Tuesday Night Miracles (21 page)

Grace tried to reach Karen, but Karen wasn’t home. She held out for an entire hour and drank two cups of tea. She finally broke down and called Evan. Sweet, kind Evan, with his dark everything, who looked at her every day at work as if he were a lovesick puppy.

He came quickly and pushed past Dr. Bayer, rushed to where Grace was sitting, immediately knelt down by her side, and wanted to know if she was okay.

Grace realized that having Dr. Bayer in her house was like being on live television. Dr. Bayer might look cute, standing there in her sweatshirt and tennis shoes, but under that cotton was a keen observer. She saw the crumbing house. She noticed the chipped cups, and that Kelli was a slob. And before she left she noticed the tall black man with lovely eyes who threw himself at Grace’s knees and promised to stay until Kelli arrived.

“Kelli, this is Evan. He was working late tonight and came to stay with me because I hurt my foot,” Grace told her daughter, totally leaving out the part about Dr. Bayer, the arrow, and her growing hatred of the woman who shot her in the foot.

Kelli stood in the doorway and looked at her mother, then at Evan, then back at her mother, and started to smile as if she had just remembered that she’d gotten a full ride to Harvard.

“Right, Mom,” Kelli said, laughing. “And I’m going to win the daughter-of-the-year contest.”

Evan was paralyzed. He had been sitting next to Grace and holding her hand. The moment Kelli walked in Grace didn’t just drop his hand; she shoved it about a mile away.

“What do you mean?” Grace asked, breaking out in a hot flash that was about to set a personal record.

Kelli totally ignored her lying mother and politely turned toward Evan, stuck out her hand, and said, “Evan, it’s nice to finally meet you. Thanks for babysitting my mom. Mom, let me know if I can help you when he leaves.”

Then Kelli rolled her eyes at her mother, threw her backpack on the kitchen table, and went down the hall to take a shower.

Grace had absolutely no idea what to do or say next. Evan closed his eyes, dropped both hands in his lap, got up, turned to leave, and then came back. He stood in front of her, closed his eyes, and then reached out to gently lay his hand on top of her head.

“You are a good woman, Grace,” he said softly. “I’m leaving now, but I’m not going anywhere.”

After he left, Grace sat alone in the dark living room for a very long time. Her foot ached, her head throbbed, and her heart felt like a dead weight that could drop out of her chest at any moment. She struggled to believe Evan and to fight off the old echoes of her mother’s voice that still occasionally ricocheted throughout her mind, telling her again and again what a disappointment she had become.

And damn that Jane, whose arrow had now triggered an avalanche of events. And yet she could still smile, because firing the rifles and shooting the arrows really was fun.

She fell asleep like that, grousing about Jane, thinking she might like to take Kelli shooting someday, with her bandaged foot resting on the coffee table that was held together with duct tape. But she woke up suddenly, well after midnight, and there it was. She had an idea about Jane; it was like a mild tickle in the back of her throat, and she couldn’t wait to get to work and scratch it, even if that meant she had to cross a very sacred line.

Leah and Kit took the evening’s chain of events in stride. As mothers, they had both seen and experienced a variety of physical tragedies—cut fingers, one broken arm, three bicycle accidents, an emergency appendectomy, a baseball bat to the head, and stitches times ten. That’s what happens when there are children in the house.

The arrow-in-the-foot seemed funny to them on the ride home from Bob’s. Funny in that thank-God-it’s-over kind of way when the victim is finally safe, the blood has been cleaned up, and everyone has safely limped away.

“It’s the last thing I thought would happen with adults doing this kind of thing,” Leah says.

“Well, yes, but then you have to consider Jane,” Kit says, as they pause at a stoplight. “She seems like an accident waiting to happen.”

Leah, who has learned the hard way to think before she speaks, pauses for a moment. Jane, to her, seems like a lost, hard soul. Something is clearly amiss.

“I think if I had to describe her in one word it would be
hollow
,” Leah says.

Kit thinks about that as they get close to the shelter. Maybe Leah’s right. Maybe Jane needs the attention to fill up that space inside her that’s so empty.

“I guess,” Kit says, pulling in front of the building. “But there’s something else about her, too. I hate to be catty but she seems so familiar, yet I can’t place her. And there’s something else, too.”

“Like what?” Leah asks, with her hand on the door.

“She’s almost mysterious, you know, but it’s like she has a secret. There’s something going on, something … I don’t know even how to say it.”

Leah smiles and opens the door. “I can barely keep my head above water,” she says, getting out of the car. “You worry about Jane, okay? And, in spite of the arrow-in-the-foot mess, I really had a blast tonight.”

Before Kit can say anything else, Leah has closed the car door, mouthed “Thank you,” and is halfway up the sidewalk.

Kit pulls away, hating herself for not asking Leah if she needed anything, if there was something she could do for her, and then thinking that perhaps her female ancestors had it right. Go to the bedroom, turn off the lights, take a pill, and everything goes away.

“Maybe I’m just as crazy as they all were,” she mutters, pulling away, and driving toward her empty house but also excited to tell Peter, or maybe even Ronnie, about the wild night she has just experienced.

Hours later, when the stars have decided to disappear and there is a blink of light rising from the black edges of the earth, Derrick wakes up when he hears his wife drunkenly snoring beside him.

He lies there for a few minutes and then lifts up his head to look at her. Jane is on her back. Her arms are flung over the top of her head and her mouth is open almost as wide as the rim of her favorite wineglass. Maybe he’d be snoring, too, if he had just shot someone with an arrow.

Maybe.

He turns to look at her while she stirs and turns onto her side. “Open up to me, please,” he whispers. “I can’t take much more.”

Frustrated, Derrick slips quietly from bed and moves across the floor to the walk-in closet. Jane is not moving. He expects she will lie in bed like this half the morning, because she will have another hangover. Then she will get up, promise herself that today will be new and different, and try really hard for at least thirty minutes to make that happen. But she will still keep so many of her emotions locked inside of her own heart.

He has no idea that she’s been writing down what makes her happy, that she has held the soft hand of a little girl, that she’s been thinking of going hiking again—without an official assignment.

“To hell with it all,” he mutters, moving into the closet.

He starts from the left side and first grabs the damned red stilettos she was wearing when she totally went off her rocker. He moves to the solid black ones and then the blue ones. He gathers them all up and walks silently down the steps, through the kitchen, and into the garage, where he throws them one at a time into the garbage bin.

Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam
. When the shoes hit the bin, they sound like little firecrackers. That’s what Jane used to be—a firecracker. Now she’s a time bomb.

All six shoes end up on top of yesterday’s white plastic garbage bag. Derrick walks back through the house, up the steps, and gets back into bed, where he shifts away from Jane and watches the night sky slip away.

He doesn’t go back to sleep, but an hour later Derrick Castoria goes back into the garage, removes all six shoes, carries them back to the closet, refuses to look at his wife, finally gets up to dress, and then silently leaves for work.

“Maybe it’s me,” he says, as he turns and throws his sleeping wife a kiss from the driveway. “But I don’t think it is.”

Derrick has no idea that his Jane, awakened by his rummaging in the closet, has heard and seen everything.

25

The Challenges of Change

P
hyllis absolutely hates winter. She was never the kind of cute little puppy who frolicked in the snow, tried to dig up old bones in the frozen ground, or begged to go for walks when there was frost on the window.

Tonight it’s so cold outside that when Phyllis puts her nose close to the metal door she’s tempted to pee on the brown braided rug by the front door. She’s done it before and, of course, paid the price. The thought of the punishment—the closed bedroom door with no access to her beloved Olivia while she sits in the big chair—is too much for Phyllis.

When Olivia opens the door and steps onto the little concrete porch, Phyllis does not walk or trot but runs to the first tree. She goes to the bathroom so quickly that Olivia doesn’t even have time to step onto the sidewalk.

Phyllis has managed to zip past Olivia and is actually thinking about barking to get the door open and get back inside. Phyllis barks about twice a year, and it’s usually because she’s so happy that she wants Olivia to know it, too.

It’s a mystery to Phyllis why Olivia doesn’t stay in that warm vacation place they go sometimes when Olivia gives her a tiny white pill, makes her get inside a cage—which she doesn’t mind because she’s so sleepy—and then opens the cage to let her out at some noisy spot with lots of people.

There is another very nice person in that warm place who constantly slips Phyllis red and green dog biscuits. And there are also so many tall waving trees to pee on there that Phyllis almost goes mad with excitement every time they go for a walk.

Tonight, though, there’s no escaping the cold. Olivia gladly lets Phyllis back into the house. It’s Thursday and Olivia has to figure out what to do with her wild clients the following week.

She walks into the kitchen, sticks a dog biscuit into her bathrobe pocket, grabs a mug from the shelf, and rummages in the cabinet for a tea bag.

She’s just as sick of the Chicago weather as Phyllis is. Her veterinarian told her that Phyllis feels the cold exactly like she does. Her bones hurt, the joints ache, and yes, even old dogs with fur coats love to bask in the warm weather.

“Soon, girl,” Olivia shouts from the kitchen as she dips her tea bag in and out of the water she has just heated in the microwave.

Phyllis settles on her cushion in the living room. She’s getting a little nervous. She hasn’t heard the ice cubes hit the glass, but Olivia is doing something in there. She lifts up her head and tries to look around the big chair to see what’s going on.

Olivia is just about to sit down when she realizes what lies ahead of her. Those four women. Flying arrows. A parade of mumbling. The Tuesday-night-excuse brigade. She manages a quick laugh. It’s only Thursday, but she must stay on top of these bad girls.

She turns back to the kitchen, reaches up and into the cabinet where she keeps her bottles of alcohol, grabs the whiskey, and pours it into her tea until the cup is so full that she isn’t certain she can make it to the chair without spilling any.

“What the heck,” she says, bending down to slurp some of the Jameson off the top. “It’s my anger-management medicine.”

The Tuesday-night file folders are already on the table when Olivia sets down her whiskey-laced tea, slumps into the chair with a huge sigh, and places the folders on her lap. It has been one hell of a week.

The great arrow adventure remains lodged right between Olivia’s shoulders, where a persistent ache that she has taken to calling “a high pain in my ass” has developed. She knows it’s stress, a bit of confusion, the cold weather, and the old bed she plans to burn the moment she leaves this house.

She picks up her cup and slowly sips her tea. There’s something about the bitter, burnt taste of whiskey that she absolutely loves. Her year’s supply is running low, and Olivia only hopes that her Tuesday-night whining warriors will let her live until the December holiday season.

During the past ten years, all of her friends have conspired to give her a year’s supply of whiskey during the Christmas holidays. It started out as a kind of joke, because Olivia is famous in her circle of friends for never drinking anything but the Jameson. Her pals got together and put fake labels on the bottles: Breakfast Bottle for January, Lunch Bottle for March, Evening Sit-in-Your-Chair-and-Work Bottle for August.

She can only hope that when she finally decides to get the hell out of Chicago the fabulous holiday gifts follow her.

But this isn’t the most festive night of the week—interesting, yes, but festive? Maybe just a little, because it’s the evening she has set aside to decide what to do next with her four angry women. Olivia puts down her tea and begins tapping the fingers of her right hand on the files that are staring at her from her lap.

The arrow in the foot really was an accident. She has never reported accidents before if they were minor, and Grace refused to get professional treatment. Well, actually, Olivia told herself, Grace professionally treated herself.

More important, something did happen in between the first rifle shot and the blood in the sawdust
.

The women let go of more than just arrows. Olivia saw it happening. She saw them begin to interact, and she convinced herself as she pulled into her driveway that even though the class had ended in semi-disaster, something positive did happen. And, in spite of the accident, she knows they all had fun.

The accident blossomed into the visit to Grace’s house, where Olivia discovered Grace has a boyfriend who is really not a boyfriend, because for some reason Grace is terrified to let a man into her life.

Could it be because he’s black? Or simply because he’s a man? Or maybe because of the wild teenage daughter, who was absolutely gracious and sweet?

Whatever the answer, Olivia knows that Grace has more than one issue on her plate, but she is also struck by how hard Grace must be working to keep her head above water. She knows a thing or two about being a single mother, and there isn’t one easy moment during the entire process.

Driving home from Grace’s house that night, Olivia made a decision not to tell her supervisor what happened. Now it’s time for her to move forward too.

Phyllis has started to nudge the chair with her rear end. Olivia gets the hint and dips into her pocket for a biscuit. She has a sip of her own treat as she slips her hand over the side and Phyllis gingerly takes the biscuit from her fingers.

Once, when she was much younger, Olivia treated a woman who claimed to be in love with her dog. It wasn’t the regular kind of love people have for their pets. It was a slightly insane kind of love. The woman slept with her black Labrador the way lots of people sleep with their pets, but she wanted to do more than just have the dog warm her bed.

This was when the woman had enough sense to come in and see Olivia. Unfortunately, it was the seventies and some goofballs had tried to marry their dogs, horses, pigs, and cows, and this was in Olivia’s pre-Phyllis years, when the mere thought of caring for a pet, on top of everything else, made her want to spontaneously start sobbing.

The woman eventually figured it out. The dog had to sleep on the floor, and the woman, ironically, ended up falling in love with a farmer, who convinced her that animals belong outside. The dog happily ended up in the barn, and Dr. Olivia Bayer realized that in her line of work she would never, ever be able to say, “Now I’ve seen everything.”

Lucky Phyllis gets to sleep on the end of the bed, and she’s smart enough never to wiggle out of bounds. Olivia can’t bear to think of her life without Phyllis, so she just doesn’t do it. One day at a time and one anger-management class at a time.

She picks up the four file folders and realizes that she doesn’t want to open them up. For a moment, she wonders if Leah and Kit connected. Then she thinks about Grace and hopes she can forgive Jane. A part of her would love to lock them in a room for a few hours without any sharp objects and then see what happens.

Of course, her heart aches the most for Leah. Leah, whom Grace knew to ask for help. Leah, whom, now that she thinks about it, she must hook up with her friend who runs the clothing cooperative that helps outfit women who have little or nothing and are trying hard to change their lives.

Jane is a huge question mark, and Olivia would like the chance to get her alone, which she may do, and ask her why she shot the arrow. Kit and Grace look alternately sad and upset, but Grace is the one who appears the most embarrassed by what she has done.

But what about the next assignment?

Olivia has a million ideas. A class like this for some smart people doesn’t have to last forever or very long at all. And these women are all smart and likable in their own interesting, if not confounding, ways.

“Eureka! Phyllis, I know exactly what the women need to do next!” Olivia says excitedly, moving her hand back and forth behind Phyllis’s right ear.

Phyllis has no idea what Olivia is talking about, but she adores the way Olivia knows how much she loves to have her ear rubbed. And something about the tone of Olivia’s voice—so soft, so low—makes Phyllis turn and gently lick Olivia’s hand very quickly.

Some people might call it a loving dog kiss, but Olivia calls it a sweet answer.

“I guess that means yes, eh?”

Phyllis kisses Olivia again.

Olivia is too tired to get up and get more tea. She wishes she could train Phyllis to use the microwave. Wouldn’t that be something! Olivia chuckles, thinking about the headline: “Old Psychologist Teaches Old Dog New Trick.”

This is when Olivia decides to double-dose the women. She’s going to send them on another secret mission and bring them back to class to talk about it. In front of each other. It’s time. She throws the folders back onto the table next to her and reaches for her cup of tea.

There is one sweet sip left, and the warmth of the cup is fading fast. Olivia lifts the cup to her lips and drinks the last few ounces as if they were liquid gold. Then she sets the cup down, closes her eyes, pushes her head back against the chair, and almost wishes she had trained Phyllis to sit in her lap. She lets her hand fall back onto Phyllis’s warm, furry back and feels her dog snuggle into her soft little bed.

“Wait until they get their next assignments, Phyllis,” Olivia says sleepily. “I’ll set everything up in the morning and have the envelopes hand-delivered tomorrow afternoon. I wish I could be there to see their faces when they open up their envelopes.”

Phyllis kisses Olivia one more time and then they both fall asleep, dreaming about warm hands, sunshine, and the possibilities every tomorrow brings.