Kids These Days (23 page)

“Restriction, is how we see it,” Mid said. We'd made it to the kitchen table, and we were working through a lasagna Carolyn had found in the freezer. Delton was hunched into a chair, folded hard in on herself. She'd been alright before, when it was just the two of us, but now, in the spotlight, she looked like she'd rather be hiking across the face of the moon. Carolyn looked like she might have wished Delton was doing that, too, and that she'd taken Mid with her.

I said, “Does restriction still exist? People still call it that?”

“I don't know, but that's what we're calling it.”

The deal they'd arrived at was this: Two weeks. That was all. She wanted out, and she was getting it, at least in part. The rules: She could come and go from the condo, but only to specific, preordained places. She could hang out with Nic, but only in restaurants and coffee shops, and not after dark. She could see her other friends, but not after ten p.m. Nothing after ten p.m. By then she was supposed to be home, doing whatever it was she did. Texting. Interneting. Reinventing electricity. Mid had climbed up into the attic, found a little television she could set up in our nursery, which was where she was staying. There was still a single bed in there. Delton was saying she wanted to help paint the room whatever color we wanted, that she could help us get ready for the baby. “I know how to paint,” she said. “I'm really careful.”

Carolyn said, “Sweetie, I'm not sure they need your help, OK?”

“Mom, I'm just offering. God.”

“We'd love that.” said Alice. “That would be a big help.”

“See?” Delton said.

“And if she doesn't follow those rules,” Mid said, pushing ahead with his terms, “then she comes back here. Simple as that.” He turned to her. “Does that sound like what we talked about?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Those are rules you can abide by?”

“That's such a Dad move, saying that.
Abide by.
”

“That's the move I'm trying to make,” he said.

“We're having a little trouble with authority,” said Carolyn.

“I am,” Delton said. “
We're
not.”

“I rest my case,” said Carolyn.

“May I be excused?” said Delton. “I need to pack.”

Mid said, “You're already packed.”

“I need to pack more.”

“Go ahead,” Carolyn said, and she let her get all the way to the stairs before she said, “Your plate won't clear itself, you know.” Delton came back, every movement just barely exaggerated—enough to show injustice had been visited upon her yet one more time, but not quite enough to elicit any sanction. It was a perfect tightroped teenage line. She banged her plate into the sink, left again. “Leecy,” Carolyn said, quietly, “You guys are really up for this?”

“Of course,” Alice said, but she didn't sound totally sure. She'd been on edge since Varden, waiting for the next thing.

“She's not like this normally,” Mid said. “She's having a bad summer.”

“Except she isn't.” Carolyn rubbed at one eye. “She's having a terrific summer. The Summer of Nic. We're the ones having the hard time.” She looked at Mid. “Well, you are, anyway.”

“I'm fine,” he said.

“You're anything but.” Things were definitely broken between them. Delton might have been the only thing keeping that from being on fire. Maybe we shouldn't take her, I thought. Maybe we should leave her behind to give them something to do.

“We'll figure it out,” Alice said. “It'll be good for her.”

“You're both sure?” Carolyn said. “You promise?”

“You don't know what you're getting into,” Mid said.

“Don't say things like that,” said Carolyn.

“It'll be like a tryout,” I said, which was the safest version of where Alice and I had landed. We didn't know her. She didn't know us. But what the hell. If she thought she liked us, we could be those people.

Mid said, “It'll be like something.” He opened the fridge and stared in. “Fifteen. Jesus Christ. Maybe I don't understand anymore. Maybe that's my problem.”

Carolyn said, “That's not your problem.”

“What is with you?” he said.

“Really?” She held her hands out at an imaginary pile of things on the table. “Pick. Pick anything.”

Alice said, “Fifteen was hard.” She was trying to bring them back from the cliff. “It was awful, really.”

“I liked it OK,” said Carolyn.

“You got to go first. You were older.”

“Shouldn't that make me like it less?”

Alice said, “It wasn't easy. That's all.”

“Is it ever easy?” Carolyn asked.

“When you're eight,” I said.

Mid said, “When's eight? Is that second grade?”

“You play kickball,” I said. “A ton of kickball. And you turn in reports on birds of prey.”

“Maybe second grade's easy for boys,” said Carolyn, “but it's a nightmare for girls.”

“Why's that?” Mid said.

“Every grade is a nightmare for girls,” Alice said. “First it's clothes, and then it's boys and clothes.”

I said, “That seems a little broad.”

Alice shook her head. “It's easy for maybe five seconds when you're with one other friend. But then you get a third girl in the mix, and two of you have to gang up on the other one. Or they gang up on you. It's some kind of rule.”

“But even in second grade?” Mid asked.

“Especially in second grade,” said Carolyn. “How do you not remember the twins? Second-grade girls are awful.”

“Let's have a girl,” I said. “Let's have two.”

“Probably better than a boy,” Mid said. “With boys, it's just shouting and breaking shit until they're old enough to be jerking off into a sock.”

“Nice,” said Carolyn. “Lovely.”

I said, “Maybe we should forget the whole thing and get a puppy.”

“They chew your table legs,” said Mid.

“So do boys,” said Carolyn.

“So do girls,” he said, and brought a few beers over to the table. He poured one for himself, one for me. I let mine sit there and tried to remember the second grade, but I could only come up with one or two names. Our teacher broke her ankle at the skating rink. I knew that. The ambulance came. It was a hell of a thing to see your second-grade teacher loaded onto an ambulance. The BOJ would be in second grade. She would have a lunchbox. She would have friends. She would be working very hard on becoming her own disaster.

“Mom?” Delton called down the stairs. “Have you seen my yellow shirt?”

“No,” said Carolyn.

“Did it get washed?”

“Did you wash it?”

“God,” Delton said, and went back toward her room.

Carolyn got up, walked through the kitchen to the laundry, came back with a yellow shirt folded into a tight square. “Here,” she said, and handed it to me. “Use it as a peace offering.”

I said, “Do we need one?”

“You will,” she said.

“You guys are scaring him,” said Alice. “We all are.”

“He needs it,” Mid said.

“I don't,” I said. “I'm plenty scared. I work on it.”

“That's actually true,” Alice said, taking the shirt from me. “He does.”

Delton wanted to keep the tinfoil on the windows. She walked in the room, turned off the light, shut the door, and we stood like that—us in the hall, and Delton inside, in the dark—for what had to be way too long. Already we were doing it wrong. Finally she said, “I've never seen anything this nothinged-out in my entire life. This is the best thing ever.” She opened the door and blinked into the light of the hallway. “Can I leave it? Is that OK?” We told her it was. We had no idea what else to tell her.

Lying in bed, Delton closed into her room and us into ours, Alice said, “Are they cute at that age?”

“They're supposed to be,” I said. I was feeling a calmness about her being with us, and had no good idea why. Maybe it was that she came off like a creature it might be possible to understand: She had, as it turned out, a pretty basic set of needs, and they were give or take the same as anyone else's.

“I don't always, always want it,” Alice said. “You know that, right?”

“The baby?” I said.

“Catherine of Aragon. Whatever you're calling her. I'm not always a hundred percent behind it.”

“I get it,” I said.

“No, you don't. You think I'm some cheerleader who wants four hundred kids.”

I said, “Did I do something?”

“I know it's supposed to be me. I know I'm supposed to be in charge. It's just hard. It turns out having her actually here is hard.”

“Why do you have to be in charge?”

“Well, it's not going to be you, is it?”

“That's not fair,” I said.

“I still want it. I completely still want it. But then sometimes I kind of don't. Some days.”

“Sure you do.”

“Not if she's going to be fifteen.”

“I think she's going to be fifteen,” I said, sitting up. “I think that's the whole deal. If we're lucky, she turns out to be a normal, impossible fifteen-year-old girl. That's what I was trying to tell you all along. This was the losing argument.”

“Then forget it,” she said. “I change my mind.”

“I think it'd be great if she turned out like Delton.”

“I don't understand how you wouldn't be afraid of that,” she said.

“I'm completely afraid of that. I'm just more afraid of other things.”

“Like what?” she said.

“Like everything that comes first. I'm afraid of never choosing what to watch on TV again. Or the kid getting brain damage. Or CP. Or syphilis.”

“She could get syphilis riding around on that motorcycle with that boy.”

“Were we not just sitting around Mid and Carolyn's table with you telling
them
not to scare me?”

“Keep your voice down,” she said.

“Plus aren't you the one who's supposed to be all cool under fire? Isn't it you who takes the kid to the liquor store to buy condoms and cigarettes before the prom?”

“I'm tired of being cool under fire,” she said. “It's wearing me out. I can't do it all the time. And I thought
you
were the one who hated all things child.”

“I don't hate all things child.”

She rubbed her feet together under the covers, then held herself still. She was wearing an old long-sleeved T-shirt of mine, some wintertime fun run from ten years before. “I just don't have any idea how to have a fifteen-year-old,” she said, whispering. “That's all.”

“You don't have to know,” I said.

She pointed at the door. “In fact, I do. We have one now. She's on loan, but we have one.” She was blinking a lot. “I can't believe we did this,” she said. “She doesn't know us. I can't believe anybody thought this was a good idea.”

“You were for this,” I said.

“You said yes, too,” she said, right away. “You sat there and you said yes.”

“What else would I have said?”

“That's never stopped you before.”

“We just have to not kill her,” I said. “That's all.”

“It's
not
all. We have to be role models. We have to feed her breakfast.”

“We'll feed her breakfast,” I said.

“We have to send her back fixed.”

“She's not broken,” I said.

“Then what's she doing here?”

“The same thing we're doing here,” I said.

“We have to fix her.”

I said, “Why can't we just make sure not to send her back any worse?”

She didn't answer. I didn't say anything else, didn't ask her any more questions. I let her be. She was another creature. A new one. I reached across her to turn out the light, a huge thing with a huge shade, nothing I'd have ever bought, and nothing she would have, either. I rubbed her arm on my way back by, trying to make peace. Also I just wanted to touch her, wanted to make sure she was still real.