“I understand,” he said. “My brother has three little boys. Believe me, I know what it takes out of you. I know what goes into it.” You don’t know, thought Lillian, but she appreciated the effort that went into saying so. He extended his hand, and she reached hers out to meet it, but instead of shaking her hand he clasped it and placed his other hand squarely over her the back of her palm.
She found, as she walked home, that she seized on one thing he said: For another day. He wanted to hear her story. She wanted to tell him.
She thought about how he clasped her hand at the end, and covered it with his long fingers. She thought about how she could have pulled her hand away, but how she waited for him to release her, because standing there, protected from the heat of the day, protected, for a moment, from the complications of her life, she felt safe.
“How long do you think they’re staying?” Ginny said to William later that night. They were undressing for bed. Around them the house was quiet—finally, blissfully quiet.
It was nearly eleven, dark everywhere inside the house, but with a beach ball of a moon visible through the skylight in their bedroom.
“Shhh,” said William. “They might hear you.”
“What? Who might?”
“Stephen and Jane.”
“Oh, but, William. They’re a floor below. And they’re off tomorrow, that’s what they said. Jane’s got to get back to work. I meant Lillian and the kids. How long do you think they’re staying?”
“Don’t know,” said William. He was wearing the striped pajamas Ginny had given him the previous Christmas. He rubbed at his eye and turned down the bedspread on his side of the bed.
“Take your best guess.” She turned down her side, fluffed the pillows. William held the television remote.
“Read, or eleven o’clock news? Or sleep?”
“Read or sleep. The eleven o’clock news is completely useless.”
“Sleep, then.”
“So, how long?” She switched off the lamp on the bedside table.
“A week? Two?”
“Two?”
“I don’t know. What do you think? I guess it depends on if Tom is coming up to join them. Is he?”
“What? Coming up?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know. I haven’t asked her. I guess he is. He usually does. Maybe next weekend, when the workweek is out—”
“I suppose that would be the way to find out, wouldn’t it. To ask her directly.”
“I suppose,” she said. William closed his eyes. They lay there silently for a few minutes until Ginny said, “Isn’t it strange, though? That he didn’t come this weekend?”
“Not necessarily.”
But Ginny persisted. “You don’t think?”
“No. No, I don’t think it’s strange. Maybe he had things to do around the house, things he couldn’t get to with the children.”
“Maybe,” said Ginny. Then, a moment later, “Do you hear something?”
“No.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
“Well, I do.” She got out of the bed. He could hear her slippers padding down the hallway. In less than a minute she returned. “It’s Lillian,” she whispered. “She’s on the phone.”
“Hmmmm.”
“Who is she talking to, do you suppose?”
“I don’t know. Probably Tom.”
“At this hour? No, I don’t think so.”
“How do you know?”
“I could just tell, just by the way she was talking.”
“Must be Heather.”
“Oh! I bet it is.”
“Why do you care?”
“I don’t.”
“Not much,” he said. He closed his eyes, but on the other side of his eyelids the moon seemed to brighten. Why was it, William wondered, that when you wished for a moon there was none to be had and when you wished for a solid night of sleep it was above your window, as round as a cantaloupe, as insistent as a child? He turned his head to the side on the pillow.
He was nearly asleep when Ginny said, into the darkness, “You’ve always gotten on better with Jane than I have.”
He made a noise of neither disagreement nor agreement.
“Why is that, do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“Take a guess,” said Ginny. “Why do you think that Jane takes to you more?”
“Not sure,” William said. He lifted his head from his pillow and pounded it lightly in the center. “There,” he said to the pillow.
“I wish I got on better with her.”
“You could.”
“How?”
“You could make more of an effort.”
He felt her bristle.
“I make an effort all the time.” She turned away from him, faced the nightstand.
He kissed her on the shoulder, the shoulder that he knew, even in the darkness, was freckled and soft. “Ginny, my dear. Don’t ask a question and then get mad at the answer. It’s bad form.”
“I’m not getting mad.”
“You are.”
“Well.”
He shifted in the bed, then swung his legs over the edge and rose.
“Where are you going?”
“Kitchen,” he said. “I’m thirsty.”
“You’re as bad as Olivia.”
“Yes,” he said.
One or the other of them had been in three times to Olivia’s bedroom since her bedtime: once to take her to the bathroom, once to bring her a cup of water, once to plant a kiss on some imagined scratch on her elbow. Each time Olivia had called they had waited to see if Lillian would reach her first; each time she had not.
“Goodness,” said Ginny the third time. “Are we to do this all night long? Do you think she doesn’t hear her? Or do you think she hears and she’s ignoring?”
“The latter,” said William. “But I don’t mind.” He was reminded, going into Olivia’s room, of when his children were young, and the different ways they slept. Stephen always on his stomach, giving in to sleep with complete abandon. Lillian on her back, arms beside her. Rachel on her side, hugging one or another of her stuffed animals to her. She had been a teenager before she’d forsaken the animals. To college she’d brought her green bunny with the long ears, ostensibly to be placed on a shelf or on top of the dresser, as decoration, but he suspected that in times of heartbreak or loneliness the bunny made its way into her bed.
In the kitchen he retrieved a glass of water from the cupboard and filled it from the tap. He drank it standing, looking around. The kitchen looked different at night, illuminated only by the glow of the under-counter light, and the unremitting moonlight coming in through the kitchen window. All surfaces were wiped clean, the toaster was gleaming: the evidence of all the meals eaten that day, all the different people fed and watered, was completely gone, save one lonely colander sitting in the dish drainer. He took the colander and found its spot, nesting it inside other larger colanders.
He felt a flood of affection for Ginny, who had done all of this, who had wiped the counters and sucked up the crumbs from Olivia’s animal crackers with the Dustbuster; who had set out the Disney Princess place mat for Olivia’s breakfast the next morning. He thought of all the nights and mornings Ginny had done this for him and the children while he went on about his business: providing for them, certainly, but also nourishing his own soul and his own ambition. Entrepreneur. Small-business owner. Qualified success.
Perhaps, after all, it was this great difference between Ginny and Jane that unsettled Ginny; perhaps she looked at Jane over a great chasm of ambition and achievement and felt that she, Ginny, remained forever on the other side of the chasm.
He filled the glass again, then filled one for Ginny, and returned to the bedroom with them. Ginny appeared to be sleeping so he set the glass carefully on the coaster on her nightstand.
Then, instead of getting into bed, he went one more time down the hallway and paused outside L
illian’s room. The room was silent; if she had been on the phone, as Ginny said, she was no longer. The door was slightly ajar, which was the only reason he looked in. This room, too, was lit by the moon. Lillian was asleep in her clothes on the top of the bed, shoes too. Beside her Philip was sleeping also, his arms above his head. He wore a one-piece Red Sox pajama outfit. His chest moved up and down, up and down, as rapidly as a bird’s. There was something birdlike about the tuft of hair on his little head too, and about the way he worked his mouth in his sleep.
William thought perhaps he should do something. He thought perhaps it wasn’t safe, the baby sleeping on the bed like that. He thought about moving him into the Pack ’n Play, but if Philip woke up during the transfer it could result in a disaster for all of them. So in the end he found an afghan on the trunk at the end of the bed, which he laid over Lillian, keeping it carefully away from the baby. Lillian didn’t stir when he put the afghan on her, and he backed out of the room, closing the door softly behind him.
When he returned to his bedroom he climbed carefully into bed. Ginny shifted and stirred and when he thought she was close enough to awake that he wouldn’t be disturbing her he said, in a stage whisper, “Ginny?”
She sat upright immediately, looking around. “What? What is it?”
“Oh, no—nothing. Nothing big. I didn’t mean to wake you. I’m sorry.”
“Well, now that you have, let’s have it, whatever it was you were going to ask.”
“It’s nothing, really.”
“William. I was sleeping. It had better be something.”
“All right. Well, I was just wondering.”
“Yes?” Ginny switched on the light, saw her glass of water, nodded at William. “Thank you for this.” She took a sip.
She switched off the light again, and he felt her settle herself back down on the pillow. He took a deep breath.
“Does Lilly seem different to you?”
“Different? Of course she’s different. She’s had a child recently. Childbirth always changes a woman.”
“I know, but it seems… beyond that. More sad than anything.”
“Maybe. It’s not our business, though. She’ll be fine.”
“But we’re her parents.”
“Yes,” she said slowly. “Yes, of course we are.” He could feel her waiting for him to fill the silence after she spoke, and when he didn’t she patted his arm softly, the way one would pat an old dog, turned carefully away from him, and went off to sleep.
William lay there for a long time, tired but not sleepy, listening to the noises of the house settle around him. He remembered the creaks and groans that his own childhood home had given out at night, he remembered his mother consoling him when the noises frightened him, he remembered the apple scent of the soap she used and the way her cheek felt smooth against his when she leaned down to kiss him good night.
And there was something else he had forgotten, from his children’s youth, something he’d never articulated but now felt so strongly it was almost palpable: the peace you feel when you are awake in a house where children are sleeping.
Normally Rachel went to the Starbucks closest to her apartment, but she knew that Marcus went there sometimes, and she thought that seeing him might be too damaging to her already fragile state. She nearly swore off coffee altogether but instead decided to choose a location closer to her office, in midtown. This one was less busy than her usual Starbucks, most likely owing to its proximity to another, identical shop, and, being unusually ahead of schedule, and having treated herself to a particularly large and expensive concoction, she decided to take a seat.
She sat at one of the small brown checkerboard tables, between a teenaged girl whispering earnestly into a cell phone and a fiftyish man in a pale gray suit. Were they happy? They looked happy enough. The man was reading the business section of the Times; he wore a silver wedding band; his hair was cut neatly but not stylishly; he had the air of a person whose life was considered, ordered, in control. The girl appeared to be going through some sort of teenaged drama, but, as Rachel remembered from her own teen years, sometimes the adrenaline resulting from those dramas could masquerade as happiness.
Was Rachel happy? She didn’t feel happy. Had she ever felt happy, apart from the nine months she had spent in a relationship with Marcus and the three months she’d spent sharing the apartment with him? She didn’t think so.
If she thought back, very far back, to when she was a child growing up in Vermont, well cared for, the youngest, the most coddled of three children, she thought maybe then she had been happy. Riding a bike, perhaps, feeling the wind off Lake Champlain on her face. Or waking up in her bedroom on a Saturday, the whole of the day ahead of her, to spend or squander as she wished. Maybe then she had been happy.
The door opened and the napkin Rachel had set beside her cup blew onto the floor. A woman with short blond hair who was making her way past with her coffee retrieved it. She was familiar in a vague way to Rachel, the way that people on reality television shows look familiar when you see them in a magazine photo spread, outside of their usual milieu.
“Here,” said the woman, handing her the napkin. And then, “Don’t I…? Aren’t you—”
“You’re Jane’s mother,” said Rachel, realizing. “From the wedding, I remember you. I’m Stephen’s sister, Rachel.”
“Of course. Of course you are. I’m Robin.” She tipped her head toward the table. “May I?” She sat without waiting for an answer. When she was settled she took a long drink of her coffee and pointed her kind brown eyes toward her and said, “Now, Rachel. Isn’t this funny? All this time, living in the same city, never running into each other. Tell me what you’ve been up to.”
“Well,” said Rachel. She thought about lying in bed with Marcus the previous month. She thought about his most recent visit. You take things too seriously, he’d said. That’s your biggest, one and only problem.
“I’m working for a casting director,” said Rachel.
“Wonderful!”
She remembered now that Jane’s mother was some kind of doctor. A therapist, that was it. She thought about her boss, Tess. In her recent employee review Tess told Rachel that she seemed like she’d lost something over the past year. “You’re talented, pet,” Tess said. “I just don’t think you’re focused anymore.” Tess, who was one of the least nurturing people Rachel had ever known, had a grating habit of calling everyone pet.
“Casting!” Robin said approvingly. “Such a glamorous business.”
“Sort of,” said Rachel. For Tess, it was glamorous. Tess cast famous actors in famous plays; Tess went to the theater so often that she actually complained about going; Tess was married to a publishing executive and lived on the Upper East Side with him and their three-year-old twins, whose care fell almost entirely, as much as Rachel could tell, to the live-in Mexican nanny. “It’s not exactly glamorous,” said Rachel. “For me. I do a lot of commercials, that sort of thing. But I’m going to be in charge of casting an independent film, later in the summer. That could be a big deal.”
“Wonderful!” Robin wore glossy lipstick and a beige pantsuit that Rachel’s father, with his slightly old-fashioned way of talking, would have called sharp. “A single girl, working in New York. Self-sufficient. The best way to be.”
“I guess. It doesn’t feel that way, always.”
“You’re what? Thirty? Thirty-one?”
“Twenty-nine,” said Rachel morosely.
“Oh! Twenty-nine. You’re practically an infant, still!”
“Not really.”
“And I suppose everyone is telling you these are the best years of your life.”
“Yes—”
“And they’re not.”
“No.”
“Because you don’t feel settled, and you feel that you ought to.”
“Yes!”
“Well, don’t believe them, is all there is to it.”
“Really?”
“Really. It
gets better. When I was your age—Lord, it all felt like such a struggle! Deciding whether or not to have a baby. And then being married to someone I shouldn’t have been. And then having the baby. And working, trying to get ahead. And wondering if I was caring for the baby properly. And then a divorce. God, I’m glad to be finally done with all that. And now I’m about to become a grandmother! Which is unbelievably exciting. I plan to be the best grandmother in the entire city. To make up for all the mistakes I made as a mother.”
“Oh, I’m sure you didn’t,” said Rachel.
“Trust me.” Robin opened a small brown bag and drew out a blueberry muffin, which she offered first to Rachel, who shook her head. “I did. But I’ve come to terms with it.”
“Well,” said Rachel breathlessly. “In my case—” Later, telling her friend Whitney about the conversation, she felt faintly embarrassed for her honesty, for unloading the contents of her heart so readily in front of this woman who, whatever their connection, was nearly a stranger. But at the time it felt perfectly reasonable.
“In your case?” Robin prompted. Her face fell into creases of understanding and expectation.
“Oh, I’ve just gone through this breakup.”
“Oh. That’s hard. That’s very hard.” Robin nodded sympathetically. This, Rachel figured, must be the way she nodded at patients, because there was something about it that made Rachel want to continue talking.
“And we were living together.”
“Ah! Even harder.”
“And I can’t afford the apartment anymore without him.”
Robin sighed and made a small grimace with her mouth. She bit into the muffin. “Well, that’s a shame. Only in Manhattan! If you lived in, say, Boise, you’d just keep the apartment on your own without worrying about it. But you can’t find the energy to move, I suppose.”
“Exactly. Or the time. Or the money.”
“So what will you do?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’ll figure something out. People always do. It’s the survival instinct.”
The Arrivals: A Novel Page 6
