John could handle the new obligations in his life only because his days were his to schedule however he wanted. Next Step required his presence at development meetings and to sit in with the staff often enough to stay in touch with the nonprofit’s mission, but he did his grant writing from home and as he chose to attend to it. This is why, despite the fact that there was work due for both Next Step and his freelance clients, he was asleep on the couch at four o’clock on a Thursday afternoon when the phone rang.
“Is she there?” Robin asked sharply when he answered.
John’s heart raced, his mind sludgy from sleep. Wandering away is a serious concern for Alzheimer’s patients.
“Who? Mom?” he asked.
“Katie!”
He sat up on the couch and shook off the fog. This was the time of day when he’d normally be keeping an eye on their daughter. Unless something special was going on, she was supposed to be home every day after school.
John looked at his watch; he’d been asleep since 2:30. As the napping became a regular thing, he came to count on Katie coming through the back door to wake him up. He always shot right up and composed himself, not wishing his daughter to know he snoozed while the rest of the world was at work.
John went to the kitchen: no backpack, no homework spread across the table. He called up from the bottom of the stairs hopefully.
“Katie? You home?”
Nothing. He cursed his carelessness, and girded himself for Robin’s displeasure.
“I guess she’s not here. Did you try her cell?”
“She’s not answering,” Robin said. “You need to come over to school.”
John looked at his idled laptop and the pile of neglected work. “I really need to—”
“Now, John. Leave a note for her and tell her she is not to go anywhere until we get home.”
Robin hung up. John had been considering a custom ringtone for his wife, just so he’d always know it was her calling. Something she’d find funny, like maybe the B-52’s “Love Shack,” which they flailed about to at their wedding. Robin knew that he already used this trick to screen his mother’s calls and she’d be pissed to know he did the same to her, but John figured she would never find out because she’d always be on the other end when the phone rang.
It felt like the perfect plan, but John still tested it for flaws. He didn’t need to push Robin’s tolerance any further.
* * *
As clumsy a strain as the Larry situation brought to their marriage, things really became awkward after John brought Robin to see his father.
It wasn’t a move he was eager to make, wondering if Robin would find the invitation ghoulishly inappropriate but impossible to turn down if she thought it important to him. On the other hand, this was the father-in-law Robin never met. She was complicit in putting their family’s finances at risk to keep him alive, and she had been placed in the horrible position of saying nothing about it when around Rose or Mike. Or their daughter.
John recognized Robin as a partner in this whether she was enthusiastic about it or not. If letting her see for herself what he was committed to helped, he wanted to bring her in. If she preferred to keep her distance, that was fine, too. But it felt like he needed to make the offer.
“What would we do?” she asked when he clumsily brought it up about a week after she agreed to help keep Larry going.
“You’d just meet him,” John said before correcting himself, Larry being beyond making new acquaintances. “You’d see him, for just a minute. We wouldn’t have to stay.”
“I won’t pretend to talk to him,” she said bluntly. “And I don’t want you making conversation for us. ‘Hey, Dad, here’s the wife!’ That would be too … Just, no talking.”
“Okay.”
“What if we get caught?”
John smiled. “Honey, you don’t need to do this. I’d really understand.”
“He’s your father. As long as you’re doing this—we’re doing this—I should at least meet…” she drifted off, dismissing the convolutions with an exasperating sigh. “I should have a look at him.”
“Okay,” John said, loving her for trying to figure out how to make this work.
She sized up the jeans and T-shirt she wore. “I have to change.”
* * *
By the time John led Robin into room 116, the lovingly preserved tableau clashing with the haunted house rot she stumbled through to get there, Robin regretted her decision. She thought she could distance herself enough from the creepiness of it to play a part in her husband’s ordeal, but as her mind strained to take it all in she realized that there would be no fault in finding this more than any wife should be expected to handle.
A Christmas card photo of her with her family from several years ago sat on Larry’s shelves. Robin squirmed at seeing herself reduced to a prop.
And then she saw Larry, emaciated in his perpetual nap. Robin immediately saw the resemblance between father and son, rendered on Larry in a near death mask of what John might be reduced to one day. Would Robin still be his wife by then? Would disease or body failure bring her to the same tragic state of diminishment?
Tangles of time—past, present, and future—spun through the room in ways Robin hadn’t anticipated. The power John said he felt standing in his father’s presence struck her in entirely different ways.
Robin felt the unspoken pressure to extend a hand to make contact with Larry’s waxy skin, or to straighten his straw-like hair. It would have been the compassionate thing to do, if only for John, whom Robin felt anxiously desiring some sort of bonding moment between the two. But this scheme was too grotesque, this sad form in the bed too much a stranger. She came to have a look, as she said she would. But it was not in her to offer more.
Uncomfortable meeting John’s eyes, she sized up Larry’s room. The new Tom Perrotta novel John was struggling to find time for at home waited for him beside a comfortable-looking wingback chair. A box of Cheez-Its, some cookies, and a case of bottled water were situated beside the chair along with the pair of slippers Robin hadn’t noticed missing from their house.
John had described the process of tending to his father, but she also knew there were long hours to fill in the middle of the night, when he wasn’t home sleeping beside her. When he wasn’t there to confront Katie as Friday and Saturday night curfews were broken.
What he created for himself here was cozy, like a den. Robin couldn’t help desiring such a refuge for herself.
There was a dense and brittle silence at Larry’s bedside, John and Robin seeming to have jointly realized that there was nothing for them to discuss. Robin worked up to announcing her desire to leave, but sensed some sort of protocol required her to stand dutifully for at least a few more minutes.
The unwieldy quiet bore down on John, made him squirm with discomfort. Some gummed-up cell of his brain suggested to him a mood-lightener.
“See, Dad,” he said, leaning over his father with a proud, man-to-man smirk. “I did all right.”
Robin recoiled. “Jesus, John!” she protested, rushing from the room.
There was no way she’d find her way out of the old building on her own. A rat up her pant leg would not make things any more comfortable between the two of them now that Robin had met the old man. John bolted to catch her.
* * *
When John arrived at the high school after Robin’s call woke him up, there were fire trucks in the parking lot. Inside the building, teachers and parents who were looking angry and sad grouped together at the periphery of the main commons. As John approached, he smelled the smoke and felt the dampness of too much water where there should have been none.
Rounding the corner, he saw that the commons—where he spent hours as a student—was drenched. One whole wall, where banners and artwork were always on display, was charred black. The fire began to reach elsewhere before the sprinklers in the ceiling did their job. But the student projects situated throughout the room were turned into soggy clumps of papier-mâché and poster board.
John saw Robin standing with Debbie Sterling and Johnette Griff, Robin’s two closest friends in the math department. The uneasy look John detected from the two of them as he approached his wife put him on immediate alert.
“What happened?” he asked. Robin quickly took him by the elbow and led him to an empty classroom, closing the door behind them.
“Why don’t you know where Katie is?” she began.
“She…” John stammered. “I don’t know. I was busy, I lost track of the time.”
“I trust you to be with her after school.”
“I am! I just…” John insisted defensively. He fought to keep this tamped down. “Do you want to tell me what’s going on?”
She dialed down her anger. Besides her concerns for her daughter, she was saddened that her school was attacked.
“A bunch of kids came running in from the parking lot, started tearing things up in the commons, and one of them set a banner on fire. It was a bunch of those fucking goths.”
John knew that Robin’s emotions had to be raw to show such contempt for any of her students. Even the shitty ones.
“It could have been really bad,” she said fearfully.
Once upon a time John would have hugged her at seeing her so distraught, but she was really mad at him. He would have made things worse if she took his consoling as insincere or designed to lessen his guilt. That’s how he read the moment, anyway.
Hugging came with complications when a marriage wasn’t working the way it should.
“And you think Katie was with them?” John asked doubtfully.
“I don’t know,” Robin admitted. “It was the same crowd she’s always texting with, Johnette saw someone running out that could have been her.”
“I really don’t think it was,” John said softly. Robin just shook her head wearily.
“Well, you would know, wouldn’t you, if you had been paying attention,” Robin said dryly. John knew that this was a subject that was not going get resolved right then.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked, punctuating each word coldly.
“I don’t know,” she sighed. “Check that Starbucks they always hang out at. Go to the mall. If Connie Frederick is working at Foot Locker this afternoon, she might know something. Just try to find her.”
“Fine,” John said.
“But don’t go home without me. If she’s there, we need to deal with this together. I want to be there.”
John knew what she was saying. She didn’t want him having a first crack at their daughter, to help her get her story straight if he decided for himself that she was innocent. He resented the charge, but he just turned and headed out.
“Fine.”
* * *
John and Robin came through the back door at 6:30 to find Katie at the kitchen table doing homework. This in itself was a confession of guilt, a fifteen-year-old’s limp attempt to deflect parental wrath by pretending to be more conscientious than all three knew she was.
Posing herself with her schoolbooks like the diligent student they kept wanting her to be was the right move. She knew her dad, in particular, would be impressed.
“Where were you?” Robin asked before even closing the back door.
“I’m sorry,” Katie pleaded openly. She wore layers of black and her understated makeup still had a hard-edged severity. “Gretchen had to return something at the mall and she said it’d just be a few minutes, but we ran into some friends. And then we missed the four twenty bus. I tried to call you, but my phone was dead.”
“None of your friends had their cells? They’ve taken out all the pay phones at the mall?” Robin asked. Katie looked to John for backup, but John clearly was not going to get in the middle of this. His silent head gesture to Katie said, “Don’t make this any worse.”
“I said I was sorry, okay?” Katie sighed petulantly.
Robin took off her jacket and set down the schoolwork she brought home, seeming to idly move on to regular business while keeping her eye on her daughter. Now that Katie locked herself into her “look at me doing my homework without being asked” pantomime, she had to sit there and actually do it.
Robin took on a studied nonchalance. “Did you hear what happened at school this afternoon?”
“Yeah,” Katie said, a tone of wonder and disapproval in her voice. “I mean, it’s all anyone’s been talking about.” Her phone was on the table beside her. John saw the usual scroll of incoming texts.
He listened hard to Katie. He was not as clueless about his daughter’s changing behavior as Robin thought he was, but he wasn’t going to apologize for giving her the benefit of the doubt until they heard her out. Still, he was already on guard for the crack in her story that would break his heart.
“Anybody talking about who might have done it?” Robin asked.
Katie kept her eyes on her paper. “Just some kids,” she muttered, pretending to concentrate.
Robin drew closer. “Were you with Brendan or any of those other kids you’re always texting with?”
“I told you,” Katie sighed, the tension escalating. “I was with Gretchen at the mall, and then we met some other girls, and then I came home on the bus.”
“You weren’t given a ride home?” Robin persisted. “You weren’t riding around with any of your goth friends?”
“No one calls us goths anymore,” the teenager sulked.
“Answer my question!”
Katie slammed down her pen with righteous rage. “They didn’t do it! God!” She pointed to her phone. “Everybody’s already saying they’re guilty and they weren’t even there!”
Robin sat down in the chair beside her. “How do you know?” she asked.
“Because they just weren’t!” Katie insisted bitterly. “You don’t even know them! Just because you don’t like the way they look doesn’t mean they’re guilty of everything!”
Katie rose to storm out; Robin grabbed her wrist.
“Sit down,” she said firmly. Katie threw herself back down, radiating raw contempt. John saw this fury in his little girl, and it drew fine razor knicks across his heart.
Robin spoke evenly. “How do you know where your other friends were after school if you were at the mall with Gretchen?”
Katie appeared cornered. “Fine! Call Gretchen if you think I’m lying! She’ll tell you where I was!” she shouted defiantly. It was a classic teenager ploy, daring her parents to seek out the confirmation that she knew would blow her story. It was remarkable how often parents don’t call their bluff by picking up the phone. It was almost as if they didn’t want to know.
“We just want to be able to trust you,” John said earnestly.
Katie turned on her father, just like that. Just to hurt him.
“Maybe you’d know where I was if you weren’t sleeping on the couch all day!”
John recoiled as Robin processed this new information.
“It’s not all day,” John offered stupidly to his wife, blindsided to find himself on the defensive. “Sometimes, if I’m—”
“I know you’re out all night, Dad. I’m not stupid,” John’s daughter continued, delighted to lay bare a parental secret. “Nice how you expect me to be perfect when you’re not.”
John’s mind ping-ponged for a response.
“Your father has been taking care of your grandmother at night,” Robin shot back at Katie reflexively. “She’s having real problems, which you would know if you cared about anyone but yourself.”
John turned to his wife—a lifeline was the last thing he expected. Her glare back at him quickly disavowed him of any sustainable truce. It appeared Robin was merely prioritizing her anger on the fly.
John’s head spun. His daughter just betrayed him, and his wife—at least for the moment—lied in his defense despite being dangerously unhappy with him.
His inability to respond seemed to stretch on for minutes. Seeing her father struck dumb, disillusioned, and exposed, Katie felt a little girl’s ache of empathy that her teenaged peevishness quickly suffocated.
“Whatever!” she sneered as she fled the kitchen and raged up to her room.
John’s eyes followed her up the stairs. He turned to Robin, who was looking at the couch in the living room.
Now that it was just the two of them, Robin found nothing left to say. She shook her head wearily and headed up to their room with her grading work.