Family and Other Accidents (15 page)

“With meat sauce?”

“I didn't know you were coming.”

Taking out a box of oyster crackers, Laine funnels a few into her mouth and wishes she had gone to her father's condo in downtown Providence. But then she feels the same shot of guilt she felt as a kid each time her mother kicked her father out and her father asked Laine to go with him. Before she was old enough to understand why her mother was sending him away, to understand spare shirts her father kept in his office, the little square packets of condoms. Laine knew it wasn't right to leave her mother, even though she wanted to.

“Do you know what you're going to do?” Caroline takes a fistful of crackers from the box, shuffles them in her hand. “Leaving him could make things hard.”

Laine fakes a yawn. “Do you want to watch Jor tomorrow, or should I take her back to the city with me? I'll only go into work for a few hours.”

Her mother says of course she wants Jorie to stay with her, of course she wants to see her granddaughter, if it's really only a few hours, because she does have things to do, things Laine and her father never understood.

In Laine's old room, Jorie sleeps in one of the twin beds. The reading lamp casts a weird glow over Laine's awards and plaques from the debate and cross country teams, her honor cords and photos of friends she hasn't heard from in years. Her mother's school crap has taken over the desk and the surface of her dresser, but otherwise the room is the same as when Laine left for Harvard eight years earlier. A picture from her senior prom is even tucked in the corner of her dresser mirror. She'd gone to the dance with a twenty-four-year-old architect, and he'd been one of the younger men she dated in high school. Since Laine was thirteen, when she stopped eating to eat and started running to run, there'd always been men and they'd always been older, men like her father and Steve at work, serious men with serious plans. They were the ones who appreciated her graceful collarbones and the way her mind worked.

Five months her junior, Connor was the only younger person Laine ever dated, and it wasn't a great “how they met” story. She'd picked him up in a bar. Out for a friend's bachelorette party her first semester of business school, she'd been annoyed by the other girls—the bride-to-be was wearing a “Suck for a Buck” shirt, and everyone was doing body shots with BU frat boys. Connor was eating cheese fries and watching the Indians–Red Sox game at the bar. She asked if he went to school in the area, which was pretty much Boston slang for “wanna fuck?” The sex was good but forgettable; she was tall and skinny, and he was tall and skinny. But the next morning when her alarm clock went off, he pulled her back to bed, said, “Don't leave, lovely lady,” and log rolled with her across the mattress onto the floor. He'd pretty much had her there. It turned out he was getting a master's in social policy from the Kennedy School, though she realized his getting in probably had a lot to do with the teaching he'd done with AmeriCorps and the fact that he was an orphan by fifteen. He seemed to be chilling out in graduate school because he couldn't think of anything else to do and his brother was footing the bill. When Laine got pregnant (how she could graduate at the top of her class and not remember to take a little white pill was one of the world's greater mysteries), she waited until she was sure she was keeping the baby before she told him. She knew he'd want it, having a child with her was better than any plan he had. At least that's what she'd thought.

Since Laine turned off her cell phone three hours earlier, Connor has left seven messages on the voice mail.
Lainey, please pick up. Will you at least tell me where you're going? I'm calling C.J. and Dan to see if you went there. Are you still going to work tomorrow? I'll get Jor if that helps you.
She stops listening when she hears a sob in his voice, because it makes her feel sorry for him, and she's furious at herself for feeling that way. The phone rings in her hand, and she clicks the talk button before it wakes Jorie.

“Can you at least let me say good night to Jor?”

“She's already asleep,” Laine whispers and turns the phone off again.

Pulling down the blankets of the twin bed opposite Jorie, Laine changes her mind and crawls in the bed beside her daughter.

“Daddy?” Jorie murmurs, sleepy and perfect.

She looks almost exactly like Laine did as a child, fair, with wide-set gray eyes, more her daughter than Connor's, even if she does love her father more, even if she wants him more than she wants her mother.

         

A year before he would even meet Laine, at the top of a double black diamond slope in Vail, Connor got down on one knee and presented Beth Martin with a velvet box from his ski pants pocket.

“I love you more than I've ever loved anyone and can't think of any family without you,” he said, squinting against the sun—he thought he should take his goggles off while proposing. “Beth, will you marry me?”

Saying yes, she hugged him through the layers of their down ski jackets and took off her glove so he could put the ring on her finger. They raced down the hill and when they got to bottom, he tackled her and they rolled around kissing and laughing, snow wet and cold on their cheeks and the slivers of flesh between their coats and gloves. It was Beth's twenty-second birthday, and he'd made reservations at the four star restaurant in the lodge. They were the youngest couple in the dining room, drawing attention to themselves by being giddy, giggly, and drunk from the cheapest wine on the menu.

“We'll have lots of kids, right?” Connor asked, dipping a two-dollar pomme frite in a pool of mustard and hot sauce he'd swirled together. “I want a whole gaggle of kids.”

“No more than nine.” Beth smiled. “Just enough for our own softball team.”

When he went to the bathroom that night, she wrote him a note on the lodge stationery. It said she was better expressing herself in writing and she wanted to make sure he knew she couldn't wait to start a life with him. She signed it “Cheesefry,” and he actually kissed the paper.

Five weeks later, a month before
his
twenty-second birthday, a hyperventilating Beth Martin handed Connor back the ring and another note, this one on loose-leaf paper, blue ink smudged with tears, saying she was going to medical school alone.

“I'm so sorry. It's just that you're the only boyfriend I've ever had,” she said over and over again, crumpled on the cheap carpeting of his apartment. “We're so young, and you don't even know what you want to do yet. I'd never forgive myself if I let you make my plans your plans.”

He never told anyone, not Laine, not his brother, all of what happened after he finished reading Beth's note and she walked out. Guts mangled, he'd spent days on the toilet shitting out everything that had been a part of him for the previous three and a half years. One night he washed down a bottle of aspirin with a fifth of Gin and slept for twenty-nine hours. He didn't shower; didn't eat; swam laps at the U of C pool until he couldn't feel his limbs, then walked home in the March air in nothing but wet swim trunks. After twelve days, when he hadn't shown up to their child psych class, Beth timidly knocked on his door.

“I wanted to make sure you were okay,” she said, pulling nervously at strands of her brown pageboy. “I was worried.”

He wanted to slice open her belly and pull strands of intestines out by the fistful. Instead, he said he'd slept with her best friend, whom she always joked had a crush on him.

“Dana and I were kicking it on and off for pretty much the whole last year you and I were together,” he said. “I was going to give her up when we got married, but she's a fabulous lay.”

Without a word Beth left, shoulders slumped and defeated. He wanted to slouch her even more, to pound her into the ground. So he called Dana and made it as true as possible.

Connor didn't see Beth Martin again for four years, not until she walked into Café Paridiso for the coffee that Laine set up but couldn't attend because she had to work.

When Beth walked through the door shaking rain off the collar of a violet peacoat, he almost didn't recognize her. Not because she looked any different, but because she looked exactly the same, he'd just forgotten, remembering only her back, her hunched shoulders, and the hatred that made his fingers shake. Unlike Laine, who was aggressively attractive with the classic bones of a statue in the Art Institute, Beth was pretty in the most unassuming brown-eyed way. And like those dogs they'd studied in freshman psych, Connor remembered exactly how it felt to be in love with her. Remembered she used to rub her feet together before she fell asleep, that she wrapped herself in warm sheets when they came out of the dryer, the way her belly button had a slightly musty smell.

“Conn?” Beth asked. “Who would have thought we'd both end up in Boston?”

“Yeah, everyone in this city calls me ‘Kahnah.' ” He stood up, and she gave him a quick hug; she was easily a foot shorter than him. “So you're a doctor now or something?”

“Or something.” She shrugged, rolled wide eyes, smiled at Jorie. “Is this your little girl?” Beth held out her fingers for Jorie to squeeze, and looked up at Connor. “She's so cute. I can't believe she's yours.”

“Hey.”

“No, I mean, I knew you'd have a beautiful kid; I just can't believe you have a kid.”

But Connor knew what she meant: she couldn't believe he had a kid that wasn't hers.

         

It's pouring rain, and Laine is already late to get Jorie from her mother's when she leaves her office on Market Street, still she goes completely out of her way back to her apartment. She tells herself she's going to get clean underwear and a change of clothes, but the only thing she takes is a shoebox of Connor's old photos they unearthed the year before while moving from their last crummy apartment to their current crummy apartment.

Pulling the car into the parking lot of a White Hen Pantry, Laine thumbs through the pictures. Most of the shots are Beth and Connor in L.L. Bean outerwear—apparently the two of them did nothing in college but ski and have snowball fights on the campus lawns. But there is one shot of Connor on a bed with the paisley coverlet in all hotels. Even though he's wearing jeans and a T-shirt and Laine knows he and Beth never had sex, the photo is decidedly postcoital. Half on his stomach, half on his side, something between surprise and a smile is on his lips, black eyes unfocused, like Beth whipped the camera out of a travel bag without warning. This is what Laine wanted to see—what it looks like for her husband to be in love with someone else.

Laine sets the box of photos on the wet asphalt in the parking lot, leaving it to confuse the next person stopping for cigarettes and soda. As she drives, fighting Big Dig construction and sheets of rain, she wonders for the first time in twenty-six years if her father loved any of those women. Wonders if that makes any difference.

“Ma, I'm really sorry,” she says preemptively in the doorway, when she finally gets back and lets herself in.

“Jorie's with Connor.” At the top of the stairs, her mother shakes her head. “He came by looking for you, but you didn't answer when we tried your cell. He waited around, but Jorie was hungry, so he took her to get something to eat.”

“What?” White-hot anger burns Laine's lungs. “You just let him take her, just like that? God, for once I really thought that you would be on my side. Just this one fucking time.”

And then she's running up the stairs to her childhood bedroom, grabbing her deodorant and makeup from the dresser, and shoving them back into her gym bag.

“There aren't sides here,” her mother is saying. “You said you'd be home by noon, it was going on three. He's her father; she wanted to go with him. What did you want me to do?”

Laine realizes it's a perfectly legitimate question. If her childhood taught her anything, it's that children shouldn't be used as pawns in their parent's disasters. But she wants to be nine years old again to tell her father yes when her mother kicks him out and he asks Laine if she wants to go with him.

“Wait, where are you going?” Caroline's hand grazes Laine's shoulder as she runs past her down the stairs.

“I'm going where I should have gone in the first place,” Laine says. “To Daddy's.”

         

Connor hadn't realized Laine was someone he could love until the night he tripped over her on his way to pee. It was four in the morning, but she was on hands and knees scrubbing the splintered floors in her apartment.

“What are you doing,” he asked, squatting next to her. “Don't you have a big test tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” she said, cheeks red—the first time in the two months they'd been sleeping together that he'd seen her embarrassed about anything. “I just do this when I get nervous.”

It might have been biological, OCD or something fixable with a pill, but it was the first crack she'd let him see, the first time he thought of her as a person and not some perfect droid.

It wasn't until half a year later, when Laine was six months pregnant, that he realized he
did
love her. It was the middle of winter, but the heat in their apartment couldn't be adjusted, so it was perpetually ninety-six degrees. They spent a lot of time languishing on each other on the futon. With her head in his lap, she looked like a dying queen ant, twig arms and legs protruding in all directions from her huge, round stomach.

“Baby, let's go out to dinner.” Laine looked up from one of his heavy books on social policy—she'd started off editing his thesis but by that point was pretty much writing it. “I want you to eat a steak for me.”

“If you want a steak, I'll take you to get a steak.” Connor smiled down at her. “But I'm not gonna torture you by eating one in front of you.”