Perfect Family (19 page)

“What?” Tinker wailed. “Why did you have to get him up, Ruth?”

“He was crying,” Ruth said. “I thought—”

“So kids cry, you let them cry.” Tinker pulled out her chair and sank into it. “Not that you'd know.”

“Lay off her,” William said. The whole scene was falling apart, had been since it started, and all because his father was being so passive. It was almost as if Tinker was pushing and pushing, like she had no limits unless Daddy told her where they were. She was unstoppable. She was still on the subject of Andrew, crabbing about how it all fell to her and how she wished Ruth hadn't gotten him up.

“You're the one who woke him up, Tinker,” William said.

“And you're the guardian,” Tinker exploded.

“He's the guardian?” Keith asked.

“Stay out of this.” William really didn't like the guy. Didn't understand what in the name of God Mira saw in him or why he was here.

Tinker was on a tear about Pony and the baby out of wedlock. Ruth took Andrew out of the room so he wouldn't hear. Tinker kept appealing to their father. “Right, Daddy?” she kept saying. Their father was watching without seeing, as he'd been that afternoon sitting on the grass, oblivious to William's presence. Tinker wasn't letting up about the unfairness of it all and how irresponsible Pony had been and how William should be taking Andrew but wasn't, and then she just sat down,
slid
down was more like it, into her seat and started sobbing that none of this ever would have happened if their mother were alive, Pony never would have dared have Andrew out of wedlock, and she, Tinker, had tried to hold the family together, but what was the point when they were all so hell-bent on falling apart?

When she stopped her rant, there was a harrowing silence during which they could hear the distant chirp of crickets. William stole a glance at his father, not knowing what to make of the old man's silence. This was supposed to be his meeting, and now it was nobody's.

Finally, Mira spoke in a very quiet voice. “Mom would have been okay with Pony having Andrew.”

“Oh, please,” Tinker said. “What planet are you on?”

“She would have welcomed him with open arms.” Mira appealed to William. Her eyes glistened. “Can I tell her?” she asked him.

William had no idea what she was talking about. “Tell her whatever you want,” he said. He hoped it would be good. He hoped Mira could even the score with Tinker.

“Mom had
William
out of wedlock,” Mira said. “Right, William? Right, Daddy?”

Silence ate the porch.

“She
what
?” William said.

Mira's color drained. “You didn't know?”

“Dad?” William said.

His father looked at each of them in turn, then rose to his feet, pushing the table and knocking back his chair. The table screeched,
tipping glasses, sending the silver rattling to the floor. He stood un-steadily. He was a giant of a man. He supported his weight with those monster hands spread on the oilcloth. William had never seen him like this. His face was red, his chin trembled. William didn't even breathe. He hadn't done anything wrong, but still he felt that ancient fear, the shame of misbehavior, waiting for the wrath of God to descend on them all. Watching. Waiting. The old man opened his mouth to speak. His eyes were slits. And then, as if in slow motion, his body pitched forward, his hands splayed to either side of the table, and he dropped to the floor like a stone.

He was standing one second. Down the next. Dishes and glasses crashed to the floor. He landed hard, his face creased and pushed where he came to rest, as if it were made of rubber. He left a smear of bright red blood down the oilcloth. Tinker screamed that he'd had a stroke and pushed her way around the table to get at him, tipping more stuff over. Mira couldn't move.

William shouted out orders. He shook Tinker. He told her to give Dad some room and to stop screaming. He said they didn't know it was a stroke. It could be anything. He told Keith to call 911 and do it now. He barked at Mira to help Mark pull the table away and give them more space. They needed to move their father to the couch. Tinker tried to block the way. She kept saying, “No. You never move the person.” William told Tinker to shut up. She didn't know what she was talking about. Their father didn't have a spinal-cord injury. Tinker crouched over him as if nobody else had better touch Daddy; he was hers, all hers. Ruth kept trying to ease
her away. Their father could be dead, for all anybody knew by the sight of him. He was white as a ghost.

They got him to the couch in the living room. Tinker kept saying they should wait for the EMTs. The EMTs would know what to do. Ruth told her really it was okay, that William had the same training as EMTs, more, even, which was news to Mira but didn't impress Tinker. William tilted their father's head back, put an ear to his mouth, announced that the old man was breathing okay, that he hadn't choked on anything. Mira hadn't thought about that, but of course it was a possibility. William opened their father's shirt and felt along the neck, said his pulse was good. Mira's world went from black and white to color when William said that. Their father was alive.

And then there came the candy-apple-red lights flashing in the driveway, a gorgeous color, and these three big guys came up to the porch. Really big. Like sumo wrestlers, and so tender with her father. They treated him as though he was almost delicate, and he looked completely peaceful as they ministered to him in that brief window before he was crawling with tubes and all the other equipment of life. One of the EMTs, a kid younger than Mira was, with a very big face, sat the family down and asked questions.
Has Mr. Carteret complained of pain?
They all looked at one another and shook their heads.
What was his medical history?
Not even Tinker knew that. They were private about medical problems in their family. What medications was he on? Tinker ran to the bathroom and came back with her hands full of prescription bottles. The EMT wrote down the name of each one.

It was all Mira's fault.
Mom had William out of wedlock.
She had said out loud what she'd promised never to tell.

The men strapped her father onto a gurney, and he was just starting to wake up as they loaded him into the ambulance. The EMTs gave the family no warning that they were about to leave. They were there one minute, and then the ambulance was heading out the drive
with those beautiful lights going, and the siren firing up, and the family left standing dumbly in the yard.

The Bells were watching from their part of the woods, with flashlights. Anita came forward in her bathrobe. “What happened? What can we do?” she said.

“Everything's fine,” Tinker said. “Daddy just had a little fall.”

A little fall?
What was the matter with her?

They were ready to leave, but where was Keith? Mira had to go back to the house to find him. He was upstairs getting his hat, he said. He wondered if he could borrow a jacket; it was cold out there. It wasn't. It was still warm, but whatever, she thought. They had to go. People were waiting. She found one of her father's coats in the downstairs closet and gave it to Keith. He put it on, turning up the collar as if headed out in a storm. What was his problem? Mark said he would stay back at the house with the kids, and maybe that was a good idea for a lot of reasons. Something was up with him and Tinker. William's car was blocked, so they went in Keith's. Mira was in the middle of the backseat between Ruth and Tinker. Keith stepped on it down the dirt road. He tore out of the driveway when they hit the pavement after the ambulance, which they could see way in the distance. He leaned on the horn a couple of times. He caught up with the ambulance and then ran an intersection to keep on its tail.

William told him to slow down or they'd all be killed.

They had to wait in the emergency room. It was an old country hospital with yellow linoleum floors worn in paths. It was hot in the waiting room, and the air conditioner was loud. Tinker sat apart from everyone else, one side of her face pressed against the wall. Ruth went to the cafeteria and came back with paper cups of coffee for everybody. Mira kept glancing at William. He was staring at the floor and wouldn't meet her eyes.

She'd always thought he knew. How could he not? That was the thing. She thought it was one of those secrets people knew but didn't talk about. It had never been a matter of informing William, just of not talking about it. A big difference, she saw now. But the look on
his face when he said
She what?
Worse than seeing her father down was what she had seen in William's face. Like a scared child.
She what?
But William had said Pony showed him a picture of their mother and a guy when she was young. So maybe Pony knew, too. The secret was leaking out in other ways. Like water, a secret sought its own level.

The doctor came out and told them they could go in to see their father. He would be kept overnight, but he was stable. Suffering from exhaustion. His EKG was normal. His brain function fine. Still, they wanted to observe him. He needed rest and calm. Tinker said she'd stay at the hospital with him. “Somebody has to,” she said, and normally Mira would roll her eyes, but not tonight.

 

The porch light was on when they got home, and one of the lamps in the living room. Mark had cleared the table, done the dishes, and moved the tables back into the house. The porch looked like nothing had happened there. They went in. Someone turned on another lamp. Mira had a heightened sense of William's whereabouts at every moment, as though he were a magnet and she the metal shavings. When he passed her on his way to the kitchen, the hairs stood up on her arms and the back of her neck. Why wasn't he asking her about what she'd said? His silence was making her scared. The longer he went without asking, the guiltier she felt. She went upstairs to the safety of her bedroom. Keith came in a few minutes later. “You disappeared,” he said.

She used a wet wipe to take off her makeup. She didn't dare use the bathroom in case she met William in the hall. She looked in the mirror and dragged the little square across her forehead.

“What was all that about?” Keith was sitting on her bed. “Right before your father fell?”

“Nothing,” she said. He was the last person she wanted to discuss it with.

She heard William or Ruth going up the hall to the bathroom. She got into bed. The light went out in the hall; the slit under her
door darkened. She lay rigid in the bed. This might have been the night they made love for the first time. But she was unresponsive when Keith tried to touch her. “No,” she said. She lay awake for hours, it seemed.
What I've told you was for your ears only, Mira,
her mother had said. And Mira had promised. How could she have spoken those words aloud?

A knock came at her door. A very light rap. William stood in the darkened hallway. Mira put on a robe and followed him downstairs.

He was sitting at the table in the kitchen, waiting for her. He still had on the same T-shirt he'd worn earlier, streaked with their father's blood. He indicated the other chair. He looked exhausted. “What did you mean tonight?” he asked her.

“You didn't know? They never
told
you?”

His face. Oh. “Solemn” didn't begin to describe it. Blank except for his eyes, so black she couldn't see where the pupil ended and the iris began. “Told me what?” he said.

“That you…” She couldn't believe he hadn't known this at all. “That you had a different father. Before Mom married Dad.”

A spasm ran through him, a tiny visible shiver. “I don't believe you,” he said.

She felt frightened all of a sudden. “Mom told me once,” she said.

He just stared at her.

“Lawrence. His name was Lawrence?” she said as if the name would jar a memory.

His face seemed to collapse. “What?” He shook his head. “What?” he said again.

She couldn't stop now. She wished she'd never started. “Your, you know, your father.”

“Mom told you
what
?”

“That she had you before she married Dad. That you had a different father.”

“Mira.” He looked around the room.

“I'm only telling you what Mom told me,” she said. “I'm sorry. God, William. I just thought you knew.”

“Well, I didn't,” he said. “Nobody happened to mention it.”

“I'm sorry,” she said again. It was all she could think to say.

“Why you?” He said it like
You, of all people
.

In all the years since it had happened, she had never told anyone about the abortion. Not even when she went to see her gynecologist.
Have you ever been pregnant?
“No,” she always said. She knew they'd disapprove. But William deserved the whole thing. “I had an abortion in Canada when I was fourteen. Daddy didn't even know. Mom wanted to make sure I was okay with the abortion because if I wanted to have the baby, I guess she would have helped me. But I didn't want it at all. So she said she'd had you, you know, out of wedlock, and the guy's name was Lawrence, and Daddy adopted you. You were born someplace out west. She said he was mercurial.”

“This is fucked.” William pushed back his chair and got up. He went to the sink to splash water on his face, then out to the front porch. She followed as far as the living room. He came back inside. “Mercurial,” he said.

“It means—”

“I know what it means.” He paced back and forth in front of the door. “Why didn't anybody tell me?”

Mira felt the tears coming. How could she say “I'm sorry” one more time? How could she say she hadn't known again?
I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry.
She made a small shape with her hands, as if packing a snowball. “All I know is what I said.” She opened her cupped hands. “I only know this much.” She held her hands out to him. “That little bit. That's it. I've told it all. That's all I know. What I just told you. I never talked about it to anybody else.”

“What about Tinker and Pony?”

“I don't know.”

“You don't know.” He sat. He got up. He looked out the window on the lakeside. And then he left. Out the screen door again. Bang. Across the porch. She followed him to the door and watched the glow of his headlights disappear into the night. She sat back down
on the couch in the living room. The only sound there was the ticking of the clock. What had she done? She could feel the rhythmic pressure of her heart in her ears. She rocked back and forth. She'd broken the promise to her mother. William hadn't known. She couldn't imagine the shock of that. The damage was out there. It was done, and it was only beginning.

She heard a sound. Her heart stopped. She sat still and listened. Someone was in the room with her. Yes. Whoever it was took a single careful breath. The sound came from the corner by the window behind the drapery panels they used in cold weather. “I hear you,” she whispered. Nothing stirred. The house had always frightened her. She hated being alone. She heard every creak and moan. But this was real. Someone was there. If only William hadn't left. She should get up and look. Maybe call for Ruth or Keith or Mark. But what if it was nothing? She'd look ridiculous. She got to her feet. “Please?” she whispered.

The curtain moved, and Keith stepped out.

“You?” she said. She couldn't put it together. Why he'd be hiding.

“I heard a car leave,” he said. “I came down to check who it was.”

Did he think she was stupid? “You were listening in.”

“Nonsense,” he said.

It ripped her. Nonsense. She peered out the window. “You couldn't even see the driveway from that window,” she said. “It looks over the lake. You were listening in.”

He came toward her, and she backed away. He was weirding her out big-time.

“Why don't you just admit it? I'd understand.”

He opened his hands, the gesture of the wrongly accused. “Jesus. You can be a real wack job sometimes.”

“Look, Keith, I've been right here the whole time, except when I was in the kitchen with William.”

“So who are you now, Jack McCoy?” He came toward her again, and she stepped away.

She considered calling for Mark. “I think you need to leave.”

“Okay, Mira, have it your way.” He gave her the big smile she'd once liked. “If you want me to say I was listening, I'll say I was. There. Does that do it for you?”

“I want you to leave.”

“You're making a mistake,” he said.

She sat on the couch while he went upstairs loudly enough to wake the whole house. He came down, put his suitcase by the front door, then went into the kitchen for his cooler. He came back into the living room lugging the cooler. He put it down on the dining table. “You'll regret this,” he said.

She waved him away. She listened for the sound of his car leaving. She half expected him to come back, and she sat on the porch in case he did. After a while she was sure he was gone. What had it been about him in the first place? That he'd known Pony, she supposed. That had been powerful at the time. They hadn't even made it. Everyone thought they were, but they weren't. And he'd stuck around anyway, which had been strange. She shuddered.
Good riddance,
she thought.