Family and Other Accidents (14 page)

“I'm doing the best I can,” Jack says.

And Connor realizes Jack isn't just talking about Jorie anymore, but about everything. Realizes he's almost the age Jack was when their mother died, that the two of them have been on their own for nearly a decade. For almost ten years, Jack has been doing the best he could. But it's not enough anymore, or maybe it's not necessary anymore.

“I'm sorry,” Jack says.

And Connor knows that he is supposed to turn around and acknowledge that he heard, to accept, because that is the right thing to do. But he doesn't want to look at his brother, because there's something more horrible about Jack falling apart than there is to Jack being selfish and awful. There's a traffic light leading out of the hotel parking lot, and he watches it change from red to green. His face crumbles, and he feels a hot tear run down his nose. It has been ten years, and Connor is a grown-up with a wife and a child of his own, but it's somehow still too much.

the only pregnant
girlfriend he ever
married

They're phrases Laine remembers from her childhood. Words murmured into her father's jackets by all those “aunts” who weren't sisters of either one of her parents, messages left on the answering machine of her father's car dealership.
I know it's not right, but it seemed right; I feel awful for your wife and
daughter
.         .         .         .         Laine finds these exact words on a sheet of tear-stained typing paper folded and tucked in her husband's parka pocket when she looks for the car keys.

She'd been on her way to the gym, the first night she'd left Merrill Lynch before ten in nearly a month, but she marches through the tiny apartment to the bathroom, beats the closed door with a flat palm.

“I can't believe you did this to me.” Her voice quakes with anger, the way her mother's voice used to.

“Lainey?” Connor asks from inside. “What's going on?”

“I found Beth Martin's note. Open the door.” Laine reaches for the doorknob at the same time Connor reaches for the handle on the other side. Both knobs come off, clanging on the floor and locking him in.

“I hate this fucking apartment,” she says. “This is absolutely ridiculous.”

She tries twisting the inner workings of the lock with her fingertips. Through the pressed wood separating them, she hears him do the same.

“I guess you should call the super,” Connor says. “Gimme a second, I think I'm going to be sick.”

“At least you're in a good place for it. I might boot, too, and I'll have to do it on my shoes.”

Actually Laine doesn't feel sick, but strangely calm, maybe because she's been expecting this, not this exactly but something like it, since she was a kid, because she never believed in happily ever after.

In the bedroom she finds the maintenance man's number. When there's no answer, she leaves an emergency page. The intercom buzzes. It's not the handyman but the day-care car pool dropping off their two-year-old. With Jorie balanced on her hip, Laine goes back to the bathroom door, where she can hear Connor tinkering with the lock inside.

It occurs to Laine that she's happy her husband is trapped in the bathroom, because if he could get out they'd have to have the same fight her parents always had, the fight she thought she'd never have to have because she'd chosen someone like Connor.

“I called the maintenance guy,” she says to the door. “I'm going to go somewhere.”

“Wait.”

“Daddy?” Jorie reaches for his voice with dimpled fingers. “Come out.”

“I'm working on it, cheesefry,” Connor says. “Lainey, please just wait until we can talk.”

“I don't want to talk. I don't want to know all the reasons why you did this.”

“Whatever you want, but don't take off.”

The room shakes as he throws his weight against the door in a poor attempt to knock it down. She tells him to stop before they lose their security deposit.

“I'll leave the front door unlocked so the super can get in,” she says, glad she doesn't have to look at him, because he has that heartbreaking twelve-year-old-boy look that skinny guys in their twenties sometimes have. “I'm taking Jorie with me.”

“Lainey, wait. At least tell me where you're going.”

“Somewhere.”

But behind the wheel of the Jetta, a business school graduation gift from her father, Laine isn't sure where to go. She suspects Steve Humbolt, the only real friend she has at work, might have a crush on her, so he's out of the question. More than anything she wants to go to her father, wants to inhale his scent of Lagerfeld and leather from the car dealership. She wants to cry on his shoulder and have him threaten to kill her husband or at least have his legs broken. But she can't go to her father, not for this. He'd made a second career of fucking around on her mother; anything he could say on the subject would be pretty hollow.

So she gets on 95 South and heads toward her mother's house in Providence, even though her mother forgot Jorie's last birthday and told Laine not to marry Connor when she got pregnant. In movies, women go to their mothers when their husbands screw around, and that sense of sisterhood seems right.

“Want to go see Grandma?” Laine looks in the rearview mirror at Jorie strapped in her car seat.

“Want Daddy.”

On cosmic cue, Laine's purse starts ringing in the passenger seat. The caller ID on her phone shows the number for their Cambridge apartment.

“Lainey, don't do this to our family,” Connor says in a rush, knowing there's a finite amount of time he has to say anything. “Please, let me explain.”

“I take it you got out of the bathroom,” she says, and turns off the phone.

         

Two months before Laine found Beth Martin's note crumpled in his coat pocket, Connor was floating in that place between awake and asleep, where he thought he was having conversations with people who weren't in the room.

“Baby,” Laine shook his shoulder, definitely a real person, a real person home from work hours later than she'd promised. “Get up, you did that thing where you fell asleep with water again.”

That thing—drifting off with a glass of water in his hand—had been happening a lot since their babysitter dropped out of MIT to follow Phish and Laine had started going to her office at noon till all hours of the night so Jorie only spent afternoons at day care. Connor always tried to wait up for Laine, but rarely made it.

“I'm sleeping,” he said, though that was becoming less and less true, and the sheets
were
wet and his contacts had dried to his eyes. “Just lay on the dry parts.”

“Come on, get up so I can change the bed before we get sick.”

Connor moaned. Laine was a superevolved human who functioned on three hours of sleep, no food with faces, and decaf coffee; she didn't get sick, or tired, or unproductive. While she yanked off the bedding, he went to the bathroom. He couldn't find his glasses, and everything was fuzzy when he came back sans contacts. Tall, blond, and in her underwear, Laine looked good, even fuzzy. He touched the pointy bone of her shoulder.

“I almost forgot to tell you,” she said. “Beth Martin called.”

“Who?”

At the University of Colorado, Connor had almost married a Beth Martin, but Laine had to mean some other Beth Martin, perhaps a Beth Martin graduating from college and looking for an AmeriCorps placement in Boston, maybe a Beth Martin who'd seen their ad in
The Crimson
for child care. He hadn't heard from University of Colorado Beth Martin in nearly four years and couldn't fathom a reason she'd contact him. Even so, his heart flopped against his chest at the thought of his Beth Martin.

“She's doing her internship at Mass General.” Laine got into bed and the pulled blankets up to her chin. “She heard you were in the area and wanted to get together for coffee.”

“My ex-girlfriend called here and talked to you?” Connor asked; Laine nodded. “How'd she even get the number?”

“We're in the book.” Laine shrugged from under the covers. “She seemed nice. I told her you'd give her a call. I figured you'd want to see what she was up to.”

Laine talking about Beth Martin had an unsettling nightmare quality of things being off. Not that he hadn't told Laine about Beth. In that part of a new relationship where you tell each other the reasons why you are the way you are, it was one of his sugar-packet stories—dead father, dead mother, living with his brother, and a brief engagement to his college sweetheart. What Laine didn't know were the details—that for years after breaking up with Beth Martin he'd start sweating at the mention of her name, that the thought of her made his fingers shake.

“I guess coffee would be okay.” His hands weren't shaking per se, but his heart was pounding blood furiously enough to make him wonder if his eardrums might explode.

“Are you coming to bed? I thought you were tired,” Laine said, and curled her body into his when he lay down beside her. “So I have a question. When you proposed to Beth, was she pregnant, too?”

“You know you're the only pregnant girlfriend I ever married.” He patted Laine's hip, wondered if she could feel the blood in his ears. “Beth and I didn't even have sex.”

“You never told me that.” Laine propped herself on her elbow. “You never had sex with her? And you dated for two years?”

“Three and a half.”

“You didn't have sex for almost four years?” Laine was incredulous. “Was she religious?”

“Not really. She just wanted to wait until she was married,” Connor said. That wasn't the whole truth. Initially Beth
had
wanted to wait, but after they'd been together a year, she'd wanted to do it. By then Connor was convinced he would marry her, and it had seemed silly to compromise her beliefs. That didn't seem like something he should tell Laine—Laine who'd picked him up at a bar, Laine whom he'd gone to bed with when he still thought her name was Jane. “There are other things you can do.”

“You got by on hand jobs and hummers for four years?”

“If you want to have these heart-to-hearts maybe you should try getting home before midnight.” Connor sighed, mad at Laine for bringing the whole thing up in the first place. “Why is this so important anyway? I never hold it against you when I find your name scribbled in bathroom stalls.”

Laine laughed, mock smacked his shoulder.

“So these bathroom messages,” she said, “do they promise wicked good times?”

“A great lay, sound financial advice, that kind of thing.”

“Wanna fuck?”

“That's romantic.” He turned on his stomach. He'd wanted to fuck a lot three hours ago when Laine was supposed to have come home, before she mentioned Beth Martin. “We've got to be up in like four hours.”

Laine crawled on his back, aligning her arms and legs with his, reaching for his big hands and feet with her big hands and feet.

“Come on, baby, we haven't all week.” She licked the back of his neck, making his shoulders bunch.

“Whose fault is that?” he asked, but Laine's hands slid beneath the waistband of his boxers—it was a lost cause.

“Baby, a little longer,” she said ten minutes later, as he held her long, lean torso, and she rocked back and forth on top of him. “I'm almost there.”

But he just let himself go, not entirely on purpose, but not really an accident either. Halfheartedly, he apologized.

“That was a shitty thing to do,” she said.

“I was sleeping, what do you want from me?”

“Sorry I bothered you.” She rolled away from him, sounding like she might cry.

Then he
did
feel horrible. It wasn't Laine's fault they were on a weird crepuscular schedule, wasn't her fault Beth Martin had a copy of the white pages. Reaching over Laine's hips, he tried to open her thighs, but she swatted his hands away.

“Go to sleep if you're so tired.”

“Let me make you happy, please.”

“It's fine.” Her voice was marginally softer. “Don't worry about it.”

“I
am
really sorry.” He kissed her dishwater blond head. “Can you get off work one night this week and come with me to meet Beth for coffee? I'd really like it if you came.”

“I can try.”

         

“I've never met anyone who needed a family more than Connor,” Laine's mother says. “I never thought
he
would do this to you.”

Even though she's saying the exact opposite, Laine is pretty sure her mother means
This always happens; you just thought you were special and it wouldn't happen to you.
The two of them are in the kitchen of the house where Laine grew up, and everything looks the same as it did then, only not as clean.

“That makes two of us,” Laine says, missing her father's quiet understanding, wishing she'd gone there.

“And he just left the note in his pocket,” Caroline says. Still thin and blond, an older Laine. “It's almost as though he wanted you to find it.”

“I really don't want to talk about it,” Laine says, and she doesn't. Because the note was so sad and chock-full of regret, Laine almost felt sorry for the woman fucking her husband, the short, dark-haired girl she'd talked to once on the phone and met briefly last week when she and Connor had bumped into her at the grocery store. She just can't shake the feeling that if it were a movie, she'd be rooting for Beth Martin and Connor to be together.

Laine opens the pantry and stares inside, just like when she was a kid. Even though she isn't hungry, just like when she was a kid.

“There's leftover spaghetti,” Caroline says. It's Friday night, but her lesson plan book is open on the table—the same red vinyl kind she used decades ago, probably the same grammar lessons she used decades ago. Caroline became a teacher because all women of her generation became teachers; a mother because all women of her generation became mothers.