Sleepless Nights (14 page)

It was the Thursday afternoon after our visit to see Kent, and I’d left Samuel with Tom while I went to pick up some groceries. I saw the yellow-haired woman standing in front of me in the queue at the general store, grabbing onto the wrist of a little boy of about four. His dark brown hair was cut short, and he was wearing a pair
of green army pants and a Spider-Man T-shirt. Sticking out of his pocket was a rough, faded, well-worn scrap of blanket. He was pulling away from her, trying to pry her fingers off his wrist, while she simultaneously hunted with her free hand through an open bag slung over her shoulder. “I swear I don’t know what’s happened, Katie, I had more coupons somewhere…Paulie, stay
still…!”

The young woman behind the cash desk shrugged. “Forget it, Emmie. I’ll put the milk on the tab this week, okay? You can bring in the coupons next week.” She got out a black notebook from under the cash register, and wrote down the new entry. I knew Katie reasonably well; she was the daughter of the general store’s owner, a kind, efficient woman named Liz. Katie was about twenty-four, I guessed; maybe two or three years older than the struggling young mother.

Emmie nodded gratefully, produced a few dollar bills to pay for her bread and cans of Spaghetti-Os, then ran after Paulie, who had finally broken free and was now attacking the cereal display in the window, which was wobbling precariously. “Paulie, I swear, if you don’t get your ass over here, there’ll be no more lollipops this week,
this whole week,
d’you hear me?” she warned. “Not one!”

Faced with this serious threat, Paulie shrugged, gave the stack of boxes one more push for luck, then slipped his hand obediently into his mother’s. Emmie, bustling back to the cash desk with the boy in tow, suddenly stopped and swore softly. “I forgot to get soap…” she said apologetically, lifting up a small cardboard box from a nearby shelf.

Katie shook her head, laughing, and offered to put the soap on the tab too. In the middle of writing the new item down (and while Emmie was informing Paulie what his gramps would say when he heard about this), Katie looked up with a searching glance.

“You kicked that worthless son of a bitch out yet? For good, I mean?”

Emmie flushed, tightened her lips, then nodded down meaningfully at Paulie, who was now sitting on the floor, peeling bits of
crackling skin off a large shiny red onion. Katie rolled her eyes. “Whatever. Did you?”

Emmie nodded shortly. “Yeah. I did, as it happens. But—” She glanced down at Paulie, then looked carefully around the shop; I hastily dropped my eyes and pretended to be paying a great deal of attention to a box of plastic sunflower pins being sold to raise money for some local charity. It was none of my business, after all. “Jeez, Katie, it’s, like, a nightmare. He says he’s going to take Paulie away.” The last words were a miserable whisper.

“He does?” (Katie sounded shocked; I chanced a glance up.) “How come?”

Emmie shrugged. “You know what he’s like,” was all she said, still keeping a careful eye on her son. He was now investigating the fruit display, but like Emmie, I thought he was listening. There was something quietly alert about him.

Katie rang up the soap, then slipped it and a strawberry lollipop into the top of Emmie’s brown bag. “You don’t need to worry,” she remarked evenly, closing the little book and sliding it back under the register. “He can’t beat the crap out of you for three years—oh shut up, Emmie—then suddenly claim World’s Best Dad award. It just isn’t going to fly. No judge in the state is going to listen to him. I’d forget about it, if I was you. Don’t let it bother you.”

Emmie stood, hands on her brown bag. Then she leaned forward. “It isn’t that simple,” she whispered across the conveyor belt. Paulie had found himself an apple and was taking big, juicy, unnoticed bites. “I wish it
was
, Katie. But he says stuff. He’s—starting telling people things. Things that aren’t true. Plus he’s the one with the job still. I’m worried, Katie, real worried. You know what people think—about me.”

Katie rolled her eyes (“It wasn’t your fault Brigster’s went bust”); the mother picked up the bag of shopping. “You
know
I’m right, Katie. It’s just the way it is.” She turned around and reached for Paulie’s hand; dropping his apple, the little boy scampered to join her.
As Emmie maneuvered herself and her son carefully to the door, I caught sight of her face, the scar pinched tight against her white skin. “Good-bye,” Katie called after her; we heard a faint “U-huh!” as the bell on the door jingled sharply.

Katie moved onto my groceries with a preoccupied face. Tins of tomatoes and packets of fettuccine, bags of cookies and pots of yoghurt, all sailed toward her, and were swept through the scanner with rough, unconscious hands. It was only when she’d finished, and was announcing the total, that she looked up at me.

Something changed in her face. “You’re that woman from the Dupont house, right?” she asked sharply, sliding her fingers into her jeans pockets; when I nodded, she looked thoughtful. “Mom told me you people know Kenton Tyler. That true?”

“Yes, it is,” I said, briefly wondering how much fodder our household provided for local gossip.
There’s three of them, and a kid. You should hear the screaming
…“Not very well, though. We just—I—well, my husband’s an old friend of Paul Dupont’s,” I explained.

Katie took this in, while dropping bricks of tomato puree and quarts of milk on top of the eggs and grapes in the big brown bag. I heard a despairing
smoosh
as a quart of orange juice landed on a plump juicy peach that had manfully fought loose from its box. “People say Kenton Tyler is the one lawyer around here that isn’t too picky about getting paid. Is that right?” she asked at last, when everything was packed, standing with my credit card held fast in her hand.

I was in the middle of rearranging the shopping and mourning the peach, whose yellow flesh was now spattering the inside of the bag, but as she spoke I began to see where this was going. “I—to be quite honest, I can’t tell you,” I said feebly. “I mean—I take it you are talking about—I couldn’t help overhearing—the young—er—Emmie, I think was her name—”

I reached out my hand; Katie was holding my card in a most ferocious grip. “I’ve known Emmie since pre-K,” she asserted, a battle-
light in her eye. She wasn’t giving up the card. “She’s got herself in trouble a few times, I guess, but she’s a good mom. That Ryan’s an asshole—everybody knew it, but nobody stepped in when she was stupid enough to get herself hitched to him. Landed her in a hospital more than once, not that
she
would tell the cops what happened—it’s the old story, y’know?”

I nodded.

“She never drinks when Paulie’s around, just to let her hair down once in awhile, and when a girl’s got bruises the color of pomegranate all over her chest, why the hell not? Now look,” she went on, a note of wheedling entering her voice, “maybe
you
could talk to Mr. Tyler? See if he’d be willing to take on Emmie. Because that girl hasn’t a dime—”

This was awful. “Katie, I can’t help you, I have no influence over Mr. Tyler, and it’s really his choice who he takes on,” I explained firmly. “Emmie can go and see him, of course, but that’s up to her. Now—can I have my credit card please?”

Katie reluctantly handed it over. “I guess,” she said dourly. “But if—if! You happen to see him, would you do me a favor and mention her name? It’s a small thing, just a small thing to ask. We’re a community here. We try to help each other. You understand?”

By the time I got outside, bags sticking uncomfortably into my armpits, Emmie had just finished strapping Paulie into his seat and was slipping herself into the front of her battered white car. Hanging baskets of trailing ivy and sweet jasmine were festooned along the roofline of the little store’s porch; the rich, warm smell came wafting toward me as I walked down the wooden steps in the afternoon sunshine. I watched as Emmie turned around to reply to something Paulie said; he made a funny little gesture in the air, and I could see her laughing in response. She reached over and tweaked his nose. He stretched both arms forward, and I could even hear the shouted words: “Cuddle, cuddle…”

Impulsively, I walked over to the car and tapped on the window.
Emmie’s pinched face looked startled, but after a moment she rolled it down. A smell of melted candies and Play-Doh poured out of the interior. “Yeah? Can I help you?”

“Emmie, your friend Katie told me you might want a lawyer,” I said quickly. “This man” (I scribbled Kent’s number onto a card of my own, then gave it to her) “might be able to help you. Okay?”

She looked down at the card, then up at me, her brow furrowed. “I—okay—thanks—”

I nodded perfunctorily, then walked away and started loading my own car, telling myself I’d done all I could. By the time I’d finished battering paper bags into the crevices left between the baby buggy and car seat frame in the back of the car, Emmie and her young son were gone.

24

Jeanie

Q
uiet Lanes Elder Care Home was pink—very, very pink. The paint was pink, the doors were pink, the sign that announced
WELCOME
!!!! was pink. The bed-heads were covered in pink velour. The bedspreads (comforters, they call them in America) were a glut of pink roses, and smelled strongly of hospital-grade stain remover. In every room dangled pink ruched lampshades, and pink
plastic flowers reposed in a—yes—pink glass vase in the silent, pink-carpeted entrance hall.

You might suspect that only old people who liked pink came to Quiet Lanes, but there was a settled expression on every face that suggested that personal inclination had little to do with becoming an inmate. The old people were clean, and the staff were cheerful enough, but there was an inescapably institutional feel to the place.

“Hello—you must be Jeanie—gee, we are just so
excited
to have you here,” gushed Mrs. Forrest, an unexpectedly tiny woman of about forty with eyes like a sparrow’s, short blond hair, and massively strong calf muscles, when I hesitatingly walked into her office. A scarf of vibrant fuchsia was coiled around her neck. She put her hands up to her face and stared at me with a look of deepest admiration, as if meeting me was pretty much the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her. “Your experience! Your qualifications! I have, like, a whole file of stuff here on you!” she added, waving a (you guessed it) pink envelope file in my face, which appeared to house my one-page CV and a lone faxed letter of reference from college. I wondered what earlier volunteers had proffered.

“Come in, come in; everyone is
crazy
to meet you!” she added, leading the way out of the office and beckoning me energetically toward the day room. I followed awkwardly behind her, down a corridor of badly painted portraits and framed poetry (“Quiet Lanes is the place to be / If you’re old and like the sea”).

Twenty pairs of eyes looked up as I entered; twenty faces registered a degree of vague interest that Mrs. Forrest interpreted as body-shaking delight. “I
told
you!” she said, laughing deeply, as she looked appreciatively around the room. “Crazy! And here is—Jeanie Boothroyd!” she announced to the assembled company, as if I were a rabbit she had just produced from a silk top hat. She even did a little mime of a drumroll as she spoke (completing, for me, the likeness between her and the Energizer bunny). Clearly, Mrs. Forrest was a lady who liked to use her arms.

I smiled awkwardly both then and repeatedly over the course of the next half hour, as Mrs. Forrest introduced me painstakingly to every person in the room (“This is Teddy, he’s got Parkinson’s, his wife died last year, he has a catheter; this is Sue-Ellen, she’s had three husbands, she does fortune-telling, her daughter is a federal prosecutor—isn’t that
wunnerful?
—and she just had a mastectomy. This is Tim, he does yoga, you must come and watch sometime, we have to take him for a colonoscopy tomorrow. This is…”).

I was just about to begin a tortuous explanation of how I was unlikely to be able to come ever again (tremendously important obligations requiring my immediate presence elsewhere) when I caught sight of two of the inmates exchanging sly glances behind Mrs. Forrest’s back. The look said, as clear as day, “Oh Lord, here she goes
again,
” and it gave me pause. The two ladies caught sight of me looking at them, and one—the woman called Sue-Ellen, a lady of faded majesty with a bouffant haircut—raised her delicately penciled right eyebrow a millimeter upward. It was a tiny but unmistakable gesture of camaraderie.

I allowed myself to be ushered onward by Mrs. Forrest toward the tea-urns, then began to locate lost magazines, slippers, and letters, while dodging a million questions. Everybody was very curious about me, it seemed—about who I was, what kind of family I had, what the weather’s like in England (“How
do
you tolerate that rain?”), and, most important of all, what I thought of America. I was just about managing to keep them at bay when a cool, questioning Southern voice brought me up sharp. “Did I hear you say you’re one of three, my dear?” asked the lady called Sue-Ellen, keeping her foot squarely on a copy of some old-lady magazine I was trying to retrieve. I stood up. The foot, encased in an impeccably white sneaker, was down flat and hard. “That’s right,” I said, smiling politely. “Like Macbeth. We’re the three weird sisters.”

“Hand in hand, hmm?”

“Something like that.”

She slowly moved her foot off the magazine; I picked it up, then returned it to its rightful owner on the other side of the day room, conscious all the time that Sue-Ellen’s blue gaze was fixed upon me. When I finally caught her eye, she beckoned me over with a little flick of her forefinger. “Three English sisters. Sounds less like Macbeth than Jane Austen to me, actually,” she began, making room for me beside her on the sofa, then patting the open space. Each fingertip was finished with perfect salmon-pink polish. “Tell me, my dear: do y’all compete over beaux?”