The Venus Fix

Forty-Four

“Dulcie, your mother is right,” Mitch admonished. “You owe her an explanation. Actually, you owe me one, too. You never told me that Mom didn’t know you were coming here.”

My daughter gave her father a withering look-one you’d barely expect a much older teenager to manage. A glance that not only accused him of treachery but also conveyed her disappointment in him for not taking her side.

She was sitting on the oversize white couch in her father’s living room. Her arms were crossed over her chest and her chin was lifted high into the air. Mitch was sitting next to her, and I, the outsider, the enemy, was on the opposite couch.

In the last ten minutes, she had yet to speak directly to me.

The ignoring tactic was my mother’s trick and yet my daughter had learned it on her own. I’d hated it so much when my mother had done it, I would never have repeated it.

So how did it come to be part of my daughter’s repertoire? No matter what I knew about science and nature and genes and what we inherit, I was still shocked by how much my daughter was like her grandmother, despite having been born eighteen years after she’d died. Even the way she held her head, thrust out her sharp chin, flipped her hair, widened her eyes, contradicted her smug words with sweet facial expressions-all were just like my mother.

Sometimes it comforted me that my mother lived on in my daughter. Other times, like that night, it made me furious. The rage I’d felt when I’d walked in, which had been stoked by the twenty-minute panic of not knowing where Dulcie had gone from the theater, had not dissolved. I wanted to scream at her and shake her and tell her what it felt like to have your heart fall out of your chest from worry.

“Daddy, I want to move back here. For good.”

“Even if you stay here, you can’t do the TV series. Your father is one hundred percent with me on this. Aren’t you, Mitch?”

“Absolutely.”

“I know that,” she said, talking to her father as if he was the only one in the room with her. “I’m not staying here because of that. You understand me. If you won’t let me do the series it’s not because of your problems, it’s because of me. So that’s it. Decided.”

“Talk to both of us, Dulcie. Not just to me.” Mitch’s voice was raised. “And before we discuss anything else, I want you to apologize to your mother for scaring her half out of her mind, and I want you to do it now.”

She glared at him. He stared her down.

“I’m sorry.” She said it low and under her breath and without looking at me.

“You don’t want to know what is going to happen if you don’t turn around and face your mother and apologize to her loudly enough that she can hear it. Now.”

Finally, reluctantly, she turned toward me but looked somewhere to the right of my face. Mitch couldn’t tell this from where he sat, and I debated whether or not to bring it up.

In a voice that was devoid of any emotion at all-as if auditioning for a part she did not want to get-she said, “So, I’m sorry, but I’m staying here. With the parent who understands me. Not with the one who wants to rule my life because of stuff that’s not about me. At all.”

I stood up. I knew Dulcie, I knew myself, and I knew Mitch. This was not going to get solved tonight. “Mitch, is there somewhere we can talk?”

Yes, I wanted to speak to him, but I also wanted my daughter to know that, try as hard as she might, she was not going to get us on opposite sides of her battle.

He followed me out of the living room and then led me to his bedroom. If it was an odd choice of rooms, I didn’t think of that then.

Mitch sat on the upholstered window seat and I sat on the edge of the bed, facing him. The duvet cover was cool to the touch and my fingers sunk into the fluff. I was suddenly overcome with a desire to lie down on the bed and pull the coverlet up over me and sleep. To have all of us rest under one roof again. It was the last thing I expected to feel, and it took me by surprise.

“I don’t think you should try to force her to go home with you,” Mitch said.

There were four pillows on the bed; if I lay down, they would cushion me.

I faced my ex-husband. Mitch, at forty-two, had thick, dark brown hair and a boyish smile that included dimples. He hadn’t changed as much as I thought I had over the past few tough years. Suddenly I was picturing him, in the hospital, holding Dulcie in his large hands only minutes after I’d given birth to her. There were tears on his cheeks and he kept shaking his head and saying, Look at her…just look at her…

“I thought we’d straightened it out the last time.”

“So did I.”

“Well, we didn’t do a good job. This is even more serious now that she’s playing us a second time. We need to work this out once and for all. She can’t keep running away from me every time she doesn’t get what she wants.”

“I know that, but not tonight. You’re exhausted. She’s exhausted.”

“I was so frightened. Last time she was here, she just refused to leave with me. But when I couldn’t find her…it never occurred to me…I thought…” I was surprised to feel the tears. I didn’t cry often, but I wasn’t often afraid for my daughter’s life.

He got up, came over to the bed, sat beside me, pulled me to him and stroked my hair. For a few minutes, he soothed me the way he had when we’d been together. There were problems in our marriage, but they had never interfered with our caring about each other and being friends. I didn’t cry for long-a fast release of pain and fear and then I straightened up and wiped my eyes.

“Morgan, are you seeing a lot of Noah Jordain?”

The question took me aback. “Why?”

“I think it might have something to do with Dulcie’s attitude.” I thought about it.

“I don’t want to believe that. But the first time she pulled this wasn’t long after I started seeing him.”

“And now that the relationship has been going on for a while, I think she’s getting more worried that we’ll never get back together again.”

“You think she’s doing this so that we spend more time together? You think she wants me to get upset and wants you to comfort me?”

“You’re the therapist, not me.”

“You’re not doing bad for a layman.” It was an old joke between us. No one is a good therapist in his or her own family, and Mitch had more often than not been the one who had realized what was going on with us.

He looked at me with an expression that I hadn’t seen for a very long time.

Whenever Mitch had wanted to make love, his features became less animated and his eyelids became heavy. I used to tease him that he practiced the expression, but of course he didn’t. I’d seen the “sex look” on some of my patients’ faces when they discussed their relationships. I’d never imagined I’d see it on Mitch’s face again. And then he reached up and with his right hand began to massage the muscles in my neck, where he knew I stored all of my tension. He was good at it. He’d been doing it for years. I let my head fall forward. I let him touch me and try to work out my tightened cords. And then his lips were on the skin he had just warmed, and I could smell his familiar amber-scented cologne.

For a few seconds, I sat there under the spell of old memories and an easier time-before Dulcie became a teenager, before Mitch told me he wanted more from a relationship than he got from me, before the fabric of our family had been ripped apart.

And then I picked up my head and pulled back.

“What is going on?”

“You’re different,” he said, and then he grimaced. “That was the worst sentence. I can’t believe I said it. Listen, I don’t know how to say this. And I know it’s a bad time to even bring it up, but lately I’ve been thinking that maybe we shouldn’t have split up so fast-”

“Mitch, don’t do this.” I stood. “It wasn’t fast. It was a year. And it was what you wanted. And you can’t change your mind now after-”

He reached out and took my hand. “Can’t we even talk about it?”

“You are falling for it. Our daughter is sitting in there manipulating us. You’re the one who noticed it.”

“I know that. But I also think there’s something to the idea that we should be together again. At least try.”

“No. Not now. We have a big problem here. Our daughter is not talking to me. She ran away from home tonight.”

“She didn’t really run-”

“She did, Mitch. We need to discuss Dulcie. About how much she wants to test for this TV series, and how we are going to explain to her, in a way that she understands, why it is not right for her. And in the middle of that you are thinking about us? We had months and months to think about us!”

I was trying to keep my voice down but it was hard.

“I know, but what if it’s all unnecessary. What if we did get back together? You’re different now than you were. I don’t think we’d have the same problems. And we’d solve what’s bothering Dulcie. She could stop acting out. Believe me, I’m more surprised than you are. I didn’t expect to feel this way about you again, but I do.”

In the middle of this crisis, in the middle of a nightmare night, why was Mitch pushing this? I knew better than to listen to my ex-husband, but I really hated the idea that I was going to walk out of that apartment and leave Dulcie there. I had missed her so badly the last time. She was only thirteen. I wasn’t ready to let her go. Was there really a chance that it could work between Mitch and me, and the three of us could once more be a family?

I’d give up anything for that.

Anything?

Noah?

Noah, whom I couldn’t even think about without feeling confusion and exhilaration. Who moved me and got inside my head in a way no one, including Mitch, ever had. Would I give up Noah to have Dulcie smiling and home with me for the next five years? Even if Mitch would never understand the darkness in me the way Noah did?

Would anything ever matter again if together we were able to make Dulcie’s life lighter?