Sisterland (44 page)

Jeremy called as Cinnamon the schnauzer was disappearing from view. “My cousin Joe in Minneapolis just texted to ask if Matt Lauer is really in Vi’s living room right now.”

I grabbed the remote control. And sure enough, there they were, sitting on chairs about two feet from each other. With Jeremy still on the line—it was an hour earlier in Denver, meaning Vi wasn’t on there yet—I turned up the volume on the TV and put him on speaker so he could hear it, too. So distracting was the fact of Matt Lauer in Vi’s house that it took me a few seconds to focus on Vi herself; she looked exhausted. She was wearing, I noted, the navy blue short-sleeved sweater I’d picked out for her to try on at Lane Bryant, which fit well, though she’d paired it with a somewhat tacky necklace of interlocking silver circles. “I wonder who did her makeup this time,” I said.

“Will you be embarrassed if you’re wrong?” Matt Lauer was asking.

“I’ll be thrilled,” Vi said. “That’s what I’ve been telling people all along.” She knew, I thought. She, too, knew already that an earthquake wasn’t going to happen.

“But your credibility will be undermined,” Matt Lauer said.

“Do you think I’d put thousands of people’s lives at risk just so I don’t look bad?” Vi said. “Shame on you, Matt.”

Jeremy laughed. “You gotta love her self-righteousness.”

“I want to ask you a question a lot of our viewers have asked since you and I last spoke,” Matt Lauer said. “If you have the ability to see the future, why don’t you take advantage of it by, for example, playing the lottery?”

“I wasn’t given this gift to use for my own gain,” Vi said. “I’m sure some mediums do that, but I’ve always wanted to help others.”

“One last question: What are your plans for today and tonight?”

“I’ll be attending a low-key vigil with old friends,” Vi said. “This is the kind of day you want to spend with people you’re close to.”

“Wow,” Jeremy said. “The irony.”

“She’s roped my dad into driving her to the bookstore tonight.”

“He could have said no.” We were both quiet—it seemed we’d missed Vi and Matt Lauer’s final exchange, and the interview had wrapped up—and I muted the TV and said, “You think Matt Lauer used her bathroom? I hope she cleaned it.”

“If he did, she should install a plaque. Did you get Mickey Mouse, by the way?”

“Not yet.” I could have told Jeremy that in spite of Vi’s latest appearance on TV, I felt the calmest I had since she’d made her prediction—that the day felt ordinary and not like the occasion of something terrible. But again, to reveal my own calmness would have been a kind of olive branch I still wasn’t ready to offer. Yes, Jeremy had been right about the earthquake, but that didn’t mean he should have gone to the conference.
He
hadn’t known he was right. Instead, I said, “I wonder if our family should stop eating meat.”

“But mice are so delicious! They’re so tender.”

“Seriously,” I said.

“We can talk about it when I get home,” he said. “I’d be up for cutting it out at least a couple days a week. You think Rosie would deign to say hi to me?”

I held the receiver toward her. “Want to say hi to Daddy?”

Rosie took the phone and said, “Hi, Rosie.”

“Hi,
Daddy
,” I said.

“Mama cleaned pee-pee on Rosie’s pajamas,” Rosie said.

“Say, ‘I miss you.’ ” Then I realized that without deciding to, I’d acquiesced, because surely Jeremy could hear me coaching her. “Say, ‘Rosie misses you.’ ”

“There’s no more pee-pee on Rosie’s pajamas,” Rosie shouted.

“Rosie misses you,” I repeated.

“Mommy misses you,” Rosie said.

If Vi was
wrong, then I was wrong, too—after all, I’d thought the earthquake would occur on October 16 before she had. And yet hadn’t I been wrong before, over and over? Wrong in believing that Scary Black Man would attack me; wrong that I would adopt Chinese girls; wrong that I would marry Ben Murphy or David Frankel and, on our first date, that I wouldn’t marry Jeremy. Confirmation bias was what Jeremy had called the tendency to pay greater attention to the times I was right, so what was its opposite? Because considering the many errors of my past was oddly comforting. Though I wouldn’t have believed that anything other than an emergency could have induced me to take Rosie and Owen on an outing on what I’d imagined to be the most anxiety-provoking day of my life, it felt increasingly ridiculous to stay cooped up. As the rain continued, as seven forty-five became eight-twenty and eight-twenty became nine-twenty, as Owen went down for a nap, woke, ate, and it wasn’t yet eleven, it just seemed silly for us to stay inside. And perhaps all I’d ever wanted was this—not the assurance of permanent, unbreachable safety for my children, because that was impossible, but the ability to distinguish between anything less than extreme caution and tempting fate. Because I
didn’t
think I was tempting fate as I said, “Hey, Rosie, want to go look for a Halloween costume?” I felt that I was doing what a normal parent, a normal person, would do.

Besides, I meant at Target, which would not be, by most people’s standards, a bold journey. The store was two miles away, and though we’d drive, I’d have the stroller in the trunk so we could walk home if necessary—if the highway cracked open, say.

Before we left, I called Hank and said, “I did end up watching Vi on TV this morning, and I can tell she doesn’t believe her prediction anymore.” If I couldn’t offer this gift to Jeremy, at least I could share it with Hank. I added, “And I’m feeling so brave that we’re going to Target to look for Halloween costumes. You need anything?”

In a surprisingly serious tone, Hank said, “There were so many kids out at Amelia’s school this morning that I had a moment of wondering if I shouldn’t leave her.”

“I really don’t think so.”

“Now I keep watching the clock till it’s time to go back.”

“You’re welcome to come with us to Target if you want a distraction.”

“Mmm—” I could tell he was considering it, but then he said, “I was about to fix the leak in our tub. I promised Courtney I’d do it while she’s gone.”

Rosie, Owen, and I were in the car but still in the driveway when my phone rang:
Dad cell
, the screen said. Which was an identification that had never shown up; Jeremy had entered a few numbers into my father’s cellphone, but my father called me only at home. When I answered, it wasn’t my father’s voice on the other end. It was a woman.

“Your dad fainted, but he doesn’t want to go to the hospital,” she said. “You need to come get him.”

“Who is this?”

“He’s at Relax Massage. Can you come get him? He says he’s fine, but he’s still out of it.”

“My father was getting a massage and he fainted?” Since when had my father gotten massages? My heart was tightening the way I’d thought, when I’d awakened to rain, that it wouldn’t.

“Can you come get him?” the woman said.

“Is he conscious?” I asked.

“Yeah, yeah, he’s drinking a soda. He didn’t want us to call you, but it’s like, ‘We’re calling an ambulance or your family. Take your pick.’ ”

“Can I talk to him?”

I heard her say, “Your daughter wants to talk to you,” and after a few seconds, there was a beep that I was pretty sure was my father inadvertently pressing the keypad of his phone, and then he was saying, “Kate, I’m perfectly fine.”

“What happened? Do you need to go to the hospital?”

“I stood up too quickly, but I’m fine.”

“And you’re getting a—” I almost couldn’t say it; it seemed intimate in an unsavory way. “You were having a massage?”

“When she was finished, I stood up too quickly,” my father said. “That’s all.”

“Your daughter come get you,” said a female voice in the background, a different voice—this one was accented, perhaps Eastern European or Russian, and more forceful. “She get you or we call ambulance.”

“Will you pass me back to the person I was talking to before?” I said.

“Truly, I’m fine,” my father said, and it seemed that the second woman grabbed the phone because she said, “You come get father now. We are on Olive Boulevard. Relax Massage.” Then she hung up.

I glanced in the rearview mirror at Rosie and Owen before calling Hank. “I just got a really weird call. This woman who doesn’t identify herself says my dad was having a massage, he stood up and fainted, and I need to come get him.”

“Has he come to?”

“Yeah, I actually talked to him. He sounded normal, I guess.” I paused. “I should go out there, right?” Without waiting, I said, “Yeah, of course I should. You don’t think they, like, kidnapped him, do you?”

“Did they say anything about money?”

“No.”

“You want me to go with you?”

The air of embarrassment around whatever was happening—I knew that for my father, it would be bad enough to have me witness it without Hank present, too.

“At least let me come over and watch the kids,” Hank was saying. “But if you’re worried it’s unsafe, call the police.”

In fact, as I thought about it, it was like the opposite of a kidnapping—these women seemed intent on getting rid of my father.

I said, “The whole massage thing—isn’t that code for prostitution?”

“Not always.”

“No, I know there are legit places, but I just got this feeling—”

Hank laughed, before saying, “Sorry. But if at his age, he’s still—well, more power to him.”

“Yeah, if he’s not your dad.” I looked once more at the backseat and made a decision. “If you really don’t mind, maybe I’ll leave Rosie with you and keep Owen. Hopefully, I’ll be back by the time Amelia’s school lets out.”

“Come on over,” Hank said.

It is tempting,
in retrospect, to assign a starting point to the sequence of events that unfolded on this day—tempting as well as futile—and when I do so, this is the obvious moment. Because surely, if I had decided to keep Rosie with me instead of handing her over to Hank, everything would have gone a different way. And I did feel a fleeting uneasiness about separating myself from my daughter, rain or no rain, but this was Hank, who was practically a third parent to Rosie, whom I trusted far more than Vi or my father as a caretaker. Plus, dealing with whatever situation I was about to enter at the massage place would be considerably easier without Rosie running around, grabbing things, and shrieking.

I pulled into the Wheelings’ driveway, where Hank was waiting, and as he opened the back door, I said, “You swear this is okay?”

“Don’t even think about it.”

“I’ll fix your tub later,” I said, and he grinned.

“Yeah, right.”

“Rosie, you get to stay with Hank while I run an errand,” I said. “Maybe you can play with Amelia’s grocery cart.”

She was looking at me with suspicion in the rearview mirror, and as Hank unbuckled her car seat, she yelled, “Rosie wants a costume!”

“We’ll get the costumes this afternoon,” I said.

“Rosie wants a costume now!”

Hank and I made eye contact in the mirror, and he said, “If you trust me to help her pick something, I don’t mind going to Target.”

How I wish that I’d said no and just let Rosie whine. Instead, I said, “That would be awesome, if you’re up for it. Just nothing S-L-U-T-T-Y.” I
unfastened my own seat belt and climbed out of the car, taking Hank’s place in extricating Rosie, and as I did, I said, “You get to go with Hank to look for your costume. Isn’t that nice of him? So please be his helper in the store and do what he tells you.”

When Rosie was standing in the driveway in the rain, the little green hood of her raincoat pulled up, Hank extended his hand, and somberly, Rosie took it. I could tell that she was confused in ways she couldn’t express. I bent to kiss her forehead. “I love you, little pumpkin,” I said.

Relax Massage was
in a strip mall, and after I’d inserted Owen into the carrier and crossed the small parking lot, I almost collided with a man as I stepped from between two parked cars onto the sidewalk in front of the stores. He stopped, gesturing for me to go first; I did, smiling apologetically, and as I walked the remaining few feet to the door of Relax Massage, I could feel him walking in after me.

The waiting room couldn’t have been more than fifty square feet, a dimly lit space with tan walls and an opaque sliding window that was open onto an interior hall. A bell waited on the window ledge. None of which was that suspicious, but there was a musky smell in the air that wasn’t at all like the minty scents of the spas I’d been to.

As I was wondering whether I ought to ring the bell or let the guy behind me ring it, a door next to the window opened and a middle-aged woman with dyed red hair emerged. She said, “You are the daughter of Mr. Earl?” When I nodded, she said, “You come with me.” Looking at the man, she said, “You sit down, Mr. Nathan, and Alina, she is ready for you one minute.”

She led me to a room about the size of the waiting room, also dimly lit, where a tape player emitted classical music and my father sat with his legs hanging off what looked like a doctor’s exam table except longer, and covered by a sheet rather than paper. He was—thank goodness—fully dressed, and drinking 7UP from a can; he wasn’t visibly injured. “Daisy, I didn’t mean to trouble you,” he said. Leaning against a wall, her arms folded in front of her, was a young woman I assumed to be Alina, an unsmiling
figure with light brown hair that fell almost to her hips, wearing black leggings, a black tank top, and dark red lipstick. She had large breasts beneath the tank top, and I tried to suppress the question of whether she’d recently given my father a hand job.

In a voice that was accent-free and neither friendly nor unfriendly, she said, “Don’t forget his raincoat.” She pulled it from a hook and passed it to me, even though my father had made no motion toward standing. When she spoke, I saw that behind the lipstick, she had a dead front tooth.

“Dad, you’re well enough to walk to the car? Because I can call an ambulance.”

“I’m fine.”

As if my father were not present, the older woman said, “You take him to doctor. Could be problem of—” First she tapped her chest, over her heart; then she said, “Or here,” and tapped her head.