Once Upon a Time, There Was You (21 page)

“You want me to … do anything?”

She sits up. “Make some sandwiches? I’m so hungry.”
Bake some sadwiches
.

He starts to laugh, and then she does, too.

“Peanut butter and grape jelly?” he asks. Irene’s favorite. He has never felt such a peculiar kind of joy. It almost hurts.

“I like black raspberry now.”

“Should I make one for Sadie and her hubby?”

“Not funny.”

He shrugs. “A little funny?”

“No.”

“So, what do you think we should do? Ground her?”

“Go and make the sandwiches. I’ll wash up. And … I put clean sheets on my bed so you can stay here. Do you want to stay here?”

“Uh …”

“Not with me! I’ll sleep on the couch. But if you want to stay here, you can. This is kind of … It will be good to have you here for a while. This needs two.”

“Yes,” he says. “This most definitely needs two.” He heads for the kitchen, then turns back to say, “Still heavy on the jam?”

“Yes.” Her face softens, and she smiles. “Thank you for coming. I’m glad you’re here.”

“Me, too.”

He goes into the kitchen and finds the peanut butter, the jelly, the bread, the plates, the knives. He makes four sandwiches. He knows Sadie better than Irene does. He always has.

22

T
ogether, John and Irene stand at the window, watching Sadie come down the sidewalk. “She has him with her,” Irene says. “He’s coming with her!” She’s furious that Sadie has disobeyed her explicit instructions.

“Well, let’s just see what happens,” John says. “I kind of admire the fact that he’s willing to face the music.”

“I don’t want him to face the music!”

“Let’s just see what happens,” John says, again. He moves out into the hall; Irene goes to the door and opens it.

“You’ll have to leave,” she calls out to the young man, before she fully sees him. He and Sadie are rounding the stairs.

“I’m sorry,” he calls back. “Sadie asked me to come with her.”

Then he is before her and Irene crosses her arms and says, “Well, I’m asking you to leave. You go home, now.”

“Mom,”
Sadie says, and then, “You can come in, Ron. Never mind. Come in.”

The young man steps just over the threshold, and Irene almost feels sorry for him. He’s a nice-looking guy in jeans and a blue T-shirt, worry all over his face.

“This is my husband, Ron,” Sadie tells Irene, pointedly. And then, “Hi, Dad.”

John moves to embrace Sadie. “We were so worried about you!” he says. “I’m glad you’re safe.” He holds out his hand to the boy. “I’m John Marsh, Sadie’s father.”

“John,” Irene says quietly. He has no idea how to handle this situation.

“I’m glad to meet you, sir.” Ron turns to Irene. “I’m glad to meet you, as well. I won’t stay. But I hope I’ll see you again very soon.”

Irene stands still, waiting. She fears speaking; she’s afraid she’ll yell, or cry.

“I’ll call you,” he tells Sadie, gently, and puts his hand on her shoulder, then turns to leave.

“Ron!” Sadie says. “You don’t have to go!”

“It’s okay,” he says. “They need some time with you.”

He holds his hand up, a wave of sorts, and locks eyes with Sadie in a way that excludes everything else.

Irene closes the door and turns to her daughter. “Are you out of your
mind
?” she says.

“Irene!” John says. “Jesus. Can we sit
down
? Can we
talk
?”

What fills Irene now is a wobbly kind of rage. She doesn’t know who to be angrier at, John or Sadie. Easy for him to show up and be the even-tempered mediator! Easy for him to be the part-time parent who gets to say yes to everything because he never has to suffer the consequences of what he allows! She is the real parent, and she will handle this. She wishes he’d never come. He won’t be of any use at all. He will make everything harder. “You keep out of this!” she tells John. “You don’t even know what happened!”

“Neither do you, Mom!” Sadie says. “You don’t know anything! You never do!” She goes to her room and slams the door.

John and Irene stand there. “Nice going,” John says.

Irene goes into her bedroom and slams that door. There is silence, and then Irene hears John knocking at Sadie’s door and saying, “Sadie? Can I come in?”

A muffled “Yes.”

Irene sits on the edge of her bed, kneading her hands. What to do? Apologize? No. No. She is not the one who has done something wrong. That would be Sadie, who is now probably telling her father the whole story so that John can then absolve her of any responsibility whatsoever.

She goes into the hall and stands outside Sadie’s closed door. Knocks.

“Not right now, Mom,” Sadie says. “Please.”

She opens the door anyway, stands there.

“Mom.”

Sadie is lying on her bed, John sitting on the edge, his head down, his hands clasped between his knees. He won’t interfere, then; she can say what she wants.

“I’m going out,” she says. “I’m going for a walk. When I come back, I want you to tell me exactly what happened. I want you to tell me what’s going
on.
”

Sadie nods.

Irene looks at John; he nods, too.

Irene goes for her jacket and her purse. She has no idea how these bricks have all just fallen on her head.

But Sadie is safe. And so she goes out the door and down the stairs.

She walks briskly around the neighborhood for half an hour, seeing nothing, really, but losing some of the tension that was making her feel she might fly apart into a million pieces. She goes up enough steep inclines that her legs are aching when she returns, and she climbs the stairs to the flat with some difficulty. She lets herself in and hears Sadie and John in the kitchen.

She finds them at the banquette, eating the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches John prepared earlier. Irene pours herself a glass of milk, grabs a sandwich, and goes to stand beside her daughter. “Scootch over,” she says, and Sadie does.

Irene puts her sandwich and milk down, then puts her arms around Sadie, squeezes her.

“I just got jelly on your blouse,” Sadie says, and Irene says, “I don’t care.”

“I sort of can’t breathe,” Sadie says, and Irene lets go.

“Tell me,” she says. “Please.”

Sadie sighs. She looks over at John, and he moves his hands in a small but expansive way that seems to say, “You have to tell her, too.”

“I was waiting for Ron,” Sadie says. “We were going to take a driving trip up the coast.”

Irene has to clench her teeth to keep from saying,
“You told me you were going rock climbing!”
But then Sadie tells her about the car that pulled over, the man who took her, all he did, and Irene sits still, her head empty of anything but gratitude for the fact of her daughter, sitting here with her, alive. Three people; a family, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, half-drunk glasses of milk.

23

J
ohn awakens and for one second tries to think where he is. Then he remembers: Sadie missing. Sadie home. The relief at seeing her safe, the horror at realizing the extent of the danger she was in. The way he and Irene peppered her with questions after Ron left, and how all that seemed to do was shut her down, turn her more and more in to herself.

“She’s in shock,” Irene said, after Sadie had gone to bed and the two of them were sitting and talking in the kitchen. “She can’t talk about it now because she hasn’t even realized what happened—or might have.”

“I think she does realize that,” John said. “But for some reason, she’s not willing to talk to us about it.”

“But why would that
be
?” Irene asked, and her eyes were full of confusion and sorrow.

“She’s not ready,” John said. “Maybe we just have to give her time.” He did not add that he thought Irene’s questions were too loaded with her own emotions to give Sadie room to respond. He felt that Sadie was balancing a precarious load, but she was balancing it; it was not up to her parents to shout instructions from the sidelines. Rather it was up to them to let her know that she was loved, and supported, and safe. They had to let her know that they were here when she needed them, and they had to deal with
the fact that she might
not
need them, at least not in the ways they expected, or thought she should.

Just before Sadie went to bed, she told her parents that she had answered a million questions at the police station, that she didn’t want to talk about it anymore, it was done, it was over, she just wanted to forget about it now, and go on with her life.

“A life that includes a sudden
marriage
after having been
kidnapped
,” Irene said, and her voice held too much anger to get the response John thought she was hoping for.

Sadie turned to Irene and said, “I don’t
belong
to you, Mom! I am my own
person
. My life belongs to me, including everything that just happened to me. It’s mine to do with as I want or need to. Just back
off
!”

“Fine,” Irene said, when it was anything but.

John sat in silence with Irene for a while, then told her about an experience he had had when it had been his fault that a child was injured. When he was nine, he’d talked a playmate into riding his bicycle along a retaining wall, something John did often, despite the fact that he’d been told numerous times not to. When his friend, Paul, had tried it, he’d fallen and fractured his leg, which had never healed properly. “You know how long it took me to apologize?” John asked Irene. “Twenty years. Twenty
years
!”

“But … why?” Irene asked.

“I was so guilty,” John said. “The guy ended up with a million complications; he walked with a limp afterward, he couldn’t play sports anymore, other kids made fun of him, it was awful. I just didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to start the conversation. I ran into the guy at O’Gara’s one night. We were both drunk.
Then
I apologized.”

“It’s not the same,” Irene said.

“It’s the same in this way,” John said. “I had to wait until I was
ready to talk about something that was really hard to talk about. I think Sadie’s … Maybe she is in shock. But I think she’s a little embarrassed, too.”

“Embarrassed about what?” Irene asked. “She didn’t do anything!”

“She got into the car,” John reminded her.

Irene nodded. “Yeah. Remind me to yell at her about that.”

“You think she doesn’t
know
it was stupid?”

Irene said nothing, just sat there, rubbing her knuckle with her thumb. Finally, she said, “I’m losing her more every single day.” And then she went to bed.

He turns on the bedside lamp to check the time: 3:18; 5:18 in St. Paul. He closes his eyes again but then decides to get up. There’s no use trying to go back to sleep; whenever he awakens like this, he never can. He sits on the edge of the bed, wondering if he’d wake Irene if he went into the kitchen. He’s hungry. There’s a sandwich left over, lying on the counter. He can grab it and the milk carton without turning on the light or making much noise. There are chocolate chip cookies in the tall glass cookie jar, too; Irene always has cookies in the cookie jar, one of the things he liked about her.

He goes into the hall and pads silently down the bare wooden floor. When he passes Sadie’s bedroom, he hesitates, then quietly cracks her door. Her bedside light is on, but she is sound asleep, facing him, one pillow beneath her head, another held tightly against her. He looks at her bent knees, her tousled hair, the familiar, straight line of her eyebrows, her dark lashes below. He watches for the rise and fall of her chest just as he did when she first came home from the hospital.
Ah, Sadie
.

He starts to tiptoe in to turn out the light but then wonders if maybe she intentionally left it on. One of the things he asked her was if she still felt afraid, and she flatly denied it. Still.

He wishes she’d let him come to the trial; he’d like to see the man who caused his daughter such distress. Well, he’d like to murder the man who caused his daughter such distress, actually, and that’s one reason Sadie told John not to come: she didn’t want to have to worry about her father when she was trying to take care of herself. She wanted only Ron to come with her. John had seen Irene’s face when Sadie said that, and the message in it was perfectly clear:
We’ll see about that
. It was perfectly understandable that Irene would want to go with her daughter to the trial; in fact, John thinks she should, and hopes that Sadie changes her mind on this point. But if there is any lesson Irene and John are beginning to understand, it is this: Sadie is eighteen. She really can do what she wants, now.

In the living room, he is stealthily moving past the sofa bed when Irene sits up and gasps.

“It’s me,” he whispers, then adds, unnecessarily, “John.”

Silence, and then he can hear a muffled laugh.

“John Marsh,” he says. “Your ex?”

She turns on the light, blinks in the brightness. “What are you doing?”

“I’m hungry.”

“Oh. Want some nachos?”

“Yeah! Do you have some?”

“I’ll make some.”

“I don’t want to wake Sadie up. I’ll just get the leftover sandwich.”

“She never wakes up once she goes to sleep. And anyway, I threw that sandwich out.”

“Why?”
It used to make John crazy, the way Irene wasted perfectly good food. He’d put something in the fridge that he fully intended to eat later, and she’d throw it out. Over and over. He’d ask her where the sandwich or piece of pie or leftover pasta was;
she’d say it was rotten and she threw it out. He’d say no, it wasn’t rotten; she’d say yes, it was. Over and over and on and on. “I would have eaten that sandwich,” he says.

“Well, in full disclosure, I only threw it out after I took a bite. From each half. Plus I sucked the jelly out.” Irene sits up and reaches for the bathrobe at the foot of the bed, slips it on. “Anyway, nachos are better.”

He follows her into the kitchen, watches as she wraps an elastic around her hair to make a ponytail. Next, he knows, she will don a bib apron, then wash her hands. Irene, cooking. A pleasant memory. One of the few.