Deena Goldstone - Tell Me One Thing

BUT MAGGIE DOESN’T TALK THE NEXT DAY and the day after that, and Lucia spends those days watching her intently. Suddenly there’s nothing casual or easy about her interaction with her daughter. Now she must pay close attention at all times because Maggie volunteers nothing and will answer only with a shake or nod of her head.

Bernadette, who has never had children, tells her to give it a while. Max, who has two grown boys, agrees.

“Children go through phases,” he tells Lucia on Sunday night as they sit in the backyard, late, Maggie asleep upstairs in the apartment, Bernadette and Lucia sharing a bottle of wine, Max drinking a beer.

He tells her about Noah, his youngest, who wouldn’t eat anything that wasn’t white for, oh, it must have been about two years. Pasta, butter, white bread, ranch dressing, potatoes — that was about it.

“What did you do?” Lucia asks him. “Weren’t you frantic?”

Max shakes his head. “Our pediatrician said not to make a big deal about it. He was of the school that believes kids know what they need better than we do.”

“Do you buy that?” Lucia asks him.

“Not really, but I didn’t have a better answer. What was I going to do, hold him down and force-feed him?”

“And Janie, their mother, had just died,” Bernadette adds to bring some context into the conversation.

“Oh, I didn’t know.…” Lucia says quietly. “That must have been such a difficult time.”

“Yes, that’s why I’m telling you,” he says. “Children find their own way of dealing with difficult times.”

“She’s not being willful,” Lucia says, needing validation.

“Of course not,” Bernadette agrees.

“She’s waiting.” This last judgment from Max.

AFTER LUCIA GOES UP TO BED and curves her body around her sleeping child, Bernadette and Max remain in the yard, talking in whispers.

“Did you tell her Richard’s been calling?” Max asks.

“No. I thought about it, but no.”

“Do you think he believes you — that you don’t know where she is?”

“I don’t know. I told him we don’t have any room for them, that you have a small house. Luckily, he’s never been here to see that.” And she gestures toward the garage apartment, then puts her feet up on the chair Lucia vacated and changes her tack. “A lot of us do what Lucia did.”

Max looks at her, puzzled.

“Oh, you know, commit to a starter marriage for all the wrong reasons.”

“Such as?”

“Lucia had no idea what to do with herself after graduation, so she followed Richard out here. Problem solved.” Bernadette sighs. “And a new one created. No one knows what they truly want when they’re eighteen or twenty-two or even twenty-five.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“Okay, I was completely clueless.” And then Bernadette reads Max’s face. “But not you and Janie.”

“No.”

A moment and then Bernadette says, “And that made her death so much harder.”

Max takes her hand, grateful she isn’t jealous. “We need to stay out of this mess, Detta.”

“I know,” Bernadette agrees, but without much conviction in her voice.

IT’S SUNDAY NIGHT OF THE WEEK Lucia left, and Richard hasn’t slept more than a few hours since the Thursday evening he came home to find the apartment empty. He’s started smoking again, something he gave up when he started graduate school and began running. Now he sits at the kitchen table, Lucia’s note permanently in front of him, unaware that he’s rocking slightly back and forth as he smokes one cigarette after another. The ashtray overflows. He’s staring at his laptop screen, trying to craft the perfect e-mail, the one that will bring her back. So far he has written, “I love you,” and nothing else.

He deletes it. That’s the wrong approach, he thinks. He needs a grand gesture, something that will wake her up, something that will make her see just how much he loves her. It seems an impossibility to get that into an e-mail. His heart is bursting with love for her. How can she be throwing all that away?

IT’S BEEN EXACTLY A WEEK SINCE Maggie stopped talking, a week in which Maggie and Lucia have spent every hour of every day together. And without consciously planning it, Lucia has stopped expecting Maggie to speak and has begun to speak for her. If asked, Lucia would have said that she was taking the pressure off her daughter, not demanding something — speech — that Maggie wasn’t ready to give.

But what Bernadette sees as she watches them together is that already, in a week, any separation between mother and child has evaporated. Lucia reads Maggie’s sighs and translates those into wants. She studies Maggie’s shrugs and facial expressions and immediately knows, or thinks she does, when Maggie’s anxious, or bored, or needy, all without a word being spoken.

Bernadette can see these two dark-haired and spritelike creatures begin to spin their own communication, to build a universe of only two. It feels so intimate that sometimes Bernadette has to turn away, as if she’s witnessing something too private to be shared.

The only time Maggie leaves Lucia’s side is when she goes to visit the bees with Max. And in those few minutes, on those nights when the four of them eat together or get together after dinner for coffee and homemade cookies in the backyard, it is then that Bernadette has an opportunity to talk to Lucia. But what to say— Are you sure it’s good for Maggie to spend so much time with you? How can Bernadette say that to any mother, especially since she’s raised no children of her own? No, it seems she must watch this drama play out from the sidelines. She must observe a child attach herself to her mother and begin to grow into her flesh. And say nothing.

Well then, isn’t it fair for Bernadette to suggest that Lucia let Richard know where they are? Should she describe what his daily phone calls are like? How he sounds frantic and bewildered and furious, sometimes in the same sentence. How he goes on and on without needing Bernadette to say one word. Of course, Bernadette isn’t surprised by any of this. She’s always known that within Richard the precise, detail-oriented scientist is in tension with the extravagantly emotional man. That combustion is part of his charm and what makes him so exasperating.

Bernadette is mulling all this over as she parks her car in the college parking structure and begins walking to the anthropology department office, her briefcase stuffed with graded finals, her mind preoccupied with her concerns about Maggie and Lucia and Richard. That’s why she doesn’t see him until she’s practically on top of him. He says nothing, simply stands alongside the path and watches her approach, smoking, looking like he’s dropped fifteen pounds in the ten days his family has been gone.

“Oh, Richard,” Bernadette says, and all resistance flees. He looks haunted, horrible. She has to tell him some version of the truth. “Let’s sit somewhere.” And Bernadette leads him to a bench tucked into a small green space, one of the many pocket parks that seemed to have sprung up around campus in the past year.

She sits. He doesn’t. “They’re with you, aren’t they?”

Bernadette doesn’t answer.

“At first I thought she’d gone home to Ohio and I tried her parents. When they said she hadn’t contacted them, I thought they were lying, because, after all, they’d be protecting her, you know? But their story never changed — they didn’t know where she was. They hadn’t known anything was wrong. She told them nothing. Finally, it made sense to me. Her parents are the last people she’d tell. Leaving your husband isn’t something you do in Lucia’s family. She wouldn’t go home to her parents. She wouldn’t want to hear what they had to say, but you, Bernadette, you’ve left two husbands, so there you are — the logical person to support Lucia’s insanity. That’s how I figured out she’s with you.”