DELLA
Friday, August 29
Della scrubbed the dried lasagna off the plates she’d been soaking all day. She was in the kitchen of 18 Legare Street, where she’d been cleaning clothes and sheets, mopping the floors and scrubbing the surfaces of the bathroom and kitchen. Drew should be home from the airport by now. He’d called her at two in the morning before Dr. Swan sent Lish over to President Street, and when she told him that Lish was in the emergency room, he exhaled deeply and said, “Okay.”
He was practically silent when she called him this morning and reported that Lish had been voluntarily admitted to the Institute of Psychiatry. He let out a groan and she said, “Dr. Swan says she’s going to be okay. She just needs a few days there . . . a little time to get straight, you know?”
“Hmm,” he said faintly.
Now she heard someone fiddling with the lock, and when she went toward the foyer, Drew flung open the door and stood before her, seeming taller than usual in his straight-leg jeans and crisp white oxford. His salt-and-pepper curls seemed to gleam, and his fresh-shaven face had a squeaky-clean glow to it.
“Della, thank you for your help.” He gestured subtly toward her car with his elbow as he stepped inside. “It’s time you leave.”
She wrinkled her brow. “Have you been to see Lish? Tell me what’s going on.”
He picked at an invisible fleck on his shirt sleeve, then looked down to meet her gaze. “You really care about Lish?”
“What?” she said. “Of course I do.”
“Mmmn.” He crossed his arms, and she noticed the small black tufts of hair below his knuckles.
He took a cursory survey of the house before staring back at her. “You care about her and yet you drop her off ”— he pinched his brow—“a successful physician and mother of the decade, for crying out loud”—he inhaled—“at the emergency room for a psychological evaluation?”
He shook his head and now refused to meet her eye. He looked above her at a portrait of Andrew hanging at the bottom of the stairwell. She watched as he gently kicked the door closed before counting off her offenses on his hands. “You threatened her reputation; you allowed her to be prodded and drugged and forced to sleep in a closet of a room next door to a teenage girl who swallowed a medicine cabinet full of pills for the second time in a month.” He cupped his chin and narrowed his eyes. “Yep, you really care about her.”
Della’s stomach lurched. “But Todd advised—”
Drew raked his hair with his right hand and looked at her dead-on now. “I asked you to wait until I got home. It was twenty-four hours, and you couldn’t do it, could you? You and your old ex in my home deciding what is best for my wife?”
Della bit her lip. “Drew, come on!” She took a step toward him and met his gaze. “She was not right. The kids were in potential danger. And I thought she might be too. She needed help, and we didn’t know what kind.”
He quickly leaned down, inches away from her face. “Don’t be so dramatic, Della! This is not one of your fictional plot trajectories, all right?” He pointed his index finger toward her. “This is my wife’s life. Her reputation. She has never endangered our children. Not for a second, and you know that.”
“The baby hadn’t eaten. She was dehydrated.” Della got her footing and spread her hands out before him as if she was carrying a large and fragile bowl. “I don’t think you understand.” She clenched her thin fists. “Your wife couldn’t move. She couldn’t get up. She was practically catatonic, and the one time she did move, it was with a sharp object in her hand coming toward me.”
She took a deep breath and lowered her voice. “You know I love Lish. All I want is to protect and help her.”
He nodded toward the door. “Get out,” he said. “Lish doesn’t want to see you now or for a while, all right?” His nostrils flared and for the first time Della noticed a small mole beneath his chin. “I can take care of her. Rosetta will be back. Melanie, the doctor who lives in the carriage house, can help. She’ll have all the support she needs. Now go.”
Della threw down the dishrag, strode through the foyer, and slammed the front door. She felt as though she’d been kicked in the stomach. What an out-of-touch cad. He had no idea. Poor Lish.
As she walked to her car, she saw a shadowy figure in the passenger seat of the Suttons’ Volvo. It was Lish, still strapped in, gazing in the opposite direction. Della wanted to run over, knock on the window, and tell Lish she loved her, but she could feel Drew’s eyes on her as he stood on the piazza waiting for her to exit.
Now she walked toward the gate, shaking her head.
When Della arrived home, it was dusk. The night was cooler than usual and all of the rickety windows were open. She saw the thin strips of paint peeling off of the sills and wondered if they had lead in them.
As she walked through the foyer, she saw that Peter and the children had painted a mural on the hallway walls. One image was of Burl and Bernice and their newfound mutt, Beauregard. The other was of a bed and three little monkeys jumping on it. In the background there was a mother monkey wagging her finger at them and a Dr. Monkey, much smaller, in the distance, scratching his head as he talked on his cell phone.
In the kitchen Della saw an open, empty Domino’s pizza box and the browning skins of some apple slices on paper plates. A half-drunk pitcher of lemonade was on the table, attracting a lone fly.
She found them all in the backyard in between the tool shed and two half-built, headless crustaceans that stood four feet tall. Peter had laid out a blanket, and they were listening to the crickets. No one was in anything matching and Mary Jane’s dress was on backward. But they were clean. They had been fed, and they were listening to the crickets.
“Mama!” Cozy shouted when she turned and spotted her. She ran and jumped into her arms, and then Mary Jane and Andrew danced around her, chanting, “Cousin Del, Cousin Del!”
Then Andrew rested his head against her hip and said, “Where’s Mama?”
“And Baby Cecilia?” Mary Jane asked, her cheeks flushed from the excitement.
Della rubbed their heads and found her gentlest voice. “Mama’s at your home and Baby Cecilia is with Aunt Anne, but I imagine your daddy will be picking you and her up real soon.”
Peter rolled on his side, cocked his head on his hand, and looked at Della.
“Cozy, why don’t you take Andrew and Mary Jane into the kitchen and let them pick out a Popsicle for dessert?”
“Okay!” she said and they quickly followed her.
Della sat down next to Peter on the blanket, half wanting to collapse into his arms and tell him what her last twenty-four hours had been like, half wanting to keep it to herself, the frightening parts with Lish and her conversation with Todd Jervey over meatball subs in the middle of the night.
He sat up, tapped her sandal with his bare toe.
“How’s Lish?”
“Not good.” Della suddenly felt the weariness from the night spent at the hospital. For the first time, her eyes were beginning to blur. “She’s had some kind of real mental break. A postpartum thing, I think.”
She teared up. “Drew just chewed me out for taking her to the emergency room.” She rubbed her eyes with the tip of her index fingers as the kids came running down the rotting back steps.
“He wants me to stay out of it. Says I overreacted.” Her lower back ached, and she leaned over to stretch it out. When she sat up, Cozy jumped into her lap, and it was as if the very weight of the little girl’s body breathed a new kind of life into Della. Holding her daughter was a kind of resuscitation. Something that jump-started her heart and got her blood pumping. I am someone’s mama, she told herself. Someone is depending on me. I’ve got to keep it together.
Cozy reached up and played with Della’s earring, a silver drop with turquoise that dangled just below her ear. “Tell us a Burl and Bernice story, Mama.”
“Yeah!” said Andrew, “but make it one about Burl, okay?” He crossed his arm, a miniature version of his disgruntled father with black, curly hair and long, dark eyelashes. “Bernice is a brat.”
Cozy rolled her eyes, and Mary Jane watched her older cousin and tried hard to do the same thing but seemed to get dizzy in the process. Della reached out her hand to steady the little girl.
“All right, Andrew,” Cozy said, and she wrapped her arms around her mother’s neck as if to claim her for her very own. “I guess it can be a Burl story even though it’s Bernice’s turn.”
“Someone give me a line,” Della said.
“I’ve got one,” said Peter, rolling down on his back.
“Okay, Daddy.” Cozy turned to him, grinning with expectation.
“Burl’s Mama Seems Sad, and He Wants to Cheer Her Up.”
“Mmm,” Cozy tucked a strand of hair behind her mother’s ear. “That sounds pretty good.”
“Yeah,” Mary Jane added. “Tell us why Burl’s mama is sad.”
After Drew picked the children up, Della tucked Cozy into bed. She had a stack of quizzes on her desk to grade before her first class tomorrow morning, and she had to be at school at 7:30 to take roll. If she got behind now, the whole quarter would spin out of control.
Peter was in the yard, welding a head on one of the crustaceans. She knew he didn’t have a commission, so why was he wasting his time and materials? She hoped he’d given more thought to the idea of a new career, but she doubted it.
As she put the pillow over her head, she wondered how she could check on Lish without Drew’s disapproving glare in the background. She’d give it a few days and then start with an e-mail to test the waters. As she closed her eyes and tried to feel a thumping in her own head, she wondered what was going on in her cousin’s brain. How did it all start, and how could they get it to stop? As the sound of the blowtorch halted, she removed the pillow from her head and suddenly recalled the rest of her conversation with Todd.
“So you never married?” she said after she unloaded on him in a way she hadn’t with anyone in a long time.
He shook his head, looked up at the indigo sky and then back at her until their eyes locked.
“I’ve only been in love once.” He bit his lower lip, looked down at his feet and then back to her. “And you pretty well ripped my heart out.”
Della tried hard to swallow. They had been engaged for six months. Todd was on his way to residency at the University of Colorado where they had an established program that specialized in his real interest, the revival of electroshock therapy to treat severe depression and bipolar disorder. She was going to go with him to Boulder—until she had her epiphany that she should follow in her mother’s footsteps and write. Once she received her acceptance letter from NYU’s M.F.A. program, she knew she had to go for it. And that very next summer she met Peter.
“Oh, come on.” She brushed him off like she used to do when he got too intense or emotional. “You’re a nice, attractive, successful guy. I’m sure you’ve had to beat off the women with a stick.”
His eyes glistened in the thick air. He nodded and wiped his brow. “If you’re wondering if I’m over you . . .” He leaned in and gently patted her knee. “I can’t say the answer is yes.”
Now she wondered, as she did from time to time, if she made the best decision, not to marry Todd Jervey. Did she follow the right career path? Did she marry the right man? All she needed to do was open the door by her bed and see Cozy sleeping soundly, her eyelids fluttering, to know she could never call it a mistake. And yet it was hard. Not at all what she imagined.
Todd would take her back now. She knew that from the look in his eyes, and she wondered, for the good of them all, if she should go.