“I said don’t say chicks!”
“Okay.” He rolled over to look at me. “Well, if I can’t say my guitar, and I can’t say chicks, I guess I’d have to say the weather.”
“I’m sorry. What?”
He shrugged. “The weather.”
“All kinds of weather?”
“Well, yeah. But that’s not what I’m talking about, exactly. I’m talking about, like, how it works. Energy and fronts and stuff. I know a lot about the weather, actually. I used to want to be a meteorologist when I was a little kid.”
“You did not.”
“I did.”
“You are full of surprises.”
“So they say.”
I reached over him and turned off the reading lamp. “Tell me about clouds.”
37
After
The last time I was in a hospital was when Hannah was born. She took twenty-one hours to come, my baby girl, and I spent the great majority of them crushing ice chips between my molars and cursing both God and man. I stared at the bland yellow walls of the maternity ward. I cried a little.
The time before that was the night Allie died.
“Why didn’t you have your cell phone?” Cade demands, before anything else. He looks unkempt, pacing like a lion across the waiting room. “I tried to call you a thousand times.”
“Stef met us at the house,” I say, shaking my head, trying to clear it. I hand Hannah off to Sawyer, his arms already outstretched. “What’s going on? How is he?”
“He’s having surgery. He had a heart attack.”
“I know,” I snap. “Stef said. What else?”
“They brought him upstairs a few minutes ago. It’s a triple bypass.”
“Is that dangerous?”
“No more dangerous than a heart attack,” my brother retorts, his face twisting meanly.
“You don’t have to be a shit about it.”
“You should have had your phone.”
“I left in a hurry.” A fresh wave of fear and dread rolls though me, remembering my dramatic exit. I can’t believe I talked to him that way, knowing that his heart is the way it is. “I was horrible to him at dinner. With Roger and Lydia. We got in a fight.” I can hardly get the words out. It feels like some cruel and unusual déjá vu for this to be happening and I try not to follow that train of thought to its inevitable conclusion, how Allie and I never got to make up before she—
“Jesus, Reena.” Cade shakes his head. “They’re here. They went to get coffee.” He glances over his shoulder at Soledad, who is as still as a dime-store Mary in a hard-backed plastic chair. Her shirt is limp and wrinkled. She looks a little like she’s died. I sit down next to her, dig through her purse for the rosary beads I know she keeps at the bottom. She runs them through her fist without looking up at me.
I glance around. Sawyer is standing near the door talking quietly to the baby, explaining the contents of a nasty-looking watercolor painting hanging on the wall there. “…the ocean,” I can hear him saying. “No swimming today.”
The wall is sponged shades of taupe and beige, linoleum speckled gray like a low-budget Pollock. The soda machine rumbles and glows. A young man with a towel wrapped around his hand sits next to a bored-looking woman in a halter top who’s playing on her cell phone: Besides us, they’re the only ones here. Slow day for emergencies, maybe.
I cross my legs, uncross them. It’s cold in here, uncomfortable, like the North Pole or a convenience store at two A.M. I think of the day Sawyer got here. I think of the night of Allie’s crash. Behind the desk, a receptionist is reading Glamour. I swallow.
Cade told me once that the night our mother died, our father sat in the pitch-dark of our old, cracking house and played piano until the dawn came up orange and dripping behind him. Scales, Cade told me. Scales and Mozart and Billy Joel and anything else he could think of, melodies made up out of the thin air that no one, including my father himself, could remember once morning finally broke.
I have no way to account for the historical accuracy of this particular legend. Lord knows my brother loves a good story, and he’s never lacked the imagination to craft one, but since the night I first heard it—whispered through the rain forest heat of our backyard years after it supposedly happened—I’ve believed on blind faith. There’s a picture of it in my head: my father, features glass-sharp with grief, back hunched and fingers flying over the black and white piano keys. A picture so clear that, for a long time, I was convinced that maybe I remembered, too.
Now when I think about it for any length of time, I realize it’s probably just a composite, some sloppy amalgam from all the other nights when I did wake up to find him at the glossy Steinway that sits in state near the window at our house. There were dozens upon dozens of those when I was a little girl: nights when I’d climb out of bed, woken by whatever heinous nightmare I’d been having, and creep barefoot and half-awake down the hall to sit at the bottom of the stairs and listen to my father play his music. With the right song, you understand, my father could atone for whatever sins had been committed against his baby daughter by the world at large. With the right song, I always thought with sleepy confidence as I leaned my dark head against the banister and closed my eyes, my father could set me free.
“Reena.”
I look up and realize that this isn’t the first time Sawyer has called my name—that he and Cade and Stef, who had followed in her car, are all looking at me, waiting. My ankle is jiggling wildly. I stop it. “What?” I ask, defensive.
“I’m going to take Hannah to get changed.”
I almost laugh. “Do you even know how to change a diaper?” I ask, and it comes out a lot nastier than I mean.
Sawyer smiles, half a second and gone. “I’ll figure it out.”
We wait. What they don’t tell you about hospitals, what they don’t show you on TV shows about well-scrubbed doctors and the patients whose lives they save is how long everything takes. Roger and Lydia return with two cardboard trays full of iced coffees. I take one and say thanks. Stef gets food from the cafeteria. Sawyer walks Hannah around. I can hear Soledad muttering in Spanish: “Dios te salve, Maria …”
When the receptionist finishes with the Glamour and drops it on the counter, I walk over and pick it up, skim it to find out what girls with more money, less belly fat, and healthy fathers are wearing this season. I can hear the clock ticking, steady.
It’s hours before anyone comes to talk to us, close to midnight by the time a scruffy, tired-looking doctor in rimless glasses makes his way into the waiting room to let us know that, in fact, he has nothing to report. There have been some complications, he says vaguely; there’s nothing he can tell us other than that. They’ll be with my father until the morning, machines beeping and cold hands inside his chest cavity. We should all go home.
“I’ll stay,” Cade says immediately, shaking his head like a mule. “You should take off,” he tells Stef. “Reena, you should go, too.”
I prickle. “If you’re staying, I’m staying.”
He raises an eyebrow at me. “What about Hannah?” He’s a bossy bastard sometimes, my brother, but he’s practical as all get-out.
I glance at Sawyer. Am I desperate enough to let him take her from me? I’m trying to think quickly now, but Soledad gets up out of her chair: As if someone has plugged in her power cord, she’s back in action, taking charge. “Don’t be stubborn, Reena,” she tells me. “Take the baby home.”
“I’ll take her,” Sawyer volunteers.
“Don’t talk about me like I’m not here,” I snap. “I’m right here.”
He shrugs, all innocence. “I know you are.”
“Go,” says Soledad. “I love you. Put the baby to bed.” Before I can react either way, she’s got her arms around me, squeezing tight. “Reena,” she continues softly, and it occurs to me that one day was never meant to hold so much. “Say a prayer.”
*
Back at home I slam the car door in the drivewa
y, the sound of it strangely startling. Wind chimes tinkle on the porch. In the trees, crickets and cicadas are rubbing their lazy legs together. “What a racket,” Sawyer whispers to Hannah as he retrieves her from her car seat. We’ve been quiet on the ride back, one of only a handful of times I’ve ever been in a car with Sawyer without the stereo on. The sudden noise, natural or not, is startling.
He walks me to my door, hesitates as I dig my keys from the depths of Hannah’s diaper bag. She’s fully awake now, chattering nonsense syllables at the top of her voice. I get the door unlocked and Sawyer hands her off to me. So many fathers and daughters tonight.
“So,” he says, standing on my porch with his hands in his pockets. I am half in my house and half out of it. “How you doing?”
I shrug, encumbered by my girl and the bag but mostly by the sudden and complete fatigue swallowing my whole body, like my skin is full of sand. “Okay. Tired.”
Sawyer’s not satisfied. He doesn’t move. “What else?”
“I don’t know.” Something I can’t name. “Out of my mind, maybe.” Everything is so heavy and I feel suddenly, ridiculously, like I am going to burst out laughing in his face in one more second, and then:
“Do you need me to stay?” he asks, at the same time I say,
“Do you want to just stay?”
Where the hell did that come from? I do not want to go into this house by myself, is where it came from, but I’m not quite sure I want to go into it with Sawyer, either. “I’m probably okay,” I say, but Sawyer interrupts.
“I’d sleep on the couch.”
“No, yeah, totally,” I say, fumbling all over myself. “Of course.”
I’m not sure if that was agreement, but Sawyer takes it that way. “Okay,” he says slowly. “So … I’ll stay.”
I blink. “Okay.” I hold the screen door so he can get inside and let it slam behind me, dump the diaper bag at the bottom of the stairs with an unceremonious thud. The first thing I do is turn off the AC: I absolutely, one hundred percent cannot bear one more breath of recycled air.
I take Hannah with me, balancing her on my hip and flinging open window after window one-handed, letting the outside in. I have gotten very good, this past year and a half, at doing things one-handed.
“Hey,” he says, coming up behind me in the dining room. “Need help?”
“Couldn’t breathe.” Maybe that’s the truth, actually, now that I think about it. Maybe I haven’t had a decent amount of air in my lungs since before dinner. Could be I’m brain-damaged, oxygen-deprived.
“Let’s get this lady to bed,” Sawyer suggests. I nod, willing to follow for now, and get Hannah changed and into the crib without much comment. “Down for the count,” Sawyer says, rubbing a fast hand over his bristly head, when she’s been breathing deeply for a few moments.
“Nicely done.” I sink down into the rocker, exhausted.
“Go put your pajamas on,” Sawyer says, noticing how tired I am. I probably look like garbage, though I can’t exactly bring myself to care. “Are you hungry?”
I shake my head. “I ate, like, three packs of M&Ms while we were waiting,” I tell him, accepting the hand he offers to help me to my feet.
“I know,” Sawyer says. He closes the door to the nursery behind him as we step into the hallway, leaving it open a crack so that a sliver of light falls onto the gray carpet inside. “I watched you. You’re an impressive woman. You want real dinner, though?”
“Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Well, since you feel so strongly about it.” He grins. “I’ll run downstairs and see what’s in the fridge. You go take your clothes off.”
“Shut up.” I pad down the hallway to my room and change, hastily rebraid my hair. By the time I make it down the stairs, Sawyer has warmed leftovers from tonight’s dinner—Stef must have cleaned up while she was waiting for us, and there are several neat Tupperware containers stacked on the counter. Sawyer’s tuned Soledad’s little radio to the university station, and Billie Holiday croons about her bad, bad man.
“Wanna get tanked?” he asks, poking his head out from behind the fridge door. He is holding out a bottle of white wine.
I raise my eyebrows. “I thought you don’t drink anymore.”
“I don’t. But that doesn’t mean you can’t.”
“No thanks.” I hop up onto the counter as he replaces it. “Did you go to a program?”
“Hmm?”
“To quit drinking.”
“Oh. No. I just kind of stopped.”
“Wow.”
“I wasn’t an alcoholic. I was just stupid.” He shrugs elegantly. “The Oxy, though, that I needed a little help with. What?” he asks, of my presumably gobsmacked expression. He nods as he eats a forkful of rice out of one of the containers. “I went for, like, a month in Tucson.”
I blink. “Before or after the farm?”
“Before.” He glances at me, amused. “Is it so hard to believe?”
“That you went to rehab? Kind of.”
Sawyer shrugs. “Don’t spread it around, okay? Don’t want people to think I’ve lost my edge.” He smiles, looks out the window at the shadowy yard. “But it was good. I had quite the habit when I left here, kiddo.”
No kidding. I think of the not-aspirin in Sawyer’s shoe the first night we were together, of Animal and Lauren Werner and the low-slung stucco house. I think of how it felt to lose him, slow and painful and confusing, and how it felt to wonder if I’d ever really had him at all. “Yeah,” I say slowly. “I remember.”
We’re quiet for a minute, the both of us. Finally I clear my throat. “Do your parents know?” I ask him, my voice sounding loud in the empty kitchen. “That you went?”
“Nope.” He shakes his head. He took his ridiculous tie off at some point, dress shirt unbuttoned at the collar and sleeves rolled halfway up to his elbows. “Nobody does. I mean,” he amends. “You do, now.”
I think about that for a minute. “I wish you’d said something.”
“Really?” He looks interested.
“Yeah,” I reply, smiling a little. “I might have hated you a little less.”
Sawyer grins back. “Probably not.”
“Well, no, probably not.” I pick a bit at the food on my plate. “But it couldn’t have been easy.”
“I mean, it didn’t tickle.” Sawyer shrugs. “They had a twenty-four-hour Slurpee machine, though.”
Aha. I wrinkle my nose. “There’s that lightbulb,” I say, feeling sort of embarrassed and not entirely sure why. There’s still so much about him I don’t know. “Cheaper than booze.”
“Cheaper than a lot of things,” he tells me, and we sink into silence after that. Still, I’m glad he’s here. I’ve relaxed: My heartbeat has timed itself to the rhythm of the music coming from the radio, syrupy slow, and that realization is all it takes to send me into a fresh panic. I sent my father to the hospital today. I humiliated my family. I’m a mess, miserably and in public, in so many senses of the word.
“Hey,” Sawyer says. “Cut it out.”
I blink. “Cut what out?”
“You didn’t give your dad a heart attack.”
“What?” For one crazy moment I think he’s actually read my mind, but Sawyer just shrugs.
“That’s what you were doing, right?” he asks. “Kicking the shit out of yourself for speaking up for once in your life?”
I consider denial, decide it’s worthless. “Among other things.”
“Well, cut it out. Look,” he says. “You know I love your father like he is my father. I know he freaking hates me now, and that’s fine, but he was never anything but good to me when I was a kid, and I don’t hold it against him. But I know how he works. And I know how it must have been for you. Everything you said to him tonight?” Sawyer shakes his head. “He more than had it coming.”
“Maybe.”
“No maybe,” he says. He steps forward, right into my personal space. My breath hitches a little. “I’m tell
ing you the truth.”
There’s a lean—oh God, there is definitely a lean here, so close I can see the amber flecks in his green eyes—but in the end I jump down off the counter, evading. This day has gone on for years, and I don’t need one more dangerous thing.
“I think I’m going to try bed,” I tell him, putting a safe amount of space between us, the clean expanse of kitchen tile. “Want me to get you set up on the couch?”
Sawyer raises one dark eyebrow. “I think I can manage.”
“Okay then.” We load our plates into the dishwasher. I give the counters a perfunctory wipe. The moon washes in through the window, silver-pale.
38
Before
It wasn’t long after the night he snuck into my house that Sawyer started taking me to parties on the outskirts of Hollywood—crowded affairs in rented bungalows far from the shoreline, thirty-racks of Bud Light in the fridge. “We’ll just stop by for a minute,” he always said before we got there, but in the end a minute usually took an hour or more. He held my hand at first, introduced me to a friend of Animal’s or a girl who’d graduated from my high school a year or two ago, before he drifted away, promising me he’d be right back, always, that he just had to talk to this guy really quick, take care of this one thing.
“Unless you want to …,” he always began, then trailed off, leaving me to fill in the blanks on my own: unless I wanted to relax, finally, to let go of my mad grab for control and be, finally, finally, like everyone else. To pull off my armor. To make him happy. Unless you want to.
I didn’t want to, was the problem, and so I sat on the counter in any number of kitchens, drinking warm beer out of a red plastic cup and watching the minutes go by on the digital clock on the microwave, hoping no one said anything to me as they moved through the room, and wishing I was home watching reruns with Soledad. My stepmother believed in dinner parties and barbecues at dusk, events that required invitations and drinks with stirs and a glass jug full of daises on the counter. “Reena, sweetheart,” she would have said, if she had known how I was spending my nights, “this is not what we do.”