She heard more than I thought. “It’s just the same old,” I say.
“If only it were. Dr. Ricker warned me that this new discovery in the woods would rekindle the media’s interest in you. I didn’t want to do this during Girls’ Night, but that call makes it clear: we need to talk about how we’ll manage intrusions into our privacy.”
As if having reporters crouching in the bushes outside our house last fall, or setting blankets next to ours on the Tanglewood lawn last summer, was manageable. That’s the special talent of Gwen Spunk, biomedical engineer. MacArthur Genius Award winner at the tender age of thirty-five. Survivor of Having Your Child Abducted. Other moms pop Valium. Mine strategizes.
“Dr. Ricker advises a no-tolerance policy when it comes to the media,” she says. “I agree.”
“She mentioned that. I don’t see how local news reporters are the enemy. In fact, to hear Paula Papademetriou tell it, the police are the ones who screwed up by not watching Donald Jessup in the first place.”
“Dealing with reporters isn’t useful to your healing. In fact, quite the opposite.”
I consider pointing out that spending hours alone after school during torrential downpours is not useful to my healing. Instead, I grunt.
She sticks her index fingers into the ends of her eyes and stretches them into slits. “By the way, which reporter was it?”
“Ryan Lombardi,” I lie, tossing out a name less likely to ping Mom’s radar, since Paula was way aggressive last time around.
“Is Ryan a woman?”
“Ryan is a man.”
“That’s odd. I thought I heard a woman’s voice.”
“Nope.”
“Male or female, we aren’t letting a reporter ruin Girls’ Night,” she says.
Every night is Girls’ Night. From a medical perspective, Erik Meijer is my father, but that’s pretty much the extent of it. I’m not even supposed to know Erik was Mom’s sperm donor, but I figured it out around age ten, and since then it’s been a silent understanding among the three of us, along the lines of Santa Claus. I know the truth, Mom and Erik get that I know the truth, but talking about it would spoil the magic. My discovery is based on our identical looks (Erik is half-Japanese and half-Dutch, which for us translates into being tall, with blue almond-shaped eyes, oval faces, and pale skin, for me, with a dusting of freckles), and, more directly, the legal paperwork Mom keeps on the family desktop outlining said sperm donor’s parental rights (none). Keeping my knowledge on the down-low saves me from taking a stand if vague tensions erupt, as they inevitably do, when Mom feels Erik is overstepping. Despite all this unspoken weirdness, Erik’s always been devoted to Mom, especially when she didn’t get tenure, and apparently that’s some kind of learn-who-your-real-friends-are moment. It’s mutual, because when Erik was being wooed away from her lab by the big Ivy across the Charles River, Mom was beside herself until he rejected their offer.
How she resists an übersmart, ridiculously fit hottie who’s devoted to her and gave her his guys to produce a fabulous kid like me is another question entirely.
Mom circles behind me and reaches up to give my shoulders a gentle squeeze. “What’s in the oven? It smells like chicken.”
“Bingo.”
“Really lovely, Julia.”
I should admit it’s precooked supermarket rotisserie chicken, but she’s already yelling into the fridge. “Thanks for getting dinner going! The rain had traffic at a standstill! Did you know the Aberjona overflowed and they closed Main Street?”
“I notice rain, yes,” I say.
She produces a bruised onion triumphantly. “This should perk up the salad.”
I take the onion and set to work at the cutting board. The knife gets stuck in the mealy layers. “I don’t care that you were late,” I lie. It’s a fine line, wanting Mom around, but not wanting Mom around as much as in the Berkshires.
“I care.” She cups her hand over mine. “I’ll slice. You finish the salad.”
I drop the knife and move to the sink. Mom chatters about a dating epidemic among her latest crop of postdocs while I squint through the window. Somewhere in that purple darkness is an improbably gorgeous, rolling grass lawn. We are the last people in the world who should have a backyard, given that Mom spends most of her life under artificial light and I’m afraid of trees in any number. Yet there’s our backyard, a rarity in Shiverton, where grand colonials and Victorians are wedged into lots the size of postage stamps. We even have a deck and Adirondack chairs, price tags still tied to the legs.
The knife slices, onion to wood, chop, chop, chop, a solid noise that I should like, but it flicks at my belly.