The Most Fun We Ever Had (61 page)

“You ask Wendy that,” she said, softening. “You ask Wendy that when she’s ready to talk about it. It’s an invasion of privacy, sweetie.”

“She’s our daughter.”

She hesitated.

“I’ll meet you in a minute.” He pressed the elevator button for her and kissed her cheek. “Tell Wendy I love her and I’m parking.” The doors slid open and she stepped in. She lifted a hand to him as they closed.

So he interrogated Wendy’s doctor, requested a meeting in the hospital cafeteria and grilled her about the specifics, about whether they’d done blood tests or planned on an autopsy, about how this possibly could have happened to such a young, healthy woman. The doctor regarded him patiently, sadly from across the table.

“Your daughter declined an autopsy,” she said gently. “And there’s no guarantee that it would be conclusive, anyway. You know that as well as I do. Wendy’s blood pressure was normal. No hydrops in the—your granddaughter. I wish I could tell you something more comforting.” She shook her head. “I’m so sorry for your loss, Dr. Sorenson. But Wendy’s going to be fine. She can try again.”

He was fairly certain she wouldn’t, though. His eldest was not fond of trying again. Quashed efforts at anything—hula hooping, long division, SAT prep—had historically reduced her to angry tears, histrionic sessions of huffing and cursing and declaring things
idiotic.
Wendy didn’t generally try again. She gave up and found a new thing that worked better for her, and she took that new thing and ran with it, threw herself into it with a fervor that made her forget previous failures. She’d run away from them all, from the shame of her teenage years, into the arms of Miles, and look where it had gotten her.

“I appreciate your time,” he said, and she patted his arm.

“Your family is in my thoughts, Dr. Sorenson.”

“Thank you,” he mumbled. He sank back down at the table, twisting his wedding ring. This wasn’t how things were supposed to be. Marilyn was supposed to be in her garden right now and Wendy was supposed to be safely at home with her husband and instead they were both on the second floor of this fancy downtown hospital, his girls, grieving the loss of someone neither of them had even had a chance to meet.

—

A
tiny weight against her chest, avian and sleepily kinetic. The compliant pursing muscles of her mouth as she nursed. The rhythmic flexings of her star fruit fingers. The mystery of her infinite mind, housed inside her ever-growing brain. Her first daughter, the baby who’d just been
given
to her and David, to take home, with no consideration whatsoever of their ineptitude, their past darknesses, their own respective infantilities. Their Wendy Evelyn Sorenson, born at 12:26 a.m. on the fourteenth of December, nine pounds and nine ounces.

Thinking of Wendy as a baby, Marilyn sat by her daughter’s bedside, held her hand, prayed with her. And Wendy—perhaps only because she was medicated—acquiesced.

“Mom,” she said, and Marilyn turned to her on high alert, feeling an uncomely sense of pleasure given the dark circumstances because it felt like she and her daughter were
connecting
for the first time since Wendy’s babyhood. “Mom, she was— She had a
face.
” Which was a silly thing to say, perhaps, because of course a thirty-week-old baby had a face, but in the utterance of the phrase she felt her daughter’s broken heart and felt her own heart break in kind. “She looked sort of like Dad and she had a—she had an
expression
and I couldn’t tell what kind of face it was; I couldn’t tell what she was feeling.”

One of the perils of having a daughter who was similar to you was that you were frequently at a loss for what to say. What could you possibly offer to a statement like that?

“I’m sure she was at peace, honey,” she said, because she was—her feeble Catholicism had its merits sometimes. “How could she not be, sweetheart? Look at how much you loved her. Look at all you did for her.”

Wendy, miraculously, accepted this lame assurance, and she did not protest when her mother climbed beside her in the hospital bed and held her.

—

G
race associated the arrival of bad news with the scent of burning bread. It began, she assumed, because her mother had given her the Sex Talk when they were driving down Roosevelt Road one afternoon, coming home from the city, and just as Marilyn uttered the words
making love
they drove past the Turano factory and the car was suddenly filled with the pleasant scent of a-bit-too-toasted French rolls, swirling around among abject mortification and unbridled disgust. Thenceforth she remembered all bad news being imparted to her this way. She got watered-down, after-the-fact, diplomatic versions of events that were unquestionably more confusing than the true versions.

The first time she got a straight story it came from her father. She had the sense that something was awry but she couldn’t quite place what it was.

“We’re going to the hospital to visit your sister,” her father said, merging onto the expressway.

She turned to him, first confused and then embarrassed. Her dad, perhaps sensing this, took one hand from the steering wheel and ruffled her hair.

“You know how Wendy was going to have a baby, Goose?”

“Yeah.” This was, in fact, what had prompted the burning-bread Sex Talk from her mom, Grace’s inability to wrap her mind around the notion of sisters becoming mothers.

“Well, sometimes—sometimes a pregnancy doesn’t
take,
honey.” Her father could be very awkward. She didn’t know what he meant. She looked at him in the driver’s seat, clutching the steering wheel more intently than usual. “The baby died, Gracie,” he said. “It’s a really terrible thing that happens. Sometimes people die before they’re born.”

She wanted to say
I don’t get it
or
How is that possible?
or
What happens to all the cupcakes Mom and I just ordered for the baby shower?
but she also didn’t want her dad to go into any detail; she didn’t want a repeat of the Sex Talk, made significantly more awkward because it would be coming from her father.

“It’s a sad thing, Goose.” His voice sounded thin and wobbly. “Wendy and Miles are really sad. So are Mom and I. Wendy’s going to be okay, but it’s a really sad thing.”

She didn’t know babies
could
die. She knew, certainly, that people could, but babies weren’t people, or not really.
Does this mean I’m not an aunt anymore?
she wanted to ask, and
Do you still get to have a name if you die before you’re born?
She felt herself starting to cry, not because she was sad—though she was; it was a sad thing—but because she recognized, at twelve years old, that a part of her had died, too, the part that was normally spared these sorts of details. Because it was the first time her dad had ever told her
he
was sad and that seemed like a pretty seminal thing, the realization that your parents could feel sad or scared.

Her father squeezed her knee, not picking up on the selfish layers of her thoughts. They were on the Eisenhower bound for the hospital, nowhere near the Turano factory, but she smelled it anyway, burning bread, and she rested her head against the window and breathed.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The phone buzzed in Wendy’s sports bra, and she answered, even though she was in the middle of core barre.

“Wendy?” And at the voice, her heart stalled. Took them long enough. Jesus Christ.

She slipped out into the hall. “Where the fuck
are
you? Where have you been?” She was finally allowed to exhale, finally allowed to reveal how fucking terrified she’d been since she’d heard he’d left Grace’s house, despite the fact that she kept assuring everyone that he’d call when he was ready.

“I’m sort of in a jail.”

“In
jail
?”

“In—like,
a
jail, not an actual cell, just, like, the location, technically, is a jail.”

“I’d kill you if I wasn’t so happy you’re alive.”

“I need— They said I need someone to come pick me up. I have your dad’s car but I can’t— They won’t let me drive it.”

“How did you get to
a jail
?”

“I got pulled over. One of the taillights was out. Sorry, Wendy. I wasn’t—expecting this to happen.”

“When you stole your grandfather’s car and drove to fucking Oregon? Without a license? You weren’t expecting to get pulled over and end up in
a jail
?”

“You can stop saying
a jail;
I get that you think it’s funny.”

“I love that you managed to evade capture when you were driving across the entire country but you ended up getting busted for something as stupid as a taillight.”

“Wendy—”

“Where are you?” she asked. “Where,
technically,
is this jail?”

“Sort of in Montana.”

“What, like, half-in, half-out?”

“In Montana.”

“How’d you end up in Montana?”

The voice got smaller. “I got kind of lost, and then was thinking of—like, maybe Canada, but I realized I didn’t have any ID with me.”

“Jesus. Don’t quit your day job.” She sighed. “Are you safe? Can you stay in the—jail? I’ll get the next flight.”

She heard the murmur of a voice from the background. Then: “He wants to talk to you.”

She closed her eyes, leaned against the wall, wondered if the heat coursing through her veins felt at all like what it felt like to be someone’s mother. If her mix of terror and relief and hysteria and exhaustion had anything in common with loving someone, parentally, whether you were their parent or not. “Put him on the phone,” she said. “And for fuck’s sake, stay where you are. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

—

M
arilyn insisted on setting them up temporarily in the downstairs guest room.

“I didn’t break my
legs,
” he’d said irritably, as he had when she’d insisted on wheeling him out of the hospital in a wheelchair.

She had, both times, ignored him.

So David was sitting by the window in the easy chair his wife had dragged from the living room, looking out into the yard, Loomis curled obligingly at his feet. His broken arm had shifted from hurting to itching in its cast, and he felt renewed and retroactive sympathy for eight-year-old Violet—
Dada, it’s a
mean
itch—
who had broken her wrist falling off of the monkey bars. The discomfort in his chest had abated as well, but he still didn’t feel like himself. His appetite was gone, which meant his energy was low, which meant he was less interested in doing things like showering, which meant that his hair felt waxy and his face like steel wool. Dressing was an ordeal, so he was wearing his bathrobe. He was embarrassed by himself. And feeling no insignificant degree of self-pity. And the fact that Jonah—who’d been missing now for nearly a week—had had to witness it all. For all David’s years in practice, he’d never actually
seen
anyone having a heart attack. To have to experience that, to see it happening to your
grandfather.
He shuddered, and was reminded again of his infirmity by a niggling spark of pain in his shoulder—no longer the ache he’d been ignoring for months but a new kind of pain, a sprain, from the fall.

“Sweetie.” Marilyn bustled in, bringing with her the static smell of cold. She kissed his head. She’d brought tea and toast, which she arranged on the end table beside him. “The Roths just got this unbelievable snowblower. Space-age. Like a Zamboni.” She perched on the windowsill in front of him. “Dan did the driveway and the sidewalks for us.” Certainly she wasn’t rubbing it in on purpose, but she had to remember that he actually
enjoyed
shoveling snow, that it was yet another simple pleasure now denied to him. She retrieved his pill case from the nightstand—a day-by-day, like his elderly patients had, filled with a flamboyant amalgam of pills—and knocked the day’s allotment into her hand. “You want water instead of tea?”

“It’s fine,” he said, taking them. Then, remembering: “Thanks, kid.”

She smiled at him and smoothed his hair away from his forehead. “How about we get you showered today, huh? It might feel nice; it’s so cold outside.”

Infantilization aside, the thing he was having the most trouble thinking about was the simple fact of her being here, being
home.
It had actually taken him until recently to notice that she was home all the time, home to administer his meds and make him bland meals and lie in bed beside him and cheerfully read him notable news items.

“Did you draw up some kind of family leave policy?” he’d asked. “For powerhouse women to care for their one-armed husbands?”

She’d turned to a new page, not meeting his eyes. “I put Drew in charge.”

“You
what
?”

“It just seemed easier that way.” Then she’d looked up at him, smiling tiredly.

“You’re taking a leave from work?” He’d felt a creeping sense of déjà vu. “Hang on, Marilyn, I didn’t— I’m not going to let you—”

“It’s done,” she’d said, and she’d leaned over to kiss him on the shoulder. “I’ll go back when we’re ready. Once we’ve got you climbing trees again, huh?”

Now he’d adjusted to her being home, and, less so, to her tending to him.

“A shower,” she said, sounding preoccupied, lost in her own mental calendar. “And then maybe something out of the house? The grocery. Or a movie, if you’re feeling adventurous.”

“Naah,” he said. “I’m not in the mood.”

“Well.” She rose, her voice unnaturally chipper, and went about making their bed. “Sometimes it takes a little jump start to
get
in the mood. Let’s get you in the shower, and it’ll warm you up, and then you’ll be all nice and clean and we can—”

“For Christ’s sake, Marilyn, could you stop talking to me like I’m a toddler?”

She froze, leaning over to tuck in a corner of the sheet.