But she didn’t. After a while I decided she was having dinner with a friend, and I cooked a single finger’s worth of spaghetti and sat at the table, looking through the morning paper as I ate. Back in New York, Kilroy was reading in his living room, or maybe reading in bed. Or would he have gone to McClanahan’s? I didn’t like to think of him there, sitting alone at the bar while the place grew noisier and noisier.
My mother came in a little before ten, her hand going to her throat in the split second between seeing me and seeing it was me. “Oh, Jesus,” she said. “Good Christ, you scared me.”
“Sorry.”
We hugged, and I smelled the moisturizer she’d been using since I was a child. She had her London Fog raincoat on, the belt knotted around her tiny waist. She set her briefcase down. “Is this because of Jamie?”
“You know?”
She gave me a tired smile. “I’ve been at the hospital since six.”
It turned out Jamie had called her the previous day, even before she’d called me—called for advice, for help. My mother and I sat in the kitchen and she told me all about it, how Jamie’d phoned her from the hospital, how my mother’d cancelled the rest of her appointments so she could go. “I guess things have been difficult at the Fletchers’ for a long time,” my mother said. “Apparently Mrs. Fletcher’s been taking Valium for a while, and when Lynn started waitressing last summer and coming home so late, she began having a drink or two to calm herself down while she waited.” My mother shook her head.
“What?”
“It’s a bad combination. That’s—that’s pretty well known. I think there are warnings on the Valium label.”
I wondered what this had to do with what had happened to Lynn. Guiltily, I remembered Jamie’s complaints about Lynn and her mother. I remembered the summer day when I ran into Jamie and Mrs. Fletcher: how vague Mrs. Fletcher seemed; and how, watching her drive away, Jamie asked if I thought she was
on
something. I’d thought she was kidding.
“Anyway,” my mother continued, “when Lynn came home night before last and Mrs. Fletcher saw her, she broke down. Lynn was—well,
she had a black eye, among other things, and she was hysterical, of course. Mr. Fletcher was out of town, and Mrs. Fletcher started with the Valium and the drinking, too much of both. Lynn didn’t call Jamie home until yesterday morning, and by then Mrs. Fletcher was unconscious. Jamie had great presence of mind: she called an ambulance, found the meds—I’m not sure I would have guessed Jamie had it in her, but she did everything right. She called the police and they told her to get Lynn to the hospital, so the two of them drove over, about five minutes behind the ambulance. When I got there Mrs. Fletcher was in one room having her stomach pumped, and Lynn was being examined in another room, and Jamie was going back and forth between them.”
I stared at my mother. Talking to Jamie, I hadn’t understood the gravity of Mrs. Fletcher’s situation. “Are you saying Mrs. Fletcher tried to kill herself?”
My mother frowned. “Whatever her intentions were, Jamie saved her life. The doctor I talked to said another hour or two and it might have been too late.”
“Oh, my God,” I said. “My God.” I was horrified. I could hardly believe how cold I’d been to Jamie on the phone.
It’s not a good time
. Jamie had been right to hang up on me, right to refuse to listen when I called back. “How is she now?”
“Mrs. Fletcher?”
“Jamie.”
My mother shrugged. “As well as can be expected. Bill was there with her tonight.”
I looked away, and my mother reached across the table and put her hand on mine. “Is it strange that life’s gone on without you?”
I nodded. Strange but inevitable. My life had gone on, too. For a moment I wished Kilroy were with me taking it all in: so I wouldn’t have to explain it to him, so he’d just know. How would I be able to convey what it felt like to sit across from my mother knowing she knew Jamie better now than I did?
“How’s Mrs. Fletcher?” I asked her.
“They’re watching her. I don’t know what’s going to happen.” She bit her lip and sighed. She looked tired: she’d grown her hair out, and it made her face look smaller, more lined than I would have expected.
“What about Lynn? Do you know how she is?”
My mother frowned. “It’s a long road back from something like this. I guess she’s OK physically.”
I nodded, nearly unable to ask my next question. “Was she raped?”
“Apparently not. I think you should hear about it from Jamie, though.” My mother gave me a piercing look, and I wondered if she knew Jamie’d asked me to come home. Did she know I’d said no? She licked her lips, then stood and got a glass from a cabinet. She filled it at the sink and drank, her back still to me.
“I blew it when she called me,” I said. “She asked me to come home and I said I couldn’t.”
My mother turned around, her face full of compassion now. She knew.
“I’ve tried her a million times since then. She won’t speak to me. What can I do?”
My mother set her water glass on the table and then came around to my side. She gave me a pat on the shoulder. “I think you know.”
The next morning, I put on a pair of the black pants I’d made in the fall and the velvet shirt I’d bought in January, and I set off for the Fletchers’.
There were no cars out front, only Mrs. Fletcher’s station wagon at the end of the driveway. I tapped on the front door, then went around the back and tried the mud room. No one responded, but the door wasn’t locked, and I pushed it open and quietly went in. Right away I saw Jamie’s winter coat on a hook, and the sight of it galvanized me, sent me past the basement stairs and right into the kitchen, which smelled ever so slightly of—what was it?—cornbread.
It was after eleven—after twelve in New York. Kilroy was in Midtown this week, was probably at this very moment buying a hotdog from a street vendor. Before leaving my mother’s I’d spoken with him briefly, nothing more to report than Mrs. Fletcher’s situation; from his short silences I knew that he was frustrated, that what he really wanted to know was when I’d return.
I crept up the back stairs, then tiptoed to Jamie’s old room. The door was all but closed, and I drummed my fingers against it softly, pushing it open at the same time.
She was in bed, asleep. Bunched in a fetal position, knees bent, arms held close to her body. Her wrists were so tightly flexed that her knuckles touched her chest, her chin the backs of her hands. She had scooted down below her pillow, and it lay above her head like a crazy stuffed hat.
I stepped in. Jamie’s girlhood bedroom was as familiar as my own. There was twining ivy wallpaper, cream with dark green, accented by
clusters of dark purple berries. She’d gotten it when we were about ten, and I was insane with envy: for the wallpaper, and for the gold-edged white furniture and the four-poster bed.
From downstairs I heard a noise, and I crossed the carpet to the window and saw Jamie’s car parked out front, where I was certain it hadn’t been five minutes ago. I made my way out of her room and down the front stairs to the dining room, where I found her middle sister, Mixie, sitting at the table with a cardboard cup of coffee in hand and a vaguely bored look on her face that didn’t change a bit when she saw me.
“I barged in,” I said.
She shrugged. She had always been pretty but was beautiful now, in a sulky, self-conscious way. She had a perfect, tanning-salon tan, and as we looked at one another she brushed a silky strand of hair away from her face. “Did she talk to you?”
“She’s still asleep.” I pulled out the chair opposite her and sat down. She’d spent last summer in California, which meant I hadn’t seen her in almost a year. “How are you?”
“How do you think?” She took a sip of her coffee, and I wished I had one, too—something to hold.
I said, “I was really a jerk the other day but I’m here now. Do you think she’ll talk to me?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s not just about the other day.”
“What do you mean?”
“Lynn told us about running into you out at that bar last summer. She was sure you’d told Jamie. She was hurt Jamie didn’t seem to care.”
I heaved a big sigh. “She made me promise not to tell,” I said lamely. “Jamie thinks you should’ve anyway.”
I turned and looked out the front window. A crow hopped across the sidewalk, then stopped to peck at something. A moment later, a light blue Oldsmobile went past, just like Mrs. Mayer’s. Was I going to call Mike while I was here? How could I? How could I not?
Mixie reached for her purse and fished out a pack of cigarettes. She shook one up and lit it coolly, blowing the first smoke toward the ceiling. “So how’s New York?” she said.
“Great.”
“I have to say you look amazing. That shirt—I never knew you had it in you.”
“I didn’t.”
We watched each other for a time, Mixie’s eyes wide, curious, unrevealing. She turned away first. She curled a lock of hair around her finger
and then reached for a section of newspaper lying at the far end of the table.
“So what happened?” I said.
“Happened?”
“To Lynn.”
She let go of the newspaper and shook her head. “Uh-uh.”
“Mixie.”
She stared at a point somewhere over my left shoulder and took a long drag on her cigarette.
“Please?”
“Why should I tell you?”
I looked down at the table. Why indeed.
She blew out a stream of smoke. “She had a customer at one of her tables who kept flirting with her. He was alone and she figured,
Poor guy, must be lonely, I’ll give him a little sugar with his dinner
. So she flirted a little, and he asked her out for a drink afterward, and he came on to her, and she freaked out, and he—” Abruptly Mixie broke off.
“He what?”
“He beat her up! He gave her a black eye! He hit her on the face and the arms, you should see the bruises on her arms from where he was holding her. And then he forced her into his car and made her suck him off.”
I clamped my hands over my nose and mouth.
Mixie gave me a fierce look. “No one knows the last part except me and Jamie, so don’t tell, OK? Not even your mom.”
“I won’t,” I said, shaking my head. “I promise.” I stared at her. “That’s awful.”
“Yeah.”
We looked away from one another.
My fault
. That’s what I was thinking: it was my fault. “I’m really sorry,” I said.
From upstairs there came a sudden insistent chirping: Jamie’s alarm clock.
“You should go,” Mixie said. “I mean, whatever, you can stay, but she was up really late last night and I don’t think …” Her voice trailed off and I stood. I watched her for a moment, sitting there with her cigarette, her golden forearms resting on the table. They weren’t the forearms of someone in the middle of something like this. Her hair wasn’t the hair of someone in the middle of something like this. The glow of trauma: it was as missing from her as it had been present in Jamie, even asleep. Somehow everything was resting on Jamie, a huge, terrible weight.
I walked back to my mother’s. The only sound was the tap of my New York ankle boots against the sidewalk. The last time I’d seen Jamie had been a day or two before I’d left for New York: we got iced coffee to go and then walked over to Lake Mendota and sat together on a bench. What was about to happen between me and Mike sat between us, huge and unspeakable. She couldn’t bear my not talking about it, and I couldn’t bear her wanting me to. “I have to get going,” I said after just four or five minutes, and when I held out my palm for her she grudgingly put hers on mine but wouldn’t meet my eye.
At my mother’s I called Kilroy. “Mixie?” he said. “What kind of name is that?”
C
HAPTER
32
In the afternoon I walked to State Street. It was a long way, a route I’d rarely walked, and though I was used to walking for hours in New York, this tired me out—blocks and blocks of empty driveways, then the bleak, colorless stretch of Campus Drive.
I went to Cobra Copy first. Inside, a handful of students leaned against the counter while behind them the giant machines roared out copy after copy. As I’d expected Jamie wasn’t there, but I got her schedule from a cashier, who told me she’d cancelled several shifts but was due back tomorrow.
Everyone looked dull on the street. It had warmed up a little, and coats were open, revealing tired jeans, ratty sweatshirts and dark plaid shirts. Hairstyles seemed arrived at by default, girls with their hair hanging by their faces, guys with wayward bangs and errant curls along the collarline. How funny that I’d ended up with the one man in New York who looked as if he could live in Madison. Actually, he did and he didn’t: his hair and his clothes, yes, but he had a face that was pure New York, pointed and intent. And his walk was New York, head down, no eye contact, move, move.
Here, people strolled. I made my way past them up the street. I glanced in shop windows, but they held nothing to invite me—not after SoHo.
At a cart on the corner of Johnson I bought a bunch of daffodils and
headed back to the Fletchers’. Jamie’s car was in the driveway now, parked just behind her mother’s wagon.
This time I went straight to the back. I knocked on the mud room door and then peered through the window, trying to see into the kitchen. I could hear a radio playing, the bright sounds of some pop song.
Jamie appeared. She stopped when she saw it was me, then came forward and opened the door.
“Jamie,” I said.
She stood there staring, her blond hair tucked severely behind her ears, her face pale and tired-looking. She wore a plain black sweater with a U neck, and her collarbones appeared bony and fragile.
“Jamie,” I said again. I held the flowers out, the yellow bright between us, then dropped them to my side when she didn’t react. “I’m so sorry. About everything. I was horrible not to say I’d come right away.”
Her face split in two, the top half flushed and teary while her mouth screwed into a knot and her chin tightened. I felt terrible looking at her, not just for the current situation but for all the months of being out of touch.