43
The following day was overcast but very warm, and Louis was sweating heavily by the time he had checked Rachel's and Ellie's baggage through and gotten their tickets out of the computer. He supposed just being able to keep busy was something of a gift, and he felt only a small, aching comparison to the last time he had put his family on a plane to Chicago, at Thanksgiving. Ellie seemed distant and a trifle odd. Several times that morning Louis had looked up and seen an expression of peculiar speculation on her face.
Conspirator's complex working overtime, boyo, he told himself. She said nothing when told they were all going to Chicago, she and Mommy first, perhaps for the whole summer, and only went on eating her breakfast (Cocoa Bears). After breakfast she went silently upstairs and got into the dress and shoes Rachel had laid out for her. She had brought the picture of her pulling Gage on her sled to the airport with her, and she sat calmly in one of the plastic contour seats in the lower lobby while Louis stood in line for their tickets and the loudspeaker blared intelligence of arriving and departing flights.
Mr. and Mrs. Goldman showed up forty minutes before flight time. Irwin Goldman was natty (and apparently sweatless) in a cashmere topcoat in spite of the sixty-degree temperatures; he went over to the Avis desk to check his car in while Dory Goldman sat with Rachel and Effie.
Louis and Goldman joined the others at the same time. Louis was a bit afraid that there might be a reprise of the my son, my son playlet, but he was spared.
Goldman contented himself with a rather limp handshake and a muttered hello. The quick, embarrassed glance he afforded his son-in-law confirmed the certainty Louis had awakened with this morning: the man must have been drunk.
They went upstairs on the escalator and sat in the boarding lounge, not talking much. Dory Goldman thumbed nervously at her copy of an Erica Jong novel but did not open it. She kept glancing, a little nervously, at the picture Ellie was holding.
Louis asked his daughter if she would like to walk over to the bookstore with him and pick out something to read on the plane.
Ellie had been looking at him in that speculative way again. Louis didn't like it. It made him nervous.
"Will you be good at Grandma and Grandda's?" he asked her as they walked over.
"Yes," she said. "Daddy, will the truant officer get me? Andy Pasioca says there's a truant officer and he gets school skippers."
"Don't you worry about the truant officer," he said. "I'll take care of the school, and you can start again in the fall with no trouble."
"I hope I'll be okay in the fall," Ellie said. "I never was in a grade before.
Only kindergarten. I don't know what kids do in grades. Homework, probably."
"You'll be fine."
"Daddy, are you still pissed off at Grandda?"
He gaped at her. "Why in the world would you think I was that I didn't like your grandda, Effie?"
She shrugged as if the topic held no particular interest for her. "When you talk about him, you always look pissed off."
"Ellie, that's vulgar."
"Sorry."
She gave him that strange, fey look and then drifted off to look at the racks of kid books-Mercer Meyer and Maurice Sendak and Richard Scarry and Beatrix Potter and that famous old standby, Dr. Seuss. How do they find this stuff out? Or do they just know? How much does Ellie know? How's it affecting her? Ellie, what's behind that pale little face? Pissed off at him-Christ!
"Can I have these, Daddy?" She was holding out a Dr. Seuss and a book Louis hadn't seen since his own childhood-the story of Little Black Sambo and how the tigers had gotten his clothes one fine day.
I thought they'd made that one an unbook, Louis thought, bemused.
"Yes," he said, and they stood in a short line at the cash register. "Your grandda and I like each other fine," he said and thought again of his mother's story of how when a woman really wanted a baby, she "found" one. He remembered his own foolish promises to himself that he would never lie to his own children.
Over the last few days he had developed into quite a promising liar, he felt, but he would not let himself think about it now.
"Oh," she said and fell silent.
Chapter 6
"Never mind. I'll call them right now... if that's what you really want."
"It is," he said, and the words seemed to echo in his mind with an iron clang.
"It might even be best... for Ellie." She looked at him with her red-rimmed eyes, still slightly glazed from Valium. "You look feverish, Louis. As if you might be coming down with something."