The Most Fun We Ever Had (26 page)

But she was
functional,
wasn’t she? She volunteered and went to core barre and showed up to fund-raisers biweekly at
least,
and she’d yet to make a spectacle of herself. And now she was taking care of a teenage kid, and he was still
alive,
wasn’t he? And she’d turned her sexual exploits into kind of a game, sneaking around, sparing Jonah from her visitors. There was a pleasant excitement in it, tiptoeing through the halls, muffling her cries in the pillows, silently seeing the men to the front door. And she was surprised by the erotic benefits of this: it felt like when she was a teenager and she’d had to sneak Aaron Bhargava in and out of her bedroom window. She wondered—not to be gross—if her parents had ever benefited similarly from hiding their own romantic exploits. It made her feel illicit and mature,
responsible,
shielding the kid down the hall from witnessing the primal scene.

He’d begun, lately, though, to look at her with a mix of caginess and concern, like nothing that came out of her mouth quite made sense, like anything she said was potentially a joke. She couldn’t pinpoint exactly when it had started happening, but now it was all she could see, the way he acted like she was some doddering hag who couldn’t be trusted to use the stove.

“Do you think I’m a fuckup?” she asked him.

“What? No.”

“Why the fuck did you ask if I wanted a bottle of wine, then?”

He winked. “Because sometimes you ask me that.”

“
Maybe
if you’re passing by the kitchen I’ll ask you to bring me
something,
but it’s not like I’m constantly soliciting you to bring me bottles of wine.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Do you think I’m just a total boozehound?”

“God, no, Wendy. Chill out.”

“Honestly.” The nausea she felt was another thing that could be assuaged by marijuana, scientifically speaking. “What do you—take me for?”

Jonah frowned.

“What do you
think
of me, I mean.”

“I think it’s pretty sick, actually, your life,” he said, and she felt the blood drain from her face. “No,” he said, noticing. “Like,
good
sick.”

“Oh yeah,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“It’s like
lit,
” he said. “Like good sick. Seriously. Like you’re just this— I don’t know. You smoke and drink a bunch and just hang out and you still seem—I don’t know, like, okay with everything.”

“Just
hang out
?”

“Like you’re just a chill person, and it doesn’t seem like you’re that bothered by all of the bullshit that everyone else worries about. Which is cool, Wendy. It’s a good thing.” He squirmed. “Can I bum a smoke?”

“No,” she said, surprising herself with her anger. “Jesus fuck; you’re like a baby. It’s not
cool
to smoke; you’re fucking yourself over by starting so early.” Her father chastened her for it, which made her furious because he was such a fucking hypocrite, because her mother used to keep a pack of Camels wedged behind his workbench in the garage.

“Look, dude, I didn’t mean—”

“I’m not a
dude.
God, what the fuck do you— Christ. Forget it. You should go to bed.”

“It’s like eight-thirty.” He looked up at her with surprising clarity. “Wendy, I didn’t mean— I think you’re cool. I don’t need to bum a cigarette. You’re good. We’re good.”

Of course it was common sense, just textbook being-a-person, that you would never appear in someone else’s eyes precisely as you did in your own. There had been talk, when she was a teenager, of body dysmorphia, an adolescent mindfuck that added fifteen pounds to her frame every time she looked in the mirror, dishwatered her hair and tripled her chin. But now she worried she’d floated all the way to the other side of the spectrum, that she’d lost perspective on herself in possibly a more detrimental way, one that convinced her she was fine when in fact she was supremely fucked, shoplifting-Winona-Rider-level fucked, merely a mammoth bank account away from being drowned-rat-sewer-dwelling fucked.

“You’re too old to be this dumb,” she said.

“What?” He seemed like a child again now, fully.

“Stop trying to be cool. You’ve got enough stacked against you already. Play to your strengths.” She convolutedly wished he
had
brought out what remained of the bottle of wine.

He didn’t say anything, and it made her feel worse, and she prematurely stubbed out her cigarette and lit another one just for something to do.

“I’m not the cool degenerate aunt who you can just— I’m an
adult,
Jonah; I’ve been through more shit than— Christ.”

“Look, Wendy, I was trying to be nice. I didn’t mean anything by it.” He rose uncertainly. “You’re cool,” he said. “You’re lit.” She heard desperation in his voice, and she felt a combination of anger and compassion, for his apprehension, for his naïveté.

“Sleep well,” she said, and she leaned definitively away from him over the railing, staring wistfully down at the lake like some kind of persecuted maritime harlot, listening to the swish of the door as he went inside, feeling an allergic pressure in her sinuses, watching the waves hurl themselves mercilessly against the Harbor Lock.

—

L
ater, when everything had had time to sink in, David would marvel over the fact that Wendy had called him first. But when he saw her name flash across his phone on a Tuesday evening, when she responded to his hello not with a reciprocal greeting but with a guttural catch from her throat, his first thought was that something terrible had happened and he wished she’d called Marilyn instead. His wife was reading on the back porch and he had half a mind to bring the phone out to her, deposit it in her lap like Loomis did with sticks and squirrel skeletons.

“What is it?” he asked.

Her voice, when it finally found itself, was more assured than he was expecting. “So this isn’t working out,” she said. “This— Jonah.”

“What do you mean it’s not working out?” Of course they could have anticipated this. Of course Marilyn
had
anticipated this, but he’d held out some hope for Wendy, had seen how tender and thoughtful and resilient she could be. She couldn’t be getting rid of him
already.

“There’s too much maneuvering. Plus my schedule. It’s all too— It’s just not meshing.”

As far as he knew, his daughter’s schedule consisted of various core-strengthening exercise classes and surface-level psychotherapy and a steady stream of cocktails—things to which he’d always considered her entitled, for now at least, given all she’d been through.

“Did something happen?”

“No, I— No, not like one specific
thing;
I just don’t think this is an ideal situation and frankly I’m not sure why we even considered it in the first place. You guys are blocks away from the high school. You have the room. You have the—”

“Adolescent strength training?” he asked. It had never been clear to him when Wendy would respond favorably to his jokes but tonight she laughed, after a long minute of quiet.

“It’s a lot,” she said finally.

No shit,
he did not say.

“There’s just— I just don’t think this is necessarily the best time in my life to—you know, be
sharing
a life with another person. I don’t think I’m ready to— I’m
definitely
not ready to have a kid in my possession right now.”

He knew that if anyone waited to have kids until they felt ready to have them, the human race would have died off centuries ago. But again he held his tongue.

“It makes more sense for him to be living there anyway.” She paused. “I’m sure you think I’m a total fuckup. I know everyone thinks I’m a total fuckup but I— This really just isn’t— I just can’t right now, Dad. I’m sorry.”

“Nobody thinks that, sweetheart. Can you at least stick it out until the weekend?” This poor kid, being ferried around between their homes like a library book.

“Sure,” Wendy said. “I haven’t told him.”

“Don’t say anything yet,” he said. “In case it— You don’t want him to feel unwelcome.”

“He’s not un
welcome.
I just—”

“I know. Hold tight. Let me talk to your mother.”

Marilyn was curled up on the wicker couch on the back porch with Loomis beside her, his head nestled into the crook of her knees. David paused in the doorway to watch her, the wave of hair that fell over the curve of her neck, the way one hand idly traced soothing lines down the dog’s back. He came up behind her and laid his hands on her shoulders, making her startle.

“Just me,” he said.

“Hey, you. Who was on the phone?”

“Wendy, actually.” He sat down beside her, placing a hand on her knee. “So, guess what?”

She held a finger in her book and looked up at him expectantly. He remembered getting a call from her during his rounds at the hospital in Cedar Rapids, her voice wobbling, uttering the very same line: “Looks like we’re going to be having another baby.”

He should’ve known before he said it that it wouldn’t make her laugh.

—

“M
om called me,” Violet said, and Wendy, phone pressed to her ear, felt a surging of bile in her throat. “God, you really are fucked up, aren’t you?”

“I—”

“I should have fucking known,” Violet said. “Of course you don’t feel any kind of
anything
about this because you’re a goddamn sociopath.”

“It just wasn’t—”

“I asked you one thing,” Violet said. “I asked you for one
thing
and I— Christ, I didn’t even
ask;
you offered, and all you had to do was the bare minimum and you lasted the
summer
? You’re the one who started this, Wendy. You’re the one who started
all
of this and you’ve never given a single thought to the fact that these are people’s actual
lives.
Jesus. Do you not get that other people exist and have feelings and needs and— God, he’s fifteen. He’s a fifteen-year-old kid with a fucked-up life and you had the
effortless
opportunity to make things suck a little bit less for him and you couldn’t even pull it together for that? Do you realize how much instability he’s had in his life? Do you get that I
told
him you’d be happy to have him for as long he wanted? Which you said to me, by the way. Verbatim. I wrote it down because I was so fucking shocked to hear you sounding like a psychologically reasonable person.”

Violet never spoke to her in this way, never dared to be so candidly cruel. She was so busy trying to compose herself, to speak past the thickness in her throat, to not feel life-endingly hurt, that she didn’t give any thought to what came out of her mouth in return: “You know, Violet, I seem to recall someone else in this family being the direct cause of his fucked-up life.”

“Fuck you,” Violet said.

“Perhaps our most entitled member, who refused to even
look
at him when he was born. You couldn’t even make sure he was
alive
and you’re throwing around the word
sociopath
?”

“Don’t ever talk about that to me,” Violet said. “You have absolutely no— It’s not yours, okay? That experience isn’t yours. It never has been. Just because you were there doesn’t mean that you get to add it to your fucking—your—”

“My what?”

“The—your—the roster of suffering you keep. It’s pathetic, Wendy. We get it; your life sucks. So does everyone else’s. That’s just life.”

“Roster of suffering?”

Had this been a different conversation, they might both have laughed.

“It’s not a game,” Violet said. “None of this is— You treat other people’s lives like they’re— Not everything is about entertaining yourself.”

This, for whatever reason, filled her with a hot purple shame.

“I want nothing to do with you,” Violet said. “I want you to stay as far away from me as possible, okay?”

“There’s something profoundly wrong with you, Violet,” she said, because she had always found combat easier than crying. “Like, for whatever reason you’re able to pass as a normal human being but there’s something
deeply
fucked about you, like core-level fucked.”

“Coming from you,” Violet said, before she hung up, “that’s actually a compliment.”

PART THREE

FALL