Eight
EIGHT
OUT HER WINDOW, under the moonlight, a garden. One of the grannies and eleven dogs near a tree, foraging, sniffing, sitting near her, gazing up at her, leaning against her heavy legs.
“SO WHAT’S IT like?”
Judd on the phone sometime at three in the morning, when the pounding in her head and the dryness in her mouth woke her up once more. She had missed seven calls while she was asleep.
“It’s lovely here,” she said. “It’s sad.”
“Why sad?”
“It’s a pretty difficult time.”
“What do you mean?”
“I just—I should have done more work before I got here, read up more. There’s all this political tension right now, and everyone cares, everyone has a stake. Maybe because it’s a small country, but it feels like everyone opts in to politics here. Not like at home.”
He paused. Then he said, “I miss you.”
She closed her eyes. “Are you even listening?”
He sighed. “Of course I’m listening,” he said. “I just wanted you to know I miss you. Roxy misses you. The cats miss you.”
“How’s Meret?”
He sighed again, more heavily. “Did you go this far away so we can fight?”
“I’m just curious.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t seen her.”
“Is that true?”
For a moment, neither one said anything. Then: “It’s true. What time is it there?”
“You don’t know?”
“How should I know?”
“The internet would tell you. You could have checked before you woke me up.”
“You called me,” he said.
“You called me first.” Six thousand miles away from one another and this was what they were going to talk about? Well. They had never done very well on the phone.
“Ferry wanted me to let you know he got an A on his chemistry test.”
“He could have called me.”
“He didn’t know what time it was,” Judd said. “He didn’t want to wake you up.”
She was quiet for a moment, then she laughed.
“Tell him I’m proud of him,” she said. “We’ll be paying for medical school soon.”
“Uno can do that,” Judd said. “We’re spending enough.”
“Come on,” she said. Judd always acted like they didn’t have enough money. She didn’t know why. Couldn’t he see he had more than enough? This was one of the downsides of growing up rich; you never learned how little a person actually needed.
“He’s going to take care of us in our old age,” Amy said. “It’s a good investment.”
“Come home soon,” Judd said.
“I will,” she said. “As soon as I’ve done what I came to do.”
TWICE SHE HAD saved Ferry’s mother’s life.
The first time had been simple, almost reflexive: Amy was driving her to rehab somewhere deep in Bucks County when Uno started to choke on one of the Werther’s candies she’d been compulsively sucking the entire ride.
Although Amy had never performed the Heimlich maneuver, she had studied the posters in every kitchen in which she’d ever worked (NYC Health Department Code 17:172) and therefore moved in balletic form: pulling over, removing Uno from the car, hoisting her up, making a fist between her ribcage and belly button and thrusting one, two, three times on her frail frame until the mostly-intact Werther’s flew in a graceful arc toward the trees.
“Whoa,” Uno said, when she’d recovered language. She was wispy in the passenger’s seat, her once-lovely face lined and worn. “I can’t believe that actually worked.”
Amy tried not to consider how easy it might have been to let Uno die. Keeping Uno alive had been her project and her promise to Ferry since he’d been old enough to understand promises.
They kept driving west, listening to Steely Dan’s Aja on CD in the Volvo. Eventually, abashedly, Uno popped another Werther’s.
The second time Amy saved her life was more orchestrated, yet also more emotionally chaotic: she’d organized an intervention (this was after the liver transplant, after Uno’s surgeons wouldn’t talk to her anymore and her mother wouldn’t talk to her anymore and she was by this time so sunken and sallow that she looked like she could be Ferry’s grandmother even though she was only forty-one years old).
Ferry: twelve, a sixth grader at St. Ann’s, still held her hand when they crossed the street.
Ferry, up at night, claiming “headaches,” asking if he could go to the restaurant with her and his dad, asking if he could sleep in their room, on the floor, since he knew he couldn’t fit in their bed.
Not eating or wanting to shower. Even Judd in his bluff obtuseness knew something was wrong.
“He thinks she’s going to die this time,” Amy whispered. She had cut back her hours at the shelter to be home with Ferry more.
They were at the restaurant, it was ten in the morning, and Ferry had refused, once again, to go to school: the poor exhausted kid was sacked out along a banquette. Judd stared deep into his espresso.
“We can’t let her die,” he said. “He’s too young for his mom to die.”
“We’ll do an intervention,” Amy said.
“Another one?”
“It’ll be the last time,” she said.
“We can’t do it again,” he said. “Who’d even come? Who’s left?”
“Ferry,” she said.
Judd’s enormous hands enfolded his tiny cup. “I don’t know.”
“The alternative is worse.”
Judd looked over at his son, asleep on the bench along the wall of the restaurant. His scuffed Nikes dangled off the side. He had his backpack under his head for a pillow. The school’s nurse was sympathetic but had also warned that he’d missed fifteen days of school so far and it was only November.
They had never let Ferry participate in an intervention before (this would be Uno’s fourth) but now that their choices were so bleak—let him talk to her or let him watch his mother die—
It was just the three of them, Ferry and Amy and the intervention specialist, a no-nonsense middle-aged woman, prim and steely. They were all sitting in Uno’s beautifully disheveled townhouse when she came home one afternoon. Uno looked at Amy, looked at Ferry, looked at the interventionist.
“Oh no,” she said.
“Uno,” Ferry said. “Mom.”
Amy and Uno both looked at the boy at the same time.
“Please, Mom.”
At earlier interventions Uno had reacted with fury, with iron-fisted rage: she had actually taken a picture off the wall and thrown it at them, had thrown an empty vodka bottle at them, had tried to climb out her bedroom window and down a trellis.
But this time, she just sat on the couch.
She was so exquisitely frail, wore such incredible clothes—if it had been another time, Amy thought, Uno herself could have modeled—although her skin was sort of yellowish now and her hair was like straw and her eyes were bloodshot and all in all she looked more tragic than tragically glamorous.
She had Ferry’s lovely features, though: the full lips, the hazel eyes, the wavy blond-brown hair.
“Okay,” Uno said, softly. “Okay, sweetie.” She held a cushion from the couch to her chest. “Nobody else is here?”
“There’s nobody else,” Amy said.
Uno bit her lip, clutched the pillow.
“It has to work this time,” Ferry said. “Please, Mom. I’m so afraid you’re going to die.”
She turned to him with eyes that suddenly seemed huge, then shot a fierce look at Amy, and Amy knew she was rallying herself to yell at her for bringing Ferry to an intervention, for using Ferry this way, as it had long been an unspoken agreement between them that she and Judd would do everything they could to cover for Uno and explain away her missed weekends and recitals and soccer games and that, during the times she was stable, they would release Ferry to her like nothing was amiss, and let her love him and take care of him and pretend it was normal, Amy hovering by the phone, her heart in her mouth until Ferry came home again.
Ferry had learned to love Uno with a sort of wariness, a guardedness that was recognizable to Amy; it was how she had related to her own mother.
But still: when her own mother died she thought she would never breathe again and she wouldn’t let Ferry feel that way, not yet. So she met Uno’s eyes.
“We’re giving this one last try, Amy,” she said. “You have to try again.”
“I’m so sick of it,” Uno whispered.
“I know,” Amy said. “He is too.”
Uno turned to Ferry again. He was stoic, pale-faced, his hazel eyes the same exact shape as hers. “Oh god, honey,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”
“Will you go?” he asked.
She nodded, opened her arms, held him, and Amy looked away like she sometimes did when Ferry wanted his—real, biological, how were you supposed to say it?—
His mother.
And then Uno got up and headed out of the townhouse and got in the car with the interventionist who hadn’t said a word but who had already packed up Uno’s delicate, beautiful clothing and off they went, back to Bucks County, and this time, like a miracle, it took.
As far as anyone knew, Uno hadn’t had a drink in seven years.
She hosted Ferry’s graduation party with the elan of the high born, top-notch catering and no alcohol, didn’t make a big deal about the drinking, just turned the backyard of the town house into a fairy-lit wonderland and served lobster tails and sent everyone home with teddy bears dressed in Cornell T-shirts.
And then she was off to Morocco to supervise a wellness retreat in Agadir and from there to her new beau’s house in Singapore; she liked to stay in places where illicit substances were hard to find or vigorously proscribed.
But while she was in rehab, she wrote Amy a letter—the first kind or sincere thing she had ever said to her, and though it was short and poorly spelled, the line that Amy remembered was: “You have saved my life over and over and I don’t even know why.”
Which was how Amy knew that she herself was Ferry’s real mother (was that what you called it?)—because a real mother would know why.
IN THE MORNING she followed the sounds of the dogs to the kitchen, where Irine was getting ready to head out the door. There was coffee on the stove and the remains of the previous day’s lemon cake on the counter and a cigarette stub still burning in an ashtray on the kitchen table.