Authors: Jill McCorkle
There was a time when they could do this for hours, the best of Carnac committed to memory from all those years their dad was determined to spend time with them and the best way he knew how was taking an interest in the television shows they liked. In the years between Rosemary Looney and their stepmother, the television was like the fourth family member, the dummy at the bridge table, focus of many conversations. There was also a time when Jimmy might have dropped the routine for just a minute and asked how she was
really
doing, if she needed anything, but it seems this is unlikely now, especially when Kaycie comes back into the room.
“What are you two talking about?” She grabs Jimmy’s hand and presses it to her stomach. “Are you being silly again?”
“No. We’re talking divorce, death, bankruptcy.” Jimmy smiles at Ann, close to a flicker of familiar, but then Kaycie pats and shakes his shoulders with an “
Oh you
.”
“You know,” she turns to Ann wide-eyed and serious, “you should always pay off your credit card the second you get it. And pay cash for things like cars.”
“Really?” Ann says, working to keep her thoughts from her face, and in that moment realizing that too much of the house is the same —the light, the smell, the door to the room at the top of the stairs where her mother died, the door to the basement where she broke her arm. She tries to catch Jimmy’s eye but he is looking elsewhere, not a trace of response or emotion. If only they could make a rearview mirror to correct the blind spot of privilege and denial.
“We have a friend who got in so much trouble, and I know James would have helped him, but I knew better.” Kaycie sits moving his hand round and round her stomach, the baby barely a bump on her tiny frame. She has said at least three times that she feels
huge
. “You cannot afford to help people, especially those close to you.”
“It was Sam Rowland,” Jimmy says. “Man, talk about a guy getting taken to the cleaners. His wife screwed him to the wall.”
“And he should have thought about that while screwing that stupid office assistant,” Kaycie adds. “You need smarter friends, honey.”
“Jimmy,” Ann says. “He’s your best friend —or was —for your whole life.” She watches Kaycie flinch when she calls him Jimmy, as if the boy she never knew isn’t allowed in this room. “Is he okay?”
“He made some really bad and stupid choices,” Kaycie says.
“Who hasn’t?” Ann asks.
“He’ll be okay,” Jimmy interrupts, and Ann realizes she wasn’t even thinking of Sam in that moment. She was thinking of herself and of Jimmy. She was thinking of their dad. She was thinking of that summer Jimmy came to her needing money and she gave him all she had earned and saved waiting tables. She gave him over a thousand dollars that, for all she knew, went up his nose or to get some girl an abortion or just to have an easy month or so between semesters.
When Jimmy hid
under his bed after their mother died, Ann was determined to find and be with him, even if it meant rolling into and through the wall herself and getting lost there in the vacuum of another dimension. He knew she was afraid to crawl under the bed, which is exactly why he went there. Their mother was buried earlier that day, and there was a mountain of Tupperware and Pyrex in the kitchen, their dad exhausted but politely thanking a throng of people.
Yes, cancer is very cruel. Yes, she’s in a better place. Yes, no more suffering
. Jimmy was crying and didn’t want anyone to see him. He was angry.
“Please let me come.” She begged. She clutched the leg of his blue jeans as she inched her body under there and waited for her eyes to adjust.
“No, get out of here.” He kicked away from her and she began crying uncontrollably, overwhelmed by the darkness and the thought of being all alone.
“Do you remember
that day at Pongo Lake?” she asks when Kaycie returns to the kitchen. “The day that creepy guy took our picture?”
“Of course. Why?” He holds his hand up to his forehead and threatens to start the game again but she interrupts him.
“There was nothing in the hamper,” she says. “Mom wasn’t even sick yet but there wasn’t any food. It was all fake.” It feels good to say it, to acknowledge what she has come to think in recent years. The sadness was already there, coating their lives like mildew, and then they allowed the illness to eclipse and camouflage everything. “I think they were never really happy.”
“Sure they were.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, I think so,” he says. “At least until she got sick.”
“No,” Ann says. “The sickness just gave them a reason they were willing to admit. I bet if she had lived they would have divorced.” Ann is on a roll now and has to finish. “Or worse, they would have lived together unhappily for the rest of their lives.”
“Oh how ridiculous.” Kaycie comes in and waves her hand dismissively. “You two were terrors. Who could have acted happy? And what you did later to run off that redneck fry cook!” She is laughing, her beautiful face animated by her amusement. “I mean you were right to do it, but still, it was so
mean
.”
There is a crack of splintered silence, a struggle for balance, and then Jimmy moves on. She can tell that the impulse to tell
a joke is alive on his tongue, but he goes the safer route and asks about her work as a high school guidance counselor, the same kinds of questions she gets asked by people meeting her for the first time:
Do kids come to you with personal problems? Is it all confidential? Do you help them prepare for tests?
Jimmy had spoken the words they vowed never to speak, words sworn on their parents’ lives. Had he told all the wives? Confessed some late night to each the terrible thing he and his little sister had done? Was it something he told with remorse or as a joke? Ann had never said anything, not to her husband or a friend, not even in therapy or to her dad not long before he died when she caught herself humming “Hey There” only to feel his drugged gaze searching the room for someone not there. Not even after that day at Chuck E. Cheese when she realized it
was
Rosemary and she wanted to reach out and beg her forgiveness.
“Oh my,” Rosemary had said, her face flushed bright pink when she saw Ann there with Sally. “Is that little Ann?”
She nodded and let go of Sally’s hand so that she could dash to the big plastic hamster cage – looking structure she loved.
“What a darling child you have,” she said, and Ann didn’t correct her to say she was the substitute mother, just nodded a polite thanks and pointed to the young boy with pizza sauce all over his face.
“My grandbaby, Jonah.” She laughed. “That’s an old-sounding name for a baby, isn’t it? But that’s his name. I have four grandbabies.”
She held up four fingers, thin silver band held firm on her plump finger, and smiled at the older man sitting there easing the greasy milk straw into the child’s mouth. “Oh, and this is Roland, my husband. Jonah is his daughter’s boy.” She turned to her husband. “I was friends with Ann’s daddy when she was just a little skinny thing.” She turned, her back to Roland and Jonah. “I was so sorry to hear about your dad,” she whispered, and her large dark eyes filled with tears. “He was too young.”
“Way too young.” Ann nodded and looked away, up to where Sally was climbing and crawling behind the pink swirled plastic, lost in the maze of children. Ann knew her own marriage would likely not make it another calendar year, and in that moment the grief for all that was lost to her was somehow housed in the soft body of this woman whose real name she didn’t even remember if she ever knew it at all.
“Well, he was very proud of you and Jimmy,” she says. “I remember how he would walk way out in that lake with you on his back, whenever you asked to go.”
She hadn’t thought of that afternoon in years. They had gone back to Pongo Lake, only this time with fried chicken and biscuits and jam packed in a brown grocery bag from the Winn-Dixie. Ann clung to her dad’s warm broad shoulders as he waded out into the lake. She remembered thinking his shoulders looked like luncheon meat, freckled and speckled that way, a ridiculous description but one she has thought of from time to time when
shopping for cold cuts. “Deeper,” she called, and when he was up almost to his neck, she scooted up with a foot on each shoulder and dove off and away from him.
“Poor man was scared to death,” Rosemary said. “Couldn’t swim a lick and standing all the way out there in the deep.”
Ann didn’t know he couldn’t swim; she had not known until that moment.
“I was always worried I’d have to go in there or yell for a lifeguard, but he always came back.” She laughed and shook her head. She wore a silver chain with an assortment of charms —a bird and a rolling pin, a boat, a moon, the ankh. “I hope he learned to swim. He swore to me he would.”
“Did you know
Dad couldn’t swim?” Ann asks.
“No, but doesn’t surprise me,” Jimmy says and pats Kaycie’s leg. “He didn’t do much beyond work and golf and watch television.”
“But those times he took us in the lake,” Ann leans forward and waits for Jimmy to look at her.
“Ooh, we hate that lake,” Kaycie says and laughs with the great confidence that plural pronoun gives her. “It’s full of snakes and rednecks.”
“Jimmy used to love it, though,” Ann says. “In fact, the boy I knew loved the lake
and
scary movies.”
“Well,” Kaycie says, rearranging her magazines, “that boy is now a man. He may act a little silly when he gets with you but
he is a grown man with a family to take care of and over fifty employees under him at the bank.”
Ann resists the urge to make
family
plural, to say that Jimmy is living in another dimension —there with their beautiful young mother and a basket draped in linen with plump purple grapes on a china plate, but it is a place where nothing is real and no one is really happy and if they step too far into the lake they will all short-circuit, and if they walk to the flat edge of that happy family portrait, they will all fall off.
“My boy has
a son, too,” Rosemary said that day. “We got all boys and I love ’em to death but I’m still hoping for a little girl.”
“Wild boys,” the man, Roland, said. “And they love Martha too good to talk about.”
Martha
. Had she ever even known? Martha.
“You know,” Ann
says now, “that was an awful thing we did to Martha.”
“Who’s Martha?”
“Rosemary Looney.”
“Dad never could have been happy with her,” Jimmy shrugs. “She was nothing like Mom.”
“But he
was
happy,” she says.
Jimmy blinks and for the world looks just like their dad, and she tells him so, says she wants to go get some of the old photos
to compare their features. She wants to show Kaycie what their baby might look like, show how Jimmy’s ears were enormous before he grew into them, and how he used to suit up and pretend to be Bret Maverick.
“And I want to see the picture from the lake,” Ann says. “I want to see if I’m remembering it right.”
He tells her it’s right where it’s been for years, the far corner where they always kept the dog food and drink coolers, that he and Kaycie didn’t want it hanging but of course hadn’t felt like they could just throw it away. Ann opens the door and ventures down into the basement, the familiar damp smell, old lamps and chairs that used to be upstairs. “It’ll just take a sec,” she hears Jimmy tell Kaycie. She’s upset because the dinner is going to be ruined if they don’t eat soon and she’s tired and hungry. Ann hears him offer a plea to her, the kind that seems to imply he’s having to do this —humor and placate his little sister —the one afraid of the dark, the one inept in relationships like he used to be until he found and married her.
Ann goes to the far corner of the basement, and sure enough, there it is. Pongo Lake —the typical American family. Grapes and bread on a plate, her mother’s dark hair curled close to her head, pearls at her throat. In the picture, Ann is studying her mother, hand reaching but not touching, and Jimmy is grinning, their dad’s large hand on his shoulder. Ann remembers climbing on his back that day and holding close, begging him to go deeper,
her cheek pressed against the speckled warmth of his skin. But that day he stopped at his waist and swung her off his back, urged her to swim on ahead, to show him what a fine swimmer she was.
With Martha on shore, he felt safer and had been able to go much farther. Martha had said his heart was beating like a jack-hammer when he came up out of the water and collapsed on the blanket beside her. When she asked why on earth he did it, he said it was important that Ann not sense his fear, that she trust him to keep her safe.
“And I asked, ‘who’s keeping you safe?’ ” Martha laughed and instinctively reached and grabbed Ann’s hand. “And he said, ‘
You
are.’ That’s what he said to me and he laughed great big and asked me to open him a beer.” Martha shook her head and looked off toward the big plate windows and the busy parking lot where young families were coming and going. She took a deep breath and turned back.
“Your daddy said, ‘And my Ann can swim like a little mud puppy.’ ” Martha squeezed Ann’s hand and then patted her long-mended forearm. “A mud puppy, he called you, and he loved
my
hush puppies. Lord, he could put them away. He loved them.” Her eyes filled with tears again and she blinked to straighten herself up when her husband called for her to look at Jonah dancing with Chuck E. Cheese. “He was a sweet man, your father.” Ann nodded and wanted to fall into that body she had loved as a child,
the same way she wishes she could fall into the portrait before her, just for a second, to fall into that time and kick the empty basket, to tell her mother to stop wasting time.
You can swim and won’t
, Ann would say.
And you have less than three years to do it
.
She is staring into her dad’s eyes, and with the focus on his face, the image of herself off to the side blurs and disappears from view as if she is no longer there, was never born, or maybe, as if with a great burst of freedom, she had run unafraid out into the lake all by herself. She wishes she had told her dad how sorry she was to have ruined his great chance at happiness, the chance for all of them to learn how it is supposed to feel, and she is speaking the words to him in her mind when she hears the door upstairs slam and click and then she prepares herself for what she knows is coming. The light goes out. She hears a shrill, giggling Kaycie telling Jimmy how bad he is, how foolish to reenact every childhood moment when they could be eating dinner and watching the movie that is from
her
childhood. “We never talk about
my
childhood,” Kaycie says, and then there are the murmurs of their low conversation, apologies and promises. There is only blackness, and Ann takes long deep breaths while waiting for her eyes to adjust, the chairs and tables and books and furnace, the frame of the portrait, the long splintered steps up to the kitchen.