The Guy Not Taken (26 page)

“Of course,” Alice said, hating the sweetness that had seeped into her voice like spilled honey.
Hypocrite,
she thought.
Liar.
“Of course, Victoria, you’re a wonderful mother.”

Victoria sounded like a little girl. “Will you tell them?” she
asked. “We’re at the hospital now. Will you come here and tell them that?”

Alice stared into the rearview mirror. Maisy had fallen asleep in her car seat. Her head rested on her shoulder, and the collar of her winter coat was damp with drool.

“Tell me which hospital. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

•   •   •

The social worker was an imposing black woman with iron-gray curls and eyeglasses on a jeweled chain resting on the shelf of her bosom. She sat on a doctor’s wheeled stool, taking notes. Tommy paced the length of the empty hospital room, his face pale and furious. Victoria, huddled in a vinyl chair, had twisted her body into a pretzel and was holding her knees, rocking back and forth, crying without making a sound. Ellie had been taken away for another MRI.

“It’ll be fine,” said Alice, patting Victoria’s back. She had taken the unprecedented step of dropping Maisy off with her father at his office. “But I’ve got—” Mark began, looking trapped and desperate as Maisy clambered into the chair behind his desk and started pounding on his computer keyboard with both fists.

“It’s an emergency,” Alice told him over her shoulder as she ran back down the hall to the elevator.

“What if it’s not?” Victoria asked, wiping her eyes, leaving grayish streaks along her cheeks.

“It will be,” said Alice, looking at the social worker for confirmation. “Ellie had an accident. Kids have them all the time. I’m sure the judge . . . or whoever . . . they’ll understand. They’ll ask Ellie, and she’ll tell them what happened. And really, it could have happened to anyone. Anyone who knows anything about kids would understand.”

Victoria raised her splotchy, streaked face. “But what if Ellie can’t tell them it was an accident?”

“I’m sure this will all be fine,” Alice repeated helplessly. “Whatever you need from me . . . whatever I can do.”

“Tell them we’re good parents. Tell them I’m a good mother,” Victoria pleaded. Tommy made a strangled sound in the back of his throat and turned and slammed his fist against the door frame.

“I will,” said Alice. The social worker shot her a sympathetic look over her half-moon glasses. “Of course I will.”

•   •   •

Victoria and Tom took Ellie home the next morning. Three days later, DHS officers knocked on their door at ten o’clock in the morning and took Ellie into protective custody pending the completion of their investigation. The next morning, Victoria showed up at the Mother’s Hour alone.

“Ellie’s in foster care,” she said dully from her seat on the floor. She leaned against the radiator as if she couldn’t muster the strength to stand. Her studs and chains and lip ring were gone, and her hair hung over her ears as if she hadn’t bothered to wash or comb it. “They scheduled a hearing for the end of the month to see if we’ll get her back.”

The other mothers murmured sympathetically, even as they pulled their own children close.

“What can we do to help?” Alice asked.

“Could you guys write letters? Just saying that you know me. That you saw me with Ellie. That I’d never hurt her.”

There were more nods and more murmurs.

“We’ll do whatever we can,” Alice said, and the other mothers—even Pam—nodded vigorously.

Alice wrote a letter. Morgan’s mother wrote a letter. Annie’s mother wrote a letter. Pam contributed a carefully worded missive in which she described her encounters with Victoria and Ellie. “Although I have not met Eleanor’s father, I can attest that
Victoria seems to be a conscientious caregiver, in spite of her youth.” At the end of the month, the judge ruled that Ellie could go home with her parents, but that the return would be conditional. They would be visited by a social worker each week, unannounced, for the next six months, and pediatrician’s reports would be forwarded to the court until Ellie was eighteen.

The last Mother’s Hour of the semester convened on the last Friday of January, beneath a stainless-steel sky. The forecast was promising six inches of snow for the weekend, and the air had a metallic bite. “We’re moving,” Victoria told Alice, as the children joined hands and played ring-around-the-rosy. “Back to Harrisburg. To be closer to our families, so Tommy’s mom can babysit. Our social worker told us that it might improve our standing.”

“But you got Ellie back!”

“For now.” Victoria’s eyes were hooded, and the circles beneath them were such a deep plum they were almost black. “But we’ll have to be careful for the rest of her life. I think if she ever falls again . . . or skins her knee . . . or loses a tooth, and somebody thinks . . .” Her voice trailed off. Alice felt her insides buckle. What parent’s care could withstand that kind of scrutiny? Certainly not her own.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. The words hung limply between them. Victoria nodded and wrapped her thin arms around Alice.

“You’re a good friend,” she whispered. And Alice nodded, feeling tears prickle her eyelids as all of her regret, and all of her shame, coalesced in a knot in her throat.

•   •   •

Alice thought about Victoria on and off as the years passed, wondering where she’d gone, how she was doing, whether she was happy, what Ellie looked like now.

Maisy grew out of her tantrums by the time she started
kindergarten, and Alice and Mark had a few sunny years with their sweet little girl. They added a swimming pool to the backyard and redid the kitchen, and talked about trying for another baby, but it never happened, and neither of them was inclined to push. Alice went to Penn to get another master’s—this one in social work—when Maisy started first grade, and back to work when she started third. When Mark announced, a week after their daughter’s twelfth birthday, that he’d fallen in love with a woman from his office, Alice found that she wasn’t surprised or even especially upset. She had, she realized, gotten out of the habit of loving him during the first few years of their daughter’s life, when every minute of every day was a struggle, and while she’d learned to get along with him, she’d never learned to love him again.

He told her he was sorry. She said that she was sorry, too. They handled their divorce better than they had handled their marriage: graciously, mindful of each other’s feelings, always careful, always kind.

He got the savings. She got the house. He remarried when Maisy was fourteen, and he and his new wife had twins. Alice couldn’t keep herself from hoping, maliciously, that their first years would be much like Maisy’s had been, so that the new wife could enjoy what she’d been through, times two, with a husband in his forties instead of his thirties. Eventually she found a man of her own, a man she felt strange calling her boyfriend and knew she would never call her husband. Jacob had been divorced twice, had three grown children, and had made it clear from their first dinner that he wasn’t interested in another matrimonial go-round.

She saw Jacob on weekends, but for six years it had been pretty much just the two of them, Maisy and Alice, rattling around in the big house with the grand entry foyer that had so
impressed her as a newlywed. Now Maisy was off to Cornell, and Alice was downsizing to a condo across town. There were rows of cardboard boxes lining the hardwood floors, some of them filled with the books and clothes Maisy would take to school, others packed with the bed linens and towels Alice had earmarked for Goodwill. Maisy was unzipping the sofa’s slipcovers to take to the dry cleaners and Alice was rolling up her old Oriental rug when she heard her daughter gasp.

“Oh my God. Are these real?”

Alice looked over and saw, sparkling on her daughter’s smooth palm, the diamond-and-pearl earrings she’d lost sixteen years before. “They are,” she said faintly.

“Finders keepers!” said Maisy, snapping her fingers shut.

“They’re mine,” said Alice. She must have sounded sharper than she’d meant to, because Maisy looked chastened and muttered that she was just kidding as she handed the earrings over to her mother.

“They were in the couch,” she said, as Alice shuffled the earrings in her palm, staring down as they twinkled under the lights.

“I lost them,” Alice said. “A long time ago.”

“Oh,” said Maisy. She went back to the sofa. Alice slipped the earrings in her pocket. All through dinner at Maisy’s favorite pizza place, she imagined she could feel their weight against her hip, the sharp edges of the faceted stones, the loops of the wires.

When Maisy kissed her good night and went to her room, Alice plugged Victoria’s name into the computer. More than two thousand entries came up, and she browsed through them until she was hot-eyed and shaky, but none of the Victorias who showed up on the Internet appeared to be the girl she remembered. Of Eleanor, she could find no record at all.

At first light the next morning, Alice pulled on yesterday’s jeans and her sneakers and went prowling through the high-ceilinged, half-empty rooms, past boxes labeled “Condo” and others labeled “Cornell,” boxes of old family albums, her good silver, her old sweaters, leashes of dogs that had died.

She eased the front door open. The earrings were still in the pocket of her jeans.
They’ll turn up,
Mark had told her.
You’re a good friend,
Victoria had said. There was a sewer at the corner of their street, covered in a rusted metal grate. She remembered Maisy lying down on top of that grate on her way back from the playground two blocks away, pounding her fists against the bars, shrieking that she didn’t want to walk, so many years ago. Alice bent over, looked down into the darkness, and opened her hand. The earrings vanished into the water with hardly a sound.

O
RANGES FROM
F
LORIDA

T
he telephone woke him at just past midnight, and Doug, still half asleep, flung himself across the bed to answer it. His arms tangled in the covers, and the light switch didn’t seem to be where it was supposed to be. He had his hand on the receiver when the stunned, sinking feeling came over him, and he woke up enough to realize that he was alone in the bed, and the bedroom, and the house.

The telephone was still ringing. He shoved himself upright against the headboard and lifted the receiver to his ear.

“Hello?” Doug said. He kept his voice down, out of habit. In the first weeks after she’d gone, he’d had a few hour-long, whispered telephone conversations with Carrie.
Please come home,
he’d tell her.
I want to be a family again.
Her sighs were louder than his words.
I can’t,
she’d say.
I just can’t.

“Hello?” he repeated.

“Did I win?” his caller asked.

It was a child’s voice—whether it belonged to a boy or girl, he couldn’t tell, but he knew immediately what had happened. After the second time he and Carrie had been woken up in the wee hours by someone requesting a song or asking, urgently, if they’d won, Carrie had flipped through the phone book and
found that their number was just one digit away from the number for WQXT—Quickie 98. It had struck them as funny at the time—all those teary-sounding women and giddy teenagers calling in with their dedications and requests, the love songs they just had to hear in the middle of the night.

The voice spoke again, and Doug decided it belonged to a boy. “Am I the lucky caller?”

Doug looked across the empty bed. The clock on the dresser clicked from 12:02 to 12:03. “Yes,” he said.

They both paused—Doug because he was astounded by his lie and the speed with which it had leaped out of his mouth, and the boy because “yes” was obviously not what he had expected.

“What did I win?”

“Oranges from Florida,” Doug said. It was the first thing that came to his mind. Oranges from Florida were what Carrie’s mother sent them each Christmas. He wondered, briefly, whether he’d get any citrus this December. What was the etiquette of holiday gift-giving for not-quite-former sons-in-law?

“Oranges,” the boy said, sounding so disappointed that Doug was moved to add: “And a hundred dollars, of course.”

“Oh, wow,” said the boy. It sounded to Doug as if he were trying to work himself up to the fever pitch that disc jockeys demanded of their winners. “Wow, jeez, thank you! I never won anything before!”

“Congratulations,” Doug said. “And, uh, thanks for listening.”

“Thank
you,
” said the boy politely, as if he were about to hang up.

“Wait,” Doug said. He hadn’t realized how long it had been since he’d had a non-business-related conversation with a stranger. This was certainly a weird one to start with. What was a kid doing up this late, anyhow? “Caller, are you there?”

There was a pause, a faint staticky thumping. Then: “I’m here.”

“Oh, good,” Doug said, improvising frantically. “We need your name.”

“Joe.”

“Joe what?”

“Stern,” the boy said, and spelled it out.

“Very good. How old are you, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Ten,” said Joe. “Is that okay? Do you need to be eighteen to win?”

“No, you’re fine,” Doug said, already casting about for his next question. Some dim part of his mind was warning that the boy would think he was crazy, but he couldn’t stop talking. “Isn’t it pretty late for you to be listening to the radio?”

“My mother lets me,” Joe said. “I can listen to it to keep me company before I fall asleep.”

“That’s great,” said Doug. “We’re always glad to have listeners.”

“I like Dr. Larry’s Help-Line,” the boy said, and sang a snatch of the show’s theme song in a gruff, tuneless voice. “Someone to turn to, someone to trust . . .”

“Dr. Larry’s Help-Line,” Doug marveled. “People have interesting problems,” the boy said. “Last week was adult bed-wetting.”

Doug couldn’t stop himself—he laughed, and after a minute, Joe laughed, too.