I'd Give Anything

by Marisa de los Santos

  “It does, doesn’t it? And Ave’s insomnia, it makes her fragile. Anxious, even in the daytime. And you know what else? If my marriage is going to end, I do want it to be out of urgency on my part. Or even Harris’s. I want it to be a decision, and this feels random, like a meteor striking. I hate it.”

  “I can see how you would,” said Daniel.

  I remembered Harris from the night before, placing his shaving cream, toothbrush, razor into his leather Dopp kit with a slow care so characteristic that it hurt my heart. Before that, he had slid a suit, dress shirt, and tie into his hang-up bag, even though he had no place in the world to wear them.

  “We will figure out what to do,” I’d told him.

  “Do?” he’d said, filling that tiny word with an ocean of hopelessness.

  “I’ll find a therapist for you.” I’d said it mostly because it was the one thing I could think of to offer. Later, I realized I hadn’t said “for us.”

  “Thank you,” he’d told me.

  Before he left, his shoulders bent under the weight of his bags, he’d said, “Nothing happened. It really didn’t. You can read our emails, my and Cressida’s. You should. I looked back over them, read every single one. Nothing, nothing wrong. Not a wrong word in the entire batch.”

  Now, I looked at my friends and said, “I just want to declare this right now, with you two and these four good dogs as witnesses: I won’t let Avery’s life fall apart.”

  “That’s the spirit,” said Mag.

  Daniel could have said that if his daughter had survived her mother’s dying at the age of thirty-four, mine could surely survive her father’s dalliance. He could have said that sometimes families and worlds, no matter how careful everyone is, no matter how much love, fall apart and there’s not a thing you—or all of modern medicine—can do to stop it.

  Instead, he said, “You? Are you kidding? Of course you won’t.”

  That afternoon I went to visit my mother. Before I’d even sidestepped the ramp and walked up the front steps to my mother’s door—the door of the house Trevor and I had grown up in—I heard the opera: incandescent, full-throated sorrow turning the air on the pillared porch deep blue and reverberant. I didn’t recognize the singer. I didn’t know what opera the aria was from, a fact that would have elicited icy scorn from my mother. I didn’t understand a word of Italian. But the grief in the woman’s song was unmistakable, the indigo hopelessness, the unbearable, irretrievable loss.

  Although I had possessed a key to that house for thirty years, I knew how my mother hated to be caught off guard. As I always did, I rang the bell, and I heard the single bright chime of it get caught by the music like a tossed marble landing in an open hand. Before the chime had fully faded, Agnes opened the door.

  In her dark jeans, immaculate white shirt, and vermillion Tod’s loafers, Agnes looked more like a well-heeled young society matron than a nurse/caretaker for a wheelchair-bound cancer patient. But I knew that inside those perfectly creased sleeves were some mighty biceps, ready to transfer my mother from wheelchair to velvet armchair or mahogany dining chair or backyard Adirondack chair whenever it was required, which was often, since my mother found the wheelchair, with its black, breathable fabric and aluminum tubing, unsightly and insisted on spending as little time in it as possible. I also knew that, after Agnes had arrived at her house on the first day in fuchsia scrubs and white clogs, my mother had purchased her entire outfit. The white shirt was one of three. After two wearings, my mother would send one shirt out to be cleaned and pressed—or rather would send Agnes to have it sent out to be cleaned and pressed—and Agnes would come to work in a fresh one.

  Agnes smiled at me, but I could see the frustration in her eyes. She was as efficient and patient as anyone I had ever met, but my mother was not an easy person to care for. In fact, if she had been an easy person ever, in any way, even for a day, I had never witnessed it.

  “She’s in the sunroom with her tea and cookies,” said Agnes.

  “Lemon snaps from Rolf’s?”

  “Well, it is Wednesday,” said Agnes.

  Rolf’s Bakery’s lemon snaps on Mondays and Wednesdays. Devonshire Market’s currant scones on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Cesarini’s mini cannolis on Fridays and Saturdays. Each bakery had a small string-tied box marked with my mother’s name ready for Agnes to pick up on the designated days. Sundays were a day of tea-sweets rest, just as God had commanded.

  Agnes was too professional to roll her eyes at a patient’s behavior, but the way she said Wednesday suggested that she was thinking of rolling her eyes. She gave me a tiny private smile. I gave her one back.

  “You are an angel and a saint and the world’s best sport,” I told Agnes, not for the first time.

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” said Agnes. “She gives me the extras to take home for my boyfriend. She may be singlehandedly keeping our relationship afloat.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time Cesarini’s cannolis saved the day. Maybe I should try that.”

  “You?” said Agnes, startled. “Does your day need saving?”

  With a small pang of annoyance, I recognized that particular brand of startle. It said: “You of the perfect life are worrying about something?” I also recognized that, since I was the one who had carefully cultivated the myth of my family’s perfect life, my pang of annoyance, however small, was pure hypocrisy.

  “Hey, you never know,” I said, breezily. “I should probably keep some cannolis in my back pocket, just in case.”

  “That sounds messy,” said Agnes, with a shudder and a grin.

  Oh honey, I thought, you have no idea.

  My mother sat in her delicate Duncan Phyfe lyre-back chair at her delicate little round Duncan Phyfe table in her beautiful stone-floor sunroom with sunlight misting through the long windows and opera swirling around her. A china plate of Rolf’s lemon snaps arranged on a plate before her. Two cookies on a second, smaller plate, one cookie broken exactly in half, both otherwise untouched. A plate smaller still bearing three slices of lemon, so thin as to be translucent. An even thinner china teacup, a wisp of a teacup, on a matching saucer. A flute-narrow crystal vase eliciting one white lily. My mother as she’d forever been, Adela Beale at her quintessence: ramrod straight and hard as nails and surrounded by deliberate and delicate beauty. But, although I had seen her two days before, her frailness stunned me like a blow to the solar plexus. I could never get used to it, that my mother—all fierce, force, incisiveness, mercilessness—should, in the end, fade. I’d expected fireworks. Clouds parting and a bodily ascent. I’d expected her to go on forever.

  “Virginia. Come sit.”

  Her voice was as sharp as always. Her eyes were lasers. I sat down in the chair opposite my mother. She leaned toward me an inch or two, her gaze flickering over my face.

  “What’s happened?” she said.

  As little as she had ever seemed to discern—or bother to notice—my other emotions or states of being, my mother had an eagle eye for trouble. For two full seconds, I considered saying, “Happened? I don’t know what you mean. Everything is fine.” But I knew it would be no use. And then there was also the fact that telling her was my whole reason for coming. The story came out in a single, long, sad, sordid stream of words.

  “Harris was fired. He developed a relationship with an intern, a young one. I don’t know how far it went. Possibly, he was obsessed with her. I’d say it’s even likely. A lower level employee at his company saw them holding hands across a table at a restaurant. In an attempt to keep him quiet, Harris offered him inside information on a new drug that’s about to launch, something big. The employee went to Harris’s boss. The boss fired him.”

  It never paid to try to give my mother anything but the unvarnished truth. I’d tried many times, mostly when I was between the ages of eight and eighteen, and it always somehow came back to bite me. In this instance, I wasn’t even tempted. I needed to tell her the true story, even if it would be the last time I ever told it to
anyone.

  Nothing. Not a hitch in her breathing or a narrowing of her eyes. Once, in high school, I’d asked my brainy friend CJ what the coldest liquid on Earth was so I could say that it ran in her veins.

  “Liquid helium,” he’d said. “Which doesn’t exist in nature. It has to be made in a lab, but most scientists settle for cooling things off with liquid nitrogen instead because liquid helium is stupid expensive. It’s like the Rolls-Royce of lab-cooled gases.”

  “Only the best and fridgidest for Adela,” I’d said.

  “When she looks at you, her eyeballs alone could give you the kind of frostbite that makes your nose turn black and fall off,” my friend Kirsten had said, shuddering.

  Now, my mother said, “How young?”

  “Eighteen. A high school senior.”

  Her face was immovable, a frozen lake.

  “Lucretia Mott?”

  “No. St. Michael’s.”

  “Name?”

  “Cressida Wall.”

  “What do her parents do? St. Michael’s isn’t exactly cheap.”

  “I don’t know. I guess I can ask Harris.”

  “Don’t bother. I can find out myself. Does Avery know?”

  “Not yet. But she will.” My chest felt tight just thinking about this.

  “Of course she will. Everyone in town will make sure of that.”

  I sat up straighter. “I’ll make sure of it. She needs to know the truth. The bare bones of it anyway. We don’t lie to our daughter.”

  My mother just flicked her index finger. It was the smallest gesture. Her hand didn’t even rise from the table next to her plate, but somehow, with it, she managed to dismiss me, Harris, the entire concept of Truth, and the relationship Harris and I had built with our only child. She did not dismiss the child herself, because if there was one person in her world whom Adela Beale considered eternally undismissable, forever worthy of her attention, it was Avery.

  “The truth. Well, I’m sure you have some semi-hysterical, psychobabble, morning-talk-show reason for that. What you tell her is your business. My concern is what others will think and what they’ll aim at her. That’s the story that matters most.”

  “I know,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “Of course that’s why. Have you told anyone else? That ridiculous Kristin, for instance?”

  “Kirsten’s been my friend for over twenty years, which incidentally means that you know her name is not Kristin. She has an MBA from Wharton and runs her own highly successful business. When does she get to stop being ridiculous?”

  “Have you told her?”

  “Not yet. I haven’t had time. And maybe I wasn’t ready to hear her say what I know she’ll say.”

  “Which is?”

  “Finally.”

  “Finally your husband shows a spark of life?”

  “Hey! Ouch. And anyway, you like Harris.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. But Harrises do serve a purpose.”

  “Harrises? Like he came off an assembly line? Like my husband is a Barbie?”

  “They are functional without mess and drama. Until they aren’t, apparently.”

  “He’s always been a kind man. Honest and hardworking. A good father.”

  My mother lifted an eyebrow.

  “Okay. Until he wasn’t,” I said. I wanted to rub my eyes, which felt tired, but few things aggravated my mother more than smudged mascara. I settled for rubbing the crescent of skin just beneath each eye.

  “The eye area is like tissue paper,” said my mother, “except that the crinkles stay.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “What was I saying?”

  “That, in a shocking display of sound judgment, you haven’t told that ridiculous Kristin about Harris’s lapse.”

  “Right. Finally you can stop playing house with Harris. Finally you can end this charade. Finally you can find a man who doesn’t bore your best friend to tears. Those are the finallys Kirsten will mean.”

  “Is the Kristin portion of this conversation over?”

  “Can you help?”

  I knew the answer before I asked. My mother had run multiple successful political campaigns in our city, including her own. She’d turned bad guys into everymen, everymen into heroes. She’d recast drunk driving records, embezzlement, and assault as virtual virtues. In her day—a day that almost certainly hadn’t ended yet, despite the physical ravages of age and illness—Adela Beale had spun this town like a top.

  “This Harris nonsense is nothing,” said my mother. “Nothing. Child’s play.”

  She laughed and said, “I should probably avoid that phrase, though. In this particular instance.”

  I snatched up a lemon snap and bit it.

  “Thanks for your compassion, Mom.”

  Another finger-flick jettisoned compassion and motherly concern into the stratosphere. Adela’s eyes met mine, and even though I had known her forever, I had to hold back a full-body shiver.

  “Are you sure you want my help?” she asked.

  I hesitated.

  “There is a teenaged girl involved,” I reminded her.

  At this, Adela lifted one penciled eyebrow.

  “I know. She’s my granddaughter.”

  In that second, when my mother said those words, I recognized where I was: standing on the vertiginous edge of solid moral ground, with the dark pit of my mother’s ruthlessness gaping below me. I could leap or not. Before I could even quite consider this choice, a memory of Avery from just that morning flashed into my mind. Avery reading the sports page, furrowing her pretty brows at the plight of her beloved Sixers, her skinny fingers holding a piece of toast made the way she liked it, toasted just to goldenness with the thinnest varnish of peanut butter. And I didn’t leap. It was more like what happens to those tourists who stand at the lip of the Grand Canyon for a photo, the sky wild with sunset behind them, and the ground just crumbles out from under their feet. I thought of Avery and her paper and her toast and I was falling.

  “All I want is for Avery to get through her days without hearing murmurings that her father is a creep who got obsessed with a child and then resorted to bribery to cover it up,” I said. “I want his name to be cleared, to have him be perceived as bumbling but well intentioned, maybe, which is exactly what he’s been for almost the entire balance of his life. That’s it. Nothing else. So, within those parameters, yes. I want your help.”

  I saw it, the spark in her eyes, the color in her hollow cheeks, the purse of her lips. I really didn’t think my mother was happy that her son-in-law, husband of her only daughter, had lost his mind and his job and his moral compass because of a teenaged girl. I mean I couldn’t be sure, but I didn’t think so. Certainly, she was anything but happy about the pain it might cause Avery. Oh, but the woman loved a challenge. I watched it enliven her, like green and yellow springtime creeping over a barren winter landscape in a nature show. Who knew? Maybe it would even keep her alive for a while, despite her doctors’ grim predictions. For a bizarre few seconds, I felt noble, like a thoughtful child who had given her poor sick mother a gift.

  As I looked at her I noticed again what I’d seen the last two times we’d been together, something new about her face. Deep lines hooked around the corners of her mouth. A high clench to her shoulders. Shaky hands. It struck me that what I was seeing was pain.

  “So how are you, Mom?”

  “Dying,” said my mother. Her lips twisted. “But I’m still having a better day than you are, I daresay.”

  I laughed.

  “I daresay you’re right,” I told her.

  As I prepared to get up and leave she said, “This is what happens when you marry a man you think will never surprise you.”

  Because this was true but was something I had never articulated to my mother or to anyone else and had barely admitted to myself, I froze for a moment, halfway out of my chair. Then, I finished standing up.

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” I said.

&
nbsp; As soon as I said this, my mother’s face committed the rare and remarkable act of softening. She shut her eyes almost as if she were blinking back tears, and I wanted to shout: “Stop!” But when she opened them again, her eyes were dry.

  “Yes, I can see how it might have,” she said and, with one last flick of her finger, dismissed me.

  When my daughter, Avery, was born, taking a full twenty-five hours to hem and haw, crown and retreat her way into the world, she didn’t cry, just radiated pale gold light and stared around with wondering fawn eyes. Later that day, in my hospital room, after Harris convinced me to let them put her into the nursery so that I could sleep after the long labor (and so that he could go home to his own bed), when the nurse took her from me, I swear—and no amount of infant brain science can change my mind about this—she turned her head to look over her shoulder and stare exactly into my eyes, and a mantle of peace fell over me. That’s precisely how it was: a direct gaze and a mantle of peace. I felt visited upon; I believed we had a spirit child, a mystic, a Buddha. I fell asleep certain that her days would slip like pearls onto the string of my life, one luminosity after the next after the next, and I slept for six hours.

  I woke up in my dark, quiet room, twenty-three years old, alone, bereft of my child’s presence, craving her river stone tranquility and her tuft of hair. Gingerly, I sat up, shimmied myself to the edge of the bed, slid into my slippers, and found my way to the nursery, one with a big viewing window, just like in the movies. Through the glass, the rows of bassinets awash in faint lunar light from some unseen source created a landscape that struck me as solemn, lonesome, and majestic, like Stonehenge, except that even through the closed door, I could hear one baby crying, an unhinged sound, hoarse goose-calls scratching rents in the stillness. The night nurse sitting at a desk outside the nursery gave me a tired smile and, when she checked my hospital bracelet, a wry laugh.