Family and Other Accidents (24 page)

“You're wearing me out, girlie,” he said. “I've gotta sit the next one out.”

She started back to the table with him, but her director offered to take her for a whirl, and then the VP of marketing wanted a dance. When her friend Steve Humboldt stepped in too close, Connor appeared at Laine's side and cut in as if they'd all fallen into a Fitzgerald story.

“Lainey, when you dance I want to make it rain”—one of those nonsensical things he said instead of
I love you.

But his steps were off, and sweat beads rolled down his throat to stain his white collar. He stumbled in her arms, and she took several steps backward, suddenly supporting his weight.

“Baby?”

“I feel weird.” He shook his head, straightened up, took a labored breath. “Really dizzy.”

“Let's sit down.” In some horrible slow-motion universe, she tried to lead him back to their table. “I'll get you some juice or maybe a soda—”

Then Connor was on the floor, and hundreds of arms were reaching toward her as if she were a rock star. The director's wife, a gynecologist, and someone's plastic surgeon husband swooped to Connor, who blinked and tried to sit up. Steve Humboldt's hands were on Laine's shoulders, as he told one of the kids to call an ambulance. Connor shook his head and waved away the attention. But then he looked at her, and it was the closest Laine ever felt to another person before or again. When she took his hand, the joining was welded platinum.

With both his parents buried by the time he was fifteen, Connor had always been convinced he didn't have much time to knock around the earth, which made the fact that they hadn't recognized he was sick all the more awful. For months they'd been fighting over it without knowing that was what they were fighting over.
“I know you're tired, Conn, but I'm tired, too.” “Lainey, could you stop cranking up the freaking heat, every morning I wake up drenched.” “If you ate better, maybe you wouldn't feel like shit all the time.” “You're not my mother.”

Four days later, hands linked across the armrests of the oncologist's black leather office chairs, they got the results of Connor's tests and learned that the likelihood of a cure would have been better than ninety-eight percent had they caught it a year earlier. Instead the oncologist offered them half of that. But they weren't surprised; they'd realized that the night of the party, that's when they made all their promises to each other. It was sometime between the floor of the
Colonnade and now when they broke them.

         

Of course it falls on Laine to tell the girls the dog is dead, because Connor isn't back when the yellow bus deposits them in front of the house. Keelie simply starts crying when she hears, but Jorie looks at Laine with accusatory gray eyes.

“So you finally convinced Daddy to put Mouse to sleep?” she asks. “You promised you were going to call the place about the transplant. You didn't even try.” Her skin is blotchy, face suddenly soft and squishy, and then Jorie is running up the stairs, slamming the door so hard everything in the house rattles.

“Jor—” Laine calls after her and then just stops.

Keelie is still crying, strings of snot leaking from her nose, wide eyes wet and sad. Laine tries to gather her daughter into her arms, but Keelie shudders, stiff in her embrace.

“Did you really kill Mouse?” she asks.

It isn't fair that Laine has to do this by herself, which is what she screams at Connor when he comes through the door twenty minutes later.

“I can't believe you fucking did that to me,” she yells. “You hung me out to dry. I've got Jorie screaming that we killed the dog and now Keelie thinks I'm a murderer. Where were you anyway?”

“Lainey, calm down.” When Connor gets exasperated, Laine sees exactly how he must have looked as a child and knows she wouldn't have liked him then. “I just went to get the stuff for Jorie's project,” he says. “And I had to go to like three places, because she wants real mulch and they didn't have that at Frank's. Then I was right by Ben & Jerry's so I stopped to get some ice cream, cuz I thought we all might need it.”

It all seems quasi reasonable. He does have plastic bags from two different craft stores, and sticky pints of Chubby Hubby and Cherry Garcia.

“It was just awful to do by myself.” She feels her voice catch.

“I'm sorry,” he sighs. “I thought I'd be back in time; I'll talk to them. Let's just order a pizza, then I'll work with Jorie on the Alamo thing.”

Even though he does talk to them, Jorie won't come down for dinner. Laine starts upstairs to get her, but Connor puts a hand on her wrist.

“Let it go,” he says. “When she gets hungry she'll come down and eat the leftovers.”

There are lots of leftovers. Though Keelie puts away two huge pieces, her round face rouged with marinara, Laine and Connor just pick at the toppings on their slices. As she's putting the wide, flat box in the fridge, she asks Connor if he wants coffee, but he shakes his head, says he's still not drinking it. She bites her tongue so hard she tastes blood.

He does the dishes, and she goes to the study to check all of the e-mail and voice mail messages she hadn't checked all day. On her way to the kitchen to get juice, she pauses outside the door, hearing Connor and Jorie inside.

“I don't understand why it matters,” says Jorie, always so serious. “I don't know anything about world politics, and this is just one dumb battle. The Texans lost anyway.”

“Yeah, well, they tried really hard to save it,” Connor says. “Sometimes trying counts enough, cheesefry.”

“Whatever,” Jorie says. “They probably shouldn't have even been there in the first place.”

Through the gap between the door hinges, Laine watches. They're at the table with all the things Connor bought earlier in the day—Popsicle sticks, clear glue, green gobs of mulch and tempera paint. The “A” volume of
Encyclopedia Britannica
is open to a picture they're using as a model. Laine smiles when she sees the plate of pizza crust next to Jorie.

“How are things going in here?” Laine walks in, tries to look casual. “The Alamo rising again?”

“Hey,” Connor says. “Thanks, by the way, for taking off today, I know it's your busy season.”

“Sure.” Laine nods.

“You don't have to be nice to her for me,” Jorie says, staring at the Alamo on the table so she won't have to look at her parents. “I know she killed Mouse.”

“Come on,” Connor says, unusually parental. “She didn't kill Mouse. He was sick, and we were being selfish keeping him alive. It's okay to be sad, but you can't take it out on your ma, okay?”

Jorie says nothing, looks at the sticks and paint. Laine tries to meet Connor's eyes to thank him, but he's fiddling with the clogged orange Elmer's nozzle, so she pours a glass of carrot juice and goes back to the study, lets Connor put the girls to bed. From the living room, faint sounds of
Late Night
filter through the walls. When she hears Connor click off the TV, she goes upstairs, where he's climbing into bed. Sliding out of her clothes, she gets in beside him, touching his bony shoulder.

“Thank you for sticking up for me with Jor,” she says.

“I told you I felt bad about leaving.”

She lowers her hand from his arm to his nipple, feels the bump harden under her fingers, but he brushes away her touch.

“Lainey, I can't.         .         .         .         Mouse.” He kisses her cheek, rolls away from her onto his stomach.

On one hand Laine could count the number of times they made love when Connor was on the very hard drugs. But one night, even after hours spent shitting and shivering on the toilet, he woke up with his cock hard against her thigh.

“I know what to do with this,” she said, trying to sound sexy as she ran long fingers down his gaunt body, and took him in her hands, lowered her head. She'd wanted only to go down on him, unsure if he was even supposed to have sex—all those amber vials with so many restrictions: no operating heavy machinery, no driving or drinking, no taking on a full stomach, no taking on an empty stomach.

“No, Lainey, please.” He pulled up her head to his, kissed her. “Let's not waste it.”

On top of her, he felt brittle. Fat splotches of sweat falling from his forehead onto hers. Laine had never faked an orgasm before with anyone, but she knew Connor wouldn't stop until she came, his face contorted as he thought about whatever it was he thought about to distract himself. She'd loved him so much then, more than she loved her children, more than she loved herself. So she rolled her eyes back, bit her lower lip, and called his name until he believed it.

         

Three weeks after they put down the dog, when they still haven't had sex, Laine comes home from work, late and tired, and steps in a pile of dog crap in the living room. Her first thought is that Mouse must be sick, because he never has accidents. Then she remembers Mouse is dead, and Connor still isn't drinking coffee. But there's barking, and through the screen door Connor and the girls are playing with a dog that truly seems to warrant the label “mangy mutt.”

“It's Mouse Two,” Jorie says when Laine slides open the door to the backyard. “Because Mouse is dead we don't use junior.”

“I see,” Laine says. “Conn, can you come talk to me in the kitchen for a minute.”

Of course Connor has a story about finding the dog stuck in the broken fence in the woods behind their house, about how it seemed like fate.

“We talked about getting a new dog, and we said we were going to wait until the summer,” Laine says. “Then I'd have some time off and the girls would be home, and it wouldn't be such a bitch to train it.”

“But I found this dog now,” Connor pleads, actually whining. “And it's a good dog.”

“I'm sure it is,” Laine says. “But it's really awful timing.”

“You're such a hypocrite,” he says. “You walk around all holier than thou because you won't eat a cheeseburger, but when there's actually an animal that needs help, you totally bail. It's all theory with you.”

“Conn—”

She's starting to feel guilty, starting to reconsider, when she notices Connor has one of their kitchen towels tied around his left hand, a giant crimson blotch in the middle.

“What happened to your hand?” she asks, even though she knows exactly what happened, and Connor doesn't say anything, which just confirms it. Anger swells in her chest. “The dog bit you, didn't it?”

“It was just a little nip when I was helping it out of the fence. She was really scared. You saw her, she's a good dog.”

And Laine is running through the living room and out to the backyard, screaming for the girls to get away from the dog. Keelie obediently goes inside and up the stairs, but Jorie stays behind, looks at the dog, then at her mother, shrugs, annoyed as always.

“Now,” Laine yells with enough force that Jorie kicks the earth in front of her and shuffles through the sliding door.

With the girls gone, the dog rubs against Laine's wool pants. Laine backs away, leaves it outside and shuts the screen door. Sitting on haunches, it watches Laine and Connor through the glass.

“The dog bites you, and you bring it into our house and let it play with our children,” Laine says. “You probably have fucking rabies.”

“I don't have rabies.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

“God, what is wrong with you? It's one thing for you to try to kill yourself on the fucking motorcycle. But your kids?”

“Aww, Laine, you know I'd never do anything to hurt the girls; you're just screaming at me to scream at me.”

Then she can't take it anymore, feels blood pounding through her system, in the back of her head.

“Just get out,” she says, trying to breathe. “I can't deal with you right now, so just go somewhere for a while.”

“Where do you want me to go?” Red fills the spaces under his cheekbones.

“For starters, why don't you go to the hospital and have them check out your hand.”

“What about the dog—”

“Just go.”

The garage door rumbles up and the Fat Boy's pipes crack.

Muffled by the screen, the dog barks. An unfortunate cross between a collie and dalmatian, she has messy spots under a layer of dingy, rough fur. She does look sweet though, with her mouth slightly open, kind of like a smile. It's a look Mouse used to get. Connor had set out a dish of water and some type of food by the door, but both dishes are empty. Sliding open the glass door, Laine bends down to pick up the bowls, and the dog licks her hands, pink tongue rough and not really wet. Mouse II starts to follow her inside, but Laine points a stern finger, tells her to stay, which the dog does. In the basement, there's a twenty-five-pound bag of Mouse's dog food; somehow it had felt wrong to throw it away. Laine hauls it back up the stairs, fills Mouse's old bowl, and sets it on the concrete step for Mouse II, slides the door shut again. She sits in one of the wooden chairs watching the dog eat.

Jorie's model Alamo is on the kitchen table, fat red A+ on the corner of the cardboard base, the report she wrote is beside it. Laine picks up the loose-leaf paper and skims her daughter's eloquent prose.
Whether or not the story of the battle with Santa Ana is true, the Alamo has become an important part of our national history. It has come to symbolize the courage it takes to fight against overwhelming odds.
At the end the teacher has simply written, “Excellent,” like all Jorie's teachers are forever writing “excellent,” just as Laine's own teachers used to. Realizing it's after ten, Laine goes upstairs. Keelie is in her bed with the sheets pulled up to her round chin.

“You're such a good girl, going to bed without being told.” Laine strokes Keelie's forehead, kisses each of her eyelids with their dark lashes.