When You Go Away Read online

  “We could go to Oakland on BART. I bet I could find Grandpa’s.”

  “What?” Carly shook her head. He didn’t know anything. “And leave her? Alone? And I don’t want to stay by myself anymore.”

  “Fine. Okay.” Ryan sat down on Brooke's bed, pulling the sheet away to expose her legs. "What are those red spots?"

  "I don't know. I only noticed them today."

  He tucked the sheet around her body and clenched his hands between his thighs. "So, what? What should we do?"

  "There is someone. You know. Mrs. Candelero. She's a nurse."

  "That old lady? Why would we bring her up here? She'll be talking about it for the rest of her life."

  Carly grabbed his arm, and hissed, "If not her, 911. I'm not going to stay with Brooke like this one more minute. You've just like totally bailed on me. I've been with her for two whole days. You go off with Quinn, and I have to feed her, I have to worry. And it's not like it's been normal with Mom for weeks and weeks. So I don't even care what you say. I’m going down to Mrs. Candelero's now."

  She said all this, but she didn't move, her hand still tight on his bicep. Ryan didn't pull away, but touched her hand, softly rubbing it. "Okay. Okay. Jeez. I'll stay with Brooke and you go get Mrs. Candelero."

  Letting go, she backed away, looking at Brooke, glad that in less than five minutes things would be better. "Her name is Rosie. Don't call her Mrs. Candelero. She doesn’t like it."

  "If you call, I'm out of here," Ryan said, his hands on his hips, standing over Rosie, who knelt beside the bathtub holding Brooke up in the cold water. "There's going to be cops, and I don't want any part of it."

  "Well, you better get your ass gone because I’m calling in about five minutes. Once I get this fever manageable, I’m all over my phone, so pack your bags."

  Ryan swore lightly under his breath and then turned to Carly, his face red. "I told you this would happen."

  Carly frowned at Ryan, handing Rosie a towel as she lifted Brooke up. "There, sweetie. You feel better? You're not so hot now." Carly helped her pat Brooke dry, while Ryan stood in the doorway.

  "What is it? What does she have?" Ryan asked.

  "You still here? I thought you'd left already." Rosie lifted Brooke to her chest and carefully stepped through the door and down the hall to the bedroom. "You have that Tylenol?"

  Carly handed her the Tylenol and the syringe after Rosie laid Brooke down. "That's all we have left."

  "That should do for now. I need that ice pack, Ryan."

  "What does she have?"

  "Listen, I’m no MD, as I am reminded every day at work. But I can tell you she has an upper respiratory infection. Maybe pneumonia. She needs to get to the hospital. I've got this fever down, but it's only temporary, you understand?"

  Ryan blinked, his mouth open. "Oh."

  "So, the ice pack?"

  Ryan went to the kitchen for ice. Rosie put a clean diaper on Brooke and then covered her with a sheet. "I need my phone, Carly."

  "My mom. She'll . . ."

  "Yeah. I know. But if she could see what we're looking at, she'd do what I'm doing. I don't doubt it for the world. I’ve seen your mom. She’s tender for you all.”

  Carly nodded, knowing that was true, even when her mother was still and silent under the covers.

  “So, sweetie,” Rosie said. “Could you get my purse? I have my cell phone in it."

  She turned and went to the living room, grabbing Rosie's heavy black leather purse. As she carried it back to the bedroom, she heard things jangling and clicking together inside it, and she wanted to stick her hand inside and pull something out, remembering the grab bag presents from her second grade classroom. Her mother usually carried a sleek tan purse, so small all she could fit inside it were her wallet, keys, and sunglasses. But Rosie seemed to have a world inside hers.

  "Okay. Let's get the phone." Rosie dug around, lifting out a candle, timer, her wallet, and a spoon. "It's here somewhere. Oh! Okay."

  "Tell them it's not her fault,” Carly said. “She didn't mean to! She didn't know what she was doing. Tell them--tell them how sick Brooke always is." Tears pushed out her eyes and ran down her face.

  Rosie moved her stuff away from her and pulled Carly down on the bed, putting an arm around her. "I'm going to tell the truth. That's what you did when you came to get me, and that's what I'll do when I talk to the paramedics."

  Leaning into Rosie's shoulder, Carly nodded, wanting this part to be over even if the next part was worse. At least then, Brooke would be okay. Brooke wouldn't die.

  "Ryan, take your sister back to the apartment. I'll stay at the hospital until Brooke’s all right, okay? I’ll call as soon as I can." Rosie patted his cheek, and Carly noticed he didn’t flinch.

  Rosie dropped her hand, and Ryan pulled Carly to him, holding her wrist. "All right."

  Before the paramedic closed the door, Carly saw Brooke wrapped in a sheet on the gurney, one small hand reaching up. Rosie took it, held it to her cheek, and talked to her. If anyone should be in that ambulance, Carly thought, it should be her mom, not a stranger, even if Rosie was nice. Carly felt something new inside her flare hot and constant like the pilot light in the apartment's one heater. The ambulance drove off, neither Carly nor Ryan moving until the noise of the big engine disappeared in the night air. The small crowd of people that had gathered stared at them, eyebrows raised, hands at their mouths, and then walked away without saying anything to them. Carly wondered if one of them was the terrible Ted, who was supposed to collect the rent. "Have a good enough look?" Ryan called after them, but not loud enough for anyone to hear. "Assholes." He looked down at Carly. "Come on. Let's wait inside."

  "Don't go."

  "I'm not going. I’m sitting here, aren't I?" Ryan shook his head and punched at the remote control, flicking through the channels without seeming to look at one single show. He finally paused at The West Wing, and both of them stared at the screen, trying to find a way to let the show pull them away from the empty apartment. But all Carly could see was who wasn't there, her mom, Brooke, her father.

  "Shit." Ryan threw down the remote. "I can't fucking believe this."

  "What's going to happen?"

  “Who cares? You don’t see anyone here but some lady from downstairs, do you?”

  “You like her.”

  “So?” Ryan moved away from her, crossing his legs.

  “But what the police and stuff?”

  "Who knows?"

  She thought about all the people who would soon know that their mother had left, the doctors and nurses and lawyers, people who could change things. "What about Mom? What are they going to say about Mom?"

  He stood up, running his hands through his red hair. Carly was the only brunette in the family beside her mother, but Carly was even darker. Her mother always told her she had Grandma Janice’s coloring, but Carly wondered if people thought she was adopted. Sometimes when they'd all been out as a family, she'd pretended she was adopted, a changeling, pulling slightly aside, walking behind her fire-haired family, imagining who her real parents were, the parents who really loved her. Lately, she hadn't had to pretend. Every night, she wished something would happen or someone would come to take away the sad feeling, the days that felt like bad nights full of horrible dreams.

  "Look, Carly,” Ryan said. “It's too late to worry now. Brooke's at the hospital. Everyone will know. I don't care at this point. I really don't."

  "You're just mad. You care. You were telling Rosie you would leave."

  "Yeah, well I don't care. It's not my problem. Mom's no better than Dad now anyway. And I thought he was the complete asshole."

  "Don't say that."

  "Why? Isn't it true?"

  "You left me, too. You left me for two days all alone. You didn't help me take care of Brooke or do the laundry or feed her. You don't even know how. You were off with Quinn, smoking or whatever . . ." Carly bent forward, her forehead on her knees, the scratch of her jeans on her face, w
anting her mother to come in and touch her back, rub her neck, say, "I'm so sorry, baby. It will all be better." But there was nothing except the live wire of Ryan body, the hum of his anxiety that matched hers, the whine of the refrigerator.

  "I . . . I--" he began, but then there was a knock and a voice at the door. He stood up, ready to let in whoever was there. Ready to let their whole lives change.

  FOUR

  At 2.30, Carl Randall was up at the tennis court next to the Montclair fire station, sitting next to his old buddy Ralph Jones, waiting for another two players so they could get a doubles match going. It was Wednesday, the spring afternoon swelling with late heat, the sun reflecting off the metal fence. Carl sat with his elbows on his thighs, spinning his racket on its end.

  "Some days it takes a while," Ralph said, leaning against the fence.

  "Indeed," Carl said. If someone didn't come in fifteen minutes, though, he was going to go home and work on his sprinkler system. It was getting hot enough to run it every other day, and one head was plugged, causing the water to geyser into his Mrs. Trimble's yard, his old bitch neighbor. "You're causing root rot," she'd yelled over her rhododendrons yesterday. "I can't have that, you know."

  He'd spent the morning at Home Depot looking for parts, and he knew he should put them in before switching the system on automatic. He'd end up with Mrs. Trimble on his doorstep clutching her wilted plants, dirt flying everywhere from the mangled, drooping roots.

  "Okay! We're on," Ralph said. Bob and Ramon walked through the court, and Carl breathed out, needing this match, needing it every day, like some kind of fix. This habit had started after he and his wife had split up and he found himself free--or empty, he wasn't sure what the right word was—after 5.30, so he'd searched around and discovered this pick up match. Carl liked the order of the games, the way people rotated in set after set, spinning to see who played, almost all mannerly, spats over bad calls not lasting more than one or two games. He'd been coming up here for almost thirty years, and once he retired, he was able to start at 2.30, getting in two, sometimes three sets. So, he was one of the old guys now, one of the men the younger fellas probably hoped they wouldn't get as a partner. But he was still fit, his legs muscular, his gut not hanging over his pants. And he still had it, too, not needing that Viagra like Ralph did. After that last blasted exam, his doctor said his prostate was as smooth and round as a bean. Not that he'd had the opportunity to use his still firm anything. He should have remarried when he’d had the chance, but time was never right, the perfect woman just around the corner. Strange thing was, now life was a straight line, no corners at all.

  And damn if the only woman he'd been close to lately was Mrs. Trimble, which was enough to turn him off women for life. But tennis helped him stay ready for whoever might show up. He wanted to play. He needed to.

  "Let's go," Carl said, standing up and stretching first his right and then his left shoulder. "I want to beat you all."

  On his way home, he took a left instead of a right so he wouldn't have to pass Mrs. Trimble's house. She was always out front pruning something, keeping her eye on his sprinklers, neighborhood dogs, cats looking for soft dirt to scratch in, unusual cars, someone to talk to. He pulled his 1966 Chevy Corvair convertible carefully into his garage, immediately pushing the door button behind him. He could hear the phone ringing as soon as he cut the engine. He'd forgotten to turn on his machine, so he hurried into the house, pausing only when he thought of Mrs. Trimble, but she didn't have his number so he answered it, trying to hide his breathlessness.

  "Yeah."

  "Dad, it's me. Are you okay?"

  "Fine. Fine. Where are you?"

  There was a pause, the sound of shuffled papers. Carl imagined Noel’s set face, the way he bit his lower lip when he was thinking.

  "Sorry. Can you hold on for a second--I'm still at work."

  Carl sat down, putting a hand on his chest, feeling the quick pattern of breath in his lungs. He was relieved to be listening to the muffled sounds of a business conversation. If he didn’t have a second to regroup, Carl thought he might turn into an emergency here, his heart pounding as if he'd been playing singles instead of doubles. As his breath slowed a bit, Carl brought the phone closer, the noises of the Kent Raifson Cleary brokerage office in his ear. When Carl was in commercial real estate, he thrived on the din of machines and voices, the bustle and adrenaline that seemed to fill him, made him wake up for another day, made all the time at home dull as a church service. Noel was exactly the same, waking at 4.30, driving to the office to be able to check the markets back east and in Asia, managing his accounts, clients, deals. “Dad,” he’d say, calling from a taxi in Chicago. “We sealed the Toy Town account.” Work seemed about the same as women—once plentiful, vastly entertaining, and hard to remember. Sure, after he'd retired, it had taken two, three years before he stopped waking up at exactly 5.35; but now, he sometimes had to set the alarm to wake up at nine, the thought of a good project and two fine sets of tennis enough for him.

  “Dad.” Noel was back, a sigh behind his words.

  “What’s going on? Are you okay? I thought you were in New York.”

  “I was.”

  “How did it go?”

  “Fine. Good. We probably have the TexCorp account. They liked our package—but that’s not why I called.”

  Carl felt his pulse glide to normal. “What’s wrong?”

  "It's not an emergency. But it's the same thing I've been talking about for a month. We have got to get a hold of Graham. I called Peri's neighbor Melinda, and she told me that Peri came by yesterday, looking terrible, but she doesn't have a number either. She said that Peri promised to call her, but she hasn't."

  Carl shook his head, rubbing the back of his neck. "I'm the last person Peri wants to have find her, Noel. She's fine. She's a grown woman, who obviously can take care of herself and those kids. You know how well she's done with Brooke. With all the kids."

  Noel's voice tightened. "You didn't see her before she moved. And why hasn't she called?"

  "She didn't want to see me, Noel. I left a message awhile back to ask her about the move. I never heard a word."

  "But she hasn’t called me either. And she was on the edge. Tired. Completely drained. It’s all Graham’s fault. I don't even want to talk to the son-of-a-bitch, but he's got to know where they are."

  Standing up, Carl moved to the kitchen with the portable phone to pour himself a glass of water from the faucet. As he listened to Noel, he looked out the window at two chickadees on the bird feeder he'd bought at Home Depot, both spraying seed to the ground. A big waste, he thought, and I'll have to worry about rodents later.

  “She’s been doing okay,” Carl said, but he really didn’t know anything. His daughter's divorce had been awful and even worse for Carl because as she went through the legal proceedings and the emotional upset, Peri seemed to revisit and re-experience his divorce, his and her mother's. She'd been seven when he and Janice separated, and Carl had tried to see the kids as much as he could, hunkering down with them on weekends, taking them to tennis matches with Bob and dinners at Mel’s Diner. But after Graham left, it was as if Peri forgot all of his efforts, looking at Carl as if he were the one who’d left a disabled child. "I can't believe you did this to Mom. I’m glad she can't see this happening all over again," she'd hissed at him the last Thanksgiving they'd spent together as a family. "You are all alike."

  He'd wanted to remind Peri that he'd only moved a few miles away, saw her on the weekends, and never stopped supporting her. But he hadn't, not wanting to add anything else to her misery. Her whole house was saturated with it, as if it had a leaky sprinkler head.

  Carl could almost hear Noel shaking his head, the skiff, skiff of his work shirt against the receiver. "She’s not okay,” Noel was saying. “And I blame myself for this. It's all my fault. I should have checked in more often. Especially on Brooke. I've been so busy with work."

  “You have to work, son,” Carl said
. “We all have to work.”

  “Yeah. But what if something horrible has happened?" Noel's voice deepened, and Carl paced back and forth, remembering how upset Noel used to get as a child. Usually quiet, he would surprise Janice and Carl by suddenly throwing himself on the floor in a classic temper tantrum, flailing his arms and legs, emitting shrieks of sorrow the neighbors could hear.

  Standing again by the sink, Carl put his hand on his hip. "Okay. Listen Noel. I'll go ahead and get on the horn to Phoenix. I can find Graham. You're working. That's important. Don't think otherwise."

  "What if you can't find him?"

  "If that doesn’t pan out, I'll go over to the neighborhood and talk to Melinda. I remember her. The one with the boob job."

  Noel laughed. Just a little. "Yeah. That's her."

  "She'll know all of Peri's friends. So I'll call you, okay? Let me take care of it for now."

  He could hear the decision in Noel' silence. Carl closed his eyes. No matter how he acted, no matter what he'd done for his daughter since the divorce, he'd never be able to make it up. With Peri, he would never be good, not now, not ever. He’d gone to Carly’s ballet recitals and school plays and Ryan’s soccer matches; he’d sat by Brooke’s bed and read her the books Carly picked out for them: Pig William, The Giving Tree, Where the Wild Things Are, The Trouble With Trumpets. He’d shown up for every single holiday dinner, two years ago even hosting Christmas brunch. But in the year since Graham left, Carl was beaten down by the look of disgust in Peri’s eyes, the way she ignored what he wanted to give her, them. What she still wanted, he felt, even though Janice had died almost five years ago from stomach cancer, was for Janice and him to get back together, the fantasy of a child of divorce. And in a way, that fantasy was an extension of her hope that Graham would come back, say he was sorry, move them back to Monte Veda and their old life. What could Carl do about that?

  "Okay. But we've got to do it soon. Today," Noel said.

  "I know. I will,” Carl said, thinking this would all turn out fine. Peri could take on any load and carry it farther than anyone else he knew.