He opened the car door and stepped into the rain.
CHAPTER 2
Alecia, Tuesday, April 21, 2015
A month before Nate was fired, nearly a thousand starlings fell from the sky. Not fluttering to the earth like snowflakes, but plummeting, like quarter-pound raindrops. They fell hard and fast in the middle of the third inning of opening day at Mt. Oanoke High field. The first one Alecia saw bounced off Marnie Evans’s shoulder and hit the gravel with nothing more than a soft rustle. She screamed, her fingers threaded through her hair, get it out! Get it out! Get it out! Like it was a trapped bat. Alecia didn’t mind watching Marnie Evans freak out; in fact she kind of enjoyed it, so she just covered her mouth with her palm. Marnie Evans treated minor hiccups—missing basket bingo cards and off-color varsity jacket orders—like national disasters all while chewing Xanax like Pez.
But adversity builds muscle, and since Alecia chipped and clawed her way through every day, it took so much more to rattle her than the Marnie Evanses of the world, and a few little birds weren’t going to do it. So she didn’t mind watching Marnie at all. She hadn’t even expected to be at the game. Nate had asked her out of the blue. It felt nice to be so spontaneous. The day had a fresh-air, college-kid-out-on-the-green feel to it, summer break looming, with all its newness.
It was just a regular Tuesday, except that it was a good day. And all of Alecia’s days were divided clean down the middle, it seemed. Good Days (capital G, capital D) and Bad Days. The deciding factors were variations on a theme: whether they were able to get through a grocery trip, whether Gabe got through his therapy without freaking out, whether she got a call from a bill collector.
Gabe actually did remarkably okay with change, perhaps because Alecia didn’t fight against every wrong turn, every slight schedule adjustment, like some of the women in her special-needs-moms’ group. But it was always easier when things went according to plan. Today there had been no tantrum, no horrific trip to the store, no bill collector. When the phone rang at two, after Gabe’s nap (a record thirty minutes), she picked it up, sort of excited and breathless.
“Hey.” She thought it was amazing that her heart still skipped when she saw Nate’s name come up on caller ID, and on a Good Day, she might count herself as belonging to the apparently few happy marriages left.
On a Bad Day, she thought about packing a bag, leaving Nate to deal with Gabe, to let him see, for once, how it really was. To fully recognize Gabe and all his cracks and scrapes and bruises and bumps and imperfections. No more I’m sure you’re overreacting, hon, or, He’s just his own person, that’s great! To understand her frustration when everyone, including Nate, said, but he looks normal! Or are you sure kids aren’t just kids? To live with autism in a way that wasn’t a blue T-shirt or a charity walk or a foundation, but to live with the ugly. On a Bad Day, she wished all the ugliness on her husband and nothing but windblown freedom for herself.
“Hi!” Nate exclaimed, both happy and surprised that she was happy.
Alecia pulled the phone away from her ear and adjusted the volume.
“Good day?” Nate asked, a note of caution in his tone that lit a quick fire under Alecia’s skin and then settled. The answer to that question would dictate the rest of the conversation: whether Nate would stay on the line and chat, or scamper off with some well-thought-out excuse.
“Yep, so far. He’s just waking up.” She could hear Gabe, his too-heavy-for-a-five-year-old stomps around his bedroom.
“Come to my game this afternoon? Please?” He pleaded with an unusual edge of desperation. Nate asked so little of her, always wanting to be mindful of her time, of her energies, worried about her stress levels and how he could make her happy, to the point of dancing on eggshells. She knew that she couldn’t say no, this one time, even if it meant dragging Gabe into unfamiliar territory. He’d know some of the people but not all. In Mt. Oanoke, people never change: the baseball crowd, the dressed-to-the-nines gym moms, the coaches’ wives, the athletic association groupies. Nate’s mother would probably be there, too.
Maybe Bridget would go. It had been months. Bridget Peterson was one of Alecia’s only friends who didn’t stem from a support network. She was a teacher, with Nate. She wasn’t a special-needs mom, or even a regular-needs mom. She wasn’t a therapist or a sympathetic nurse or a doctor. She was just a person, and sometimes Alecia forgot what that was like, to have friends who were just people.
Years ago, before Gabe, when she and Nate first got married and moved to Mt. Oanoke, Bridget and Holden Peterson were Nate and Alecia’s first real couple friends. They’d spent long, boozy nights at local pubs, laughing till their sides hurt, drunk on cheap rum and Cokes and the golden, sparkly potential of their infant marriages. Before infertility (for Bridget) and special needs (for Alecia) and then, later, the unspeakable.
“We’ll see how it goes,” Alecia said to Nate, noncommittal, because anything could and sometimes did happen at the last minute. We’ll see was a standard translation of yes, unless I let you down.
“That’s a no.” Nate huffed into the phone.
“That’s a maybe.” Alecia sighed, her annoyance creeping in. A crash from upstairs, followed by a quick, air-stabbing wail. “I gotta go.” She hung up the phone and took the steps two at a time.
Gabe stood at the foot of his bed, his lamp cockeyed in front of him on the floor. He turned to Alecia and pointed to the mess, the shattered bulb and fragmented plastic lampshade. The lamp was a gift from Violet; “Vi” everyone called her. Nate’s Mom. Over half of what they owned was a gift from Vi and most of it had been broken by an energetic, well-meaning Gabe. While Vi loved her grandson, Alecia dreaded the quick flicker of disappointment in her eyes when she inevitably asked where the lamp went.
“Oh honey, what happened?” She bent to pick up the pieces, shards of plastic interspersed with razor-sharp glass. “Back up!” She pointed to the doorway and Gabe scampered in bare feet. He sulked, hands over his ears. Her sharp tone, even a hint of it, could send him reeling, and she took two deep, calming breaths. He hummed to soothe himself.
Still, it was just a lamp, and a fairly cheap one. Vi had picked it because Gabe liked the colors, the red, yellow, and blue fluted plastic splaying bright light on the ceiling and the walls, and also because it was hardy, but no matter. They could get a new one. Maybe next month with what was left of the first baseball check.
“Hey, buddy.” Alecia pushed the hair out of her eyes with the back of her wrist, the broken glass and plastic pinched between her fingers. Gabe hummed louder, covering his ears, so Alecia said it again, a bit more forcefully, this time meeting his eyes. She smiled. “Hey, buddy.”
He stopped humming. Smiled back at her, his eyes crinkling at the corners and for a brief second, worry-free. She pantomimed a deep breath and he took one, too. Their little inside joke, breathe, Mama. Breathe, Gabey. It’s just breathing, easy peasy.
“Do you wanna go see Daddy? He has a baseball game. Remember?”
His eyes flicked away, disinterested.
She tried again. “Gabe, let’s go see Daddy.” He brightened. She tried again. “On the way we can stop at the construction site. We can’t go in, but we can look.”