When You Go Away (15 page)

     "Well, we went to bed so early.  Maybe we should just stay up.  We have to get to the airport two hours in advance now."

     "Yeah."

     "How are you?"

     "I'm okay.  I mean, don't be worried.  I'm not like I was before.  I'm just so sad.  I can't believe what I did and what it's going to do to the kids.  They've been through enough."

     Noel was silent, and Peri could almost hear him trying to find the right thing to say.  She felt sorry for him because what could possibly be right here?  What words wouldn't be a lie? 

     He rubbed his nose and sat up a bit.  "It is going to be hard.  I guess there's no getting around that.  But I talked to Dad, while you were in the shower.  The kids are doing okay.  They've talked with the social worker and some psychologists or something, and it looks like the judge wants you to have a thorough evaluation, too."

     "But what about Graham?"  Peri hated how her mouth still held his name, the way she loved the air high against her palate with the H.

     "From what Dad said, Graham will want custody.  I won't lie about that."

     "Brooke, too?"

     "I don't know--I don't think so.  No one's said anything."

     Slipping onto her back, she tried to stop the anger that rippled from her chest into the rest of her body, but she couldn't.  "Goddamn it!  Goddamn him!  He couldn't even wait to talk with me."  She hit the bed with her fist, grimacing as the stitches throbbed.

     Noel didn't say anything.  He let her yell and cry, and after a minute, she sighed, wiping her eyes.  "What would Mom think of me?" she asked him.

     "If Mom hadn’t gotten sick, I can't see this turning out the way it did.  When Graham left, she would have moved in with you.  Or she would have moved you into her house.  She wouldn't have let you slip away like I did.  Like Dad did. Like everyone did."

     There were silent for a moment, the long moaning wind of the air conditioning wrapping around them.  Her mother had still been well when Brooke was born, her diagnosis coming when Brooke was two months old.  But up until then, she came over every single day.  She picked Brooke up out of her crib as if she were any other baby, singing the same songs Peri sang to her kids, taking Brooke outside in the snugglie, staying to eat lunch with Peri, listening to her talk about nothing but the baby this and the baby that.  Just before all the tests came back on Brooke, Janice had test results of her own, and before Brooke turned one, she was dead.  A week before her mother died, Peri brought her home, thinking she would want to be surrounded by those she loved best.  But with Janice dying in one room and Brooke struggling to live in another, Peri felt stretched between love, pulled and battered and sore, her heart full of loss.  But none of this was Noel’s fault.

     "Don't think that.  I didn't call anyone, Noel.  I was in a fog or a dead zone or someplace where I couldn't feel anything except what Brooke felt.  And then I couldn't feel anything.  I let poor Carly take care of so much.  She'll never forgive me."

     Noel shifted on his bed, the mattress creaking under him.  "You were sick.  You've been sick all this while, Peri.  It was bad, but everything is going to get worked out."

     "Brooke will never get worked out.  She's always going to be like that.  She's going to get worse."  Boys with MD eventually curved into themselves, their muscles turning to fat, the leg muscles too weak to carry them, their hearts and lungs slowly shutting down, no muscles to move them
anymore
.  Maybe none of that would happen to Brooke, but already, she needed help to breathe and eat; she'd never know what it was like to run around a playground with a friend or swim without Peri holding her.  She would never date or get married or have children.  She would never live on her own.  There was no way Peri could work those facts into her mind, even as she sat in support groups and listened to the experts.  She hadn't wanted to believe, but now, on drugs in a hotel in Phoenix, she did.

     "Periwinkle.  Don't think that way."

     "But that's the point.  I never have before.  But it's true."

     Noel sat up and turned on the light, running his hand through his still -blonde hair.  She blinked, watching the way his fingers made grooves through the curls.  "Dad will be glad to see you.  He's been out of his--he's been so worried."

     "You can't offend me, Noel.  I
have
been out of my mind."

     "Are you still mad at him?"

     She pulled her pillow up and leaned against it, her hands empty in her lap.  She wanted a cigarette.  She hadn't smoked since before meeting Graham, taught in her senior year in high school by her best friend Michelle, but now she needed that feel of smoke and heat in her lungs, a reminder of how life felt on the outside.  "Do you know why he left Mom?" she asked.

     "They didn't get along?  They married too young?  I don't know.  Mom's stories."

     "Dad had an affair with a secretary, and supposedly she got pregnant, even though Mom never heard about any baby.  Dad told Mom about it, and that was the final straw.  She'd suspected other affairs, but she had proof this time."

     "What kind of proof?"

     "The woman called the house.  That kind of proof."

     Noel looked at the clock nervously and cleared his throat again as if his cough could clear the room of the idea. 
We're the same
, she thought,
neither of us wanting bad news
.

     "How do you know this?" he asked after a moment.

     "Mom told me when she was sick.  She was on morphine during those last days, and she either talked or slept.  She still loved him, too.  After all that time."

    "So are you mad at Dad for what he did or for what Graham did?"

     "Both.  I hated him for leaving.  I hated how I could always see Mom loved him, even though she didn't tell me till the end.  I hated that he thought he could have it all--Mom, the secretary and us.  I hated that Graham wasn't even as good as Dad, not wanting Brooke or me, the damaged parts."

         Peri sighed, rubbed her arms and put them under the blanket.  “Dad and I haven’t been close since her left Mom.  You know that.”

     “Dad saw us at least,” Noel said, his voice at the same time defensive and conciliatory, holding both his father and his sister in his voice.  It was strange how before the divorce Peri had been her father’s favorite, but afterward, he and Noel became friends, buddies.  Before Carl retired, they met at least one night a week for drinks and dinner at a Financial District restaurant, loosened their ties, exchanged stories about the market and the economy, clients, and women.  At least, that’s what Peri imagined, Noel not divulging more than she wanted to hear.  “Went out with Dad last night,” he’d say.

     She sank against her pillow.  Why did all that had happened so long ago bother her, when Brooke’s illness and Graham’s and her marriage were still weeping wounds no stitches could mend?  But it wasn’t just her.  The past must bother Noel because aside from his questions about her and her family, his work was all he ever talked about.  She never heard much about his short-term girlfriends.  And after Brooke was born, her family gave her space and permission to be selfish, focusing on herself and her girl.  Now, it seemed too late to ask what he wanted.  A wife?  A family of his own? For so long now, she and the kids had been his family, his only family, really.  They still were.  After all, who was here with her?  Her father?  Graham?

     Staring at the swirls of plaster moonscape above her head, she could not fathom how Ryan and Carly could ever emerge unharmed from their childhood.  She didn’t worry about that with Brooke—her childhood was written on her crooked body.  How could Peri’s depression, insane road trip, and inevitable punishment, not to mention the divorce, Brooke's hospitalizations, Brooke's surgeries, Brooke's constant, all-day care not leave a scar?

     "Dad's trying to change, Peri.  He really is."

     Turning again to face him, she pulled the covers to her chin, yawning.  Seeing him like this, rumpled, his hair sticking up in the back, she almost could imagine it was 1968, and both of them were staying up to listen to the noise of a dinner party in the living room, giggling as adults bumped down the hall, drunk and desperate for the bathroom. Her father’s business friends and their hair sprayed wives would drink martinis around the table until everyone except their mother forgot children were in the house.  Once, she and Noel found Mr. Samuels and Mrs. Merrimack kissing in the hallway, their heads clattering against family photos hanging on the wall.  She had pulled Noel into her room, both of them breathing hard as if they’d discovered a murder.  After that, she made Noel stay in his room with the door closed.

      All her life, Peri had tried to forget that worried girl she’d been, make her life better than her mother's, her father's, make her children's lives completely unlike her own.  And that's what she still wanted, more than anything. 

     Of course her father was trying to change, but maybe it wouldn’t matter until Peri could truly leave her childhood behind. "Aren't we all trying to change?" she asked, closing her eyes, pulled suddenly into a deep, short sleep.

When Graham flew in on Friday, the first thing he must have done was call Carl from his cell phone, his voice echoing in the taxi--or no, limo, the sound too quiet and smooth for a taxi. 
Figures
, Carl thought, his heart pounding as he sat down, holding the phone to his ear.

       "I'm coming to get them, Carl.  I know what you said to my mother, but it's not going to fly with me."

     Carl's felt angry words like tacks on his tongue, but then his old negotiating self came back to him, the one that had convinced the entire Bestway Superstore board of directors to let him be the one to find them a new headquarters, and he sat back in his chair, wishing he had a cigar to slow his responses down, a word, a drag, a mouthful of delicious smoke, a exhale, another word.  "So, Graham.  Where have you been this past year?"

     "What?"

     “I said, 'Where have you been this past year?'"

     "Don't start with me, Carl."

     "I haven't even begun yet.  I'm not sure where you even get the idea you can come and take these children anywhere after leaving them.  Abandoning them."

     “I didn’t abandon them, Graham.”

     "They're my kids."

     “Well then were in the hell have you been?” Carl asked, his voice steady, sure, unlike the waver of fear under his skin.

     “Look, we can’t argue about this now.  I am their father.”

     "That may be a biological fact, sad but true.  But I don't think the social worker or psychologists are taking too kindly to your disappearing act.  Your I-live-in-wealth-and -splendor-while-my-children-don't routine."

     "This isn't about me.  This is about Peri and her illness.  She's crazy.  You should talk to my wife Blair about what happened Wednesday morning.  Maybe I wasn't there, but at least I’m normal."

     Carl felt the blood pulse in his neck.  "That's up for debate, I think."

     "Look.  I’m coming to get them.  I'm taking them to my mom's.  You can't stop me.  I have visitation rights.  Let's call this an official visitation, all right?  Have them ready."

     "Here's a news flash.  It's twelve in the afternoon."

     "So?"

     "Your kids are at school.  You know, that’s what children do?"

     Graham was silent, and so was Carl, hearing nothing but the whooshing echo inside the limo, the same buzz that had been inside the conch shell his mother had displayed in the family room.  On his way to school each day, Carl had pressed it to his ear, knowing
there was only the sound of his own head inside it.  Now, he wished he could put the phone down as he had the shell.

     "After school then.  What time do they get out?"

     "A friend is picking them up and bringing them back here.  Home.  The social worker thought it was best they go to school back in
Walnut Creek
.  Of course what would be best for them is to be in the Monte Veda schools, but that's another story, isn't it?"

     "What friend?"

     Carl wanted to tell Graham about Rosie, mention all that Rosie had done in lieu of a parent, finding the children, calling the authorities, traveling in the ambulance, but he knew that Peri's absence was as keen as Graham's in that story.  "Someone who lives near the kids."

     "What time, Carl?"

     "Come over at three-thirty.  But I'm going to have to call my lawyer and the social worker.  Don't expect you're going to walk off with them."

     "I'll expect exactly that.  Don't get on your high horse with me.  You have nothing on me, Carl.  You are the disappearing Dad yourself.  I'll be there at 3.30.  Have them ready." 

     Graham hung up without another word, and Carl held the phone to his ear, listening to the buzzing sound of his own head.

He walked outside for some air, picking up the clippers he'd bought at Home Depot last week, new fancy clippers with a “rust resistant" coating and a ten year guarantee.  Last week, that had seemed very important.  That along with the new string job for his tennis racket with synthetic gut at 60 pounds of tension and his new Wilson DST 02 tennis shoes, both of which he knew would blow away Ralph, scaring him out of his killer backhand.  And the sprinklers.  He couldn't believe he'd gone ahead and fixed them before getting around to calling about Peri.  He'd been more concerned about Mrs. Trimble than Peri, thinking his girl could take care of her life, as she'd always done.  Peri had always thought
Carl
needed help, but now, less than a week since he'd fixed the last sprinkler head, he knew that his girl was in big trouble.  The worst kind, and now that Graham was in town, things could go to hell in a hand basket, just like that.