Tuesday Night Miracles Page 17

  Olivia’s voice is softer now and Phyllis lifts her head for a moment, but then she hears the dreaded word, “shit,” when the phone hits the table next to the chair.

  If dogs really do have a secret language like the stuff that has been displayed for countless generations in Walt Disney movies, then a dog like Phyllis could be an interpreter for the dumb, deaf, and blind canines of the world. Before Olivia rescued her from a shelter, Phyllis thought her name was Shit. That’s all a very round and mean man called her until she was swept away by a caring neighbor. It took Olivia a while to figure it out, even though Phyllis tried to tell her by cocking her head sideways and walking backward every time Olivia said the horrid s word. Ten years later, when Phyllis has gotten past all that—even without group dog therapy—Olivia hates herself when she forgets and says it.

  “I’m sorry, Phyllis,” she yells toward the bedroom. “This is big stuff. I’ve got my hands full.”

  Olivia leans forward and mouths the word shit again very quietly into her hands, while tapping both feet. Sometimes there is nothing like a silly swear word to help her move to point B.

  Point B, in this case, is a phone call to Grace, who would not answer her earlier calls. Point A has already been accomplished. Point A being her professional ability not to reach across the chairs last night and strangle first Jane, then Kit, and then, for good measure, the silent one—Leah.

  “What in the world are you thinking, Jane?” Olivia asked this while she was gripping her notebook so hard that her fingers cramped up. Then, without hesitating, she turned to Kit and added, “After what you shared with us, and how accepting everyone was of your dream, is there a reason you reacted that way?”

  Leah, of course, responded first.

  “She was obviously telling us something special, maybe even sacred,” Leah said. “We should all have been more sensitive. I feel just terrible.”

  Well, Olivia thought at the time, that makes one of you.

  “Jane? Kit?”

  “It just seemed odd, that’s all,” Jane said. “Does she look like a singer?”

  “Do you think you look like a dancer?” Olivia asked her.

  Jane appeared a tad pained by that question, and shrugged.

  “I feel terrible, too, and I’m sure Jane does also,” Kit said, taking it upon herself to save Jane’s rear end. “I suppose the reason some of us ended up here is because we say the first thing that comes into our mind and we don’t think about how someone else might feel when they hear what we have to say.”

  Bingo! Olivia thought joyfully. That’s something a second grader knows before the first day of school, but at least it’s something. She hopes Jane is listening.

  “What should we do?” Kit wanted to know. “Should I try and stop her from leaving?”

  “I think she needs to be alone,” Dr. Bayer told them. “I will make certain she is okay as soon as I dismiss you.”

  “Someone should put tape over my mouth,” Jane admitted. “I didn’t mean to hurt her feelings. I’m sorry, too.”

  “She needs to know that, and she needs to know it as soon as possible. When you leave, before you do anything, and the moment you get home, you all need to email her a note and copy me on it. It’s called an apology.”

  Olivia reminded them that she had sent a message to everyone about writing down things that made them happy and that they could get email addresses from that. Will they ever get the point of being happy?

  “I don’t have my own computer,” Leah reminded Dr. Bayer. “I can email on the one in the meeting room when they unlock it in the morning.”

  “That’s fine, Leah,” Olivia told her, wondering if the other two women realized how absolutely easy some parts of their lives must be compared with Leah’s.

  There was no sense in continuing the meeting after that, and Olivia reminded them how important it was to put this behind them once they’d sent their emails, and that they should keep writing in their logs. It might seem ridiculous, but Dr. Bayer was determined to make certain they looked in front of them and not behind them all the time.

  After the three women left quietly, Olivia sat in her hard metal chair for a good ten minutes before calling the janitor to let him know that she would be leaving the building, slumped toward her car in the dark, and drove home. It’s time to try and talk to Grace again.

  Phyllis hears Olivia get up and walk to the kitchen. She walks fast and then spins on her heels and heads back to her chair too quickly to have grabbed a dog treat. Phyllis stays put.

  Olivia sits back down and riffles through her files until she finds the one with the blue dot. She flips through it quickly, wishes at this point that she knew more about Grace and her life and heart than she does. Then she dials Grace’s number.

  It is after 7 P.M. when Grace’s personal cellphone vibrates on her office desk at the hospital, and before she looks at it Grace says a silent prayer that it’s not either of her daughters. They call when they’re in trouble, want something, or have an urge to share with her all her failings as a mother, provider, and human being.

  She sees that the call is from Dr. Bayer and her first instinct is to put the phone inside her file drawer, close it, and run from the office. That, she quickly realizes, would simply prolong the pain.

  “Hello, Dr. Bayer,” Grace says the moment she accepts the call.

  “How are you, Grace?”

  Grace hesitates. How she is is frantically busy, pissed off, exhausted, worried, and about four hundred other adjectives. Dr. Bayer’s voice is gentle and kind, and Grace is tempted to fall right into her. Now, she decides, is probably not the best time to do that.

  “I’m at work, Dr. Bayer, and I’m fine,” she says softly, still wishing she could take a step closer to honesty.

  “Can you give me a few minutes, please?”

  Grace knows that she can’t stop this; she knows that she has so many balls in the air that if she pauses or looks away her entire life will come to a halt. Her singing admission during the anger class opened up a wound so old, so deep, so hurtful that she could barely drive home. She is not ready to go there, but she knows that she must talk to Dr. Bayer. This is not a choice.

  “Of course,” Grace finally agrees. “Unfortunately, we are on overload here and I may have to go help out, but until then we can talk.”

  “Talk,” Dr. Bayer quickly finds out, means only about certain topics. The singing revelation is not one of those topics; neither is much else. Grace assures her that she simply overreacted and was tired during the meeting. Dr. Bayer knows that she’s lying, but she’s more interested in making certain Grace comes to the next meeting than she is in dealing with the underlying issue that sent Grace running from the room.

  “I know I should have stayed,” Grace says. “It was silly.”

  “The good thing is that you didn’t get angry at the meeting. You did the right thing.”

  “I was just hurt. It’s crushing to open up and then have someone step on you.”

  Dr. Bayer knows that all four of the women in her controversial Tuesday-night group are poised for change—if they choose to accept it, if they want it, if they understand what they can gain and how their lives will open up. And, especially, how damn much they have to lose if they don’t. She is absolutely certain they want to reclaim their lives or re-create new ones. The great Dr. B. can sense it. Stubborn women, herself included, love to learn the hard way.

  Leah, she is certain, is ready to get to that place and there is something about Grace that makes Dr. Bayer think she is ready to go there also. Jane and Kit are battling for third and fourth place, but Dr. Bayer refuses to settle for anything less than one hundred percent with these women.

  Sometimes when she closes her eyes, or when she’s having the same kind of day every person in the world has now and then, all Dr. Bayer can see are the faces of the women and men who have failed no matter how hard she has tried.

  It’s as if they have their own channel inside her mind that
gets switched on when she’s feeling like a failure herself.

  The suicides, all four of them, haunt her the most. Three women and one man who were already in severe mental anguish when they came to her for help. There were other women who were forced to give up their children; men who never showed up again and simply disappeared, and were probably roaming the backroads or some half-deserted highway; both men and women who repeated their mistakes and were sent away so they could spend the next thirty years trying to figure out why.

  Dr. Bayer is no fool. She knows that saving everyone is an impossibility. But her heart sometimes rises up and interferes. There have been many days when she thought she should have been a damned dermatologist, or maybe tried harder to have a life of her own. Here is yet another evening and she’s alone, with Phyllis, of course, and she’s still working.

  Dr. Bayer also knows that if she had to do it all over again she’d still slip on the same shoes every morning. It’s who she is and who she has been for a very long time.

  “You know it’s okay to be upset now and then,” she tells Grace. “I’d be angry if someone slapped my dream upside the head. And, if I could get any of you to cooperate, we’d get to alternative forms of anger expression.”

  “We are pretty surly, I agree.” Grace manages a smile as she talks.

  “Grace, you know you have to come back to class. Whatever it is, you have to face it and fix it.”

  “It would be easier to run away, don’t you think?”

  “It’s never easier to run away. I know, because I tried that once myself,” Dr. Bayer admits, sharing something personal so that, hopefully, Grace will do the same.

  “You?” Grace mocks surprise. “I find that hard to believe.”

  “You work in the medical field. I bet you could diagnose half my clients, and probably half the people you work with could be in this same class.”

  “Sure, but they aren’t. They didn’t get caught being angry. I did.”

  “Sometimes getting caught is a real blessing.”

  Right. Grace needs this kind of blessing like she needs her menstrual cycles to start again. This will all go away eventually. The class will end. She’ll do what she has to do to get Dr. Bayer to sign the little piece of paper freeing her. Her daughter will surely graduate and go away to college. The other daughter will grow out of this lesbian, gay, whatever in the hell phase she’s in. One day she will figure out what in the world to do with Evan, the good-looking accountant who wants to take her out to dinner. The day after that, she will open the front door and there will be a bag of money on the step and a one-way ticket to Paris resting on top of it.

  “Listen, Dr. Bayer, I have to go. Forget about the singing-dream thing and me rushing from class like a big baby. It’s no big deal. I have a lot on my mind. I’m going to try harder. The happiness thing makes sense, really it does.”

  Olivia wants to believe Grace. If only she and her classmates knew how easy it was to move through this and focus on the positive. Maybe she will have to trip them all in order for them to make that leap. After all, if a person is in midair she will either fall or put a foot out and land safely.

  “You know that if you want to talk or need me you can call.”

  “I understand, Dr. Bayer. Thank you. And …”

  “What is it, Grace?”

  “I just wanted to tell you that I’ve been carrying my needlepoint around.” Then Grace hangs up before Olivia can say another word.

  Damn it, Olivia thinks, setting the phone back on the table. Damn it and alleluia! It’s a night of mixed blessings.

  Much, much later, when Phyllis wakes to the sound of ice cubes dropping into a glass and the slap of Olivia’s slippers moving through the kitchen, she shakes quickly, jumps off the bed, and groans softly when she hits the floor and her brittle hips bounce.

  Olivia’s hand is on Phyllis so fast that Phyllis jerks a little bit, and Olivia says, “Sorry, girl.”

  Then Olivia makes another call. Phyllis can tell this is a good call. She often talks into the phone like this late at night, and so softly that Phyllis thinks Olivia is sitting there talking to her.

  “Darling, I know, I know,” Olivia whispers to her sweetheart. “Can you be patient just a little bit longer?”

  Phyllis hears the glass being moved off the table while Olivia is listening.

  “I’m not sure how long this will take. It’s a hard question to answer. You know it’s an anger-management class. Court-ordered.”

  There’s another pause. When Olivia isn’t drinking, she pets Phyllis. Phyllis wishes she’d get off the phone.

  “They aren’t like that, not at all. I told you what I’m trying to do. I just can’t get them all to budge at the same time. And, yes, I know I’m out on a limb and this may not be the time to do it, but there I am, and it’s gotten kind of windy but I’m hanging on, sweetie. I’m your Livie. You know I have to try.”

  The last thing Olivia says is “I love you, too”, and Phyllis understands the word love. It’s what makes her tail wag when she hears the key in the door.

  Lots of quiet time passes and then, without warning, Olivia gets up and walks back to the kitchen. Phyllis is beyond startled to hear more ice cubes falling into the glass, but then she feels the fingers again and she melts into her soft bed.

  The next time Phyllis wakes up is when she hears the empty glass hitting the table next to Olivia’s chair.

  This rarely happens, and now Phyllis decides that she needs to go outside for a moment.

  Olivia is not upset when Phyllis gets up and goes to stand by the door. She opens up the door and, fortified by the whiskey—two glasses, which is highly unusual on a weeknight unless she’s with Buffy—she doesn’t bother to put on a jacket over her well-worn navy terry-cloth bathrobe.

  Phyllis has her little go-to-the-third-tree-stop-to-make-certain-Olivia-is-there-eight-times routine down to less than ten minutes. Olivia stays on the front step and waits.

  It’s chilly for October, and even as the air makes her shudder and the stars are out in full force, Olivia can’t stop thinking about her conversation with Grace and how she needs to stay with it, work harder herself, try new things. But what?

  Her ankles are starting to get cold, but Phyllis must not be rushed or she’ll have to do this again in about three hours.

  One of the reasons Olivia has always loved living this close to the heart of the city is that she can hear it beating—trains, cars, horns, factory engines—without having to be too close. She also gets to have a tiny yard for Phyllis, and those all-important trees. Just as she is thinking she will go to bed without a bright idea, something drastic to shake up her Tuesday-night class, Olivia is startled by the sound of either a car backfiring or a gunshot.

  Phyllis hears it, too, and stops where she is. No one had better hurt Olivia or there will be hell to pay! Phyllis instinctively barks at the noise.

  When Phyllis runs back, without having bothered to take care of her business, she is relieved in another way to see Olivia standing where she left her and smiling wildly.

  “I’ve got it,” Olivia says, reaching into her pocket for one of those tiny biscuits that taste like fresh gravy. “To hell with caution. I know I have to get these women on their own adventures and interacting in a setting that isn’t so restrictive.”

  Phyllis has no idea what’s going on. She can’t believe her good fortune and eats the biscuit slowly, wondering if that loud noise will come back so that she can get another treat.

  Two point nine hours later, when she finally does her business by the tree, Phyllis is just as happy, because Olivia doesn’t scold her for not going to the bathroom earlier.

  Whatever it is that’s happening is very exciting and new. That’s what Phyllis thinks. Olivia isn’t as sure as she was when the idea first cataspulted into her mind, but to hell with that. She’s going to do it anyway.

  “I’m taking them to places outside the ugly old county building, and who knows if I’m right or wr
ong,” Olivia says as Phyllis’s attempt at getting a second biscuit fails. “But I have to do it. I have to try.”

  Phyllis just wants to get back on the warm bed. Sometimes Olivia makes absolutely no sense.

  No sense at all.

  19

  The Black Dot

  Leah’s days have turned into an unexpected pattern that rarely varies, and she’s amazed at how quickly she has fallen into its predictable arms. Just as one of her housemates suggested, her fears, the constant looking over her shoulder, the way she jumped when a door slammed, a window banged, or anyone raised her voice—all those reactions have ever so slowly diminished.

  During the occasional few moments of the day when she has time to stand in one spot, Leah realizes that her old life—surely not the memories that often drag her down like fifty-pound anchors—becomes smaller and smaller when she turns around to look at it.

  Her own nightmares have begun to fade, and as she watches her children fall asleep each night she can tell that they fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer each day. All good signs. During the past weekend, when Jessie was busy drawing in the living room, Leah peeked over her shoulder and asked her what she was working on.

  “It’s a new picture of our family, Mama,” Jessie shared, holding the picture up for Leah to see.

  Leah was astounded. Her daughter had drawn a picture of her brother, herself, and her mother. There was no daddy in the drawing.

  “That’s lovely,” she managed to say, her throat tightening.

  “Mrs. Harrison, who talks to me about all the bad things, said it’s okay for just us to be a family now.”

  “She’s right, honey. We are a family, and we will always be a family.”

  “Mama?”

  “What, sweetie?”

  “Can we stay here forever? I like it here.”

  Leah closed her eyes and wondered what to say. Even though she was mostly happy, there were still moments when she wanted to stop right where she was standing, lie down, have someone cover her with a blanket, and then wake her up when all the hard stuff was over. And there would still be plenty of hard stuff.