Sleepless Nights (17 page)

My mother claimed, predictably enough, that all Samuel’s problems were caused by my breast-feeding. “Goodness me, dear, your generation does seem to like making things difficult for itself,” she announced (I could tell she’d been simply longing for the opportunity to advance her theory). “Give the child a bottle of
proper
milk, and I’m sure he’ll calm down. And you won’t feel so much like a milch-cow.” She seemed to find it impossible to believe that a human being was actually capable of producing enough to feed a child—particularly a son (“Boys are such
feasters!
” she said indulgently, never having borne one herself. If she had, I’m sure I’d have hated him, though, since he would clearly have enjoyed the biggest portion of pie and the extra bowl of chocolate mousse throughout our childhood. He’d have been able to sleep in on the weekends, he would never have had to tidy his room, and I could just see her face when he brought home a C from school: “Justin [or whatever] just has
different
skills, dear, he can’t be a whiz on the football field
and
a genius in the classroom!”).

“Now then, as for the nighttime crying,” she went on briskly, “try leaving the lights off when you feed him. You need to keep the room as dark as possible,” she explained. “That’s
bound
to help.”

“Mother, of course I turn the bloody lights off,” I replied, exasperated, “what, you think I’m an idiot? I could feed the child by the radiance of a glowworm, it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference.”

“My dear girl, don’t take it out on me, dear, I’m just trying to
help,” she returned magnificently. “And really, I think you just have to accept that babies cry. It’s what they do. What were you expecting, dear? That Samuel would articulate his needs in fully formed sentences?”

I slammed down the phone.

Then, at the end of the evening, just as Tom and I discovered we had fallen asleep in front of C-SPAN (I think Tom dropped asleep literally while changing the channels), the phone rang again. When I picked it up, there was a growl on the other end, a low, inarticulate, indefinable mumble of irritation that made my hair stand on end.

Startled into hallucinatory wakefulness, I listened for a second, horror-struck. Just as I was about to grab Tom, the growl metamorphosed into a voice. “Grrrrrrwhat the
hell—what the hell
—d’you think you’re doing? Huh? What? For Chrissakes?”

I stared at the phone, then cautiously put it back to my ear. “Hell—hello?”

“You sent Emmie Cormier to me.
What do you think I am, made of money?”

“Oh—” I collapsed back into my chair, hand on my chest, trying to regularize my heartbeat—“it’s you, Mr. Tyler. How are you? Now listen, I’m sorry about that, about Emmie I mean. I don’t really know her. I bumped into her in the general store, and—”

“Well
I
know her. Emmie Cormier is a deadbeat, and always has been,” came the uncompromising response. “Let’s not mince words. She’s a slut. Look at the way she dresses. Skirts slit to her waist, you can see her—”

“Mr. Tyler,” I cut in hastily. “Listen. As I said, I don’t know Emmie personally, I have no investment in this. But it does seem as if her ex is about to try to take custody of her son—”

“That’s right,” Kent acknowledged unexpectedly. “He is. Quite right. And a worse lowlife you’ll never hope to meet.”

“Really? You know him?”

“Yup. Known him since he was in kindergarten. Beat his first
wife silly, then when she finally ran off to lose herself in Wyoming, he set about Emmie. Man’s an absolute monster. ’Course, he’s got money; works for Joseph Pinkerton, the furniture showroom, over on Route 1, they say he’s the best man in the place, only one they’ll never let go. If you was to meet him socially, now, you’d think he was—charming. You’d fall for him straight up. ‘Good morning, how are you, and how are the little ones?’ He’s a born salesman, and it shows. That’s how he gets the girls in the first place, of course—and there’s plenty around here that’ve never seen through him.”

“So I heard.”

“Which—” gaining belligerence again—“is
exactly
why I can’t take on her case! It’s going to take serious man-power to defeat Ryan Cormier, if he’s really set his mind on taking that kid away. You think I’ve got that kind of time? That kind of money? This isn’t the big city, my dear! Think about what it will take! I’d have to face a man on the witness stand who’s going to have half the community swearing he’s an angel fresh from the Lord. That his wives have an unfortunate habit of walking slap into walls and twisting their ankles in flower beds. I’d have to find that first wife of his in the mountains of Wyoming, for a start (and they say around here she don’t want to be found). Then, on top of it all, I’d have to make Emmie Cormier stick to the straight and narrow for as long as it takes, because if she gets herself drunk—or worse—even once, she’ll be spotted, and someone’ll take a picture on their damn cell phone, and send it straight to his lawyer. That’s the thing with the country, my dear: you can’t make mistakes. And I can’t do that kind of case on my own! Not anymore, y’hear?”

I had been faintly protesting for the last five minutes; now, at last, I managed to lever myself into the conversation. “I’m sorry, Mr. Tyler, really I am,” I began placatingly. “I see that I’ve put you in a difficult position. But perhaps you could—you could—I mean, if you don’t help her, what else can she
do?”
I realized I didn’t know much at all about how Connecticut family law worked.

“Lose her kid,” Kent replied crossly. “She can apply for legal aid, of course. But they’re full up to bursting, the system is strained, these days they’re turning most cases down. If Ryan Cormier’s set on taking that kid, it’s going to be tough; there’s plenty of precedent for overturning a custody order if he can just prove he has new information. I’m seeing her Monday night, at Flannigan’s Bar, as it happens. Little place in the center of Sussex. Ten o’clock. I’m going to explain I can’t help her. My days of taking deadbeat chicks pro bono is past. And
you,
my dear, you stop butting your nose into business that don’t concern you. You hear?” The phone clicked.

I looked at it, tapping my fingers slowly on the pile of books on the side table next to the sofa, feeling slightly sick. Samuel was actually sleeping. A rare moment of silence unfolded in the evening; Tom’s even, slumberous breaths punctuated the discreet purr of the air-conditioning. I switched the radio on low, and listened to a lady with a voice like sweet cream caramel talking about how to make sweet cream caramel, while wondering—I couldn’t stop myself—what I could possibly do to help Emmie.

30

Jeanie

B
eing with Dave again was a bit like cuddling up with a very familiar blanket. A bit worn around the edges, not particularly handsome, but warm and—well, comforting. I knew every part of Dave, every thought in his brain; had done, now, for over a year. When I looked into his eyes, there was nothing dangerous or unexpected lurking inside, just Dave-ness. A simple, straightforward, companionable, jovial Englishman. What you see is what you get.

I’d heard all the latest episodes in the saga of Badger’s on-again, off-again relationship with his bank manager, a neat, tidy, professional woman who was bizarrely attracted to the loafish Badger with his weird shock of hair and multiple piercings in spite of the existence of a neat, tidy, well-dressed husband. Dave’s account of the time he found the bank manager—his bank manager too, as it happens—hiding sheepish and half-naked behind the bathroom door made Q choke on her artichoke (“You’ve got to admit, there’s never a better time to ask for an extension on your overdraft.”).

I shared my stories too with someone who knew all the characters; I described the unfortunate mess-up at college, and Dave—who used to take courses with Sibelius Mordaunt, before he got kicked out of Kingsbury for nonpayment of fees—was pleasingly furious on
my behalf. “Silly old codger, wouldn’t last three minutes in the real world,” he declared. “Sounds like he’s lost his marbles, I mean, who could forget
you?”
he added, pulling me toward him. I smiled, my hand hanging limply in his.

Q was staggeringly polite to him and Tom staggeringly accommodating. Every time Dave expressed a hint of a wish, they rushed to try to find him whatever it was, from Jaffa cakes to “rough” bath towels (“These fluffy things—! I mean, I’m not complaining, Jeanie, but where’s the
friction?”).
And Dave, in his turn, did his very best to make nice to the baby, peering hopefully into his little bed whenever he was sleeping (“Nothing for me to do, I’m afraid!”) and swearing blind, whenever he was asked, that no, Samuel’s screams did not disturb him at night. He kept pottering off to the package store and coming back with new six-packs of beer (he was fascinated by local microbreweries), which he then plied us all with (“Have another? No? Sure? Don’t mind if I do…”).

Then Dave came with me to Quiet Lanes, and entranced everyone with his tales from the frontline of the mighty eco-battle. In fact, I won a bit of reflected glory from my association with him. The old people had never met anyone like him and were touchingly convinced that he must be a genuine pioneer. They were American enough to find this thrilling, no matter what their own politics on the environment were. “We need more young men like you in this world,” said Ken, an ex-fighter pilot, taking Dave’s elbow in his hand. “Sometimes I think young men these days have forgotten
how
to be men,” he went on, and although his palsied hand was shaking, his gray eyes were steady and serious. “That’s why we get into the messes we do! You stand up for what you believe in, son; you keep thinking you can change the world. Only way to live, I think.” The others nodded their heads in vigorous agreement; I felt curiously proud.

Sue-Ellen elected to read his palm (“If I can see through all this
dirt, young man. You never heard of soap, perhaps?”) and promised him—not riches, but a life of independence. “You’re a traveler,” she told him, and Dave grinned.

“Um—yes, but you already knew that,” he said, chuckling. “Don’t need to read my palm for that!”

She was not at all put out. “I don’t mean that you came here on an airplane from England,” she said scathingly. “That’s
obvious.
I mean that you’ll never settle in one place for long. A restless spirit. You’ve inherited it from your mother,” she went on, and Dave gave a shout of laughter.

“My mother’s lived in a tiny Yorkshire village her whole life,” he said, shaking his head, “she’s no restless spirit, let me tell you. A very normal housewife, in fact.”

Sue-Ellen smiled peacefully at him. “If she’d lived in another generation, your mother’s story would have been very different,” she replied, and Dave wrinkled his forehead.

“Eh?”

Sue-Ellen patted his hand gently. “You’re the son of a woman who didn’t live the life she wanted,” she said. “A woman who was never happy. I’m sure you picked that up as a child, children always do.”

Dave furrowed his brow. “I don’t think that’s right,” he said, confused, but then he shrugged, and laughed a little defensively.

Mrs. Forrest was looking on. “She’s quite a woman, our Sue-Ellen, isn’t she?” she said, happy and ineffably patronizing. Sue-Ellen looked up at her, folded her fingers neatly in her lap, and said nothing.

Dave, pulling himself together, helped us with lunch; he dashed around with plates, filled cups with cranberry juice, dove under chairs for lost napkins, and was generally very agreeable. “It’s just like Mam’s Day Center in here,” he whispered to me as we flew past each other bearing plates laden with apple pie. “Old people are basically the same the world over, just want someone to talk to them.”

“He’s a breath of fresh air,” a quiet old man named Joel told me,
as he tucked into his dessert. “Thank you for bringing him to us, my dear.” I smiled proudly.

In fact, as long as we were in public, we were having a lovely time together. Dave and Jeanie: “You seem like such a team!” But when the light faded, when Q and Tom yawned themselves up to bed, it was a different matter. Then I felt something horrible stirring in my stomach, something cold, gelatinous, and a bit twitchy. Something that made my skin shrink onto my bones. And when Dave slipped into bed, slid his hand in my pink check pajamas, and felt for my breast, my heart sank. Everything changed.

“Blimey, Jeanie, must be the water around here or something. Never seen you so ill,” Dave said after our Quiet Lanes excursion, bewildered. “Can’t I make you—better, love?” I pushed his reaching hands aside, and gabbled something incoherent. Everything is fine, I said; I just need to sleep it off. My head is throbbing. I’m very tired. And so I put off explanations for another day…

I didn’t
want
to be different, especially not now, with his poor mother lying ill on the other side of the planet. I wanted to be the same girlfriend, the Jeanie I’d always been; there was so much pain in his eyes, and I wanted to take it away, not add to it. But something in my body seemed to be pulling me away from him, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop myself.

31

Q

I
was swinging myself out the door at ten p.m. to go down to Flannigan’s Bar and surprise Kent and Emmie when Jeanie appeared in the front hall. “Where are you off to?” she asked, astounded, I suppose, to catch sight of me dressed to go out. When I explained, a wistful look appeared in her eye. “A—bar?
Really?
Do you think I could come too?”

I was perplexed—but something in her eye inspired me to silence. “Of course,” I said therefore. “God, we haven’t been for a drink together in years. Do you remember that time we went out with—now what was his name?—the funny bloke you swore was ‘the one.’ Codger. No, Lodger. Oh, yes! How could I forget? Arty, the Dodger…”

We set off arm-in-arm through the darkness, down the dirt driveway, then along the narrow footpath bordering the coastal road and into Sussex. There is not much going on in the town at nights, just a few dog-walkers out for a last-minute stroll round the block, some kids waiting listlessly around the gas station, and the drone of the occasional passing car. The white clapboard houses looked untouched by the centuries. After a moment’s silence, Jeanie’s grip tightened. “So how did you know that Tom—you know—that he was really—really the one?” she asked unexpectedly.