Twelve
“Freddie kicked me out,” Anne says when I meet her in the hallway, halfway between her room and her sister’s. “What’s up with that?”
I want to tell her what’s up with that is her father’s empathy deficit, but instead I tell her to help Malcolm with the dishes and go down the hall myself. The sight in my daughter’s bedroom stops me short.
Freddie is packing a suitcase.
It’s the old green one, the hard-shell Samsonite that O.J. used to kick around on television, the one Malcolm and I took on our honeymoon to Bermuda. I don’t know where Freddie even found it.
Her room, usually arranged with the help of a T square, has morphed into a disaster zone. Think New Orleans after Katrina. A few patches of shag carpet peek out through gaps in underwear, jeans, hair scrunchies, winter socks, and almost everything else that used to live in a drawer or a closet or a hamper. I’m ready to call in FEMA.
“Freddie?” I say, careful to keep my voice steady. “What are you doing?”
As if I need to ask.
She sits on the floor and starts a process of unfolding and refolding, getting the creases in pants’ legs exactly right, measuring the distance between T-shirt sleeves until she’s satisfied they’re symmetrical. All the while, she’s rocking to some inaudible rhythm. It isn’t really inaudible; there’s music going on inside Freddie’s head, in a dark space I can’t quite reach. The best thing when she’s like this is to sit down across from her.
So I do that. And I start rocking, matching her time, being a mirror image metronome of Freddie. After a few minutes, she’s back with me, back in the now.
“I bombed,” she says in a flat monotone.
“You can’t know that, honey.”
Someone knows it, though. While we gorged on Chinese food in our dining room, a machine, or a bank of machines, in the Department of Education tallied thousands of scores. Qs are being adjusted at this very moment, matched with student ID numbers. Soon, phones and tablets will start pinging. Some families will celebrate. Others will be shopping for new uniforms over the weekend. Still others will make last-minute plans to visit relatives, pack favorite items of clothing in old suitcases, spend their last Sunday together in tears.
This is all supposed to be good for the children. Good for the families. Good for society.
I lean over and wrap her in my arms. She’s wooden. I feel like I’m holding a doll.
“Come on,” I say. “Let’s go have some ice cream.”
This elicits a crack of a smile, and Freddie’s eyes shine. Good. Somewhere underneath that stiff exterior, there’s still my little girl.
“Chocolate?” she says.
“Sure. And vanilla and strawberry and cookie dough. Anything you want, honey.”
The thing I love best in the world happens next: Freddie’s crack of a smile turns into a grin.
Then all the phones start pinging.
Thirteen
I’m okay.
I’m okay I’m okay I’m okay I’m okay.
If I say it enough, it’ll be true, right?
Malcolm and Anne are in the den, eating ice cream. Well, Malcolm is eating nonfat organic frozen yogurt sweetened with Splenda while Anne devours celebratory spoonful after spoonful of rocky road mixed with strawberry. Neither of them knows what I know.
The problem, I think, is that I’ve got a husband who’s so intensely wrapped in his überintelligence bubble that imagining any world outside that cocoon is impossible. The idea of failure in our family doesn’t enter into Malcolm’s equations of reality, and Anne lives in the kind of blissful oblivion that only teenagers can live in.
This is about to change.
“Malcolm,” I say quietly.
He looks up, and I don’t need to say another word.
I want to, though. I want to say a million words, all beginning with F and ending with UCK.
“Impossible,” says Malcolm.
Possibilities are only measurable before an outcome, I think, but I don’t say anything, only hand him my phone with the message from the Department of Education and wait while he reads. It doesn’t take long—the department is ruthlessly parsimonious in its alerts. Child’s name, child’s ID number, child’s current tier, and a single, life-altering number: 7.9.
“It’s a mistake,” he says, getting up from the sofa. “I’ll sort it out.”
“You do that,” I say.
He’s on the phone in five seconds, talks for another half minute. Toward the end, the only words he says are monosyllables like “Oh,” “Right,” “Okay.”
My glance shifts from him, to the hallway leading toward Freddie’s room, and back to Malcolm. He’s the same as when I met him over twenty-five years ago. Same angular, often emotionless face; same square-set shoulders, as if he’s preparing for a wrecking ball to hit him and plans to hit back just as hard; same dark blond waves of hair framing his face, although there’s gray curling around his temples and at the nape of his neck. The glasses he wears have gone through a few more thicknesses over this past quarter century, but otherwise, Malcolm’s the same.
It must be me who’s changed, because when I see him now, I don’t see anything to love.
“We need to fix this,” I say. “Now.”
His call has ended, and I corner him in the kitchen. He’s turned his back to me and pretends to be fiddling with a grease spot on the counter. “Malcolm? Did you hear me? We need to fix this.”
I grew up in a family of quiet men and women, people who didn’t shout over one another at Sunday dinners, didn’t try to shut one another up to get their point heard. Mostly, tense situations called for calm voices and steady nerves.
Malcolm’s absolute silence, on the other hand, isn’t a calming force. It’s jarring and violent, this stone wall. There’s too much room for wonder and speculation.
When he finally answers me, he’s almost inaudible.
“We’re not fixing anything, Elena.”
My full first name is supposed to be a signal that the conversation is over. I don’t agree.
“What if it were the president’s kid? Or a senator’s? Are you telling me they’d sit back and watch their child board a yellow bus on two days’ notice?”
This gets to him, and his eyes narrow. “Sometimes the rules are bent.”
“Broken, you mean.”
“Bent, Elena. Everyone’s treated equally.”
I pour a glass of wine, all the way up to the rim, and drink it down an inch. Maybe I’m building up some Dutch courage. Maybe I want to piss off Malcolm. “Bullshit. Don’t give me that ‘everyone is equal’ crap.”
Anne comes into the kitchen with a bowl of ice cream that’s melted into soup. “What’s going on?” she says. “You guys having another husband and wife fight?”
She gets a sour smile from her father and an exasperated sigh from me.
“We’re leaving,” I tell her, changing the subject. Let Malcolm deal with that hardball. Let him figure out who the “we” is.
“What?” Anne spits the word. “Leaving for where?” She doesn’t wait for me to answer. “But I’ve got homecoming in a couple of weeks. And the math club. And the forensics team finals. And—”
I cut her off. “And your sister isn’t going to a federal boarding school. Period. The end.”
Her mouth opens, the jaw working up and down, up and down, while not a sound comes out of it.
“Go to your room, Anne,” Malcolm says, then he turns to face me, placing a hand on my arm. It’s not a gentle touch but a restraining weight. “Do you have any idea how much jeopardy my job would be in if we took off? I’m supposed to set an example, not be a poster boy for rule dodging. I work in the goddamned Department of Education.”
“I meant the girls and me.”
What emerges from his throat is a bark of a laugh, an explosive negation of my statement.
And then, less explosive and more sinister: “You’re not taking my daughter from me.”
Daughter. Singular.
“You don’t want Freddie here anymore, do you?” I say. “You don’t want her here at all.”
Malcolm says nothing, which really means he says it all.
I pull my hand away and drain my glass of wine. Malcolm gives me the eye, and I pour more until the bottle is nearly empty and the glass is brimming again. “Do you know how much jeopardy our family will be in if you don’t work this out, Malcolm?”
But my words have no force in them, and Malcolm only smiles.
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