The Book of Why (9 page)

THEY ARRIVED, AFTER
all, Lucy and Vincent, but not in the manner I had intended. Red-haired twins, four years old, the girl too shy to look at us, the boy unblinking, studying our faces.

Impossible, these names. The beach we loved, where we threw sticks into the ocean for Ralph to fetch. Names we'd chosen for the children we couldn't conceive, the children I'd tried to will into existence. Names given to these twins by someone else. And now they had been matched with us.

Lucy and Vincent, dropped off at our door, ours for the time being.

Becoming foster parents had been Cary's idea. Everything, she said, was for the time being; everything was temporary; everything, eventually, had to be let go; so why not embrace this truth, why not welcome it into our lives. That everything changed, she said, that everything ended, made life worth living. “I mean, could you imagine,” she said, “if everything lasted forever.”

“I want you to last forever.”

“No thank you,” she said.

“So you actually
want
to die?”

“Eventually,” she said.

“Well,” I said, “I don't want you to die.”

“That's sweet,” she said, “but I have news for you.”

She must have noticed the look on my face; she grabbed my face and kissed me.

They walked into our home, Lucy hiding behind Vincent, each carrying a bag of books and toys. Their caseworker, a burly man with a deep but gentle voice, introduced us to the children. I crouched in front of Vincent and held out my hand for him to slap me five; he stared at it, so I put my hand on his head and told him how happy we were that he and his sister were there.

I leaned around him to look at Lucy, but she pressed her face into her brother's back.

“She's afraid of beards,” Vincent said.

“Well,” I said, “at least Cary doesn't have one.”

Vincent smiled. From behind him, a muffled voice: “Girls don't have beards.”

“Are you sure?”

“You're silly,” she said.

We showed them their rooms, their beds, the dresser they'd share. They fought over beds, even though they were identical, and over the bottom drawer. “Stop being a dope,” Vincent said. Lucy started to cry, but before we could say anything—our first parenting moment—Vincent hugged his sister and said he was sorry, she could have the bottom drawer as long as he could have the bed by the light switch, and she said fine, as long as he stopped calling her a dope, and he said fine, as long as she let him be in charge of the light, and she said fine, as long as he stopped calling the doll she slept with Barker instead of Parker, and stopped making the doll make dog sounds, and stopped holding the doll above his head and dropping her and pretending she was falling from the sky, and he said fine, but I could see that behind his back he'd crossed his fingers.

Their mother, a heroin addict, came to see them every other week unless she wasn't doing well, code for: wasn't clean, wasn't going to meetings, wasn't going for counseling. She was thin and had long, dark hair; she wore the same black leather jacket whether January or June. Her name was Eleanor but people called her Rigby, she said, because of the Beatles song. We called her
Mom
to the twins, but rarely did she look comfortable in that role, not even when Lucy clung to her legs or Vincent sat in her lap. She read to them too quickly, the book shaking in her hands.

The first time she visited, after she was out of rehab and had been clean two months, she kept stepping outside for air. She had asthma, she told us, but when we looked out the window she was smoking. She saw me by the window once; she turned away and dropped her cigarette. When she came inside, she said, “You can't give up everything at once. I mean, they expect you to give up everything.”

She was an artist, she told us. “But now I have to get a schmuck job like everyone else.”

During her visits, in bits and pieces, she told us the bare bones of her story, at least its most recent chapter. The father of her children, also an artist (“a much better artist than me, I mean he was a
real
artist, he lived it”), OD'd when she was six months pregnant; the kids never knew him. “Probably for the best,” she said, but during her next visit she said, “I wish they could have known him. Not as their father, just as an artist.” The next visit, before she said hello, as if continuing a conversation she'd been having with herself on the subway, she said, “He's going to be famous. You should see what he left behind. People in the art scene—they worship him. They won't let his work die.” We talked about the kids for a while—Vincent liked the peanuts guy at Shea Stadium; Lucy liked giraffes at the zoo; both were afraid of planes, of heights; Vincent was wetting the bed—but as soon as there was an opening, and sometimes even if there wasn't, she'd say, “His name was Maynard Day, but everyone called him May Day,” or “I guess it could be worse, I could have OD'd with him,” or “They have his genes, so.”

I wasn't sure whether this last statement was consolation or concern.

Whenever we found Vincent sleeping beside Lucy, we knew that he'd wet his bed. The first time, when we changed the sheets in front of him and told him it was okay, he grew angry: he balled his hands into fists, shut his eyes tightly, and his body went rigid; his face turned almost as red as his hair.

“He didn't do it on purpose,” Lucy said.

“We know,” I said, and Cary said, “It happens to boys all the time, even Eric when he was your age.”

“Nothing happened!” Vincent said, punching the air with each word. “Leave me alone!”

So we didn't change the sheets in front of him, didn't acknowledge his bedwetting in any way. Sometimes Lucy brought it up in indirect ways; she'd tell Vincent, for us to hear, that when he got into her bed the night before he scared her, and would he please not touch her with his feet, which were cold.

“Fine,” Vincent said. Then: “My father was famous.” Anything to change the subject. He was the more dominant of the twins, without question, and perhaps Lucy knew that his bedwetting was her only leverage.

I was surprised one night, before bed, when Vincent came to me. He wanted to ask me a question, but not in front of girls. We sat on the floor in my office, and he asked me if it was true, had I really wet the bed when I was a boy.

“Yes,” I lied. “Right around when I was your age.”

“Did you ever sleep over at someone's house?”

“A few times, sure.”

“When did it stop?”

“Oh, it didn't last very long.”

“How long?”

“Are you afraid it'll never stop?”

He nodded his head yes.

“Believe me,” I said. “It will.”

“But how?”

“No water or juice before bed.”

“We tried that.”

“Okay,” I said. “I'm going to tell you the secret method, but first you have to promise never to tell anyone.”

“Promise.”

“Double promise?”

“Double promise.”

“It'll take practice,” I said, “but eventually it'll be easy. Not too many kids know about this. Here's what you do. You realize that wetting the bed is impossible. It simply can't happen. You couldn't wet the bed if you
tried
. Then,” I said, “you want to lie in bed, close your eyes, and feel how dry the sheet is, you want to imagine waking in the morning with the sheet just as dry. You want to close your eyes and see it in your mind. We can practice now, if you want.”

He closed his eyes.

“Imagine how great it feels to wake in your own bed,” I said. “Your sheets are dry, your pajamas are dry. Keep your eyes closed,” I said, “and really feel what that'll be like. Pretty good, huh.”

He nodded yes.

“Now, before you fall asleep, I want you to keep imagining yourself waking tomorrow in a dry bed. If you find yourself getting worried, just say to that worry, ‘I'm sorry, but I don't want you right now,' and go back to imagining what it's going to be like in the morning.”

“I don't want worry,” he said.

“That's it,” I said. “That's the secret.”

“Easy,” he said, and in the morning we found Lucy in Vincent's bed.

“Dry,” he said, his first words upon waking.

Later, during breakfast, he said, “Do you got any other secrets?”

“Who has a secret?” Lucy said.

“Me and him,” Vincent said.

“I want a secret, too,” Lucy said, and Cary said she'd tell her one later.

“So,” Vincent said, “do you got any more?”

“That,” I said, “is the only secret you'll ever need to know.”

But Lucy and Vincent had their own secret; they told me one February morning, the day after we returned from Martha's Vineyard. We'd taken them to Lucy Vincent Beach; Cary told them it had been named for them, and we carved their names into a rock.

We were home in Brooklyn, sitting by the window, watching squirrels leap from tree limb to tree limb, when a plane passed overhead; we watched it disappear into the clouds, reappear, then disappear again.

Lucy walked away from the window.

“She's scared,” Vincent said.

“You should be scared, too,” Lucy said.

“Well, I'm not.”

“Why are you scared?” I asked her.

“Because it's going to fall,” she said.

“I don't think it's going to fall,” I said.

She ran back to the window, looked up at the plane as it moved out of view. “There are three people on that plane.”

“Probably more than that,” I said.

“Three,” she said. “And it's going to fall, and they're going to die.”

“My father died,” Vincent said.

“Yes,” I said. “I'm sorry.”

“Don't worry,” Lucy said to me. “You're not on the plane.”

“Neither are you.”

“Yes, I am.”

“Lucy,” I said, “you're right here.” I put my hand on her head as if to prove she was really there.

“Vincent's on the plane, too,” she said.

“Stop saying that,” he said.

“It's nice when you go up,” Lucy said, “but then something bad happens.”

“Tell her to stop,” Vincent said.

“Lucy,” I said, “your brother's getting upset.”

“It was a long time ago,” Lucy said.

“I don't want to talk about that,” Vincent said.

Rigby didn't confess until she'd been clean for eight months. If she stayed clean until the end of the year, and held on to her job—she was waiting tables at a Polish restaurant on the Lower East Side—she'd be able to regain custody of her children.

“The second time I was here,” she said, “I put it in my bag. Didn't look at the title until I got home. I was like, Shit, of all the books I could have stolen, I get a self-help book.”

“But why steal a book?” I said. “Why steal anything from us?”

“Not sure,” she said. “I'd been doing all these destructive things for years, and I'd had to give them all up, except smoking, and maybe something inside me was just like, man, I have to do
some
thing bad, even if it's tame like stealing a book.”

We were sitting in the courtyard, where she could smoke. She finished her cigarette, then lit another; she took a long drag, and ash fell from the tip before the drag was done.

“As soon as I saw the title,” she said, “I threw the book under my bed. I don't read books like that—you know, here's how to fix your life in three easy steps.” After a pause: “No offense.”

“None taken.”

“But listen,” she said. “One night I was out of cigs, and I was looking around for an old pack. I found one under the bed, two stale cigs left, and there was the book. That was the first time I noticed your name. So I said, Let me read the first few pages. And, you know, I just kept going. I mean, at first I was like, this is
not
for me. But, hey, two days later I'd read the whole thing.”

It was the chapter about gratitude, she said. The exercise where you treat everything that happens to you, and everything that has ever happened to you, as a gift. “It's the opposite of how I normally see things,” she said. “Everything's a curse, everything's out to get me, everything's holding me back, everything's responsible for whatever lousy place I'm in. I was like, well, that's not working for you, so let's try this. Today, I told myself, everything's a gift, everyone's my teacher. Let's see if this guy knows what he's talking about.”

It was difficult the first few days, she told me. Especially waiting tables. “A man asks three times for a new water glass,” she said. “No hair in the water, no floaters, he just doesn't like the
glass
. Three times, and I was like God knows what this guy's here to teach me. Maybe patience, fine. Deep breath, here's your water, let me know if you need anything else. Same with the lady who talked on her cell phone while ordering, didn't say excuse me, just looked away as if I wasn't there—you know the type, has money to eat fancier but is trying to be cool by lunching at this Polish joint, wants to tell her friends back in Jersey about this great place. All these angry thoughts going through my head,” Rigby said, “and I was like, wait a sec, I'm going to stop judging her, I'm going to assume she's actually a nice person, or maybe she's had a difficult year, a difficult life, and while she was yakking on her phone, making me wait, my anger reached a peak, you know, and then
poof
,
it was gone. I could have stood there forever with my pad and pencil and been happy. I didn't need anything else, didn't need to
be
anywhere else. Then the woman got off the phone, looked at me, smiled, and said, ‘That was rude, I apologize,' and I said, ‘That's all right, it was actually nice to stand still for a minute.' She left me a huge tip, and I didn't even resent her for it. I have this thing,” she said. “I hate when someone stiffs me, but I hate even more when someone overtips. It's like they're showing me up or something. I'm working on that.”