Circle of Three (28 page)

“Not for long?”

“Just a catnap.”

“Why, are you kicking me out? Got another girl coming at five?”

“Heh heh.” He leaned over me. He put his hand on my stomach. His whiskers felt prickly on the skin between my breasts. “Got you coming at five, play your cards right.”

“Oh, you’re coming back,” I said, thrilled. And already the puns were starting, the lovely, corny sex jokes. I could’ve died from happiness.

“I’ve got to talk to Mr. Green for a few minutes, get the boys started with the milking. Don’t you go away.”

“Don’t you worry.” I sat up when he turned to look at me from the doorway. “Mr. Green’s going to know, isn’t he?”

“Probably, unless I make something up. Want me to?”

“No, I don’t care. Not at all. But…”

“Other people.”

“Some other people. Ruth. Especially.” No need to mention my mother; she was a given.

“Will she hate this?”

“I honestly don’t know. Ruth loves you, Jess, but I don’t think she’s ready for this.”

“She’s loyal to Stephen.”

“Yes. Very. More than that, though. It’s a funny age,” I tried to explain. “She’s using you to grow up. Sometimes you’re her father, sometimes you’re her friend. And sometimes, more than a friend.”

“I know that. I’ve tried to be careful.”

Of course he knew that. I wanted to tell him then that I loved him. The feeling was on me, strong as a flood. What was the barrier? Habit, I decided, listening to the fall of his footsteps on the stairs, the opening and closing of a door. Habit and caution. Jess wasn’t the only one who had grown discreet in his old age. But our lives had taken a turn, and by some miracle we were back at the tricky place that had confounded us—me—years ago. Only an idiot would pass up a second chance.

W
E’RE SUPPOSED TO
be keeping journals for English. Mrs. Fitzgerald says to write in them every day, preferably first thing in the morning before our censoring brains wake up, so what we say will be freer, like an extension of our dreaming selves, or failing that, right before going to sleep because sometimes the tired mind is as uninhibited as the just-awake one, so it’s the same thing.

Yeah, right. I don’t have time to eat breakfast in the morning, much less jot down Deep Thoughts, and at night I might get two sentences down before I fall asleep. I think I’ve got sleeping sickness. It’s like the opposite of insomnia. What is that, somnia? I’ll ask Krystal. Anyway, I do like writing in my journal, but the only time I can fit it in—and we have to show Mrs. Fitzgerald, she goes down the rows on Fridays to see how our notebooks are filling up; she doesn’t read what we’ve written but she looks to see if there are pages with words on them—so I guess you
could
copy the newspaper or a book or something into your notebook to fool her, but I don’t know anybody who’s doing that—the only time I can fit it in is when I’m in class. So instead of paying attention in math, say, or biology, I’m writing in my journal, and Mr. Tambor and Ms. Reedy just think I’m taking notes. It’s cool.

What’s hard about writing in a journal is always having in
the back of your mind the thought that somebody besides you is reading it. (Which could happen—Brad Leavitt left his journal on the bus and Linda Morrissy, a sophomore, found it and brought it to Mrs. Fitzgerald the next day, who gave it back to Brad. So that’s a minimum of two people who could’ve read Brad’s journal, not to mention potentially Linda Morrissy’s entire family and all her friends, plus Mrs. Fitzgerald’s friends and her husband and her college student son, and all her son’s friends.
Time
, we see, is the only limiting factor.) Anyway, Mrs. Fitzgerald says the only way to get over feeling self-conscious is to write down some embarrassing things about yourself. Don’t embellish them, don’t let yourself come off as the hero or the innocent victim, just spit it out, something really stupid you did or said, and don’t censor it. (But then really make sure you don’t leave your notebook on the bus.)

I’ve been practicing that. The hard part is deciding what to pick among all the humiliating possibilities. So much to choose from. Once I wrote, “I used to stand in front of the bathroom mirror with the door open and pretend the laughter and applause from a program on TV downstairs was for me. I was a famous, beloved performer, and everybody in the audience clapped and laughed uproariously just at my facial expressions, they were so hilarious. I practiced looking surprised and humble during long bursts of applause.”

That’s the kind of thing that gets you warmed up. You get over being paranoid about confessing something like that, and then you can start writing the real stuff. Like, “I hate my mother. Who’s not even my mother anymore, she’s turned into some completely different person. It’s like the aliens snatched her, implanted a chip in her brain, and sent her back down, and now she’s just impersonating herself. She’s doing a really shitty job, too.”

School sucks. Caitlin is definitely making it with Donny Hartman now, so she and Jamie have, like, circled the wagons and I’m not allowed in, like it’s too huge a deal to be a three-way secret. Meanwhile, I am so not interested. I’ve always
known they were better friends with each other than with me. But when I first moved here from Chicago they were having one of their breaks from each other and I got to know Jamie first, then Caitlin after they made up. So I was always the third wheel, which was okay until now, when I’m not much of a wheel at all. I’m getting to be pretty good friends with Becky Driver, but even she has people she’s known about a hundred years longer than me.

Raven at least is talking to me again. Except what he’s talking to me about is suicide, so that’s not too cheerful. Not
his
suicide, just in general, I mean, I’m not worried he’ll jump off a bridge or anything. We went to the movies once, but I don’t know if it was a date because I just met him at the theater on a Friday after work and we sat with a bunch of other kids from school. We held hands while we watched, but then Mark Terry and Sharon Waxman drove me home because they live nearer. Figure that one out. Not that I care.

So school is a wasteland and even work is sort of boring these days—and
then
, then I get home at six-thirty after a long, hard day and I’m tired and hungry and maybe in the mood for a couple of laughs and some chitchat, a little human contact, not much but some, you know, to keep up the pretense that in my house there still lives an actual family—but what do I get? Nada, because there’s nobody home. The house feels shut up, like nobody lives there—I told Mom we should rent it out to crackheads during the day, that way we’d at least get some money from it, and they wouldn’t leave it any messier than it already is. All she can say is, “It’s temporary.” Everything is supposedly going back to normal in one week, when the stupid ark sails.

I wish it was tomorrow. It’s getting worse, it’s
all
she can talk about—should the horse be a palomino or a regular reddish brown one, wouldn’t it be neat if it rained on the seventeenth, should Jess paint the ark white or a color or not at all, and on and on, like I’m somebody who cares. She didn’t like it when I told her the first thing Noah did when he landed on land—this is in the Bible—was to get out, build an altar, and
sacrifice some animals. Too bad for that species! Instant extinction! She keeps saying she’s almost finished, but she gets home later and later every night, and she’s so
weird
, either really quiet and off in her own little world or else laughing and talking like she’s high, and trying to make
me
happy by telling dumb jokes or tickling me or saying let’s go get ice cream—and that’s almost worse because it’s, like, nothing to do with me, I’m just the one who happens to be there, and whatever mood she’s in I’m the one it gets inflicted on.

What if I died? What if the house caught on fire when I was in it and she was out? What if I was asleep and she was the only one who could’ve saved me, but she was over at Jess’s making aardvarks? When she came home she’d turn into our street, wondering what all the fire engines were doing there, why all the flashing lights, who the ambulance was for. The closer she got to our house, the scareder she’d get. And then she’d see it—the stretcher with the body on it in the front yard, the sheet pulled up over the face. The cops would try to hold her back, but she’d break free and throw herself on top of it. “My baby!” I’d have died of smoke inhalation, not burns, so my face would still look nice. In fact I would look very peaceful and beautiful. Mom would completely break down. She’d be ruined.

Sometimes I go over to Modean’s after work and play with the baby. It’s better than starting my homework or trying to figure out what’s for dinner when Mom hasn’t left me a clue. Modean always talks to me, asks me about school and work, how my life’s going. She bought an aroma-therapy kit at Krystal’s, and once she let me do an essential oils treatment on her. She said it was great, she wants to do it again sometime. She’s a really great mother. Harry’s going to grow up without any hang-ups at all, he’ll be like the poster child for good parenting. Unlike me, the poster child for neglect.

I call up Gram sometimes and we talk about how stupid the ark is. She’s definitely on my side. “Is your mother home yet?” she says, and I’ll say, “No,” and she goes, “I’m coming
over there right now and making your dinner. It’s seven o’clock!” But Mom always strolls in around then, so Gram never actually comes over, at least not so far. I wish she would. Wouldn’t Mom be embarrassed?

If I just had my driver’s license, this wouldn’t be happening. It wouldn’t feel like solitary confinement around here because I could get out anytime I wanted, like being in prison but with the door open. I told Gram it’s like time stopped and I’ll
never
get older than fifteen and three-quarters. She said wait till I’m her age and see what I think about time.

What I should do is report Mom. She’s starting to get famous, ha-ha, in Clayborne because of the ark; they did a front-page story on her and Jess in the
Morning Record
, and also a feature in the Richmond paper, about how wonderfully zany and nutty it is that they’re doing this and what inspired them and blah blah, it was like
gag me
, I could hardly read the articles. So what I should do is call up child welfare and turn her in for neglect. Then you’d have some headlines! “Ark Lady Cruel to Latch-Key Daughter.” “Ark Artist Implores Court to Keep Child, But Loses.” They’d put me with a kind, loving foster family. She wouldn’t even be allowed to visit. No—she could visit, but only an hour a week, and she’d spend the whole time crying. I’d be nice to her, but then it would be time to go back to my foster family. She’d promise to reform and be the best mother ever, but the court would say I had to stay with the foster family until I was eighteen. Then it would be time for college. She’d have missed the best years of my life, and she’d have only herself to blame.

That’s better than the house-fire fantasy. It’s more grown-up, plus I’m alive at the end. I think I’ll put it in my journal.

C
HRIS CALLED WHILE
I was baby-sitting for Harry at my house on Saturday afternoon.

“Carrie, hi! How are you?”

“I’m so glad you called,” I said, shifting the baby to my other hip and getting a better grip on the phone. “I’ve been wanting to call you for weeks.” I heard relief in her big, braying laugh, and knew I’d said just the right thing. “In fact I was going to call you today or tomorrow, Chris, I really was—”

“Oh, sure.”

“No, I was! Because the crunch is finally over and I’ve got some time to breathe. It’s been so crazy, honestly, you can’t believe how hectic.”

“No, I do believe it. I’ve been reading about you in the paper.”

“Oh, God.”

“You’re a famous person.”

“Famous lunatic. Anyway, it’s all over but the sailing, and that’s the day after tomorrow.”

“Yep, and we’ll be there, the whole family.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Absolutely not! We wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

That was my worst fear and my secret hope, that lots of
people would turn out for the launch at Point Park on Monday: an actual crowd. “Well, I’ll look for you among the hordes,” I joked—sarcastic humor was good for warding off disappointment.

“You sound great, Carrie. You sound a lot better than the last time we talked.”

“Do I? Well, I’m feeling pretty good, to tell you the truth.”

“I’m glad, that’s a relief, because I still feel awful about what happened.”

The baby grabbed a fistful of my hair. To distract him, I found his training cup on the counter, still half full of orange juice. “Why should
you
feel bad?”

“I just do. I feel like Betty Currie.” We laughed, and it was like old times. “I really miss you,” Chris said. “It’s dull at work all by myself. I guess it was dull before you came, but I didn’t notice.”

“I miss you, too.”

“God, Carrie. I look at him now. I believe everything you told me, I truly do, and yet—when I look at him, I still can’t picture it. I can’t believe he’d do such a thing. But I
do
believe it, that’s not what I—”

“No, I know exactly what you mean. I couldn’t believe it either, the whole time it was happening.”

I didn’t mean the night Brian mauled me in my front hall, I meant the day he called me into his office and fired me. He did it on a Friday, and he waited till late, after Chris had gone home. I couldn’t understand what he was saying at first, I thought it was a joke. I laughed. Then I stopped laughing. “You’re serious,” I said, staring at him in utter dis-belief. “You’re firing me.” He said, “I don’t want to. I
wish
I could keep you,” rubbing his hands together with fake boyish nervousness. His forehead was pink and wrinkled with worry, eyes brimming sympathy.
This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done
, he tried to say with his face, and for half a minute I believed it, actually thought there was some truth in his halting explanation—that I wasn’t working out, he really needed somebody with more
personal initiative
, somebody
he wouldn’t have to give any direction to at all. But when he spread his hands and said, “Almost like a partner, an equal,” the truth hit, and I knew he was lying.

“First of all, you don’t pay me enough to be a partner,” I said—since then I’ve thought of a dozen much more scathing ways I could’ve put that. “Brian, why don’t you just admit it. This is about that night, isn’t it?”

“What night?” The blankness, the absolute incomprehension! I wanted to scream at him, but I knew I’d only feel more humiliated afterward, and he’d still win. All I could do was insult him, inadequately—“You are a complete joke!”—and storm out of his office.

“What
is
it with men?” Chris wailed. “How could he be so stupid, and then be so
mean
about it?”

“But he’s never done anything with you, never tried—”

“Never, nothing. Oz asked me that, too, of course, but there’s never been anything, not even a hint.”

“It’s weird.”

“It’s
weird
. And it’s not even so bad that he
tried
, as rotten as that is, it’s that he got rid of you afterward! I can’t get over that. I’d quit if I could, but I can’t.”

“No, you can’t quit, that wouldn’t make any sense.”

“That’s what Oz says, but I tell you, I feel like it. I’m seeing Brian in a whole new light. I can’t trust him anymore, and it changes everything.”

“Chris, I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault. If I had something else lined up, you know? Another job to go to. But right now we really need the money, and I feel like I’m stuck.”

Harry threw his cup on the floor and shrieked in my ear.

“Modean had to go out, so I’ve got Harry for a couple of hours. As you can tell, it’s lunchtime.”

“Oh, okay. Well, see you Monday, then. At the launch.”

“You’re really coming?”

“Of course!”

“What a pal.”

“Listen, now that you’re unemployed again, you want to
have lunch or something? I could meet you. Away from the office—so you’d never have to see
him
.”

“I’d love it. How about next week?”

We made the arrangements, and after we hung up I thought,
There
. One good thing had come out of the Other School—my friendship with Chris. Even Brian couldn’t ruin that.

“Where’ll it be, big guy, your place or mine? Yours,” I decided, eyeing my just-cleaned kitchen floor. If I fed the baby here, I’d have to wash it again afterward. “Want to go home?”

“Mama?”

“No, Mama’s not home yet, she’ll be home
soon
. Let’s go eat lunch!”

“Lunts!”

In Modean’s kitchen, I set Harry in his high chair and gave him half a banana to eat while I heated his SpaghettiOs in the microwave. He was a lazy, sweet-natured baby, and so funny, just his facial expressions cracked me up. Spending the afternoon with him was like watching cartoons or the Marx Brothers; you got lost in deep play. “Handsome boy,” I cooed, setting his bowl in front of him. I gave him his spoon, too, but only as a courtesy; he ate everything with his fingers. “Want me to feed you?” I offered, waving the spoon. No. His bib was the plastic kind with a food-catcher at the bottom; by meal’s end, it was half full of spaghetti, and the other half was on his head. “Did you eat
anything
?” He laughed at me, banging his cup on the table in time with his bouncing legs. He could speak in sentences, long ones, you could even detect the punctuation. You just couldn’t get the words. I couldn’t; Modean swore she understood everything.

I cleaned him up at the kitchen sink, got a pudding pop from the freezer, and carried him out to the front yard. Should I put sunscreen on him? We’d stay under the maple tree by the porch; surely the dappled shade would be okay for half an hour. I couldn’t remember constantly worrying about sunscreen for Ruth when she was an infant, but maybe
I did. What different babies they were. There sat Harry on the grass like a Buddha, quietly absorbed in picking apart a dandelion. If I’d turned my back on Ruth at that age, she’d have been three doors down the street by now, staggering along in that cute, drunken, hand-fluttering walk that made you laugh until you realized she was going, she was
gone
.

Harry said, “B-bb-bbbb,” which gave me the idea of blowing bubbles—possibly his intent in the first place, you never knew. I carried him inside, found the bottle of bubble liquid in his toy box in the family room, carried him back out to the porch steps. Ruth used to love bubbles. Me, too. Harry let me go first. I blew a perfect stream of airy, iridescent globes, so pretty, gone in seconds, like fireworks. “Bbbbb,” the baby said, and I put my cheek next to his soft one and said, “Bbbbb” with a little more air, and we blew a big floating bubble that didn’t pop until a grass blade speared it,
poof
.

A car slowed in front of my house and started to park. Not a car, a truck. Jess’s pickup. I couldn’t see him through the wavy, sun-streaked windshield, but he saw me—he backed up forty feet and parked in front of Modean’s house instead of mine. I hadn’t seen him in three days.

“Tuck,” the baby said. He sat between my legs, leaning back against my chest, pointing. I should get up, but some other kind of weight besides Harry’s was keeping me where I was. Jess had on white tennis shoes, maybe running shoes. Was he a jogger? I hadn’t known. The jogging farmer. Black jeans and a blue T-shirt, and he was striding toward me, swinging his arms, Jess. Coming up the walk, and Harry stopped pointing and scooted back, amazed. Jess came right up to us and squatted beside my left leg. I could see a place on his jaw where he’d cut himself shaving, and for some reason it made me weak. I rested my chin on the top of Harry’s head. Jess smiled his slow, two-stage smile. “Hi,” he said. “Who’s this?”

“This is Harry. That’s Jess,” I said softly in the baby’s ear. Harry could be skittish with strangers. “Can you say ‘hi, Jess’?”

“Tuck,” Harry said.

“He likes your truck.”

“Tuck!”

So then we had to get up and go over to Jess’s truck and look at it and touch it, and Jess let Harry sit in the front seat and play with the steering wheel. I wondered how we looked together. Could people tell we were lovers? I had to remind myself to keep my distance, not lean into him or absentmindedly stick my fingers inside his waistband or in his back pocket—giveaway intimacies I already took for granted. “I missed you,” I murmured, surreptitiously brushing his hip with the back of my hand. “I wanted to come see you today, but my neighbor called and asked me to sit for Harry. I couldn’t say no.” Especially since Modean had been so good about watching out for Ruth while I was up to my eyes in ark animals.

“I haven’t been home all day,” Jess said. “Missed you, too. Can we go somewhere and kiss?”

I laughed, weak again. “Maybe. What have you been doing?”

“Last-minute things at the river. Guess what I dreamed last night.”

“What?”

“The ark sank.”

“Oh, no.”

“Broke in half and went straight down.”

“Like the
Titanic
. Did the animals float?” He laughed at me. “Well, did they?”

“I don’t know, I woke up.” He took Harry’s hand off the gear shift for the third time. “The portholes are perfect.”

“Really? Do they show up?” Eldon let me paint extra animal faces on three-foot round plywood shapes Jess cut out for me on his band saw. I hadn’t seen them on the ark yet. “Did you put them on all three levels or just around the bottom?”

“All three. The chimpanzees look great hanging off the lower deck. That was a great idea.”

“Maybe I’ll drive over this afternoon and look. I know, I said I wouldn’t, but I can’t stand it.” The way I made myself stop putting finishing touches on the animals, which were still in Jess’s barn, was to take all the paint cans and brushes over to Landy’s and store them in his basement. The end. It’s over.

“What have you been up to?” Jess asked.

“A million things, all the things I’ve been putting off since this started. Yesterday I cleaned my house, and it took
all day
. I’ve been calling people, reminding them I exist. And trying to think about a job, but that’s not working—I can’t see past Monday. Will you be glad when it’s over, or sorry?”

“Both.”

“Me, too.”

Harry was getting more aggressive; he wanted to take off the hand brake. “It’s time for his nap,” I told Jess, scooping the baby up. “Come inside with me. You don’t have to go right away, do you?” Harry gave a bitter wail. His roly-poly body became all muscle, all of it straining to crawl over my shoulder, fat arms outstretched and beseeching, “Tuck! Tuck!”

Hugs, apple juice, and more bubbles calmed him down. I put him on the floor and let him play with the pots and pans in “his” cabinet (all the others were padlocked) while I heated water for his bottle. “Modean should be home any sec, but I’ll put him down first—”Jess turned me around and pulled me into a long, hot kiss. “Oh, I really missed you,” I said, holding tight, “I didn’t know I would this much.”

“You’re the only thing in my head. You were before, but that was nothing.”

“Can you stay? When Modean comes, we could go to my house.”

“Where’s Ruth?”

“At Krystal’s—she works all day on Saturdays.” We kissed again—but it scared Harry for some reason, so we had to stop.

Modean came home. We three chatted in the kitchen for a
while. Once she felt comfortable, Modean could talk, and she liked Jess; she’d told me so even before I’d started bringing his name up, so I could talk about him to someone—one of the frustrations of a secret love affair, I’d discovered. Precious minutes ticked by in the kitchen, and eventually Jess said, “Well, Carrie, we should probably go see about that flying squirrel.”

Modean didn’t even blink. “Oh, okay, see you guys. Thanks again, Carrie,” she called, waving to us as we walked across the driveway, trying to look purposeful. That was easy.

Lovemaking was different now. Orgasms with Jess—not at first, but lately—felt as if they were in the exact center of me. As if, before, they all were slightly askew, off middle, but now they were exactly where they were supposed to be. Could that possibly be literally true? Probably not. More likely my body was trying to tell me something. It was making an analogy.

I kept a picture of Stephen on the far bedside table, Jess’s side of the bed. He had it propped on his chest when I came back from the bathroom. The photo flattered Stephen, made him look loose and fun loving, shading his eyes from the full sun, his teeth showing in a tight, rare grin. Jess lifted his eyes from the picture to me, and I waited for what he would say. He lay with the sheet twisted between his legs, rumpled and rangy, at ease with everything, and I thought how different they were, the two men in my life. Once Ruth came home from a visit with Jess, talking about who she’d rather marry, a man who felt things or a man who thought things. An oversimplified distinction, but I knew whom she was comparing. Women wanted both, of course, but we were usually drawn toward one more than the other. My mother chose a thinking man because she thought he would be safer. And I guess he was.