“Okaaaay,” she says finally, dragging it on over the tank top. Andy is a nicer person than I am. Or more devious. As she stretches to pull it over her head, I realize my little sister is taller than me. No wonder that skirt looks so short.
“Twenty bucks says that lives in her locker all day. Maybe all year.”
Jase shrugs. “Not taking that one, Alice. You were young once too.”
“Of course, I also have my period,” Andy adds, looking back and forth between us as though we both, definitely, need to hear this. “Naturally. Because why wouldn’t I be breaking out on the first day of school? Does being on the Pill really help with that, or is that just something people say because they need to use it for other reasons?”
“Don’t look at me,” Jase says.
“Why not? Sam’s on it, right? And she never has pimples—ever.”
“Andy. None of your business.”
“Alice? Come on, you know, right?”
“Talk to Mom,” I mutter. Wait—I’ve been taking mine, right? I can’t remember punching the little vacuum pack, holding the pink tablet in my hand, washing it down. But I wouldn’t forget. I never forget. Besides, Brad’s gone.
Or not. My cell phone dings. Brad. Early-morning at the gym probably. It’s a picture of a puppy begging, “I may not be Red Rover, but can I come over?”
What happened to we’re over?
I put my head in my hands.
“Alice!” shouts Duff from the house steps. “I can’t find my glasses anywhere! Or my summer reading book.”
“Alice!” yells Harry from the screen door. “Whatja do with my owl? Someone moved it!”
“Alice!” George calls from Jase’s window upstairs. “That lady who lived in the shoe—what kind of shoe was it? I hafta draw a picture.”
“Alice,” Jase says, bending to pick up his backpack, “go for a long run on the beach as soon as we get on the bus. I grabbed a three-pack of spearmint Mentos for you at Gas and Go this morning—it’s hidden behind the box of that oatmeal stuff so no one else gets to it first. There’s an everything bagel too.”
The school bus screeches, hitting the top of the hill. As it comes down the street, the brakes shrill out a long, groaning sigh, almost exactly like the sound I’m trying hard to repress.
I’m a hundred and ten.
I’m the old woman who lives in the shoe.
“Hang in there,” Jase calls, turning back with one foot on the bus stairs. “You’re only temping as Mom.”
“Thank God for that,” I call. “I’m selling these kids on eBay and never having any of my own.”
Andy scrambles up the steps, the door slams shut, there’s more squealing from the brakes, a puff of gray exhaust rising into the bright blue sky.
A whistle and an “Al-eece!” from some guy in the back of the bus. Jimmy Pieretti. Dated his brother Tom three years ago. Under normal circumstances, the whistle would make me roll my eyes. Jim’s, what, Jase’s age?
Oh.
Right.
So’s Tim.
But Tom was fun, Jim’s a sweetheart, and I’m grateful for any evidence that I’m not as ancient as I feel, so I shoot a smile at the window.
Scattered whistles.
There’s almost a spring in my step as I turn away from the bus.
TIM
Total blur. All of it.
Cal’s sleeping, he’s crying, he’s drinking, he’s lying on my stomach while I lie on the floor of the apartment or the grass at Dominic’s waiting for the fever to break or the buzz to go away so everything goes back to normal.
But it doesn’t, because neither of those things is real. Cal is real. When he sleeps for a while, I jolt up sweaty because I’m afraid he’s dead. When he only sleeps for a short time, I walk around sweaty because I’m so bushed and what’s wrong with this kid anyway? He doesn’t have any rhythm or I can’t find one. He drinks the whole bottle and then screams for an hour like he’s starving. He drinks nothing and falls asleep fast. I don’t know if this is because he’s a baby or because he’s mine and therefore terminally unreliable. Either way, it blows. I can’t believe I ever felt sorry for myself about anything ever before because I should have saved it all up for this. This tops anything Pop could have devised—I mean, he could have sectioned me, for Chrissake, locked me away to recover in rehab for as long as he wanted. Because this? It’s been three whole days and it’s honestly lasted longer than the entire seventeen years of my life.
Not to mention:
It was cake to pull crap over on my parents because they didn’t want to know, so sucky excuses and lame explanations played fine.
But with the Garretts, I don’t have that home-field advantage. Too many sharp eyes, too many working brains. Not to mention the fact that I’m not trying to smuggle Bacardi into a movie theater in an antibacterial gel container, but an actual human in and out of my apartment and their yard with his diaper bag and all his other crap. I actually do drive-bys to make sure there are no cars in the driveway or the lights are off or whatever before I skulk into or out of the apartment. Then I haul ass faster than Christmas. So Cal and I are spending a lot of time hanging at Dominic’s, since he’s in between fishing gigs. I sit on his steps, throw sticks for Dom’s massive German shepherd Sarge, and hold the kid while Cal sleeps or drinks or stares, and Dom power-washes the hull of his boat or chops firewood or repaves the driveway.
“Could you maybe, like, bake cupcakes or sew an apron or something?” I ask, after watching him clean out the storm drains.
“You have messed-up ideas about manhood. I bake awesome cakes, by the way. What’s losing you cojones points is that you’re holing up here.”
I know, I know, I know.
Me on the phone with Hester, way the eff early in the morning on day three: “Look, I’ve got—stuff—to do. I’ve got an econ class online that I’m behind in and a civics test and a physics one I need to get in by the end of the week. Not to mention a couple days on at the hardware store.” With Alice there too, during at least one of them. God. “When can I drop off Cal?”
Hester: (long pause) “This morning. We need to talk anyway.”
Do we hafta? The thought does not fill me with joyous anticipation.
First off, I smuggle Cal into the car as the school bus pulls away and the screen door flaps shut behind Alice. Hester and I have set up a Cal swap in Willoughby Park, where I used to buy weed. She didn’t want me to come to her house, but all she’d say when I pushed for an explanation was, “It’s not a good time.”
When I get to the park, I try to give back all the baby crap, but about all Hester’ll take is the actual child. I half expect her to hand me a dime bag in exchange.
Right away she’s rooting through the big-ass diaper bag, like she’s counting stuff in there, like maybe I stole some of the formula and fenced it on the street or something, and my jaw clenches so tight, my neck muscles start throbbing. I never used to get angry, and now it’s like I’m a goddamn volcano set on “continuous erupt.”
I look away, kicking the dust with the toe of my flip-flops. Willoughby is not one of those nice parks with tons of green grass and leafy trees and all that jazz. It’s more on the scraggly, sad side. The better to do the drug deals. In fact, I see one going on as we speak. Over in the far corner, near the stone wall that marks the end of the park, there’s Troy Rhodes, the guy every school has at least one of, the guy who can set you up with whatever you want or need, any day, any night, any second, as long as you can pay.
My dealer, in other words.
Until a few months ago, probably the person I knew best in town.
He’s doing the old hand-shake pass-off with some middle-school type. The guy’s little-kid skinny, his chest practically concave, pants hanging low, wearing a Pokémon shirt that he probably doesn’t know yet is uncool.
When I refocus, Hester’s passing her hand back and forth in front of my face. I grab her wrist and she does this cringe thing like I’m going to snap it.
Christ, I was annoyed, but I’m not a psychopath.
“I know you’re not, Tim.”
Whoops, said that out loud.
“You looked glazed. I know what that can mean. But you’re just tired, right? And trust me, you look way better than I usually do after time with him. It’s like your worst nightmare ever, isn’t it? Like hell.”
I’ve spent the past days thinking that 345,678,900 times, but when she says it, it sounds almost criminal, like there’s something really wrong with her.
Seeing me blink, she focuses on packing things back into the bag. “I don’t have any brothers or sisters, and I do the older kids at camp and I just”—she shrugs—“thought they were like babies in commercials, somehow.”
“Like, as long as you gave ’em”—I pull out my Moviefone voice—“Sleepy Hollow Brand Formula, your little one will sleep like Rip Van Winkle.”
She laughs, the first one I’ve heard from her since that first day, then covers her mouth like she’s let something shameful escape. When her fingers move away, there’s still a smile.
“That,” she says, “is how Calvin happened.” Her voice is accusing.
“Uh—”
“You made me laugh.”
“Luckily, I don’t need a rubber for that. When do I have to get him back again?” That sounds even worse than what she said, so I’m not surprised that she looks like she wants to deck me with the diaper bag. “I mean—”
“You don’t. Never mind. Here’s the thing, Tim. I thought about what you said—that I was being a sadist by bringing you into the picture at all.”
I can barely remember using those words, even though of course I did. I’m such an asshole. “Forget about it, I shouldn’t—”
“No, I can’t. It makes sense. I was the one who got in trouble.”
“Fuck that, Hester. This is not actually The Scarlet Letter. I don’t have a problem with babysitting.”
She purses her lips, looks down at Cal, away into the distance, narrowing her eyes in the bright sunlight.
“It’s not babysitting if it’s your own child. What I’m saying is that you don’t have to be involved. It can just end here.”
Cal’s punted off a sock. He loves to do that, like it’s some personal baby challenge. I bend over and pick it up, pulling it up his squirmy pink foot. He watches me somberly. Probably can hardly see me at this distance yet, according to the baby facts I’ve googled. I could be gone before he can. Say yeah, sure, I’m done, and putting his sock on could be the last thing I ever do for him, other than, presumably, sign off on some paperwork. A baby? Right, I had one for a day or two. It didn’t work out. End of story. He’d never remember I existed and I could try to forget he ever had. I can see the tape rewinding, me walking backward through the past few days, up the steps to the apartment, lying back down after push-ups, the only thing on my mind meeting Alice in forty-five minutes. Poof. Erased.
But.
Hester’s still staring out at the river, so I turn her chin toward me. She sort of freezes at my touch, wash of pink under her pale skin. “Hes. He happened. You let me know. We can’t time-travel and un-happen it any more than I can go further back and unscrew you.”
That was beautiful, I hear Dominic say in my head.
She looks like I’ve smacked her. Of course. “You—I—” Tears come to her eyes.
Can’t go back and unsay it either, so I bumble onward:
“What I mean is—I’m in this. He’s not, like, a movie I checked out the preview of and decided not to watch. He’s my kid. So, let’s just get on with it. What happens next?”
She blinks, her face smooths. Totally back to prissy-tone: “I’m doing a follow-up with the adoption agency this morning—that should help us figure out the timetable.”
She looks even more rumpled today than the first time I saw her. Her dark hair’s in this twisted-knot-thing that looks like a squirrel’s nest: she’s got khakis on, but they’re tight—and not in a good way—and her shirt is buttoned wrong. She’s going somewhere like this?
“So when’s your appointment?”
She brushes some flyaway hair out of her eyes. “It doesn’t matter. You don’t need to come. I wasn’t asking you to. Your name isn’t on the birth certificate anyway.”
I hadn’t given one second of thought to the birth certificate, but, “Uh, shouldn’t it be?”
Hester explains, in this elaborately patient tone, that she wasn’t sure I would “acknowledge paternity.”
“And yet here I am, acknowledging,” I say, my voice, like hers, sounding like someone is chopping each word off from the one next to it. She pulls out her phone and scrolls through it, the text-check blow-off move. Usually I have to know someone better for them to piss me off this much.
The kid who was over in the bushes buying is now riding down the street toward us on his bike. He’s got the backward-hat thing going on and kind of a freak-out face—because he sees us, or because he hasn’t done this before, or because he somehow knows he’s taken a giant step down the Road to Stupid.
He can’t be more than twelve.
Almost as much of a baby as Cal.
He speeds on by, his eyes dead ahead, jaw set, legs a blur.
Takes just about all I have not to step out into the street in front of him like the goddamn Ghost of Christmas Future.
ALICE
I come into the kitchen after the school bus trundles away to find Duff and Harry dueling with Popsicles. It’s seven o’clock in the morning.
“I am not left-handed,” Duff says triumphantly as I walk in, swapping his Popsicle to the other hand and smashing it into Harry’s, shattering sugary purple shards of ice all over the floor.
Harry leaps onto Duff’s back, all ready for hand-to-hand combat. I grab both the backs of their pajamas, twist, and pull them apart. “Knock it off or you’re both going to the fire swamp.”
I serve breakfast, helped by the presence of actual food in our cabinets and fridge.
I even find both Duff’s glasses and his summer reading book hidden in and under Harry’s LEGO castle, as part of a complicated revenge plot, the details of which I’d rather not know. “You have a lot to learn about revenge,” I say, drowning out Harry’s outraged “No fair no fair no fair.” “Never hide things in the most obvious place, for starters.”
“Don’t give him tips, Alice!” Duff says. “Whose side are you on?”
“Whichever pays better. Get dressed.”
I have this down. I can hear water running, so Mom’s up, but the least I can do is give her time for a shower. Assuming Andy left any hot water.
Patsy has escaped from her crib, of course, but she’s no match for me. Although my diapering while she’s trying to run away skills really aren’t up to Dad’s.
I tell George to draw eight kids for the Old Woman’s shoe, and negotiate a discussion of what kind of shoe it would be, which turns ugly.
“It wouldn’t be a high heel, duh,” Duff says. “They’d all escape.”
Or she would. But I don’t even say that out loud. I’m a goddess.
Except I forgot about the owl.
“Where is it?” Harry asks, tears streaming down his freckled cheeks, searching frantically through our kitchen junk drawer, scattering pizza delivery menus and pencils all over the floor.
“Do you have something to do with this?” I ask Duff.
He gives me an actually innocent look, instead of the super-wide-eyed one that is always suspect. “I was the one who found it for him in the first place!”
Text Jase: Where is effin owl?
But he doesn’t answer because no cell phones at school, duh.
Harry’s now on his hands and knees, rummaging through the drawer where all the Tupperware is, tossing it all out on the floor, sobbing. His skinny little shoulders . . . he sounds so lost—and I could be right there on the floor with him in a heartbeat, kicking and screaming. I put my arms around him, try to pull him onto my lap, the way I wo
uld George (who is hunting for the owl in the broom closet, judging by the crashes) but he looks at me like I’m a demon from the pits of hell. “You took him. I know you did, Alice. You never wanted me to have him in the first place. I hate you.”
“Jesus God,” I say loudly, sounding like Tim. “Shut up.”
Beat of silence.
“We’re not supposed to say that,” Duff says righteously.
Patsy is now crunching something that looks a lot like it came from the cat dish.
I can’t do this. I don’t want to do this. I never, ever signed on for this.
Now my chest is seizing up and I really can’t breathe, and . . .
Mom comes in, slightly green, and solves it all. She might as well have a wand. The owl turns out to have mysteriously disappeared, but there are many photographs of it, from every disgusting angle. “This is better,” she tells Harry firmly. “I’m fairly sure Mrs. Costa is allergic to feathers. Besides, it would’ve been hard to carry in your backpack.”
“I could have put him in my lunch box,” Harry says sulkily, but the fight’s gone out of him, even as he still has almost as many tears on his face as freckles.
She admires George’s picture, while scooping the cat food (yes, it was) out of Patsy’s mouth, saying, “Jase needs to keep this in his own room.”
Sends Duff off to reorganize the broom closet, because he loves to do stuff like that, and I’m glad someone does.
Then Mom looks up at me, shielding her eyes from the light streaming in from the window over the sink. “Go for a run, Alice. I’m on this.”
I practically beat my best time just getting to the hallway, then turn back. “Mom . . .” Why the hell would you ever do this? Why? “How do you do this?”
“I have access to the Dark Arts. Run, Alice.”
So I do.
Chapter Twenty-three
TIM
From hell to heaven, the minute I get back to the Garretts’.
Alice is in the driveway, washing the Bug. White halter bikini top, cutoffs. Man, will it suck when the cold weather comes. Right now, this can make up for everything—GEDs, global warming, even the last few days of my life.