The Smart One (35 page)

EVERY WEEK, MAX FORWARDED AN
e-mail from a baby website to Claire that had been forwarded to him by Cleo. Claire was familiar with the website. Lainie had been obsessed with the same one when she was pregnant with Jack. “Do you believe this stuff?” Max would sometimes write at the top. The e-mail gave weekly information about skin and organs and fingernails. It gave comparisons to objects, so that you could imagine how big the baby was: The baby was a peanut, a grape, a kumquat, a cucumber. Okay, maybe they didn’t use that last one, but Claire couldn’t bring herself to read the e-mails. She knew that Max was overwhelmed, knew that he needed her to talk to, so that she could tell him that it was all going to be fine. So she did try.

Your baby is an orange, your baby is a peach, your baby is a plum, a watermelon, a fig
. This is what Claire thought each night before she went to sleep. She listed them out of order, then went backward, making the baby smaller and smaller. Sometimes she’d keep going, creating her own list of objects: Your baby is a basketball, a watermelon, a dachshund, a couch. The list of items ran in her head fast, until it felt like she wasn’t in control of them anymore. How could you tell the difference, she wondered, between hearing voices in your head and your own thoughts?

And then one day, when the IT guy was working on her computer, she saw his eyes get wide and he turned to her with a smile. “Well, I guess congratulations are in order.”

“What?” Claire said.

“Your baby is a lemon,” he said. “You can barely tell.”

“Oh no, that’s not me. That’s my brother’s baby.”

“Oh, sorry about that.”

After he left, Claire tried to figure out what he meant when he said,
You can barely tell
. Barely tell? “I can barely tell that you’re a huge loser,” she muttered. And then she felt mean. And she deleted the e-mail.

FRAN’S PARENTS WERE STILL IN
Florida and Claire started sleeping there a few nights a week. Whenever she left the house with a bag and said she wasn’t coming home that night, Weezy raised her eyebrows.

“What?” Claire would ask. Weezy would just shake her head.

It wasn’t much different with Fran’s parents gone all the time, since they’d seemed oblivious to Claire’s presence anyway. She’d met them a few times and they’d seemed uninterested and bored. His mom was a thin woman with short gray hair who wore sweat suits and looked tired. His dad was the same.

Claire knew without having to ask that these were not the kind of parents who asked after her, or asked Fran much about his life, for that matter. They were the parents who were truly surprised when Fran was caught smoking pot in his car at the high school, who were annoyed about it mostly because it meant they’d have to go in and meet with the dean.

One Saturday, Claire went over to help Fran watch his niece. Fran’s sister lived a few towns over, in an apartment building. She was divorced. Claire vaguely remembered her from high school. Bonnie was a couple of years older, and used to stand with the group of kids that huddled at the edge of the parking lot to smoke cigarettes in the morning and the afternoon.

Fran’s niece was about three years old, and was not an attractive child. It seemed horrible to think that, but it was the truth. She had stringy blond hair and her nose was way too big for her face. She always had food on her clothes and cried often and loudly. Also, she was a hitter.

When Claire got to the house, Fran was smoking a cigarette in the basement and Jude was sitting on the floor playing with a doll. Two lines of snot were running out of her nose.

Claire tried, but she couldn’t take an interest in the little girl. She
pretended to, kneeling down to talk to her, but Jude just snatched up her doll to her chest and reached out to smack Claire. After that, she just watched. Fran seemed fond of his niece, or at least not opposed to her. He made her macaroni and cheese and got her milk in a sippy cup, which she immediately poured down her shirt. For the rest of the day, the little girl was slightly damp and smelled sour. When Claire got up to leave, she leaned down and touched the top of Jude’s head.

“ ’Bye, Jude,” she said.

“ ’Bye, stupid,” Jude replied.

She and Fran never went out, which suited her just fine. Sometimes they picked up food or got takeout, but mostly they just sat in the basement. “Don’t you two ever want to go out to dinner?” Lainie asked. Claire knew she thought it was weird, but to her it would have been weirder if they ever left the basement.

“Not really. We’re fine just hanging out,” she said.

It wasn’t just that she never wanted to spend money (which she didn’t), but it was like they both knew that their relationship, or whatever it was, worked best in the basement. If they took it out into the light of day, it would be different.

All through high school, Claire had imagined what it would be like to date Fran. Fran now seemed like a different person than the one she used to spend hours thinking about. In high school, Fran had worn a gas station shirt to school almost every day. It was navy and had the name
BUD
stitched above the left breast pocket. She would wonder what it would be like to lie next to him, rest her head right on top of the
BUD
.

She remembered the way Fran would sometimes take huge sandwiches to parties, how he would sit, stoned, in the middle of a room and shove a sub in his mouth, letting lettuce and onions drop all around him, like he was the only person in the room, or really, like he could give two shits about what these people thought of him anyway. In her whole life, Claire was pretty sure she had never felt that comfortable.

Sometimes when she was with him now, she would have a moment where she’d think,
I am lying in bed with Fran Angelo
. It was a strange, out-of-body experience, like when she used to get stoned in college,
stare in the bathroom mirror and think,
That is me. That is me looking back at me
, until she got dizzy and had to leave the room.

WINTER SEEMED LONELIER,
although Claire couldn’t say exactly why. She was barely home, but when she was, the idea of going somewhere else seemed so hard. It was like the idea of putting on boots and a coat exhausted her.

She didn’t spend as much time at Lainie’s, mostly because with the three boys stuck in the house, it seemed smaller and much more crowded. The last time she’d been over there, Jack spent most of the time leaping from the couch to the table to the chair. “I can’t touch the ground,” he screamed. “It’s lava and if I touch it, I’ll die.” Then he’d leapt back over to the couch and hit his arm on Claire’s nose. “Ow!” he yelled. He cradled his arm against his chest with his other hand and glared at Claire like she’d hit him. “That hurt,” he told her.

Martha had gotten in the habit of coming into Claire’s room every night. She’d sit on the edge of Claire’s bed and rattle off a list of things she’d done that day. She talked about her job and Max and Cleo. It didn’t matter if Claire answered her or even really listened. It was like Martha just needed to hear herself talk.

Claire tried to be patient with her, but it wasn’t easy. Most of the time she just wanted to be left alone. She found herself shutting her bedroom door early, turning off the lights and getting into bed so Martha would leave her alone.

One night, Claire woke up outside the house in her pajamas. She stood there, heart pounding, and realized that she must have sleepwalked out of her room, down the stairs, through the garage, and outside.

There she was, barefoot, staring right into the living room and trying to figure out what had happened. It felt a little like waking up in a hotel room on vacation and not knowing where you were for a few minutes—only so much worse. Claire hadn’t sleepwalked in years. As a child, she’d occasionally wander out of her room and down to the kitchen or into her parents’ room. Once, she’d walked out the front door, but Will had been following her and managed to guide her back to her room.

At camp, she’d once woken up a few feet from the cabin, and her counselor, a snarly teenage girl with horrible acne, was behind her, looking like she’d just seen a ghost. “What the hell?” the counselor had said. “You’re, like, possessed or something.” From then on, Claire had a note in her camp file that said
PRONE TO SLEEPWALKING. PLEASE MONITOR
.

But she’d thought she’d outgrown this little habit. All those years that she lived in apartments in New York, she never even worried that she’d do such a thing. And here she was, standing outside in winter in the middle of the night.

A few nights later, it happened again and Claire woke up standing on the front porch. Ruby was right behind her, her head tilted as if she was getting ready to bark. Claire hurried back into the house, locked the door, scooped Ruby up, and headed to her room, where she scrunched underneath the covers and tried to get warm again.

Telling her family was out of the question. Weezy would freak out, Martha would insist that she needed to go see a therapist, and Will would start trying to figure out how to lock the doors so that she couldn’t get outside. The whole family would talk about it at dinner for weeks. Martha would pretend that she knew the medical reasons for sleepwalking, as if being a nurse qualified her to diagnose Claire. No, it was out of the question.

The next night, Claire put a stack of books in front of her door, so that she couldn’t open it without knocking them down, which she hoped would be enough to wake her up. She was pleased with the plan, pretty sure that this would keep her safely inside. Although she did go to bed every night a little afraid that she was going to wake up somewhere strange.

AT THE END OF FEBRUARY,
the whole family came down with the flu. It was a flu that sent each of them running to the bathroom again and again. Just when one would flop down on the couch, dehydrated and exhausted, the next one would hear a rumble in their stomach and get up, clutching their middle and running out of the room.

Martha and Claire lay on the couch, trying to watch a movie, but
they couldn’t get through much before one of them had to leave. They were starting to get delirious. The flu had been going on for almost three days now and there was no sign of its slowing down. They had all said out loud that they might be dying.

“We look like a diarrhea commercial,” Claire said. Martha started to laugh. “What?” Claire asked.

“A diarrhea commercial? I know what you mean, but it sounds like you’re talking about an ad that’s selling diarrhea.”

“Oh yeah,” Claire said. She started to laugh too. “I meant like Pepto-Bismol or whatever.”

The family shuffled around in their pajamas, getting ginger ale and toast from the kitchen and then heading back to the couch or their beds. For the first time, when Max called, Claire told him truthfully that they hadn’t talked about him and Cleo in days. “We’re too busy talking about each other’s shit,” Claire told him. “You’re off the hook.”

“I think I might be coming down with something too,” Lainie said to Claire on the phone.

“Well,” Claire said, “you would know if you had this.”

“Yeah, I just feel so pukey all the time. Great. I’m sure the worst is coming.”

But then a couple of weeks later, Lainie called and asked Claire if she could go out for a little bit. “Brian’s watching the boys,” she said. They met in Lainie’s driveway, and Lainie drove to the Post Office Bar, a place that they used to frequent during the summers when they were home from college.

“This okay with you?” she asked.

“Sure,” Claire said. “I haven’t been here in forever.”

They ordered two drafts of some sort of amber beer, and a basket of Parmesan-garlic fries, which looked like frozen french fries that had been warmed and covered with grated cheese, but were actually not bad. The bar was empty, except for one older man at the end of the bar, who was doing a crossword puzzle and drinking. Claire wondered where he went in the summer, when this place was overrun with underage kids and a DJ came in on Friday nights. She wondered if he was mad when that happened, if he felt like his house had been taken
over, or if he had a different place that he found, another quiet place for the summer.

“I’m pregnant,” Lainie said. She was addressing a thin, limp fry that she was holding. It seemed to bend further with the news.

“What?” Claire said. “When?”

“I just found out last week. It wasn’t the flu.”

“Oh my God. Well, congratulations.”

Lainie’s eyes had started to fill with tears. “I can’t be pregnant,” she said. “What am I, that reality TV woman that has like a hundred kids? I’m barely recovered from Matthew. I can’t be starting this all over again.” She took a sip of beer and the tears fell on her cheeks.

“Should you be having that?” Claire asked.

“It’s just one beer,” Lainie said. “It won’t do anything.”

“Okay,” Claire said. She was unsure how to continue.

“It’s just so fucked up. I can’t believe I let this happen. We have, like, just barely enough money now, but not even really. And that’s with me teaching, which I can’t do much longer.” Lainie’s nose had started to run, and Claire handed her a napkin.

“You’ll be okay,” Claire said. “I know you will. It seems crazy now, I’m sure, but you’ll be okay.”

Lainie lifted the glass of beer to her lips and then put it down again without drinking. “I don’t even want it,” she said, pushing it away. “Not really. I just ordered it because I’m annoyed I can’t have it.”

“What did Brian say?”

“Same as me. He just doesn’t know how we’re going to afford it, or even fit in our house anymore, not that that matters, because we’re not going anywhere. We can’t.”

They sat together for a while, Claire reassuring Lainie that it would be fine, and Lainie listing all the things that would be different. They picked at the fries, and Claire drank both of the beers, even though by the time she got to Lainie’s, it was a little warm.

“Well, maybe it will be a girl,” Claire finally offered, as they paid their tab. “You did always want a girl, too.”

Lainie laughed and put the last group of french fries in her mouth, dragging them through the cold grease that was dotted with garlic
before eating them. It was a bitter sort of laugh that sounded like she was a wise old person who’d seen it all. “It will be a boy,” she said. “I know it. We’re just going to have all boys.”