The Most Fun We Ever Had (47 page)

“I’m Star of the Week in January,” Wyatt explained, oblivious to his parents and the horror on their faces, which was plainly obvious to Jonah.

“Dope,” he said. “Congrats.” He pictured himself showing up at Wyatt’s fancy school, an outsider with three hundred dollars to his name, being run off of the grounds by armed guards.

“Wy, sweetheart.” She came over and kissed the top of Wyatt’s head. They both stared at him from across the table, two identical sets of dark brown eyes. Violet must have the recessive gene, Bb; this meant, of course, that his dad had blue eyes. “We talked about this, baby.”

Jonah must’ve looked hurt—he
was
hurt; he wasn’t the fucking Unabomber; he hadn’t fucking asked for any of this—because Violet softened again.

“It’s during the school day,” she said. “Just some— Dada and I don’t think it’s a good idea for anyone to miss school because of this, right, Dada?”

These fucking bizarro cyborg people. Matt nodded stiffly. Violet pressed her lips again into Wyatt’s hair and he could tell, watching them from across the table, that she was a good mom, that she was nuts about her kids, would always be nuts about Wyatt and Eli in a way that she would never be about him.

“Okay,” she said with what sounded like forced enthusiasm. “What if we get our jammies on and then read
The Grinch
?”

“Can Jonah put me to bed?” Wyatt asked.

Violet stiffened. “Oh, I—”

Jonah watched with interest as Violet and Matt exchanged some exaggerated pantomime across the room, Violet lifting her eyebrows all the way up on her forehead and Matt cocking his head to one side, scratching an invisible itch on his cheek as he mouthed something.

“Have you read
The Grinch
?” Wyatt asked him, clambering into the seat beside him.

“For sure,” he said. “
Every Who down in Who-ville,
right?”

“Mama, he
knows
it,” Wyatt said, incredulous.

“Yeah, sweetie, that’s impressive, but isn’t it—”

“I’ll read to Eli,” Matt said in a tight voice, and then, turning to Jonah: “You can read to Wy.”

Violet spun from the room, and he followed Wyatt and Matt and Eli uncertainly up the stairs and down the hall.

“Teeth and PJs first,” Matt said, and Wyatt skittered off to the bathroom, Eli toddling behind him. “You all good with this?” Matt asked him, like Jonah was about to fly a plane or something.

“Sure,” he said. “Yeah, no problem.”

“I’ll be right across the hall,” Matt said, and Jonah took a second to stew in the
gall
of these people, their acting like he was not only an inconvenience but a sketchy Stranger-Danger predator too.

“Got it,” he said, but only because Wyatt had appeared again, having changed into his pajamas in approximately three seconds. Wyatt took his hand and pulled him into his room. It took a few minutes—Wyatt giving him the tour of his bedroom, showing him his gargantuan arsenal of Matchbox cars; God, their abundance of
stuff
—but he finally got the kid into bed.

“Lie down with me,” Wyatt said.

“Oh—I’m good.” He sat upright at the foot of the bed with Wyatt’s copy of
How the Grinch Stole Christmas!
on his lap. He looked up at the ceiling, its elaborate skyscape of glow-in-the-dark planets, and thought about how fucking nice it must be to be these kids, growing up like they were, with racecar beds and guitars and parents who loved them.

“You live with Loomis, right?” Wyatt squirmed under the blankets. “Do you like dogs?”

“No,” he said.

“How come?”

Violet always referred to Wyatt as shy, but this seemed less and less true every time he saw the boy. He wondered if Violet would be mad if they didn’t read. If she tried to fill a quota every night, a hundred thousand words per kid, stuffing their tiny brains with brilliance. If he’d ultimately be to blame if Wyatt wasn’t accepted to Yale.

“Will you come to Star of the Week?” This kid was so earnest and hopeful it was ridiculous. “It’s on January fifth at ten o’clock.”

He thought of Wyatt with a tiny date book like Violet’s and almost smiled. January fifth: his birthday was January seventh. He wondered if Violet remembered. Marilyn had it written on her calendar, had insisted on having some kind of celebration, a dinner out or with some of his new school friends. He’d told her he’d prefer to have it just be with her and David. Was picturing, with a kind of dorky excitement, how nice it would be to celebrate his birthday with people he liked. To celebrate it, period.

“I’ll try, dude,” he said.

“Could we sing instead of read? Mama sings to me sometimes.”

He couldn’t picture Violet singing. “That’s out of my wheelhouse, man.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I don’t sing. You can sing if you want.”

Wyatt was quiet for a minute. Then: “Is Santa real?”

Oh,
shit.
Of course this was happening to him.

“Jax told me Santa’s not real,” Wyatt said.

“Who the hell is
Jax
?”

“He’s in my class.”

“Tell him he’s got a stupid name.”

“Is he right?”

He felt like he was on a reality television show where they put unassuming people into uncomfortable conversations with child geniuses and left them to dig their way to safety.

Wyatt watched him expectantly.

“How old are you?” he asked. “Five?”

“I’ll be six in the summer.”

He’d been seven when he learned the truth about Santa, from an atheist manic-depressive kid in one of the foster homes. Before that, though, he’d always been skeptical of Santa, conceptually speaking, and a little creeped out, too, by the idea that there was an adult man in a fur suit who broke into your house at night and watched you sleep.

“Santa’s not
not
real,” he said. “Not exactly. I mean, technically, no, he’s—”

“Where do the presents come from?” Wyatt sounded less traumatized than he did curious, wide-eyed and tenacious under his covers, hungry for intel; his face reminded Jonah, again, of Violet, the mother he shared with this kid. He wondered if any of his own expressions resembled hers. He wondered if he’d inherited from Violet this stupid tendency to say precisely the thing he wasn’t supposed to say, like he’d done when he accidentally told Ryan about Liza and the Subaru guy. It took him a few seconds to realize that the creepy feeling at the back of his neck was because someone was watching him. He sat up halfway and saw Violet in the doorway, her face white with anger.

“Jonah’s teasing you, my tyrannosaurus,” she said, entering the room. “Say goodnight.”

The kid must have been tired, because he just waved listlessly from his pillow, eyes already drooping closed. Maybe he wouldn’t even remember their conversation in the morning. Violet wouldn’t look at him, even as she sat down on the bed beside him. He stood up to go.

“Of course Santa’s real, sweetheart,” she whispered to Wyatt. “And he’ll come down the big chimney at Grandma and Grandpa’s house in Seattle.”

He wasn’t sure what to do so he just stood in the hall watching them, the way Violet rubbed circles on Wyatt’s chest, how her voice had dropped in both octave and volume so it became the perfect bedtime voice. She leaned in to kiss him and Jonah looked away.

“I love you, my pumpkin,” she crooned. “Sweet dreams, sweet thing.” Then she rose and clicked off the lamp and tiptoed out of the room. He moved out of her way and she pulled the door shut. Then she turned to him. “What the fuck was that about?”

He froze. He’d always suspected Violet was capable of meanness, but so far he’d only seen her be subtly bitchy. “He asked. I wasn’t sure what to— I didn’t want to, like,
lie
to him.”

“Ninety percent of talking to children is lying.”

“Violet, hey.” Matt appeared, closing Eli’s door behind him. “Keep it down.”

“He just told Wyatt that Santa isn’t real.”

“Let’s talk about this downstairs,” Matt said.

“I mean, he
asked
me,” Jonah said, ignoring Matt. “He said
Jax
already told him. He was
confirming.
”

“He’s five years old. He would’ve believed you over another kid,” she snapped. “Jesus Christ. I’m sorry if you were forced to grow up more quickly than you should’ve, but you’re almost a fucking adult. There’s no reason for you to try to ruin it for my kids.”

“I didn’t—”
My kids.

“I think you should—probably go. Matt, can you take him?”

“Honey, hang on a second; let’s—” Matt went over to Violet, dipped his head toward hers, whispered something,
Calm down, Viol.

“It’s fine,” he said. “I’ll go ruin things for David and Marilyn. Set fire to the house or something. Old Christmas tradition from the mean streets.”

“Do me a favor and don’t raid our wine rack again,” Violet said acidly.

Matt glanced up at her, not with anger but suddenly wary, alert, and Jonah could tell that he was worried about her, legitimate crazy-person-level worried, like she was about to catch fire.

“Matt, if you could just—” Violet said, turning away from her husband’s grasp and disappearing through the bedroom door behind her.

“Come on, let’s get you home,” Matt said, not unkindly. How fucking weird these people were. How you could burn your bridges with one half of a couple and not the other. It was exhausting to be with them, with their stuffiness and their secrets. He still didn’t understand how Violet had come from David and Marilyn, how it was possible for someone to be such a total fucking android when her parents gave off so much warmth it was unseemly; how when he worked on the trees or the plumbing with his grandfather, the silence between them contained more kindness than he’d ever experienced from Violet for a single second.

“Whatever.” He pulled out his phone to text his grandparents a warning that he was coming home early, just in case they were having old-people sex in his absence.

1998

In the span of a single weekend, Wendy had, unbeknownst to them, found a studio apartment near the Briar Street Theatre and a job waiting tables at a steak house in the Loop. The only favor she’d asked from her parents was use of the station wagon to transport her possessions. Marilyn’s first reaction to this had been to firmly object to Wendy’s moving out, but the more she thought about it, the more she couldn’t help but feel proud. Her daughter was taking initiative, making a bold move that would force her life forward. She’d hugged her daughter goodbye in the foyer, feeling almost sadder than she had when they’d dropped Violet off at Wesleyan that fall, though Wendy was moving only twenty minutes away. Wendy had never quite fit in in the world in the way that Violet had. Wendy forging her own path was a far more terrifying prospect, she thought, at the time, than anything Violet would ever undertake.

Standing at the window, the Volvo’s taillights having long since left her field of vision, she both missed her daughter and didn’t. She was both proud of her and hopelessly worried about her.

“Mom? Lurk much?”

She startled and turned to Liza, who’d appeared at her elbow. She smiled faintly. “Apparently so.”

“What are you doing?”

“Just contemplating my half-empty nest. Just missing your sister a little.”

“Mom, she’s an
adult.
She’s
twenty,
” Liza said, as though that were the oldest age imaginable. Marilyn had gotten married at twenty-one; by the time she was twenty-four she had a husband and two kids and free rein over her own household. And yet saying goodbye to Wendy had felt a bit like dropping her off at preschool for the first time.

“I’m allowed to miss twenty-year-olds,” she said. She put an arm around Liza’s shoulders. “Or fourteen-year-olds.”

“She’ll be fine, Mom,” Liza said gently. At some point your children crossed a threshold from being children to being real people and it never seemed to announce itself dramatically but rather in quiet moments like this one. Marilyn said goodnight and went upstairs, forwent putting on pajamas and instead stripped down to her underwear and climbed between her sheets in the dark. Her own children slipping from her in increments, she pressed the cool knob of her wrist against her forehead, willing away either the dregs or the beginnings of a headache. When the door creaked open she rolled instinctively toward the light from the hall.

“You awake?” David whispered. He shut it behind him and the bright blade disappeared.

“How’d it go? Was she okay?” She and David could talk about Wendy to only a certain degree of honesty; their firstborn was emblematic of too much for them both—too much heartbreak, too much tension, too much earth-shattering love.

“Fine,” he said. She knew him well enough to know that it was not gruffness in his voice but gloom. He crawled in next to her, his knee grazing her thigh and his hand getting tangled in her hair before they settled together, an old, tired pair of spoons.
Forks,
David called them, because he was tall and she was slight and their limbs sometimes seemed to get stuck together like interlacing tines.

—

A
t some point, Marilyn had let go of the notion of going back to school. And while she never quite stopped resenting that fact, she held the anger back, stored it in the space behind her molars, biting down, every so often, and allowing herself to revel in the injustice. But mostly she just kept going. Kept dropping off the girls at school, kept going to their water polo games and piano recitals, kept signing their permission slips and hemming their skirts and fixing their dinners. It was all-consuming, as it had always been.

She was headed to the hardware store on Chicago Avenue in pursuit of new pruning shears one morning, but when she arrived, she found the front door locked and a small sign taped to the window announcing that the business was for sale.

She was less haunted than one might think, raising her family in the place where she herself had been so distressingly reared. Most of the time she focused on the creation of new memories—choosing the guest suite instead of her parents’ room for her and David’s bedroom; covering the nauseating yellow floral wallpaper in one of the bedrooms with an infant-appropriate animal print when she was pregnant with Gracie; urging the girls, when they repaved the driveway, to imprint the concrete liberally with their initials and handprints. The house on Fair Oaks had been a saving grace for them, of course, but that didn’t mean Marilyn wouldn’t approach it like she had their house in Iowa, with the blue paint in the kitchen: with a penchant for change and renewal.