The Most Fun We Ever Had (67 page)

“I know,” he said.

“You can’t imagine how scared we were. On top of what was already an unbelievably awful time. You can’t ever do something like this again, okay?”

“I won’t. I’m really sorry.”

“Which is why we’ve decided to ground you,” Marilyn said. David had tepidly engaged with her in this discussion, but he’d ultimately told her to do whatever she thought was best. “One month. Effective immediately.”

“Mom, don’t you think he’s been through enough? Jesus Christ.”

“Do you realize how
lucky
it is that he got pulled over? I can’t even think about what might have happened otherwise—another accident, or if something had gone wrong with the car out in the middle of nowhere, and—”

“He got pulled over because I hired somebody to go find him,” Wendy said. “Christ. Yes, it was dumb of him and, yes, it was immature, but he’s back and he’s safe and it’s not going to happen again—right, Jonah?—so can we all just eat our fucking grape leaves in peace and let this horrible ordeal be
over
?”

She recalled Wendy making similar moves as a teenager, dropping explosive lines like lit grenades in the middle of the dinner table and watching gleefully as they detonated. Jonah was staring at her, openmouthed.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Wendy said to him, pouring herself more wine. “God knows why, but we’re all quite fond of you.”

Jonah’s face softened to the point where it almost seemed like he might laugh. “I’ve never been grounded before,” he said.

“I’ll draw you a map of the escape routes,” Wendy said.

“The comedic timing in this family leaves something to be desired,” David said.

“How’s Liza?” Wendy asked.

“She’s well.” Marilyn didn’t look at David. “Home with the baby. Getting acclimated.”

“She sent me a couple of photos. Kit looks slightly less like the Crypt Keeper than the male babies born into this family.”

She studied Wendy, surprised to hear her making this sort of joke, and tried to smile at her. “Yes, she’s darling, isn’t she?” It had just dawned on her that Kit was now occupying the space intended for Ivy, the coveted first granddaughter. It filled her with a guilty sadness.

“What do you think, Dad?” Wendy asked.

It snapped Marilyn out of her reverie. She stiffened. David looked to her, seemingly for help, but she busied herself with her salmon.

“Pretty cute,” he said.

“Not that he’d know firsthand.” She hadn’t meant to say it, but perhaps public shaming would nudge him in the right direction. Wendy and Jonah glanced up, and David glared at her.

“You haven’t met her yet, Dad?” Wendy asked.

“Doesn’t anybody understand that babies are highly susceptible to infection?”

“Are you, like, radioactive now or something?” Wendy asked, and Jonah snorted.

“Casts are
full
of bacteria,” David said, his posture caved rather dramatically around his own bandaged arm. “I’m just taking extra precautions.”

“It’s not as though Kit’s going to be directly breathing in your cast bacteria,” Marilyn said, breaking her own rule about mealtime conversational propriety.

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” David said, and the look he gave her—the fact that it was less angry than wounded—shut her up.

“I broke my arm in first grade,” Jonah said. “The cast smelled so sick when they took it off.”

“Thanks for ensuring that no person at this table is left with an appetite,” Wendy said.

“
Thank
you,” David said to Jonah. “Finally, another voice of reason.”

It pained her to see him like this. She couldn’t determine the origin of his objection to seeing the baby, but she knew it wasn’t rooted in his fear of infection, however vigilant he’d been about germs when their own children were newborns.

“Dad,” Wendy said. “It’s kind of— I mean, like, shit happens regardless, right?”

A quiet fell over the table.

“Am I not allowed to say that? It’s not like Liza’s asked you not to come over, right?”

“No, she hasn’t,” Marilyn answered for him. She realized, with shame, that she was allowing her daughter’s grief to get tangled up in her marital spat. “That’s a good point, Wendy.”

“Thank you,” David said, “for all of this unsolicited feedback.”

“Two fights in one dinner,” Wendy said, raising her glass to Jonah. “Your welcome wagon has arrived.”

—

J
onah went to shoot layups after dinner. His grandfather didn’t look great. He was pale and thin, and there was a big blue cast on his arm, and his hair looked matted, like he hadn’t showered in a while. He couldn’t believe that Wendy had hired someone to find him. Sniper-level shit. He didn’t hear the front door open.

“Jonah.”

He jumped about twelve feet out of his skin, clutching the ball to his chest.

“Whoa, whoa, sorry.” David sat on the stairs facing the driveway.

“Sorry, was I— I can— Am I making too much noise? I was just— Sorry. Sorry.”

“Are you sorry about something? I couldn’t tell.” David smiled. “Just came out to say hello. You’re doing nothing wrong. I wanted to thank you, actually.”

Thanks for fucking up our lives. Thanks for breaking my arm.
He dribbled the ball for something to do.

“I’m so sorry that you had to—see what you did. I can’t imagine what that must have been like for you.” David sounded almost teary, and it made him profoundly uncomfortable. “I didn’t see it coming. Though arguably I should have. I— It’s funny, the blind spots we have for ourselves. If any of my patients complained of shoulder pain, I’d have them go to the hospital straightaway.” He rubbed at his forehead with his free hand. “I wanted to thank you for calling the ambulance. For calling Marilyn. For telling her—what you told her.” Here he colored. “And I wanted to thank you for staying with me.”

“But I didn’t—”

“I would have died if you weren’t there, Jonah. I don’t want to scare you, but I want you to know that.”

“But I wasn’t— I didn’t hold the ladder.”

“Oh, kid. The ladder was the least of my worries.”

“I should have—”

“You stuck around for when it counted,” he said, “and none of this was your fault.”

“I stole my birthday present,” he blurted out. “From your desk. I was looking for your wallet for the paramedics. And I found an envelope with my name on it and I—took it. Because I thought— I wasn’t sure if I was going to be coming back. Or if you…”
I decided to take it in case you died and couldn’t give it to me.
God, what had he been doing?

But David laughed. “I’m glad you got it on time.”

“It was really nice of you. Thanks. A lot. For—everything.”

“It’s our pleasure,” David said. “You should move a little to the left of the net when you’re making free throws. I’ll show you when I get this thing off of my arm.”

—

I
t dawned on Wendy later, when the vodka wasn’t helping her to sleep and she was prostrate on her living room couch, thinking of her dad, of how he didn’t want to meet Liza’s baby and of how, similarly, Violet had decided, way back when, that she couldn’t come to say goodbye to Miles.

The fragmented cognitive leaps of the intoxicated, the mess of the last few weeks: her infant niece, blind to the fact of her grandfather’s incapacitation, the gray cast of his skin. Jonah, mysteriously missing and now returned. And, out of nowhere, the inquisitive little Bhargava girl, ignorant of her impending demotion by an incoming baby. Those big blue cyclone eyes that came, Wendy knew, straight from her father, the hot graceful tennis player who’d once fucked her on the hard acrylic of the court behind the baseball field. His agility, his dexterity, the current running through him. The vulpine abilities of his body, incongruous with the benign aesthetic magnetism of his persona.

She sat up.

This: her punishment.
The grand reality-show reveal.
Because Jonah was suddenly alive on Aaron’s face, all over, the flattish nose, the long lashes, the eyes—boundless blue typhoons—that betrayed an intrinsic kindness even when their proprietor was being kind of a dick. And then—she colored, even there, alone on her couch at three in the morning—his body, long-limbed, lined with muscle, an olive cast to skin that didn’t freckle—though Aaron had a birthmark high on his left thigh, just below the curve of his ass; she remembered that—and overall, generally, an alluring self-possession. And those weird inverted elbows. She pictured Jonah stretching beside her in the passenger seat of the Jeep. Catlike reflexes. She’d always assumed that that part of Jonah came from their dad. But—well, David had just fallen from a tree, hadn’t he?

Rob fucked his TA,
Violet had said.
He fucked his TA and he left me and now I’m late.
Utterly convincing. And why shouldn’t it be?

You’re a goddamn sociopath,
Violet had said to her more recently, during their last substantive conversation.

She was blown away by the expansive cruelty of this act, not just that Violet had slept with her ex-boyfriend—that, in itself, hurt, of course, though she’d moved on by the time it occurred; she’d unequivocally identified Miles as her intended—but that she’d allowed Wendy to become so intimately acquainted with the fallout, that she’d let the fallout become a part of their shared history, that it had sparked so much more than either of them ever could have anticipated. And all the while, Violet had had her eyes on the prize, knowing the details, knowing their magnitude, knowing that with Wendy’s aid she’d be able to land steadily on her feet.

She felt the need to sit, though she was already seated.

Because Violet—fucking Violet—had always known how to save face.

2013

Things had been stable for almost two years when the fever happened. Miles was teaching again, one class a week, and taking his daily walks to the lagoon by the Museum of Science and Industry. He’d been in remission for so long that Wendy had started to relax, loosen her shoulders, dare to think about the future. Finally, some luck, in among the rest of it.

But then one evening—she’d been running numbers for an upcoming Misericordia auction—he called to her from the living room: “Isn’t the capital with the dense one, Scout?”

She felt the hair stand up at the back of her neck, and she rose and found him lying on the couch, face shiny with sweat. “Sweetheart,” she said.

“If she sparkled the other one, you can’t see her—”

“Miles.” She knelt next to him, and she flinched when she felt how hot his forehead was.

He smiled thinly, eyes elsewhere, rolling upward.

“Fuck,” she said. “Fuck, fuck.” She ran for her phone. “No, no, no.”

The doctor confirmed what she already knew. She half-listened as he explained the difference between recurrence and progression.

“We’ll keep on fighting till the end,” she sang under her breath in her Freddie Mercury voice, when the doctor finished talking, and he looked confused, and she laughed, and then she dipped her head down to her husband’s arm and cried and cried.

—

V
iolet had invited Wendy to join her at Matt’s parents’ lake house on Mercer Island primarily because she thought her sister wouldn’t come:
Look at this inconveniently located olive branch I’ve extended; don’t feel bad if you can’t reach it.
But her sister, as she was wont to do, surprised her by accepting at the last minute. She’d been alone there with Wyatt for the better part of the month, Matt flying in for long weekends, and she couldn’t remember a time she’d felt more relaxed, waking with the sun each morning in a place where the air felt different, spending full days on the beach with her two-year-old, working her way through novel after novel, napping liberally. She worried about nothing beyond Wyatt’s well-being, that he was fed and rested and not getting sunburned. Wendy’s arrival threw a wrench into this system.

“Please tell me those are not Matt’s sunglasses on the counter,” she said. She’d just arrived and they were making lunch. Violet glanced over. There was a beat-up pair of black frames by the toaster; Matt had sensitive eyes and a terrible mind for keeping track of things.

“I’m sure they are,” she said. “He picks them up at yard sales. He can’t spend much time in the sun without them.”

“Those are Prada sunglasses. Your husband bought himself Prada sunglasses.”

“From a
garage sale.
Jesus, Wendy, lay off, okay?”

“Someone’s pissy,” Wendy said.

“Long day,” she replied with less hostility, not wanting a fight. “You look wonderful.”

“Thanks,” Wendy said. “God, you look like hell.”

She chewed, literally, at her tongue, containing all of the acidic responses she had stored in her brain. She was trying to maintain her zen. “Thank you. Is your hair different?”

“One of Miles’s friends gave me a Turkish spa workup as a gift. Which ended up being far less relaxing than it sounded. All of the
people,
you know? Naked bathhouse.
Communing
. Total nightmare. So I felt like I needed a week when I got home just to
recover.
”

“Naked bathhouse?”

“I’ll just say that I saw a stranger’s
literal
vagina and I almost died.”

“The life you lead. We drove to town yesterday and I considered that a huge victory.”

“Becoming one with nature?”

“Sort of,” she said. “Wyatt’s gone crazy for swimming.”

“I was reading about radioactivity in freshwater not too long ago.”

“Well, if he’s survived this long, I’m not too worried,” she said, and then she realized her word choice and paled. This was what got her; this was what sucked her, every time, back into the nauseating stratosphere of being Wendy’s bitch: this unplayable card, this awful, looming iceberg whose existence you could conjure without even realizing it. Wendy studied her, assessing the level of intent with which she’d made the statement. Then she stood up.

“Speaking of environmental toxins,” she said, “let’s go to the beach.”