Authors: Emma McLaughlin
“Stilton,” I say loud enough to be heard over the smoke siren and his screams. “Put your hand back in the sink!”
But he can’t move from the agony.
“I can’t take this!” Carter shouts.
“Stil, ssh.” I reach down and gently guide him by the elbow, lifting his arm over the lip of the sink and submerging his hand in the cold water.
“Jesus,” Carter mutters behind me. The alarm suddenly stops, leaving in its absence only a high-pitched whine in my ears and Stilton’s whimpering.
“Got it!” Grayer yells from down the hall.
“Thank fucking God.” Carter’s fingers circle her temples.
“And I found the Percocet, Darvocet, and Vicodin.” A panicked Grayer rounds the hallway corner holding three bottles. He sees me and stops short. “Nan, you don’t need to be here.”
“M-mom’s voice m-mail wasn’t picking up,” Stilton stutters through his pain.
With a quick glance at Carter, Grayer shimmies past her into the bathroom to place the pills on the sink. “Carter has it under control, Stil.”
She sits hard on the bathtub rim.
“And Dad’s on his way.” Grayer puts a hand on Stilton’s back.
“He is?” I say, surprised. “Well, that’s great. I’ll stay until he gets here and then you guys can go to the emergency room.”
“I mean, I left a message with Gillian,” Grayer adds. “So I’m sure he’ll be here as soon as he gets it.”
“Okay . . .” I say, trying to figure out how to escalate Stilton’s aid without puncturing Grayer’s belief in the change Carter is capable of effecting in his father.
“How bad is it?” I offer Carter the floor.
“You heard the screams,” she says, declining it.
“Here.” I turn to Stilton, with Grayer leaning over my shoulder. “Let’s have a look.” I gingerly pivot his wrist so I can assess his palm, which is covered in prune-sized blisters where it hasn’t burned through to the meat. I wince. “What happened?”
“I was making macaroni and cheese for Carter because she said she was going to have a hard day and I wanted to surprise her when she got home. I turned the button to make the stove work and then I couldn’t find the stove and then I touched the counter while I was looking—”
“It’s an utter disaster in there. The damn thing’s cracked after only a month.”
“I’m so sorry,” Grayer says nervously. “He won’t do it again, Carter. I should have been watching him. I nodded off doing homework and I shouldn’t have—I’m sorry.”
“Right.” I spin to her
Vanity Fair
face. “Do you have a plastic bowl we can use to keep Stilton’s hand cold and wet on the way to the emergency room?”
“No.”
“No?”
Arms crossed over her jacket, she backs out of the bathroom. “No.” She tosses her small hands up, stamp-sized post-Letterman engagement ring glistening. “I don’t allow plastic …anything and …those are
my
painkillers …and I was about to handle this. My homeopath will be here in, like, five minutes.” She walks away down the hall.
Grayer crouches to search Stilton’s face. “Stil, can you hang in there, just a little longer until Dad gets here? Please?”
“It hurts.” Stilton looks at him as if he’s not quite believing he’s being asked to wait. “I want Mom.”
Grayer’s nostrils flare. “She’s not coming.”
Stilton’s eyes widen.
“But Dad will,” Grayer repeats with conviction. “I just don’t get why you would . . .”
“What?” Stilton asks, wiping his nose on his other sleeve.
“Isn’t it cool getting to see Dad in the morning at breakfast?” Stilton nods. “When they get married we’ll move to a new place with real rooms for us. In Hollywood. Don’t you want to meet Padma for real?” Increasingly pale and sweaty, Stilton is rapt. “So just …please …hang in there a few more minutes. And don’t ever do anything like this without checking with me first. Ever.”
I look down into the sink, where a shred of skin has come loose and is floating to the top. I search out Carter into the smokier end of the apartment, finding her in the olive foyer, typing on her BlackBerry.
“
Is
he coming?”
“He’s
working,
” she says defensively. “I told Gillian this is silly, he shouldn’t bother himself.”
“okay, let’s take him.”
“You don’t want to go to the hospital.”
“No. I don’t want to go to the hospital. I went last week, so I feel like I’ve filled my annual quota. But Stilton needs Silvadene,” I say steadily, holding myself back from adding
and antibiotics and maybe a skin graft
. “And a doctor to decide how much painkiller for his height and weight.”
“No, you can’t.” She starts shaking her head. “I lead a very quiet life here.
Please.
”
“Nan, he’s fine,” Grayer yells down the hall. “Let’s wait for the homeolady! Carter says she’s really good! And then Dad will take us to the hospital! You can totally go!”
“This’ll be in the magazines,” she mutters to herself, hands fluttering in the air. “They’ll say I’m an unfit stepmother—a child abuser.” She turns to face me. “I never wanted this.”
Suddenly we hear a strange cracking sound, like twigs snapping underfoot, and then footsteps pounding down the hall toward us. We turn to see Stilton, his Converses slapping against the pickled hard-wood, his arm submerged in the forsythia vase to his elbow. “It’s cold and wet. Let’s go.”
I press for the elevator, which springs open at my touch. Stilton darts in.
“Grayer?” One hand on the electronic eye, I call down the corridor, “Are you coming?”
Silence.
“Grayer?”
Nothing. I turn to Stilton, who’s holding the vase up in the crook of his other arm, his face contorted in sweaty pain.
“Carter, I’m sorry. But he needs to go to the hospital right now.”
I look back at her as I step in with him. Unable to meet my eyes, she tosses her hand, inhaling deeply through her nose. The door starts to shut. “Wait.” I thrust my arm out, catching the cold metal. “Do you have Stilton’s insurance card?”
“What?” she asks the floor.
“His insurance card.” She doesn’t look up. “Then please have Grayer text me his ID number. One of his parents must have it.” God willing. “Thanks.”
“You know you’re ruining this for me,” she says quietly.
“What?” I keep my hand on the electronic eye.
“New York. It may be ruined.”
Shaking my head, I let the door slide shut.
Having finally gotten Stilton settled in bed with his hand submerged in a newly purchased, deeply offensive, water-filled Tupperware bowl, and with no fucking idea
where
Grayer even is, I make my way home from the subway, contemplating selling
this
nugget to TMZ. Ruined New York, she should be happy I didn’t ruin her face.
I round the corner to my block and spot a town car parked behind our overflowing Dumpster, as our neighbors, some of whom stretch out their windows to get a better look, the metal in their curlers glinting in the glow of the streetlamps. I wonder if they know something I don’t—that this is, say, Fat Cy’s car. Fat Cy, who formerly owned the seized property and ran a very profitable business in it, thank you very much, before the City of New York stuck their moth-erfucking noses where they don’t motherfucking belong and now he would like to take back what is rightfully his—at gunpoint.
So I’m profoundly relieved when Citrine emerges in a pale pink trench coat proffering three giant Eli’s bags. “Surprise! I brought dinner!” she says, holding up the straining white and orange plastic.
“Oh my gosh.”
“You said you were camping. I thought, slumber party! I couldn’t bear the thought of you roughing it.”
“Oh my gosh,” I say again stupidly, looking at her holding out armfuls of plaster dust-free food, in her pristine cotton coat, and want nothing more than to get back in the car with her and slumber-party with the accessible toilets of 721. “You’re so sweet! But know I’m living in a pit of despair. As you are a pregnant person, I honestly have to give you a full disclaimer that there is stuff going on in that house that may give us all flipper babies. I mean, once we’re actually constructing
anything
I’m going all sustainable nontoxic, but right now we’re all lead paint chips, all the time.”
Citrine laughs and puts a hand on my shoulder. “I love you. You’re so considerate. I promise not to lick the walls. Now lead the way.”
I take the heavy bags from her as her car maneuvers out onto the street, and she follows me up the stoop. “Okay, brace yourself. We’re kind of rocking the
Little House
thing right now, so let’s put on our bonnets and get ready to kick it old school, like,
old
old school.” I reluctantly swing the door open into the darkness and place the bags on the floor, where Grace commences inspecting them. “Grace, no.” She sits and, panting, tilts her head as if I’ve just told her that I’m taking away her family’s food stamps and bulldozing their shanty. “She knows it’s dinnertime and thinks I’m having it hand-delivered for her from Eli’s. It’s an honest mistake for a retriever.”
“Oh my God, she’s so cute.” Citrine grips her coat closed in the shadows.
“Wait here, where one day a fabulous vintage chandelier will hang.” I grab the bare bulb’s five-extension-corded wire and follow it back along the floor toward the kitchen. “Someone had knocked out the original walls decades ago and put up multiple plywood partitions—we think it was an SRO at some point. So we just tore them down and now we’ll re-create the original floor plan.” I’m careful to step over lumber and saws and buckets of nails, grateful for the little slivers of street light filtering in through the grimy back windows. “Those windows look out on a garden! Currently the site of New York’s next West Nile outbreak, but charming in a
Dark Crystal
sort of way. They’ve started the rewiring, so my contractor rigged up the light from the generator, so just hold on and I will find, the uh . . .” I feel my way back to the switch. “He didn’t attach it to the water heater, or any appliances, but he did leave me with one working bulb, so yeah.” I find the lever and it hums on. “Ta-dah!” The bulb trumpets to life, casting its unsparing eye on the front third of the space. “So, this is it! Casa Hutch. Hutch-on-a-Crutch, we call it.” I walk over to join her and we look up at the open landing that was once and will one day be my second floor. “Sorry, yes, there were stairs, but they collapsed, and in the next week or so, they’re going to come give us a brand-new set, which’ll be really exciting. So …what do you think?”
She cannot even fake it. And she is trying. Every ounce of her debutante training is straining to pull up the corners of her mouth like an Olympic lifter. But the weight of my war-zone abode is too much for her. “Oh, I see the—potential.”
I swing back to the ripped open walls, the girl at the party wearing the secondhand dress, and start manically pointing out its stunning features. “The moldings! And the plasterwork! And the—the bay windows!”
“No, no, it’s great, Nan, it’s great. So much …character.”
I follow her stricken gaze to the kerosene stove and the sleeping bag and the pee bucket and the ceiling-high pile of drywall and I burst into tears.
“Oh, God, I’m an asshole.” She rushes to embrace me.
“No, I’m the asshole. I live here,” I spit out in huffs. “I had the whole
world
to choose from and I picked this place.” I sink to the floor, sliding on the sawdust.
“Nan, it’s gonna be great.”
“It’s a shithole.” I push Grace away as she tries to lick at my damp cheeks. “I’m so sorry. This is so not what you came here for. You don’t have to stand on ceremony. You seriously can go.”
“I’m not going anywhere. We have an Italian picnic!”
We find the broom and declare what was the entry hall a debris-free zone. I drag over the air mattress and put the sleeping bag on top and we lay out our picnic under our friend, the naked bulb.
“I had a plan,” I say, taking a much-needed swig from the half-bottle-I-wish-was-a-magnum of Shiraz she brought, trying to pace myself for as few trips to the bucket as possible. “We would live upstairs in the lovely bedroom overlooking the wild garden while we updated the kitchen, rocking Trader Joe’s and a microwave for a few weeks while we went stoveless. I mean, we lived in Africa. In huts. But everyone was in huts. I wasn’t leaving my hut to get on a subway with people who had showered and ironed. I had no idea we’d need a new boiler, new roof, new
stairs
—that a facade could separate from a building, that a basement could be toxic. And it was so weird when the contractor told me. I was just like,
toxic?
My basement can’t commit? You know, like, the word has been so overused I’d forgotten the original meaning, which is
will kill you.
And we had the house inspected before we bought it. By, it turns out, either the most incompetent engineer ever, or a psychopathic optimist.”
“Wow.” She laughs, gamely biting into a cold pizzette, her legginged legs tucked to one side.
“Wow is right. A bank’s inspector would’ve caught these things, but the foreclosure price was so cheap we didn’t need a mortgage. Of course, now we’ve had to take out a loan to cover the construction. So we have massive debt. And a gigantic pile of tinder in an up-and-coming neighborhood.”
She rests her slice back in the foil container. “Do you mind if I lie down?” she asks. “I’m realizing how out of shape I am. I’m only half-way there and my lumbar is giving out.” She slides onto her side. “Do you have anything I can use to rest my top leg on?”
I cast my eyes around the perimeter of wood and power tools. “Grace?” Following my strategic patting, she shuffles around on the mattress and recircles with a humph next to Citrine, allowing her to rest her top leg on Grace’s golden back. “Oh, that feels great.”
“Your shower invitation was really enchanting,” I say, smiling as I picture the little foldout elephants. “It’s on the mantel, over there in the dark. I’m really looking forward to it.”
“Promise you won’t leave my side the entire time? I’m dreading being in a room full of those women. Tatiana called Pippa and then Pippa wanted to host it and then she invited some other Chapies and the whole thing got out of hand.”
“Well, my offer to help still stands. Oh, I forgot to ask, have you finished
Lucky Jim
?” I ask.