She said, “Everyone spends their whole life looking for their daddy,” and I said that might be true, and she pulled me tight against her and said, “I don’t want to go home.”
I saw the clock on the stove, and knew I had to get to class. I wondered if she’d figured out her plans. But she rolled onto her back, breathing funny, and said that she wasn’t taking any helicopter in this weather. Then she told me Lily had called from sleepaway camp, and it was not the first time, either, in which she’d pleaded to come home. She’d said she was ashamed of the scars on her head, and her cabinmates were mean, although they’d voted her president of the Squirrel Den. Mike had insisted that Lily go away for camp, even though she was seven and had had emergency brain surgery in March, and had missed a month of school because she could barely walk. She hadn’t wanted to go, and had never spent a night away from home in her life without her mother. Mike knew almost nothing about his kid’s procedure, hadn’t been listening during the few doctor’s appointments he’d attended, but felt in his expertise that two weeks among strangers would be good for her, hiking, picking up survival skills, learning to water-ski, and, at the end of two weeks, running a 5K race. This seemed like a winning proposition to confirm her recovery and help her regain her self-confidence. It was sick, twisted, and evil. Amy felt powerless to protect her.
She also worried about the neurological stress tests Lily would be doing as soon as camp ended, to see if they needed to open up her skull again. Then she realized that with the next couple days free, she could drive up to New Hampshire, maybe later today, to surprise Lily, to bust her out and bring her home.
I was afraid to mention my own kids’ near-death experiences, afraid she’d unnerve me by attacking Robin or demand some gruesome detail. But when I did, she didn’t pry any further. My son had almost choked. My daughter was all cut up.
“You need to concentrate on them,” she said sadly. “You should go home.”
“No.” Anyway, I couldn’t. I had to teach my class and get paid. I mentioned the pit behind Curtis’s, and that idiot Brett, merging that other life with this one, a necessary and welcome violation, a doubling of my selves. I felt bigger, more enmeshed. I told her how grateful I was that it hadn’t been worse, that I didn’t have to drive nine hours to a hospital so that I could sit by the bed of my kid, and left it at that.
“But doesn’t it seem a little weird?” she said. “First Lily, then my wrist, and now your kids?”
“You think God is watching, making adjustments to our lives so we can experience the right amount of pain?”
“Don’t talk to me like that.”
I said, “If Lily hadn’t played soccer that day, she wouldn’t have ended up in the doctor’s office.” The puking and the fainting had led to tests and finally an MRI, which picked up a rare malformation, a weakness in the branch point of an artery under the brain. The room had quickly filled up with doctors who’d never seen it except in an autopsy. “What do you call that if it’s not good luck?”
Amy didn’t care what I said. She’d had plenty of good luck in her life, and look where it got her. Then, for no reason, we started frantically kissing and hugging. We did it again, sideways this time, spooning, another first in a series of firsts, just as good as the other ways, better maybe, but with more blood. It seemed the parts of us were smarter than the whole. Or dumber, much dumber. I felt sorry for those parts, worn and red and working away down there when all we wanted was to cry. I was sad, patient, and careful with her, but very connected, impossibly close, and as I got closer I could hear her breathing with me. This was undeniably an activity in which we both excelled. We came at the same moment, kablammo, which of course I’d read about in dirty magazines as a youth, and had imagined but never in my life experienced until that instant. I hadn’t even been sure such a thing was possible, though apparently it was, and showed the rare wonder of our compatibility, right down to the nerve endings, a sign of this instinctual trust. It was so good we started laughing, like scientists celebrating a discovery after an explosion blew up the lab, banging our heads on the ceiling, giggling when we did. I was late for breakfast, and jumped up and threw my clothes on and kissed her goodbye, “So long, kid,” like it was nothing, and had to run out the door with my shirt unbuttoned and my flip-flops flapping.
I stood in the rain, soaked in that remembering, blowing on my coffee, trying to restart the loop, rewinding and freezing images until the boy who worked in the main office banged a stick against a tent pipe to get everyone’s attention.
People knew him now and screamed his name in joyful mockery. Christopher! He wore a festive yellow slicker and black rubber boots. He announced changes in the day’s shuttle bus schedule, warning us that the clouds would soon be gone and the sun would return. Amy could hop into her car or chopper away in clear skies. More hooting. We were as a group undaunted by weather, awake and alert, as if this were the real world, the one we were born for, and not that other one of petty, groping, pasty drones who cowered all winter in the dark and cold. Boys and girls from the lacrosse camp ran across the far fields, helmets slung on their sticks. A seagull hovered over the garbage can as I moved to the toaster. I was exhausted, and the pain of my exhaustion forced me to move stiffly; I felt it in the sore muscles in my jaw and head.
“I love Mark,” said the girl on the other side of the buffet table.
“Who is, of course, a very good friend of Teddy’s,” the guy said.