Sisterland (48 page)

After an endless stretch in which I had traveled across continents of
disbelief and regret, over forests and fields and rivers, and he was
still
thrusting away under me, finally, finally, he sighed deeply—his eyes were closed—and stopped moving. He tilted his head back against the cushions, and his hands remained at my hips, though it seemed to be because he hadn’t gotten around to moving them rather than because he was actively placing them there. My head was above his, and I felt an uncertainty about what to do next that was as complete as the comfort I’d derived from him such a short time before. What words would either of us now say? In what way was I to extricate my body from his? And surely I was the one who had to start the extrication, wasn’t I, since I was on top? The moment when he’d open his eyes would be terrifying, I thought; if there were a way to permanently avoid it, I would.

And then he did open them. He opened his eyes and raised his head and smiled wryly, and it was the same smile he’d exchanged with me the week before at the Oak Knoll playground when Amelia had thrown not one but two apples into a muddy puddle, as if he were saying,
What can you do?
He patted my side in a friendly way that also, clearly, meant
Get up
.

I swung my left leg over his lap and turned until I was also sitting on the couch—I was bare-assed on the couch where Rosie and I read about the adventures of Frog and Toad—and I leaned forward to retrieve my underwear and jeans from the floor. In my peripheral vision, I could see that he, too, was pulling his clothes back on, and I heard him zip his pants.

He tapped me on the arm, and I turned my head.

“Hi,” he said. Again, his expression—it wasn’t one of intense amusement, but it wasn’t unamused, either. It wasn’t horrified. He said, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said.

I felt another way I hadn’t for years, which was that I didn’t want to be the girl who was lame after sex. Who took it, for whatever reason, too seriously. This seems odd in retrospect, given that I might have just wrecked my marriage and that surely wrecking one’s marriage was grounds for seriousness.

Hank stood. “I’m gonna pee,” he said.

This time, I just nodded.

I could hear him in our downstairs bathroom, and I had no idea what to do with myself. Go to the upstairs bathroom and wipe away the semen leaking into my underwear? Throw away the dead mouse in the kitchen? Check on my children?

The toilet flushed, the faucet ran, and he came back into the living room and said, “So I should get Amelia home to sleep in her own bed.”

Yes, this was exactly what needed to happen—they needed to leave. Which did not preclude me from feeling a sting of rejection at the hastiness of his departure. How was it possible to know already that this had been a mistake and still to be as sensitive to his every inflection as if we were dating?

As I stood, I said, “Let me get the leftover Chinese for you.”

“Nah, you keep it. Rosie was going to town on the broccoli, huh?” We were both quiet for a second, and he said, “I’ll say goodbye to you now, because who knows what state Amelia will be in when I bring her down.” He stepped forward and set his palms against both sides of my jaw and kissed me on the lips, quickly but fully. In a strange way, this moment brought me back to him. My jangled, seething brain was busy thinking,
I would never leave Jeremy for Hank; I could never even have an affair with Hank, because he takes so long to come
. But when he kissed me, it was so much the gesture of a husband that I could, however briefly and misguidedly, imagine being his wife. Also, this time, the taste of his mouth was familiar.

While he was getting Amelia, I gathered their jackets and Amelia’s pink backpack. He carried her down the stairs, and as far as I could tell, she was still asleep. As I let them out the door, he whispered—he said it not the way a single guy does to a single woman but the regular way he’d said it to me hundreds of times before, for playdate-scheduling purposes—“I’ll give you a call tomorrow.”

The first thing
I did when they were gone was go into the bathroom myself, but sitting on the toilet, I was so churned up I couldn’t pee. What—
what
—had
I done? What had I been thinking? How could such a ruinous act be so easy? Its nonoccurrence up to this point hadn’t required restraint, so it seemed as if, conversely, there ought to have been more effort involved in its occurrence. And what now? Should I tell Jeremy? If so, while he was still in Denver? No, not while he was away. Definitely not. But whatever had happened between Hank and me was finished, I thought. It had to be. And then, having resolved something, I was able to pee. When I wiped, Hank’s semen coated the toilet paper.

After I’d washed my hands, I dried them on an orange hand towel, which was one of two Halloween-themed towels Rosie and I had picked out the year before at Target; the orange one was embroidered with a little spider, and the other was purple with an orange pumpkin on it. As I dried my hands, I experienced the first bout of nostalgia—there would be many—for the person I had been before this evening, the person who’d bought these silly towels, who hadn’t cheated on her husband. The person who had felt guilty when she hid
The Berenstain Bears Go to Camp
because she was sick of reading it to Rosie or when she forgot to put sunscreen on Rosie and Owen before leaving for the playground. In the past, those had been the kinds of sins I committed against my family.

In the kitchen, while averting my eyes as much as possible, I slid the poor dead mouse in the trap into a plastic bag; I walked out the back door, deposited the bag in the garbage bin, and washed my hands again at the kitchen sink. Then I filled a glass with tap water and gulped it down. It was somehow reassuring that I’d already cleaned up from dinner; it was one less way that my life was squalid.

Back in the living room, I changed the channel from NBC to CNN. It was eleven twenty-three. Was there any point in watching the final half hour of a nonevent? I’d shower before bed, I decided, then return downstairs to hear them officially say on TV that nothing had happened.

I carried both monitors up to the bathroom and had just pulled back the shower curtain when the doorbell rang. I looked at my own face in the mirror, as if for guidance, and the bell rang again. Who would it be at almost midnight? Had Jeremy decided to come home after all? And Jesus, what if he’d arrived an hour earlier? But no, Jeremy would have a key. My
father? It seemed doubtful. Marisa Mazarelli, attempting once more to pry her romantic future out of me? But she was traveling, too. The likeliest possibilities had to be Hank or some reporter who wanted to interview me in the moment of my sister’s prediction not coming to pass. Either way, to ignore the doorbell would keep me from getting in the shower out of worry that whoever had rung was still lurking.

I had failed to consider one person, and when I peered through the window at the top of the door, even though the glass was beveled and the porch light was off, I recognized her immediately. I opened the door and said, “Hi, Vi.”

She held up both hands, as if in surrender. “Just me—no paparazzi. Although I swear I understand now how Jennifer Aniston feels.” I let her in, and as she shrugged off her cape and tossed it toward the living room couch, she said, “Is Jeremy asleep?”

“He’s out of town.”

“He left you here to hold down the homestead while he fled for higher ground?”

“He’s at a conference in Denver that was planned way before all this.”

“That makes more sense. I mean, I couldn’t imagine he ever believed me.” She sounded nonchalant, not bitter, as she added, “Which means that now he gets to say I told you so. I just wish Courtney Wheeling the self-righteous prune didn’t get to say it, too.”

Courtney. So focused on my betrayal of Jeremy had I been that I hadn’t yet considered her. And though she wasn’t my favorite person, she was—she had been—a friend. Really, what had I done? What was my justification? That the past few weeks had been stressful or that Jeremy had let me down by going to Denver? These were not adequate, as justifications went. I pointed to the TV and said, “Aren’t you supposed to be at the vigil?”

“The whole vibe was bugging me, so I said I had to go to the bathroom and snuck out the back. I could tell that when midnight came, they were going to offer me condolences like someone had died while secretly gloating.” She added, “I thought I’d feel humiliated, I know I’m
supposed
to feel humiliated, but I really and truly feel relieved. I had a nightmare this week of, like, this falling-down church with dead bodies in front of it, and it was
so gruesome. And maybe it was just some slum in Nigeria or somewhere like that. Maybe it was the country I was supposed to go to for the Peace Corps, and not even an earthquake but normal life. Matt Lauer interviewed me again this morning—”

“I saw.”

“I think he thought I was lying when I said I wanted my prediction to be wrong—that I was putting on a good front. But it’s true. Sometimes it’s good to be wrong.” She paused. “Do you think I should feel humiliated?”

I didn’t answer right away, and then I said, “I don’t know what to think anymore.”

“Ha,” she said, but she still didn’t seem offended. “Nice dodge.”

“Dad fainted today,” I said. “That was the reason he couldn’t drive you. He—well, he was getting a massage, and he stood up afterward and passed out.”

“Dad was getting a
massage
? Like a
massage
massage or a happy-ending massage?” Already, I felt the relief of sharing this information with the one person in the world who’d feel exactly the way I did about it: just as concerned and just as squeamish. “Is he okay?” she said.

“I think he’s fine. He was super prickly when I went to get him. I wanted to take him to the hospital, and he insisted I take him home, although I did make a doctor’s appointment for him for Monday. But here’s the really bizarre part: Later, on the phone, he basically confessed that he has senses.”

“Dad?
Our
dad?”

“I know. He said he hadn’t known before today if there would be an earthquake, then he woke up this morning and saw the rain and knew there wouldn’t. And he said it very matter-of-factly, like he wasn’t dropping a bombshell. I kind of wonder if he’d taken pain medication and was loopy.”

Vi’s expression was one of uncertain and excited interest, as if she were trying to remember the details of a very odd but pleasant dream. At last, she said, “Wow. I mean, holy crap, Dad, what else have you been hiding from us, you mild-mannered lighting salesman from Omaha, Nebraska? Besides your massages with hookers, that is.”

“I always thought senses were hereditary,” I said. “I just didn’t think
they were from his side. Anyway, don’t ask him about it. Or about the massage.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s none of our business.”

“Was the masseuse Asian?”

I shook my head. “Maybe Polish.”

“It wasn’t a tranny, was it?” It was hard to guess whether Vi wanted the answer to be yes or no.

“There was an older woman and a younger one, maybe a mother and daughter, and I think the daughter was the one who’d given him the massage. I mean, she looked over eighteen. And they were both real females. It was at a place in Olivette.”

“But it obviously skeeved you out, so what aren’t you telling me?”

“I’m just not sure if it was a sexual thing.” Though, really, who was I to pass judgment? “Let’s not talk about it anymore.”

“Remember when you thought I should give Dad a gift certificate for a massage for his birthday and I said he’d hate it?” Vi laughed. “Well, I stand corrected.”

And then on the television screen, there appeared footage of the truck smashed into the day care, an aerial shot followed by a close-up of brightly colored plastic balls and a flattened teddy bear and shattered glass, and I could understand why Jeremy had warned me against looking at the images.

I said, “Do you know this is where Rosie went?”

“Really?” Vi seemed more interested than I’d have expected, though I myself was preoccupied by trying to figure out why, in the last minutes before the clock ran out on Vi’s prediction, CNN was showing this accident. I didn’t yet understand that the accident at the day care would become a central part of the earthquake narrative—it would become the part that redeemed Vi, at least in the eyes of St. Louisans. The logic was similar to Jeremy’s when he’d told me about the accident: If not for Vi’s prediction, then the front room of the building would have been filled with children when the truck crashed into it; ergo, Vi had saved the children’s lives. And maybe the reason Vi wasn’t humiliated when there was
no earthquake on October 16 was that at some level, she already knew—she had a sense—of this public redemption.

Personally, I never bought into this version, and my view, it turns out, is shared by people outside St. Louis, which I know because I no longer live in St. Louis myself. It was only in the city of Vi’s prediction that the prediction justified itself. The proximity of the accident made people nervous, left them feeling grateful for what hadn’t happened, and their gratitude needed a recipient. That recipient became my sister. So she was wrong about the earthquake; she was right about something else, and her rightness allowed her to be forgiven.

In that moment when Vi and I were still watching TV, when it still wasn’t quite midnight—we were standing just inside the front door because we’d never sat down—Vi said, “You haven’t asked how I got over here.”

“I thought you snuck out the back of the bookstore.”

“I did,” Vi said. “But after that.”

“How’d you get over here?”

Vi beamed. “I drove,” she said.

Rosie’s music class met in
the basement of a temple in Clayton, and what I first noticed—this embarrasses me now—was that the parent in one of the other parent-child duos was a black man. Then I noticed that he was a fit black man wearing a Wash U T-shirt. Then I noticed that he was Hank Wheeling, the husband of Jeremy’s colleague Courtney. Across the circle of children and moms—all the other parents were white mothers, and there were twelve adults total—I made eye contact with him, patted my chest, and mouthed,
Kate Tucker
. He nodded and smiled. We were waiting for the first class to start, and in my arms, Rosie squirmed in her flowered onesie. Amelia, who was then almost one and a half, though I knew neither her name nor her age, stood in front of Hank, clapping and yelling, “Bubbles! Bubbles! Bubbles!” She was exceptionally cute—so cute, in fact, that she could have been a model for the Swedish organic cotton baby clothes I had told Jeremy I’d stop ordering. Her skin was light brown and her eyes were dark brown and she had ludicrously long eyelashes and curly, wiry hair that was pulled into a fluffy ponytail on top of her head. I happened to know that her striped T-shirt and pink skirt were
from
the Swedish organic clothing company because I recognized the outfit from the most recent catalog.