The Fallback Plan (9 page)

“You’ll have to stay for dinner some time, we’ll fire up the barbecue,” he said once, but it was the kind of polite invitation that’s safe to make if you know the recipient won’t take you up on it.

“If you want me to watch May some evening so the two of you can have a night out, I wouldn’t mind staying late,” I said. May raised her head at the sound of her name.

Amy looked at May and then back at me. She cupped her hand like an oyster shell again. “Statistically speaking,” she whispered, “most marriages will not survive the loss of a child.”

• • •

Amy had a friend named Scout who had eight-year-old twins and a third daughter who was May’s age. After breakfast one morning, Scout called to invite Amy and May to join them at the pool, and Amy said we’d all go. “Scout is very involved,” Amy told me. “Her daughters are in
everything
.” I helped May get in her swimsuit and rubbed suntan lotion on her shoulders while Amy went out to have a cigarette. When she came back inside she loaned me a suit to wear.

At the pool, Amy introduced me to Scout as “my good friend Esther,” and Scout introduced me to Gemma, Gabriella, and Emma. They were all tan and lean and blond. The twins were allowed to go in any pool they wanted
unaccompanied because they were on the swim team. Emma and May played in the wading pool where we could watch them. They each wore inflatable floaties around their upper arms so if they somehow fell into water over two feet deep they wouldn’t drown.

“So, are you in school, Esther?” Scout asked.

“She just graduated from Northwestern,” Amy said, before I could answer. “She’s writing a screenplay. How many pages do you have so far?”

“Almost a hundred.” Six.

“Oh, you must be very talented. I’d love to write one of those self-help books, you know the ones that help you help yourself—Amy, did I tell you this already? About how to find the time to train for a triathlon if you’re a full-time mom.” She didn’t wait for Amy’s answer. “What’s your movie about?”

“My life,” I said, but Scout wasn’t listening.

“No running!” she called to Emma and May. Either they didn’t hear her warning above the sound of the miniature waterfall or they didn’t care, and I watched as Emma chased May around the perimeter of the pool, holding a noodle-shaped Styrofoam toy as if it were a javelin.

“Duck, duck, duck!” Emma called, as she ran.

“Potato!” May yelled back. They both squealed and giggled. Either they didn’t understand the game Duck, Duck, Goose, or this was a new game I didn’t know the rules to.

I stared at the girls’ perfect legs as they ran, the way they fit into their swimsuits like real-life American Girl dolls.

“What did I just say!” Scout yelled, louder this time.

The thought did flash across my mind that something might happen. Why would Scout have warned them if it weren’t a possibility? And I was the babysitter. I was being paid to be there. But since I was there with Amy, wasn’t she ultimately responsible? Didn’t she outrank me? I couldn’t tell if her eyes were open or closed beneath her sunglasses.

Before I could make up my mind and decide what to do, May slipped and fell face-first onto the cement. Her head hit the ground with the soft thud of a faraway firecracker.

I jumped off my chair and hurried over, expecting Amy to be right behind me, but I was the one to reach May first. Emma was standing beside her, staring at May’s still body, still holding her javelin, now gone limp on the ground.

“May?”

When she rolled onto her back, I saw that her face was scraped and bleeding. It looked like she’d been boxing. The skin around one of her eyes was red and beginning to swell. It was as if she didn’t remember what had happened until she saw my concerned reaction, and then she started to scream.

“Come here,” I said gently, holding out my arms, but she pushed me away, panicked.

“Oh my God!” Scout said. “May, are you okay? Are you okay, sweetheart?”

“Give her to me,” Amy said. I hadn’t known until then she was behind me. The teenage lifeguard climbed down from her tower and approached us with the first-aid kit. A row of mothers on the other side of the wading pool were talking excitedly, but remained in their tanning positions.

Amy picked her up, and May immediately hid her bloody face in the skin of Amy’s shoulder, leaving the lifeguard to stand there, holding the first-aid kit, a useless offering.

“Don’t cry,” she said. “Don’t cry. Are you fine? Are you my fine, fine girl?”

May shook her head
no
. She managed to get a thumb in her mouth, while keeping her face hidden from all of us. Emma dropped her javelin and put a thumb in her own mouth. Scout picked her up.

“My Bonnie lies over the ocean,” Amy sang. “My Bonnie lies over the sea.”

“No,”
May said.

“My bonnie lies over the ocean, so bring back my Bonnie to me.” She pushed her sunglasses up on top of her head and craned her neck to look at May’s face. “Bring back, bring back—”

“Stop it,”
May said, but lifted her face. She looked to
Amy for her own reflection, an indication of how to react next, and Amy just raised her eyebrows and smiled. The lifeguard took a few steps closer. Amy kissed May’s eye, and continued to hold her while the girl put antiseptic on a cotton swab.

“Oh, bring back my Bonnie to me, to me.” Amy was as cool as stone.

“That’s a brave girl,” Scout said.

I wasn’t sure if she meant May or Amy. I felt detached, uneasy.

• • •

After the fall, we all went for ice cream.

Amy shared a cone with May, who was now wearing a bandage over one eye. She looked like a pirate, but I wasn’t sure if she liked pirates as much as baby dinosaurs, so I didn’t mention it. Gabriella and Gemma were holding their ice cream cones like microphones, and belting a song about “bopping” to “the top.” Every few seconds, they tossed their silky hair in a different direction.

“May, should we invite our friends over for dinner later? Wouldn’t that be nice?”

“Wish we could,” Scout said. “But I’ve gotta make something for Dave.”

“Dave can come.”

“Amy,” Scout said, putting her hands on her shoulders, “after all this the last thing you need to do is cook for five
more people. You just take it easy tonight.” She clapped her hands. “C’mon, troops! Pack it in!”

Amy looked at me beseechingly. I was her “good friend Esther.”
Say you’d love to come to dinner. Say it
.

“We’ll barbecue,” she said, “nothing fancy.”

But I couldn’t do it. Amy made me feel desperate and sad; the way she’d behaved so calmly after May injured herself only reminded me of the trauma that hung above their lives like a cloud. It was like how Meryl Streep had no problem dating a schizophrenic in the movie
Sophie’s Choice
because she’d already lived through the Holocaust. Instead of overreacting to May’s fall, Amy had under-reacted. She was numb. I wanted to go home and forget I was responsible for anything. “I already have plans,” I lied.

“What are you going to do?”

“Oh, I’m hanging out with my friend Lucy. We haven’t seen each other in ages. We’re going bowling.” In Narnia.

“That’s too bad,” Amy said to May, who was finishing the cone. “Isn’t that sad that Esther can’t eat with us?”

May nodded. Amy held and rocked her.

• • •

When I got home, my dad asked if I wanted to go to a movie and instead of saying no and going into my room and smoking pot through an empty toilet paper roll wrapped in sheets of fabric softener, I said I would go.

The movie was called
A Mighty Heart
, and it was about a pregnant woman whose journalist husband is beheaded because he is Jewish, in a scorched city without traffic laws or addresses. It was a true story and it starred Angelina Jolie. Throughout the movie, my mom put her face in her hands and murmured,
no, no
, and my dad comforted her shoulder. I ate a box of chocolate-covered raisins, and cried and felt useless.
What am I doing?
I thought.
I should join the Peace Corps. I should read to blind people
.

After the credits, I joined the throng and exited the theater. Everyone was rubbing their eyes at first, but by the time we reached the fluorescent lobby we remembered what country we lived in and where we’d parked our cars.

“Thank you for that,” my mom told my dad in the car. She was still wiping her eyes with napkins and putting the used ones back in her purse to throw away at home.

“I think the lesson we can all take away is ‘Never enter journalism,’ ” my dad said, and then smiled the smile that was an invitation to our laughter. He glanced at me in the rearview mirror. I stared back at him.

“Paul,” my mom said, “don’t say that.”

“It was a joke.”

“She’ll think you’re serious.”

“I don’t think he’s serious.”

My mom turned in her seat. “If you ever wanted to be a journalist, we would support you a hundred and ten percent,” she said. “You know that.”

“I feel sick,” I said. “I should adopt a Cambodian baby.”

For the rest of the ride home, I stared out the window at all the gas stations that had become empty lots while I was away at school, and at all the empty lots that had become new gas stations. They had demolished the McDonald’s and built a new McDonald’s in the exact same spot. They had closed the bowling alley and fenced it in. Every time we passed a streetlight, I saw my face reflected back at me, dark-eyed and pensive. I pretended I was a model in a luxury car commercial. I pretended I was Jocelyn. I pretended I was Jack’s girlfriend and I didn’t know how to drive and I had over seven hundred friends on Facebook.

When we got home, I went to my room to get the two hundred dollars I’d saved from babysitting for two weeks.

“Here,” I said, and handed it to my dad.

He took twenty off and gave it back to me. “Spending money,” he said.

“That’s okay.”

“No, take it. I know this is kind of a hard transition for you, a time to figure things out, but you’ve always been so smart, I’m sure you will. I have no doubt in my mind that you will. And it’s not too late to apply for grad school.”

“Why would I want to go to grad school?”

“Don’t put too much pressure on yourself.”

“I’m not putting any pressure on myself.”

“You’ll figure it out.”

“I can always kill myself.”

My dad ran a hand through the hair that was still left on his head, in the back. He coughed twice. I had made him uncomfortable. I wanted to say something quickly, something kind, but I didn’t know what.

“Uh, I was kidding,” I said. “If I really wanted to kill myself, I wouldn’t tell you.”

“Your mom and I love you, you know.”

“Love you, too, Dad.”

He kept his hand on my shoulder for so long I thought he might have had a stroke, but then he said good night and went upstairs.

• • •

I fell asleep on top of my sheets, and dreamed that I was the actress in the movie and that Jack was my husband. I dreamed that I was waiting for the kidnappers to return him to me, but they said first I would have to walk across the desert.

“I’d walk across a mile of broken glass for him,” I told them.

In the desert I met a meerkat who showed me the way to their secret lair. But when I opened the door, it only led to another door, and another, and when I finally reached the interior, I was at Best Buy, where they were holding Jack’s wake because I was too late; my husband was dead. Jocelyn was there and I could tell she thought I looked trashy because I’d just walked through a sandstorm.

Someone put a hand on my shoulder and when I turned around, it was Nate. What was he doing there? I remembered Jack, his arms around my waist, pulling me down from the fence. Now Jack was dead. Across the room, Jocelyn laughed.
Isn’t that a scream?
Then she turned into a mannequin. A mannequin without a heart. A t-shirt with the Old Navy logo over where her heart should have been.

When I woke I was covered in cold sweat. I called Jack.

“I just had a nightmare about you.”

“It’s only eleven o’clock.”

“I know,” I said, “I fell asleep by accident.” In the background I could hear “I Just Died in Your Arms Tonight,” and gunshots.

“What are you doing?”

“Killing hos,” he said.

“Killing what?”

“Playing Grand Theft Auto.”

“Oh. Is Pickle there?”

“No,” he said.

“Is anyone there?”

“No.”

I still hadn’t completely shaken the dream. If I closed my eyes I saw meerkats coming toward me like bloodthirsty pallbearers. “I want to die before anyone else I know does,” I said before thinking. “I want to die first so I don’t have to go to any funerals.” I straightened my twisted sheets so I could shimmy under them.

“Are you crying? Why are you crying?”

“I don’t know.” Sentimental sadness.

Jack never felt sorry for me and maybe that’s why I called him. Plus, he was always awake in the middle of the night.

“Do you want to die in my arms tonight?”

“What did you say?”

“Do you want to come over and drink?”

“I don’t know. Do you think I should join the Peace Corps?”

“Why?”

“I just saw this movie and it made me feel so, what’s the word? Inefficient? Ineffectual? Fuck.” Brain tumor.

“Come over,” he said.

“I have to babysit in the morning.”

“Come over,” he said, “and we’ll talk about it.”

• • •

Before I left the house I checked my email while I brushed my teeth. Tierney had written to tell me how much gelato she consumed in Rome. She was lactose intolerant and she said she’d lost ten pounds so far and had had to buy all new jeans. In Munich, she’d slept with a man she met at a bar—and his wife. The next stop on the trip paid for by her grandmother was Prague, but she wouldn’t be there for long, and she wasn’t sure if she’d have email, so she wanted
me to “take care,” and save stories to tell her.

I miss you
, she wrote.
I miss you and I love you and I can’t wait to see you when I get back and hear all about your summer
.

When did you become such a slutty whore
, I wrote back.
Miss you, too
.