Rose bit her cheek. She had heard all of this before, a hundred times.
“You were building out your lab,” he went on. “A million-dollar start-up package from Darlton, or was it two milllion? I barely saw you for months. Then you won that huge grant your first semester on the faculty. Meanwhile I’m cowering at home, trying to keep my writing career going.”
“Just a dry spell, you called it.”
“It was more than that. Not that you were paying attention.”
She sighed, almost bored.
“I joined the gym, North Crystal Rec,” he continued. “I went every day that first fall, sometimes twice a day. It was good for me, kept me balanced. When you join, they comp you four sessions with a personal trainer.”
Rose saw Samantha in one of her training outfits, the violet one. Lycra, running bra, stomach a circumference of muscle and effort.
“I don’t even know how it happened,” he said. “Maybe she thought it was glamorous somehow, to have a novelist as a client.”
“Oh yeah, like George Clooney,” Rose knifed him.
“She asked me all these questions about my writing, my process.”
“Your process?”
“She’d even bought and read my novel before our third session.”
Rose made the disconcerting connection. Samantha loaning her copy of Gallows Road to Tazeem Harb, her surprising interest in a novel published over twelve years ago: a book written by her daughter’s biological father.
“When did it end?” she asked him. “Did you keep going after she had Emma Z—after I met Sam?”
He shook his head. “Never. I tried to steer you away from that mothers’ group, but it was already too late. Once—I guess—I mean one time you were at a conference and they had one of their midwinter parties and for some reason I went. She was helping me look for my coat on their bed. I made some suggestive remark, not even serious, I was drunk, and I remember exactly what she said. ‘Back off, Gareth. Rose is my best friend.’”
Rose felt a sob rising but edged it back, refusing to show him anything. She reached to the top of the fridge for a bottle of Herradura—a gift from Samantha. A double shot sloshed in a chipped anniversary mug—one of Samantha’s selections: Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends (Virginia Woolf). Rose didn’t know which was worse, the knowledge that Samantha could keep such a massive secret for so many years—or that she’d found Gareth compelling enough to cheat with in the first place.
She took a burning gulp. A second pour. A second gulp. She wiped her mouth on the back of a hand. The tequila’s sting sparked nettles across her chapped lips.
“So Emma Z,” she said finally. “She’s yours.”
“Looks like it,” he said glibly, and for a while no one spoke. Small house noises filled the room. Shift of clock hands, the hiss of a refrigerator hose.
“I stopped going to the Rec Center after things ended,” he said. “I assumed I’d see Samantha around town, but we never even bumped into each other again, not once, until that first dinner at Julian and Lauren’s over a year later. And there she was, with a baby the same age as Q. With the same goddamn name.”
“Lovely coincidence.”
“I actually looked it up. Emma was the third most popular girl’s name that year.”
“So did you two chew over the fact that you’d been together?”
He was looking at his hands. “She never wanted to. Neither did I, I mean I assumed she was on the pill, we never even talked about the possibility that Emma Z might be—honestly we both acted as if it’d never happened. The girl has always seemed like pure Zellar, and I’ve always thought of Q as my only child.”
The kind of lie you can see anyone telling himself, Rose thought. And as for Samantha, why tell your husband that a child might be another man’s if you don’t have to—and ruin your marriage, your friendships, the life you’ve made?
Yet what was missing from all this, in a way that Rose found vaguely disappointing, was the shock of recognition. Where were the clues, the dark adumbrations of false paternity over the years? She could see them now, of course, lined up like dominoes: Gareth’s instinctive dislike of Kev, his antisocial attitude toward Rose’s friends. Yet Rose had never once questioned whether Emma Z was Kev’s daughter. She was a beautiful girl—beautiful like Samantha, and like Kev. Outgoing and confident—like Samantha, like Kev. A strong jaw and hooded eyes—like Kev’s. Perfect—like a Zellar.
But gifted? Well . . . maybe not.
The thought stopped her cold. She pushed herself off the counter and went to the sliding door and stared southwest, where the full moon splashed pearl on the Redirons. God that’s gorgeous, she thought, and with this incongruous perception of beauty came a jarring epiphany, so unexpected it almost knocked her forward against the glass.
Gareth had sculpted his own well-wrought story to tell about his unacknowledged child; so had Samantha. He had decided that Emma Z could not be his, just as Samantha had decided Emma Z was Kev’s, just as both of them had gone through the last twelve years of their lives within the palatable narrative enabled by these self-deceptions, the stories they had chosen to tell about themselves and the daughter they shared.
Yet weren’t they all cheaters, of a sort? And were these deceptions so different from the carefully cultivated fictions Rose had built up around her own daughter over the years? Were they any worse than the parenting habits Rose and her friends indulged, telling themselves what they wanted to believe about their children—their gifts, their talents, their milestones—and doing what they could to sustain these impressions and project them out into the world, then acting as if this same world owed them something in return?
She thought of Xander’s project, the personality traits he had been tracking for years through those countless games of chess, catching them all out on their feints and fakery, their striving, their little cheats. Gareth and Samantha’s affair was but one example of a collective crime against childhood they had been committing together, its outcome no more controllable than the amount of snowfall on a mountain. No wonder the admissions process had resulted in such a pile of catastrophes, and it wasn’t even over yet.
Now the consequences.
The glass door shimmered as Gareth came up behind her. The thought of those moist hands touching her shoulders ever again—
“Look, Rose,” he said. “Maybe this whole thing can be for the good, help us be honest with each other in new ways. All the therapy we’ve already done this last year could get us through this, if we want it to. If we try.”
When she turned around, his lower lip started a puerile tremble. Has Gareth’s chin always been this weak, she wondered, his view of our marriage this delusional? He opened his mouth, but she held up a hand.
“You need to leave,” she said. “Now.”
He flinched, and she was expecting him to cower out. Instead he straightened his spine, backed away three steps, and fixed her with a withering glare.
“Let me tell you something, Rose,” he said. “I fucked up a long time ago. Obviously. Hugely. But you want to know one of the reasons I liked being with Samantha so much, even for just a few weeks? Because she let me be who I was, even if who I was back then was just a failing writer who couldn’t finish another book. She never treated me as an extension of herself, as if my flaws were hers, or would somehow make her look bad. For you, though, it’s all about self-reflection, isn’t it? How smart your daughter is, how talented your husband is, how successful your lab is, what value we all add to your stock and the way you look at the world. And you like to go after everybody else for how ‘inauthentic’ they are. Hate that ‘fraudulence,’ don’t you. But really? Look at all you’ve done over the last few months, the shit you’ve tried to pull. You’re a worse cheater than I am, Rose. You’re just about the most dishonest person I’ve ever known.”
He looked down at his hands, as if he had struck her physically with his frankness. Rose experienced a rush of what felt like longing. Where had this candor been all these years? Why now, when it was far too late?
“So yeah, I’ll get out of here,” he went on, looking up but not at her. “Happy to.”
With that he grabbed his keys and his wallet from the coffee table and left her alone, flattened against the glass.
SEVENTY-FOUR
EMMA Z
Her parents might think she couldn’t hear them from her bedroom but she could, and the longer she lay in her bed, the longer they cried. Her mother whimpered like a dog left outside, and her father cried almost like Emma Q, cried in these hiccupy little chokes that made his voice sound high and girlish. It was disgusting.
She wished they would stop, but they probably wouldn’t for a while. They’d brought her upstairs together and put her to bed almost two hours ago (much too early), sitting on either side and stroking her hair and using those fakey voices they used when they pretended nothing was wrong. They’d spent a few minutes explaining things, and at least they hadn’t tried to lie to her.
Mommy made a bad choice a long time ago. And Emma Q’s daddy made a bad choice too. But all of it happened waaaaayyyyy before you were born, okay? It doesn’t have anything to do with our family now.
“You know we love you just the same, right? This doesn’t change anything,” her mother had told her.
“I’ve always been your daddy, I’m your daddy now, and I’ll always be your daddy,” her father had said before kissing her on the forehead. “I know you know that, Emma.”
And Z had nodded in all the right places, returned their hugs.
But she could tell her parents were pretending, for her. And more than that, she could feel, in her own muscles, how scared they were, and beneath the fright she could sense their anger in the tense way they moved around the house, in how they wouldn’t look at each other like they always did. No one reached out to squeeze an arm or pat a bottom. Her mom was crying, a lot.
Emma Z was scared too.
She got out of bed, went downstairs and down the hall to the library and listened outside the door. She heard only sniffles now, no talking.
She took a step around the corner and looked at her parents. The low lamp on the coffee table made creepy oval shadows of their heads, and even in the dim light she could see how red her mom’s eye sockets were. Her father’s face was pale and swollen and sick-looking.
“Hey, baby.” Her mom dabbed her eyes with the corner of one of her fleece blankets, the blue one. The rest of it was spread over her legs and her feet. She looked too tired to get up. “You want to come up here with us?”
Emma Z hesitated, then climbed on the sofa. Her parents kind of smelled bad. Her father looked at her in a way she didn’t particularly like, with his lips all pressed together and ugly, but she didn’t blame him for it. This whole thing was just too weird.
She leaned back and nestled between them. Her mother lifted the bottom flap of the blanket and covered her knees and feet. Part of the blanket settled on her father’s leg. He reached over and patted Emma’s knee. She put her hand on his and felt him start to cry again, but not as loudly this time; less like Q.
No one was saying anything, so maybe it was up to Emma Z to say something.
She took a deep, deep breath, held it for a five-count, and when she let it out, she said, “Xander’s a loser and his science project wasn’t even smart.”
She looked up at her mother, then her father.
“Plus all he did was buy a bunch of test kits,” she went on, remembering what Rose had said, because even though Rose was really annoying, she’d been right about stupid Xander Frye. “It was the dumbest project ever.”
Her parents stared at her some more, then they started to stare at each other the way they sometimes did just before they started to kiss.
“Besides, it doesn’t matter, that stuff he found out.” She folded her arms across her chest. “Everybody knows we’re all Zellars. I don’t care. It doesn’t even matter.”
She heard her father clear his throat and swallow. Then both her parents leaned in across the middle of the couch, toward each other. They hugged, with Emma Z in the warm roasty center of it. The family stayed like that for a while, faces down in the near dark.
“How about some hot cocoa?” her mother said, sitting back up again. “We have some Ghirardelli, I think. Kev, are there marshmallows?”
“There are indeed,” said her father, looking surprised to hear her nice voice. “Hoof-free to boot. Shot of Frangelico in yours, hon?”
“Make it two,” said her mother.
* * *
—
After midnight. Emma Z stared out at the moon. It had been a really stressful day, and now for some reason she kept thinking about that thumbtack, the delicious sensation of the point going into her finger. The tack had fallen out of her pocket sometime after the open house, but her thoughts kept circling back to it.
She slid to the floor and padded her way silently out of her bedroom and down the hall to her mother’s sewing room. The door stood halfway open, and the space was filled with silvery light and the lemony smell of the Pledge that rose up from the shining wooden floor.
Her mother’s sewing machine, covered in a dustcloth, sat against the left-hand wall. Z pushed the cloth aside, then felt around on top of the machine until her hands discovered the pincushion. Her fingers quickly located a thick needle buried right in the middle. She pincered it out carefully between her right thumb and forefinger.
Back in her bedroom she shut the door and locked it, then went into her bathroom and shut the door and locked that. She turned on the light and sat on the closed lid of the toilet.
She looked down at her legs. With the needle in her right hand she pushed up her nightgown enough to expose her thighs. There was a spot just above her left knee that she’d been thinking about since the open house. With her left hand Emma Z lowered the needle and was about to push the point into her skin when she saw them.
The built-in cupboard against the opposite wall was normally closed, but tonight the white wooden door stood ajar. The bottom three shelves were stocked with bathroom supplies. Neat ranks of toilet paper to replace on the roller, extra washcloths and hand towels, a pretty basket of soaps, and two containers of Emma Z’s favorite kind of bubble bath, in lavender and lemon scents.
And on the top shelf, the animals. A tawny lion, an emerald dragon, a creamy dog, a yellow giraffe; at least twenty altogether. All the origami creatures the boy had made over the last few months and that Emma Z had taken apart, one by one, to leave as flattened, curling sheets of thin paper on her dresser. The used papers would disappear every time; to the trash, Z had assumed, thinking nothing of their absence.
But no. The boy had folded all the same animals back together again, one by one, and left them here, together, hidden in the bathroom cabinet for Emma Z to find. A loose company of paper beasts, all repaired.
She lifted the nearest one delicately between her right thumb and pointer finger. It was a rhinoceros. Red, not brown, with a triangular horn jutting out the front.
She wanted to take the animal apart again, but for once Emma Z stopped herself. The point of the sewing needle relaxed against her skin. She looked down at her thigh. No blood, just a small indentation above her knee. She set the needle on the edge of the sink and nested the rhinoceros in the bowl of her palms. For a long time Emma Z stared at it, then she started to turn the creature about in her hands, to squint at the angles and the joints, to see the wonder in its many folds.
SEVENTY-FIVE
XANDER
On the morning after the open house Xander helped Aquinas get out of bed at 7:10 and walked into the living room. His mother and sister lay sprawled across the sectional sofa, asleep with their heads almost touching in the middl
e. Tessa’s arm hung off at an awkward angle. When Aquinas went over to sniff at it, she pulled her hand up with an angry grunt, turned over, and went back to sleep. The dog wandered into the kitchen and glopped down a bunch of water. Despite the noise his mom and sister didn’t move an inch.
Upstairs in his mother’s study he whipped an Italian guy at chess, and when he came back down, they were still asleep. He fixed himself a bowl of nut-free oat flakes, and even after he finished that, they were still asleep.
Last night they’d talked for a long time and kept talking after Xander went to bed. His father’s name had come up, along with a bunch of stuff he didn’t understand, but at least they weren’t screaming at each other. The last word he remembered hearing from the living room was college.
No one had mentioned consequences yet. Maybe his mother would forget about his science project. Maybe Aquinas would learn to fly.
But was it really so bad, what Xander had discovered? It was just science. The truth. Data. It wasn’t even the interesting part of the experiment, and now Emma Z got to have two fathers when Xander and his sister didn’t even have one.
I mean, geez, he thought. That’s like having two queens, and who couldn’t kick ass if you had that? Why was everyone so flipped out?
Xander took a pillow from a nearby chair and stretched out on the floor against the couch. Aquinas came over and flopped his fat self down next to him. Xander snuggled back against the corner of the sofa, as close as he could get to his mother and sister while still levered against the dog.
Xander Frye: . . . patient, deliberate, but swift to capture when advantageous . . . quickly adapts to opponents’ strategic shifts . . . main weakness: overconfidence in temporary tactical advantages . . . willing to risk defeat for an artistic endgame against inferior opponents.
The Gifted School Page 40
