The next morning, I make it through the serpentine security line, flash my boarding pass, and buckle my seat belt. Because of the last-minute reservation, I’m sitting within six inches of the toilets, a good excuse to close my eyes and direct my mind to the roaring from the engines as the plane accelerates.
It doesn’t take long for me to zone out, a skill I’ve honed to perfection. When I was growing up, we had a neighbor with a narcoleptic dachshund, apparently a condition to which this breed is predisposed. Whenever Mischka became overstimulated in some way (that pesky cat invaded his yard again), he’d suddenly drop to the ground—fortunately, a short trip—roll onto his side, and seemingly fall into a deep sleep.
It’s actually a very handy trick, the ability to remove oneself. Sleep deprivation, anxiety about my dad, and the upsetting conversation with Cal, combined with the mechanical drone, almost lull me into a state of nothingness.
But not quite. Yesterday’s interaction with Cal is on replay, running over and over through my brain. He wasn’t wrong. Especially in a situation like this, I should be able to accept help from the man I love. And I do love Cal, but I couldn’t blame him if he finally decided to walk away. It’s got to be impossible for him to be on the receiving end of me always simultaneously pulling him in and pushing him away.
I try to open my ears to all the noises around me, concentrating solely on sound—the couple next to me discussing their plans to see the Degas exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the flight attendants in the galley, opening and closing compartments, preparing for beverage service; the kid whining that if he doesn’t get in the bathroom soon, it will be too late. Finally, it works. These individual pieces slowly meld together. It’s as if I’ve placed a pillow around my ears and soon everything muffles to a softened murmur.
Into this self-imposed cocoon seeps a memory.
I’m back in ninth-grade biology, and Mrs. Kemple is droning on about symbiosis. It’s spring, three days before the end of school. The window next to my desk is cracked open enough to entice with the fragrance of impending summer, a mixture of bees, lilacs, and clover. I’m barely listening to the lecture but infiltrating my it’s-almost-vacation haze, the real truth about symbiosis floats into my consciousness, gels, and solidifies there.
Here’s what I figured out. No matter whether it’s a symbiotic relationship that’s mutualistic, where the blind shrimp digs a burrow for the goby fish because that fish can warn the shrimp of predators, or whether it’s parasitic, where the tick feeds on the blood of its host—it all sounded like love to me.
Another memory: one night, when I was almost nine, as I was brushing my teeth, I overheard my mother say to my father, “I couldn’t live without you,” and his reply, “I hope we die in each other’s arms at exactly the same moment.”
What I understood then about symbiosis of any kind was that, at its core, it’s a desperate, life-sustaining, and imperative connection but at best a precarious link. Because what if the goby fish deserts the blind shrimp or the tick infects its host, which then dies of Lyme disease?
What I concluded about love was that it was steeped in the ever-present potential of pain and loss and imbued with a suffocating sense of responsibility, and the fear of being subsumed. I’ve spent most of my nearly thirty years running from it.
Until Cal. With him, I occasionally slow down and allow my heart the benefit of his soothing voice, his full understanding and . . . shock . . . acceptance of me. For a moment, I think, perhaps this too is love. It feels pure and light and joyful. And terrifying.
I must have slept, because as I open my eyes, the captain is saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, we are beginning our descent into Atlantic City International Airport. It’s currently seventy-three degrees and drizzling.”
10
Rena
My headache’s only a little better when I wake up. I feed the cat and scrape his crap off the den rug. In the last few weeks, he stopped using the litter pan. But why the hell can’t he at least shit in the same spot in the same room instead of trashing every rug in every room? I shove a load of whites into the washer and call my mother.
She picks up on the first ring. “Yeah?”
“Hi, Mom, it’s me.”
“Oh . . . Rena.”
“Yeah. You expecting another call?”
“No, no. It’s fine. Your sister, she was supposed to call me this morning.”
Of course. Janet.
“I can hang up if you want.”
“No, I have a few minutes. What’s going on?”
What’s going on? Her only granddaughter is in the hospital, nearly dying, and she never even bothered to visit her, and she asks me this question?
“Stephanie’s better. Out of the coma. That was pretty scary.”
I hear her flick the lighter. I know exactly where she’s at, sitting by the picture window, in the wooden rocker with the smashed and ripped cushion. I hear her take a puff of her cigarette, and then cough.
“When are they releasing her?”
“Soon, I hope, but I don’t really know. They might run more tests.” I reach for the bleach. Some of it splashes onto the front of my shirt. Fuck. I grab a dish towel from the kitchen to wipe at the three huge white circles. But, of course, it’s too late.
“I thought we’d come see you, you know, before Stephanie and me leave?”
She shouts, “Don’t pick the red box, you moron. It’s never the red box. Stupid jerk.” I should have known better than to call when The Price Is Right is on.
“Mom, did you hear me? We’re coming to see you, okay?”
“There’s my other line,” she says. “I better get it. Yeah, come over. Call first.” Click.
I throw the phone at the wall and knock off the calendar hanging there. I step over it on my way to the laundry room to rearrange the wash. The piece-of-crap machine is unbalanced and moving all over the tile floor.
Later, when I get to Steph’s room, Dr. Rondolski and three nurses are standing around her bed.
“Hey,” I shout. “What’s going on? What’s wrong?” They turn around and the nurses leave.
“Mrs. Cole, I’m glad you’re here. I wanted to talk to you,” says Dr. Rondolski.
I give Stephanie a kiss on her cheek and hug her. There’s an applesauce stain on her pajama top. “Look, sweetie, your shirt’s all dirty. I brought your favorite from home, the one with the penguins?” I reach into my bag for the shirt and take off her dirty top. I slip the clean one over her bony shoulders.
“Oh, honey, I’m sorry. Did I get lipstick on you?” I rub at her cheek with my finger.
She pushes my hand away and whines, “Stop, Mama.”
Pulling the blanket up to her chin, I say, “Well, you’re in a mood today. That’s okay, sweetie.” I give her another kiss and say, “Let the doctor and me talk a teeny bit, and then I’ll be right back.”
Dr. Rondolski pats Stephanie on the arm and says, “You feel better, kiddo, okay?” She looks at him with those sad puppy-dog eyes and nods her head.
We walk into the hallway. The overhead lights make Dr. Rondolski’s skin look kind of green. His glasses are full of greasy smudges.
He says to me, “We’re still having difficulty figuring out what caused the problem with Stephanie’s sodium levels. Fortunately, today, they’re almost normal, but, without any basis for why they spiked, we can’t be certain they’ll stay that way.”
I look down at my cuticles, which are a mess, all torn up. I pull at one until it bleeds. “When can I get her out of here?” I ask.
One of the nurses at the desk calls to him that Mrs. Fatel in room 3-C wants to see him. He says he’ll be there in a moment.
He’s frowning when he turns back to me and says, “I’m not sure. Like I said to you the other day, I think we should run more tests.”
I find a tissue in my jeans pocket and wrap it around my bleeding finger.
I ask him, “Yeah, but, is there some reason she absolutely can’t be
released?”
His glasses slide down his nose, and he pushes them back up. With his other hand, he jiggles the change in the pocket of his khakis.
“No, I think it’s safe, at least relatively so, to move her now. But as I said, I can’t promise the sodium issue will not reoccur, especially since we still don’t know what caused it.”
I look him straight in the eye. “Well, that’s the problem right there, isn’t it?”
I’m about to walk back to Stephanie’s room when he says, “Mrs. Cole, there’s one more thing.” I turn around.
“Yeah?”
“Something Stephanie told one of the nurses this morning,” he says.
“What’s that?”
Rubbing his forehead with his palm, he says, “She said you scared her.”
“Scared her? How? When?”
“Last week. After you and I talked in my office.”
I think for a minute.
“Oh yeah.” I pause. “It must have been the night I brought her the giraffe.”
Another nurse is waving at him, trying to get his attention. She mouths, I need a signature. He waves back at her.
I tell him, “I came back to the hospital that night because I wanted to bring this stuffed toy she’s been begging me for. It was dark in her room when I got there. I wanted to surprise her, so I stuck the giraffe through a crack in her door and said in this silly voice, something like, ‘Hi, cutie,’ and she gave out a little scream. Poor thing. I felt so bad. But I told her I was really, really sorry, and she was fine.” I smile up at him. “And I took that stupid giraffe right home so she wouldn’t be scared of it again.”
The nurse is walking toward us, holding a folder and a pen. Dr. Rondolski looks at me and says, “Yes, I guess that was it,” and turns away to sign a paper.
I walk into my daughter’s room and shut the door behind me.
11
Claire
Aunt Frannie pulls to the curb outside the terminal, and it seems she loops around the car and hugs me before even coming to a full stop. Squeezing my upper arms, she steps back to get a better view, dark eyes flashing and cocoa curls frizzing in the damp air.
“How beautiful you look. You get more beautiful every time I see you. Which isn’t often enough. And your hair. It’s growing out. I like it this length, but I also loved it short like it was last summer too. You looked like a woodland nymph.”
“Not exactly what I was going for, but thanks anyway,” I say, lifting my carry-on into the trunk and sliding into the front seat.
She puts the key in the ignition and then turns to stare at me until I start to squirm.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she says. “It’s just, with your hair longer, I can’t believe how much you look like your mother. Except maybe a few more freckles.” She reaches across the gearshift and cups my cheek in her hand.
“How is . . . ?”
A minivan blares a horn behind us. Aunt Frannie pats my knee, pivots the car away from the curb, but doesn’t answer immediately.
Finally, “Not good, honey. Things are a little dicey right now.”
I wipe my palms across my eyes and she reaches over me into the glove compartment to grab a handful of tissues, causing the car to swerve right. A driver revs past us, flashing my aunt the universal sign of road disgust.
“Dicey?”
“Your dad’s going into surgery, probably tomorrow, assuming he remains stable through the night. Like I told you on the phone, they’re keeping him sedated.”
“But what . . . ?”
“I don’t know. We don’t know anything yet.”
“But what are they saying about the operation?”
“Unfortunately, what we don’t know is much greater than what we do. Listen, you must be beat. It’s a long drive to the hospital. Why don’t you lie back and sleep for a bit? I’ll wake you up when we get there.”
I start to ask another question, but Aunt Frannie gently presses my forehead back onto the headrest and says, “Sleep, Claire.”
Somehow I do. Exhaustion trumps anxiety, and I drift off as a scientist in a singsong voice on NPR discusses how whales might be the link to understanding human longevity. When I open my eyes, the sun is out. We’re pulling into the parking lot of the public beach in Drift Point, a town where two weeks every summer when I was a kid, we rented a house with Aunt Frannie and my Uncle Ted.
“I decided to break the trip in half. Besides, I thought we could take a little time to talk,” my aunt says in answer to my questioning expression. “Don’t worry. We’ll get there before visiting hours are over.”
After she turns off the car, we sit for a moment as the engine pings, and look at the ocean. I’m guessing the earlier cloudy weather kept people away, because the beach is deserted except for seagulls squatting like tea cozies in the sand. As we watch, the sun breaks through.
For the first time in two days, I inhale deeply.
We get out, slip off our shoes, and Aunt Frannie pulls me by the hand toward the shoreline. As waves pass over them, mussel shells cascade, a percussion section of miniature castanets. Frenetic sanderlings prance and peck, darting in and out of the surf, hunting their unseen delicacies. When we can no longer feel our toes, we retreat several yards and lie on our backs. It’s my favorite time of day, late afternoon, when the sunlight sluices diagonally across the beach, illuminating the jetties in a citrine glow.
“Know what I’m thinking about?” asks my aunt.
“No, what?” I’m playing the cloud game and spot one that looks exactly like a cow, if a cow had five legs.
“The summer you were twelve and we played miniature golf in that horrible storm? We were racing around the course, shooting balls all over the place because your mom refused to leave until we got our money’s worth,” says my aunt.
“Yeah, gave a whole new meaning to a lightning round.”
“That was a good day,” she says.
What she means but doesn’t say is what we’re both thinking: that was the last good day.
Soaked, we ran off the course, promising ourselves we’d come back the next day to finish. But it rained for the rest of the week, forcing us to stay inside the small house, eating popcorn and playing multiple rounds of gin rummy.
Finally, on the following Monday, we ventured into a day that started out clear but, as we drove back to the miniature golf course, began to cloud over. Laughing about our bad weather luck, we decided to persist anyway. It began to pour when we were at the last hole, a metal windmill where the challenge was to maneuver the ball between rotations of the blades. The storm grew exponentially. Uncle Ted hit a ball, which flew off the green, bounced against the fence, blew back to the other side of the course, and then into the traffic on Ocean Boulevard, narrowly missing the windshield of one of the cars. Gusts tilted the windmill sideways, rain pelted us from what felt like every direction, and a boom of thunder seemed to climb through my club and shake my shoulders. My mother shrieked and laughed and shouted that someone needed to sink a hole in one so we could get the free game and go around again. That was my mom—before everything changed.
“She’s bad, Claire, your mom,” Aunt Frannie says now, interrupting my memory. “I’ve never seen her quite this bad.” She hoists herself onto her elbow and flips toward me. I study a seagull executing a graceful flyby before it swoops in to investigate an empty potato chip bag.
“Claire?”
“I heard you.”
“Maybe you did, but I don’t think you understand. And I need you to.”
I sit up, hug my knees to my chest, and lower my head. “It’s always the same. She’s a mess and I don’t know how to help and besides, whatever I do won’t make any difference,” I mumble.
Nobody aced the last shot that stormy day. We drove through flooded streets to the beach house and waited our turns for hot showers in the only bathroom. Finishing mine, I opened the door wrapped in a towel, and as the steam cleared, I could see my father lying on the
floor in the hallway. One part of his mouth was yanked to the side as if pulled by an invisible fishhook. My aunt, who as a nurse must have recognized the symptoms, was saying, “Mark, I need you to repeat this sentence: ‘Today I played golf.’ Try, okay?” My mother was screaming our address into the phone. I ran to her and asked what was wrong with Daddy, but she pushed me away so hard I fell to the floor and the towel slipped off. I grabbed it and tried to cover myself.
She was inconsolable when the EMTs moved him, rain drenching his exposed face. As they carried him outside, she reached for his glasses, cleaned and replaced them, carefully pinning the temple frames behind his ears, only to repeat this three more times before the EMTs slid the stretcher into the ambulance.
After, my mother became unreachable. She was solidly barricaded, captive within her grief, and the unremitting stress sapped every ounce of her energy, emotional and physical. She’d move through the hours, zombielike, expressionless, no glint of connection in her eyes. Late into the night and early in the morning, I could hear her sobbing in her room. Eventually, she’d emerge, her face blotchy and wan. There was simply nothing left in her for me. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t break through her grief.
All I wanted was for her to let me experience the pain with her. Eventually, I gave up trying.
“She’s not easy, I’ll give you that. And I know, I do, that the years after your dad got sick were terrible for all of you. But, you’re too hard on her. You can’t turn your back on your mother,” my aunt says, pushing sand into small hills and then smoothing them flat again. She touches my arm and continues, “I will be honest with you, Claire, I’m afraid you’re becoming a very hard person, overall.”
I think about Cal. How he offered to come here with me. All he wanted to do was help me. And I wouldn’t, couldn’t let him.
After I don’t reply, she continues, “It was particularly tough for you. I know that. You had to handle things nobody so young should have to. Your mom and dad, they had . . . have something remarkable. The whole destiny thing they believe about their relationship. Who’s to say there isn’t something to that? Honey, look at me. Please?”
The Perfect Fraud Page 6