Circle of Three (37 page)

“Oh, stop it. I should’ve married him because he was right for me. I fell in love with Jess when I was seventeen. No—
eleven, the first time we met.” I couldn’t help smiling, but that only made her flounce around in disgust. “The reason I didn’t marry him is because I chickened out. He was…a wild boy. Your grandmother couldn’t stand him,” I said with a careful laugh. Ruth wouldn’t look at me, but I could tell she was listening closely. “But he wasn’t wild, not like that. I doubt if he ever even broke the law—speeding, maybe. He was just different, he unsettled some people.”

“Like Gram.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe she thought…” She stopped, remembering she wasn’t talking to me. But then she had to finish. “Maybe she thought it was catching. Jess’s mom’s disease or whatever.”

He’d told Ruth about his mother? I hid my surprise. “I think you’re right, I think that was part of it. And I think that’s why he changed when he got older. Partly. Became more sedate. Cooler.”

“All grown-ups do that.”

“I suppose.” I gave up; I couldn’t explain Jess, it was beyond me. Especially to Ruth, especially now. And what a dangerous job, clarifying for my daughter why I loved someone else and not her father. However I phrased it, how could that do anything but wound?

“Mom?” She fiddled with the radio dials, the heater knobs, hunched forward, giving me her closed profile.

“When you, um, whatchacallit. Committed adultery, did Dad know? Was it…is that why he crashed the car?”

“
No
.”

“How do you know?”

“Because—it was years before—you were a
baby
.” She gawked at me, finally more amazed than angry. “But I’m not—this isn’t something I want to talk to you about. I told you, one time, and never after. It was a mistake, and I suffered for it.”

“Oh yeah, I’ll bet.”

“Ruth, listen. People can’t always choose who they love, sometimes it just happens. Sometimes we—”

“We can choose who we sleep with!”

Ah, the knife in the heart. She wouldn’t look at me, so I let my face crumple, breathing through my mouth, hoping I wouldn’t cry. “We can,” I said, voice fluttery. “You’re right.”

“And you were wrong.” Implacable.

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

She wiped the windshield with Pop’s handkerchief and turned on the wipers again. Needlessly; the sun was breaking out in patches. A billowy wind chopped the surface of the river, dulling the shine. It was clammy in the car; I rolled my window down a few inches. Finally I had no choice but to find a tissue in my pocket and blow my nose. When I did, Ruth glanced at me.

“
Jeez
, Mom.”

I couldn’t hear any sympathy. I wiped my face, sniffed in the rest of the tears. Amazing, how prodigiously well I was botching this job. “I was wrong, I admit it. But not only for what happened with Jess. I was guilty of a kind of cowardice, too.” But was she old enough for that revelation? No, I decided, backing off; let Stephen stay the innocent, injured party a while longer. Forever, maybe. Yes.

“The important thing is that your father never knew about us.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know. I swear—you can let that go.”

She stared at me fixedly for a long minute. “Okay,” she said, and we both relaxed slightly. A little light slanted through the murk.

“Here’s the thing,” I said. “Eventually we have to forgive ourselves. I know you think I’m a hypocrite, a liar, a—a jezebel—”

“What’s a jezebel?”

“It’s kind of a…”

“Slut?” But she blushed when she said it, and smirked, trying to make it sound like a joke.

“The things you think I’ve done wrong—I did them out of love, and so I forgive myself.” Her mouth pulled sideways; I
could practically hear her thinking,
How convenient
. “That’s not an excuse. Or—it’s the
only
excuse. Listen to me. If Stephen had lived, I don’t believe we’d have stayed together. Not because of Jess—don’t think that. And I know you don’t want to hear it, but I
can’t
explain this to you until you’re older.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not fair to your father. But Ruth—Jess is for me, I can’t do anything about it. Do you think it takes anything away from how much I love you? It doesn’t. It doesn’t. You’re the best part of my life, you’ve always been, that can’t ever change. Even if you—tattooed your whole body.”

She snorted. And colored again, and stared down at her lap. She almost smiled.

“I know I’ve been too easy with you sometimes. That’s been my biggest failing as a mother, but the reason—”

“No, you haven’t.”

“The reason—and it’s hard for me to tell you, but I’m going to—it’s because I’ve always tried so hard not to be like
my
mother. Who, frankly, wanted to run my life for me—and this I’m telling you in confidence, woman to woman. But she did it out of love—again—so I’ve forgiven her, too.” The reality wasn’t as neat and tidy as these linked, symmetrical revelations implied, but I wasn’t trying to illuminate a moral lesson, I was just trying to tell the truth. Finally. “But that’s beside the point, we’re not talking about my mother, we’re talking about yours. I’ve tried—”I sighed, suddenly exhausted. I put my head back. “I’ve tried to be a good mother. And I know, I can
hear
that that doesn’t sound like much. And I’m sorry if I’ve been permissive or loose or if it’s felt to you as if I don’t care—”

“Mom—”

“—or I’m uninvolved. Because, believe me, I couldn’t
be
more—”

“Mom. You’re not lax. I don’t even know where you get that.”

“I’m not?” I got it from Stephen.

“
No. Jeez.
You’re a lot of things that aren’t so great, but permissive isn’t one of them.”

“Oh.” That stopped my momentum. “I thought I was. As a reaction.”

“Well, you’re not.
God
.”

“Okay. Well.”

Was she trying to make me feel better? Worse? I was thinking of what to say next when Ruth said, “I didn’t mean there’s a
lot
of things. You know, that aren’t so great. Some, a few things. That’s all.”

My heart swelled at this overture. “Oh,” I said, low-keying it. “Well, that’s good. Some; that’s better than a lot. There are…almost no things about you that aren’t so great. To me. Well, one thing. That I’m thinking of right now, but that’s it.”

Suspenseful pause.

“What? The car, right? That was an accident. I was backing up—”

“No, not the car. Last night. The things you said on the phone. And I didn’t know where you were, and I couldn’t find you, and I didn’t know what to do.” The deadliest time of my life. Like being buried alive.

“I know.” Her pale face flushed. “That was, like, a really bad time for me.”

“I know,” I said, anxious to forgive.

“Sorry,” she mumbled, playing with the door handle. “I thought about calling back. I knew it was rotten, and I just—did it anyway.” She shook her head, looking baffled, as if that instance of adult cruelty didn’t fit with her idea of herself.

I reached out to stroke a dark, wet strand of hair behind her ear, something I’d been wanting to do for fifteen minutes. “It’s all right. It’s okay.” I’d have worried I was being too lax, but apparently that wasn’t one of my failings after all. On the other hand, Ruth’s perspective might not be totally objective.

“God, I’m tired. I’ll tell you everything that happened, but
not right now, okay?” Her face, bland and accepting as she suffered my increasingly affectionate caress, sharpened all at once. “Oh—I forgot.”

“What?”

“The car died. I think. I parked it down there—”

“I saw it.”

“And now it won’t start. I think this time it’s really dead.”

Were we finished? For the time being? Ruth had a lot of explaining to do; I had a lot of discipline to mete out. Neither of us was in the mood to get on with either of those. “Let’s go see if it starts,” I said. “If not, we’ll come back for it later.”

“Okay. Look, the sun’s out.”

I started the car and drove down the hill. Double-parked, I waited while Ruth got out and tried to start the Chevy. No luck. “Nope,” she reported, getting back in. “All it does is make a clicking sound.”

“Could be the battery.”

“Or maybe the starter.”

We drove out to the highway and across the river bridge.

“Mom, I gotta say, it looks really cool.” She meant the ark. I glanced over, suspicious. She didn’t
look
sarcastic. “Too bad you missed all the action,” she continued, with breathtaking casualness. “Stop here for a sec, okay—look how it looks from here.”

I pulled up behind a line of cars parked on the verge, just beyond the bridge, and we gazed down at the floating, bobbing ark, tied with taut, multiple lines between the two long piers. “Let’s get out,” Ruth said, and so we did, and stood on the grass with our backs against the car, looking down at the ark. “So it’s hollow inside? Because guys were walking on it when they put the animals in. Isn’t it cool that it rained just for the boarding part? Like, symbolic.”

“It’s got a solid deck, but no hull, nothing underneath,” I said. “It’s a raft, basically—”

“But I can see it going down, I can see the sides under water.”

“I know, but there’s nothing behind, it’s just painted sheets of plywood, and they only go down about two feet. It’s an illusion.”

“Cool.”

“It’s a raft with two hollow boxes on top. You can stand on the main deck, but the other two are fake. You never saw anybody walking on them, I’ll bet.”

“No, they went inside with the animals, and then put them out through the windows on the two upper stories. I figured there were stairs in there.”

“Nope. A ladder.”

“Wow. Everybody really liked it.”

“Did they?”

“There were a million people at least, I mean, it was like the Fourth of July almost, you should’ve…” She pulled on her hair, a childish habit, and usually an indication of moral uncertainty.

“I got here about nine-thirty or so,” she started again, speaking slowly. A news report. “They were just starting to put the animals on. Some TV cameras were here, and people doing radio interviews, I guess—they just had tape recorders and microphones. I saw Landy, he was with about six guys, I guess Arkists, rolling animals up the gangplank or whatever you call it—which is gone now, they took it away when they were done. Everybody thought the animals were great. For a while I was standing near this family, the parents and these two little girls and one boy. They went nuts over the monkeys especially, Mom, but also that flying cat and the elephant. And the owl. Everybody liked the polar bear. I think the big animals were more, like, crowd pleasers, but that’s because most people were far back—anybody on either one of the piers could see the little animals perfectly. I like the prairie dog a lot. And the chicken. The mouse—that was cool how you had it going up the chain.

“I heard this guy near me saying how there was only one of everything, how come there weren’t two, so I told him about the different sides. He thought that was neat. I didn’t
tell him I was related to the person who made everything. I was going to, but then, I don’t know, I just didn’t.

“I saw Mr. Pletcher. And his wife. He had on a black suit and she had on a navy blue suit and a flowered hat. In fact you could tell all the women who were Arkists because they all wore hats. They had cameras on Mr. Pletcher; I think he gave an interview. He looked pretty, you know, blissed out. Maybe he was on drugs. Landy went and stood with him when they were finished with the animals, and then he gave a speech.”

“Landy gave a speech?”

“Yeah, and it wasn’t bad. But you could tell he was nervous. He stood right down there, right there, on this raised box thing, right by the water. He just said thanks to everybody for coming out, and he named the people who had helped. He named you. And—Jess. And some others. He read the ark story from the Bible. Then he carried the microphone over to his dad, who was behind him. The P.A. system must’ve been really cheap, at first all you could hear was squeaks and squeals. Landy held the umbrella over the old guy and he said something, but we couldn’t hear him. Everybody got really quiet. His voice was so weak, and it took him forever to say what he said. Which wasn’t much, but I can’t quote it or anything. Just about how the ark doesn’t mean God’s wrath, it means forgiveness, and like, starting over from scratch. Purification. And then something about how kind people were to him, all his dear friends and his family. How much love he felt. Their generosity to him. Because they saved him. Then he said good-bye, and—some people cried, which was weird because, before, it had been like a carnival, almost. The Arkists sang one song, a hymn, and it was really…how can I say this…terrible. So then the ceremony part was over, and people just crowded around the ark as close as they could get and looked at it. Anybody who had a camera took about a million pictures. They really…they really liked it.” She paused, thinking. “I guess that’s about it,” she said, and sat back.

I gazed down, easily imagining, thanks to Ruth, a milling crowd under umbrellas around a makeshift platform in the rain. Landy mumbling into a squawky microphone, screwing up his courage to read the story of Noah to hundreds of strangers. And Eldon, struggling to say his piece in the little bit of time left. Giving thanks for a singular act of love, the expression of which was floating on the river in front of him. An ark.

“Hey, Mom. Wanna see my tattoo?”

“Oh.” I tried to sound thrilled. “I definitely do. Is it wonderful?”

She laughed.

“I’ve been thinking maybe I should get one,” popped out of my mouth. “Think I’m too old?”

“No
way
. I think you should get one exactly like mine.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely. Mother-daughter tattoos.”

There was a glint in her eye that tipped me off. Oh Lord, what had she gotten, a swastika? Coiled snakes? I put a light, very tentative hand, just my fingertips, really, on her spine as we turned away from the river. Immediately her arm came up and circled my waist.

“Want to drive?”