A Simple Thing (7 page)

“Susannah?”

Susannah's heart clenched. Sweet Jesus, she'd been on this island all of sixty minutes and her mother was already checking in. Just the sound of her mother's voice stirred an undercurrent of anger and irritation in Susannah, something dark and viscous. It had begun shortly after Katie was born, when Susannah had looked at the tiny infant in her arms and been filled with a sudden rage. She could not imagine a mother, any mother, failing to protect her children, as her own mother had. From that moment, Susannah had sworn to herself:
Not on my watch. Never
.

“Mom?”

“Hi. Do you have a minute?”

Susannah took a deep breath. “I'm kind of busy right now. Can I call you back?”

“Of course. What are you doing?”

“Well, we literally just got here, to our house. We haven't even unpacked yet.”

“Is it habitable?”

“Of course it's habitable. It's a house, with four walls and a roof and a bathroom and everything you'd expect.”

“I wasn't sure
what
to expect.”

“It's nice. It's definitely
different
from what we're used to, but it's nice.”

“I just wanted to suggest one thing about Quinn.”

Quinn was her mother's clear favorite, and he in turn adored “Dida,” the name that had stuck after his first, baby attempts to pronounce “Lila,” Susannah's mother's name. With Quinn's birth eleven years ago, the hard, protective shell Lila had worn for so many years had cracked, and she'd allowed herself to fall in love with this fair-haired, blue-eyed baby. Little Katie, with her dark hair and dark eyes and stubborn moods, had been too reminiscent of Janie, Susannah's little sister—even Susannah could see that. But Quinn was Lila's second chance. They talked on the phone every week, and took trips together once a year—to Cooperstown, to the Key West Turtle Museum, to the Grand Canyon.

“What about Quinn?”

“He sent me a picture last week that showed him with long hair. I know he was getting teased at school, and that hair can't help. You should cut it so he doesn't get teased at his new school.”

“Quinn likes it long, Mom.”

“Yes, but it looks terrible.” Lila paused. “Can't Matt talk to him? Matt has—”

“Mom? Quinn loves Jered Weaver, and Jered Weaver has long hair. It's
his
hair. And I
really
can't talk right now, I'm sorry.”

Lila sighed. “You're
always
too busy to talk. I hope this move changes
that,
at least. You run around from one thing to another like a chicken with its feet cut off.”

“
Head,
” Susannah said. “A chicken with its head cut off. A chicken with its feet cut off couldn't run.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Mom—”

“All right. But Quinn—”

“Mom.
I've got to go. I'll call you tomorrow.” Susannah slipped the phone back into her pocket. Three thousand miles and thirty years, and she still couldn't escape.

And what was she trying to escape? A childhood that wasn't, really, remarkably worse than anyone else's, at least before Janie died. Her father yelled. Her mother made excuses and apologies. Yes, her father's rages—irrational, bitter, and well fueled by the vodka martinis he drank every evening—had terrified Susannah. She never wore shoes in the house, so her footsteps didn't annoy him. She buried herself in books, reading upstairs with a flashlight in her closet. At times she was still haunted by the painful self-consciousness of those years—her profound desire to fade into the background, to become a shadow, a branch, a pebble pressed into the soil. Something you'd never notice.

But she'd survived. She'd found Matt.
Matt would never yell at me,
she remembered thinking when she was eighteen or nineteen and the idea of marrying him had first crossed her mind.
My kids would grow up totally differently with Matt for a dad
.

And they had. Matt was a kind and involved dad. While he didn't quite get why Katie was so difficult, he held her and rocked her through the sleepless nights of her first year, coached her soccer team, taught her to shoot layups, and sat at the dining room table, his graying head next to her glossy dark one, explaining her math problems. He didn't yell.

Yet still Susannah was uneasy. She looked around the room, at the space that would be home for the next nine months—a haven, or, if you were Katie, a jail. She was protecting her daughter from a threat she couldn't name, from all the unseen things that might harm her—or worse, make her feel she wasn't worth protecting.

Chapter 7

Betty 1952

Four months after the wedding, Betty miscarried. Not at all unusual, the doctor said, and nothing to worry about because she was young and healthy and had gotten pregnant so easily. Betty accepted the doctor's reassurances and tried to believe him. Someday we'll have a houseful of children, she told Bill, like the one she'd grown up in, a big old house filled with roller skates and baseballs and a piano and bicycles leaning against the front stoop. Bill had been tender with her about the miscarriage, worried about her health. But he didn't grieve the baby as she did. He wanted kids, of course he wanted kids—they'd talked about that before they got married. But she'd gotten pregnant awfully fast. Why, they hadn't even been
trying
for a baby.

A few months after the miscarriage she was curled against him in bed, her head on his chest, one arm thrown across his flat stomach. They'd made love twice already this afternoon. He stuffed another pillow behind him to prop up his head, and lit a cigarette. “Maybe now there's no baby coming and you're feeling better we could think again about Alaska,” he said.

“Alaska?” Betty pulled herself away and sat up, turning to face him. “Alaska? I thought we decided that didn't make any sense.”

“You
decided,” Bill said, taking a long drag. “I think it makes plenty of sense. Let's do it now, before we have kids. And if we like it, we'll have our kids there.”

Betty felt cold suddenly, deep inside her body. Yes, they had talked about it. Crab fishing was too dangerous, even Bill admitted that, for a man who had a wife. But he'd found out he could get a civil service job on the Fort Richardson Army Base, near Anchorage, and homestead a 160-acre parcel nearby.

“Think of it,” Bill had said. “One hundred and sixty acres all our own, for free.”

“It's not free,” Betty had said, her voice dry. “You have to farm it and live on it for five years before you own it. That's a lot of sweat and hard work. That's not ‘free.' ”

The debate had ended with the discovery of her pregnancy. Bill had agreed it would be too hard to move and homestead with a new baby. In Seattle he had a steady job with Boeing and she had her family nearby and they had their little apartment, just a ten-minute walk from her family's house on Queen Anne Hill. But Bill was restless.

Now, “Alaska's not even a state,” Betty said.

“It will be someday,” Bill said.

“And what am I going to do there?” Betty said. She'd given up her secretarial job at the lumber company when they got married, although, truth be told, she itched to work again. She took care of the house and shopped for groceries and cooked, but she didn't enjoy it the way some of her married friends did, or the way Bobbie did. Bobbie had married Dick Hudgens and had a sweet little house near the university, and was forever sewing things for the house or herself and throwing wonderful parties with themes like “An Evening in Hawaii.” Betty couldn't operate a sewing machine to save her life, nor could she understand how anyone could think that tiki torches and leis and grilled pineapple on skewers would convince anyone they were in Hawaii and not standing in a soggy, cold, fog-soaked Seattle backyard.

“You can help with the homestead,” Bill said. He gave her muscular thigh a playful slap. “You were made to be a farm wife.”

“Maybe,” Betty said, leaning over to take the cigarette from his mouth and take a drag on it herself. “But I don't want to be a farm wife.” She drew in a deep breath. “I want to go back to work, Bill. I liked my job.”

He raised both eyebrows. “Your secretary job? Working for the fat guy with the scotch bottle in his desk drawer?”

“Mr. Timmins is a smart man,” Betty said. “And he always treated me fairly.”

“Look, honey.” Bill took the cigarette back and ground it out in the ashtray on the bedside table. “I make enough money. You don't have to work. I know you're disappointed about the baby, but maybe this means we should do something different. Maybe we should wait on the whole baby thing and explore our options.”

“I don't want to go to Alaska.”

“I told you before we got married that I didn't want to stay in Seattle.”

“You also told me you loved me and you'd do anything to make me happy. So let's stay here. I can go back to work, even part-time.”

“And how long are you thinking we'll stay here?” Bill said.

“I don't know,” Betty said. “It depends. On your work, on kids, if we have them. On us and how happy we are here.”

“I'm not happy pushing papers,” Bill said.

Betty felt a stirring of unease then, something discordant. Bill loved her because she was strong, independent. But Bill also wanted her to do what
he
wanted.

“Do you want to have a baby?” she said.

She wanted a baby. She'd had a big family and a happy childhood and wanted to recreate that with Bill.

“Sure,” Bill said, but his eyes didn't meet hers. “But you're young—we're young. We can wait.”

“And go to Alaska?”

“I don't know.” He was exasperated now. “I just know I don't want to spend my life sitting in a windowless office at Boeing.” He stood up, got dressed, and then went to the closet and found his bomber jacket.

“I'm meeting some of the guys for a drink,” he said. “Don't wait up.”

Betty was just as proud and stubborn as he was. “I won't,” she said.

 

“Oh, pooh,” Bobbie said. “You don't have to go to Alaska.”

Betty and Bobbie were sitting on the back porch of their mother's house, with gin and tonics in hand and feet up on the railing. Betty had walked over after Bill left, where she found Bobbie in the kitchen, fending off Grammy.

“Your sister is ruining my pot roast,” Grammy said, when Betty arrived. “She's pouring cups and cups of beef stock in. She's doing it all wrong.”

Betty laughed. Long ago Grammy had misread her pot roast recipe and put in two and a half quarts of red wine and a cup of beef stock instead of the other way around. She'd made it exactly the same way ever since, insisting she was right even though the result was a cabernet-colored slab of tough meat that the kids fed to Smelly under the dining room table. Smelly got a little drunk after a pot roast dinner, and would lean against the door jamb in the kitchen and howl, which would lead Grammy to think Smelly was having one of her “attacks” and put her in the bathtub to calm her down.

“Smelly will love you for this,” Betty told Bobbie.

“How's married life?” Bobbie said. She grabbed Grammy's yellow flowered apron from the hook on the back of the kitchen door and tied it around her waist.

“Dreamy,” Betty said. “Isn't that the word now? Married life is dreamy.”

“Married life is dreamy, huh?” Bobbie said. “That's why you're over here at eight
p.m
. on a Saturday night?”

“
You're
over here. Where's your husband?”

“It's Dick's regular poker night. I come here every Saturday for dinner.”

“Bill's out with friends.”

“Uh-huh. What was the fight about?”

“There wasn't a fight.”

Bobbie lifted the lid from the cast-iron skillet and poked the pot roast with her fork.

“He shouldn't be arguing with you so soon after you lost the baby. No woman is in her right mind for a few months after something like that.”

Betty told her about Alaska.

“I'm going to pour us a drink,” Bobbie said.

So here they were freezing their asses off on the porch, with the gin burning a path down their throats and Smelly lying at their feet, calm and unbathed.

“You don't have to go to Alaska,” Bobbie repeated.

“Well, I don't want him to be miserable.”

“Get pregnant again.”

“I don't know,” Betty said. “I think Bill would rather wait a while. He wasn't really thrilled I got pregnant so fast.” She sighed. “Although I may not be able to help it.” It was hard to use the rhythm method when they were having sex three or four times a week, and her desire for him was strongest at exactly the time of the month when she was supposed to abstain.

“Then figure out a compromise,” Bobbie said. “He wants to go to Alaska, you don't, so think of someplace
you
want to live and convince him he wants that, too.”

Betty rolled her eyes. “You read too many magazines,” she said. “I'd like to see you convince Bill Pavalak of anything.” She closed her eyes and took in the scent of the Douglas firs that towered next to the house, the aroma of pot roast, the slightly musty smell of the old wooden porch. “And I don't want to leave Seattle. I'm happy here.”

“You should have thought of that before you got married.”

“I didn't really think about much other than Bill before I got married.”

“I know,” Bobbie said. She was quiet for a moment, rocking on the porch. “He's not the type who's going to be happy in one place, Bets. You've got to indulge his taste for change in some areas, so he doesn't indulge it in others.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” Betty's voice was sharper than she meant it to be.

“It means he stepped out on his first wife—don't look at me like that, Dick told me about it. And you don't want him to cheat on you.”

“If I've got to move to Alaska to make sure he doesn't cheat on me then I shouldn't have married him,” Betty said.

A dog barked down the street. A long silence filled the space between them, and grew until it seemed to Betty almost like a tangible thing.

“So that's what you think,” Betty said finally, her voice flat. She adored Bobbie, whose calm optimism had always been a touchstone for her. Bobbie's silence stung.

“He loves you, Bets, I really believe that. I wouldn't have let you marry him if I didn't. But he's a guy who likes adventure and change. He's not going to be happy working nine to five in an office every day for the rest of his life, then coming home to a house on Queen Anne Hill with a bunch of kids. So you have to figure out how to get some of what you want—like a big family—and give him some of what he wants.”

Betty said nothing, but rolled Bobbie's words over and over in her mind during the next few weeks. Bill had come home drunk that night, and then apologized the next morning.
He's the kind of guy who likes adventure and change
. Betty saw how hard it was for him to get out of bed on weekday mornings, how he'd lie there long after the alarm clock had rung, flat on his back, staring at the ceiling with his hands on his chest, until he'd roll over with a heavy sigh and get up. She felt the sinking mood that settled over him on Sunday nights, noticed the flatness in his voice when he talked about work.

They talked about it. He wanted,
needed
something more. They debated likely jobs for him. Forest ranger? Fishing guide? Bill kept coming back again and again to homesteading in Alaska. Betty couldn't imagine it: In addition to Bill's job at the base, they'd have to build their own house and farm their land. It seemed impossible. Yet when they talked about leaving Boeing, or leaving Seattle, Bill's whole face changed. His smile widened, the deep vertical crease between his brows softened, the tight muscles around his jaw relaxed. She couldn't kill the hopefulness in him.

He was grateful to her for considering it, and brought home flowers unexpectedly, sometimes twice a week. They made love more often than ever, lingering in bed while Bill sketched out the outlines of a log cabin on a notepad, or read books on farming. “Maybe in two years,” he said. “We could save as much as we can for two years, then we'd have something to help us get started once we move.”

Betty never agreed, but she never said no, either. The next spring, when she found out she was pregnant again, she waited three months to tell him, to make sure she wouldn't miscarry, that this one would stick. She saw the hope die in his face as soon as the words were out of her mouth.

“We could still move,” she said. “We just have to wait until after the baby comes.”

“And then we'll have to wait until the baby is older,” Bill said.

Betty saw what he saw, the future unfurling and the relentless grip of responsibility and duty and routine tightening their hold.

He tried to smile. “It's good about the baby. The doctor says you're okay?”

“The doctor says I'm fine. I'm past the point where I might have a miscarriage.”

“That's good.”

Later that night he picked up his hat and coat and went out for a walk. She assumed he was going out to drink, but he came home sober, his face and hands cold and smelling of the fresh Seattle night air. He got undressed and climbed into bed beside her and lay there staring at the ceiling without saying a word, for as long as she was awake and, she guessed, probably longer.