The Most Fun We Ever Had (72 page)

“There’s the library; there’s Matt’s guitar room; there’s the little tree house, I won’t let Wy go in it yet, Matt says he’s old enough but I can just see him falling out of one of those windows, can’t you?” It was like a very boring episode of
Cribs.
Violet cracked open another door. “There’s my office,” she said.

Even Wendy couldn’t get away with asking,
What the fuck do you need an office for?
so instead she chose a more diplomatic phrasing. “Are you working again?”

Violet looked a little sad. “I mean—not—not
practicing,
no.” She swallowed. “But this is my space for—you know, paying the bills, managing the boys’ schedules and”—at this she blushed—“doing things for the preschool. Listen, I’m desperate to pee; can you take him for just a minute?” Violet pressed Eli suddenly into her arms and she held him awkwardly, arm’s length away from her body. This kid she knew so little about. Dressed in a onesie with a necktie screen-printed on it. Healthy and perfectly formed.

It was all so simple for Violet; it was all so nauseatingly effortless. Her sister was, as always, so fucking
calm,
confident that life would have her back and that everything was just
natural
. Wesleyan, the adoption, law school, Matt, the bar exam, marriage:
everything
was just
happening
. Things
happened
to her sister, and the fact that they were happening to her seemed to be enough for Violet. She required no external stimulation because she was a knockout with an advanced degree and a dorky husband who probably ate her out on command, and everything that happened to her was just
life
. Violet took things in stride, Wendy had to hand it to her; but it always seemed kind of put-on, like
Oops, life’s amazing.
Meanwhile, Violet treated Wendy like a piece of glassware, an antique beer stein that was very old, very ugly, and very breakable. But there were plenty of times—
most
times, really—that Wendy had not called her sister for help. She’d spared Violet from so much and her sister couldn’t help but shove her fulfillment in her face.

At Violet’s wedding, not long after they’d lost Ivy, she’d passed out, inexplicably, on the couch in her father’s study, and Miles had carried her to the car and taken her home. Violet had left the next morning for her honeymoon in Greece, and then she came back and worked at her impressive job and then she got pregnant and they had Wyatt and all of the chips kept landing precisely where they were supposed to land.

The baby squirmed, being held up in the air like he was, and she was forced to bring him closer to her, to rest him on her canted hip. “Hi,” she said, trying. “Hey, there.”

He felt strange, like a damp pile of laundry. He smelled nice, though, like Dreft and sleep and the subtle perfume Violet had worn since college. The last kid she’d really held for any significant amount of time was Grace. She’d been good with her, when she was feeling giving enough to allow her mother the satisfaction of help, would wake up in the night sometimes before their parents heard Grace crying and wander around the house with her, whispering stories into her uncomprehending ears,
Spencer Stallings is the dumbest person on the earth but he’s so hot, Goose,
and
See this table? This table is from a hundred years ago; that’s three hundred times as old as you
. She tried bouncing Eli, and he smiled at her, a dazzling baby smile, and reached for her necklace, taking it in a tiny fist.

“Isn’t that a beautiful necklace?” she said. “Isn’t it, mister?” He laughed, a great gremlin laugh, and she felt herself laughing too. “I know,” she said. “I’m a riot.” Her eyes drifted to a frightening calendar over Violet’s desk, one that was the size of an overhead projector screen and color-coded, it appeared, by family member, Matt in blue and Wyatt in red and Eli in green, and Violet, appropriately, cloyingly, in purple.
Vinyasa. Shady Oaks Fun Run. Dr. Jacobi
.
Bongos by the Boatyard. Park day w/ Wilhelmina and Grayson.
It was like another language, the language of a crazy person, a boring, well-tended-to crazy person. She hoped, for Violet’s sake, that Dr. Jacobi was a shrink.

“Careful with your necklace. He’s hell-bent on destruction lately.”

Eli turned at the sound of his mother’s voice. The simple science of it made her ache. “Aren’t you, little terrorist?” He reached out for Violet, suddenly straining against Wendy when seconds earlier he’d been so content. Everyone liked Violet more than they liked her. “I think I just heard Matt,” Violet said, and she led the way back downstairs.

“Are there guys
and
gals in my house tonight?” Matt’s voice rang out from the kitchen and she saw Violet lighten at the sound of it. “Wendy, hey, welcome.” She watched as he went over to Violet. “Hi, honey.” He leaned in close and kissed her.

Wendy looked away.

“Hi, love,” Violet said.

She looked back in time to see Violet lift her face to kiss him again, then hand off the baby to him. “Wendy, some wine?”

“God, yes.”

Matt was laughably bland—not even milquetoast, she’d joked once, but like a piece of bread that you
intend
to toast, but you forget to turn the toaster on—but it still made her insides twist when she saw him rolling up his shirtsleeves like Miles used to, one of the absolute sexiest pedestrian things a man could ever do, in her opinion. The baby looked even tinier against Matt, impossibly fair against the thatches of dark hair on his forearms. Wyatt appeared again, summoned from his picturesque playroom by the sound of his father’s voice.

“Daddy,”
he said.

“As we live and breathe,” Violet murmured from over by the fridge.

“The
monster,
” Matt said, and she watched as he hefted Wyatt up using his free arm and pretended to gnaw at his shoulder. Wyatt squealed with laughter; her gut throbbed. “How did you get past the guards, huh?” Being in such close physical proximity to a man with such big, capable arms was enough to make her need to sit down. The man she was currently sleeping with, a young financial analyst named Todd, was blond and reedy, pleasurably fox-like in bed but unimpressive in his street clothes. Violet brought her an enormous glass of wine, nearly two times a normal ration, and she looked up with amusement, grateful for this break from the unbearable lovefest happening in her peripheral vision.

“Is it passé to make
Desperate Housewives
jokes? Jesus. So this is how you get through the day.”

Violet blanched, then blushed, white to red. It was a cruel thing to say, maybe; judging by the look on Matt’s face it was
definitely
a cruel thing to say. “We’re celebrating,” Violet said weakly after a moment, going to pour her own glass. “Honey,” she said to Matt, and something in her voice changed. “I said we’d do the food for the pre-K open house next week; it’s seven to ten on Tuesday so remember to be home on time. And Jax’s birthday party is on Sunday at the pottery-painting place and I’d
really
love if you’d come with; I think a lot of dads are going to be there. I fixed that light in Wyatt’s bathroom too. Oh! And I built the bookshelf while Eli was napping. It looks good, I think. You might have to check and see if all the screws are tight enough; I started to get that same backache before I finished. I might go to the chiropractor again next week.”

If she wasn’t mistaken, this domestic catalog was being recited for her. It was how Violet got her digs in—artfully, through the unassuming shields of other people.

And then her sister turned to her, swept over in her size-4 Sevens and her practical, stylish Sperry Top-Siders, and her frozen face had configured into something distinctly unkind.

“Cheers to desperate housewifery,” she said, clinking her own full glass against Wendy’s. She went over and kissed her husband again—her husband, who had seemed bored by her talk of bookshelves and back pain but who perked up at this intimate act. She took the baby and kissed his head and took a slug of wine, fixing her gaze on Wendy, buoyed on all sides by the undeniable aesthetic perfection of her circumstance. “It’s really not so bad.”

It wasn’t fair that Violet got to live this life, that Violet got an able-bodied man who loved and took care of her, that her own body produced child after healthy child, that her house had a
guitar room,
that she was pretty much guaranteed to never be alone again. And it especially wasn’t fair that Violet seemed unwilling to acknowledge any of this, to be grateful for the fact that she was doing okay when Wendy had been so cosmically fucked. That she was content enough with her superior standing in life that she could make jokes about it while canoodling with her husband in front of her recently widowed sister, the sister who had made her good life possible in the first place and would never, ever have what Violet had, despite all the money in the world. That Violet was apparently just fine with shedding any pretense of humility about how goddamn lucky she was.

This was why the next day Wendy called her attorney and asked whether he knew any private investigators, money no object, someone who could circumvent sealed adoption records.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

“It’s kind of sad, isn’t it?” Marilyn asked, beside him on the back stairs, voice barely audible beneath the whir of chainsaws. One of the biggest branches fell from the ginkgo, and David flinched.

He studied the atrophied bark, the familiar patch of grass beneath it. So odd, how well acquainted you could become with the physical details of your life without even realizing. If you’d asked him to recall, from a distance, the pattern of the exposed roots and the paltry sprinkling of tulips that encircled the trunk, he wouldn’t have been able to tell you, but staring at it now was like looking at the complicated map of veins on his own hand, a visual memory that made his eyes well up.

It wasn’t quite melancholy, what he was feeling. It was more mathematical than that, more of an itemization of intangible things, his life with his wife, the ground they’d covered together, how he still felt a little like he had when they’d lain beneath the ginkgo on that cold night in December: astonished by the fact of her presence alongside him.

“You okay?” she asked him, leaning her head against his shoulder. She’d been like this since the heart attack, constantly aware of how close they’d come to losing this life they’d built. It pained him a little to see the way she looked at him lately—the way all of them looked at him, like he could expire at any moment. Old Tenterhooks, he’d called her, jokingly, last week, but she hadn’t found it funny. Astonishing, also: the fact that he was still here to be beside her, watching the tree come down.

He wrapped his arm around her. “I’m very much okay, kid.”

Between their two sets of parents, only his father had grown old enough to contemplate his impending obsolescence. What would Marilyn’s dad think if he could see them here, weatherworn, the two kids he’d caught in flagrante now older than he’d ever been? He thought of making a joke—
the Dago prevails
or some such—but it struck him as unkind, and plus—he remembered—of course she wasn’t following the train of thought inside his head, at least not to that degree of specificity. The landscapers were going at the trunk now, notching it deeply in specific areas so it would fall where there was only flat lawn. He felt Marilyn tense beneath his arm, then relax, angling her head more snugly against him, closing her eyes to the show before them, like when they’d be carrying in the girls from the car and they’d tuck their sleeping eyes away from the light.

His best friend, the most wonderful surprise life had ever lobbed his way.

“I am so unspeakably glad you’re here with me,” she said, and her breath warmed his chest, and his eyes filled, because the statement was not, upon reflection, so very different from his train of thought after all.

—

V
iolet couldn’t recall a time when she’d actually, formally apologized to her sister. It wasn’t how they operated. She was professionally averse to linguistically accepting blame, and it seemed as though it had never occurred to Wendy to say she was sorry for anything. In the elevator on her way up to the thirty-sixth floor, Violet nursed a renewed anger over this, anger tinged with envy, because going through life unburdened by guilt actually sounded pretty nice. They hadn’t spoken, not really, since their phone call after Wendy had kicked Jonah out. They’d both thawed slightly when their father was in the hospital, but only for the purposes of civility, of not further upsetting their mother, of bonding, on some level, in order to karmically encourage David’s recovery. It had been Matt who’d convinced her that she needed to make things right, who’d reminded her that Wendy was as much a part of things as she or Jonah; who’d acknowledged—setting aside his own reservations about her sister—that the only way she or Wendy would ever be able to truly move forward was if they cleared the air. She’d almost turned around a dozen times on her way, and she considered it once more as the elevator dinged open, but Wendy was already waiting in her doorway.

“Speak of the sacred,” she said, “and she shall appear.”

Violet could not assess her sister’s level of levity. “You were talking about me?”

“Nope.”

“Then how did you—”

“Jesus, the doorman buzzed me.” Wendy ushered her inside. “Come in, I guess. Though it behooves me to point out that if I ever showed up at your house uninvited you’d have me tasered.”

“Is now a bad time?”

“Not in the grand scheme.”

She was half-annoyed and half-relieved that her sister had adopted this tonal affectation, speaking theatrically like some kind of genie. “I figured—you know, it was about time we talked about some things. Cleared the air.”

“Great,” Wendy said. “I love entertaining the emotionally maligned.”