I'm Glad About You (44 page)

“Does she have a GP?” Nurse Patricia asked. “Do you know anybody on staff here? Sometimes it helps to have a doctor with a personal relationship, just to get things sorted.” She didn’t look at her, but Alison got the message.
Who do you have on the inside? You better have someone, or we’re just going to let your mother die.

Who knows if that was what was being said? Alison was out of her depth. She made the only phone call that was available to her.

Van picked up.

“Hi—yes, hi, uh, Van? This is Alison Moore, Kyle’s friend?”

A surreal silence bloomed on the line.

“Sure, Alison, I remember you,” Van said. Just as poised and appropriate as ever. Even cheerful. “How have you been? Are you in town?”

That was vastly better than anything Alison could have hoped, aside from Kyle picking up the phone himself. “Yes, I am. My mother’s ill,” she explained.

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Could I speak with Kyle? I tried him at his office and they told me he had already left for the day. And I, it’s very complicated here at the hospital, I really don’t know how to get any of these doctors to just tell me what’s going on. And I thought, maybe Kyle, I’m sure he knows someone on staff over here, or at least, because he’s a doctor one of them might talk to him.”

“What hospital is it?”

“Jewish.”

“I don’t think he knows anyone there.”

“Could I just talk to him?”

“He’s busy with the baby.”

“I really need to talk to him.” Alison knew she was reaching for straws. But this runaround with the hospital just couldn’t continue, and she needed help, and she also knew enough about the way the world worked. When you’re getting a runaround, you need an insider. She just needed Kyle to get on the phone with one of these nurses, for two minutes. It might help. It had to help.

“Well, I’ll tell him you called,” Van said.

Alison willed herself not to panic. “I just need him for a second, Van. My mom is really in trouble and there’s no one here to help us, I just need to even ask him just a few questions. She’s really sick.”

“Awwwww,” said Van. “I’m sure they’re giving her great care there.”

“Well, they’re not—they’re not—I just thought—”

“I’ll have Kyle call you right back,” Van promised.

And then she hung up the phone.

twenty-six

V
AN SLIPPED
the phone back into its cradle in the kitchen. She turned back to the lovely granite countertop and wiped off the leafy remains of a head of cauliflower she had just finished dismembering. The idea that Alison Moore would call their home and ask for help from Kyle was laughable, aside from the fact that it completely laid bare all of Kyle’s insistent lies about his relationship with her. Alison just
happened
to come into town because her mother
happened
to be sick, and she
happened
to need a doctor? It was a ludicrous story, particularly when you factored in that Kyle didn’t work at that hospital and that oh by the way he’s a
pediatrician. Your mother is sick in the hospital, so you decided you needed to call in your local pediatrician?
That was hilarious, really. This whole situation was hilarious.

Van’s bitterness had settled into a permanent distortion. She knew she could not stand in it forever, but her wound was fresh, and exceptionally deep. The hopes she had nurtured for a life with a man who adored her were less than nothing now. She was humiliated by the fact that she had ever hoped anything. Why Kyle had refused to grant her an annulment, no one honestly could say. He insisted it was a lie that he would not tell to his God, but lying relentlessly about his feelings for this other woman seemed to be something he was fine with. He insisted that it would be bad for the girls, to be raised by someone who wasn’t their own father, but he didn’t seem to think that it was a problem for
him
to raise someone else’s child. In fact, he made quite a show of doting on that baby. It was unseemly, frankly, given the fact that the boy wasn’t his. Another lie he felt okay about perpetrating. It’s okay to tell the world that the baby is your baby, but it’s not okay to say, hey, we made a mistake, we should get an annulment? People got divorced all the time; who cared what you called it? If the Catholics wanted to call it an annulment, what was the big deal?

The light in the kitchen was shifting, settling into stronger angles; the sun was starting its descent. It was all too late anyway. Martin was gone. Not gone from Cincinnati, but gone from her life; as the days ticked by, he had become more and more frustrated with the way Kyle was dragging his feet. And then he was gone, and she was stuck. She could have gone to see him at his law office, she could have created a scene, embarrassed him, embarrassed herself. But the whole idea seemed disgusting to her.
I’m carrying your child
.
I betrayed my husband. I have put my whole family through months of torture and you’re tired. So sorry you found this tiring.
She did not send him an announcement when the baby was born.

Kyle never asked about her lover. After their one hissing argument the night he finally figured a few things out, he had been silent, and she resented his impassivity even more than she had the months and years before this crisis. Why was everything so hidden with him? Over time she had found in his silence betrayal, then judgment, then punishment, then cruelty. There may have been love in there at some point, but who could tell? It was a stunning change of course to have him insist on going into couple’s counseling, where apparently all anyone did
ever
was try to communicate, in ever more grueling detail. Up to this moment in time, she would have said that communicating was the last thing Kyle wanted to do, with anyone.

He had ruined everything for her. If he had just agreed to the annulment when she asked for it, this whole thing would have been over before the baby was born. She and the girls would have moved on; everyone would have moved on. He wouldn’t have even had to pay alimony. But Kyle’s insistence that they talk through every exhausting detail of their non-marriage doomed her plans for escape more completely than anyone could have predicted. He seemed so reasonable. And Martin’s infatuation with the idea of claiming Van and her two adorable girls began to look—to Martin himself—tawdry.

Or was it Kyle’s seeming forgiveness that made their affair look tawdry? When that idea flitted across Van’s consciousness, it really pissed her off; Kyle was in no position to stand in judgment of her. She didn’t fully believe that he had been sneaking off to New York for passionate weekends with his old girlfriend, but you couldn’t tell her that he didn’t lust after Alison in his heart. And Van had sat through enough of those boring Catholic Masses to know that
that
was a sin too.

She pulled the spray attachment out of its dock at the edge of the sink and rinsed the cauliflower one last time before tossing it into a buttered glass casserole dish and shoving it into the oven. It was so hard to get the girls to eat any vegetables. After years of serving them nothing but whole organic anything, they still complained and whined; all they wanted was pasta, peanut butter, pizza, hot dogs. In the few months of her fleeting happiness, she had let her lover occasionally spoil the girls with these treats—it was so important that they all like each other—and now they were in a constant snit that they couldn’t have that junk all the time. Maggie was already getting a little chunky, although Kyle the pediatrician insisted that she was right where she should be in terms of height and weight. After years of ignoring both girls, Kyle now seemed to think he was the expert on everything.

Speak of the devil. There he was, in the doorway, holding the swaddled baby and looking completely besotted, even though Gabe was as usual colicky and screaming. Kyle didn’t seem to mind; he was more in love with that boy than he had ever been with his own daughters. It was infuriating. Her lover had just evaporated, and she and Kyle had never once spoken of her broken heart, her disappointed dreams. This whole public charade, that the baby was Kyle’s, that was another thing that just happened without any discussion. Even when you’re forced to sit through nobody can even count how many hours of couple’s counseling, the important things never make it to the table. Bouncing the fussy baby on his shoulder, Kyle looked at Van, curious.

“Who was on the phone?” he asked.

“Just some wrong number,” she said. “Oh, give him to me.” She took the baby into the next room to feed him.

After some four days of casual consideration, Van decided to pass along the message. If Alison wanted to come along and cry on her old boyfriend’s shoulder because her mom was in the hospital, why should she care? The whisper of guilt which hovered in the back of her head had begun to bother her. She had no reason to feel guilty. She in fact refused to feel guilty. In regard to Alison she remained blameless. The bitterness of her heart informed her that Alison could not say the same. But her own sense of moral certainty finally insisted that she do the right thing.

“I meant to tell you, your friend Alison called.” This was tossed over her shoulder as Van fetched dinner plates from the kitchen cabinets.

“Alison called?” Kyle’s voice took on a quiver, the slightest of strains.
I knew it
, Van thought. The girls, at the table, were coloring wildly. They didn’t even look up.

“She’s in town, her mom is in the hospital, she was having some problem. I’m not sure . . . Maggie, come on, sweetie, we’re setting the table now.”

“What did she say?” Kyle asked steadily. “Did she want me to call her?”

Honestly, he was trying so hard to be cool.

“I think she did.”

For the next three hours everyone pretended that everything was normal. Kyle helped feed the girls, then he and Van had dinner, then the baby woke up, and while Van fed him, Kyle did the dishes, and then he took the girls upstairs and gave them a bath, and then he changed the baby and rocked him while Van put the girls to bed. And then, while she took the baby back for his nine o’clock feeding, she looked up at Kyle and smiled with a friendly, helpful encouragement.

“Aren’t you going to call Alison?” she asked. “She sounded like she really needed to talk to you, about her mom. I think she said she was ill.”

“Are you okay with that?”

“Of course! Kyle. I think that you should be allowed to talk to your ex-girlfriend on the phone.” She smiled at him, as if he were being silly. How she was pulling this off, she didn’t know, but it felt good, even virtuous.

“Did she leave a number?”

“Actually, she didn’t,” Van acknowledged. “You probably should try her parents’ house.”

Kyle nodded and reached for the phone by the side of the bed.
Yes, okay, you’re going to do it in front of me so you can prove that you don’t have anything to hide
, Van thought.
But you still know the phone number by heart.

Kyle waited patiently, listening to the burr of the phone ring across town. His wife was sitting on the bed, breastfeeding their baby; his daughters were sleeping down the hall. Alison had called him. He could call her back.

“Hello,” she said. In high school, in that household of millions, she always had seemed to be the one to pick up the phone.

“Alison, yes, hello,” he said. “Hi, it’s Kyle.”

“Kyle,” she said. “Hello, Kyle.”

They could still say hello to each other. The past and the present started to merge.

“I heard you called, that your mother was ill?” he said. “How is she doing?”

“She died,” said Alison.

twenty-seven