Crush (2 page)

“Teething and have colds.”

“Yes!” She pumps my hand even harder.

“How did you know?”

“I’ve babysat about a million kids.”

One of the babies stretches his legs and opens his eyes a little. Maira finally lets go of my hand to put a finger to her lips, but just then the pilot comes over the speaker to tell us, louder and with more enthusiasm than necessary, that we’re ahead of schedule by five minutes. Both babies wake up, and the
one in green opens his mouth and lets out a spectacularly loud wail for such a little guy. I glance back at my seat. Thankfully, Daisy is sleeping through it.

“Oh dear.” Maira picks him up. “Here we go.”

“How about I take him for a little walk?” I offer as the other one sticks his fist in his mouth and screws his eyes shut in preparation for a screaming fit.

“You’re an angel,” she says as she hands me the first baby. “This is Felix. He has sneezing fits, so don’t be alarmed if he goes off.”

Felix and I pace the aisles—not into first class though, even with a cutie in my arms—and when he finally falls back to sleep, I trade him for the other one.

“Avery.” Maira hands the wailer to me. “Normally the quiet one.”

I pace with Avery for a while, singing softly to him, until he finally calms down too. Back at Baby Central, Felix is asleep, his head lolled to the side, sucking his bottom lip in like babies do. Avery reaches for his mother and gabbles at her.

“Hope, the miracle worker.” Maira takes him. “That’s the happiest he’s been in days!” Avery kicks his legs gleefully as Maira covers him in kisses. “How can we thank her, Avery? What do you think, baby boy?” She bounces him and looks up at me. “Where are you headed?”

“To stay with my sister for the summer.” I perch myself on an armrest. “My parents are madly in love with each other and have jetted off to Thailand to build a school to celebrate their thirtieth anniversary.”

Maira goes quiet and her eyes well up. She’s crying? Why? What did I say? “That’s so sweet,” she says as she fishes a tissue out of the diaper bag and dabs her eyes. “I don’t think I’ve heard anything so sweet in a long, long time. It’s so nice to hear about people who can make love last.”

Maybe the tears are about her relationship with the babies’ dad? But I can’t ask a complete stranger that. My dad would, but he does that for a living. I don’t.

“Uh, yeah. I guess.” Great, now she’s crying harder. “Sorry?”

“No, don’t apologize.” She fishes for a fresh tissue. “Your parents have the right idea. Maybe if we all celebrated love more, it wouldn’t end up dead so often.”

Wow, am I ever curious now. “You want me to leave you alone?” I wish my dad were here. He’d know how to deal with this.

“No, no, no.” She pats the empty seat beside her. “Have a seat.” She wipes her eyes one more time. “Now, tell me all about yourself. How’d you get to be such an amazing baby handler?”

“I live in a commune. There’s lots of kids.”

“A
commune
?” She stares at me. “Tell me, is that hard for you? What kind of commune? Not a religious one, I hope. I hear awful things about those, marrying the girls off so young, abuse of all kinds.”

“Standard garden-variety hippie kind.” I glance back to check on Daisy. Still snoring. “That’s kind of our little joke, actually. We run a market garden.”

“Organic, of course,” Maria says bitterly. “Right?”

“It is.” I summon my little evil-hormones-pesticide-cancer-GMO speech and prepare to launch it. “Are you anti-organic or something?”

“Not at all. I’m all for it.” She pulls out a jar of baby food. “See?” Organic mashed peas and squash. “Oh no, I’m not the one with the attitude about it.”

Oooo, I am dying to meet this guy. I glance at her left hand. White gold band. Still married, so far. Or at least still wearing her ring. Part of me wants to come right out and ask her how her marriage is going, but most of me just wants to change the subject.

“So where are you and the babies going?” I ask.

“Home, thank god.” She settles Avery back into his seat. “But enough about me.”

“That’s hardly anything, but okay.”

“Tell me about life in a commune,” she says. “Are you homeschooled?”

“Sort of. We have our own school at Larchberry.”

“That’s the commune?”

I nod. “And the school is called the
Larchberry Experience. The kids decide the curriculum, select the instructors, basically run the place. Once we spent an entire year researching all things Egyptian.”

“And your parents are building a Larchberry Experience in Thailand?”

“Yep.”

“God, I would love to meet your parents.” Good grief, she’s crying again. Postpartum depression maybe? “They sound so wonderful. We should all be so blessed.” She brings Avery’s fingers to her lips and kisses them. “Really, we all should be so blessed.”

She’s full of questions, and when she finds out I’m going to be staying in Brooklyn, just ten blocks from her, she takes Joy’s phone number in case she needs a sitter. As the plane starts its descent, she gives me a list of NYC must-do’s, and I hand back Avery and his various yuppie baby toys.

“Thank you, Hope.” She hugs me. “You saved me on this flight.” She writes down her phone number. “If you need anything while you’re in New York, you just call me, okay?”

“Do you want some help off with the babies?” I ask.

“Oh, would you?” She hugs me again. “Of course you would. Yes, please. Thank you.”

It isn’t until I’m pushing her double stroller down the airport corridor that I really begin to wonder about Daisy. She’s slept for almost four hours and still hasn’t stirred. As we wait for the baggage to arrive, I try to wake her up, but she just keeps snoring.

“Do you think she’s okay?” I ask Maira.

Maira peeks at her. “Did you give her tranquilizers?”

“No, my parents don’t believe in that kind of thing.”

“Are you sure?” She lifts Daisy’s paw and lets it drop. “Sure reminds me of my mother when she takes her ‘special’ pills.”

“Maybe—” My heart leaps, suddenly terrified. “Do you think someone drugged her?”

“You know what?” Maira nods. “I think you might be right.”

“Who would do that?” I pull Daisy out of
the bag and cradle her. She’s limp. “I have to get her to a vet!”

“Bags first, Hope.” Maira puts a hand on my shoulder. “She’s breathing fine, her nose is wet. She’ll be okay.”

“I can’t believe this is happening!”

“It’s okay, calm down.” Maria nods at the carousel. “The bags are coming. Collect your luggage, and then you can take care of Daisy.”

With my luck, my bag will be the last off, or worse, it’ll be lost. The first bags tumble down and, miracle of miracles, mine shows up soon after.

“Off you go,” Maira says as she helps me pile it onto a cart. “Call me, okay? Let me know how you’re doing. And Daisy.”

“Okay, bye.” I practically run with the cart and Daisy to where Joy is waiting for me. I run right past her and out into the night.

“Where’s your car?” I holler behind me. “Someone drugged Daisy!”

“Oh my god,” Joy says, deadpan. “I don’t think so, kiddo.”

“It’s true! Where’s the car?”

“First of all,” Joy catches up to me and grabs my arm, “you’re making a scene. Second, I doubt someone drugged your stupid dog. And third, I sold the car.”

“You
what
?”

Joy holds up her hand, manicured nails and a chunky bracelet and a wrist so skinny it is nearly translucent. “I don’t want to hear it. Dad never said I had to keep it for a certain length of time or anything.”

“You have no idea how hard it was for him to save up for that,” I say. “I cannot believe you sold the car. How can you be so ungrateful, Joy?”

Joy gives me one of her precisely constructed glares.

“Whatever, Joy. That’s between you and Dad.” I hold up a floppy, snoring, drooling Daisy. “Look at her! We have to get her to a vet.”

Joy uses the same perfect manicure to leisurely hail a cab. As the driver stuffs my luggage into the trunk, Joy gracefully descends into the backseat. Every move she makes is like a carefully choreographed slice
of her very own personal ballet in which she is the prima donna, of course. How can she be ten years older than me and still be so stuck on herself?

“Park Slope, please.” Joy gives him her address.

“We need to go to an emergency vet, Joy.”

“Relax, okay? She’ll come out of it.”

“We don’t know that!”

“Fine.” She flips open her cell to call Bruce. “But you’re paying, kiddo.”

It’s dawn by the time we leave the vet, with a groggy but happy Daisy and a bill for hundreds of dollars. The vet, a grandfatherly man with a long beard and thick glasses, agrees to let me pay for some and work off the rest. There goes my entire savings along with a great big chunk of my summer, which looks like it will be spent walking gimpy dogs and cleaning litter boxes. Joy, of course, refuses to pay even one penny. I doubt she could, anyway. She spends all her money on eating out and clothes, and drugs too, if she’s being honest. She might not be
a full-time cokehead at the moment, but she still snorts it. I can just tell. My parents really have no idea. They think she’s clean. That’s a joke. Well, she is
clean
, very clean, as in neat freak bordering on obsessive-compulsive, but drug-free? Not likely. Not our Joy.

Chapter Three

Bruce, the failed-actor boyfriend, is waiting for us when we finally drag ourselves through the door. Daisy is now the widest awake of all of us, bouncing from couch to chair to floor to lap. Bruce is very hungover. He shuffles around like a zombie, trying to put breakfast together, but he burns the toast, the coffee is sludge thick and the eggs are snotty.

“Way to go, Bruce.” Joy pushes her plate away, untouched. “This sucks.”

Bruce snorts, slams a plate of toast onto the table and stalks off into the kitchen.

“You hear me?” Joy yells after him. “It’s inedible! Nice going, Mister Chef Man!”

I cringe. They are so mean to each other. I just don’t get how someone who was raised at Larchberry can have a mean bone in her body. And Dad is a couples’ therapist! How can Joy be such a cruel mess?

“Give him a break, Joy,” I murmur.

“Stay out of it, Hopeless.”

I cringe some more. I hate it when she calls me that. “He’s trying, at least.”

“He’s a useless prick is what he is.” Joy jumbles all the dishes together in a manner that gives away the fact that she was also a waitress for years. She storms into the kitchen. “You hear that, Bruce?”

Bruce places both hands on the counter, stares at the floor and sighs as Joy shuts the door and rips into him for being a general all-round screwup.

Daisy bounces from couch to chair to my
lap to the floor and then starts her circuit all over again. I can barely look at her. Whenever I do, all I can think of is my vastly empty wallet. That money was all I had. I’d given the rest to the Larchberry Thailand Project. Sure, it’s great to be charitable, and sure, I have it better than most of the world, but right now I’d give anything for just two dollars to get on the subway and go somewhere interesting to get away from the train wreck that is Joy and Bruce.

While Joy verbally dissects Bruce in the kitchen, I slip out with Daisy and head for Prospect Park. Huge and free and green and treed, with trails and meadows and a lake that you can’t swim in. This will be my summer solace. The last time I was in Brooklyn, with my parents for one of Joy’s performances, I spent most of my time here. And this summer, with not a penny to my name, my options are limited. Daisy finds some off-leash dogs to torment, and I find a patch of shade under a tree. Everything starts to feel a little more manageable.

There’s a kite festival going on across the meadow, so I lie down and watch the box kites and stunt kites and regular kites soar against the cloudless sky. Peaceful, but only until the thoughts creep back, the ones I’d promised myself I wouldn’t entertain, like why my parents wouldn’t let me stay at Larchberry for the summer.

“It’s not that we don’t trust you,” Dad had said. “It’s just that we were seventeen once too.” He took my mother’s hand. “We fell in love when we were seventeen, after all.”

“I’m not in love with Orion, and I’m definitely not going to have his love child.” Orion had been a mistake—a total and utter mistake. “It’s over with him.”

Until Orion came along, they were going to let me stay home for the summer. My parents might be hippies, but they might as well be born-again Christians when it comes to their little girl having sex. Summer at Larchberry brings a flock of Woofers—Workers on Organic Farms. Tanned and fit, they come to help with the crops and the market. Virginity doesn’t last
long at Larchberry, whether the parentals acknowledge it or not.

I was fifteen my first time—he was a seventeen-year-old, staunchly vegan surfer boy from our sister commune in California. His name was Denver, and I’d managed to keep him and the two others secret from my parents. Just my luck, they had to find out about Orion.

Mistake number one: he’s twenty-four. Mistake number two: my parents caught us smoking hash. Mistake number three: we were naked at the time, in a makeshift bed in the hayloft. Mistake number four: there was a used condom flung and hanging like a flag from a rake at my parents’ eye level. Mistake number five: he’s married. But I didn’t know that! I didn’t!

“I’m not Joy,” I protested. “I’m not going to disappear for two years and come back with a drug problem and various STDs. We’re two different people.”

“We have your best interests at heart, love,” Dad said.

“So you’re going to send me to the one who
did
disappear for two years and came back with a drug problem and various STDs?”

“Joy has done a lot of growing up since then,” Dad said.

“Not that much,” I muttered.

“Say what you have to say clearly,” my mom said. “The phrase is ‘speak your mind,’ not ‘mumble’ it.”

“I don’t want to go to New York for the summer. I want to stay here,” I said.

“That’s not an option.”

“So you’re going to blame me for Joy’s screwups—”