Hooked (24 page)

“Thea, please, don’t answer the phone at the dinner table.” He scowled. “You don’t see me doing that.”

I hit the green button. “Your bikini?” I recognized Carmen’s slightly scratchy voice. “It sold in less than an hour. I remember looking at my watch. It was, like, forty-seven minutes after you left.”

“No way,” I said quietly.

“I think she was Brazilian, I’m not kidding. I was going to
call you right after, but I had to catch a train to Wellfleet for a family thing and I ran out of juice. I just got back. Anyway, you should make more. How long did it take you to make that one?”

“A while,” I admitted. “But I think I can ramp it up.”

“Well, why don’t you do, like, two or three more and bring them in. You have the yarn, right?”

“Yup,” I said. Dad was glaring at me, but I put my hand up, gesturing, Wait till you hear this.

I hung up, my heart racing, some weird baroque music sounding in my brain. I felt like a window had opened up in my head again, cool air blowing through it, the same way I felt in Carmen’s shop when I was first there with Vanessa.

“So something really exciting just happened.” I looked at Dad, picking up my fork.

“What’s that, Thea?”

“I sold a bikini.”

“Bikini?” Dad focused on stabbing his last lettuce leaf.

“Vanessa taught me how to crochet, and I made this bikini, just like one I had when I was a kid—there’s a picture of me at the beach on Charter, Nana made it. Anyway, this woman Carmen helped me, a lot, actually, and then she sold it in her shop. That’s what she called to tell me.”

“I didn’t realize you made swimsuits,” he said, standing up with his plate. He either wasn’t listening or was really dense.

“She sold it for three hundred bucks,” I called after him as he headed to the kitchen. He turned toward me and paused at the mention of money.

“That’s great,” he said. “That’s terrific, Thea.” He continued to the kitchen, looking befuddled and slightly worried, as though my earning three hundred dollars were potentially illegal. “Some more salad?”

My life and Ian’s in the shitter, I drowned myself in crochet. I brought it with me everywhere—on the subway to Ian’s doctor; to coffee with Mom, where it calmed me as she told me things were heating up with Alex the married guy; to the park, looping and twirling while Ian stared at the branches over us. I’d grab it whenever Ian slept, and when he woke up, I’d do just a few more stitches. Sometimes I’d push it, listening as his sharp cries changed to long, low growls. Just a few more stitches. I’d pick him up and he’d scream into my ear, showing me how mad he was, and I’d mash his cheek against mine and beg forgiveness.

It had taken two days to finish the first teal and royal-blue zigzagged bikini. I crocheted from six a.m. Thursday until two a.m. Friday, stopping only to put Ian on the boob for ten minutes a side. When he wasn’t nursing, he lay next to me in a nest of blankets I constructed to help him sleep. On Friday I started again at nine a.m. and went until midnight. By midnight my eyeballs were swollen and frozen in their sockets and my index finger felt like a burnt twig. But Saturday morning I started right in on the second one.

The second bikini had the hardest design—a red, orange and yellow sunburst pattern. It took me almost five days of nonstop crocheting to finish it, and I was feeling so good about it, I thought for sure Will would call before I finished to say he hadn’t been thinking straight. He didn’t.

The third bikini’s pattern was almost identical to the bikini I had when I was six, and as I cast on the first few chains of green, I pulled out the original photo of me, in glorious
red, white and blue, that I’d kept in an envelope. I looked at my Mona Lisa–smiling face in the photo and remembered how miserable I was after that fight Mom and Dad had had in the middle of the night, and how hard it had been to smile for my grandmother, who was snapping photo after photo of me on the beach. How long after that had they gotten divorced? Six long years. I did the first row and all the slipknots, remembering the day I found out.

“You know, I was thinking,” Mom had said, standing in my doorway, “last night when I picked you up from Kyra’s and you were running down the hallway to the elevator … your pants are too short. Your ankles are starting to show again.” She’d sat on my bed and examined a chicken pox scab healing on my cheek. “When did I take you to that horrible place for jeans? September, when school started. And already they’re getting too short.”

“I don’t want new ones,” I’d said. She always started an argument with me as I was just waking up.

“Sweetheart, you look like Twiggy.”

“Who?”

“Never mind. Let’s just get you a couple more pairs and you can at least alternate. Wherever you want. Your choice. We’ll get some breakfast first.”

“Daddy too?” I’d asked.

“He’s got errands,” she’d said. “Just us.”

I don’t remember what I had. It was gray and windy and there were puffed-up plastic bags in the tree outside our booth window. Mom brought the paper and she read it while we fought about letting me go to some movie that she didn’t want me to see. Then we went to an army-navy store, where I got a pair of black corduroys.

“How about we go look for dresses for Aunt Cecilia’s wedding?” she’d offered. Her face was bright but tense, the way some people looked after snorting cocaine.

“It’s not till July,” I’d said. A strange, open-ended feeling had started taking over the day.

“We don’t need to buy,” she’d said. “Just look and think.”

So we went to Barneys. We walked around the second floor and Mom picked up sleeves of black jackets and long-sleeved shirts and dropped them. She tried on a pair of brown suede boots.

“Let’s get a coffee, shall we?” she’d asked. “Are you hungry again? I love the café next door. Let’s go.”

It was starting to fill up for lunch and we sat down at the last free table.

“Aren’t we lucky,” she’d said, straightening her place mat.

It was one of the few times in my life I remember her sitting still. She held the menu up to her face and read it for a long time. Then she put it down.

“Thea, there’s something I need to speak with you about.”

“What?”

“It’s about your father and me.”

She called him “your father” instead of “Daddy” and I knew right away. She went back to calling him Daddy again after they got divorced. She still calls him Daddy and he still calls her Mom when they’re with me.

When we got home to our lobby, Dad was talking to Tom, the doorman. He was standing with a suitcase between his legs, the same way he stood when he waited for the elevator. He turned around and looked at me, all of a sudden a stranger.

As I started to cry, Mom asked Tom if the mail had come, and Dad hugged me, not saying anything. I thought about how
good everything had been since he’d stopped drinking. How he’d helped me do my homework and made popcorn in the lobster pot and did crosswords under the black lamp. Every single night he was Dad instead of the sleepy-eyed, drunk imposter who’d come home late from work and fling his arms around in the air whenever he said anything. But for some reason that I couldn’t for the life of me figure out, the fact that he’d finally quit made no difference to Mom.

“Where are you going?” I’d asked.

“I’ll be close by,” he’d answered, and as I looked at his face, I thought I could see disappointment as big as mine.

Ian stirred and scrunched his face next to me, burrowing his head into my leg. I put down the crochet hook and picked him up as he opened his eyes. The questions that had plagued me since I’d left Florence’s crowded the air around his head: Did he know Will was gone? Did he miss him? Would I be able to love him enough to make up for not having a dad? I kissed him and held him, letting his warm cheek sink into my neck. It was all I could do.

I took my new green-and-purple-squared bikini with me to the moms’ group I’d read an ad for on Craigslist, thinking it would facilitate hanging back, not getting caught in the fray.

Ian and I were the first to arrive at the restaurant, which somehow confirmed that I had no friends. I sat down in the middle of a long, narrow farm table as Ann and Hilary, the
preexisting friends who’d started the group, came in together with their babies. They saw me and parked their strollers by the door.

“Are you Thea?” Hilary shook my hand overly hard, jutting out her Sigourney Weaver jaw.

I nodded, getting up. Ian was in the sack, his head nestled against my chest.

“Don’t, you’re in kangaroo mode.” She smiled, nodding at Ian.

“Thea, this is Ann. Leah and Kate should be here any minute.”

“Hi, Thea,” Ann said in a nasal voice. She grabbed the menu. “Eggs, I want eggs,” she said. Her baby reached for the brown sugar packets.

“If I have another coffee, my head’s going to explode,” Hilary explained. Her baby stood on the floor in a jean jacket, leaning on her, swatting her legs. “He’s just standing, as of yesterday.”

Hilary was an associate at a law firm and had taken a year off, but she’d just hired a nanny because she was “going back.” She was having trouble relinquishing control to the nanny.

“I feel like she can’t do it I like I can,” she said, banging her empty latte cup on the table. She glanced at me crocheting away. I tried to catch her eye every so often to not seem rude. “We’re working on it.”

“You know what will make your life so much easier when you’re working?” Ann asked urgently, licking her thumb and sticking it on the table to sop up the spilled sugar from the packet.

Hilary and Ann started in about a meal delivery service. I watched them, wondering, How did I used to make friends?
How did I make friends with Chris Fontana from Staten Island, who I had nothing in common with other than pre-calc? We laughed about Mr. Kushman’s shoes and made fun of the way he rolled his l’s, as in
l-l-l-evel
. We’d write notes back and forth—“What did you do last night?” “Went to the mall with my mother, she picked out something for her date with the butt doctor.” And then all of a sudden you knew each other, you could ask specific questions—“How was the date with the butt doctor?” “Sucky, poor Mom,” and so on. It was easier then, I thought, watching as Kate, too pretty for me, arrived in boho-chic perfection, a binky-sucking boy slung on her hip.

“Thea, you’re the new girl,” she said, holding her free hand away from me. “I won’t shake,” she said apologetically. “He’s got something.”

“No problem,” I said, nodding earnestly, then smiling at the baby. He turned his head as far away from me as it would go, and I decided I hated making small talk with other people’s children. My knees bumped up against the table as I watched her saunter around to the other side, to a seat next to Hilary. Kate had a nice, direct way about her, and she was wearing a cute embroidered-leather belt. But there were pots of jam and menus, nestled between hunks of bread, blocking our way, and I just felt too tired.

I loitered at the table after they all left, pulling my hook and yarn out of the bag, annoying the waiters seating lunch customers. I ordered another coffee and crocheted until my fingers were white-knuckled and sore, my arms aching from holding the whole thing over Ian’s sleeping body. I slipped the last loop off the hook just as someone placed my check squarely in front of me. It was Friday—exactly two weeks since I’d started. I was done and ready to haul my new stash to Stash.

My phone rang as we got outside.

“Hi,” Will said.

I leaned my shoulder against the traffic-light post on the corner, the ticking noise from inside it reverberating through me. I couldn’t speak. It had been almost three weeks since I’d left Florence’s. Cars clunked over a manhole in the street. I wished I could sit down someplace quiet where I could hear him better.

“How are you? How’s Ian?” He sounded distant. All business.

“He’s fine.” Everything I looked at took on a surreal quality. I had no idea how I felt or how to “be” with him.

“Thea, I’m sorry I haven’t called. I needed to think.”

“About what?” I mumbled.

“Listen, I want to talk to you about something and I want you to really think about it. Do you want to meet someplace?”

“What is it?” I asked.

“Maybe we should meet.”

“Just tell me, Will,” I said. “I don’t want to wait.”

“I talked to someone at an adoption agency. They were incredibly understanding and …”

The light had turned green, but I stayed put. “No,” I said.

“You can’t just say no without talking about it first.”

“Yes, I can.”

“Well, I want to talk about it.”

“There’s nothing to talk about. If you don’t want to be a part of it, that’s fine,” I said. “There’s nothing to talk about beyond that.”

“Thea, please …”

I hung up the phone and crossed the street. The first thought that went through my head was that I was going to have to change my cell phone number. I caught our reflections
in the window of a sushi place, my puffy black down jacket, Ian in his checked hat, broadcasting whited-out loneliness in the flat winter sun.

After that, Will became the enemy. I wondered how far he was willing to go. Would he plant drugs on me? Would he lie about me? What was he capable of? I walked around to the front of the stroller. It was almost as if Ian’s whole body broke into a smile as he looked at me. If anyone took you away from me, I don’t know how I could keep living, I thought. How could Will even consider it? How could he know me and know how I felt about Ian, even when it was tough and I was in a bad mood—how could Will even begin to think about doing what he was doing?

“Just go on with your life,” Vanessa said when I called her right afterward. “He’s powerless and he knows it.”

“I’m so scared, Vanessa,” I said. I’d gone one block while I was on the phone with her, staring the whole way at the whirly pattern of Ian’s knit hat. When I got to the next corner, it hit me how quickly things changed. How sharply and unwaveringly betrayal could sink in.

Ian kicked in his stroller the next day, knocking a box of matzo off a shelf. It was starting to dawn on me that he really didn’t like food shopping.