A Spool of Blue Thread (21 page)

While she was flipping through her mail the other day, she’d grown gradually aware that he was speaking to her. “Hmm?” she’d said absently, slitting an envelope. Then, “ ‘Wealth management,’ ” she had said, biting off the words. “Don’t you hate that phrase?” and Denny had said, “You’re not listening, dammit.”

“I’m listening.”

“When I was a kid,” he told her, “I used to daydream about kidnapping you just so I could have your full attention.”

“Oh, Denny. I paid you a
lot
of attention! Too much, your dad always says.”

He just cocked his head at her.

Not only had she paid him attention, but she had secretly taken more pleasure in him than in any of the others. He was so full of life, so fierce. (In fact, he sometimes brought Dane Quinn to mind—her renegade ex-boyfriend, killed these many years ago in a one-car accident.) And he could delight her with his unexpected slants of vision. Last month, rolling up the supposedly dusty rug in the little boys’ room, he had paused to ask, “Did you ever think how conceited those Oriental rug weavers are, to believe they have to
try
and make a mistake so as not to compete with God? Like they would have done it perfectly otherwise, if they hadn’t forced themselves to mess up!” Abby had laughed aloud.

Maybe when he was grown, she remembered thinking during his childhood, he would finally tell her what used to make him so angry. But then when he was grown she had asked him, and he had said, “I don’t know, to be honest.”

Abby sighed and watched a schoolboy walk past, bowed low beneath an overstuffed backpack.

This porch was not just long but deep—the depth of a smallish living room. In her early years here, when she was a gung-ho young
housewife, she had ordered an entire suite of wicker furniture varnished the same honey-gold as the swing—a low table, a settee, and two armchairs—and arranged them in a circular “conversational group” at one end of the porch. But nobody wanted to sit facing away from the street, and so gradually the chairs had migrated to either side of the settee and people once again sat in a straight line gazing outward, not at each other, like passengers on a steamship deck. Abby thought that summed up her role in this family. She had her notions, her ideas of how things ought to be, but everyone proceeded as he or she liked, regardless.

She looked down through the trees and saw a flash of white: Heidi’s mane feathering as she pranced homeward, followed by Nora wheeling the stroller in her sashaying, aimless way. Without even thinking about it, Abby bounded up from the swing like a much younger woman and slipped into the house.

The front hall still smelled of coffee and toast, which ordinarily struck her as cozy but today made her feel claustrophobic. She headed straight for the stairs and climbed them swiftly. She was out of sight by the time she heard the thump-thump of Sammy’s stroller being hauled up the porch steps.

Her study door—Denny’s door now—was shut, and a heavy silence lay behind it. His schedule had not reset itself as she had first imagined it might. He was still the last one to bed every night and the last one up in the morning, emerging at ten or eleven o’clock in his battle-weary outfit of olive-drab T-shirt and none-too-clean khakis, his face creased from his pillow and his hair hanging limp and greasy. Oh, Lord.

“Who said, ‘You’re only ever as happy as your least happy child?’ ” she’d asked Ree in last week’s pottery class.

“Socrates,” Ree answered promptly.

“Really? I was thinking more along the lines of Michelle Obama.”

“Actually I don’t know who said it,” Ree admitted, “but believe me, it goes a whole lot farther back than Michelle.”

You wake in the morning, you’re feeling fine, but all at once you think, “Something’s not right. Something’s
off
somewhere; what is it?” And then you remember that it’s your child—whichever one is unhappy.

She circled the hall to close the door to the little boys’ room, a distracting welter of clothes and towels and parts of toys. Legos would bite the soles of your feet if you ventured in without your shoes on. She backtracked to her own room, stepped inside, and shut the door soundlessly behind her.

The bed was still unmade, because she’d wanted to get downstairs and eat a peaceful breakfast before Nora and the little boys came down. (Oh, the exhausting enthusiasm of small children hurling themselves into each new day!) Now she pulled up the covers and hung her bathrobe, and she folded Red’s pajamas and tucked them beneath his pillow. On workdays Red dressed in the dark, and he always left a mess behind.

This was the room that had seen the fewest occupants: just Mr. and Mrs. Brill, then Junior and Linnie, then Red and Abby. The armoire in the corner was the Brills’, in fact, because it had been too massive for the downtown apartment they’d moved to. And the other furniture was Junior and Linnie’s, although the decorative objects were Abby’s—the framed color print from her childhood showing a guardian angel hovering behind a little girl, and her mother’s glass-slipper pincushion stuffed with velvet, and the little Hummel fiddler boy Red had given her when they were courting.

She heard Nora’s voice downstairs, low and unintelligible, and a crowing sound from Sammy. A moment later there was a scratching at her door. She opened her door and Clarence slipped in. “I know, sweetie,” Abby said. “It’s very noisy down there.” He circled on the rug a few times and then lay down. Good old Clarence. Brenda.
Whoever. Abby did know this was Brenda if she bothered to stop and think about it.

“It’s like when you’re drifting off to sleep and a gear sort of slips in your head,” she would tell Dr. Wiss. “Have you ever had that happen? You’re having this very clear thought, but then all at once you’re on this totally
other
illogical, unconnected thought and you can’t trace it back to the first one. It’s just tiredness, I imagine. I mean, once about five or ten years ago—oh, long before I was old—I had to drive home alone from the beach late at night to keep an appointment the next morning, and I suddenly found myself in this very scary neighborhood in Washington, D.C. And I could swear I’d managed to do it without crossing the Bay Bridge! I don’t know
how
I did it. To this day I don’t know. I was tired, was all. That was all it was.”

Or last December, when the McCarthys had invited her and Red to a Christmas concert along with a bunch of their other friends, and she had been so chatty and confiding with the man who happened to be seated next to her but then discovered, by and by, that he was a total stranger, had nothing to do with the McCarthys and no doubt thought she was a lunatic. Just a skip in the record, that was. You can see how it might happen.

“And time,” she would tell Dr. Wiss. “Well,
you
know about time. How slow it is when you’re little and how it speeds up faster and faster once you’re grown. Well, now it’s just a blur. I can’t keep track of it anymore! But it’s like time is sort of … balanced. We’re young for such a small fraction of our lives, and yet our youth seems to stretch on forever. Then we’re old for years and years, but time flies by fastest then. So it all comes out equal in the end, don’t you see.”

She heard Nora climbing the stairs. She heard her say, “No, silly-billy. Cookies are for dessert.” Her footsteps proceeded at a stately pace toward the boys’ room, followed by Sammy’s little sneakers.

Was there something wrong with Abby, that she didn’t fall all over
herself to spend every waking minute with her grandchildren? She did love them, after all. She loved them so much that she felt a kind of hollowness on the inner surface of her arms whenever she looked at them—an ache of longing to pull them close and hold them tight against her. The three little boys were such a clumped-together tangle, always referred to as a single unit, but Abby knew how different each was from the next. Petey was the worrier, bossing his brothers around not out of meanness but from a protective, herding instinct; Tommy had his father’s sunny nature and his peacemaking skills; and Sammy was her baby, still smelling of orange juice and urine, still happy to cuddle up and let her read to him. And then the older ones: Susan so serious and dear and well-behaved—was she all
right
?—and Deb who was Abby herself at that age, a wiry knot of inquisitiveness, and poor clumsy, effortful Alexander who could wrench her heart, and finally Elise who was just so different from Abby, so completely
other
, that Abby felt privileged to be granted this close-up view of her.

But it was easier, somehow, to reflect on them all from a distance than to be struggling for room in their midst.

The upstairs hall was quiet again. Abby turned her doorknob by degrees, opened the door a bare minimum, and slipped out. The dog shoved the door wider open with his nose and plodded after her, snuffling noisily and causing Abby to wince and glance toward the boys’ room.

Down the stairs to the front door she went, and out onto the porch. Then she stopped short, struck by an idea. She reached back into the house for the leash that hung on a hook just inside. Clarence made a glad moaning sound and shambled onto the porch behind her, while somewhere in the depths of the house Heidi gave a yelp of envy. Eat your heart out, Heidi. Abby was not a fan of overexcitable dogs.

She paused on the flagstone walk to clip the leash to Clarence’s collar. This was the old-fashioned, short kind of leash, not the
permissive retractable kind that people nowadays favored. Strictly speaking, Clarence didn’t need a leash; he was so slow and stodgy and mindlessly obedient. But he did have a willful streak when it came to very small dogs. They seemed to bring out all the old feistiness of his puppy days. He never could resist pouncing on a toy terrier.

“We’re not going far,” Abby told him. “Don’t get your hopes up.” From the stiff-jointed way he moved, she suspected he wasn’t up to more than a block or two in any case.

They turned to the left when they reached the street—the opposite direction from Ree’s house. Not that Abby wouldn’t love to see Ree, but after Abby’s little lapse that time, Ree would have been distressed to find her walking alone. And Abby loved walking alone. Oh, it felt so good to set out like this, free as a bird, no “What’ll we do about Mom?” hanging unspoken over her head! She hoped she wouldn’t run into anybody she knew.

Sometimes on her walks it would strike her that of all her original family, she was the only one left. Who would ever have dreamed that she’d be traveling through the world without them? She thought again of the framed picture in her bedroom: the solitary child threading a path beneath giant, looming trees, the guardian angel following protectively behind. Except that Abby didn’t believe in angels, and hadn’t since she was seven. No, she was truly on her own.

She used to have at least one of her children with her everywhere she went. It was both comforting and wearing. “Hand? Hand?” she used to say before she crossed a street. It came to her so clearly now: the stiff-armed reach out to her side with her palm facing backward, the confident expectation of some trusting little hand grabbing hers.

Clarence eyed a squirrel but kept on heeling, not even tempted. “I agree,” Abby told him. “Squirrels are beneath you.” Then she gave a testing pat to the cushiony space above her breasts. Had she thought to hang the house key around her neck before she set out? No, but never mind; the lock was set to manual. And there was always Nora to let her back in if need be.

Another secret she knew, but this wasn’t something anyone had told her: it had occurred to her just recently that the song Stem remembered his father’s singing him to sleep with could very well have been “The Goat and the Train.” Burl Ives used to sing that on a children’s record she had owned when she was small. Should she suggest it to Stem? It could be a transporting moment for him, hearing that song again after all these years. But he might think she was tactlessly reminding him that he was not a Whitshank. Or maybe her reason for keeping silent was more selfish. Maybe she just wanted him to forget that she wasn’t his first and only mother.

He and Denny had treated each other with artificial politeness ever since their fight at the beach. You would think they were barely acquainted. “Denny, are you going to want that last piece of chicken?” Stem would ask, and Denny would say, “Be my guest.” They didn’t fool her for a minute. They could have been two strangers in a waiting room, and she was beginning to lose hope that that would ever change.

Oh, always lately it seemed that some crisis arose at the beach house. No wonder she dreaded vacations! Not that she ever let on.

“What’s gone wrong with us?” she’d asked Red on the ride home from this year’s trip. “We used to be such a happy family! Weren’t we?”

“Far as I can recall,” Red had answered.

“Remember that time we all got the giggles at the movies?”

“Well, now …”

“It was a Western, and the hero’s horse was staring straight at us, head-on, chewing oats, with these two little balls of muscle popping out at his jaws when he chomped down. He looked so silly! Remember that? We burst out laughing, all of us at once, and the rest of the audience turned toward us just mystified.”

“Was I there?” Red asked her.

“You were there. You were laughing too.”

Maybe the reason he’d forgotten was that he took their happiness
for granted. He didn’t fret about it. Whereas Abby … oh, she fretted, all right. She couldn’t bear to think that their family was just another muddled, discontented,
ordinary
family.

“If you could have one single wish,” she had asked Red one night in bed when neither of them could sleep, “what would it be?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“I would wish wonderful lives for our children,” Abby said.

“Yeah, that’s good.”

“How about you?”

“Oh,” he said, “maybe that Harford Contractors would go bankrupt and quit underbidding me.”

“Red! Honestly!”

“What?”

“How can you not put your children’s welfare first?” Abby asked him.

“I do put it first. But you already took care of that with
your
wish.”