Wish Club (19 page)

It did seem hopeless. She couldn’t do this without Dan on board, and it would probably take all of two seconds during the interview process before the social worker would know that Dan wasn’t on board. It was ridiculous to even try. But still, now that she was finally here, holding this little baby, she knew this is what she was supposed to do. She knew that somehow, making sure Elliot was going to be fine was her responsibility.

And where was Dan anyway? He’d said he would be here twenty minutes ago. Saturday traffic could be brutal, but this might be just another of his passive-aggressive protests.

They’d run separate errands this morning. Claudia had bought groceries and stopped by the cleaner’s. Dan had gone to get the oil changed in his car. He’d said he needed to run by his office to pick up some drawings he’d forgotten and that he also wanted to stop by Genesis Art Supply on the way back if he had time. Claudia was sure he’d make the time. Dan had said it would be easier if he just met her here, but now she was getting the sinking feeling he wasn’t going to show at all.

Claudia looked down at Elliot and snuggled him a little closer, amazed at the warmth he gave off. He fell back asleep in her arms, so precious and trusting, and she had to wonder, as she looked at his face, what she’d ever been afraid of.

Mara
was just getting to the good part of her book when she saw, from the corner of her eye, Henry climbing up the front steps. His key turned the front lock and Tippy hopped down off her lap in anticipation. She started reading more quickly, trying to get in as many words as she could before Henry got inside. She crammed in one more sentence while he shut the front door and walked over to her.

“Hi honey,” she said, closing her book, at the same time that Henry bent down to kiss her.

Mara tilted her cheek up for him and when he bussed it, she recoiled as if he’d scraped her face with thirty-grade sandpaper.

“Henry!” she complained, turning her face up to look at him.

Her eyes went wide.

“What?”

She stared back at him open-mouthed and pulled her legs up under herself on the chair. Mara crouched there, speechless, pointing at his face.

“Oh, this?” He rubbed the quarter inch of thick stubble that covered his chin and cheeks. “Yeah, I really need to shave. Didn’t mean to scratch ya, hon. Sorry.” He mussed her hair with his hand.

Mara sank back down in the chair with a sigh. He must not have shaved before going to the gym this morning—probably had over-slept and been in a hurry. Mara shook her head with relief. She shouldn’t let herself get spooked like that.

“I think I am going to call Dr. Bernstein today, though,” Henry said, turning toward the kitchen. “This hair stuff is getting a little too weird.”

She could see Henry rubbing his face with his hand again as he walked away.

“I shaved once this morning already.”

The
truck had its trailer wedged securely underneath the viaduct, ironically right underneath the yellow and black sign that read, 13' 10'', something, Dan imagined, the driver should have read before he tried driving underneath it. He tapped his hand on the steering wheel. Claudia was going to be pissed; he was already twenty minutes late.

The truck driver kept getting out of his cab, looking up at the viaduct and assessing his truck, then getting back in to talk on his radio. Dan watched from his car, penned in by traffic on all sides, positioned about six cars back from the scene of the accident. At one point, the man in the car directly behind the stuck truck had tried to wave it backward authoritatively, but the truck driver had just looked at him as if he were nuts. Now, the truck driver was hiding in his cab, apparently waiting for the police, or someone of authority, to arrive and untangle the mess.

Dan tried to call Claudia on her cell phone but she hadn’t picked up, and that’s when he figured she probably couldn’t have it on at the hospital. He left her a message, telling her he was stuck in traffic, but it sounded like the kind of thing he wouldn’t believe either. They both knew he didn’t want to go to the hospital to see this baby, but he had promised.

He’d been hoping Claudia’s idea that this was
going to lead to something
was just
going to go away,
but as the week had worn on, she’d only seemed more determined. He felt like the guy in the car behind the truck—tilting at windmills, trying to single-handedly unstick an impossibly stuck situation.

Two squad cars, a tow truck, and forty-five minutes later, Dan stood outside the nursery. The babies in the bassinettes all looked the same to him, with the exception of the one who was crying. Dan could hear his howls through the glass, his little red face screwed up under his blue cap. “That’s probably him,” Dan thought. He watched a nurse walk over and pick up the crying boy; she held him to her chest and patted his back. When she noticed Dan, she pointed off to his right and he went through the double doors to the nurses’ station.

The woman sitting behind the desk didn’t look up as he stood in front of her, ignoring him even after he’d cleared his throat. He was thinking there should be better security in a place like this, when the nurse he’d seen through the window came around the corner, no longer carrying the squalling boy, and asked if she could help him.

“I’m Daniel Dubois. I was supposed to meet my wife here a while ago, but—”

“About an hour ago, if I’m not mistaken.” She smiled at him. “C’mon.” She waved her hand for Dan to follow her. “I was just going to check on them. I think she was getting ready to leave pretty soon.”

They walked down a short hallway and the nurse stopped outside a room next to the nursery. She put her index finger over her lips and then silently mouthed the words, “in there,” while pointing inside. Dan could see Claudia in profile from the door; her hair was hanging down the side of her face, swaying back and forth as she rocked the baby in the glider, and she was humming Brahms’s Lullaby. Dan could see Elliot asleep in her arms, his face the picture of contentment, a little arm thrown back next to his shoulder in complete relaxation.

It might have been less of a surprise to him if he’d watched her go through an entire pregnancy, instead of just all of a sudden one day acting like someone’s mother. He stood watching silently, not wanting to interrupt this scene. He wished he could keep watching it indefinitely. She looked so relaxed, so confident—so oddly unlike Claudia. When she finally looked up and noticed him there, he could see that her face was the picture of contentment, too.

Chapter Eighteen

“Whoa,
whoa, whoa. Gimme that. Where’d you find this?” Gail grabbed the video out of Will’s hand.

“Andrew wants to watch a video,” Will said. “I was helping him get it—since he needs to take it easy.” Will made big eyes at her—all innocence and light.

Andrew was on the couch, his expression a mirror image of his brother’s.

“Well, I have no idea what’s on this.” Gail turned the unlabeled video over in her hand. “Why are you getting into these old video tapes? I had them in a bit of an order. What is it you wanted to see, Andrew?”

“Nokio.”

“Well, this isn’t Pinocchio. I don’t know what’s on this—old baby videos or vacation or something. Let me help you find Pinocchio.” Gail rummaged through the stack of videos forced to the back of their entertainment cabinet, having given way over time to the stack of DVDs that had replaced them. “Here it is.”

“Let me do it. I can do it.”

“Okay, here you go.” Gail gave the video to Will. “You guys got it under control now?”

“Yeah, we got it.”

The VCR ingested the videotape with a high-pitched wheeze and Will nodded at her vigorously, his shaking head saying,
go away.
She looked over at Andrew on the couch, his new inhaler resting on the coffee table in front of him—just in case. She frowned at it, hating it. Andrew smiled at her, too, the same
go away
expression on his face. Gail smiled back and left the room, heading into the kitchen with the mystery video in her hand.

She flipped it over again, as if hoping a label might appear. They had so many old VHS tapes, and the labels had fallen off a bunch of them, if they even had had them in the first place. Another project for another day: cleaning out the old videos. Probably half of them were ancient episodes of
All My Children,
material she didn’t want her children to see, but before she could get rid of any of them, she wanted to look through them all, catalogue them maybe, at least make sure they didn’t contain anything important.

Back when Will was first born, they used to have a VHS recorder, and she didn’t want to take the chance they’d accidentally throw away any VHS tapes of first steps or spaghetti dinners. It would take time to archive all those old tapes, figure out which ones she wanted to keep, and then she’d still have to take them in somewhere to have them converted to digital. It would take time she didn’t know where she’d find. It had been on her list of things to do for a couple of years now at least. Well, in light of everything that had happened recently, she certainly wasn’t going to
wish
for time to do something like that. She was still reeling from what she thought were the consequences of her last wish.

Andrew had had to stay in the hospital for two days and had been sent home with that inhaler. The doctor had said he would have to use it for as long a year, until his lungs had time to recover. Until then, no running, no sports: Andrew was to
take it easy.
Clearly, Gail thought, that woman had never tried to raise a five-year-old boy.

She sat down at her desk in the kitchen and booted up the computer, her fingers absently drumming the videocassette. A long, long time ago—back before the kids—she and John had used their video camera to make some home videos of their own. Gail smiled: their own private Paris Hilton–like “memoirs.” Come to think of it, where was
that
video? Gail stopped tapping the one under her hand.
Oh man, what if? Maybe I dodged more than a racy episode of
All My Children. That would have been God-awful. Terrifyingly embarrassing. Lord only knows—well, maybe Lindsay did, too—how much therapy it would require to recover from an incident like that.

John entered the kitchen, walking past her and over to the fridge. “What are you grinning at?” he asked, opening the door and leaning inside. “You look like you’re guilty of crimes.”

“Do you remember that old,
old
video we made? Right after college? At our first apartment on Wellington?”

John turned around and grinned at her, his hand still on the open refrigerator door. Not much else besides sex could take his mind off food. “Why yee-esss I do. Why’s that? Do you want to make another?” He gave her a mischievous grin.

Gail smirked back at him. “I was just wondering where it is. I haven’t seen it in ages and now, with the kids getting older…Do you remember where we hid it?”

“In a safe place so we’d know where to find it?” John took out the mayonnaise and the bologna and cheese and shut the door to the fridge. “I remember hiding it.” He laughed. “I just have no idea where.”

Gail didn’t say anything. She tapped the video under her hand again.

“Why? Did
you
want a
movie night
tonight?”

“No…I…That’s not what this is about. The boys had this.” She held up the tape. “And it’s unlabeled and I don’t know, it got me thinking. I guess I got a little concerned again—thinking about, you know,
what if
?”

John shrugged and pulled out the loaf of Wonder Bread from the breadbox, forgoing the Brownberry Whole Wheat. “I’m sure it’s around here somewhere.”

“Mmm.”

“If you’re worried about it, we can look. It’s got to be up in our room—or buried in a box in the attic from one of the moves. We’ll find it. I’m sure we didn’t give it away.”

“Give it away?” Gail’s voice was higher than usual.

“I’m saying I don’t think we gave it away.”

“When would we have given it away?”

“I’m sure we didn’t. All the stuff we’ve donated to the Brown Elephant has been clothes or books—albums and stuff. I don’t think we ever unloaded any videos.”

Gail did not feel comforted. She felt panicked.

John spread mayonnaise on both slices of bread before slapping his sandwich together. “If it’ll make you feel better, I’ll look around for it tonight. It’s probably up in the attic.”

Gail nodded. She ran her hand over the tape on the counter. Maybe this one was it; maybe it somehow got mixed in with the others during a move. Given away? Of course not.

John stuffed nearly half of his sandwich into his mouth in one bite.

“How can you be hungry? We just ate dinner.”

John smiled at her while he chewed. He winked at her and said, through a mouthful of pasty white bread, “As you should know, I’m a man with large appetites.”

The
large white canvas stretched out in front of Jill like an arctic landscape, cold and foreboding, freezing every ounce of creativity in her psyche. She sat on a metal stool in front of the abominable seventy-two by one-hundred-two-inch canvas with her arms crossed over her chest, her feet flat on the floor and her legs spread wide. The canvas hung on the back wall of her studio.
The big canvas. The anchor for her show.
It was an anchor all right. Every time she looked at it, she could feel it dragging her down.

What had happened? Everything had been going so well. She’d been on quite a roll getting ready for her show, and then—poof—nothing. All inspiration and motivation had stopped cold.

The thought that this might be some problem with her wish for creative inspiration crossed her mind. Could it be that her wish had backfired? This badly? It didn’t seem possible, because her first wish, the one that had brought her Marc, was going so well.

At least she had that going for her. And Marc was the best. It was ironic, she thought, how the less he pushed her for a commitment, the more she found herself thinking about one. The less he pushed her to
open up,
the less he tried to chip away at her shell, the more she felt compelled to crack it open.

So far, Marc had never once interrupted a comfortable moment of silence to ask, “What are you thinking about?” The
death sentence,
she called it. Whenever it came out of one of her boyfriends, Jill was tempted to run. And usually did. Marc didn’t spend all his time trying to get to know her better; he seemed to be just letting the relationship unfold—and how wonderful was that?

He’d started her portrait a week ago, having her pose in an off-the-shoulder, red velvet dress in which her black hair framed an enticingly exposed décolletage. Marc hadn’t let her see the painting while he worked, wanting her to wait, to see only the finished product. Although once, when he’d left the room, she’d stolen a peek.

Even though she’d already gone back to her side of the studio, and was stretching her neck and back, when he’d walked back into the room, he knew.

“You peeked.” He stood behind the canvas again, holding his brush.

“No I didn’t.” Jill adjusted herself in her chair, returning to her pose.

He narrowed his eyes at her, staring. “You peeked.”

“I did not.”

“Don’t lie to me, Jilly girl.” He’d been smiling when he’d come over and sat on top of her, straddling her, pressing her down into the chair with his weight. “I have a way of dealing with models who lie to me.”

“You don’t scare me. I’ve seen the way you
deal
with your models, remember?”

And he’d dealt with her right then. On the modeling platform in the middle of the floor of his studio.

Today, during the five hours and forty-three minutes she’d been sitting in her studio, Jill had mulled that scene over and over in her mind. She’d mulled a lot of scenes over and over. She just hadn’t
painted
any. She was starting to panic. The opening at Eleventh House was less than two weeks away and she didn’t have anywhere near the amount of pieces she wanted—the amount of pieces she
needed
if she wanted to break out. She knew she should probably forgo this big canvas and just get on with some smaller ones; that had been her plan in the first place. Only one or two more would have done it, but she’d gotten all wrapped around the axle with this big one and now she wasn’t going to be ready.

This had never happened before. Jill was always ready. Always prepared. Always professional. Sure, she had enough for a smaller show, but what had Greta said: that the finished pieces were
fine, but the quantity was a little thin?
She’d given Jill a judgmental, motherly look, a look that had torn her up more than she cared to admit. And now the pressure was really on, because she’d gotten a great preview in
Chicago
magazine, which meant there would probably be a crowd. She’d already sold one of the paintings to the City of Chicago, too, which was great, but now it meant that the quantity of available paintings was even more
thin.

As her panic began to rise, so did her drinking. Each night she had a martini, and then, when it didn’t make her feel any better, she had another, and then some nights, another. Falling asleep eventually, she would wake up two or three hours later and be unable to fall back asleep until just before dawn. It was then, between six and sometimes noon—when she finally emerged from bed—that she had the dreams.

Winter dreams. Snow dreams. Crawling though white shag carpeting dreams. One night she’d dreamt she’d stumbled upon two albinos having sex on a white sand beach.

No psychoanalysis was necessary for her to figure out where the dreams where coming from; she’d been staring at seven thousand, three hundred and forty-four square inches of pure unadulterated white space for six hours a day, every day, for the past two weeks.

This kind of thing, this loss for ideas, this “painter’s block,” had never happened to her before. She always had ideas. In fact, she always had too many ideas, so many ideas she never had time to execute them all. There were some she’d been meaning to get to for years. And now…well now, they all just seemed so dumb. This, too, had never happened to her before. Sure, a few times she’d gone back to an old idea, rethought it and then concluded it wasn’t timely anymore, or maybe it just wasn’t anything she was interested in doing anymore, but she had never thought of any of her old ideas as
dumb
before.

Jill squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her knuckles into them, then opened them onto the blank canvas, hoping the swirling colors burned into her retinas might inspire something on the great white canvas. They didn’t.

She reached over to the side table, grabbed her palette knife, and began scraping the big globs of paint off of her mahogany board and into the trash.

Was this Wish Club’s fault? Was this all because of her wish for creative inspiration? Her stomach twisted into a knot. She’d been against all the wishing, all the witchy nonsense, at the beginning. Maybe she should have stood by her original feelings, because now here she was staring at her big, blank canvas unable to paint a stroke. It seemed to her that the wish had stopped up her creativity with the worst case of imagination constipation she’d ever had.

Creative inspiration.
Goddamn it, why had she done it?

Because of Marc. Because things with Marc had been going so great, that’s why. Because everyone else in Book Club had done it, too. They’d all made wishes—for fame and fortune, success. Maybe she should call Lindsay, or Gail, to see if their second wishes were coming true. To see if their second wishes were going as badly as their first wishes had gone well.