The Accidental Book Club (4 page)

“And a sixteen-year-old kid would know so much about alcoholism because of why again?” Laura asked.

“Is that a serious question?” Curt answered. “I’ll spell it out for you. She knows so much about alcoholism because her mother”—he pointed at Laura—“that’s you, is an alcoholic.”

“Oh, ho-ho, is that so, Mr. Perfect? Well, let me tell you something about what’s wrong with me, then. It isn’t the booze. It’s not having a husband to rely on. How convenient that you left me right when the parenting got tough. For better or for worse, remember?”

“It’s been worse for a long time.”

She leveled hard eyes at him, making Jean feel uncomfortable and in the way. “Boy, don’t I know it.”

They continued bickering, and Jean watched Bailey, who stood behind her father, her eyes moving back and forth between the two of them, as if she were watching them physically duel, but her face was turned down, her hair obscuring it like a veil, and Jean’s heart just kept breaking into pieces and more pieces because she could see it. Even if they couldn’t see it, she could see it—her daughter and her son-in-law were ruining this little girl.

Jean took a step forward so that she was between them. “You two need to stop doing this in front of Bailey.” She sensed Bailey’s head tilt up just the slightest at the sound of her name.

“No offense, Mom, but you shouldn’t even be here. I appreciate your concern, but this isn’t your business,” Laura responded. “It’s him. If he’d just leave me alone like divorced people do . . .”

“We’re not divorced. I’d like to save the marriage, in case you forgot.”

“Why? So you can live off my paycheck while you hang out with your buddies all the time and then come home and belittle me for finding a life while you were gone?”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Jean didn’t know what to say. As impossible as marital fights were—and she and Wayne had had their share of them—inserting oneself into someone else’s marital fight was even more futile. Her gaze roamed back to her granddaughter, who happened to be looking right at her, a smirk on her face. But it was an unkind smirk, as if she was daring Jean to say her name again—challenging Jean to bring her back into this nonsense.

Jean looked away, uncomfortable under that gaze. “Laura, I think maybe just a couple days to recover might not be such a bad idea,” she said.

“So is this an intervention now?” When Jean didn’t answer her, Laura shook her head and stared at the tiles for a few moments. “Fine,” she said. “Fine. You all want to lock me away in some rehab program? Fine. I’ll go. I could use some time off. But when your lives are still shit while I’m gone, you’ll see that I’m the one holding it all together. Not you.” She pointed at Curt, and then at Bailey and Jean. “Not you. Not you. Just me.” She shouldered her purse. “I’ll take myself. Don’t go with me.”

“You don’t have a car,” Curt said.

“I’ll take a cab.” And with that, Laura left, pushing past Curt and Bailey and not even bothering to acknowledge Jean at all.

They all stood in silence, not looking at one another, Laura’s absence filling up the room almost as much as her presence had. Jean could hear her daughter barking orders loudly at the nurse’s station, then the sound fading as she stormed away.

“Should I follow her?” Jean asked.

Curt shook his head. “I’ll go with her. Why don’t you head over to the restaurant at your hotel and I’ll meet you there in an hour?”

Jean nodded and started to say something to Bailey—though she wasn’t sure what. Maybe she should ask her about school or tell her that her new hairstyle looked interesting, or just . . . something that a grandmother should say to a granddaughter. A way to show her granddaughter that she was interested, that she cared. And maybe to bring some normalcy to the teen’s day, if that was even possible. How did you do normal when your mother was huffing off to a rehab center at that very moment?

But Jean never said anything, and by the time she looked up again, Bailey was gone as if through a magic trick.

Dear Margaret Wise Brown:

My name is Bailey and I am six years old. My favorite book in the whole world is
Home for a Bunny
by you. My mom reads it to me every night. I love how fluffy the bunny is in the pictures. I would like to pet him sometime.

I only have two questions for you: Why didn’t the bunny have a home? Where was his mommy bunny?

Love,
Bailey
Age six

P.S. My mom is writing this for me, because I don’t know how to make all my letters yet.

P.P.S. I also like it when my mommy says the “Spring, spring, spring” part in her frog voice. It’s really funny.

B
ailey watched from the loft above the living room.

She was curled behind the rocking chair, hugging her knees to her chest, her fingers rubbing against her stubbled ankles, digging harder and harder into the skin until she felt soreness there. She pressed her cheek against her knees, a tattered copy of
Anne of Green Gables
trapped between her legs and stomach. It was a book that most of the kids from school deemed “lame” and “old-fashioned,” something they were forced to read in eighth-grade English, but it had always been one of Bailey’s favorites—a story she returned to when she felt like her life was slipping out of control. She couldn’t explain it. Not even to herself, really. All she knew was the book was like an anchor tied around her feet, keeping her tethered to the ground, where things were safe and pretty.

She would turn the pages, the words practically memorized by now, and picture herself as the imaginative and determined Anne. She would run her fingers over the text—
Marilla, isn’t it wonderful to know that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?—
and try to absorb them through her skin, wishing real life were like that: that you could show up on someone’s doorstep, a mistake, and still end up belonging. Most of the time she felt like she didn’t belong in her own family, if you could still call it a family. Could you still call it a family when the dad was living somewhere else and the mom was living in a bottle and nobody seemed like your kindred spirit anymore? Most of the time, she felt like she was the mistake, and every tomorrow was messed up before it even got there.

She’d been reading behind the rocking chair for hours, until her eyes got droopy, but now she was just watching. Just waiting for the world to blow up around her.

After her mother had stomped out of the hospital, and her father had brought Bailey home, she’d “taken off”—stormed out the front door, slammed it behind her angrily, shouted something about how not at all awesome it was that her mom was going to rehab and now she was stuck with
him
, and no, thanks, she’d rather live on the streets alone. It was one of those speeches that sounded good at the time, even though she knew while saying it that she in fact had nowhere else to go but with him.

In truth, she’d walked to the next-door neighbor’s back porch and watched until, after way too long of a time for him to ever convince her that he really did care as much as he said he did, her dad barreled outside, calling her name, and then got into his car and squealed away. She’d quietly snuck back into the house, grabbed
Anne
, and hidden behind the rocker. Because, really, where else did she have to go? There were no mistake-free tomorrows for her anywhere.

Her father had blown through again about an hour later, shouting her name angrily. His suit coattails had flapped behind him, showing the little potbelly on which he’d been working so hard for all these years by sitting in front of the TV all alone with his beer and his cell phone, texting nobody, saying nothing, doing nothing, a ghost in the house. He’d gone from room to room, slamming doors and cussing.

He’d never looked up at the balcony.

Why would he? It wasn’t like he really wanted to find her, anyway. She’d been right in front of him for so long, yet he’d never wanted to find her, not really. How long ago had she learned that if she wanted to disappear, all she needed to do was get in front of his face?

She’d tried. Oh, how she’d tried. Over the past year, it seemed like she did nothing but try to get her parents to notice her. But they’d been so wrapped up in their own stuff, it was as if she didn’t exist, no matter what she did.

The day before, when she’d found out about her mom, she’d had her mom’s friend Becky drive her to the hospital and drop her off there. She didn’t know what she planned to do. She only knew that she felt like she needed to do something—something to show them that she existed in this too. That she was
there
.

After Becky had dropped her off, she’d stopped at the information desk and found out where her mom was, and five minutes later she was standing next to Laura’s bed, watching her chest move up and down beneath the flimsy hospital gown. Even though she hated Laura Butler, Alcohol-Poisoned Hospital Patient, a part of her felt awash with relief that the woman wasn’t dead. Not today.

She’d seen her dad out in the hallway, talking on his cell phone. It was sort of amazing that he’d bothered to show up at all. It was so totally unlike him—must have meant things were serious this time.

What he didn’t know, and maybe what Laura herself didn’t even know, but what Bailey could totally see, was that her mother had been trekking slowly and steadily downhill since the moment he’d left them four weeks ago. And Bailey’s dad had left her to deal with it. Who did that? Who left a sixteen-year-old to deal?

Dealing with it was scary. And it hurt. This was the same mother who’d read bedtime stories to her every night. The same mother who’d sewn a Native American princess costume for her for Halloween. How was that possible? How could the same life include both of those mothers? It wasn’t fair. And the unfairness that used to pop up at unexpected times now seemed to rage inside Bailey all the time, which only scared her further.

Bailey had wandered the hospital room, pulling open drawers and rifling through the rolls of paper tape and stacks of gauze and tape measures and little wooden sticks.

She considered a glass jar filled with cotton balls sitting on the counter. She ran her finger along the smooth side of it, imagining herself picking it up and throwing it to the floor. Letting it crash.

She’d been swept over by these strange feelings a lot lately, this need to do something crazy, to be shocking. To make her parents sit up and notice her, even if it was only to complain or punish her once again. At least it was something—a punishment was preferable to being invisible.

She put both hands on the jar, picked it up, felt the heft of it. But her mom’s blank face was right there, and the sight of it hurt Bailey’s heart too much. She returned the jar and stepped away from the counter. She knew it was best to stop before she did something stupid. These days it seemed like she specialized in stupid. It seemed like her whole life specialized in stupid, and none of it made her feel any better.

She stood awkwardly between the counter and the bed, staring at her mom, willing her to open her eyes and be normal again. Willing her to stop this nonsense and care about things and be a mom. She stared so long, her eyes ached and tears streamed down her cheeks. But the longer she looked on, the more her mom slept, the more Bailey realized that this was real and her mom wouldn’t change, not for a messed-up wrist and a little embarrassment of a hospital visit. It would take more.

She heard a shuffle in the hallway and a woman’s voice. “Mr. Butler?”

“Hold on, Ted,” she heard her dad say, and then, “Yes.”

“I’ve got the phone number for the rehab center for you . . .”

Bailey looked up. Rehab? They were sending her mother to rehab? Nobody had said anything to her about that. What would happen to her if her mom was locked up? Would she have to go with . . .
him
—her dad? The deserter? No way. Never.

She wanted nothing more than to go home, grab her book, sink into the beautiful Prince Edward Island farmland where drunk moms and ghost dads and embarrassment didn’t exist. She wanted nothing more than to escape this messed-up family, and the fact that she wanted to made the anger that had been percolating inside of her burst to a boil.

Bailey wiped her cheeks on the back of one arm and turned to the counter. In one swift motion she picked up the jar of cotton balls, held it high over her head, and threw it to the ground with an ear-shattering crash.

She’d dashed out of the room, out of the ward, laughing and crying until her belly hurt.

Her father hadn’t been amused. Not in the least. And after they cleaned up the glass, he’d yelled at her for, like, a million hours, but somehow it had kind of been worth it. Even if her mother didn’t remember any of it this morning.

And now her mother was in rehab, and her father was looking for Runaway Bailey, and she was behind the chair with a book—
There’s such a lot of different Annes in me. I sometimes think that is why I’m such a troublesome person
—listening to the hum of the refrigerator and the whoosh of the air conditioner kicking on and off, and underneath all of that, a faint buzzing of flies in the kitchen. Or maybe she wasn’t really hearing those. Maybe she only thought she was hearing them because she knew they were down there, swarming the trash.

Three times the phone rang. If she closed her eyes and imagined it, she could hear the pounding of her mom’s feet toward the phone, the beep of the
TALK
button being pressed, her mom’s voice starting low and steady and ending high and shrieky as she took on yet another battle. Who would it be this time? Work? The mortgage company? Maybe it was the phone company, and the ringing would at last be turned off for good. Peace. Peace would be good. She once knew peace. She once knew what it felt like to curl into her mom’s chest, touch picture book illustrations, mouth memorized stories along with her mom. That was peace. But it was so long ago, it didn’t even seem like a real memory anymore. Like that girl was a fictional character Bailey had once read about and loved.

She wondered where her dad was now, if he was still looking for her. Or maybe he’d gone off to the rehab to make sure her mother didn’t detour into some bar along the way. Had it really gotten that far? Was her mother frequenting bars now, begging for brews, belching and tipping sideways off barstools, only to fall into the waiting arms of some trench-mouthed troll? She doubted it. Laura Butler was a lot of things, but tacky wasn’t one of them. Laura Butler would rather be dead than be tacky.

Still, her mother hadn’t exactly been excited about going to rehab—was anyone, ever?—and he probably was rushing to her, rushing to make sure she got checked in, to exert his will on her or maybe to fight with her some more or to do . . . God knew what.

But whatever it was he was so hot to do, it was not to find Bailey. Not really. Because she’d been just above him the whole time and he’d never bothered to look up.

She’d stayed after he’d left. Had wrapped herself up into a tighter ball and watched the dust motes swing around on the air. After a while, her mind wandered and she saw herself get up and climb onto the rocking chair, then step over the loft rail and just float there in the sun with the dust. Just twist and turn and ride the invisible breezes of life shifting around her. Weightless. Beautiful. In her daydream, her hair even turned red and floated out behind her in plaits.

She was snapped out of her daydream by the front door opening a second time. She blinked, rubbed her eyes (had she fallen asleep?). She’d lost track of the time, but from the way the shadows had shifted—the swimming dust particles were no longer in her direct line of sight—and the stiffness in her legs, she guessed it had been hours. Her knees now ached from being pulled up against her; her cheek felt hot and bruised from resting against the denim of her jeans; her book had fallen out of her lap and lay beside her now.

The door pushed open farther and her father stepped in again, but then stood to the side and waited, letting her grandmother in after him.

She couldn’t even really remember her grandmother. Their visits had been few and far between. They’d almost never driven to Kansas City to see them (her mother called it “That Godforsaken Town”), and her grandparents had only slightly more often come to St. Louis to visit. Her mother had gone to her grandfather’s funeral alone. Until this morning at the hospital, she hadn’t seen her grandmother in what seemed like forever. She looked smaller than she remembered. And older.

So what was she doing here now? Was this curiosity? Voyeurism? Some misplaced sense of needing to take care of Laura after all these years? Was that what she had waiting for her in the future—a life so messed up, her mother might finally take an interest in it?

Her grandmother stepped in and made a face, and she could see the woman making an effort to not cover her nose.

“It’s trash,” her father mumbled, leading the way into the living room and reaching over to snap on the light. “I guess she stopped paying the bill. There’s loads of it stacked in the garage too. As bad as it is in here, it smells even worse in there.”

The grandmother looked dazed, following him at a gait that didn’t seem entirely even.

“Besides, there are dishes. Piled up to my chest. Stuff caked on them for weeks. I don’t know what . . . Usually Bailey is really good at doing those,” her father added.

Usually Bailey is really good at doing everything,
she wanted to correct him.
If Bailey doesn’t do it, usually it doesn’t get done.

“I had no idea,” the grandmother said. “I wouldn’t have guessed Laura would let her house go like this.”

Trust me, Sober Laura wouldn’t,
Bailey wanted to cry.
Sober Laura would die if she knew there was somebody in this disgusting house right now. But Sober Laura left the building a long time ago. Gosh, could it have been the night that Ghost Curt suddenly discovered he wanted nothing to do with this life anymore? Why, yes, yes, I think it was.

And would that also be the night that they had the not-so-sober knock-down-drag-out about who
had
to take Bailey in this mess?