Acts of Love (3 page)

“Whoever said I wanted to hunt, anyway?”

“Ssshhh,” Ali warned. “Look.”

Five feet away, a doe was poking its head out from behind a thick tree trunk, its chocolate eyes wide, cautious, curious, its large pointed ears quivering slightly so that they could see the short white hairs rippling within.

“Are we going to shoot it?” Ali asked.

“No, Ali, look. It's a doe. It's against the law to shoot does.”

“Why?”

“Because then there'd be no deer next year.”

They stood still as still, listening to their breath, and to the subterranean cracklings of the mountain that they had not noticed until now but that suddenly disturbed the very air between human and animal, while the doe, head cocked, returned their stare. Then, just as abruptly, it swiveled on its spindly legs and vanished back into the woods.

“I'm hungry,” Julia complained as soon as they started walking again. “When are we going to eat?”

 

W
HILE
T
ED NAPPED THAT AFTERNOON
, sprawled atop his sleeping bag, his arms and legs splayed in the dirt, his open mouth streaked with saliva, Julia led Ali to a large pine a few yards away for the day's lesson. It had been going on for years, this secret school of theirs: Julia grading Ali's coloring books according to how well she stayed within the lines, Julia passing along inside information about teachers Ali would have and how best to work around them, Julia interpreting schoolyard events, the fiery vicissitudes of playground allegiances, Julia deciphering their parents' arguments, which seeped through the vents of closed doors and expanded to fill the house like smoke, Julia handing up conclusions fully formed so that Ali, easygoing and lazy, became used to receiving information wrapped and tied by her.

Julia looked at Ali, her face so open, so hopeful of a cure. It worried her, all this softness. She knew how dangerous it could be. How easily bruised. Each lesson was aimed at tempering it, this boneless pliancy of Ali's that others found so sweet. Julia had taken it upon herself to teach Ali what their mother could not. How to be hard and smart and knowing. How to survive. Things she needed to know. Once, Julia had made Ali climb beneath an entire block of parked cars, as if the weakness could be shimmied out of her. It is only adults, after all, who cling with such fervid sentimentality to the notion that childhood should be made to last as long as possible.

She took the nettle Ali had been playing with from her hand. She paused. Julia, at thirteen, had a perfect sense of timing.

“Don't ever believe him,” she said in a low, fierce voice. “Never. Not ever.”

Ali nodded.

“Don't ever believe anyone.”

 

T
HAT NIGHT
, Ali, Julia, and Ted sat huddled about the small campfire Ted had taught them to build out of a pyramid of dry twigs. The low flames rippled about their feet, lighting the bottom half of their faces with a frail orange glow and filling their hair with the dust-rich scent of smoke.

“Okay, so maybe we won't be bringing home any antlers for the den, but it sure feels good being up here where a person can breathe.” Ted scrunched a fistful of hard earth between his fingers.

“It sure feels good,” Ali agreed sleepily.

Ted smiled. Ali, whose doubts were still so easy to assuage, whose love did not have to be won anew each day but who loved him still, loved him even now. “C'mon, partner, I think it's time for you to turn in.” He gathered Ali in his arms, surprised by the weight of her, the fleshiness of her eleven-year-old body, and tucked her into her sleeping bag. “I love you,” he whispered as he kissed her forehead, smudged with dirt.

“I love you, too,” she answered, quietly, so that Julia would not hear.

When he returned to the campfire, Julia quickly erased the secret messages she had been scrawling in the dirt and wrapped her arms tight about her bony knees. Ted sat down beside her, watching her angular profile in the fire's flickering light.

“I'm not the enemy, you know,” he said softly.

“I never said you were.”

“You haven't stopped saying it for the past year. Julia, whatever happened was between me and your mother. It had nothing to do with you.”

Julia remained silent, patient as a spy.

“It's complicated,” Ted went on. “I don't expect you to understand it when I don't fully understand it myself. All I know is, it wasn't all my fault. Sure, I make a lot more noise. And no one's ever going to tell you that I don't have a temper. But we both made a lot of mistakes. There were no angels living in that house.”

She leaned closer. “What mistakes?” she asked carefully.

“Leaving, for one.”

She watched, waiting, and smiled grimly when she realized that there would be no more.

Ted looked away. In fact, he had never really meant to leave, had certainly never meant to stay away. He had simply stormed out in the middle of an argument and not been able to figure out a route back until, as the hours turned into days and nights, spent on his partner's foldout couch, it had hardened into fact, his leaving. When Ann called him at work three days later and told him that if he didn't pick up his clothes in one hour she was going to take them to the town dump, he had wanted to find a way to admit his mistake, but he couldn't; proving how little they needed each other had become one of their measuring sticks, though he had never really meant to win. So he had picked up his clothes where she had left them, in two large black plastic trash bags on the front steps, and a few weeks later he was looking for an apartment and a lawyer, and try as he might, he still couldn't remember precisely what the argument had been about. “Look, things happen between a man and a woman. Things they can't always control.” He paused. “I think you're a little young for this.”

“I'm thirteen.”

“I know.”

“I know more than you think I do.”

“Oh, I'm sure you do.” He picked up a stick and prodded the last piece of wood deeper into the fire. He wanted to tell her how it feels like a ball you just can't catch, how once it starts rolling away, there's nothing you can do to stop it, the ball that is the two of you, or what the two of you used to be, and how you keep running and running after it and sometimes you even think you've caught it, but then it just slips away again. “It just got away from us,” he said.

Julia's eyes remained fixed on him as she squinted from the smoke, listening intently.

“I've seen you and Ali argue,” Ted continued. “Sometimes you start off knowing what you're arguing about but by the time you're done, you have no idea. It's about everything. Your mother and I got like that. But it's different now.”

“What do you mean?”

The other night, resisting and then not. He studied Julia, weighing, balancing each word before he spoke, trying to predict effect and adjust accordingly. “I never meant to hurt your mother.” He paused. “Or you and Ali. I've been doing a lot of thinking. If I tell you a secret, do you promise not to tell anyone, not even Ali?” He would bind Julia to him yet, bind her with secrets she would store in her hard, riven crevices. Surely she would carry them with her like a prize.

“Okay.”

“I'm trying to get Mom to give us, give me, a second chance. Maybe it's not too late for us after all. What do you think?”

“I don't know.”

“Anyone ever tell you you're one tough customer, kid?”

“It's a lot quieter without you guys yelling all the time.”

“See, that's what I'm telling you.” Ted pounced on this with the instinct of turning liabilities into assets that had helped him build his construction business from scratch, a born salesman. “It won't be like that again.”

“You promise?”

“I really promise.” He reached over, his hand hovering in midair an inch from Julia's back, wondering if he would feel beneath his touch the flinch that had greeted his every attempted caress in the last year. His hand landed gently, and he could sense, even beneath the wool jacket, her muscles tense in rebellion. “I need you to believe me.”

“Why do you need me to believe you?”

“Because I want you to do me a favor.”

“What?”

“I want you to put in a good word for me with your mother. She'll listen to you. Tell her how much I love her. Will you do that for me?”

“I don't know.”

Ted leaned back, taking stock of his daughter once more, gauging his own progress before starting again in a quiet voice. “I've hated every minute of being away from you girls and Mom.” He smiled broadly, his cheeks dividing from eye to chin. “I think it's going to work. I really do. First thing tomorrow, I want you to tell her we should all go out to dinner, okay? Okay, Julia? You remember how we used to go out to dinner every Sunday night, the four of us? It'll be like that again, it'll be just like that.” His knees cracked as he straightened out his legs, and he sighed deeply.

Julia blinked, longing, just for an instant, to be carried along, the way Ted had always carried them along with each new enthusiasm, each new project, in his shop, in their bedrooms as he helped them with their school assignments, on weekend outings that so often required some new gadget, some new toy. His enthusiasm and excitement for any plan, particularly in its seminal stages, was irresistible to them all. She rose quickly. “I think I'm going to go to sleep.”

“Okay, pal.”

He smiled at her and she smiled back, not as fully, not as long, but still.

As she walked away from him, though, she bit deep into the soft plump skin of the lower lip that had betrayed her, grinding her front tooth in and in and in until she tasted the salt of her own blood. She should, after all, know better.

“You sleep well,” Ted called after her. “And don't forget. First thing when we get back on Sunday, right?”

Julia, far off in the dark, crawled into her sleeping bag.

Ted sat by the fire, watching it slowly die out, waiting until Julia's eyes were shut and then pulling the flask from his pack, holding it tight in his hand, bringing it for long draughts to his lips and then resting it on his knee, the whiskey, the night, his daughters, all good.

 

B
Y MIDAFTERNOON
, Ann had already read the paper, cleaned the girls' rooms, and relined two kitchen shelves with a new green marbleized paper. She wandered restlessly about the house, rearranging magazines, flipping the radio on and off, seeing before her only endless empty Sunday afternoons, lined up one after another like dominoes through the length of her life in exile from her married self. She used the kitchen telephone.

“Sandy? Hi. What are you doing? You want to come over and keep your big sister company?”

Twenty minutes later, Sandy pulled into the driveway in her beat-up aqua Honda. Ann watched from behind the lace curtains of the living-room window as Sandy walked to the door with the rapid, determined bird steps that marked her progress to even the most casual of destinations. She was a smaller, more chiseled version of Ann, whittled by nervous energy and an incessant alertness. Head down, chin thrust forward, she nevertheless always managed to guard her rear. She was carrying an enormous leather bag whose omnipresence Ann found mystifying and enviable, with all its implications of an existence more varied and involved than her own. She opened the front door, smiling. “Thanks for coming over.”

“So where did Ted the Magnificent take the kids for the weekend?” Sandy asked as she followed Ann into the kitchen, settling down at the immaculate white Formica table and pouring herself a glass of the white wine Ann had set out.

“Hunting up at Fletcher's Mountain.”

“He's just bound and determined to turn those girls into good little men.”

“Shouldn't girls have as much right to hunt as boys?”

“You're learning,” she said, smiling. “But that's not the point. I thought you disapproved of hunting.”

“I do.”

“I don't know why you always let Ted get his way.”

“Sandy, he's their parent, too.”

“A biological misfortune. Maybe we'll get lucky and he'll have an accident up there. Sit on his rifle or something.”

“How can you say that? All weekend, I haven't been able to stop thinking about them up there with no telephone…”

“No VCR, no Nintendo…”

“I'm serious.” She looked at Sandy, so empirical and so sure, never allowing anything to enter that she didn't personally invite, no thought, no fear, Sandy, who at ten could terrify Ann with the force of her judgments. “Do you remember when Ted and I were first married and the only job he could get was assessing properties out of state?” She smiled shyly. “I used to stick these little love notes in his suitcase every Monday morning before he left. It started as a joke, but then”—she paused, remembering how shocked and happy she was then to be married, to be his, things she had never expected, and how fearful she was of losing it, creating an intricate web of superstitious rituals to protect herself—“then I began to believe that if I ever forgot, something would happen, the plane would crash, something.” She didn't tell Sandy how she used to listen to the radio all day whenever Ted flew, waiting for news of disaster. “Do you want to hear something silly? I stuck notes in the girls' packs before they left on Friday, just to be sure.”