Twenty-Two
Twenty-Two
Wednesday
Ellie doesn’t wait for someone to knock. She’s been awake for hours. She’s already seen the sun rise, already showered, dressed, and run a fast errand. She’s ready. This morning, unlike the ones that came before it, she’s prepared for whatever waits for her in this new, not entirely real, day.
“You’re leaving,” Ellie announces when Bunny, just having risen from her reading chair, shuffles into the kitchen. Behind them, the coffee machine beeps predictably on the counter. “And I made you your breakfast blend.” She pulls two mugs down from the cabinet. “Now sit.”
After Jonah appeared on the porch—Jonah, her Jonah, not a stranger, not some person who accidentally crashed into her and whom she was meeting for the first time—and handed Ellie the completed drawing, she stayed awake nearly all night looking at that creased sheet of paper and mapping out a plan.
The drawing itself was silly, literally a child’s drawing that, over the years, Ellie had produced and reproduced alongside her daughter, and yet it told the story of their family’s whole life. The dozens of birthdays and holidays when Maggie was too small to find real value in stores and so instead gifted assorted versions of her signature illustration to her parents and grandparents as gifts. The trail of marker caps and broken crayons she left all over their house and their cars and even the yard for years and years and years. Her hand-drawn pictures, the ones Ellie often taped to the fridge, a happy greeting there for her and Jonah anytime they needed to pull open the door for milk or eggs.
Jonah knew how to finish that silly drawing because, like Ellie, he’d watched Maggie draw it dozens of times. And although Ellie hasn’t solved all the how s and why s yet, she comprehends enough to recognize that he understands what’s happening. That something about their life has been flipped.
“What do you mean I’m leaving?” Bunny asks as she pulls her robe tighter around her body. Her short bob of hair is frazzled from sleep. “To go where? And when?” She coughs, a slight rattle of mucus in her throat. “I’m not going anywhere until I’ve had my coffee first.”
Ellie is already wearing her jeans and a clean white T-shirt. Her favorite taupe cardigan is folded up in her book bag nearby. Her car keys are out and waiting right beside it. “Here.” She sets a steaming mug down in front of her mother and then reaches into the refrigerator for the new carton of creamer she picked up earlier from the store. She places this down on the table, too. “It’s fresh,” Ellie confirms, already anticipating Bunny’s line of questioning. “Now drink.”
“Are you kicking me out?” Bunny asks before pouring way too much creamer into her mug. Her coffee is basically a milkshake. She takes a sip, adds another splash. “I don’t know where I’ll go now,” she mumbles, partially to Ellie and partially to herself. “I suppose I’ll live on the street,” she rambles while nervously fidgeting with her cross pendant. A sudden thought transforms her face. Bunny throws up her hands. “I knew it! You’re sending me to a home, aren’t you?”
“A home?” Ellie squeezes her eyes shut, shakes her head. “No! What are you saying?”
“Well, I can’t think of any other place I’d go,” Bunny continues. “I certainly won’t move back into the condo, not with everything going on between—”
“Wrong,” Ellie states, newly pleased with herself. After months and days of turmoil and uncertainty, for this brief snippet of time she feels, thankfully, in control of things again. “That’s exactly where you’re heading, Mom.” She begins to gather her mother’s belongings—her blue tub of VapoRub, her plastic pill case—from the counter and sets them on the table in an orderly pile. “We’re going to find Dad.”
Knock, knock, knock.
Ellie swings the door wide open a little while later, already knowing what to expect. Inside the house, Bunny continues to take her time as she organizes and gathers her things.
“I can’t,” she tells Gabby, who stands opposite her on the porch. Her macramé bag is slung over her shoulder like a fashionable knot, while her long, crimped hair forms an unruly crown that drips from her head. “I know what I’m about to say won’t make much sense—or maybe it will—but ever since I woke up on Monday morning, my entire life has been completely out of order.”
Gabby, who wears a different vintage T-shirt today (some relic from an old camp resort upstate), tugs a piece of her hair, pulling her head toward one side. “Is this because of the scuba diver?” Her face illuminates, her tone lifting. She releases the long strand. “Or because of yesterday in the coffee shop with Jack?” Her pink-painted lips mold themselves into a smile. “Because, honestly, I definitely did not see that one coming!” She lifts her hands, offers a dramatic slow clap. “By the way, A-plus for whatever that was all about.”
“Um.” Ellie bites her lip, slicked with a hint of bare shimmer. So much has transpired—so many loose threads have unraveled in her head since yesterday—it’s hard to believe it was only a few hours ago that she sat in the coffee shop window with Jack. “It’s partially about that run-in,” she explains. Around them, the world is heavy with springtime perfume—all blooming flowers and clean air. “Though, if I’m being honest, that’s not quite the full story.”
From behind Ellie, a forlorn Bunny appears in the hallway, carting her things.
“Should I ask?” Gabby poses.
Ellie shakes her head. “Just take care of the shop,” she says. “That seems a lot more like your world right now than it does mine.”
“This is silly,” Bunny keeps saying, over and over like a broken record, as she hands Ellie her overnight bag in the driveway. “We’ll never find him.”
“Of course we will, Mom,” Ellie insists as she hoists her mother’s bag into the back seat, even though the movement makes it feel as if her back will rip right in half. “There are only two places in the whole world where Dad would be right now.”
Before she gets in the car, Bunny cranes her neck toward the back of the vehicle. “What happened to your bumper, Ellie?” She slides her readers from her head and onto her nose. “It looks like you got into an accident!”
“I did.” Ellie slams the door shut. “But I’m fine.”
“Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” Bunny exclaims, as if an accident might be happening right now. “When did that happen?”
“Yesterday,” Ellie announces and then shoos her mother into the vehicle. “And another the day before that.”
Ellie opens the driver’s side door, clicks her seat belt into place. In the rearview, she sees the power company’s truck parking against the curb. Two employees lumber out. Like her, they’re intent on fixing everything that’s been damaged these last few days.
“You got in two accidents this week?” Bunny asks from the passenger seat as she thumbs her gold cross. “How can you expect me to drive with you after this news?”
Ellie takes one last glance at the porch, praying Jonah will miraculously appear on it again. “Right now, Mom,” she says as she shifts the gear into reverse, “I don’t think you have much of a choice.”
Frank is nowhere. Not at the deli (the only place other than his home where Ellie thought he might be). Not out walking through town. Not at church. Not at Ellie’s house (which they circled back to twice). And not here, in his and Bunny’s New Jersey condo, which Ellie now sees exists just a few blocks over from where she lives.
“I told you we wouldn’t find him,” Bunny says as she moves around her tight, windowless kitchen. “I’m sure that, by now, he’s long gone.”
Feeling claustrophobic, Ellie steps out and paces through the living room. This doesn’t look like the place where her parents live at all. Yes, she sees familiar objects—her father’s reading chair, some framed childhood photographs of Ellie. But the room is missing something. A lot of somethings.
“Wait.” Ellie turns back to face the kitchen entryway. “What do you mean ... ‘gone’?”
Bunny joins her daughter in the living room. “This is the problem, Ellie. Your father wants his life, and I want mine.”
While Bunny talks, Ellie rummages through the room, as if a clue about her father’s whereabouts might exist beneath a couch cushion. “What does that mean, Mom?”
A creature of habit, Bunny walks to the empty space where her reading chair was previously positioned and nearly tries to sit. She stops, lowers herself into Frank’s chair instead. “Your father told me weeks ago that if I ever did go through with this, the first thing he’d do is put himself on a plane and go someplace sunny, finally follow our original plan.”
This is when it clicks for Ellie. Without another word, she races down the condo’s short hallway and into her parents’ bedroom. She pulls open the closet and sees that her father’s old blue suitcase is missing. “Mom!” Ellie calls out and then zips through the room, hunting for the specific items her father has packed. She flicks on the light in their small, en suite bathroom, sees his toothbrush is missing. “Is this a joke?” she shouts. “Dad’s in his eighties! He doesn’t travel by himself anymore! He hardly knows how to use his phone! What if something happens?” She swings open the medicine cabinet, revealing a half dozen orange prescription bottles. “And he didn’t pack his heart medication!”
Bunny appears in the bedroom. “See? I told you he never remembers a thing about his pills.” She purses her lips. “I suppose he didn’t pack the list I wrote out for him, either.”
Ellie slams the cabinet closed and rushes back into the bedroom, searching. “There!” Beneath the printer that sits on her parents’ shared desk is a mess of loose papers on the carpeting. Ellie gathers them, notices the duplicate printouts of the same thing—testaments to her father’s inability to understand electronics. “Jesus Christ, Mom. You’re not kidding.” She shoves the papers at Bunny. “This is a flight confirmation. His plane leaves in an hour!”
Bunny hands the papers back, then nonchalantly straightens up the bed linens—Frank’s side of the mattress the only one that’s been slept in. “Well, he finally got what he wanted. A tropical retirement. With or without me.”
Ellie is sweating through her shirt. “But it should be with you. That’s what you’ve always wanted, too.”
Bunny closes her eyes, breathes deeply. She opens them, tugs the comforter tight. “Not now,” she states. “Right now, you need me here.”
“No! I don’t!” Ellie exclaims, realizing she sounds like an angry teen. “You can’t put your whole life on hold—you can’t throw your whole marriage away—because of me!”
Bunny shakes her little blond bob. “I’m not.”
“You are,” Ellie insists and then moves back toward the closet. She drags out Bunny’s suitcase. “But I’m not letting you anymore.”
“Don’t be absurd, Ellie.” Bunny straightens her back—or as much as her spine will let her these days—to assert her maternal dominance. “You’re my child. You don’t get to make these choices for me!”
“Well, today, I do.” Ellie heaves the suitcase onto the bed, triggering her back once more. “Now get moving.” She wipes some perspiration from her forehead. “You have exactly ten minutes to pack.”