Sisterland (43 page)

“What’s an earthquake party?”

“I’m guessing it’s an excuse for parents of young children to drink cocktails. You’ve heard of hurricane parties?”

“Are you staying overnight at their house?”

“God, no.” He paused then. “Let me put it this way: Maybe some people are.
We’re
not.” I gave Owen a push with the heel of my hand, and Hank said, “Are you and Vi still in your
Today
show fight?”

“It looks that way.”

“I wonder if she’s going on TV by herself.” I shrugged, and he looked amused. “Don’t try to tell me you’re not planning to watch.”

“Honestly, I’ve seen enough of Vi on television.”

Hank grinned. “Touché.” For the last several days, he had seemed to be in a good mood; he hadn’t mentioned the abortion, so neither had I. We’d talked about my having run into Courtney and Jeremy at Blueberry Hill—Courtney had told him about it—and he’d treated it as a pleasant coincidence, an impression I hadn’t corrected. He’d said, “So you finally got busted for not leaving Owen with the sitter, huh?” and I’d said, “No, I pretended it was a one-time thing.”

Rosie wandered over to the swing set. “Rosie wants toast.”

“If we can’t lure you with Chinese food, we should probably start heading back so I can get her dinner ready,” I said to Hank.

“You want to meet up with us later at Forest Park?”

“I don’t think I have it in me.” I felt a clinginess then, a wish not to separate from Hank, as if nothing bad could happen to any of us in his presence. But this was childish, and I needed to be a grown-up.

“Hang in there.” Hank flicked my cheek with his thumb and middle finger. “Okay?” There was something both odd and pleasing in the flicking gesture, though it wasn’t until I was at home, waiting for the water to boil for the macaroni and cheese Rosie and I would eat, that I was able to pinpoint what the oddness was: It had been flirtatious. And Hank and I didn’t, I was pretty sure, flirt.

After I drained the noodles, I heard my phone ding inside my vest pocket, and when I pulled it out, thinking it would be Jeremy, I saw that the text was from Hank:
Found out what yr famous sister is doing tmrw
,
he’d written, and he’d pasted a link I couldn’t resist clicking on. It was an article from the
Post-Dispatch
, with the headline
EARTHQUAKE PSYCHIC TO ATTEND PRIVATE VIGIL
. The vigil would be at the Mind & Spirit Bookstore, I discovered as I continued reading, and it was closed to the public. So she’d be on the
Today
show in the morning, and then she’d embrace privacy and discretion? She was ridiculous.

By seven-thirty, I’d
applied Rosie’s Neosporin, put Owen to bed while Rosie danced and shouted around us in her nightly frenzy, and then put Rosie herself down, and the night ahead felt almost unsettlingly free. All my earthquake preparations—removing the wall hangings and storing the china; organizing the emergency supplies in the basement; even consolidating our important family documents, like birth certificates and Social Security cards, into a Ziploc bag—were complete. I wondered if I ought to organize the junk drawer in the kitchen, which barely closed, or if this was the moment to catch up on the last two and a half years’ worth of emails, at least the non-earthquake-related emails, or if perhaps I should finish reading the novel I’d started over the summer. What usually happened when an unanticipated chunk of time presented itself was that I spent ten minutes pondering the possibilities available to me, at which point either Owen or Rosie woke up or else I realized that something demanded my immediate attention—poop-stained pants, milk pooling on the kitchen floor. And it was almost a relief to remember what it was I needed to attend to; otherwise the choices were bewildering.

Sure enough, as I descended the stairs, I realized that I ought to call my father. Jeremy’s suggestion to the contrary, my father wouldn’t help me with Owen and Rosie, but for his own sake, I wanted to offer him the option of staying at our house the following night. Because what else would he do with himself on this strange day, a day that could be momentous or ordinary? Did he believe that Vi’s prediction would come to pass? It was such a basic question, yet it was unthinkable that I’d ask him. And even if I could have, he wouldn’t have answered.

When I reached him and told him he was welcome to come over anytime
the next day, from the morning on—“We’re up around six,” I said—he said, “Maybe I could stop by in the afternoon.”

Something in his tone told me that he meant he’d be willing to do us a favor, not that he thought we’d be doing him one.

“Just if you want company,” I said. “If you’d rather stay put in your own house, I don’t blame you.”

“Well, Vi’s event doesn’t start until five, if I’m not mistaken.”

My father was attending Vi’s bookstore vigil? “Did she ask you to drive her?” I said.

“I don’t mind. I’ll sit out back and listen to the radio in the car.”

“Dad, she can get a ride with a friend who’s going anyway. I’m sure it’ll run really late.”

“I truly don’t mind.”

You might not
, I thought,
but how about the other people sharing the road with you when you can’t see at night?

“Let’s touch base in the morning,” my father said.

I had, while
talking to my father, been dimly aware of a rattling in the kitchen; I’d even walked in there from the living room, carrying the phone, but the kitchen was silent until I walked back out, at which point the rattling resumed. It wasn’t an earthquake—it was much too small, and it kept starting and stopping.

I returned to the kitchen, and this time the rattling continued. I took a step toward the oven, which seemed to be its source, and it stopped, but when I waited a minute, it started again. I reached for my cellphone and texted Jeremy:
I think we have a mouse
.

As he had promised, no more than thirty seconds passed before our home phone rang.

“Where’d you see it?” he said. In the background, I could hear the buzz of many voices—the hotel bar, presumably, where he was busy placing articles in journals.

“I didn’t see it yet, I only heard it under the stove. Isn’t that where we had one last year?”

“Sorry this had to happen tonight. We have some traps in the basement, on that shelf where you keep the Christmas decorations.”

“Lovely,” I said.

“The traps are in a plastic bag.”

“Do I have to put cheese in it? Is that something people do in real life?”

Jeremy laughed. “Has my princess never set a mousetrap? No, you don’t need to put any food in. Just be careful with the spring, and you might want to put out more than one, but make sure you move them before Rosie’s up in the morning. If you do catch a mouse, what I always do is just roll it up in newspaper and take the whole thing out to the trash bin.”

“It won’t still be alive, will it?”

“No, but don’t feel too guilty. Mice spread diseases. How’d things go tonight?”

To reveal that they hadn’t gone badly would be to concede in a way I wasn’t yet ready for. I said, “About how you’d imagine.”

“The baloney’s holding up in my absence?”

“You’ll have to ask Rosie.”

“All right, then.” He wasn’t going to let himself be pulled toward rancor. “Call back if you have trouble with the trap, and call either way before you go to bed.”

Setting a mousetrap, it turned out, wasn’t harder than applying antibiotic ointment to a squirming two-year-old. In fact, it was easier. I set three, washed my hands, and was opening the refrigerator door to reward myself with a beer when my cellphone rang.

“We’re in the car leaving the park,” Hank said. “I have a confession, and I need you to absolve me.”

“Is it Mommy?” I heard Amelia say, and Hank said, “It’s Kate.” Then he said, “The family that had us over for dinner served lasagna with M-E-A-T in it, and I ate it.”

“Should I call the cops?” I asked.

“Probably, because there’s more. It was delicious. It was like an old friend giving me a big warm hug.”

I laughed. “Did Amelia have any?”

“Maybe a bite. Not really.”

“Speaking of killing animals, I think we have a mouse. I just set my first traps.”

“Congrats.”

“Do vegetarians set mousetraps?”

“You’d have to ask one.”

“Ha,” I said. “Where are you guys, by the way? You’re welcome to come over.” Hank was quiet, and I said, “Amelia probably needs to go to bed.” Already, it seemed a little weird that I’d invited them.

“We’re on Skinker right now.” His voice sounded completely normal. “Yeah, we’ll come and say hi.”

“Rosie and Owen are asleep,” I said, which felt like a retraction of my invitation, but all Hank said was “We’ll be quiet.”

I waited for them in the living room and opened the front door before they knocked or rang the bell. “Where’s Rosie?” Amelia said. “I want to see Rosie.”

“Owen and Rosie are sleeping,” I said.

“I want to wake them up.”

As they entered the living room, Hank said, “At the rate you’re going, you will.”

“Kate, can I have some milk?” Amelia asked.

I looked at Hank, who said, “Sure. Why not?”

Because they needed to get home so Amelia could go to bed was why not, though it occurred to me that maybe Hank didn’t want to leave any more than I wanted them to. This, I supposed, was the reason people had earthquake parties. “You need a beer?” I asked, and Hank said, “Nah, I’m good.”

Rosie still used a sippy cup, but Amelia had graduated to a regular glass, which I filled halfway and carried out to the living room. Hank and Amelia were side by side on the couch, and Amelia was turning the pages of
Frog and Toad All Year
. I set her milk on the table, and as I sat in the armchair, I said to Hank, “So how long had it been since you last ate you-know-what?”

He looked up toward the ceiling, calculating. “A really long time. Ten years?”

“And you never even had a bite?”

“Once at Courtney’s parents’ house, her mother was all proud for having made vegetable soup. If you know her mom, she was really stretching herself—first her daughter marries a black dude, then she stops eating meat. We’re all at their dining room table, and Courtney says, ‘This is delicious,’ and her mom says, ‘It’s so easy. I just cut up some carrots and celery and zucchini, added a little chicken stock—’ ” Hank smiled, shaking his head. “So it was a cheat, but not even a satisfying one. And her mom was trying so hard.”

“Someday I might join the vegetarian club,” I said. “When you least expect it.”

“We’ll be honored to have you as a member.” He made a self-mocking expression. “If I haven’t been kicked out by then.”

They stayed for only about fifteen minutes, by which point Amelia’s eyes were fluttering. Hank lifted her into his arms, and as I opened the front door for them, I said, “You’re sending Amelia to school tomorrow, aren’t you?”

“Kate, if I kept Amelia home because of Vi’s prediction, Courtney would file for divorce.”

I was glad then that Rosie wasn’t in school yet, that this was an argument I didn’t have to have with Jeremy. I said, “Well, here’s to things being uneventful,” and as I spoke, I again had that wish for Hank to stay, that sense of us as safe in his presence.

“You’re okay, right?” Hank was looking at me with unusual seriousness.

What would he say, what could he do, if I told him no? He was holding a half-asleep child; we both were married to other people. Really, there was no room for me to not be okay. “I’m fine,” I said.

Hank nodded his chin toward the staircase. “Tell O to let you get some sleep tonight.”

The reason I
went down to the basement after they were gone was to get Jeremy’s sleeping bag, but I paused to survey the supplies I’d amassed:
the gallons of water, the diapers and wipes, the crank radio and propane stove and first-aid kit. There was a peculiar pride I took in this collection, which might have been a sign that I had more in common than I’d ever realized with members of the survivalist movement.

I shoved a flashlight into my back pocket before pulling Jeremy’s sleeping pad and sleeping bag from the closet; taking these items wasn’t a spontaneous decision. Upstairs, I unrolled them both on the hardwood floor in the hall, right outside Rosie and Owen’s rooms, and I pulled the pillow I normally used from our bedroom. I still needed to brush my teeth, but when I lay down, my head would be next to Owen’s door and my feet next to Rosie’s.

On a typical night, I slept approximately twenty-five feet from my children; on this night, I’d sleep, or not sleep, five feet from them. Which was perhaps ridiculous—Jeremy would have thought so—but I didn’t see the harm. If shaking started, my plan was to grab Owen first, take him with me into Rosie’s room, get her out of her crib, and sit on the floor holding them both, my back against the interior wall of Rosie’s room. I’d sleep with the flashlight and my cellphone next to me. I was ready, insofar as it was possible to be ready for something completely amorphous.

And whether or not my behavior was ridiculous, Jeremy wasn’t home to witness it. He had gone to Denver and left us behind.

It was raining
when I awakened in the morning, and I thought,
Vi’s wrong
. There wasn’t going to be an earthquake. I knew because I’d never heard Vi mention rain, because it had never occurred to me that October 16 would be rainy, and yet the rain had that murmuring, all-day quality, as if it were pacing itself. But even as I felt relief, even as I thought about how removing the wall hangings and putting away the china had been a waste of time, I still wanted the day to be over.

It was five after six when I climbed out of Jeremy’s sleeping bag and went downstairs to check the mousetraps, all of which were empty. When I returned upstairs, I could hear Owen and Rosie making noise in their separate rooms, neither of them sounding displeased, so I took a three-minute
shower, then nursed Owen, changed him into clothes, and carried him with me to get Rosie. By the time we’d made it through breakfast and post-breakfast cleanup and settled to play in the living room, it was seven-twenty. Which was, of course, still punishingly early; there was still so much day to get through. But Rosie was in an excellent mood—she kept tapping my face with her index finger, saying, “Mama’s nose is friends with Mama’s mouth”—and not one but two dogs walked past our house with their owners, making Owen squawk with delight when I held him up to the window.