Family and Other Accidents (19 page)

Mona grabs a wad of paper towels from the dispenser. As she hands them to Laine, Mona sees the ragged edge of the cut. There's so much blood, plus something white and important looking. Her own shoulders bunch, her own exaggerated swallow.

“I'm sorry.” Mona starts toward the bathroom, hand over her mouth.

“Wait, Conn's still in there.” Jack grabs her arm below the elbow and reaches for the flip-top waste can. “Here.”

His hand on the small of her back, Jack leads Mona to one of the futuristic chairs. Any question of whether or not she's going to throw up is answered by the funky smell of something in the can. Jack pats Mona's hair, and asks Laine about her hand.

“What's going on?” Back from the bathroom, Connor does look sick: dark hollows eat the spaces under his cheekbones and temples. He's bluish and pale, lips white.

“I cut my hand,” Laine says matter-of-factly, as if blood weren't soaking through layers of quilted paper towel, weren't coating her arms and dripping on the floor. “Mona got sick, and the girls freaked out.”

“Lemme see.” Connor reaches for Laine's wrist, but she brings it to her heart.

“You'll get sick again.”

“I'm fine; let me look at your hand.”

“No.” Laine's lower lip quivers.

“I've gotten more stitches than anyone. I just want to see how bad it is.”

“It's really bad, all right?” Her voice trails off into a question, and her face crumbles. With the back of her sleeve, she wipes her eyes.

“Lainey.” Connor pulls Laine against his chest, kisses her forehead. “It's okay.”

“I'm sorry, baby.” Her words are muffled by his crimson sweatshirt. “I meant to be so much better. I'm so sorry.”

Connor makes soft sounds into Laine's hair. Mona takes Jack's hand, and he squeezes back so hard the diamond of her engagement ring cuts into her index finger. But when she tries to meet his gaze, he shakes his head, fixates on the floor. Except for puddles of pumpkin insides and blood, the honey-colored wood is immaculate and Mona wonders how Laine can keep the floors so clean with two kids and a dog. Mona has Jack and a cleaning lady, but her floors never look like that.

“Can you wiggle your fingers?” Connor asks Laine. “That's good, you're gonna be groovy sweet like a peppermint stick. We'll just take you to the emergency room, get you sewn up. No big deal.”

Things feel loose and melodramatic, like Mona wandered into one of the soaps she watched in college, everything fuzzy because it's shot on video instead of film. Somewhere in the big, old/new house, Jorie screams and Mouse barks.

“I'm sorry,” Laine says again. “I'm so sorry.”

“Don't be sorry, everything's going to be okay.” Connor holds her, and she cries. Blood seeps through the balled paper towels onto her shirt and onto his. It's on their arms and on Connor's face, which she keeps reaching for. “I'll just get my shoes, and we'll go.”

“You're sick,” Jack says. “I can take her.”

“I can do it,” Connor says. “Will you watch the kids?”

Mona nods.

“Let me go tell them.” Laine sniffles.

“We need to clean you up a little before you see the kids.” Connor looks at Jack. “Can you go find them?”

“I'll take Laine to the hospital,” Jack says.

“Jack, she's my wife, she's upset. I'm going to go with her. It won't kill you to spend an hour with my kids.”

Jack opens his mouth, closes it, and looks at Mona who nods. “Okay.”

Keelie is easy enough for Jack and Mona to find. In the den she's drawing on Mouse's side with one of the permanent markers, her own hands and arms already tattooed with black scribble. Mona picks her up, balancing Keelie's warm body on her hip. Trusting and docile, the girl loops her arms around Mona's neck and leans her head on Mona's shoulder. Having finally stopped screaming, Jorie proves more difficult to locate.

“This is what you want?” Jack asks. In Connor and Laine's bedroom he opens the closet, revealing rows of folded sweaters and hanging shirts but no Jorie.

On the nightstand there's a picture of Connor, Laine, and the girls that must have been taken last Halloween, everyone in costumes from
The Wizard of Oz
—baby Keelie in furry lion jammies; Jorie as Dorothy in a checkered dress and ruby slippers; Connor, face painted silver, in a boxy Tin Man's outfit; and Laine as Scarecrow. Beautiful children, beautiful parents. Mona hadn't realized just how idyllic they look, easy and perfect in a photo.

“That's not fair,” Mona says.

“No, what
you
did wasn't fair,” Jack says. “And not just to me. Have you thought about it at all? Are you going to quit your job? We moved to Chicago for your job.”

“I'll figure something out,” Mona says, but the truth is, she has only considered those things in the abstract, thinking of the pregnancy as the first obstacle, the step that would put all other steps into motion, the one allowing them to plan new and different things. “People do this every day—” Mona starts, but Keelie reaches up and puts her fingers over Mona's lips, laughs when Mona stops talking.

“Yeah, they do, and a lot of times they screw it up. My father's been dead twenty years, and Connor still hates—” Jack stops mid-sentence. A rustling in the bathroom.

Pale and placid, Jorie is in the shower stall, fully clothed. Opening the glass door, Jack takes her hand and leads her out.

“Your mom is going to be fine.” Mona tries to sound light, but Jorie remains a haunted doll.

“Jesus,” Jack says, under his breath, and Mona follows his eyes to the mirrored medicine cabinet open above the sink.

In neat little rows, there are a dozen amber vials with names like all those galaxies in
Star Trek
—prednisone, procarbazine, Procrit, Anzemet, and Neupogin. Jack shakes his head, and Mona wants to hold him, but Keelie is heavy in her arms, they haven't talked, and Laine is bleeding downstairs.

         

Looking for the Museum of Science, Jack, Mona, and the girls have driven by the same White Hen Pantry three times. Connor took Laine, hand swaddled in dish towels, to the hospital and left Mona and Jack with the kids, keys to the minivan, the museum membership card, and directions that didn't include Big Dig detours. Normally a human compass, Jack has somehow led them to a residential neighborhood, and Mona notices he's driving awfully near to the curb.

“Jack,” Mona says. “You're kind of close on this side.”

“It just seems close because this is twice the size of your car.”

The White Hen Pantry appears again.

“Is Mommy going to die?” Jorie asks. It's the first thing she has said since Mona and Jack found her in the shower.

“No, sweetie.” Mona looks over the seat. “Your mom just cut her hand.”

“Is Daddy going to die?”

“He's going to be fine,” Jack says.

“But he's sick?”

“He'll get better.” Blue veins bulge in Jack's wrists because he's squeezing the steering wheel like he's trying to juice it. The side mirror next to Mona flirts with low-hanging sycamore branches.

“If Mommy and Daddy die, would Keelie and I live with you, like Daddy did after Grandma and Grandpa Reed died?”

“No one is going to die,” Jack says; the car inches closer to the curb. “So we shouldn't worry about it.”

“But if they
did
die, would we live with you?”

“Sure,” Mona says.

“In Chicago?”

“Maybe.” Mona wonders what the right answer is. “Or maybe we'd move here.”

“No one is dying,” Jack says again. “I don't think your parents would like this conversation.”

“There's a lot of car on this side—”

“Mo, it's fi—”

On cue, the passenger-side mirror cracks against a black metal mailbox. Both objects spiral behind the van like flying saucers and land on the sidewalk. Jack pulls to the side of the street, rubs his eyebrows, as Jorie opens her lungs for more of the magnificent screaming.

And Mona understands the wounded impulse to make the loudest noise in your power, to break the silence that so often follows something bad. Why shouldn't Jorie scream? Her mother's blood is still smeared on the clean floor, and her father's blood turned against him in a way that even a seven-year-old who can write a haiku can't make sense of because no one can make sense of it. She's stuck in a car with an uncle she knows only as a grouchy onetime guardian of her father and he's just wrecked their car. As Jorie's screams crescendo, Mona actually feels a swelling of respect for her niece, because Jorie shouts out, doesn't wait for someone else to make the first sound.

“I'll go see if they're home.” Jack shakes his head—
not good when he's not in control.

While he knocks on the door, rings the bell, and waits, Mona says mindless things to soothe Jorie, but Keelie repeats the tail ends of Mona's phrases—an echo of her ridiculousness.

“We can fix the car.         .         .         .         It's not hurt too bad.         .         .         .         It will be okay.”

“They're not here.” Jack opens the driver's door, which starts the van beeping because the key is in the ignition. “I'll leave cash for the mailbox.”

“You can't just leave money.” They're yelling over Jorie and the car. “You need to write a note.” Mona rummages through her purse for pen and paper, but pulls out a bank envelope and a tampon. She digs back in her bag.

Jack leans over the front seat. “Can you girls please be quiet?” he asks, but Jorie screams louder, and Keelie joins her. “Please stop, please.”

“Here, Jorie.” Mona swivels around in the seat, reaches for Jorie's slender shoulder. “Help me write the note for the people who live here. We can make it a haiku. How does that work again? Is it nine, five, seven?”

“Five beats, seven beats, five beats.” Jorie's voice is bruised and raw. She sniffles. “My haiku about Mouse is on the class bulletin board.”

“Okay.” Mona writes on the envelope. “How's this:

“Sorry for your box,

         Uncle Jack didn't realize

         The van was so big.”

Together she and Jorie count the syllables on their fingers. Jorie nods.

“That's good,” she says.

“You missed your calling, Mo,” Jack says. “You should have been a Japanese poet.”

They drive in silence, passing the White Hen Pantry again. Jack turns on the CD changer, and Bruce Springsteen's raspy voice fills the vacuum of the van.

“Ohh Ohh Thunder Road, Ohhh Thunder Road.”

Jack reaches to adjust the controls, and Mona grabs his fingers.

“Don't change it,” she says, far more forceful than necessary.

He looks at her, and he looks forty-something. Still bushy as ever, his hair has lost its blackness—not the jet paint of Keelie's and Connor's. He's heavy, the lines in his face settled. In five years he'll have jowls.

“It's a really good song,” she says.

“I was just going to start it from the beginning.”

She'll take that. She'll take it because being bored wasn't a good reason to get pregnant, and they won't make good parents. She'll take it because Connor is sick, Laine is going nuts, and the Big Dig construction makes it impossible to get anywhere. So Mona will take “Thunder Road” as a sign that maybe it's not that bad.

“This is Mommy and Daddy's song,” Jorie says from the backseat, and Keelie repeats her.

“Mommy and Daddy's song.”

         

Mona is still humming it under her breath an hour later when they're shuffling through the museum exhibits among all the real families. There's the complete units where both parents are present and the kids have similar features. But there are also the families that have splintered and cracked. The dads with joint custody trying to cram whole weeks into a Saturday visit, the moms who don't have men to carry around the jackets and activity bags.

Mona thinks that she, Jack, and Keelie, propped on her hip, make a convincing enough family. Keelie could easily be Jack's daughter, but fair-haired Jorie throws them off. Standing apart from the rest of them, she still looks placid and haunted. She's the reason they get second glances from other museumgoers and the staff in costume for Halloween, the reason they're not fooling anyone.

Jack must see it, too, because he turns to Mona in front of a perpetual motion statue where plastic balls hurtle through gadgets designed to keep them going.

“I'll respect whatever decision you make,” he says quietly. “I'd never ask you to do anything you didn't want to. But you know who I am.”

Mona nods, Keelie's fingers in the spirals of her hair. She does know or she thinks she does. She also knows he isn't going to pack his monogrammed luggage and leave her in the obvious way, they've tried that before and it didn't work. But there are other ways to leave someone, and in some of them he's already gone—if he was ever there at all.

         

Connor and Laine, her hand and wrist in white bandages, are spooned into each other asleep on the couch, while the Soup Nazi
Seinfeld
episode plays on the TV. Mouse, at the foot of the couch, picks up his golden head when Jack and Mona and the girls get back. Mona hushes everyone, but Connor props himself on his elbow and massages unfocused eyes crusted with sleep. Both girls run to take his big hands.

“Let's let Mommy sleep for a while,” he says. He still looks pale and blue and thin. “Then we can all go trick-or-treating, okay?”

“How is she?” Jack gestures to Laine.

“Ten stitches, no permanent damage.” Connor shrugs. “They gave her Vicodin, and she's been out for hours.” He nods at the girls. “These guys give you any trouble?”