The Most Fun We Ever Had (66 page)

“Okay.”

“I don’t understand why or how you sometimes manage to sound like an adult, but I appreciate it.”

“Ditto.” He felt, weirdly, like he might cry. Everyone’s life was just as fucked-up as his was. Wendy, with her mean jokes and her wine and her questionable roster of d-bag hookups, had lost things too. Was possibly not as confident as she appeared.

“Jonah? There is nothing on this earth that would be made better by your not being around. Please set fire to that thought immediately. Run it over with a stolen car.”

Nobody was who they appeared to be; everybody was struggling; money didn’t make a difference; blah blah blah; he could spin all of this for some extra-credit what-I-contemplated-when-I-got-mono essay, but for right now he was focused on Wendy, his strongest link to the only family he had: Wendy, who had shown up; Wendy, who had held him before he’d even consciously been a person; Wendy, who had found him again in the first place, and taken him to that fancy restaurant patio to meet Violet almost a year ago.

“Violet is someone who resists interruption,” she’d said, across from him at the table before Violet had shown up and then left again. “But she needs you in her life, whether she’s aware of it or not.” At the time he’d felt like collateral damage and he still felt sort of like that, but that was also probably how Grace felt, sometimes, like someone who wasn’t quite old enough to be taken seriously but who people also turned to in times of crisis, someone with whom they shared things that were confusing or twisted or hard to process.

“You can’t run away from this family,” Wendy said now. “Take it from someone who knows.”

He felt the heat blasting from the vents of the Jeep and he gave a lot of grateful thought to the fact that he was finally in a comfortable enough place to fall asleep, not driving a stolen car and not sleeping in said stolen car in a copse of trees in twelve-degree weather; not in an unfamiliar bed that smelled like someone else; not in the series of try-hard cots in the Interim Room at Lathrop House but instead in the soft bucket seat of a Jeep that smelled like someone he knew; homeward bound, God what a queer thing to say but he hardly had the wherewithal to correct himself, so heavy were his eyelids, his head full of newfound knowledge, his belly full of egg rolls, and he didn’t even notice falling asleep; he just drifted off, Wendy to his left, because he knew, somehow, that she’d get them home.

2011

On the plane home from Portland, having successfully deposited Gracie in her freshman dorm at Reed, Marilyn—who hated to fly—accepted her husband’s proffered Benadryl, allowed herself to cry for a few moments and then dropped her head onto David’s shoulder and fell asleep for the entirety of the flight. She dreamed of Grace, wide-eyed and vulnerable, tromping around the unfamiliar campus; she dreamed of Grace as a baby, strapped to her chest in a Björn, that specific wonderful weight of sleeping infant head on her breastbone.

When they arrived home, stopping on the way to pick up Loomis from the kennel, they both peered through the front door with hesitation. Loomis broke free of her grip on his collar and shoved ahead of them.

“After you,” she said, and David went first, dropping the bags in the hallway.

“Huh,” he said. Certainly that echo was normal—it wasn’t as though Grace’s presence had dramatically altered the acoustics of their house; it wasn’t as though she was remotely large enough to absorb ambient noise—but it startled her still.

“Well.” She’d cringed every time someone had made an empty nester remark lately, but standing in the foyer she heard the words clanging around in her head. It wasn’t even as though Grace had been a particularly
enjoyable
presence in the last few months—in the last few years, honestly. She was moody and temperamental and teenaged; she walked too hard on the stairs and spoke in affected hyperbole and made faces that suggested she thought her mother was a subpar life-form. But without her—without anyone—the air felt different; she heard Loomis crashing around upstairs, where he’d gone, she realized, straight up to Grace’s room. She drew in her breath and it made a little sound.

“You okay?” David asked.

The dog skittered down the stairs, his nails clicking frantically against the hardwood, and presented himself at her feet, pushing his head between her knees.

“Where’s your sister, buddy?” David asked Loomis, reaching to scratch behind his ears. She felt herself start to cry again and David looked up at her, squeezed her hip.

She stepped into his embrace, the dog pressed between them. “We knew this was coming. Why am I acting like it’s a surprise that everyone’s gone?”

“Because it
is
a surprise,” he said. “How could it not be a surprise? Gracie’s been in this house every day since she was born.”

She rued his composure, but she’d seen his face when he hugged their daughter for the last time, knew that he was holding himself together for her benefit.

“Let’s take the dog for a walk,” David said. “This quiet’s going to drive me nuts before I start to love it.”

They were alone in their house—really alone—for the first time since Iowa City, she realized, since they’d first been married. This thought seemed to occur as well to David, who pushed her gently against the kitchen counter with his hips.

“Is there an empty nest joke about spring chickens?” he asked, his mouth near her ear, then moving down to kiss her neck.

She laughed, but then felt herself growing serious, here in this familiar space with her husband again. The nest would never be empty so long as she was in it with him. They both stilled in the newfound quiet, and she met his eyes before lifting her face to kiss him, really kiss him, without having to worry about being interrupted.

Loomis, sensing his walk was being postponed, skulked away resignedly to chew on one of his discarded rawhides.

—

I
t was astounding to Violet how ignorant she’d been during her first pregnancy, how blithely and offhandedly she’d approached the whole process, blind to the boundless melancholy that awaited her after the birth—to say nothing of the breast engorgement, the ghoulish blood clots, the racing thoughts and spontaneous weeping, the afterpains that curled her into a ball in her bed at Wendy’s house. Wendy sustained her, keeping her elbow-deep in painkillers and leaving trays of tea and toast outside of her door like a scullery maid. And this gave her the ability, then, to tune out everything besides her bodily horrors. She slept sometimes for twenty hours a day. She existed in a psychotropic fog, cabbage leaves on her breasts and archaic puffy pads between her legs, pretending she was dead, because denying the fact of her existence allowed her as well to deny the fact of all she’d allowed herself to lose.

With Wyatt, these same things happened—the soreness, the swelling, the hemorrhoids and stitches and ghastly emissions of blood—but they were secondary, perhaps even tertiary to their cause, this tiny perfect person she’d borne, this person who slept in fits and over whom insatiable hunger descended in seconds, this person for whose existence she was exclusively responsible. And the end-all love she felt for him—of course she loved him! God, how
intensely
she loved him—raised the stakes even higher, caused her to focus on him with such sleepless intensity that once she forgot to change her pad and bled onto the couch while feeding him, a woman who no longer had control over her most basic bodily functions. She endured these days with no medicinal aids, without so much as a single cup of coffee, because he deserved it, didn’t he, her son; but also, convolutedly, though the other baby was ignorant of her goings-on, because she wanted to redeem herself, to be fully present for this intentional child in the way she hadn’t been for the first baby. She had the luxury of a do-over, and she’d be damned if she took it for granted. She felt it was her comeuppance, the price she had to pay for so cavalierly abandoning her first child, for thinking that she could just go on like everything was normal.

For weeks she ignored it—lacked the wherewithal to acknowledge it, really, blinded by her exhaustion and her newfound routine, at once foreign and soul-annihilatingly boring. She wept while she nursed her son to sleep and pictured, sometimes, smothering him at sunrise, when she’d been up with him for hours already, but these wrongs would right themselves eventually, when Matt came home in the evenings and the three of them would curl together on the couch, she and her two most favorite people, and she would feel as though things were on an upward trajectory, but then they would all fall asleep, and by the time the baby woke her up she would forget about the bright spots. Endless hours spooling before her, Matt off to work, and she would be alone with Wyatt, aware constantly of his pressing need, so different than that of the first baby, so much more
dire.

And so each day the sun would rise and everything would begin anew, the weeping and the smothering and the drifting away, until one evening when Matt got the baby down in his crib and came and cradled her against him and said, “Hey, sweetheart; I’m worried about you.” And she’d resisted then, for weeks, indignant and offended, until one day when she was changing Wyatt and she looked down at his tiny defenselessness and thought,
I could do anything I want to him right now,
and the thought startled her so that she called her husband at work, and he came home within the hour, already in crisis mode, prepared to talk about
next steps
and
getting help.

There was a diagnosis: quiet and crisp; and a subsequent cure: candy-colored and complex. She switched Wyatt to formula and began taking the pills. She became used to the way her husband tiptoed around her. She grew accustomed to the beige hum of her psyche, no longer in overdrive but now seemingly in no drive at all, out of gear, quietly churning as she cooed benignly to her baby.

“I’m sorry,” she said to Matt one night, the two of them unsure of how their bodies fit together anymore, his arm wrapped around her abdomen, her abdomen clenching at his touch, mortified by her excess flesh and her newfound emptiness. At this point she was medicated enough to feel self-conscious, and the thing she hated more than anything was how helpless she felt, while still being entirely in control of her faculties.

“You have nothing to be sorry for,” he said, his mouth pressed against her temple.

“I never would’ve hurt him.”

“Oh, sweetie, I know that.”

“I’ve never seen you be so
urgent
about anything before.”

“I didn’t recognize you, Viol. It scared me.”

“It’s just a lot,” she said. “All of this.”

“Of course it is. Violet, it— Everything’s new, and constant, and—of course you were feeling overwhelmed. I’m just so glad you called me.”

And it both appealed to her and repulsed her, how he was speaking about this so matter-of-factly, like they’d already gotten through the worst of it, like it was possible to move forward without glancing back at the past, like maybe this was simply a matter of chemicals, a physiological imbalance that had nothing to do with anything that had happened before.

“You can tell me anything,” he said, but she couldn’t bring herself to move her mouth, so she said nothing, so it wasn’t true—
anything
—and the tiniest crack formed then, in their bed on a warm Wednesday evening, and she held herself responsible for all of it, everything,
anything;
and she committed, thenceforth, veins full of tonic, fallout be damned, to never frighten him in that way again.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Marilyn was the first one to witness the change in her husband, to see it before he’d even had time to realize it himself. David shifted when Jonah returned, culminating in the kind of smile—genuine, full of relief—that she hadn’t seen from him in ages. They’d both been characteristically reticent at first: Jonah, though he’d consented to her hugging him for aeons straight in the foyer when he’d come in with Wendy, had simply held out a hand to David and said, “Hey, man.” And David—only she, too, could hear the fullness in his voice—had replied, “Look who it is.” And they shook, and that was that.

Later that night, the four of them sat together around the dinner table. Wendy, adhering thoughtfully to the dietary specifications of David’s cardiologist, had ordered out a fancy and heart-healthy Mediterranean spread. Marilyn watched Jonah devour two folded-together pitas in three bites, like he hadn’t eaten in years.

“Should I acknowledge the elephant in the room?” she asked, and her motley trio of family members looked up at her innocently over their plates.

“Honey,” said David.

“My
God,
Mom
,
” said Wendy.

“I’m sorry,” said Jonah, and she focused her gaze on him, this sweet mysterious boy with the prematurely mournful eyes. “I freaked out and I figured it would be easier for everyone if—”

“Mom, I swear to you that Jonah and I
just
debriefed this in the car. Exhaustively. He’s sorry. He’s embarrassed. He’s hungry. The Catholic trifecta. You’ve taught him well.”

“This isn’t something to joke about, Wendy.” Amid the relief of having him back, she’d allowed herself to entertain all of the thoughts she’d been pressing into the depths of her mind since Wendy had assured her everything would be okay: even if it
were
okay, Jonah had still run away from them; in the wake of a terrifying, terrible event, he’d taken David’s car and driven cross-country without a license; he’d behaved recklessly and childishly and disturbingly, and could this not, perhaps, have had something to do with their failure, as a family, to offer him any real permanence, from his jarring arrival into their lives to Violet’s white-knuckled avoidance of him to Wendy’s failure to give him a stable home? She and David had been good for him, she thought, but there was no such thing as good parenting, apparently, and so who knew what blind spots they had with him, what they’d overlooked. They were all capable of doing better. “Jonah, that was an incredibly irresponsible thing that you did.”