Breakdown Lane, The (22 page)

“We met your friend, India Holloway,” I told him. “You know. The grandmother of the excellent would-be sister raper.”

“India’s a special woman,” Leo said.

“Did you hear what the hell I just said?” I hissed at him.

“Leave it, Gabe,” Caroline told me.

“Look, I admire your self-reliance, guys, but this wasn’t a very mindful thing to do.”

“You should know. Can we please leave?” I asked him.

And finally we did. Caro’s face was a little white disc at the window.

Ten times, that night, I dialed home, and ten times I didn’t press the

SEND
button. What would I say? What did I owe Mom to say? Did she need preparing for what would be a helluva shock (but, my God, she couldn’t be so dim she didn’t know he wasn’t coming back, when we already did, at least subconsciously)? Was I the one to do this?

Was I the one to do any of this?

I didn’t relish the prospect of assuming permanent guardianship of my little sister. I didn’t relish the prospect of…like, dropping out of school and working at ABS or someplace to help Mom make ends meet. It was sort of old Jimmy Cagney–movie semi-appealing, but also appalling. It also made me want to shake my mother, actually. Since this whole thing began, I don’t think I’d had an uncharitable thought toward her, probably because Caro had so many. But at that moment, I envied old Leon, with his soul flown through the open door of the cage. Paying boarder or not, Cathy was only Mom’s friend. I couldn’t expect her to take on the role of full-time helper if my mother had spells or switchbacks or whatever. And though I had never raised the subject with her, I knew she would never agree to take money from Grandfather Gillis’s trust funds for us; she’d rather have died.

I decided to drop out then. I wasn’t sure exactly when, but school was so over.

In fact, childhood was so over. It had been for a while.

It was like some stupid pop song. Drop out, get a manual labor job and a fast car. I decided to drop out when I turned sixteen, take the GED and go to school later, like when our trust funds matured. Or maybe they had special scholarships for idiots who could write advice columns. There would be no choice if Leo went through with this. The thought of never having to see any of the goateed assholes at Sheboygan LaFollette cheered my misery considerably. The thought of never having to see Mrs. Kimball again after a few more months about made me have an erection. I lay on Mrs. Amory’s perfectly soft and nice mattress and searched for sleep without any luck. I saw the red numbers flip over to one, one-thirty, two. I wanted to call Tian or at least Luke and say,
Get this.

But there was no one to call. I almost wished I’d stayed back in Sunrise Holler with Caro. At least then I’d have had someone to compare notes with. I wondered what they were talking about now, Joy and
Leon
and my sister, over a dinner of lettuce and water.

I finally got up at six o’clock and took a walk, my shoes having dried a size smaller next to the woodstove. I found a diner. The pretty girl with the auburn hair, the sister of Joy, was a waitress there. I didn’t recognize her at first, because all her hair was pulled up. “Hi,” she said when I sat down. “You’re Leon’s kid.”

“His name is Leo,” I told her. “His name is Leo Steiner, and he’s a lowlife piece of shit who left my mother and got involved with your sister—who I’m sure is a nice person—without telling us.”

“I kind of gathered that,” she said. “You want coffee?” I tapped my cup. “Food?”

“Yeah, the whole left side of the menu,” I told her. She brought me the eggs and toast I ordered and some waffles I hadn’t, and she sat down with me for a minute.

“You know, Joy really
is
a nice person,” she said. I remembered her name then: Terry, short for Easter. I was in the county of the Land of Oz. “She’s a little bit trusting, though. Leon’s a lot older than she is. She’s twenty-eight; she’s the oldest, and she’s never really been involved for long with anyone before.”

“How old are you?” I asked her.

“Twenty-one,” she said. “I love my sisters and my mother. There are three more of us. I have a sister who’s eighteen, Liat—that’s from some musical….”

“South Pacific,”
I said. “The girl was Tonkinese.” I thought of Tian.

“You know a lot about history!”

“I don’t really consider musical theater history.”

“And there are Kieron and Grace, who are both older than me and have three kids each. We all live in the yellow submarine. But not me, not for long. I’m getting out of the valley.”

“How come?”

“Just, it just creeps me, everyone always on top of you, and I want to have a life of my own, live on a New York street like any other single girl, go to school, quit weaving like the miller’s daughter in the fairy tale….”

“What if you couldn’t leave?” I asked. “What if your mother was stone sick?”

“I’d find someone to take care of her, or I’d find her someone to live with who’d take care of her in exchange for rent. But I’d take care of her, too, when I could.” She gave me a straight-alley look. “I wouldn’t give up my life.”

“What if she’d given hers up…like, for you?”

“What? Did you have a terminal illness and she gave you bone marrow?”

I thought, What the hell, I’ll never see this person again, so I said, “Yeah, I did.”

“Then you owe her more. You owe her to
have
more life for yourself. Like, see my mother? She’s a cool person, but she’s completely into the idea that the sun rises in this valley because she came here. And Joy buys that. Our father named her for his mother, Joyce? She changed her name to Joyous. Joyous Devlin. And I was Easter?” She pointed to her name tag. “My mother did this to me when I was eight? Easter’s over. The second day I’m out of here, I’m Terry again.”

“I can see you better that way.”

“Well.”

“Well, I’m outta here in the morning, if not today,” I said.

“Good luck, and listen up. He didn’t want that second baby or the first.”

“Who?”

“Leon. Leo. Your loser dad. I heard them. I used to stay over there? And I heard them. He was like, I’ve done this. I wasn’t good at it.”

“He can say that again.”

“So consider yourself lucky, kid. You got one sane parent. Sick or not sick.”

“Where’s your dad?”

“He died. He…died after my mother left him.” She looked up at the acoustical tile. I didn’t want to ask any more details. “I don’t even remember him. Just that he used to feed me bacon off his plate when he came in, in the morning. He worked the graveyard shift.”

“Where?”

“At the graveyard,” she said. “I’m not kidding. He was a night watchman at a graveyard.”

“How do you get
that
job?”

“Well, he wasn’t all bad. I don’t remember. But I know this. Not wanting to live in trees doesn’t make you all bad.” I put money down on the table and gulped when she stuck it down her bra. “Every little bit helps. Next time you see me, I’ll be gone.”

With that thought, I trudged up the road to where the sign turned left at the Breakdown Lane. Caro was still looking out the window. She reminded me of somebody’s dog. When she saw me coming, she threw open the front door. “He’s taking us home today. He has to take Amos. He says Joy is too sick. Funny, huh? He wasn’t that worried about Mom being sick.”

“Well, she is sick,” I said. “Joyous is.”

“I thought she had to feed the young prince twenty times a day.”

“He didn’t tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“Why Joy’s sick?”

“No. Look, I could so not care if she had Lou Gehrig’s,” Caro said.

“She’s not a bad person.”

“Oh, yeah, I can see that from her behavior.”

“It wasn’t all her idea. What about our very excellent father?”

“But why does he have to bring the baby? Talk about insult to injury. What about her mother and her dozen clone sisters?”

I shrugged. I didn’t feel like explaining. My father came out of his office and I jumped. He looked like his normal self, in a turtleneck shirt and a sport coat. He had his old duffel over one arm and a diaper bag as big as our trash used to be under the other. The baby was strapped to his front, asleep. He looked like a bomb ready to go off.

“Let’s go,” he said, touching Caro under the chin. He looked at me. “Where’s your stuff? Still at the inn? We can pick it up on the way.”

Joy wouldn’t come out of the bedroom.

“She’s tired,” Leo explained. “The early months of pregnancy are hard.”

I tried for Caro’s sake to pretend that he meant the early months of raising an infant. Or I must not have wanted to hear him say one more inexplicably despicable thing. But I heard Caro gasp. And I snapped.

“I thought that the beauty of Joyous Devlin—yeah, I know that’s her name—is she doesn’t make you do anything. I thought,” I said, “that she was perfectly capable of raising him and his successor in this community without a formal commitment.”

“Go get in the car, Gabe,” he said.

I sat up when I heard the baby’s wail.

And then, before I could even slip into my flip-flops, there was Leo. Leo, standing in my doorway.

“Lee! It’s you? For real?”

“The very same,” he said, and sighed. “It hasn’t been that long, Julie.”

“It feels longer. Time has been sort of fungible. I got sick….”

“I heard.”

“How’d you hear? You disappeared.”

“I have my sources.”

“Did you
just
hear?”

“Yesterday.”

“And you came right away,” I breathed, gratitude like honey filling my throat.

I reached up and touched his face, ignoring his flinch, like a leap in the line of a lie detector’s pen. “I’m memorizing your face.”

“So soon forgotten!” he joked.

He leaned over and kissed me, my husband, flattening his hand on my belly, opening his lips to just such an aperture through which our inner lips could touch. It was not, no, it wasn’t passion I felt, but redemption, a wafer on my tongue. He smelled of Leo, coffee beans, wintergreen, and Ivory soap. His arms sinewy, never large but strong enough, were around me, pulling me upward as if I were a child. “Were you in a place that had no phone service? Did something…what happened?”

“You don’t know?”

“Don’t know? Were you hurt? In the hospital? Because I—”

“The children came to find me, Julie. Caroline and Gabe.”

“Honey, the kids were at my sister’s. All of spring break. Don’t tell me you were in the
Hamptons
.”

“They were never at your sister’s.”

“Wait.” I sat down on the bed.

“They, ah, told you they were going to Janey’s, and they told Janey they were going with my parents, and they took a bus to New England….”

“A bus? Alone?”

Leo chuckled. “They were pretty intrepid.”

“Intrepid? I can’t even take this in. You knew about this and you didn’t stop them?”

“I didn’t know about it. I gather only Cathy knew about it.”

“Cathy.
Cathy!
”

And then the baby cried, again. It had been no dream. And all the swords that had been hanging over my head fell at once.

I said, “Who’s that?”

“Well, Julie, that’s Amos.”

“Amos?”

“My son. I had a baby, Julie, with a woman in upstate New York, a woman I love very much. Maybe not the way we loved each other once upon a time, not the way you can love someone the first time, but not every love has to—”

“You had a baby! You had a baby! You brought your baby to my house!”

“Well, he needs his father, Julie. You’d be the first to say that. Joy isn’t feeling well right now….”

I tried to swallow the irony of this. Then, I stepped back and spit on his chest.

“Jesus!” he cried, leaping up as if I’d scalded him.

The older kids sidled in then, one after the other, Caroline holding the little dark-haired baby, her eyes the huge eyes of a child in some cheap painting. Gabe fixed his stare out of the window at the swing set where all of them had played.

“You can feed him, Caro,” Leo said. “Just put some…do you have spring water…?”

“
And
juice,” Gabe said softly, “
and
fresh air. And windows that open and close.”

“Just warm it a little. Joy likes him to take it room temperature.”

“Give me the telephone, Gabe,” I said, standing up, thankful that I didn’t falter or wobble. “I have to get a witness for this. I think this may be unprecedented.” I began to dial Cathy’s number, believing that I otherwise might abscond my body and kill him. I might try to take the receiver to bash in his skull or the half smile on his face. Then I realized I was dialing Connie’s number. Cathy had lost her cell phone. “You were at my sister’s house.” Gabe shook his head ruefully, hating even then to disobey. “You weren’t at my sister’s house. You lied to me and got away with it because of the medicine. You knew I couldn’t catch you. You went to…him.” I am putting them in the middle of him and me, I scolded myself, making them a prize or a carcass. “And you made Cathy go along with it.”

“We went to
get
him,” Gabe said.

“And you got him. Now what?”

He huffed, exasperated. “Wasn’t that what you wanted, Mom? Just a chance to talk to Dad? Wasn’t that what you kept moaning for when you were out of it?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t imagine this! I didn’t want his…spawn.”

“There’s always catch and release.”

“Don’t joke,” I said, my head throbbing. “I want to work some things out before Cathy gets here with Aury. I don’t want a scene for Aury. As for what you did, it was foolish and stubborn. You could have been killed or hurt….”

“We called Cathy every night. She knew.”

“It was foolish on Cathy’s part then.” I went into the kitchen, and reached up into a cupboard for a bottle of aspirin. But I couldn’t manage the aspirin bottle; Leo had to do it, and the water kept sluicing through my fingers as I tried to cup enough to wash down the chalky pills. Acutely aware of being clad only in a flannel shirt, I asked everyone to leave while I went back into my room and dressed, which I did with care and extraordinary slowness.

As I pulled up my slacks and wrapped my belt—my once-upon-a-time once-around belt—around twice, I thought about the fact that Leo had not come home until someone cornered him in his lair. Played music on his guilt. As I tucked in my shirt and turned up my collar, as I brushed pigment on my jaw to fool the eye away from the slack, I thought about the fact that he had another child, another marriage. Not a marriage, better than
marriage
. A love match. I didn’t dare consider how this made me feel. Practical action. I would think only about what I might do for myself with Leo’s transgression. I brushed out my hair and ran mousse through it.

Wisconsin was a no-fault divorce state.

Surely, they could make an exception. If this wasn’t fault, I didn’t know what was.

No.

Well.

I thought about how I could manipulate whatever there was left of him, against him. But I didn’t think there was much left. He seemed too assured, too impatient with our dullness, our mess. He’d probably anticipated everything. And I still loved…
the rain-drenched
…

No. A guy who could kiss his wife, then draw his very next breath, and explain how very much in love he was….

No.

Some people don’t deserve second chances.

But he doesn’t want one, a carping notion nagged
. If only Leo had something he needed that I could refuse.

His parents would be home tonight.

A last glance in the mirror and then I walked, with what I hoped was a regal bearing, out into the living room. Caroline was feeding the baby in the rocking chair.

“You wouldn’t happen to have a cradle I could use?” Leo asked.

“I wouldn’t,” I said, “happen to have a cradle that you could use.” I crossed the room and selected one from a group of my father’s canes, canes he’d used as an affectation. I didn’t really need it that day, but I wanted, perversely, for Leo to see me using it.

“You need a cane?” he asked.

“Yes, for some things,” I told him. I studied his face, the shifting kaleidoscope of my children’s features that surfaced and vanished with his expressions. “I could use it now to crack your skull, but I don’t want to go to prison. I would like
you
to go to prison. However, what you’ve done isn’t against any law, except the ones that have to do with personal morality. Biblical-type laws. Your parents will want to see you, before you leave….”

“I was planning on staying a few days.”

“Where were you planning on staying?”

“At a hotel. A friend’s.”

“Leo, you have no friends,” I said softly, realizing that this was, in fact, true.

“I have friends in Sunrise Valley.”

“Is it possible that you—” I began to laugh, despite my shame—“live in a place called Sunrise Valley?”

“Is it possible that you live in a place called Sheboygan? On Tecumseh Street? West Side Julieanne Gillis?” Leo sniffed.

“Go upstairs, kids.”

“We, uh, don’t have an upstairs, Mom,” said Caro. “We have a down the hall.”

“You know that’s what I meant, sweetie.” Despite her holding the sleeping Amos over her shoulder, I kissed her. “I missed you. You were very brave. But lucky, too.”

Caro smiled sadly.

“Be careful with his head, and you have to burp him more than once or he’ll throw up…” Leo said as Caroline left.

“He changed his name,” Gabe said over his shoulder.

“I call myself Leon there,” Leo said as Gabe disappeared.

“I call you beyond belief,” I answered. “Anywhere.”

“Julieanne, I don’t expect you to understand or forgive this. I might not have been able to, at one time in my life. But I’ve read up on this. Relationships have a shelf life. Between adults, that is. Our relationship had a life. It doesn’t mean that it wasn’t real.”

“And so, this thing with…I didn’t get her name.”

“Joyous?”

“Joyous? Her name is Joyous?” I was being gutted, and yet I couldn’t help enjoying this one on some level. “Your…pal’s name is
Joyous
?”

“Well, Joy, yes. It’s a chosen name.”

“Like Leon. I’ll bet she’s…don’t tell me….”

“She makes jam.”

“Oh, God help you, Leo.” I sat down on the window seat. “You’re a caricature. And do you expect this meeting of souls to last? Forever?”

“She’s also a Pilates instructor.”

“Oh that explains it, then. She reminded you of me.”

“In answer to your question, we’re taking it one day at a time. That’s the only way Joy would do it. We’ll take this as far as it works for both of us….”

“Are you a complete idiot? You have a baby in the other room.
Is that taking it one day at a time?
You erased one family; are you going to erase another?”

“No, this feels, somehow, different.”

“Lee, it feels different because
she
feels different. Like, her boobs. Get a grip. She makes you feel twenty-five, too. Do you think that’ll last? And why the hell do I even care? I guess because you’re still
my
children’s father.”

“This was never about the children.”

“But you said it was, Leo. You said it was about too much of too much. You never went to Colorado to take photographs—”

“I did, but she went with me. She wanted to know that I was completely free of…”

“Of what? The family you snookered?”

“I didn’t
decide
to have another baby,” Leo whispered. “I didn’t even
decide
to…leave you. It unfolded that way. It was a turn of events I honestly didn’t expect. But when it did happen, I thought things happen for a reason….”

“Just not necessarily a good one, as Gabe would say.”

“I thought it over, and I realized that this might be my last chance….”

“For a young girl? For a young girl to fall for your over-the-hill self?”

“For a life of passion. For a life of my own.”

I pointed down the hall with my cane. “Good luck with a life of your own. You have four children now, Leo. But three of them live with me. And I assume that after we divorce, you’ll be paying child support in the amount of twenty-something percent—is that right—of your salary?”

“Jules, I probably don’t make half of what you make anymore. I do a lot of pro bono work and work for the community I live in.”

“Well, you can still give me twenty percent or whatever it is of what you make. Not for me. For them.”

“That’s why we need to talk, to do this fairly for all the children involved here,” Leo said. “I love my children, Julie. If you’re not up to their care, I’ll gladly take them back with me. All of them. I think the fairest thing we can do is to let the money your father put aside for the education of the children go to work for you now. This is the time for you to break that trust. Let me invest it. Or let someone else invest it, if you don’t trust me.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Really?”

Why shouldn’t he think so? Did he think I wouldn’t take care of my own, now that I knew the chips were
irrefutably
down? I had the present on my mind, how to afford Interferon, not the Ivy League.

“Well, I’m glad you’re being reasonable, given your condition and its instability. Before I left to come back here with the kids, I scanned the Net about MS. It can really throw you some curves. I know that.”

“I did cabrioles earlier today, before class, and a ballotte, in ballet class.”

“You can still do that?”

“Yes. Sometimes.”

“Because Gabe gave me the impression that you were virtually bedridden.” He glanced at the cane.

“I can do that, too.”

We stood like prizefighters, listening to each other’s breathing.

“Do you know what time my mother and father will be here?” Leo finally asked.