When It Happens to You (14 page)

“Your daddy is absolutely correct, and you should listen to him, but you told me that you were going to visit your grandparents. . . .”

Betty stopped talking as she took notice of the girl standing frozen in place. She was staring at Rosella's daughter on the couch, squinting with an immediate and visceral dislike. She dropped Betty's hand.

“Girls,” Betty began tentatively, “let me introduce . . .” But before she had the opportunity to say anything more, the girl ran out of the house, slamming the screen door behind her. Rosella's daughter stared up at Betty with large, frightened eyes, sensing that she was somehow responsible for the girl's sudden departure.

Betty emerged from the house just in time to witness the girl decapitating the last of her Dahlias. She hurled the deep-red oversized flowers in a pile and stomped on them with fury.

“Young lady!” Betty called out to her. “Just what do you think you are doing?”

The girl ignored her and kicked the pile with her small sandaled foot.

“You stop that right now!” Betty hobbled down the steps and made her way to where the girl stood glaring at Betty with her hands balled into little fists by her side.

“Are you going to tell Harry?” the girl asked. There was a glint in her eye that Betty had not seen before. “Are you?”

Betty's breath became short, and she brought her hand up to her chest. She held it there, feeling the frenzied rhythm of her heart.

The girl's eyelids lowered halfway as she stared up at Betty with a coldness that reminded Betty of a carved marble statue perched atop a grave.

“He's dead,” the girl said.

It was cruel, and it was true, and Betty felt something inside of her break into tiny sharp pieces. She staggered backward in stunned silence.

“He's dead and you just
pretend
that he's here.”

When Betty finally found her voice, it was because she was screaming.

“Get out!”

She did not stop screaming even after the girl had fled for the refuge of her own home, in search of her mother's arms.

 

Betty had no idea how she had ended up in the hospital. She woke to find a Hispanic male nurse checking her vital signs. When asked, he cheerfully explained that her housekeeper had heard screaming; when she ran outside to see what was happening, Rosella found Betty unconscious on the driveway.

Betty looked down and felt the thin hospital gown she was wearing. She lifted her head off the pillow and felt it throb.

“You lay back, girl. You ain't going nowhere tonight.”

“Where are my clothes?” Betty asked.

“We got 'em, don't you worry. You just rest your pretty head and I'll let the doctor know you're awake. Okay?”

Betty took a deep breath to temper the anger she could feel rising. She was seventy-three years old, with a lifetime of experience and wisdom and pain, and yet with each passing year, more and more people spoke to her as though she were a child. The indignity of being condescended to by people a third of her age made her want to howl with rage. “Just snub 'em, Betts,” Harry used to say to her with his smile. “We used to be that smart, remember?”

The nurse gathered up his supplies, and as he drew the curtain back, Betty was horrified to see a body lying in the bed adjacent to hers. The patient's face was shriveled and gray and put Betty in mind of a trophy on a headhunter's stick. If she hadn't seen the chest moving up and down, Betty would have been sure the woman was dead. Turning her head away from the sight in revulsion, Betty stared up at the darkening sky visible through the tiny window.

“Your daughter says she be back after she go get something to eat,” the nurse said on his way out. “Okay now? You just rest.”

“My daughter?” Betty lifted her head again, but the man disappeared on his rounds, whistling. Surely he must have been mistaken. Betty hadn't spoken to Mandy in years—she probably didn't even have a recent number. When Betty tried to conjure up an image of her daughter, she could only recall her as a teenager, just before she and Harry decided to send her back east to boarding school. Her beautiful dark hair had been bleached so many times that it practically disintegrated if she ran a brush through it, which she rarely did. And her eyes were caked with so much makeup that Betty wondered how Mandy could even see through the curtain of mascara. She remembered all of the mascara running down Mandy's face as she begged not to be sent away. That night Betty dreamed that her daughter had been killed in a plane crash, and they woke up to find that Mandy never made it to school—she ran away upon arriving at Logan Airport. She turned up at Harry's mother's in Maine, where she remained for the rest of her high school years. Her mother-in-law would send Harry pictures from time to time and they couldn't help but notice how much better Mandy looked: her hair short and dark, her body lanky and strong. It was as if the old woman was taunting Betty with every image. “This is what you couldn't do,” she seemed to be saying. Betty closed her eyes and tried to push away the regret. When she opened them again, it was Mandy's face that stared down at her.

“Hi, Mom.”

Betty blinked at her, unsure if she was still dreaming. She tried to sit up and noticed for the first time that she was attached to an IV.

“Don't sit up. Just rest.”

“I don't understand,” Betty said. “How did you . . .”

“Your neighbor found an old number in your phone book,” Mandy said. “Luckily, I rented my old apartment to a . . . friend, and she called me.” Betty noticed the way her daughter hesitated when she said the word “friend,” understanding that she was more than a friend.

Mandy looked good. Better than she had years ago when Harry was sick. Her dark hair had a few gray strands running through it, but her face was more relaxed than Betty could remember ever seeing it. “I talked to the doctor and helped them sort out your insurance information,” she said.

“The doctor was supposed to come speak to me. Why didn't he come speak to me?”

Mandy reached out and touched her on the arm. “He will, Mom. Don't worry. You're fine. You just took a fall, and they want to rule out seizures or stroke.”

She smiled at Betty as though to offer reassurance, but then her eyes filled with tears. Mandy rummaged in her bag until she found a tissue. “It seems that you were upset about something before you took the fall, or that's what your housekeeper was trying to tell your neighbor,” Mandy said. “I didn't get the full story, third-hand, you know.”

Betty shifted in the bed at the thought of the girl kicking the pile of Dahlias across the yard.

“Did something happen?” asked Mandy, leaning forward.

The girl's face came into Betty's mind as her expression changed from fury to fear when Betty screamed at her.

She shook her head. “I don't remember.”

Mandy nodded and ran her hand through her hair. Betty noticed a thin gold band on her ring finger.

“You know, Mom, I've been meaning to call you. I dialed your number so many times. . . .”

She seemed to be waiting for Betty to say something. When Betty didn't speak, Mandy continued, though her voice sounded as if it had lost some confidence.

“I know that it wasn't so”—she took a deep breath, searching for the right word—“peaceful. When Daddy died.”

Betty closed her eyes to refrain from commenting on Mandy's understatement.

“But I want you to know . . . that I'm happier now.” She looked at Betty and Betty saw Harry's eyes looking back at her. She had never realized how much father and daughter resembled each other. Like Harry, Mandy's irises were the color of polished maple, and with age she had acquired the same wrinkles finely etched around the sides. It gave her face a softer look, almost maternal.

“I'm pleased,” Betty said.

Mandy laughed a great big guttural laugh. “Well, I'm pleased you're pleased, Mom. I really am.”

Betty heard the opening bars of the Goldberg Variations. Abruptly, Mandy reached for her enormous handbag. She withdrew a cell phone and answered. “Hi,” she said, with a secret smile on her face. “I'm at the hospital. Fine, fine.” She half turned away from Betty as she spoke to the person on the line, from her tone obviously an intimate acquaintance. Betty observed how her daughter kept her answers short (yes, yes, no) so that Betty would not be able to ascertain the content of the conversation. It was a strategy that she and Harry had often used when Mandy was in the room. That and speaking Latin (
O pro poena ut subsisto
).

When Mandy hung up the phone, she sat down on the chair beside the bed and looked at Betty. Then she laughed and threw her head back with a groan. It was an exasperated noise that expressed everything she was unable to articulate with words, a lifetime of the stifled conversation between mother and daughter.

“Stop it,” Betty said. “You'll wake the dead,” she added, jerking her head toward the neighboring bed. She meant it to be funny, but the word “dead” spooked her. It was lurking everywhere now, behind every corner. In every conversation. In the evening news, every reunion with old friends—it seemed always that someone was dying. Soon, very soon, Betty knew, it would be her. If she were a religious woman, she would have been comforted by this fact. She would have suffered through any illness gladly, no matter how long and protracted—cancer, dementia, all of the insults of old age—if she could only do so with the assurances of being reunited with Harry. But she was not a believer, and as much as she longed for the comfort of an afterlife with Harry, where she would be joyfully reunited with her beloved, she knew that this was not, could not be so. The moment the light went out of Harry's eyes, he was gone forever. The room went cold. And if she was to survive in this world, she would have to learn to live with that shift in temperature.

Betty drifted to sleep that night with Mandy seated silently beside her. In the morning, the hospital discharged Betty and she sat in the passenger seat of Mandy's hybrid car while her daughter drove carefully, under the speed limit, minding all of the safety signals, as if to show her mother how she had grown up. Together, they tentatively began the long, arduous process of stitching together the remnants of what remained. Betty leaned her head against the seat and gazed at the familiarity of Harry's face in her daughter's profile.

She's all that's left of him, she thought. The blood of my own. The first little one.

 

Betty brought the cup of tea to her lips and realized that it had gone cold. Yet another example of the fractious and intractable properties of time and how it accelerates with age. She imagined the impatience of the girl in the rosemary bush and wondered if she was still there at all. A quick glance out the window answered her question. The girl was still there, only now she was seated cross-legged, peering up at the house with a look of stubborn hopefulness on her face.

In a few hours, Mandy would be picking her up to take her to the hospital for some bothersome follow-up tests, but for now Betty's time belonged to her, to do with as she pleased. She put the kettle on again and walked to the sink, staring for a moment into the mystery of the drain. She could feel the heat of the sun coming through the window. Lifting Harry's cup, she watched the trickle of liquid fall into its depth. She washed the cup carefully, dried it with a dishtowel, and placed it facedown back in the cupboard.

And then Betty walked to the door, opened it wide, and let the girl in.

MEA CULPA

PHILLIP HAD LOVED THREE WOMEN
in his life and had betrayed every one of them. This was noted with interest by his new therapist, Gerald, a man he guessed to be maybe ten years his senior.

“So, Tammy was when you were in high school?” Gerald asked as he scribbled on a notepad without raising his eyes.

“Right,” Phillip said. “Junior and senior year.”

“Virgins?” Gerald held his pencil above the paper.

“I suppose technically, yes.”

Gerald looked up from his notebook.

“Yes, we were virgins,” Phillip said, waving his hand forward. His mind had flashed to the nineteen-year-old waitress who had taken him back into the pantry of his parents' restaurant when he was fourteen and given him his first blowjob. It was a one-time thing that had occurred when the waitress, Crystal, was in between boyfriends. Not long afterward, she took up with a twenty-five-year-old unemployed mechanic—a “bum,” Phillip's mom remarked. Phillip hung around the restaurant after school for months, pining and hoping for a repeat performance, but Crystal barely acknowledged his existence, except to offer him a bored smile now and again.

Around the holidays, his parents suspected her of using some kind of drug. “An upper,” his mom said, in place of the actual term—meth, speed, coke. “She acts just like I did when I was pregnant with your brother and you. You know, the doctors put all of us on diet pills, until they finally figured out it wasn't good for us.” His mother laughed, lifting her blond hair off the back of her neck and fanning the nape before letting her hair down. “It's a good thing you kids turned out so normal!”

After the new year, they suspected Crystal of fiddling with the register, which was more or less confirmed when she didn't show up for work one day. She never returned, not even to pick up her paycheck.

“It's that bum that got her hooked,” his mother insisted. “She never would have done anything like that before she hooked up with that good-for-nothing. She was a good girl.”

Phillip nodded, imagining what his mother would have thought if she knew what the good girl had done to her good boy in the pantry back in August. And how he would have given his entire comic book collection—a thousand comics individually wrapped in cellophane, lovingly alphabetized by title and needlessly color-coded by company (red for Marvel, blue for DC, and yellow for the independents)—for it to have happened even one more time.

Phillip was not a particularly developed fourteen-year-old. His voice wavered across the registers, his face had only just begun to sprout peach fuzz and acne in equal proportions, and no matter how much he let his hair grow out like the surfer burnouts at school, his blond hair never looked cool and bedraggled—it just seemed to get fuller and puffier. His older brother, Tony, whose looks more closely resembled their father's Mexican heritage than their mother's Norwegian coloring, taunted Phillip, calling him “Little Lord Fauntleroy” or “The Little Prince.” When Phillip came after him, Tony always laughed and ducked out of the way, amused by the attempt. He was four years older than his brother and, at that age, at least a foot taller.

“At least no one calls me a beaner, beaner!” Phillip yelled after Tony, who cackled as he sprinted out back into the parking lot.

“Go wash your mouth out right now.” His mother had pointed to the restaurant bathroom with a long manicured finger. “And just be thankful your father wasn't here to hear that.”

Phillip walked to the bathroom and turned on the water, locking the door behind him. It was doubtful his father would have cared had he even heard him. His father had little pride when it came to being a Mexican American. He changed the family name from Perez to Parris—correctly assuming that the name change would garner more respect or, at the very least, lessen the ire reserved for Hispanics and African Americans back then, before it was transferred to Middle Easterners. After his
abuelita
died, the Mexican restaurant that they inherited from Phillip's grandparents changed its menu to continental cuisine, and Parris Restaurant became known in the area as that place that served Belgian waffles all day long.

 

“Where did you go?” Gerald asked.

Phillip snapped his head up and then looked over at the clock Gerald kept on his desk. They had fifteen minutes left; fifteen interminable minutes with which to examine how and with such messy imprecision Phillip had ruined his life. He leaned forward and held his head in his hands.

“Do you consider Greta to be your life?” the therapist asked. His expression was neutral; nonetheless Phillip felt mocked by the question. It wasn't even his idea to see the therapist in the first place, never having put much stock in the process, but Greta would only consider marital therapy if Phillip would agree to go individually. Greta was explicit in her clarification: she would attend therapy with him but not necessarily to save their marriage. She didn't know if she even wanted to try to save it, as was evidenced by the fact that, as she told Phillip, she had been seeing another man for the past couple of months. But fifty-five minutes with her alone was worth any cost to Phillip, and he gladly paid the $260 session fee and endured Gerald's shaggy hair, sideburns, and horn-rimmed glasses.

“I've been with Greta since my first year of college. Most of my life. We met first week. Mark Twain.”

“Mark Twain? The author?”

“We were the only business majors in the English elective. Initially, I signed up for T. S. Eliot, but at the last minute I switched to Twain. I hadn't read him since grade school.”

Gerald scribbled something in his notebook and then looked back at Phillip.

“That year we dressed up as Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher for Halloween. Her idea. We were already a couple by then.” He smiled as he pictured Greta in the long blond braids and the freckles painted across the bridge of her nose with eyeliner.

“And this was at . . . ?”

“Stanford.”

Gerald nodded. Phillip glanced at the certificates on the walls. UC Santa Barbara. Cal State Northridge, Class of 2000. He waited for Gerald to comment on Stanford. Most people did. The obligatory “Good school” or “Congratulations.” But Gerald's face remained fixed with the same neutral expression. Except people who went to UC Santa Barbara and Cal State Northridge, apparently.

“We both went there for undergrad, and then I went directly into the GSB. Graduate School of Business,” he qualified, in case Gerald wasn't familiar with the acronym. God, how proud he had always been to drop this name any chance that he got. How proud it had made his parents. How much it had tortured his brother. Gerald probably just wrote it down in his notebook, next to “self-loathing philandering husband,” Phillip imagined.

“And Greta?”

“Greta applied and was accepted to every school
but
Stanford. She got into Harvard—but I didn't.”

“So, she went to Harvard?”

“No. She decided to stay with me at Stanford. She ended up not going to grad school at all.”

Gerald cocked his head slightly.

“Her choice, not mine.” Phillip realized this sounded defensive. He remembered how much Greta's parents had resented Greta's decision not to continue her education. And she didn't even tell them about Harvard. If he were honest with himself, he could have been more supportive of Greta. Had he insisted that she go to Harvard, she probably would have gone, but both of them knew that it was unlikely that they would have stayed together. Business schools were already known as “relationship breakers” without adding three thousand miles of long distance to the equation. Greta stayed with him that first year, in the couples and family housing on the outskirts of campus, and they married at the end of August, after his consulting internship ended. During the second year, Greta commuted back and forth to Los Angeles, where she began working for a boutique advertising agency.

“Let's get back to the other women.” Gerald consulted his notebook. “Marlena?”

“Marlene,” Phillip corrected him.

“Marlene,” Gerald repeated. He scratched the side of his face. “Tell me about her.”

Phillip took a deep breath and leaned back against the itchy couch.

“Well, I cheated on Tammy to be with Marlene, and then we ended up together.”

“And how long were you with Marlene?”

“Until I cheated on her to be with Greta,” Phillip said. “Not long. Just the summer, really.”

“A pattern . . .” Gerald said. He took off his glasses and breathed on the lenses, fogging them up and then wiping them with the corner of his shirt.

“You think?” Phillip hadn't meant for it to come out as sarcastic as it sounded. If it was detected, it went ignored.

“But then there seems to have been quite a stretch before . . .” Gerald consulted his notes. “Theresa?”

Phillip felt the muscles of his stomach involuntarily constrict. It happened every time he heard her name. How many times had he heard Greta scream Theresa's name at him or hiss it if their six-year-old daughter was in the next room. Usually, but not always, the name had an expletive or curse attached to it. “Homewrecker Theresa” or “Fucking Theresa” or “That little cunt, Theresa.” Charlotte had even taken to calling her “T,” correctly intuiting that somehow her beloved violin teacher's name was off-limits.

“Yes. A long time.” Phillip sighed.

Gerald closed his folder and motioned toward the clock.

“We're out of time for today, Phillip, but I'd like you to think about what it is you would like to accomplish with our work together.”

Phillip nodded, though he had no idea how to answer.

As if reading him, Gerald continued. “No need to answer it now, I just want you to think—”

“I want my life back,” Phillip blurted out. He laughed without humor. “Can you give me that?”

Gerald arranged his face into an expression of what Phillip guessed to be encouragement. He stood up and went behind his desk, where he began shuffling papers. Phillip took this to mean that they were done and walked to the door he came in.

“Other door, Phillip.” Gerald pointed to the one on the other side of the room. “Take care of yourself, and I'll see you next Tuesday.”

 

Phillip blinked into the sunlight as he edged his Volvo out of the narrow parking garage. Feeling around for sunglasses in his pockets and then on the floor, he narrowly missed a man who had stumbled into the crosswalk pushing a cart weighed down by plastic bags overflowing with recyclables. Phillip slammed on his brakes and watched the man stumble, obliviously, to the curb. Waiting for his pulse to slow down, Phillip leaned his head against the steering wheel. A honk startled him, and he glanced back over his shoulder at the enraged driver trapped behind him. Quickly, he put the car back in gear, turned right, and drove toward Lincoln Boulevard.

At the first traffic signal, he speed-dialed his office.

“Phillip Parris.” His assistant, Heather, coughed, the sound muffled as though she had stuck her thumb over the mouthpiece she wore. “Excuse me.”

“I'm on my way back to the office, just getting on the freeway now.”

“Oh, hang on.” She put him on hold and then came right back. “I've been trying to get you. Gabe has been asking where you are.”

“Shit.” He put his left-hand blinker on, but the cars sped past him. “Goddammit!” He swerved into the lane anyway, and the SUV behind him slammed on its horn.

“It's okay,” Heather said. “I told him you were on your way and stuck in traffic, but he's expecting you as soon as you get here.”

Phillip looked at the clock on his dashboard. Two fifteen. He was at least twenty minutes away.

“What else?” he asked.

“Lee scheduled the meeting with the shared services reps for five if that's okay. I said I needed to check with you before confirming, but to go ahead and put it on the calendar.”

Lee was the project leader that Phillip had assigned to the Gap account. He was one of their best and brightest, but for the first time since Phillip had been at Connelly Consulting, he had been distracted and hadn't carefully managed the project leaders. Greta had always called him a “micromanager,” but as it was becoming increasingly clear to Phillip, being a micromanager simply meant doing his job.

“What about Rebecca? Was she informed we're moving her over?”

“She knows. She needs to tie up a few loose ends, and Brent is bringing her up to speed.”

“Good.” Phillip tapped the screen of his GPS to see what the traffic flow looked like on the way to Century City. Ropy red lines all the way to Santa Monica Boulevard. He veered off the freeway to try his luck on the side streets.

“What else?”

“Fund-raiser from Crossroads. I told her to e-mail.”

“What else?”

“Um . . .” Heather hesitated.

“What?”

“Phillip, could you pull to the side of the road for a moment?”

“What is it?” The sound of Heather's voice alarmed him. “What's happened?” It was the same tone that the police officer used when they called about his parents. Phillip cut across two lanes and double-parked in front of a car wash.

“I think you were served . . . with papers. This morning, just after you left for your meeting.”

Phillip felt hot and short of breath. He opened the window.

“I'm sorry,” Heather said.

His throat felt dry and constricted, and he searched around the car for a water bottle. He yanked an old bottle from underneath the passenger seat and took a swig of hot, stale water, swishing it around in his mouth before spitting it out the window. Then he raised the window and pulled back into traffic, racing through a yellow light, nearly running over a nanny pushing a baby carriage, who raised a furious fist at him.

“Tell Gabe I'll be there in ten,” he said, and hung up.