The Man of My Dreams (4 page)

The night of the exile, around eleven-thirty, Hannah awoke to hear them fighting. Her mother hadn’t been sleeping in the guest room on the prior nights, but now Hannah’s father wanted her to move. She was refusing. Not firmly but by begging. “But I’m already in bed,” Hannah could hear her saying. “I’m so tired. Please, Douglas.”

Then it changed to he wanted her out of the house. He didn’t care where she went—that was her problem. He said he was sick and tired of her lack of respect for him, given all he did for this family. She should take the girls, too, who appreciated him even less than she did. “It’s your choice,” he said. “You tell them they need to get out of here, or I’ll wake them up myself.” Then her mother was calling out Allison’s and Hannah’s names, telling them to hurry, saying it didn’t matter that they weren’t dressed. That was on Thursday. The next morning Hannah didn’t go to school—her mother took her shopping at Macy’s so she’d have clothes—and on Saturday she boarded the Greyhound to Pittsburgh.

But this is the thing: Hannah suspects her mother and Allison are actually enjoying themselves. The last time she spoke to her sister, Allison said, “But how are
you
? Are Elizabeth and Darrach being nice?” Before Hannah could respond, Allison said, “Fig, turn the radio down! I can barely hear Hannah.” Maybe it’s like when her father goes on business trips, how abruptly relaxed everything becomes. Dinner is at five
P.M.
or at nine o’clock; they eat cheese and crackers and nothing else, or a pan of Rice Krispie treats divided three ways, which they consume standing up by the stove; all three of them watch television together, instead of retreating to separate rooms. The lack of tension feels like a trick, and in a way, because it’s temporary, it is. But maybe while staying with their cousins, Hannah’s mother has realized their lives could be like this all the time. Which is not a wrong or unreasonable conclusion, and yet—if Hannah and Allison and their parents all live in the same house, they’re still a family. They seem perfectly normal, possibly enviable: athletic father, kind and attractive mother, pretty older sister who’s just been elected vice president of the student council, and younger sister with not much to recommend her yet, it’s true, but maybe, Hannah thinks, there’ll turn out to be something special about her. Maybe in high school, she’ll join debate and soon she’ll be attending national championships in Washington, D.C., using words like
incontrovertible.
The life they live together in their house isn’t
that
bad, and it doesn’t look like it’s bad at all, and even if their cousins on both sides are in on their secret now, well, those are only their cousins. It’s not like regular people know.

HANNAH IS SUPPOSED
to meet Rory when his bus comes home. Usually, the person who meets him is Mrs. Janofsky, who’s sixty-eight and lives across the street, but Elizabeth says Rory hates staying at Mrs. Janofsky’s house, and if Hannah doesn’t mind, it’s really a huge favor for everyone. This might be true, or Elizabeth might be trying to give Hannah something to do.

An hour before the bus is due—she has been watching the clock—she takes her second shower of the day, brushes her teeth, and applies deodorant not only below her arms but also at the V of her upper thighs, just to be safe. She ties a blue ribbon around her ponytail, decides it looks fussy, removes it, and takes out the rubber band as well. She can’t be certain that the guy will be in the park, but this is approximately the time he was there before.

He is. He’s sitting on a picnic table—not the one where she was last time, but in the same general area. Immediately, she wonders, what is it he does in the park? Is he a drug dealer? When they’re twenty feet apart, they make eye contact, and she looks down and veers left. “Hey,” he calls. “Where you going?” He smiles. “Come over here.”

When she gets to the picnic table, he gestures to the space beside him, but she remains standing. She crosses one leg in front of the other and folds her arms over her chest.

He says, “You was swimming, right? Can I see your swimsuit?”

This was a bad idea.

“I bet it looks good,” he says. “You ain’t too skinny. A lot of girls is too skinny.”

It’s because her hair is wet—that must be why he thinks she was swimming. She is simultaneously alarmed, insulted, and flattered; a warmth is spreading in her stomach. What if she
were
wearing a swimsuit, and what if she actually showed it to him? Not here, but if he followed her over to the grove of trees. Then what would he do to her? Surely he’d try something. But also—this knowledge gnaws at her—she probably doesn’t look, underneath her clothes, like what he’s expecting. Her soft belly, the stubble at the top of her thighs, just below her underwear (she’s heard other girls say in the locker room after gym class that they shave there every day, but she forgets a lot). He doesn’t necessarily want to see what he thinks he wants to see.

“I can’t show you right now,” she says.

“You think I’m being dirty? I ain’t being dirty. I’ll show you something,” he says, “and you don’t even have to show me nothing.”

If she is raped right now, or strangled, will her father understand that it’s his fault? Her heart pounds.

The guy laughs. “It ain’t that,” he says. “I can tell what you’re thinking.” Then—they are five feet apart—he pulls his tank top over his head. His chest, like his arms, is muscular; his shoulders are burned, and his skin, where his shirt covered it, is paler. He stands, turns, and leans forward, his hands against the picnic table.

This is what it is: a tattoo. It’s a huge tattoo that takes up most of his back, a bald eagle with wings spread wide, head in profile, a ferocious glaring eye, and an open beak with a purposefully protruding tongue. Its talons are poised to grip—what? A scampering mouse or possibly patriotism itself. It’s the biggest tattoo she’s ever seen, the only one she’s seen this close. The rest of his back is hairless and broken out in places. Most visibly, it’s broken out at the corners of his shoulders, after the tattoo stops.

“Does it hurt?” she asks.

“It hurt to get it, but it don’t hurt now.”

“I think it’s cool,” she says.

After a pause, almost shyly, he says, “You want, you can touch it.”

Until the moment of contact, the tip of her index finger against the skin on his back, she’s not sure she’s really going to. Then she runs her finger over the eagle’s yellow talons and black feathers and beady red eye.
The Chinese symbol that means strength of heart,
she thinks. She runs her finger back up, and the guy says, “That feels soft.” Her hand is just below his neck when she notices that her watch reads ten past three.

“Oh my God,” she says. “My cousin!”

Later, she doesn’t remember lifting her hand from his back, she doesn’t remember what else she tells him; she is already running across the park. Rory’s bus should have gotten in at three, and she was with the guy for only a few minutes, but it took her so long to get dressed that it must have been almost three by the time she started talking to him. If something has happened to Rory, she will have to kill herself. That she could ruin Elizabeth’s family—it’s unthinkable. She has always been a bystander in family destruction, never realizing she herself possessed the capacity to inflict it.

Rory isn’t at the bus stop. Less than a block up, he is standing in front of his house, in the middle of the yard. He’s looking around, wearing the backpack that’s wider than his back. A few nights ago, at Rory’s request, Elizabeth sewed an owl patch on the outermost pocket.

“I’m so sorry,” Hannah says. She is breathless. “Rory, I’m so glad to see you.”

“You were supposed to meet me at the bus.”

“I know. That’s why I said I’m sorry. I just was running late, but now I’m here.”

“I don’t like you,” Rory says, and Hannah feels first surprised and then humiliated. He is perfectly justified. Why
would
he like her?

She unlocks the front door, and they walk inside the house. “How about if we get ice cream at Sackey’s?” Hannah says. “Would that taste good?”

“We have ice cream here,” Rory says.

“I just thought if you wanted a different kind.”

“I want Mom’s ice cream.”

She fixes him a bowl of chocolate, then one for herself, though he eats in front of the television and she stays in the kitchen. She is getting increasingly upset, weirdly upset. Something horrible could have happened because of her. But also, what would the guy have done if she hadn’t had to get Rory? Maybe something could have unfolded that felt good, maybe the beginning of her life. Yet she’s selfish to be thinking this way. Elizabeth and Darrach have opened their home to Hannah, and Hannah has repaid them by neglecting their son. There are resolutions she needs to make, she thinks, steps that must be taken so that she becomes a very different sort of person. She’s not positive what the steps are, but surely there are several.

She keeps walking into the living room, imagining she hears Elizabeth’s car, but when she looks out the front window, it’s nothing, a phantom engine. Then, finally, Elizabeth is really there. Hannah can’t even wait for her to get inside. She runs out as Elizabeth is unloading groceries from the trunk, and Elizabeth looks up and says, “Hey there, Hannah, you want to give me a hand?” But Hannah has begun to cry; the tears are spilling down her face. “Oh, no,” Elizabeth says. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I saw on TV at the hospital, but I didn’t know if you’d heard. Poor Julia Roberts, huh?”

Through her sobbing, Hannah says, “What did you see?”

“Just the quick snippet on one of the networks. If it’s true he cheated on her, I say she’s right to call it off.”

“Kiefer
cheated
on her?” This is when Hannah’s tears become a flood; she can’t see, she almost can’t breathe.

“Oh, sweetie, I don’t know any more than you do.” Elizabeth’s arm is around Hannah’s shoulders. She has guided them both to the stoop to sit. “Probably nobody knows for sure but the two of them.”

When Hannah can speak, she says, “Why would Kiefer cheat on Julia?”

“Well, again, maybe it’s not even true. But we have to remember celebrities are real people, with their own sets of problems. They live in the same world as the rest of us.”

“But they were a good couple,” Hannah says, and a new gush of tears surges forth. “I could tell.”

Elizabeth pulls Hannah even closer, so one side of Hannah’s face is pressed to Elizabeth’s breasts. “They’re no different from anyone else,” Elizabeth says. “Julia Roberts goes to bed without brushing her teeth. I’m not saying every night, but sometimes. She probably picks her nose. All celebrities do—they feel sad, they feel jealous, they fight with each other. And Hannah, marriage is so hard. I know there’s this idea that it’s glass slippers and wedding cake, but it’s the hardest thing in the world.”

Hannah jerks up her head. “Why are you always defending my dad? I know you know that he’s an asshole.”

“Hannah, your dad has some demons. He just does. We all do the best we can.”

“I don’t care about his demons!” Hannah cries. “He’s a bully! He’s so mean that no one will stand up to him.”

At first Elizabeth is quiet. Then she says, “Okay. He is a bully. How can I pretend he’s not? But something you won’t understand until you’re older is how unhappy your dad is. No one acts like that unless they’re unhappy. And he knows. He knows what he’s like, and for him to know he’s failing his family, to see himself acting just like our father did—it must tear your dad apart.”

“I
hope
it tears him apart.”

“You’ll leave all of this behind, Hannah. I promise. And if your mom can stay away, it already won’t be as bad when you get home. That’s the mistake my mom made, that she just stayed with Dad forever. But your mom is getting out while she can, which is the smartest, bravest thing she can do.”

So her parents are splitting up. They must be. Hannah is pretty sure Elizabeth doesn’t realize what she’s just revealed, and perhaps at this point it’s not definite, but when Hannah’s mother drives to Pittsburgh in early August to pick her up and tells her over fish sandwiches at Dairy Queen on the ride home that she has moved into a condo, Hannah will not be surprised. The condo will be in a nice neighborhood, and her mother already will have decorated Allison’s and Hannah’s bedrooms. Hannah’s will have pink striped curtains and a matching pink bedspread over a double bed. Hannah will soon like the condo better than she ever liked the old house, which is where her father will live for several more years—the condo will not be so large that it makes her nervous to be there alone, and it will be within walking distance of a drugstore, a grocery store, and several restaurants where Hannah and her mother will go sometimes on Saturday nights. Hannah and Allison will have lunch with their father on Sundays and won’t see or speak to him besides that. He’ll tell them they’re always welcome to come over for dinner or to spend the night, but they’ll go only a few times, to gather the belongings their mother hasn’t moved already. Their father will start dating someone from the country club, an attractive woman whose husband died in a boating accident in Michigan. The woman, Amy, will have three young children, and Hannah will wonder whether her father purposely conceals what he’s like from Amy, or whether Amy chooses not to see it. For a long time, Hannah’s mother will not date.

These will be the details of the Julia Roberts rumors: that Kiefer was cheating with a dancer named Amanda Rice, though the name she goes by at the Crazy Girls Club where she works is Raven. The day the wedding was scheduled for, Julia will fly to Dublin with Jason Patric, another actor who’s a friend of Kiefer’s. At the Shelbourne Hotel, where suites cost $650 a night, hotel employees will report that Julia looks gaunt, her hair is orange, and she is not wearing her engagement ring.

Two years later, she will marry the country singer Lyle Lovett. They’ll have known each other for three weeks, she’ll be barefoot for the ceremony, and the marriage will last only twenty-one months. He will be ten years older than she is, with puffy hair and a lean, dour face. In 2002, Julia Roberts will marry a cameraman named Danny Moder. Their wedding will be at midnight on the Fourth of July, at her ranch in Taos, New Mexico, but before it occurs, Danny Moder will have to divorce his wife of four years, a makeup artist named Vera.