Why They Run the Way They Do (5 page)

In the morning Chloe came into the kitchen with the armadillo balanced on her head. Carrie was packing the lunchbox for preschool and her stomach dropped at the sight of the animal, whom she had seen first thing that morning, tucked on a shelf, only a fraction of it visible, when she'd crept into Chloe's room to do the same and found the deed already done.

“Look what Michael can do!” Chloe said.

Dan set down his coffee. “Where'd you get that?” he asked.

“Nana sent him,” she said, spinning in circles.

“I know,” he said. “I mean . . .”

Chloe stopped spinning. “Can I take Michael to school?”

“No,” Carrie said, narrowly missing severing her entire thumb while slicing a pear. Or maybe that would be preferable, she thought. Things would have to be done, ambulances called, digits reattached, bloody counters scoured. No one would think about an armadillo.

“How come?”

Carrie shook her head. “You don't take toys to school.”

“Sometimes I do,” Chloe said. She scooched out her chair and sat down in front of her Cheerios, the armadillo still perched on her head. “For show and tell.”

“Not today, honey,” Carrie said.

“But—”

“Chloe, the answer is—”

“If she wants to take him to school, let her take him to school,” Dan interrupted. “It's her armadillo.”

“Yay!” Chloe said.

Carrie ran her tongue over her teeth. She'd just be quiet; that was best.

Dan solemnly crossed his arms and addressed the puppet on his daughter's head. “Now, Michael,” he said. “This is a very serious matter. I have to ask you: Do you want to be in show and tell?”

“He does!” Chloe shouted.

“It's not for the faint of heart, Michael,” Dan said. “Everyone will be looking at you. You'll be on display for all to see. Are you prepared for that, Michael?”

“Daddy, he wants to!”

“Do you understand what we're asking of you, Michael?”

Okay, then,
Carrie thought, pitching Baggies into her daughter's lunch box.
All right, then.
This was how it was going to be. This was how he had chosen to play it. Okay. Accept. Accept and adjust. This was the price. This was the price you paid. Once, during the months of letters, she had written his name all over her body with a big red marker. She'd done it on her lunch hour, at work, in a bathroom stall, breathlessly, the tip of the pen like the tip of a finger. She had walked around for an entire day with him under her clothes, his name in thick letters on her stomach, her upper arms, her thighs. She lay in bed with the word still there, her heart pounding, knowing if Dan turned to her and started something that all might be revealed. She'd been out of her mind, sick with desire. This was the price you paid for something like that.

When she'd come home that day, that terrible day, and found dinner on the table, the house clean, Dan still there, she realized her subconscious plan had gone awry. If only her plan had been just a little less
sub
she would have surely seen the obvious holes, been able to play out the possible scenarios. She had thought Dan would leave—that was why (subconsciously why, of course) she'd told him the truth—and now he hadn't left, apparently had no intention of leaving, and now her conscious self was left with the mess made by the subconscious. What was she supposed to do now? “We're going to be okay,” he'd told her. “You're going to break that thing (thing!) off, and we're going to change and be better and happier and stronger people and we belong together and I'm not going anywhere.”

Now she would have to leave him. She had to do it. It was the only thing to do. That night she lay in bed beside him.
I'll do it tomorrow,
she told herself.
Tonight of course I could not do it because he cleaned the house and made me dinner but I love someone else and that's not fair to anyone and so tomorrow I'll leave.
The next night she lay in bed, thinking how much she liked her bed, how much she liked her bed
room
, actually, how much she would miss it, this room, which she and Dan had painted together because they were too cheap to hire a painter and so there were paint smudges on the ceiling, permanent evidence of their mutual sloppiness. The next night she lay in bed, thinking of how many books they had and how it would be hell, dividing up all those books, how they'd have to sit down for hours, days even, side by side going through everything: Was this his
One Hundred Years of Solitude
or hers? They'd taken The Contemporary Novel together in college and would have to look through the notes in the book and then they'd both remember what it had been like, sitting beside each other in that sunny classroom with the big windows, twenty years old, none the wiser. The next day the man in Phoenix sent her an email to which she did not respond. Two days later he sent her one that she deleted without reading. The next day he sent another, with a subject line that read:

?

On Saturday one of Chloe's preschool friends had a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese. Chloe, with Michael the armadillo tucked under her arm, galloped into the restaurant with the other children and the attending parents. Carrie and Dan sat in the car in silence, until Carrie said:

“Promise me we'll never have a party at Chuck E. Cheese.”

“I promise,” Dan said. He fake-grimaced. “I hate that mouse.”

“He's creepy,” Carrie agreed. “More like a rat than a mouse.”

“So what d'ya wanna do?” he asked. Drop-off parties were a relatively new thing in their lives. Dan couldn't think, now, what they would have done on a Saturday afternoon by themselves, before Chloe. How empty it must have been!—though they would not have known it, with nothing to compare it to.

“We could go have lunch somewhere . . . ?” she offered.

“We could do that,” he said. “People do that.”

When they returned to the restaurant an hour and a half later all the children were in a state of anxious fascination because one of the boys had tumbled out of a plastic tube and was bleeding from the mouth. The birthday girl's parents, mortified that blood had been spilled on their watch, rushed everyone out of the restaurant so the injured boy could be tended to without an audience of gaping kids and judging parents. Halfway home Dan realized that the armadillo was not with them, had been left behind in their whirlwind departure. A few minutes later he saw Carrie realize it; she turned suddenly to the backseat and then to him, started to say something but stopped, looked again to the backseat, pretending to stretch. Chloe had fallen asleep, slumped awkwardly against her flowery restraints. When they arrived home Dan carried her into the house and lay her on the couch in the family room. When she woke later they all played HiHo! Cherry-O and watched
The Little Mermaid
and then she went to bed, still groggy from the festivities, still unaware of her loss.

“Michael!”

Dan sat bolt upright in bed, heart pounding. A dream?

“Where's Michael?”

No. It was Chloe. Carrie stirred beside him as he swung out of bed.

“Daddy?” Chloe called as he neared her room, and he was happy it was him she wanted, his name on her lips, not Michael, not Mommy.

“It's okay, sweetie,” he said. He sat down gently on the side of her bed and put his hand on her cheek. “You're okay.”

“I can't find Michael,” she said.

“Did you have him when you left the party?”

“I did,” she said. Her eyes narrowed. “I
think
I did.”

“Maybe you left him at Chuck E. Cheese.”

She opened and closed her mouth slowly, always the preface to tears. “He's lost forever,” she said.

He was aware that Carrie was behind him, in the doorway.

“You'll be okay, sweetie,” he said. “Daddy's here.”

“Maybe we can find another armadillo, honey,” Carrie said softly.

“I don't want another armadillo!” Chloe shouted. “I only want Michael!”

But it wasn't true, not really. The next day, Sunday, without Carrie and Dan even having to discuss it, without a word to confirm they were on the same page, they went to Toys R Us and told Chloe she could pick out any animal she wanted.
Any
animal. She needed only a moment to decide, choosing a giant giraffe, as tall as Carrie, with leather hooves and ears. Dan got winded carrying it to the car. It was the kind of thing, Dan thought, that a movie star would buy for his daughter, or that a child battling cancer would receive from a charitable organization, one of those toys that a
regular
child would never get. On the way home Chloe covered its head with kisses and said, “You're my best friend ever.”

That night they were in the kitchen eating ice cream when the phone rang. Dan picked up.

“Are you missing an armadillo?” the voice on the phone asked.

“I'm sorry?” Dan said.

“This is Lindsay's mom.” Pause. “Lindsay. The birthday girl.”

He didn't say anything.

“Lindsay, from preschool. You know, the birthday party. We found an armadillo when we were cleaning up and Lindsay thought it was Chloe's.”

Dan looked at the kitchen table, where the giraffe stood resolutely—like a tower, really, a pillar of strength, even—between his wife and daughter. A giraffe! Now there was an animal you could get behind. A giraffe was, well, Christ, let's face it, pretty remarkably goddamn seriously unbelievable. Eating leaves off the top of trees? Are you kidding me?

Chloe lifted her spoon of cookies-and-cream toward the giraffe's smiling mouth.

“Hello?” said the voice on the phone.

“It's not ours,” Dan said. “It must belong to someone else.”

The next day at preschool pickup Chloe burst out the door of the four-year-old room waving the armadillo. “Look what Lindsay found!” she shouted. “I left him at Chuck E. Cheese!” She jammed the puppet into Carrie's stomach and began struggling into her puffy coat.