Authors: Callie Wright
I couldn’t picture Teddy sitting on the pitcher’s mound waiting for us to pick him up—if he was missing, he didn’t want to be found—but Dad collected his car keys and shut the door behind him without saying goodbye.
Upstairs, I sat at my desk and stared at my backpack. I had fifty pages of
Wuthering Heights
to read for English and a chem lab to write, but I couldn’t concentrate. It meant something that Teddy hadn’t come home to erase the school’s message—he wouldn’t have thought of Poppy answering the phone. He wanted to be caught, maybe, or he wanted Mom and Dad to worry, but there was enough to worry about without Teddy’s tardmore antics, and I found myself angry at him for making things even worse than they already were.
Forty-five minutes into my homework, I gave up and considered calling Sam. Carl hadn’t looked at me when he’d left the courts, but he had said goodbye, which at least meant he was speaking to me. The question was, what now?
It was then that I remembered the note about Carl’s mom, and I picked up my jeans off the floor and felt inside the back pockets, but they were empty. I stood and stuffed my hands into the front pockets, turning the liners inside out, milking the fabric: empty. Sweat beaded on my forehead—it was too bright in the room, two thousand degrees. I flapped the jeans. Nothing. I thought of all the desk chairs I’d sat in that day, all the classrooms in which the note might have worked its way up and out of my pocket; I thought of the girls’ locker room before gym class, where I’d carelessly dropped my jeans on the floor. I dug into the clothing pile in my bedroom, shaking shirts and pants over the rug, whipping empty sleeves, but it was gone, MIA, out in the world for anyone to read.
Downstairs, the front door opened and I had no choice: I left my room and crept to the seventh step on the back staircase, where I could spy into the kitchen without being seen.
“Where have you been?” asked Mom.
Teddy walked into the kitchen with his shirttails untucked beneath his sweatshirt, his laces untied, his khakis wet and dirty. His lips were nearly blue: it looked like he’d been swimming.
“You have five seconds to start talking,” said Mom.
The sound of Poppy’s steps from the den echoed in the stairwell, and I hugged my legs to my chest and stayed low.
Poppy sat on Teddy’s stool. “Your principal called,” he said, as if he were our father.
“Why would the principal call?” asked Teddy. There was something new in his voice, a go-eff-yourself-ness that sounded wrong on Teddy’s tongue. He took a granola bar from the bread drawer and began to unwrap it.
“Teddy,” said Mom desperately. “We’ve been worried sick about you.”
“We?” Teddy looked left, then right. “Where’s Dad?”
“Where do you think?” Mom snapped. She took a step toward Teddy. “What’s that?”
Teddy shifted, hiding what looked like a wet piece of paper.
“Nothing,” said Teddy, but when Mom took his hand, he allowed her to pry back his fingers, and I leaned over the railing until I could make out Dad’s Ted Williams card, signed for his brother, George, just before he drowned at a place called Reacher Falls.
No one spoke. The front door was opening again and soon we heard the sound of Dad dropping his car keys in the silver bowl and then, “It’s too dark out there. I could barely see the sidewalks.”
“Hugh,” said Mom.
Dad walked into the kitchen and stopped. He looked at Mom, who nodded toward Teddy’s hand.
“I saw you today,” said Teddy.
Dad reached for the card, but this time Teddy stepped back.
“I saw you kiss that woman’s hand—”
“Stop,” said Dad, and in two quick steps his hands were on Teddy’s face, not so much hitting him as trying to push his words back into his mouth.
He grabbed Teddy’s arm and Teddy jerked away, and for a second I thought Teddy was going to hit our father, but instead he crushed the baseball card in his hand, then slapped it on the island, the wet cardboard curling at the edges.
I wanted to move but I was Tasered. Teddy thundered past me on the stairs and I told myself to follow him, but I couldn’t move my legs.
In the kitchen, Mom picked up a tea towel and threw it at Dad. She was crying but Dad didn’t go to her. Instead, he folded the towel and leaned over his card and gently began to blot.
8
Despair tugged at Anne’s heart and danced in her peripheral vision. She tried to listen to Hugh’s story about an injured boy on the playground at Seedlings, but she was too distracted by images of her own children, just upstairs, who had come into this world when called, dutifully showing up for years now to clean their rooms, finish their dinners, ride in the backseats of cars—all the things that kids did—and now Hugh had brought something horribly adult—complicated, insoluble—into their house, while Anne, who ought to have known better, had instead been steeled by her own childhood wounds, certain it couldn’t happen again.
Now her eyes were wide open, trying not to cry, and all she could think was, I want my mother. How would Joanie have managed this? Hints and innuendos would not solve Anne’s problems: from what she understood, Hugh had committed adultery with a woman whose son was being treated for an injury whose cause may have been the Seedlings School’s negligent supervision on the playground (though if schools must supervise their students only as a parent of “ordinary prudence” would supervise his or her child [
Ramirez v. Brookhaven School District
], then Caroline Murphy, who fucked the school’s principal while her son lay semiconscious seven steps away, ought to think twice about introducing the topic of negligent supervision). God only knew how many people had witnessed this tryst. Ron Metcalf, MD, the boy’s surgeon and Anne’s cochair on the booster club’s annual Not Quite Free Throw committee? Luanne Thompson, RN, who’d kindly squeezed in Teddy for his third MMR shot before the September 1 school deadline? Wally O’Shea, PsyD, pediatric psychologist and Anne’s junior high science partner, who’d once pushed her into Mr. Franconi’s coat closet for a not-unwelcome French kiss? To date, the only known witness was Graham Pennington, age five, the injured boy at the heart of the case.
But Teddy, too, had seen something, this very afternoon in Cherry Valley, witness to his father kissing a woman’s hand. Anne was not nearly guileless enough to believe that Hugh’s hospital-room incident was an isolated event, though he maintained he’d been at Caroline Murphy’s house today only to discuss the lawsuit, kissing her hand as a way to say thank you. Was Anne supposed to believe this shit? Part of her wanted to stand up right now and toss Hugh out of the house. Instead she remained locked to the seat of her desk chair, arms crossed, and when her body began to shake, right foot hooked around left ankle, anchoring herself to herself.
She pictured an early autumn evening in Boston, a Saturday, when she was seven months pregnant with Teddy. Anne and Hugh had spent the day at garage sales, hunting for a set of dining-room chairs, and now Anne had collapsed on the couch with their plastic shopping bags—six records, an alarm clock, a new paperback, but no chairs—and kicked off her espadrilles, which had carved deep purple lines into her flesh. Hugh, meanwhile, had gone to their bedroom to change and she’d expected him to return in sweatpants and a T-shirt so that they could spend the rest of the evening right there on the couch, but instead he’d emerged in khakis and a pressed shirt, his hair combed and parted, his face newly shaved.
Hugh’s coworker was having a birthday party in Beacon Hill, he reminded her, and it was true that he’d told her about it a week ago, but they weren’t really going to go, were they? They’d been running around all day, and now that they were home, Anne couldn’t think of a reason in the world to go back out again.
“Come on,” he said, “we’ll only stay for an hour.”
But they’d have to take the T, and she’d have to shower, and Anne didn’t think she owned a pair of shoes that could contain her swollen feet.
If she had demurred, waffled; if she’d said that the party would be crowded, that the birthday boy wouldn’t miss him; if she’d pointed out that Hugh had recently complained about this very coworker for hijacking Hugh’s research before Hugh himself could make sense of the data; if she had simply asked him to stay. But Hugh was all dressed up, looking so handsome in the plaid shirt that Anne had bought for him, and so what if he wanted to go to a party and she didn’t? Hugh was nothing like her father—his face was an open book, and she would know immediately if something untoward had occurred.
So she told him to go without her. “Have fun,” she said. A permission slip, her blessing. “I’ll be fine,” she said.
But as soon as Hugh was gone, Anne’s hands began to tremble, and no amount of reason or logic would still them. She was slipping; she couldn’t hold on. She felt thirteen years old again, still playing a part in some other play, and she reached instinctively for the device that had soothed her as a child: Anne envisioned a metal cage descending over her heart. Impenetrable. Inviolable. She could not be hurt. And when Hugh had returned two hours later, just as he’d said he would, when her husband kissed her on the forehead and asked her what she’d been up to while he was out, Anne had said coolly, “Nothing,” feeling nothing. “Just catching up on work.”
Work, up to eighty hours a week for more than eighteen years now, with children at home who had, when suffering from fever or nightmares, inevitably gone to their father’s side of the bed. Work to defray the considerable start-up and subsequent operating costs of the Seedlings School—her husband’s dream—for more than fifteen years. Work to keep their children in Levi’s and Swatch watches, Nikes and Walkmen, CB jackets and Nintendos and
all the things they had to have.
Work, too, because her own mother hadn’t, and because Anne had witnessed firsthand what could happen when fathers were too often away from home. And now work as Seedlings’ legal adviser to save her husband’s school, to save their marriage, or to at least give them a fighting chance, because that was what they wanted, wasn’t it?
Anne rested her pen on her legal pad and regarded Hugh. After an hour and a half holed up in her office, their children and her father in isolation upstairs, Anne-the-lawyer was confident that she had the facts of the negligence case. She understood the issues presented by the facts, she was prepared to outline the applicable rules of law and write a motion, but she was not prepared to address Hugh’s infidelity. Because although Anne-the-wife might have wanted to send Hugh packing—straight over to Randolph DeVey, who specialized in wayward spouses—Hugh was unfortunately
her
wayward spouse, her kids’ father, and for their sakes alone neither Randolph DeVey nor anyone else in Cooperstown could find out about this.
“At her house today,” Anne prompted, “what exactly did you talk about?”
“I told her that I strongly believe the playground is safe, that Graham’s accident was just that—an accident—and that if it’s a question of money—”
“You discussed money?”
“Not in so many words.”
Anne frowned, crossing her legs knee over thigh. Her khaki pants hiked up over her bare left ankle and she quickly yanked down on the hem.
“It’s not like that,” said Hugh, averting his eyes.
“It’s not like what?”
“She’s not after money. She’s on our side.”
Now Anne cocked her chin and raised her eyebrows, daring him to elaborate.
“I only mean that she wants this to go away as much as we do. But I guess her ex-husband has custody or something, so it’s his decision.”
Ex-husband
and
custody
gusted through the room like Arctic breezes. Anne hugged herself while consulting her yellow pad but found nothing useful on the page. At her law firm she was famous for the “aha” moment, when an argument would be made known to her, when she would see clearly, before anyone else, how to string the facts into a cogent tale so that a judge, a jury, heard only what she wanted them to hear. But this case—Hugh’s case—was unfathomable. Their interaction felt clinical. Anne tried to recall when was the last time they’d spooned at night or planted foamy kisses on each other’s cheeks while brushing their teeth. Years had passed. Years.
“This husband,” said Anne. “This ex-husband. Have you talked to him?”
“Not yet.”
Hugh ran a hand over his head. Sweat had pooled under his arms, staining his blue button-down a damp navy. His unfastened shirt cuffs yawned at his wrists. The windows along the alcove behind Anne’s desk were cracked, a breeze evident in the occasional fluttering of papers across her blotter, but the overhead lights were on and Anne’s gooseneck was spotlighting Hugh like an interrogation lamp.
“Sorry,” said Anne, adjusting the desk lamp, then crossing the room to the switch plate, where she shut down one set of track lights. “Better?”
“Much,” said Hugh. “Thanks.”
Anne returned to her swivel chair, marveling at her capacity for civility. If asked earlier today how she’d planned to spend her evening, she would not have forecast the meltdown of her marriage, yet here she was, and in a way it was not so surprising, not so utterly shocking. Just last night, hadn’t she drafted a fifteen-page legal document addressing Hugh’s suspicious behavior? But there was “suspecting” and there was “knowing,” and Anne had not truly believed him capable of this.
Anne could feel Hugh watching her. She hadn’t been this aware of his gaze since they’d starting dating, twenty years before.
“What?” she asked, touching her hand to her mouth.
“Nothing.”
Hugh leaned back on the leather couch, his feet extended in front of him. He was barefoot, his second toes longer than his first. His arches curved gracefully, the skin delicate and smooth where his feet had never touched the ground.
“She was talking about their divorce proceedings,” Hugh offered. “Apparently he made them pretty tough.”
Anne clicked her pen, rapid-firing the nib.
“She said he got some million-dollar lawyer and used the AA thing to completely wipe her out.”
“The AA thing?”