The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady (20 page)

Vic felt she’d seen through him, knew that he cared too much about Suzi’s soccer career. He had yet to inform the director of the Olympic Development soccer camp that Suzi wasn’t going to be there. He read their thrice weekly e-mails, enthusing about the upcoming camp, the outstanding coaches, the successes of former campers. He just wasn’t ready to give it all up yet. “Actually, Suzi’s doing really well,” he lied. “She’s been going to church with Nancy Archer. That church where your brother is a minister.”

“Suzi has too much common sense to fall for that nonsense. How’s Oats?” Gigi used Suzi’s baby nickname for Otis.

“Oats is Oats.” Vic told her about the smoke detectors, and about how he’d just seen Otis taking a box of old alarm clocks into the shed.

“What’s he doing with old clocks?”

“It’s a big secret.” Vic was ashamed to let people know how little he really communicated with his son. His only son. He
wanted
to communicate with him. He
tried
. Just last week he’d taken Otis to see
X-Men
, but during the previews Otis exploded when Vic gently pressed him about exactly what he was doing with the smoke detectors and clocks. Otis got up and stormed out of the theater before the movie’d even started.

The only thing Otis really cared about was science, and it had always been Wilson, not Vic, who’d encouraged Otis in his scientific endeavors. Vic was a liberal arts person, so he’d readily allowed Wilson to step in. When Otis was little, Wilson sent him an endless supply of mechanical things: robots, model kits, radios, tape recorders. Otis spent hours taking things apart and reassembling them to see how they worked. He strung together batteries to use as a power source for an electric blanket on Boy Scout camping trips. He fashioned a battery-powered skateboard that Caroline had to confiscate after he fell and split his head open. At one point Wilson sent Otis an old book called
The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments
. Otis started experimenting with all sorts of chemicals and even made some chloroform that he administered to Suzi, which knocked her out cold.
The Golden Book
was sent back to his grandfather. Now, apparently, it was something to do with smoke detectors and alarm clocks.

Gigi kept talking. “Maybe Oats plans to hide those clocks around your house and set them for different times. Wake up, people! It’s happy hour!”

“Not yet,” Vic warned her, and opened another student essay, this one entitled “The Terrible Trip.”

“Hey,” she said in a quieter voice, leaning toward Vic. “Bring Avie out for a riding lesson this weekend. I miss her.”

Vic said that he would. Gigi asking about his children reminded him of where his true priorities lay—that they weren’t here, and they weren’t with Gigi—and after a while he realized that the conference
room had lost its magical sheen and had been restored to its drab state; and as usual, he couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there. He told Gigi he’d be skipping happy hour, explaining that Suzi would need him at home.

* * *

In late afternoon, sunlight hung in columns through the canopy trees on Live Oak Plantation Road, which, because they spread out so graciously, never made Vic feel claustrophobic, even though he’d grown up on the prairies of the Midwest. And, turning into Canterbury Hills, he was struck once again by how much he loved his neighborhood, the sheer ordinariness of it. It was the sort of neighborhood he’d always dreamed of living in.

Vic grew up in a house in West Branch, Iowa, that looked, from the outside, as if it had been abandoned. Until he got old enough to mow the grass, it grew so high that the neighbors called a lawn service and took up collections to pay for it. His father, who was always reading and writing and teaching, never seemed to notice the grass at all. And then there was his mother’s rock collection. These weren’t little rocks, or even hunks of interesting and unusual minerals, but big ugly gray-brown boulders she carted home from rivers and creeks in their aged station wagon. She dropped these monstrosities randomly around their overgrown yard, which made mowing even harder for anyone who dared to try it. The Fortress, people called their house.

Vic bided his time until he could get out. He enjoyed his afternoon paper route because he loved studying other people’s neat little homes; smelling the dryer lint from their laundry rooms; imagining the quiet, mundane lives that were lived within. He bet nobody in those houses accidentally fried eggs in a frying pan lined with motor oil as his mother once did after his father had used the pan to catch oil draining from the station wagon.

For years Vic had congratulated himself on the splendid, impulsive
idea he’d had of applying to graduate school at FSU. He’d been working in marketing and publicity at the University of Iowa Press, and one snowy day, eating his tasteless sandwich in the lunchroom, he’d happened upon a spread in an old
National Geographic
about Maclay Gardens in Tallahassee and Iowa was all over for him. And he’d never been sorry about leaving the Midwest behind. Tallahassee was great! Florida was great! Why would anyone not want to live here? Of course, some sourpusses might take issue with not only the hurricanes and rising insurance rates and rampant, heedless development and lack of state money for education and Governor Jeb Bush and fire ants and palmetto bugs and alligators and vicious exotic pets turned loose and humidity and heat and March, which, although breathtakingly lovely, was when spring breakers and serial killers and long-lost friends and relatives descended upon the Sunshine State. But most of the time Vic didn’t care about any of that, because every place had its drawbacks, and he loved living in Florida.

And there was his very own yellow brick house with the white picket fence, the smooth carpet of St. Augustine grass that, for some reason, this summer, didn’t sport even a patch of brown fungus. If a big hurricane came and washed his house away, he would miss it. He truly would. As he pulled in behind the house and parked the car at the bottom of the driveway he felt a bittersweet tang, as if his house were already gone.

* * *

For Vic, being around Suzi had always been relaxing, like sitting in front of a fire, basking in the warm glow of her competency. Not that she was always easy to be around, by any means. But up until she hurt her knee, she’d been on a steady course—good grades, excelling at sports, and friendships—whereas Ava and Otis were much loopier and uncertain in their passage through the days. They got A’s in some subjects
and F’s in others, could flawlessly recite their lines in
Guys and Dolls
but had trouble cutting up their meat. In a conversation with Ava and Otis, you never knew, from one minute to the next, whether they’d approach you eagerly or flail and curse at you. And being around them out in public, watching them interact with other kids, Vic always felt on edge, expecting a misstep and hating himself for it, overwhelmed one moment with pity, the next with pride, his hopes rising and plummeting. There was always distance between himself and his older two children, even though he loved them with all his heart. With them he always had to think before he said or did anything; and because being with them often felt like work, he’d gradually started spending more time with Suzi. He wasn’t proud of this fact, but there it was.

That’s why he depended so much on Suzi to be the calm center of his life. Watching her decline was extremely disturbing.

That evening after work, when he went into her messy room and sat on the bed beside her, she merely glanced at him and went back to staring up at the swiveling ceiling fan. She wore her shorty pj’s with fairies on them and had an old polyester afghan she’d dug out of the back of the closet covering her injured knee.

Vic worried about leaving her at home all day, because her mother was too busy with Wilson and Ava to pay much attention to her. Oh, Suzi could take care of herself. It wasn’t that. On one occasion, years ago, when Suzi and Ava and Otis had, for one time only, an incompetent babysitter who did nothing but sit on her butt and watch TV all evening, occasionally going outside to call her boyfriend and smoke a cigarette, eight-year-old Suzi made dinner for herself and Ava and Otis—sandwiches and cheese grits and a fruit salad—then put the leftovers away and washed the dishes, took a bath, and put herself to bed. “I figured I was second in command,” she told us later. It didn’t occur to Ava or Otis to step in and take over, or even help.

Vic reached over and stroked Suzi’s unkempt, curly hair.

She flinched, the way Ava always did when he tried to touch her.

“What’ve you been doing today?”

“Praying about my knee. It’s not working.”

Vic decided to leave that one alone. “Help me make something for supper.”

“Where’s Mom?” Suzi said accusingly, like he was keeping her mother away.

“They won’t be home from therapy till seven.”

“Figures.”

“Want to bake some cookies?”

“You don’t get it,” she said loudly. “My knee hurts!”

Vic knew he should stop pushing her, but he couldn’t seem to shut up. “You’ll feel better if you get up and move around some. And your knee will heal faster.”

In response, she rolled over and faced the wall. “I. Don’t. Want. To. Do.
Anything.
”

Vic found himself wanting to yell at her, shake her. Stop this at once! You’re my only normal child and you’d better stay that way! Then another voice, a wiser voice, came over the loudspeaker in his head: Get away from your child. Now.

He ducked out of her room and into his own, changed into shorts and a T-shirt, grabbed a can of sparkling water from the fridge—no beer left! Should’ve gone to happy hour—then went out back to sit on the screened porch, under the ceiling fan, which was uselessly paddling the turgid air. It was the golden time of day, mellow spotlights of sun gleaming between the branches of the live oak trees. Quiet except for the squirrels chittering in the limbs and the whine of a distant leaf blower. It was so hot out there in the summer that he always had this second story porch to himself. His own little tree house. Down below, Otis’s white shed looked like the hut of a fairy-tale creature.

Their backyard was so totally enclosed by trees and shrubbery, they
could cavort around naked if they were so inclined. Caroline had done that very thing one morning, peeling off her sweaty clothes after her run. She’d never do anything like that now, not since her body had decided to betray her by aging, but he wished she would. He would take off his own clothes and join her. He pictured the two of them, frolicking in the backyard, a gleeful, world-weary middle-aged Adam and Eve who’d returned for a second honeymoon in a much smaller, homelier Garden of Eden. If he told Caroline about this fantasy, she’d either bring up dirty laundry or laugh her head off.

The longer Vic sat there, sipping the unsatisfying sparkling water, the more he became aware of the work that needed to be done all around him. The porch smelled musty and the screens looked green. He needed to pressure wash again, needed to replace some mushy boards on the deck, and repaint the whole thing. But before he did any of that he would check the NHC Web site.

“Daddy.” Suzi stood in the doorway, flushed and disheveled but determined, leaning on her crutches. “I’m sorry. I want to make cookies.”

“I’m sorry, too,” Vic said, rising out of the wicker chair.

“For what? You didn’t do anything.”

How could he even begin to explain what all he was sorry about? He was sorry she’d hurt her knee, sorry that he depended on her to prop him up, sorry that she’d been stuck in the role of the “only normal kid in the family.” He was sorry that poor Wilson had had to come live with them and that poor Ava and Otis had Asperger’s and sorry that his marriage had gone south and that he missed the days when it was just him and Caroline and sorry because Caroline felt so besieged and that he felt so inadequate that he was counting on a hurricane to blow their problems away. He was sorry that his life was slipping away while he sat on the porch feeling sorry. He was sorry that he was such a sorry son of a bitch.

“Forget it,” he told Suzi. “How about peanut butter with chocolate chips?”

* * *

Gigi and Vic were finishing up the training packets—six example packets and six testing packets. The readers had been hired by Human Resources and would show up at FTA the following day, ready to be trained.

Vic was not only helping Gigi make up her packets but also supervising the other test specialists in math, science, and social studies, and he needed to go over their training packets with them later that day. He and Gigi were taking too long to make hers up, because, basically, she couldn’t keep her mind on the task.

“If I have to read one more review of
The Incredibles
I’m going to kill myself,” Gigi said. There were entire classes at one high school that had written reviews of
The Incredibles
. “I’ve never seen that movie and I never will. Just the thought of it makes me sick.”

Vic smiled at her and picked up another essay to read.

Gigi pulled up the hood of her green sweater. “It’s like a refrigerator in here,” she said. “Aren’t you cold?”

Because Vic wasn’t seeing any bigwigs that day, he was wearing shorts and a polo shirt. He was cold, but it did no good to complain, because that’s the way management liked it. “Get some coffee,” he told her.

She shrugged. “Almost lunchtime.”

The bank of fluorescent lights above them emitted a high-pitched buzz. Vic’s left big toe throbbed. He wriggled it against the bumpy rubber sole of his sandal. Gigi’s horse Cisco Kid had stepped on it. He’d been holding Cisco while Ava tightened his girth, and the dumb horse moved sideways, planting his hoof on Vic’s sneakered foot. He hoped the nail wouldn’t turn black and fall off.

“How can you stand doing this day after day?” Gigi blurted out.

“I do it with half my brain tied behind me.”

“Is that any way to go through life?”

Why had he asked Gigi to work with him again? She hated work. She didn’t know how to work. She didn’t need to work. Her family had money. “We’re not all independently wealthy,” Vic told her.