"Do you know the world record for the most broken bones?" said Jack now. He had the Guinness World Records book open on the table next to him and was turning the pages while he ate. He didn't wait for anyone to answer.
"Thirty-five! Some dude called Evel Knievel."
"Really! I didn't think we had that many bones!" said Maureen. She was acting particularly interested in the book to show that she didn't mind that Jack had put aside her gift for Anne's.
"We've actually got two hundred and six bones," said Anne.
"Well, fancy that!" Maureen smiled fiercely.
"Babies have around three hundred bones. They fuse together as they grow," said Anne.
"It must have been wonderful bringing up a child with your medical expertise," said Maureen. "I was always bundling them into the car to take them off to the doctor and then feeling like a fool when there was nothing wrong."
Please don't be condescending, Mum, thought Ellen.
"Actually, I think it made it worse." To Ellen's relief, the smile Anne gave Maureen had only minimal queenliness. "I knew everything that could go wrong. Every temperature meant certain death."
"Speaking of temperatures," said Patrick's father, "well, not temperatures so much, but aches, I've had this really strange ache in my--"
"Dad," said Patrick.
"George refuses to make an appointment to see a doctor," said Maureen, "but whenever he meets one he starts telling him about his medical problems."
"I just thought she'd find it interesting," said George.
"Would you find it interesting if people started talking to you about their electrical problems?" said Maureen.
"I certainly would," said George. "Blown any fuses lately, Anne?"
"So, anyway, it must have been nice for you, Ellen, growing up with a mother who was a doctor," said Maureen.
"Mum," said Patrick.
"What?"
Patrick shrugged and took a bite of his sausage sandwich.
"She was always sort of cranky with me when I got sick," said Ellen.
"Our mum was exactly the same!" spoke up Patrick's brother. "The angriest I have ever seen Mum was the time I got knocked out by a cricket ball. I come to, and the first thing I see is Mum, and she's yelling, 'Simon! Wake up this minute!'"
"I thought he was dead," said Maureen.
"So you thought yelling at me would bring me back to life."
"I understand completely," said Anne. "The fear makes you furious."
"You'll understand when you have your baby, Ellen," said Maureen.
Ellen, who was actually looking forward to being the very opposite of her own mother, and fondly imagined herself soothing her child's feverish brow with a gentle cool hand, said, "I'm sure I will."
"Dad wasn't mad at me when I broke my arm," said Jack. "He was mad at Saskia."
There was an instant strained silence around the table.
"That's because it was Saskia's fault," said Patrick.
"It was an accident," said Jack. "Actually, you were sort of pushing her."
"Yes, darling, it was an accident, but what your dad means is that Saskia should not have been here in the middle of the night," said Maureen.
"How'd you go with the police?" said George to Patrick.
"You told the police about Saskia!" Jack's head whipped around to look accusingly at his father. "She's not going to jail, is she?"
"She won't go to jail," said Patrick. "But you understand, mate, she can't break into our house again. The police will just tell her that she can't come anywhere near us anymore."
"Right, but I guess she'll still come and watch me play soccer, though," said Jack.
Ellen drew in her breath.
"Good Lord," said George.
"What are you talking about, Jack?" Patrick carefully placed his sausage sandwich back on the plate in front of him.
"She watches all my games," said Jack.
"I've never seen her there," said Patrick.
"You've got bad eyes," said Jack dismissively. "She stands way off. Near a tree or whatever. She always wears this blue knitted hat, like a pancake."
"Beret?" murmured Anne.
"Goodness, I think I knitted it for her," said Maureen.
"If I see her anywhere near you again I'll have her arrested," said Patrick.
"You will not!" said Jack.
"I will."
"If you do, I will never speak to you again."
"Fine," said Patrick. "Don't!"
"Boys." Maureen held out her hands to each of them helplessly.
Ellen's phone began to ring.
"I'll just--excuse me."
She rushed into the kitchen with the phone. "Mary-Kate?"
"Yes, hi, Ellen. Right, they're holding offon publication. The journalisthas agreed tohear your side of the storyfirst. And I get the impression she's readyto dropthe whole thing. Mostjournalistsdo haveintegrity--andthis one ishating the idea that Ian Roman could be using her for somepersonal vendetta. Even if Ian Roman does rule her world."
Ellen felt her whole body sag with relief.
"Thank you," she said. "I can't thank you enough, Mary-Kate."
"No problem," said Mary-Kate.
Ellen heard the deep rumble of a man's voice in the background. "By the way, Alfred says to say hi."
"Alfred?" said Ellen. "Alfred Boyle?"
Mary-Kate chuckled. Ellen didn't think she'd ever heard her laugh before. "Don't pretend to be so surprised, Ellen."
Ellen laughed. A little nervously.
"Alfred said to tell you that he gave a speech to two hundred accountants today, and he had them in stitches. That's really saying something. He made accountants laugh."
"That's great," said Ellen.
"I'll be in touch about where we go next with this," said Mary-Kate. "But I expect once the journalist and editor know the full story, it will be shelved."
"You'll have to bill me for your work," said Ellen. (Didn't barristers charge by the minute?)
"Don't be ridiculous," said Mary-Kate joyfully, and then she abruptly hung up.
Ellen dropped her head, closed her eyes and tapped the phone against her forehead. So her matchmaking with Mary-Kate and Alfred had paid off. She must remember to tell the journalist about it, if she ever got to speak to her again. Clinical hypnotherapist hypnotizes her patients to fall in love with each other. That would really add to her credibility.
"Everything OK?"
Ellen opened her eyes. Her mother was standing in front of her holding a salad bowl. "Thought I'd start clearing up. It's getting a bit tense in there. I'm not surprised. This Saskia is clearly deranged."
"Saskia is finished with us," said Ellen. "I talked to her today."
"Hypnotized her, did you?" said Anne smartly, but automatically, as if she was just doing it out of habit, and before Ellen could answer, she put the bowl down on the table and said, "Listen. I need to talk to you about something. About your father."
"You're getting married," guessed Ellen.
She could just imagine the discreetly elegant wedding. Her mother would wear violet to match her eyes. There would be designer labels galore, flutes of champagne held between manicured fingers. It would be the sort of wedding that made it into the society pages. Ellen's face would ache from faking her smile.
"Will you have Pip and Mel as bridesmaids?" she said. "I could be flower girl! Your daughter as your flower girl. Your cute little pregnant flower girl."
"Ellen."
"My stepbrothers could be page boys. Giant page boys."
"We broke up."
"Oh, no!" The one time Ellen was enjoying being a bitch and it was entirely inappropriate and hurtful. (And, in fact, she would have been perfectly happy for her parents to be married! Their wedding would have been moving and lovely. What was wrong with her?)
"What happened?" she asked. He went back to his wife, of course. Or he moved on to a younger model. Or was it somehow Ellen's fault? Did he not like Ellen? (Ah, listen to the Inner C
hild piping up for attention.)
"I broke it off," said Anne. She sat down at the kitchen table and extracted a cherry tomato from the salad bowl.
"But why?" Ellen pulled out a chair and sat down opposite her mother. "You seemed--well, you seemed completely besotted."
"I know," said her mother. She looked at Ellen and gave a little half smile and shrug. "I was. Look, I'm utterly mortified."
Ellen was momentarily distracted by the sound of Patrick's voice rising in the dining room. "Can we please talk about something else other than Saskia? Like, I don't know, Armageddon? Who wants to talk about Armageddon?"
"You don't need to feel embarrassed," she said to her mother.
"I've been such a twit," said Anne. "With everything you've got going on in your life at the moment." She inclined her head toward the dining room. "Getting married, new stepson, baby on the way, deranged stalker and what have you--and I decide to throw your father into the mix!"
"Mum, I'm a grown-up," said Ellen gravely, and extremely fraudulently, seeing as she'd thought exactly the same thing. "Tell me why you broke it off."
"I've spent the last thirty-five years being in love with a memory," said Anne. "It's crazy, and I would have denied it, but every time I went out with anyone, I was comparing him to your father. Your father, whom I had never actually dated, whom I really didn't even know that well. So of course, every man came up short." She giggled. "In more ways than one."
"Mother." Ellen recoiled. "Please."
"Sorry. So when David and I started dating again, I was deliriously happy. He was every bit as lovely as I recalled. Actually, let me make this clear. He is lovely. He still qualifies as the loveliest man I've ever met."
"So? What's the problem?" said Ellen.
"Well, I started noticing this feeling creeping over me after we'd spent more than an hour together. At first I couldn't put a name to it, and then last week it hit me. I was bored."
"Bored," said Ellen. She was suddenly feeling very sorry for her father.
"Bored out of my mind," confirmed Anne.
"Well, but that can happen--"
"No," said Anne decidedly. "He's not right for me. He never was right for me. He doesn't have enough to say! And he has these periods of time where he literally does nothing. The other morning he sat in an armchair for twenty minutes, literally twenty minutes, without doing anything. Not reading. Not talking. Just staring at a tree. What's that about?"
"Perhaps he was silently contemplating the beauty of nature," offered Ellen. "Or just taking a few moments to meditate and be thankful for his life. Or he was practicing mindfulness--"
"It was a rhetorical question, Ellen. Honestly, I thought he'd lost brain function. Anyway, as the young people say so eloquently: whatever. I don't care what he's doing, I just know it drives me nuts. We will be friends, of course. It's all perfectly amicable. And he says that he would love to see you again, if you'd like that."
"That would be nice," said Ellen. Actually, the thought of meeting up with her father now seemed perfectly acceptable, even quite soothing. She thought of rainy Sunday afternoons as a child, when she would lie on a rug on the floor mesmerized by the raindrops sliding down the windowpane, and her mother would keep walking in and out of the room saying, "Ellen, what are you doing? Let's go out! Let's talk! Let's do something."
Perhaps she and her father could linger together, without the need to say a word. No need for awkward "getting to know you" conversations. They could just be. Father and daughter. And if they didn't feel a thing for each other except a mild friendliness, then that would be perfectly fine.
"So, at the tender age of sixty-six," said Anne, "I might be finally ready for a real relationship, now that I can let go of my silly obsession with a romance that never really was. I might even do a little online shopping for a new man. Apparently it's the latest thing for the over-sixties. And look how successful it's been for you!"
"Yes!" said Ellen. He would never love another woman as much as he loved Colleen. Maybe not that successful.
"Speaking of which"--Anne lowered her voice--"I've been meaning for a while to say that I've become very fond of Patrick. Really. Very fond. I took some time to warm to him--"
"He's right there!" hissed Ellen.
"Well, that's OK, I'm saying nice things about him. I like the way he looks at you. You're right. Jon was entertaining, but he didn't look at you the way Patrick looks at you."
"How does Patrick look at me?" asked Ellen.
"And he's a good father."
"Am I interrupting?"
Ellen and her mother turned to see Maureen at the door, with her arms full of plates.
"I was just saying what a good father your son is." Anne stood up and took some of the plates from her.
Maureen beamed. There was a sound of running footsteps and they heard Jack scream, "I hate you!"
"Fine!" shouted back Patrick. "Break your other arm for all I care!"
Maureen's beam wavered. She got it back under control and began scraping leftover food from the plates with the edge of a knife.
"This windy weather really puts people on edge, doesn't it? I wonder, is there a medical reason for that, Anne?"
I must have fallen asleep because it seemed like I just blinked my eyes and Tammy had materialized. She and Lance and Kate were sitting in a little semicircle of chairs next to my bed, eating chocolates.
Tammy had changed her hair from long and dark to short and strawberry blond. A mistake, I thought.
Lance and Tammy were talking excitedly to each other in peculiar accents, shrugging their shoulders and jutting out their chins.
"They're trying to talk like Baltimore drug dealers," explained Kate when she saw I'd woken up. "They've discovered they're both obsessed with The Wire. Some weekends Lance talks like that for an entire day. Can you imagine? I mean, fine, if he actually did sound like a drug dealer, that might be quite sexy."
"Tammy?" I said.
"Saskia, honey!" She stood up and leaned over to kiss me on the cheek. She must have still been using the same fragrance as she had three years ago, because I was immediately taken back to a different time and place.
"It's so good to see you!" she said. "But you're meant to be sitting next to me in a bar, not lying in a hospital bed. Lance and Kate said you were sleepwalking and fell down some stairs? That's terrible! How long have you been sleepwalking for?"
"Since I last saw you," I said mysteriously--the sort of profound comment that Ellen would appreciate--but Tammy took it at face value.
"Really? Is there a cure? You know, I was thinking on the way here about the last time I saw you. You'd just had your heart broken by some guy. That surveyor? What was his name? Pete? Patrick? It's been so long you probably don't even remember the guy."
Oh, how I laughed.
"El-len!"
It was Patrick, shouting from the second floor.
"Goodness, is he all right?" said Ellen's mother, startled.
"I expect he needs your help working things out with Jack," said Maureen to Ellen. "A woman's touch, you know." She gave Anne a "You know what I mean" smile, which was totally lost on Anne.
Ellen dried her hands briskly on a tea towel, bustling a little for Anne's benefit, because she knew it would bug her to see her behaving so housewifely, and hurried upstairs to Jack's room. Patrick and Jack were sitting on the floor, their backs up against Jack's single bed with its Ben 10 bedspread, their hands dangling between their propped-up knees, not looking at each other.
"Can you explain to this stubborn kid why Saskia can't break into our house in the middle of the night," said Patrick to Ellen when he saw her standing at the doorway. He mouthed silently, Help!
"I'm not stupid, Dad," said Jack hotly. "I know she shouldn't have done that."
"Right, good then, so what's the problem?" said Patrick. "Why are you so mad with me?"
Ellen went and sat on the floor next to them. She looked at Jack's skinny, vulnerable little legs in trac
ksuit pants stuck out in front of him.
She said, "How did you feel when your dad and Saskia broke up, Jack?"
Jack and Patrick both went very still, as if she'd brought up something deeply shameful. For heaven's sake, thought Ellen. She felt filled with feistiness. Everything might as well be out in the open now! There would be no more pussyfooting around the subject of Saskia.
"Well, that's not--" began Patrick.
"I'd like to know," said Ellen. You asked for my help, buddy.
"I don't really remember," said Jack. "I was really little, like, five." He gazed ahead, looking back over the vast expanse of time that separated five from eight.
"That's right, you were very little." Patrick gave Ellen a triumphant look. "So, the point is--"
"Oh yeah, I remember one thing," interrupted Jack. "I thought it had to do with her lucky marble."
Patrick's face changed. "What?"
Jack banged his knuckles against the cast on his arm.
"Her lucky marble?" asked Ellen.
Patrick answered her, his eyes on Jack as he spoke. "She had this big, colorful marble that belonged to her father, and she held it in the palm of her hand whenever she was nervous about something. She gave it to Jack when he started school." He paused and cleared his throat. "She said to carry it in his pocket, and the marble would give him magic powers."
"It wasn't a weapon," clarified Jack. He looked up at Ellen. "It didn't transform into a laser gun or anything like that. It didn't really do anything at all, actually."
"I took Saskia's lucky marble with me when I saw my first ever Scott Surveys client," said Patrick. "I held it while I waited in reception."
He'd never before referred to a nice memory involving Saskia. It was Ellen's first glimpse of the other side of their story.
"I lost the marble at school," said Jack. "I looked and looked, and a teacher tried to help me, but we couldn't find it. I didn't want to tell Saskia because I knew she'd be sad, and then the next day she was gone. So I thought, Uh-oh, she found out I lost it."
Patrick's eyes met Ellen's over the top of Jack's head.
"You thought it was your fault," said Ellen to Jack.
"I thought she must have been so mad at me," said Jack. "And I thought Dad was mad at me for making her go, and that's why we couldn't talk about her."
"Oh, mate." Patrick pressed two fingers to his forehead. "You didn't."