Where Love Goes (3 page)

They seem so distant now: all those years when her children were little and she was always scrambling to get to work, get to day care, get home, with never enough time—as she used to complain to Sam—to go to the bathroom. Whatever she did, it never felt like enough. It’s as if I’m pouring water in a sieve, she used to think. No matter how much I pour, it never stays filled.

Above all, what Claire wanted was to spare her children pain and disappointment—even small pain and minor disappointment. Especially those, in fact. The large pain—her bitter arguments with Sam and her tears in the night—felt out of her control.

She always baked the children’s birthday cakes from scratch, with elaborate frosting designs in whatever theme occupied their fantasies that year: maybe He-Man, maybe Ninja Turtles, maybe trolls, or—Sally’s passion briefly—duckbill platypuses. For Christmas she always baked a gingerbread house and let Pete and Sally stick on the Halloween candy they’d collected a couple of months before that she didn’t like them to eat. She sewed clothes for Sally’s Barbie and flannel pajamas for Pete’s bear just like the ones she made Pete. One time Claire crocheted a hat for Sally that fitted over her head like a helmet, in black and yellow striped yarn, with stiff black antennae that stuck straight up. It was Sally’s favorite, but one day when Sally was mad she threw it out the car window and then didn’t tell Claire until they’d driven a few miles down the road. Claire drove back and forth over the same stretch of highway for half an hour until they found it.

Even now, from a distance of all those years, Claire can remember in the pit of her stomach the feeling she had then, of grief and loss and dread over the lost hat, the same way she felt when they visited the National Zoo in Washington and Pete dropped his special blue ribbon that he liked to wrap around his index finger and twirl inside his ear while he sucked his thumb. Sam told her she was crazy, they could get another, but Claire ran through six different pavilions at the zoo, trying to find that ribbon before closing time. When she finally spotted it in the monkey house and came panting back to the bench where Sam was waiting with Pete and Sally, Pete had simply reached out his hand for it. He wasn’t surprised his mother had found the ribbon. She always did.

One year there was a blizzard on the day of Sally’s birthday party. All the mothers called to say their children couldn’t make it, and Claire went to pick them all up in the four-wheel drive. There was that time Pete got a coffee bean stuck up his nostril. The time Sally lost the shoe to her Crystal Barbie and Claire tore apart the whole house before finding it lodged in a heating grate. She remembers waiting with the kids for Sam to cross the finish line of the Boston Marathon, and Pete breaking out of her arms when he saw his dad, and the feeling Claire had at that moment, that whatever was missing between her husband and herself didn’t matter so long as her son had a father who would be there with open arms when he came running.

Claire can still see the photograph on their annual photo Christmas card: the four of them posed under the tree and smiling a little tensely, Sam with his arm resting on the shoulder of the holly shirt he’d given Claire one Christmas that she wore every year, but only for this picture. He always set their camera on the tripod with the shutter on the self-timer before leaping over the coffee table to get into the picture on time. Pete would be clutching that blue ribbon he never wanted to relinquish long enough for Claire to wash it. Sally would have this smile on her face, as if someone was awarding prizes for the most exposed teeth. If they weren’t really such a happy family, they looked like one anyway.

She remembers a morning—early spring, the brook still high from melted snow—when she snapped at Sam as he was getting ready to take off for some 5K race up a mountain. “Don’t I ever get a Saturday morning off?” she asked him. She had been putting in extra hours every night that week on a presentation for a radio station and making favors for Pete’s birthday party: pirate hats. For this particular party she had also made treasure maps and individual treasure chests filled with chocolate coins that she had hidden around the house.

Sam looked her up and down, not unpleasantly. “You know, Claire,” he said. “You wouldn’t know what to do with a morning to yourself if you had one.”

She opened her mouth to answer but stopped. What he said was true. She’d been listening so intently to the sounds of small voices calling out their needs for so long by then, she no longer heard her own.

It had been catching up with her, though. More and more, in those last few years, Claire would watch herself lose control of her temper as if she were observing some other woman in a movie, not her self. Mostly she was keeping up her Perfect Mom routine, but there was an infrequent visitor at their house now, a woman who looked like Claire but acted like nobody she’d ever known, except maybe her father, only when he acted that way he was drunk, and Claire was stone sober. Just tired.

“Nobody takes me seriously,” she would cry, coming into the kitchen to find Sam reading the sports page while Pete sat fingerpainting with instant chocolate pudding and Sally drew unicorns on the back of her advertising presentation for a new condominium complex. “All I am around here is a servant.” Then she would get down on her knees and begin to scrub the floor, still weeping
.

“I’m jumping out of this car,” she said to Sam one time as they were driving home from a party. He had just finished telling her that she had monopolized the conversation at dinner. She actually opened the car door that time, and he grabbed her arm to pull her back in. She hit her chin on the edge of the door. She still has the scar
.

Christmas morning, the year Pete turned two: They had just opened their presents. This was the year Sam had given Claire an electric knife sharpener and the holly berry shirt. Wrapping paper and pamphlets printed with the directions for putting toys together were scattered everywhere. Claire was trying to get the turkey in the oven and construct the Bûche de Noël with butter-cream frosting and meringue mushrooms. Sam and his brother had turned on the set to watch the
football game. “Later, babe,” he told her when she said she needed help
.

“That’s it. Christmas is over!” she yelled. She stood over the garbage disposal, smashing their Yule log down the hole. Like a drunk. Now she was stuffing the holly berry shirt into a trash bag while the children clutched her legs and begged her to stop
.

“What is this, PMS again?” Sam said
.

Claire read a novel once whose author had dedicated her book to her husband. “Essential as air,” the woman had written about him. Claire has forgotten the name of the novel; it was that dedication that stayed with her. She was thirty-five when she realized she’d rather be alone with at least the possibility that someday she might feel that way about some man who might feel that way about her, than stay one more winter in the chilly bed she shared with Sam. So she moved out.

U
rsula was four and a half when her mother left. Her name is Joan, and she liked Ursula to call her that, although sometimes Ursula forgot and called her Mommy.

She remembers the day because Halloween was coming and she was trying on her fairy costume when they came in her room and said they had something to tell her. She knew what it was going to be. She had been casting spells that whole day while they yelled at each other. Her magic wasn’t working.

“Come sit on my lap, Urs,” her dad said. His name is Tim, but Ursula calls him Dad. “Come sit on my lap.” Her mother was standing in the doorway wearing that velvet dress she had that had to be dry-cleaned, so you couldn’t touch it. She was very beautiful.

“I’m busy,” she said. “I’m making potions.” She knew how bad things must be since her mother wasn’t saying anything about the smell in her room. Ursula had taken a bottle of her perfume and poured the whole thing into an old aspirin bottle and mixed it with some baking soda and toothpaste.

Her dad picked her up. She wasn’t fat then. Her fairy costume was pink, see-through, with layers of lace billowing like wings. She and her dad got it at the Salvation Army.

“You know Mommy and I aren’t getting along with each other, don’t you Ursi?” he said. “I know you hear us yelling a lot, and I bet it worries you, doesn’t it?”

“No,” she said. “It’s fine.” She was polishing her glasses on his shirt.

“Well, it worries us,” he said. “It isn’t good for kids to grow up with their parents yelling all the time.”

Ursula knew she had to do something. She wished she was bigger so she would have a good idea. She was trying so hard to think she thought her head might pop. “A-B-C-D-E-F-G,” she sang.

“Urs,” he said. “Listen to me.” He put his hands on her cheeks and turned her face around. She closed her eyes.

“Ursi. Ursi.”

Why wasn’t her mother doing anything? All she ever did was stand there rubbing her hands on her forehead. She had the thinnest fingers. Ursula’s are like her dad’s: chubby sausages.

“But we both love you so much,” he was saying.

“Q-R-S-T-U-V-W,” she sang. “N-J-R-T-C-X-W.” She thought maybe if she pulled on his earlobes that would make him laugh. If she put her hands over his mouth he would stop talking. His cheeks were wet.

“Sunny day!” she yelled. “Chasing the clouds away.” She didn’t even like “Sesame Street.”

“Ursula!” her mother yelled. “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it. Just shut up for once, okay?”

“What are you doing, Joan?” he said to her. “Can’t you let up on her, even now?”

“It’s always my fault, isn’t it, Tim?” her mother shouted. “You always side with her. You have no idea in the world what it’s like to be me!”

“Please, Joan,” he said.

“Always Mr. Reasonable. Always Mr. Parent. Always Mr. Fuck-head,” she screamed.

Ursula knew it was impossible then. There was nothing she was going to be able to do. “Okay,” she said. “I get it.” She climbed down off his lap and picked up Jenny’s chew bone. “Here, Jenny,” she called to her. “Here girl.”

“That was just great,” her father was saying to her mother. “You must feel really proud of yourself.”

“She’s fine,” her mother said, quiet again. “She’ll be better.”

“Listen,” he said. “You can do what you want to do. Just don’t kid yourself.”

Ursula’s mother moved away the next day. She went to New Zealand with a man named Elliot. She sent Ursula a postcard. “You wouldn’t believe how beautiful it is here,” she said. “I’m thinking a lot about art.” Ursula couldn’t read back then, of course. Her dad read it to her. There was another part in there about how much she missed Ursula. Her dad was probably making that part up. Or her mother was.

Ursula decided to be a ghost that Halloween. She and her dad trick-or-treated at every house on their street, all the way past the gas station to the bridge. She never saw so much candy.

Her mother would have told her she could only have one piece a day. Her dad just dumped it in a big bowl in her room where she could have some any time she wanted.

I
t’s been just the two of them living here in Blue Hills for a long time now—Ursula and her dad. They’re doing fine too.

School days she wakes him up and he makes her eggs. She puts out the silverware and pours him his juice. Sometimes she pretends she’s a waitress and he’s the customer. “What can I get for you, sir?” she asks him in this voice she has that sounds like a grown-up.

“Cup of coffee would be just dandy, little missy,” he says. He has made it, but he lets her pour his cup now, and she has never spilled, not even once. He takes milk and sugar.

“Your paper, sir,” she says.

“Much obliged, ma’am,” he says. He talks in a cowboy accent. “Why don’t you just set down a spell and join me? Give them dogs a rest.”

Then the two of them have their eggs, and maybe a bowl of cereal and a doughnut or a muffin. Saturdays he makes French toast. Sundays, waffles. They watch cartoons together. She may color. He reads the sports page.

On school days he walks her to the bus before heading out for his job, teaching biology at the community college. Ever since her dad heard about the big kid that used to tease her at the bus stop, he waits until Mrs. Kolivas pulls up. “You’re my little treasure,” he whispers in her ear as he hands her her lunchbox. They bought it before she found out that all the popular kids just carry paper bags. She still carries the lunchbox so she won’t hurt his feelings.

Jake—the big kid—never messes with Ursula anymore. Not since her dad went up to him and told him, “I understand you’ve been making some comments to my daughter. Mind repeating them to me?”

All the kids at the bus stop looked at them then. Jake is a very big kid—fifth grade—but Ursula’s dad is much bigger. He used to be on the wrestling team. Also football. He could squish Jake with his little finger.

“It was nothing,” Jake told him finally, after a minute or so passed and Ursula’s dad was still holding on to the back of his jacket. “I didn’t mean nothing.”

“You think calling a six-year-old kid Miss Piggy is nothing, huh?” he said. “You planning on holding on to your nuts a few more years?”

Ursula knows some kids would be embarrassed if their dad did something like this. But she was just proud. Nobody in the whole world has a dad like hers.

“What was that?” he said. “I didn’t hear an answer.”

“Yes,” said Jake. “Yes I do.”

“You plan on giving my daughter any more trouble, son?” her dad asked him. He was still holding on to Jake’s jacket. None of the other kids at the bus stop was saying anything, not even Wayne, the patrol. Ursula knew patrols were supposed to report it if grown-ups gave anybody trouble at the bus stop. She also knew Wayne never would on account of he also planned on holding on to his nuts.

“No way,” he said.

“That’s what I thought,” said her dad. “Just checking.”

A
fter school the bus lets her off at the bottom of the hill and she walks the rest of the way to their apartment by herself. Her father doesn’t get home from his job at the college until four-thirty, but they have a plan for that. She keeps their key on a little chain around her neck and lets herself in. Jenny is always lying right there on her special blanket in the front hall waiting for her. Jenny is almost like a sister.