Who Do You Love (37 page)

Rachel and Andy

2015

T
he telephone rang, jolting me out of a dream about college, where I'd signed up for a class that I hated but had forgotten to go to the registrar's to drop, and now it was the day of the final and I hadn't even bought the books. Next to me was Delaney, who'd fallen asleep in what she called “the big bed” wearing nothing but a rhinestone tiara and a pair of Hello Kitty underpants, with Moochie, the little terrier we'd adopted for her birthday, asleep in the crook of her arm.

“Hello?”

“Rachel?” I sat up, with the last shreds of the dream evaporating.

“Brenda? What's wrong?”

“Nothing's wrong,” she said indignantly. “Jesus. If I hadn't known you for so long I'd be insulted.”

“Well, it is . . .” I glanced at the clock, preparing to scold her for how early she'd called, except it was almost nine, which was a long way from ridiculous. “Saturday!” I finally remembered.

“I know it's Saturday. But I just got off the phone with Dante, and he wants me to come up for parents' weekend, except I already told Laurel that I'd babysit for her, and also . . .” Her voice took on a familiar, good-natured wheedling tone. “That's a long-ass bus ride up there.”

“That it is.” With the phone against my ear I slipped out of bed. Moochie opened one eye, considered her options, then recurled herself and went back to sleep. I walked downstairs in my white cotton nightgown, which covered me right down to my toes and had pockets. Now that I was officially man-less, I could wear whatever I wanted to bed, and cover up anything that I didn't feel like shaving or waxing. “But it's a pretty drive, especially when the leaves are changing.”

“Don't give me ‘pretty drive,' ” Brenda said. “Isn't there some kind of fund for poor single mothers whose kids got into Ivy League colleges, and they want to go visit them, only they don't want to take the bus?”

“I believe we call that fund ‘my credit card.' ” I used my shoulder to keep the phone in place while I started a pot of coffee, put four slices of bread into the toaster, and wondered, again, whether it was time to repaint the first floor. I'd done the bedroom over the summer, going from the light blue that Jay had chosen to a creamy ivory, with new curtains and a new bedspread to match. New pillows, on which he'd never slept, and new sheets. Bit by bit, I was reclaiming the house for myself and the girls, turning it into an increasingly girlie little nest.

While Brenda complained about Laurel's lax attitude toward her children—“She lets them drink that energy stuff, where it says right on the can it's not for kids!”—I emptied the dishwasher and looked at the calendar. Delaney had a birthday party that afternoon. Adele had a makeup oboe lesson, and then, as was all too commonly the case, nothing. Maybe I'd take Adele out for dim sum and then to the library, and then we'd pick up Delaney and grab something to cook for dinner.

“So listen.” Brenda paused in her litany of complaints. “What if,” she said, then stopped.

After over a decade on the job, I knew the steps to this dance. “What if what?”

“What if, just for example, if you knew that a mom with little kids was doing something bad, but you didn't want to, you know, tell anyone about it because they'd start a file on her and she'd lose her babies.”

“What would I do?” I asked. “What do you mean by
something ba
d
? Are the kids in danger?” She was talking about Laurel, I thought, and there was already a file on Laurel, one that had been started after she'd told her pediatrician that she gave her three-year-old daughter, Olivia, a Tylenol PM so she'd stop getting up in the middle of the night.

Brenda sighed. “It's my daughter,” she said. “My baby, you know? I don't want to get her in any trouble. I love her, and I know that the way she turned out is 'cause I wasn't around enough and I wasn't the best mom myself.”

“I know how much you love her, but I know you love Olivia and Tyler, too.”

Brenda sighed. “When I was over there last night I saw stuff in her bathroom.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Needles.”

Shit. Shit shit shit. Laurel had been through rehab three times already, and had been clean for almost six months.

“It's that boyfriend,” Brenda said. “That Jason. Maybe it's his stuff. He's a bad influence, I've been telling Laurel that he is. Maybe they're his needles.”

“Do you think she's using?”

Silence.

“Do you think the kids are safe?”

Silence, and then another sigh. “Maybe I could just take them for a while. I've got an empty room, with Dante away. Maybe it's just a slip, and I can call her therapist and some of her friends, and she can get it together and I'll watch the babies.”

While we worked out a plan for Laurel and Olivia and Marcus, Moochie traipsed down the stairs, with Delaney behind her, both of them probably drawn by the scent of toast. Upstairs, I heard the shower go on. Ever since she'd turned ten, Adele, who'd always been fastidiously neat, had gotten even more neurotic about possibly smelling bad and was bathing twice a day.

“Can I have bacon?” Delaney wore a long-sleeved white shirt with a pink star in the center and capri-length polka-­dotted pink leggings, an ensemble that would be joined by slip-on sneakers covered in multicolored sparkly sequins.
Understated
was not a word you'd apply to my little one's sense of style.

I pointed at the refrigerator, then at the cupboard. Delaney took the bacon out of the fridge, then rummaged for the frying pan. When I pointed to the table she frowned and pointed upstairs, letting me know that it was Adele's turn to set, but when I pointed again, she gave a noisy, Jay-influenced sigh and started pulling out place mats and napkins. I was just hanging up and starting to boil a pot of water for poached eggs when Adele came downstairs in her bathrobe with an angry expression and her hair full of suds.

“The showerhead fell off,” she said, and pulled it out of her pocket to show me.

“Oh, shit.”

“Language!” said Delaney, through a mouthful of toast.

“Okay, you go rinse off in my shower, and then I've got a quick call to make after breakfast, so I need both of you to walk the dog and be ready to go by ten. There's a present for Maria Cristina in the closet, Delaney. You just need to wrap it. Adele, help your sister.”

“Don't I always?” grumbled Adele, who was turning the corner from the charming path of girlhood to the freeway of adolescence. She gave me a withering look, dropped the shower­head on the counter, and stalked back up the stairs.

Okay, I thought, as I scrolled through my phone, looking for the number for Laurel's therapist. I could take Adele to her lesson, run to the home-goods store, buy another showerhead and maybe even get someone to explain to me how to install it, before picking up Adele and taking Delaney to her party. And if that didn't work I'd call a plumber. “Thirty minutes!” I called. The water boiled, the coffee dripped, the bacon spat in the pan, and the house was warm, full of good smells and comfortable couches and music and two relatively happy girls.
All will be well,
I told myself, and dashed upstairs to take a shower of my own.

•••

Two hours later, after dropping off a sulky Adele, appeasing Delaney with a package of Jolly Ranchers, and getting lost twice, I found a parking spot at Wallen Home Goods and carried the amputated showerhead inside. I peered at the signs, thinking that I'd need to get my eyes checked soon, and led Delaney through paint and toward plumbing. “Ooh!” she said, spying the strips of paint chips in their revolving displays. “Can I take some?” she asked as she spun one of the racks to the pinks and purples.

“Just a few. We have to hurry.” I watched as she considered each strip, sounding out the names of the colors. “Come on, cookie,” I said, and she sighed, filling her hands and following me deeper into the store. In the plumbing section I cornered a tall, pimply kid in a Wallen shirt.

“Excuse me,” I said, pulling the showerhead out of my purse. “This fell off. Do I need a whole new one, or is there a way to put it back on?”

“Let me find someone who knows,” he squawked, and practically ran down the aisle.

Delaney sighed. “This is boring,” she said, staring at the wall of bathroom fixtures.

“Someday I will tell you about the week I spent building houses.”

She eyed me with a mixture of skepticism and respect. “You built houses?”

“I surely did.”

A plumbing specialist arrived, and we discussed my situation, eventually choosing a new showerhead and the tools I could use to try to install it. The clerk also gave me the number of a reliable plumber. I suspected I'd be calling him before long.

“Delaney!” I turned around, but she was gone. Shit. I looked at my phone and dialed Adele's oboe instructor while jogging back to the paint section. “Hi, Marcia, I'm running a little late. . . . She's got a book, right? Just tell her I'm on my
way.”

Marcia said that Adele was fine and could fill the extra time by practicing. Delaney wasn't in the paint aisle. “Excuse me,” I called, raising my voice so the shoppers could hear me in the huge, echoing store. “Has anyone seen a little girl with curly hair? Pink and white shirt, sparkly sneakers?” People shook their heads as the PA system crackled, and I heard, “Would Rachel Pearl Kravitz please come to the service desk up front?”

Smiling, I raced to the front of the store. Delaney's middle name was Pearl, so, of course, she'd assumed that mine was, too. I saw my daughter perched on the counter, her paint samples fanned out in her hand, talking intently to a man with close-cropped dark curls.

“Mommy!” she squealed. I saw that somehow she'd also glommed on to a balloon and a Hershey bar. “I got lost!”

“I'm so sorry, honey. I turned around and you weren't there, and I was so worried!”

She handed me her pile of paint chips and hopped nimbly to the ground. “A lady asked if I was lost and took me up here, and this man says I can have a free sample of any color paint I want! And I can take it home and paint it on my wall and if I don't like how it looks, then I can come back and get another one and it is also free! And look what he made me!” She opened her palm and showed me the letter D, made out of a straightened and rebent paper clip. “D for Delaney! And I can keep it! Can I have the candy bar?”

“No more candy, and we don't have time right now, but . . .” My voice died in my throat as the man turned and I could see him. The manager. The paper-clip man.

“Andy.”

“Rachel,” he said. “I didn't know your married name.”

“Oh, she isn't married,” Delaney said smartly. “We are divorced. That means Mommy and Daddy don't live together anymore, they live three subway stops apart, and in my daddy's house I have to share a room with my big sister.”

He kept looking at me, his dark eyes, his smile, all of it so familiar, so welcoming. “Andy,” I said again, in a voice that I could barely hear.

Delaney frowned. “His name tag says An-DREW.”

“Andy is a nickname,” he told her. He was looking at me, and I felt like I was going to faint. My heart was beating so hard I felt myself shaking.

“Honey, can you go wait for Mommy on that bench right there?”

“Can I have the Hershey bar?”

“Yes.”

Delaney skipped away with her prize before I could change my mind. Andy came out from around the desk and stood close enough to touch me. When I'd known him he'd always been in motion, but now he was still, motionless, waiting.

“I should have known,” he said. “She looks just like you.”

I put my hands on the desk, turning away. I couldn't look at him. I was so sad, so mad at him, and my heart was in my throat, and I had so many questions:
Why didn't you come for me?
and
How did you live through what happened?
and
Who are you? Who are you now?

Instead, I pulled the showerhead out of my purse. “It broke,” I said, and then I started to cry.

“Then I'll fix it,” he said.

“I missed you,” I said. “I thought you'd come back for me, but you didn't.”

“I should have,” he said. “I wanted to, so many times, but I thought you didn't want me, and then I made such a mess out of everything.”

“So now you're here?” I tried to make myself look at him. He was bigger than he'd been as a runner, that almost scary whippet-lean look gone. He looked like a man now, broad-shouldered and solid, with a nametag that said “Manager” and glasses with gold rims.

“Now I'm here,” he confirmed. I looked at his hands. No rings. He was close enough for me to feel the warmth from his body, to smell his familiar smell, and I realized, as he touched my cheek, then my hair, that I had never stopped hoping for this, not in all the years we'd been apart.

My phone buzzed. WHERE R U? Adele had texted, and I knew that if I didn't leave soon Delaney would be late for her party. “I have to go,” I said. My voice sounded gaspy. “I'm late . . . I have to . . .” The showerhead and the paint samples I'd been holding spilled onto the floor. I bent down, still crying, not knowing what I was doing, with no idea of what I wanted to happen next.

Andy put his hands on my shoulders and pulled me gently to my feet. “Do you remember the night we met? Do you remember what I asked you?”

I nodded, thinking of why I'd gone down to the emergency room that night, how I'd meant to collect a story for Alice, and how, if it was a good one, she'd answer my question and tell me what I needed to know.
Will it hurt?

“You asked me, ‘Does it hurt?' ” I told him, crying harder. I'd lived long enough now to know the answer.
It hurts more than you think you can stand,
I would tell our little-girl and little-boy selves, two children lost in different dark woods,
and no one escapes it
. . .
but it's going to be better than you can believe.