Real Life & Liars (19 page)

KATYA THINKS
,
DON’T HURT THE CHILDREN
,
AND SHE’S NOT SURE
if that’s a plea to God or a reminder to herself not to crush or smother them in her clutches. She’s grateful for Charles’s strong arm around her, though she knows how useless that would be if a twister ripped the house apart and exposed them to the ruthless sky.

What about that mattress that Dad dragged down here?

Too late. A crash echoes through the earth surrounding their cellar hiding place. Someone screams, and she can’t tell, maybe she did it herself, even. She squinches her eyes shut and grips her family, maybe if she holds tight enough they can all blow away together…

Then it’s not so loud. The wind is still present, but only blowing instead of roaring. The lightning has stopped its mad flickering.

For a moment Katya thinks she’s still drunk, and only dreamed it all. But she looks up and sees the ashen faces of her family in the
light from the lantern, all doing the same thing, cautiously uncurling from their instinctive fetal positions, still gripping their loved ones, unwilling to relax yet.

“I think it’s OK,” says Darius, his warm, firm voice a balm to Katya’s shaky fear. “I don’t think it hit us.”

“Is it really?” Reenie’s voice sounds so small.

“I’ll go look.”

“I don’t know if that’s wise.” This from her father, who has released Mira long enough to fiddle with the radio. Still just static.

Sirens in the distance. They all look to Darius, and, wordlessly, he steps past them and walks up the steps.

Irina looks bereft without him, and she scoots toward Van, who offers his hand.

Other than the sirens, the quiet is scarier than the noise. It might be still raining, the cellar is too far removed to really tell, but it’s definitely not the driven, pounding, drowning rain that it’s been all evening.

Darius’s footfalls move through the whole house, and he comes down the stairs without anyone else saying a word.

“Hard to tell because the power’s still out,” he says, “and it’s still too cloudy to get much moon. But the house seems intact. No broken windows. Couldn’t see outside too well, so I don’t know how your neighbors did.”

“Oh. Patty…” Mira peels herself off the floor and makes an unsteady path for the stairs. Max rises to follow. “Don’t go outside, honey, just look through the window.”

He turns back to the rest of the family. “I’ll grab pillows and things. I’d like us to stay down here. We don’t know for sure that it’s over.”

No one argues. For once.

Katya and the rest start looking over the cellar, picking out places to sleep. She suggests that Irina and Darius be given the mattress, given her condition. Kat expects a nasty look from Irina
over the term “condition,” but Reenie only stares at her belly, her hand touching it all around, as if feeling for damage.

Katya knows that feeling so well. She remembers falling on the ice when she was pregnant with Tay. Chip had darted out ahead of her into some store’s parking lot, and she shouted after him to stop while trying to rush as much as her girth would allow. She never saw the ice or even felt the falling, she was just instantly on her back. She remembered the gasp from the surrounding shoppers, though only one person stepped forward to help her up while the rest simply gawked. Chip was too little to understand why Katya was crying when she yelled at him for running ahead.

A store security guard helped her to the car, and she squeezed Chip’s hand so hard he whined about it. Once he was in his car seat, Katya settled behind the wheel, she picked up her bulky car phone, and dialed the doctor’s office.

She cried the whole way there, cried in the exam room, and continued crying even after the ultrasound showed Taylor bobbing and weaving in the amniotic fluid, oblivious to all the drama.

So, although Irina’s stomach didn’t suffer one iota of trauma, she understands down to her marrow.

Mira comes back down the stairs, loaded with blankets. Max follows behind with stacks of blankets and some old musty sleeping bags, and a few flashlights balanced on top of the pile.

He hands out flashlights to all of them, saying he doesn’t think lighting the candles and going to sleep would be safe, so they prop up the flashlights as best they can to get situated, and ignore the spidery dust of the basement. Bartleby keeps mewling at the door until someone brings down her food bowl and litter box. She won’t have it, and finally Mira reluctantly puts them back where they belong upstairs, leaving the kitchen door slightly ajar. Trusting kitty instinct that she’ll come back down if the storm returns.

Katya makes a nest for her family along one wall. Chip insists
on his own island of blankets, but otherwise, they all pile in together. She notes with some surprise that Irina and Darius have not zipped their sleeping bags together—as her parents always did on camping trips—but have lain side by side, a pall over both of them.

Of course there should be a pall, thinks Katya as she snuggles into Charles’s side to make more room for Taylor. Mira is dying and letting herself go.

Why should someone with such self-conscious verve and spirit want to die? She should be wearing irreverent T-shirts that say
SCREW CANCER
or something, and replacing her luminous silver hair with funky hats and bandanas until it grows back. She could crack jokes about prosthetic boobs, flirt with the doctors.

And of course she doesn’t want her mother to die. Especially if her marriage goes under, and she loses herself. Especially if her kids turn to drugs and lose every opportunity she worked so hard to give them.

She still needs her mother. What is so wrong with that?

Katya feels herself drifting off, relieved she doesn’t yet have to go upstairs to face whatever devastation awaits them.

IVAN IS STARTLED TO SEE JENNY’S SLEEPING FACE JUST INCHES FROM
his. For a moment he thinks they’re in his apartment, and they’ve made love.

Then his eyes focus, and he remembers the cellar, the storm, rescuing Jenny from the side of the road.

She said she loved him.

Ivan sits up, and his joints screech and grind at having slept on three centimeters of sleeping bag over hard cement floor. Flashlight beams still glow through the basement, but the lantern has burned out. Or someone put it out. He glances around and seems to be the only one awake. He turns away from Darius’s long arm draped over Irina’s waist.

Van takes the stairs a few at a time, lightly as he can, stepping around the squeaky spots. He nudges open the kitchen door to find Bartleby mewing accusingly.

He blinks against the sunlight. It rushes in, so bright it feels tangible, like he’s swimming in it.

Van thinks of writing a song called “Swimming in Light.”

The windows are dappled with raindrops, which look like jewels in the dawn. But there are leaves too close to the house. The view outside is not what it should be.

Van steps through the screened-in porch and opens the back door.

“Oh, God.”

The first thing he sees is Katya’s Escalade, smashed by the southern neighbor’s tree. It’s gone U-shaped, as if it were a toy, and a spiteful boy has taken a bat to it. The leaves and branches of the felled tree rise two stories into the air. Even on its side, the tree is magnificent.

He trots down the driveway, though he’s barefoot, and the drive is soaking wet. His bare feet splash in little puddles here and there.

He glances south down the street and sags with relief. The houses are still intact. Porches are smashed, shutters ripped off and dangling, lawn furniture all over the street and scattered in random yards. Some windows are broken by limbs jutting into upstairs bedrooms, but no one’s house did a Wizard of Oz.

Van can see other people doing the same. Stumbling out into the daylight, surveying the damage.

He turns to face the north, to check out Patty’s house and the exterior of his parents’ home, and what he sees makes him sit right down in the driveway, right into a puddle.

The Big Tree. The maple, taller than the house, a century old, is felled. Van feels a stitch in his chest and holds his breath to keep from breaking down. It’s only a stupid tree, anyway. They’re all safe…

But seeing that giant splayed out like that…It stretches all
the way across Dixon Avenue, its leaves brushing the porch of the house across the street.

The roots have ripped up nearly the whole front lawn. They make up a massive labyrinth taller than two men, clumped with mud. The mass of tangled wood dangles in the air, useless. Dying already. The crater they’ve left is vast. Van knows that the morning light will crash into the house unfiltered by fluttering green.

“Oh, wow.”

Van turns to see Jenny on the porch. She’s wearing his mother’s old purple tie-dye dress, is wrapped in a sweater, and she has stepped into his own shoes. She looks like a girl playing dress-up.

She was talking about Katya’s truck, but then she follows Van’s gaze to the Big Tree.

“Oh, no. That was such a beautiful tree.” As she approaches, Van stands up and wipes the grit off his pants.

“Thank God it fell across the street, though. Can you imagine if it had fallen the other way?” Van shivers, imagining that massive trunk slicing through the kitchen, the upper boughs tearing into his old bedroom.

“Maybe we can blame my car in the yard on wind. The tornado blew it there.”

“Except tornadoes don’t leave tire marks in the turf.”

Jenny pulls the sweater more tightly around her. That’s when Van notices the cool breeze raising goose bumps on his arms. He’s still wearing his undershirt and suit pants, having never gotten around to changing clothes.

The silence grows bigger than casual, and Van tugs on his earlobe.

Jenny squints up at him in the morning light. He can see her freckles. “Look, I’m sorry about what I said last night.”

“You didn’t mean it?”

She looks down briefly at her tiny feet in his shoes. “I meant it. But it didn’t need to be said.”

Van notices that she looks so small, all shrunken down and hunched over. Virtually unrecognizable compared to the firecracker of a girl that he’s known for years.

She says, “But I don’t expect you to do anything about it. I don’t even know why I said it, except that…Well, it’s been getting harder not to say it.”

Van steps closer, looking down at her quizzically.

“Promise me something,” she says, brushing her hair out of her eyes. “It’s OK if we’re never more than friends, or even if it’s too weird to be friends now, I’ll get over it. I won’t die. But you have to date better girls.”

“Better?” He thinks back to stunning Barbara.

“Yes, better. I’m not talking about selfish cover models like whatsherface. Not girls who treat you like shit or girls who don’t take the time to get to know you before writing you off as a weirdo. Date nice girls. Even if they’re quiet, even if they’re a little weird themselves.”

“I do the best I can, Jenny.” Van folds his arms, uncomprehending how bad treatment at the hands of other people is his own fault.

She laughs. “That’s just the point! You don’t do the best you can. You very deliberately, for as long as I’ve known you, do everything
but
the best you can.”

“That’s uncalled for.”

“It’s true. Your songwriting for example.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“You’re not really trying to be successful. You’re not doing what you know you have to do.”

Van steps back from her, warily, as if from a friendly dog that has suddenly begun to growl. “I liked it better when you didn’t love me if this is how you show it.”

Their attention is drawn away by shouting from the house. They look back, and it’s Katya standing on the porch, her hands on her head, shouting, “No! Oh, no…”

But she’s not looking at her smashed car. She’s looking at the front of the house and the ruined Big Tree.

She starts to jog down the driveway, then winces and stops, walking hurriedly instead.

“Oh,” she says again as she reaches Jenny and Van. Jenny steps to the side, turning her eyes away. Van reaches around his sister’s shoulders and looks in her eyes. Katya’s eyes shine with tears. “It’s stupid to be upset with everything going on, but…I loved that damn tree.”

“I know. What a weekend. Irina brings home a new husband, then this huge storm.” Van decides not to bring it up, but there was also that remark last night from his niece about Chip reeking like pot. As soon as she said it, Van realized, oh yeah, I thought I smelled something…He catches a whiff of it on his students now and then. Katya’s son was doing drugs? Here?

Katya gasps, putting a hand to her mouth. “You don’t know, do you?”

“Know what?” Van asks. “What else is there to know?”

At the sound of the screen door to the porch slamming, Van and the girls look up to see Mira on the porch, clutching her purple bathrobe up around her neck.

IRINA RUBS HER EYES AND TURNS TO LOOK FOR DARIUS. GONE,
and she sighs with relief. The sound of running feet filters into the cellar, which is now lit by a slice of light coming in from the kitchen.

She follows the noise, nearly tripping over the hem of her mother’s old dress.

Katya comes flying back into the house, her eyes red. “Where’s my sketchbook?”

“Your what? What’s wrong?”

“Go look outside.”

She steps to the back porch and breathes in fresh morning, astounded at how good the air feels reaching into the deepest pockets of her lungs, but shocked at the sight of Katya’s SUV smashed by the neighbor’s tree.

Just like Katya to be freaking out over a stupid car, when their
mother is dying and her kids are smoking pot and they could all have been sucked into the sky by a twister.

She turns the other way and grasps the doorframe for support: The big maple in the front is down, having ripped a chasm in the yard. Some official-looking men in hard hats with lights on them are circling the tree, which is straight across the road.

Why did Katya want her old sketchbook anyway?

Irina sees Van, Jenny, and her mother deep in conversation and hangs back from walking out into the driveway. It hits her that no one told Van about the cancer, since he wasn’t home for the big revelation. She wonders how he’ll react, gloomy as he always is even on the best of days. He won’t take it well.

Who can be expected to take it well?

She glances around, listening to the silence in the house. Must be no power, yet, or someone would have the TV on, listening for news reports.

Katya trots past her again, still in her pajamas but now wearing her sneakers, too, carrying her old sketchbook and a pencil. She parks herself on the wet grass right in front of the old tree, puts the pad on her lap, and starts going at it with the pencil. Her hands skate over the page nimbly, her left hand pushing locks of hair behind her head as she keeps checking the tree and going back to the page. After a few moments she turns the spiral bound pages and starts anew.

She looks like a crazy person.

Irina sees Van hugging their mother. Jenny stands to the side, both hands over her mouth in the manner of shocked bystanders. So, now they know.

Irina wanders back into the house, suddenly famished. She sticks her head into the refrigerator, but it’s mostly bare, and anyway, she’s letting the cold air out in a power outage. Instead, she hops up on the counter and helps herself to an orange from the fruit bowl.

She gets orange rind under her nails as she shreds the peel. It’s strangely satisfactory, and even after she gets the peel off, dropping it in the sink next to her, she goes to work on the tiny stringy bits.

It’s like their mother has clocked out of being a mother. Distracted and unavailable as Mira was during Irina’s own childhood, she really can’t imagine her mother would just let herself die if she still had a child living at home.

Irina peels the orange in half, then sections it out, lining up the other sections on the counter.

Maybe Mira has been counting the days until retirement as a mom, that when Irina turned nineteen and moved out, Mira threw herself a party and thought, I’m free!

Irina does mental math, and calculates she’ll be forty when the baby is nineteen. That’s not so old, really. Some women are just having babies then. She could start over, recapture her youthful life.

The orange is biting and refreshing, like a cold dip in the water.

Then again…nineteen years. In her head, she hears a fearsome judge with an echoing voice pronounce her sentence, and she feels like weeping. Nineteen years, for one broken condom? Unfair! Call the ACLU!

Irina stuffs another orange slice into her mouth and wonders if she’s gone completely loopy.

The last person she wants to see comes in the back door.

“Hey.”

“Hi.”

“How are you feeling?” Darius remains distant. He’s asking in the same detached voice he used when he talked about the storm last night. His eyes are shuttered against her; she can’t see what he’s thinking.

“I’m hungry, but I’m eating, so I’m fine.”

Silly bitch.
Irina would have preferred more heat and anger. His coolness is frustrating and more than a little spooky.

He takes a few steps closer, but remains more than an arm’s length away. “I just went for a walk. Power’s still out, and downtown’s a mess. Boats are tipped all over the place out there, smashed up pretty good, too. There’ll be some pretty pissed off rich folk today.”

Irina snorts. “They’re insured. They’ll buy newer boats.”

“How are you doing about, well, your mother?”

Irina can’t finish the orange. Her stomach roils suddenly, and the pleasant tang turns to acid in her throat. She gulps. “About like you’d think. Um, excuse me…”

She dashes past him and up the stairs. The bathroom is still dim. The only light is the soft morning creeping in around the window shade.

She lifts the toilet seat and the medicinal, sterile water sets her off.

She hears no footsteps behind her. Darius has not pursued her. Katya is still freaking out over the tree.

Her mother has not come to help her.