The Accidental Book Club (3 page)

“Oh, excuse me,” Jean said, feeling as if she’d interrupted something important.

Curt looked up. “No, it’s okay. This is Will. He’s our pastor. Or . . . used to be. We . . . stopped going to church a while back.”

The man in the sweater stood up and offered Jean his hand. She shook it and stepped in just far enough to perch on the very edge of the chair closest to the door, even though it had a stain on it that would have normally made her choose somewhere else. “I’m Jean,” she said. “Laura’s mother.”

“Wonderful to meet you,” the man said, his voice gentle and kind with an undercurrent of cheer that Jean found somewhat off-putting in the hospital surroundings. A pastor in the hospital, to Jean, inspired gravity.

“He was just telling me about a program over at Blue Serenity,” Curt said between gulps of his water.

“I’ve had a couple of parishioners get good results there,” Pastor Will added, as if he were talking about a used car dealership or a tanning salon. “We’re confident we can get Laura back on the right path. A little detox, a lot of prayer.”

Jean nodded, but directed her attention to Curt. “Her wrist. You have no idea?”

“Nope. Two months ago it was four stitches on her forehead, another time a sprained ankle. I’m almost afraid to leave her alone with her doing this, getting so drunk she’s falling and hurting herself and not remembering anything.”

“And you say Bailey is misbehaving,” she said. “Is it because of this? Is it because of what’s going on with Laura?”

Curt shrugged. “Who knows why Bailey does anything she does? She never speaks, and when she does speak, it’s lies. When she gets off the couch, it’s to do something unbelievable. Shoplifting ridiculous things like wrenches and shoe polish, shit she doesn’t need—sorry, Will.”

“I understand.”

“Breaking stuff, sneaking out at night, smoking cigars of all things, and then burning holes in my suit coats with them. Just bizarre stuff. I can’t get through to her. I don’t think anyone can. The girl has no friends. Her teachers see her as a problem in the classroom. She’s just a mess. I predict jail.” He took another drink, swallowed. “Soon, if this keeps up.”

Jean’s heart was half-broken, half-frightened. She hated the idea of her granddaughter struggling, her daughter suffering, but dealing with the flailing had never been her strength. She’d barely survived Wayne’s demise. She was just getting her control back. She was just getting to normal again. Even before, she’d never been good at showing emotion. She didn’t know how to fix a broken person. She liked life steady, stable, predictable.

“Is there something I can do?” she practically whispered. “With Bailey?”

Curt seemed to consider this, then shook his head. “She’s such a handful right now. I don’t know what you could do. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ll figure out something.”

“Should I go with Laura? To this Serenity place?”

“She won’t be going tonight, I’m afraid,” Pastor Will said. “They’ve got to X-ray her wrist, and they’re going to keep her for observation since she was unresponsive when her neighbor brought her here. And the vomiting. They’ll want to keep her on an IV at least for a little while, keep her from getting dehydrated. You should go home.”

Jean fiddled with her purse handles. She hated to admit it, but she was somewhat relieved. She ached to get to a hotel, to her quiet sanctuary. She needed to rest her back. And process everything she’d learned—somehow make the pieces fit. She could visit Laura in the morning. Could follow her to the rehab center. Could see if she could get some answers then. She glanced to Curt for confirmation. He nodded.

“I’ll call you in the morning,” he said.

“I’ll just come by,” she offered. “I don’t know where I’m staying yet.”

“Okay, that’s fine. Thanks for coming. She won’t know you were here, but I’m sure she’d have appreciated it. She always said she wished you two had a closer relationship.”

The sentence struck Jean cold. If Laura had wished it, why hadn’t she ever tried?

Jean felt herself nodding and shaking hands with Pastor Will again and felt her mouth move around niceties, but as she walked down the corridor toward the big sliding double doors, her movement felt more like escape than anything. She didn’t even notice the chubby girl in the black ripped pants plowing past her, coming in the doors as she went out.

J
ean didn’t sleep at all that night. Not that she’d been sleeping exceptionally well since Wayne died, anyway. She was not the same woman who had once slept easily. She was the woman who had stayed up into the night feeding her husband ice chips, had moistened his lips for him when he was too weak to even lick them, had pressed a cold cloth to his sweating forehead, had held his hand when he wept with pain. That woman feared she would never sleep well again.

Sometimes it was hard for Jean to believe these things had ever happened to her, that she’d lost the love of her life in just a few, awful, short months. There had been no time to plan or prepare or take that trip to Yellowstone that they’d talked about since before they ever got married.

God. How was that possible? How was it possible that they’d lived an entire lifetime together and had never gotten around to jotting up to Wyoming for a long weekend? What had they been doing with that time instead? Nothing important; Jean was certain of that. As she’d sat there and smelled the foul odor of approaching death radiate off her husband, always smiling that ridiculous don’t-be-afraid-everything’s-going-to-be-fine smile down at him, even though she herself was so terrified, her insides feeling like they were liquefying, she thought about all the things they’d done instead. Pointless chores, or weekends spent in silence over some silly disagreement or running the children to birthday parties of kids they didn’t even know. Why did they choose those things? Why did they construct a life of tedium, always putting off wishes and dreams for another day that ultimately would not come?

These were the things Jean turned around in her mind endlessly, when she should have been sleeping. These were the things she thought about. She’d remember reading books aloud with Wayne, each of them sipping a glass of merlot, their legs intertwined on the couch or his head in her lap, his voice racing up and down the words like a bus on a hilly highway. She’d think about the last book they’d read together—the one she read to him at his bedside—the one they didn’t finish. She’d recall the last sentence she’d read to him—
Adele came to him in his sleep that night—
and how she’d so often wished that she had kept on reading that night, pressing on until the story was finished. Mostly she’d think just that.
Our story was not yet done. In so many ways.

But something about the hotel room made it particularly difficult to sleep. Maybe it was the way his empty half of the bed made her feel sunken into her half, her aliveness shrieking at her every second of the night. They’d rented a bed for Wayne at the very end, had placed it in the unused dining room just off the kitchen. Jean could then tend to him without schlepping up and down the stairs, and she could be close enough to spot the end when it came near (which she did, falsely, about a million times over those last couple of months, always feeling like a grim specter of doom lurking in the doorway, tissues at the ready). But, most important, and Jean knew this but didn’t really know it, didn’t face it baldly—moving Wayne to the dining room meant that he wouldn’t bring death to their bed. They’d loved there. They’d
made
love there. It was a sacred place, a place where their relationship came alive.

True, he never laid his cancer down in their bed, but his absence was a cancer, one that made Jean toss and turn and wish for morning, even though she knew she’d perpetually face it with swollen eyes and tired limbs.

But she slept in the bed at home immeasurably better than she did in the hotel bed. It wasn’t just the bed, which, true enough, felt like a medieval back-straightening device, or the pillow, which sank all the way to the hard mattress if she so much as put a breath’s worth of weight against it, but it was the realization that this was the first time she’d ever been in a hotel room alone.

At first she’d tried pretending Wayne was in the bathroom, heat light glaring down on him as he took one of his long “vacation showers.” She even got up and turned on the bathroom light, then shut the door, just for the strip of light stretching from under the door across the floor. How many times had she fallen asleep to that light? Colorado, Omaha, Branson, even right here in St. Louis (but not Yellowstone—never Yellowstone). The kids would be snoring softly in their shared bed next to her, the scent of hotel pool chlorine lingering in the room, the window air-conditioning unit rumbling like a jet through the darkness, anticipation of the next day’s adventures heavy in the air. They’d shared so many great times on those vacations. The kids were always too excited to argue, having too much fun to throw fits. And on every vacation, up until Laura went off to college, Jean had always made it a point to do something “girly” with her—get a manicure or visit a doll museum or just go shopping without the boys. It had been such fun. Laura had been such a fun child, even in her precise way.

Jean tossed and turned, the light not helping, and ultimately decided to call Loretta, though it was decidedly past Chuck’s bedtime (Chuck used the “bed” in “bedtime” loosely—most nights he sacked out in his worn recliner, leaving poor Loretta with a stack of inspirational but unrequited Flavian Munney romance novels by her bedside). Loretta answered on the second ring.

“Well, I’d started to think I was going to have to check the ditches on I-70. You got ketchup packets in your glove box?”

Jean laughed. Her friend never could just answer with a simple hello. “Ketchup packets?”

“To survive on in case you’re trapped for days in a tree.”

“How would my car end up in a tree? It’s not a hovercraft.”

“Exactly. No one would think to look for you up there. How is she?”

Jean sighed, closing her eyes to keep from staring at that strip of light coming from out from under the bathroom door. Had she really thought she’d fool herself with that tactic? “Awful. Just awful. I’m just glad her father wasn’t there. But I don’t want to talk about it. I already can’t sleep. I just wanted to see how the group went.”

“Ah. Well. Nobody found hair in May’s cheesecake bites. Which of course made everyone worry that they’d gone and swallowed it. I swear we all looked like a bunch of cats about to urp on the carpet. I saved you one, by the way. Maybe yours is the lucky one. Sort of like a king cake. I put it in your fridge.”

“Thanks. I’m afraid I’m not much in the cheesecake mood right now, though.”

“Are you kidding? You would not believe the amount of restraint it took for me not to inhale it. Especially once Mitzi got rolling with her ‘die-hard’ this and her ‘bleeding-heart liberal’ that. Someone needs to tell her those phrases are oh-so-1990s. And then Dorothy got a phone call from Elan, and it seems one of her boys apparently set a recycling bin on fire at the elementary school, so we decided to just go ahead and call it a day. Seemed like the right thing to do at that point. You are eating this cake.”

“That’s it? You didn’t talk about our next book at all?”

“Nope. Just didn’t feel right without you. We thought we might meet again in two Tuesdays. Kind of an abbreviated do-over meeting. What do you think? We can do it here if you’re not up for it. The girls are worried, of course. About you, and about Laura.”

Jean made some noncommittal noises. Loretta yawned, and soon Jean was sure that if she didn’t get up and turn off the bathroom light, she would be sick. She cut the conversation short, promising to call the next day to let her know how long she’d be in St. Louis, and hung up, practically diving for the bathroom switch and twisting up the knob on the air conditioner so far it rumbled as if it were going to launch itself into the parking lot. The back of her neck was sweaty. But she was tired. So tired. Tired as though she hadn’t slept in years. Surely she would sleep now.

But she never did. She flopped around on the bed so much she had to stand up and untwist her pajamas three times. She was too hot. She was too cold. She was hungry. She was weary, so very weary, and scared and wracked with guilt over all the times that Laura wanted or needed something from her and didn’t get it. All the times she’d made a mistake as a mother, the memories of each and every one vivid in her mind. Why did mothers do that? she wondered. Why did they carry their guilt around like a banner?

Jean sorely wished she could offer a hug or a kiss and make Laura all better now. But mostly she longed for just one more girls-only vacation outing with her daughter.

•   •   •

By the time Jean arrived at the hospital in the morning, her head so foggy with sleep deprivation she worried that she might nod off in the car on the drive from the hospital to the rehab center, the nurses had long since awakened Laura. Her wrist was set in a cast, and she was wearing her work clothes from the day before. Jean noticed grass stains pressed into the elbows of her tan blazer and some other unidentifiable smudges across the front of her blouse, which also appeared to be missing the top button. Laura hadn’t showered, and the places where her cheeks met the undersides of her eyes were deep and bruised-looking. Her hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail, but it looked greasy and stiff. She saw Jean and let out a puff of air.

“Don’t tell me Curt called you.”

Jean stepped into the room, careful not to get in the way of the nurse who was removing Laura’s IV. “He did,” she said.

Again with the puff of air, followed by a wince as the nurse pulled out the needle. “Of course he did,” she said. “He shouldn’t have. It was unnecessary.”

Jean wasn’t sure what Laura meant by that. He shouldn’t have because Laura didn’t want her mother to be inconvenienced? Or he shouldn’t have because Laura didn’t want Jean there at all? Suddenly Jean felt big and unwieldy, taking too much space in the small room.

“I want to know when you’re . . . sick,” Jean said defensively. “I’m your mother.”

The nurse bandaged the back of Laura’s hand and gathered up her trash. “I’ll be back with instructions,” she said, and squeaked out of the room.

“Yes, but you live four hours away. And I’m not sick. I had too many Bloody Marys,” Laura said, rubbing the back of her hand. “He’s always making such a big deal out of nothing.”

“But it wasn’t nothing,” Jean said. “You were . . . passed out and . . . your wrist is hurt . . . and you didn’t tell me that you two split up.” Jean realized she was sputtering and not making much sense at all, and once again she wished for Wayne. She always felt calmer when he was nearby, as if he were her voice of reason. He wouldn’t have felt awkward. He would have had no problem making his opinions known. And despite their frequent fights and the cavalier way Laura had treated his death, Laura would have wanted Wayne there; Jean felt sure of it. She would have gathered some strength from him.

Laura frowned and waved her off, then reached up and felt her hair, gingerly, as if to not mess it up further, if that were even possible. “Come on, Mom—I’m not the first person to drink too much vodka. Curt’s just being a drama queen as usual. I suppose he had Bailey here too.”

“I never saw her,” Jean said.

“Oh, trust me, she was here, leaving a path of destruction like always,” Curt said, and Jean and Laura both turned toward the doorway. Laura immediately rolled her eyes and stood up, as if readying for battle.

“Let’s just go,” she said, bending to retrieve her purse from the chair next to her bed. “I can’t handle being in the same room with him right now.”

“But you haven’t gotten your release papers yet,” Jean said.

Again Laura waved her off. “I don’t need someone telling me how to take care of myself. I’ve been doing fine for forty years, and I’ll do fine now.”

Jean tried not to let the “forty years” part of that comment sting. Did Laura really feel as though she’d always been the one caring for herself? Did she discount everything Jean had ever done? Maybe Jean really hadn’t done enough. Maybe that was part of the problem. Maybe it was all of the problem. Suddenly she wanted to cry—to curl up in Laura’s hospital bed and wrap around a pillow and cry herself to sleep.

“What about rehab?” Jean asked, and Laura stopped, halfway toward the door, and let her arms droop loose.

Her eyes flicked from Jean to Curt and back again. “Look. I drank too much on a weekday. It was wrong, I get that. I messed up. Royally. I probably got myself fired. But don’t either of you two act like you’ve never had too much to drink on a Tuesday afternoon. People make lapses in judgment, and that was mine. I’ll fix it. I’m not some street drunk. I’m hardly pissing myself and hallucinating. I don’t need rehab.”

“Yes, you do,” said a voice from behind Curt, and Jean’s stomach flipped at the sound of it, her weariness and doubt chased away immediately. Curt took a step to the side and there, standing in the corridor right behind him, was a girl Jean instantly recognized as her granddaughter, Bailey.

“Great,” Laura hissed to the floor.

“You were supposed to stay in the car,” Curt said.

“But she does need rehab,” the girl said, her voice ratcheting up a notch.

Jean gazed at her granddaughter for the first time in years. Thick in the middle, with big bones and fleshy features, a washed-out look as if she too needed sleep, her hair dyed so black it shone blue under the fluorescent hospital lights and cut in blunt, choppy layers. Her jeans were filthy to the point of being crusty, and a rock band T-shirt, black faded to gray, clung to her belly uncomfortably. But underneath it all was the voice, the voice that Jean remembered from the last time she’d seen her. The voice, clear and angelic, was far too young to be saying the things it was saying, and for its owner to be worrying about the things she was worrying about. Jean felt as if her heart split in two as she remembered the sweet little girl who used to climb up into her lap, thrusting books at her with wide, eager eyes, and she tried to pair the image with this strange child who wore her hurt and anger on the outside like a coat.

“Oh, how very melodramatic of you,” Laura said. “You must be so proud, Curt, turning her against me like this.”

Curt’s hands flew up to his shoulders innocently. “I didn’t turn anyone against you, Laura. You’ve done that all by yourself. But she’s right. You’re an alcoholic and you need rehab. This isn’t the first time I’ve said that to you. Not by a long stretch. Maybe you’ll listen if it comes from Bailey.”