The Most Fun We Ever Had (56 page)

“I lost it,” Violet said. “And I made him leave. But he showed up at Wyatt’s school today to help him. He’s not— He’s really a nice kid. We shouldn’t just let him—”

“Jesus, we all
know
he’s a nice kid,” Wendy said. “Everyone but you has known for months that he’s a nice kid. He’s fine, okay? We’re not calling in an Amber Alert, we’re not going to the fucking FBI; he’s fine, and we’ll hear from him when we hear from him.”

A vulturine man walked by, an oxygen tank trailing behind him, and Wendy leapt up when he passed. “Shit. It’s like fucking Goblin Market around here. I’m going outside.”

There was a time Violet would have gone with her. She wished she could now. Instead, she told herself she couldn’t leave Liza alone. Liza, who had no one waiting for her at home; Liza, who—like Violet, once—was grappling with the fucked-up juxtaposition of gestating in the midst of—sorrow. Parting. Abandonment. Although, of course, their father could not leave them.

Liza opened her mouth, closed it again. “Violet, he wouldn’t pass up an opportunity to meet— God. Another—you know, this person, would he?” She dropped her forehead into one hand. “Right? He wouldn’t— He has to at least— God, I’ve been banking on him an
oin
ting this baby when it’s born because otherwise—”

“Lize, it’s going to be fine.” She put her arm around her sister. Liza leaned heavily against her. She thought again of her father, standing with Gracie in his arms in their mother’s vacated hospital room, pretending not to panic. “Come on. Someone should check on Loomis.”

Liza lifted her head foggily. “Has anyone called Gracie?”

The smell of the hospital was beginning to make her feel sick. She rose, offering Liza a hand, suddenly anxious for the night air, and her reply, though not by any means intentionally unkind, was also unintentionally untrue: “I think Wendy was going to call her.”

—

A
shitty thing about living near the place you’d grown up was the likelihood of running into people from your youth, people who remembered you pigtailed or inebriated or pathetic. So Wendy wasn’t
surprised
to see Aaron Bhargava, but she also wasn’t terribly excited, especially because he was accompanied by his pregnant wife and a bug-eyed little girl wearing a tutu. She was smoking on a bench outside of the hospital, and as she saw them approaching from across the parking lot, she clung to the feeble hope that he wouldn’t recognize her. People sometimes didn’t. She was no longer coked out and twenty pounds underweight.

She kept her head down, adopted the distant brooding look of a person in deep contemplation, eyes locked on an engraved brick embedded in the sidewalk that read
IN MEMORY OF GRETCHEN AND LARRY STANISLAUS
. She wondered if they’d died together. If they were even a couple. Maybe a pair of incestuous siblings. An overly affectionate mother and son. A theatrical murder-suicide of a trainwreck woman and her sexy high school boyfriend.

“Wendy?”

She tensed involuntarily and let her gaze lift lazily upward with the sleepy nonchalance of a prolific thinker.

“I thought that was you,” he said.

She couldn’t pretend not to recognize him. He looked exactly the same as he had when they were sixteen. “Oh my God,” she said. “Aaron.” She rose, moved to hug him, realized she was still holding her cigarette, which the child was watching with interest. She could have stubbed it out but instead she simply retracted the hug, squared her body against the trio. The cigarette gave her an ally. And if she needed a quick getaway, she could light herself on fire.

“We’re just heading in to a doctor’s appointment,” he said. “I was just saying to Jen that I would
swear
it was you, but— I mean, the odds.”

“Astronomical,” she said. They hadn’t ended on bad terms, and it had been nearly twenty years, but she was surprised by how emotional it made her, seeing him, the first boy who’d treated her well.

“You look great,” he said.

She knew she was supposed to be self-effacing, but her looks were about the only thing she had going for her at the moment, and she was too tired to counter. She dragged on her cigarette as Aaron turned to his wife: “Babe, this is Wendy Sorenson. Wendy, my wife, Jen.”

“Eisenberg now, actually,” she said, ducking her head to exhale before she reached to shake the woman’s hand. “Nice to meet you.”

“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Jen said. “I mean that in the least sinister way.”

Wendy decided immediately that she liked her, and this made her, just as immediately, resentful: of Jen, for landing Aaron Bhargava when she herself could not; of Aaron Bhargava, for finding someone with a good aura and a functional womb.

“Eisenberg, huh?” Aaron said. He reminded her of a Labrador, pure myopic goodness. He made up for being so vanilla, she recalled, in bed. She looked again at Jen’s belly.

“Of the West Egg Eisenbergs,” she said absently. The Bhargavas regarded her with smiling bemusement. “And who have we here?” She gestured to the girl, whose big blue eyes were still following the trajectory of the cigarette.

Aaron laid a hand on the small head. “This is Evie,” he said. “Can you say hi, honey?”

“Why do you have that?” Evie asked instead.

“Because it’s been a long day.”

“Sweetie, don’t be rude,” Jen said.

“It’s a valid question,” Wendy said. “One I should be asking myself more often.”

“We’re in a very inquisitive phase,” Aaron said. “Do you have children?”

It was a simple enough question, but it still sometimes tripped her up. “I should head back inside,” she said. “God, sorry, I spaced. I’ve been out here way longer than I meant to be.”

“Everything okay?” Aaron asked.

“Uh-huh.” She now turned to stub out her cigarette, pressing it into the little tower of sand. “Just my—” Her throat filled before it could emit the word
dad
. “My husband sprained his wrist. Golfing. Stupid.” She apologized to Miles in her head; thanked him for saving her. She’d not told anyone yet that Jonah had texted her shortly after they arrived at the hospital:
ill give the car back. pls dont call cops. sorry for fucking everything up.
She was arguably the least emotionally stable person in her family; why did the universe insist on plaguing her anyway?

“It’s so wild to see you,” Aaron said, and this time it was he who reached to hug her, and, sans cigarette, she reciprocated, feeling the familiar way his muscles stretched taut across his back and his arms around her felt pleasantly like being in a straitjacket. “How’re your sisters, by the way? How’s Violet?”

She squeezed back for a couple of beats longer than was socially appropriate. “Superior to me in all ways,” she said.

—

T
he fact that her father hadn’t died made the need to go home feel even more pressing, but nobody had offered to pay for her ticket—her mother certainly would have, if asked, but Grace couldn’t bear to seem so pathetic, couldn’t bear to add one more thing to a to-do list whose contents she couldn’t bring herself to think about.

She resented her sisters for being in Chicago, for also not thinking to bring her home. Then again, she couldn’t believe how selfish she’d been, not coming home for Second Thanksgiving or Christmas, giving up what was possibly—God, please, not—her final opportunity to see her father. Violet had predictably insisted that she not let the accident get in the way of her schooling. Liza had been nice enough, but she’d sounded edgy and preoccupied, and Grace had felt the need to reverse their roles, act as though Liza was the one who needed taking care of; her baby was due in less than a month. And Wendy only expounded on her hatred of hospitals. So she was stuck, confined to her apartment. She’d started to text Ben a dozen times, but had ultimately decided against it.

She began to understand how some people could abdicate any commitment to normal human life. Layering one bad thing on top of another had the effect of making a person capable of nothing beyond drinking wine and smoking cigarettes, sitting on the balcony into the wee hours like some kind of pervy sitcom neighbor and coming in to watch documentaries about murderers.

When the doorbell rang, she had not showered since Sunday and was eating stale pita chips she’d found in her pantry. She panicked, thinking first of her geriatric landlord, then of Ben Barnes, then of an elaborate deliveryman murder ruse (
Call Me Craig,
a documentary about the Craigslist Killer, was streaming from her laptop on the coffee table). She flattened herself against the couch, rolled onto the floor and crawled down the hall toward her bedroom, so the visitor couldn’t see her. She considered that this might be what it looked like to hit rock bottom.

When she was safely in her bedroom, her phone dinged, like something out of a horror movie. How had this become her life, this abject fear of everything normal—a person ringing your doorbell; a well-adjusted boy expressing his love for you? She held her breath as she looked at the message:
hey its jonah ur nephew, i can see ur computer, can u let me in.

She exhaled. She was weirdly not surprised, weirdly relieved about this unexpected visitor. She wouldn’t be alone, at least. She rose from the floor. She would have to teach Jonah the art of the semicolon.

2002

Grace did not have a middle name, though her sisters got Evelyn, Rose and Ann.

“Oh, honey, I don’t know,” her mother said. “I guess we ran out of ideas.”

She had been hoping for something more mystical. Perhaps the confession of a weighty decision her parents had made: “You just didn’t need a middle name like your sisters, Gracie. You were special enough without one.” She knew, of course, that her mother had nearly died when she was born, but it didn’t seem that hard to come up with a name.

“You could have just named me after you,” she suggested. She was making a genogram for social studies and sat before an impressive spread of glitter glue and Sharpies, staring at her mother disdainfully over her poster board.

Her mom, dubiously examining a batch of tomatoes she had just brought in from her garden, stopped to consider it. “It doesn’t sound right,” she said finally, and Grace had to agree that Grace Marilyn didn’t have quite the singsongy cadence of Violet Rose.

“What about your middle name?” she suggested.

Her mother snorted, placing the best of the tomatoes into a colander to wash. “It was the least I could do to not curse you with a clichéd Irish name. Trust me. Less is more.” She’d grown up Marilyn Margaret Frances Connolly. Grace conceded that, again, her mother had a point. She still felt robbed, though; she was consistently, across her genogram, inking in middle names with an icy blue Gelly Roll pen, and it seemed a great injustice that she didn’t get to use it for herself.

“Who was your doctor?” she asked.

“Pardon?” Her mother’s voice had sharpened.

“Thompson’s named after his mom’s doctor because he almost died when he was born.”

“How romantic,” her mom said, a meanness in her voice.

“Mom?”

Her mother was holding a tomato under a violent stream of water. “What?”

“What was your doctor’s name?”

She paused, turned off the water. “Gillian,” she said.

It was rhythmically unsatisfying, but the alliteration was pleasant. She left the space below her own name blank, and waited until school the next day to ink in the false middle name.

Her parents called her their afterthought. Sometimes her dad called her the Epilogue, which she preferred, because epilogues were deliberate and valuable. But epilogues also got the shaft, because they came after all of the important things had already happened. She had a faulty memory that seemed to consist primarily of events for which she had not been present. Sometimes, during family gatherings, she would muster up the courage to speak and say something like “Remember when that lady tried to fight Dad for his parking space at the zoo?” and inevitably—almost every time—one of her sisters would snort. All of her sisters snorted in disbelief with the same intonation, like a tribe of braying elephants.

If Wendy were the first to speak, she’d say something like “I do, Gracie, because I was there. You weren’t.” If it were Violet or Liza, the rebuttal would be equally weary but slightly kinder: “You were two, Gracie,” or sometimes, embarrassingly, “You weren’t even born, dude.”

But she could see them, these memories, and this seemed a cruel cognitive trick. She could conjure with ease the memory of her father angling the station wagon into a tight spot in the parking lot of Brookfield Zoo, only to be assaulted when he emerged from the car by a woman in a
Sound of Music
sweatshirt who called him a swindler and demanded that he relinquish the space to her. Once she’d raised it, though, her sisters would fly free, sail along without her, cracking up at the dinner table over how David had offered, flustered, to move his car in order to let her have the spot and how Marilyn, already tired of being at the zoo though they had not yet entered its arched, lion-spotted gateways, got out of the passenger seat and said, “This day is harrowing enough as it is. Find another spot.” This happened constantly, her family gliding down the rails of memories for which she had not been present. It was disconcerting, especially because some of the memories were less whimsical. She had lots of scary memories whose origins and/or validity were difficult to articulate—scary only in the sense that they diverted from the otherwise cheery, pristine norm of her other childhood memories, her mother’s luminous smile and her father’s strong hugs and her sisters’ gentle laughter. She remembered Liza babysitting her once and showing her a big star that someone had drawn on the back of her neck. She remembered happening upon her mother, once, sitting on the back stairs smoking a cigarette, and she remembered asking, “Mama, who gave you that?” and her mother stubbing out the cigarette and saying, “A bad girl, sweet pea; come sit with me.”