The Blessings (9 page)

“Why don't you just try,” Ann says. “Just lie down.” She pauses then and looks at Dave. “We should call Lauren. If she's sick, she can't be near the children—”

“I'll be fine,” Meghan says. “That's like hours from now,” she adds, grabbing the phone and heading for the stairs. Meghan is babysitting that night for John's kids, Max and Elena—
my favorite little people
, she calls them. Dave knows it would take wild horses to keep her away.

Upstairs, Meghan shuts her door, and seconds later music comes pouring through the walls, the depressing Jewel CD that plays on a seemingly endless loop.

Ann turns to Dave. She says decisively, “I'll stay.” Her tone, as always, is that perfect balance of light and firm: casual on the surface, but underneath tense as steel cable. There is no room for discussion. Defeated, Dave goes outside, where Abby is waiting by the car. They get in without a word. They buckle their seat belts and Dave fusses briefly with the mirrors, which are always slightly out of whack after Ann drives, until Abby says, “What's going on with her?”

Dave blinks out at the yard—the lawn that badly needs mowing, the onion grass bursting up in patches of dense, dark green. The basketball hoop he'd put in, hopefully, when Alex shot up past six feet. The back of Abby's car, the Colby sticker in the window. The New York plate. She's never here, he thinks; she doesn't know how it is.

Finally he says, “She's always been this way, sweetheart,” and starts the car. As they drive toward the city, Abby faces the window, picking at the hole in the knee of her jeans. Dave drives quickly, braking hard at red lights, as the orderly, tended yards of the suburbs yield to the gray neighborhoods of West Philadelphia, the cramped houses and narrow streets.

Dave would actually enjoy his Town Watch shift—in fact, might welcome the chance to be alone in the car for two hours—except that he isn't alone. His partner (they're actually referred to as “partners,” as if this is real law enforcement) is Dean Kramer, who lives in one of the mansions on Trafalgar. Dean is the kind of guy Dave makes a point of avoiding at parties. He's in sports marketing and loves to talk about being in sports marketing. When he tires of bragging about his clients, he brags about his kids. Josh, a senior lacrosse player. Jeremy, a junior, lead in the school play.

Dean is picking Dave up at eight sharp, and Meghan is scheduled to babysit at seven thirty, which is why Dave has planned for the family to go to dinner early. Five o'clock. The Olive Garden. Everybody's favorite. “I won't take no for an answer,” he said lightly, not looking at Meghan.

But ever since they got home from breakfast, Meghan has seemed in better spirits. “Love you, Daddy!” she said, bouncing up to her room after going to the mall with her friend Jess. The fever wasn't mentioned again.

Dave checks his watch—five on the dot. He and Alex are waiting on the back deck. Dave's paging through the
Inquirer
. It's a cool night, with a hint of spring. Up on Spry Boulevard, the traffic goes zooming by, loud music splashing from the cracked car windows. Alex is reading a textbook, shoulders bowed over his skinny knees, chomping on a bag of chips. Dave grabs a handful gratefully, tossing them in his mouth. “What are these things?”

“Munchos,” his son replies, his mouth full.

“Huh,” Dave says, chewing. He is supposed to be watching his cholesterol—at his last physical, the doctor said he should lose fifteen pounds—but lately, all he does is eat. “What's that you're reading, Al?”

“Organic chemistry,” his son says. He pushes his hair off his brow, the last vestiges of his teenage mop, and turns the page. Alex has never offered up much about himself; he never seemed to need to. He studied hard, liked school. If he had girlfriends, Dave never heard about them. He went to his senior prom with a girl named Debbie who wore a tight, shiny red dress. Ann's family had come over to take pictures and murmured after the limo pulled away:
That was a mature dress, wasn't it?

Alex grabs another handful of chips. Dave shakes open the sports section and does the same. In some fundamental way, Dave's wife and daughters will always be a mystery to him—clothes and bras, periods and boys, boys like the awful Leo—but with Alex, it's different. It's easy. He and his son can sit comfortably in a room together, just the two of them, and not say much at all.

Then the back door slides open. When Dave looks up at his wife, his heart sinks into his gut. He knows her look. Her face is still, near serene, but her eyes have taken on a distant cast, retreating to some more worried place inside her. “I think Meg and I are going to stay here,” Ann says.

“What?” Dave says, swiping crumbs from his shirt. “Why?”

“I can't go,” Meghan says. She's standing slightly behind Ann, her face drawn, wearing sweats and big puffy slippers with puppy faces on the toes.

“What do you mean, can't go? This is our family dinner—”

“I still don't feel good, Daddy.”

Dave looks at Ann, her fingers laced across her middle. “It's fine,” she says with her unfailing calmness. “If she's not up to babysitting, I'll go over to Lauren's.”

“But what about dinner?”

“You three go,” she says. “I'll stay.”

Alex still has his book open but is looking at the floor. Abby is staring toward her car, as if fantasizing already about going back to New York.

Dave tosses the paper down and stands up. “No,” he says. “This is a family dinner.” He doesn't look at Ann. He looks at Meghan and makes himself say it. “You're going, honey. Even if you don't eat anything. You're going to sit there with the rest of us.”

Meghan's eyes flood with tears, and the sight of it nearly breaks Dave's resolve, but he stands firm, watching her face pool and crumple. And it works. Sometimes, he thinks, a little push is all it takes. Meghan kicks her slippers off and slides on her running sneakers, squashing the backs with her heels. She shuffles to the car without a word, arms crossed, face closed, and slumps down in the backseat. Abby and Alex pile in around her. Ann sits stiffly in the passenger seat, hands clasped in her lap. Driving away, Dave feels, for a moment, triumphant.

At the Olive Garden, Meghan orders nothing. “Just water, please,” she tells the waitress.

“Water? That's all?”

“Uh-huh,” she says, giving her a small, pained smile. “I'm not hungry.”

“You sure? Not even an appetizer? We have some great new appetizers—”

“No, thank you,” Meghan says politely, and Dave is relieved when the waitress drops her pitch. The rest of them order and a busboy zips by, tossing down a basket of breadsticks.

“So,” Dave says with forced enthusiasm. He turns to Abby. “You're over this Leo guy, right, Abs?”

“Yeah,” she says with a one-shouldered shrug. “Basically.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Meghan tear a breadstick into pieces and start eating. Dave keeps on talking. If anybody draws attention to it, she might stop. “Any other prospects up in Brooklyn?”

“Sort of,” Abby says, glancing at Meghan. “One, maybe.”

“Oh yeah? Who's the lucky guy?”

Abby coughs up a few details—friend of a friend, a DJ (Christ) who's spinning tonight in Brooklyn (
this
was the thing she was rushing back for?)—but Dave doesn't have time to feel offended. Meghan is now ripping apart breadstick after breadstick. When the basket is empty, she licks her salty fingers. “Hang on,” Dave interrupts Abby, waving at the waitress. “Miss?”

“Dave,” Ann murmurs, but he ignores her.

“Excuse me? Miss!”

“Dave!” Ann snaps.

“What?” He looks at his wife. Her face, above her turtleneck sweater, is tight-lipped and pink. Do they not want more bread as quickly as possible? Since their daughter who never eats anything is actually eating something, don't they want her to keep on doing it?

It's all a moot point because their dinners appear, four big steaming plates. “Change your mind?” the waitress says to Meghan, smiling at the crumbs on the table before her.

Meghan looks down at the empty basket, the waxed paper translucent with grease. “No,” she says, in a whisper.

“Don't be shy,” the waitress says, and she grabs a busboy, who plunks down another basket. Meghan reaches for the shaker of red pepper flakes and showers it on top.

“Meg!” Abby says. “What the hell?”

“I just ate like a hundred of them,” Meghan says, sounding stricken.

“But that's good!” Dave says. “Nothing wrong with a few breadsticks.” He hears his tone, jocular and large. Meghan doesn't respond, now studying her fingertips. “So,” Dave says, and turns to his son. “Al. Tell us, what's new at school?”

It's unfair, he knows, to make his children keep talking, but Dave is determined to keep this meal from capsizing. Dinner with his goddamn family in the goddamn Olive Garden—is it so much to ask? Alex obliges him with a few details about classes and midterms, but his eyes keep shifting to Meghan, who abruptly stands and leaves.

With Meghan gone, everybody shuts up. Canned Italian opera soars through the speakers. Abby tosses her napkin down. “I'll be back,” she says. In her daughters' absence, Ann doesn't touch her plate. Alex picks at his ravioli. Dave isn't even hungry but can't stop eating, wolfing down his entire plate of lasagna and half of Ann's chicken Florentine.

When Meghan returns, Abby is walking behind her, face stolid like a parole officer's. Meghan is pale, her eyes teary. Dave tenses, hoping she doesn't make a scene. He tosses his napkin on his plate and half stands to flag down the waitress. “Check, please!” he says, miming writing on his palm.

“Dave!” Ann says, chagrined.

He looks at her hard. “What?” he says. “What, Ann? What?” As if his ordering is the problem. As if
he
is the goddamn problem. He's just trying to take action, do something, get his family out of here.

“Saved room for the dessert?” the waitress says.

“We'll just take the check,” Dave says.

“Was everything all right?” the waitress asks, cheerfully confused, looking around the table at the mostly untouched plates.

“Everything's fine,” Dave says, and tells her no, they won't need anything wrapped.

Dave waits on the back deck for Dean to pick him up. They switch off driving every shift. Tonight, they'll case the neighborhood in Dean's obnoxious new Hummer. Dave is dressed for two idle hours in the passenger seat: jeans and an old sweatshirt, moccasins with toes worn shiny as cue balls. In two hours they'll cover the circuit six times—Spry all the way up to Hastings, then down Oak Road to Keene and back again—looking for “suspicious activity,” though they have yet to see anything that qualifies. Once they found an old woman wandering the sidewalk searching for her cat, and Dave had ended up shimmying under her porch on his stomach while Dean held the flashlight. The cat was in her kitchen the whole time.

The night is growing cold, but Dave can smell the first few intrepid flowers, the bright yellow forsythia blooming by the curb, the purple crocuses bursting by the garage where the kids used to play freeze tag. He surveys his yard, the familiar shapes in the dark, and feels a distant ache in his chest. The rusted swing set the kids have long outgrown. The basketball hoop Alex used one summer, obsessively shooting foul shots, and never again. Dave fishes an antacid from his pocket and crunches it, leaning his elbows on the deck railing. The deck they had built almost a decade ago, when Ann went back to work. Abby had just turned thirteen. There's a picture of her posing with the carpenters, flexing her muscles. Alex was nine, Meghan five. All six handprints were pressed into the wet varnish of the deck floor. Now the paint on the railing is chipping. The center of the top step sags, soft from years of moisture and trampling feet. Dave looks at Abby's car in the driveway, remembers when they went to buy it together her freshman year of college. He's already said good-bye; she'll be gone before he gets home.

“Dad?”

Dave turns, surprised. “Hey, honey.” Abby is standing in the kitchen, behind the shadowy mesh of the screen door. “What's up?”

“Can I talk to you a minute?” she says, and Dave feels a needle of worry. Something in the stiff fold of her arms, the forced lightness in her voice.

“Change your mind about leaving?” he asks with a hopeful laugh.

She indulges him with a small, sympathetic smile. “In the living room?” she says, and Dave is about to remind her that his shift starts at eight, that his ride will be here any second, but she's already walking back inside. He scrapes back the screen door and trails his daughter through the empty kitchen. Past the greasy lasagna pan soaking in the sink, the duffel bag full of clean laundry waiting by the door. His feet are heavy, despite the moccasins. The house feels still, deeply quiet. Meghan is babysitting. Alex went to Joey's game. Ann is in the living room, sitting in the chair she always does, her eyes on the floor.

“You should sit, Dave,” Ann says, but her voice sounds weak and strange, like an echo in a tunnel.

He remains standing just inside the doorway, one hand braced lightly against the wall. “What?” he says. “What is it?”

Abby sits on the edge of the couch, hunched over her knees.

Ann looks at her and nods. “Tell Dad what you told me.”

Dave is suddenly terrified. Ann's eyes are glassy. But it's Abby's expression that alarms him most: the look of apology on her face. Quietly, she starts to catalog the things she's noticed about Meghan since she's been home. The dry lips. The watery eyes. The feet facing backward in the Olive Garden stall. The tiny cuts on the backs of her hands: tooth marks, Abby says, from putting her hand down her throat. Dave listens numbly as the details pile up before him and around him, feeling bewildered. Betrayed. How does Abby even know these things? How to do them, and to diagnose them? As if there's some other world his daughters live in, dangerous and cryptic and submerged somewhere beneath his own—but how the hell is he supposed to protect them from what he doesn't even know is there? As Abby keeps talking, the details grow more sordid and strange—the smell of vomit in Meghan's bedroom, a backyard trash can stuffed with wrappers from the Sbarro in the mall. It doesn't seem possible, Dave thinks. It
isn't
possible. All of this going on here? In his own house? He refuses to believe that Meghan would lie to them, take such pains to deceive them—
Love you, Daddy!
How could she say that not six hours ago if all of this were true?