A Long Thaw (19 page)

He would fall asleep amid one of their talks and Rachel would stay with him, filing her nails or napping. He’d signal his wakefulness by playing with the buttons of the adjustable bed, the buzz as it moved giving Rachel a jolt that made him laugh.

She’d taught him French then, the little of it she was learning in her classes. College prep. He winked at her. ‘That’s my girl,’ he’d say. ‘Now tell me some of your fancy French words.’

And that was how it felt, as if it was theirs alone, a way to tell secrets in the room with her mother. ‘
Je suis fatigué
,’ he’d say, in an accent that was even worse than her own, and she would know that he was tired, despite the brave face he gave to his wife.

She still feels like the language belongs to them.

He had died in the hospital, but Rachel honestly can’t remember that part. She remembers the funeral, the way the house felt without him. She remembers that awful year before Allen left, him trying to be in charge of her and Rachel hating him for it. And then he was gone, too, and it was just Rachel and her mother in that big house. She had missed him then.

But, no, she doesn’t remember her father’s last days in the hospital or the exact moment they told her he’d died. For a while she tried, the blank space in her mind alarming, but eventually she gave up, content to remember those long afternoons they’d had together. She had got to know her father just in time to lose him. But she has come to see how much better that is than the alternative.

Rachel was miserable during her entire pregnancy. The morning sickness was immediate and it lasted all day. She couldn’t eat and she couldn’t not eat. She couldn’t stay awake past two in the afternoon and she couldn’t sleep well: the soreness in her breasts woke her up. By the time the doctor confirmed that she was pregnant, she was just comforted to know she wasn’t dying.

Henry took over food preparation. Rachel could usually be persuaded to eat dinner, but not if she had to be a witness to the way it was made. They stopped having sex altogether. Besides feeling awful, Rachel couldn’t stand her own body smells. They were different, foreign. By the end of her first trimester, she was wondering if she’d made a huge mistake. She didn’t feel the excitement, the bliss she’d been told to expect. She felt like she’d been taken over by an alien, a parasite.

Her second trimester was better, but it flew by. She was teaching art at the elementary school then and was simply relieved that the nausea ended before she had to go back in the fall. She wished she had paid more attention to those months once the headaches started and she was diagnosed with pre-eclampsia. She spent the last months of her pregnancy on bed rest, racked with a perpetual anxiety like nothing she’d ever known, counting the days as she got closer to a healthy delivery date, feeling like a ticking time bomb.

When she held her daughter for the first time, she felt overwhelmed with relief and love in equal measure. She didn’t forget the misery, though. She didn’t even feel that much better for another few weeks. Even with all of that, Abby was the best idea Rachel had ever had.

Her second best idea was Henry’s vasectomy.

They’d gone without sex nearly an entire year of their marriage. Rachel hadn’t ever worried that Henry would be unfaithful: it was just something they suffered together. Once they had both healed from their respective medical ordeals, they resumed their lovemaking with gusto. Now there was no fumbling with condoms or planning ahead with the diaphragm, not even the slightest worry in the back of her mind. That first night they made love in the back yard, changing position several times without a second thought. He came inside her and she rolled onto her back, his seed spilling onto the grass. The moonlight made their naked bodies glow. The earth smelt ripe with spring. Everything was new again. Abby was asleep in a bassinette a few feet away.

And it was certainly convenient while Abby was growing up. While Rachel’s friends were complaining about the sexlessness of mommyhood, she was meeting Henry for quickies in the laundry room during Saturday-morning cartoons.

When Abby begged for siblings, they’d eventually had to sit her down, delivering a clumsy, age-appropriate explanation for why it would never happen. It wasn’t until Abby was in high school that Rachel realized she’d misunderstood. She’d been sitting cross-legged on her parents’ bed, pawing through Rachel’s jewellery box.

‘What’s this?’ she asked, holding up a silver necklace.

Rachel squinted at it. ‘St Jude. Patron saint of lost causes.’

‘I didn’t think God believed in lost causes.’

‘Maybe something got lost in translation. I think it’s actually more like desperate situations. It was a gift from your grandmother.’

‘Did she give it to you when you were having trouble getting pregnant?’

Henry’s vasectomy was transformed into a struggle with infertility. Rachel didn’t see the value in trying to set her straight, didn’t see how it could matter anymore. ‘I don’t remember,’ she said.

Actually, she did remember. Her mother had given it to her when she’d left for the Peace Corps. Rachel remembers being somewhat offended by the insinuation that the work she’d be doing was a lost cause. In retrospect, she was probably being overly sensitive.

‘Can I have it?’ Abby asked.

‘The necklace?’

‘Yeah. I think it worked. You got me.’

Abby held up her hair while Rachel worked the fastener.

Allen’s under the sink in her mother’s kitchen when Rachel comes through the door. He scurries out and looks up at her. ‘Leak,’ he says, and waves his wrench at her as if to prove it.

‘Of course.’ Rachel takes off her coat, letting it sink in. This is her mother’s way of getting them to forgive each other. She sits at the breakfast table.

‘How’ve you been?’ he asks.

‘Fine. You?’

He shrugs and nods and Rachel doesn’t have time to ask what that means before he disappears under the sink again.

‘Where’s Mom?’ Rachel has to shout.

‘She went out to get subs.’

‘I was under the impression she and I were having lunch alone.’

He shimmies back out and sets his wrench in the toolbox that had once belonged to their father. ‘So was I.’ He gets to his feet and dusts off his jeans.

‘So I guess we’re supposed to talk to each other,’ Rachel says.

‘I guess so.’ Allen hooks his thumbs through his belt loops and leans against the counter with his ankles crossed. He looks like a cowboy, like he should be chewing the end of a long piece of straw.

Rachel watches him expectantly as the silence swells between them.

‘I’m not going to stand here and try to justify my life to you, Rachel.’

She flinches. Stupidly, she had let herself hope for something else.

‘The past is the past.’

That old excuse
, Rachel thinks. ‘Okay. And the present? Can we talk about that?’

‘Meaning?’

‘Juliet?’

He scowls. ‘I sent her a letter. She doesn’t want me in her life.’

‘And you’re just going to leave it at that?’

‘What am I supposed to do? Chase her down? She has every right to hate me. Don’t I have to respect that?’

‘Maybe,’ Rachel admits, although she isn’t sure. ‘And if she calls you? Will you explain yourself to her or do you tell her the past is the past?’

‘I suppose I would have to try, wouldn’t I? Not that it would matter much to her.’

‘It might.’

‘Nothing I say could excuse it.’

‘No. I suppose not.’

In the silence that follows, Rachel gets the plates out of the cabinets and starts to set the dining-room table for three.

The past was the past.

Her mother returns, giving kisses all around like it’s any other day.

‘Very subtle,’ Rachel says, under her breath.

‘Subtlety is not a virtue I care to attain, dear. Let’s go sit at the table.’

The phone rings as they are sitting down but her mother waves a hand to ignore it. ‘Everyone I’d want to talk to is right here.’

The machine picks up. A computerized voice says, ‘Hello. Please leave a message at the tone.’

‘You still haven’t changed that?’ Rachel says, rolling her eyes at Allen.

Her mother shrugs. ‘I can’t work those things.’

‘I can show you,’ Allen says. ‘It’s not that hard.’

‘Shush,’ their mother orders, craning her neck towards the kitchen.

‘Nana, I don’t know what to do.’ It’s Juliet and she’s crying. Rachel realizes from Allen’s expression that he’s unable to recognize her voice.

‘I’m at the hospital,’ she continues. Rachel and her mother get to their feet.

‘Abby’s hurt.’ Juliet begins to sob and Rachel runs to the phone, afraid she might not get there in time.

At a summer barbecue when Abby and Juliet were five, a guest had a few too many beers and decided it would be funny to hold Juliet by her ankles over the railing of the back deck. The rest of the guests tittered nervously, no one wanting to be the one to speak up and spoil the fun. Juliet was as white as a sheet, even with the blood rushing to her head. Her eyes were wide with terror, but she was silent.

‘Give her back,’ Abby said, but the crowd thought that was cute. Juliet’s sandal slipped off her foot and fell into the grass one storey below. Her blonde curls shook as the man laughed.

Abby started shrieking.

Rachel and Allen charged through the sliding doors and assessed the situation in a heartbeat. They moved as if they were one person, separate physical extensions of a single mind. Rachel reached for Juliet, scooping her up into her arms while Allen grabbed the man by his shirt and shoved him into the side of the house.

Rachel held Juliet tightly as her tiny body trembled. ‘Not here,’ she said to Allen, in a low voice.

Allen held the man by the back of the neck and pushed him through the glass doorway, into the house and out onto the front lawn.

Rachel set Juliet down in front of her and smoothed out her sundress. ‘See? You’re okay,’ she said, and she smiled.

When the police show up at the hospital, Juliet tells them everything. His name, her relationship with him, how long he’s been out of jail, that his first conviction was for drugs. She even tells them about the cheque fraud, but they say she’ll have to go down to the station and file a separate report about that. She will.

‘What happens now?’ Juliet asks.

The officer closes his notepad and slips his pen into his breast pocket. ‘Once they’re finished stitching him up, he’ll be transported and processed. If this information checks out, it sounds like he won’t be bothering you or your friend again anytime soon.’

It comforts her. She doesn’t like to think of him under the same roof as Abby, even if he is under police guard.

Rachel and Allen charge through the emergency-room door. Juliet stands up and walks forward. Three steps.

‘Where is she?’ Rachel asks.

‘Surgery.’

‘What happened? She was
shot
?’

Juliet nods.

‘Where?’

‘Our apartment.’

‘No. Where on her body?’

‘Here.’ Juliet holds her hand over the left side of her chest, high, almost to her shoulder. Closer, she hopes, than to her heart. She remembers then that she has Abby’s blood on her. She has tried to rub it off onto her jeans but her palms are still pink. Her shirt is covered. At least it has dried and stopped spreading.

Rachel runs to the front desk and begins to explain who she’s there to see.

‘Who did this?’ Allen asks.

Juliet looks up at him and her knees buckle. He reaches for her, but he can’t catch her in time.

Juliet sits on an examining table as a nurse cleans her face and hands of blood. It’s not all Abby’s now. Her face hit the floor and her lip split and there’s a doctor coming in soon to give her stitches.

Allen stands by the door, looking at his shoes. He carried her in here when she fell. She was too disoriented to protest.

The nurse discards the bloody cloth in a waste bin labelled for toxic materials. She tapes gauze to Juliet’s mouth and tells Allen the doctor will be in shortly.

Juliet listens as an overhead clock ticks off the seconds.

‘Maybe you should lie back,’ Allen suggests.

‘Maybe you should check on Aunt Rachel,’ Juliet counters.

‘I will. In a minute.’

It occurs to Juliet that these are the first things they’ve said to each other in ten years.

‘It was Jesse,’ she says.

‘What was?’

‘You asked who did this. It was Jesse.’

‘Your Jesse?’

Juliet nods.

‘Why?’

Juliet shakes her head slowly. ‘Abby was protecting me.’

She wakes to Juliet’s worried face and sees the black thread holding together the swollen flesh above her mouth, in the little dip between her nose and her top lip. ‘Are you okay? Did he hurt you?’

Juliet laughs through her tears. ‘Me? I’m fine. How are you?’

Satisfied, Abby drifts back to sleep.

Once she can sit up, and the pain meds have been reduced enough that she can think, she asks someone to call Ryan.

‘Done,’ her mother says. She’s wearing the same clothes she showed up in that first day. Her dirty hair is tied up in a beige rubber band, the kind meant for office work.

Abby’s father sits against the wall, holding his head. When he tries to speak, his voice cracks and he has to leave the room. He’s been pretty quiet, the last few hours.

When she asks, finally, what happened, they tell her Jesse is in a lot of trouble. According to surveillance footage, he’d been shot during an attempted convenience-store robbery. The attempt had failed and police are still looking for his accomplice. They’d found Jesse already. He hadn’t got far after he’d left the apartment and ended up collapsed in the stairwell. He’d been taken to a hospital, treated and released into the custody of the Boston police.

‘He’d better hope they keep him locked up where I can’t get to him,’ Nana says, and everyone in the room agrees.

Juliet stands next to the door while the nurse changes the bandage. Abby looks away but Juliet can’t. It’s a kind of penance.

‘Trying to upstage me with a split lip.’ Abby shakes her head as the nurse leaves and Juliet pulls a chair close to the bed.