Chapter Thirteen
For the rest of their stay in Cincinnati, Suella met up with he friend Julie with her son Daniel and daughter Rayna and they all went to an old style amusement park called King’s Island. Suella had heard of the place during all the years she’d lived in Cincinnati yet somehow had never found the time to drive twenty miles to see it. The last time she’d taken Natalie to an amusement park had been Disneyland, when Natalie was five. Mostly Natalie had gazed in wide-eyed wonder at all the animatronic characters in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride. At King’s Island, the scene was rowdier, with more classic roller coasters and thrill rides.
Two thunderstorms that day drove them into food courts or indoor arcades, but when everything dried off, Julie’s kids dragged them toward the exciting roller coasters. Suella noted that Natalie, being average sized, barely met the height requirements for the intense, racing coaster. “We don’t have to go on this coaster if you don’t want to,” Suella said. “There’s lots of other fun rides like the safari and the carousel…”
“I want to go on the coaster!” Natalie said, beaming. Julie had bought headbands for both Natalie and Rayna, with metal martian-like antennas extending from them and a puffy star at the end. These bounced around on Natalie’s head delightfully as she spoke.
They moved to the front of the line quickly. Julie said it was because people had been scared away that day by all the dark clouds cruising overhead. When they all searched for coaster cars to sit in, Suella felt rumbling in the pit of her stomach. “Let’s go up front!” Rayna said, jumping up and down and running for the first car in the train. Both she and Natalie hopped into the very first car. Daniel sat in the seat behind them. Another little boy quickly jumped in next to him. Julie and Suella sat in the second car.
They were in the rear seat but still close enough to keep an eye on the children. The bars came down, while calliope music filled the air. As the train rolled out of the station, a panicky thought suddenly occurred to Suella. Could Natalie’s equilibrium take the sudden drops and turns of a roller coaster? She tried to remember anything in the literature that forbade riding on thrill rides or roller coasters, but couldn’t. No one had ever warned her against it, either.
The roller coaster train turned a corner and started chugging up by chain-pull on a long, high hill. When they’d passed the outside of the roller coaster, Suella had already seen a steep drop the coaster trains thundered down. “Oh please forgive me for scaring her half to death,” Suella said to herself in a silent prayer. “Please let her little heart be able to handle the excitement. Children young and teenagers shouted and cried with anticipation as both trains neared the summit of the hill. Suella double-taked when she realized that the train traveling parallel to them, on the other track, was going backwards!
“Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god!” Suella kept saying as the cars reached the top. Julie laughed at her. In the next moment, they all plummeted down the steep drop, with all four children in the front car squealing with rowdy delight. The coaster reached the bottom and immediately thundered over another hill. Julie waved to all the people riding in the backwards train. They all thundered around a turn and then shot up onto another incline. After the cars banked around another turn, they all screeched down another drop as steep as the first. Suella screamed and laughed, happy that her daughter was having such a good time.
“Can we go on it again? Can we go on it again?” Natalie asked, jumping up and down as they all lifted themselves from the stopped coaster train and walked for the exit.
For the rest of the day, Natalie squealed and whooped along with the other children as they rode coasters with even more intense vertical drops and wicked turns. She also piloted an eagle car that swung on long cables amid other cars. Suella rode beside her on that one and was impressed by her daughter’s ability to work the handle and twist the wing to make them thrust outward higher.
When they ate a dinner later of ridiculously fatty yet delicious carnival burgers and fries food, Suella said “I never knew you were quite the little daredevil.”
Daniel and Rayna chose this moment to query their little visitor from the exotic land known as California. “Do you have lots of earthquakes in California?” Rayna asked. She wore braids that day and when she tilted her head to address Natalie, the end of one of her braids dipped into the ketchup.
“Aw, they’re nothing. Everything just shakes a little and goes ‘boom,’ ‘boom.’”
“Do you ever see any movie stars?” Daniel asked.
Natalie looked at her mother. “Aunt Toni. She’s a movie star, isn’t she?”
“Yes, you could say that, hon.” Suella replied. After she became a mother, Toni found a surprising amount of mother or neighbor roles in films made for television or subscription access. Her generous curves and facial dimples worked to her benefit now, when they’d once limited her.
“Wow,” Rayna and Daniel said, together, their mouths forming small “o’s.” “Your aunt is a movie star!”
“Your daddy plays baseball,” Natalie pointed out.
“Aw,” Daniel said, waving a hand dismissively, “That ain’t nothing.”
Julie feigned disgust, shaking her head, looking at Suella. “Its amazing,” she said.
“All this money we spend on private schools for them and they still want to talk like this. Daniel, you know better than that.”
“Oh,” Daniel said, putting his shoulders back, lifting his chin and narrowing his eyes. “I mean ‘That isn’t anything.’”
That night, as they were leaving the park, Suella’s phone rang. When she answered it, she heard a higher-pitched male’s voice at the other end that she could not place at first. “What are you doing?” he said.
It caused her to stop in her tracks, wondering if a perv had gotten hold of her number somehow.
Before she could ask who was calling, he continued. “I miss you. And I miss Nat.” He spoke slowly and sing-songy, a tip-off that he’d been drinking.
“Hey you. I’ve got a question for you. In all the years we lived in Cincinnati, how come you never took me to King’s Island?”
“King’s Island? And have all those kids hound me for autographs all day?”
Suella giggled. “Well that’s what dark glasses, mustaches and hats are for, silly.”
Nathan laughed along with her. When he spoke, Suella had to strain to hear him over the noise of the passing people and the cars as they entered the parking lot. “Really, when are you coming home? I’m so lonely.”
She believed him. And she knew that in a weak moment he wouldn’t be foolish enough to seek solace with Toni, either. Toni had found herself a guy in his twenties, who performed stunts for one of the larger studios. He was what they used to call a “boy toy.” And trolling for anonymous sex with faceless girls awed by his celebrity status wouldn’t have appealed to Nathan. “Besides, there’s too much disease shit out there.”
At heart, her husband was a simple man. “So when are you coming home?”
She’d gone over all of this with him on her way out the door nearly a week before. It was Thursday. Their flight was Sunday. Suella said “Tomorrow. We’ll be coming home tomorrow.”
In order to do it without forking over a small fortune for special tickets, Suella had to accept a torturous series of flights that hopscotched across the country with stops in Houston and Phoenix before finally landing at Bob Hope airport. They would then need to find a cab or shuttle to get them to the LAX parking lot where she’d left the car.
“This is boring,” Natalie said, as she sipped on a milk shake in a food court at the Phoenix airport. “How come we’re going home early?”
“Because daddy misses us.”
“So?” Natalie flicked at the tip of her straw, sending droplets of milk shake into the air. “When daddy was pitching, he was gone a long time. We missed him, but he never came
home early for us.”
“That was different,” Suella said. “Daddy’s team needed him.”
Her little girl’s words melted her heart. She wasn’t sure if Natalie remembered or not. Then she remembered something she said when she was five and Nathan was in the last year of his contract with San Diego. “I wish daddy was a plumber,” she’d said back then.
Suella had been dressing her for kindergarten and stopped, while zipping up the back of her jumper. “Why would you want that, honey?”
Little Natalie turned to her. “Kelly’s father is a plumber. He’s always home. If daddy was a plumber, he’d always be home, too.”
“Daddy’s a pitcher though. He makes lots of people happy. People watch him.
Besides, while you’re still a little girl, daddy’s going to get to be home all the time.”
She squinted. “He is? Why?”
“Because pitching is something you can only do when you’re young. And your father is not so young anymore.”
Of course, what Natalie was saying years later, in the Phoenix airport, was absolutely right. But women always gave too much, didn’t they? With Nathan’s help, though, she became a mother, and she would never forget that. “Let’s go to the gate, sweetie,” we don’t want to miss the flight and end up staying here all night.”
Though they’d left Cincinnati at 5pm, all the stops, delays, and the shuttle ride from Bob Hope got them to Suella’s car at two in the morning. Natalie had fallen asleep on the shuttle ride. Suella carried her from the shuttle to her car in the parking lot.
As she pulled into her driveway, she saw shining banners hanging from the roof saying “Welcome home!” Twinkling mylar balloons danced on the breeze in the grass.
The living room light was on and when Suella glanced through the window she could see Nathan sleeping on the antique couch. She keyed open the front door, and let the groggy little Natalie enter first. “Hi daddy!” she said, rushing over to the couch to plop herself down on top of him as he lay there.
“Oh sweet pea, I missed you so much!” He pulled her down and hugged her hard.
Suella followed her, lowering herself to her knees and kissing the top of Nathan’s head.
“We came home early for you!” Natalie exclaimed, causing Suella to buckle over inside.
Nathan lifted Natalie away from him so he could look at her as they talked.
“Really? You did?” Natalie nodded. Nathan looked over at her.
Suella sighed. “You got to me. What can I say?”
He beckoned her down so that the three of them could partake in a long group hug. Once they broke apart and shuffled off to bed, all three of them fell asleep as soon as their heads hit pillows.
Suella woke up first the next morning, under the bright, golden sunrise. She sunk down to kiss and touch Nathan as he slept peacefully, his breath trilling. Since she knew he would love it, she chose to gradually waken him by pleasuring him orally, taking her time, savoring him. Rather than let her finish him that way, he gently lifted her head so they could lie face to face and he could enter her. He showed the same tender languidness that she’d shown him.
Later, when Natalie went out to play, they discussed Suella’s little vacation over cups of coffee. “So why didn’t you tell Nat?”
“That we were going home early because you were lonely and I wanted to help you? I didn’t think she’d understand.”
Nathan smirked. “You’d be surprised at what that little girl understands.” To stress his point, he raised his eyebrows.
“What are you saying? Do you think she knows?”
He shrugged. “Wouldn’t surprise me.” After lowering down, he gaze at her with concern in his eyes as he continued. “Have you had ‘the talk’ with her yet?”
The idea seemed completely preposterous to Suella. Nothing like that had even entered her mind, and she knew, by attending a few parent-teacher conferences that they weren’t talking about that in school yet. “No. Of course not. She’s only eight years old. She doesn’t need to know that, yet. I didn’t know until I was almost thirteen.”
“Need I remind you,” he said, affecting his officious professor persona, “that things are different now.”
“True. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t raise my daughter the way that I want.”
“If you don’t tell her, she can find out with a couple of clicks. Or she can find out the old-fashioned way, from kids on the playground.”
“But they’re children!” Suella protested.
She was going to say more, but Nathan raised a finger, stopping her. “Different world. Now, I can tell her, or you can tell her. I think it should be you, don’t you?”
A few weeks later, the school year began, along with the crazy ritual of buying new clothes, supplies and getting Natalie ready for the fall session of ballet. When Suella helped her step into a dainty, delicate hot pink leotard and tutu, she thought about what her husband had said. Raising children could get complicated! “Why are you so quiet, mom?” Natalie asked, as Suella pinned the girls long, soft curls atop her head.
“I was just thinking about how quickly you’re growing up,” Suella replied. “Before long you’ll be in high school, and then college, and then you’ll grow up to be a doctor or lawyer and ay, yi, yi!”
“Well, right now I’m just a kid.”
Suella wished Nathan would see things that way. As she looked at her daughter’s smooth skin and dimples, radiating innocence, she resolved to spare her of ‘the talk’ for now. Hopefully Nathan wouldn’t force the issue by constantly nagging her about whether she’d done the deed or not.
Later, Suella and Nathan attended their daughter’s first ballet recital, which was held in a small auditorium a short distance from the school. Suella tingled with awe.
She searched the faces of the little girls who fluttered out onto the stage for her Natalie, but couldn’t find her. They’d printed a handbill program, which she picked up and read. The group of girls in bright white leotards and tutus had been goslings, who would become beautiful swans. Natalie’s name was nowhere to be found, until Suella searched down the list, for “trees” and found her name there. A group of trees, branches, bark, and all swayed in the background as the goslings danced. A headpiece of sticks, branches and leaves thrust upward from Natalie’s ears as she swayed, smiling.
“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Nathan said, gazing at his little girl.
“Oh yes,” Suella replied, wondering why Natalie had missed the cut for “gosling.”
As she had promised herself, the next time she picked up Natalie from regular ballet class, she pulled Nina Espinosa aside. “I was just curious,” she said, “why Natalie was put in the back during your recital.”
“She was a tree. It was a very good part,” Nina said.
Suella forced herself to smile. “I know it was a good part and important for the play and all, but I just had my heart set on seeing my little Natalie flutter across the stage like all those other little girls.”
Nina’s face took on a blank look. Suella could tell she was racking her brain, trying to come up with a tactful answer. “Mrs. Worthy, Natalie is a much better ‘swayer’ and ‘hopper’ than she is a ‘flutterer.’ I think if you asked her, she’d probably tell you the same thing. She was perfectly content with her role.”
“Okay. What more could one ask for, right?” Suella said.
The following Saturday she found her in the back yard with Nathan.
They kicked a soccer ball back and forth between them. Suella sighed. Her daughter giggled as she tried to push the ball along with her foot, the way a basketball player dribbles the basketball. Her father would stick a foot in every now and then, trying to flick the ball away from her, but Natalie was always too quick, side-stepping, stopping, and starting.
How could this be, she thought. Growing up, she’d hated soc
cer, ever since the time someone managed to kick the ball straight up, directly into her face. She’d practically been knocked out, but when a couple of her classmates helped her up, she was able to walk off the field and stand on the sidelines to recover. But when she looked out into the yard and saw her little girl, her little clone, she saw a girl completely lost in the moment, enjoying life by kicking an odd round ball all over the place.
That particular fall, Natalie started third grade. Suella remembered that as a time that schoolwork started getting serious. She made a note to carefully watch Natalie’s grades. In late October she came home with her mid-term report and Suella couldn’t believe it. An “A” in math, an “A” in reading, a “B” in social studies, an “A” in science, and a “C” in art. She put the paper down and gazed ahead. Could this really be someone who was cloned from her?
When Nathan came home later that afternoon and saw the report, he nearly hit the ceiling jumping for joy. “All right Nat! This is fantastic! Three ‘A’s’! Guess what we’re going to do tonight? We’re going to eat at Hollywood Savannah!” It was Natalie’s favorite restaurant in the world. Just after they arrived and sat down, their waiter gushed, wide-eyed when he recognized Nathan. “Oh my god, you were one of my favorites!” he said. “Proof that you don’t have to be a ‘roid taking knuckle-dragger to excel in sports.”
The kid, who couldn’t have been older than twenty, realized his bald statement. His eyes widened with horror, as he put a hand over his mouth and blushed, apologizing.
Nathan said “That’s okay, kid. I appreciate it.”
Suella remembered that people said these kinds of things to Nathan all the time. She turned her attention to Natalie. “Darling, I’m ecstatic about your good report card, but I’m curious about one thing. Why was your grade in art lower?”
Natalie had been smiling, since she’d been in her favorite restaurant, where the wait staff wore pith helmets and khaki and all of the tables looked like thatched huts. A small frown registered on her face for a moment. “I don’t like it.”
“What’s not to like? You get to paint pictures, and draw things, and play with clay. When I was your age I made cows and pigs out of clay and built a doll house out of popsicle sticks.”
“It’s messy,” Natalie said.
Nathan reached across and hugged his daughter across the shoulders. “She’s taking after her old pop on that one,” he said. “I didn’t get art, either. But I lived for gym class!”
Through the grapevine, Suella heard that the junior college would be putting on a production of “The Nutcracker Suite” and that they would use children from Nina’s ballet classes for the child roles in the ballet. Suella hoped and prayed that her Natalie would be chosen for one of the roles, but it was not to be. “Mom, I don’t even like ballet,” Natalie said. “I like soccer. Why can’t I play soccer?”
Well, at least Suella could sell all of Natalie’s ballet clothes on Ebay.
On the last day before Christmas vacation, Natalie brought home a report card.
She’d been able to raise her grade in art to a “B” though all of her other grades remained the same as they had for the mid-term. “The teacher liked a picture I drew of daddy.” She retrieved the piece of artwork from her bedroom. Suella gasped when she saw it. All of the proportions were perfect and correct: it was a view of him on the pitching mound in his old San Diego uniform, throwing a pitch to the plate. Natalie had copied the picture from something she saw in a magazine or possibly something she printed from the web. Still, all the lines were correct and the colors she used in tempera jumped out from the page. “This needs to go on the refrigerator, if I can find a magnet. Honey, I’m so proud of you!”
Suella and Nathan were so proud of Natalie for her grades that on Christmas Eve they announced that she could get one more extra special Christmas present. Anything she wanted. “I want to go skiing. Can we go skiing this year?”
Who was this child? Suella wondered. She hated the cold and thought skiing was too dangerous. She could see herself taking a nasty fall at a high speed and splintering bones through her skin. To Natalie’s wish, Nathan said “That’s a great idea! I haven’t been skiing in years.”
“We’ll just have to wait and see,” Suella said. Riding a roller coaster with stressful g-forces was one thing. An active, high-speed sport such as skiing was another. After the holidays, when she called Dr. Allende, the doctor told her that Natalie could enjoy any sport or activity that a naturally born little girl could do. Suella was almost disappointed that she could not come up with a medical reason to avoid cold and snow.