There's Something I Want You to Do

I put down my ballpoint pen. We walk into the customers’ lounge and sit down on two vinyl chairs in the corner, next to a table on which are scattered old issues of Field & Stream and Cosmopolitan. All the customers are gone, so we’re there alone. Jeremy stares at me for a moment, as if it’s my fault that I met Corinne in the first place and made love to her eighteen years ago, so that he was born.

“Dad, I’m fucked up,” he says. “And it’s really fucked up that she’s here. I’m just saying.”

“I know,” I reply. “It’s hard on all of us.”

“Not as hard on you as it is on me. I didn’t think I could go back home today.”

“Where else could you go?”

“Somewhere,” he says. “Friends.” It’s true: he has many friends he could stay with. “I could actually, like, move out.” He waits. “But I’m not going to.”

“What are you going to do?” I ask. I have neither wisdom nor advice for him. All I have is curiosity.

“So I went to school this morning? And I found Alissa. I mean, we’re over, but we’re still friends, sort of. And I’m like, ‘My birth mom showed up, and she’s fucking nuts, and also she said I looked gay,’ and Alissa is like, ‘Yeah, wow, but she’s your mom and thinks you’re cute and you’re way not gay,’ and I go, ‘Who gives a shit?’ and she’s, ‘You should,’ and I say, ‘But she’s crazy,’ and this is when Alissa sort of gets that lightbulb look and says, ‘Well, the cool thing would be to put it all on your Tumblr. That’d be so great. ’Cause if your birth mom’s so weird and interesting, everybody will want to read it. Like: “Guess what, everybody, my mom showed up.” ’ ”

Somehow I have the feeling this has become a huge business with his friends within the past few hours and that they all have opinions about what he should do.

“And?” I ask.

“That’s what’s weird,” he says. “Like half of my friends already want to know if she’s got a blog herself. Because they want to check it out, like right now.”

“Maybe you could help her with a blog,” I say, trying to mediate. “Maybe you could help her set one up.”

“Yeah, I guess I can do that. But I have to hate her for a few more days.” He sits there quietly. “I have to really hate her a few days. I know she’s crazy. I get that. But I have to hate her for not being loyal to us.” He used that word: us. As much as I love Astrid, she didn’t use that word last night. It was all you: you have to do this or that.

So I tell Jeremy that he can hate Corinne for a while, and then he has to give it up.

—

The hatred lasts longer than we think it will. In the meantime we get Corinne to a psychiatrist, who puts her on lithium. There are no discernible effects at first.

Corinne tries to be inconspicuous down there in the basement and at dinnertime. I’ll give her credit for that. It’s hard for her, however, because right out of the blue at dinner she’ll start talking about wildlife creatures, some of them imaginary, that no one has mentioned in conversation. Wolves and lemurs figure prominently in her thinking, and all the while Jeremy is seething over there at his place at the table. He stares at Corinne with distaste as he bolts his food before he rushes upstairs and slams his bedroom door.

Three weeks later the atmosphere in the house begins to shift subtly, as if a low-pressure system had arrived after a long period of drought. One evening I am coming up the stairs and I see Jeremy and Corinne talking on the landing. Then, two days later, I see her in his room, sitting at his desk in front of his computer, and Jeremy is standing behind her, quietly giving her advice. I know better than to ask them what’s going on, so I knock on Lucy’s door and go in there. Lucy hears everything that’s going on in the house before anyone else does. It’s true that she likes to preach, but she has the soul of a Soviet spy.

“Hi, Princess,” I say. She’s lying on the bed reading a Harry Potter book.

“Hi,” she says.

“You okay?” I ask.

“Um, yeah.” She has her head propped up by an arm under her chin. On her wall she has a poster of some ballet star up on her toes surrounded by other pink-tutu-clad ladies. Adhesive stars decorate Lucy’s ceiling, and her lifelong doll, Eleanor, gazes at her with glassy plastic eyes from the bookshelf. Lucy continues to read while she talks to me.

“What’s going on between Corinne and Jeremy? Do you know?”

“You should ask them.”

“I can’t,” I say.

“So,” she says, putting the huge novel aside and looking up at me, “he’s helping her with Runaway Mom.” She waits for my reaction, and when I don’t say anything, she says, “He got tired of hating her. He decided she wasn’t going to go away.”

“What’s Runaway Mom?”

“That’s her blog,” Lucy says, sitting up and stretching. “He’s helping her with it. It’s going to be real popular. All the kids at school want to read it.”

“What? Why?”

“Daddy, didn’t you ever want to run away?”

“No,” I say. “I don’t think I ever did.”

“That’s weird,” she says. “Everyone else does.”

—