the floor, doing her toenails.
What happened? Wendy asked.
Where’s Walter Charles? Carolyn said.
Listen, Violet said. It’s not like I’m thrilled about this.
Walter Charles, Carolyn said again.
There’s so many great opportunities he could get with someone else, she said. You wouldn’t believe what some people have in their houses. A TV set in the bathroom. Heated toilet seats.
Violet, Carolyn said. What’s going on? She sat down on the floor next to Violet, who had finished one foot and started in on the other one. She put an arm around Violet, who was studying her foot.
I called up that lawyer in San Francisco, she said. I was just wondering if that couple she was telling me about might still be interested.
Nobody said anything. Carolyn had turned off the mu
sic. Now Wendy heard her let out a long, slow sigh, like wind over the desert, John Coltrane in the night.
How could you just do that? Wendy asked her. You didn’t even call us. She had a million things to say, actually. It surprised her that Carolyn had not spoken a word.
You think you know everything, Violet said. But you only know how things work in your little world. Not everybody takes clarinet lessons and has a mother who dyes Easter eggs with them.
Wendy didn’t have that either anymore. But she did once. That was still a lot more than Violet ever got.
There’s more to this, isn’t there, Violet? Carolyn said quietly. Rich people in San Francisco don’t just drive up and take your baby away.
It was my mom, Violet said. She was over here, deciding to be all motherly again, only then she started in on me like always, and things got a little crazy. After she left, I just kind of lost it. Wally was screaming, and I guess I started shaking him. The neighbors called Child Protective Services. They took him this morning.
Her voice sounded like an answering machine. Up until now, she hadn’t looked at them, but now she did, square in the eye.
See what I mean? she said. Things are different here.
It was very late when the call came, a time of night when it can only be bad news.
Wendy, her father said. It’s for you. It’s a boy, and he’s crying.
She had thought it was going to be Henry, but it was Todd, calling from Colorado.
There was an accident, he said. Snowboarding. My brother.
It was their day off. His friend had gotten them passes like usual. Conditions were perfect. They’d just finished building a bunch of new jumps, and the half-pipe was packed down hard, glass.
We were on our last run of the day. Watch this, Kevin said. He wanted to try a three-sixty.
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