Elena Undone (2 page)

Elena had to give Barry his props. Her husband had a true gift with people. It wasn’t just that he was tall, handsome and pleasant, with his twinkling blue eyes and sandy-brown hair. He possessed a smile that defied objections, sweetened negotiations, and he was always able to fully engage Millie without truly flirting back, capable of moving right through her as if she weren’t there, even when he paid a great deal of attention to what she said. He just had a way of dealing with her. He was actually more involved with Miles the few moments they spent together. The two men golfed occasionally, even shared drinks and probably resigned conversations about “the spouse,” Elena suspected, and yet Millie continued to buzz around Elena’s husband with an endless flair for drama and the constant need to run something by him. Barry, always politic, met Millie head-on, taking the high road while getting all his needs met and Millie always came back for more. Elena wondered if that was the draw—she could have her cake and almost eat it too. Perhaps the ability only to gaze admiringly, to touch, smell, admire…but never actually take a bite, fueled many an unrequited fantasy.

Back to the shopping—Focus Elena
. Yes, and the supplies for Tori’s new experiment. Elena turned to watch Tori gently shift her shoulder below Nash’s head so he could find a comfortable pillow to sleep through the rest of his father’s sermon. Ahhh, Tori…she couldn’t have asked for a better daughter-in-law. Without question she and Nash belonged to one another.

Elena glanced at her husband. Sighed.

Peyton—the same Sunday in July...

Peh="r="blacyton Lombard walked to her house with cell phone balancing against her shoulder, mail and manuscripts piled haphazardly in her arms as she waited for a human voice on the other side of a phone conversation she was desperate to have. She had been dressed for a meeting in her black jeans, a long sleeved pinstriped Façonnable shirt and vest, and she was now sweltering from the heat.

What was with the endless incompetence, she wondered. For weeks she had been dealing with the transfer of her mother from the nursing home to their own family home. She had begun to believe she could no longer be surprised by how insanely screwed up the insurance and paperwork had become throughout the process, but each day came an even more outlandish mistake.

She shifted the weight of all the materials in her arms, crooked her neck as far as it would go to keep the phone in place between her neck and shoulder as she pleaded, “No please don’t put me on hold again. I beg of you. I’ve already talked to four different departments—no!” She almost cried when a vacuous rendition of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” buzzed into her ear.

“CHRIST!” She hung up, almost dropped the phone, and stalked down the front slate stone steps into her home.

The moment she entered she felt the usual deep calming that the quiet but spacious living room offered. No matter where she had been, how much traffic she had to battle, a slew of pitch meetings, endless lunches and dinner meetings with agents, editors and publishers—when she returned to her home she felt an immediate transition back to balance and sanity. The large, ranch-style house with its massive burnished wood beams and vaulted floor to ceiling windows that overlooked a spacious pool and then an endless sea of green—maple, oak and pine—was her sanctuary.

The peace was short-lived. She heard the commotion from the back room. She knew before she entered what used to be her mother’s sewing room that Sylvia, the new day nurse, would be tussling with her mom, trying to keep her in the hospital bed they had rented because of her mother’s broken hip. In frustration Peyton tossed all the stuff from her arms onto a side table as she rushed to help the aging but wonderful RN.

Her mother calmed, and actually took note of Peyton for the first time in a week, connecting with her eyes, studying her daughter’s face. For a brief moment, Peyton saw her mother as she used to look, the handsome if tight features, a Joan Crawford beauty stained by bitterness and now years of ill health. Her thin, dry lips curled to form a smile. Peyton’s heart lifted as she bent to embrace her mother, and when they parted her mother’s smile turned coy.

“I pee-peed!”

Peyton’s jaw tightened.

“I pee-peed. I’m a good girl.”

Peyton glanced at Sylvia. They both sighed, then smiled. What else could they do? Humor, at this juncture, truly was the only medicine.

“Well you are a good girl, aren’t you?” Peyton concurred.

But her mother had already gone back into the void, staring into a world of memories, perhaps an entirely different universe they could only guess at.

Peyton began the ritual of changing the bedding with Sylvia, wondering if what she had witnessed had actually been a flash of lucidity. Her mother’s eyes had been so focused, so green, that same emerald intensity she had gifted to her own daughter. As Peyton busied herself she decided to give them both the benefit of the doubt and then remembered that she had just promised her editor the pages for her deadline.

“Sylvia, are you okay here?”

“Sure am…this is
my
job. Now you get outta here and get to
your
job.” Sylvia grinned.

Peyton fluttered her eyes with gratitude as she walked back down the hallway into the living room, so happy that she had replaced the last nurse with Sylvia, a middle-aged Hispanic caretaker who was sturdy, calm and always pleasant. Unlike the previous nurse (Peyton had to wonder who screened these RNs—Sylvia had been the sixth she had interviewed!) Clara, a large-boned, extremely bleached blonde with the brightest red lipstick Peyton had ever seen, Sylvia was a godsend. The bloody imprint of Clara’s lips had had to be scrubbed from endless coffee cups from which Clara had sipped her “special healing tea.”

Peyton discovered, inadvertently, that the woman she had hired to care for her mother was singing, and “performing a healing” on her mother. She’d tiptoed down the hall to decipher the bizarre incantations she had been hearing from her mother’s bedroom, stood outside the door, and then heard Clara begin to share with her mother her incessant obsession with the First World Order taking over the universe.

Peyton had told Clara, very firmly, that under no circumstances was she to do any such healings on her mother, but the Clydesdale-like nurse begged Peyton to allow her to do ablutions on Peyton’s mother to prevent the “illuminati from taking over her body. You know, the aliens have already taken over earth, and their intention is to kill every last one of us until there are only five hundred thousand left.”

“And why do you suppose they want any of us left,” asked Wave, Peyton’s best friend, whom Peyton had asked over to see if Clara was safe to be with her mother. “I mean, why not off the lot of us?”

Wave’s offhanded remark only provoked Clara into a never-ending conspiracy theory that began and ended somewhere around the fact that Peyton’s mother had been a victim. “Don’t let this ‘Alzheimer’s’ thing fool you. She’s been taken over.” Peyton was not to believe for a minute that her mother suffered from the last and most dangerous stages of Alzheimer’s.

Wave told Peyton in her deeply rich South Manchester Queen’s English, “You do realize you have a total loon tendin’ to dear Mum. You gotta sack her. Stat.”

Peyton had had her replaced the next day.

Before Peyton could even get to her desk, which she hrea which ad set up in the huge living room, so that she could enjoy the most beautiful and peaceful view her family home afforded, her agent, Emily called.

“Do you want to lose the job I spent weeks finding for you?” she screamed.

She tried to toss in a sympathetic tone that she was absolutely understanding about Peyton’s situation with her mother, “But, Peyton, the magazine you’re freelancing for could care less.”

Peyton replied, “I’ll get it done if I have to work all night.”

“Good because I have you up for a big project with Cosmo, you know that.”

Peyton didn’t much care, but she did have bills to pay. “I’m aware…look, I’m grateful Emily, it’s just that there are only so many hours in the day and you know—”

“Yes, and I think you’re a hero…I just don’t want you screwing up a brilliant career.”

“Got it.”

Elena—two Sundays later...

“I’m not going!” Nash’s voice was tense and exasperated.

Barry stood with his wife amongst the congregants who were gathered on the long sloping front lawn of the church. Dressed in one of his four dark-toned Brooks Brothers suits, his navy blue shirt and one of the many ties Tori and Nash had gifted him with over the years, Barry could as easily have been a politician as a pastor, able to keep everyone chattering excitedly, and create a certain urgency buzzing through the crowd. In contrast to Barry’s stylish clothing, Elena’s had conformed to the code; conservative hues of peach, rose and beige, pastel floral summer dresses. Barry had insisted she keep her hair in the traditional Indian braid, or pulled back, as he warned her, “when your hair’s let free, El—you just look too damn sexy.” He had winked at her when he said it, admiring what he always referred to her as her “exotic sultriness—we can’t have that. You look nice and traditional with the braid, and that way you won’t threaten the wives!”

“You did hear they’re protesting downtown!” Garret, a mid-forties parishioner piped up. He was Millie’s right-hand minion and never far from her side.

“The nerve of those people,” Millie sighed dramatically. “We’ll all be there. All of us, Pastor Barry, won’t we?” she asked of the folks standing by.

Nods of affirmation and plenty of eager “Don’t worry, we’ll all be there” came from one congregant after another. If nothing else, this was one flock of geese that always traveled together.

Barry turned to Elena who was vaguely caught up in the fervor, but, as usual had other things on her mind. “El, make sure you get extra food and drinks for us to take.”

Nash gently tugged as his mother’s elbow, hissed below his breath: “There’s no way I’m going with them, Mom. He can’t make me.”

Elena tried to move them both out of earshot. “Please watch your tone. That’s your father’s decision.”

Nash’s jaw clamped. Elena saw in his eyes the surprise he couldn’t hide at what he felt was betrayal from her. He too was dressed in his Sunday best, slacks, shirt and tie, which he always jumped out of the second he got home into what he called his “real clothes,” a variation of jeans, T-shirts and hoodies. “Are you kidding me? Do you even know what they’re talking about here?”

Tori walked up from behind them. “Don’t these people know that being loud cannot compete with being clear? And Nash is clear he doesn’t want to be involved with this protest. How in the heck can this benefit him or them, for that matter, if he is in complete disagreement with his dad on this?”

“It doesn’t matter, Mom.” Nash’s voice grew louder. “Because there is no way I’m going!”

Before she could even respond another congregant came up to request the Kinder class calendar. Elena tried to divide her attention, but the woman was chattering so enthusiastically she began to glaze over, attempting to listen dutifully, but also trying to keep tabs on the situation with Nash. All this while she continued to shake the hands of the same congregants that she’d shaken hands with every Sunday for the past ten years. She knew the pulp, flesh and feel of every hand, but they still felt all the same. Undifferentiated.

Nash’s displeasure with the church, attending services and now even Barry’s message were becoming more and more of a problem. She kept an eye on Nash as he shoved his hands deep into his pockets, as Barry well-wished other congregants outside the doors of the church.

Barry shot a glance at Elena:
Get your son under control
.

Even when it was just the last of the folks who were involved in another one of their “God is love campaigns,” the last thing Elena wanted was for the two of them to clash in front of Barry’s parishioners, here outside the church. The rumor mill was a nano-second away at all times and Millie’s face was already pinched with displeasure at Nash’s open display of impertinence.

“Nash,” Barry intoned.

“Whatever—”

“Young man,” Millie interjected with a superior tone, “that is no way to speak near the church, and it certainly is no way to speak to your father.”

“That’s fine, Millie—” Barry tried to take back the reins but before he could, Nash stomped off across the sanctuary lawn. Elena watched nervously as Tori ran to join him, but Nash shrugged her off, trying to distance himself from everyone.

Elena could just make out Nash’s words, “You have no idea what it’s like to lieins like ve in that house—”

“You seem to forget—” Tori stood in front of him now and Elena could not help but smile at Tori’s absolute knowing of Nash. “I spend most of my waking hours there.”

Elena shook her head, taking in Tori, who was the strangest mix of absolutely gorgeous in a sort of Disney-gone-quirky display of glam curls meets funky retro stylizing. Pieces of clothing that had no business being in the same closet somehow made sense the way Tori tossed together her ensembles, a frilly skirt with a businessman’s vest, a bohemian shirt belted by an Indian scarf. And she would not be caught dead, anywhere, without one of her ties. Tori owned the most extensive collection of ties Elena had ever seen and had the most brilliant manner in which she affixed them to herself—sash, headband, belt and tie. She might appear to be nothing more than a dumb pretty blonde but Tori was the most brilliant child Elena had ever met, an absolutely stunning font of fascinating trivia, insight and wisdom.