Signs and Wonders (21 page)

But this was not enough, and they both knew it. So she put Phoebe down, turned on the baby monitor, and said she was going out for
milk. They didn’t need milk, but he wouldn’t check. He would grab, eagerly, at the chance to be alone with Phoebe for a little while, to prove himself a doting father.

She headed to Dilrod’s hotel, a corporate Sheraton fifteen minutes away. He should’ve been upstairs packing but was in the bar, just as she’d suspected. Dilrod’s drinking would only get worse, she knew, and the marriages, one after another, would fray just like his clothes, then fall apart. Either that or he’d find a woman who liked drinking with him, and then they would fray from the inside. This was his future.

“Hey,” she said, sitting down next to him.

“Look who it is,” said Dilrod. His tone snaked with menace. She hadn’t realized, until this moment, that he probably hated her; that he probably thought she was responsible for making Stefan different, less fun, more into weird movies and guilted-out about strip clubs. The idea hardly surprised her; she’d just never bothered to consider things from his point of view before.

She caught the bartender’s eye and ordered a vodka tonic.

Dilrod said, “Mama’s stepping out.”

“Everybody needs a break once in a while,” she said with careful neutrality.

Dilrod smiled mirthlessly. “I’m sure Phoebe will understand.”

“There’s frozen breast milk as a backup at home,” she said, and immediately knew she’d said the wrong thing; upright and defensive was the wrong tone. Then she added, “So how was it?”

“How was what?”

“Last night. With the girls.”

“Oh, my God. I’m going to need another drink. Did you come here to attack me too? Pussy-whipping your husband isn’t enough?”

She thought of Stefan at home, bent over the baby in his lap. He liked to sing her the ABC song. He read her
Goodnight Moon
every single evening. “That’s not it,” she said steadily. “I’m just … curious.” And into the pause left after this remark she said, “Don’t tell Stefan.” She was a fake too, but Dilrod didn’t know it.

He lifted an eyebrow and turned toward her on his stool. “I don’t believe you,” he said, though she knew he wanted to. It was more interesting, more fun, to be drunk with his old friend’s wife in the bar of the Sheraton, and she’d come out after him because he represented something different and more exciting than what she had at home. This, she thought, was a story he’d live off for years.

“Fine,” she said, carefully matching her tone to his. “Don’t believe me.”

They finished their drinks and ordered seconds, or whatever number Dilrod was on. She felt wasted, and her cheeks were flaming; this was more alcohol than she’d had in ages. Dilrod was telling her about one of the girls from last night, her huge ass and her nipple rings—trying to shock her, as if she’d never heard of nipple rings before.

“I just wanted to grab her ass, you know?” Dilrod was saying. “It’s like a primal thing that comes over a man. You see it, you want to touch it, and then you gotta pay for it. People who run those places are fucking geniuses. And the women—don’t ever let anybody tell you otherwise, they’re
in charge.
The men are like little children, begging and pleading. The women have
everything.
”

He went on like this, but she stopped listening. She was just staring at him and wondering how much longer she could stay. She loved Stefan, and Stefan—for whatever reason, it didn’t matter—loved Dilrod. Useless to explain these choices, their dark
and permanent importance, the way they could rule you forever.
You are what you like,
she thought, and put her hand on his knee.

Dilrod’s response was both sloppy and mechanical. He leaned over and kissed her, wetly, his lips grabbing at hers like some separate animal. She held the kiss long enough to confirm its reality. As they sat there, mouths attached, her breasts began to leak. At home, she knew, her baby was crying.

She persuaded him to come back with her to make up with Stefan. It wasn’t hard. He was glad to have kissed her, but also guilty about it—the guilt inextricable from the gladness. He would never tell Stefan; not telling was his thing.

She held his hand as she drew him through the doorway. Stefan stood up to greet them, and she saw him take it all in, everything she presented to him, as if on a tray: her smeared lipstick, her blouse stained with milk, Dilrod drunk and sloppy, with a secret smile.

“Look who I found,” she said, her voice a little breathless.

From the other room Phoebe, perhaps hearing her, let loose a demon wail. As she went to tend to the baby she could feel her husband’s eyes on her, following her every move.

There were three of them in the car that night: Lauren, Samantha, and that boy he’d never liked, the one he’d pegged as a bad influence. The first time the kid showed up at the house, his eyes were bloodshot, his hair wet; clearly he was fresh from the shower, deodorant and shaving cream wafting off of him, and this made Mike wonder what smells he’d had to wash away. He was good-looking enough, square-jawed and blond, and Lauren sprinted out to him like a stone from a slingshot. Mike sauntered over, leaning heavily over the driver-side window, partly to get a look at him and partly to remind him that the pretty girl in his car had a father—not just any father, but a former college football player, a man who could cast a shadow, someone who’d come looking if anything went wrong.

“I’ll have her home by eleven, sir,” the kid said, so polite that Mike wanted to reach in and shake him.
Do you think I’m an idiot? That I was never seventeen?
But Lauren had her seat belt on, her green eyes glowing with please-don’t-embarrass-me fury. So he patted the roof of the car and let them go. And he did have her
back by eleven, Lauren smiling at him where he was watching TV, yawning as she headed safely up to bed.

These were the scenes he replayed in his mind at night. The dentist had given him a mouth guard because he was grinding his teeth. He lay on his back with a mouth full of plastic, sweating into the sheets. The dentist said it would help with his headaches, and he supposed it did. But it also made a clacking noise that Diana couldn’t stand. She was sleeping in the spare room now.

Sunday morning he woke and showered, the house quiet, Diana at church. He’d never gone with her except at Christmas, and once Lauren turned thirteen they didn’t make her go, either. Heading to the hospital he stopped, as had become his habit these past months, at Samantha’s house. She and Lauren had been friends since the second grade. They’d played on the same soccer team, slept at each other’s houses, spent hours on the phone talking through teenage melodramas. He’d taught them both in his middle-school science class, relieved they were good students. Eighteen, and starting at Drexel in the fall, Sam was a stocky blond girl with bright blue eyes obscured by too-long bangs. She slid in beside him, wearing a tank top and jean shorts, and buckled her seat belt without saying anything. Her nose and shoulders were sunburned. As usual, they didn’t talk.

Lauren’s room was down a dim hallway that smelled musty no matter what the weather was like. The nurses nodded at them. Lauren’s skin was pale, her dark hair in a ponytail, her green eyes cloudy. Taking a seat, he read her a chapter of Harry Potter as Sam sat outside. After a while she came in, and he went to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee. When he came back, he saw that she’d fitted
her iPod headphones over Lauren’s ears and was staring at her intently.

Lauren had always liked music. Her favorite song was “Here Comes the Sun,” and every time he heard it his eyes filled with tears.

If she liked what Sam played for her, she didn’t show it. The nurses nodded at them when they left.

On the drive home, they chatted a little. Curiously, when he parked in front of Sam’s house, they sometimes talked for five minutes or more, the girl suddenly bubbly, as if the fact that she’d soon be getting out of the car, or that their errand was over, relaxed her.

“So a couple summers ago Mr. Harad was giving out free passes to soccer teams?” she said today. “Like for ice cream cones or whatever? And these kids just started bringing in these old passes, saying they’d forgotten about them. So we had to give them all this free ice cream, tons and tons of it. But then he figured out the passes were fake.”

“He must’ve been mad,” Mike said.

“Steam was
literally
coming out of his ears,” Sam said. “He was screaming at these ten-year-olds, ‘You use computers to cheat! Computers are to learn!’ ”

“I wish,” Mike said drily.

“No kidding,” Sam said, then opened the door, got out, and waved at him exuberantly, even though they were only a few feet apart.

At home Diana was making Sunday brunch, which they ate while reading separate sections of the newspaper. She used to tell him about the day’s sermon, until she realized he wasn’t listening. He couldn’t help it; he just tuned out. She’d grown up in the Moravian church, whereas his childhood Sundays in Ohio were
devoted to football games on TV. By now they had a truce on the subject. When he was finished clearing the plates and loading the dishwasher, he found Diana on the couch in the living room, not doing anything, just sitting. She was thin and dark haired, as was Lauren. She sewed quilts and gardened and coached Lauren’s old softball team—all that on top of working twenty hours a week in the school-board office.

She glanced up and saw him in the doorway. “Come here,” she said.

They sat together on the couch, Diana’s legs flung over his, her head against his shoulder. After a while he turned on the TV and they watched the end of a John Wayne movie. Diana fell asleep holding his hand.

Summers he generally spent fixing up the house, lucky to have learned these skills from his dad, a contractor. This year he was redoing the bathroom on the first floor. One day he and Diana were at Home Depot picking out fixtures when suddenly she grabbed him and pulled him into the next aisle, flattening him against a rack of lamps, pressing against him.

He could smell her shampoo and feel her hummingbird heartbeat against his chest. A chandelier dug into his back. “What are you doing?” he said, laughing.

She shushed him, lowering her face, and he put his arms around her, wondering if she was upset about the bathroom. But they’d planned the renovation even when they thought Lauren would soon be off to college; they needed it for when family came to visit. When Diana finally released him, her eyes were dry, her cheeks flushed. “Sorry,” she said, “it’s the Kents.”

Gazing over her shoulder, he saw Sam’s parents browsing through the lawn mowers. They were kind, smart people, both doctors. After the accident they’d come by regularly, bringing food and flowers, eyes soft with pity, but Diana had stopped returning their calls. “It just makes me feel worse,” she’d said. This was why he didn’t tell her that he took their daughter with him to the hospital every Sunday. It was the only secret he kept from her.

They hid in the lighting aisle until the Kents were gone.

The following Sunday, he picked Sam up again, read to Lauren, and drove Sam home. In front of her house, she said, “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“When I go away to college …” Her voice drifted off.

She had a scab on her right knee, like a younger child, and she’d been picking at it; it looked angry and infected, blood oozing out. If she were Lauren, he’d be on her case about it. He waited for her to go on.

She looked vacantly out the window and said, “Should I, like, write to Lauren?”

Gripping the steering wheel, he turned away. They’d never once talked about the accident or how they felt about it. It was what had made their Sundays so comfortable. When he spoke, he was surprised by how unsteady his voice was. “It’s up to you,” he said. Carefully, then, he brought his voice under control, adopting his teacher’s tone. “If it would make you feel good, then I don’t see why not. I could read the letters to her.”

She blew out a puff of air, spraying her bangs out to the side. “It’s just weird, like we said we’d keep in touch, so I feel like I
should, but I don’t really think she can hear me. And even if she could, wouldn’t she be pissed? That I’m going to college and she’s not?”

“I don’t think she would,” Mike said. The truth was in the car between them: that Lauren didn’t have the faculty for anger, that college meant nothing to her now. The thought sank him. It was like going down in an elevator into a dark, cool basement so deep beneath the earth that you might forget you could ever come back up. Forget that you’d ever seen the sun. When he was in that place, Diana said he was unreachable. Lost. So far away, in fact, that he didn’t notice at first that Samantha was crying, sniffling bubbles of snot that she wiped away with the back of her hand. He wished Diana were here; she’d have handed her a tissue and given her a hug. He patted the girl’s shoulder awkwardly. “It’s okay,” he said.

“I feel like it’s all my fault,” the girl said.

“It’s not,” he said, then paused. “Right?”

The events leading up to the accident had always been mysterious. Sam, who’d been sitting in the back, was the only one who’d come out of it intact. The boy died at the scene. At first, the doctors said that Lauren would be all right, that they could relieve the pressure on her brain. Later, they’d changed their minds.