Lovely Wild

She doesn’t need to tell them twice. It’s a privilege their dad would squawk about; even though he wants them to “get out of the house and do something,” walking a few blocks to the convenience store isn’t one of them. The world’s a dangerous place, Ryan says. Mari knows he has no real idea of what that means.

He’s locked himself in his office, where she hears the shuffle and thump of him pulling open drawers. When she peeks inside she sees he’s pulled out half a dozen file boxes from his closet. The papers are spread out all around him and he’s bent over them, studying them so fiercely, he doesn’t even notice she’s opened the door until she raps lightly with her knuckles.

“Ryan?”

“Yeah, babe.” He pushes his hair back from his forehead.

The sight of him looking so rumpled when Ryan is always so put together lifts another current of unease inside her. “What are you doing?”

He gives her a smile so broad, so bright, so full of even, white teeth, there is no way she ought to be afraid. “I’m doing it. I’m going to do it.”

“Do what?”

“I’m finally going to write a book.”

Mari isn’t sure she ever knew Ryan wanted to write a book. Frankly, she can’t recall ever seeing him read a book. Magazines, yes. Medical journals and Sports Illustrated and Consumer Reports when he’s on the hunt for some new toy. But books? Never.

“What kind of book?”

His gaze shifts just a little, cutting from hers to look over the piles of folders and papers. “A case study.”

“So, not fiction.” That made more sense to her.

“No.” Again, that shifting gaze, the cut of it from hers. “But that’s not the best part, babe. This is even better.”

He holds up a folder. The front of it says Dimitri Management Rental Properties. She doesn’t know what that means, but something about it doesn’t sit well. “What?”

“C’mere.” Ryan gestures, and Mari goes.

He settles her onto his lap and nuzzles against her, hiding his face for a moment before lifting it. His eyes are shiny bright, his smile, too. He looks so much like his father that her breath catches. Ryan doesn’t notice.

“You know I love you, right?”

“I hope so,” Mari says. “You married me.”

He laughs a little too loud for the space and for being so close to her. “And you know I’ll always do my best to take care of you, right?”

Something twists deep inside her. “I know that.”

His hand tightens on her while the other puts the folder on the desk. “And you trust me, don’t you?”

“Of course I do.”

“We’re going to move.”

Alarmed, Mari shifts on Ryan’s lap to look into his eyes. “What? Where? Why?”

“Just for the summer,” he says quickly. “Someplace that’ll be great for the kids. For us, too. A place that’ll be perfect for me to write and for you all to just get away from the city.”

She doesn’t point out that they don’t exactly live in the city. “Ryan. What aren’t you telling me?”

“I don’t want you to worry,” her husband says. “Let me take care of this.”

“What about our house?”

“I’ve arranged to rent it to a psych fellow.”

“And where are we going?” He’s taken care of everything, made all the arrangements, but she still has to ask.

Ryan draws in a deep breath. “Pine Grove. Babe, I’m going to take you home.”

ELEVEN (#ulink_a795c9b6-45b4-5cbb-b094-6aa2f102cbbe)

MARI HAD MADE dinner. Nothing special. Pasta with sauce and some salad from the cold box...no, the refrigerator, she reminded herself. She’d set the table. Two plates, one. Two. She stopped herself from counting them out on her fingers. When she caught herself singing under her breath, she stopped herself from that, too. Leon didn’t like it when she sang. He said it distracted him.

He enjoyed the food, though. “You’re becoming quite the little cook.”

His praise, as always, warmed her. She wanted to stretch herself like a barn cat, rub herself beneath his hand. But Leon never touched her. Not since she was small.

He asked her about her studies. What lessons she’d completed. Had she practiced her handwriting? She must get better at cursive. Had she read the book he’d left for her on the desk?

“I tried.” Mari pushed pasta around on her plate, her belly full but appetite not sated. Sometimes, she felt like as long as there was food in front of her, she would eat it until it made her sick.

“What do you mean, you tried?” Leon’s fork spattered red sauce on his white shirt, which Mari will put in the laundry later to soak so that it doesn’t stain. “I expect more from you than trying. You can do better than that. It’s not too difficult for you. You’re a smart girl.”

She has explained in the past, or tried to, that it wasn’t that the books he chose for her were too difficult. She could read the words. She could understand the meanings. She simply couldn’t understand what they were about.

“Anne of Green Gables is a classic,” Leon continued. “All girls your age should read it.”

Anne of Green Gables was about a girl with red hair who is adopted by a family who really wanted a boy. Mari supposed Leon thought she might be able to identify with the concept of being adopted, and in a way she did. But the rest of it, the talk of clothes and school and friends and love...that, Mari did not comprehend.

She said nothing. She ate her dinner and packed away the leftovers carefully, letting her fingertips dance over the plastic containers stacked in the refrigerator when Leon couldn’t see and tell her to keep her hands still. She washed the dishes and put them away, and she remembered not to sing under her breath.

“My son,” Leon said from the kitchen doorway. “Ryan. He’ll be here in about an hour.”

Leon had spoken many times of his son. He’d shown her pictures and video movies of Ryan as a child. Leon had even given her some of Ryan’s old things, not like they were hand-me-downs but as though they were precious gifts she should be honored to claim.

In fact, a few of the things he gave her were precious to Mari. Not the cast-off football jersey that didn’t fit and still smelled slightly of sweat. And not the boxes of plastic bricks she’d never really learned to put together to make something bigger. But the stuffed bunny, fur worn off on the ears and the tail entirely lost—that she loved. That she still slept with next to her at night though at fifteen she had abandoned all her other dolls and stuffed toys. Leon, who hadn’t asked her to call him father but encouraged the use of his first name, had given Mari that toy when she was much younger and had nothing left of her life before. Later, there were fancy toys and brand-new dresses, brought by well-meaning people who had no idea of what she held as valuable. But the bunny that once belonged to Ryan was something Mari would forever hold precious and dear.

In the year and a half since she’d been living here, she’d never even known Ryan to call the house. There’d been some trouble with Leon’s wife when he decided to give Mari a permanent home. Mari didn’t know the whole story, had only caught bits and pieces overheard in shouting conversations on the phone late at night when he thought she was asleep. She knew the doctor’s wife didn’t want to become a mother to some random, cast-off girl nobody else wanted, and she couldn’t say she blamed the former Mrs. Doctor Calder. After all, Mari’s own mother hadn’t wanted her, either.

It might’ve been the trouble with Ryan’s mother that kept him away, or something simpler. He’d been in college, then med school. He was a grown-up. With a girlfriend, Leon said with a small curl of his lip that told Mari exactly what he thought of that. And though Leon had kept many of Ryan’s things and felt free enough with them to give them away, he’d also been honest about the fact he wasn’t very close with his son.

Mari, Leon often said, was a second chance.

Since Leon Calder was the only father Mari had ever known, he was her only chance.

But now Mari stood in the kitchen, in shadow, watching Ryan come in from the outside. He stamped his feet to get the snow off his boots. Brushed it off his shoulders. It was melting in his blond hair, leaving rivulets of water trickling down his temples and making puddles from the hems of his pants on the floor.