The Most Fun We Ever Had (36 page)

She nodded. He could have reminded her of her culpability, that technically all he’d done wrong in the last few years was suffer, that his suffering was largely beyond his control and her punishing him was barrel-bottom cruelty, that his genes might predispose their kid to depression but hers might predispose it to unkindness, and that suffering of your own making was a different animal entirely.

“I love you,” he said instead, and when he came to hug her before abruptly releasing her, before driving off without a backward glance, she had no choice but to hug back, the baby pressed between them, the little person they’d already failed.

1995

When Aaron Bhargava showed up at the front door, Violet was annoyed, because Wendy had people checking in on her even when she wasn’t home to be checked in on.

“She’s still in the hospital,” she said, not quite flatly, because he was the kind of boy to whom you just couldn’t be unkind; his eyes radiated warmth; his smile made her stomach hurt. He was holding a bouquet of tiger lilies.

“No, I know. I just thought I’d bring these for—your family. And see how Wendy was doing.” He handed over the flowers.

She looked down at them, pressed her nose into one of the blooms. It had a dense sweet smell and she imagined her nasal passages filling with pollen, pollen that Aaron Bhargava had bought from Jewel-Osco. “Thanks,” she said. “She’s—I’m not really sure. Okay, I guess?” Aaron was the only boyfriend of Wendy’s who said hi to her in the hallways at school, who stopped to chat when he was leaving their house in the evenings. She sat down on the porch swing and, without thinking, anchored her feet so he could join her without it rocking.

He sat. “Have you been to see her?” he asked.

She shook her head. She and her sisters hadn’t been to the hospital yet. None of them had specifically asked, and their parents had not specifically offered. She and Liza had put Gracie to bed together, lulling her to sleep with renditions of songs their mother loved, “Please Mr. Postman” and “Harvest Moon” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” and after that they’d watched a rerun of the Tom Petty
Rockumentary,
which should have been fun and illicit because their parents didn’t allow television on school nights, but the balance felt off without Wendy there; there were four of them and to be three felt sacrilegious, even though she knew that when Wendy returned, she would consume their family entirely, because that was what always happened with Wendy.

“You holding up okay? With her—not around?”

Which of course reminded her of Wendy’s dramatic exit, of the ambulance in their driveway, of her mother like she’d never before seen her, like some kind of terrified animal.

“One day at a time,” she breathed to Aaron, feeling beleaguered and mature.

“She talks about you a lot.”

“Ha. That I’m a total square?” she intoned, imagining. “That I stole her Black Honey lipstick?”

“She did say that about the lipstick, actually.” He laughed. “But otherwise, she mainly talks about how smart you are.”

And that made her even sadder, because she’d always been sort of curious as to why her sister—her headstrong, adventurous, go-against-the-grain older sister—even bothered with her: prissy, predictable, uncreative Violet. It was the first time, throughout the whole ordeal, that she felt like crying. A good sister would never enjoy—even if it was only for half a second—the soothing hush that fell over the house when her Irish twin wasn’t in it. But she would not allow herself to cry in front of her sister’s hot boyfriend, a boy who loved Wendy enough to come check on the rest of them when Wendy herself was out of commission.

“You guys need anything?” he asked. “A ride to school tomorrow?”

“Our grandpa’s taking us,” she said, but couldn’t resist imagining how it would feel to show up at school like Wendy did, with a boy who drove a car, how it would feel to be Wendy, gorgeous and brave and dynamic, coveted by all.

“Hey, she’s going to be fine,” Aaron said. “Wendy’s Wendy. She’s resilient.”

“Thanks,” she said, and she tried to think of something she could say that would make him stay a little longer, but he was already standing up. She smoothed one of the flower petals between her middle finger and her thumb. “Thanks for the flowers.”

—

A
t the hospital, his wife had fallen asleep next to Wendy’s bed, hands steepled together and back rounded forward, her head lolling at a sickly angle, as though she’d dropped off while praying. Wendy was asleep, an IV in her left hand. He leaned to kiss his daughter’s forehead. She was bare-faced and limp-haired and looked like a child in a way that she hadn’t in years. He turned away from her, thoughts of those years suddenly too much to consider. He went around the bed and squatted before Marilyn. “Sweetheart.”

She startled; he heard a distinct crack from her neck and they both winced. She turned quickly to Wendy’s bed as though to ensure she hadn’t escaped. It was a heartbreaking gesture; they both knew that neither one of them had possessed, for several years, the ability to prevent their daughter from going anywhere.

“We should go home,” he said, although he knew it was probably best that the girls didn’t see much of her: their mother was barely recognizable, savage, circles under her eyes like bruises.

“I’m not leaving her here by herself.”

“Marilyn, you haven’t
slept
since—”

Since Saturday night,
he couldn’t say, because they were currently not talking about Saturday night, nor were they to discuss early Sunday morning, when Marilyn had awakened to find Wendy unresponsive beside her in their bed. Even if he’d wanted to discuss it he couldn’t bring himself to consider the specifics: the weight of his daughter’s body in his arms, how sallow and scary she looked. She’d been at a party; there was a mix of alcohol and a startling cocktail of pills featuring traces of MDMA and ketamine. These were the things he couldn’t think about. He could think only of Sunday morning—waking up on the couch having found his daughter in his spot in bed a few hours earlier—and the noise his wife had made, an unearthly screeching.

“She’s going to be fine,” he said, squeezing her knees. They both looked over at their daughter, who had—owing to the nurses—bathed more recently than his wife. Some of Wendy’s color was coming back. Marilyn turned away as though in pain.

“I wish everyone would stop saying that.”

Their daughter hadn’t been
fine
for a long time. And here they were.

“At least come down and get something to eat.”

He saw her glance over again at Wendy’s bed.

“Sorry,” he said. “Come on. Something simple. I’ll buy you some frozen yogurt.” He rose from his squat. She opened her mouth as if to argue but then sighed. He offered her an arm, rather archaically, and she took it and leaned into him, but not before stopping at Wendy’s bedside to tuck in her blanket and kiss the angled curve of her cheek. They rode silently down to the second floor in the eerie calm of the hospital in the evening. Seated across from her at a cafeteria table, he took her hand.

So strange to be here with her, vampiric orderlies milling about, the familiar odor of disinfectant and pizza overpowered by his wife’s unmistakable skin-sunshine-vanilla combination, a scent that had persisted despite her hygienic laxity. He held her hand to his lips and met her eyes. She held his gaze for only a second before looking away.

“Do we trust Dr. Carlson?” she asked. “I’m not sure I trust him. He doesn’t make a lot of eye contact. I just don’t— I don’t like how they talk about her like she’s this textbook
case
of something, like she’s…” She started to cry and he squeezed her fingers.

“Eat something, honey; you’ll feel better.”

She pulled her hand from his and pushed her cup away. “For God’s sake.”

“Marilyn.” The three feet separating them felt legion; he couldn’t quite recognize the look on her face.

“I’m so fucking tired of all of the—
rhetoric
they use here; they talk about her like— I’m not an idiot. There’s something to be said for the fact that I’m her mother. I could stand to not have a bunch of strangers psychologizing my daughter.”

“They’re doctors, Marilyn. There’s precedent for how they’re evaluating her.”

She smirked. “Spoken like an overeducated man.”

Overeducated man?
When Marilyn got upset, she pulled unfathomable and previously unmentioned barbs from some bottomless bag within her; she said things that made him question her love for him, their life together. He knew his wife was insecure about her education, resentful that she’d never finished school, but she was smarter than anyone he’d ever met.

“
Your
daughter,” he said. “As though I haven’t—”

“You know what I meant.”

He’d never been a parent without her. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been a
person
without her. But he was angry, angry at her cruelty, and he didn’t have the energy to try to connect with her; he lacked the vocabulary to communicate with his wife for the first time since he’d known her. “Don’t you think this is fucking killing me?”

“Of
course
it is, but it’s not— You’re not
with
her every day, David.”

“Well, fine, you are. And look what happened.”

She looked up at him lethally. He’d never before seen this white-hot anger on her face, mixed with an unrecognizable level of hurt. “You think I haven’t spent the last seventy-two hours blaming myself for this? I’m the one who found her, David. If it’s unclear whether or not I’m completely
shattered,
let me elucidate.”

“She of the ten-dollar words,” he said after a minute. She stared at him, stirring her yogurt into beige paste, her sprinkles bleeding their dye into the swirl. “I’m sorry.”

“I just sit there watching her and I—I would hand over anything in the
world
if I could make things okay for her.”

“That’s not how it works,” he said, and he was trying to be pragmatic—she usually appreciated this—but it came out sounding harsh. But of course he agreed. His desire for his child to be okay was stronger than anything he’d ever felt, stronger, even, than his love for his wife.

“Do me a favor,” she said, “and don’t talk to me like I’m
impaired
in some way, would you?” And he saw it on her face too: the myopia of her want, all of it siphoned off to Wendy, none to spare for their other girls, least of all none to spare for him. He acknowledged the newfound blank space between them and grieved for what had previously filled it. Marilyn rose from the table, her chair squeaking on the linoleum. “I shouldn’t have left her,” she said. “I’m going to go back up there before I say something awful to you. Apparently if one of us isn’t being careful about that, the entire thing can completely implode.” She said it conversationally, but her face, slack and wan, left no room for uncertainty. “Are you coming up or not?”

He rose to follow her. “I guess I should get home and check on the girls.”

She gave him a nauseated half smile and hurled her yogurt into the garbage. “Liza has band on Wednesdays,” she said, which translated loosely to
I’m three steps ahead of you, you asshole.
“Make sure she has her clarinet tomorrow morning.”

They stood in the hallway outside of the cafeteria, facing off.

“Kiss Gracie for me,” Marilyn said finally, gently. She studied him for what felt like a long time and then, to his surprise, she leaned against his chest and hugged him tightly. “We’re being terrible to each other because we’re terrified, right?” she asked.

He put a hand to the nape of her neck and another at her waist. “I imagine so.”

She finally pulled away, wiping her eyes. “Drive safely. Kiss the girls. Remember the clarinet.” She straightened her posture, sniffled.

“I love you,” he ventured, and she nodded.

“Yeah,” she said. And then, ambiguously: “Me too.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Through the sliding doors, from where she was preparing their lunch, Wendy watched her mom on her patio, her face tilted up to the sun and her eyes closed. Her mother was tiny and freckled and blond, the kind of Irish that looked more like Elfish, and her father was tall and broad-chested with an angular face and eyes that were good at winking. Wendy had good-looking parents. This did not, she argued, necessarily amount to good-looking children. The Moore-Willises and Brangelina proved incontrovertibly that impossibly attractive people scientifically failed to produce appealing offspring. It was, thus, in her opinion, a curse to have beautiful parents. And her parents were catalog-model pretty, not even a JCPenney catalog but like the Ralph Lauren section of a Macy’s catalog.

“Your father,” Marilyn said once, proudly, watching a sweaty David on the roof, hanging Christmas lights, “is the reason so many women wear lipstick to the Pancake Breakfast.”

She’d invited her mother over on a whim. After her eviction of Jonah, Violet was no longer speaking to her. Liza was pregnant, a state that Wendy found intolerable to be around for several reasons. And her father was always suggesting that she and Marilyn make more of an effort to spend time together. So her mother came over on a Wednesday, right after Yesinia had power-buffed the floors.

“I don’t know how you keep things so clean,” said her mom. “Even with just me and Dad, things have a way of—accumulating.”

“Just different priorities, I guess,” she said, and what an awful, prissy thing it was to say—she would never say something like that in front of her father.

Her mom looked at her for a long minute. “I’d almost forgotten what it was like to live with a teenager, though,” she said. “Talk about accumulation.”

It didn’t seem to be quite a dig. Her mother was well schooled in the art of passive aggression, but she wasn’t mean. They hadn’t discussed Jonah since he’d moved out of Wendy’s house. Now she met her mother’s eyes steadily, waiting for the harshness she felt she deserved. But Marilyn said nothing more.