Wish You Were Here (53 page)

A ball was hiding under the skunk cabbage like an Easter egg, right about where he'd figured. The simple juxtaposition was a surprise, elemental (for an instant he envisoned Tracy Ann Caler's naked foot, the trees strung with crime-scene tape). He wished there was enough light for the Holga, but there wasn't.

“Titleist 2?”

“Thank you,” she said.

He stood back, watching all the time, afraid of a ricochet off a tree. She'd brought a seven-iron with her, and without hesitation she choked down on the grip and punched it under the branches and out into the fairway, nearly even with him.

“Nicely done.”

“I got lucky with my lie. If it gets in those roots I have to take a drop. So tell me about this job, it's at a photo lab?”

He had to remind himself to be honest, to stand his ground. She had a way of making him a child again, the boy who needed to please her.

“It's steady,” he said, “and it's in Davis Square, right by us.” He said it casually, concentrated on the path as if it were a racetrack, stonewalling.

“So you're not teaching?”

“I might pick up a course in the fall if there's overflow.”

“What about Merck?”

“That was just a onetime thing.”

Her mouth was set, and he could see she was thinking, disappointed that she was learning this after the fact. They were almost to their balls, and she let him dangle. Over the years he'd gotten better at anticipating her objections, cataloging her tactics—not that it did him any good. It only meant he could see what was coming from farther away, giving him longer to worry. He consoled himself, thinking someone with less of a conscience would have sidestepped her long ago. Lise was right, he was the good son, the lifelong martyr.

He parked the cart halfway between them.

“I think you're away,” he offered, and while she set herself he tried to remember why this was supposed to make breaking Meg's idea easier. His mother would resent having to justify herself just as much as he did. She'd do it though, painful as it was, because, like him, she thought he deserved an answer. On the phone they might evade each other, relying on silence and omission, but not here. They wouldn't change each other's minds, though it had happened in the past. It was enough that they let their desires be known.

His mother lobbed a decent-looking iron at the green. “Get up!” she said, stepping back, but it didn't, stopping on the ramp of apron between the two sand traps.

“What was that?”

“A six. I didn't hit it.”

“It's safe,” he said. And to prove it, dropped his seven, plop, in the right-hand trap.

“Is it salaried at least?” she said in the cart.

“Hourly.”

“Good benefits?”

“No.”

It's actually a pretty crappy job, he wanted to say. To be completely honest, I hate it.

“I take it Lisa's working then.”

“Her job's got the benefits.”

“Who looks after the children?”

“We both do,” he said, though what she meant was: Who looks after them after school, when you're both at work? He preempted her, explaining that Ella had taken the baby-sitting course offered by the Red Cross.

He blasted a sand wedge on. She chipped close but ended up two-putting.

“
Hit
the ball, Emily,” she said. “I know Ella's responsible, but Sam's what, ten?”

“He'll be eleven next month.”

In the cart they sparred over his old choices, the neighborhood they couldn't afford, the lost jobs and useless degrees, and he was relieved to stop at the tee. She hopped out after him as if he were running away.

“And why am I just finding all this out now?”

The sixth was a par-three, a straight shot across a pond, and the foursome in front of them was still finishing up, making them wait. She had him. The conversation had gone as he expected, reached its inevitable destination, and yet he dreaded admitting he'd lied, though they both knew his reasons. While he accepted his penance, it seemed a double punishment, unnecessary.

He selected a club and rolled his eyes—his entire head, as if it tired him—appealing to their familiarity and the shallowness of chat, trying to make it into a joke.

“I didn't tell you because I didn't want you to worry.”

“You knew you'd have to eventually. Maybe you thought you were buying time.”

“Maybe.”

“What am I supposed to say?” she said. “That I'm happy you're working at all?”

“No.”

“I wish I could say I'm surprised.”

She made her voice tired and dispirited, when minutes before they'd been trading punch lines, and Ken readied himself. Her concerns were the same he'd been hearing since he'd gotten married. He needed to be a responsible
adult. He needed to think about the children. Even she was tired of hearing it, and she asked if he thought she ought to bother anymore. He let it pass, keeping it rhetorical. None of this was new, and none of it touched him, only the pointless repetition, the circle they turned in.

Across the pond, they were putting the pin back in, scattering to their carts.

It was still her honor, and she teed up by the right marker. He stood back, glad to relax for a minute, and when she turned to him after her practice swing, he needed to regroup.

“Now honestly,” she said, “I want to know. Do you really think your photography is going to get you anywhere?”

It was such a large question, asked so casually—almost objectively, as if she had no opinion—that he balked at answering.

“Maybe I should put it another way. Does Lisa think it's going anywhere?”

She turned to the ball again as if she didn't expect an answer, her mind taken up by the game. She was being cruel, he thought. Because she knew.

Arlene had only handed Justin over to Margaret and was about to resume her picture taking when Ella collapsed in the viewfinder with a cry, flinging her mallet aside as if shot. At first Arlene thought it was an act staged for her benefit, but when she lowered her camera, Ella was sitting in the grass, bent over the upturned sole of her foot, rocking and distraught.

“Did a bee get you?”

“Yes.” Ella gulped for breath, trying not to sob—probably afraid of looking like a baby with Sam there. “Stupid bee!” she said hatefully, outraged.

Arlene had seen the same clenched-teeth heroics from hundreds of boys and girls injured at recess, and knew to treat it seriously.

“All right, let's find the stinger. You're not allergic, are you?”

“I don't think so.” She'd never been stung before, she said, defeated, as if this had ruined her perfect record.

The black nib was sticking from her skin like a whisker, easy to get at. While Sam told them how he'd been stung last summer, Arlene squeezed it between her thumbs and the barb slid out cleanly, a miniature thorn, along with a drop of clear fluid that might have been venom. “There we are. Let's get some ice on that.” She helped Ella up and walked her to the porch, propping her on one side, depositing her on the chaise.

“Can I have a popsicle?” Ella asked, forlorn but recovered.

“Of course.”

“Can I have one too?” Sam asked. He'd followed them in, drawn by the excitement, and still had his mallet.

Margaret came down to refill Justin's ice pack and saw them. “It's like a war zone around here,” she said, and went back to tend her patient.

In a minute, Lisa appeared in a T-shirt and sweatpants to check on Ella. “I hear we had a major catastrophe.”

She squatted to examine Ella's foot, then thanked Arlene for taking care of her, grabbed something from the kitchen and disappeared upstairs. Arlene couldn't imagine how warm it was up there under the eaves. She was already roasting from being in the sun.

It must have been the effect of Ella being stung, because when she looked out on the yard, it was a city of bees whizzing an inch above the grass, crawling over the clover blossoms, filling their sacs with pollen.

She stayed with Ella, leafing through Tuesday's
Post-Journal
as the children nursed their popsicles in bowls. An accident on the Southern Tier had killed a woman. There were forest fires in Idaho and a heat wave lay over the Plains. Here, in the shade of the porch, the song of a motorboat coming across the water, the news seemed more than two days removed, the world distant, and yet—she couldn't explain—more real, as if she herself was not part of any ongoing life while she was here, was even more powerless to prevent these tragedies. The paper could have been from ten years ago, or next year, and with the pleasure of settling into a hot bath she recognized the timelessness she wanted from Chautauqua. She felt her head clear, her sinuses open, and gave in to an invigorating shiver of satisfaction.

“Aunt Arlene!” Ella cried, pointing at her. “You're bleeding!”

She looked down in time to see a fat drop splash on the page she was reading, and brought a hand to her face. Her nose was gushing.

She tipped her head back and tasted it thick in the back of her throat.

“Just a nosebleed,” she said, not wanting to frighten them (Walter's father had died of a cerebral hemorrhage, one minute complaining of a headache, the next exploding into his oatmeal). “I'm fine. One of you bring me a tissue, please.”

Sam ran inside with his popsicle.

“Must be all the excitement,” she told Ella, and had to swallow, the taste unpleasantly rich.

Sam brought back a box and Margaret, who took over, adding a constant, reassuring patter, cooing to her as if she might be afraid.

“I guess they're right,” Arlene said. “These things come in threes.”

The tissues soaked up the color—always shocking, so vivid. Margaret brought out the wastebasket from the downstairs bath. Arlene could feel her upper lip crusting over, growing itchy, and wanted to wash her face. She wished the children would leave. She didn't want them to see her like this, powerless (she would never let her students, for several reasons), but knew they needed to to make sure she was okay. She thought she was done at one point and lowered her head, only to provoke another flood. She finished the box of tissues and Margaret ripped open a second.

“Maybe if you lie down for a while,” Margaret suggested, and for everyone's sake Arlene went inside and let herself be put to bed, setting her sunglasses on the night table, laying a towel under her neck.

“I'll look in on you,” Margaret promised, and shut the door.

Arlene felt unfairly banished, as if she'd done it for the attention, her plans sabotaged. For years she'd heard her older colleagues joke about going through their second childhoods, and here she was, a girl confined to her room. She remembered how terrible it was to be sick in the summer when she was little, knowing Henry and their friends were playing Belgian fort and kick the can in the alley while she was stuck in bed. For hours she lay imprisoned, unattended, with the blinds drawn and luffing in the weak breeze, watching the light color the ceiling, thinking miserably, as she did now: But it's such a nice day.

“You can stay up here if you like,” Meg told Justin. “I've got to go keep an eye on everyone else.”

“I'll do that,” Lise said from the other bed, but without force, a courtesy.

“You've got your book. I should get going anyway, it's almost eleven.”

“Thanks. I'll make lunch.”

As Meg suspected, Justin elected to come with her rather than stay with Lise. The knot on his forehead was red from the ice. He'd covered the bump at first, afraid of anyone else touching it, but now that Ella's foot was getting attention, he proudly displayed it for Sam, who was so impressed with his own strength that he launched into a drawn-out re-creation of the fatal blow.

“Sarah's still not back?” Meg asked.

Only Ella said no, timidly, the boys abstaining, reading something potentially threatening in her tone.

“How long's she been gone?”

“I don't know,” Ella said. “I slept in.”

“Justin?”

“I don't know,” he echoed. “An hour maybe?”

The only person who could tell her was Arlene. An hour and a half at the least, she said, maybe two. Did Meg want her to watch the kids so she could go check?

Neither of them had to mention the girl who'd disappeared. Meg didn't like the way it hung between them, unspoken and melodramatic, absurd in its implications. If she thought like that, she'd never let Sarah out of the house.

“I'm sure she's fine,” Meg said, but now she was doubtful. When Arlene declared herself cured and returned to the porch, Meg had to fight
off the urge to walk over to the ponds, in part because it would be obvious to Sarah that she was checking up on her—treating her like a little kid, she'd say indignantly. And Meg remembered days like this when she was thirteen, fourteen, when she needed to be alone and the ponds were her only refuge. It might be Mark or her father, or it could be nothing, a baseless anger or the giddy freedom of just sitting in the sun. Meg had given up trying to figure out Sarah's mood swings but kept a close eye on her, worried—what a hypocrite—that she might be getting stoned. Once a month she casually searched her drawers, the wall of shoe boxes in her closet. Her greatest fear for Sarah was that she would turn out to be like her, just as her own greatest fear was of becoming her own mother. In their skirmishes, she could hear echoes of battles fought long ago. Back then her mother had laughed and promised that one day Meg would have a daughter of her own, as if putting a curse on her. At her worst times she thought it had come true, that they'd changed places, and it was with a kind of sick pride that she reminded herself that her failures were her own and far beyond her mother's.

Justin said he was okay but wanted to keep the ice pack. She examined him a last time, professionally solemn. The swelling was down. She could still please him by fussing over him.