Custody (10 page)

Dust, which bred germs, which bred illness, which bred death.

She wasn’t able to bring herself to remove the hair from the brush. She’d tell Tessa to do it when she returned home.

She felt more than heard the front door open.

She flew down the stairs.

“Tessa! Tessa, are you all right? How could you go off? Randall, how could you take her? Without my permission! Without even phoning first.”

Randall stood with his hand resting on Tessa’s shoulder. They were both wearing jeans; both smelled of sunshine and sweet grass. “I did phone first. Tessa answered. You were gone. Even Carmen was gone.”

Anne clutched Tessa by her shoulders. “Are you all right? Did you ride? Tell me the truth, did your father put you on a horse?” Without waiting for a reply, she spun toward Randall. “I have asked you—I have
begged
you—to keep her away from those horses. She could be injured. She could fall, have a concussion, break her spine, snap her neck—”

“Anne, look at her. She’s here. She’s just fine.”

He sounded so reasonable. How she hated him for this, for making her look irrational by contrast. And he was so very handsome, even though his shirt was rumpled and he needed a haircut and barn dust covered his boots.

Randall
. His clear blue eyes, his massive shoulders, his calm, bull-like confidence. Why couldn’t he continue to love her? She knew she got carried away sometimes. She knew she wasn’t easy to live with. But if she’d been a man, her wife would not only have dealt with her eccentricities, but also would have revered them as part of what made her unique.

“You look tired, Anne,” Randall said.

She sagged. “Yes. I am.”

They were all still standing in the front hall. “Let’s go in the kitchen and have some tea,” Randall suggested.

Her heart thumped. Perhaps he wanted to talk. He sounded friendly, conciliatory—“Yes. All right.”

The routine movements of making tea soothed Anne. Boiling the water, warming the pot, setting out the flowered china cups and saucers. Here, in this room of scrubbed pine and polished chrome, Anne could relax. Carmen kept this room in perfect order.

“How was the taping, Mom?” Tessa’s nose and cheeks were pink from the sun.

Anne looked at her daughter. Her beautiful, healthy, fortunate child, gleaming with a
body fed with the best substances, cleaned, groomed, loved, and educated.

“It went well. My new slogan seems to be, ‘Vote for Anne Madison, for the health of it.’ ”

Randall laughed. “That’s great, Anne. Catchy.”

He sat at the place he’d always had when he still lived here, wearing clothes Anne knew as well as her own. The blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up, those khakis—his socks didn’t match. They were both white and both cotton, but not a pair. She thought of his rented apartment, his clothes neatly folded away in cheap new furniture, and shuddered.

“I like it, too, Mom.”

Anne poured the tea. “Good.”

Randall rose and dug in the cupboard for the sugar. Anne eyed him disdainfully as he spooned it into his tea. “Tessa?” He nodded toward the sugar.

“She doesn’t need it,” Anne snapped.

Randall stirred his tea, sipped it, then said, in a companionable sort of way, as if he were discussing something minor, “Anne, you remember about the GAL appointment this week, don’t you?”

She felt her mouth tighten. “Of course I
remember
. It’s not likely I’ll forget something as important as that.”

“I’m only trying to be helpful. I know you’ve got a full schedule with your campaign.”

Placated, Anne agreed. “True.” She brightened. “Let me try an idea out on you two. The videotaping gave me an idea: What if we could produce a television show, something fun and engrossing, like a sitcom, but incorporate into the plot all the simple things we’re trying to teach? Not drinking during pregnancy. Taking medication daily. Proper diet. That sort of thing.”

“That’s a really cool idea, Mom!” Some of Tessa’s hair had come free from the braids and curled in the heat over her ears.

“It
is
a good idea, Anne. You should pursue it.” Randall’s voice was warm.

“Yes. Yes, I will.” Anne rose. “I need to get a pad and make some notes.” As she left the room, she looked back. “Randall, give Tessa some dinner if you haven’t already, will you? She can have a salad—there is lettuce and a cucumber in the refrigerator. Be sure to use the fat-free dressing; the other is Carmen’s. And a banana for dessert.”

Randall’s voice cut through her instructions. “Anne. Tessa’s too thin—”

“I’m
not
going to argue about this!” Anne snapped. “I am her mother.” She turned to Tessa. “
Nothing else. I mean that, Tessa
. And Tessa, if you’ve been at your grandfather’s farm,
you must shower and shampoo your hair before you do anything else. Certainly before you eat. And use pHisoHex.”

Tessa stood staring down at the floor.

“Well?” Anne demanded.

“Yes, Mom,” Tessa said.

“That’s better.” Anne left them, hurrying over the plush pale ecru wall-to-wall carpet that sank like butter beneath her heels down the hall into the rose-and-cream room she claimed for her own. Here her antique white-and-gold desk awaited her, everything on it belonging there, everything dusted and ordered.

Sinking into her leather chair, she folded her hands and took a deep breath. She touched, in ritual order, her white telephone, the small caller ID box, the thick Rolodex, and delicately moved her daily calendar a fraction of an inch, so that it was exactly in the center of her desk. She touched her tape dispenser, her stapler, the malachite box where she kept her stamps. She touched the pastel Lucite in and out boxes. Last, she set both hands on the silver-and-amethyst tray where her pens lay.

Her blotter was centered perfectly on her desk. Everything gleamed. She thought how much she loved marble and other veined stones whose fissures and stains were incorporated to make an even more beautiful whole, the way a streak first caused by a virus gave new breeds of tulips stripes and speckles and flaws that were considered assets.

She drew a yellow legal pad toward her and took up a pen. Her fingernails were glossy with a pale pink polish, nothing chipped. She would write a letter to her friend Natalie Henderson, who was in charge of public relations at the local PBS station.

Taking a deep breath, Anne began to work. Here, in the familiar order of her study, she could begin to change the world.

Tessa looked at her father across the pine table. “So you aren’t going to talk to her today? About me living with you?”

“Sweetie …”

“Dad, you
promised
. And you said you’d make her let me have a computer!” She blinked back angry tears. “Everyone breaks their promises.”

Her father gave her a level look. “Would you like me to go talk with her right now?”

Exasperated, Tessa bonked her head right down on the tabletop and tugged at her hair. She knew the worst thing to do was to interrupt her mother when she was working in her study. If her dad went to her mother’s study now there’d be a fight, and Tessa hated it when they fought.

She gave the table leg a good solid kick. “Okay,
fine
.”

“Tessa, remember what I told you on the way to the farm?”

“What.”

“Your mother and you and I are all going to speak with a man, a wise man, a psychiatrist, who knows all about families like ours, families involved in a divorce. He’s going to help us decide what’s best for you. The judge we saw told us we have to see this man, because it’s the best thing for you. After that, the judge will decide where you will live. Until then, it’s best for you to stay here.”

“But that’s crazy. Come on, Dad—” Tessa squirmed. “Can’t you just
make
Mom let me live with you? I don’t want to talk to strangers about it. Mom would go crazy if she thought I’d told strangers—” She kicked the table leg again, frustrated with the convolutions of her own thinking. What she wanted was to be magically transported out of her mother’s house without her mother knowing that that was what Tessa wanted, so that it wouldn’t be Tessa who hurt her mother’s feelings.

Did this make her a
monster
, that she wanted to leave her mother? Or a
coward
, that she couldn’t tell her?
Something
was wrong with Tessa, she knew. Sometimes she felt so angry and sad she thought she’d explode right out of her skin.

“Oh, Tessa, I know this all seems complicated and difficult right now. But it will get straightened out soon. It really will.” He stood up. His hair fell over his forehead and was shaggy around his ears. His clothes were rumpled and a thread dangled from the hem of his shirt collar. “Honey, I’ve got to go. We’ll talk about this another time.”

“Sure.” She stared down at the table.

He came behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. “At least,” he said, bending down to whisper, “at least I took you to McDonald’s.”

There were days when this would make her smile, days when she treasured the conspiracy between her and her father, because her mother would freak out if she knew Tessa had eaten there. McDonald’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, any of those fast-food places were the spawn of the devil as far as her mother was concerned. Not only would they make Tessa accumulate fat, it
also would be a peculiar blobby fat that comes with empty calories, and it would make her face all zitty, too, from the grease.

But today Tessa thought: So then why did her father, who was a doctor, take her there? It couldn’t be only, as her mother said, that he did it to spite her, to try to be the Disney parent, while she was left to enforce the standards of good health by herself.

“Tessa,” her father said. “Honey.”

“I want to meet my birth parents,” Tessa blurted out.

He was standing behind her, so she couldn’t see his face, but she heard him inhale sharply and she felt him tense up. He came around to face her, pulling up a chair. He took her hands in his.

“Why?”

He looked so kind and worried, her dad, and all at once he looked tired and about three hundred years old. He’d given her such a perfect day.

Her father had enough worries on his mind, she knew. A physician specializing in geriatrics, he saw lawyers, professors, and brilliant doctors he’d once studied under transformed by Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cancer. He worked too many hours at the hospital and the clinic, and added to those hours by visiting his patients at their retirement homes, checking in on them. Sometimes he took Tessa with him, and usually she liked it. The old people were so nice, with skin as soft as her sheets and bright bird eyes. Sometimes they creeped her out, though—the ones who cried or tried to touch her.

“Tessa?” her father prompted.

She looked away. She couldn’t see his earnest worried face and talk about it. “We’re studying DNA at school. Inherited characteristics.” She pulled her hands away from his.

“Ah.” He leaned back in his chair. He folded his arms over his chest. He sighed. “Have you told your mother this?”

Tessa snorted.

Calmly, her father said, “It’s not the best of times to drop it on her, do you think?”

“Why does it always have to be about
her
?”

“That’s not fair, Tessa, and you know it. It isn’t always about her. This is just a difficult year for her, a
complicated
one. Our divorce. Her campaign for the state legislature—”

“I don’t care!” Tessa burst out. She brought her fists up against her mouth to hold everything else back.

“You should care. Your mother loves you very much. Your happiness is her first priority.
And you’re not a child anymore, Tessa. You’re twelve.” His voice was level but firm. He wasn’t shouting at Tessa, but Tessa felt like he was shouting. “You need to cut your mother some slack, Tessa.” His voice dropped. “Look. Let’s make a deal. The minute the election’s over, we’ll start the search.”

She was so full of emotions it was like trying to contain a tornado inside her skin. She wanted to throw a tantrum like Brooke’s little brother did, flinging himself on the floor, kicking and wailing. Why, when everyone said she was getting older, more mature, did she feel so childish?

“Fine,” she muttered.

Her father stared at her without speaking.

“I said
fine
.”

Her father heaved a gusty sigh. “Want me to fix you a salad?”

She shook her head.

“How about a banana?”

“I’m not hungry.” Her poor dad. He hated leaving when she was sad. He’d blunder around forever trying to find something or say something to make her smile.
Then
he could leave. “I’m okay, Dad, really. I’m stuffed from McDonald’s.”

“Sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“You’ve got camp tomorrow, right?”

“Right.”

“What will you do?”

“Tennis. Swim. Maybe do beadwork.”

“Did you make that?” He nodded at a beaded bracelet around her wrist.

“No.”

“Well, it’s cool.”

“Want me to make you one?”

“Well, yeah. Yeah, that would be great. Only no pink, okay?”