The Almost Archer Sisters (26 page)

Beth answered on the first ring.

“Put one of the boys on, please,” I said.

“Sam’s not here. He went with Lou to town. Jake is though. I was just going to call you. Where are you?”

“Jake then, please. My cell doesn’t have a lot of battery power left. I forgot to grab my charger. So if I can’t be reached for the next couple of hours, that’s why. But call me at your place if there’s an emergency, and only if there’s an emergency. I’ll phone from the airport in the morning. Also, please tell Dad that he’s going to have to get over his no-coming-to-America thing, because he has to pick me up. I don’t want to see Beau’s face either.”

“Jesus, Peachy,” she whispered.

“I mean it.”

“Peachy, please talk to me. I am worried about you there.”

“Not now, I’m running late and I just want to talk to my son.”

In the silence between us I tried to picture her face. It was likely makeupless and looking drawn. Saturdays are long when you have children. Some mornings the empty hours seemed impossible to fill, but by the end of the day everything you’d planned invariably took longer than you thought. That’s what Sundays were for, to complete the stuff you had started the day before under the
misconception that you had nothing to do and too much time on your hands.

I could hear her yell for Jake and then his little feet on the wood floor running to the phone. “Mom! Where are you?”

“Hi, buddy!” His voice was food to me. I wanted to eat it, chew on it, savor it. “I’m still in New York. Just one more day. I’ll be home this time tomorrow! But guess what? I went shopping!”

“What did you get me?”

“You’ll see,” I said, stunned I had forgotten to buy them anything, a first among firsts for me that weekend.

“It is a truck or maybe candy?”

“I can’t tell you. It’s a surprise. How’s Sam? Where’s your brother?”

“Grandpa and Dad took him to get movies for tonight. He had a spell this morning and peed on the kitchen floor. He hit his head, but Auntie Beth said no stitches!”

My whole body buckled. His seizures were commonplace irregularities to all of us, but I could count on one hand how often he had seized while I was more than ten miles, or ten minutes, away. Four times, exactly, and each seizure felt more portentous than the one before.

“Honey, I miss you so much and I will see you tomorrow. Could you put Auntie Beth on please and stay good. I know you’re being so good. I love you.”

“Okay,” he said.

“Hey,” she said.

“What the hell happened with Sam this morning?”

“I wanted to tell you, Peachy, it was crazy. I can’t believe you do that every day!”

“Just—is he okay?” I started to feel that awful strangulation of the parental heart.

“Totally, Peachy. No. He’s fine. It was me I was more worried about.”

“How surprising,” I said. My hands were shaking with worry and regret. What the hell was I thinking staying away for three days? Surely there was a special corner of hell reserved for selfish mothers like me.

“Don’t, Peachy. That’s not what I meant. I’m just saying it scared the shit out of me.”

“Tell me what the hell happened. Everything.”

She told me she was alone, she had woken early and was making coffee, when Sam entered the kitchen muttering raggedy dream details, something about a moat, something about elephants coming toward the house at great speeds, then their huge legs churning and stopping in the mud, clothing and money in the mix.

“He seemed a little weirded out that I was there. That you and Beau weren’t. But not upset.

“On the other hand,” Beth said, “Jake would have made a champion orphan.” Apparently he bounded down to the kitchen and took in Beth’s news of his parents’ absence with his patented blitheness, a trait I hoped would accompany him throughout his life.

“Jake goes,
‘If they’re gone, then we can have Lucky Charms.’”

“She said Lou got up off the couch where he had fallen asleep the night before, splashed his face in the kitchen tap, and took Jake into town to buy a box of that forbidden tooth rot.

Though my feelings about Beth were still steeped in awful ire, I was sorry to hear she was alone when Sam’s eyes rolled up and back and away. She told me he dropped to his knees by the dog bowl, spilling Scoots’s food all over the Mexican tiles we were meaning to replace with carpet for that reason. She didn’t know he was falling into a fit, so picking up the damn kibble had temporarily distracted her, therefore preventing her from catching his head. Beth tried not to panic, she said, as she sat next to my almost-gone boy, inching closer to him, but afraid. She watched his body fight the current running through him before he finally
succumbed. She pulled his head onto her lap and started wiping the blood off his forehead.

“Honestly, it’s a little tiny cut. He doesn’t need stitches. And Lou agreed. I’m so sorry, Peachy. I didn’t catch his head. I fucking hate myself,” she said.

“It happens,” I said coldly, not mentioning all of the times I’d settle him down into a spell and go back to finishing the dishes. I pictured their little kitchen pietà, worried over what could have happened, but ashamed of the ownership I suddenly felt over his seizures. They happened to Sam, but they had always been my moments to manage and contain. I clutched the side of the bench.

“I kept saying, ‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’” she said, describing how she rubbed Sam’s twitching arms, trying to move some stillness into them, while reciting to herself the rules governing the next several minutes of his life.

Sam’s pee had reached up under Beth’s legs. She had tried to make a dam with her hands but couldn’t stop it from soaking her pajama bottoms. For a second she said she thought it was her own pee, her own blood, and I almost laughed to myself thinking that she must have been totally petrified of adding Sam’s death to the map of carnage she had already charted through our home. When Scoots started to lazily lick at the pee, Beth pushed his head away with a purposeful shove. After several minutes passed, each one less difficult than the one before, Sam’s slippers finally slowed to their blessed twelve o’clock stop.

“Then I said, ‘Come back, Sam. You can come home now, guy,’ like you always say. And then his eyes opened and he opened and shut his fists and rubbed his jaw and the first thing he said was, ‘Mom,’ and I said, ‘No honey, it’s me. Auntie Beth.’”

By then I was sniffling audibly. Beth was oblivious, describing how it seemed like Sam was embarrassed while lifting his bum from the wetness.

“I told him there was a little blood because he smacked the tiles. And I told him I was sorry I didn’t catch his head. And you know what?
He
apologized, Peachy, for peeing his pants. Poor kid. So I told him the pee was probably mine,” she said, nervously laughing, adding she wasn’t altogether sure it was untrue, she’d been that scared. She said her legs were so numb they felt welded to the tiles. She described how she had folded my son forward, keeping her hand on his wet back for a second while he took in his surroundings. Even after Beth added several minutes to the clock on the microwave, only remembering to time it out as Sam was coming to, it still sounded like one of his shorter spells.

“When I was firing up the shower, I asked him, ‘How’d I do?’ And he goes, ‘Okay, I guess. Not as good as my mom. She never lets me hit my head.’ So I told him that I sometimes wish your mother would let me hit
my
head more often,” she said, leaving a bit of silence dangling at the end of the sentence.

“You seem to manage doing that all on your own.”

The pride in her voice was hard to hear. I imagined her in her pee-soaked shorts, moving the soapy water around in circles on the floor, her heart calming down a little with every swirl.

“God. It must feel heroic to always be so
necessary
,” she said, exhaling.

I ignored the statement, but I wanted to say, to tell her, that the horror of always being so necessary is the worst part about being a mother, something no one tells you about until you have children.

“That’s good,” I said. “I’m relieved to know that your guilt didn’t interfere with helping my child get through his seizure.”

“Peachy. That’s not what I meant. I’m trying here.”

“Trying what?”

“To be good,” she said. “I’m trying to tell you that I think you’re a fucking hero for what you do every day. I’m trying to tell you how sorry I am for what I did, for how I hurt you. I’m trying to show you I can be a good person.”

Beth had a knack for walking down the brightly lit corridors of other people’s dramas, dropping their most interesting hurts into her grocery cart.

“Beth. Thanks, okay? But the only hero here is Sam. And I’m glad you were there, but what do you want, a medal? That’s just what has to be done. That’s life. That’s what it looks like.”

“I know. I’m aware of that. I’ve been made aware of that, among other things,” she said in a voice so meek it was barely recognizable as Beth’s. “Where are you? Are you going to meet Marcus? You know I almost stopped in town to check the email. I was going to send him one, telling him everything about what I did, but I didn’t even have a minute. Not even one fucking minute today. It was kind of great.”

“Yeah, well, Saturdays with kids are like that. I gotta go, Beth. I’ll be home around noon tomorrow. And I don’t want you to be there when I get home.”

“Peachy, please. We have to—we can’t not talk about what happened.”

I hung up just as the battery was signaling its near death knell, and just in time to prevent Sam’s dilemma from giving Beth an opening back into my heart. Too often Beth had left me feeling like all those police officers in all those superhero movies, relegated to moving people along. “Nothing to see here,” they’d say, while awestruck cleanup crews dealt with the upturned trains and toppled buildings the hero left in his wake. I wanted to tell her there were no capes in my closet. Sam’s spells had nothing to instruct, nothing to show us. These were stupid and unruly events, I wanted to tell her. They came with almost no warning, and our powers merely consisted of the casual clichés of parenting; cushion the fall, soften the blow, do what you can, hope for the best, apologize if necessary, but when someone goes down, you have to try to catch their goddamn head.

T
HE BAR PART
of the restaurant was front-loaded with attractive people, men the same size as the other men, all in dark suits and white shirts, the women the same size as each other, each looking vaguely related. I felt like I’d walked into a family reunion for which I was the sole adoptee. I craned around, suddenly panicked that I couldn’t remember what Marcus looked like. I can see why Beth says that it’s possible that even people who are supposed to meet still don’t find each other in these homogenous crowds of people trying so hard to look so different from one another that they all end up looking the same. The women seated at, or standing near, the bar seemed to possess Beth’s anxious energy and shoulder-length hair, expensive-looking and clean, hanging unnaturally straight and giving off an unnatural golden glow. Their heads were bent up toward the men they were talking to like so many chatty, skinny flowers. And the men’s booming voices barking back down at them seemed to be the heavy beat that
underpinned this social symphony. Just then, a tall man in a dark suit leaned away from the crowd of talkers to touch my elbow.

“Georgia?”

“Georgia,” I repeated.

“I mean, I’m … you’re Georgia, right?” The man squinted into my eyes, which then traveled from my forehead and down the length of my body to my new shoes, just beginning to pinch my toes.

“Yes. Of course! That’s me,” I said, shaking his hand with so much aggressive delight I think I frightened him at first. Marcus’s hair was not as red as it appeared in his picture, and he was taller than I expected. He stooped over to take in my face, giving me the impression that he was studying it a little. What saved him from being considered a gawky redhead was the way he stood with his hands in his pockets, flashing a ridiculously great grin—the wide kind—that confident people tend to sport. I grinned back, thrilled to see the features from his photograph finally moving. I was also stunned that the prank had worked. In me was the feeling that I had successfully built something complicated from a set of dubious instructions, like a gas barbecue or a small airplane.

“I’m Marcus.”

“Yes,” I said, wittily adding, “I know.”

“And you are Georgia,” he said, sounding like a teacher introducing a foreign-exchange student to a silent classroom. I couldn’t tell if his eyes were green or blue.

“Yes. That’s who I am!” I said, slapping the side of my thigh and trying hard to keep my smile undisturbed by the pain the rest of my body was in. Lying hurts, I realized, its clean execution almost impossible for the amateur. Then, sounding an awful lot like Nana Beecher, I said, “Gosh, it’s really crowded, eh?”

“Yes, it’s Saturday night, so—”

“You’re very tall. And you’re much better looking than in your picture too,” I quickly added.

He thanked me, then looked around to see if anyone had heard.

“Seriously. And your shirt’s really nice, too. And those shoes,” I said.

“Okay. Thanks,” he said. He pulled his lips into a stiff grin and held a hand up as though to deflect further compliments into the crowd. “Let’s sit down before my head gets so big it falls over on you, shall we? We’re back here.”

He steered me quickly to the restaurant part of the bar where he had reserved a tippy table. I felt like he’d taken a rolled-up newspaper, slapped me on the nose, then led me by a leash to the doghouse.

“So you’ve been here before, I imagine,” Marcus said, pulling my chair out for me and glancing around again. I couldn’t tell if he was hiding from someone or was fully expecting the room to burst into “Happy Birthday.”

“Um. No. But I didn’t have any trouble finding it,” I said.

“That’s right, you live in Park Slope.”

“Yes, that’s right,” I said, burying my face in the menu.

“Good. Well,” he said, sitting down. “I’m not in love with this restaurant, but they do a nice osso buco. And their wines aren’t ridiculously marked up.” He cracked his knuckles and erected his menu between us and began lobbing questions over the top of our laminated divide.