Flight Behavior (23 page)

Dellarobia took a long, slow drag on her cigarette, feeling the chemical rush arrive little by little in her blood, her hands and feet, the answer to a longing that seemed larger than her body. “And anyway I’d felt that baby
move
. It would get the hiccups whenever I tried to lie down. Cub was the happiest he’d ever been in his life. We were going to be this little family. There’s stuff you can’t see from the outside.”

Dovey stood very still, holding her in the eye in the mirror.

“We had to use up our savings to buy it a cemetery plot.”

At that, Dovey sat down beside her and put her head on her shoulder, close to tears, an uncommon and worrisome sight. If they both fell apart at the same time, some greater collapse might follow. “Here’s the thing,” Dellarobia said. “He’d be turning
eleven
today. If the child had lived, he’d be that old now. We’d be having a fifth-grader birthday party here. I can’t find any possible way to make that real in my head.”

Preston suddenly appeared in the mirror behind them, standing in the doorway, startling Dellarobia so badly she nearly dropped her cigarette.

“Mama,” he said, “smoking gives you cancer and makes you die.”

“Honey, I heard about that too. I ought to quit right now, hadn’t I?”

He nodded soberly. Dellarobia made a show of grinding out her unfinished cigarette in the ashtray. She opened the vanity drawer, pulled out her pack of cigarettes, and flung it into the trash basket. It floated like a shipwreck survivor among the wadded tissues and crumpled receipts. Already Dellarobia was plotting its rescue, her mind darting forward to the next time she’d be able to sneak off for a secret hookup with her most enduring passion, nicotine. Who needed hell when you had a demon like this?

“So,” Dovey said quietly, after Preston had disappeared again, “how many times have you been through that little routine?”

“I hate myself for it.”

“Just don’t picture the crash landing in the cancer ward,” Dovey said, raising one eyebrow. “Like you say, it’s a strategy. Works for some.”

“Okay, fine, I’m a jerk, like the rest of them. Lying to Preston, of all people. The congenital Eagle Scout. He deserves a more honest mother than me.”

“Who do you think is doing any better? You should see what I do at work—the meat counter is guilty-conscience central. People with ‘heart attack’ written all over their faces, buying bacon. Or these hateful old ladies commanding me to get them a twenty-pound Thanksgiving turkey, like
that
’s going to bring the kids back home this year. The human person cannot face up to a bad outcome, that’s just the deal. We’re all Cleopatra, like that Pam Tillis song. Cruising down that river in Egypt. Queens of de-Nile.”

The word had weight for Dellarobia, who had been through school-sponsored grief groups after each parent’s death. The stillbirth was an unofficial add-on to the second round, in those dim final months of high school she otherwise barely remembered. Denial-anger-bargaining-acceptance, get it over with, was the counselor’s advice. “I’m a lot of things,” she said, “but not in denial, I don’t think.”

“Case rests, sugar.”

Dellarobia felt disoriented, with all those years inside her that added up to naught. Twenty-eight. She felt so young, especially with Dovey here anchoring her to the girl she’d been at seventeen, and at seven. She and Dovey could make each other over until their hair fell out, but nothing in the core of a person really altered.

“I look like a preteen runaway,” Dovey pronounced, startling Dellarobia with her similar frame of mind. But that wasn’t it. Dovey’s focus was on the flat, flyaway hair. “Who were the little orphan girls in those books we read?”

“The boxcar children.”

“Them! I’m a boxcar child.”

“You always say that, and you’re wrong. You turn out looking like Posh Spice, and I wind up like Scary. Why do we keep doing this?”

“Repetition of the same behavior, expecting different results: that’s actually one definition of mental illness.” Dovey read a lot of magazines.

“I look like Little Orphan Annie.” Dellarobia stood up and shook her curls. Maybe she could get a
Flashdance
thing going, in the off-the-shoulder T-shirt. But there was no question about which of them was the real orphan. Dovey rolled her dark silk floss around like a shampoo commercial, relishing her own existence in any form.

“Or some kind of hooker,” Dellarobia persisted, fussing with the curly tendrils around her face. “You have to admit, I look like I have more hair than brains.”

“But here’s the thing, peach. You don’t.”

Dellarobia shot her a look. “ ‘Peach
.
’ Where’d that come from?”

Dovey laughed. “This guy that comes into Cash Club calls me that. He’s tried to hit on me more times than he’s bought ground beef. Cute as the devil, b-t-w.”

“How long’s this been going on?”

“I don’t know, a year? I’m just using him as ammo against the guys I work with. They’re always drooling over the ladies that come to the meat counter.” She deepened her voice and grunted: “ ‘Hey, I see my future ex-wife out there.’ ”

Dellarobia did not laugh.

Dovey shrugged. “So this guy’s drool bait. My future ex.”

“And jailbait, more or less. Am I right, he’s real young?”

“Of course,” Dovey said.

“A dimple in his chin, right here? Works out, really good pecs and shoulders? A silver gauge in his left ear?”

They read each other’s faces in the mirror. “You are totally—”

“I’m not.”

“
Him?
”

“Him.”

“I swear to God, I’m going to take a couple of hams out of that jackass. I mean it. I’ve got the knives to do it.”

“No, Dovey, let him be. He’s nothing to me anymore.”

Dovey reached up to clasp her wrist and gently pull her down onto the seat next to her. Their side-by-side faces in the mirror were like photos in the twin halves of a locket, some long-gone children in a bargain bin of dead people’s jewelry. “This is not turning out to be your day, is it?” Dovey asked.

Dellarobia shrugged.

“Honey, I had no idea.”

“How could you have?”

“Shit. Your telephone guy.”

“Shit.
Everybody’s
telephone guy.”

D
ellarobia wasted too much of a night and all the next morning on a project of self-loathing. She had been two-timed, and probably worse, by the man with whom she was prepared to cheat on her husband. So she’d been nothing special to him, even as an adulterer. To whom could she possibly complain? She had made her peace with that mistake and taken pains to put it behind her. Yet he still had the power to wreck her.

It never wavered, this bleak helplessness she felt when confronting her undignified obsessions. Before Jimmy it was the man at Rural Incorporated, when she was pregnant with Cordie, which she’d told herself was not a true flirtation. He had steel gray hair and a gold wedding band, and a confidential kindness that completely unwound her. Those appointments got her from week to week. He always had a lot more time for her and her Medicaid papers than for the other people waiting outside his office, and Dellarobia hadn’t minded taking it. She never minded. Cub’s old friend Strickland, who lifted weights and ran his own tree-trimming business, kept delivering wood chips for mulching the flower beds she didn’t have, and she’d taken that too, letting pile it up for years behind the barn. New Heights, his business was called, emblematic of a can-do spirit she found hard to resist. Cub never knew. She had never let things go that far. Yet she understood the betrayal was real. She envisioned the internal part of a person that buttressed a faithful marriage, some delicate calcified scaffold like a rib cage, and knew hers to be malformed, probably from the beginning.

All of Dellarobia’s personal turmoil notwithstanding, the second of January must have been a slow news day. At the stroke of noon, while she was putting out bologna sandwiches for the kids, a TV crew showed up at her door.

She flew to answer the knock, leaving Cordie strapped in the high chair and Preston in charge of making sure she took little bites. Dellarobia was startled to see two strangers on her porch: a beautiful woman in perfect makeup and a man with a bald, pointy head and little horn-rimmed glasses. A huge camera sat on the man’s shoulder as if it just lived there, possibly attached somehow to his complicated all-weather coat that had extra pockets and zippers, even on the sleeves. Strangest of all was their vehicle parked in the drive, some sort of Jeep tricked out with oversize tires and a satellite dish.

“Dellarobia, is it?” The pale woman looked her straight in the eye with a shocking force, like a faucet left on. “We’re from News Nine—we were hoping for just a few minutes of your time to talk about the phenomenon on your farm.”

The
phenomenon
. The man was looking all around the front of the house, as if casing the joint for a break-in.

“I’ve got small children here that I can’t leave unattended.” Dellarobia stepped outside, pulling the door closed behind her. No way was she letting these people into her trashed house. It had been a long day already, and it wasn’t even noon. Whose idea was it to keep kids home from school a full week and more after Christmas? Preston was having a rocket-science day, using toys as projectiles and sofa cushions as the landing pad. Cordelia did something she called “farmer” with the Cheerios, planting the entire box like seeds in the living room carpet while Dellarobia was in the bathroom less than five minutes. She could see her future in that carpet, the endless vacuuming, the grit on the soles of everyone’s feet. Like a beach vacation minus the beach, and the vacation.

“We only need a few minutes of your time,” the woman repeated. “I’m Tina Ultner, this is my associate Ron Rains.” She shook Dellarobia’s hand in her firm grip. Tina Ultner was amazing to look at, a woman with slender everything: face, nose, fingers, wrists. Her hair was the true pale blond that can’t be faked, with matching almost white eyebrows and a candlewax complexion. She was only a few inches taller than Dellarobia, but with those looks she could own the world. Her makeup alone was a miracle, eyeliner applied so perfectly, her wide blue eyes resembled exotic flowers.

“Listen, I’m sorry,” Dellarobia said, “we’re not presentable in here. My kids are eating lunch. I don’t know what to tell you.”

Tina cocked her head to the side. “How old?”

“Five and almost two.”

Tina’s face crumpled into a combination of anguish and high-beam smile. “You’re kidding me! I have been there, let me tell you. Mine are six and nine, and I never thought we’d see the day. Two boys. What are yours?”

“What are they, good question. This morning I’m thinking monkeys, maybe. So you’re telling me there’s life after kindergarten and diapers?”

“There is, I promise. It’s like principal and interest or something. I don’t know why, but at age six they shift from a liability to an asset.”

“Perfect,” Dellarobia said. “That’s when I’ll sell them.”

Tina laughed, a two-note, descending peal like a door chime, a laugh as tidy as the rest of her. “What I mean is, they start following instructions. You can tell them to go get Daddy, and they’ll do it.”

Dellarobia grinned sadly. “And that’s a plus?”

“Oh, I hear you,” Tina said, seeming as if she really might. Was it possible she had done anything as messy as child-rearing with those white-tipped fingernails? Dellarobia was mortified by her baggy T-shirt and naked face in the light of Tina’s glow, but Tina seemed not to notice. She appeared ready to abandon her cameraman friend and run off for coffee and gossip. He must not be that interested in children, was Dellarobia’s hunch.

“Here’s the truth,” she confessed to Tina. “If I let you all see my living room right now, I’d have to kill you. And the kids are alone in there, so they’re probably scheming to drink the Clorox. I just don’t see any way I can help you out.”

“Should we come back another time, when you’re not tied up?”

Dellarobia shrugged. “After their high school graduations?”

Tina laughed again, the same two-note ripple, and glanced over at the man, sending him some kind of signal. Ron pulled his head to the side in obvious irritation. He had not yet said a word, and now walked away toward their vehicle. Tina waited until he got in the Jeep before she spoke again in a lowered voice.

“Ron’s a little intense,” she confided. “He’ll go ballistic if we don’t meet our deadline on this assignment. He’s already talked to the neighbors down the road about getting the story from them, but I just can’t see going that way. I’m in a bind.”

“I’m sorry,” Dellarobia said. After only three minutes in the acquaintance of Tina Ultner, it seemed very important not to let her down.

Tina glanced around, appearing to size up the options. “I’ll tell you what. Go and do what you need to do with the kids, I’ll do damage control out here. But do you think in maybe, about, fifteen minutes we could put the kids in the Jeep and just scoot up there to where the things are, the butterflies, and do the shot? We’ll keep everything tight, and the kids won’t have to be out of your sight for a single minute. Maybe bring something to keep them occupied in the car?”

Dellarobia studied the Jeep. Ron was in the driver’s seat, making a phone call.
You go for things
, Dovey had said.

“Could we get a car seat in that thing? Does it have belts in the back?”

“Absolutely,” Tina said.

Dellarobia charged back into the house, feeling jinxed after what she’d said about their drinking the Clorox. And that crack about selling her children—what must Tina Ultner think of her? The kids were fully intact in the kitchen, praise heaven, eating their sandwiches. Dellarobia flew into action, throwing the sofa cushions back together and doing a quick pickup of the living room in case Tina had to come in later to use the bathroom. She stuffed Preston’s beloved watch and Cordie’s animal-farm toy into the diaper bag, and made quick work of her lipstick and eyeliner. The day was sunny and too warm for a coat, which was good luck, her farm jacket or dorky ten-year-old church coat being the choices. She put on a cream-colored ribbed cardigan the kids had given her for Christmas. Meaning it was picked out by her at Target, wrapped by Cub. And never yet worn, also good luck, so she wouldn’t look down and see a big stain somewhere on her front side, as per usual when she went out in public. Jewelry or not, she couldn’t decide, so opted for small fake-pearl earrings that seemed classy. Her hair still had some curl left over from yesterday’s nonsense with Dovey, so she pulled it back loosely with a baby-blue ribbon, and that was that. Before the kids knew what hit them, they were wedged with their mother into the backseat of the News Nine–mobile, bouncing toward the High Road. Dellarobia didn’t find any seat belts, but there was no room for the car seat anyway, she just held Cordie in her lap. They wouldn’t be getting up much speed. No actual car had tried out that road yet, save for Cub’s pickup with the gravel. But that was the point of all Bear’s work, as she understood it. Access to the goods. She leaned forward to direct Ron up through the field toward the gate.