The Most Fun We Ever Had (54 page)

“We’re just pontificating,” Wendy replied. Violet sipped her water, even more frightened than before, letting their weird domesticity wash over her.

“Raucous Thursday night around here,” Miles said. “But I just graded thirty-eight papers, so I’m getting a drink.”

“One for me too,” Wendy called after him. “And get Violet a glass of wine. One of the lighter reds.” She turned to Violet. “Relaxed muscles are better prepared for labor.”

She still hadn’t quite confronted the fact of impending labor, of how it would feel. She was enormous but didn’t feel anywhere near ready to give birth. “So glad someone’s aware of what controlled substances I’m allowed to consume.” The sensation lingered, her nervy trepidation. What it would feel like to leave the hospital with a baby in her arms.

“You’ll thank me later,” Wendy said, the edge back in her voice. But then Miles returned, three glasses clustered in his hands, and he came to Violet first. He was deferential toward her; he acted almost as though he was the visitor. Tonight he sat beside her at the other end of the couch and lifted his glass to cheers them both.

“What’d I miss?”

“We’ve been discussing existential anointment and the grave peril of hypothetical thinking,” Wendy said. Her jauntiness sounded forced.

“And how are
you
doing, Violet?” he asked solicitously.

She didn’t know what to say. She’d been with them for over six months, but it was Wendy who took her to doctor’s appointments, who entertained her with Pavement albums and rice cakes and endless games of Scrabble, who facilitated shoddy contact with their parents, an elaborate setup involving *67 and prepaid calling cards, approximating—at this they’d both died laughing—Parisian background noises, clanging spatulas and softly playing Serge Gainsbourg. Wendy who made it all feel, somehow, like a game.

“Apparently I’m ceding to the powers that be,” she said finally. How dare Wendy speak to her with such authority now, as though she deserved scolding, as though either of them had had any idea what they’d been getting themselves into six months ago? She felt the panic rise again but it was quelled by the baby’s sudden movement, a reminder of the fact that she wasn’t alone. That for now, at least, she had a person of her own.

Miles smiled. “Not much else to do, I suppose. It’s funny, one of my students tonight actually—we were shooting the shit during our break, and she’d been adopted from Seoul as a baby, and she was talking about how grateful she was to have ended up where she did.”

There was an uncomfortable pause before Wendy said, “Taking remedial night classes where an eccentric billionaire teaches her about inflation?”

Miles was the only person—besides Violet herself—who didn’t flinch after Wendy made a joke. “I just think it’s a brave thing that you’re doing,” he said. “Giving it up to people who—”

Her eyes were suddenly filled. She knew this would always be the decision in her life that made the least sense: why she hadn’t just taken care of things at the clinic in Middletown. Why she’d hemmed and hawed for so long that by the time she called Wendy, it was just about too late for the clinic. What the fuck had she been thinking? Going through with a pointless pregnancy was not a Violet move; it was a Wendy move, ballsy and inexplicable.

“For Christ’s sake, master of bedside manner,” Wendy said.

Violet shook her head. “No, it’s fine.” Of course the adoption agency had found good parents for the baby—parents who could care for it better than she could, parents who
wanted
it.

“May I?” Miles asked, and she looked up, confused. He gestured to her.

“Oh.” She could feel Wendy’s gaze on her.

“Not if it makes you—” Miles began.

“No, sure.” She forcefully ignored Wendy, now. “Go ahead. Not much to feel, but…”

He inched closer to her on the couch and held his hand out like he was waiting for her to stamp it. She grabbed it and placed it squarely at her navel.

“So if you—yeah, right here is about— I think that’s a foot.”

“Oh, wow.”

She watched his face light up and some of his tightly wound awkwardness receded and she could see some of what she suspected Wendy saw in him, a kindness in the eyes. So long since she’d been touched by anyone besides her doctor. He looked up at Wendy and she watched them exchange something.

She sipped her wine, warm and foreign to her after months of herbal tea, and felt her panic pulsing dully in her ears as she tried to listen to them talk about an upcoming fund-raiser. When she finished her glass, she rose to go to bed. In the opulent guest suite, she sank down between the cool sheets. She squirmed around to accommodate the baby, thinking that maybe she could confront it tomorrow, consider what she was really doing. The presence inside her had been so unyielding, so sweetly trusting of her to ensure its safe passage. Maybe she was stronger than she thought. Maybe her real bravery could show itself with what happened next. Wendy had said it herself:
It’s not always the most logical decision that’s the right decision.
She would give herself the remaining two weeks to consider all possibilities, to itemize what she was capable of. She drifted off, envisioning telling her parents, contemplating the road not taken.

An hour later, her water broke.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

She thought she knew fear. She’d been afraid for most of her childhood: of her mother’s tenuous grasp on reality and her father’s ability to turn a blind eye, of how huge and unforgiving the world often seemed. She suspected—but would never say—that David had happened in part because he made her feel safe.

And then she got pregnant with Wendy and it all started up again. She feared every potential outcome of her unborn child’s life; and when the girls emerged from the womb she invented new things to fear without even trying. She feared sharp table corners and faulty electrical sockets, ruthless kindergarten classmates named Ashley and Heather, cars that drove too fast and teachers who missed important signals. She worried about them drinking as teenagers and she worried about them overdosing and then Wendy actually
did
overdose. She worried about losing them and then she did lose them, but she lost each one in a way that left both parties adult and largely unharmed; she lost them in a normal, suburban way that enabled her to still see them at major holidays.

Losing David, though—scarier, perhaps, than anything else, because it was the most likely. The thing that happened to the blood in her wrists when Jonah called her at the store at 4:46 p.m. on a Tuesday was nothing she’d felt before.

Of course,
she thought, oddly serene.
This is what I’ve been afraid of all along
.

—

A
t every mile marker Jonah worried he’d be pulled over, that maybe Wendy hadn’t gotten his text, that maybe she
had
gotten it and called the cops anyway about David’s car. About David himself, please, Jesus Christ, let him be alive. He wasn’t sure what his plan was. He’d just left, knee-jerk, because this—whatever it was that had happened—seemed far worse than the stupid thing with Liza’s car. He’d taken driver’s ed last semester, and David—following the dumb mailbox accident—had been giving him lessons, too, taking him all around Oak Park.

He’d heard one of the paramedics use the word
code,
and he was almost positive, from TV, that
code
meant
dead,
although they were still shocking David’s chest with paddles.

“Hey, buddy, how about if you go grab your dad’s wallet for us?” the male paramedic had said. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

And though it was in his historical experience that everything was not going to be fine if someone felt the need to
tell
you everything was going to be fine, he scurried inside anyway, the dog following him, not chasing anymore, rubbing his big dumb head as if in apology against Jonah’s leg as he rifled through David’s desk in search of the wallet.
Your dad.
It was then that he found the envelope with his name on it, a regular white letter envelope with
JONAH
across the front in his grandfather’s blocky, doctory writing. It stilled him for a second, but then he shoved it into his back pocket and went, with Loomis at his heels, to check the kitchen counter.

He found the wallet there and brought it out to the paramedics, who had loaded David onto a stretcher. There was an oxygen mask on his face and a needle in his arm and they’d cut open his sweater to reveal the pale hairiness of his chest. He stopped in his tracks without meaning to, and the male paramedic came over to him and put a hand on his shoulder.

“We’ve got him stabilized and we’re going to take him to the hospital. How about if you ride with us?”

He handed over the wallet and, still staring at his grandfather, shook his head. “I’ll wait here,” he said, though he wasn’t quite sure why, and he watched them lift the stretcher, watched the bottoms of David’s shoes as the doors closed, watched the red and blue lights blur purple against the red-brown brick of the house on Fair Oaks as the ambulance screamed away.

He felt like he’d failed, in some fundamental way, and on many levels. He’d allowed his fear of the dog to get in the way of his grandfather’s need for his help. He’d been too frightened to ride in the ambulance because what if David
died
in the ambulance; what if the medic was just being nice and David was actually already
dead
and so he would just be trapped with a dead body? A braver person wouldn’t have cared about these things. Maybe he’d used up all of his bravery with Wyatt at Star of the Week. He thought of Violet on Christmas, before she slammed her bedroom door in his face:
You’re almost a fucking adult. There’s no reason for you to try to ruin it for my kids.

And so he ran upstairs to his bedroom, grabbed a few essentials—a couple of sweaters, some boxers and socks—and while he was in the closet he found the wine he’d stolen from Violet over the summer, so he grabbed that, too, because even in his panic he didn’t want her to be able to use it against him. Then he called Marilyn and he texted Wendy and he filled Loomis’s bowl with dry food and he grabbed David’s keys from the hook by the door and he got the Jeep purring and he found his way carefully to 290W, because Wendy had taught him that if you went east, where they lived, you could get only so far before you ran into the lake.

So he was westbound, hours later, the highway pitch-black, his visibility limited to the scope of his headlights. He hoped he wouldn’t hit a deer or a yeti or anything. He cranked the radio and kept the windows open, so he couldn’t hear anything but the bass and the roar of the air outside. The noise was almost enough to distract him from the thoughts about his grandfather, who was possibly no longer alive, and who, if he
wasn’t
alive, probably would have been if only Jonah had grabbed the ladder in time, if fucking Cujo hadn’t chased him away. The noise almost erased the image he had in his head, David on the ground beneath the tree, eyes closed, arm at a fucked-up pipe cleaner angle, dark wetness pooling from the left side of his head. He stopped at a rest area in Nebraska to throw up.
Cardiac arrest,
the paramedic had said. And the arm was definitely broken. He wasn’t sure about the blood.

He couldn’t get rid of his phone—he needed it for the maps—but he’d turned it on Do Not Disturb, and he was afraid to check and see if Wendy had responded to his text, or see who had called him. He took only a minute’s pleasure in the fact that he was certain
someone
had called him. That he was missing, and there were people who would care, even if they cared only because he had possibly murdered their dad, their husband, their grandpa. He thought of Wyatt and Eli, lucky little bastards who never had to worry about anything. He’d miss them, though. Goofballs. They probably wouldn’t remember him after a month or two.

There was a strobe light going in his head, reminding him repeatedly of the worst parts of the day. The way David had dropped the chainsaw. Then the sickening sound of his body hitting the ground, a dull thump like the chainsaw but a thousand times worse. Christ. How harmless that stupid fucking horse-dog was. How the ladder had started to waver, and how he hadn’t been there to catch it because he was running away from the dog. How the dog, as soon as David’s body hit the ground—Jesus, the
sound
it made—immediately forgot about their impromptu game of tag and went to check on his master.

And possibly worse than anything else was how Marilyn’s voice had sounded when he called her: sick with fear, trembling, bodiless, and—most notably—not remotely suspicious.

“Oh, sweetie, I—” A vacancy, like she was reading from a script in a language she didn’t speak. “Are you okay? I’m so sorry you had to— I’m so glad that you’re—” A sharp intake of breath, but not a sob. “I should get to the hospital,” she’d said. “Oh, but I— He gave me a ride to work this morning.”

“Maybe Wendy could drive you.”

“Of course. Thank you.” Now a sound that might have been crying, but when she spoke again her voice was steady. “You stay in one place for me, will you? I’ll call Violet and—you can either go to her house, or stay home, or I’m sure Liza’s going to want to come to the…”

“I’ll call Liza for you,” he offered, but she still didn’t reply. “I said I’ll— Marilyn?”

“Had he been complaining of chest pain? Tingling in his arm? Anything like that?”

“No.”

“His eyes really weren’t open? Not at all?”

“Not— It was hard to tell, I guess.” He hesitated. “They were maybe a little bit.”

He kept, based on the green signs he passed, making decisions that propelled him west. And in his consideration of where he might go—a sad inventory of people he knew on the entire earth—he remembered Oregon, home to the only Sorenson he’d yet to meet. He could leave David’s car with her. And maybe she’d loan him some money. Enough so that slipping even farther away would be a cinch.