“Unfortunately, I will be with my trainer for most of the day at his small and lovely gymnasium downtown rehearsing for the reshoots. So, alas, you’re on your own.” She paused. “Think you can handle it?”
“Ah yes,” I said. “You need to learn how to be flung around the top of a skyscraper at midnight. I forgot.”
I swallowed hard. There was a slight tremor and then I accepted the reality of my Saturday. I involuntarily glanced at the side of the house Omar was pacing beneath and the paint was the color of salmon and it was touching something in me, taking me back somewhere. Jayne spoke again.
“Yeah, sure, the mall . . .” I murmured reassuringly.
“I’m going to ask you something and don’t get mad.” The smile was no longer there.
“Honey, I’m always furious so you can’t make me mad.”
“Have you had anything to drink today?”
An intake of breath on my part. This lack of trust was a horrible realization. It was such a pure and concerned question that I could not possibly be offended by it.
“No,” I said in a small voice. “I just got up.”
“You promise?” she asked.
My eyes started tearing. I felt awful. I hugged her. She let me and then gently broke away.
“I promise.”
“Because you’re driving the kids to the mall and, well . . .” The implication was strong enough that she didn’t need to finish the sentence. She saw my reaction and tried to ask in a playful way, “Can I make sure?”
I decided to be playful too. “This is a very easy test to pass.” I exhaled and then kissed her. Against me she felt soft and small.
The smile returned as I pulled back, yet she still seemed worried (would that ever leave?) when she asked, “And nothing else?”
“Honey, look, I wouldn’t put myself behind the wheel of a car under the influence, let alone our kids, okay?”
Her face softened and for the first time this morning she smiled genuinely, without forcing it, without any affectation. It was spontaneous and unrehearsed.
This moved me to ask, “What? What is it?”
“You said something.”
“What did I say?”
“You said ‘our.’ ”
10. the mall
I had scanned the papers to see what was playing at the Fortinbras Mall sixteen-plex and chose something that wouldn’t confuse Sarah or annoy Robby (a movie about a handsome teenage alien’s disregard for authority and his subsequent reformation), and since I suspected there was no way Robby would have agreed to this excursion unless he’d been cajoled into it by Jayne (I didn’t even want to imagine that scene—her pleading versus his furtive begging) I anticipated that he wouldn’t come without a fight, so I was surprised by how calm and placid Robby was (after a shower and a change of clothes) as he shuffled out the front door and walked with his head bowed down to the Range Rover, where Sarah sat in the front seat, trying to open a Backstreet Boys CD (which I eventually helped her with and slipped into the disc player), and where I was staring out the windshield thinking about my novel. When Robby climbed into the back seat I asked how soccer practice had gone, but he was too busy untangling the headphones to the Discman in his lap. So I asked again and all I got back from him was “It’s soccer practice, Bret. What do you mean, how did it go?” This was not the way I wanted to spend my Saturday—Teenage Pussy was waiting for me—but I owed Jayne this outing (and besides, Saturdays weren’t mine anymore). The guilt that had been building since I moved into the house in July was announcing itself more clearly and it was coming down to: I was the one responsible for Robby’s misery, yet Jayne was the one trying to cut the distance between me and him. She was the one on her knees pleading, and this reminded me again of why I was with her.
“Seat belts on?” I asked cheerfully as I pulled out of the driveway.
“Mommy doesn’t let me sit in the front seat,” Sarah said. She was wearing a Liberty-print shirt with a Peter Pan collar and cotton velvet bootcut pants and a pure angora poncho. (“Are all six-year-olds dressing like Cher?” I asked Marta when she delivered Sarah to my office. Marta just shrugged and said, “I think she looks cute.”) Sarah was holding a tiny Hello Kitty purse that was filled with Halloween candy. She took a small canister and started popping Skittles into her mouth and throwing her head back as if they were prescription pills while kicking her legs up and down to the beat of the boy band.
“Why are you eating your candy that way, honey?”
“Because this is how Mommy does it when she’s in the bathroom.”
“Robby, will you take that candy away from your sister?”
“She’s not my real sister,” I heard from the back seat.
“Well, I’m not her real father,” I said. “But that has nothing to do with what I just asked you.”
I looked in the rearview mirror. Robby was glaring at me through his orange-tinted wraparounds, one eyebrow raised, while tugging uncomfortably at his crewneck merino sweater, which I was certain Jayne had forced him to wear.
“I can see that you’re very cold and withdrawn today,” I said.
“I need my allowance upped” was his response.
“I think if you were friendlier that wouldn’t be a problem.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Doesn’t your mom handle your allowance?”
A huge sigh emanated from him.
“Mommy doesn’t let me sit in the front seat,” Sarah said again.
“Well, Daddy thinks it’s okay. Plus you look quite comfortable. And will you please stop eating the Skittles that way?”
We suddenly passed a three-story mock-colonial monstrosity on Voltemand Drive when Sarah sat up and pointed at the house and cried out, “That’s where Ashleigh’s birthday was!”
The mention of that party in September caused a surge of panic, and I gripped the steering wheel tightly.
I had taken Sarah to Ashleigh Wagner’s birthday party as a favor to Jayne, and there was a sixty-foot stegosaurus balloon and a traveling animal show and an arch made up of Beanie Babies framing the entrance and a machine spewing a continuous stream of bubbles around the backyard. Two weeks prior to the actual event there had been a “rehearsal” party in order to gauge which kids “worked” and which did not, who caused trouble and who seemed serene, who had the worst learning disability and who had heard of Mozart, who responded best to the face painting and who had the coolest SCO (special comfort object), and somehow Sarah had passed (though I suspected that being the daughter of Jayne Dennis was what got her the invite). The Wagners were serving the lingering parents Valrhona hot chocolate that had been made without milk (other things excised that day: wheat, gluten, dairy, corn syrup) and when they offered me a cup I stayed and chatted. I was being a dad and at the point at which I vowed that nothing would ever change that (plus the Klonopin was good at reinforcing patience) and I appeared hopefully normal even though I was appalled by what I was witnessing. The whole thing seemed harmless—just another gratuitously whimsical upscale birthday party—until I started noticing that all the kids were on meds (Zoloft, Luvox, Celexa, Paxil) that caused them to move lethargically and speak in affectless monotones. And some bit their fingernails until they bled and a pediatrician was on hand “just in case.” The six-year-old daughter of an IBM executive was wearing a tube top and platform shoes. Someone handed me a pet guinea pig while I watched the kids interact—a jealous tantrum over a parachute, a relay race, kicking a soccer ball through a glowing disc, the mild reprimands, the minimal vomiting, Sarah chewing on a shrimp tail (“Une crevette!” she squealed; yes, the Wagners were serving poached prawns)—and I just cradled the guinea pig until a caterer took it away from me when he noticed it writhing in my hands. And that’s when it hit: the desire to flee Elsinore Lane and Midland County. I started craving cocaine so badly, it took all my willpower not to ask the Wagners for a drink and so I left after promising to pick Sarah up at the allotted time. During those two hours I almost drove back to Manhattan but then calmed down enough that my desperate plan became a gentle afterthought, and when I picked up Sarah she was holding a goody bag filled with a Raffi CD and nothing edible and after telling me she’d learned her four least favorite words she announced, “Grandpa talked to me.”