The Fallback Plan (14 page)

“Amy,” I said, even though I wasn’t sure if I really wanted the answer, “are you okay?”

“Why wouldn’t I be,” she snapped. On Friday morning I told her I was going to have to report her to one of those fashion crime reality TV shows if she kept that outfit on.

“At least I can still fit into them,” she said, which was obviously an insult, but who was the target? Was I supposed to be jealous of those pants? Or did she mean at least she could still fit into them as opposed to other women who’d had children and had to give away their circa 1990 loungewear?

“Yeah, that’s pretty incredible,” I said.

“I’m on a roll,” she told me. “This is it. I’ve got it. This is it.”

Do me a favor, Esther. Ask Amy to show you what she’s working on
.

“I, uh, I can’t wait to see your new painting,” I said. I felt like a puppet, propped up on Nate’s hand.

Amy raised her eyebrows. “Really? I can’t wait to show it to you. But not until I’m finished.”

That whole week, the week of the rhinestone costume, Amy let me and May do pretty much whatever we wanted, including leave the house, and she only came downstairs if she wanted to smoke or drink orange juice straight from the carton or call Nate because she couldn’t get reception in the attic.

“Yeah, hi, it’s me,” she’d say, if she had to leave a message. “Thought you said you’d be available … Anyway, I found the perfect you-know-what so let me know soon if I should order it. If it’s the wrong size, we can always
return it to the place where we bought that thing with the handles that’s in your study. May asked if you’d play with her and Edgar in the bathtub tonight and I said probably. Call home. Love you. Bye.”

This was not the Amy of days before—not the free-spirited, hide-and-seek Amy, nor the emotionless woman holding May at the pool while she cried and bled on her shoulder. Voice-mail-leaving Amy was a code-talker, a manic catalog-shopper. I felt a twitch of envy, like a badminton racket to the face, whenever I heard the ambiguous language of these voicemails, the mysterious quotidian details of their lives without me. I was pretty sure that Edgar was an inflatable Tyrannosaurus rex, but I couldn’t be certain, because I’d never given May a bath.

At least now that Amy was missing for most of the day, I could resume my investigation of their home while May napped. And by “resume investigation of their home,” I mean “snoop.” And by “snoop,” I mean “steal things belonging to Nate that were small enough to fit in my purse.”

In a button box I found two Boy Scout badges, one of a bow and arrow and one of a bird. I took both. I took a Midnight Oil biography because I didn’t know who they were. (An Australian rock band, I found out, who toured with Aborigines.) I stole a dirty t-shirt from a laundry basket Amy had forgotten by the basement stairs. Luckily, I carried a very large purse, a purse from a department store that labeled it as a “hobo sac.”

The freedom from Amy’s constant watch over the course of those few days gave me the feeling that this was my house, that I was highest in the hierarchy. The longer her absence, the more relaxed and reckless I became. I ate a quarter pound of smoked Gouda one day for lunch. I borrowed their copy of
Interview with a Vampire
without asking, intending to put it back where I found it once I got around to watching it. I should have been more suspicious of her absence, and I shouldn’t have felt so entitled, because on Friday afternoon she almost caught me.

I was about to go through the drawers in the foyer table, but for some reason I looked up and there was Amy at the top of the stairs. She was holding out her arms. The midday light from the upstairs windows illuminated her like a Madonna.

“Can you do me a favor?”

“Yeah!” I said, too enthusiastically, overcompensating for my guilt.

“My hands are so dirty. Can you open that middle drawer right there where you are and see if my cell phone’s in there?”

It was. “Here,” I said, and went to bring her the phone.

“I can’t hold it,” Amy said, waving her arms as if I missed them the first time. They were covered in some kind of white paste up to her elbows. “Call Scout.”

“Want me to call her,” I said, “and then hold the phone up to your ear?”

Amy looked irritated. She stuck out her bottom lip and tried to blow her bangs to the side. “I don’t want to talk to Scout. I want
you
to talk to Scout and ask her if I can borrow her husband’s chainsaw. I’ll need you to go pick it up. The car keys are in the drawer where my phone was.”

And before I could come up with a good reason to say no, she turned and went back to the attic.

I read her text messages.

To Nate:
Where r u? May wont sleep
.

From Nate:
On my way, give her kiss
.

To Nate:
Voulez vous coucher avec moi ce soir?

I couldn’t read any more. I called Scout. She asked me why Amy needed the chainsaw. I had no idea why Amy needed the chainsaw, but I had to get it somehow, and anyway, if someone asks to borrow your chainsaw can you ever really refuse? So I told Scout that she needed it to cut the branches off a tree in the backyard. I said the branches were growing dangerously close to the telephone lines, and Amy was worried the local squirrels would get electrocuted.

“How does she plan to get all the way up there?” Scout asked.

“You know Amy,” I said. “Ha ha.”

“Ha ha,” Scout agreed, and gave me directions to her house.

It was around the time May usually woke from her nap anyway, so I went up to her room and put my hand on her shoulder. “Hey,” I said. “Hey, little pup.”

She opened her eyes, but I could tell she didn’t really know what was going on, and when she realized who I was and what I was trying to do to her, she closed them, and burrowed deeper under the covers like a mole.

“Nope,”
I said, and walked my fingers up her spine until she started to squirm. Finally, her head popped out.

“What were you doin’ in there?” I said.

“Sleepin’ in the woods,” May said, rubbing her eyes.

“We have to go,” I said. “Let’s see if we can find two shoes that match.”

Outside, it was too hot for even the birds. Who knows where they go in the middle of the afternoon, but they weren’t in the trees or the grass. Amy and Nate’s neighbors had their driveway roped off because it was paved with new tar, and the smell was sweetly familiar, a summer smell, nostalgic and toxic, like mosquito repellent or grill charcoal. I had once read a magazine article about a chef who invented dishes not to necessarily taste the best, but to evoke the best memories: autumn, childhood, snow. What would he make for summer, I wondered—not an angel food cake with blueberries. Maybe a piece of smoldering charcoal wrapped in banana taffy on a bed of clover.

Can I eat this?

Once I unlocked the door, May knew how to get into her booster seat, but I had to pull the seat belt around and buckle it for her. My phone rang as soon as it clicked.

“Yeah, hi,” I said.

“Hey,”
Pickle said, dragging the word out for about three hours, the lifespan of a mayfly. “What’s up?”

“I’m at work,” I said, “can I call you back?”

“You have a job?”

“Remember?”

“No?”

“I’m a nanny?”

“Oh,
right
. For
kids.”

“My shoes are on the wrong feets!” May suddenly screamed, panicked. She watched her own feet kick the car seat as if they no longer belonged to her and she wanted them back. I held the phone to my ear with my shoulder so I could switch the shoes.
Does it matter?
I wanted to ask her, but clearly, it did.

“Better?” I said.

“Hello?” Pickle said.

“What did you say?”

“You sound really busy, so this’ll just take a sec. Are you doing anything later?”

“Maybe,” I said, “why?”

I was supposed to meet Nate at the park. My hands turned to ice just thinking about it.
Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?
I wanted whatever was going to happen to have happened already, so I could email my friends and tell them about it. We weren’t going to meet at the nice park, where the moms and kids went in the morning, but
at the empty one, where people cross-country skied in the winter, the park that I passed every day on my walk home. There was nothing to really do there, so we would be alone, and the parking lot in back was secluded by a cluster of pines and the unkempt side of a steep, grassy hill.

“Me and Jack and Jocelyn are going cosmic bowling,” he said, as I watched May drop the handful of goldfish crackers I had given her all over the backseat.

“Uh oh,” she said. “Esther!”

“It sounded like you just said Jocelyn,” I told Pickle.

“I did just say Jocelyn.”

“Jocelyn who?”
Which Jocelyn? Jocelyn Jocelyn?
Maybe there was another Jocelyn I didn’t know about. Maybe Pickle was now dating Jocelyn’s best friend Jocelyn. Girls like that stick together.

“Jocelyn
Jocelyn,” he said, at which point her name became a wet chewing sound that ceased to mean anything.

“But I thought her and Jack broke up.”

“When?”

“Like on Monday or something.”

“Where’d you hear that? They’ll be together forever. They’re like David Beckham and that hot alien woman.”

“Posh Spice.”

“Yeah, her,” Pickle said. “She’s super hot.”

May was beginning to get bored. Having forgotten the crackers, she tried to get at the pocket behind my seat where her books were, but she couldn’t reach, and so she
started kicking her legs against the plastic booster and grabbing at the air.

“May! Don’t do that!” I told her, in a voice usually reserved for greater emergencies, but if she continued banging that seat I was going to turn into one of those women who would drown her children in a retention pond.

“I can’t talk anymore!” I said. “Sorry I can’t come tonight! I have a hot date!” I hung up before he could respond. All I could hope for was that he would pass the information along.

I backed out of the driveway at about thirty miles an hour and almost hit a maple tree.
Fuck you, maple tree
, I thought.
I bet another maple tree has never gotten you drunk and lied to you on his birthday just so he could have sex with you for twenty minutes
.

“Where are we going?” May asked quietly. She must have noticed that I’d lost control of the volume of my voice.

“To Dairy Queen,” I said, gritting my teeth.

After we had our ice cream we would go and get the chainsaw.

• • •

After her most unwelcoming welcome home, the littlest panda runs upstairs to her room and falls on her bed like a twelve-year-old girl. The bed makes a morose sound. She hopes her brothers and sister have heard the sound and are worried. At any moment they will come running up the
stairs to ask if she’s okay, which will give her the opportunity to say, “No. I’m not.” The panda hugs her pillow gently.
What if you have feelings
, she thinks,
what if lots of things have feelings and we’re going around destroying them just because scientists say that if you don’t have a brain you can’t feel anything?

Almost immediately a voice responds:
Name one scientist who says that
.

That one guy
, she says.
With the thing
.

You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re a retard
.

Shut up
, she says. You’re
the retard
. If the panda had a mother, she wouldn’t be allowed to say those words, but she doesn’t, so she is.

The panda realizes it’s the pillow who’s speaking to her. So many unbelievable things have happened today that she is going to have to reconfigure her definition of unbelievable.

If you can talk
, she tells the pillow,
you can feel
, and then squeezes it until it whimpers.

No one is running up the stairs to get her. She feels angry. She promises herself that if her sister doesn’t come in five seconds, she will go in her bedroom and ruin all her Cat Power CDs with a pair of nail scissors, and then go back through the wardrobe to the snowy wood, where she is needed as a soldier. Five Mississippi, four Mississippi, three Mississippi, two.

The littlest panda is having second thoughts. She gets out her cell phone and calls her sister.

“Where are you?”

“I’m downstairs,” her sister says, “where are you?”

“Upstairs.”

“Come down and play Guitar Hero with us.”

“I don’t want to play Guitar Hero.”

“So what are you gonna do?”

“I want to go back to the woods and help the faun fight the war,” the littlest panda says.

She can hear “I Love Rock-n-Roll” on the TV in the background. Whoever’s playing messes up and yells a bad word.

“Go, then,” her sister says. “Go to these ‘woods’ and win this ‘war’ with this minotaur.”

The young panda knows sarcasm when she hears it.

“HE’S NOT A MINOTAUR, HE’S A FAUN,” she yells, and then hangs up. She is surrounded by idiots. She wishes there were a book she could read, a book that would tell her exactly what to do, and what to believe in.

The only thing she can do is take her red hat with the yellow pompom, and her mittens, and return to the snowy land of the lamppost, where someone needs her most of all.

• • •

After our chocolate dip cones, and after we had done our best to clean the sticky mess off our fingers with paper napkins, I told May I was going to teach her a new game. It
was an exercise they’d made us do in college acting classes. As far as I knew, it didn’t have a name. It didn’t even really seem to have a point, but out of everything I’d learned, it was one of the things I actually remembered.

“When I clap my hands, I’m going to tell you a different animal to be. Okay?”

“Okay,” she said.

I clapped. “Cheetah!”

May crouched over and, with her arms folded like broken wings, started to run toward the curb.

“Wait!” I said. “A
frozen
animal. An animal that
doesn’t move
.” May froze. I clapped my hands. “Turtle!” She got on her knees in the grass adjacent to the Dairy Queen parking lot. “Starfish!”