“Can you sleep?” he asked his uncle.
“On and off. How about you?”
“I was dreaming,” Henry said. “I had such a strange dream.”
“Go back to it,” Brendan said. “I’m sorry I woke you.”
Henry went back to his blanket, but his dream was gone.
20
THE EVENING HAD PASSED SO SMOOTHLY, AND IT HAD BEEN so nice to have the house to themselves and not to think about what their families were up to, that Wendy had let time slip and slide and high-step past her without telling Delia what had happened. Sometime after eleven, though, in the living room littered with cartons of grapefruit juice and vodka bottles and pizza boxes, Delia said, “So where’d your mother go, anyway? One of her weird retreats?”
Wendy had almost forgotten how strange her story was. Casually, almost flippantly, she explained about Grunkie’s disappearance and her mother’s reaction to it, and her father’s reaction to her mother’s reaction, and her mother’s suspicions that Henry had actually stolen Grunkie away. Wendy’s embroidered bag leaned against her chair with the rag dolls showing at the top, and as she spoke she took the dolls from the bag and manipulated them like puppets. The story, backed by the dolls’ gestures, seemed almost funny. She said, he said, I said; she said he said; I said to her; rumors, guesses, speculations. She was not prepared for Delia’s response.
“My father did what?” she said, and it took Wendy a minute to realize that Delia might see the story from a different perspective, evidence of one more link in the endless chain of her father’s recent fuck-ups. She forgot, sometimes, that Delia took her father’s escapades so hard. She’d had less than a year to get used to them, and she felt guilty about the way he’d ended up. Lise and Kitty had shed Henry like snakes, but Delia still seemed tied to him by a tag of obligation or love, like the string of flesh left behind by a pulled tooth.
“This whole thing’s probably in my mother’s head,” Wendy said soothingly. “You know how she gets. All anyone really knows is that your father and Grunkie left St. Benedict’s together in this van they borrowed. Mom and Dad both think they went to Massachusetts, so that’s where they’ve gone to look for them.”
Delia bent over until her head met her knees. “Asshole. Asshole, asshole, asshole.”
“Your father?” Roy said. He rested his hand on the back of Delia’s neck.
“Of course my father.” She sighed and lifted her head and stretched her arms behind her back. “He’s such a jerk — after all he’s done to us, after all he’s done to his family, you’d think he’d give it a rest. But no — he has to take a helpless old man from a nursing home, fuck up everyone’s lives again ….”
“We don’t know that,” Wendy said. “We don’t know what happened at all. I’m only telling you what my mother said.”
Win, who had finally agreed to stay home, had been playing with the Nintendo paraphernalia Waldo had loaned him. The television bleeped and flickered as a helicopter exploded again and again and was miraculously resurrected. Now he set down the controls and drifted toward Delia. “What’s going on?” he asked. “What’s the problem?”
“The problem,” Delia said, “the problem is …” Without warning, and with considerable grace, she hurled her glass of grapefruit juice and vodka into the fireplace. “I’m so sick of this family,” Delia said more calmly. “I’m so sick of my father I could puke. This is all his fault, I know it is — I don’t even have to know what’s going on to know he did it. He’s like a bulldozer without a driver out there, crashing through the world and wrecking up everything. He’s such a child.”
With her flushed face and her curly hair, Delia looked like a child herself. Win bent over the fireplace and began picking up the shards of glass. “What’s the big deal?” he said. “Your father, my mother — they’re both crazy. It’s not like this is news. What’s the point of getting all upset?”
“You’re sixteen,” Delia said scornfully. “What do you know?”
“More than you do. I know there isn’t any point in worrying about whatever they’re doing. They’re all out there on the road somewhere, buzzing around each other, and you watch, whatever’s going on, they’ll all be back tomorrow acting like nothing ever happened. And that’s because probably nothing is happening. You can’t take them seriously.”
Delia rose unsteadily and headed for the kitchen. “I have to call Lise,” she said, as if Lise had ever been any help to her. She shook off Wendy’s hand when Wendy reached out to stop her. “Don’t touch me. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me this was going on.”
“I did tell you,” Wendy said. “I just did.”
“Now. After letting me sit here all night, thinking everything was fine.” Delia vanished into the kitchen and Roy touched Wendy’s forearm gently.
“It’s not your fault,” he said. “She always overreacts when she hears anything about her father. She can’t stand to side with him, but she still feels sorry for him and she gets herself all tangled up.”
When Delia returned from the kitchen she looked grimly satisfied. “You won’t believe this,” she announced. “Lise is over at Mom’s helping her pack up, and when I told her what was going on, she said that Dad and Grunkie had been there around lunchtime, in a van no less, and that Dad was in this really strange mood and he and Mom had one of their fights. Lise said she heard Dad tell Mom that he was bringing Grunkie over here for dinner.”
She said she heard him tell her, Wendy thought. “Not for dinner,” she admitted. “To stay.”
“What?” Delia said. “What else aren’t you telling me?”
Win frowned across the room at Wendy, but Wendy kept on talking. Somehow, even without the dolls in her hands, her words didn’t seem to matter anymore. All the words that had sprung from everyone’s lips all day had fused and mutated and taken on a life of their own, which seemed bound to sprout strangely no matter what she did. She said, “Grunkie was supposed to stay here. Until — you know.”
“Until he dies,” Win said firmly. He came and stood next to Wendy and picked up the dolls she’d set against the pizza boxes. “Where did you get these?” he asked Wendy quietly. “Did you take them?”
“I borrowed them.”
“I don’t get it,” Delia said, while Win scanned Wendy’s guilty face. “Why would Grunkie come here?”
“Because,” Wendy said. “Mom wanted — he was due for some chemotherapy, and Mom said it wasn’t going to do any good, and she wanted him to come stay here so someone from her stupid church could try some sort of diet on him.” She rose and beckoned to Delia and Roy and then led them into the spare room her mother had readied for Grunkie.
“Look at this,” she said. She showed them the Manual, the bookcase filled with Church literature, and the cross-stitched sampler bearing the Church motto. Nothing exists external to our minds, she read for the second time that day. Things are thoughts. The world is made up of our ideas. She made a mental note to add another item to the list in her closet: I will remember that the world is real. Ideas had gotten them nowhere, she thought. Ideas had brought her mother to this.
“He was supposed to come tomorrow,” she said. “Mom was going to pick him up. And then somehow she was going to take care of him. Except she can’t even take care of herself half the time.”