Family and Other Accidents (18 page)

“No rice!” she screams.

         

Jack's pants spin in the dryer downstairs, and the
Seinfeld
where Elaine won't sleep with a guy who isn't spongeworthy is on the TV in the guest room. Jack and Mona have seen it at least twice, but he waits till the closing monologue before flipping off the power with the remote.

“Jack,” she says when he clicks off the light on the nightstand. “We never did get around to—”

“I haven't slept in a week,” he says. “Let's do this later?”

She wants to scream at him, but she also wishes he'd hold her and let her warm her hands on his stomach like he did in the early days when they slept tangled as phone cord, the days before the enormous bed in the condo. But she knows he's worn thin with worry about his brother and the work he's missing, and already she hears the rattle of “coming down with something” in his lungs.

“Sure,” she says, and within minutes he's asleep.

It has been years since his snoring kept her awake, but tonight Jack's thick wheezing bothers her. Leaving him balled on his side, she wanders Connor and Laine's house: brick and stone laid more than a hundred years ago, innards clean and renovated. Connor is in the sunken family room, TV playing odd lights on his face, golden retriever at his feet. Mouse barks when she walks by, and Connor is up, shushing the dog, asking her if everything is all right.

“I just feel a little icky—” She stops mid-sentence and stares at her bare feet, blushes. Because Connor really
is
sick, even if he looks okay, even if they only talk about it in vague ways. “I can't believe how inconsiderate that was, I'm sorry.”

“Don't be.” He shakes his head. “And you're in the right place to feel sick, we've got all kinds of stomach stuff here. We have prescription stuff, over-the-counter stuff, this horrible herbal crap Laine keeps buying from some natural foods co-op. Name it, I'm sure we've got it.”

She shakes her head—no, she's fine. He pats the cream leather sofa, and she sits next to him.

“Can I ask you something kind of personal?” Connor licks pale lips. She nods. “Are you pregnant?”

Mona says nothing, and blood rushes to Connor's thin cheeks. “I'm not asking because you look fat or anything,” he says. “You look great, you always look great. It's just you and Jack are acting kind of weird, and I was wondering if that's maybe why you're sick.”

When Mona's little sister got pregnant, she conference-called the entire family, burst into the conversation by screaming, “Patrick and I have news.” Mona doesn't want to have to tell Jack's family this way, sheepish and uncertain, wants her baby to be special, too.

“We
have
been talking about it.” Mona gives the story she wishes were the truth. “Nothing yet, though, except some wishful thinking.”

“That's great.”

“Did Laine get sick much with the girls?” Mona asks.

“In the eight years I've known Laine, the closest she ever came to sick was a cold sore. She may have actually worked while she was in labor. Pretty awful, huh?” Connor shakes his head. “But she knew all the words to ‘Thunder Road,' so I married her anyway.”

“That's funny.” Mona smiles. “I never had you pegged for much of a Springsteen fan.”

“Aww, Mo, I'm crushed.” Connor brings a hand to his chest in mock agony. “All these years, and you don't know me at all. Ever since I was in junior high, I swore I'd marry the first girl who knew all the words to ‘Thunder Road.' It happened to be Lainey. When we were in grad school, we'd drive for hours. And she'd lean across the stick of the Sentra and sing in my ear.” Standing, he hands Mona the remote. “TV's all yours. I'm gonna go to bed before she realizes I'm awake and tries to make me take more ginseng.”

“She loves you,” Mona says, touched by the image of Laine, all five feet eleven inches of her, all two Harvard diplomas, singing a song about blue-collar Jersey kids who'd never heard of soy milk.

“Yeah, she's just like Jack, though. She's not good when she's not in control.”

For fourteen years Mona has tried to figure Jack out, and his brother has done it with one sentence.

“Jack will make a great dad, though.” Connor turns around halfway to the step out of the room. “After our mom died, I had these really horrible nightmares, where I'd wake up screaming. And Jack would come check on me, bring me a glass of water. For a couple weeks, they were like clockwork, and he started anticipating when I'd wake up. They tapered off, but even on nights I was fine, I'd wake up and there'd be water by my bed.” Connor lowers his head, looks away. “I wish my kids knew him like that.”

Maybe the story is true, or maybe Connor knows she's lying about not being pregnant and tells it to make her feel better, either way she's grateful. He starts to leave again, but she calls after him, sings quietly.
“Screen door slams, Mary's dress waves. Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays.”

“Don't tempt me, Mo.” Connor smiles, which makes him look like his brother. “I'm a married man.”

And she's a married woman, though she didn't marry Jack because he knew all the words to a certain song, she married Jack because she got a concussion. After living together for six years in Cleveland, they couldn't set a wedding date, and she realized it was because neither of them wanted to get married. So she took the job in Chicago; it was okay for a few months, she even dated a Channel 4 reporter she met on assignment. But while making coffee in the break room, she whacked her forehead on the cabinets. The paper was on deadline, so one of the copy editors just dropped her at UC's emergency room. Head in the giant white cylinder of the CAT scan, she started crying. The technician rolled her out, assuring her lots of people got claustrophobic during the test. But that wasn't it. It was being in a strange city, with no one waiting for her in the next room. She called Jack from a pay phone, and he got to the hospital in four hours flat. In the black Porsche he'd leased since she left, he was Batman. He stayed at her apartment that night, waking her every few hours like the attending ER doc had instructed. Each time he shook her back into consciousness, he told her how much he missed her. She told him how much she missed him, and by eight the next morning, they decided it was dumb for them to go on missing each other. So he sold his parents' house and got a job at a Chicago law firm. They moved to Oprah's building and were happier together than apart. But there were annoying hangnails of boredom itching to be chewed. Then that kid fell in the pool and Mona stopped taking birth control.

         

After a solid hour spent trying to ignore the chairs, feet, and paws scraping the hardwood floors and the voices and barks below, Mona touches Jack's shoulder.

“You awake?” she asks.

“Of course, there's a fucking carnival downstairs.” He reaches for his watch on the nightstand. “Six thirty. When he was in high school, my brother slept until three or four in the afternoon on Saturday. I'd go to the office, come back, and wake him up to see if he wanted to get dinner.”

“They've got two kids,” Mona says deliberately, waits for Jack's reaction, any reaction. He says nothing, stretches his legs under the covers and rubs his feet together. She starts to sit up, but he holds her wrist.

“Let's sleep for an hour.” He smiles, eyes arching into half-moons—it was the first thing she noticed about him when they met, when she couldn't believe someone with a smile like that would smile at her. “If we pull the blanket over our heads, we might drown out Family Circus.”

They shift into familiar grooves of each other, her head in the dent between his collarbone and arm.

“What was it like when your mother died?” she asks, thinking about Connor's story.

“Why?”

“I don't know much about that part of your life at all.”

“It was sixteen years ago,” he says, lips on the crown of her head, close enough she can feel air come out of his nose. “I thought you wanted to sleep.”

Below them something crashes.

“We should get up,” she says.

“We should have stayed in a hotel. That's what we should have done. I hate staying here.”

“He wanted to see you.” There's a concrete edge in her voice. “Do you really think he needed you to do money stuff this minute? You haven't drawn a will since law school. It was an excuse to get you here.”

“I know.” Jack balls onto his side, eyes and nose bunching together as though he might cry. “But he's going to be fine.”

“Of course he is.” She inches back down, grazes his forehead with her fingertips. “We should be helping; he wants you to spend more time with the girls.”

The phrase hangs between them.

“What do you think we could do with them, Mo?” Jack's black eyes are soft. “My brother's kids don't like us.”

         

Everything in the kitchen is from the future—chrome and stainless steel, black lacquer, a flat-range oven, copper pots dangling from racks in the ceiling. Laine washes fat pumpkins in the sink, and Connor spreads pages of
The Globe
over the table. From a television built into the wall, the
Today Show
anchors give the mornings' top news stories dressed as Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler.

“Feeling better, Mo?” Connor asks, and Jack looks at Mona—part guilt that he didn't ask, part terror she told his brother she's pregnant. “Can I get you some breakfast? We've still got pancake batter and Egg Beaters, and there's bagels and cereal and stuff.”

Mona had a family like this, where everyone sat down to dinner at six thirty with Tom Brokaw and
NBC Nightly News
, where meals were served on plates with vegetables and rolls. She wonders if it's what she wants, and then wonders why she chose Jack, who never wanted anything like this.

“Bagels and cereal.” Keelie puts her chubby hands in her mouth.

Hunched over a piece of orange construction paper, pencil in hand, Jorie doesn't acknowledge them at all. Connor scoops Keelie into his lap, guides her hands as they draw triangle eyes on the best side of a pumpkin.

“Coffee'd be great,” Jack says.

“That pot should still be pretty fresh.” Laine points to the machine at the end of the counter, tells Jack where to find mugs.

“Daddy.” Jorie pokes her father in the shoulder. “He's using the cup I gave you.”

In his hand, Jack has a ceramic mug proclaiming “World's Greatest Dad” in a font that's supposed to look like a child's crayon.

“Let's let Uncle Jack be the world's greatest dad for a while.” Connor looks directly at Mona, and she's sure he knows she lied last night. He holds out his own mug to Jack. “Can you top me off?”

“Conn.” Laine, toasting a bagel, using the rice voice. “If your stomach's bothering you, don't drink more coffee.”

“Stop it, Laine.” Connor nods at Jack, who stopped pouring. “You're being loony tunes.”

“Like Bugs Bunny?” Jorie looks up, sets aside her paper, picks up a Sharpie and draws ornate, impossible-to-carve lips on her pumpkin.

“Exactly like Bugs.”

“Bugs Bunny.” Keelie, still in her father's lap, claps her hands.

“Ask Mommy, ‘What's up, Doc?' ” Connor says.

“What's up, Doc?” Keelie gurgles.

“That's just great, Conn.” Laine presses pouty lips together, puts Mona's bagel on a plate. “Cream cheese, butter, or jelly?”

Sliding the sports section out from under a pumpkin, Jack sits next to his brother and disappears behind the quarterback's thoughts on Sunday's game and a photo of the Bruins loss. Mona takes a seat by Jorie and looks at her paper.

“Is this a poem you wrote?” Mona asks.

“It's a haiku.” Jorie doesn't look at her, instead finishes eyelashes on her jack-o'-lantern. “This one is about Halloween.”

“What's a haiku?”

“A Japanese poem with five syllables in the first line, seven syllables in the second, and five in the third,” Jorie says as if Mona were an idiot. “They're very hard to write, but the one I did yesterday was the best in class and Mr. Marcus put it on the bulletin board. It was about Mouse.”

Hearing his name, the dog under the table picks up his head, barks once. Laine takes a long knife from a chopping block and stabs into the circle around the stem of Jorie's pumpkin. Threads of pumpkin guts coat the blade, but the top won't budge when she tries to rock it off. She saws in again, jerking the knife back and fourth. The rotten, squishy smell hits Mona, and she sets down her bagel. Sweat dots pop onto Connor's forehead, and his shoulders bunch. He swallows slow and exaggerated, like he's a bad actor trying to indicate swallowing. Having thrown up for the past five days, Mona knows the signs and isn't surprised when Connor hands Keelie to Jack, who sets down the paper and holds his niece at arm's length.

“Take her for a minute,” Connor says, and jogs to the bathroom.

Laine's gray eyes follow him, not the knife still lodged in the pumpkin. Even before it happens, Mona knows it will. The jack-o'-lantern top finally flips out, and the blade slices deep in the meat of Laine's palm.

“Fuck.” Laine hops from foot to foot, grabs her injured hand with the other one, knocking the pumpkin off the table. It hits the hardwood with the dead thud of a corpse. “Fuck.”

A blood ribbon unfurls down her arm, red drops rolling off her elbow onto the black and white newsprint. Eyes wide as gumdrops, Jorie opens her mouth like she's going to cry, but no sound comes out. When she finds her voice, it's primal, horrible and magnificent, truly one of the loudest sounds Mona has ever heard. Between a squat and a stand, Jack looks from Jorie to Laine to Keelie, still in his arms. Jorie sprints from the kitchen, screams floating behind her like a parachute. Nails clacking on the floor, Mouse chases her. In the bathroom, Connor is still puking.