I stood in the doorway and watched her crash around, hit suddenly with the force of all we’d lost. Losing a friend was like losing a language. The jokes were just never as funny if you tried to explain them to someone else. Whole private vocabularies disappeared. I smiled, thinking of those lost days, when we’d all scrambled around, grumpy and giggling on our way to school.
“What’s so funny?” Jeannie asked, seeing me in the doorway. She sounded as if she was still mostly asleep, and blinked at me as if she too was confused into thinking I was the high school version of myself.
“This,” I said, maneuvering around her with remembered ease to grab a mug and some coffee. I smiled. “What year is this?”
Jeannie yawned. Then she smiled slightly. “Junior year in high school, at least,” she said, crossing her arms across her body. “Lord knows there was never any breakfast in my house. My mother still thinks it’s funny that I had to come over here on my way to school every morning if I wanted to eat something before lunch.” She shook her head. “Just one more thing to talk about in therapy.”
We grinned at each other. Jeannie gave me an affectionate elbow to the stomach, more like a nudge. It felt like old times in a way I had never believed could happen again. I felt a rush of something, some emotion, and opened my mouth to comment on it. Maybe build a bridge.
Which is when Hope came stamping in from the outside. I turned away from Jeannie and the moment disappeared.
“Ah, the delightful Hope McKay chooses to grace us with her presence,” Jeannie said smoothly. “And look, it’s only nine in the morning. Have you been out all night?”
“When I want your opinion on what I do, Jeannie,” Hope said, unperturbed, “you’ll know because I’ll ask.”
“Hey, Hope,” I greeted her mildly. “Were you somewhere fun?”
Hope stood in the doorway, as if about to take flight. She was wearing what was probably a clubbing outfit, which was all about her perfect legs and perfect abdomen. My younger sister was a hottie. And she knew it.
“Nowhere you’d know about,” she said, in perfect seriousness. She rubbed at her eyes. “Are you making breakfast?”
“For your father,” Jeannie said. She eyed Hope. “You know, the one you can’t be bothered to take care of, because your life of debauchery and clubbing is more important.”
“I know you feel like you’re my older sister,” Hope said, “but you’re not. Try to remember that. And it is way too early in the morning.” She collapsed into the nearest chair.
“Has anyone heard from Mom?” she asked.
“She called last night.” I flicked her a look, but she looked only politely interested. “Christian talked to her. She’s having a great time, although, of course, she’s worried about Dad.” I tried to sound as if I supported and understood this, but I wasn’t sure I was successful.
Hope stared at the surface of the table and said nothing.
“Maybe it’s for the best.” I tried to sound reassuring. “Dad seems to think it’s really important that this trip happen for her.”
Hope’s gaze was incredulous when it swung to me. “You can stop the Miss Perfect act, Meredith,” she said. “Because there’s no one here to see it and applaud.”
Miss Perfect. My default family role. I hated it when they called me that—or, even worse, Saint Meredith—with that tone. As if it was outrageous that I tried to help out, to make things better. As if they were somehow better for sulking about everything (Hope) or demanding praise for lifting a pinky finger (Christian).
“The topic here is Mom, not me,” I replied, stung. “And I’m not putting on any act, Hope.”
Like she was in any position to judge anyone else.
“Whatever,” Hope snapped. She lurched to her feet. “I have to crash.”
“She’s completely out of control,” Jeannie said with a sniff when the sounds of Hope stamping up the stairs faded away. “She’s probably still drunk.”
“I wish I was,” I muttered, and turned my attention to the breakfast tray.
“You don’t do anything to help, Meredith,” Jeannie continued. “Catering to her isn’t going to make her change.”
I watched her as she put the finishing touches on the tray. Jeannie thought she was such a big expert on Hope, but I noticed she hadn’t opened her mouth on that topic until Hope had left the room. I also noticed that her fiancé was nowhere to be seen.
“Oh,” she said when I asked. “He’s at the gym. But he definitely wants to do as much as he can for you when he gets back. Before we head back down to Hoboken.”
“It’s nice of you to help out.” It was a deliberate tone, that one. It suggested Jeannie was a helpful stranger at best.
She stiffened.
“Of course,” she said. I’d obviously thrown her off-balance.
Score one for me, I thought, and took the tray upstairs.
The enforced rest was clearly not sitting well with Dad. His broken leg stuck out straight and unavoidable before him. His bare chest was patterned with bruises and yellow remnants of tubes and IVs. Medicine was much more violent in real life than it seemed when George Clooney was waving syringes around and smiling bashfully over gurneys. My father’s body was marked and scarred. Maybe for good.
All of my early mental images of my father involved him in motion. Laughing, shouting, tossing footballs in the backyard with Christian, or dancing around the kitchen with Hope. He told long stories at parties that circled in and around themselves and always ended somewhere unplanned, and he had a merry laugh that was impossible to hear without smiling.
After his retirement, he’d seemed to shrink a little bit more every time I saw him. I could even hear it in his voice on the phone. The accident had made him even smaller, and worse—mortal.
I thought back to our small, insignificant talk in the basement right before the accident and it made heat pool behind my eyes. What if he had died? What if that was the last time I’d spoken to him? How would I ever deal with that?
“I love you, Dad,” I told him as I settled his tray on the bedside table, before I knew the words were coming.
Once said, they seemed to ricochet around the room.
Dad looked startled, and uncomfortable. He blinked at me, then at the food, as if he suspected the cantaloupe might have precipitated this emotional outburst.
“Well,” he said. He sounded baffled. “Well, Meredith. I love you too. Sweetheart.”
It wasn’t exactly violins swelling and the credits of a Hallmark Channel movie rolling, but it was something.
I knew better than to exhibit even the hint of tears—he might have a coronary, and a broken leg was quite enough drama, thanks—and so busied myself instead with fixing the tray, fluffing his pillows as he sat up, and other such mindless tasks until I got myself under control.
“I’m not sure I need a nursemaid,” Dad said, clearly trying to curtail any further emotional declarations. He took a pillow and wedged it behind him, which required more movement than his leg could handle. Wincing, he tried to cover by swiping a piece of toast from the tray. He bit into it and chewed like he could get rid of his pain with his teeth.
“I’m not a nursemaid,” I soothed at him.
This was not a man who could bear to show any weakness. I had distinct memories of him succumbing to colds or flus over the years. Each time he’d carried on as if his body had deliberately betrayed him and we, by implication and by being healthy, were in on it.
“I’m just going to help out around here, so you can concentrate on getting better.”
“I appreciate the gesture, Meredith.” He sounded weary, but he met my eye.
“You’ll hardly notice your leg is broken!” I promised him. Rashly.
“But I will notice you hovering over me like a vulture,” he said, with a glimmer of exasperation. He tried to hide it, and sighed. “Can I just eat my breakfast in peace, please?” he asked. “I’m sure I’ll be in a much better mood once I have my coffee and read the p
aper.”
This didn’t exactly surprise me. My dad could be sweet, but emotion? Forget it. Any concrete sign of love made him freeze up. Our version of hugging involved him stiffening, angling his torso away, and patting me awkwardly on the back. It was hardly intimate.
Being forced to accept this much help was probably just about the worst thing my father could imagine.
Out in the hallway, Jeannie was waiting for me. She straightened away from the wall and moved with me down the hall to my old—and current—bedroom. Jeannie sunk onto the bed, and I sat next to her out of habit, before I could think better of it.
I could admit it: I wasn’t feeling very positive. About Dad or anything else. Why had I agreed to stay home in the first place? No one in their right mind would want this particular job.
“Is he any better today?” Jeannie asked. “Christian said yesterday was pretty bad.”
“It must be tough for him,” I mused aloud, trying to make myself feel better, if nothing else. “Think about what a control freak he is normally. This is his worst nightmare.”
We sat quietly for a moment. I stared at the wall where my six-foot Wham! poster had hung throughout my youth. My mother had replaced it with a tasteful watercolor, and redone the once blue room in a palette of pinks. Nothing in the house—or in the family, for that matter—was safe from the force of my mother’s attention.
I snuck a look at Jeannie from the corner of my eye. She was frowning at the same wall, as if she couldn’t figure out what had changed.
“The Wham! poster,” I supplied.
Her brow smoothed. “Of course. I was thinking Duran Duran, but I knew that wasn’t quite right.” She sighed. “I was always so jealous that you had that poster. My mother refused to let me hang stuff on her walls.”
“When I came home for the summer after my junior year in college she’d overhauled the entire room.” I shrugged. “The Wham! poster was long gone by then, but it was still a little disorienting.”
“That’s your mom,” Jeannie said, with a sigh.
But I could hear the affection in her voice, and wondered why other people seemed to have no trouble at all seeing the great side of my mother. I seemed to only ever see the other side. The one involving that voice in my head.
“I think the real reason Dad didn’t want to tell her about the accident is that it will prove what she’s been saying for years,” I said then. “You know, that he’s a terrible driver.”
“Who are you telling?” she asked with a chuckle. “Do you remember that time he almost killed us by driving the wrong way down that street? I knew we were going to die!”
She laughed that rich belly laugh of hers. It was so contagious I grinned. She’d always been able to do that. Growing up, we all would have done anything to make Jeannie laugh and then to bask in it.
Which is when I realized that I was slipping back into my old role again, confiding in Jeannie as if she was still my best friend. How did she do that? How did she make it so easy to feel comfortable around her, even when I knew better than to believe it?
I could tell that she was encouraging me to laugh along, maybe bond a little bit and patch things up between us, but something perverse stirred in me despite my wanting exactly that back in the kitchen. We weren’t in high school anymore. She couldn’t bridge the distance between us just by laughing, just by making me feel relieved to be back there laughing with her.
“Thanks for making my father breakfast,” I said coolly, as if she was some distant acquaintance who’d mouthed a pleasantry about the weather. “I know he might not show it, but I’m sure he appreciates it.”
Jeannie was quiet for a moment, then shook her head. Her mouth tightened.
“I can sense your appreciation,” she said. “Whatever, Meredith.”
She jumped to her feet and was through the door before I could react. She slammed it shut behind her, leaving me to blink into the silence.
Everything about her made me angry and sad at the same time. Maybe there would always be that part of me that yearned to relax back into the old embrace of our friendship. It was so tempting, after all. I’d known her forever. There were no surprises, easy laughter, a hundred shared stories.
But there was also something toxic in it, something that swirled around and exploded every now and then. I’d decided I was finished with those explosions after that last one, the summer before our sophomore year at separate colleges. But then Jeannie started dating Christian after college, so I’d sucked it up during the holidays, smiled hugely, made empty promises, and concentrated on my new life in Atlanta, the one I could control. The one that made sense.
I told myself I never looked back.
Chapter 4
In the hot and airless week that followed, I threw myself into my new routine. I cranked up the AC, concentrated on one room in the house each day, and cleaned it from top to bottom. Scoured it, actually. When Mom got back, she’d find her house sparkling even brighter than when she’d left it. The very idea gave me intense satisfaction.
“You’d be surprised how much dust can accumulate in hidden corners,” I told Travis on the phone. Smugly.
“You’d be surprised how little I want to know about dust accumulation,” he replied. “How long should I put this chicken thing in the microwave for?”
The cleaning was for my own purposes, and I wasn’t so sure I wanted to look too closely at my rationale. I reported my progress to Dad in half-hour intervals. Dad didn’t care about cleaning wars or my need to prove myself through Lysol to my absent mother, of course.
What Dad cared about was his fish.
The flowchart Christian and I had been so afraid of was real.
Terrifyingly, unavoidably real.
It wasn’t a chart, exactly. It was a sheaf of papers attached to the sort of clipboard I associated with overenthusiastic coaches and mirthless retail managers. The papers included a map of the fish tanks in the basement (drawn to scale); a breakdown of the number of fish per tank; and several pages of incomprehensible scribbling I took to be either scientific data vaguely pertaining to the composition of the water in the tanks or (and far more alarming) some crude form of experimentation with fish DNA.
Clearly, retirement was driving my father stark raving mad.
Dad frowned at me anxiously as he watched me flip through the pages.
All the pages.
“It’s very important that you follow the instructions to the letter,” he insisted.
Which is when I saw that the final set of pages detailed how much fish food was to go into each tank at each feeding, complete with drawings of the actual amount of food Dad believed constituted “a pinch.”
“When did this happen?” I wanted to know. Because this was a little bit scary, frankly. “Christian had one single goldfish. Once. There were never any other fish around the house, were there? When did you become the fish guy?”
“I’ve always liked fish.” He sounded distracted.
“Really?”
I tried to remember any particular interest Dad had paid that lone goldfish, but all I could recall was the elaborate funeral ceremony Christian had insisted upon, and how angry he’d been that I’d failed to keep a straight face when he started reading The Tenth Good Thing About Barney over the toilet.
We’d been in fifth grade. It had been halfway through the seventh grade before Christian had fully forgiven me.
“I had fish as a boy,” Dad said, definitely impatient now. “And much as I’d like to talk about them, it’s the fish I have now that need your attention . . .”
“I’m on it!” I promised—cheerfully—and descended the rickety old stairs into the basement.
In the dark, and without my father there, the fish tanks took on a decidedly sinister cast. What was he doing with all those equations, so many that they filled up whole clipboarded pages? Was he brewing up some biological weapons here in our suburban New Jersey basement? Look at the Unabomber—a good education was no guarantee that
a man wouldn’t go completely nuts, given the right set of circumstances. Should I be calling Homeland Security instead of searching for the fish food?
Weapons were probably out, I decided, because that would involve carrying out attacks, which would in turn require leaving the basement. Dad didn’t seem too keen on that idea. If he’d had his way, he’d probably prefer that we set up his recovery room down here in the middle of his creepy, tank-filled hobby.
As I looked around, however, I began to feel as if I was in some seventies sci-fi movie. It really was eerie. Maybe he wasn’t making bioweapons—maybe he was breeding something horrible. Like monsters. Was my father some kind of mad scientist? God only knew what he was whipping up down here—Frankenstein with fins? Exactly what was that squiggly-looking thing, lurking right behind that rock in the nearest tank? Was it a tentacle? Was it moving—
“What are you doing?”
I lurched backward and screamed bloody murder, scaring Hope as much as she’d scared me. She scrambled back up the stairs and glared at me from halfway up the steps. I glared back from where I’d plastered myself against the nearest wall.
“You scared me half to death!” I told her. When I could breathe.
“You need to get a grip on yourself, Meredith,” Hope retorted. “I almost swallowed my tongue!”
From upstairs, Dad shouted, “What happened down there? Did you break something?”
“Everything’s fine!” I yelled up the stairs.
I rubbed at my heart, trying to manually convince it to stop beating so fast, and eyed Hope as I retrieved the clipboard from the foot of the stairs. Apparently, I’d planned to beat off my assailant with Dad’s flowchart.
“I’m feeding the fish,” I told her. With great dignity. “According to this chart, it should take me just about forty-five minutes.”
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s because he likes to talk to them. Mom thinks he names them. Anyway, you can do it in five.”