His job at Harold Washington gave texture to his gobs of money: his parents had, of course, wanted him to take something at Northwestern or the U of C, and certainly would have been able to make it happen for him, but he’d demurred, explaining to Wendy that spending his days teaching students whose parents could afford forty-grand-a-year tuition—students like he himself had been—would only fuel his well-oiled hatred of the American elite, into which he had undeniably been born. Her husband had a complicated relationship with his privilege, working constantly against all that he could easily be taking for granted. And he had fun with his students, she could see; he took unfathomable amounts of time grading their papers and prepping his lectures. He took his job seriously, even though technically he didn’t have to, and there was a beautiful dignity to that, she thought.
Other than his course load, he sat on the boards of a few nonprofits, but he mostly spent time with her. She started getting involved in charities and social clubs and once she had enough of those things to make a schedule she no longer felt bad about quitting school or her job.
She started owning it, her new life with her Audi and her checkbook and her badass contrarian husband. She was finally able to shed the part of her that was fucked-up and anxious and deficient in comparison to her unyieldingly middle-class, moderate-to-high-functioning family. She was in love, and someone loved her back.
And then one day, by some miracle, she answered the phone and it was Violet, the only person missing from the newfound wonder of her circumstances, but before she could get too excited, her sister started talking, her voice unrecognizably uneven, and everything started to slip after that, down down down, gaining speed, lightpost-bound, like a doomed kid on a sled.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
She and Matt had survived Christmas with his parents by banking on their limited acting skills, using their children as a distraction, and avoiding each other as much as possible. If his family noticed the chill between them, nobody mentioned it. There was a fog delay for their flight out of Sea-Tac so they didn’t return to Chicago until nearly midnight, and Violet, by the next morning, was so desperate to be alone that she took the boys through the drive-through drop-off lane, derided by most Shady Oaks moms as being taken advantage of by the lazy or employed.
Her mother called just as she was walking in the door.
“Are the weary travelers back?” Marilyn asked when she picked up the phone.
“Just barely,” Violet said. She made a point to sound beleaguered sometimes when talking to her mother, to drive home the point that just because she’d had half as many kids didn’t mean that her life wasn’t still stressful.
“Well, merry belated,” her mom said, sounding a little short.
“Is everything okay?”
“Yes, fine. Well. I mean, everything is fine, but I— Listen, please don’t take this out on Jonah, Violet, because he didn’t volunteer the information without my prompting, but I heard what happened at your house that night he came for dinner.”
“What did he tell you?” she asked carefully.
“Just that— Well, he told me what happened with Wyatt, the whole thing about Santa Claus, but he also told me that you’d gotten quite upset with him, that you asked him to leave.”
“I’m sorry, how exactly did you prompt that specific information from him?”
“He was upset when Matt dropped him off. I kept asking him what had happened and he finally told me. There’s no reason to take that tone, Violet; it was clearly an accident…”
“I don’t have a tone and he didn’t accidentally tell him; Wyatt asked him and he easily could’ve talked his way out of it.”
Her mother was quiet.
“God, Mom, what?”
“No, it’s— I’d hoped maybe he was…I hoped he’d misinterpreted your anger, I guess.”
“Did you call to scold me for getting mad because Jonah ruined Christmas for my son?”
“Jonah is also your son, Violet.”
When she wasn’t ruing it, she envied her mother’s ability to speak about the world with such frank obviousness. But right now she just wanted a few fucking minutes to catch her breath after the Christmas from hell with her frigid husband and her hyperactive children.
“Oh my God, Mom, you can’t just— You don’t have any right to—” But she recognized her anxiety as the kind that came with being caught, and she was afraid of what her mother was going to say next. Her mother, the pacifist. Her mother, who gave her such a long leash. “Christ, Mom, I never wanted this. I don’t have room in my life for this.”
“This being Jonah, you mean.” It was jarring to hear her mother sounding angry.
“Sorry we don’t all quite have your free-love, open-door policy, Mom. Sorry some of us actually like for elements of our lives to not be utter chaos all the time.”
“It’s my free-love open-door chaos that’s the reason Jonah isn’t getting shuffled through the child welfare system anymore, Violet. A fact that you’ve never acknowledged or expressed an ounce of gratitude for. This whole family has rallied to care for this kid, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to wonder where you’ve been the last eight months. You’re his mother.”
“Look, Mom, if you want to be worried about one of us? Wendy’s been on the edge of a cliff for decades. Liza’s pregnant by a man who’s never going to be remotely her equal in terms of maturity or functionality. There are plenty of other directions for you to focus your attention.”
“I’m going to get off the phone before I say something I regret,” her mother said, her voice clipped. “I’ll be here to talk if you decide you want to, Violet.” Her last few syllables wavered, and she hung up.
She never fought with her mother; to have Marilyn—loving, patient, easygoing Marilyn—be angry with her felt uniquely awful. It dawned on her, as she went to curl up in the armchair overlooking their side yard, wrapping a blanket around her shoulders, feeling her eyes and nose leaking beyond her consent, that she had felt as lonely as she did lately only twice before in her adult life: the weeks following Jonah’s birth, and the weeks following Wyatt’s. She couldn’t talk to Wendy. She couldn’t talk to Matt. She could barely bring herself, anymore, to engage in the most base-level small talk. And now she’d driven away her mother, too, and this felt like the most damning thing of all. She wanted to call Marilyn back and tell her this—I’m sorry, I’m lost, I know I fucked up—but she’d left her phone in the kitchen, and she was suddenly so tired she could barely move, and so she just lay there, knees to her chest, crying in the way she’d resisted for months until she didn’t have anything left, until—empty, utterly depleted—she fell blackly asleep.
* * *
—
Jonah went to Wyatt’s school less to spite Violet than because he thought it would be nice to be a little kid and have an adult promise you something and then actually do it. He had never had that, though he was starting to understand how nice it was, because David was never late—not even by a minute—picking him up from Krav Maga, and Marilyn remembered that he hated asparagus but was okay with broccoli. So he ditched second period and took the Green Line to the Red Line to the Purple Line and then followed the directions he’d printed and jogged thirteen blocks to Shady Oaks Academy, and he arrived, both freezing and sweaty, only eight minutes after ten. He hadn’t talked to Violet or Matt since the night he’d ruined Santa. He wondered if Violet had put him onto some prep-school no-fly list and he’d be turned away by security. But he was banking on the fact that she would be too embarrassed to cause a scene and would explain him away as some poor little street urchin whom she would allow to watch her son’s performance as an act of charity. He wasn’t looking forward to seeing her again.
When he told the secretary he was there to see Wyatt, her face broke open in relief.
“Oh, thank God,” she said. “He’s been a wreck. Po
or thing. Are you— Wait, I’m not sure I have you on the list. Are you a new babysitter?”
But suddenly there was a blue blur coming toward him, and then Wyatt was in his arms, wrapped around his torso like a koala.
“I’m his brother,” he said, the words clumsy in his mouth. Wyatt was weeping, again that sad quiet kind, almost like an adult. “Whoa, okay.” He patted the kid’s back. Then—so the secretary, whose list seemed pretty official, didn’t call the cops—he added: “Half brother.” He tilted his head down. “Wyatt, buddy, it’s okay. It’s all right.”
“What on earth is going on?” A woman in a skirt-suit had appeared behind the secretary’s desk, along with a scary-looking tall-haired Spandexed lady.
“This is his…brother,” the secretary explained.
“I wasn’t aware that Wyatt had an older brother,” said the principal.
He took an immediate dislike to these two women. “Violet’s my mom.” It was the first time he’d ever said it and the last thing he’d been expecting to say, and he could only imagine Violet’s reaction if she were here, the fury he would incite simply by stating the obvious. And then, with a bit more authority: “What’s going on? Why is he so upset?”
“Mr. Lowell is in a meeting,” the principal said. “And Mrs. Sorenson-Lowell is—running late, apparently.”
“Just a little case of stage fright,” the secretary said more tactfully, patting Wyatt on the back. “How’d you feel about doing your song now, with your brother here?”
“I’m sorry,” Spandex said, jutting out a hip, giving Jonah a once-over like Violet sometimes did, like he was spewing bad intentions and environmental toxins. “Who is this person? How did he even— Is this how lax our security has become, that we just…”
Jonah stared at her and she trailed off. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but who the hell are you?”
“I’m Mrs. Morley, the vice president of the Parents’ Association,” she said emphatically, but then her curiosity seemed to get the better of her. “Did you say you were Violet’s—son?”
“What’s your name, young man?” the principal asked, equally intrigued. “Do you have some form of identification?”
Like the cop after he’d wrecked Liza’s car. Rich people were endlessly obsessed with identity verification.
“I’m fifteen,” he said. His birthday was in two days, at which point he’d be eligible for a legitimate ID. “Jonah Bendt. You can call Matt and ask him. But I still don’t get— Wyatt, buddy, what’s the matter?”
Wyatt pulled his head away and looked at Jonah. “Where’s Mama?”
He had no fucking idea where Violet was, and he was shocked that she wasn’t here, and it made him nervous, her absence, because forgetting didn’t seem like something she did.
“She got stuck in traffic,” he said without thinking. Wyatt continued to stare at him expectantly. “Yeah, it was— There was a crazy—this crazy accident and your mom got stuck on the other side of it. This big accident with a train and like a million cars, and a fire, and—”
The principal cleared her throat.
“Everyone was fine, though. And Violet—your mom was watching the whole thing from a few blocks away, but she couldn’t move her car, right, because everyone else was stopped, too, and so she—she called me and told me to let you know that she’s fine and she’s trying to make it but if she can’t then…” He glanced up at the secretary, who seemed like a better wingwoman than the principal. “What’s your name?”
“Miss Ruth,” she said, like that was a normal name to go by as an adult.
“If your mom can’t make it, Miss Ruth is going to record the whole thing on my phone, and you and your mom and your dad can all watch it together. Does that sound good?”
Wyatt whispered something, his face once again buried in Jonah’s shirt.
“Come again?”
“I can’t do it by myself,” he repeated.
“You won’t be by yourself,” he said, though he had a bad feeling about where this was headed. “I’ll be there, and your whole class, and—Miss Ruth.”
Miss Ruth beamed.
“No, I can’t sing by myself. Mama promised to sing with me if I got too nervous.”
“Yeah, except.” He cleared his throat. “Yeah, except, man, remember how we talked about this? I’m not a singer. You’re the singer.”
“I’m not the singer. Mama is the singer but I do it too because no one knows the song if it’s just the music.” Wyatt shook his head, his body beginning to tremble. This poor nervous kid.
“Hey, hey,” he said. He said it into the top of Wyatt’s head like he’d seen Violet do. “All right, man. Fine. I’ll do it with you.”
* * *
—
The moms surrounded him in droves after the Star of the Week performance, bringing with them an amalgamated cloud of perfume and a blinding rainbow of athleticwear.
“You two were adorable up there,” one woman said. “I had no idea that Wyatt had an older brother; are you adopted?”
He’d gotten through the performance by numbing himself to the crowd and focusing only on Wyatt, his little brother with his teensy guitar. He had a weird moment at the beginning where he remembered hearing the song in the car with his dad—his dad-dad, his viaduct dad—but he pushed past it, toward a moment from last week, fixing the gnarly shower stall in the basement with his grandpa and watching David’s face light up as he said, “Marilyn loves CCR.” By the end of the first verse he’d kind of gotten into it, drumming the beat onto the edge of the teacher’s desk, singing along with Wyatt without caring what his voice sounded like and without caring, for the most part, that he got a little choked up midway through. And he was proud of Wyatt, the first time he’d ever been proud of another person: this goofy kid who’d just been let down by his parents for the first time in his life and still pulled it together enough to sing a whole song in front of his class.
“You have a lovely voice,” one of the moms said, and another, picking up seamlessly, asked, “Is that something you get from Violet’s side? Or your dad’s?”
“Where is Violet, by the way?” said another, a startled-looking woman with dark eye makeup and a visor. “She’s been keeping a pretty low profile lately, but it seems unbelievable to me that she’d miss Star of the Week.”
He was able to ignore them, mostly, by watching Wyatt commune with his classmates, all of whom seemed to like Wyatt as much as he did. But he was worried about Violet, despite everything, because for her to miss something like this did seem radically out of character, even though he wasn’t entirely sure what her character was. He wasn’t sure she knew what her own character was, to be honest, but she at least seemed pretty heavily swayed by the opinions of others, and he figured it had to be something pretty bad that prevented her from being here to fend off the stylish vultures and keep them from learning about him, her darkest secret.
He didn’t like her, but he didn’t wish her dead.
“She’s not actually my mom,” he said, knowing Wyatt was out of earshot. Being someone’s family had something to do, he’d learned from watching his grandparents, with taking one for the team. “She and her—Matt, they were volunteering at the shelter where I live. And they took me out to lunch one day with Wyatt and Eli and we all just—hit it off.”
“A shelter?” said one of the women, looking suddenly devastated.
“More like a group home,” he said. “Lathrop House.”
Were he some kind of precocious Disney-movie hero, he would have expounded on the importance of giving to those less fortunate, on the fact that nobody who lived at Lathrop House chose to live at Lathrop House, and that they could really use some new iPads for the computer lab, some more contemporary books in the library. But at the moment, all he wanted to do was scram before he had a chance to make anything worse, before Tall Hair called the
cops or before it was revealed that Violet had been crushed to death by a stop sign in the accident he’d made up to calm Wyatt down. Miss Ruth had assured him that Matt was on his way.
“Buddy,” he whispered, pulling Wyatt aside, kneeling before him. “I’ve got to get back to school. But you kicked ass out there, okay?”
Wyatt smiled baldly, trusting him like kids deserved to trust adults, or fifteen-year-olds, whatever, like how he wanted Wyatt to be able to trust the world, though he hadn’t been able to himself; and he held out his fist for Wyatt to bump.
* * *
—
Violet awakened and didn’t remember falling asleep. Her head felt leaden, her esophagus raw from crying. She rose from the chair and stretched, feeling the stiffness in her body from sleeping in a ball. She wondered what regrettable thing her mother had prevented herself from saying when she hung up the phone. She felt her eyes fill again when she heard a strange buzzing sound: her phone, on vibrate, half-covered by a dish towel on the counter.
“Hey,” she said, seeing Matt’s name.
“Oh my God,” he said. “Oh, for— God, are you okay, Viol? Jesus Christ.”
The Most Fun We Ever Had Page 40