House Rules: A Novel Read online

  “No,” I tell her. “But I wouldn’t put it past him.”

  She stares at me for a moment, and then she bursts out laughing. “You haven’t seen his perfect little wife and his perfect little girls. Believe me, Oliver, I’m not the great love of his life, the one he’ll never forget.”

  “You are to me,” I say.

  The smile fades from her face, and then she rises up on her toes and kisses me back.

  “Don’t you need this?”

  At the sound of Jacob’s voice we jump apart, putting a few feet of space between us. He stands in the doorway, one hand still on the knob and the other one holding my legal briefcase.

  “Were you just …” He stumbles over his words. “Are you two …” Without saying anything else, he throws my briefcase hard at me, so forcefully that I grunt when I catch it. He runs down the hallway into his room and slams the door.

  “What did he see?” Emma asks frantically. “When did he walk in?”

  Suddenly Henry is standing in the doorway, looking quizzically down the hall where Jacob’s gone and then at Emma. “Everything all right up here?”

  Emma faces me. “I think maybe you ought to go home,” she says.

  Emma

  When I walk into Jacob’s room, he is hunched over his desk, humming Marley and writing furiously across his green blotter:

  1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233

  I take the pencil out of his hand, and he turns in his swivel chair. “Do I make you horny, baby?” he says, bitter.

  “No movie quotes,” I tell Jacob. “Especially not Austin Powers. I know you’re upset.”

  “Let me think about that. My mother is supposed to be practicing her testimony with my lawyer and instead she has her tongue halfway down his throat? Yeah, that might make me a little upset.”

  I tamp down the flash of anger that rises inside me. “First of all, I’m completely ready to testify. And second of all, I didn’t expect to kiss him. It just happened.”

  “Things like that don’t just happen,” Jacob argues. “You want them to happen or you don’t.”

  “Well, all right then, I suppose after fifteen years of being alone I don’t mind being attractive to someone.”

  “Not someone,” he says. “My lawyer.”

  “He’s completely focused on your trial, Jacob.”

  “I don’t care about him. I mean, if he isn’t doing his job I can just fire him. But you,” he yells. “How could you do this to me right now? You’re my mother!”

  I stand up, toe to toe with him. “One who’s given up her whole life to take care of you,” I say. “One who loves you so much she would trade places with you in a heartbeat. But that doesn’t mean I don’t deserve to be happy, too.”

  “Well, I hope you’re really happy when I lose this trial because you were too busy being a slut.”

  And just like that, I slap him.

  I don’t know which one of us is more surprised. I have never struck Jacob in my life. He holds his palm to his cheek as the red print of my hand rises on his skin. “I’m sorry. Oh, God, Jacob, I’m sorry,” I say, the words somersaulting over each other. I pull his hand down so that I can see the damage I’ve done. “I’ll get you some ice,” I say, but he is staring at me as if he’s never seen me before.

  So instead of leaving, I sit him down on the bed and I pull him against me the way I used to when he was little and the world became too much for him to bear. I rock, so that he doesn’t have to.

  Slowly, he relaxes against me. “Jacob,” I tell him. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.” It is only after he nods that I realize I’ve repeated the very same words Jacob said earlier to me about Jess Ogilvy.

  In all the years that Jacob has had tantrums and meltdowns and panic attacks, I have restrained him; sat on him; held him like a vise—but I have never hit him. I know the unwritten strictures: Good parents don’t spank. Reward works better than punishment. Yet it only took a single moment of frustration, of realizing that I couldn’t simultaneously be whom he needed me to be and whom I wanted to be—for me to snap.

  Is that what happened to Jacob, too?

  Oliver has called four times tonight, but I didn’t pick up the phone when I recognized the number on the caller ID. Maybe this is my penance; maybe I just don’t know what to say.

  It is just after two in the morning when my bedroom door opens a crack. I sit up immediately, expecting Jacob. But instead Henry enters. He’s wearing pajama bottoms and a T-shirt that reads THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE 127.0.0.1. “I saw your light on,” he says.

  “Can’t sleep?”

  Henry shakes his head. “You?”

  “No.”

  He gestures to the edge of the bed. “May I?”

  I shift over. He sits down on my side of the bed, but I see him staring at the pillow beside me. “I know,” I say. “It must seem a little weird.”

  “No … It’s just that now, I sleep on the left side of the bed, like you. And I’m wondering how that happened.”

  I lean back against the headboard. “There are lots of things I don’t have the answers for.”

  “I … don’t know exactly what all the yelling was about,” Henry says delicately. “But I did hear it.”

  “Yeah. We’ve had better nights.”

  “I owe you an apology, Emma,” he says. “First of all, for showing up like this. I should have asked, at least. You’ve got enough on your plate without having to deal with me. I guess I was really only thinking of myself.”

  “Luckily, I have a lot of practice with that.”

  “That’s the other thing I have to apologize for,” Henry says. “I should have been here all the other nights there was yelling, or … or tantrums, or anything else that was part of raising Jacob. I probably learned more about him today in that courtroom than I’ve known in the eighteen years he’s been alive. I should have been here to help during all the bad times.”

  I smile a little. “I guess that’s the difference between us. I wish you’d been here for the good times.” I look over his shoulder, into the hallway. “Jacob is sweet, and funny, and so smart he leaves me reeling sometimes. And I’m sorry you never got to know that part of him.”

  He reaches across the quilt and squeezes my hand. “You’re a good mom, Emma,” he says, and I have to look away, because that makes me think of my argument with Jacob.

  Then Henry speaks again. “Did he do it?”

  I turn to him slowly. “Does it matter?”

  I can only remember one concrete instance when I blew up at Jacob before. It was when he was twelve and had not acknowledged the fact that it was my birthday with a card or a gift or even a hug, although I had dropped enough hints in the weeks prior. So one evening when I made dinner, I slapped it on the table in front of him with more force than usual and waited in vain—like always—for Jacob to thank me. “How about a little gratitude?” I exploded. “How about some recognition that I’ve done something for you?”

  Confused, Jacob glanced at his plate, and then at me.

  “I make your dinner. I fold your laundry. I drive you to school and back. Did you ever wonder why I do that?”

  “Because it’s your job?”

  “No, it’s because I love you, and when you love someone, you do things for them without complaining about it.”

  “But you are complaining,” he said.

  That was when I realized Jacob would never understand love. He would have bought me a birthday gift if I’d told him explicitly to do so, but that wouldn’t really have been a gift from the heart. You can’t make someone love you; it has to come from inside him, and Jacob wasn’t wired that way.

  I remember storming out of the kitchen and sitting on the porch for a while, under the light of the moon, which isn’t really light at all, just a pale reflection of the sun.

  Oliver

  “Jacob,” I say, as soon as I see him the next morning, “we need to talk.”

  I fall into step beside him as we move acr