House Broken Read online

  It’s my life and I can’t even control it, she thought. What could anyone else do? “I’ve kept someone waiting in Room Two for twenty minutes. It’s my last appointment. You free?”

  “You bet,” he said, getting up. “And let me know if you’ll need time off.”

  Dublin’s message was a list: fractured knee and leg, broken nose (from the air bag, she presumed), dislocated shoulder, possible concussion, monitoring for internal injuries, stable. He had placed the word stable in quotes. She smiled thinly at the quip, then winced as she imagined her mother in a hospital bed, in a hip cast, her nose taped across the bridge, and bruises blooming under her closed eyes.

  • • •

  Geneva lifted the leash off the hook behind the door and hung up her lab coat. She left her office and stopped by reception to remind the assistant to check on Zeke later that evening.

  Outside the treatment room, she peeked through the window in the door. Rosa was bent over a computer next to Diesel, Geneva’s Great Dane–chocolate Lab mix. The dog had recognized her footfall in the corridor and sat up expectantly, his head cocked to one side. She pushed open the door and called to him. He trotted across the room and sat in front of her, his nose at her waist, and lifted a paw. She held it and inspected the strip of adhesive tape on his forelimb. Tom, her husband, had brought Diesel to the clinic that morning to donate blood for a dog that had been hit by a car.

  She stroked Diesel’s ears flat. “How’s my brave boy? Ready for the steak I promised you?”

  • • •

  The marsh wasn’t on her way home. By the time she stood on the path that ran along Pickleweed Inlet, the shadow of Mount Tamalpais had turned the water midnight blue. A pair of kayaks, pointed toward Sausalito, slipped along the eelgrass at the marsh’s edge. She walked Diesel only a short distance, not wanting to tire him after the transfusion. Raising her binoculars, she scanned for unusual shorebirds. A dowitcher probed the sand and a handful of sandpipers huddled close before scattering like children at recess. The head of a harbor seal surfaced twenty feet from shore. It regarded her briefly, then vanished, leaving the merest ripple.

  The binoculars had been a tenth-birthday present from her father, Eustace, who died less than two years later. The weight of them on the strap around her neck calmed her as she looked across the water at the reeds on the distant bank, Diesel’s shoulder against her thigh. Her father had no particular love for birds, but Geneva tagged along when he hunted turkey or small game in the lush Carolina wood. He said searching for songbirds would keep her occupied during the long, quiet mornings in the woods. Walking behind him on the narrow paths in the predawn glow, his back as broad as the trunks of the ancient cottonwoods around them, she felt safe, and because of that, happy. They only spoke occasionally, when he would drop to one knee and show her some animal sign—a new opening in the bramble or a print in the dewy moss—his voice so low it sank into the damp mulch at their feet. He never minded when there was nothing to shoot, and she never minded when there was. The harsh crack of the rifle and the limp rabbits and doves represented the practical cost of the joy of those mornings.

  That marked the beginning of her interest in animals, and the beginning of who she was to become. When her father died, she felt forsaken. A few years passed before she also felt cheated. Her eldest sister, Paris, was nearly an adult when he died, and his love for her was blinding, uncommon. Geneva, by comparison, was a child in the shadows. He had missed out on her entirely.

  She turned toward the car. Tom would be wondering where she was. She would have to explain why she hadn’t called him about Helen. He would nod with understanding. And when he asked if she wanted him to go with her to L.A., she would watch for the measured disappointment on his face as she admitted she hadn’t decided whether to go.

  CHAPTER TWO

  GENEVA

  The porch light shone in the dusk when Geneva pulled into the dirt driveway shadowed by redwoods. She parked in front of the barn next to her brother-in-law’s Explorer. The sign above the barn’s carriage doors read, in art deco lettering, TREEHAUS. Nine years earlier, Tom had designed and built an elaborate two-story tree house for a wealthy friend. When it appeared as part of a spread in an architectural magazine, he quit his job as a graphic designer and set up a woodworking shop in the four-stall barn. Although he now specialized in building custom staircases and hadn’t made a tree house in years, the name stuck.

  Geneva wasn’t surprised to find the kitchen crowded with Novaks. Tom, his four siblings and their families lived in one another’s pockets. Today, Ivan, Tom’s brother, perched on the butcher block island, beer in hand. His twin sons and Geneva and Tom’s son, Charlie, all in baseball jerseys, gathered around a large bag of chips. Tom stirred the contents of a saucepan, his back to the door. She had to smile when five heads bearing the same Dennis Quaid grin turned toward her. Diesel pushed past her, bounded over to Tom, then to Charlie, butting his forehead against their stomachs in greeting. At fourteen, Charlie was almost as tall as his older cousins and as long-limbed as his father—and Diesel. Geneva still saw the toddler in him. A warm pulse spread under her skin.

  Tom took the dishcloth from his shoulder and wiped his hands. “Long day?”

  “Very.”

  “Spaghetti’s on the way.”

  “Smells wonderful.”

  Ivan jumped off the counter. “You want a beer?”

  “Maybe later, thanks.”

  Charlie looked up from scratching Diesel’s chest. “Hey, Momster, is the dog okay?”

  “The dog?”

  Charlie shot her a quizzical look.

  Of course, she thought. The transfusion. That was today. It might as well have been last week. “I was confused. There was another very sick dog today. But the one that got hit by the car is doing just fine, thanks to Diesel.”

  Cars hitting dogs. Dogs eating socks. Intoxicated mothers ramming armored cars. Geneva’s head filled with cotton, and the kitchen suddenly became too confining. She turned away. “I’m going to change.”

  She left her shoulder bag on the bench near the door and headed down the hallway. Ella’s door was closed—which meant Do Not Disturb—so Geneva didn’t pause. She entered the bedroom at the end of the hall, not bothering to turn on the light. A red light blinked on the bedside phone. She crossed the room in the dark and pushed the button. The attendance officer from the high school reported Charlie had missed first period.

  “I dropped him off in town on time.” Geneva spun around to see Tom silhouetted in the light spilling from the hallway.

  “But apparently he was tardy again.”

  “Those late starts on Wednesdays seem to be a problem for him.”

  “Then he shouldn’t be allowed to go to town before school. Those are the rules.”

  “I realize that, Geneva. He’s very persuasive. As you know.”

  “That’s why we agreed to be firm with him. No bending the rules for a wink and a smile.”

  “It’s easy to talk about rules when you’re not around to enforce them. I have to be the heavy.”

  “Or not.” She spun away, fed up with his laxity. Wasn’t it just last week she had warned him that with both kids in high school they had to maintain discipline?

  He approached and put his arm around her shoulders. She flinched. He let go and said, “I didn’t come in here to argue about Charlie. I came to see if you were okay.”

  She might have said that if he was so worried about her well-being, he could try not undermining the parenting decisions they had made. Together. But she didn’t have the energy to act out her part of the script.

  In the darkness, she felt smaller than usual, as if she were contracting. The voices in the kitchen receded.

  Tom swiveled her to face him and lifted her chin. “Are you okay?”

  She nodded. Holding it together was her strong suit. But all at onc
e a band tightened around her chest. Her nose stung as she fought back tears.

  “No.”

  • • •

  Ivan and his sons left after dinner. Ella, sixteen years old, cleared the table. Her blue eyes hid behind fine blond bangs. She was dressed entirely in gray, as she had been for the last six months. When Geneva had noticed the pattern, she asked Ella if it was a statement. “A nonstatement, Mom.”

  Ella stacked the dishes. Geneva leaned against the counter and finished her wine.

  “Did you work at the library after school today?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Was it busy?”

  “Not really.”

  “Still reading Pride and Prejudice in English?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Liking it any better?”

  “Not really.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Too many words.” Ella wiped down the table, tossed the sponge in the sink, and headed to her room. “Nice chatting with you, Mom.” She gave the word Mom a sarcastic twist, as if it might not apply.

  Geneva caught Tom’s eye and raised her eyebrows.

  He shrugged and pointed at the laptop screen. “There’s space on a flight Saturday at noon. Knee surgery’s scheduled for Friday, right? You’d have a couple days to get organized. You could even make Charlie’s game on Saturday morning.”

  Geneva loaded plates into the dishwasher. “I know I should want to see her, Tom. Honestly, though, I’m not feeling much like the attentive, loving daughter.”

  “But you do love her.”

  She closed the dishwasher and faced him. “That word. I don’t see how it’s relevant. The question is whether it makes any difference to her—or to me—if I appear at her side.”

  He frowned. “You’re angry.”

  “Furious.” She folded the dishcloth and pinched several spent blossoms from the miniature rosebush on the counter. “I’ll go see her. But for Dublin. No reason he should deal with her alone. And because I’ll feel guilty if I don’t.”

  “Do you want me to come?”

  “Thanks, but I’m reluctant enough without having to worry about who’s going to look after the kids.” That was an excuse. What she didn’t want was Tom monitoring her bedside manner. Maybe Tom should go and she should stay.

  “Ivan and Leigh would take them. Or one of the others.”

  She didn’t doubt it. Tom’s family functioned as an organism. Eighteen years in, Geneva still marveled at the Novak family’s cohesion and adaptability. If someone was ill or distressed, siblings arrived like macrophages at an infection, efficiently absorbing the duties of the other family into theirs. They drove children to school and sports practices, stocked refrigerators, walked dogs, and texted updates while working and shopping until all of the organism’s parts were up and running again. Even Tom’s parents, who were in their late seventies, would not be left out. During months when birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays were thin, the elderly Novaks invented occasions. Recently they’d hosted a barbecue to celebrate the first anniversary of their new barbecue.

  As much as Tom’s family embraced her, Geneva was an outsider. Her family was too different. Helen had named her four children after European cities to give them the sophistication lacking in their one-horse South Carolina town. But to Geneva their names had come to represent their distance from their mother and one another. She hadn’t seen Paris in ten years, and Florence, two years younger than Paris, rarely left Manhattan. Only Geneva and Dublin phoned and visited each other regularly. If it weren’t for her brother, she might as well have no family of her own.

  “You stay with the kids, Tom. I’ll be fine. Really.”

  “She’ll be glad you came. You’ll see.”

  She smiled at his insistence on remaking her mother into a version of his. Or maybe he believed her mother could change. Geneva knew better. The woman had been on a steady downhill slide since her husband’s death. The trajectory had been hard for Geneva to discern early on. At first she was too young and wholly dependent on her mother to stabilize her fatherless world. A child sees what she wants to see. Once she entered middle school, she began to understand emotions could be complicated—even paradoxical—and attributed her mother’s self-destructive behavior to grief. Geneva, patient and watchful, waited for Helen to come around. But the strength that should have returned to her mother never appeared, or never for very long, and Geneva finally realized she was waiting for a mother she never had. Six years after her father’s death, she left Aliceville (and her mother) for college and for good.

  Helen’s life increasingly took on a haphazard quality, with a recent emphasis on hazard. Tom avowed that every incident provided an occasion for positive change, but Geneva disagreed. She believed the best predictor of future behavior was past behavior. In her mother’s case, this did not bode well for the future. Her mother was too old and too stubborn a dog to learn new tricks.

  Charlie came into the kitchen. “All done with my homework. Can I watch TV now?”

  Geneva turned to Tom. “I didn’t have a chance to check his grades online today. Has he earned back weeknight TV?”

  “How’d you do on your history test?” Tom asked.

  “Mr. Shaw hasn’t finished grading them.”

  “And you’re up to speed on everything else?”

  “Yup.”

  “Okay. One show.”

  “Thanks, Pop.” Charlie left before Geneva could object.

  “I’m willing to wager a week’s worth of dishes there’s a history test in his backpack,” she said.

  He closed the laptop and got up. “You worry too much. I wasn’t much of a student either, and I turned out all right.” He moved to the living room couch and picked up a magazine. Conversation over.

  It wasn’t Charlie’s grades that concerned her, but his character. Habits were hard to break; a child cutting corners and bending the rules was the same as a dog with a habit of digging. Look the other way, and a hole becomes a tunnel, and the dog is somewhere on the far side of the fence.

  Did she worry too much? Maybe. But if she erred on the side of excess concern for either of her children, she had her reasons.

  If you worry too little, you might find out too late.

  CHAPTER THREE

  GENEVA

  Geneva held a mechanical pencil above the Saturday Los Angeles Times crossword folded in her lap. During the hour she’d sat next to her mother’s hospital bed waiting for her to wake, she had entered only half a dozen words. Her stomach growled. She had rushed from Charlie’s baseball game to the airport in San Francisco and missed lunch.

  The setting sun pierced the haze and reflected off the matrix of glass and steel outside, throwing lurid shafts of orange light into the room. Flying in, she’d seen the smog that enveloped the city, held low by an inversion. Her eyes burned during the taxi ride and even now the back of her throat was raw. She had difficulty understanding why anyone, let alone thirteen million people, chose to live here. She’d trade palm trees and smog for redwoods and fog any day of the week. She took a sip from the Starbucks cup on the bedside table, recrossed her legs, and resumed tracking her shadow as it moved glacially across the brace on her mother’s leg.

  Five years earlier, shortly before Helen turned sixty, she’d announced her intention to leave her native South Carolina, declaring the last of a string of interchangeable Southern gentlemen to be much less fun after a hundred dates than after three. Besides, she said, she’d had her fill of snakes, sweet tea, and red-faced women who rested their chins on their bosoms. Her first choice was to live with Florence and her husband, Renaldo, in Manhattan. She packed and waited for Florence to offer her a closet-sized room in their walk-up. When the invitation failed to appear, she brushed it off, telling Geneva that New York was too expensive and “chock-full of Yankees.” Dublin was her next choice. This time she
didn’t wait to be asked. She sent her belongings ahead of her and flew to Los Angeles for the easy glamour of room-temperature life amid palms. She purchased a condo a few miles from Dublin’s house in Sherman Oaks.

  In the hospital bed, Helen lay slack as a marionette doll abandoned by a puppeteer. Someone had brushed her platinum-blond hair away from her face, which accentuated her cheekbones and magnified the bruises under her eyes. Her lips were chapped and colorless. She would hate that, Geneva thought, recalling how her mother reapplied lipstick at the table after every meal. Without makeup, Helen appeared more vulnerable. Maybe “war paint,” as she called it, was exactly that—it emboldened her, or at least made her appear stronger. In the beige confines of the hospital ward, she lay stripped of her accessories. No war paint, no spectator pumps, no oversized sunglasses. And no Dutch courage.

  A nurse in a kelly-green uniform entered with several paper cups on a small tray. She introduced herself to Geneva and gently tapped Helen’s uninjured left shoulder. The doctors had immobilized her right shoulder after repairing torn cartilage and resetting the joint. When Geneva received news of the surgery she knew her mother’s recovery time had doubled. She wouldn’t be able to lean on a walker for weeks.

  “Time for your medication, Mrs. Riley.”

  Helen opened her eyes a little. “Am I still here, for Pete’s sake?”

  “Yes, you are. And your daughter has been waiting for you.” The nurse nodded at Geneva on the far side of the bed.

  Helen’s face lit up as she slowly swiveled her head. “Florence?”

  “No, Mom. It’s me.”

  “Oh. Geneva. I didn’t realize.”

  The note of disappointment was slight, but it pierced Geneva like a dart. She turned away and pretended to admire the view. Her mother lifted her head an inch, then sunk into the pillow. “Is my water over there somewhere?”

  Geneva picked up the cup, adjusted the angle of the straw, and handed it to her. “I got here a while ago.”