The Almost Archer Sisters (14 page)

H
EY, YOU’RE WEARING
your Bad Santa pajamas,” Sam said, tugging a wad of my yellow nightie thingie from inside my housecoat. He was fully alert in the grass, and the park was beginning to fill up with morning dog walkers streaming out of the neighboring subdivision.

The boys loved when I named my clothes. I had my Scaredy pants, which I had been wearing when Sam got lost at the mall last year. I had my Bobby belt, which I used to capture a stray dog we later learned was named Bobby and belonged to one of those monster-home people who probably thought that moving out to Belle River meant animals could run wild.

“That’s right, bud. Bad Santa.”

“Maaw-
um
! Hear me!” Jake yelled. “We need to go home!” I suddenly caught a glimpse of what a little asshole he might become at twenty or thirty, when he was grown up and hopefully some nice woman’s problem.

“Maybe we could stay in the park permanently,” I joked, stubbing out my cigarette and winking at Sam, who had his hands on his hips, twisting back and forth in his cute postseizure stretch. “It’s fairly temperate. There’s parking. We could set up house in the spiral slide. Wash dishes in the wading pool. Cook over burning garbage cans. We’d keep it clean. Order in a lot.”

But Jake wasn’t laughing, just bewildered.

“Okay. Let’s go, boys,” I said, tossing my cigarette and stifling my sniffles in case I sparked a nosebleed.

It was a short drive home. The boys were dew-covered and shivering in the back seat even though the sunrise had heated up the car’s interior. As I drove Beth’s convertible down the gravel driveway, the farmhouse suddenly looked completely different to me, like a different version of itself. I looked at the overgrown lawn, the dormers like ghoul eyes, the crabgrass strangling my heirloom tomatoes, defeated Scoots tied to the willow stump overnight until the smell of whatever he’d likely rolled in abated, the broken bike next to the house that Beau tugged from a garbage pile, promising to fix it into a chopper for Sam, the carp pails stacked in the carport, next to them the tarp-covered Dart, the back seat still probably strewn with the paperwork of my interrupted education, the detritus of Internet searches about epilepsy, spent Kleenex, empty coffee cups, broken doughnut boxes, and stray socks from lugging the laundry of boys and men to and from town, before the Dart, which I was more sentimental about than my mechanic husband, had finally died, and it occurred to me how right it was for Beth to leave this place when she had had the chance. From outside, it seemed like the rooms in our house had shrunk, but I pictured the furniture growing bigger, monstrous, vengeful, our grandfather clock shooting through the roof in slow motion like a launching rocket, Nana Beecher’s oak table rolling sideways, smashing through the front window box, the antimacassars flitting through the air like bats, our mahogany night tables exploding
out of the dormers,
baboom, baboom
, each landing feet first in the lush hydrangeas, which, that summer, had only finally bloomed the proper garish way the seed pouch said they would. And I saw Beau and Beth trying to escape, but as they reached the worn living room shag, it turned into a boiling blue ocean swallowing them both bloody under.

The boys were pups straining against me, now their least-favorite leash. Jake broke out of my grasp first when he heard the phone ringing in the house.

“I’ll get it!” he yelled, running up the flagstones.

Sam looked at my face, then at his dad’s Jeep parked crookedly next to Lou’s yellow pickup.

“Are you guys gonna fight again?”

“I think so, sweetheart,” I said, kissing the side of his sweaty head. “Go in the house and play with your brother in your room. Play Monopoly, okay?” Jake was too young to understand the game, but Sam was still at an age where winning was important.

“I hate it when you guys fight,” he said, stomping a foot and walking off.

“Me too.”

I watched our first born trip toward my childhood house, bumping directly into his dad, who was speaking to someone on the phone. He stopped Sam on the porch to hug him and to examine his bloody hand. Sam yanked it away and skulked past him.

I tried to look at anything but Beau’s face, which was flattened with fear and shame. He leaned on the rail where the boys’ bathing suits waved at us like sad flags. He said goodbye to whomever he was talking to and hung up with an angry digit. The cordless telephone was not invented for the enraged. Punctuating the tail end of a horrible exchange with a stern poke of a finger was wholly unsatisfying, which was probably why Beau hurled the expensive cordless into the house. I listened to it skip wounded along the wooden floor, causing even more unnecessary damage.

“Heyyy, DAA-aad,” Jake scolded from inside.

“Where’ve you been?” Beau asked, his voice heavy with everything. His eyes were bloodshot from drinking and not sleeping. Or from crying, maybe. I wanted to believe there had been a lot of that.

The walk toward the house felt utterly uphill. I half-expected Beth to appear behind him wrapped in one of our wedding-present towels. I pictured her placing her chin on Beau’s shoulder in casual ownership, as I had smugly done to chase off unwanted visitors. Maybe this was all a big misunderstanding, I thought. Maybe they were the ones who had gotten married all those years ago and I was the one
just stopping by
. Maybe those were their two boys and I was Beth, flying in for my monthly hair touch-up, my “slumming it with the family” weekend, and I would snap out of this electrified daydream.

“I was in town. At the park.”

Beau had taken a shower, but he hadn’t shaved. His freckles darkened in the summer. Though he still had all his hair, his sideburns were shot with dashes of white, the scalp along the part was pink and flaky with sunburnt skin. I’d known Beau since I was fourteen, when I was his and Beth’s pouty gadfly. We’d married when I was twenty and he was twenty-three. Almost a decade later, I felt twice his age. I could smell Brut, a scent I found unsettlingly sexy, as it was Lou’s smell too.

“You were at the park all this time?” Beau asked.

“Who was that on the phone?”

“Beth.”

“Where is she?

“Lou’s.” She must have called on her cell phone.

“Peachy, come in the house,” Beau said.

“Why is she still here?” I demanded,
and not strapped in a burning plane careening toward pavement?

“Ah, well, you took the rental,” Beau said, trying hard not to sound smart-assed.

“Right.”

I noticed my red battered carry-on with the rusty metal buckles sitting slouched next to Beth’s leather tote bag. The boys had helped me pack, my way of including them in our first goodbye.

“Peachy, come inside. Okay?”

The sun was peeking over the top of the Rosarios’ barn across the highway, mocking us with its benevolent glow. I watched their leggy Doberman, Briar, run circles in the front yard like some big, demented toy.

“Are you two having an affair?”

I knew the answer, but it seemed like the question scorned women in soaps, in books, women elsewhere, asked in situations like this one. Annalisa Morrow must have asked Scott that question, and people would ask me if Beau and I split up over this, so I wanted an answer.

“No. Fuck. No. It was a stupid, stupid—we got drunk, Peachy. I am so sorry. You got blood on your face. Where’d he get you this time?”

“Nose. Where was Lou? While you were fucking his other daughter?”

“Jesus. The boys,” Beau muttered, glancing over his shoulders and driving his fingers through his damp hair. “He was sleeping.”

“You don’t even like Beth.”

“I don’t. I don’t. I don’t.”

“Then why would you fuck someone you don’t even like?” I hissed. “Let alone my sister. A person who I love. Who I loved.”

He just shook his head and showed me his palms. I walked past him, smacking him hard in the middle of his chest, partly to move him, partly to hurt him. I grabbed my purse off the roll-top desk
and pulled my passport out from one of the upper slots.
Jesus
, I thought.
I am doing this. I am going to do this
.

“And you certainly can’t say it was curiosity, Beau, because her goddamn pussy can’t be new to you, let alone to the rest of the county.”

I opened up the carry-on and it spilled across the floor. I kicked out a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. I wished for Beth to be in the house to take that in, but naturally only Sam had heard me say that. He was perched at the top of the stairs, chewing the bottom of his pajama top. Oh, the conversations Beth and I had had in front of Sam when he was a baby, it was a miracle his first word wasn’t “fuck.” Looking at his little face, I was suddenly aware of how easy it can be to earn the right to leave people, to shatter the very core of a family, and how difficult it would be to fix it. I had never insulted Beth. I had never thrown her past, her promiscuity, her selfishness, her arrogance, in her face, having never felt in a position to judge her. I wouldn’t even tolerate lazy putdowns from Beau. Because if Beth was sad and angry, she had good reason to be, I said. And because she had always loved me, and mostly well, I even hated the very hate I felt for her.

“Where’s your brother, Sam?” I tried to avoid looking into his loaded eyes while I manically dressed myself, tucking the yellow nightie top into my jeans.

“Asleep. He fell asleep on my Monopoly board and I want you to carry him to bed. Now, okay? And lay down with him.”

I looked at the grandfather clock behind him. Poor Jake had run circles in that park for hours. His batteries must have just died.

“Let him lie there for a bit, bud. Okay? Daddy’ll get him up later. Maybe you should get some more sleep, hey?”

“Are you guys going to fight?”

“No. Not anymore. But listen to me.” He met me halfway on the steps. “I’m going to New York, like me and Auntie Beth planned. But she’s going to stay here, okay? And I’m going to be
back after you wake up and go to sleep two times. Before Disney Sunday night.”

His mouth made the shape of the word “mom,” but no sound came out.

“Look at me.” I knelt in front of him and took his hands in mine. “You can be angry. That is okay. But I’m going to be gone for exactly two days. So listen to your father, and grandpa and Auntie Beth, okay? And how much do I love you?”

He was biting his lips and shaking his head, no.

“More than monkeys, mountains, or the moon?” he whimpered.

“That’s right. Now give me a great big hug and a massive bye-bye and go back to bed and remember like I said, you only have to go to sleep and wake up twice and I will be home. Okay? And be nice to Jake.”

“What if I have a seizure and you’re not here?”

“We talked about this and it’s okay, sweetheart. Everyone knows how to take care of you real good. So no worries.”

“You’re going by yourself?”

“Yes. I’m going to take a little break.”

“From us?”

“No, baby, from me.”

“What about Auntie Beth?”

“Well, lucky puck, she’s now going to stay with you. So you’ll have extra eyes on you.”

“Aren’t you scared to go by yourself, Mom? You’re not supposed to.”

“A little bit. But it’s okay to be a little scared.”

“You got blood,” he said, pointing to the right corner of my cheek. I licked my hand and rubbed it. “You’re coming back?”

I nodded. “Absolutely.”

“Not like Grandma?”

I shook my head no. “Baby. No. Never like Grandma.”

I regretted we ever told him how my mother had died. But Lou insisted we never lie after the legal and emotional debacles that sprung from her suicide. I wanted to tell Sam I would never abandon them like that, because the consequence of a mother killing herself is that she also kills her children’s night-and daydreams, their imaginary friends, their favorite foods. She kills their private and public trusts. She takes with her their giggles and dimples and boo-boos. She breaks their hearts in half so that they grow up to become doubly steeled to disaster. And they’re meaner than they were ever meant to be. And they can’t shake it off. It’s a permanent slip of toilet paper stuck to the bottoms of their souls forever. So if not abandoning my sons meant they wouldn’t grow up to be assholes like Auntie Beth, and, frankly, me, then I could live with the residual damage my hypervigilance might cause.

“I’m so coming back. Buddy, this is a quick little trip Momma needs to take. Now I want you to kiss me good night and go upstairs and take a shower and please do your neck and I will see you Sunday.”

Sam grasped all of me with everything he had. Things were tight and terrible for several seconds and then he loosened and ran. After slamming the bathroom door, he screamed, “I hate everything!”

I’d never had daughters, and never once thought about my mother’s suicide in relation to the shared sex of the kids she left behind. But in that moment I had a sharp vision and a darker bodily sense about how different my goodbye would have gone if Sam were a Samantha. I felt how much easier it was for me to briefly leave boys, but how much harder it would have been for me to leave the kind of girls I would have raised.

“Peachy? What the … what do you mean, ‘you’re going’? Please stay. Please talk to me,” he begged, trying to block the living room archway with his body. “You can’t leave. Who’s going to watch Sam?”

“Don’t use him. You, Beth, and Lou. There’s plenty of people to take care of him here. Everyone who’s been telling me he has to stop being afraid of being away from me.”

The phone rang again. The lit-up window showed Beth’s cell number, and despite Beau’s plea for me to ignore it, for us to just talk, I answered.

“What do you want?”

“Hi, Peachy.”

“Oh. Hi, Daddy. Where’s Beth?”

“Here, in the trailer.”

I pictured Beth shaped in the letter
C
, hands clasped to her knobby knees, head bowed, long shiny hair skimming over her beloved breasts, tickling the tops of her skinny thighs.

“Did she tell you what happened?”

“Kinda. Enough,” Lou said, taking a deep breath. “Honey, breathe with me.”