A Spool of Blue Thread (5 page)

At five till seven, Abby placed her first call. “Good morning, may I speak to Lena, please?” Then, “Oh,
I’m
sorry! I must have the wrong number.”

She placed the second call. “Hello, is this Lena?” The briefest pause. “Well, excuse me. Yes, I
know
it’s early, but—”

She winced. She dialed again. “Hello, Lena?”

She straightened. “Well, hi there! It’s Abby Whitshank, down in Baltimore. I hope I didn’t wake you.”

She listened a moment. “Oh, I know what you mean,” she said. “I keep telling Red, ‘Sometimes I wonder why I go to bed at all, the little bit of sleep I manage.’ Is it age, do you think? Is it the stress of modern times? Speaking of which, Lena, I was wondering. Are Carla and Susan and Denny okay? I mean, after last Tuesday?”

(“Last Tuesday” was how people were still referring to it. Not till the following week would they start saying “September eleventh.”)

“Oh, really,” Abby said. “I see. Well, that’s something, at least! That’s comforting. And so you don’t … Well, of course I can see that you wouldn’t … Well, thank you so much, Lena! And please give my love to Carla and Susan … Hmm?… Yes, everyone here is fine, thanks. Thank you, now! Bye!”

She hung up.

“Carla and Susan are all right,” she said. “Denny she
assumes
is all right, but she doesn’t know for sure because he’s moved to New Jersey.”

“New Jersey? Where in New Jersey?”

“She didn’t say. She said she doesn’t have his number.”

Red said, “Carla would, though. On account of Susan. You should have asked for Carla’s number.”

“Oh, what’s the point?” Abby said. “We know he was nowhere near the towers. Isn’t that enough? And I’m not willing to bet that even Carla has his number, if you want the honest truth.”

Then she started loading the dishwasher, while Red stood gaping at her.

So: New Jersey. Another broken relationship.
Two
broken relationships, unless Denny had stayed in touch with Susan. Red said of course he had stayed in touch; wasn’t he the most hands-on father they knew of? Abby said that didn’t necessarily follow. Maybe Susan had been just another passing fancy, she said, like that half-baked software project of his.

This was not characteristic of Abby. She believed devoutly in people’s capacity for change, sometimes to the exasperation of everyone else in the family. But now she seemed to have given up. When she phoned Jeannie and Amanda with the news, she spoke in a toneless, emotionless voice, and she told Red he could just let Stem know when he saw him at work. “I’ll get right on it,” Red said, falsely hearty. “He’ll be relieved.”

“I don’t know why,” Abby said. “There was never any real danger.”

The following morning, a Saturday, Amanda stopped by unannounced. Amanda was a lawyer, their hardest-nosed, most competent, most take-charge child. “Where’s the number for this Lena person?” she asked.

Abby pulled it off the fridge door and handed it to her. (Of course she’d kept it.) Amanda sat down at the kitchen table and reached for the phone and dialed.

“Hello, Lena?” she said. “Amanda calling. Denny’s sister. May I have Carla’s phone number, please?”

The burble at the other end must have been some kind of protest, because Amanda said, “I have no intention of upsetting her, believe me. I just need to get in touch with my rascal of a brother.”

That seemed to do the trick; she dipped her free hand in her purse and pulled out a memo pad with a tiny gold pen attached. “Yes,” she said, and she wrote down a number. “Thank you very much. Goodbye.”

She dialed again. “Busy,” she told her parents. Abby groaned, but Amanda said, “
Naturally
it’s busy; her mother’s calling her with a heads-up.” She drummed her fingers on the table a moment. Then she dialed once more. “Hi, Carla,” she said. “It’s Amanda. How’ve you been?”

Carla’s answer didn’t take much time, but even so, Amanda seemed impatient. “Good,” she said. “Well, could I have my brother’s number? I’m going to give him a piece of my mind.”

While she wrote it down, Red and Abby hunched forward and stared at the pad, hardly breathing. “Thanks,” Amanda said. “Bye.” And she hung up.

Abby was already reaching for the pad, but Amanda pulled it away from her and said, “
I
am making this call.” She dialed once more.

“Denny,” she said, “it’s Amanda.”

They couldn’t hear what his response was.

“Someday,” Amanda said, “you’re going to be a middle-aged man
thinking back on your life, and you’ll start wondering what your family’s been up to. So you’ll hop on a train and come down, and when you get to Baltimore it will be this peaceful summer afternoon and these dusty rays of sunshine will be slanting through the skylight in Penn Station. You’ll walk on through and out to the street, where nobody is waiting for you, but that’s okay; they didn’t know you were coming. Still, it feels kind of odd standing there all alone, with the other passengers hugging people and climbing into cars and driving away. You go to the taxi lane and you give the address to a cabbie. You ride through the city looking at all the familiar sights—the row houses, the Bradford pear trees, the women sitting out on their stoops watching their children play. Then the taxi turns onto Bouton Road and right away you get a strange feeling. There are little signs of neglect at our house that Dad would never put up with: blistered paint and gap-toothed shutters. Mismatched mortar patching the walk, rubber treads nailed to the porch steps—all these Harry Homeowner fixes Dad has always railed against. You take hold of the front-door handle and you give it that special pull toward you that it needs before you can push down the thumb latch, but it’s locked. You ring the doorbell, but it’s broken. You call, ‘Mom? Dad?’ No one answers. You call, ‘Hello?’ No one comes running; no one flings open the door and says, ‘It’s you! It’s so good to see you! Why didn’t you let us know? We’d have met you at the station! Are you tired? Are you hungry? Come in!’ You stand there a while, but you can’t think what to do next. You turn and look back toward the street, and you wonder about the rest of the family. ‘Maybe Jeannie,’ you say. ‘Or Amanda.’ But you know something, Denny? Don’t count on
me
to take you in, because I’m angry. I’m angry at you for leading us on such a song and dance all these years, not just these last few years but
all
the years, skipping all those holidays and staying away from the beach trips and missing Mom and Dad’s thirtieth anniversary and their thirty-fifth and Jeannie’s baby and not
attending my wedding that time or even sending a card or calling to wish me well. But most of all, Denny,
most
of all: I will never forgive you for consuming every last little drop of our parents’ attention and leaving nothing for the rest of us.”

She stopped speaking. Denny said something.

“Oh,” she said, “I’m fine. How have
you
been?”

So Denny came home.

The first time, he came alone. Abby was disappointed that he didn’t bring Susan, but Red said he was glad. “It makes this visit different from those last ones,” he said. “Like he’s getting squared away with us first. He’s not taking it for granted that he can just pick up where he left off.”

He had a point. Denny did seem different—more cautious, more considerate of their feelings. He commented on little improvements around the house. He said he liked Abby’s new hairstyle. (She had started wearing it short.) He himself had lost the boyish sharpness along his jaw, and he had a more settled way of walking. When Abby asked him questions—though she tried her best to ration them—he made an effort to answer. He wasn’t what you’d call chatty, but he answered.

Susan was doing great, he said. She was attending preschool now. Yes, he could bring her to visit. Carla was fine too, although they were not together anymore. Work? Well, at the moment he was working for a construction firm.

“Construction!” Abby said. “Hear that, Red? He’s working in construction!”

Red merely grunted. He didn’t look as happy about this as he might have.

Notice all that was missing, though, from what Denny had told them. How much did he really have to do with his daughter? And
when he said he and Carla were “not together,” did he mean they were divorced? Just what were his living arrangements? Was construction his chosen career now? Had he given up on college?

Then Jeannie came over with little Deb, and Red and Abby left them alone, and by the end of her visit they knew more. He had a
lot
to do with Susan, Jeannie reported; he was very much involved in her life. Divorce was too expensive, for now. He shared half a house with two other guys but they were starting to get on his nerves. Sure, he would finish college. Someday.

But still, somehow, it wasn’t enough information. Oh, always there seemed to be something else—something that surely, if they could ferret it out, would at last explain him.

He stayed a day and a half, that time. Then he left, but—here was the important part—they did have his cell phone number. That number they’d dialed was his cell phone number! This changed everything.

They allowed a strategic lapse of several weeks, and then Abby called him (Red hovering in the background) and invited him to bring Susan for Christmas. Denny said Carla would never allow Susan to be away on Christmas Day, but maybe
after
Christmas he’d bring her.

Red and Abby knew all about his maybes.

But he did it. He brought her. Christmas fell on a Tuesday that year, and he brought her down Wednesday and they stayed through Friday. Susan was a self-possessed four-year-old with a mass of brown curls and very large, very brown eyes. The eyes were a bit of a shock. Those were not Whitshank eyes! Nor were her clothes the rough-and-tumble play clothes that the Whitshank children wore. She arrived in a red velvet dress, with white tights and red Mary Janes. Well, perhaps on account of Christmas. But the next morning, when she came down to breakfast, she wore a ruffled white blouse and a red plaid taffeta pinafore very nearly as fancy. Jeannie said it
made her kind of sad to think of Denny having to button all those tiny white buttons down the back of Susan’s pinafore.

“Do you remember us?” they asked her. “Do you remember coming to visit us when you were just a baby?”

Susan said, slowly, “I think so,” which of course could not be true. But it was nice of her to pretend. She said, “Did you have a different dog?”

“No, this is the same one.”

“I thought you had a
yellow
dog,” she said, and they traded unhappy glances. Who was it she was thinking of who had a yellow dog, and perhaps one not so slobbery and arthritic as old Clarence?

She was entranced with her cousins. (Aha! They could be the Whitshanks’ bait: fairy child Elise and rowdy little Deb.) She seemed unfamiliar with card games but soon developed a passion for Go Fish. Also, it emerged that she knew how to read. They were surprised that Carla could have reared a precocious child, but maybe that was thanks to Denny. She liked to snuggle next to Abby and sound out the words to
Hop on Pop
, heaving a loud sigh of satisfaction whenever she finished a page.

By the time she left, she’d lost all her reserve. She stood in front of the train station holding Denny’s hand, waving like a maniac and shouting, “Bye-bye! See you! See everybody soon! Bye-bye!”

So Denny brought her again, and then again. She had her own room now, the one that used to be the girls’ room. She drank her cocoa from a mug reading
SUSAN
, and when it was time to set the table she knew where to find the alphabet plate that Denny had once used. And he, meanwhile, sat back and watched all this benignly. He was the most accommodating father. It seemed she had smoothed his edges down.

In 2002, shortly after Jeannie’s Alexander was born, Denny came to stay with Jeannie and tend her children. At the time, this was puzzling. Abby had already done the usual grandmother stint—taken
off work to keep Deb while Jeannie was in the hospital, and stopped by frequently afterwards to offer help with errands and laundry. But then all at once, there was Denny. And he remained there—slept on Jeannie and Hugh’s pull-out couch for three solid weeks, pushed Deb in her stroller every afternoon to the playground, cooked the meals, met Abby at the door with a diaper draped over his shoulder and the baby in his arms.

It came to light only later that Jeannie had been going through some sort of postpartum depression. So, had she phoned Denny and asked him to come down and take care of her? Asked Denny and not Abby? Abby did her best to find out, using her most neutral, non-offended tone. Well, Jeannie said, it was true that she had phoned him, but just to talk. And maybe he had heard something in her voice—well, of course he had, because she’d grown a little teary, she was ashamed to say—and he had told her he would be coming in on the next train.

This was both touching and distressing. Had Jeannie not realized she could call her own mother?

Well, but Abby had her job to go to, Jeannie said.

As if Denny himself didn’t have a job.

Or, who knows? Maybe he didn’t.

Red told Abby they should just be grateful that Denny had come to the rescue.

Abby said, “Oh, yes. Yes, I know that.”

Things fell into more or less of a pattern. Denny never became particularly good at keeping in touch, but then, that was true of a lot of sons. The point was that he did keep in touch, and they did have that phone number for him, if not always his current address.

How shocking, Abby told Red, that they were willing to settle for so little. She said, “Would you have believed it? Sometimes whole days go by when I don’t give him a thought. This is just not natural!”

Red said, “It’s
perfectly
natural. Like a mother cat when her kittens are grown. You’re showing very good sense.”

“It’s not supposed to work that way with humans,” Abby told him.

At least they could be sure that Denny would never live far from New York City. Not as long as Susan lived there. Although he did travel now and then, because once he sent Alexander a birthday card from San Francisco. And another time, he shortened his Christmas visit because he was taking a trip to Canada with his girlfriend. This was the first they’d heard of the girlfriend, and the last. Susan stayed on alone that year. She was old enough—seven, but she seemed older. Her head was slightly big for her body, and her face was beautiful in the way that a grown woman’s face is beautiful, her brown eyes large and weary, her lips full and soft and complicated. She showed no sign of homesickness, and when Denny came to collect her she greeted him equably. “How was Canada?” Abby dared to ask him.