What I Had Before I Had You (13 page)

As Laura and Courtney rise to the level of the porch door, I realize I am standing in plain sight. I dive behind a parked car and try not to breathe. My feet must be visible under the car, I think, and then stop myself. This is not an episode of
MacGyver
. Nobody is looking for me. My sisters move across the porch, and Laura knocks on the front door. Through the screen, they look as ghosts should look: filmy, remote. Sepia-toned. Laura yells, “Mo-oooom.”

The door swings inward, revealing the soft dark of an unlit daytime house, and a woman appears. My sisters move toward the woman with clear familiarity. They move as if they love her. This woman: the pale, tall woman with the chestnut hair. The grocery-store woman. “Did you lose your key?” she asks them.

Laura and Courtney step out of their flip-flops and smack them against the porch screen, showering sand. “No pockets,” says Courtney. “We rented a movie.” And then the house swallows my sisters, these sisters who are not my sisters, and I am an only child once more. The door shuts with the groan of heat-swollen wood, and I stand up in the street.

My sisters have a mother who is not my mother. The faith that I have held, the hope, magical or insane, that the tall tales of my childhood are true, vanishes through the closing door of a rented beach house. As I stand staring at the house in the failing afternoon, I clasp my hands together and squeeze because I have never felt so disconnected from people. There are no ghosts, there are no guardians, there is no God, no father, no whispers from a general consciousness. There is only this newly severed mind of mine, shivering with logic and with loneliness.

ALTOGETHER, WE RECOVER
only nine of the joy boxes. When the utilities start shutting off, I dig through the piles of junk mail and bills on the coffee table and learn that what we have would only begin to cover what we owe. It takes all my willpower to speak to my mother, but I make myself ask the necessary questions: “Is there any other account? Is this all we have?”

She pauses for a long time, holding her scissors aloft above the coupon page of the Pennysaver, and then says yes, it is. The electricity goes first, and then the gas. She digs a fire pit in the backyard like a Boy Scout. She rings it with stones and fills it with sand. She cooks a risotto this way and sets the table with our holiday silverware just to show me that she will not be beaten by gas or light. Her strength, she says, comes from the earth itself, from the mercy and the will of God.

 

9

K
ANDY'S DAUGHTER, MELANIE,
climbs onto her lap where we sit in the screened-in sunroom, braces her small bare feet against the wicker sofa, and nestles. Kandy nudges the plate of chips and salsa closer to me on the table. “You should eat something,” she says. All the unbroken chips are gone; we have delayed dinner for hours. I stuff my mouth obediently. Carrie takes a single chip and holds it in her hands. The cordless phone sits on the table, poised to ring. I feel irrelevant now that Kandy is here to take police phone calls, to make up our beds, to feed my daughter.

Every time I see Kandy, I have to relearn her: no longer the bleached-blond sexpot of my adolescence but this softened, effective brunette person. After she ran out of new drugs to try, after her father died, after she watched her disciples from our old Emerald crew burn out one by one and turn into parking-lot loiterers, assembly-liners, data-entry clerks nursing terrorist fantasies, she surprised everyone by applying to college at twenty-two. By her senior year, she was utterly changed. She went on to earn a master's in social work, and now she is a grief counselor. Her mother still lives in Ocean Vista, which is why she came back to settle here after all her brothers fled. She married a gentle electrician ten years her senior, and she seems wholly satisfied with her life. It boggles my little mind.

When we got Daniel's diagnosis, Kandy was the only person I told outside the family. It wasn't that other people didn't sympathize, but there was always that note of condescension in their “oh nos” and their “mm-hmms” when I told them that Daniel had bitten me or thrown a fit on the school bus. That twinge of not-my-problem. Kandy just listened. It's possible that I was better able to talk to her because she'd known me when I was wild myself, and I'd known her when she was wilder still. For sixteen years we have talked on the phone most Sunday nights.

I make female friends rarely, but when I do, I find myself acting slightly different: bubblier or quieter or more intellectual, or less. These small calibrations wear me out; I am exhausted after spending time with women. With Kandy, I don't have to recalibrate, and I feel the danger of that authenticity now. I am untethered.

In the backyard, among the artificial boulders and potted shrubs, Kandy's son, Ricky, is tending an enormous propane grill. He's a good-looking kid, quiet and quick with strength. A baseball kid, not a football kid, and just the right number of years older than Carrie to make her visibly nervous. She texts fiercely to prove she's not looking at him.

Kandy gets up to check on something in the kitchen, and little Melanie stares at us baldly. “Maybe somebody kidnapped Daniel,” she says, and waits for the explosion of this idea into our unprepared minds. “At school we had an assembly about how sometimes there are kidnappers and they give you something, like candy or something, and they tell you they'll give you a ride home.”

“And then what happens?” I ask. Carrie gives me a disgusted look.

“Then they take you away.”

“Where do they take you?”

“Their house.”

“What do you do there?”

Melanie watches herself point and flex her feet on the Hawaiian-floral sofa cushions until she thinks of an answer. “Watch TV.”

I laugh. Carrie gets up abruptly and storms through the screen door into the backyard. The patio is lit by a row of floodlights. I watch her wander along the dark perimeter, kicking small stones. The evening has turned chill, and she has put on a black hoodie with a glittering skull and crossbones on the back. Ricky turns and says something to her, and she ambles over, letting her hair fall in her face, gesturing dismissively toward the house. She hooks her fingers in her belt loops and hunches, trying to be shorter than he is. I want to call her back inside, but I can't think of a pretense.

I DON'T KNOW
when Carrie became this new person, and that is exactly what implicates me. Where was I? What was I doing? Slipping off in secret, driving from office to gym to store, over-occupied by the small things, worrying about Daniel, dealing with Daniel, placating Daniel? In what sand did I bury my head so deeply that I missed it? I imagine her writhing on her bed, shedding her skin, moving from a larval to a pupal state, Sam sitting at her bedside and me off somewhere, oblivious, fucking the bike-store guy.

I remember Carrie's face as she got off the bus after her first day of sixth grade, gravely concerned. There was some kind of virus going around. It was a virus only girls could catch. It made the rims of their eyes all black. After I recovered from a long teary-eyed laugh in the backyard with Sam, I showed her a stick of eyeliner, how to put it on, what it looks like when you put on too much. We made ourselves into ghouls in the bathroom mirror. She wasn't so tall then; the top of her head fit under my chin. We pretended to be a totem pole.

Now she highlights the tear duct; she knows how to blend and foil. She uses the cosmetics companies' color language: aubergine, slate, champagne. I am not the kind of mom to forbid a little pigment, but the aggregation of this and other small changes has made Carrie difficult to recognize. She is embarrassed to use Kleenex in public and so just sniffles. The corners of her mouth turn down when she is aware of herself; she hides her face behind hair that she allows to tangle and muss. She wears legging jeans and belted tunics, and I have no idea where she gets them. I could never read her thoughts, or anyone's, but I used to be able to read her face. In my mind, her true thoughts pour into her phone through her quick-tapping fingers, and every word she says to me is false.

What will I do the next time I eat Froot Loops and Sam is not there? Who will steer the ship? I had hoped it would be Carrie, but now I see that I can't impose that on her, too. When there were four of us, she leaned heavily on Sam. Someone to share a grimace with when Daniel or I went snappish, someone to remind us all of rules and regulations. If she knew that I had been unfaithful to Sam, it would push her over the edge. She'd be his entirely, and lost to me.

Even before Daniel's diagnosis, there was a sense that he and I were of a kind, and Sam and Carrie were something else. Daniel stepped on a bee when he was three just to see what it would feel like. Carrie was afraid of everything. She wouldn't get on half the playground equipment. When I call Daniel into the kitchen for pill time, Carrie buries her face in a magazine. At first I thought she was ashamed of us. But I don't think that's it. Daniel and I get to blame our bad days on chemicals in the brain. There are pills for what ails us. But for Carrie there is nothing. She must soldier on through life, alone and normal.

WE EAT AROUND
Kandy's oval dining room table. Her husband, the electrician, plunges a fork into his chili with enviable resolve. Carrie is moving salad around on her plate and communicating nonverbally with Ricky. They are having a whole conversation of eyebrow twitches and mouth shapes. Carrie: incredulous grimace. Ricky: comforting shrug. Carrie, with her eyes:
Did you see that stupid thing my mom just did?
(What? What did I do?) Ricky, with a slight clench of jaw: acknowledges humor. Carrie manifests attractive sadness. I can see them drawn together by circumstance. He will comfort her, she will pretend to need comforting. Later she will slip out some agreed-upon side door to rendezvous with him and roar off in someone's parents' station wagon for a night of empty and premature firsts.

Kandy is talking about Melanie's recent school play, in which she played both Maria von Trapp and a piglet somehow. I missed the beginning. Kandy is trying to keep it light. The chili is mostly beans and makes me miss Texas-style. I keep spooning through, hoping for meat. It's not working like food is supposed to work; each bite makes me hungrier. I push back my chair, and Kandy stops talking midsentence.

“I can't stay in here when he's still out there,” I say. The electrician is the only one who nods understandingly. “Come on, Carrie.”

“Mo-om!”

“What?” I feel sweaty and contradictory. It's getting Carrie out of the house that I'm interested in, as much as looking for Daniel and getting away from this pleasant, claustrophobic home. My sisters glimmer at the corners of my mind, their hair under the street lamps, their forms receding into shadow.

“I'm staying here,” says Carrie in a sharp sliver of a voice. “That's what the policeman said to do.”

“I need you to come with me,” I say. Ricky and Melanie watch our volley, fascinated. Disobedience is unfamiliar to them. How has Kandy pulled that off?

“Why should I?”

“I'm not asking.”

“Fuck you!” Carrie yells, and runs from the room, accidentally snagging the tablecloth so that her fork clatters to the floor and flecks the baseboard with chili.

Kandy sets her napkin on the table, though she has barely had a chance to taste the food she cooked. “Why don't
I
come with you?” she suggests, and I know it is the kind of suggestion that nurses make on closed wards: Why don't you take this pill? Though of course she is trying to help. Everyone is trying to help.

When we get out to the car, Carrie is sitting on the hood with her head in her hands. She jumps down and bugs her eyes out at me. “I don't have the thingy.” She mimes the clicker with her hand. I fish it out of my purse and unlock the car, and as I walk around to the driver's side, I hear my daughter tell Kandy she can have the front seat. On the way into town, the stoplights are all green.

 

10

T
HE OFFICIAL POLICE
reports will say that the fire at the Emerald started around ten
P.M.,
that the probable cause was bad wiring, and that it was purely accidental. If you ask any cop in Ocean Vista, though, he'll say that the actual cause was my mother, who showed up grease-stained and filthy at the fire department, rang the bell for service, and rode in the fire truck back to the blaze. “I was cleaning,” she said. “Is cleaning a crime?”

I am at Pam's when it happens. Kandy has begged off due to some family obligation, and Pam and I are lying on her bed on our elbows, talking over reruns of
I Love Lucy
on her little rabbit-ears TV. There is a knock on Pam's window, and she tumbles over to open it, revealing that public school girl with all the piercings. Does she often come by?

“Hey.” The girl's face is sweaty. “Hey. The Emerald's fucking burning down. Right fucking now. Come on.”

We fly out the back door, Pam's mother calling after us, “Girls? Girls?,” and we don't stop—Pam knows where to cut through backyards to get there the fastest. Her house is much closer to the water than mine is, so we just run for it, almost as if the Emerald is a friend in peril whom we must save. We stop to pick up the public school girl when she trips over uneven sidewalk, and we laugh, punchy with excitement.

We approach the Emerald from the rear, and there is already a crowd gathered to watch in that scrubby field. The fire truck is parked up close, firemen yelling to one another and reeling out a yellow hose flat as Scotch tape. The windows on the sixth floor glow, and there is a crackling, rumbling sound that we might attribute to a heavy vehicle on gravel far away if we couldn't see that the loudest noises correspond to bursts of flame through the windows of the honeymoon suite. The fire lights the field to an uncanny gold, and outside its reach, the darkness deepens. Pam and I stand close together and watch, exclaiming sometimes over debris falling from the high windows, or the incredible power of the stream of water that the firemen send through the window of the honeymoon suite, that same window we swung out of only weeks ago.

It takes the firemen half an hour to tame the fire. It is more contained than it first appeared. From our vantage point on the ground, the fifth floor seems to be charred, but the fourth looks all right, and the building stands. What a miracle, people whisper in the field, that this never happened with all those teenagers inside. Later, after they investigate, they will tell us that the Emerald is full of death-trap wiring: old ungrounded power outlets and dangling ends of copper wire. It could have burst into flame at any moment, unaided. The toys have all melted out of the paint and the paint escaped skyward in toxic fumes. The sofas are skeletal. The mural is gone. That whole wall is gone. They will find buckets melted fast to the exposed floor struts, and traces of various household solvents, as well as a nylon-bristle scrub brush charred bald.

When I go home, exhausted and a little somber, I find cops waiting outside my house. “Are you Olivia Reed?” they ask me. “Your mother's at the station house. We need you to come with us.”

OF COURSE IT
is not a crime to clean, but it is a crime to trespass, so my mother is charged with a misdemeanor and held all night. I imagine that her misdemeanor is the very same one I wiggled out of by jumping out the window at the Emerald that night; it has been hovering mosquitolike, waiting for a Reed, any Reed, having gotten the taste for us. The police question my mother at length while I sit in the gray-green bucket chairs of the room reserved for the detention of minors. A chubby policewoman babysits me, every now and then offering me a magazine or a stick of gum. I am asked if I would like to be picked up by a responsible third party—a neighbor or a friend—but I say no, there is nobody. I want to see her face, to know for sure.

Here's what I think happened: The mural wouldn't come off the wall with Brillo pads and turpentine or Drano or acetone paint thinner, so she tried heat. Just like that. The next logical step. She wanted to erase my new life.

A police officer enters the room. It's the cartoon hound dog, though he looks more or less human tonight. He sighs, recognizing me, but goes ahead with his question: “Does your mother have any medicines she needs with her?”

I shake my head.

“Any pill bottles in the bathroom, anything like that?”

“I know what medicine is.”

He leaves, and I am dozing when the door opens again. James is there in the doorway, looking mussed and woebegone. The policewoman hands him a clipboard so he can sign me out like a library book.

“Where is she?” I ask him. “Is she arrested?”

“I don't know. Let's get you home.” I am not supposed to see my mother, but I do as we pass the cell block, through a glass pane in a door. She is pacing like a jungle cat behind a black aluminum folding table. I have my answer in the sly squint of her eyes, her dry-gummed grin. I am tired of being this woman's daughter. I look at her and think,
This woman.
“What did you do?” I shout through the glass, and she rushes to the door.

James puts his hands on my shoulders to steer me away, but I am already going as she shouts a string of our old jokes in response, “Olivia bunny rabbit light of my life!” and then, “Be safe, my love! Be safe, be safe, be safe!”

James drops me off at home and doesn't even come in the house. This stings; I was counting on his insistence that I eat and then sleep, his disapproval of the filth in our house, his snore. I wonder what he told the police to be able to sign me out. Alone, I have nobody to push against, and the house feels full of watchful and malevolent ghosts. I whistle for Blanche, and we run together all the way to Kandy's house, where at least I can watch TV unobserved, and do, until morning, when her brothers descend on the living room and change the channel to wrestling.

MY MOTHER DOESN'T
come home. I send Jake into the precinct to ask after her, since my going would risk the disclosure that I am unattended. He comes out, blinking in the sun, to our rendezvous point in the park across the street, and says that she was released with a warning at seven in the morning. Jake cups my jaw with his hand in a gesture that is too full of tenderness for me to bear right now. I spit in the grass. “Fuck her,” I say.

Later I search my mother's bedroom and see that her suitcase is gone, and a few clothes. James must have come in the night. I wonder what it would be like if she never came back. I picture our house swallowed by ivy and the tomatoes gone wild. I make pancakes on a griddle over the fire pit and sit alone in the backyard eating them, watching the neighbor boys watch me from their living room window. Their little eyes rise beady above the level of the couch back, wide in horror, I think, at the way I have to live. I raise a pancake to my brow in salute, and they duck out of frame.

THE MORE I
know about Jake, the more exotic he seems: a boy born to privilege slumming it with shore scum like me and Kandy, and managing to come off like the worst of us. He played Little League as a kid but quit over an unjust call. He lost his virginity when he was fourteen to his adult cousin's date at a wedding in Colorado. I'm the only one who knows how much better he does in school than the slackers he hangs out with; he makes A's when he doesn't cut.

Ever since the joy boxes, Jake has been buying me things. He makes a killing selling weed. He says he is saving for something big and that he'll know it when he sees it, which sounds to me like a fantastic luxury. Every couple of months, he drives to New York to pick up a package from his dealer, whom he refers to, reverently and frequently, as Max. Usually, a package costs him about two thousand dollars, and he makes four times that from the suckers in our town.

“How much do you have saved?” I ask him.

“Sixteen thousand.”

“From
weed
?”

“And work. And bar mitzvah.”

Max gets shipments of weed from a grower and distributes them to dealers, some small-time underage kids like Jake, some full-timers. Jake explains how he met Max at a Bad Religion show in Brooklyn last summer, how they hung out socially before Max cut him in, so he'll always get a good rate.
Cut him in.
It sounds to me like a gangster movie, all glitz and plans gone awry, late-night trysts, ducking into trash cans as packs of muscle-bound cops thunder by.

Jake has been to Holland, Japan, Mexico, and Vietnam. On these vacations, he has gone bike trekking and gotten scuba-certified. At a restaurant in Mexico, he danced salsa with dark-haired women who stroked his neck and giggled to each other in Spanish. In Vietnam, his dad dared him to eat a still-beating snake's heart in a shot of snake's blood, and he did it.

Jake takes me to his house. It is like my house only insofar as it has been a closed museum. I am the first girl he has let inside, he tells me. It is like walking into a furniture catalog, everything clean, a generic architecture book square to the corner of the coffee table. I see his bed, I sit on it, I lie on it, we whisper in it. Jake says he can't sleep here—he misses the rusty bed in the dead green room on the beach. It is so private to lie in someone else's bed. I can feel his thoughts rising from the pillow.

He asks me if I like it, his house, and I say sure. How can I find fault with this place? How can it make me anything but jealous? It is a palace with carpets that feel like fur on bare feet and cutting-edge design elements, a chandelier of prisms in the kitchen that cast tiny rainbows across the creamy marble counters. Everything in shades of white. Jake's mother lists these shades for me, leaning against her electric cooktop in a charcoal skirt suit: ecru, eggshell, snow, off-white, pure white, white sand, lily.

Jake holds his hands behind his back and keeps from looking at me while his mother leads me on a brisk tour. “This is the dining room!” she says. “This is the downstairs bath!” I count the rooms: twenty, not including storage closets and the two staircases, one straight, one spiral. “And this,” Jake's mother says, holding up her arm like Vanna White to showcase the shelves of canned artichoke hearts and the bulk bags of basmati rice, “is the pantry!”

I ask her why they live in Ocean Vista year-round when they could afford a suburban plot in Connecticut or a Brooklyn brownstone.

“She doesn't pull any punches,” she says to Jake. “I like her, Jacob!” Jake stares at the floor. I have never seen him like this. His mother goes on to say, curling her hair around her pinkie finger, that it's the air. The sea air is good for Jake's father's system. When Jake's mother says “system,” he will explain later, she is referring to his father's cancer of the intestine, which requires him to drive to New York City once a week for an afternoon of radiation.

Jake's father works at a flavor factory in the big industrial park a few miles down the parkway, engineering the tastes of everyday food. He sits at the kitchen table with a newspaper unfolded around the mass of his belly, and when Jake introduces me, he offers me a tiny packet of yellow liquid. “You know how they say everything tastes like chicken?” I nod, unsure. “You know, ‘Mmm, tastes like chicken'? Taste that. Taste it.”

Jake rolls his eyes. I squeeze a drop of the liquid onto the back of my hand and lick it off. Rotisserie chicken.

“Well, there's a reason.” Jake's father hooks his thumbs in the belt loops of his khakis and rocks back on his heels, his laughter ricocheting off the white surfaces. Later we make chicken-flavored milkshakes, and when Jake says he can't wait to get out of this shithole, I pretend to commiserate. He has no idea how good he has it.

ONCE AGAIN, I
own my mother's house. I come and go as I please, through the front door. I chat with my sisters sometimes. I drink my mother's wine. I raise a glass to the babies, I spill a drop on their pillows not to be withholding. I realize quickly what I have to offer. It was my fault that we lost the Emerald, and now I can prove my loyalty and trustworthiness to my crowd. I put out the word: We need a new place, I got one, but give me twenty-four hours to clean.

When I say this to Kandy, she laughs, but she hasn't been over in weeks, not since I made the hole in the wall. She almost vomits when she walks in. Dog shit and rotting food, maggoty scraps of chicken skin, moths beating their wings at all the lamps. The water has been turned off, so the toilet won't flush. Pam brings surgical masks and brooms. James comes by to check on me just as we are starting, and when he sees what we're up against, he goes home for his Shop-Vac and a supply of gloves. Nobody seems to blame me for the filth. It seems organic to the house and the situation.

It is hot and vile work, and the single battery-powered oscillating fan cools only one person for one moment before moving on. Pam and I take a break to lie on our backs in the yard and chug soda. Blanche chews on a Nylabone; all her legitimate dog toys are stolen from other dogs' yards. Pam grabs the Nylabone and waves it around in a way that frustrates Blanche, who wants to chew, not play. Pam gives up and props herself on her elbow beside me. She puts her hand behind my neck and pulls my head toward hers. I resist. Nobody is watching us. “We don't have to anymore.”