Shelter Me (2 page)
Authors: Juliette Fay
Today Janie was first in line, as she had been every day except Tuesday, when she was third. On Tuesday, Dylan had said, “Why are you late? Did you go to the doctor again?”
“I’m not late, Dylan. I’m just not first,” she’d told him. “Third has to be okay, too. Even last has to be okay every once in a while.”
I’m doing the best I can
, she wanted to say.
That I get here
at all is a minor miracle some days.
She wanted to remind him that Shelly and Aunt Jude had been taking him to and from preschool until fairly recently. Even her cousin Cormac had left the bakery to swing him home a couple of times. She wanted him to be impressed with third and ecstatic about first. He had merely chewed his backpack strap and asked if they had any marshmallows at home. Which they did not.
Today, Friday, Janie was first again. She stood quietly while the mothers behind her chatted and exchanged things: tips on good roller-skate sales, recently released G-rated movies, cruise vacations. Borrowed baby clothes, forgotten lunch boxes, money for group teacher gifts. News about the upcoming tax hike, candidates for school committee, another unsolved burglary in the neighboring town of Natick. There was a whole Mommy Marketplace happening in the hallway, and if Janie were first in line, it was not considered rude to have her back turned to it. Or not that rude, anyway.
“…That’s nothing!” she heard a woman behind her say. “Barry loaded them into the car on Saturday. Brought not one blessed thing—not so much as a baby wipe. He’s always complaining that it takes me too long to round up all that stuff they don’t really need.”
The other mothers murmured their solidarity, “Mmmhmm…Oh, yeah…Been there…”
“They get back a few hours later,” the mother of Barry’s children continued. “They’re sunburned, covered in bug bites, the two-year-old has a massive load leaking out of his diaper, the five-year-old has dried blood on his leg from scraping his knee, and lunch was a half-eaten bag of barbecued potato chips they found on a park bench.”
There was a short burst of laughter, which was then oddly curtailed, as if the humor had gone out of it suddenly.
They’re looking at me,
thought Janie. The pity was palpable. Moments of silence followed.
I am the joy killer. My life is a cautionary tale.
When the classroom door opened and Dylan came out, he needed to rummage around in his cubby for what seemed like decades. This gave a mother, whose name Janie no longer knew, a chance to approach. She was wearing tight black biking shorts and a neon orange polyester tank top. Her knife-straight blond hair evidenced a slight dampness around the bangs, but she wasn’t actually sweaty. Her figure was gallingly perfect, no remnant puckers across her midsection, where babies had once rolled and punched from the inside; no breasts drooping from months of expansion and contraction as they ballooned up with milk, only to be sucked flat on an almost hourly basis.
“Would Dylan like to come over and play with Keane today?” Biking Mommy ventured. “Or, maybe if today isn’t good, some time next week? Or, you know, any time you need a break…?”
“Uhh,” said Janie, briefly wondering whether Keane was a boy or a girl. Dylan’s arms slipped around one of her thighs as he hid behind her, pressing his nose into the small of her back. “We’re hanging close to home these days. But thanks.”
“Okay, well, whenever he’s ready,” said Biking Mommy, inching backward toward the safety of her own child’s cubby.
And your little dog, too,
thought Janie.
A
T
1:30, D
YLAN LIKED
to watch
Clifford the Big Red Dog
on PBS.
What a world, that Birdwell Island,
thought Janie, as the theme song rang out from the living room. There was “diversity” but no real cultural tension. There was one not-too-nice girl and her not-too-nice dog, but she always came around in the end. Everyone was, in a word, happy.
“I can’t play right now, guys,” said John Ritter, the voice of Clifford. “Emily Elizabeth told me not to get dirty before the party.”
Janie couldn’t watch
Clifford.
John Ritter’s voice was one of the many things that was guaranteed to make her sob. John Ritter had died unexpectedly several years before, in his mid-fifties. He’d had a heart attack on his daughter’s fifth birthday. These were
facts, and Janie had known them before Robby’s death, when they had seemed distantly sad. Now they seemed emblematic of her life. Life in the real world, not terminally happy Birdwell Island. Janie lived in fear of the day that Dylan found out Clifford was actually a dead guy like his dad.
When the doorbell rang, Janie was sitting on the back of the toilet tank in the dark with a hand towel over her face to keep tears from dripping onto her T-shirt and betraying her to Dylan. Or whoever. She knew that Dylan would not open the front door. He would continue to sit six feet away from the small TV in the corner of the living room, legs crisscrossed in front of him, head tilted back, mouth slightly open. He wouldn’t even hear the damned doorbell.
Possibly it was Aunt Jude, Janie’s mother’s only sister. Unmarried, retired, and childless, Aunt Jude had found a way to absorb, unbidden, whatever part of motherhood Janie’s own mother seemed to neglect. Where Mum was quiet and, at times, distant, Aunt Jude was never at a loss for words. Or syrup of ipecac.
If it were Aunt Jude at the door, Janie knew she would ring a second time, and a third. Then she might very well assume that Janie had fallen into a diabetic coma (though she was not diabetic) and the children had drunk bleach, and Aunt Jude would have to heft her sizable bottom through a window and force-feed them all syrup of ipecac to induce vomiting. She carried ipecac in her white vinyl purse at all times. It was her antidote of choice, suitable for any occasion.
Janie ran one end of the hand towel under cold water and pressed it against her eyes and cheeks; with the dry end, she patted her face. She tossed it into the hamper and stepped into the lighted hallway.
“Door,” droned Dylan, eyes still captive to the screen.
It was the contractor, wanting to know if Robby had gone over the papers. Dylan blinked and shifted his gaze to his mother.
“They look fine,” said Janie, glancing at Dylan. If he hadn’t been sitting there, having broken free of his Clifford-induced trance, Janie would have been able to continue with her “Robby’s not here” tactic. It was not a lie. In fact, nothing could be truer. He was completely not there. This she knew to the core of her being, every minute of the day, in every possible way that mattered. Robby, who was so very much there for so many years, no longer was.
But Dylan did not understand the utter verity of this simple fact. Even a very mature four-year-old would be confused about the permanence of death, the book had said. Janie had only read a few pages, but she had retained that one thing: kids don’t really get it. They have to talk about it—Janie tried but found it excruciating—and they have to see for themselves that it really is true over time. Her instinct was to shelter his boy-sized heart from the enormity of this loss. But evidently her instincts were wrong. For this one reason, and for the fact that Janie was sure she was failing Dylan in so many other important ways, she made herself say it out loud.
“My husband died in January, but I checked the papers myself, and everything seems in order.” Actually it was Shelly who had reviewed the contract; Janie had merely stared at the plans until the lines blurred before her eyes. Knowing that Robby had dreamed up this porch, that he had meant to surprise her with it, compelled her toward it as if she were caught in a riptide.
The contractor’s face fell. “Oh God, I…,” he muttered. “I had no idea.” He shook his head slightly, as if this might dislodge an appropriate response. “You’re sure you want to…? I mean, it’s okay if you don’t—”
“I’m sure,” she lied, and tried to move the conversation up and out of the tar pit of her revelation. “So, how long’s this thing going to take?”
“What?” he said. “Um…what?”
Janie enunciated, “How long will it take you to build the porch?”
You think this is hard for YOU?
she thought, the rage
monster snorting himself awake inside her.
You didn’t even know the guy.
“Oh yeah…” He scratched the red scar on his arm and tried to focus. “Well, lemme think…”
Jesus H. Christ, it’s a porch, not the Louvre,
she silently retorted. Rage monster rattled his chain.
“First we gotta…you know, dig the footings…” He saw her recross her arms, tighten her chin. “Six weeks,” he said. “Starting Monday.”
“A porch?” said Dylan, as Malinowski’s truck pulled out of the driveway and the
Clifford
credits rolled. “Daddy likes that porch, you know the one we saw that time we went to that lady’s house that time? It had that…that…that thing around and around up high?”
“A ceiling fan. Yeah, Daddy liked that.”
“Are we going to have a ceiling fan?”
“I think so.”
“Good. Daddy will like that.”
F
RIDAY NIGHT
Cormac, good cousin that he is, came by at 5:30, right when I was starting to slide into my pre-six-o’clock stupor. There are a lot of bad times of the day. I used to think the worst was right when I woke up, that moment before I realized I was alone. Not just alone, but you know, Alone. I think I’m getting better at that one, though. I think I’m starting to handle it.
Now six is the worst. Six is when he would be walking in the door from work, when I would be handing him the baby and saying “Tag, you’re it” with a big sigh, and he would smile and kiss me and squeeze the baby. And Dylan would come barreling in and hang on the back of his belt until his pants were halfway down his nice, tight butt. And he would swing around, back and forth, saying, “Where’s Dylan, where is that little bear?” and Dylan would howl with the satisfaction at having stumped him again.
Six still completely sucks. I am not getting better at it.
Cormac got me laughing, though. Some crack about Uncle Charlie. Wish I could remember it now.
Janie stopped writing, pushing herself into a memory from her childhood. She hungered for moments like this, when her brain let itself be distracted with events that had occurred before the day her life had come to a grinding, colorless halt.
She remembered being young, fourteen or so. She and her twin brother, Mike, were up on the counters in this very kitchen, their feet dangling down, banging occasionally into the lower cabinets. Mike was working the cabinet door by his head, opening and closing it, studying the hinge as if it held a proof for the string theory. As usual, he barely heard the conversation, much less contributed. Cormac was sprawled in one of the kitchen chairs, not the chairs that were here now, but ones that had eventually become so irreparably battered that Janie had given them to Uncle Charlie, her mother’s only brother, to take to the dump.
Janie had asked Cormac why he had such a thing about his father. He had said it was because Uncle Charlie named him Cormac, Irish for Charles. It was proof that he had had a son for one reason and one reason only—spare parts. “And believe me,” Cormac had said, “he needs ’em.”
The three of them had laughed at this, made funnier because Cormac and his father did look so much alike—huge, beefy Irishmen with thick black hair and pale blue eyes. Uncle Charlie was always so proud of his size, as if it were a personal accomplishment instead of a genetic outcome. Cormac would do impressions of him, like “Well, at six foot five and 254 pounds, I don’t feel I need any help doing my taxes.”
Cormac figured out how to keep all his own parts, though, Janie mused. He did whatever Uncle Charlie thought was unmanly. He took ceramics instead of wood shop. Janie couldn’t imagine those huge fingers making anything smaller than a watering trough,
but he wasn’t too bad. She still had a little mug-pot-bowl thing he had made her.
Freshman year in high school Cormac refused to join the football team and played tennis instead. He gleefully reported that you could have heard Uncle Charlie screaming and carrying on in the next county: “No one in the entire history of this family has ever hit a goddamned ball with a goddamned racket of any kind, and I’ll be goddamned if any son of mine is gonna start! I swear to Jesus, if I see you in a pair of little white shorts, I’m not gonna be responsible for my actions!”
Cormac started playing tennis on the sneak, and as big and strong as he was, he had a serve that blew the briefs off any other kid his age. He started winning tournaments and getting his name in the paper. Uncle Charlie didn’t know whether to blow a gasket or congratulate him. Then Cormac was named team captain, and Uncle Charlie started going to all the matches and yelling at the judges. It drove Cormac so crazy, he threatened to take up figure skating. He told Janie and Mike, “Pop’s so steamed, I’m thinking of joining the friggin Ice Capades!”
Janie could see Cormac so clearly—the self-satisfied grin, the long, muscular legs splayed out across the kitchen floor. But the chair was wrong. The chair she saw now was one of a set that Robby had ordered from a do-it-yourself catalogue and came in parts. Janie wished she’d kept just one of those old chairs. It was from before, an inducer of memories. She picked up the pen and finished the journal entry.
Thank God for Cormac at 5:30 with his box of day-olds from the bakery. Thank God for a six o’clock that doesn’t completely suck.
M
ONDAY MORNING
J
ANIE WOKE
to the sound of torrential rain. And something else. A kind of splatting sound. She unwound herself from the stranglehold she had on Robby’s pillow and sat up. “What is that?” she said to the pillow. “Weird house sounds—that’s your job.”
But they were all her jobs now. The hunting, the gathering, repair and maintenance of the shelter. The division of labor, discussed and renegotiated countless times over seven years of marriage, had become meaningless in one blown stop sign.
Janie lay back down and tried to reclaim unconsciousness, but the odd sound jabbed at her until she sat up again and flung the covers off the bed. Marshaling her self-control, she reined in the temptation to stomp her feet, and tiptoed to the landing at the top of the stairs. She peeked into the kids’ room. Dylan was on his side, his face buried in his stuffed bunny’s floppy gray ears. The baby slept on her back, her arms thrown back by the sides of her head, as if she were preparing to dive.
Downstairs, Janie opened the front door to find tiny waterfalls leaping from the roof above her and splattering onto the front step. Clogged gutters. It was April, after all, and the gutters had waited patiently for Robby to clear the dead sticks and leaves that winter storms had thrown into them, as he did every spring. Except this one. Janie closed the door and made a pot of coffee.
M
ONDAY
, A
PRIL
30
Fucking gutters. Fucking rain.
O
N
T
HURSDAY THE RAIN
stopped and the yard glistened radioactive green, a color so strong and loud Janie thought she might fall in and never be found. She gave the grass a good hard cut, wielding the mower like a small cannon. The baby rode in a backpack slung across Janie’s shoulders, squawking at squirrels, clapping at cars, and finally falling asleep to the little engine’s grinding drone.
The contractor had not shown up on Monday, or any other day that week, nor had he called to say he wasn’t coming. It wasn’t until Thursday morning that Janie had remembered he was supposed to come at all, and the thought instantly infuriated her. The nerve, after all. She had weathered his surprise attack, with all those papers, asking for her dead husband. And she had honored the deal they had cut behind her back, though it would have been easy to say,
Sorry, little change of plans. Your deal’s with a dead guy, not with me
.
She had kept up her side of the bargain, though it wasn’t even her bargain, and he had left her at the altar of her porchless house, the egotistical son of a bitch. She fed her fury as she laid waste to the ankle-high grass, imagining a confrontation so full of threats and recriminations that it might actually have come to blows, had the yard not unexpectedly surrendered, fully mown.
Hopped up on her own anger, Janie was in no mood to stop. She wasn’t finished with him yet, and since she was, of course, winning the imaginary fight, she was anxious for the final showdown. She put the sleeping baby in her crib and cranked up the volume on the baby monitor. Then she hauled a ladder out from the garage and climbed up onto the roof to attack the gutters.
Sliding her hands into Robby’s sweat-stiff work gloves threw cold water on the hypothetical skirmish. She thought of Robby’s long, gentle fingers, the way they stroked a keyboard the same way they stroked her skin. She realized with horror that there
was no record of him at the piano, no video footage that she could show the children of how beautifully their father had played. Dylan would soon forget, and the baby would have no memory of it at all.
She crawled over the peak of the roof onto the back side to hide from passing cars. She sat on the hot gray shingles and wrapped her arms around herself, the work gloves resting gently on her sides.
Sorry I never thought to videotape you at the piano,
she thought, and her throat tightened into a painful rope.
But I remember it, if that helps.
After a while the breeze blew refugee drips from an overhanging branch onto her face. She crawled down to the gutter and started throwing handfuls of wet leaves and muck onto her freshly mown back lawn. She heard the creak of metal and wondered momentarily what she would do if the ladder blew down. If she jumped, would she sprain an ankle? Or would she merely feel like an idiot for stranding herself on top of her own house?
“Hello?” called a man’s voice. Malinowski the contractor appeared over the roof peak. With the sun lighting him from behind, his thinning auburn hair looked almost orange. “Gutters,” he nodded seeing the muddied gloves. “Just did my own.”
“Nice of you to show,” she said.
“Are you a lefty or a righty?” asked Malinowski, as he squatted and hobbled toward her.
“What? Righty.”
“Give me this one then.” He pointed to her left hand. She looked down at Robby’s glove, smeared with muck. Malinowski held out his hand for it. Confused, she slipped the glove off and gave it to him. He dug into the gutter, lobbing a massive handful directly onto her pile below.
“You’re making a mess of your lawn like this. Better to put something down there to throw it into.”
Janie picked up a handful and winged some muck out across the yard. “You could have called, at least,” she said, trying to ramp up to the satisfaction of her earlier fury.
“We don’t call,” he said.
“We who?”
“Contractors. We don’t call. It’s in the handbook.”
“What handbook? There was no handbook…”
“No, the Contractor Handbook. They give it to you at Contractor School. It’s says, ‘Don’t call. Especially if you SAY you’re gonna call, don’t. And if you have to call, wait a couple days.’” He dropped another glob onto the pile below. “We take an oath. Sort of like the Hippocratic Oath doctors take, except without the ‘Do no harm’ part.”
“What?” Janie demanded, her face pinched in irritation. Then a slow grin bloomed on Malinowski’s face, and she understood the joke. She rolled her eyes and shook her head, trying not to smile. “Then why are you here?”
“Well, listen,” he said, scooping and dropping a little faster. “When I saw it was going to rain all week, I started this kitchen rehab over in Weston. That way the footing holes aren’t full of water when the town inspector comes out.”
“It only rained for three days, not all week,” said Janie.
“It’s going to start up again tomorrow, and I can’t afford to lose a week of work for a porch. No offense.” He kept moving and scooping, and Janie had to crawl after him to hear what he was saying. “So, I’m going to start here in about a month. Probably around the first of June.” He took off the glove and handed it to her. “There, the whole back side is done. I’ll put a piece of plastic down in the front yard for you.” A hint of a smile crossed his face. “Aim your muck at that.”
T
HURSDAY
, M
AY
3
That porch guy came by today to tell me he’s NOT going to start work like he said he would, not for another month. At least the gutters are clear.
Aunt Jude brought dinner over. Franks and beans, even though it’s not Saturday, the “official” franks and beans day. A package of generic hot dogs, a can of Boston baked beans, and
a bag of Tater Tots. Gotta be the most highly processed foods known to man, with nary a vegetable in sight. Oh, excuse me, Aunt Jude is of the opinion the Tater Tots are a vegetable—they’re potatoes, aren’t they? Sort of, I told her. If you squint.
Carly adores her. I think it’s all the colors. The dye job makes it seem like her head’s on fire, and the lipstick looks like the fire engine’s on its way to put her out. Then there’s that baby blue eye shadow she orders online to match the color of her eyes. What with all the big shiny jewelry, Carly probably thinks Aunt Jude is a toy.
Dylan was happier than a pig in slop. Would’ve eaten the whole pile of Tater Tots himself if Aunt Jude didn’t grab some. I’ll admit I may have had a few, too. Dylan wasn’t so big on the hot dog, however, until Auntie Nutrition slathered it with a spoonful of honey! She’s completely losing it! She never would have done that when we were kids.
One time, when we went out for one of our Saturday morning breakfasts while Mum was working at the dress shop, there was a little smidge of honey left on the table from the previous meal. Mike stuck his tongue out and licked at it. She went wacky, telling him he could get botulism and die, and how her sister couldn’t afford a funeral. I, of course, had to take her on about this, and we got into a fight about how much money Mum might or might not have.
We always got under each other’s skin, Aunt Jude and me. Neither of us is what the other hoped for. Even now, with everything, she’s on me, pecking at me to do this, try that. Go to this grief group I found for you. Talk to the priest, Father No-Actual-Life-Experience. My policy is to take as little of her advice as possible, while doing just enough to keep her off my back. I realize now it’s exactly how Mum handled her.
So, I put the kids to bed, I stretch and yawn, but she sits her butt down on my couch and doesn’t leave. Finally she tells me one of her friends she volunteers with down at the soup kitchen
has a son who just got divorced. At first I wasn’t sure what she was getting at, so I made little sympathy noises, hoping that would satisfy her and she would go home.
She tells me way too much information (as usual) about how he owns his own business, and how I must have heard of it, Walking on Sunshine Carpet Cleaners? With that funny jingle on the radio? Apparently he has kids, but they’re grown. She made a big point of how he married young.
I’m yawning and checking my watch, but she keeps going. Then she says, “So?” with her eyebrows way up high. With all that reddish-brown pencil on her eyebrows, her face turns into the Joker from Batman.
Can you believe it? She’s trying to get me to date! I put a stop to that little fantasy quick as a lightning strike. Still, she gives me her special performance of the “You’re an Attractive Woman/At Thirty-eight You’re Not Getting Any Younger” Medley. So then, of course, there was a fight. I told her I wasn’t going to date, EVER, and she said think of the children, they need a father, and I said it’s my business not hers, and she said she’s older and knows a few things. On and on. She and her shiny white purse left in a huff. So predictable and too boring for words.
I’m going to bed.
Janie slept fitfully, dreaming that her feet were cold and wet. In the dream she looked down to find the rugs swimming in soap-suds. At about 4:00 a.m. Carly began to wail for no reason that Janie could determine, so she brought her into bed and tried to go back to sleep. The baby’s chubby fists flailed around mercilessly. Finally they both drifted off. Shortly thereafter, Janie woke to find Dylan and Nubby the Balding Bunny hovering over her face.
“I’m tired,” said Dylan, as if this were the only explanation necessary. He climbed in and burrowed into Janie’s armpit. She lay there, held hostage by her dozing children until she was
certain she could extricate herself without waking them. She went downstairs and made a full pot of coffee. It was going to be a high-caffeine-index day.
The rain did return, just as the contractor had said it would. What he hadn’t mentioned was that the temperature would shoot upward, and the air would feel hot and squishy. The coffee made Janie sweat.
At 8:45 she went back upstairs to wake Dylan. His teacher, Miss Marla, gave parents her Disappointed Look if children were dropped off after 9:30, when free play was over and circle time began. Circle time was serious business for Miss Marla, and interruptions disappointed her. Miss Marla appeared to be in her late thirties, and Janie guessed that her social life was not going well. It was hard to know, however, which might have come first: chronic disappointment or lackluster dates.
Dylan was groggy and uncooperative, and screeched when Janie tried to get him upright. This woke Carly, who bellowed until Janie let Dylan slide to the floor so she could pick the baby up. The two crying, sagging children grated on Janie’s exhausted, overcaffeinated nerves, and she yelled, “Stop it!”
Carly howled even louder, her furious screams stuttering like toy machine gun fire. Dylan went silent, covering his ears with his palms and looking up at Janie in fear.
“Sorry,” Janie sighed, shushing the baby and slumping onto the floor next to him. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. But you have to get UP, Dylan. We just have to keep MOVING.”
They threw on clothes, tossed down breakfast, raced to school, and skidded into the classroom just as Miss Marla was calling the children for circle time. Dylan’s relieved smile, the way he squeezed Janie and whispered, “You will pick me up?” decimated her. He was such a trooper, after all, and she felt so mean these days, with no end in sight.
Every so often, time passed at a normal pace. An hour took an hour; an afternoon lasted just about an afternoon. But more
often than not, days were long. Slogging through the puddles and humidity on their way back to the house, Janie knew the day would be endless. This was confirmed when she walked into the kitchen and saw Dylan’s lunch box sitting on the counter, an item he would panic over if it weren’t in his cubby by 11:35.
“Damn, damn, dammit!” Janie yelled, sending the grouchy baby in her arms into fits. Knowing Carly would scream until she got a little diversion, Janie spent the next half hour on the living room floor, piling up towers of blocks for her to bash down over and over again. Janie was just thinking she had done sufficient penance for her bad temper, and was about to end the block bashing so she could deliver the lunch and be back for Father Teabag by eleven o’clock, when the phone rang.
“Janie, it’s Mum.”
“Hi!” said Janie. “Where are you?”
“I’m home. Just got in from school. Glory be to God, but it’s a rowdy group this year.”
“Well, summer’s coming, you’ll be out soon,” said Janie, throwing the blocks into a pink plastic basket and sliding it over to the designated toy corner.
