Proper Care and Maintenance of Friendship (9781609417291) Page 5

  Her life was perfect, just as it was.

  And Rachel had known it.

  “Miss Marcum, are you all right?”

  The plastic surgeon stood before her, holding Grace’s chart.

  No. “Yes. Just distracted. Did you finish the stitches?”

  “All five of them.” Dr. Mulcahey pulled a pen out of her lab coat pocket and wrote something on Grace’s chart. “She’s a tough kid. Very serious. Didn’t cry, didn’t squeal, a perfect patient. Give her acetaminophen when she gets home. She’s, what, fifty, fifty-five pounds?”

  Hell if I know.

  The doctor did a quick calculation and wrote down the dosage—in milliliters. Jo wondered when acetaminophen had started coming in a liquid.

  “And make an appointment at my office,” she continued, tearing off the discharge papers, “to have the stitches taken out next week.”

  Jo hoped all these doctors had Saturday hours. But she couldn’t think about that right now. She pulled herself together and walked into Grace’s room. Grace’s wound was closed. The ends of the thread splayed in odd directions. The nurse standing by the bed glanced up as soon as Jo came in and gave her a look that said, Where the hell have you been, leaving this kid alone?

  “Ah, here she is, Grace,” the nurse said. “Bet you want to get home to your own bed, huh?”

  A spark lit in Grace’s eyes. “Am I going home now?”

  “Yeah, kiddo.” Jo grabbed Grace’s coat. “We’re going to hail one of those funny yellow cars again. The kind we took here? The one that went so fast? The man in it will take us back home.”

  “To Nana’s house?”

  Jo shook out the coat and slipped Grace’s arm into a sleeve, taking advantage of the motion to hide her face. “Back to boring old Nana’s house? Oh, no. You’ll be staying with Aunt Jo for a while. It’ll be an adventure.” It certainly had been so far. “Hey, but what’s this?” Jo squinted at the stitches, then pretended to pick at them. “Girl, you’ve got a caterpillar on your head!”

  Grace lifted one hand and ran a finger over the stitches, greasy with antibiotic ointment, as if she had just become aware of their presence. Her eyes went wide, and she drew up her knees, crossing her brown-bear slippers.

  Shit.

  “Just kidding, kiddo, it’s covered by your hair. Why, by this time tomorrow it’ll be like there’s nothing there at all.” Jo tugged the girl’s nightgown over her knees. “Come on, now, help me get your other sleeve on.”

  Jo hustled her out, ahead of the tears, chatting mindlessly all the way to the elevator. After a stop at the hospital pharmacy, where Jo puzzled over a myriad of choices of children’s pain reliever and finally purchased some orange-flavored Tylenol (“Cherry,” Grace said, “makes me throw up”), she hailed a cab and headed home.

  Manuel, the doorman, crouched to Gracie’s level. “How you doing, Gracie? Everything put back together?”

  Jo answered for the silent kid. “She’s all stitched up.”

  “She’s what? Stitched up?” He squinted at Grace, cocked his head, then mugged a bit as he pretended to pluck at her stitches with his fingertips “Uh, Gracie, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but you’ve brought something home from the hospital.”

  Oh, no. Oh, no—

  “You’ve got a caterpillar on your head!”

  Jo braced herself.

  Grace laughed.

  She laughed?

  As they headed into the elevator, Manuel called after Grace: “Don’t press the button, Gracie, you’re too little to press the button—no, don’t press that button!” Grinning, Grace poked it. Jo waved as the doors shut. Then, brightly, Jo told Grace not to press the “8”—“No, don’t press the ‘8’!”

  Grace shrank in the corner of the elevator.

  Wearily, Jo pressed the “8” herself. Tomorrow, she told herself. Tomorrow will be better.

  Inside the condo, Grace wandered to the scene of the crime. The end table lay on the floor. The glass top stood cocked against the banister. Magazines covered the rug. Grace stared at the spots of blood on the carpet.

  “I’m going to clean that all up, honey, don’t you worry. Upstairs now.”

  “Don’t want to go upstairs.”

  “Aren’t you tired? You’ve had such a big day.”

  She chewed on the tip of her rabbit’s ear. “Don’t like the dolls.”

  “The dolls?”

  “The ones in the big glass cabinet.”

  Jo frowned. She’d forgotten about the corner curio in the spare room, filled with china dolls dressed in Victorian costume. A hobby she’d taken up not long after she’d gotten her first job.

  “You can play with them tomorrow,” Jo said, “if you’d like.”

  “They stare at me.”

  “They have great eyes, don’t they? They blink, too.”

  Grace tightened her grip on her bunny.

  “I mean, if you move them, they blink. They don’t blink on their own.”

  Geez. Now the demon dolls.

  Grace ran her fingers across the armrest of the couch. “Nana lets me stay on the couch when I’m sick.”

  “What?”

  “I get to watch cartoons.”

  A dozen thoughts flashed through Jo’s mind, most of them to do with manipulation and setting bad examples and starting off on the wrong foot, but under the influence of a pair of averted brown eyes, she figured she couldn’t be any worse of a guardian, so she fetched a comforter and said, “You can sleep here, on my white couch, if you really want to.”

  Jo settled Grace in front of an all-night cartoon station and scrubbed her carpet clean. When Grace finally fell asleep, splayed like she’d been shot out of a cannon, Jo dimmed the lights and poured herself a scotch. She slung it back in one grateful gulp.

  She told herself she needed the alcohol for its sedative effect. It wasn’t going to be comfortable sleeping in that modern living-room chair, a piece she’d bought more for style than for comfort. But what choice did she have? She certainly couldn’t leave Grace down here alone. What if the kid woke up during the night and needed to go to the bathroom? She’d knock over a vase, or trip over the carpet, or walk into a wall. What if the kid wanted a cup of water? She’d pull over a chair, reach for a glass, drop it, shatter it on the tile floor, then step down in her bare feet, and then there’d be a second trip to the emergency room—

  How am I going to do this?

  Her own mother had done it alone. She’d worked day shifts—and, later, night shifts—shuttling Jo among friends in town, or settling her in unofficial and unregulated day cares that they couldn’t really afford, until she was just old enough to be a latchkey kid. What was she, nine years old? She remembered Mom coming in after 10 p.m. smelling like henhouse and blood, still shaking off feathers. She’d worked for minimum wage, back at a time when a soul could live in Kentucky on minimum wage, cutting chicken breasts off the bone. Sweet Jesus. Jo had sworn as a teenager that the last thing she’d do was be poor in a Kentucky town.

  But Jo wasn’t living on minimum wage.

  In fact, Jo made a really, really good salary.

  Then Jo thought about Kate. Hyperefficient Kate, ferrying her clean kids from one sport to another, keeping a dust-free house, baking cookies to serve with low-fat milk after school, serving up a square family meal every damn night. Kate, who lived in her big rambling house with her bring-home-the-bacon husband, and behaved as if her own life had stopped with the birth of her first child.

  Jo set her glass on the counter, then braced her palms on the beveled granite countertop. She took a good look at her reflection in the stainless-steel microwave in its custom-made cabinet.

  She reminded herself: She was Bobbie Jo Marcum, Mistress of Her Universe. Twenty-two people owed their livelihoods to her. Fortune 500 corporations paid her obscene amounts of money to launch their newest products at impossibly chic blowout parties. She had to stop thinking of motherhood as Kate did—as something overwhelming, something imposs
ible, something so all-consuming that her own ambitions stopped for it. She had to treat the sudden appearance of Gracie in her life just like any other eleventh-hour project. It wasn’t going to be simple, it would require great organizational skills and a search for professionals, but that’s what she got paid for. That’s what she was good at.

  Maybe, just maybe, that’s why Rachel chose her instead of Kate.

  Besides, Jo knew there wasn’t a damn problem in the whole world that couldn’t be solved with money.

  Curled up on my bed

  In my cramped old room,

  Teaneck, New Jersey

  Dear Kate,

  If you’re reading this, darling, then my last desperate treatment has failed, and I’m gone.

  I’m so sorry you had to find out this way. I wish I’d told all of you about the cancer earlier. I was so convinced I could beat it. I pictured it like another mountain I had to climb. I didn’t want you fussing over me, and worrying, when surely I’d be back to my old self, and soon.

  It’s strange, the things you think about after you get the bad news. When the doctors first told me, the one thing I wanted to do—more than anything—was to go skydiving. Skydiving has a way of clearing my mind, focusing energies, and revealing what’s really important in life. Boy, did I need that.

  So I called you, Kate. You were the first friend I thought of. For years I’ve been trying to get you to come with me. There’s a reason for that. Kate, for a long time I’ve had the sense that you’re overwhelmed by your own life. You need to rise above it for a little while, so you can see it more clearly. But you begged off. Maybe you remember? You needed to attend a soccer tournament with Tess. But someday, you promised. Someday.

  Someday is here, darling. There are no cell phones where I’m going, so this letter is my very last request. Go skydiving, Kate. I’ll be with you in spirit when you tumble out of the plane. I’ll be with you when you pull the chute. You won’t see me, Kate, but I’ll be there anyway, watching you come alive again.

  Will you do that for me?

  Love,

  Rachel

  chapter five

  Kate flew again—this time, nearly solo.

  The wind sucked the breath right out of her. The loose jumpsuit battered her body. Bubba flew on her left, gripping one arm and one thigh. A lean young buck by the name of Keifer tumbled to her right, holding her just as tight.

  I’m alive.

  A single thought, electrifying her mind. Oh, she understood that she was tumbling at terminal velocity toward the ground, with all its bristly trees and electric wires and concrete surfaces. And she remained keen enough to watch Keifer’s hand signals and heed the lessons of four hours of training. But all that was as automatic as her beating heart, as subconscious as breathing—what she felt above all was the fierce tingling certainty of being alive.

  She lifted her head to grin at the camera on Keifer’s helmet. The wind caught under her lips and snatched away her laughter. Somewhat below and to her south, two trainers released another student. After a few moments, the student pulled his cord. A red parachute exploded into the sky.

  She breathed through her nose and experienced this, her body careening through the atmosphere, high above the world. She felt capable of anything, everything—yet in control of nothing—the way she’d felt a long, long time ago. Before she was married, mothered, mortgaged. Here in the sky, the weight of those years peeled away from her—one after another—stripping off and reeling into oblivion.

  Keifer signaled. She signaled back. All at once, the men’s grip eased. They swept away from her, suctioned by the wind.

  She tumbled alone.

  I’m doing it. Kate flexed her arms. She wobbled, then steadied. The air itself cradled her up. She had only three seconds.

  One.

  Why had she never done this before? Rachel had tried to talk her into it so many times. Every time Rachel started training for a bike race or a rock-climbing expedition or went for her scuba-diving certification or to learn CPR with the American Red Cross, she had always asked Kate to join her.

  Two.

  But first it was the demands of her job that had stopped Kate, and after that her husband, and too soon after that she had a baby and then another baby, and then another baby, and then there was a mortgage and college funds and first communions and PTA—

  Three.

  Grief welled up. She let it happen; she wanted to feel. That’s why Rachel had done this to her. Amazing how a jump could clear the fog from her head. And now Kate wanted to feel this intensely forever.

  Pull!

  With a whistle, the cords unfurled. The blue cloud of the parachute caught the wind and billowed. Abruptly the chute yanked on her harness, snatching her vertical. In a second, the roaring of the wind stopped, the suction in her lungs gave way, and she settled back into her body.

  She floated through the sky, marveling at the white haze of the horizon, the gold and red foliage sprouting amid the green carpet of the world. She welcomed the grief; she even welcomed the guilt. Over how much she and Rachel had drifted apart. Over how many times she’d said no. Over her own fierce, frowning opinions of Rachel’s choice to bear a child without a father—an idea Rachel had presented over dinner as if it were just another trip to the Brazilian jungle.

  Today… right now… with the limits of her world as far as the horizon, Kate could almost understand.

  The drop-zone target glowed bright yellow on the tarmac. It expanded beneath her. Following the hand signals of her floating mentors, she gripped the risers and pulled them the way she’d been trained, to aim closer to the target.

  But her gaze wasn’t on that little yellow target. It was on an iridescent Volkswagen Beetle parked off the edge of the runway, behind a high, razor-wire-topped fence. Just beyond that fence grew a thick oak, and through the webbing of branches, she glimpsed the car that held her unsuspecting husband.

  He’d come.

  Just like she’d asked him to—luring him with the promise of a lunchtime backseat tryst in a deserted airport parking lot—neglecting to tell him one tiny little detail: She’d be arriving by parachute.

  She yanked the right handle. She pulled it down and across her chest. The other two students, already aground, leapt and waved at her from the pool of their parachutes. She kept her gaze on the flash of metal between the branches. As she skimmed lower, the tree drifted out of her sightline. Then she glimpsed Paul, a lanky figure draped against the hood.

  Her heart swelled. She’d been waiting for this moment since she’d first jumped out of a plane. Of course, she was nervous about his reaction to the sight of her falling from the sky, but she kept reminding herself that they’d both been adventuresome, once. After college, they’d backpacked through Europe, sleeping in flophouses and working the wine-grape harvest just to extend their stay. Once, they’d gotten lost hiking in the Adirondack Mountains for three full days. For their honeymoon, they’d surfed the killer waves off Oahu’s Makapu’u Beach. As soon as he got past the surprise, he’d be thrilled to see her floating down from the sky.

  She couldn’t think about him now; she had to concentrate on landing. The scenery whipped by swiftly, and she was coming down fast. One of the instructors waved, signaling her to pull the left riser, to pull. The target loomed. She should be a good girl, land where she was told. It was her first free-fall, too early to start hot-dogging it. She’d be judged on how well she landed.

  But the devil on her shoulder won.

  She veered left on the final turn and straightened her arm. One of the instructors shouted. She ignored him. And kept ignoring him, even when the painted yellow target swept past beneath her feet.

  Under her, the smooth asphalt ended in old paving, cracked and split by weeds, and still she flew above it, buoyed by a lowlying gust of wind. The asphalt deteriorated to chunks and then to rubble. She touched down, dragging two ruts through the debris, until she caught her foot in a fissure and stumbled. She righted herself
and then stumbled again as the parachute overshot her, unfurling on the weedy lot no more than twenty yards from her own husband.

  From behind a high chain-link fence, Paul flashed a lazy grin and applauded. Kate searched his face, waiting for him to realize who stood before him. His features stilled for a moment, but it wasn’t the stillness of recognition. This was the kind of expression he wore when an idea came upon him suddenly, at dinnertime, with a spoonful of peas halfway to his mouth. She suspected that later he would hole up in the home office and work on how to simulate the billow of a parachute—as realistically as possible—in his next computer game.

  From the target drop zone, Bubba and Keifer came running.

  “I’m fine, I’m fine!” She brushed off her jumpsuit, then unhooked the harness. Free of the parachute, she curled her hand around her helmet and pulled it off. Her hair tumbled in the wind. Very much like Lola Lipstick, the buxom wasp-waisted sword-wielding heroine of one of Paul’s more “mature” computer games.

  Paul froze mid-clap.

  She strode straight for him—striding swiftly, with purpose, as if she could pass right through the chain-link fence and slam up against him. Then she opened her arms as she hit the fence, seizing two fistfuls of links.

  She couldn’t stop grinning. “Hey, darling.”

  He made a strangled noise and stumbled back, smacking against the hood of the VW. He braced himself upright. His blue eyes blazed with incomprehension… and shock. “What the hell?”

  She pressed her body against the fence, feeling the pressure of the grid dig into her breasts. “Hungry for lunch, darling? I am. I’m just starved.”

  Paul blinked at the yellow jumpsuit, and then glanced beyond, to the parachute deflated upon the ground, and then still farther beyond, to the instructors grinning at a respectful distance. He looked like he’d been beta-testing a new game that had just, inexplicably, jumped six levels.