"Sorry?" Drew's voice rose on the word. "I canceled a client meeting I'd scheduled three weeks ago. A new client. A series I want very much."

Merry stirred. "Maybe I'd better go."

"Please, yes," I said, turning from Drew to Merry.

Drew shook his head. "Stay," he ordered.

Merry leaned forward, then back, settling on remaining locked upright and seated.

"What was the big emergency?" Drew asked.

I took a breath and thought before speaking, wanting to compress my mistake into as few words as possible. "Eldon's after me. Either it was finish reports or he'd pull the plug on what he considers unnecessary visits with one of my patients. Breast cancer. Incredibly fast-growing."

"Unnecessary visits?" Drew banged his hand on the wooden rocker arm.

I jumped as though he'd smacked me and backed away.

"Where's your head, Lulu? Just once could we take precedence over your job?"

I grabbed the mantel edge and squeezed. "Okay, I forgot the appointment. But you don't need to act as though I hung Ca.s.sandra over a cliff."

"How would you even know?"

Don't be mad at me; don't be mad at me. "So she's talking about being adopted. Every kid has that fantasy. Nightmares. I had an entire pretend family."

"Comparing anything to your f.u.c.ked-up childhood doesn't offer me comfort. It's not like you have a bit of experience upon which to draw for stellar, h.e.l.l, even halfway-decent mothering."

"Stop," Merry said. "The kids will hear you. Being mean to Lulu won't help Ca.s.sandra. Don't say stuff you'll regret."

"Thanks. I forgot what a relationship expert you are." Despite his words, Drew stopped.

Merry came over and put an arm on my back. "Sit down, Lu."

I let her guide me to the couch, where I sank down, pulling a pale yellow cushion over my stomach, kneading the cotton-covered down in both hands. "I just forgot, Drew," I said. "I didn't mean for you to have to handle it alone."

"I know, I know." He fidgeted with his watch. "Still. How could you forget your daughter because of a patient?"

I wondered the same thing. Weren't children the most important thing in a mother's life? Weren't they supposed to rent most of the s.p.a.ce in your brain? Didn't children make you so acutely aware of others that everyone became in some way your child? Could Hitler have been Hitler if he'd been a father?

Stupid reasoning. My father was a father.

"Everything piled on top of me," I said.

"Your daughter needs you. This isn't a case of having little adoption fantasies." He handed me a manila envelope from the coffee table. "Ca.s.sandra's family pictures."

I shuffled through the sheaf of scratchy drawing paper. Ca.s.sandra drew all of us, including Merry, in the bottom right corner of the paper. Everyone was underlined. A wavy half circle surrounded us. Ghostly men and women, drawn larger than life, floated above our family.

"Want to hear how the school shrink interpreted them?"

"They sent her to a shrink?"

Drew waved my question away. "She's the guidance counselor. Just listen. Children who perceive their families as insecure underline the family figures."

"You mean Ca.s.sandra's insecure, or she thinks we are?" I didn't want to hear this.

"The whole family system," Merry said. "She thinks our family is insecure."

"Have you become a shrink, too?" I curled my toes up and down, trying to get control of my mouth.

"The guidance counselor didn't have a clue about our family, about our mother and father," Merry replied. "And yet, look what she said."

"Now this is all about them?"

"Just let Drew finish before you go off into the world of denial."

I closed my mouth. Acid bubbled in my chest.

"See the floating figures in balloons?" Drew said. "The counselor thought they could be secrets. She asked if we were having problems, if maybe Ca.s.sandra was worried we were going to get divorced. She hinted that I was having an affair, for G.o.d's sake."

I stared at the picture, trying to recognize Ca.s.sandra's watery circles as balloons.

"Okay," I said. "I understand. But is this really so off the charts?"

Apparently, Merry could contain herself no longer. "Her teacher is suggesting she go to a private shrink. For counseling. Are you listening? Are you blind, deaf, and dumb?"

"You listen. You're acting as though the teacher said Ca.s.sandra needs to be locked up in an insane asylum." How dare they? How dare she, this teacher, make my child into some sort of deranged child at risk? "I know something about psychology, also."

"You had a rotation for what, a month?" Drew said. "A hundred years ago?"

"And her teacher had what? One course, five hundred years ago?"

Drew grabbed the pictures from the coffee table and stuffed them back in the envelope. "We need these for the meeting with the child psychologist. I made an appointment for next week. Shall I enter it in your Palm-Pilot? Will that help you remember?"

I threw my hands up. "How could you make an appointment without letting me check this doctor out first?"

Drew's face looked hard enough to crack wood. "She's connected to the school."

"All the more reason to distrust her."

"Do you even hear yourself?" Merry slapped the arm of her chair. "Ca.s.sandra is having family issues. She thinks someone might kill her. She's afraid of being kidnapped. She worries about being abandoned. Does any of this sound familiar? Does it sound like something maybe a daughter and mother need to deal with?"

"Did I ask for your opinion?"

"When did I start needing your permission to talk? Aren't I part of this family? Isn't that what you're always saying-It's all about us, we only have us, Merry? The five of us have to stick together, Merry?" Merry plunked herself down next to me on the couch. "There are six of us, and you have to face it."

"Face it? Have you figured out just how I present a grandfather who murdered their grandmother? Don't you think I've thought about it a thousand times since they were born? What? You're so high and mighty? Special Merry, who faces her father?"

Merry looked like I'd smacked her. I fought the instinct to comfort her, make her all better, and swallow my rage.

"Ca.s.sandra might be reacting to us having lost our parents at practically the same ages as she and Ruby are now," I said. "She's overidentifying with our being orphaned by a car crash." She's okay. Ca.s.sandra is fine. Just fine.

Merry opened her mouth in disbelief. "But that's not what happened."

"It's what she thinks happened, so it's what happened. Leave this alone, okay? I'd rather Ca.s.sandra and Ruby worry about Drew and me getting in a car crash than have them know I've spent my life trying to forget seeing Mama dying in front of me."

What? Nothing to say now?

"What do you think I see at night when I close my eyes?" I asked. "You and Daddy bleeding out on Mama's bed. For my entire life, ever since then, I've had to be responsible for everyone and everything, including you."

Merry shook her head slowly, as though I were a stranger. "This isn't about us, not like that. We have to take care of Ca.s.sandra now."

I threw the pillow I'd been clutching to the floor and stood. My arm trembled as I pointed a finger toward Merry. "I care for my daughter. I make the rules. This is my family, and if you don't like my mothering, then maybe it's time for you to go. Get your own husband. Get your own children. Stop sucking on my life."

I marched out of the room and into the bedroom, slamming the door behind me. I kicked the dresser and etched deep lines up and down my arm, wondering what I was supposed to do. After dropping to the floor, I placed my head on my knees. I wrapped my arms around my legs and prayed for one person, one grown-up, somewhere in the world who I could call.

Sickened by my weak posture, I tore off my clothes, dropped them in a heap on the corner chair, pulled on a soft, billowy nightgown, and collapsed on the bed.

The door creaked open. I waited for Drew to come and kiss away my tears.

"Mommy? Are you okay? Are you mad at me?" Ca.s.sandra walked in on little tiptoes, as though the sound of her footsteps might anger me.

I wiped my face dry and patted the bed next to me. "I'm not mad at you, honey."

The bed barely registered her weight as she fell on it, spilling into my arms, folding her long, thin body as small as possible, so I could wrap her up into a package I could hold. "I'm in trouble, right?" She pressed her lips together.

"You're not in trouble. You're feeling troubled. That's a world of difference."

"But Daddy had to go and talk to my teacher." Ca.s.sandra pushed her face deep into my shoulder, m.u.f.fling her voice, hiding her face.

"Because she wants us to know that you're scared."

Ca.s.sandra didn't move. I felt her stiffen.

"Do you want to talk about it?" I asked. "The kidnapping? Being adopted?"

I felt her shake her head.

"You know that you're not adopted, right?" She shook her head again. "When I was a little girl, right around your age, I thought maybe I was adopted. I think every ten-year-old girl in the world wonders that at some point."

"But you had to be. Fostered. After."

"After my parents"-I hesitated-"died. Right. But I had thought about it before, honey." I held her tighter. "Maybe you think about it because you're afraid you'll lose me and Daddy like I lost my parents."

"What if I do?"

I leaned my cheek on top of her head. "You won't."

"You can't be sure." She backed away from me, crossing her legs. "You and Daddy drive together all the time. You could die like they did."

As I started to rea.s.sure her that she'd always have Aunt Merry, I imagined my sister introducing them to our father. Fatigue pressed down, pulling me toward the unconscious world. "Don't worry, honey. It could never happen twice to the same family."

Ca.s.sandra's eyes thinned with mistrust. "You don't know."

"I do know. Because of statistics. Something you learn in college. It's a kind of math."

"Math?" She clasped her hands, lacing her fingers into a steeple, with which she covered her mouth. "How does it tell you that?" she asked, her words m.u.f.fled.

"Statistics are about chances, the likeliness something is going to occur. When you get older, you learn this formula sort of math for figuring out chances of things happening. And statistically, chances of you losing me are infinitesimal." I smiled. "Which means it won't happen."

Her body relaxed, slumping toward me. "You're sure?"

I nodded. "I'm sure." I pulled the covers back, kicking my way in. "Let's both go to sleep."

Ca.s.sandra pressed in close until we matched up like notched dolls. Slowly her body relaxed, her breathing became even, and she slept.

I loved this child. She was my breath and my body. More than anything, I needed to keep her safe. Nothing else mattered.

Silent tears slipped from under my closed lids, tears of fear, fear I'd never be able to comfort anyone so easily again.

25.

Merry The next morning I woke before the alarm, grateful to be free from my shallow and unsatisfying sleep. I stared out the window with gritty eyes, drinking coffee, watching and waiting until I saw Drew walk to the car with Ca.s.sandra and Ruby. My nieces held his hands as they made their way through the drizzling rain.

Ruby's determined little steps kept up. Ca.s.sandra strode wearing the crown of the elder, then and always, the powerful child. Both walked under Drew's protection. How did that feel?

The moment Drew's car pulled away, I went to Lulu's door. "Did you mean it?" I blurted the moment she answered my frantic knocking.

"Did I mean what?" Her truthful eyes belied her question.

"Any of it; did you mean any of it?" I asked.

Lulu reluctantly opened the door wider and let me in. "Let's not do drama this early, okay? I have to leave for work by nine." She headed down the hall with me trotting behind her.

We entered the kitchen, and I grabbed a mug. Lulu sat on a stool at the counter and resumed spooning up bran flakes from a bowl I'd bought her, white with cornflowers.

"I have to get to work, too." I poured cream in my coffee. "I just want to talk for a minute."

Lulu gave a much too obvious look at the wall clock, then her watch. Did my oh-so-important sister need to synchronize? I clenched the warm mug to keep my hands from shaking. My right foot pumped like a metronome.

"We both went overboard last night," Lulu said. "Let it go."