The Most Fun We Ever Had (55 page)

—

D
avid looked smaller in the hospital bed, his skin pale against the green gown. He’d always been thin, her husband, but it was a thinness padded by muscle and browned skin and outerwear. Now he looked gaunt and wasted, which was ludicrous because she’d seen him just that morning, kissed him goodbye in the car when he’d dropped her at the store. The doctor had walked her through the sequence of events that had transpired: cardiac arrest, a fall from the ginkgo, resuscitative paddles by the firemen, an ambulance ride. He’d been dead, technically, for an indeterminate number of minutes. It seemed unconscionable that she hadn’t been cosmically aware of this at the time. That she’d been adding up the register, humming “More Than a Woman,” when he’d temporarily ceased to exist. And now: a medically induced coma. His body temperature lowered to subsequently lower his blood pressure.

“Mother of God,” she said without meaning to. She went to him, touched his face, nearly recoiled at the chill of his skin, like he was already dead.
Still
dead. Wendy was now cowering behind her in the doorway. She was at once grateful for her presence and put out by it. Her husband smelled like hand sanitizer. She kissed his cool cheek and studied the monitors on either side of him, the bandage on his head, the bruising visible on the vulnerable exposure of his right arm, the institutional blue cast on his left.

“Jesus,” Wendy whispered from behind her. It was normally her reflex, when her children were scared, to assure them that everything was fine, but she was light-years away from feeling maternal, couldn’t bring herself to dredge up anything remotely comforting. She needed to be comforted in order for that to happen, and the only person who could comfort her had a catheter snaking out from under his thin green hospital blanket. On top of everything else, he’d been up in a tree at the time—that
fucking
tree, when he was having a fucking heart attack, her healthy jogging husband—and so he’d fallen, and there were two broken ribs and a broken arm, a messy laceration above his left eyebrow, and they weren’t ready to rule out a concussion from his head hitting the ground. The person on whom she relied to process medical information was missing. The only prognosis she could devise was grim.

“Mom?” Wendy said.

Still she couldn’t answer. Wendy, driving her to the hospital, had called the other girls, shocked voices blaring, one by one, from the speakerphone in her car. She hadn’t retained many of the details but she kept thinking of what Gracie had said after Wendy gently delivered the news—that their father had a heart attack, and that he’d fallen and hurt himself, that he was in the hospital:
No he’s not.
Matter-of-factly, not the least bit childlike.
No he’s not
. As though what Wendy had said was unequivocally contrary to fact.

She should buy Gracie a plane ticket, she thought. Call and make sure she had the credit card information. How frightened her baby must be, all alone, all the way across the country. The nurses told her, after she’d awakened from the trauma of Grace’s birth, that David had cared for the baby exclusively during the time she’d been unconscious.
My two,
she’d called them. Her prolonged stay at the hospital, watching her husband waltz their newest daughter around the room.
Find yourself a man who likes to hold babies,
she’d said to Liza once.
It’s a sign of good character
.

She felt her shoulders shudder and realized she was crying. She seemed to have been split into a number of distinct entities: the physical self in the hospital room, the emotional self clinging to the physical self from the outside, the brain stalled somewhere in the early 1990s. She was experiencing the world in photographic flashes. A horrible thought: What if she was having a heart attack too? An even more horrible thought: at least she’d get to be with her husband, wherever he was.

David in their house in Iowa City, before the children were born, getting ready for work in the middle of the night, stalking naked around their bedroom looking for his clothes in the dark, trying not to wake her. David in a silly mood, humming to her, driving them home from dinner at his father’s house, the girls asleep in the backseat of the station wagon, sleet sullying the windshield
.
David, walking with her in the rain in College Green Park the night she’d gone into labor with Wendy. When Jonah had called—where was he? Someone should call him too—he’d sounded frightened, had tactfully lied to her about David’s eyes possibly being open before the paramedics arrived. And at the end of the call: “Marilyn, he said to tell you…”

And she’d braced herself, prepared to reject any of the painfully finite things he might say to her if he thought he’d never see her again:
I love you; if you ever need to adjust the water heater, you have to hit it on the left side a few times first, really give it a good thump with your fist
. “Wait,” she said to Jonah, “I don’t know if I—”

“He said to tell you you’re the—” Jonah sounded embarrassed. “He said to say you’re the most fun he’s ever had.”

At the time, she’d laughed aloud, surprised. Now she felt the crying escalate.

The hand on her back startled her.

“Mom,” Wendy whispered, wrapping her into a hug. “Mom, it’s okay.”

2001

The contractions: one on top of the other, furious, merciless, and Violet felt herself turn into someone not quite human, a mammalian beast, growling, cursing.

“Remember what the book said.” Wendy was somewhere beside her, an infuriating disembodied voice. “If you
resist,
you’re making it harder on your
self
.”

“Shut the fuck
up
.”

“Almost there, Violet,” said the hot doctor. It seemed utterly wrong that such an attractive man was allowed to oversee the undignified carnage of childbirth. “What say you help out this little one just a bit more, okay?”

She vomited into a bedpan, pushed against her will.

“Viol, I can see the head,” Wendy said.

“Oh my God, don’t
look
at me.
Fuck
.”

And then what felt like an explosion.

“Violet,” Wendy said. “Oh, wow, Violet.”

To her, the baby’s cries sounded Jurassic, a series of angry, desperate bleats. She fought the urge to cover her ears with her palms, like a child.

“Great job, Viol,” Wendy said, trailing a few steps behind the nurse, who was taking the baby over to a scale. “Oh, Violet, he’s—he’s perfect.”

He.
He.

Wendy moved in efficaciously, perching next to her on the bed and taking one of her hands. “I know you’re exhausted, but are you sticking with your plan? It’s totally up to you.”

“Yeah,” she said hoarsely, still not opening her eyes.

“Yeah, you want to see him?”

She shook her head.

“You’re sure?”

She nodded.

There was a beat before she felt her sister’s forehead rest against their clasped hands. She heard her inhale sharply. Wendy stayed like that for nearly a minute and finally kissed her hand and raised her head: “Would it be okay if I—held him?”

This caused her to open her eyes, avoiding looking at the wailing mass being swabbed clean on a rolling cart across the room.

“Please.” She closed her eyes again, feeling hot tears seep through her lids, and heard her sister murmuring to the nurse. The wailing quieted and the door closed.

When Wendy returned she slid neatly next to her in the bed.

“He’s exquisite,” she said, and then she held her little sister while she wept.

—

W
endy had expected the delivery to be disgusting—and she was right; it had included the most horrifying noises and antiseptic smells and animal moanings that she had ever experienced in her life—but as soon as they swaddled the gross little alien she could see clearly that he was amazing, with bizarrely intricate tiny features and perfect star hands. Once she had Violet’s permission—her poor sister no longer looked lustrous and whole but deflated, bloated and bleary and more depressed than she’d ever seen another person look—Wendy was taken by one of the nurses to an empty delivery room and there she sat, in a hospital rocking chair intended for an exuberant new father, and cradled the baby’s warm, near-nonexistent weight.

“Don’t know how you do the voodoo that you do,” she murmured.

Small children unnerved her then. So did school-age kids, come to think of it; and she couldn’t
stand
teenagers. Once Liza had asked her, very earnestly, if it
counted as sex
if a guy fingered you (except she had said, in the roundabout fashion of unsophisticated youth, “Puts his—like up your—with his hand?”), and Wendy had just stared at her, horrified, and finally replied “It depends on the guy” and skittered away, far away from her dorky little sister with her lavender Converse and her boundless, embarrassing curiosity.

Babies, however, were different. Babies were soft and helpless and they smelled nice; they had tiny fingers and sweet blue eyes and they wore hilarious outfits that looked like little sacks. They trusted you; they held on to your forefinger when offered even if you had not introduced yourself to them and were about to relinquish them blindly to some ruddy strangers who had just flown in, frantic, from vacationing in Steamboat. They slept against your chest even though you had betrayed them, harbored their mother like a fugitive for six months in your fancy house and then just
let her
hand over custody. They snuggled into you and made snuffling noises even though you probably didn’t smell that great because your sister had wakened you in the middle of the night and requested that you take her to the hospital
now
and didn’t let you change out of your sporadically laundered Hole T-shirt. Babies were different, and she wanted one, a tiny perfect person, the most lasting tie to the world you could possibly ask for.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Violet had tried to apologize to her mother at the hospital, but Marilyn had just hugged her fiercely and said
oh, honey
in a way she supposed was meant to absolve her. They’d moved on to bigger things. It was absurd to her that only a few hours earlier she’d been fighting with her mother and neglecting her tiny troubadour. She didn’t feel comfortable leaving Wyatt with a sitter after she’d so let him down, so Matt had left work to take care of the boys—he now had a sympathetic excuse, she noted darkly, for walking out on the DreamWorks guys—and she was sitting next to Liza on a little bench outside of their father’s room. Time was funny that way—sometimes it felt like her days took months to go by, days when the kids had colds or stomach bugs, days when the weather prevented them from going to the park; but entire years seemed to have passed since she’d woken up this morning.

Wyatt had been quiet when she picked him up from school, accepting her apologies and telling her that it was okay, that Jonah had known the words without having to be taught.

Jonah.
“Who do we call about Jonah?” she asked now.

Beside her, Liza blinked, as though surfacing from underwater. In a chair across from them, Wendy kept her eyes fixed on the exit sign above their father’s door. She had a strange momentary memory of being at the hospital with her sisters after Grace was born, their father skittish and their mother’s fate uncertain. She hugged her arms tightly around her rib cage.

“Do we— I mean, is this Amber Alert territory?”

“He wasn’t
kidnapped,
” Wendy said.

“Okay, but he’s an unaccompanied minor without a license. Isn’t there a similar degree of—urgency?”

“He did total my car,” Liza spoke up.

“That kid’s been more mature than all of us for a long time,” Wendy said, and though the statement struck Violet as somehow accurate, it annoyed her still.

“Being wise beyond your years doesn’t make you a safe driver. It doesn’t mean he’s anywhere
near
equipped to steal Dad’s car and just go—on the lam.”

“He didn’t steal Dad’s car,” Wendy said. “And could you stop acting like you give a single fuck about what happens to him? When’s the last time you even talked to him? Christ.”

“You guys,” Liza implored. “Please, not now.”

“We had an early Christmas with him,” she said. “That’s the last time I saw him.”

“Great,” Wendy said. “Room at the inn. Gold star for spending one evening with the kid you gave away.”

“I’m actually trying to keep my blood pressure down,” Liza said, “if that’s something that matters to either of you.”

Violet touched Liza’s shoulder in apology. When she started speaking again, she was unsure of why. “I said awful things to him. He— I kicked him out of my house, kind of.”

It was easier to think of this than try to recall the last time she’d seen her father. A weekend lunch at her parents’ house a few weeks back. Something totally and unremarkably normal, her dad playing trains with Eli or pulling Wyatt in a wagon. Her mind kept, against her will, slipping to all the pitiful unknowns: the thoughts that must’ve raced through her father’s head; how scared he must have been; the sheer indignity he must have felt at losing control of his own body like that, her handsome, stoic, formidable father.

“Let me guess, Mrs. Bridge,” Wendy said. “He actually used one of your hand towels to dry his hands?”

Liza closed her eyes. “Wendy, God, please.”

But Violet was unoffended, immune to her sister’s toxicity. Maybe she could unburden herself of her own toxic memory, the one brought to life so vividly by her mother that morning. Wasn’t that what sisters were for, the storage of shameful secrets? “He told Wyatt that Santa’s not real.”

Liza tsked. “I had to be the one to tell Gracie. Though she was about seventeen, not five.”