The Most Fun We Ever Had

by Claire Lombardo

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I fell—”

  “I— You have no idea what I’ve been— Holy shit, Violet, I can’t believe that you…”

  She felt the same creeping dread as she had when she’d talked to her mother.

  “I guess you forgot what was happening today,” Matt said.

  It thumped through her head like an extra heartbeat: oh no oh no oh no. “What?” She leaned against the table, looked over at her kitchen wall calendar. “Oh, God.” Oh, poor Wyatt. Oh, her poor, tiny star, sweeter than anyone on the earth.

  “They waited a while for you,” Matt said. “They tried calling you.”

  She closed her eyes. “Did you go? Did he do it?”

  “I was in a meeting. I left right after they called but traffic was hell.”

  “What happened?” she asked again.

  “Jonah came.”

  Surprising and inevitable. It stilled her.

  “They sang it together. Miss Ruth made a video for us.”

  Were they on solid ground, they both might have laughed at something like this. Miss Ruth. They both might have taken a moment to bask in how bizarre it was, their kindergartener’s debut CCR performance, accompanied on vocals by his relinquished half brother, before an audience of women who’d be fueling their lunchtime conversation with the indiscretion for months, Bouffanted Gretchen and Ashton’s Mom and Jennifer Goldstein-Visor.

  But instead she was crying, and Matt sounded angrier than she’d ever heard him.

  “Jesus, Violet. I told you something like this would happen. Plus I just left in the middle of a meeting with the DreamWorks guys.”

  “I was so tired,” she said.

  “Okay, but here’s the— I’m not sure what’s quite so tiring when the only thing you’re required to do is not be a shitty mom.”

  “That’s—that’s an awful thing to say.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s been pretty fucking awful for the last hour when I assumed you were dead, Violet, not napping.”

  “Did you tell Wyatt how sorry I am?”

  “Of course I did,” Matt said. “Jesus, have you told me how sorry you are? Will you tell Jonah? Christ. This is exactly what I’ve been trying to avoid. But he’s in it now, you see that? He made up this whole story about how you got caught in traffic. He saved us, Violet.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “You could try,” Matt said, his voice eerily measured, “to sound sorrier.”

  * * *

  —

  The landscapers wouldn’t come to cut down the ginkgo until spring, and he wasn’t going to let it languish like it was, stripped of its dignity, dead branches drooping downward. Plus he had an apprentice now, in Jonah, who was strong and nimble and seemed to take pleasure in physical exertion. A branch fell and he bent to retrieve it, throwing it into the pile with the others. Jonah, fifteen feet up, killed the motor on the chainsaw.

  “I forgot to tell you,” he said. “I need this permission slip signed.”

  “What for?” He stepped forward as Jonah began his descent on the ladder.

  “It’s this tournament,” he said. “This regional Krav Maga thing.”

  He did not pretend to understand the boy’s unusual extracurricular activity, but it seemed to be a good thing for him, a source of structure. “Regional sounds like a big deal.”

  “Yeah, kind of.” Jonah met his eyes once, quickly, and appeared to be suppressing a smile. “I’m a finalist. Statewide. So I get to compete against—like, really good people.”

  “As a really good person yourself, it sounds like?”

  Jonah shrugged.

  “That’s fantastic,” he said.

  “It’s not for a couple months. April. Can I go?”

  “Of course,” he said. “I mean—as far as I— We should talk to Marilyn too. And—Violet? Or—well. I’m sure it won’t be a problem. Can families come?” He shook out the stiffness in his shoulder and reached for the chainsaw. Jonah held the ladder for him as he climbed.

  “I’m not sure. I guess so.”

  He made it to the branch above where Jonah had last been cutting and leaned back against the trunk, winded. “Well, find out. I’d like to see what all the fuss is about.”

  “You’d want to come?”

  He looked down to see that the incredulity in Jonah’s voice matched the expression on his face. He smiled. “Of course we would. Marilyn’s conflict-avoidant, so she might want to pace around outside during the actual fighting, but we’d love to see what you’re—” A belch rose in his throat and he colored. He revved up the saw and went to work on a branch, but about halfway through he was overcome by nausea. He turned off the saw, his lungs quickly filling with a rising panic. “Christ, it’s hot, all of a sudden.”

  “It’s like five degrees out here,” the boy said.

  He tried to laugh. “Of course. That’s what I meant.”

  The world, at once, seemed finite and fleeting, the breath in his lungs limited. He was sweating through his sweater. His wife, twenty years old, above him beneath this very ginkgo tree. His daughters, again and again and again and again, coming into the world. His father exiting it. All of those things gone in an instant, nobody left to remember them but him and now no longer him, it seemed. Marilyn on all fours, just before Gracie was born. Motherfucker. The pain in his chest, sudden and crushing, insistent behind his sternum.

  “Jonah, I’m going to drop this down. Don’t try to— I’m just going to—” The saw fell from his hands and he heard it land on the cold ground with a sickening crack. “I just need to—”

  “David?”

  The lawn swam beneath him. The sharp pain behind his heart. “Sonofabitch.”

  “David, are you okay?”

  The dog barked, muffled, from inside of the house.

  “I need to—I need you to— If you can hold the ladder— I’m just not feeling—”

  And then the dog: loud and ever-present, having pushed through the screen door.

  “Call Marilyn,” he said woozily. “But don’t scare her.”

  “Fuck,” Jonah was saying. “Fuck, get away from me, you—”

  The barking.

  “Tell her—” He felt half-formed and disoriented. He smiled. “Tell her she’s the most fun I’ve ever had.” And the sharpness grew sharper, and his vision began to blur, and he couldn’t make his limbs move the way he wanted them to, and Jonah was yelling from the ground, and he wanted to tell the boy not to worry, that there was nothing he could do, but he found he couldn’t really speak, either, because the pain was all-consuming.

  “David!” the boy yelled.

  The dog barked madly.

  His gaze drifted downward. Jonah and Loomis, swirling in circles.

  He’d read, of course, about life flashing before you in the final moments.

  The last thing he pictured—as he fell from the ladder, as the world began to swim—was the beguiling cat-green of his wife’s eyes.

  2000–2001

  Violet reentered Wendy’s life in an exquisitely un-Violetesque fashion, her trembling voice over the phone spewing disclosure: “I have nowhere to live and now I’m late and I’m never late.”

  And Wendy’s first shameful thought: Well well well, look who’s just as fucked-up as the rest of us. She had been sunbathing nude on the roof of the brownstone and she sank back into one of their deck chairs and folded her legs into a pretzel, reveling in her pantilessness and the position of inarguable power her sister was placing in her lap. Violet had been brooding at their wedding nearly three months ago, still reeling from a breakup with her lame boyfriend, too heartbroken, apparently, to dredge up any occasion-appropriate happiness for Wendy, the glowing bride. And now Violet was knocked up. She reached for her sundress and slipped it over her head, suspecting that this was not a
conversation she wanted to conduct naked.

  “I have to take care of it,” Violet said. “Jesus Christ, Wendy, I’m starting law school in a couple of months.”

  Of course she knew about this; of course there had been ample discussion of Violet’s recent U of C acceptance at her parents’ house when last she’d seen them. But Violet hadn’t led with that sentiment; she’d begun with I have to take care of it, and Wendy wasn’t sure if she was imagining the indecisive wobble in her sister’s voice as she delivered that particular line.

  “I mean, why?” she asked, and she marinated in Violet’s resultant quiet, letting the midsummer breeze flutter the hem of her skirt.

  “I just— I wasn’t expecting for this to…”

  “You could be siring the next Stephen Hawking,” she said. And, at Violet’s silence: “Or, I mean, not a great example, I guess. But—hey, there’s a chance you and Mr. Express-for-Men Poindexter might enhance Dad’s scientific genes in a way that none of the rest of us could.”

  Her sister remained quiet, and her heartbeat trilled.

  Then: “Rob doesn’t shop at Express, Wendy; I don’t understand why you have to be so—”

  “I’m just saying,” Wendy said, “that you could be harboring a kid who comes out with the periodic table memorized.”

  Violet’s silence, then, she recognized as the tearful kind, and she remembered the context, the content, the stakes.

  “I’m just asking why this is so black-and-white for you. Because you don’t seem particularly happy with the option you’ve chosen.”

  “Nobody’s happy about having an abortion, Wendy.”

  “Maybe it’s not your only option.”

  “I just— I’ve never felt so— But of course it’s the most logical…”

  “It’s not always the most logical decision that’s the right decision,” Wendy said, feeling wacky and sage and somehow powerful, like their mother. But it was what she would have told herself. You didn’t always have to do what other people expected you to do. She’d built an entire life around this. “I’m just saying that you can find a little leeway if you want to. Defer school for a year. Come here, if you want. God. I’m not saying that you have to do anything; I just mean that the thing that everyone else does isn’t always necessarily the best thing.”

  “You have no idea how fucking scary this is for me,” Violet said.

  And so Wendy was triply surprised when her sister called her from the airport three days later.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing,” Violet said, climbing beside her into the passenger seat of Miles’s Audi.

  “First time for everything,” she said, but she took a second—in the O’Hare arrivals lane, with neon-vested sticks-in-the-mud ushering her car out of its idling place—to look her sister up and down. “You look fulsome,” she said. “You actually look really good, Viol.”

  “You’re sure Miles is okay with this?”

  Her husband had been unbelievably accepting when she’d floated the idea by him, still fascinated, as an only child, by Wendy’s mystical ties to her myriad siblings.

  “Absolutely okay,” she said. She glided the car into traffic, and she and Violet spent the stop-and-go ride home on the Kennedy talking about what was to come.

  She’d pulled the lie about Paris out of her ass, and Violet, conversationally fluent from a French minor, had gone with it, and when they got to Hyde Park they sat drinking lemonade on the roof, Wendy in the hammock and Violet primly cross-legged in a wicker chair, both of them getting kind of silly from the sun and the circumstances.

  “I bet they sell shitty black-market Chanel bags at Navy Pier,” Wendy said. “You could send one to Mom.”

  “We could get Dad a beret,” Violet said, and they both cracked up in the hysterical punch-drunk way you could do only with your sister.

  It was in moments like this that Wendy remembered how much she loved her sister—her prissy, perfectionist, annoying-as-all-get-out sister—because Violet was the only person on the earth who had experienced the world in almost the exact same way, in real time, step for step, save for those first few months of life, but even then she’d been accompanied by Violet for most of the time, Violet growing inside of their mother. And she felt a surge of pride for Violet—laughing, lovely Violet, head dipped back and throat exposed and a hand unthinkingly on her still-flat stomach, but even still the gesture reminded Wendy that all of this was not quite funny, was actually quite fucking terrifying, if you really gave it a lot of thought, but not giving it thought had been her idea in the first place, hadn’t it? Violet doing something brave. Violet doing something because some part of her wanted to. She pushed her toes against the ground, setting the hammock aswing. Their laughter had died off.

  “What’ll we do about Mom and Dad, though?” Violet asked, and Wendy bristled at the strains of whininess in her voice.

  But it was a fair question. Because their parents were, of course, only fifteen miles northwest, benevolently worried about Violet traveling abroad (even in Europe), expecting weekly long-distance phone calls and newsy handwritten letters and, probably, an excess of visits from Wendy to make up for the absence of their preferred child. She and Violet were both fairly certain that their parents wouldn’t try to visit Paris; they still had Liza and Gracie at home, and their mother had thrown herself full-throttle into running the hardware store and was so deeply entrenched that it was unlikely she’d pull herself away for a vacation.

  “God, I should be going to Paris,” Violet said. “I should be doing something exciting before I…”

  “Spend the rest of your waking hours negotiating contracts and staving off the advances of overstuffed Midnight-at-the-Viagra-Triangle predators in Canali suits?”

  “I’m not sure,” Violet said softly.

  “I’ll deal with Mom and Dad.”

  “Wendy, I…”

  “Jesus Christ, how many fucking times do you want me to tell you that you’re a legal adult who’s allowed to make whatever decisions you want to make? I don’t have some shrewd insider knowledge, Violet. I don’t have any kind of assurance that everything’s going to be—”

  “I was going to say thank you,” Violet said. “For—this. Whatever it is.”

  And people did not often thank Wendy, so her voice contained the hint of a question when she replied, “You’re welcome.”

  Then for a while it was actually sort of fun, a pedestrian espionage. They figured out a way—a friend of Miles’s who lived in Bretagne and accepted envelopes of prewritten postcards—to get correspondence from Violet to their parents with European postmarks. Violet moved into one of their guest rooms and at night they’d walk together along the lakeshore, out to Promontory Point, talking about everything and nothing. Wendy expounded on her sex life, and Violet pretended to be disgusted but asked sly follow-up questions that betrayed her curiosity; they assuaged each other’s weak guilt over lying to their parents—parents wanted their children to be best friends, didn’t they? And everything had unfolded from there, in the way that most of their interactions unfolded, with long stretches of defiance punctuated by bursts of tenderness, arcs of jealousy that tapered off with flurries of compassion. In the way that most of their interactions unfolded, except wholly different, huger and more extraordinary than either of them could begin to understand.

  Wendy, on the occasions when she had to have dinner in the suburbs with their parents, played her part flawlessly, peppering David and Marilyn with fraudulent secondhand anecdotes about the personable sheep in Mont-Saint-Michel, betraying nothing of the fact that their little Francophile was in fact just a few miles away, watching The West Wing and reading about breathing exercises.

  Unsurprisingly, Violet excelled—as she did with everything in her life—at pregnancy. Wendy would come home and find her sister sitting Indian-style at the kitchen table, one hand cupping
her belly and the other holding a book—What to Expect, or Let’s Go: France, or, during windows of peak dorkiness, The University of Chicago Law Review—a beautiful glow coming off of her face, glints of red in her messy brown hair. Violet seemed, despite the elemental desolation of her situation, accompanied. She was supplemented in a way that Wendy herself had never felt.

  “I don’t know,” Violet said one night, beached on the loveseat. “I feel sort of—like, anointed.” She wore her pregnancy well, seemed only to be getting prettier as she gained weight, rounded out, became slower in her movements.

  “Calling yourself a saint is generally frowned upon, I think, in terms of being—you know, humble,” Wendy said.

  “I suppose what I mean to say is that I feel—well, blessed, kind of. Despite everything,” Violet said. “I feel almost—whole.”

  “Call Mom and tell her,” Wendy replied. “She’ll be happy to know that all the money she spent sending us to CCD wasn’t entirely for naught.” She liked the sound of what Violet was saying, though, the idea of wholeness—and the implied wholesomeness—that came along with childbearing. She wasn’t sure she’d ever felt whole. She had a house and a husband and a kitchen with a built-in wine fridge, but when she donned the black backless Calvin Klein tomorrow night and went with Miles as Platinum Donors to the Shedd Gala, she would feel not like a woman but like a little girl playing at something. She would drink too much and, she hoped, not say anything embarrassing and later she would tumble into a cab and come home to Violet—who would likely be wearing sweatpants and doing the weird, private exercises she did with her pelvic muscles to prepare for the coming months, but who was blessed and whole.

  It might be kind of nice, she thought, not for the first time, to be Violet.

  * * *

  —

  There was something about being around Wendy that made her feel almost drunk. Or maybe the feeling was amplified by the fact that she hadn’t had a drink in eight months. But she’d started to feel inexplicably weepy one night sitting cross-legged in Wendy’s living room, feet falling asleep beneath her slightly swollen ankles. The baby, whoever it was, had been making her feel, alongside a sickly and unending indigestion, a strange euphoria lately, imbuing her with an unfamiliar sense of communion with the world around her, despite the fact that she was hiding from said world. But in the last few weeks she had begun to allow herself—really allow herself—to consider what might happen next. What came after her parting from this tiny bonfire of human collegiality and wonderment, this little person who wouldn’t exist were it not for her. Were it not for her sister.