The Arrivals: A Novel

by Meg Mitchell Moore

  He remembered Stephen in high school, and the anxiety—no, not just anxiety, the terror— he had exhibited before each cross-country race. Even though he was the best on the team, even though he never came in lower than third for his school, he threw up in the bathroom before each race—and once, ominously, in the woods partway through the course. He suspected that of the two of them, Stephen and Jane, it might be Stephen who would have a more difficult time with this.

  “She’s going to go crazy,” said Lillian. “She’s going to go absolutely nuts.” She moved Philip to her opposite shoulder and rubbed his back vigorously until a burp, as small and unobtrusive as an afterthought, emerged. “Attaboy,” she said, and Philip closed his eyes.

  “Lillian!” said Ginny. “Never mind about what you think she will or won’t do. Come upstairs and help me get the room ready. I’ve got something I need to run over to the rectory right after.”

  “What?” said Lillian quickly.

  Ginny gave her a look. “An announcement for the bake sale that needs to go into the bulletin. Why’s that matter to you?”

  “I’ll do it. I’ll run it over.”

  “Okay,” said Ginny. She was writing something on a new grocery list. “If you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind at all.”

  William drained the water from the sink and wrapped the plums in a dishcloth. “Bowl, or fridge?” he said to Ginny.

  She felt one. “Bowl,” she said. “No, fridge.”

  Lillian shifted Philip again and looked about for somewhere to put him.

  “Give him to me,” said William. “Just let me wash my hands first.” After he dried his hands he held them out for the baby, and Lillian, handing Philip over, said, “Just watch his head there, Dad. It still needs some support.”

  “I know,” said William, smiling, softening as he felt Philip’s weight give in to his hands. “I happen to have done this before.”

  “I suppose you have,” said Lillian. “Sorry.” She reached out to wipe the plum juice from Olivia’s mouth with a paper towel she tore from the kitchen roll. “You’re not worried, are you, Dad?” asked Lillian.

  William shrugged and sat in a kitchen chair. He moved Philip so that he lay in William’s lap with William’s hands behind his head. Philip squinted up at him. He curled his legs up like a frog and then straightened them, sighing.

  “She going to be fine,” said Lillian. “It’s just bed rest. It’s just a precaution. It happens all the time, tons of people get put on bed rest.” And then, more softly, “Dad? It’s just a precaution.”

  “I know,” he said, and he noticed how old and sinewy, how spotted and veined, his hand looked next to Philip’s smooth white head.

  “I’m going up to get my stuff,” said Lillian. She leaned down. William thought it was to kiss the baby but instead she kissed him, a cool, unexpected whisper on his cheek that was over so quickly he barely had time to register it. He didn’t acknowledge it—he looked steadily down at Philip’s unblinking gaze—but he felt his heart lift slightly. It was funny, the way your adult children could both delight and annoy you in the very same ways that they had when they had been actual children. He wouldn’t have predicted that particular truth of parenting, thirty years ago.

  “You,” he said sternly to the baby. “You keep getting passed around like a hot potato.” Beside him, Olivia, quivering with anticipation or excess energy, said, “Grandpa? What’s a straitjacket?”

  To Philip, who was regarding him thoughtfully, fluttering his eyelids, William said, “Listen to that one. You’re going to be in for it, with her as a sister.”

  Philip said, “Bah” and raised a fist toward William.

  To Olivia he said, “I’m not sure what a straitjacket is. You should go ask your mother.”

  “Why don’t you know?”

  William shrugged. “Don’t know everything. I know a lot, but not everything. Go ask your mother. She’s upstairs with Grandma.”

  “Okay,” said Olivia, and she left him, dancing lightly up the stairs, with all the verve and brio of a three-year-old on a summer afternoon.

  Lillian knocked softly at the door of the rectory. She expected that someone other than Father Colin would answer, but it was the priest himself.

  “Lillian Owen!” he said, smiling. “This is a nice surprise.”

  Why was she flushing? “Here,” she said, thrusting the paper at him. “I told my mother I’d bring this by. Something about a bulletin and a bake sale.”

  “Ah.” He took it from her. “Thank you. Come on back to the office, and I’ll make sure to put it in the right spot before I lose it.”

  Lillian had never been in the rectory. She followed Father Colin down a long dark hallway, past a living room with old-lady furniture, past a dated kitchen with green Formica countertops, and into the office. “Not my choice of décor,” Father Colin said over his shoulder. (Could he read her mind?) “But it is what it is.”

  Was he always smiling? Lillian couldn’t say for sure, but if she thought back again to those boys in college it seemed possible that he was. Things seemed to roll off their backs, those boys.

  “Come, come,” he said. “This is the parish office here, but this little nook back here is all mine. I mean, Father Michael’s, of course. But temporarily mine.”

  “It’s nice,” she said insincerely.

  “Well, it doesn’t feel like home,” he admitted. “I got a lot of visitors in Boston. Baked goods, kids coloring pictures for me, the whole nine yards. But here… it’s been rather quiet.”

  “I guess maybe it’s confusing to people,” she said, “not knowing how long you’ll be here. And Father Michael was such an institution.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “Hard shoes to step into.”

  She felt her cheeks grow even warmer. “Oh, no! That’s not what I meant.”

  He waved a hand at her. “That’s okay, really. I know what I’m up against. People get accustomed to doing something one way, and it’s hard to change.”

  To shield her awkwardness, Lillian looked around the room. It was rather cluttered, with piles of books and papers stacked against the wall, and a few cardboard boxes in the corner. The desk was neater, with a computer, a black office telephone, one stack of papers, and a framed photograph of three young boys.

  “Nephews,” Father Colin said when he saw her looking. “My brother Seamus’s kids. They live in Southie, three blocks away from where I grew up.” She picked up the photo and looked at it. The boys were all wearing baseball mitts and caps. They were freckled and shorn, with open, honest smiles like Father Colin’s.

  Behind Father Michael’s desk was a print of the Crucifixion. Lillian stared at it, at the grotesque angle of Christ’s arms, the way his right foot crossed over his left, the sinewy muscles of his calves and thighs.

  “Grünewald,” said Father Colin. “One of the bleaker perspectives on things.”

  “I guess so,” said Lillian. “But I guess there isn’t really a cheerful perspective on that, is there?”

  Father Colin looked for several seconds at the print. “No,” he said. “No, I suppose there isn’t.” He smiled and rustled the papers on his desk. “There,” he said. “I think I’ve got it in the right place. Though the bulletin, I’m happy to say, is not my responsibility. Thank you for bringing it by.”

  “No problem,” said Lillian. She turned toward the door but found that she was casting about in her mind for something to say, for a reason not to leave. Why was that? She couldn’t articulate it. But later, driving home, and still later that night, lying on the pullout couch in the den, moving slightly back and forth to settle her back between the springs, listening to Philip’s little snorting noises as he slept, she thought that there was something about the office in the rectory that made her feel sheltered and safe.

  The light was coming into the apartment at a peculiar and arresting angle; it made the apartment, and, indeed, the entire city appear to be lit from within. Rachel was try
ing to read through the script for the film she was going to cast. Tess wanted to see her list of actors to call soon. Rachel had a pad of paper and a pen next to her to make notes. She shook a page of the script, then began to read it out loud. Her voice sounded odd in the empty apartment, as though it were not part of her but rather had come floating in the window on the back of a cloud.

  She gave up and dialed Lillian’s cell phone number.

  She did not allow herself to think about the test she had taken the day before. She concentrated on the script, in which two brothers were arguing about what to do with their alcoholic father. All the scripts she read lately, it seemed, featured two brothers and an alcoholic father.

  “It took me a while to find you,” said Rachel. “What are you, in hiding?”

  “No,” said Lillian. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I left three messages on your home machine, and then finally Tom called me back.”

  “Tom?” said Lillian quickly. “What did he say?”

  “He said you went up there—”

  “Well,” said Lillian. “I did come up here. So what?”

  Rachel looked out the window. In the building across from hers she could see three people sitting on a roof deck next to a giant red pot of flowers. They were drinking something out of tall frosty glasses. The trio, and the air of festivity that surrounded them, seemed to underscore her own solitude.

  She would never sit on a roof deck with other people drinking frosty beverages.

  She would never own a red pot.

  If she did happen to come into ownership of a red pot she would never have the initiative or the resources to make her way to a garden center and purchase flowers to plant in it.

  Did they even have garden centers in New York City? Surely they did—they had everything in New York City—but she hadn’t the faintest idea of where they were or how to shop at them. She thought of her father, and the way he got excited if he found a particularly exotic plant to buy.

  She had bought the test during her lunch hour, walking an extra six blocks to visit a pharmacy where she was unlikely to run into anyone she knew, and she had carried it into the bathroom in the lobby of her office building.

  “What else did Tom say?” demanded Lillian. “About why I came up?”

  “Nothing. Why?”

  “No reason.” There was a pause, and then she continued. “What’s going on?” said Lillian. “How’s work? And… other stuff?”

  “I don’t know,” said Rachel. “Okay, I guess.”

  “Oh, come on. Don’t be a sourpuss. Just tell.”

  Then in a rush Rachel was telling Lillian about the independent film she was going to cast, and about Whitney’s wedding plans, and even about the money William had sent her after she called him the previous week, and which she had deposited, and which she had then promptly spent on the past month’s rent and on the shoes to go with the bridesmaid dress for Whitney’s wedding, and which was now gone.

  “Jesus, Rach,” said Lillian. “It’s good about the film, that’s fantastic. But otherwise… you’re kind of a mess.”

  “Not how I like to think of myself,” said Rachel stiffly. “But I guess you could say that.”

  “So…”

  “So the problem,” Rachel said, “is that the money Dad sent was sort of like a Band-Aid. When really I need—”

  “Really you need major surgery.”

  “Exactly,” said Rachel, relieved that her sister understood and would, perhaps, advise her on what to do next. “I need major surgery. And I don’t know what to do.”

  “Move?” suggested Lillian. The three people on the roof deck stood in unison—Rachel half expected them to bow—and disappeared one by one down a hole in the center of the roof. They left the glasses. How was it, Rachel wondered, that they left the glasses? Who were they expecting to come up and clear them away?

  “Way, way easier said than done,” she said to Lillian. “This is Manhattan. I’d need a security deposit, and the Realtor’s fee, and moving costs. Well, it’s just impossible. It would cost me more to move to a cheaper apartment than to stay here.”

  “So you’ll stay there, then.”

  “But I can’t. I can’t pay the rent, not on my salary.”

  She opened the door to the refrigerator. It was, as she had suspected, completely empty, save for the ancient box of Arm & Hammer that had been there when she and Marcus had moved in and which she had bothered neither to replace nor to dispose of. The box reminded her of her mother, who always kept baking soda in the refrigerator, and she felt a sudden, intense flash of nostalgia for the order that resided in the house in which she had grown up: for the washcloths and towels folded in neat stacks in the linen closet, for the spices organized in the cupboard to the right of the stove, for the oversized Rubbermaid containers, labeled in her mother’s tidy hand, which held outgrown or off-season clothes in the attic and which had done so for as long as Rachel could remember and which, she was certain, were still doing so.

  “So what will you do?”

  “I don’t know.” Rachel fingered the yellowing leaves of her only houseplant, a pothos Marcus’s mother had given them when they’d moved in together. Marcus’s mother had promised Rachel that it was impossible to kill, but Rachel seemed to be doing an alarmingly efficient job of killing it anyway. She turned the tap on and filled a juice glass full of water, then poured it into the pot.

  Rachel had tried to hold the stick straight under the urine stream, the way the directions had said, but even so she ended up with urine on her hand and she sat there uncomfortably for the requisite three minutes while two girls from another casting agency on the third floor (not Rachel’s) had come in and talked in quiet, bitter voices about the meeting they had just come out of.

  One of them was saying, “Well, if that’s the way he’s going to play it—” when the second pink line emerged, faint at first, then darker, then darker still, until there was no denying it.

  She wrapped toilet paper around the stick, and put it back inside the box, and waited until the girls from the third floor had gone; she could smell their perfume, and also a hint of cigarette smoke. She stuffed the box in the bottom of the garbage can, underneath a clump of wet paper towels, and after a moment’s consideration she unearthed it and wrapped the whole thing in more paper towels and put it inside her handbag. She washed her hands and washed them again and considered her face in the mirror.

  Pregnant, she said to her reflection, and she watched her lips move and watched them settle themselves into an angry knot in the center of her face. You stupid thing. You idiot.

  “I think,” she said slowly, “I think I need to ask Mom and Dad for more money.”

  In the background Rachel heard a little infant noise. “Aw,” she said. “Philip.” Her heart lurched.

  “Rachel! Don’t ask them to give you more money.”

  “Not a gift,” said Rachel. “More like a long-term loan. To get me back on my feet again.”

  “You can’t ask them for more.”

  “Why not? If they have it to give.”

  “Who says they have it?”

  “I don’t know. Don’t they? They’re parents, for God’s sake. They’re supposed to have it all together.”

  “Rachel. You’re nearly thirty. You have to be on your own.”

  “You’re thirty-six,” said Rachel.

  “And?”

  “And you ask them for stuff all the time.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like everything! You’re hiding out there!”

  “Not hiding out. Visiting.” There was a clattering in the background, then Lillian said, “Shit,” softly.

  “That’s not the picture Tom painted.” Rachel wandered into the tiny square of bathroom and rummaged in her makeup drawer for a pair of tweezers.

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “No! It isn’t. Anyway, it’s a different situation entirely.”
r />   “How’s it different?”

  “I have children. I need more help. Different help. It’s a whole different world, once you have children.”

  “You have a husband, too. You should need less help, not more,” said Rachel. She knew as she said it that they were beginning to tread on dangerous ground. With the tweezers she plucked at an errant hair just above her right eyebrow, and she was looking at the droplet of blood that formed there when Lillian said what she said next.

  “But you’ve never been a parent,” Lillian said gently, almost tenderly, and Rachel could tell that her older sister knew that it was the difference between the softness of her tone and the austerity of her words that would wound Rachel the most. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Lillian,” she said. “I’m—”

  “You’re what?”

  “I’m.” She couldn’t say it, she couldn’t say the words: I’m pregnant. Instead she said, “I’m in the middle of something. I have to go.”

  Before Nina, before Lillian left for Vermont, before Tom began to fear that he might actually forget the particular scent of his daughter, Olivia, after she’d been playing outside in the yard—the pungent clothing, the innocent three-year-old sweat in her hair—there was a night that Tom went back to again and again over the summer, etching the details in his mind.

  Lillian had been for her six-week postpartum checkup that morning, and Tom, finding himself in an ebullient, celebratory mood, picked up take-out Thai food on the way home and a bottle of white wine to go along with it.

  Tom entered the house whistling, not minding, for once, the sight of the overgrown lawn (he had to get the mower serviced) and the crabgrass growing angrily through the cracks in the driveway (he had to get the driveway repaved). He even, after one quick glance, averted his eyes from the inside of Lillian’s car, which was littered with empty Dunkin’ Donuts plastic cups, the melted ice and leftover coffee forming a shallow brown lake in the bottom of each.