The Mermaid of Brooklyn (43 page)

“She doesn’t let strangers hold her,” I said.

“Jenny,” Harry said as I took her from him.

Betty smashed a rag doll into his face. “Don’t wook at her! Wook at me! This is my dolly her name is Samantha I named her after Sam”—I winced—“and Emma broke her arm and she got a dolly named Dolly and there is a new slide at the playground and Gwamma got a swing set at her house and—”

“Go wash up for dinner,” I interrupted. I put Rose down again and went into the kitchen, shoved my fabric off the table to the floor, started flooding a large pot with water, taking a package of spaghetti from the cabinet and slamming it onto the counter. “Will you be joining us?” I said to Harry.

Rose was touching his face like a blind man. He looked up, his eyes sagging gruesomely from her tugging. “If I’m welcome.”

If he was welcome! As if I’d kicked him out, as if he’d been trying to come back all along. I slammed a jar of spaghetti sauce onto the counter. A crack shot up the side. Good. I wanted to break everything in sight, dissolve into a true toddlery tantrum. My kind and gentle family-oriented thoughts from the picnic revealed themselves to be the mental ramblings of an idiot. Now that he was back, I hated his fucking guts. Excuse me, but he was not allowed to do that! Just take off because he needed some time to himself? Didn’t he think I wanted some time to myself now and then? Would I ever disappear for months at a time? I’d poison his dinner, I decided. I’d stab him in his sleep.

“Come on, Bets,” he said, taking Betty into the bathroom. “Mommy said time to wash up.” I could hear them playing in
the sink, splashing water around, Betty continuing to ramble on. I looked at Rose, who was about to topple over—how would he know she wasn’t that steady at sitting? How would he know anything about any of us? Even if he’d been here all along, I thought bitterly, scooping up Rose and slipping her into the high chair, he wouldn’t know anything about us at all. Anything about me.

My phone buzzed in my jeans pocket. I handed Rose a wooden spoon and turned toward the stove, taking my phone out to check the text. “Need to see you. Told J I’m going to the gym at 8.” Sam.
Don’t cry,
I warned myself.

Reading his text there in my kitchen, with normal happy family sounds restored to the apartment, hearing Betty giggle and protest, “DADdy!” I felt as if I’d encountered a movie star on the street, and I realized that without the makeup and the lights and costume, the star’s beauty vanished, she was just a normal person with bad skin and goofy sunglasses. What the
fuck
. I couldn’t imagine what I could have been thinking. Sam? Cute Dad? And me? Really? That would be something you could never take back, something that would change our lives, certainly his life, maybe the lives of our whole neighborhood, our spouses, our children, and for what? For a moment or two of feeling slightly better than we did before?

My eyes brimmed hotly as I tapped out a message with my thumbs: “Don’t come. I’ll explain later.” Apparently Sam had not gotten my psychic message that we were through. I was aware that Harry was standing behind me but that we were still in the sort of wonderful, terrible in-betweenness, like when you’re driving across state lines and find yourself in between a “Thanks for visiting” and a “Welcome to” and picture your car traversing the map’s black line, and that he couldn’t yet ask whom I was texting, that I didn’t yet owe him even the mildest of civility. We were strangers; he was a dinner guest at a single mom’s apartment. By the next night, if he
managed to stay that long, everything would be different. We’d be stiff with each other, a little sore, like human scabs, but by then we would be beginning to know whether we were a married couple or not. Maybe after the girls were in bed, he would tell me he wanted a divorce. Maybe I would tell him I wanted one. Maybe I would kick him out, tell him never to come back. I muttered the word “divorcée” in my head, trying it on for size. What an interesting thought. “My ex-husband.” Huh.

But for now we had to get through dinner and put the kids to bed so that we could talk. I thought of Sarah and John shouting their plans for divorce at Max above the Chuck E. Cheese’s din. I’d never called to find out how it went.

As much as I wanted to hear whatever it was Harry was going to say to defend himself, and as curious as I was to find out just where he had been, how he would explain this one, whether we’d come out winners or losers, at the same time, it was a relief to be quietly traveling through the black line. I bit my lip a little too hard.

“What is Rosie eating these days?” Harry said, pulling up a chair.

My chest twanged like a banjo string. “Ah, yes,” I said, “how would you know? Well,
dear,
there is a jar of sweet potatoes in the cabinet. She’s been eating solids for a couple of months. Her first was rice cereal. She liked it.”

“Jenny,” he said softly. He looked pained. There was some small satisfaction in knowing it hurt him to realize how much he’d missed.

I whirled around, the pasta scoop in my hand. “Yes?” Betty was perched on her booster seat, studying us. I smiled, thinking of gorillas bearing their teeth in anger. “Betty, sweetheart, would you like milk or water?”

Betty cocked her head at her daddy. “Juuuuuuicy?”

“No,” I said quickly. “Just because your father’s home doesn’t
mean all hell can break loose. We still have some laws in this land.” Hell. Oops. It would be fun to hear that one get repeated in some public setting.

Harry popped open the baby-food jar and started spooning it into Rose’s mouth. I wordlessly slipped a bib on her, glaring at him over her head. Instead of calming down throughout dinner, I managed to get angrier and angrier, my heart racing like in a near-miss car accident. My voice tasted sour in my mouth. Every time he attempted to ask a question, my answers got snippier and snippier—“Yeah, I’ve been sewing a lot. What did you imagine I was doing this whole time? Catching up on
American Idol
?”—until he stopped asking, looking chastened. At least that was something. It made me feel mean to acknowledge it, but it was true: I wanted him to seem unhappy. And I wanted him to think that I was fine, just fine, that everything had been just fine. Fun, even! Great! Never been better! Wait, no—I wanted him to think we had suffered, to know that he had damaged his family, that he had dissolved my trust. Wait. I guess I didn’t know what I wanted.

Betty demanded the Total Daddy Treatment all night, ordering him to bathe her and showing off her new rubber ducky—“From Sam!” she crowed, and again I cringed, listening from the hallway. I nursed Rose to sleep and deposited her gently into her crib, while Betty melted into Harry’s arms as he whispered her bedtime stories. Aliens could have sliced open our building like a dollhouse to study our behavior, and even their advanced, space-travel-capable brains would have seen only a happy family, a sweet bedtime scene. I wanted to cry. I did cry.

By the time Harry tiptoed out of the girls’ bedroom, easing the door shut, I had already cleaned up after dinner and was sitting on
the couch slugging down the wine I’d bought for—dear God, it felt beyond pathetic, remembering how, as I’d selected it, I’d hummed Betty’s favorite princess song, “I know you, you danced with me once upon a dream”—me and Sam. I closed my eyes. I could almost feel him, almost taste him. Sam, I mean. Or maybe Harry. I opened one eye, like a timid woodland creature. “Oh,” I said. “It’s you.”

He smiled as if he got the joke. He perched on the far end of the couch, cautiously, as if I might bite. Which I might have. I handed him my juice glass of wine. He took a hearty gulp, looked around. “So,” he said.

I was almost able, in that moment, to see him the way I once saw him. It was weird to imagine that I was meeting him for the first time. Maybe I was. It had always been a problem, how fucking good-looking he was. It had always meant he’d gotten away with a lot. He had precise, pointed features—the beaky nose that Betty had inherited, Rose’s sharp chin—and mocking almond-shaped eyes. He had great hair. He really did. It was thick and bristly and stuck up in the front, effortlessly cute, like a little boy’s. He had gotten it cut since he’d been gone. If I tried to imagine how this had happened—a foreign barber, a tender woman—I would fall apart completely. So I didn’t. I thought about Sam’s hair and the wild way it framed his face when it came out of its ponytail, the lion’s mane of curls, extravagantly threaded with red and gold, heroine hair, far too pretty for a man.

“So,” said Harry, when neither of us had spoken in a while. I sucked down some more wine, feeling its warmth eke throughout my limbs. “Where’s the dog?”

I stared at him. “The
dog
?”

He looked around the room, held out his palms as if testing for rain, and looked at me again. “Yeah. Where is she?”

I collapsed back into the couch and rubbed my face. “Where is the
dog,
Harry? You go out for cigarettes and come back
months
later with no word, no note, no calls, one measly postcard—you let me and your mother and your brother worry ourselves sick, not knowing if you’re
dead
or
what,
you asshole, you miss
half
of your baby’s entire
life,
you steal money from the company, which has gone bankrupt in case you hadn’t heard, and then you just reappear one day and that’s what you have to say for yourself? Where is the goddamn
dog
?” I was getting loud, despite my efforts. He looked stricken. He was struggling to be the new Harry, I could tell—swallowing a tide of rage, resisting the urge to make a bitchy remark that would send everything spinning into argument.

“You didn’t— Just tell me you didn’t put her down.” Harry raked his hands through his hair. He was the only person I’d ever met who actually made his hair look better like this, by accident. I poured another glass of wine. A bad idea, I knew, but I’d been sort of into bad ideas lately.

“Harry. Are you really more concerned with the dog’s well-being than your family business going bankrupt? Did you hear that part? Your family going broke? You and I have some things to sort out. We need to
talk,
my friend. You tell me where on God’s green fucking earth you have been, and then I will tell you what’s become of that half-witted mutt. Deal?” I was pointing my finger at his chest like an angry Uncle Sam. The wine did nothing to soothe my thumping heart. My phone vibrated in my pocket again. I ached to read the text. Part of me hoped Sam hadn’t gotten my message, that he would burst through the door and gather me into his arms, just so I could see the look on Harry’s face.

Harry knitted his brow. “I understand. You deserve that, you do, of course you do. But it’s a really long story.” He tried to gather my hand into his. I jerked it away, sloshing my cup, and stood up.

“Don’t touch me,” I said.

“Okay.”

“Talk.”

He sighed. “Okay.”

What followed, I am sorry to report, was not especially satisfying. He’d never meant to stay away so long. He never would have done that to me and the girls and his mother. Except that he did. Yadda yadda yadda. It had started, as we’d all suspected, as just another gambling binge. Yes, he took company money. Yes, he took his overnight bag. He went to Atlantic City. He drank too much and played a lot of poker. “I don’t know if I’ve ever really tried to explain it to you, but Jenny, it’s so weird, this thing that happens to me. I feel like I’m in control for once. And it’s exciting. People—when you’re winning—they gather around and cheer and want to be a part of it. You’re a rock star. You’re on top of the world. Strangers are suddenly your pals. It’s a different world from, you know, the office, boring life—”

“Your wife and kids,” I supplied. I was getting impatient and annoyed that my anger was dissipating, that soon I would be feeling sympathetic—he did seem so
sad
—and the months of saved-up anger would no longer be useful to me. “Harry, you disappeared. You deserted me. I have been alone with two babies all summer! And it’s been so fucking
hot
! I’ve been going
crazy
! I didn’t know how we were going to pay all our bills, or what to tell people, or what to tell Betty or myself. I didn’t know if my girls would ever have a father again. For all I knew, you could have been dead! Or with some other woman!”

“I would never,” he protested too quickly. “I swear to you, there’s no one else. I know this must be hard for you, believe me, I— Jenny, will you at least sit down?” His words sounded stilted, as if he’d memorized what a decent human being might say. It was
annoying that he didn’t seem to have considered the possibility that I’d been with another man. I felt perversely proud of my secret, of how bad I had been, of how shocked he would be, how hurt.

I shook my head, backing away. “Just—talk. Just talk.”

He stared at his hands while he told me the whole nonstory. He’d been feeling cooped up and irritable and like he was going to bust. As usual. I couldn’t help it, burst out, “Oh! And I’d been feeling like the bee’s knees! Because having two little kids and no money is supposed to be a fucking walk in the park, everyone knows that! You know what I do when I’m feeling cooped up, Harry? I take a goddamn bath. I do some goddamn yoga.” He let me finish, apologized again, took a deep breath, and continued. He’d gone to the tables. He’d lost. Then he’d won. Then he’d won big. Then he’d lost big. Bigger. Really big. And then he was too ashamed to come home.