Ever After. William Wharton

first moment I see her. I can look in her eyes and she’ll look right back at me and it’s magic somehow. I feel I’ve known her a long time, that she’s very wise and loves me deeply. I know this is considered kooky talk by most people but they just don’t know. I know now I was right.

      We need to put the apartment back in perfect condition or we’ll lose our deposit; three kids can really wreck a place. We scrub everything, then paint. To us it looks perfect but we know to a German eye it’s a pigsty. But Frau Zeidelman gives us back our money anyway.

      The goodbye parties seem to go on forever. It’s worse than three Christmases and New Years thrown together. But it’s wonderful. The washing-machine we give to Camille and her husband Sam. The VW ‘hulk’ we pass on to Matt. We give away most of the furniture the same way it had been given to us. On the last night we have just the crib for Mia, our mattress on the floor with Day between us, and Wills on a pillow. Friends are going to pick those up the next day.

      In the dark, Bert turns toward me.

      ‘You know, Kate, I thought I’d never learn to like old Krautland, but if it weren’t for my mother being alone, and Wills going to live with Danny, and the fact we don’t have any furniture, I’d go right back to Stan and tell him I’m going to stay after all. These people here at the school are even nicer than Oregonians and that’s saying something.’

      Traveling with kids is never fun, and this trip starts out wrong. First, we need to wait six hours in Munich before the plane is allowed to take off. On the trip to Paris, strong winds make the plane dip and roll. The flight from Paris to New York is even worse. And then I get sick. I haven’t been sick on a plane since I was twelve years old, but I go into the tiny plastic restroom and vomit till I think I’m going to die. One of the attendants hears me, or maybe Bert sends her back, but she knocks and I manage to pull back the lever to let her in.

      She’s nice and considerate, and puts me in one of the seats reserved for the crew, tips it back and gives me a pill. She asks if I’m pregnant. I point up the aisle toward Bert, Mia, Day, and Wills.

      ‘They’re mine.’

      I’m sure the stewardess thinks I’m either some kind of Arkansas hick or a fanatic Catholic. But she, like everyone else, is so kind. Different attendants help Bert and Wills with the babies during the whole trip.

      When we finally land at JFK, we’re six hours late.

      Mom is waiting at the airport, and has been for almost six hours. She’s come up from the beachhouse they have in New Jersey, where they’ve spent the last seven summers. It’s a really old-fashioned house in an old-fashioned town called Ocean Grove. I loved it when I visited them there about five years ago. But it would’ve cost 700 additional dollars to make the stopover this time, and we couldn’t afford it.

      I get off the plane dead white, Mia in my arms, Bert’s balancing Dayiel and our hand luggage. Wills is toting another bag. It’s a deep, low point. And there’s Mom, smiling as ever, as if she’d just met us on the street by accident. I cry. I don’t feel much like a grown-up. I feel like a little girl who’s gotten lost and just found her Mommy.

      When it all settles down, Bert is looking at our tickets.

      ‘Well, Babe, we’ve missed our connecting flight. Could I leave Dayiel with you while I go see what’s happening?’

      I can only nod. Mia is nursing. I’ll bet the milk she’s getting is sour. But it keeps her quiet. When Mia drops off to sleep, Mom takes her. She watches Wills watching Day, and I drop off, dead to the world.

      When I wake, Bert’s back and he’s all smiles.

      ‘They were going to put us up in a Hilton Hotel or something until tomorrow, but I told them we have a place to stay if they could just hold us over until the flight next week.

      ‘There was a whole bunch of palaver, but in the end we agreed, so if it’s OK with Rosemary, we’re on our way to Ocean Grove, in a car, yet. Think of that.’

      We arrive in Ocean Grove after midnight. Dad’s asleep. He jumps out of bed the way he does, stark naked. He says he’d held the place at the banquet they were supposed to be attending, until the lady took the food away. Then he came home, worried, checked at the airport, found the flight from Munich was delayed, then decided to grab some sleep and worry more in the morning. The idea of catastrophes happening in our family just never seems to come up. Somehow we’ve all lived in a kind of never-never land where nothing ever happens to us, only to other people.

      For twenty years, while Dad was supporting the family as a painter, we lived without life assurance, car insurance: we had no liability insurance of any kind, no social security, nothing but Dad’s little disability pension from when he was wounded in World War II. My parents were crazy, lucky, or dumb. Maybe it was crazy-dumb-luck, because we hardly ever even got sick. I don’t think that any of us four kids saw a doctor more than six or seven times in twenty years, and then it was mostly to get shots.

      Mom is a bit of a witch, a good witch. She has fixed up the whole upper floor of that big house in New Jersey just for us, with a crib for Dayiel, a bassinet for Mia, and separate beds (and rooms) for Wills and us. We aren’t even supposed to be coming. Could she have bewitched that plane? When I was a teenager, I used to think she had some special power, the way she’d always know things. Now I see it has nothing to do with witches. She just has strong intuitions that she believes in and then acts on them. She’ll never believe what’s happened to us – that’s not the kind of witch she is. She’s a practical one.

      We sleep like dead people. It’s ten o’clock before I hear Bert rolling out of bed to get Mia. She’s slept through the night for the first time. Or maybe she did wake but we didn’t know it. He tucks her in beside me and she begins to nurse furiously. Bert climbs out of bed, and goes downstairs. Wills is still asleep.

      I know that Dad and Mom, even after being up late the night before, will have already played tennis, swum, gone for a bike ride, or maybe a little jog.

      Dad’s something of a fading jock, but Mom was always the most unathletic person I’ve known. Now, she’s out there, hitting a tennis ball two-handed, and hitting it hard. She runs her two miles every morning, slowly, but she does it. I wonder if, after the kids have grown some, I’ll ever get back in shape. I’m the same as Mom, no athlete, but I like feeling good.

      We have a wonderful week. Dayiel’s in and out of the water, playing in the sand with her granddad, making castles, ball ramps, and running around on a beach that seems to have no limits.

      Bert is a regular water-bug and Wills even more so. They’re in and out of the ocean with Dad about twenty times a day. Wills has more friends than he can play with and disappears for long stretches. Both Bert and Dad are a lot more confident about the kids than I am and don’t seem to be watching them. Bert comes up to a shower that’s attached to the boardwalk, washing off Mia. After he’s changed her, I go over.

      ‘Aren’t you watching Wills? He’s out there in those high waves, riding on one of those boogie boards, and he could sink, or even float out of sight. You’re as bad as Dad. You never expect anything dangerous to happen.’

      Bert squints up at me into the sunlight.

      ‘Look, Kate. You see those guys sitting up on those white stands, wearing the red jackets? Those are lifeguards. They’re watching everybody, especially little kids, and they know this water like the back of their hands. I was talking to one, in fact the captain of the lifeguards, and do you know that, in the almost hundred years since they started having lifeguards here, nobody has ever drowned on this beach? This is probably the safest place in the world. So relax and enjoy.’

      I turn away. This is so like him. But he’s right. From then on I try to relax and enjoy. It’s like coming home.

      Mom and I share the cooking, and the boys take care of the little ones. Even Uncle Robert, my tall little brother, does his share. He likes Day, although generally he hates little kids. After watching her, he then has to explain to us, in his slow, methodical way, why she’s exceptional.

      Mom