The Fallback Plan (15 page)

“What’s that?”

“Like a snowflake,” I said. “But a fish.”

“Oh,” she said, and lay in the grass, spreading her limbs into an X. “Whooooo,” she said.

I started to laugh. “I really love you, May, do you know that?”

She nodded.

• • •

Amy called when we were on our way home with the chainsaw. While I was loading the thing into the back of the minivan, I had been shamefully afraid of its teeth; since
childhood I’ve thought machines are creatures of free will, and I’ve been unable to rid myself of the terror that at some moment one will come alive and take my hand off.

“Sorry,” I said, “we’re almost there.”

“Where are you right now?”

“On Grove?”

“Can you stop and get some olive oil on your way? I’ll pay you back.”

“Uh, yeah. Sure.”

“I want to talk to her!” May yelled. I looked at her in the rearview mirror and shook my head. Before she could yell again, I held a finger to my lips so she would understand that when someone buys you ice cream you have to do what they say for at least the next thirty minutes.

“You can stay for dinner, can’t you?” Amy asked. It was 4:45. Nate would be waiting for me at the park in a half hour.

“Um, you know I’d really like to, but I promised my mom I’d do something. My mom and dad. We have plans. The three of us do.”

“It would only be you and me and May,” Amy said. “Nate has karate.”
Karate?

“I wish I could.”

“Then stay.”

“But I can’t.”

“Why?” she said.

“It’s my dad’s aunt,” I said. “She has dementia and we
have to bring her flowers.” I don’t know why that’s the lie that came to me, but Amy accepted it as a legitimate reason to miss dinner, and at five o’clock May was home and I was on my way to the park.

• • •

“And I told him, ‘If you think these expense reports are legit, let me know, but looks to me like the salmon are on their way upstream with this one!’ ”

“Yeah,” I said. “That sucks.” I couldn’t remember what we were talking about. We had smoked a bowl and shared a bottle of Chilean Merlot that I could see had cost Nate ten dollars and ninety-nine cents at the supermarket. Fancy. My white sandals were on the floor of the car, and my feet were on the dash. I turned my toes out and then back together, like wings, or like Dorothy, trying to stay in Oz.

“I haven’t done pot in forever,” Nate said.

“You haven’t
smoked
pot.”

“That’s what I said.”

“No, you said you hadn’t
done
it. Like cocaine, or ceramics.”

“Oh,” Nate said, and then laughed really hard without making any sound. He was still wearing his tie. It was navy with long yellow stripes. I bet May had picked it out. I bet May had picked it out and this made me feel profoundly uncomfortable. I hadn’t seen her in an hour, and I missed
her, and I hoped she would never grow up to find out her babysitter had spent dusky summer evenings with her father in the front seat of his Jetta.

“Do you ever do it with your parents?”

I shook my head.

When Tierney’s mother, Val, had flown in from New Jersey to visit at the beginning of fall semester junior year, she’d asked Tierney what the green stuff was in the prescription bottle on her desk, surely knowing exactly what the green stuff was, but that was Val’s way of saying she wanted some. This was a woman who had admitted to her teenage children that the six weeks she’d spent out of commission with a sprained ankle years before were not due to a gardening accident, as she’d originally told them, but the consequence of a slippery afternoon spent with their father and a can of whipped cream. Tierney and her brother were five or six when it happened. Teenagers when she told them the truth. I had to agree with Tierney that there was no age at which this information would be appropriate to hear from your mother.

“But it wasn’t like I couldn’t let her have any,” Tierney told me later. “She pays my tuition.”

They’d smoked in her room, and then wandered out into the apartment courtyard together, stoned enough to think every approaching footstep was a bat in a tree, and walked six blocks to buy a pound of Hershey’s Kisses.

Nate activated the moon roof and we watched it recede,
fascinated. I felt as if we were actors in a commercial for a car that’s so safe and quiet you can take your kids anywhere and they’ll fall asleep in the backseat so you can have a romantic moment with your husband on top of a mountain somewhere without having to worry about getting eaten alive by a bear.

I couldn’t remember what the law says about open bottles of alcohol in a car. Are they allowed if the car stands still? What about people who live in cars that don’t run anymore? Are they allowed to drink? Because they should be.

“What are you thinking about right now?”

“The law,” I said.

Nate leaned across the gear shift and kissed me. I kissed him back. I felt like I disappeared inside my brain. An early July firecracker popped in the distance, followed by the sound of car brakes and an ice cream truck playing a slow twinkly “Clementine.” Then he lay back in his seat, closed his eyes, and made an expression that was a cross between a smile and a wince.

In a cavern in a canyon. Excavating for a mine
.

I watched a bulky, shadowy figure schlep across the empty grass on the other side of the parking lot.
Dwelt a miner forty-niner
. As he got closer to the lights of the recreation center, I saw that it was a thin teenager in a referee uniform lugging a mesh bag full of soccer balls and a plastic cooler.

“I don’t know what to do,” Nate said, as if picking up a conversation he had put down only minutes before like a glass of water. “About Amy.”

“About Amy,” I repeated.

And his daughter Clementine
.

Nate let out a long sigh and removed his glasses before rubbing the bridge of his nose. Was it my turn to say something? I had no idea what we were talking about.

“How can I stay? How can I leave? There’s someone else. Not that I’ve done anything about it, but there’s Lila.”

Wait, who?

“I was seeing Lila a year ago. I was seeing her when Annika died. I felt awful. We broke it off, and I was there for Amy, I’ve been there for Amy for
months
. I don’t know what to do. But I can’t keep doing this.” Nate swatted at a mosquito that had flown in through the roof. It buzzed close to my ear.

“Lila is my, my what? Why can’t I remember words right now?”
Because you have a brain tumor
, I wanted to say.
Just like all the rest of us
. “My associate’s secretary, I mean. I pass her every day on my way to and from the copy room. What would
you
do? Should I quit? I can’t quit. Do I tell Amy?”

The mosquito landed on my neck and I slapped it, unsure if it was a hit or miss. In the mirror above my seat I checked, and saw a fresh pink bite starting to swell a few inches below my jaw.

“Fuck,”
I said, suddenly sober and back in
Weltschmerz
mode.

“What happened?”

“Nothing.” I didn’t understand what was going on. I couldn’t justify my sudden hatred of Nate, but I couldn’t stand being near him anymore. “I need to wash my neck.”

Before he could say anything, I got out, and stood in the gravelly parking lot with my water bottle. I cocked my head and poured the water over the bite, hoping to wash the mosquito saliva off my neck before it swelled too much. A trick I learned at camp the summer I was twelve. Water spilled over my shoulder and soaked the top of my t-shirt. I felt like a human fountain, a garden sculpture. Crickets droned in the park.

Instead of coming out to see what I was doing, Nate started the car to turn on the radio. The familiar intro to a song about watching someone’s every breath played as I dried off my neck with the hem of my shirt.

I got back in the car.

“I can’t live there anymore,” Nate said, apparently having come to a decision in my absence. I didn’t care. I saw who I was to him. I spent more time with his wife than he did and he wanted my blessing.

“Then don’t,” I said.

“Is that what you think I should do?”

“Doesn’t matter what I think,” I said.

During the ride back to my house, I stared out the
window at the blue light falling behind the split-level homes, the fenced-in yards, the tall old oaks spaced along the road. Both of his freckled hands gripped the wheel. I wanted to be four years old, asleep in the backseat, or even pretending to be asleep, waiting until the car was parked and there was someone to open the door and carry me to bed.
Voulez-vous coucher? Oui, j’aime coucher. Pour tous le temps
. But this was not my someone. And I was too old to be carried anywhere.

“I’m sorry, Esther. I didn’t mean to put you in the middle of this. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“I know you don’t,” I said, slipping my sandals on. “But it isn’t fair. You tell me things and expect me to hold on to them and I don’t know why you think you can trust me or why you’ve chosen me to keep these things.”

“You’re a good listener.”

“Yeah. I’m a good listener.” Nate knew nothing about me. What did I want him to know? I don’t know. Something. How many bones I’d broken. That I liked coffee ice cream. I got out of the car without saying goodbye and ran inside. My dad was standing at the front window, holding the painted wooden lion he had gotten long ago at a crafts fair in the palms of his hands like an offering to the god of rec rooms.

“What are you doing,” I said.

“Who was that?”

“Nate.”

My dad waved, and seemed disappointed when Nate pulled out of the driveway and drove off. “Why didn’t he come in and say hi?”

“He had to go somewhere. He was just dropping me off.”

“Work late?”

“What are you doing?”

“Watch this,” he said, and pulled the lion’s wooden tail. It opened a secret compartment on the top of its yellow back. His eyes were wide with wonder. “Did you know it could do this? Did you know you could just open it up and put things inside?”

“We should go somewhere,” Amy said.

“Who should?”

“You and I. You and I? Or you and me?”

“You and I,” I said.

“Where should we go? Where would you like to go?” Her voice sounded far away, like it was coming out of a megaphone in the cavernous auditorium at the zoo where the dolphins perform.

“Like, today, you mean? The mall?”

“Have you ever gone on an Alaskan cruise?”

“No,” I said, “but that’s always been my dream.”

How did she know?
I wondered.

Amy left her chair to go browse the living room bookshelves, and came back with a whale watching guide and a Christmas tree ornament shaped like a snowshoe.

“We’ll leave tomorrow,” she said, pressing them both into my hands.

“Just the two of us?”

“Why? Do you have something else going on?”

I considered my options. “You’re right,” I agreed. “I guess not.”

“We’ll leave at first light,” Amy said, and then leaned in to whisper:

“And on the way there, we’ll stop and say goodbye to the faun.”

I startled myself awake in May’s bed, a copy of
Goodnight, Moon
pressed into my forearm hard enough to leave a mark. Careful not to rouse her, I put the book on the nightstand and rolled, James Bond-style, out of bed and onto the area rug. She didn’t stir. The rug was patterned with mythical beasts: I landed on a centaur, whose head was turned toward the siren.

After I checked that all three night lights were plugged in, I backed out of the room, and closed the door three-quarters shut behind me.

And there was Amy. In the hall, near the attic door, rifling through a shopping bag, like a homeless woman.

“I like your hat,” she said.

Was I wearing a hat? I touched my head. Yes. I was wearing a visor, with a 3-D dinosaur on the front.

“I think I fell asleep for a sec,” I said. “Around the fourth reading of
Goodnight, Moon
.”

Amy stopped the bag lady routine and stared at me, smiling patiently like she was waiting for some confession. I couldn’t remember when the dream had ended and reality had begun again. I clenched and unclenched my fists, just to be sure I wasn’t holding a book or a snowshoe.

“Viva la
Goodnight, Moon
,” I said lamely.

“May really likes you,” Amy said. “Weekends, when you’re not here, she goes to the front window and waits for you every morning. She’s never done that with any other babysitter.”

“I really like her, too,” I said. Some paint, or glue, had dripped and dried in white rivers from Amy’s elbows to her wrists. There was a bandage around one of her index fingers, and a small bruise near her right temple. She didn’t explain the injuries, even as I stared at them, but they seemed too minor to ask about. Then I imagined Nate, at that very moment, walking from the copy room to his desk. Smiling at Lila as he passed. Then hitting himself in the head with a stapler.

It was us vs. him now. There was kinship in that.

“Uh, can I make you some iced tea or something?” I asked.

“Are you having some?”

“Sure,” I said.

We went downstairs. Since I’d started babysitting earlier that summer, the kitchen had become less of a health hazard. Sometimes in the morning, the sink would be filled with the previous evening’s dishes, but I would do them right away, and then the purr of the dishwasher would fill me with ease like anesthesia. There was something about being with May every day that gave my life a purpose: I needed to either kidnap her and raise her as my own, or clean the house she lived in and make sure her mother
didn’t do anything that would land her in prison.

We sat at the table with our tea and our spoons. Amy poured sugar in hers. I stirred my ice cubes.

“What was it like here?” she said.

“Here?”

“Growing up here. In Lilacia Land.” She tilted her head to gesture toward the back door and beyond, toward that tamed wilderness. I wasn’t sure how to answer, how to describe the only place I’d lived in long enough to want to leave it.