Jensen. I knew your father.”
TWO
1984
It was an unusually chilly spring for the Midwest, cold enough to sleep with my winter comforter on the bed. The sounds of traffic on the street below woke me, and one at a time my eyes let in the bright light, the morning sun. I rolled onto my side. My panties were lying on the floor next to the bed, my jeans over by the door, my bra and blouse out in the hall. I turned onto my other side.
“Norman?” No answer. “Norman?” Had I gotten his name wrong? “Good morning.” I reached out to touch his head, thinking I could wake him by running my fingers through his long dark hair or tickling his beard. But the space next to me was empty.
“Damn,” I muttered out loud. When a man goes to bed with you and then sneaks out sometime during the night, it’s a pretty good bet he went home to his wife.
I rolled onto my back. A spider crawled across the ceiling. What day was it? It must be Wednesday. Last night was the Monrow City Peace and Justice Coalition meeting, always on Tuesdays.
Then what happened at work yesterday slowly came back to me.
“Mommy, Mommy,” two-year-old Lucy had wailed. Her face was flushed nearly as red as her tiny T-shirt and her eyes were filled with a panic so palpable it burned every bone in my body. But her mother, slumped over in a drug-induced comatose state, didn’t respond, didn’t even hear her.
“Come, my love,” I said as I gathered the toddler in my arms. “Mommy needs to sleep for a while. We’ll take care of you until she wakes up.”
In the car, Lucy howled, hysterical. She kept looking back, searching for her mother. At the temporary foster home, she went numb and silent. She had a fever. A child so young shouldn’t have to suffer like that. She wasn’t equipped. Neither was the foster mother. I stayed to help when Lucy’s little body went stiff and she wouldn’t eat. We had trouble taking her filthy clothing off so we could give her a bath. I wanted to stay longer, but I had to leave. There were other clients waiting for me. Other children, other foster parents who weren’t equipped to deal with the traumas they were forced to face.
Last night, even though my heart was broken and my body exhausted, I went to the coalition meeting after work. And that’s where I met him, the man no longer in my bed this morning. A jackhammer pounded at the concrete fog in my head and loosened chunks of the night before in little bits and pieces—a kind and thoughtful man, in his forties like me; green eyes, white teeth, crooked smile; our whispered comments during the meeting, our nonstop conversation over drinks afterward; tripping on the edge of the elevator and staggering down the hall to my apartment, and after that . . . after that . . . I couldn’t remember anything after that.
Not that that was unusual. That was my pattern. I poured all my compassion into the foster children I worked with during the day and then turned to alcohol, and sometimes men, for love at night. Well, at least the one last night hadn’t just been a stranger I found in a bar. At least I had something in common with this one. At least there was that.
I sat up and glanced at my bedside clock. Shit! Either my alarm hadn’t gone off or I’d slept through it. I jumped out of bed and raced to the bathroom, splashed cold water on my face, gulped down a couple aspirin, and ran a comb through my shoulder-length blond hair. I pulled my brightly flowered peasant blouse and long faded denim skirt from the closet, then tossed them on the bed and opted instead for the beige linen suit and navy blue cotton blouse I usually wore to court. If I was going to be late, I should at least look professional.
It was after nine o’clock when I rushed upstairs to the foster care unit carrying a cup of coffee from the café on the first floor of the downtown Health Services Building. I had just slipped into my cubicle when Betsy Chambers, our department administrator, headed my way. I smoothed down my knee-length skirt and tugged at the hem of the suit jacket, ready to tell her I’d make up for my tardiness by working late tonight.
“Good morning, Sylvia.” She flashed me a warm smile. “I’ll see you at the meeting this afternoon.” A little wave and then she was gone.
Whew! Except for my raging hangover, no harm done. She didn’t seem to have noticed I was late, and from her friendliness, I was pretty sure I was still her number one choice for the supervisor position after Rita retired. I lifted a stack of files from my bottom right-hand drawer and got to work. Today was my day to do paperwork and update case records.
A few hours later, the phone rang. If it was a foster parent calling to say a child had run away or been injured, or there was some other crisis requiring my immediate attention, I wouldn’t be able to finish my paperwork before the staff meeting and I really would have to work late tonight.
“Sylvia Jensen speaking.”
“Hi, this is Norton. I didn’t have a chance to say good-bye last night.”
“Oh.” So that was his name. Norton. “Okay.”
“That’s it? Just, ‘Oh, okay’?”
“How about, ‘Oh, you didn’t tell me you were married.’”
There was silence on the other end of the line for a few seconds. “I am,” he finally admitted.
“Was that so hard?”
I listened to him inhale and exhale. “I’m sorry. I should have told you.”
“What’s her name?”
“Chloe.”
“And your children?”
“One. Corey. He’s four years old.”
A few awkward seconds passed. “Well, no matter,” I said. “It was just a one-night stand. Thanks for calling.”
“Wait, Sylvia. Don’t hang up. Please. I really liked talking to you. I was hoping we could do it again.”
“Do what again?”
“Talk.”
“Sure.”
“Sure . . . what?”
“Sure, we can talk.”
He laughed. “Well, okay then. I’ll call you.”
“Sure.” Sure, meaning a married man who just wanted to talk would be a first. And sure, meaning I knew he wasn’t going to call anyway.
But he did call, the next day and the next. The following Thursday we met after work to talk. We met again the Thursday after that and the Thursday after that, then before and after the coalition meetings on Tuesdays. It was just talk, I told myself. Nothing more. Just talk. That first night had been a fluke, a drunken mistake, and I really didn’t know what had happened anyway. Several weeks went by before I finally asked him.
“I’m embarrassed that I don’t know,” I said, “but did we have sex the night we met?”
He laughed. “You passed out,” he said. “I was drunk, too, but I had enough sense not to take advantage. I tucked you into bed and hurried home.”
My initial instincts had been right: he was a good man, a decent man. I told myself there was no reason to feel guilty about our relationship. Norton might be married, but he and I were just friends, that was all. He probably went home and told his wife all about our conversations each week.
For six weeks we met every Tuesday and Thursday, still talking, just talking—mirroring each other’s terror about the world being on the brink of the final abyss and raging at Nectaral Corporation’s continued manufacture of weapons of mass destruction—always in the same back booth in the same bar with the same drinks, white zinfandel for me, Pabst beer for him. One night he brought his journal and read what he’d written about a dream he’d had.
I’m standing on top of a hill that’s almost tall enough to be considered a mountain, high enough to see a mushroom cloud in the distance. There’s a fire in the cloud, red, yellow, orange. First there’s only