Falling in Love with Natassia Read online

  Nora reached for her fourth cookie, and Giulia got up to bring the box in to Natassia.

  “Did you ever hear of somebody named Cather?” Mary asked.

  “No. Is it a man?”

  “A woman.”

  “I never heard of her, but that doesn’t mean anything.”

  Giulia came back into the living room. “Mary,” she said, “go in and see Natassia. She’s kind of weepy again. She asked me to leave, but maybe you should go in.”

  Mary jumped up, but then the phone rang. Before she reached it, the ringing stopped. Mary stood in the hallway, heard Natassia say “Hi” in a happy way, so Mary went back to the others in the living room. “Well, that’s good. Her friends are calling. Last week she didn’t want to talk to any of them.” Mary sat down and asked Giulia, “What do you mean, she was weepy?”

  “She told me the risotto I brought her was salty, and I said I’d make her something else she liked tomorrow. Then she apologized, and I told her she didn’t have to, then she got teary.”

  Mary had just picked up a fortune cookie, but now she tossed it unopened onto her plate. “Erratic.” She’d been fooling herself all evening. “That’s how Lotte said she was last week. Bitching and then being sweet.”

  “She didn’t bitch at me. She just—”

  “Ssh, I don’t want her to overhear us talking about her.”

  “Oh, sorry, you’re right,” Giulia said. “What a good mother you are.”

  Mary’s face was half hidden inside the wide mouth of her wineglass. She lowered the glass and stared at Giulia. “I’m a shit of a mother. If I were a good mother, my kid wouldn’t be racked up like she is.”

  “Oh, stop.”

  “No, Giulia. You stop. You’re always romanticizing. Did you know that when she was four I left her sitting outside our building for two hours because I forgot to be there when she got home from a playdate? Do you know how many times I fed her Pepsi and peanut-butter crackers for dinner and nothing else? You didn’t know that, Giulia.”

  “Mary, what do you want me to say? That you’re a monster? I’m not going to say it.”

  Mary knew that Giulia had been working overtime in her darkroom so she could spend two full days with Natassia while Mary went back to work. So many people were trying to be helpful. Mary tossed her napkin onto the coffee table. “I don’t know.”

  “So what kind of dinners did you get when you were a kid?” Giulia asked.

  “My stepmother didn’t know how to cook, and usually she ran out of frozen dinners after she fed the boys and before she got to me. I’d make myself peanut butter and jelly.”

  “So your kid learned to fend for herself. Just like you did.”

  They were all silent for a minute.

  Mary told Giulia, “I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

  “That’s just what Natassia said. You don’t need to apologize. Just don’t beat yourself up.”

  Nora told Mary, “Giulia’s right, Mar. There’s no way you could ever match Dorie. You’ve been good to Natassia in ways Dorie could never even dream about.”

  “Yeah,” Giulia said, “and even if you really were Mommie Dearest, this guy Natassia hooked up with—man, bad news.”

  “Ssh, wait,” Mary said. She sat up and raised her voice. “Natassia, are you in the kitchen?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Come here, honey, let me see you.”

  The women all looked at one another, waiting, while Natassia took her time coming down the hallway. When she appeared, she was in her big, long nightgown. The circles under her eyes were purple. “You ready for bed, sweetie? Can I have a kiss?”

  Natassia blew one across the room. “That’s the best I can do. I’m tired.”

  “Okay, good night, sweetie.”

  “Good night, Natassia.”

  “ ’Night.”

  When she was gone, Nora said, “She’s completely worn out by this. She looks like a thirty-year-old woman.”

  “Why’re you telling me that?” Mary said. “Don’t tell me that.”

  The women were quiet. They listened to Natassia’s bedroom door close.

  “She met him early,” Nora said in a low voice.

  “Who?” Mary, out of cigarettes, pulled her backpack from under the coffee table and started digging through it, hoping to find a piece of nicotine gum.

  “The guy who turns you inside out.”

  “I was hoping she’d never meet one of those,” Mary said.

  “You know my friend Candice?” Nora said. “Who married the vineyards after her first husband left her? She has a ‘troll at the gate’ theory: you don’t get the good lover until you get past the bad one who turns you inside out. Mary, remember summer after junior year, high school?”

  “Peter Ashley, preppy slime.”

  “What did he do?” Giulia asked.

  “He invited Nora to his summer house on an island. Where?”

  “Maine.”

  “Some island off of Maine, and when she got there with all her brand-new birth-control pills and this halter top we spent forty bucks on—”

  “I wanted to die. When I got up there, he had this babe all set up in his cottage behind his parents’ big house. He had his own cottage. She was in college; he was a junior in high school, like me. I’ll never forget. She had a dark-green Datsun. He was so crazy about her he used to wash her underpants in the stream behind the cottage.”

  “Oh no. You never told me about the underpants.” Mary had found a stale cigarette in the bottom of her bag and was lighting it.

  “Do you know how humiliated I was? And then there was a storm and no way off the island for three days, until the ferry came back. I followed the two of them around like a sick dog until his father pulled me aside—his own father—and said, ‘My son’s a louse. I’m apologizing for him.’ Oh, stop. I can’t talk about it. It still makes me want to die.”

  “Did you ever see him again?” Giulia asked.

  “Of course. I’m telling you, I was sick over this guy.”

  “Yeah, but, Nor, you had other guys who were nuts about you.”

  “None of that mattered when it came to Peter Ashley. When school started again, I went out with him. I even slept with him.”

  “We’ve all done it,” Giulia said.

  “Yeah, but I was really hoping Natassia wouldn’t. Hey, wait, ssh….” Mary sat up, stiff and alert. “I thought I heard the baby.”

  Nora and Giulia looked at each other. “The baby?”

  Mary stood. “What?”

  “You said, ‘I thought I heard the baby.’ ”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Yeah, Mary, you did.”

  “Ssh.” Mary put her cigarette out in her plate.

  There was a faint kittenlike sound of crying, like a kitten caught in wire and crying.

  “Natassia?” Mary called.

  “M-o-m-m.”

  Running, followed by the others, Mary screamed, “Natassia! What, honey?”

  “Mom!”

  Blood on the sheets was the first thing Mary saw. Natassia was sitting on the edge of the bed, her sleeves rolled up. Her face was crumbled. She was poking into her wrists and the crooks of her arms with a Cuisinart blade. “Help me,” she whimpered to her mother and her friends. “Help me do this. I can’t do this.”

  CHAPTER 10 :

  SEPTEMBER

  1989

  In the days following Natassia’s attack on herself with the Cuisinart blade, Mary refused to do the thing everybody insisted had to be done. She would not check Natassia into a psychiatric facility. Mary made that decision slowly, during the six hours they spent waiting in the hallway outside of the emergency room.

  It was a little past ten-thirty when they got Natassia to the hospital. By midnight, she’d had a shot of penicillin and a tetanus shot, sixteen stitches in her left forearm, six stitches in her right forearm, and the ER resident was just finishing up two stitche
s on her right wrist. “Why’d you do this to yourself?” the doctor asked her.

  Natassia turned her face away from him, into the stiff white pillow. Up until that point, Mary hadn’t been sure Natassia was even hearing what was going on around her. Since they’d found her in her bedroom, she’d had a hollow horror in her eyes, a violet emptiness in her irises. The doctor persisted, “Am I hurting you right now? Do you feel this?” When Natassia turned her head back toward him, her eyes were even more hollow, but the horror was out of them. She looked frighteningly as if she didn’t care what was being done to her. “Are you cold?” he asked. She was in a hospital gown. Her bloody nightgown and her clogs and the raincoat they’d wrapped her in were rolled into a ball underneath the stretcher.

  Earlier, undressing her, a nurse had found three cigarette burns on the inside of Natassia’s right thigh; one was oozing pus and needed attention. There was a small moon of a cut on the top of her left thigh, where the Cuisinart blade had dropped while she was gouging herself. “Why’d you do this?”

  “Leave her alone,” Mary told the doctor, whose name tag said Montrose, and Mary thought, Monster. She had her hands on Natassia’s head to keep her still on the stretcher, but Natassia wasn’t moving.

  “Your daughter’s a smart girl,” Dr. Monster told Mary. His needle was going in for the last suture. “She doesn’t really want to kill herself. She mostly went for flesh. That’s a good sign.”

  Mary moved her hands down over Natassia’s ears so she wouldn’t hear anything. The way she lay there, with her goose-pimpled, stubbly legs splayed, Natassia looked almost indolent. Or like some animal killed on the side of the road.

  “Are you okay?” the doctor asked Mary; then she heard him shouting, “Hey, hey! Help over here! The mother’s fainting.”

  Mary felt cold and hot all at once, and she had the taste of metal in her mouth. There was an ammonia smell. She glanced down at two large brown hands supporting her under her arms, but she never did see the person who said, “Whoa, Mama,” and lowered her onto the floor.

  “I’m okay,” Mary said after a few minutes. They helped her up onto a stool, something with wheels, and Mary rolled herself close to Natassia’s stretcher. Natassia really did look like roadkill. Somewhere in Mary’s gut was the urge to move right on, do a drive-by, leave the mess. I’m not qualified. Mary was sure she didn’t know the first thing to do to help Natassia.

  Lying there on a white sheet, partly covered with a white sheet, Natassia was doing nothing except breathing, deep and slow. Her chest moved, but nothing else. Then, suddenly, riding lightly on one of her shallow exhalations was the question “Mom?”

  “I’m here, Natassia.” Still so dizzy she couldn’t stand, Mary reached her hands up to Natassia’s head again.

  “Hey, come on, Mom, no need for crying now,” the doctor said. “It’s a little blood. Natalia’s fine. The scare just got to you.”

  “Her name’s Natassia.” Mary ran her hands over Natassia’s wide forehead. Her skin was cold, but her fuzzy hair was matted with sweat. Mary brushed a wad of loose curlicues away from Natassia’s ear. Now that Mary was sitting down, she could whisper right into Natassia’s ear. “I love you,” Mary whispered. Natassia’s eyes were open but didn’t even blink. “I love you,” Mary insisted. Mary had been waiting for years, afraid but always knowing that eventually they’d get here. Bottom. We’ve hit.

  “Okay,” Dr. Monster said, tugging off his gloves. “She’s done, but I can’t release her yet. Things are going to take a while tonight. Get comfortable. You’ll be spending a stretch of time here in our wonderful emergency ward.”

  Finally.

  A NURSE and an aide dressed in green lifted Natassia—“One, two, three!”—onto a gurney and, because they had no other place for her, wheeled her into the corridor, where Nora and Giulia were waiting. Now, with a blanket over her, Natassia didn’t look so much like something left in the street. She lay on her side with her eyes closed.

  “Jesus, thank God, she’s all right,” Giulia gushed. “They kept you guys in there so long, we didn’t know what to think.”

  Nora was standing back a bit, behind Giulia, and Mary got some relief just seeing Nora, her white hair an aura around her silence. Always calm no matter how bad things got. Always practical. “Lotte’s been at the pay phone for a while, trying to reach David,” Nora told Mary.

  They were standing in a too-bright corridor, very noisy, lined with patients on stretchers.

  “We’re here for a while,” Mary told her friends. “That’s what the guy said.” On the gurney to one side of Natassia’s lay an elegantly dressed old woman—attractive but confused—who had had an episode of amnesia at a dinner party. She was being watched over by her silver-bearded boyfriend, who she thought was her husband, who’d been dead twelve years. The guy on the gurney to the other side of Natassia was an HIV patient with two-day head pain so severe he was in a constant moan. He was there by himself, holding an ice pack on his head. When it slipped out of his hands onto the floor, Giulia picked it up for him and held it over his eyes for a while.

  At twelve-forty-five, Natassia vomited onto the floor. She couldn’t stop vomiting. Mary looked around for a nurse or a doctor, but there was no one. Mary’s friends held Natassia to make sure she didn’t roll off the stretcher. Mary used the edge of the sheet to wipe Natassia’s mouth. Natassia was still vomiting when a nurse came rushing by and yelled at Mary, “You said she didn’t take pills. Honey, did you take pills?” Natassia shook her head violently no and looked offended by even the suspicion of an overdose, while the nurse unhinged the brake on the stretcher and started moving Natassia down the hallway.

  “I want to go with her,” Mary said.

  “Yes, you better come with her. We’re going to need you in there.”

  Back in the ER, Natassia was wheeled up against a wall to wait. The nurse gave Mary a bedpan and looked through Natassia’s chart. “No pills; then it must be stress. This should teach you, Natalia. Don’t ever try this again, you hear me? We can’t give you anything yet for pain. You got any pain, Natalia?”

  Mary was trying to ask, “But can stress really make her vomit this much?,” but the nurse interrupted, “Ah-ah-ah, hold the pan for her, the pan. There she goes again. That’s right, just throw it all up. Good girl. You’re the mother who got dizzy before, aren’t you? You okay now? Need some orange juice or something? I’ll check with you in a little while.” The nurse rushed away and left the two of them alone.

  There were too many stretchers, and not all of them had curtains pulled around them. When Mary looked up from Natassia, she saw, all at once, blood spurt from an obese woman’s shoulder, an old man pushing an oxygen mask up against his own face, two male nurses lifting a convulsing teenage boy, another nurse knifing open the inside seam of somebody’s jeans and lifting the denim off of a bloody leg.

  Mary heard, just beyond the sound of Natassia gagging and the mess plopping into the pink plastic pan, screams in different languages. Sirens were churning outside somewhere. For a disoriented moment, Mary thought about outside. We’re in the city, we’re in the hospital. She didn’t know which hospital. Natassia breathed out, “Can’t…hold…this,” and Mary realized she’d forgotten to support the pan for Natassia, whose feet were sticking out past the end of the sheet. Her toes, in her black-and-white polka-dot socks, were wiggling at a high speed; her breathing was labored and shallow. She was working hard to catch up with herself between bouts of vomiting. “Relax,” Mary told her. “Breathe. Breathe slow.”

  By two o’clock, Natassia had stopped vomiting, and they wheeled her out into the corridor again, into her place between the amnesic lady and the man with the headache. Lotte and Giulia had been taking turns holding ice bags on his eyes. He kept begging, Someone please turn out the lights. The few chairs in the corridor were already taken. In one of them, a sleeping woman was holding a snoring, congested toddler. In another, an old man sat with his half-full urine bag hanging outside his
trousers. Mary stood by Natassia’s stretcher with Nora and Giulia. Lotte was back and forth from the pay phone. David was home calling psychiatrists all over the country. Lotte came back once and said, “He’ll have something figured out by morning. We’re going to take her someplace first-rate. Enough of this…” Mary had the sense that people were hugging her a lot; meanwhile, she kept touching Natassia, her shoulder, her back, her feet. Natassia was now sleeping.

  After a while, when Lotte went to use the phone again, Nora said, “Lotte and David are kind of forcing your hand, aren’t they? Mary, what do you think you want to do?”

  “What?”

  “Do you want her to go away to get help someplace? That’s what they’re working on.”

  Mary leaned against the wall and put her hands into the pouch of her sweatshirt, where she found Natassia’s three silver rings and her beaded earrings. Earlier, in the ER, someone had taken off all of Natassia’s jewelry and shoved it into Mary’s hands. “Do you think she needs to go someplace?” she asked Nora.

  They’d now been at the hospital for over four hours. Nora, Giulia, and Lotte had taken turns going to the nurses’ station to find out when Natassia would be released, but Mary didn’t mind the waiting; within these hours at the hospital she felt safe. She was almost grateful to be held in this sling of time, until she could figure out what to do.

  But the wait had hyped up Nora, who was practically crying, insisting, “Mary, I’m the last one who can tell you where Natassia should go and what you need to do. I’m useless, I’m…”

  “I’m just glad you’re here, Nora. Both of you guys. Really.”

  Nora was crying. Weird. “The most I can do is call one of those therapists I mentioned. The police are going to get involved, you know. They’ll insist on some kind of treatment.”