House of Wonder (16 page)

Oysters

A
s I dressed, I could hear Rose in the family room, showing the babysitter her toy collection, explaining that her Barbie dresses actually fit on her barn animals and that sometimes the cows liked to pretend that green Legos were grass. I had asked the sitter to come early so that she and Rose could spend some time getting acquainted, since Rose had only rarely been left with someone.

“A girl named Kimmy is coming over to play with you tonight,” I'd said.

Rose had looked at me, her chin raised inquisitively. “A big girl or a little girl?” she'd asked.

Kimmy was a senior in high school. “A medium-sized girl,” I'd said.

Taking one last look at myself in the full-length mirror in my room, I flipped off the lights.

“Hey, Kimmy,” I called, as I stepped into the bright warmth of the family room. She looked up, already smiling. “Does this look okay?” I asked tentatively, gesturing to my outfit. From his dog bed, Gordo lifted his head, looked at me, then groaned and rolled over on his side.

Kimmy nodded with a teenager's cool enthusiasm. “Totally,” she said. “It looks awesome. I
love
that dress with those boots.”

“Yeah,” said Rose, positioning herself next to Kimmy and adopting her assessing posture. “You look
really
pretty.”

“Thank you, guys,” I said. I perched on the edge of the couch beside Gordo's bed. Watching Kimmy and Rose play, I slowly rubbed one of Gordo's velvety ears, my thoughts drifting back to Royal Court, as they had more and more often recently.

I think Warren likes that Mehta girl down the street,
my mother used to say hopefully. Paru Mehta had moved onto Royal Court when we were in high school, and Warren had seemed intrigued by her. With her melodic voice and elegant nose, we were all intrigued by her.
The Mehtas' house smells like curry!
kids used to whisper on the bus, as if that were somehow salacious and shameful. I remembered the way Warren would look at them as they snickered, his head cocked to the side as it so often was, as if he had to look at the world from a different angle in order to see it properly. I didn't know what had happened to Paru Mehta or her family, only that they had moved out of Royal Court about seven years ago, having sold their home to Beth and Rob Castro.

Headlights turned from the main road into our driveway. I waited to see if they would veer in the direction of the Pritchards', but they held steady, and I hooked my hands around my knees. The doorbell rang and Gordo barked, lumbering back to his feet.

“I'll get it,” I said, smiling at Kimmy as I stood.

I put my hand on the cold brass knob and turned. Bobby smiled as he stood on the cracked concrete of my front step, my brass porch light valiantly trying to illuminate the night.

“Hey,” he said, before his balance was nearly disturbed by Gordo's greeting. He chuckled and bent slightly forward to attend to Gordo, finding the sweet spot behind his ears. “Oh, there you go, buddy.”

Stepping aside, I waved Bobby into the house. “Come,” I said. “Come on in.”

Rose, suddenly interested in our visitor, piped right up. “Hey, Gabby's daddy,” she began, “where's Gabby?”

Bobby squatted down so that he and Rose were eye to eye. “She's home with her nonna,” said Bobby, his forearm resting on his knee. “Is it okay if I take your mom out tonight?”

Rose thought about it for a moment. “Yeah,” she said with a shrug. “I'll just play with Kimmy.”

I kissed Rose on her cheek, and quickly ran over the bedtime routine again for Kimmy. “There's a sheet in the kitchen with everything you need to know,” I said, referring to the page I had typed up with cell phone and doctors' numbers and a list of Rose's favorite stories. Then I waved good-bye and stepped out the door for my evening that was not a date with a man whom I knew very well yet not at all.

Freedom,
I mouthed to Bobby as the door clicked shut behind us.

The gravel crunched under our feet as we walked side by side down the path to the driveway, the cold night feeling bright and electric around us. As we approached his car, Bobby stepped ahead of me and reached to open my door, the hinges of his old Jeep groaning with effort.

I thanked him as I slid in, then watched him hurry across the front of the car, his keys in hand. He got in and closed the door, and we looked at each other for a moment before both laughing quietly, simultaneously, and without any clear reason. “I'm glad we're doing this,” he said, as he turned the key in the ignition.

“Me, too,” I said, recalling the last time I'd been out with a man, how different it had felt. When I had tried to date after Rose was born, I had always felt the weight of the past, of all the explanations it required. I would have to tell a new man about Duncan, and about Rose, of course. Eventually, I'd have to tell him about Warren and my mother, about my father and Lydia. Bobby already knew it all.

“I was thinking,” he said, as he cranked the stubborn old gearshift into reverse and glanced over his shoulder, “that we could go to Orto. Have you ever been?”

“No,” I said. “That sounds great.” Orto was known as an eccentric little gem of a restaurant with a garden tended by the chef's first-generation Italian mother. Duncan always used to speak highly of it, though we had never eaten there together.

As we drove, we wove out of West Hills, where Rose and I lived, into one of the more elegant neighboring areas, talking
about Bobby's work at the hospital, about why he had decided to become a doctor. “I had always wanted to go into medicine but had talked myself out of it,” he said. “After a few years doing the corporate thing, none of my reasons—the debt, the hours—seemed good enough anymore.” And I talked about Wonderlux, about how I got to go to work with my best friend and pick my daughter up from school and design beautiful things.

“And what made you leave New York?” he asked. Duncan and I had lived in the city together for eight years. I'd tried to stay after he left, but the financial reality was too daunting.

“Money,” I said with a sad chuckle. “Maggie and I were both new moms starting a business and we couldn't afford the city. Her uncle owns the building that our office is in and he gave us a great deal on rent. So coming back to Jersey was sort of a no-brainer.”

“Yeah,” he said, lifting his chin as we approached what looked like an old white farmhouse. “I went to med school at NYU. But to raise kids in the city is
brutally
expensive.”

He turned the wheel. “This is it,” he said, as we pulled into Orto. It was located on a dark stretch of road and identified with a simple but elegant sign, flooded with light. Navigating around to the back, we came to a parking lot and he slid into a spot.

“I used to live out here,” he said, as we walked through the cold night toward the sanctuary of the restaurant. “Before Gabby and I moved back with my parents.” It was a subtle reference to his life with Mia.

Bobby opened the glossy black door into what felt like someone's home. The hostess stand was set up next to the
staircase and from it, you could see into four dining rooms, each of which held five or six tables. The walls were nearly bare, the lights very low, and they were playing the sort of jazz that nearly everyone I knew had “discovered” in some smoky dorm room. It was an unassuming little restaurant that didn't seem to pay much attention to trends, but found itself on the right side of many of them.

We were brought to a small table near a window and ordered drinks that I'd never had before. They came in thick lowball glasses and smelled like herbs. I took a sip and felt the liquid slide down my throat, settling snugly in my stomach and warming me from the inside out. A beautiful older woman with caramel-colored skin and Sophia Loren glasses came out, and without a word, she set down a single plate. “Some pickled beets from the kitchen,” she said in a heavy Italian accent; then she winked at me. “For sharing.”

Bobby and I smiled at each other, and with his fork, he cut one of the beet slices in half. Stabbing it with the tines, he swirled it in the little puddle of magenta brine at the bottom of the plate, and then handed the fork to me, watching me as I took a bite. Mr. Vanni used to be like that, a man who loved to indulge people, loved to watch them enjoy themselves. I smiled and covered my mouth with my hand. “Delicious,” I said, handing Bobby back his fork.

“Gabby loves beets,” he said, a bite about to enter his lips. “We planted some this summer, but the rabbits got 'em.”

Our waiter returned, prompting us to pick up our menus, which we hadn't yet given so much as a glance. “Do you like oysters?” asked Bobby. I did.

They came, carefully laid in a circle on a bed of pristine ice,
still wet with seawater. I brought one to my lips and breathed in the ocean, tipping the shell back and rolling the flavor back and forth on my tongue. Looking at the empty shell, a small opalescent cup, I turned it over and ran my fingers over the oyster's rough, plain exterior. And I decided I liked things like that: things that kept their beauty hidden. When I looked up, Bobby's gaze was on me. “Sorry,” I said, laughing at myself for fondling an oyster shell. I set it back down on the ice. “It's just kind of gorgeous . . . don't you think?”

Without hesitation, he answered, “I do.” And for a moment, neither of us looked away, until our waiter came back to fill our water glasses.

“Thank you,” I said, as I shifted in my chair, my ankle brushing against Bobby's. Reflexively, I went to move it. Then I stopped myself, settling into the feeling of a small patch of my body touching a small patch of his. And Bobby smiled.

“How's your family doing?” he asked, as he took a sip of his drink.

“Can I tell you something?”

Bobby straightened up, became alert and attentive, like the Dr. Vanni who rushed around the beds in the ER. And so I told him about the Castros. I told him about the notes.

“So she's been sending these for a while?” asked Bobby, his head inclined, his forearms resting on the table.

“We don't
know
it was Beth Castro. But yeah. For a few months, at least.”

Bobby was silent for a moment. “I'm sorry,” he said.

“I'm hoping it can all get sorted out.” I spread my hand over the smooth white tablecloth. “I'm going to go try to talk to the Castros.”

“Do you want me to come with you?”

And though I insisted that no, it was fine, that I didn't want to involve any more residents of King's Knoll than were absolutely necessary, I took solace in his offer, and in the readiness with which he made it. “I just feel really bad for my mom,” I said. “I know her house isn't in the best condition.” It was an admission that I found difficult to make, if only for its obviousness. “But she's been living in that neighborhood for almost thirty years. You'd think this all could have been handled differently.” Taking a sip of my drink, I spoke through its afterburn. “And she's trying to clean things up. We're painting the columns. And she got some quotes on painting the exterior in the spring.”

We each ordered another drink, the mood turning again toward the jovial as we exchanged stories about Gabby and Rose. “Gabby is pissed because she doesn't have a flower name,” Bobby said, his affection for his daughter deep and clear. “She says she wants to change her name to Hydrangea.” I let my head fall back in laughter. By the time our entrées arrived, we had moved on to talk again about our families, about growing up on Royal Court. “Do you remember Howard Li?” asked Bobby.

“Of course I remember Howard!” I said. “He used to be friends with Warren.”

“Did you hear that he won the Nobel Prize in chemistry?”

“What?” I asked, shocked. “The
Nobel Prize
?” I was astounded that I hadn't read about it in the papers. Though Howard's family had moved away soon after he finished high school, I would have thought that the human-interest-story-starved
Star-Ledger
might have picked it up. “Oh my God,” I
said, picturing Warren and Howard, shirtless and skinny and wonderfully weird. “Howard and Warren used to spend hours together in our backyard.”

“I remember that,” said Bobby, smiling fondly, his hand on his chin. “They'd be whipping those . . .” He snapped his fingers, searching for the name.

“Forsythia branches,” I said, my eyes on the rim of my glass as I pictured the yellow flowers bursting from the bark. When I was Rose's age, I wove a single one of those pliant branches around and around until I had a small hoop, looped with gold.
Mom, look!
I had said.
It's a crown!
And she took my chin in her hand and tried to smile. But she didn't speak a word. “It's funny,” I said, looking at Bobby as I took a sip of my water, “what stays with you from growing up.” It seemed it was the small moments that made us who we were, the moments that were supposed to be insignificant, the ones that we didn't know quite why we remembered. They were the ones that mattered, those that were like messages in a language we didn't yet speak.

Surprises

“H
ow was it?” Maggie's voice was sleepy; she had been waiting up for my call.

“It was good,” I said, watching the taillights from Kimmy's car retreat back down the driveway. “Really good.”

I heard rustling on the phone line, as if Maggie were moving to a more discreet location. “Did you guys kiss?” she asked.

I smiled, knowing my answer would madden her. “Not really,” I said.

“Not really?” asked Maggie impatiently. “What is that? What is ‘not really'?”

Not really was the honest answer. Bobby had walked me to
the door and we could see the bluish flashes from the TV through the transom above. Kimmy was just inside, watching a show full of beautiful young kids with dramatic and tortured relationships, a contemporary version of the sort of thing I used to watch when I was her age. And Bobby and I both just stood there, not wanting to break the seal of the night, not wanting to open the door.

“I had a good time,” I said to him. But he didn't answer. Instead, he reached for my hand and rested it on his lower back, pulling me into him. I looked up at him, our faces inches apart, our hips angled toward each other. But when he leaned in, his lips landed lightly on my forehead, resting there until I closed my eyes and felt my heart become still.

“He kissed me on the forehead,” I said to Maggie.

“Your forehead?” asked Maggie, with disbelief and worry, afraid that all my protests about my evening with Bobby
not being a date
were well-founded.
You kiss your sister on the forehead,
I imagined her thinking. But it was actually that moment, standing on my doorstep with his hand gently holding mine in place on his back, when I knew that I was, in fact, on a date with Bobby Vanni.

“It was actually really . . . nice.”

Maggie asked me a few more questions, but I found myself volunteering the answers, glad to talk about the evening I had spent with a man I liked very much. “What did you guys talk about?” she asked.

“Oh, God,” I said. “Lots of stuff.” I thought about the way my laughter had seemed magnified by his, my concerns diminished by sharing them. In fact, the only subject we avoided was Mia. And Duncan.

•   •   •

The phone rang just after six thirty the next morning. I sat up with a sudden breath and fumbled for the receiver, wanting to silence it but fearing what I was about to hear; good news never came this early.

“Hello?” I said.

There was a brief delay.

“Jenna!” It was Duncan's voice.

I closed my eyes and sank back in bed. “Hi, Duncan,” I said unenthusiastically.

“What time is it there?” he asked.

I lifted my hand and let it fall back down on the bed in exasperation, letting it make a muffled thump on my soft, white comforter. “It's not even seven, Dunc.”

“Hey, listen,” he said, without an apology. “I wanted to talk to you about some stuff.” I remained silent, knowing that the “stuff” he wanted to talk to me about was his move back to the States. The one Miriam had mentioned weeks ago. The one that he had been planning for who knew how long. “Jenna,” he said. “Are you there?”

I took a breath, letting my head sink into my pillow. “Yup,” I said. “I'm here.”
I've been here all along.

•   •   •

“Hey, Rosie,” I said as I stirred brown sugar into her oatmeal. “Would you like it if you got to see your daddy more often?”

I kept my eyes on my task as I waited for her response. “Yeah,” she said lightly, as if I'd just offered her something moderately tasty. Something like oatmeal. “I'd like it.”

I nodded and set her big red bowl down in front of her. My conversation with Duncan had become strained rather quickly. As I had anticipated, he'd announced that he was moving back to New York.

“When?” I'd asked.

“In about a week. I'm going to spend a couple of days in L.A. on my way back.”

“That'll be nice,” I said, and I wondered if he detected the resentment in my voice.

“So anyway,” he began, “I was thinking that it would be cool to spend Christmas with Rose. Up at my parents' place.”

“You were thinking that would be cool,” I said flatly.

“Yeah, I mean, she's my
daughter
.” It was clear that he intended to hit the tricky spot between indignant and contrite.

Oh, now she's your daughter?

Sensing the trajectory our call was taking, I ended it quickly after that. I told him that I had to go, but that I'd think about it. Then I congratulated him on his move. I had promised myself that when it came to Rose's relationship with Duncan, I would always put her interests before my own. But as I stared at her now, as she lifted her nose and looked down into her bowl to search for the very best bite, the one that promised to hold a treasure trove of barely dissolved brown sugar, I realized that her best interests might not always be so easy to determine.

“Hey, can we go see Uncle Warren later?” asked Rose suddenly, her legs starting to kick under the table, the spoon erect in her hand.

I chuckled. “We actually
do
need to go out there today.”

Rose's eyes widened gleefully. I watched her for a moment. “You like your uncle Warren, don't you?”

“Yeah,” said Rose, with a cool shrug, an affectation she may have gotten from Kimmy. “Uncle Warren is awesome.”

I smiled and took a sip of my coffee. During our recent visits to Royal Court, I had seen the affection Rose and Warren were developing for each other. And I often heard them engaged in the sort of animated conversations that I used to have with him when I was younger, when I used to sneak into his room at night and lie next to him on his bed. He'd tell me wonderful, fantastical things. Talking and talking, he would move his hands with his words, and his mind would skip from thought to thought, following a fluid path that made me feel as though I were on a ride.
Did you know that the Milky Way is spinning?
he'd ask me, not waiting for my answer.
It's moving at something like
—he'd lift his hand, as if he were about to make a random guess, as if he were about to estimate the number of candy corns in a jar—
two hundred twenty-five kilometers per second.
I'd ask him if that was fast. He'd think about it and tell me that depended on what you meant by fast. Then he'd tell me that not only is the galaxy spinning, but it's also traveling through space as it spins.
And then, if you factor in the rotation of the earth.
He'd rest his hands under his head and laugh softly, having officially blown his own mind.

“I'm surprised we're not all dizzy all the time,” I'd say.

Warren would look up at his ceiling, as if he could see the cosmos through it, spinning and rotating and orbiting in a most miraculous dance. “We're all moving even when we're standing still.”

And I would close my eyes and almost feel it: the universe's teacup ride.

But such conversations had grown more infrequent as I had
aged and become less and less able to see the things that Warren did. As I became less and less able to let myself.

Rose was about to dig into her breakfast, her spoon cocked, when she looked up at me. “Hey, did you know that I'm an Aurotite?” she asked.

I looked at her with mock skepticism. “Says who?” as if I didn't know.

“Uncle Warren. He says you can tell by my spot.” She pointed at her birthmark. “I told him that Tucker said it was ugly, but Uncle
Warren
says it shows that I'm an Aurotite and that only Aurotite
princesses
have spots.” Her eyes grew wide with delight as she declared her royalty.

And at that moment, I couldn't have loved my brother more.

•   •   •

I felt Rose's feet kicking the back of my seat as we sped down the highway toward Harwick. Maggie and I had had a rare unproductive day at Wonderlux, one in which we each kept our respective files open, but would constantly call over our shoulders to each other with confessions and observations and questions. She had asked me more about my date with Bobby. “You really like him,” she said.

I do.
Whatever was between Bobby and me was too vulnerable and new to speak about freely. Like something beautiful and wild, something I might spook and send running. I cleared my throat, acquiescing in my silence. I did it again now as I looked back at Gordo, who was panting and taking in the view.

“Did you know that Uncle Warren is making me a plane?”
asked Rose. She had been talking nonstop during the drive, and I had been enjoying a lull in the conversation.

“He is?” I said casually, unsure of the veracity of the claim.

“Yeah,” she said. “He asked me what color I wanted and I told him
red
.”

“Red looks nice on planes.”

“Me and Uncle Warren are on the same team,” she said. Rose had just learned about the concept of teams in her weeklong soccer peewee day camp this summer.

“What team is that?”

“The
Good
Team,” she said. “You can be on it, too.”

Glancing at her in the rearview mirror, I smiled. “Thanks, Rose.”

“Uncle Warren is the leader, though,” she said, as if breaking difficult news.

“Okay.”

“But that means if you need him, all you have to do is rub your ear and say his name and he'll come.”

Again I looked in the rearview mirror, more alert this time. “Did he tell you that?” I asked, remembering all the times I had needed him. All the times he had come running.

•   •   •

As I turned into King's Knoll, I glanced at the sky through the windshield. The clouds looked as though they had been raked across the faded blue, leaving long wisps as they hurried to some great meteorological disturbance, some churning of air hundreds and hundreds of miles away. The high tomorrow was supposed to be only in the low forties, and it was going to get progressively colder after that.
It never used to get this cold this
early,
I thought. And I wondered how much of adulthood was spent benchmarking the present against the past. Thinking about how things were so very different from what you remembered, so very different from what you'd expected.

I let my eyes flitter only briefly to Lydia's lawn signs. When I was a child, I never ever imagined that Lydia Stroppe would be my stepmother. And yet she was. I never imagined that my parents would be divorced or that I would be a single mother or that Warren would come home one night, his nose broken and face cut. But I had also never imagined that I would have Rose. Or Gordo. Or that one day, I'd turn onto Royal Court and see Bobby Vanni standing on a stepladder on my mother's front porch with a paintbrush in his hand.

And yet he was.

I felt a sudden surge in my chest, an overflowing.

“Who's that?” asked Rose, aware of my attention. He wasn't dressed as usual, in his jacket and jeans. Instead, he was wearing a pair of battered khakis and a sweatshirt, the hood of which was pulled over the thin wool cap on his head. He had a paint bucket at his feet, and his arm was lifted above his head, the brush concentrated on a spot on the column.

I swallowed and then opened my mouth to speak, my smile shaky and unsure, like something just born. “That's Gabby's daddy,” I said.