Chapter 14 #2
The Andrea Hannah knew could be promiscuous, but she would not have had a six-month long affair with a married man, let alone the father of one of her best friends. She wouldn’t have yelled at Hannah in the street and badmouthed her family.
Sure, they had had fights before, but lately it felt like their crossed words were chipping away at years of friendship. They were losing touch with each other. Keeping secrets.
Hannah missed their days at Sanfia Records, when Andrea was producing and happy.
When she asked Hannah for her opinion on music and the management of artists.
When Sofia was carefree and didn’t have Jay anchoring her.
When Rosalie would pop into the studio to show them her latest pair of shoes and flirt with the artists.
Times changed. What mattered now was that she had four mouths to feed at home.
That Rod was excited about his new coaching job in Queens and she wanted him to be happy and to feel satisfied.
He too had had dreams, bigger dreams than hers, and they had been shattered, not by children but a broken back.
He could never change that, no matter how old and independent the kids got.
Those boys and Rod were her life and they were what mattered, not an argument with Andrea over her sex life.
Hannah stood from the bench with renewed purpose and headed back to the office.
* * *
Hannah and Andrea had passed the remainder of the week in the office with stoic silence, neither one of them speaking to the other, communicating through blunt email exchanges. Hannah was now standing in packed Penn Station staring at indeterminate train delays, thanks to a jumper.
‘People are so selfish,’ one commuter said.
‘Couldn’t they have jumped from a bridge or a building or something?’ another said.
‘All I want is to get home on a Friday night with my bottle of wine,’ said another.
Whoever said humanity was dead?
Though, despite having a little more compassion, Hannah couldn’t disagree with the inconvenience they had all been caused.
It was the first week of Rod’s new job in Queens.
She was frantically trying to get hold of him, wondering where he was and when he would make it home for the kids, since the sitter got off at 5.
30p.m. She wasn’t worried about Luke, or even so much about Jackson – they were old enough to fend for themselves for a few hours – but TJ was not.
Rod finished work earlier than Hannah, but he also had to pass through Penn Station and she had no idea if he had already made it through.
She tried calling his cell again. No answer. She called home. No answer. She called the sitter. No answer.
‘Doesn’t anyone answer their goddamn phones?’ she shouted into the station, her voice lost in a mass of noise.
As if the big man upstairs had heard her taking his name in vain and wondered what the heck was up, her cell phone rang.
‘Rod! Where are you?’
‘Babe? You there? Han?’
‘Rod? Can you hear me?’
‘Hold up, one sec.’
‘Rod?’
‘Yeah, yeah. I can hear you, babe. Whatssup?’
‘I’m stuck at Penn Station. Are you with the kids?’
‘No, babe. My first week, the guys wanted to take me out for a drink, you know, welcome me to the team.’
‘That’s great, Rod, but the sitter finishes in…’ She checked the digital clock on the train departure board. ‘The sitter finished twenty minutes ago.’
‘No, babe, I got her to stay until six.’
‘I hate to state the obvious here, Rod, but neither of us will be home by six.’ At that moment, God was definitely looking in on her because the departure board refreshed and gave her four minutes to get to the platform for her train home. ‘Rod, I’ve got to go, the train is coming.’
She ran toward the designated platform, pushing and shoving other commuters, feeling like Kevin McCallister’s mom in Home Alone, eventually making it onto her train in time.
Squished like a sardine in a can, she managed to dial the sitter and bring her phone to her ear. After a broken conversation, the sitter, Hannah thought, agreed to stay until 6.40p.m., at which time she absolutely had to leave.
Hannah watched the minutes tick by on her cell phone, working out with each passing second how long her kids might be left unattended between the sitter leaving and her arriving. How much harm can come to them in five or ten minutes? A teenager, an eleven-year-old and a baby… Oh, hell.
She had visions of TJ choking to death as his brothers played computer games. Or worse, lying in a heap at the bottom of the staircase, where they had fought on the landing and tumbled to their deaths.
When the train pulled in, Hannah ran from the station, hardly breaking stride – despite her heels, despite the fact she had not run the distance since track in high school – until she arrived home.
She burst through the front door to the house. ‘Kids?’ she managed, panting.
Music was blaring upstairs – some godawful rap; the teenager’s latest fad. That she couldn’t hear any child was disconcerting enough to make her energy-drained legs carry her up the staircase.
She followed the rhythmic expletives to Luke’s bedroom, where he was lying on his bed, playing computer games.
She picked up his headset and plugged it into his stereo, stopping the racket. ‘Is everything okay? Where’s TJ? Where’s Jackson?’
‘They’re fine. They’re making potions or something in the bathroom.’ He snatched the headphones from her, pulled them over his ears and continued playing the game he hadn’t paused.
Without the sound of rap music blazing in her ears, Hannah could hear TJ’s childish giggle coming from the bathroom. He’s alive, at least, she thought.
‘Splash!’ she heard Jackson say. ‘Splash!’ This time louder.
She opened the bathroom door to find Jackson holding her only bottle of perfume in his hand, about to drop it into the loo.
‘What are you doing?’ she yelled, grabbing the bottle from him. She next saw TJ lying on his back on the bathroom rug, giggling as he held his foot to his mouth.
Scooping up the baby and doing a quick check for any major injuries, she turned back to Jackson. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Playing splash. TJ likes it. He thinks it’s funny.’
His pants were soaked through and he was shirtless. What the…?
Then, she peered into the loo and all became clear as she saw her toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste, a razor and a bar of soap in the bottom of the pot.
‘I bet your smelly bottle would have made the biggest splash,’ Jackson said.
Closing her eyes, she inhaled deeply. ‘You’re eleven years old, Jackson, not five.
Go change your pants,’ she said. Because what was the point in labouring the point to her child who already knew better that he was a little shit for putting all those things down the loo, which she would have to fish out before she could take a pee?
Surely his retort would be something like, You abandoned your kids, what did you expect?
She closed the bathroom door, then put down the toilet seat and held TJ to her chest as she slumped down on top of it.
She was failing as a mom. She did nothing but snap at her husband. Her best friend currently wasn’t speaking to her. And she was so exhausted, she couldn’t tell her own ass from her elbow.
Either she needed to quit working in the city, which she didn’t want to do, or they needed to move home, which they couldn’t afford to do.
‘Or I need to sell you kids to the highest bidder,’ she said, stroking TJ’s wiry black hair and kissing his temple, knowing there was no way on earth she would ever sell her boys… Unless… No, she couldn’t give up the babies.
She sighed. ‘But something does need to change, little man. Mommy can’t continue like this.’