Hush Little Baby (5 page)

Thirty yards behind my dad, Gordon talks with some of the other dads. The men dissect each minute and congratulate each other on each play as though they were the ones who played the game and as if world peace were determined by the outcome.

My dad turns to look with me, and the twinkle leaves his eyes.

“Come on, Pops, I’ll walk you to the car.”

“And we’ll get to dinner by breakfast tomorrow,” my mom says. “Just get him to the curb. I’ll bring the car around.”

She marches off with Martha at her heels. My dad begins to shuffle in the direction of the parking lot. I shuffle with him, happy to have him by my side.

“Mommy!”

A redheaded pirate with an eye pencil mustache, a backward ball cap, and more freckles than anyone can count is holding me at sword point with a twelve-inch twig.

“I surrender,” I say, my heart swelling at the sight of my girl.

“Mmmeee toooo,” my dad gurgles beside me.

Addie doesn’t laugh. Her mission is too serious. “Mommy, I want to go. We’ve been hewre foooowrever.”

Three hours is forever to a four-year-old.

“I’m just going to walk Papa to the parking lot and then we’ll go.”

“Okay. I’ll help,” she says, and takes her spot on the other side of her grandfather to help him avoid holes and uneven spots with his walker. A job she takes very seriously until a stray ball crosses our path and she takes off after it.

“Jill.”

At Gordon’s voice, I stop, and my dad pushes forward at twice his previous pace. Nine years and I’m still between them.

“Hello, Nick,” Gordon says as he walks past me and in front of my dad, extending his hand.

With some difficulty, my dad accepts the outstretched palm.

Gordon’s mood appears light, considering the loss.

“Jill, the team’s headed to Gina’s. We need to get going.”

I glance at my dad, who has continued his struggle up the ramp to the parking lot. Gordon’s already turned and is walking the other direction, fully expecting me to follow.

The walker sticks in a crack, and my dad struggles to dislodge it. With a deep breath, I move toward my dad, help him out of his jam, then continue beside him toward the parking lot at the pace of a proud man who’s had a stroke and needs to use a walker, but won’t stoop to any more assistance than that.

Gordon’s eyes are on me, but I don’t look back.

We’re twenty yards from the curb when Addie appears on the left.

“Mommy, Daddy says we got to go.” Her voice is too tense for a little girl.

I nod, and my dad stops, which I don’t want him to do. Suspicion fills his eyes, and I feel his concern and his blood pressure rise.

I force my face into an easy smile and say with what I hope passes for nonchalance, “Tell your dad I just need to say good-bye to Papa and Nana.”

Addie looks uncertain, but turns to deliver the message, and my dad and I shuffle on, no longer worried about hurrying.

The damage has been done.

11

G
ina’s Pizza is Laguna Beach Little League’s second headquarters. Gordon’s team and the opposing team and at least two other teams fill the red, white, and green landmark. Team photos from three decades cover the walls, and pennants for every team west of the Mississippi fill in the holes.

Beside the restaurant is a drugstore, its glass storefront blazing with fluorescent light. My eyes slide guiltily through the windows to the pharmacy counter where hundreds of boxes of Next Choice are kept, then shift to the dim interior of Gina’s.

Gordon drinks beer at a table, completely absorbed in his conversation, his hands gesticulating a story of grand proportions.

His eyes pause, find mine through the window, and I shiver with fear.

He knows my thoughts. He always knows. He possesses superhuman powers—ESP, radar, incredible intuition. No matter how small the deceit, he catches me, and the punishment is always so much greater than the crime.

Gordon’s eyes find me again, staring twice as long as the moment before, and I walk away from the light and into the darkness to join the team for the celebration, hoping this time I get away with it, manage to deceive him, survive another day, knowing it’s only a matter of time before he catches me.

*  *  *

“I’m glad you decided to come,” Michelle says, stepping up beside me. “You don’t join us often enough.”

I offer my patented smile as my eyes slide more than I intend to wander to Gordon’s beer glass. Four or five, hard to know exactly because it’s being refilled from endless pitchers on the table.

Beside him, Claudia Rousseau, a petite pale predator with large accoutrements and bird eyes that never meet mine, laughs too loud at whatever Gordon’s saying. From twenty feet away, I smell her scent, the perfume that so often lingers on my husband. The emotion evoked is unclear—sorrow, jealousy, pity, gratitude, relief—a combination of all of the above.

Michelle misinterprets my glance. “You’re a lucky woman,” she says. “Gordon’s so great with the kids. I wish Bob doted on Max the way Gordon does on Addie and Drew. Fifteen minutes a day’s about his tolerance.”

Michelle’s husband, Bob, sits half a table down completely immersed in the Lakers-versus-Orlando matchup on the screen above his head. He’s so typical that, although I’ve known him for years, there’s a chance I wouldn’t recognize him if I ran into him outside of baseball or church.

Gordon, his instincts honed like a lion’s, notices me looking Bob’s way. My eyes slide to his, then return to Michelle.

“Or looked at me the way Gordon looks at you,” she continues. “He’s crazy about you.” Something in the way she says it is a question.

The pitcher rises and falls again from Gordon’s glass, and Claudia’s laughter bubbles over like champagne, as though my husband is the next Rodney Dangerfield.

“Excuse me,” I say. I walk from Michelle and out the doors to the throng of players and siblings playing tag on the pizza parlor’s patio.

Addie runs past me in hot pursuit of a child two years older. Unbeknown to him, he’s seriously outmatched. Addie’s flaming red hair is matched by her lightning speed.

I look around for Drew. He isn’t there.

I wander right toward the parking lot, see nothing, then retrace my steps to the left and into the service drive.

Full darkness has settled into a moonless night, but four street lamps provide halos of illumination down the hundred yards of pavement. In the distance, the slow trickle of water whispers from the runoff channel that runs behind the strip mall.

Under the third halo of light, three young heads squat around something in the middle of the road.

My footfalls are concealed by the boys’ whispers and nervous giggles. Max, Michelle’s boy, is closest to me, his round figure unmistakable. To his right is Travis Burk, catcher for the team, a scrawny, shy boy who I like very much. To the left is Drew. All three still wear their uniforms, though their caps are gone and their cleats have been traded for sneakers.

Three feet from them, still in the darkness, I stop, and the pizza crawls up my throat.

“I think we should leave it alone,” Max says.

“Yeah, I think we’re killing it,” Travis stutters.

Drew continues to spin the helpless toad on its back, stopping every few seconds to see how it’s responding.

It’s not responding very well.

“Drew,” I say.

All three boys look up, Drew glancing only for a blink before returning to his work. The other two boys stare, eyes wide, a combination of fear and relief in their young faces.

“Drew,” I say again stronger.

“What?” he answers, still not interrupting his stirring.

I step between the other boys so quickly that both fall back from their haunches to their butts and scuttle back on the pavement. I grab my son’s arm that still holds his stirring stick, a Big Gulp straw, and he looks at me with annoyance. “What?”

“Stop it.”

His arm tenses against mine, but he’s still only eight and I’m still stronger.

I glance at the boys on the pavement. “Go,” I say, holding on to my anger so they won’t witness it.

Both spring to their feet and sprint away.

When they’re out of sight, I kneel to the ground and examine my son’s handiwork. The toad, an unsightly spotted brown blob a few inches tall and wide, is laid out helpless on its back. Its arms and legs splay from its round body as it twitches against the pavement, its small heart rapid-firing through its parchment underbelly.

I snatch the straw from Drew’s hand and roll the beast right side up. Its legs fan flat from its body, and its eyes are closed.

I nudge it gently, but it remains inert.

My eyes squeeze tight, and I swallow hard.

Drew is beside me, but he isn’t looking at the poor creature, he’s looking at me. I raise my eyes to his.

“Why?” I ask.

For a moment he says nothing, just stares at me with his icy blue gaze that always receives so many compliments—long, dark lashes that frame irises the color of a robin’s egg.

Then he answers. “Why not?”

And I feel the tears rebelling again.

“Jillian?”

Michelle walks toward us. “Max said there’s a hurt toad?” she asks quizzically, unsure the eight-year-old’s message was relayed correctly, “and he wants me to help it.”

I inhale my emotions and stand to face her. “I’m afraid it may be beyond help.”

Michelle looks at the small mass at my feet.

“I suppose I’m a bit relieved,” she says. “Giving mouth-to-mouth to a toad might be a little beyond the call of duty.”

I force a smile.

Drew stands and walks past us and, without a glance back, heads toward the party.

Michelle and I fall in behind him, Michelle filling the air with a boys-will-be-boys anecdote that I lose track of after the first sentence.

We return to the patio where the families have gathered and are beginning to make their exits.

Gordon and Bob stand together on the curb, their backs to us.

“Nasty scratch,” Bob says, looking at the red line beside Gordon’s eye. “Bad arrest?”

Gordon chuckles and shakes his head. “Mad wife. Let’s just say Addie doesn’t get her temper from me.” The words stop my footsteps and my blood.

Michelle stops as well.

Gordon turns and sees us. “Speak of the devil.”

Michelle moves to stand beside the men, and her eyes slide to the red slash on Gordon’s face.

Gordon puts his arm around my shoulder and pulls me to him.

I smile and take hold of his fingers draped around my neck, my pulse quickening.

“We should get going,” I manage. “Addie’s getting tired.” At the far side of the patio, Addie runs from the child that earlier she’d been chasing. She looks anything but tired. “Give me the keys, and I’ll get the car. You can drop me at my car in the morning.”

He’s drunk, but not so inebriated as to not notice the manipulation. “I’ll get it,” he says.

“Maybe you should let Jillian drive,” Michelle says, her eyes fixed on the scratch.

“Nothing better than a beautiful chauffeur, I always say,” Bob adds in support of his wife. Gordon smiles as he digs into his shorts for the keys. Only I see his eyes pulse.

Bob grins at me with approval as I take the keys from my intoxicated husband. He errantly believes I don’t want Gordon to drive because I’m a conscientious mother.

*  *  *

I adjust the seat and rearview mirror in Gordon’s Cayenne to accommodate my smaller size. My vision won’t focus past my own eyes. Gordon’s hand squeezing my throat was a warning, a reminder of a year ago, and it worked.

It was a night similar to tonight. Gordon had been drinking, and we’d been fighting.

It was half an hour after I’d picked him up from jail, the second time in a year he’d have gotten a DUI had he not been on the force. It was also the day I found out he’d bankrupted us.

We were in our bedroom. I still wore the sweats I’d thrown on when I’d gotten the call to come and get him. I stood near the bed, and he stood near the closet unbuttoning his shirt. Gordon’s side of the bed was unslept in, the sheets tucked tight, the pillow plumped and unused. The clock on the nightstand said it was 3:02.

“Get out,” I said, surprised the words were in the air, unaware, until that moment, I intended to say them.

Gordon looked at me, unsure, a rare moment of humility, the day of failings reaching his soul. He’d failed in every part of his life—his business was a bust, he’d been arrested by his brethren, he’d broken his oath not to drink, his wife stood before him hating him.

Emboldened by his dejection, I clarified, “Out of the room, out of the house, out of my life.”

The diffidence evaporated, transformed into a smile, and then he chuckled, his mouth screwed up in a toothless grin, his eyes dancing like we were having some kind of friendly repartee.

And when he moved, it was so quick that I didn’t react. I braced for a blow, but was entirely unprepared for my body to be spun and my neck to be trapped in the crook of his elbow, my throat crushed, my feet lifted off the ground. Everything happening so quickly that I didn’t have time to take a breath.

My eyes bulged, and my tongue gagged out of my mouth as I clawed at his arm to break free, my strength draining as quickly as my air.

“Tell you what,” he seethed, his beard chafing my cheek, “we’ll go together, you first, then the kids, then I’ll take care of myself.”

And in that instant, several things became clear: Fear overcomes anger quickly; time moves slower when it’s running out; when you’re going to die, you’ll do almost anything to live; and it takes less than a minute to snuff out a life.

“Dad, stop.” Drew was in the room.

I tried to scream, but there was no air. I swung like a ragdoll as Gordon turned toward the voice, my toes dragging across the carpet, then his arm released and I dropped to the ground. My throat took a second to open, then I was gagging and coughing and gasping for air as the world pulsed back from blackness.

Drew was in front of me, my frantic breaths blowing on his small toes, and I reached for him, but before I could touch him, the toes were lifted and carried away.