House Broken (2 page)

She turned toward the car. Tom would be wondering where she was. She would have to explain why she hadn't called him about Helen. He would nod with understanding. And when he asked if she wanted him to go with her to L.A., she would watch for the measured disappointment on his face as she admitted she hadn't decided whether to go.

GENEVA

T
he porch light shone in the dusk when Geneva pulled into the dirt driveway shadowed by redwoods. She parked in front of the barn next to her brother-in-law's Explorer. The sign above the barn's carriage doors read, in art deco lettering,
TREEHAUS
. Nine years earlier, Tom had designed and built an elaborate two-story tree house for a wealthy friend. When it appeared as part of a spread in an architectural magazine, he quit his job as a graphic designer and set up a woodworking shop in the four-stall barn. Although he now specialized in building custom staircases and hadn't made a tree house in years, the name stuck.

Geneva wasn't surprised to find the kitchen crowded with Novaks. Tom, his four siblings and their families lived in one another's pockets. Today, Ivan, Tom's brother, perched on the butcher
block island, beer in hand. His twin sons and Geneva and Tom's son, Charlie, all in baseball jerseys, gathered around a large bag of chips. Tom stirred the contents of a saucepan, his back to the door. She had to smile when five heads bearing the same Dennis Quaid grin turned toward her. Diesel pushed past her, bounded over to Tom, then to Charlie, butting his forehead against their stomachs in greeting. At fourteen, Charlie was almost as tall as his older cousins and as long-limbed as his father—and Diesel. Geneva still saw the toddler in him. A warm pulse spread under her skin.

Tom took the dishcloth from his shoulder and wiped his hands. “Long day?”

“Very.”

“Spaghetti's on the way.”

“Smells wonderful.”

Ivan jumped off the counter. “You want a beer?”

“Maybe later, thanks.”

Charlie looked up from scratching Diesel's chest. “Hey, Momster, is the dog okay?”

“The dog?”

Charlie shot her a quizzical look.

Of course, she thought. The transfusion. That was today. It might as well have been last week. “I was confused. There was another very sick dog today. But the one that got hit by the car is doing just fine, thanks to Diesel.”

Cars hitting dogs. Dogs eating socks. Intoxicated mothers ramming armored cars. Geneva's head filled with cotton, and the kitchen suddenly became too confining. She turned away. “I'm going to change.”

She left her shoulder bag on the bench near the door and headed down the hallway. Ella's door was closed—which meant
Do Not Disturb—so Geneva didn't pause. She entered the bedroom at the end of the hall, not bothering to turn on the light. A red light blinked on the bedside phone. She crossed the room in the dark and pushed the button. The attendance officer from the high school reported Charlie had missed first period.

“I dropped him off in town on time.” Geneva spun around to see Tom silhouetted in the light spilling from the hallway.

“But apparently he was tardy again.”

“Those late starts on Wednesdays seem to be a problem for him.”

“Then he shouldn't be allowed to go to town before school. Those are the rules.”

“I realize that, Geneva. He's very persuasive. As you know.”

“That's why we agreed to be firm with him. No bending the rules for a wink and a smile.”

“It's easy to talk about rules when you're not around to enforce them. I have to be the heavy.”

“Or not.” She spun away, fed up with his laxity. Wasn't it just last week she had warned him that with both kids in high school they had to maintain discipline?

He approached and put his arm around her shoulders. She flinched. He let go and said, “I didn't come in here to argue about Charlie. I came to see if you were okay.”

She might have said that if he was so worried about her well-being, he could try not undermining the parenting decisions they had made. Together. But she didn't have the energy to act out her part of the script.

In the darkness, she felt smaller than usual, as if she were contracting. The voices in the kitchen receded.

Tom swiveled her to face him and lifted her chin. “Are you okay?”

She nodded. Holding it together was her strong suit. But all at once a band tightened around her chest. Her nose stung as she fought back tears.

“No.”

• • •

Ivan and his sons left after dinner. Ella, sixteen years old, cleared the table. Her blue eyes hid behind fine blond bangs. She was dressed entirely in gray, as she had been for the last six months. When Geneva had noticed the pattern, she asked Ella if it was a statement. “A nonstatement, Mom.”

Ella stacked the dishes. Geneva leaned against the counter and finished her wine.

“Did you work at the library after school today?”

“Yeah.”

“Was it busy?”

“Not really.”

“Still reading
Pride and Prejudice
in English?”

“Yeah.”

“Liking it any better?”

“Not really.”

“Why's that?”

“Too many words.” Ella wiped down the table, tossed the sponge in the sink, and headed to her room. “Nice chatting with you, Mom.” She gave the word
Mom
a sarcastic twist, as if it might not apply.

Geneva caught Tom's eye and raised her eyebrows.

He shrugged and pointed at the laptop screen. “There's space on a flight Saturday at noon. Knee surgery's scheduled for Friday,
right? You'd have a couple days to get organized. You could even make Charlie's game on Saturday morning.”

Geneva loaded plates into the dishwasher. “I know I should want to see her, Tom. Honestly, though, I'm not feeling much like the attentive, loving daughter.”

“But you do love her.”

She closed the dishwasher and faced him. “That word. I don't see how it's relevant. The question is whether it makes any difference to her—or to me—if I appear at her side.”

He frowned. “You're angry.”

“Furious.” She folded the dishcloth and pinched several spent blossoms from the miniature rosebush on the counter. “I'll go see her. But for Dublin. No reason he should deal with her alone. And because I'll feel guilty if I don't.”

“Do you want me to come?”

“Thanks, but I'm reluctant enough without having to worry about who's going to look after the kids.” That was an excuse. What she didn't want was Tom monitoring her bedside manner. Maybe Tom should go and she should stay.

“Ivan and Leigh would take them. Or one of the others.”

She didn't doubt it. Tom's family functioned as an organism. Eighteen years in, Geneva still marveled at the Novak family's cohesion and adaptability. If someone was ill or distressed, siblings arrived like macrophages at an infection, efficiently absorbing the duties of the other family into theirs. They drove children to school and sports practices, stocked refrigerators, walked dogs, and texted updates while working and shopping until all of the organism's parts were up and running again. Even Tom's parents, who were in their late seventies, would not be left out. During
months when birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays were thin, the elderly Novaks invented occasions. Recently they'd hosted a barbecue to celebrate the first anniversary of their new barbecue.

As much as Tom's family embraced her, Geneva was an outsider. Her family was too different. Helen had named her four children after European cities to give them the sophistication lacking in their one-horse South Carolina town. But to Geneva their names had come to represent their distance from their mother and one another. She hadn't seen Paris in ten years, and Florence, two years younger than Paris, rarely left Manhattan. Only Geneva and Dublin phoned and visited each other regularly. If it weren't for her brother, she might as well have no family of her own.

“You stay with the kids, Tom. I'll be fine. Really.”

“She'll be glad you came. You'll see.”

She smiled at his insistence on remaking her mother into a version of his. Or maybe he believed her mother could change. Geneva knew better. The woman had been on a steady downhill slide since her husband's death. The trajectory had been hard for Geneva to discern early on. At first she was too young and wholly dependent on her mother to stabilize her fatherless world. A child sees what she wants to see. Once she entered middle school, she began to understand emotions could be complicated—even paradoxical—and attributed her mother's self-destructive behavior to grief. Geneva, patient and watchful, waited for Helen to come around. But the strength that should have returned to her mother never appeared, or never for very long, and Geneva finally realized she was waiting for a mother she never had. Six years after her father's death, she left Aliceville (and her mother) for college and for good.

Helen's life increasingly took on a haphazard quality, with a recent emphasis on
hazard
. Tom avowed that every incident
provided an occasion for positive change, but Geneva disagreed. She believed the best predictor of future behavior was past behavior. In her mother's case, this did not bode well for the future. Her mother was too old and too stubborn a dog to learn new tricks.

Charlie came into the kitchen. “All done with my homework. Can I watch TV now?”

Geneva turned to Tom. “I didn't have a chance to check his grades online today. Has he earned back weeknight TV?”

“How'd you do on your history test?” Tom asked.

“Mr. Shaw hasn't finished grading them.”

“And you're up to speed on everything else?”

“Yup.”

“Okay. One show.”

“Thanks, Pop.” Charlie left before Geneva could object.

“I'm willing to wager a week's worth of dishes there's a history test in his backpack,” she said.

He closed the laptop and got up. “You worry too much. I wasn't much of a student either, and I turned out all right.” He moved to the living room couch and picked up a magazine. Conversation over.

It wasn't Charlie's grades that concerned her, but his character. Habits were hard to break; a child cutting corners and bending the rules was the same as a dog with a habit of digging. Look the other way, and a hole becomes a tunnel, and the dog is somewhere on the far side of the fence.

Did she worry too much? Maybe. But if she erred on the side of excess concern for either of her children, she had her reasons.

If you worry too little, you might find out too late.

GENEVA

G
eneva held a mechanical pencil above the Saturday
Los Angeles Times
crossword folded in her lap. During the hour she'd sat next to her mother's hospital bed waiting for her to wake, she had entered only half a dozen words. Her stomach growled. She had rushed from Charlie's baseball game to the airport in San Francisco and missed lunch.

The setting sun pierced the haze and reflected off the matrix of glass and steel outside, throwing lurid shafts of orange light into the room. Flying in, she'd seen the smog that enveloped the city, held low by an inversion. Her eyes burned during the taxi ride and even now the back of her throat was raw. She had difficulty understanding why anyone, let alone thirteen million people, chose to live here. She'd trade palm trees and smog for
redwoods and fog any day of the week. She took a sip from the Starbucks cup on the bedside table, recrossed her legs, and resumed tracking her shadow as it moved glacially across the brace on her mother's leg.

Five years earlier, shortly before Helen turned sixty, she'd announced her intention to leave her native South Carolina, declaring the last of a string of interchangeable Southern gentlemen to be much less fun after a hundred dates than after three. Besides, she said, she'd had her fill of snakes, sweet tea, and red-faced women who rested their chins on their bosoms. Her first choice was to live with Florence and her husband, Renaldo, in Manhattan. She packed and waited for Florence to offer her a closet-sized room in their walk-up. When the invitation failed to appear, she brushed it off, telling Geneva that New York was too expensive and “chock-full of Yankees.” Dublin was her next choice. This time she didn't wait to be asked. She sent her belongings ahead of her and flew to Los Angeles for the easy glamour of room-temperature life amid palms. She purchased a condo a few miles from Dublin's house in Sherman Oaks.

In the hospital bed, Helen lay slack as a marionette doll abandoned by a puppeteer. Someone had brushed her platinum-blond hair away from her face, which accentuated her cheekbones and magnified the bruises under her eyes. Her lips were chapped and colorless. She would hate that, Geneva thought, recalling how her mother reapplied lipstick at the table after every meal. Without makeup, Helen appeared more vulnerable. Maybe “war paint,” as she called it, was exactly that—it emboldened her, or at least made her appear stronger. In the beige confines of the hospital ward, she lay stripped of her accessories. No war paint, no spectator pumps, no oversized sunglasses. And no Dutch courage.

A nurse in a kelly-green uniform entered with several paper cups on a small tray. She introduced herself to Geneva and gently tapped Helen's uninjured left shoulder. The doctors had immobilized her right shoulder after repairing torn cartilage and resetting the joint. When Geneva received news of the surgery she knew her mother's recovery time had doubled. She wouldn't be able to lean on a walker for weeks.

“Time for your medication, Mrs. Riley.”

Helen opened her eyes a little. “Am I still here, for Pete's sake?”

“Yes, you are. And your daughter has been waiting for you.” The nurse nodded at Geneva on the far side of the bed.

Helen's face lit up as she slowly swiveled her head. “Florence?”

“No, Mom. It's me.”

“Oh. Geneva. I didn't realize.”

The note of disappointment was slight, but it pierced Geneva like a dart. She turned away and pretended to admire the view. Her mother lifted her head an inch, then sunk into the pillow. “Is my water over there somewhere?”

Geneva picked up the cup, adjusted the angle of the straw, and handed it to her. “I got here a while ago.”

“Have you spoken with your sister? She was so upset about my accident!”

Geneva had two sisters, but her mother spoke of only one. After thirty years, her mother's erasure of Paris still registered.

“I called Florence yesterday after I spoke with your doctor. She's fine. I mean, we're all upset, Mom.” She noted a defensive tone had crept into her speech: I'm a good daughter! I'm here, aren't I? She told herself not to be pathetic. “How are you feeling? You were sleeping so heavily.”

“I don't do anything but sleep.” The nurse picked up Helen's wrist, silently counted pulses, then moved to the end of the bed and picked up the chart. Helen looked Geneva in the eye. “Every time I wake up I pray I'm not here anymore.”

The ambiguity of the statement hung in the air between them.

The nurse handed Helen her pills, ensured she had swallowed, then wrote the time in the log. “A few more days, Mrs. Riley. Then you can go home.”

Geneva reminded herself to talk with Dublin about home care assistance after Helen's release. It might be a while before she could get around.

“Who brought those dahlias?”

“I did, Mom.”

“They're my favorite.”

“I know.”

The nurse asked Helen about headaches and the level of pain in her shoulder and leg.

“It's tolerable, but I don't much care for that medication you've been giving me. Makes me feel I'm floating along like a bunch of balloons in a breeze. Why can't I choose my own medication? It's a free country, isn't it?”

“Mrs. Riley, we've gone over this . . .”

“I know, I know. Hospital policy. Too much policy and too little sense, if you ask me. It's only a drink, for Pete's sake.” She turned to her daughter with a look that said this would be an appropriate moment for Geneva to speak up and demonstrate her solidarity. Geneva's face was noncommittal, so Helen changed direction. “Have you seen Dublin? Do you know when he's coming?”

Geneva was used to this question, and the anxious tone accompanying it. Her mother was always searching for one of her
children. It started when Paris was fifteen. Geneva, at nine, would walk into the house, and her mother would be standing at the window, hands nervously flattening the front of her skirt. Her first question was always “Have you seen Paris?” Geneva didn't understand her concern because Paris wasn't ever hard to find. If she wasn't at the school library or the one in town, she was at the mayor's office with their father. For as long as Geneva could remember, Paris wanted to follow in their father's footsteps and become a lawyer. She applied herself at school with remarkable dedication, determined to be the top of her class as Eustace had been. After she graduated, she secured an internship at the State House in Columbia, and moved there. Several months later their father died, and after the initial shock wore off, Helen began asking Dublin and Geneva if they'd seen Florence, the next eldest. Didn't her basketball game end an hour ago? Why isn't she back from her friend's house? Then Florence graduated and left to play college basketball at Chapel Hill. She was too busy to return home often, so Helen shifted her focus to Dublin. When Geneva started high school, she began to wonder if she would finally become visible to her mother only after she left her behind. It never happened.

“He should be here soon, Mom. It's rush hour, so it's hard to say exactly when.”

Ten minutes of stilted small talk later, her brother blew into the room like a dust devil, wearing the same leather jacket he'd had since college, his brown hair rumpled as if he had been roused from a nap. His smile was tense at the corners. He flung his arms wide, and Geneva sank into his bear hug. They were the exact same height. Bookends, Helen had called them.

“It's good to see you,” she said.

“You, too, Ginny.” He placed his hands on her shoulders and appraised her. “You look like hell. Good hell. Hell that's keeping up appearances. But still hell.”

“Thanks.”

“That's enough cursing, Dublin.” Helen tried to sit up. “Aren't you going to say hello to me?”

He gave her a hard look. “I'm weighing my options.”

“What ever are you talking about?”

“I got to hand it to you, Mom. I did not see this coming. Blindsided, sucker-punched, bushwhacked . . .”

“See what coming? Geneva, what is he talking about?”

“I have no idea.”

Dublin sat down. “She has no idea. You know why, Mom? Because I just found out myself. Yeah. Only a few minutes ago from the friendly folks downstairs in the billing department. Correction. They
were
friendly. Now, not so much. But that was my fault.”

“Oh, the billing department! This is about money, is it? Don't worry yourself. I've got plenty.”

Dublin looked pointedly at Geneva, then back to his mother. “Had.”

“Had?”

“You
had
plenty of money. But then you had a little accident and, oh, yeah, before that, you canceled your health insurance. . . .”

Geneva put a hand on his arm. “What?”

“They admitted her because the card in her purse looked valid. For three days, no one followed up. But the formerly friendly folks in billing informed me that Mom will be transferred to a county facility in the morning unless she forks over cash for the bills she's racked up so far.” He addressed Helen. “Unless, Mom, you've got insurance coverage somewhere else?”

“Well . . .”

“Of course not! Too easy!”

“It must be a mistake,” Geneva said. “Mom, you didn't cancel it, did you?”

Helen threw her hands in the air. “They wanted to raise my premium! It was already so high. I figured I'd be eligible for Medicare before long. I never go to the doctor. Why spend all that money when I'm in perfect health?” She fixed Geneva with her bright blue eyes, daring her to contradict.

Geneva gripped the railing at the end of the bed. “That's the nature of insurance. As I'm sure you know.” She pushed down on her frustration and anger. “Dublin, what's the damage?”

He cocked his head and studied the ceiling. “A five-series BMW with all the extras. But if she stays here a few more days and you include the outpatient care she'll need, you're looking at a Porsche, and a pretty nice one.”

“Who's buying a car?” Helen asked.

“Not you,” he said. “Ever again.”

“Anyway, they took away my license.”

“That's not the point.”

“I still have car insurance.”

“That was lucky, wasn't it, Ginny? Can you imagine the fucking mess if she'd canceled that, too?”

“Dublin! I asked you to quit your cursing. Honestly!”

Geneva shook her head in dismay. “Mom, I don't understand you. Don't you care?”

“About the money? I've been poor. I'm not afraid of it.”

Dublin said, “I'm guessing it's worse when you're old.”

“I've got news for you, son. Everything's worse when you're old.” She rubbed her temple. “The two of you have given me a
headache. Why don't you let me rest? Go find something else to get your panties in a twist about.”

• • •

Geneva sat in a lawn chair in Dublin and Talia's backyard in Sherman Oaks. She pulled her sweater closed and crossed her arms against the evening chill. Through the window, she listened to Talia read to Jack and admired her slight Russian accent. Talia had lived in the United States since the age of sixteen, but her vowels still emerged deep and rounded. She was reading the same chapter for a third time. Three was Jack's number. Three slices of apple on his plate. Three flicks of the light switch when he entered or left a room. Three knots for his shoelaces. At dinner earlier that evening, Geneva had joined them at the dinner table and Jack had refused to eat. “I have dinner with three people, not four!” His ten-year-old brother, Whit, had said, “Guests don't count. Just pretend she's not here.” Before Dublin and Talia could intervene, Geneva picked up her plate and moved to the nearby breakfast bar. “Is this okay, Jack?” He'd bent his head and began eating.

Light from the kitchen fell in parallelograms on the patchy lawn. A stack of empty planters leaned against the fence next to a bag of potting soil, perforated by rot. Weeds grew under the rusted swing set, next to a sandbox where hundreds of tiny soldiers—a green army and a brown one—had been painstakingly arrayed for battle. Jack's work, Geneva thought.

The back door creaked and Dublin stepped out. “Like what we've done with the place? I call it Postmodern Disintegration.”

“It's lovely. You've really made it look as though it were simply neglected.”

“Only a trained eye such as yours could spot the difference.” He took the chair next to her.

She nodded toward the swing set. “Remember when Charlie and Whit knocked Ella off the slide? I thought her head would never stop bleeding.”

“And Jack—what was he? Four? He ran around in circles for hours afterward with his hands over his ears, screaming, ‘No! No! No!' The neighbors were threatening to call the cops. Those were the days.”

“Jack seemed okay tonight.” She knew enough not to use the word
better
. A good day was a good day, not a trend.

“He likes you.”

“And I like him. He doesn't seem so strange to me.”

“I'll resist the obvious reply.” He grinned at his sister. “I'm guessing it's your animal behavior thing.”

“My ‘animal behavior thing'?”

“You don't take him personally. You just go with what he gives you, work with what he will do instead of what he won't. His specialist says it's the best route forward.”

“Maybe it is from years of working with animals—and their owners. No one's behavior surprises me anymore.”

“Except Mom's.”

She laughed. “Except Mom's.” She drummed her fingers on the armrest. “What are we going to do? It's going to be weeks before she can get around on her artificial knee.”

“I thought they wanted her using it pretty quickly.”

“They do, but in therapy. She can't use a walker because of the shoulder injury. With the insurance debacle, do you think she can afford weeks of nursing care?”