Jack & Jill (8 page)

The band finished mangling Leadbelly's "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?", and graciously thanked the nonexistent audience for their nonexistent applause.

"I'd never," Chris
said, and belched. The smell of stale beer rolled into my face, and I grimaced. "Sorry," he added.

I made a point of checking my watch. "Look Chris, if you're not done getting your drunk on, there's beer in the fridge at home, but we have to go."

"Will I have to share?"

"I don't drink, you clown, now come on." I slid off my chair and went to him. He raised his hands in surrender.

"What would I do without you?" he asked, rising unsteadily to join me.

"You'd probably have more hair," I told him.

"Ouch."

SIX
TEEN

I drove, despite Chris's insistence that he was more than capable, and when we returned home the house was quiet and dark.

"Jesus," Chris said. "Leave a light on why don't you?"

"I told her if we were later than midnight to lock up and turn everything off," I explained.

"Very responsible of you, but potentially problematic for the vision-impaired drunkard."

"You're right. Next time I'll have her set a candle out for the souls of the recently inebriated." I squeezed his arm, then cracked open the door of the car. Instantly the night air rushed in to greet me, my breath forming clouds before my face.

"Hey," Chris said, as I was halfway out of the car.

"What?"

"We're gonna make it, right?"

"Inside?"

"You know what I mean. Be serious."

"
Yeah, I know what you mean."

"Tell me honestly. No bullshit.
We're going to make it. We are, right?"

I stared at him
, the chill infecting me, and in that moment I saw the depth of his pain. The alcohol did more than make an emotional jester out of him; it forced his guard down too. Sitting there with the dome light scalding his face with shadows, I knew without a doubt that I loved him, and that I was sorry for what I had put him through.

"We are," I said. "And if we don't, it won't be because we didn't try."

He nodded, and watched a moth trying frantically to get at the light from the other side of the windshield. "Good. Because as hard as things have been, I can't even imagine what my life would be like without you in it."

"You'll find out soon enough if you don't get me out of this cold, Chris."

"All right, all right," he said, opening his door and stepping out. "Christ, you say something nice and all you get in return is whining. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to my world."

I waited for him to come around to my side of the car and looped my arm around his w
aist, ostensibly to support the drunken fool, but also because I just plain wanted to. We'd forgotten how to be intimate with each other, and as part of the healing process, I figured it was time to start remembering.

* * *

"I'm gonna use the little boy's room," Chris said, as we stepped inside. I closed the door behind me and quickly flipped on the light, just in time for him to realize he was headed straight into the kitchen counter. He stopped short, raising his hands and looking over his shoulder at me to see if I'd caught the near-collision.

"Good one," I said.

A sheepish grin and he rounded the counter, back on course to the bathroom.

On the small table in the sunroom, a red number 1 was pulsing in the phone's LED display
, and while I listened to Chris's off-key whistling, I debated whether or not to check the message. I set my purse down on the table and decided it could wait. Checking on the kids was infinitely more important than what I suspected was either another telemarketer, ignoring the rules about appropriate times to call, or worse, Chris's mother. If the latter proved to be the case, then it would be just the thing to end the night on a bad note, and I wasn't willing to let that happen. Although I knew months of damage couldn't be undone in a few hours, tonight had certainly been an encouraging start. We would have to be careful around each other for a while, but if I stuck to the promises I'd made while maintaining a more positive attitude, regardless of whether the nightmares continued or not, it would prove to Chris that I was dedicated to rescuing us. He would have to play his part too, of course, but I had seen in him that he was willing, and for now, that was enough.

"I'm going to check on the kids," I called to Chris.

"Okay. Now that I've made room, I'm gonna have a beer. Just one."

"You're going to regret this in the morning."

"Oh, didn't I tell you?"

"Tell me what?"

"I have the day off tomorrow."

"
Since when?"

"Since about a minute and a half
ago when I walked into the sink and then tried to take a leak without taking my tire iron out of the trunk. Also, I have the distinct impression my esteemed and foul-smelling boss Mr. Taylor would rather not start his day watching me upchuck a half-dozen McDonald’s hash browns into his wastebasket. So, humanitarian that I am, I'll spare him the ordeal."

"Sounds like you have it all planned out," I said.

"I think it's best for all concerned." He pronounced this
conzerned
.

Smiling, I made my way through the living room and headed upstairs.

* * *

I checked on Sam first and found him asleep in one of those positions unique to children of that age. He was lying on his stomach, face mashed into the pillow, mouth open, butt raised slightly in the air, knees bent, as if he'd dozed off while kneeling. He was drooling slightly—
his mother's son
, I thought wryly—and as always, he'd managed to kick the covers not only off himself, but off the bed too. They lay in a pile on the floor.

As I picked up the comforter, I
looked around and was reminded of my brother’s room. I felt a brief twinge of regret that I hadn't explored my own room when I'd had the chance, if only to compare how it had been treated by my father. I had the sad feeling I'd have found it either bare or used for storage. Sam's bedroom, like John's, had barely an inch of wall that was not covered in posters, though instead of cartoon and comic book superheroes like
The Hulk
and
Spider-Man
, my son preferred to gaze upon characters from video games. Here was a scowling Kurt Russell-looking figure dressed like a ninja. There was a handsome if ridiculously overbuilt guy wielding an equally oversized gun flanked by an exotic and buxom female sidekick as they pumped rounds into a horde of the undead. Yet another poster showed what was presumably a man, dressed from head to toe in a copper-colored and segmented spacesuit, his visor filled with blue light as he posed in the doorway of what I supposed was a spaceship of some kind. I vaguely recalled seeing Sam engrossed in these games, none of which I'd thought appropriate, all of which Chris had assured me were fine. Another battle I'd lost and one that didn't seem quite as monumental now as it had back then.

Sam never slept without his night-light on. He to
ld us it was simply so he could find his way to the bathroom if he woke up in the middle of the night, but we knew better, and had no plans to dissuade the habit. He would outgrow it in his own time, and both Chris and I could clearly recall those nights when we were children when no amount of adult assurance could convince us there wasn't indeed something in the dark just waiting for us to be left alone.

In m
y case, that suspicion had been confirmed on many occasions.

I spread the comforter over my son and tucked the edges under the mattress. It wouldn't make a difference, I knew. He'd find a way to kick them off again, but he'd be warm for a w
hile at least. As I bent down and kissed his brow, he mumbled "Mommy?" and I whispered to him a good night. He chewed contentedly on his dream and went back to sleep.

I slipped out of the room, hesitating briefly at the door to wonder how I could ever have doubted my devotion to this beautiful little boy, to my daughter or my husband, and shook my head.

You have a lot of work to do, lady
, I thought, and gently closed the door.

* * *

Jenny had, only in the previous year, instituted a new rule regarding her privacy. If the door wasn't ajar, then we had to knock and wait for an answer before entering her room. We were informed that it was never okay to just walk in, nor did we have the right. And though we of course knew she was absolutely entitled to her privacy, and had expected such declarations of secession from our decidedly uncool dominion for quite some time, we had to marvel at the way in which her demands were conveyed. She made it clear that these were not requests, but rules, and to violate them meant suffering her wrath, which translated as a hissy-fit and silent treatment that could last for weeks. The problem with this rule, however, was that another recent change in Jenny's life had been her discovery of and subsequent dependency on music, ubiquitously carried to her ears via the iPod Chris had bought her the Christmas before, so that even when we knocked on our daughter's door, chances were she wouldn't hear us. This left only two options: Knock louder, a tactic we could only employ when Sam wasn't asleep in the next room, or: Enter the room anyway and just hope that Jenny wasn't indisposed, or otherwise engaged in something deemed unsuitable for parental consumption by her high school
BFF
s.

I knocked on the door and waited. No sound from inside the room, not even the faint tinny buzz of the music being pumped into her brain. I gave it thirty secon
ds or so and then knocked again, a little louder this time.

Another thirty seconds, and I eased open the door, just enough to increase the c
hances of Jenny hearing me, not enough for her to declare it an invasion, and called her name.

No answer.

From downstairs, I heard the clink of a bottle and the
whush
of the fridge door closing. Suddenly I was eager to be back down there with Chris, capitalizing on this ceasefire before he got too drunk or too maudlin, or both.
And
, I told myself,
you're the adult here for Chrissakes, yet you're standing outside your daughter's door like you're afraid of her.
I frowned. Respecting her wishes was one thing, but acting like she was the boss was granting her a little too much power for her age. If it led to a war, then fine, I was willing to fight it, but Jenny would have to understand that if she wanted her privacy respected, she'd have to be available to hear it when someone came to her room.

I pushed the door open.
It was dark inside, but the expanding wedge of light from the hallway allowed me to see that Jenny was sitting at her desk in her nightdress, her back to me.

"Hey, d
idn't you hear me?" I asked.

Clearly she hadn't, nor did
it appear as if she'd heard me now. She just continued sitting there, motionless, so much so that I wondered if she'd fallen asleep in the chair.

"Jenny?"

Listening to that damn music,
I thought, annoyed.

But then I glanced at her unmade bed and saw the iPod lying amid the folds of her comforter like a raft in the troughs of a rough sea.

I sighed—
nothing's ever easy
—and reached for the light switch. Jenny's voice, little more than a whisper, stopped the motion, and my heart, with four simple and yet devastating words: "He touches me, Mommy."

I did not look at her. Did not move. Instead I stared at my hand, frozen there inches from the light switch, my shadow a misshapen lump thrown against my daughter's bedroom wall, and I told myself I had misheard.

At length, "What did you say?" I asked her, and whispered a short prayer, the first I could recall uttering in my adult life, that her response would be something benign.

What I got was no answer at all.

I waited, held in place by panic. "Honey," I asked the quiet room. "Honey, what did you say?"

Again, only silence.

"Jenny, answer me." How I longed in that moment for the familiar and ordinarily infuriating hornet-in-a-jar buzz from her iPod ear buds. It would have been a normal, innocuous, everyday sound in a room that suddenly felt pregnant with expectant dark.

Sick to my stomach, I jerked my hand upward and light flooded the room. I snapped my head around to Jenny, to the chair, and found it empty, my daughter's name dying on my tongue before I had a chance to speak it.

Confusion buzzed through me, the taste of copper filling my mouth as a new headache tapped gently but insistently at my right temple. Another hallucination?