Deep Down True (40 page)

“Okay, that was this
morning’s
series of phone calls. Abby’s exhausted, and Lizzie’s furious-slash-heartbroken, and they want to sleep in their own beds and not play the pride-inducing daughters of Tony Sakimoto for two straight days.” His hands went up in a “there you have it” gesture.

Dana laughed.

“Oh, sure,” he said, grinning back at her, “easy for you! Just go right ahead and enjoy the entertainment!”

Her smile dimmed. Easy for her—but not really. In the happy distraction of Tony’s story, Dana had forgotten that her own children would not be in their beds. They would be a thousand miles away with her adulterous ex-husband and his home-wrecking, pregnant girlfriend. And with no confirmation that Connie and Alder would be there for Thanksgiving, it was actually possible that Dana would be alone. She couldn’t even beg an invitation to Polly’s.

“Oh . . . hey,” Tony said apologetically.

“My sister Connie showed up unexpectedly last night.” She gave a little eye roll to wrench herself from a descent into self-pity.

“Yeah? Alder’s mom?”

She nodded. “If there’s anyone out there who’s more my opposite, I have yet to meet her.”

“No kidding!” said Tony. “This I’ve gotta see. Hey, is she around still? Invite her for lunch!”

“Oh, I don’t know . . .” Connie in an enclosed space with her boss? Dana wasn’t sure she was up to the potential for disaster that would present.

“Seriously,” Tony said as Dana went to greet a patient coming in the door. “Think about it.”

As it turned out, it was just as well she didn’t call Connie; Tony spent the better part of the lunch hour in his office placing and fielding phone calls from Nashville, Providence, and New York. By the time he was able to get to his veggie sub, he was irritable and exhausted.

“So?” Dana hazarded to ask.

“Cranky daughters coming home, angry girlfriend
definitely
staying in New York,” he said around bites. “
Ohhh,
it’s gonna be one happy Thanksgiving.” He took a swig of his iced tea. “Okay, tell me about this polar-opposite sister of yours.”

All too soon the next patient arrived, but throughout the afternoon he popped his head into her work area between appointments and murmured things like, “What about Alder’s father?” and “If she weren’t your sister, would you like her?”

He couldn’t possibly be so interested in this,
Dana told herself.
He’s just trying to keep his mind off his own problems.
Enjoying the distraction of someone else’s drama, as she herself had been doing, though she really did want to know about Abby and Lizzie. She found herself hoping she’d get a chance to meet them. And Martine . . . well, maybe not. Dana knew she was hearing only one side of this one incident with Martine. She was very likely a nice person if Tony had chosen her to love. Assuming it
was
love. He hadn’t ever ascribed that particular word to it. Hadn’t really given any words to it at all. Nonetheless, Dana had a less-than-positive impression.

“If Connie weren’t my sister?” Dana had to think about that. Her instinctive response was,
Yes, of course.
But would she really? “Well, I hate to admit it,” she told Tony, “but Connie wouldn’t be the kind of person I’d gravitate toward.”

“No kidding,” he teased. “And you two being such peas in a pod. What I meant was, knowing who she is down deep, would you be friends with her?”

Down deep,
she mused. Leave it to Tony to want to know everything down deep.

Later, as they were locking up the office, he said, “Well, keep me posted.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow morning,” she reminded him.

“Yeah,” he said vaguely. “But if . . . you know, if things went completely haywire and you wanted someone to bounce things off of, you could call me at home.”

“Okay, thanks,” she said, squinting into her purse as she rooted for her keys, knowing she would never call her boss
at home
with a personal problem.

“Though I don’t think I ever gave you the number.” He patted the pockets of his bomber jacket, looking for a pen and paper, she supposed. “Well, here,” he said, holding out his hand. “Give me your cell phone, and I’ll program it in.”

As she handed over the cell phone, she couldn’t decide whether the buzzing in her head meant she was appalled or—even worse—
happy
that he was taking such liberties with her personal items. Either way it was a bad sign.

He’s just being his usual kind self,
she told herself. Something he would do for any half-broke employee who had been dumped by her husband, invaded by her overbearing sister, and was facing a major holiday without her children, possibly completely alone. In fact, who
wouldn’t
take pity on such a sad sack?

But the look on his face bore no signs of charity as he handed back her cell phone. “Hope that wasn’t out of line,” he muttered. “Next I’ll be telling you my health problems.”

“You have health problems?” she asked, suddenly worried that he had some undisclosed condition.

“Fit as a fiddle.” He gave an embarrassed chuckle. “I just meant I hope I wasn’t being intrusive . . . or presumptuous . . .”

“Not at all,” she assured him. “And I promise not to use it except for emergencies.”

“Use it anytime,” he said. “Really.”

P
OSSIBLY IT WAS THE CURRIED LENTILS WITH TEXtured soy protein. Didn’t their mother always say spicy food before bed made for a night of wandering with the hobgoblins? And having Connie sleeping next to her, in almost constant motion—twitching her toes or grinding her teeth—didn’t help either. Whatever the source, Dana found herself drifting in the long-gone Paragon Park of her youth.

It was dark, and the place seemed abandoned, though the rides still lurched along. She darted from attraction to attraction, certain that Morgan and Grady were there somewhere, waiting for her, needing her. They weren’t on the carousel, which screamed its warbling organ music at her. Not on the Wild Mouse or the Congo Cruise. She kept searching, desperate to find them.

“Mom!”
It was Grady’s voice, and she darted toward it, past the smell of burning sugar—cotton candy, she realized, left to spin too long in the heat of its enormous Bundt pan. Grady was the lone rider on the Matterhorn, cars wagging wildly as they sped over a circular track, into a building painted with cartoon mountains, and back out again. His car was filled with golf balls, which he raised one by one, looking for identifying marks. “Jump!” Dana called to him.

“I have to find it!” he yelled. His car swept into the darkened building, and she waited, but it never came back out.

“Mom!”
A cry from the opposite direction. She ran toward it. Then she was on the platform of the Comet, screaming to Morgan, who was clamped into the front car beside her cello. The panic on Morgan’s face turned grotesque as the ride took off, shaking and grinding up the track to the top of the roller coaster’s peeling white latticework. Dana lunged for the last car. In the dream she was screaming, but when she opened her eyes, she knew it had been a whimper.

Connie groaned. “Y’all right?”

“They’re gone,” she breathed before her throat closed around the words.
They’re never coming back.
In the wake of the dream’s terror, the possibility seemed very real.

“What’s gone?” muttered Connie, scratching her neck. “The kids? They’re just in Plasticland with their idiot father.”

This was true. But there was a goneness that defied geography, and Dana couldn’t ward off the sense that something essential was changing, that they were now separated from her by more than just distance. “I miss them,” she choked out. “I feel like they’re dead.”

“It’s Disney World,” said Connie. “They’ll recover.”

Dana gave her a shove. “You make fun of everything! I’m
sick
of it! Go sleep somewhere else.”

“Oh, all right. Y-ross.”

It jiggled something in the back of Dana’s brain, and she turned to squint at Connie in the waning darkness.

Connie said, “Come on. You made me say it to you about every other night when we were kids.”

Growing up, they had shared a room the size of a closet that accommodated only two twin beds separated by a tiny bedside table.
Y-ross.
Dana remembered. “Sorry” spelled backward—sort of. “You can’t just say Y-ross and think it makes everything okay.”

Connie considered this for a moment. “Double Y-ross,” she said. “Best I can do.”

Wholly unsatisfied, Dana lay there sulking, nerves still pulsing staccato from the terror of the dream.

“I do know a little bit about this, by the way,” Connie said after a while. “You’ve had my kid for almost two months now.”

“Yes, but I’m not going to
keep
her, am I? I’m not going to go marry some thirty-year-old and have more babies and kidnap her into my new life without a backward glance.”

“What if she likes your life better than mine?” Connie said quietly. “What if she chooses you?”

Dana stared at the ceiling, predawn beginning to wear the edges off the darkness. What if Alder wanted to stay—needed to? And if she left, what would it be like without her comforting presence? “I would never take Alder away from you,” Dana said.

“Yeah, but what if it happens anyway?”

 

 

By noon Dana could barely keep her eyes open. It seemed that whatever little sleep she’d gotten had been erased by the nightmare and the disconcerting conversation with Connie. The day’s schedule had been full, but several patients had canceled, citing the holiday, incoming relatives, and grocery-store trips that had taken on the magnitude of preparations to climb Mount Everest. With no patients in the office, Marie had left early for her lunchtime run, and Dana took a moment to lay her head in the crook of her arm on her desk and close her eyes.

Misplaced children,
she thought as she drifted. It was as if Morgan, Grady, and Alder had been playing a game of musical chairs and had each ended up in the wrong seats. Or the seats themselves had changed.

She knew that the delivery boy from Nelly’s Deli would be here soon, but she told herself she would hear the tinkle of the bell on the door and be upright before anyone saw. A clump of hair slid across her face, but she was too sluggish to push it back.
Haircut,
she thought. It had been months.

Would they be different when they got home from Plasticland? Would they be so full of thrill rides and restaurant food and care-free laughter with their father and soon-to-be-stepmother that they could barely remember the boring life with their cash-strapped working mom? There was a sound, and she wanted to rise from the comfort of her arm, sleeved in knit cotton, but her head disobeyed her. And there were voices, one mid-toned and anonymous, one deep and sonorous, a rumble like distant thunder. Voices!

“Oh, my gosh!” she muttered apologetically, not entirely sure to whom. When her vision stabilized, she saw Tony holding a white bag and sliding money into the breast pocket of his lab coat. “The door’s locked,” he murmured. “Put your head down and go back to sleep.”

“Oh . . . no, I . . .” She ran her fingers back through her hair to subdue it. “I just . . . I woke up so early this morning . . .” A strand stuck to her lip, and she swiped her face several times but couldn’t quite locate it. “And then my sister—”

“Okay, Rapunzel,” he teased, “pull yourself together.” He reached out and drew a finger across her forehead, capturing the rogue hair and tucking it back behind her ear, his fingers sliding down along the strands to the end, brushing lightly against her shoulder. She could still feel the trail they’d traced across her skin, and a flush came into her cheeks. He was staring at her with an intensity tinged with surprise that made her wonder if he’d regretted his action. Mortified, she turned away quickly and said, “I’ll just get my lunch.”

He left, and she snatched the brush from her purse and raked it through her hair.
For godsake, settle down!
she told herself.
He’s probably done that for his daughters a million times.

When they were seated at the little table with their lunch items spread across it like chess pieces, he asked about her bad night’s sleep and she told him about the lentils and the nightmare and sharing her bed with Connie. “We slept in the same room our whole childhood, and I always sleep with her when I go to her place. Her house is small, and she doesn’t have extra beds. It’s only when she comes to Cotters Rock that she sleeps in a separate room.” Dana considered this. “I think she must have been holding that against Kenneth for fifteen years now.”

“I didn’t get the impression you two were that close.”

“We’re not.” Dana thought for a moment. “But in some ways . . . We don’t like each other that much, but we’re—I don’t know—attached.”

“Lizzie and Abby are like that. Very different. They got closer after Ingrid died. By the way, the late-breaking news is Lizzie’s going to the boyfriend’s for Thanksgiving after all.” He let out an annoyed snort. “Miss Thing throws a conniption about how much she
needs
to be
home
. I change my plans, and she gets back together with Joe Cool.”

Dana smiled. “She’s the one to the left of your wife in that picture on your desk.”

Tony nodded. “Smirking, as usual.” He reached into his back pocket for his wallet and withdrew a small photo. “This one’s recent.” Their arms were hung around each other’s shoulders, wind blowing the taller one’s auburn hair out to the side. She was laughing, mouth open, teeth white behind bright lipstick. The shorter one grinned modestly. Her skin was a darker olive shade, like Tony’s, and her wavy black hair hung just below her ears.

“Abby got the Italian looks from my mother,” he said, his head leaning close to Dana’s to gaze at the photo with her. “Lizzie takes after Ingrid, except her hair’s darker. My father used to say, ‘Where’s mine? Where’s the Japanese granddaughter?’ And my mother would say,
‘Madonne!
They have your last name—you got them both!’”