Tuesday Night Miracles (7 page)

Kit can’t help herself. “You can tell my selfish, controlling brothers that they can kiss my ass!” she shouts into the phone. “I’m sure I have legal rights when it comes to this. An—”

“Excuse me, but you’re yelling,” the attorney says, cutting her off.

“No kidding, brain box!” she yells again, and then slams her phone shut.

Kit is immediately embarrassed. Why does she do that? It’s as if she’s forgotten to be normal, forgiving, light. She staggers back to the table, sits down, picks up the letter from Dr. Bayer, and violently rips it open. It begins the same way as Grace’s letter but does not end that way at all:

Next week, instead of class as a group your assignment is to attend a comedy club by yourself. You must go alone, go early, stay for the entire show, and work hard to enjoy yourself. Try and keep track of how many times you laugh. You have a week to complete this task, and you must tell me what you did, how you felt, and send me an email by one week from today. The next class details will follow once I have your assignment
.

Sincerely
,

Dr. Bayer
.

Kit reads the letter three times in total disbelief. Is this doctor nuts? A comedy club? Then she puts the letter down and looks around to make certain she’s alive, in her house, and actually reading an assignment from her anger-class doctor.

“This Dr. Bayer woman must have fallen and hit her head!” she says, unable to keep herself from laughing. “This proves she was a hippie. Drugs! It must have been the drugs.”

9

The Red Dot

J
ane is already halfway through her bottle of California Zinfandel and making believe the envelope from class doesn’t exist.

Her kitchen is almost as quiet as Kit’s, yet so very different. Kit’s eat-in kitchen, with its cracked tiled floor, fading brown-and-yellow Formica countertops, and simple white appliances, appears to have gotten stuck in the 1970s. Jane’s kitchen is to the far side of modern.

The entire left wall, facing a huge open living-room area, is actually one of the most unique wine racks in Chicago. Jane made sure it was featured in three real-estate magazines. Instead of a wall between the kitchen and dining area, Jane had the designers build in the transparent handblown glass wine rack. It also houses an extensive French, California, and South American wine collection that Jane is drinking away one bottle at a time every single night of the week.

Kit would call the whole damn thing sterile. The stainless-steel appliances are top-of-the-line. The Kohler sink looks more like an indoor fountain than a place to wash out dirty wineglasses. The spotless floor is made of bamboo, and the recessed lighting makes the entire room look more like a museum than a friendly, warm hangout.

The rest of the house has the same attitude. The long entryway hall is a solid mass of snow-white tile that looks as if it’s never felt the pressure of feet dancing across its surface. The cathedral ceilings are stunning, capped in dark hand-polished wood, but they make the large living room and the formal dining room seem cold and uninviting.

The upstairs, a glimmering mass of steel bedroom furniture, includes a master walk-in closet that is as big as many downtown Chicago apartments, and the last time the beautifully appointed guest suite had visitors was so long ago the gold towels have dust on them.

Jane’s very last guest was her college roommate, who had kept in touch sporadically and then, almost a year ago, called to say she was in town.

“Ask her to come for dinner and spend the night,” Derrick had mouthed while she was on the phone.

Jane invited her, and the entire evening was a disaster. Her soon-to-be ex-friend had become a high-powered attorney who was in town for a huge corporate-compensation battle. She looked fabulous, had a fabulous job, two fabulous children, a fabulous husband she apparently adored, and Jane could absolutely not stand the fabulous competition.

She started picking on the woman as if she were a piece of lint. She couldn’t believe she didn’t like the same wine. Why had she cut her hair?
Have you thought of letting your hair grow again? Remember the time I stole your boyfriend?

Derrick told her later when they went to bed that he wasn’t just embarrassed but mortified. “You don’t belong to a book club, there are no friends stopping by, invitations from anyone to go out for drinks, no weekend getaways to Lake Geneva,” he pointed out. “Keep this up and you’ll be more of a snob than you already are.”

Jane knew that Derrick wished she’d had siblings and different parents, but he had known what he was getting into when he married her. When the college roommate slinked off to bed early and then left before they even got up, Jane caught him fingering the guest towels that had never been touched.

Her lack of an extended family might also explain why there are very few personal items in the entire house. No family portraits in the hall. No old college keepsakes hanging on the door that leads to the garage. Not one mismatched pair of shoes or slippers thrown carelessly against the fireplace along the full wall in the living room.

It’s as if the house had never really been lived in.

And in an honest moment, which is becoming rarer and rarer, Jane would admit that the silence, the coldness, the aloneness is sometimes suffocating. Why is it so hard for her to admit anything emotional? Why can’t she reach out and touch someone, speak gently, admit her myriad failings, her weaknesses, the longings that parade inside of her but dare not surface? Why?

She is pushing a crystal wineglass from one hand to the other, and trying very hard to pace herself in between sips. The envelope is glaring at her as if it has eyes. She drank three-fourths of the bottle before she went to her anger-management class and is now less than half a glass away from finishing the entire bottle. And she wants to keep drinking.

Drinking is what occupies at least five, if not seven, nights of her week. The high-end real-estate market, even in Chicago, is a very small world, and once you nearly kill a broker with your shoe it’s hard to get new listings.

Gone are the late-afternoon strategy sessions at all the best restaurants. Gone are new listings. Gone are the phone calls from other agents tapping into you for your cast-off listings. Gone are the lovely, sophisticated, well-connected, and filthy-rich clients whom you could parade through all the lakefront mansions.

Things were bad enough when the economy did a belly flop, but after word of Jane’s attack on the broker got out, her professional world skidded to a halt as if it had hit a brick wall.

As if
.

As if no one else would have flipped if they had worked for three months to close a deal only to have the rotten broker cancel it because of “potential” funding discrepancies.

As if a multimillion-dollar deal came along every single day of the week and clients like this would appear again anytime soon.

As if there were
any
clients beating down doors to snap up property that was still so expensive even the discount prices were scaring people away.

As if Jane Castoria had something else—even one other thing—to do besides work constantly, ignore the fact that her ovaries were about to turn into rocks that would never produce a baby for her relentless husband, and scare away the few remaining people who actually might consider her a friend.

A friend. One single friend. A woman who might now be waiting for her in the living room with nothing but pure and generous intentions.

Thank God she has alternative plans. Won’t the world be surprised when she puts all the pieces together.

Jane finally lifts the spicy fruit-driven wine to her lips and drains the last of it. Then she immediately looks up at the wine rack to see how much longer she can get away with drinking every night. The bottles, especially on the red side, are getting dangerously low. And there is no money from her account coming in to replace them.

Not that Derrick would notice. It’s as if she has the plague because of this little problem with the court system. Derrick has suddenly gotten very busy at his engineering firm. Jane sees this as a mixed blessing. If something miraculous happens and she starts to get busy again, he won’t miss her. Also when he’s busy like this he seems to forget how much he wants to be a father.

If Jane had a dollar for every time he’s talked about kids, begged her to go back for more tests, talked about adoption, or rattled on about his nieces and nephews, Jane would be able to restock her wine rack for the next few months.

“Forty-two-year-old women are having babies all over the place,” he often reminds her. “Anything is possible.”

For a few moments, Jane drops both of her hands to her lap and presses her fingers above where her stomach ends and where she is certain her dormant uterus sits like a useless weight. A baby would fit right there, riding between her hips, growing little fingers and toes, and twirling like a fish in the sea. She would feel it move one day, see a heartbeat, wait for the tiny ball of energy to push itself out into the world, where she would be the first person to look into its eyes.

I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care
.

Jane presses harder each time she lies to herself, until she almost bruises her skin.

“Babies,” she says mockingly, closing her eyes. “All everyone talks about is babies.”

Her so-called friends have made her physically ill with their baby showers and photographs. Who cares about new teeth and first steps and the way a baby changes your life so drastically you quit your job, downsize so you can still pay your bills, and disrupt every relationship you ever had?

Who cares if your husband looks at you as if he hates you when you tell him you don’t give a goddamn if you ever have kids? And you are not, absolutely not, going to have one more exam or do the test-tube thing!

Who cares if your own unemotional mother thinks something is wrong with you, if you refuse to even get a puppy, if you’ve drawn a line around your heart that has a huge
NO TRESPASSING
sign on it?

Who cares if you beat the shit out of that guy and now you have to go to a dumb class with one woman who looks like an Avon lady and another one who looks as if she’s on furlough from her street gang?

Who cares if the cotton queen in charge can make you roll over and speak if she wants to, and holds a very important key to the rest of your professional and personal life?

Who cares if this whole anger mess has given you a nervous twitch that makes your left shoulder move forward involuntarily at awkward moments?

Jane pushes herself away from the slick granite island where she has been sitting and turns toward the refrigerator. The shiny surface is like a mirror. She can see the outline of her tight curls, the way her high cheekbones push against the corners of her eyes, the almost invisible tiny white scar above her left eyebrow from a bicycle accident when she was ten years old.

Ten years old when she started to wonder who she really was, because she didn’t look like her mother or her father. Ten years old when she started keeping secrets and discovering things a little girl should never have to know, or worry about simply because she’s adopted.

Jane raises her hand to the scar, an imperfection that reminds her how much she has to lose if certain people find out about her wild outburst. After all, women like her aren’t allowed to have an outburst in public.

Her mother made sure of that, always talking about the perfect this and the perfect that, and how a woman had a responsibility to set the stage, always be ready, prepare for her purpose in life, which meant both a fabulous, high-powered career and a family. You can have it all, her mother said constantly, while her father smiled in the background and waved his hand as if on cue.

Many times Jane has imagined a conversation of total honesty with her mother, a mother who has also cared for her, tried what was probably her best even if it was based on a 1950s
Good Housekeeping
article about preparing for your husband’s nightly arrival from work.
Make certain you have reapplied your makeup. Clean up the house so he can relax. Make certain the children are amused so as not to bother him. Always prepare him a drink—remember he had a very hard day at work while you were at home
.

Even with all that, Jane would love to put her head on her mother’s lap, feel the coolness of her hand stroking her face, and tell her about the dark ache in her heart. Jane remembers the few times that happened as if they have been seared into her memory.

Her mother would call her over to the couch and pat the side of her leg almost as if she were calling a pet over for some affection. “Come,” she would say, and Jane would run.

Her mother would hum a little bit and Jane would lie there, afraid to move, afraid to breathe, afraid to say a word, because her mother might remember that she was there on her lap and shoo her away.

Sometimes they talked.

“How was school, little Jane?”

“Good, Mother. I was a good girl, and the math teacher told me I have a gift.”

“Wonderful. You must keep at it. Work harder. Always work harder.”

“I try very hard, Mother.” Jane knew what to say. It had to be just right. And her mother was always a mother, not a mom, a mommy, a mum—absolutely nothing but
mother
.

“Someday you will be very glad you worked so hard,” her mother said, pushing her own hair back behind her ears.

“Yes, Mother. Thank you so much.”

Jane can recall even now what her mother smelled like. She wore the heavily scented perfume Tabu, and often Jane could smell her coming. It was like a scented invisible wave. When she set her head on her lap, she could feel the warmth of her mother’s legs rising slowly into her shoulders and then her neck. When her mother touched her face, it was as if a feather were dusting her cheeks or an angel kissing her face with the tip of its wings.

One of Jane’s deep secrets is that she goes to this place when she’s sad and weary. Sometimes she actually lies down on the couch with her head on a pillow and imagines her mother there, the old clock on the mantel ticking, the refrigerator kicking in, her mother’s deep sighs, her own heart beating as if she had just run a race.

When Derrick isn’t home, she sometimes talks to her mother in a way she can’t talk to her face-to-face or even on the phone.

“Oh, Mother, I’m so tired. Tired of trying to be perfect, trying to have babies.”

Then she will wait a moment, making up a reply that is usually filled with affirmation, before she continues.