Best Kept Secret (13 page)

He is the reason I can never drink again.

I awake the next morning in my sister’s guest room and Charlie is already gone. A brief sense of panic quickens my pulse, wondering where he is, but then I hear his high-pitched giggle and realize he is already playing in the living room.

“Charlie?” I call out, wanting to hold him again, desperate to make up for lost time. I hear the
thwap thwap thwap thwap
of his bare feet running down the hall and he rushes back into the room, jumping on the bed next to me.

“Morning, Mommy!” he says, leaning over to give me a kiss on the cheek. His breath is pungent and earthy after skipping his dental hygiene the night before; my mother would have a coronary if she knew I didn’t make him get back out of bed to brush his teeth.

“Morning, monkey,” I say. I try to snuggle him to me, but he wriggles away.

“Marley and Jake and me are going to play in the wrecked room.”

I smile.
God, I adore him.
“It’s the ‘rec’ room, sweetie. Not ‘wrecked.’ ”

“Oh. That’s what I said.” He leaps back off the bed and is gone in a flash.

I get dressed and proceed to the kitchen where Jess and I sit at the kitchen table, sipping huge mugs of coffee as we watch her husband cook breakfast. Sunday morning means Derek’s fancy-pants pancakes at my sister’s house. He and I are kindred spirits when it comes to food preparation. No boxed mix for this man. He
makes them from scratch, doctors them up with vanilla, cinnamon, or lemon. Whatever he has on hand.

I started cooking when I figured out it would please my mother that she didn’t have to. Over the years, I learned that it was a practice that soothed me. Even today, if only for a moment, following a recipe removes me from the prattle led by the chorus of crazies in my head into a world where careful steps taken, measurements made, lead to expected, predictable results. How I wish my life were like this: proper ingredients exposed to the right environment, blossoming into something tantalizing to the senses and easy to digest. Do the right thing, and the right thing should happen. I made a huge mistake, but I did the right thing—I stopped drinking, I’m in treatment. It follows that I should get my child back. It’s driving me out of my mind how little control I have over any of this.

Derek stands in front of the stove now, using a pastry brush to coat the griddle with butter. He rolls up to the balls of his bare feet and bounces to an unheard rhythm, pausing a moment from the task before him in order to conduct an invisible band with his pastry brush. Jess rolls her eyes and laughs.

“Hey, Harry Connick Jr.,” she says, winking at me. “Don’t burn breakfast this time, okay? Our fire alarms are tired of being prodded with a broomstick on Sunday mornings.”

Derek flips around to face her and shakes his pastry brush at her in mock irritation. “Listen, woman,” he warns, the lines around his warm brown eyes crinkling up as he tries, and fails, to keep from smiling. “Don’t start with me. And stop trying to show off in front of your big sister.” His normally well-groomed, salt-and-pepper hair is flipped up in the back: a two-inch alfafa sprout. A small beer belly pushes at his sweatshirt; the weight he gained on par with Jess when she was pregnant with the twins was not as easy to lose as hers. I’m not sure why it is that men can gain twenty pounds and still be considered attractive, but if a woman gains the same, it’s time for a food addiction intervention on
Oprah.

“Oh, no,” I say, setting my mug down on the table. “Don’t blame me for her bad behavior. I had enough of that growing up.”

Jess reaches over and smacks me lightly on the top of my thigh. “Hey! You did not. I didn’t
have
bad behavior when we were growing up.”

I snort. “Yeah, right. I saved your butt on a regular basis with Mom, and you know it. I can’t even count the number of times I took the blame for you. Mom was always mad at me, anyway. It was just easier that way.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jess says, incredulous. “I was sweet and innocent.”

Derek snorts at this one, steps over, puts his meaty hand at the base of her neck, and kisses his wife on the top of her head. “Not even close, honey. I wouldn’t have married you if that were true.” He moves back over to the stove, picks up a ladle, and starts pouring batter onto the griddle. A toasty, sweet scent infused with vanilla bean and lemon zest wafts through the kitchen almost immediately; my stomach growls in response.

Jess grins impishly. “Why
was
Mom always mad at you?”

I shrug, reach for my coffee again, and take a sip, looking at her over the rim of the mug. “You know why. Because I wasn’t more like you.”

“And how was I?” Jess asks.

“Like her.” I smile at my sister. She knows I’m right about this, though she’ll argue the point. From the time she could tie her shoes, Jess was the kind of child who washed the dishes the minute a meal was over and went about her chores without grumbling. She picked up her toys and put them away when she was done playing. She kept her side of the closet organized by season and color, her dresser drawers were full of neatly folded shirts and perfectly rolled socks. I, on the other hand, much preferred escaping into a good book or spending hours writing in my Holly Hobbie diary to performing any kind of manual labor. Most days, I was lucky to find a clean pair of
underwear or a shirt without some kind of telling stain. I spent a lot of my time trying to emulate my younger sister. I tried to be the kind of daughter it was obvious my mother appreciated.

“You’re so organized, Jessica,” my mother was fond of pointing out when we were kids. “What a wonderful quality to have.”

I stood next to my sister, my body erect, my mind alert, primed to hear what wonderful quality my mother thought I possessed. When she said nothing, I solicited a response. “What are mine, Mom?”

“Your what?” she asked. Her mind had already moved on to other things.

“My wonderful qualities.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, let me see. We can’t all be organized, now, can we? You’re creative. Creative people tend to be messy.”

Our mother also took note of how alike she and my sister were. One of my clearest memories is that of our mother sitting on the couch in our small living room with us both, one on each side of her. I was twelve and Jess was eleven; it was a rare evening Mom was home early from work. I had made spaghetti for dinner.

“Did you like the sauce, Mom?” Jess asked. “Cadee made it, but I added the basil.”

I shot Jess a dirty look for trying to take credit for the work I’d done. Nobody cared about a stupid teaspoon of basil.

She smiled at Jess, tousling my sister’s hair. “My little carbon copy.”

“Am I your carbon copy, too?” I asked, wriggling my way over on the cushions to snuggle more closely with my mom. As the oldest, I came first. I was certain her answer would be yes.

“Oh, sweetie,” she said, wrapping her arm around my shoulders and giving me a quick squeeze. Her fingers smelled pleasantly of garlic. “A person can’t have more than one carbon copy.”

I looked at the floor, then back up at her, forcing a smile. “Whose carbon copy am I, then?”

She paused, assessing me. “My mother’s, I think. You’re starting to look like her.” Her hazel eyes narrowed the slightest bit. “Around
the eyes, mostly. She had that wild mop on her head, too.” Both my mother and sister’s hair, though dark like mine, was straight as a board. After months of begging, Mom finally broke down and took me to have mine chemically relaxed. A week later, after all my curls broke off in uneven chunks, I ended up with what the hairdresser mercifully called a pixie style, but more truthfully resembled a marine’s boot-camp buzz cut. This was an undoubtedly sorry look for a chubby adolescent girl.

“Didn’t you say your mother was crazy?” I said. Our mother had dropped enough comments about her mother’s erratic behavior and subsequent hospital stays for me to be curious to learn more. This seemed a perfect opportunity.

“Mm-hmm,” my mother murmured, closing her eyes and leaning over to kiss Jess on top of her head.

“
How
was she crazy?” I asked, a tiny nugget of fear materializing in my belly.

“She just was,” my mother responded. There was a sharp, irritated edge to her words.

“But how?” I persisted. “What kinds of things did she do?” I didn’t like the look on my mother’s face when she said I reminded her of her mom. I wanted to do everything I could to avoid seeing it again.

“She wandered the neighborhood in the middle of the night in her nightgown,” my mother said with a sigh. “She’d be barefoot, singing show tunes at the top of her lungs. When my father would bring her home and I asked her if she was okay, she picked up her shoes and threw them at me.”

As children, Jess and I had giggled at this image of our grandmother standing in the entryway, chucking a pair of penny loafers at our mother. But a still, small, cold space inside me reserved judgment. I felt sorry for my grandmother. From the bits and pieces of the stories our mother had told us over the years, I gathered that she had been abandoned when she was three years old to be
raised by an elderly, distant aunt. She married our grandfather when she was only sixteen and gave birth to our mother less than a year later, losing a lot of blood and her ability to have more children in the process. As our mother told it, throughout her childhood, our grandmother popped in and out of the hospital, the doctors prescribing medication that never seemed to work. While she was gone, our mother became the woman of the house.

“I was cooking my father dinner by the time I was seven,” she told us. Her chin lifted as she spoke. “I learned to be self-reliant a long time ago, girls. You would do well to do the same.” Her father left when she was twelve. Old enough, he said, to sign her mother into the hospital when she needed to be there. He never came back.

As a child, my grandmother’s death—years before I was born—scared me. I was left with no way to confirm whether or not what my mother said about her being crazy was true. I took her at her word. She was my mother; what other choice did I have? I worried that insanity might follow me the way my grandmother’s curly hair and dark, round eyes had. Did instability already flow through my veins? I swallowed my fears, pressing them into a hard ball inside my chest.

The sound of a thin, metal spatula scraping across the griddle snaps my thoughts back to the present. “How’s treatment going?” Derek inquires.

I suck in a breath, set my coffee down. Derek is a salesman; he goes right for the kill, every time. “It’s fine, I guess,” I say, trying to keep my voice even. “But I do feel kind of stupid getting an attendance slip signed at AA meetings.”

“Why do you have to do that?” he asks.

“To verify I showed up. It’s a requirement of the program I’m in. I have to show it to my counselor every week.”

“What about the custody case?” Jess asks. She reaches behind her head to pull her ponytail tighter. “What’s going on with that?”

“I have my first meeting with the guardian ad litem next month. May fifteenth.”

“The guardian ad what-what?” Derek asks, turning around to look at me, his eyebrows scrunched in confusion.

I give him a halfhearted smile. “Guardian ad litem. He’s appointed by the court to make a recommendation for who should have custody. He’s supposed to represent what’s best for the child. Charlie, in this case.” Again, it seems unfathomable to me that I’m sitting here discussing how someone else will decide what’s best for my own son.

“Oh. How exactly does he figure that out?”

I shrug. “By talking to everyone involved, according to my lawyer. Gathering information, looking at all the facts. He’s supposed to be a neutral party.” Though I was uncomfortable about meeting Mr. Hines, I was trying to approach it like a job interview. I’d never interviewed for a job I didn’t end up being offered. I had my mind set that this situation would be no different.

“Are you nervous?” Derek asks, transferring a stack of pancakes onto a platter, then sliding it into the oven to keep our breakfast warm.

“I don’t think ‘nervous’ is strong enough of a word.”

“Why aren’t you meeting with him sooner?” Jess asks.

“My lawyer told me most GALs like to give the emotion of the dispute some time to calm down before they talk with all the people involved. He’s not meeting with Mom until July. I wish we could just get it all over with.” I have no idea what I’m going to do with myself while I wait for these meetings to happen. Hours and days and weeks loom in front of me. Time that used to be filled with my son. What was I going to do now?

Jess sets her coffee down and reaches over to give my arm a reassuring rub. “You’ll do great. Just be honest with him. Be yourself, do what you normally do.”

“You mean I should down a bottle of wine beforehand?” I intend this as a joke, but it falls flat. Neither Derek nor Jess cracks a smile.

“So, how often is Charlie with you?” Jess asks.

“Every other weekend and Wednesday nights for dinner.” Before
either Jess or Derek can respond, my cell trills. I reach for my purse to catch the call before it goes to voicemail.

“Hello?” I say, standing up and stepping down the hall toward the living room. I can feel my sister’s eyes on my back.

“Cadence? It’s Laura.” Laura was one of my roommates when I was still an in-patient at Promises Treatment Center, where I ended up after the psych ward. She was a twenty-two-year-old girl with a high IQ and a heroin habit. We shared a mutual passion for chocolate and tacky reality television shows and a similar practice of weeping in the dark.

“Oh, Laura, hey.” It’s strange to have her call me. She isn’t part of this world here, with my sister, my family. It feels oddly intrusive, like an adulterous lover showing up uninvited to a family event. “I missed seeing you at group last week. Are you okay?”

“I guess so,” she says. “I relapsed last week. Didn’t they tell you?”

“No,” I say. “They didn’t. Andi said you were sick.”

She laughs. “That must’ve been what my mom told her, so I wouldn’t lose my place in treatment. I think I get one get-out-of-jail-free card, though. Hopefully, they won’t kick me out.” She pauses. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to shock you.” Another pause, her deep inhale of breath in my ear. “So . . . I’m having a really hard morning.”