Four Wives (9 page)

T
HE PICKUP LINE AT
the Hunting Ridge lower school was particularly long, and Baby Will was growing restless in his seat. Love tapped her fingers on the steering wheel to keep herself from screaming. It was more than Will’s crying and Jessica’s whining pleas for Love to make him stop, or the anger at herself for not getting to the school earlier to be first in line. The night had been long, one more sleepless odyssey that had left her exhausted, and the pain in her neck was now running down the right side of her back.

It was her own damned fault, she knew. No mother in this town would fail so miserably to sleep-train their children. She had the knowledge, but lacked the will, and at four thirty she’d found herself asleep in the rocker with Baby Will wiggling in her arms. Then came the pleas from next door.

“Mommy …”

Henry had called out. At five he was still not a steady sleeper, and already showing signs of the lopsided intelligence she’d handed down. He was unusually sensitive, and far too perceptive for a boy his age’waking with disjointed thoughts that occupied his little head along with the big ears and floppy brown hair.

“Is it time to wake up?” he’d asked, and she’d scrunched herself up beside him to help him back to sleep.

With the sickness of exhaustion in her gut, she’d managed to muscle through her day. Getting them all dressed, packing up the bags’Henry’s backpack, the diaper bag, Jessica’s swimsuit and towel for her class. She’d loaded them in the car as Baby Will screamed. Driving, screaming, all day. Now the last pickup, then home again. Her head was pounding, and although she could fight the urge, she knew already that she would make the coffee. There was no chance of getting through the nighttime routine without it, even though it was probably getting into the breast milk and stunting Will’s development. Another rule broken. And yet she had sworn to herself again and again that there would be no mistakes. Not this time. Not with her children.

Sitting in the car now, with the baby crying and her pain growing, she could feel the desperation push to the surface.

“Mommy!” Jessica was pleading. “Make him stop!”

“I’m sorry, sweets. I can’t right now. He has to stay in his seat.”

In a matter of seconds, Jessica began to cry, and Love didn’t blame her. Were she not a mature woman, had she not been socialized over the course of thirty-eight years to ignore every unpleasant human impulse, she would be screaming herself’perhaps even slamming her foot on the accelerator and ramming the car ahead in a fit of insanity.

In the end, it was too much to bear. Riding a wave of rebellion, Love waited for the Lexus in front of her to move forward, then maneuvered her minivan out of the line’
the
line that was dictated by school policy and strictly enforced. Only if a parent had good reason could they park in the lot and walk to pick up their child. There simply wasn’t enough room for all the cars, not to mention the mayhem that would result from the mix of cars and pedestrians in the lot. Love understood the reasons. And like everything else in Hunting Ridge, universal conformity was the very thing that kept the community so pleasant.

Still, the children were crying.

With her eyes fixed on the road, Love ignored the stares from the other mothers as she drove past car upon car, making her way to the front of the school. She pulled into the adjoining parking lot, and weaved through the lanes. There were spots open, but only in the back three rows.

“No way,” Love said out loud. She stepped on the gas, drove to the front row, and pulled into a handicapped spot. It was the worst kind of transgression’clearly illegal, unambiguously defiant. But Love didn’t care.

“Come on, Jessie,” she said, pulling her daughter from her seat. Jessica wiped her eyes, a look of surprise coming across her red face.
What is Mommy doing!
¹
Next came Baby Will. Reaching his mother’s hip, he too stopped crying and assessed the situation. With wide, curious eyes, he looked to his mother for an explanation. She was always there to make sense of things.
Stairs, toilet, hair dryer.
But today she was silent, in some other world where he couldn’t reach her.

They started to walk, but Jessica refused to move.

“Carry me,” she said.

Love stopped and looked down at her pink-clad child, little blond ringlets flying every which way and tears still wet on her cheek. How could she refuse? She was carrying Will. She always carried Will, as Jessica was quick to remind her. From the moment he entered this world he’d been attached to Love like a fifth appendage. And when she tried to remove him, he reacted as anyone would to a person severing their own limb’with utter dismay. In his mind, they were one. It was that simple, and it had been but a matter of time before Jessica wanted a piece of the action. On this afternoon, giving in to her daughter’s pleas’and her own guilt’would prove to be the crucial error. But Love didn’t have it in her to reason with a three-year-old.

“Here,” she said, bending down to scoop up her little girl. With thirty pounds on her right hip, and sixteen on the left, Love crossed the grass median, then squeezed between two of the SUVs and Mercedes wagons waiting in the line. Stares of disbelief, disapproval, and’most of all’envy, burned a hole in her back as she approached the children lined up by the school’s entrance.

“I need Henry, please,” Love said to the teacher handling the dismissal. Like much of the school’s staff, the woman was young, just out of college, with an air of self-importance that verged on disrespect. Dressed in a skimpy skirt, matching blouse, and shoes whose shape defied all rules of geometry, she looked Love up and down through eyes that were now squinted. And although she pursed her lips tightly and started to speak, she ultimately held her tongue. It was too unseemly to berate a woman carrying two children in her arms, especially one so disheveled.

As the girl turned to fetch Henry, Love could feel herself, her life, in the expression left behind. Wrinkled pants’no time to iron. Hair long and unruly, nails unshapely, skin dry. There was a time when things like this had mattered. The house had been let go as well. The screens on the porch were ripped, the front step loose, jam and syrup crusted on the refrigerator shelves. It wasn’t just the little things either’the whole place screamed of chaos. Toys were sprawled out in every room’cars and trucks and hot-wheel contraptions, play kitchens, and big, unsightly plastic dollhouses, and of course, Legos (Henry’s obsession) in various stages of construction. When did it become like her to be this way? Or was it? There just never seemed to be time for herself or the house. She was in a state of perpetual motion, and her father’s letter had sent her into warp speed’on the run from what she knew was coming.

Love smiled when she saw Henry, though every muscle in her back was starting to tighten.

“Hey, big guy! How was school?”

Henry looked surprised. This was not how things were supposed to be, and even at five, he could sense that his mother had done something wrong.

“Mommy, you’re supposed to wait in the line.”

“I know. But sometimes things happen and we have to do things a little differently. It makes life interesting!”

Henry wasn’t buying it. He knew his mother too well not to see through the sugar coating. With a look of embarrassment on his face, he followed her through the line of cars, acutely aware of the mean looks from the strangers that were now upon him. Deflated, he hung his head and walked close to the rest of his family, hoping he would blend in and escape unnoticed.

As he approached the median, there was a scream, a cry of pain that was both peculiar and haunting. It was not the sound Baby Will made when his mother put him down, or his sister when she didn’t get her way. This was the cry of a grown-up, and Henry thought it was the worst thing he’d ever heard. Looking up, he saw something equally disturbing. On the small patch of grass, tangled in a heap of arms, legs, and heads, were his mother, sister, and baby brother.

“Mommy!” Henry yelled, his feet glued to the earth.

Looking back, Love would remember the feeling distinctly. Her back had simply let go. When she took the step up to cross the median, that was how it felt’a complete collapse of her body and with it her hold on the children.

She tried to sit up, locate each child, make sure they were all right. But nothing in her was working. A moment later, she heard the crying’first Will, then Jessica, and for the first time in her life as a mother, she was crying herself with relief at the high-pitched wails.

“I’m OK, Henry,” she said, trying to reassure him. There was no doubt in her mind that her oldest and most sensitive child would also be the most unsettled. “I just fell’I’m really OK. Can you come and get the baby for mer

Henry stood still, fear and confusion mixed together on his face as the tears began to fall.

“You can do it. Can you see him here?”

Love couldn’t move her head, but she could hear the baby just beyond her. “Can you see him?”

Henry nodded, but didn’t move. In a matter of seconds, a circle of women had formed around them. Jessica was suddenly before her in the arms of a familiar stranger, then Baby Will with another. Voices of concern mingled in a soft hush, and Love knew she should answer, tell them what she needed. But the pain was too intense. Her head became light, full of air, and her vision began to blur.

Then it all went black.

“L
OVEY, CAN YOU HEAR
me?”

When she came to several minutes later, the flurry of confusion had given way to a somber, alarming concern. Still laid out flat on the moist grass, Love listened for her children’s cries, but heard only muffled chatter and a soft familiar voice close to her ear.

“Lovey?”

It was Gayle, kneeling down next to her. Dressed in one of her expensive pants suits, her hair perfectly styled into place and smelling of fine cosmetics, Love’s friend had swooped in and taken charge. She’d been stuck at the back end of the car line when Love fell, but like a row of dominoes, the women had left their vehicles for a firsthand viewing of the event, and Gayle had done the same. Walking up the hill from the road to the school parking lot, she’d seen Henry standing alone, then heard the distinctive cry of the baby. She’d quickened her pace and reached the circle of women standing around. In a tone that was at the same time polite and commanding, Gayle had broken through the ranks and issued the orders.

“Anne, take Henry to Love’s car. Joanna’bring Jessica, then come back for the baby. One of you stay with them.”

Gayle knew these women. She knew their names and faces, the names and faces of their children, where they lived. She was a fixture in the community, present at every fundraiser from the YMCA to the library to the school book fair. And despite her gentle disposition, she had a strength within her that showed its face at times like this one’when someone other than herself was in need of help.

The women had listened. One after another, the tasks were carried out until there was nothing left to do but wait for the paramedics to arrive.

“The kids … ?” Love asked, but Gayle put her hand to Love’s lips.

“They’re in the car. Everyone’s OK. Not a scrape. You need to lie still now.”

Feeling her friend’s soft hand clasped around her own, Love returned her head to the ground and tried to relax. The pain had become indescribable. Running from the base of her skull, down her right side all the way to the back of her knee, the piercing ache was more than she could bear.

“I hear them!” one of the women said. Then the siren grew louder.

Gayle squeezed Love’s hand before letting go. “I’ll be right back. Don’t move.”

Standing over her now, waiting for the paramedics, Gayle was completely unfazed. Nothing mattered to her’not the curious stares of her peers, or the muddy stains on the knees of her silk pants that would never come clean. The concern for her friend was selfless, needing no praise or recognition, and this was precisely what held most people an arm’s length away. Despite the way she lived, Gayle’s heart was as pure as they came. No one wanted to look in that mirror.

From the ground where she lay, Love watched two young men in blue uniforms rush to her side with a gurney. Her head was placed in a brace, and a board slid under her. Within a matter of minutes, she was hoisted on the gurney and rolled to the ambulance, her friend at her side every step of the way.

“I’ll sort out all the kids and meet you at Bill’s,” Gayle said as they approached the white van.

Love squeezed her hand harder.
No,
she thought,
not to Bill.
But she couldn’t bring herself to say the words.

Gayle waited for the men to load the gurney, then pulled them aside.

“Take her to Dr. Bill Harrison in town. He’s her husband.”

The larger of the two, who appeared to be in charge, shook his head. “We’re under contract to go to Cliffton Hospital.”

“Well, this time we’re going to the offices of Dr. William Harrison. You can send me the bill.”

The man stopped and looked her in the eye. Her face was soft, her appearance refined. Still, he could tell she wasn’t going to waver.

“She’ll have to sign a release.”

“Fine. I’ll be right behind you.”