The Breakdown Lane

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “Daddy?” Aury asked tentatively, “can we keep the baby?”

  “My God, Leo!” I told him. “Go now, out of mercy. I’ll try to explain it to her….”

  “I want a chance to see her, Julie,” Leo whirled on me. “I want a chance to see my little girl!”

  “You should have thought of that oh, about sixteen months ago!” Cathy scolded him.

  “No…don’t,” I told her. “Not in front of them. Leave it alone, Cath. I know you’re trying to help, but you’re making it worse.”

  “Julie, will you let me take her to the hotel with me? After my folks get here? So she can swim in the pool and we can get reacquainted?”

  “Would you like to go to the hotel with Daddy? Aury?” I turned her to face me, softly holding both her shoulders, her birdlike little shoulders. No, she mouthed, no. “She doesn’t want to go, Leo. It’s been a long time…and she’s shy…. Don’t take offense. I would let her; I would.”

  Caroline spoke up. “Aury-o, don’t worry. Gramp and Gram will go there,” Caroline said soothingly. “They really will. It’ll be fine. You can play with the baby.” Gabe and I stared at Caroline, looks that might have turned her to salt. “Well, she would be fine. Gramp and Gram will come there!”

  As it turned out, Gramp and Gram would not. Not then.

  They came to my house first.

  Cathy discreetly decided to visit her mother. I promised to call if there was anything I couldn’t handle. Caroline gave Cathy back her cell phone, and I could hear her, out in the kitchen, treating Cath to an appropriately lurid account of their near-miss. It was the first time Cathy had heard about it.

  Then my in-laws arrived. And I tried to explain, softening the sharpest parts, what had happened to the children while they were gone. Hannah still clutched her chest. Gabe Senior stood on the back porch, hatless and coatless, staring into the darkness.

  Then Leo arrived, offering Amos to his mother as a warrior priest would offer his child to the sun, withering as she said, “He’s sweet, Leo. God forgive you. What have you done?”

  “Dad?” Leo turned to his father. Gabe Senior shook his head and put his hands over his face. He sat down heavily on the couch. “Look, Dad, I’m not the first person on earth to have ever wanted to leave a marriage! I’m not the first man who ever wanted to live the latter part of his life, alive! You don’t even begin to imagine the joy I feel, simply from being—”

  “If you have no respect for yourself, Leo, have respect for your daughters and your sons. Don’t say anything else.” He stood up. “I do have an imagination, Leo. But it doesn’t take imagination to see what’s happened here. You’ve deceived your wife. You’ve deceived yourself. And you have no shame.”

  “No, I don’t, Dad, Mom,” said Leo. “I don’t have shame for having a heart, and a need to feel! I love all these children equally! I take full responsibility for them.”

  “But three of them, you ignored. You didn’t take responsibility. To the point that you put two of them in danger.”

  I glanced at Leo, to see if his mother’s chastising had an effect. It hadn’t. He said, “That was their choice. And they have a mother. I…didn’t know Julie was ill. Well, as ill as she says she is. I never meant to ignore them for any extended length of time. First of all, the baby was born,” Leo began.

  “You talk as though babies fall from trees, Leo,” Hannah said.

  “Does that mean he shouldn’t be loved? And by his own grandparents? Because he wasn’t part of this neat little plan?”

  “No one has said that, Leo,” Hannah continued.

  “That’s how you’re acting!”

  “How you are acting,” Gabe Senior said, “is like a child yourself. We’re going back to our place, Julieanne.”

  “Okay, Papa,” I said.

  “It’s like,” Leo said, “you only see her side of it! Don’t you want to spend time with me? With Amos? At least come over to the hotel.”

  “Leo,” his father said gently, “we will. We have to…get settled first. We love you. You’re our son. And you have made us proud in your life so many times. But there were times over the past few months we thought Julieanne might die, and you not only didn’t seem to care, you didn’t seem to want to be bothered.”

  “She doesn’t look so bad now,” Leo said.

  “No, she looks wonderful,” Hannah told him. “You do, Julie. No thanks to you.” She turned to me. “You’re so dressed up and shiny. Like your old self.”

  “Not hardly, but I had a good day. Despite…”

  “That’s good, honey,” said Hannah. “We’ll take Aurora over to the hotel and then maybe she can stay over with Gram and Gramp, hah? Aury can help Grandma find some surprises in her boxes!” Aury ran to get her little backpack. “And Art and Patty said, use the condo in Florida whenever they’re not there! Isn’t that nice? You can bring the children.”

  “I can’t. Heat…makes it worse. What I have.”

  “Then we will.”

  “Thank you, Hannah,” I said.

  “Why don’t you get your things and…Amos’s things and we’ll speak at the hotel?” Leo’s father asked. “Let Julieanne have some rest.”

  “I’m not so sure I want to now,” Leo said, and their bracing scorn felt like an injury even to me.

  “I’m not so sure I want to, either,” said Gabe Senior. “But if this mess is to be straightened out, someone is going to have to talk to someone. I have a mediator, a friend of a friend, a lawyer.”

  “I’m not crawling back here for any sessions or negotiations,” Leo told him, motioning to Caro to hand him his coat and to help him drape his various traps around his shoulders.

  “Crawling. No. Crawling is what you’re doing now. This shame you don’t feel,” Leo’s father said, “we do, son. We do.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Gabe’s Journal

  There was this John Ciardi poem I read in sophomore year, just after I got to New York. It stayed with me. “Snail, glister me forward/Worm, be with me/This is my hard time.” That was the part I remembered.

  Perhaps you think we were already over the hump, bad-time-wise.

  No.

  You’d think you couldn’t sink much lower than turning your dad up like something you’d find under a rock, after a six-month lapse, with his illegitimate child no less.

  Very urbane for Sheboygan.

  But like Mom’s therapist, who I went to myself a couple of times, says, it’s a mistake to think stuff can’t get worse.

  The phone rang all weekend. Leo wanted to see Aury. My grandparents wanted Leo to see a lawyer and set up mediation. They wanted my mother to talk him into this. Mom wanted to know if Leo would come to the house closing, and he did, but at a separate time. He agreed to go to the title company before Klaus and Liesel showed up and sign the papers. I guess he didn’t want to run into Liesel and Klaus. I wouldn’t have either. Klaus later helped move some of our stuff out to the garage for the sale we were going to have. My mom offered my dad all his good clothes. He mailed one box of things to Joyous and said for my mom to sell the rest. She asked me if I wanted to keep any of Dad’s sport coats. It was like she didn’t notice I was already four inches taller than he was. I said I’d pass.

  Klaus and Liesel brought down noodle kugel, which I ate the entire pan of by myself in one sitting, after having given Mom and Aury the stamp-sized portions they requested and didn’t finish. They sat the obligatory mournful ten minutes at the table with my mother, and then Liesel said, “We have found life is too short for small talk, Julieanne. This is our home, and we will be glad to also have more of a chance to expand, an office for Klaus over the garage, a small lab. But we also feel that, as long as you need to, this is your home, and the rent will never change from whatever you can manage to pay us.” My mom started to object, but Liesel said, “This is our wish. We have saved all our lives, and this house is already paid for. We have no need to take money you need now more than ever. Think of what is fair, but modest
, and we will draw up a paper.” They went back to their own apartment. Caro and her squealing gerbil friends reacted with feigned horror to the Vermont Hot Springs and Rape Retreat. (“Was he cute?” Justine asked. I’m not making that up.) On Sunday night, I got a long letter from Jessica Godin, who said she hoped we’d found our father safely, and maybe we could write. She already knew about Muir, and more shit he’d pulled with his father’s lost sheep convicts had emerged. I answered, it seemed like, for hours. I thought my wrists would swell. Telling her about my mother, how half of me wanted to just let my reptile father break our educational trusts so I could run, become an emancipated minor (I had looked this up) and how his selfishness made me want him to have to go back to work, to put on a suit each day over there in Nature World and go hump to support us. Later, unable to sleep, I wrote Tian, but I didn’t expect to hear back from her for days, e-mail between here and Thailand is always a little sluggish. Cathy was unpacking her boxes of old stuff, and as fast as she did, Aury and Abby took out whatever looked good to them, a scarf or pancake turner, until junk was scattered all over the house, Mom’s and Cath’s. After they got into all the makeup in Mom’s room and Aury cut Abby Sun a nice little mullet, Connie came over to watch them. No one else had the strength.

  Luke Witt stopped by twice that weekend, just to view the rubble.

  “Dude,” he said, the first time, coming into my room, where I was pretending to read my English. “Hell’s a poppin’.”

  “Yeah, my dad’s back in town.”

  “I heard. It’s all over Tombstone. Gunfight at the OK Corral. Heard there was…trouble.”

  “Well, if you consider that he has a girlfriend old enough to be my sister and that they have a baby, then it’s trouble, yeah. It’s not very confusing, though.”

  “Say hey.”

  “I mean, I don’t have big divided loyalties, man.”

  “My mother’s p.g.,” Luke said. “They want a girl now.”

  “How does that synch with what I just said? I’m the one who’s not supposed to make sense.”

  “Well, it was on the general theme of even the oldies howl at the full moon.”

  “Your parents are married. To each other.”

  “It’s still embarrassing. My littlest brother’s, like, nine.”

  “Point of order. Luke, my mon, you don’t know what embarrassing is. As a matter of fact, you don’t know what shit is, to tell you the truth. No offense.”

  “None taken.”

  “Because I don’t know what the hell is going to happen to us. We could end up in a double-wide before he’s through.”

  “Not happening. It’ll work out. I bagged the wet leaves.”

  “Dude.” I nodded.

  “You took buses all the way out there?”

  “Who told you?”

  “The Caroline.”

  “She’s actually proud of it, I think. She could have been porked by some ecosavage if I hadn’t pistol-whipped him.” Luke guffawed and threw his size-fourteen feet up and folded his arms against my headboard, as if he was doing a reverse crunch.

  “You pistol-whipped him, huh?” He laughed again.

  I gave Luke a once-over, not sure whether or what I wanted to say. Luke was still my best friend. More or less. On good days. He also had a big mouth. On the other hand, the pistol business might not hurt my reputation among both the normal and the un.

  “There were no bullets in the gun,” I said.

  “I’m sure.” Luke smiled.

  “It was a 1937 Colt police special.”

  Luke sat up. “What the hell? You really pistol-whipped a guy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where’s the gun now?”

  “Under a car seat in New York. Or not.”

  “Jesus fuck. I thought you were fucking with me. Where’d you get a fucking gun?”

  “I found it. It’s a long story.”

  “Dude!” Luke said. “This was some hairy adventure.”

  “Then there was our excellent encounter with the Massachusetts State Police and our fake driver’s licenses….”

  “I never thought you had it in you, dude. No offense,” Luke said.

  “Why?” I asked. “Because I don’t get a hard-on about running up and down the hills with the cross-country weenies? You think everyone who isn’t a jock is some kind of pussy?”

  “No,” Luke said honestly. “Get over yourself, Gabe. I didn’t think that. You just don’t seem…c’mon, Gabe. You don’t seem like the pistol-whipping type. But it’s cool. I admire it.”

  Well, I had finally arrived. Fought my way out of geekdom.

  And it didn’t matter.

  I watched my mother, physically better than she’d been in months, constantly in motion. Shopping. Making lists. She cooked stew with dumplings on Saturday night and took Aury to one of those places where little kids jump on trampolines into big foam pits—just the two of them. Like she had to prove she was among the living. I think it was at the foam pit that she explained that Dad, although he loved Aury very much, had to take care of little baby Amos. Mama would take care of Aury, and Aury would be able to visit Daddy when she was just a little bigger. I assume that was what she said. We didn’t even hide Easter eggs for Aury. We forgot about Easter, even Cathy the Catholic. Gramp ran out Sunday morning to the Dollar Bonanza and bought the girls Easter baskets the size of Trump Towers that he hid under the shrubs in front for them to find. We kind of left clues, in picture language, around the house. They were pretty cute, searching. Cathy took her and Abby Sun to the egg-rolling contest at the Laurel Tavern, which isn’t what it sounds like. It’s this sort of fish-fry place, and they have a big egg deal for little kids in the back every year, where there’s a little park.

  I kept wondering when Dad was going to attempt the “Son, we need to talk” thing, and he did, on Monday when Mom was at the closing.

  He came over with Amos, limp as a doll in his front holder. I saw him come up the walk, talking on the cell phone, gesturing at the air as if the person on the other end, I assume it was the Joyous one, could see him. When he came in, he said, “For Christ sake, Gabe, take him a minute and lay him down. I have to go to the bathroom and wash the barf off my hand.” When I hesitated, he said, “Look. He’s your brother.” And yeah, he was, the poor little bastard. I stuck him lengthwise between the couch pillows, the way I’d learned to do with Aury when she was little, and heard the little catch in his breath as he relaxed into a baby snore.

  “So,” Leo said, returning, “you hate my guts.”

  “Something like that.”

  “I don’t blame you for being angry….”

  “Big of you.”

  “But hate’s a massive word, Gabe. I don’t know if it does me or you more harm, you know?” About this, he had a point. My guts were literally twisted. I couldn’t stay off the toilet. Having Leo around was like having the flu that followed you from room to room. He sat on the end of my bed. “Remember, Gabe. There were good times. Remember when we made the Pinewood Derby car? And…” I groaned. “How is school?”

  I pretended to laugh, bitterly, though I sounded like some old guy in a tux in a black-and-white movie. “Nonexistent or shit, depending on the day,” I told him.

  “You have to try at that, Gabe. College is going to be easier for you. There’s a program at UW-Baraboo for bright kids who are LD….”

  “I’m not LD. I have LD.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I do, actually. I hear it every day of my life.”

  “You could get help with the speech thing. And that would help the writing thing. Do you take meds for the ADD?”

  “No.”

  “You could.”

  “Uh, okay.”

  “Your mother told me that there are programs.”

  “They run about one-forty an hour. Are you offering?”

  “You know I’m in no position to do that, Gabe,” he said. “But I can help your mother break the educational trusts so
you can get the help you need….”

  “So that her kids have her father’s money, instead of having to bother their father.”

  “There’s probably some sort of aid for that.”

  “Christ, Dad, you think she’d accept, like, aid? She does for her medicine from drug companies who give it free, because she can’t really buy much insurance from anyone, but she’s not the aid type.”

  “That’s what it’s there for.”

  “I didn’t think you could amaze me anymore, Daddy of mine. But you know, I was wrong there. You’d rather have Caro and me take state aid than have you work full time?”

  He looked away then. “Remember building that tree fort? How you thought there had to be boards that fit over the tree, like the neck in a T-shirt?”

  “Skip the walk down memory lane.” I looked at my watch. “I have to, you know, go look for a job and junk.”

  “Gabe, someday you’re going to understand why I did this. I don’t know if you’ll ever forgive me, but someday you’re going to want something so badly, just for yourself, just to live, that you’re willing to risk anything.”

  “I’m missing something. What exactly did you risk?”

  “The respect of my son, for starters.”

  “Okay. Point taken.”

  “And I’ll come. When the baby…well, the babies, are a little older…and you’ll come to see me. If you knew Joy better—”

  “Yeah, count on that. In fact, it’s about as likely as me going down right now and taking a little dip in Lake Michigan. They say the water temp’s up to about fifty-three near shore.” I got up. “Are you nuts? Dad, I don’t want to talk to you like this, but you force it. Why would I come and visit you? Why would I want to come and visit you and get to know Joy better? I think the two-hour visit I already had with Joy about filled me in on the whole scope of Joy, and even her own sister can’t wait to get out of that happy horseshit.”

  “You’ll change your mind.”

  “Don’t lay money on it. Once I can find…a way, and I shouldn’t have to be saying this, to make sure Mom has…help, and is okay with Cathy, I’m outta here. You know, mention my name in Sheboygan, but don’t tell them where I am.”