House of Glass
“Stay here. I’m going to go get us a couple Red Bulls,” Paige said, bounding off the bed.
“Okay.” Livvy crawled under the covers. Maybe she and Paige could sleep here a little longer. She wasn’t supposed to be home until after lunch. With any luck, when she got home she would go straight to her room and her parents would leave her alone for once. At dinner if they asked her about the skiing she’d just lie—no big deal.
Except the thing with her mom’s dad. Livvy squeezed her eyes shut and burrowed down deeper in Rachel’s bed. It was so weird, not to even know she had a grandfather, that he had been alive all this time. Then all of a sudden he was dead, and Mom was going up there with Aunt Tanya to get him cremated or something.
At least her mom would be distracted and maybe she wouldn’t ask her a million questions about the ski trip. But still. It was her mom’s dad. Her mom and Aunt Tanya had been really poor growing up and their mother died when they were in high school and they had to go live with relatives, and her mom never talked about it except to constantly say how grateful they should all be for their blessings. So her dad must have been a real dick, not even taking care of them when their mom died, but still, not to ever even mention him?
Paige came back with the drinks. She slid in next to Livvy, and they popped the tops and drank. “So, what did you say to Sean?”
Livvy shrugged. “I told him I heard Allie has herpes. Then he told me I didn’t know what I was missing, and I told him to go fuck himself.”
“You didn’t!” Paige cracked up. “You can do so much better, anyway. Did you give that guy your number last night?”
“Are you kidding? My parents would kill me.”
“So? They don’t know about last night, right? You got away with it once, you can do it again. We just have to be careful.”
But as Paige chatted on about the night before, Livvy could only think of the way Sean had looked at her over his shoulder as he left. She knew her parents hated him, and even her friends thought he was a loser since he got suspended again, but none of them knew what it was like when he looked at you as though you were the answer to every question he ever had.
Last fall, for a few months, Sean had made her his world. And even if Livvy pretended she hated him now, even if he was with that skank Allie, whose cousins supposedly were in a gang, even if he never thought about her anymore, she knew that being with him had changed her and she would never be the same.
She hadn’t told Paige the truth about what really happened. Sean and Allie came up to the keg together, holding hands, not seeing Livvy standing there until they already got their drinks. Sean looked like someone slapped him, and Allie said something, and Livvy tried to get past them but Allie blocked her way.
“I heard you have herpes,” she muttered so only Livvy could hear.
And Livvy couldn’t think of anything to say back, because she was drunk and about to cry, and so she shoved Allie hard and the full cup of beer went all down her front, splashing up into her face and soaking her hair. As Sean dragged Allie off, she was yelling that Livvy would be sorry.
Livvy was already sorry. But not about Allie.
Chapter Three
When they got back to Tanya’s apartment, Jen parked and turned off the car. “Let me help you take your stuff up.”
Tanya had fallen asleep on the drive, and there was a crease on her face from where it was pressed against the hood of her coat. “What stuff?” she said irritably. “All’s I’ve got is just the one bag. Plus I need to pick up Jake from next door.”
She already had her hand on the door handle, and Jen didn’t know how to tell her that she wasn’t ready to leave her, that she’d replayed that desperate little apartment over in her head the whole way back and her stomach felt like it had a giant hole in it. That there were things somebody needed to say and she didn’t know what they were or how to say them.
“Have lunch next week?” she asked.
Tanya was out of the car, and she ducked back down to peer in. “We never have lunch. There’s nothing around the office except that Arby’s.”
She looked both perplexed and irritated. It was true that they never met for lunch—Jen wasn’t sure she could even find the building where Tanya worked.
“Or just call me,” she settled for.
Tanya got her bag and shut the door. Jen watched her walk to the stairs of her building, but drove away before Tanya reached the landing.
* * *
Jen managed to compose herself before she picked up Teddy from the Sterns’. Cricket Stern was one of her best friends, not to mention the mother of Teddy’s best friend, Mark, but even so Jen hadn’t been able to bring herself to tell her the real reason she’d gone out of town. Spa weekend with her sister, she’d claimed, a late birthday gift to Tanya. It wasn’t like Cricket’s and Tanya’s paths would ever cross, so it was a safe lie, but Jen felt guilty, anyway. But if she hadn’t been able to talk about Sid before the trip, she was even less willing now, so when Cricket asked she just said that the spa treatments were relaxing, the restaurant very good.
Teddy fell asleep in his car seat on the way home. She carried him up to his room and put him to bed; a nap wouldn’t hurt, considering the boys had been up late the night before. Ted was taking a shower in the hall bathroom, and Livvy’s door was closed, which only deepened Jen’s dark mood as she went to unpack.
The door to their own bathroom, the one Ted was renovating, was closed. On the floor of their bedroom was a mound of clothes, a sweatshirt and jeans and socks that were still warm when Jen picked them up to toss them in the hamper. She had lifted the wicker lid and was about to drop the clothes in when she noticed something odd: in the bottom of the hamper was only a single pair of boxer shorts.
Jen stared at the boxer shorts, thinking. She had emptied the hamper Friday when she did the laundry. In her arms were the clothes Ted had worn today while he worked on the bathroom. The flannel pants and T-shirt he slept in were on the floor by the bed, where he left them every morning for Jen to fold and put under his pillow.
She dropped the clothes in and let the lid fall shut, and went looking for his gym bag. She found it on the floor of the closet, unzipped it and confirmed there was nothing in it but his MP3 player and a couple of water bottles. Nowhere was there another set of dirty clothes.
Ted hadn’t done laundry since Livvy was a baby, and he never wore the same clothes twice. Which meant he had hidden or disposed of yesterday’s clothes for some reason.
Or left them somewhere else. He could have left the house yesterday with a change of clothes in his gym bag, gone somewhere else where he showered and changed, leaving the clothes for someone else to wash. Sarah, for instance. Sarah, who probably had one of those stackable units in her condo, who was in training to take on the role that Jen played, learning how Ted liked his T-shirts folded and his socks rolled and—
“No,” Jen whispered. There had to be a good explanation. It was crazy to equate a note and some missing laundry with a full-blown affair.
Ted walked into the bedroom, a towel wrapped around his waist, a thin sliver of shaving cream under his chin. He looked exhausted. Jen toed the gym bag out of sight in the corner of the closet.
“Hey,” he said, giving her a tired smile. “Welcome back.”
She watched him get socks and underwear from the dresser, clean clothes from the closet. He dressed unhurriedly, tossing the damp towel across the hamper. If he was covering up a guilty conscience, he was putting on a hell of an act.
“How was the drive?” he asked. “Any snow on your way back?”
“A few flurries. Nothing that stuck.” She forced a smile. “So, I can’t wait to see what you’ve been up to all weekend.”
His expression slipped, and his eyes darted to the closed bathroom door. “Okay, look,” he said nervously. “Don’t lose it when you see the tub. I mean, where the tub was. It was a big job getting it out of there.”
“What do you mean? What happened?”
“Nothing happened. Look, Jen, that thing weighed a ton. It would have been a job no matter who took it out.” He opened the bathroom door, and light poured in from the window.
“I hit the wall trying to get it out of here,” Ted continued, talking fast, his face going slightly red. “And listen, there’s a little damage to the subfloor, too, but I was lucky, I lost my grip, and I’m telling you, if I’d dropped that thing there’d be a crater there and not just a dent.”
Jen pushed the door open the rest of the way, willing herself not to react. No matter how bad it was, it could be fixed, and—
“Oh, wow,” she said, putting her hand over her mouth. Where the old tub had been, she saw a gaping hole edged with ragged plasterboard, wallpaper hanging in strips. The wall tile was gone, leaving exposed lath and scarred plaster. The subfloor was filthy and gashed, and the whole thing looked like a bomb had gone off in it.
And nothing else appeared to have been done. Ted had promised to finish stripping the wallpaper and replace the light fixtures—not to mention replacing the bathtub—by the time she was back from Murdoch. Instead, he’d gotten the tub out and then...what?
“Like I said, I know it looks bad,” Ted said.
“It’s just...I don’t understand what you’ve been doing all weekend. With us gone and the house to yourself—” She stopped, because if she kept going he might actually tell her, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. “Never mind. Just never mind.”
“Don’t you think I’m trying?” Ted said. “Is this really about the job search? Is that what this is?”
“What? No, I know you’re trying. I know it’s a tough market out there, and—”
“No. You don’t know what it’s like to send out thirty résumés and get only four callbacks. You can’t know what it’s like when a guy you trained—a guy who got out of business school in two thousand five, for Chrissakes, gets hired instead of you.”
“Ted, please. The kids’ll hear.”
“Hear what? We’re just talking, and it’s long overdue. I guess you’ve been wanting to say this to me for a while, and—”
“I didn’t even say anything! You brought it up. I have never once criticized you for not looking harder, not trying hard enough.” Tears welled up in her eyes, and she swiped them away.
“Hey, hey,” Ted said, instantly abashed. “Jen. Jesus. I’m sorry. Don’t cry. God, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to go off on you like that.”
He reached for her, and after a moment she stepped into his arms. She pressed her face pressed against the soft cotton of his sweater, feeling his heart beat against her cheek. What was she doing? How could she really believe Ted would cheat, would risk everything they had built together?
“Jen, look...it’s my fault, too. I don’t—I know I’ve let you down. I’ve let the family down. It’s just, knowing that I’m not providing for you guys, it eats away at me.”
“Oh, Ted...” Jen closed her eyes and inhaled, his soapy shower scent tinged with the faint metallic sweet smell he had when he drank too much the night before.
A tiny leftover spike of suspicion flared inside her, but she fought it back down. He probably took a break to watch a game, have a beer...and just let the afternoon overtake him, that was all. She could hardly hold it against him, considering she’d had more than enough herself last night.
“We’re going to get through this,” she said as much for her own benefit as his. “They say the economy’s picking up, and even if it doesn’t, we’re fine—we have money put away for exactly this situation. We could go another year before we have to worry.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Ted said heavily. “I don’t think I could take that.”
“No, that’s not what I meant, honey. You’ll find something long before that. I just mean that there’s nothing to worry about.”
They held each other for a moment longer before Ted pulled gently away. There was something in his eyes, some troubled emotion. God, she hoped he found something soon.
“I’m going to do better,” he muttered. “I’m going to make things right.”
Chapter Four
In the hours before dawn on Wednesday, Jen dreamed the red bird again. It was bright as blood, coiled in a circle, its beak open and angry. In the dream, the bird slowly unfurled its wings, expanding until it filled her mind, its screams growing hungrier and its beak widening until it seemed that it meant to consume her from the inside out.
She’d first had this nightmare years ago, when she was fresh out of college and just starting to date Ted. The bird didn’t do anything but scream, its beak open wide, spinning and getting larger and larger until she woke up. It had been years since she had the dream, but now it had come twice in one week.
When it first happened, Jen had researched the meaning of birds in dreams and decided the bird was nothing more than a symbol of her struggle—to put herself through school, to get her first job, to pay back her loans, to survive the stress of trying to fit into the society she had worked so hard to join. She struggled to erase her past, to project the ease and confidence that her colleagues and friends seemed to come by naturally, to be the mother she hadn’t had, the wife her own mother hadn’t had a chance to be.
But none of that had been a problem for years. So why was the dream returning now?
Jen was tired and irritable as she got Teddy fed and ready for preschool. Livvy refused to eat breakfast and dashed out the door so she didn’t miss the bus. Ted took his car to the dealership to have the oil changed and a dent fixed. He’d been complaining about the dent for weeks—someone had dinged him at the Target Center parking lot during a Timberwolves game.
After preschool, Cricket Stern brought the boys over for their standing playdate. “Listen, Jen, something happened today,” she said as Mark and Teddy shot past her into the house. “I thought you’d want to know.”
Instantly Jen was on alert. She had worked so hard to get the speech pathologist and Teddy’s teacher on the same page. A year ago, when he was three, Teddy stopped talking to strangers; when he stopped speaking to his babysitters and then to his friends and teachers, Jen and Ted became concerned enough to have him evaluated, and Teddy had been diagnosed with selective mutism.
For the past year, he hadn’t spoken to anyone outside his immediate family, but the speech pathologist said that Teddy was responding well to the self-modeling and desensitization exercises. She thought Teddy was very close to verbalizing one-on-one with a trusted adult.
“It’s nothing,” Cricket said hastily. “Just, the kids are starting to pick on him. Well, not all the kids. Mack and Jordan. Of course, right?”
“Oh. Shit.”
“I know.” Cricket grimaced. “Sometimes I just want to smack Tessa. It’s like she wants to raise a couple of delinquents, the way she lets them run wild.”
The twins had been a problem since the beginning of the year. Recently they pushed a kid out of the castle in the play yard and knocked out two of his teeth.
“What did they do?” Jen asked, steeling herself.
“They had him in the corner by the dress-up box, and they were trying to make him talk. Mack was making fun of him and calling him retarded. Or maybe it was Jordan—I can’t tell them apart.”
Jen’s anger was tempered with dismay. “What did Teddy do?”
“He managed to get past them. They’re big, but he’s fast, you know?”
“Well, it could have been worse. Did he look upset?”
“Not too bad. More like aggravated. I said something to Mrs. Bray, and she talked to the boys. I thought you could decide whether you want to have her talk to Tessa.”
“No, I feel like that’ll make it worse. You know, like he’s a tattletale. Damn it. He’s so close. He’s been talking to the speech therapist over Skype. She says any day now...” She felt her eyes tearing up.
“Oh, honey, it’s okay. I didn’t mean to upset you,” Cricket said, pulling a packet of tissues from her purse.
“No, it’s not even that,” Jen said, taking a tissue and dabbing at her eyes. “It’s...just, things are kind of a mess right now.”
“Is it Ted’s job search?” Cricket asked sympathetically.
Jen hesitated. She hadn’t told Cricket about Sid’s death, or about Sarah’s note. She didn’t like to make her problems public, even to her best friends. “Yes, I guess,” she said, settling for a partial truth.
Cricket nodded sympathetically. “When Brad was laid off a few years ago he was unbearable. I finally made him rent office space to get out of the house. We pretended he was ‘consulting.’” She smiled as she made air quotes. “Luckily it was only for a few months or we’d be divorced.”
“Oh, it’s not that bad.” Jen had heard rumors that Brad was seeing a woman he’d met on one of his accounts while he was supposed to be at that rented office. “Just a blip, that’s all.”
As Jen watched Cricket drive away, she had the strange sensation that she could be watching herself. Sometimes it felt like she and her friends were all the same, well-preserved Calumet housewives in expensive sunglasses and recent-model SUVs.
Jen closed the door and wondered how many other secrets they kept from each other.
* * *
Thursday afternoon, Jen decided to bundle Teddy into the car and pick Livvy up from school so she wouldn’t have to take the bus. Livvy had been hostile and distant all week, and the gesture was meant to be conciliatory, to let her daughter know she was trying.
As she inched forward in the car-pool line, she caught sight of Livvy with her cluster of friends. Standing a few feet away was a gangly boy with shaggy black hair and a threadbare backpack repaired with duct tape. Sean—Livvy’s first boyfriend, the one who had broken her heart over the Christmas holidays. He was talking to a girl in pink UGG boots and a pink knit cap, his hands jammed in his pockets, and Jen had a momentary urge to get out of the car and shake him, to demand to know who he thought he was to hurt her daughter’s feelings, an unspectacular boy with a dusting of acne on his forehead and gauge earrings he was surely going to regret in a few years.
Livvy got into the car without sparing Sean a glance. She said hi to Teddy and lapsed into sullen silence.
“How was your day?” Jen tried. “Anything interesting happen?”
“My day was like every other day of my life,” Livvy muttered. “So no, I would say that nothing interesting happened.”
“Well, mine was fascinating. After I worked at your school, I did your laundry and made you a dentist appointment and picked up your sweaters from the cleaners.”
“Good for you.”
Jen tightened her grip on the steering wheel and pressed her lips together. They rode the rest of the way in silence. When she turned onto Crabapple Court, she realized she’d been holding her breath. She exhaled with relief as the garage door glided up, and she saw Ted’s BMW parked in his side of the garage. So he’d come home from wherever he’d been all day.
Jen had barely turned off the car when Livvy opened her door and bolted into the house. Teddy started whimpering to get out of his car seat, shoving at the restraints, and Jen hurried out of the car to help him. But even as she worked at the tangled strap, his protestations turned to frustrated tears.
Even though Jen could swear she was doing everything right—even though she was trying just as hard as she knew how—the more she strove to connect with her family, the further she seemed to drive them away.
* * *
Jen set her purse on the hall table and headed for the kitchen. She could hear Livvy’s footsteps racing up the stairs, and she winced, waiting for the slam of her daughter’s bedroom door.
Jen filled a plastic cup with snack crackers and got Teddy settled in front of the TV, his tears forgotten. She felt guilty using Dinosaur Train as a babysitter, but she just needed a few minutes to change into yoga pants and put her hair in a ponytail before she started dinner.
Jen went upstairs to her bedroom, steeling herself for whatever Ted had done to the room now. There he was, on his knees by the wall under the windows. It wasn’t really all that bad. He had put a drop cloth on the bed and the nightstand, and the lengths of baseboard that he’d pried away from the wall were stacked neatly. But there were several gouges and scrapes in the plaster. And there was a long, thin scratch in the finish on the walnut-stained floor.
Jen pushed her hair behind her ears as she looked around the room. It’s fine, it’s fine.
Ted set down his pry bar and got to his feet. “Hey, hon,” he said, a note of guilt in his voice. “I had to go to the lumber store to order a few trim pieces. Thought I’d get these baseboards taken care of.”
“Uh-huh. Listen, I was wondering, maybe you could watch Teddy while I get changed and start dinner.”
“Jen...” Ted ran his hand through his hair. “All I’m doing is trying to get this thing finished. I know you’re tired of the mess. I got that message, loud and clear, and I’m just trying to get it put back together.”
Frustration mixed with fatigue in his voice, and Jen tried not to rise to the bait. “I appreciate that you’re trying to get some work done up here. I just wonder if you could have done it while Teddy was at preschool instead of going...wherever you went.”
“I just told you, I was at the lumberyard. And a couple of errands.” Ted’s face darkened with anger. “Look, I don’t think it’s the end of the world if our kid watches half an hour of PBS. I guess that makes me a crappy parent on top of everything else, but I wish you’d stop and think once in a while that maybe your way isn’t the only way to raise a kid.”
“Could you keep your voice down?”
“Why? A little disagreement’s normal, Jen. It’s not going to break us. It’s good for the kids to hear it once in a while, instead of growing up thinking everything has to be perfect all the time.”
Jen flinched. “If you really want to go there, I’m not going to have our daughter listening,” she said, hurrying to shut the bedroom door.
“Look,” Ted said carefully, waiting until she came back. “I’m sorry if that came out wrong. But there’s no need to get hysterical about every little thing.”
Hysterical, Jen repeated in her mind. Was that how her husband saw her? She was trying to think of how to respond without sounding defensive when there was a knock at the bedroom door.
She and Ted both froze. Ted wiped his hand across his forehead, muttering softly.
“I’ll get it,” Jen said.
As she crossed the room, she thought about how the smallest reminder of one’s children could make a person feel guilty even when there was no rational reason. The air, charged with tension seconds earlier, was now weighted with wistful failure.
Jen put her hand on the brass knob. Later, she would remember this detail, the warmth of the old brass to her touch, the way she had to tug to clear the slight jam.
Standing in the hall was her beautiful daughter, her face exquisitely frozen, her lips parted and her long-lashed eyes wide with terror.
On her left, a man Jen had never seen before held Teddy in his arms, her little boy flailing ineffectively against his grip.
On her right, a man who looked unnervingly like Orlando Bloom pressed a gun to Livvy’s head.
Chapter Five
“This is where you stay real quiet,” the younger man snapped, jabbing Livvy’s skin with the barrel of his gun, making her head jerk. He was wearing gloves, his hands pale and dead-looking through the thin latex.
“Mom,” she whimpered, and Jen didn’t think, she threw herself at her daughter, her fingertips brushing Livvy’s arm before she was struck from the side and went crashing to the floor. The other one had kicked her in the knees, still holding her son in his arms, and as Jen pushed herself up on her hands, she saw the rough work boots he was wearing and wondered if he had broken something in her leg.