Better than Perfect. Melissa Kantor

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СКАЧАТЬ how many pills she’d been taking lately. As I crossed to the bathroom door, I picked up her robe from the floor.

      “Mom?” I knocked at the door. “Does that sound good to you? Tomato salad?”

      There still wasn’t an answer. My mom had a radio in the bathroom, and sometimes she listened to music while she took a bath, but I couldn’t hear any music playing. I knocked again. “Mom!” I shouted.

      The only sound on the other side of the door was silence, and suddenly I felt uneasy. “Mom?” I snapped my knuckle against the wooden door. For no good reason, my heart started beating very fast, and I felt light-headed, as if there weren’t enough oxygen in the room. “Mom!” There was still no answer, and I knocked harder, hard enough that my knuckle stung. I dropped the robe onto the floor and put my hand on the knob. To my relief, it turned easily in my hand, and as I pushed the door open, I thought of how stupid I’d been to be so scared and how my mom was probably out of the house and had left the bathroom door closed and here I’d been yelling at her and freaking myself out when she wasn’t even there.

      And then the door was open and I was looking at her body lying on the floor in a T-shirt and underwear, her hand and arm smeared with blood, blue pills scattered like drops of rain across the white tile floor.

      

      The emergency waiting room was freezing cold. I shivered in my tank top and jean shorts, totally underdressed for the over-air-conditioned hospital. All around me, people slouched in their plastic chairs; it was impossible to tell who was really ill and who was just sick with waiting. The ambulance driver had told me to go to the desk and fill out paperwork, but I hadn’t been able to answer any of the questions on the form. Even looking at the blank line under date of birth left me confused. March twenty-second. I wrote in the numbers: 3. 22. But what was the year? My mother was how old? She was forty-eight. Wait. She was forty-nine. No. Forty-eight. My father was forty-nine. My mother was forty-eight. So what year was she born? I tried to subtract forty-eight from the current year, but I kept losing track of the numbers. Carry the one, I thought to myself, and then the one would disappear and all I could see were the paramedics pumping my mother’s chest and shooting her full of something and sitting in the ambulance next to her still, still body and the woman asking me who to call, who to call and me just staring at her and thinking, No one. There’s no one to call. Because my brother was camping and was I seriously going to call my father and my mother would never forgive me if any of her friends saw her now and my grandparents were too old to be able to help. Finally I told her to call my aunt in Oregon because my aunt was someone who always knew what to do.

      “Juliet Newman?” My head shot up. A woman with long, braided hair extensions was surveying the room. “Juliet Newman?”

      “Here!” I shouted a little too loudly. A few heads turned in my direction, but most people were too caught up in their own troubles to worry about mine. I made my way down the aisle to the woman.

      “Hello, Juliet. I’m Jordyn Phillips. I’m the social worker. I was just with your mother.” She put her hand on my arm gently.

      My mother was dead. That was the only reason she was holding my arm the way she was: because my mother had died. If I hadn’t slept at Sofia’s, my mother would be alive, but now she was dead. The floor dropped out from under me, and I could feel myself falling, falling down into the center of the earth. I stared at the woman, my mouth hanging open.

      “She’s resting comfortably,” said Ms. Phillips.

      My mother was alive. She was alive and resting comfortably. I stumbled in my relief, and Ms. Phillips gripped my arm to steady me.

      “Juliet!” I snapped my head around and saw my father racing across the waiting area.

      We’d talked and texted, but I’d only seen my dad once since he’d moved out. In July, I’d had a Wednesday off from Children United, and I’d met him at his office. We’d gotten sandwiches and taken them to a shady spot between two buildings with a waterfall and some benches. My dad called it a park, which seemed like a stretch. As we’d opened our sandwiches and settled onto the bench, I’d tried to remember the last time it had just been the two of us, and the only memory I could come up with was the previous summer, when he and I had done an ice run right before my parents’ big Fourth of July party. Sometimes when I pictured my dad, I pictured his signature on his email.

      It was a broiling day, and my sundress stuck to the backs of my legs. My dad was wearing a tie, but even though he was sweating, he didn’t complain about the heat. He’d grown up without a lot of money and without a lot of the things that my brother and I took for granted, like central air conditioning and sleepaway camp and not having to have jobs after school. It drove him crazy when we left lights on if we weren’t in a room or turned the temperature in the house down to below seventy in the summer.

      My dad asked about my internship and my classes for the fall, but all I really wanted to talk to him about was what was going on with him and my mom. Halfway through my sandwich, I asked him if it was true that he’d gotten tired of being married, which was what my mother said.

      “Juliet,” he’d said, wiping some mayo off the tip of his finger, “does that really sound like me? Do I strike you as a quitter?”

      “No,” I’d answered. Rather than look him in the eye, I watched him open the paper bag on his lap and push his napkin into it. “But it’s not like being married is the same as working.”

      My dad crunched the bag into a ball. “In some ways it is, Juliet. You have to work hard to get through the bad times. But you need someone to meet you halfway.”

      I snapped my head up to look at him. “So you’re saying it’s Mom’s fault? She wouldn’t meet you halfway?”

      “I’m not blaming your mother,” he said patiently. “This is nobody’s fault. I know that’s hard to believe, but it’s the only answer I have for you.” It was what he always said when I asked him to explain what was going on, but this time I stared at him, not saying anything, a terrifying idea suddenly overwhelming me. Was there some awful secret that my parents were keeping from me?

      I kept staring. Like my mother, my father was very good-looking. His hair had some gray in it, but it was still thick, unlike most of my friends’ fathers’. He wore vaguely hipster glasses and, like my mother, he spent money on expensive clothes.

      Had he been having an affair?

      My dad was still talking. “… and I’m sorry, Juliet. What matters is that your mom and I both still love you and Oliver very much. We’re still your parents even though we’re not together anymore.”

      He was waiting for me to say something, but the possibility that he’d been unfaithful to my mother was too awful for me to speak it. Instead, I cleared my throat, then forced myself to joke, “Did you get that from a book or something?”

      “What gave it away?” My dad grinned at me and reached over to tousle my hair. “Come on. If we walk a couple of blocks, we can get an ice cream cone for less than four dollars.”

      At the end of lunch, my dad had promised we’d see a lot of each other, more than we had when he was living at the house. We’d agreed to have dinner once a week—either he’d come out to Long Island or I’d stay in Manhattan and meet him СКАЧАТЬ