The Most Fun We Ever Had (22 page)

She turned to look at him again with curiosity. “Because you’re also the adopted child of one of my sisters?”

“Because I’m not a Sorenson.”

She paused, unsure of where he was heading. “Well, thank God for that, I guess.”

“I just mean that I know what it’s like to come in blind to your family. It can feel a little—overwhelming.”

“Believe me; I’m well aware of how overwhelming my family can be.”

“But you’re not— There’s a caste system, kind of, isn’t there?”

“A
caste
system?”

“I didn’t grow up how you did.”

“So what? What do you mean, how
I
did?”

“There’s just an inherent level of privilege that you all have. And that’s fine, Lize. It’s just life. But it can be kind of an adjustment if you didn’t grow up with it.”

“I didn’t grow up with it. My parents were scraping by before my dad went into private practice. And even now, I mean—sure, they’re fine, but they had four of us to take care of, and my dad was a family practitioner; it’s not like he was an orthopedic surgeon or something.”

“See, even the fact that you
know
orthopedic surgeons make more than—”

“I know that because I don’t live under a rock. And I really don’t think this is a fair comparison to make. Jonah grew up in foster care. You grew up with stable caretakers in a comfortable home. It’s not like you were in, like, the
slums.
”

“Are you trying to fight with me?” he asked.

“No, I just— You seemed pretty prepared to make that argument.”

“It’s a hard thing to not be aware of.”

“Fine.”

“I think it’s a good idea,” he said. “To reach out to Jonah.”

“Because you feel some sort of brotherly class disparity?” Could it be that she was almost
enjoying
this, the feeling of sparring with him about something as banal and time-tested—something as
normal
—as their differing backgrounds?

“I’m agreeing with you, Liza.”

Because it felt sort of good to pretend things were normal, that they were a normal couple who could trade barbs as a means of gaining or losing prosaic pearls of power, she rolled her eyes at him, suggesting that perhaps she wouldn’t—though she
would,
of course—let the subject drop.

—

D
avid was in his study, glasses slid halfway down his nose, glaring at his computer as he attempted without success to turn it on. There was a message blinking that he couldn’t make sense of, white text across a blue screen. He hit blindly at a few keys and suddenly the monitor made an ominous flashbulb noise and the screen went dark.

“God
damnit,
” he hissed, tapping the keys a few more times just in case.

“Dad?”

He glanced up, startled, to see Liza standing in the doorway. The sight of his daughters pregnant still unnerved him: the fact that he almost always saw them first, in his head, as little girls was complicated by the reality of them as adults—Liza, now, a grown woman with a swollen belly.

“Sorry, I was going to call, but— Is everything okay with your computer?”

He glanced over at it ruefully as he rose from his desk. “We’re having a difference of opinion. What brings you here, Liza-lee?”

“Yeah, I wanted…I was hoping I could talk to you.” She reached out to hug him and something about the motion seemed kind of desperate.

He put his arms around her, abuzz with the lurking suspicion that had been popping up on and off within him since his daughter had announced her pregnancy. “Is everything okay?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Is it the baby?” Alarmed, he pulled away to examine her.

“No. Or—not really. Mom’s not coming home soon, is she?”

“She’s at work until six.”

“Okay. I just—I wanted to just talk to you about this.”

This was so utterly
strange.
The girls rarely approached him about anything before they approached their mother, and he’d never taken it personally: he went to Marilyn first for everything too.

“Let me make you some tea.” He put a hand on her back and led her to the kitchen, where she sank without protest into the chair unofficially designated hers for the entire history of their family’s dining. He rifled through Marilyn’s tea bags. “Decaf?” he asked.

“Regular. Please don’t judge me. I’d lose my mind if I cut out caffeine entirely.”

He smiled and held up his hands. “I don’t judge.” He regarded her with one part amusement and two parts concern. “Tell me what’s going on.”

And then she started to cry.

“Oh, honey. Okay.” He should have been used to tears, but whenever one of the women in his life began to cry unexpectedly, he couldn’t help but act as though she were bleeding, and that he could stanch the flow with his anxious, evasive murmurings of
all right, okay
.

“Ryan’s sick,” she said. “He’s really sick and he’s not getting better.”

For David, as a doctor,
sick
meant everything from head colds to leukemia. He sat down beside his daughter.

“He’s clinically depressed. I didn’t know how much you and Mom had sussed out. He’s— He never wants to go anywhere, and he sleeps all the time, and I…I don’t know what to do. I’ve run out of— I’m running out of ways to pretend like it’s not happening.”

He’d been at once expecting this and entirely not. “Okay,” he said again. He paused. “It— How long has this been going on, Liza?”

“I mean, he’s had
ten
dencies since I’ve known him, but it’s been the worst it’s ever been since—well, since we moved here, you know, with his difficulty finding work, and his— I think he feels infantilized, kind of, with me as the breadwinner, which— We can all endorse gender equality until we’re blue in the face but it’s a real thing, Dad; it’s really hard to be a woman who makes more money than her partner. I don’t know what I’m supposed to—with the baby, and the— He had a good few weeks after we found out, but things are getting bad again, and…”

“Breakthrough depression,” he said. “Maybe. Stress can cause one to backslide.”

“So it’s—it’s
because
I got pregnant?”

“No, sweetheart.” He passed her another tissue. “That’s not what I meant at all, Liza.”

“It was an accident,” Liza said, and he glanced up to see her hands pointedly clasped beneath her little belly and he recognized the act, ruing the arrival of your unforeseen child while trying to be grateful for it at the same time. “I never meant for this to happen. But part of me thought—I thought it might make things better, maybe. But it seems like he’s— I mean, of course it didn’t fix things; of course it’s not going to fix…”

“Is he on medication?”

“He’s on Prozac but it seems like he needs to be reassessed. I’m hesitant to bring it up because I don’t want him to feel even
worse,
like he’s so bad off that he’s not even
treat
able.”

“That seems like a necessary step, sweetheart. The benefits will outweigh the costs.” He wished so much that he could emulate his wife, take his daughter in his arms—hum to her, as he used to, or murmur some soothing Catholic adage from his childhood,
sweet hope in the midst of the bitterness of life.
He tried to put faith in his medical knowledge, in its formulae and numbers, but the disappointment on his daughter’s face negated any chance of that. He thought of her as a baby, the tiny trusting peanut tucked against his chest. “Are you taking care of yourself, Lize?”

“That’s actually kind of why I came here. I mean—I wanted to— This is the first time I’ve told anyone about this and I—I guess I just needed someone else to know, so I won’t feel so—so
alone
with all of this.” Her voice broke.

“Hey,” he said, and he put his arm around her and she crumpled against him. “Oh, Liza.”

But she righted herself quickly, pulling away, wiping her eyes. “I was hoping I could ask you something. A—favor, kind of.”

“Of course.”

“I’d like to change doctors,” she said.

“Oh. But I thought you— Is your OB not—”

“She’s fine. But I—I’d like someone a little more experienced.”

“Did they— Is there cause for concern, Lize? Is everything—”

“I’d like some assurance.” The line sounded rehearsed.

“Assurance of what, sweetheart?”

“Just—you know. Confirmation.” This time he held out, waited for her to continue.

“I’d just like to feel a little bit less unsure. About Ryan. About what his—condition means for the baby. Do you know what I mean?”

He did know what she meant; he’d run the same gamut of anxieties with all four of his children: routine new-parent jitters, mostly, enhanced by his vault of professional knowledge and his keen awareness of the tenuousness of human life. But instead he responded in the only way he knew how: as a clinician, as a person who relied on research and evidence and data.

“There’s no way to know these things before babies are born, Lize.”

“I want to know that there’s no—” She shook her head. “I want to know which options I can rule out.”

“I think those are few and far between, Liza. You’re five months along.”

“I know that.” She looked up at him evenly. “I just want to feel that I’m…ready.”

“There’s no way you can ever be
ready,
honey. Even if you do everything you’re supposed to do.”

His poor daughter, the one who had found her place in the world after a childhood of being—not
forgotten,
but benched. Perpetually sidelined, waiting patiently in the wings. Their easy one, who was now facing such miserable hardship: an unreliable partner, an unequal coparent. Such a heavy burden for Liza to carry around, on top of everything else. And he could see now that
assurance,
for his daughter, meant ensuring that there wasn’t—he flinched at the thought—a way out, a loophole to escape motherhood and its subsequent inextricable ties to Ryan. Not like his wife in the early days after all, then. Liza’s concerns were far more potent and her desires much darker. He ached at this revelation.

“I’d like to see if Gillian Levin’s taking on new patients,” Liza said.

He could’ve fallen out of his chair. He could’ve dropped dead right there in the middle of the kitchen, so unswervingly was he not expecting this, the syllables of Gillian’s name and all they stood for. Her dark head beside him in the passenger seat of his car. Her eager face appearing in his doorway. Her hand on his arm.

“She was so good with Mom,” Liza continued. “When Gracie was born? I mean, wasn’t— She was the reason that both of them—made it, wasn’t she?”

“She was,” he said. It came out sounding stiff.

“So I just thought that— I thought it might make me feel better. To have someone who—played such a big role in our family. And she’s—familiar.”

He looked up and studied his daughter, trying to assess the level of knowledge behind the statement.
Such a big role
. “That was over twenty years ago, Liza. How familiar could she be to you?” He hadn’t meant to snap. “I mean—”

“She knows our history,” Liza said evenly. “And about Wendy, everything, you know.”

What could he say to this? “You know you don’t need my permission, Lize.”

“I know, but I figured— I just wanted to make sure you wouldn’t mind.”

He swallowed. “Why would I mind?”

She seemed to study him for a moment too long. “No reason.”

“You should do what you think is right.” But, as he considered it: “Except how about you let me tell your mother, okay?”

Liza frowned. “I— Sure, but—why, do you think she’s—?”

“No,” he said quickly. “Just— Those were hard times for your mom, Lize. With Gracie. And then Wendy. It just might—dredge up some things, you know.”

“Oh. Sure, yeah, if you think so.”

“I’ll take care of it. You focus on yourself, Lize.”

She looked down, brow furrowed, nodding. He thought again of her as a baby, then as an apologetically tattooed seventeen-year-old. To the best of his ability, he ignored his unease.

—

H
is new Krav Maga instructor talked a lot about living
purely,
which made Jonah start considering his own habits—he smoked only occasionally, because one of the kids at Lathrop House taught him, and he didn’t like the taste of beer—and, by extension, Wendy’s. He wasn’t sure what made someone an alcoholic. He’d looked it up online, and the bar seemed pretty low, like if you went by those standards
everyone
would be considered an alcoholic. And Wendy didn’t necessarily exhibit all of the “telltale signs” listed, either; she was usually up before him in the morning, she never seemed to drive erratically, and she was never incoherent, she just sometimes got more animated. She did drink a lot—nightly, for sure—and he’d also come home sometimes to find that the condo reeked of weed, but it seemed like a pretty okay system, as far as he could tell, to be an adult with a sweet house who drank and smoked whenever she wanted and wasn’t at risk of becoming, like, a mole person who lived in the gutter.

The sex stuff weirded him out, though; the fact that she seemed to be having so much of it and that she seemed to think she was doing a good job of hiding it from him. He heard her through the walls at night—muffled laughter, a cry, once—and he could hear, too, when she ushered the men out the front door, tenor voices alternating with her alto. He hadn’t meant to walk in on her that one time, and he hadn’t meant to stand there, but it had shocked him, seeing her like that, and it further intrigued him, that she was so unself-conscious about the fact that she was sort of a dirtbag, bringing home as many men a week as she wanted. But their life proceeded as it had been, dinner together and then Scrabble or rummy on her patio, during which Wendy would nightly finish off a bottle of wine but never get
sloppy,
not like the websites warned about.

“If you don’t give your body the respect it deserves, you’ll be surprised by the ways it can fail you,” his teacher said. They’d spent the full ninety minutes of class time sitting Indian-style on the floor listening to him give a boring Karate Kid lecture about integrity and the inner self and how their bodies were temples. “Ignoring signs of distress can be a fatal mistake,” his teacher continued, and this made Jonah nervous because what if Wendy was having signs of distress and she didn’t notice because of the wine and the weed? Was he
worrying
about her? It didn’t seem like they were close enough to worry about each other, and plus she was the adult, so she was technically the one who was supposed to be doing the worrying.