Beyond Summer (16 page)

I was lonely here.

When I pulled into our driveway, the old lady next door was out by her mailbox.
Speaking of lonely people
. Even though there wasn’t twenty feet between our houses, I’d only caught sight of her a couple times, when she was peeking out her window at us, or coming and going in her car. I’d knocked on her door once, thinking I’d try to be friendly. She hadn’t answered, even though the TV was on, and I knew she was in there. Today, she was watching me with her arms folded, frowning. Definitely not any friendlier than usual.

“Who’s that?” she asked, jerking her chin toward the moving van across the street as I got out of the car.

“New neighbors, I think.” I took few steps closer, thinking,
Maybe she’s actually nicer than she seems. . . .

“Mmm,” she muttered, squinting at the blue house. Her lips fused together, pleating in a single frown line.

“They had kind of a commotion over there earlier.” Usually I could talk to a tree, but this lady was hard to like.

“I saw,” she said. Nothing else, just,
I saw.

I thought about getting the boys out of the car. There was always the chance that she liked kids.

She turned back toward her house, then stopped and looked across the street again. “Two of you in one week.”

“What?”

“Two in one week,” she grumbled, shaking her head.

I felt my cheeks go hot, and I wasn’t even sure why. “Two of what?”

“Householders.” She snorted, and walked off without saying another word.

Barbie sped down the block, turned left instead of right, and drove three blocks in the wrong direction before whipping around the corner, catching the curb, and bouncing the rear end of the car onto one tire momentarily. After missing the highway ramp, she hung a U-turn so fast she cut off a guy in a rusty pickup truck, and he honked and gave her the finger. Changing lanes, she nearly clipped someone else.

“Mommy, no!” Mark screamed. He had destroyed enough toy cars to know what happened when two vehicles ran into each other. Aside from that, Barbie let the kids watch the news, and cop shows, and old episodes of
CHiPs
, so they knew all about police chases and the mangled results of driving disasters. Car Chase and Car Wreck were two of their favorite make believe games.

“Be quiet!” Barbie snapped, her voice vibrating through the car in an ear-piercing shriek. “Shut up! Just shut up!” Her fingers kneaded the wheel as she darted in and out of traffic.

Mark sniffled and let out the kind of long whine that usually preceded a tantrum.

“Don’t you start
crying
,” Barbie hissed through clenched teeth.

Mark responded with a loud wail, then grabbed a Happy Meal toy from the seat and threw it toward the front. It hit Barbie’s arm, bounced off, and landed on the floor.

“That’s it!” Growling in her throat like an animal about to bite, Barbie leaned over and fished for the projectile. “You want to see what that feels like? Do you?” The Escalade swerved across the center line into oncoming traffic before Barbie grabbed the Happy Meal toy and steered the vehicle into the correct lane as an oncoming garbage truck laid on the horn.

“Barbara, stop it!” I tried to reach for the wheel.

“Look ahead!” Aunt Lute cried as all three of the boys descended into tears and Jewel let out a wail in the backseat.

Lowering the window, Barbie pitched the toy out. “You want to see how it feels?” Her voice was ragged, between a desperate scream and a sob. “You want to see how it feels?” Opening the console, she grabbed one of the kids’ DVDs and threw it out the window. “It’s like this!” She pitched another. “And this, and this!”

“Pull over!” I screamed, reaching for the steering wheel again. “Pull over, now!”

Barbie whipped into a McDonald’s parking lot, then hit the brakes and threw the car into park all at once. The vehicle was still vibrating when she dropped the last DVD, buried her face in her hands, and began to sob.

My heart pounded in my throat as I leaned over, turned off the ignition, and tucked the keys into my pocket. Barbie would be getting those back over my dead body. I collapsed in my seat, my throat burning and too dry to form words.

A police cruiser pulled into the parking lot and stopped behind our vehicle.

“Barbie.” I forced her name past the pulsating lump in my throat. “There’s a police car outside.”
Thank God
, part of me said.
Thank God somebody’s here.
Then a myriad of terrible possibilities ran through my mind. If Barbie ended up in jail, what in the world would happen to the sibs?

The officer tapped on the window, but Barbie ignored it. I hit the button to lower the glass.

“Everything all right here?” The officer leaned closer to the window, taking in the whimpering kids, the sobbing driver, Aunt Lute, and then me.

“We’ve been lost,” Aunt Lute piped up, unbuckling her belt and leaning over the second seat. “Terribly so. It upset the children.”

Squinting at Barbie, the officer pursed his lips skeptically. “I had a complaint called in about reckless driving. The vehicle matched this description. You know anything about that?”

Barbie shook her head, wiped her eyes, and patted her cheeks. “I’m fine. I’m fine. I just . . .” Closing her eyes momentarily, she took a page out of Aunt Lute’s book. “. . . got lost. I don’t know this neighborhood.”

Backing away from the door, the officer asked Barbie to step out of the car.

“I’m all right now,” she insisted, and he requested that she step out of the car anyway.

“I haven’t done anything!” Her voice quavered with a haughty combination of anger and tears.

The officer braced his hands on his gun belt. “Ma’am, if you’re refusing to comply, I’ll have to remove you from the vehicle forcibly.”

Barbie unlocked the door and lifted the handle, and the officer took another step backward, as if even he were reluctant to get involved with whatever was going on in our vehicle.

Barbie stepped out, and the conversation took on the usual Barbie drama. Within minutes, she was in an epic meltdown like nothing I’d ever seen in my life. She paced the parking lot, babbling incomprehensibly about the Baby Bundles wreck, my father, the eviction from our old house, and the blistering descent of the past week, while the cop followed behind her, trying to calm her down and keep her still. Staggering over a storm grate, she twisted her ankle, then yanked her foot free, pulled off her stilettos, and threw them at the car, screaming, “Homeless people! He thinks we’re going to live in a house with homeless people lined up. Just lined up!” She raked her fingers over her hair, creating so much static that the top of her head looked like an upside-down haystack. “But we’ve got bars! We’ve got bars. That’ll keep them out. Bars on the house, and he thinks I’d live in a place like that! I’m not an idiot. I have . . . I have friends. I have . . .”

Tipping his hat back, the officer scratched his receding hairline and gave the Escalade a look that said he wished we’d landed on some planet other than his.

Inside McDonald’s, a growing audience stood plastered against the glass, watching Barbie’s performance, and in the backseat of our car, the sibs had just realized we’d, quite conveniently, stopped at a McDonald’s with a playscape out front. They wanted to go inside and enjoy the facilities.

The officer tapped the passenger-side window, and I rolled it down. “Is there someone I can call for you?” he asked, monitoring Barbie’s rant from the corner of his eye.

“Someone?” I repeated, thinking,
No, there’s no one. Not a soul in the world
.

“A friend, a relative, a clergy member?” he suggested, clearly hoping to turn us over to a higher authority, or any authority, actually.

“No, sir.” Both of us watched as Barbie kicked the car tire with her bare foot, then roared in pain. “We’re all right, I promise,” I said, trying to mollify the situation before we ended up in state custody. “She’s always like this. Well . . . not quite like this, but it’s been a bad day. She’ll calm down once we’re home.”

He slowly folded his ticket pad with what would have been our ticket still in it. “Are you a licensed driver?”

“Yes, sir. I’m sevent . . . eighteen.” I realized my birthday had passed without my even noticing. The luau and the new car I’d been expecting seemed light-years away now.

Tucking his pen in his pocket, the officer gave Barbie a worried look, then turned back to me. “All right. I want all of you to go inside, cool off, and calm down for a while. Then I want you to drive. If I see her behind the wheel again, I’m taking her straight downtown.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is she on any medications?”

“No, sir.” That was probably a lie. In the past week, Barbie had made short work of a bottle of Xanax, as well as a smattering of herbal stuff provided to her by her only remaining friend, Fawn. “This is just her. She’s high-maintenance. You should see her when she breaks a nail.”

Shaking his head, he pulled his hat into place and backed off. The police procedure manual probably didn’t have a recommendation on what kind of social services to call for a hysterical, stiletto-throwing woman having a really bad day in the McDonald’s parking lot.

“All right.” He pointed a stern finger at me. “Take a little break until everyone’s got it together; then head on home. Safely.”

“Yes, sir.”

His police radio beckoned, and he took advantage of the opportunity to hurry off and engage a problem that could be solved.

I climbed out, retrieved Barbie’s shoes, shoved them into her stomach so hard she coughed out a breath, and said, “Here. Good job, Barbara. You just about managed to get us taken to jail.” I pictured Barbie under incarceration and the sibs and me stuck in some kind of emergency shelter, and a shiver went down my spine. There were worse places than the blue house with the burglar bars. Much worse.

Barbie stood on the sidewalk with her shoes dangling loosely in her hands as I unloaded the sibs and herded them, along with Aunt Lute, toward the restaurant. “For heaven’s sake, Barbie, get a grip!” I growled out, waving at the officer as he circled the parking lot and drove off.

Inside McDonald’s, the sibs and Aunt Lute headed for the play yard, trailed by the curious stares of restaurant patrons. Stifling a sob, Barbie dashed toward the restroom, a hand over her face. I didn’t try to stop her. Locking herself in the bathroom was one of Barbie’s favorite tricks. It drove my father nuts. Undoubtedly, we were going to be in McDonald’s for a while—however long it took Barbie to get her head together and realize that the blue house around the corner was the only place we had to go.

At least the sibs were happy in the meantime. Within moments of our arrival, Aunt Lute had them convinced the playscape was a castle, and they’d forgotten all about the mama drama. Meanwhile, Barbie’s emotional surrender to reality slowly progressed, first in the bathroom and then in the play area. While Jewel dozed in her carrier, Barbie stared out the window, her eyes tracking the passing cars, flicking from one to the next as if she were waiting for a solution to drive by. Every so often, she fished her cell phone from her purse, thumbed through her contacts, dialed up a number, then either waited while no one answered or, occasionally, had short conversations with ex-friends whose discomfort echoed through the phone. Everyone Barbie knew was suddenly on the way out of town, had company in the guest room, or felt it was better not to get involved. Even Fawn was “putting new carpet” in her apartment, but she did promise to come take Barbie “out for a mocha later in the week and talk about everything
.
” Listening in from the next table, I almost felt sorry for Barbie. She was finding out that nobody cared.

Eventually, the twins lost interest in employing the playscape for its intended use, and began running around the enclosure like over-wound toy trucks, making engine noises and bumping into the walls and other kids. When Landon fell asleep on the lower deck, they made a game of bombing their sleeping brother with balls from the ball pit. The only other mom in the place gathered her kids, sent a dirty look our way, and left. A few minutes later, the manager came in and gave us the boot. “You can’t stay there. This is a restaurant, not a day care.” He studied us while chewing his lip, then shook his head and walked away.

I felt sick to my stomach. “Barbara, we have to go.”

She didn’t answer. She just picked up her cell phone and started thumbing through her contacts again.

I walked over and scooped Landon off the floor, then told the twins to put on their shoes. They ignored me, of course, and disappeared into the maze of brightly colored tunnels overhead. Landon sagged in my arms like a rag doll, his hair tickling my chin, his feet bumping my thighs as I turned back to Barbie and Aunt Lute. “We need to go.
Now
.”

Aunt Lute slid to the edge of the seat and unfolded herself to a standing position, then walked to the edge of the playscape. Linking her hands behind her back, she bent forward and began walking back and forth in front of the slide as if she were searching for something on the floor. The boys stopped to watch from the playscape balcony. Mark asked what she was doing.

“I think they’ve left tracks,” she told him.

“What tracks?”

“The leopards,” was Aunt Lute’s answer. “I think they’ve left tracks.” She moved slowly toward the door, still trailing the leopards. Mark and Daniel slid down the slide and fell into line behind her.

“We mustn’t forget the little pea,” Aunt Lute pointed out, touching Jewel’s face and grabbing the car keys I’d set on the table, then heading out the door. The noise of the boys’ departure caused Jewel to whimper. Barbie gave the sound a dull look, then dialed another number on her phone.