The Air We Breathe (23 page)

Tobias nodded. “Frank told me. I’m sorry.”

“Well, you know. This crud happens and you gotta roll with it, know what I mean? Kat’s okay, she’s dealing. And now we got Dakota.” Dillon nodded toward a little girl, maybe nine years old, staring at the television in the other room. She sat on the floor, chubby shoulders rounded, arms strapped across her shins, feet bare. Her long straw-colored hair nearly touched the carpet, her face a mask of freckles and loss. “Linda helps as much as she can, but she couldn’t keep up with a kid, not with her Parkinson’s.”

“What happened to the dad?” Tobias asked.

“Didn’t want her. No surprise there. Liz tried for years to get anything from him. Time. Money. Man, a phone call now and then would have made Dakota happy.” Dillon snorted, shook his head. “Nothing.”

“That’s hard.”

“Tell me about it. I’ve barely gotten used to this one,” the guy
said, bouncing his baby on his hip. “How the heck am I gonna take care of a nine-year-old whose life has been torn apart?”

Tobias stuck out his hand, and Dillon shook it. “I don’t know, Dill. But you call if you need anything. I’ll help if I can.”

“Thanks. Tell Frank I said hey.”

“Will do.”

Dillon took the pizza from Molly and shut the door. Back in the car, Tobias exhaled deeply. “You okay?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” she asked, shaking from within. She’d been that little girl, was still that little girl.

“Nothing,” he said.

Tobias dropped her off at the side entrance, his upbeat mood all but evaporated, his dark eyes flat. “Hey, Moll . . . ?”

“Hmm?”

“Nothing. Never mind. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”

She nodded, unsure of where the two of them stood. She slipped into the apartment, changing from the skirt to a pair of clean jeans she had left folded on the washing machine before making her way into the kitchen area. Mick and her mother were eating at the table, jotting notes on identical turquoise Post-it pads. Louise was laughing.
Laughing
. Molly half smiled at the sound while bracing herself for her return to bring a scolding and the end of the happy atmosphere. But it didn’t. When Mick saw her, he said, “Miss Molly Macaroni, how was church?”

She hesitated. “Good.”

“Good. Great. Come sit and eat.” He tapped the red-and-white bucket of KFC.

“How come you always bring chicken?”

“Why, because I know the way to a woman’s heart is through her stomach, and your mother loves this stuff.”

She does?
And Molly realized right there that despite living the past six years packed together in a broken-down wax museum, their lives inextricably knotted to each other, she didn’t know her mother at all.

“That’s okay. I’m not hungry.”

Mick shrugged, throwing up his hands and bringing them back down with a slap on his meaty thighs. “You never eat. Louise, she never eats, not a bit.”

Her mother laughed again. “That’s why she wears a size three.”

She’s happy
. Molly had the beginnings of happiness stirring inside her, too. She didn’t want it to disappear, and she didn’t want her mother to lose it, either. They’d both been trapped in wax for too long.

“I guess I will have some,” Molly said. She sat across from Louise, grabbed a chicken leg and scooped a mound of mashed potatoes onto a paper plate.

Louise met her eye, and nodded.

C
LAIRE
M
ARCH
2009

“Andrew, you’re here.”

She’d returned from the grocery store—picking up a few things for Beverly—and found him in the bedroom, his presence unexpected, like discovering an army of fat black ants when opening a brand-new bag of sugar. He squinted at her. “Why wouldn’t I be here? This is where my family is.” He shifted her toiletry bottles around the top of the dresser, pushing the cocoa butter stretch-mark cream back against the antique mirror and stacking her perfume atop a container of salted peanuts she’d been snacking on last night. “You are still my family, correct?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ve been trying to call all week, Claire. You can’t return my voice mails?”

“I did.”

“Yes. You left me messages when you knew my phone would be off.”

“That’s not how it is, Andrew.”

“Then how is it? From where I’m standing, I would think my wife is trying to avoid me.”

“Because I knew you’d want to know when I was coming home.”

“You’re right.”

“And I just don’t know yet.”

He sighed. “What’s going on? Talk to me.”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? You’ve been here more than a week and nothing has happened?”

“I thought you meant with us.”

Andrew sat hard on the bed, first smoothing the wrinkles in the floral duvet, then chopping at the fabric with the side of his open hand, creating lumpy waves in the feather comforter.

She loved this room, with the simple painted-wood furniture, the misty blue walls, the fresh whites and tender grays. The closeness of the furniture in the small space. But it was a woman’s room, and Andrew looked out of place.

“I’ll take anything at this point,” he said.

“Hanna went outside. For the first time in four years. She walked on the beach. She came here to see Beverly. We’ve talked, a little.”

“So things are good.”

“They’re better.”

“Which means what?”

“I can’t go yet.”

He opened a second button on his shirt, fingers of one hand mauling the fabric until the smooth plastic slid through. Always overheating, Andrew liked having two buttons undone. Claire hated it. She thought he looked like one of those
television Mafia men, collar wide and chest hair curling out. Instinctively she stepped to him and closed the button. He took her hands. “I don’t think this is about the girl anymore.”

“Of course it is.”

“No, it’s about us.”

“There’s nothing wrong with us.”

“You’re here. I’m in New York. Our son is in Vermont with my sister. You end up in the hospital because of problems with our baby and you don’t tell me? There is absolutely something wrong.”

“The baby’s fine. It was a false alarm.”

“That’s not the point.”

“What is the point, Andrew?”

“I love you,” he said. He still sat, peered up at her, a starving man searching her face for the tiniest crumb of reciprocation.

“No you don’t.”

“What are you talking about?”

Claire pulled away from him. She wanted to stand, to stay taller than him, towering over his seated form, but her back ached and her shoes pinched her swollen feet, and she felt so tired all of a sudden. She pressed into the wingback chair in the corner, remembering Molly in the car, crying up her past. Claire’s own haunts were ready to show themselves, and there was nothing she could do to stop them.

She didn’t know that she wanted to.

“You don’t love me. You only love the Claire you think you know. The one I’ve been showing you these past six years.”

“And who is that, Claire?”

“The one who wears the sandals you like and the blouses you like and puts on mascara every day because you like it. The one who cooks the foods you like, and who hasn’t
changed the stupid color of the bathroom—even though I hate it—because you picked it out. Or the ugly striped comforter on the bed. Or the dishes that you bought with Liz. The one who never tells you how I really feel because I don’t want you to look too close at me and see who I really am.”

“You’re my wife.”

“Will you stop being so insanely calm? I’m telling you I’m a fraud. I’m telling you I’ve kept huge parts of myself locked away from you so you wouldn’t wake up one day and realize . . .” She started to cry. “And realize what a huge, dumb mistake you made in marrying me.”

She went to him now, despite her brain repeating
Don’t go, don’t go, don’t go
, wanting her to prove she didn’t need him at all. They rolled back onto the bed, his hips against her tailbone, his arm threaded beneath her neck and folded up to her shoulder.

“This isn’t a mistake. You’re the prize, Claire. Not what you do. Not what you like. Just you.”

“No.”

“Yes. You hate the dishes? Gone. You hate the bathroom color? I’ll paint it polka dots if you want. I don’t care. I want to serve you. I want to know you. Nothing you tell me will shock me or disappoint me. I’m so sorry if I ever made you feel like you weren’t enough.” He came up onto his elbow, took her chin, and turned her face toward his. “So go ahead. Lay it on me.”

“What?”

“Tell me what you’ve been keeping from me.”

“I can’t.”

He laughed. “After all this drama, you’re going to waste the opportunity to say whatever it is that’s on your mind?”

She took a breath, shifted her eyes to the window, to the eyelet drapes, counting the lacy holes. “I miss my clogs. And those long cotton dresses I used to wear, even if they make me look completely shapeless. And I want to write puzzles again.”

“I never asked you to stop.”

“I know. This isn’t about you, Andrew. It’s me. I wanted to be perfect for you. And I didn’t want to bother you with all my crud about . . . you know . . . The accident. The divorce. I didn’t want you to know how much I still had to work through. Still am working through.” She wiped her eyes on the pillowcase; its edging matched the curtains. “I didn’t realize it myself until this week, really.”

He tilted her face back toward him. Kissed her. Dabbed her remaining tears with the cuff of his shirt. “Come home. I need you. Jesse needs you. The rest of it? Eh, we’ll figure it out.”

“You think you’re so smart,” she said, smiling a little.

“One of my most annoying personality traits.”

She nodded. “Okay. Let’s go home.”

Andrew stayed behind to fix Beverly’s leaky kitchen sink. When Claire left, he was wearing one of the elderly woman’s short-sleeved house robes over his pants; Beverly had made him take off his good shirt so he wouldn’t ruin it. He worked like an auto mechanic beneath a car, his feet, legs, and most of his torso outside the cabinet housing the plumbing, his face turned up toward the PVC pipe, water dripping on his face. Claire saw one of his socks was inside out, the green toe seam showing. She chuckled to herself and shook her head. This was the man who bought only dark socks so it
didn’t matter which ones he put on in the morning, even if the lengths or ribbing didn’t match.

She borrowed Beverly’s Olds and drove to the museum, after a detour to the mainland and the first gas station mini-mart she saw to buy a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Mint Chocolate Cookie—the only flavor remotely close to Molly’s favorite.

The girl beamed when she came through the door, and Claire jumped as the recorded witch’s cackle echoed down on her.

“Sorry. I forgot to disconnect it.”

“I’m surprised someone hasn’t had a heart attack.” She shook the plastic bag. “Ice cream? It’s the best I could do without driving all the way to Straightham.”

Molly opened the bag. “It’s perfect. Thank you. Wait a minute.” She went through the door marked Office and returned moments later with two spoons and two coffee mugs. “All the bowls are in the dishwasher.”

“Oh, I don’t need any,” Claire said. She patted her stomach. “This little one doesn’t like dairy all that much, and doesn’t let me forget it.”

The girl laughed, opened the container, and stuck the spoon into it. Took a bite and dug out another scoop. “It just doesn’t seem right if it’s not green.”

“You’ll have to come visit me in Avery Springs, then, and I’ll take you out for some of the real stuff at Stewart’s.”

Molly’s spoon stopped mid-flight. “What do you mean?”

“I’m going home tomorrow.”

“You just got here. I mean . . .” Her face crumpled, and she dropped the spoon onto the container lid. A white blob dripped onto the counter. “You can’t go.”

“I have to, Molly. Andrew and Jesse need me back. And
this baby has a mind of its own. It could decide to make an early entrance, and I’d like to be home if that happens.”

“I don’t want to lose you again.”

“Oh, sweetie,” Claire said, pulling the girl close, knocking the spoon onto the floor. Mint Chocolate Cookie splattered on her jeans. “That won’t happen. You can call me anytime. And I promise to come visit again after the baby’s born. If you want me to.”

If you’re still here
.

Molly disentangled herself from Claire. She bent to retrieve the spoon, jammed it into the softening ice cream. Opened the drawer beneath the cash register and removed a wad of napkins. She dropped them to the floor, using her feet to rake them over the spill and stepping on them to soak up the stickiness. An impression of the bottom of her sneaker imprinted into the paper. “Can you stay a few minutes longer? Because there’s one more thing.”

Claire nodded. “Okay.”

The girl looked back at the door, then motioned toward the display entrance. “In here, though.”

She followed Molly through several rooms, until she stopped in front of the Shirley Temple figure. Stared at her. “She was always my favorite. I whispered it to her. And I wrote it for . . . someone. But I’ve never told anyone real.”

“Told what, Molly?” Claire asked. She rested her hand lightly on the girl’s back, and Molly closed her eyes.

“Why we left.”