Janice turns toward Lizzie. “Lizzie…” she says, then stops, lost.
“Get out of the house, James, please,” says Margaret. “Really, just leave now, before I forget that I have conscientious objections to California’s drug laws and feel compelled to pick up the phone and let the police know that a meth dealer is running off to Mexico. I’m sure they’ll love that.”
James hesitates. He looks at Janice, who is now pressing her forehead to the granite countertop between her arms. “Mrs. Miller…” he begins.
Janice lifts her head just a few inches off the granite, then drops it again. She groans loudly.
“Just go,” says Margaret.
James sighs and throws up his hands. Before he can say anything else, Margaret slams the door in his face, so hard that the entire house shakes. A glass perched on the edge of the counter jitters, tips, and falls into the sink. It rocks back and forth in the stainless tub, miraculously unbroken.
Lizzie looks out the window as James walks slowly away. When he reaches the truck he takes the sombrero off and throws it in the bed, alongside a suitcase, a guitar, a few cardboard boxes. She imagines Margaret in the front seat with him, the back of her head receding into the distance, and wonders whether it wouldn’t have been for the best if Margaret had gone with him, after all. Her mother, too. If all of them just
left,
James and Janice and Margaret, she could be all alone with just her baby and the Lordness light. It would be simpler.
When James’s truck pulls out of the driveway, Margaret speaks. She is apparently talking to the orange juice splotch on the floor. “Jesus, Mom. Crystal? I mean, wow. Honestly, I can’t believe I didn’t see it earlier. I mean, the whole cleaning thing should have been a giveaway…” Janice doesn’t respond; her face remains planted on the granite. Margaret grips two fistfuls of hair at her temples, tugging the skin tightly back. “Anything else you want to tell us, Mom? Any other deepest, darkest secrets you feel like sharing?”
Janice lifts her head from the counter. “Oh
can it,
Margaret. You have no right to speak to me like that. If you want to talk about lies, how about your little visit to your father while you were supposedly helping me sue him? Were you ever planning on mentioning that? And what about this little jaunt to Mexico with the pool boy? Please drop the Saint Margaret act.”
Margaret gives her hair another tug, grimacing. “It’s unbelievable…” she continues, as if Janice hadn’t spoken at all. “I mean, really. It’s almost too much to take. My mom is a meth addict—”
“What’s meth?” interrupts Lizzie again, sensing that something is spiraling quickly out of control, hoping to steer this exchange back to facts, figures,
information.
Margaret talks right over her: “—and my father abandoned his family, and my sister is a born-again teen-pregnancy statistic, and I’m bankrupt and homeless without a boyfriend or a job. Where do we live, the Ozarks or something? It just blows my mind. It’s all such a…mess.”
The resolute Margaret from Lizzie’s bedroom is gone. This Margaret looks petrified, with tears in her eyes, and the torn dress sliding off her body makes her look so young. Lizzie senses that if she were to go over and give her a hug, this Margaret might stop talking and start crying instead. Lizzie twitches as the light in her belly glows back on and feels a saintly desire to fix everything. Could she do that?
But Janice has finally sat up and is staring at Lizzie as if she’s a visitor from Pluto that has just materialized in the pantry. Lizzie can see that her mother has been weeping, and there are pizza crumbs from the countertop trapped in the tears on her face. Lizzie belatedly realizes what her sister has just revealed, and she turns away so that her mother can’t see her face. She hadn’t even considered how to tell Mom yet.
“A pregnancy statistic?” Janice asks. She wipes a crumb from her lip. “Somebody please tell me that doesn’t mean what I think it means.”
“Nothing,” says Lizzie quickly. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s
not
nothing, Lizzie,” Margaret barks. “Mom: Lizzie’s pregnant. I tried to convince her not to have it, but she won’t listen. She’s going to have the baby, because
God told her to.
” Margaret covers her face with a hand, then mutters, “And I don’t think she
ever
read
Snatch.
”
Janice turns from Lizzie to Margaret and back again, uncomprehending. Lizzie can’t bear her gaze. “What’s meth?” she whispers one last time, as if the answer to this question might somehow explain away all the other chaos and confusion in the room. And then, as her stomach rises up in protest, she runs to the sink to dry-heave.
“Pregnant?” echoes Janice, behind her. “No. Margaret, that’s really not funny. Not—Lizzie? Oh, Christ. Is this true? Lizzie?”
Lizzie watches her distorted reflection in the stainless steel of the sink, a blur of brown hair and pink flesh dipping and bobbing as she struggles to regurgitate the sour knot in the bottom of her stomach. But nothing comes up. In her belly, the Lordness light has vanished and left behind a coiling pain, as if someone were grabbing her intestines and twisting. She turns slowly back to face her mother.
“Yes,” she says, and in her mother’s horrified gaze Lizzie sees reflected all the disappointments Lizzie has ever delivered upon her, all the failed elocution lessons and late-night ice-cream binges and date-free Saturday nights. Lizzie squares her shoulders and aligns her spine, just as she learned in her ballet classes. She places one hand on her navel, feeling the worn elastic of her bathing suit stretched tight over her belly. She conjures up the love of God—she tries very, very hard to feel that warm solace again—and speaks. “I’m gonna have a baby,” she says. “Isn’t that great? Mom?”
“A baby…” Janice echoes. Her hands float uselessly in the air before her, shaking visibly.
There is a silence. Lizzie watches her mother’s sharp nasal breaths; they start slow, like sighs, and then come faster and faster. It looks like she is hyperventilating. Lizzie is transfixed, afraid to move. The walls of the kitchen seem to press inward.
Janice’s hands flutter back down to clench the rims of her bathrobe pockets. “I can’t do this anymore,” she says. Her voice is faint, and Lizzie and Margaret glance at each other, both unsure what this means. Janice looks out the kitchen window to the front yard with dark eyes. Her voice rises an octave and threatens to snap. “I can’t. I can’t! I give up. Do you hear me, girls? I GIVE UP!”
And Lizzie helplessly watches her mother cinch the belt of the bathrobe around her waist, take her purse from where it sits on a chair, and walk right out the kitchen door. She hears the tires of the Porsche squeaking in the gravel and turns to watch, through the kitchen window, as her mother peels out of the driveway and into the street, leaving a thick layer of black rubber behind. To Lizzie, her face pale and drawn in the window’s reflection, it looks like her mother is leaving forever.
the pool is august warm, and peaceful. floating on her back, a half hour later, Lizzie closes her eyes and sees the inside of her eyelids, pink in the sun. She squeezes her eyes closed even tighter and watches the starbursts of sunlight exploding into her darkness. When this fails to distract her from the cramping in her stomach, she rolls over and hugs her knees to her chest. Her head bobs, half submerged. The water that leaks into her mouth and ears tastes gritty. She wonders if she could sink to the bottom of the pool and disappear forever.
When she rolls over onto her back again, she hears Margaret’s bare feet on the patio, slapping as she jogs across the hot stones to the cooler tile by the edge of the pool. Lizzie doesn’t look up but registers wrinkled toes gripping the tile, a dab of chipped red nail polish.
“Lizzie,” says Margaret. Her voice is garbled through the water in Lizzie’s ears. “We need to talk.”
Lizzie takes a deep breath and descends below the surface. Under the water, drifting down toward the rough cement, all she can hear is the hollow ringing inside her head; when she looks up, she sees only the mirrored surface of the water, magnifying the light of the sun into shimmering shafts. Tiny bubbles cling to her brown limbs, which float loosely from her sides as if they weren’t even attached to her. She makes small gestures in the water to keep herself there, down at the bottom of the pool, curled up like a sea horse, counting. When she gets to thirty-seven, her lungs force her back to the surface. She is above water long enough to hear Margaret shout, “Please, Lizzie, stop…” before gulping in another deep breath and propelling her body back down to the bottom of the pool.
Surfacing. “…don’t be angry at me for…”
For. “Mom needs us to…”
More. “…a family, dammit, despite…”
Air. “…are you doing?!”
On Lizzie’s sixth trip to the surface, Margaret is gone. Lizzie gasps in the summer air, breathing deep into her belly, hoping that this will make the pain go away. The knot there tightens and tightens, and she wonders whether God is punishing her. She is going to die here in the pool.
Your Lordness,
she thinks.
Tell me what to do. Am I a sinner? Am I going to hell? What do I have to do to be happy again? What do I have to do to make everything in my family right? How can I be loved? How can I be good?
She recalls the photograph in her Bible of Mary, virtuous Mother of God, a beam of yellow light illuminating her from heaven, her face suffused with the joy of righteousness. Suffused with the forgiving love of Jesus.
Please Lord,
she thinks.
Give me a sign. Show me what to do.
She opens her eyes and looks around. The pool water slaps against the tile. A dead dragonfly floats by her. Overhead, in the sky, there is no heavenly shaft of light, just a feathering white plume of exhaust trailing a private jet. She swims toward the air mattress, which bumps uselessly against the wall in the deep end like a prisoner with no chance of escape.
Halfway there, the knot in her stomach convulses and contracts. It feels as if someone has stabbed her. Lizzie chokes on the pain and closes her eyes. She paddles frantically toward the edge of the pool with one hand, the other clutching at her belly. Water churns and roils and splashes up her nose and she thinks she might drown.
Behind her, a trail of dark blood inks and spreads, marking her path through the water.
janice feels the crunch of the gravel through the thin rubber of her slippers, the slap of the purse against her satin bathrobe as she jogs toward the car, the dimple of the remote lock under her finger. She is behind the wheel of her SUV and then—just like that—she is out the driveway. Her pulse races, almost as fast as when she took too much It, but this is just adrenaline. She presses the pedal to the floor, the Porsche leaping forward like a thoroughbred released from the gate (zero to sixty in 4.8 seconds, the salesman had told her, but she’d never considered trying), and skids out as she rounds the corner down the street, crushing some poor azalea bushes in the Upadhyays’ front yard.
Who had made the decision to leave? It was as if some invisible hand had jerked her forward, propelled her out and away from her house. She passes the Gossetts’ home and the Brunschilds’, drives past Lizzie’s old nursery school and toward downtown, before she realizes that she doesn’t have a destination.
It,
she thinks.
I want It.
And she has none. She should never have let James leave like that, a drastic mistake. Could she chase him down?
Reeling the car around—a U-turn, right in the middle of the street, nearly taking out a Porta Potti that sits in front of a freshly bulldozed home—Janice turns back toward her neighborhood. James was headed to Mexico, which means that he must be making his way toward the highway. She accelerates along the streets, keeping her eyes peeled for a red truck. He already has a fifteen-minute head start, but perhaps he stopped for gas or coffee? She can still catch him. She’ll buy the entire contents of his glove compartment and maybe even talk him into sticking around for a while longer.
Lizzie is pregnant.
Her initial shock and dismay has given way to anger. Lizzie is
pregnant.
How could her daughter have been so foolish? Was this somehow Margaret’s influence, that magazine filling Lizzie’s mind with sex talk and propaganda about vibrators? Was it Paul’s fault, for never having given Lizzie the attention she deserved? Was it her own? What did she do wrong? She imagines her daughter, her swollen watermelon belly, waddling down Centerview Avenue, and swallows down the horror of it all—her poor baby girl will be shunned, her life will be ruined. And Janice, Janice too will be judged. A middle-aged woman abandoned by her rich husband, with one daughter in debt and living back at home and a second one pregnant before she even has a driver’s license. Janice knows this town well enough to understand that they will see her at the center of all this disaster and find her somehow lacking. It is always the mother’s fault, isn’t it? It is
not fair.
It. She needs It.
Janice had worked so hard to give It up, had locked herself in her own bedroom like a patient in a lunatic asylum, a cell padded with silk wallpaper and wall-to-wall pile carpeting but a cell just the same. She had persevered through the most difficult week of her life—a week of sweaty nightmares in which she was chased by faceless monsters with grasping claws, an excruciating week of insomnia and nausea and anxiety so overwhelming that she thought she would suffocate, a week in which she was finally and totally consumed by her own failed marriage. She’d committed herself to quitting with the same perseverance with which she’d tackled a six-course dinner party, and she had succeeded despite what she now knew were impossible odds. When she woke up this morning without that feeling of
want,
she knew she had somehow kicked It, but this moment wasn’t as victorious as she’d imagined it would be. Instead, it was as if she had committed murder, killing off the better version of herself—the more spirited, more interesting, more adventurous self—that she had only recently met. But that was all right; she had done it because she’d thought she had to.