Sisterland

  “That guy was nuts,” I said. “He had no grounds—”

  Hank shook his head. “Let’s forget about it.”

  At home, I had fed Rosie and Owen and gotten them down for their naps when my cellphone rang. Was Hank prepared now to talk about the weirdness of what had just happened? Had my father changed his mind about going to the hospital? But no, neither—it was Jeremy.

  “I saw on CNN about the day care, and I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe you were right and I was wrong.” He sounded rattled, and unlike himself.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Have you not heard?”

  “Today has been crazy. But heard what?”

  “An eighteen-wheeler crashed into Rosie’s old day care. You remember that playroom in the front with the huge windows? It went right through there. There’s pictures online, although you probably shouldn’t—” Hastily, he added, “Sorry, I should have said this already: No one was injured besides the driver. There was hardly anyone there today, because so many people kept their kids home.” Jeremy was quiet in an odd way, and when he spoke again, I was shocked to realize he was crying. He said, “I just keep thinking, what if we hadn’t pulled Rosie out of there, what if Vi hadn’t made her prediction? I know I’ve been dismissive, but if Rosie had been—” Then he had to stop.

  “Jeremy,” I said. “Sweetheart. It’s fine. We’re fine. Those are really big ifs.” He said nothing, and I added, “Rosie and Owen are asleep right now. Honestly, I don’t think there’s going to be an earthquake anymore. I’m not worried, and if I’m not worried, you definitely shouldn’t be.”

  He sniffed loudly (Jeremy had not cried at our wedding or at his aunt’s funeral—in fact, the only time I’d ever seen him cry was watching the movie Brian’s Song, and even that had been more like watery eyes than tears) before saying, “I’m thinking I should come home today.”

  “We’re fine,” I said. “Forget everything I said before. You need to stay and deliver your paper and schmooze with people.” How had we arrived at this point, with him lobbying to return early and me trying to convince him not to? But it was, in a way, unsurprising; wasn’t our marriage a series of flip-flops in which we alternated the stances either of us took? And, even if he didn’t realize it, wasn’t the reason he was suggesting coming home that he knew I’d talk him out of it?

  Jeremy sniffed again. “What did you mean about it being a crazy day?”

  After I’d filled him in on my father’s fainting and what I mistakenly referred to as Hank’s arrest—no, no, I had to quickly say, not arrested, just detained—Jeremy said, “Jesus Christ. Has Hank never had Rosie without you before?”

  “I guess not,” I said.

  “I wonder if Courtney knows yet. Her panel was this morning.”

  “I assume Hank called her.”

  “And you did or didn’t make a doctor’s appointment for your dad?”

  “I didn’t. I was on the phone with the office when I heard from Hank.”

  “Your dad should definitely be checked out. It could be a head rush or it could be something serious.”

  “I realize that,” I said. “Believe me.”

  “I’m not trying to stress you out.” He himself sounded more normal, not shaky like before. He said, “Part of me wants you to see the pictures of the day care and part of me thinks you definitely shouldn’t.”

  “I’m not planning to look at them.” As if I needed a reminder that scary things could happen. On the contrary: I yearned to be a person stunned by misfortune.

  “I checked the times for if I try to change my flight, and they’re all bad,” Jeremy said.

  Of course they were. And of course I’d told him not to bother, meaning that by staying in Denver, he was merely obliging me.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said.

  Rosie hadn’t yet awakened from her nap by four—apparently, the drama of Target had worn her out—at which point I knew we wouldn’t be returning to my father’s apartment for dinner unless he outright asked us to. Which he wouldn’t, though when I called him, he showed none of the morning’s irritability. When I mentioned that I’d made a doctor’s appointment for him for the following Monday, he even thanked me, and then—this was my true victory—I managed to extract a promise that he wouldn’t drive Vi to the vigil. “I’ve tried calling her a few times today, but it says her phone is full,” he said.

  “I’ll text her for you.”

  “Will you tell her I’m sorry not to help?”

  “I’m sure she’ll understand.”

  “I hope being wrong about the earthquake isn’t a terrible blow.” He seemed to be in a musing sort of mood, as if he were talking to himself as much as to me, and he added, “I suppose it still could happen, but when I woke this morning and it was raining, I thought it was awfully unlikely. Violet’s picking up on something, there’s no doubt about that, but I don’t think it’s an earthquake.”

  So the weather had convinced him, too; this was amusing, coming from my not-exactly-intuitive father.

  And then he said, “I didn’t have a sense one way or the other in advance. I certainly couldn’t rule it out. But the rain made me think, Not today.”

  There was no one except Owen to see it, and he was busy with a toy car on the living room floor, but my jaw literally dropped. I didn’t have a sense one way or the other? Since when had my father—my father—had senses? And he was as casual as if this was not only an established fact between us but one we’d agreed was no big deal.

  Trying to sound equally casual, I said, “Yeah, the rain made me have doubts, too.”

  I waited for him to reveal more, but instead he said, “I hope it didn’t disrupt your day to come get me this morning.”

  “I’m just glad you’re feeling better. Why don’t I pick you up tomorrow morning and we’ll get your car?”

  “That’s not an inconvenience?”

  “Not at all. What if we come around eleven?” Then I said, “Will you promise that you’ll call if you feel faint again? I really mean it, Dad. Even if it’s the middle of the night.”

  After I hung up, I texted Vi: Dad asked me to tell u he can’t drive u tonight. It wasn’t that I was surprised when she didn’t text back, but still, it was hard not to feel like I was waiting for a response. Because Vi and I weren’t speaking, and because the topic of senses had gone sour between Jeremy and me, there was no one I could talk to about my father’s revelation. To distract myself, I took a picture of Owen and his car with my phone and sent it off to Jeremy.

  Around five, I texted Hank: Have fun at eq party! Though I still hadn’t heard from Vi, Hank replied immediately: Decided to skip. Want us to bring over chinese?

  Twist my arm, I wrote.

  At our house, as Hank unloaded white cartons from a brown paper bag and set them on the kitchen table, he seemed subdued, the way he’d been in the days before and after Courtney’s abortion. He didn’t mention Target, and neither did I.

  The children were seated, Owen in his high chair, and Amelia was chanting, “I want noodles! I want noodles!” Rosie pointed at the pile of chopsticks still in their paper sleeves and said, “Mama gives Rosie that.”

  “Those are for grown-ups,” I said.

  I set beers out for Hank and me and spooned rice onto a paper plate so that it would cool; the fact that we were eating takeout seemed to conceal the weirdness of my having put away our china. After Hank had opened the flaps of all the cartons—he’d ordered vegetable pot stickers, vegetable lo mein with tofu, broccoli with garlic sauce, and Szechuan eggplant—I thought of making a joke about how he’d become a vegetarian again, but I didn’t want to risk offending him.

  He prepared a plate for Amelia, and I made one for Rosie. Owen was having a jar of pears.

  As Hank and I served ourselves, he said, “I know you said Vi’s wrong, but I’m still waiting for the ground to start rumbling.”

  “Well, there’s been so much hype.”

  “You ne
ver had premonitions?”

  His question had a making-conversation quality to it, or even a post-fight quality, as if we’d quarreled but were now trying to get along. How could he know what a loaded topic he’d stumbled onto? It wasn’t impossible that I’d have told him the truth under different circumstances, but it seemed unfair to dump my life-defining secret on him when he was just filling the silence. So I said, “Not like Vi.” Then I said, “Did you hear about the day-care place on Hanley?”

  “Wow, I didn’t even realize until right now—that’s where Rosie went, huh?”

  “Only for about five weeks. But Jeremy told me not to look at the pictures.”

  “They were saying on the radio the driver fell asleep after being on the road for fifteen hours.”

  “What’s Mommy and Hank talking about?” Rosie said.

  “A man who was driving a truck.” Glancing at her plate, I said, “You’re doing a great job eating broccoli.”

  “How’s your dad?” Hank asked.

  “If you ask him, fine.” I sighed. “He has a doctor’s appointment for Monday.”

  “Did you tell Vi he fainted?”

  “That would involve speaking to her.” This wasn’t even true—it could merely involve texting her—but presumably the day was chaotic enough for Vi without the addition of my father’s health problems. Anyway, the thing I really wanted to talk to her about, even more than the fainting episode, was his astonishing mention of having senses.

  “If you’re interested in going to that vigil, I’ll stay here,” Hank said. “Amelia can go to sleep in your bed.”

  “Honestly, the vigil sounds awful. Would you want to go?”

  “She’s not my sister.”

  “You think I’m being unsupportive?”

  “I think however things play out, this has to be an insanely weird night for her.”

  I hadn’t seriously considered attending the vigil, and for about thirty seconds, I thought, Okay, if I put Owen and Rosie down first, and if Hank stays here with Amelia, and then I thought, But it’s closed to the public. And my name won’t be on any list. And there’ll be media camped outside. And Vi said I’m turning my children into clingy little wimps. So no. She was on her own.

  I said to Hank, “You and Amelia are welcome to hang out here as long as you want, but I’m not going to the vigil.”

  “Mama.” Rosie tugged on my shirt. “This broccoli is tasty and wonderful.”

  Hank and I both laughed, and as I said, “I think so, too,” I felt that the awkwardness from Target had dissipated; things were normal again. After we finished eating, Hank distracted Rosie by singing “Bingo” while I applied Neosporin to her cut, and then he watched all three children in the living room and I cleaned up the food and set out the mousetraps. When I rejoined them, I called Jeremy so Rosie could say good night, and when I carried Owen upstairs, Rosie and Amelia were taking turns holding Hank’s hands, walking up his legs, and doing backward somersaults. If no one ended up puking, I thought, I just might have to conclude that the evening had been a success. Vi and I had indeed been wrong about what would happen on October 16.

  Hank did put Amelia down to sleep in our bed, after I’d taken Rosie up to her room, and finally there was that moment, familiar to me from nights with Jeremy, when Hank and I could both relax. I’d turned the television to CNN, which was the only channel with live coverage of St. Louis, though even on CNN it wasn’t continuous. Anderson Cooper, who was in the studio in New York, was interviewing the surgeon general about subjects that had nothing to do with earthquakes, and then he’d get periodic updates from the ground in St. Louis, where the correspondent was standing with the Arch behind him. “You want another beer?” I said.

  “Are you having one?” Hank asked.

  He knew about my one-beer-and-one-coffee-per-day policy. “I will if you will,” I said. “But only because it’s earthquake season.”

  I sat in the armchair and he sat on the couch, and we flipped among various stations. On MSNBC, the host of the show was talking to a FEMA engineer, and Hank said, “I thought all geologists were in Denver right now.” Later, when they showed a clip of Vi’s first interview with Matt Lauer, Hank said, “How weird is this for you?” and I said, “Very.” Eventually, during a commercial break on CNN, we ended up watching a competitive cooking show and didn’t change it.

  Sitting there, I became conscious of a strange—an inappropriate—tension between Hank and me. The longer the stretches lasted when neither of us spoke, the more I felt like we were in a romantic comedy about two single parents trying, after years off the dating market, to get up the nerve for a first kiss. Except that, obviously, having a first kiss was the worst thing Hank and I could do.

  Just before ten, as the head chef berated a contestant, Owen let out a cry, and I said, “I’ve been summoned” and went up to feed him. Usually after his ten o’clock nursing, I didn’t go back downstairs—I went to bed, where Jeremy joined me after he’d closed down the house—but sitting in the glider in Owen’s darkened room, I was completely awake. And what I was thinking about wasn’t the countdown to the end of this bizarre day, this whole bizarre period; I wasn’t thinking of Owen, even as I burped him, changed his diaper, and set him back in his crib. I was thinking of Hank, and what I realized was at once shocking and unsurprising: I wanted to have sex with him. I had never felt this way before. Had I? I was pretty sure I hadn’t. Clearly, I needed to get him out of the house as quickly as possible. (I wanted to take off my clothes and I wanted him to take off his clothes, and when we were both naked, I wanted—well, any number of scenarios would work. I could get on top of him, or he could get on top of me, or he could enter me from behind, with me pressed against the couch cushions. I didn’t generally love that position, but in this case, I’d take it. I’d take any of it.)

  As I descended the stairs, my heart pounded, and this was not anxious heart; it was something else entirely, something familiar, though I hadn’t experienced it for years. There was a pressure in the roof of my mouth, and even my saliva had thickened. Surely when I saw Hank sitting there, regular Hank, the friend with whom I discussed diaper rash and preschool admissions, surely this anticipatory alertness in my body would correct itself. Surely.

  He turned his head as I entered the living room, and nothing was corrected; I felt deranged with lust. How had I managed, for the last two years, to ignore how good-looking he was, his eyes and his smile and his smooth, dark forearms? He patted the couch next to him and said, “Come on over,” and still, we both might have pretended this was all just friendliness—maybe on his part it was—as I foolishly, foolishly sat beside him. Not as close as I’d have sat to Jeremy, not touching, but not far enough away.

  The local news had come on—the anchor was describing a bank robbery in Fenton—and I said, “Did they mention Vi yet?” My voice sounded oddly normal.

  “Are you kidding? She was the top story.” His tone was normal, too.

  “Of course she was.” I reached for the beer I’d left on the table and took a sip. (I wasn’t drunk; I can’t use that as an excuse.) I tried to make myself think of Jeremy, but he seemed like an idea and not a person; instead of being a body next to me, his name was just a word, and the body next to mine was someone else’s.

  The local news turned into The Tonight Show. It had been fifteen minutes since either of us had spoken, and I was afraid that if I did speak, it would be to beg Hank to touch me. Then, at the same time, we both started to talk. Hank motioned for me to go ahead, and I said, “I was just going to say we should go to the zoo tomorrow. I’m driving out to my dad’s at some point, but we’re free besides that.” (Really, I was the dullest person on the planet. No wonder I irritated Vi.)

  “Sure. We’d be up for the zoo.” There was another full minute of silence, then Hank said, “See, I’ve gotten used to people seeing me out with Amelia during the day and assuming I’m her deadbeat dad—that she’s one of the seven children I have with my five different baby
mamas, and she’s just the one who’s with me while her mom is off, you know, collecting welfare.”

  “Hank,” I said. “No one would ever think that.”

  “Trust me,” he said. “They would and they do. That’s not even my point. I’m used to it. It’s just that, the idea that I’d kidnap this little white girl—it’s like, okay, assume I’m a deadbeat, but seeing me as a child molester—that’s where I draw the line.”

  “Hank, I’m not just saying this to make you feel better. I swear to God I can’t imagine anyone ever in a million years thinking you’re a child molester.”

  “Besides the security guard who thought exactly that? And the responsible Target shopper who turned us in?” He was quiet before saying, “You want to feel like you’re above all these prejudices and stereotypes. Like, hey, it’s 2009! We can chart our own path! But me being the stay-at-home parent, it’s not just other people who still don’t get it. With Courtney, our deal was that this setup would give me more time to paint, and she’s like, ‘I don’t see any paintings.’ Not even from the perspective of generating income—she just wonders how I can have any self-respect doing nothing besides hanging out with a three-year-old all day.”

  Of course Courtney would wonder this. “I think anyone who’s ever stayed home with a child knows how hard it is,” I said.

  “She’s right, though,” Hank said. “I mean, what the fuck am I doing with my life? You wouldn’t think it to look at us now, but there was a time when Courtney and I were considered equally promising. In our separate fields, we were both going to light the world on fire. Do you even know that I have a master’s in painting?” Before I could respond, he said, “Not to mention the whole traitor-to-the-race thing. First I squander my Harvard education studying art, then I marry a white girl, then I let her support me. When I could be a hedge fund manager in Manhattan, making big donations to my church, grooming my daughter for Jack and Jill.”