The Arrivals: A Novel

by Meg Mitchell Moore

  “What about your job?”

  “Mom! I don’t know. I don’t know. I just want to go home and go to sleep.”

  “Do you want me to make you an appointment with Dr. Green?”

  “No! No. There’s nothing to do, really. There’s nothing to check. I looked online.”

  “Online!”

  “It’s just… gone. Over.” Rachel’s face crumpled.

  “I could kill him, you know,” said Ginny.

  “Marcus?”

  “Yes.”

  Rachel looked out the window. “Don’t, Mom. He didn’t even know.”

  “Oh, honey. Why didn’t you tell him?”

  “I just thought,” said Rachel, staring into her lap, “I thought, I can call Marcus about this, or I can go home.” She shrugged, and Ginny was reminded of her slender six-year-old shoulders, shrugging as she told some story about first grade. “And given those two options, well… I just wanted to come home.”

  “I’m glad you did,” said Ginny. “We’ll have to put you in with Olivia, in your room. That’s the only space that’s left. Unless you want Stephen’s room. But that’s full of junk.”

  “I’ll go in with Olivia. Wait, she doesn’t wet the bed or anything?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Okay, then. Put me there. But I don’t want to tell anyone, okay? Not Dad or Lillian or anyone. Let’s just call this a visit. Okay?”

  “Okay,” said Ginny. Later that summer a feeling of gratitude and appreciation would come upon Ginny in swells when she thought about that ride home with Rachel, because Rachel needed somebody, and she chose her.

  “Let’s get you home,” she said. “You poor thing. Let’s just get you home.”

  William, just back from an early round of golf, came in the door holding a bouquet of red roses in a tall glass vase. “Lillian!” he called. “I have something for you!”

  “In here,” said Lillian softly. “Philip is asleep.”

  William held the flowers out to her. Lillian flushed. “There’s a card,” he said. “Do you want me to read it?”

  “No,” she said. “Give the card to me. Please.” She lay Philip down on the sofa and scanned the card quickly. “I don’t want them,” she said. “Why don’t you bring them up to Jane?”

  Olivia appeared then.

  “Oooooh,” said Olivia. “Who are those from?”

  “Daddy,” said Lillian.

  “Wow,” said Olivia.

  “Do me a favor, Dad? Please? Bring them up to Jane. I really don’t want them.”

  “Grandpa?” said Olivia. “Will you make me a PB and J?”

  “If you don’t mind,” said Lillian, “that would be fantastic. And one for me, if you can stand it. I’m starving.”

  After William had made the sandwiches, and after he had poured a cup of milk for Olivia, and after he had folded a napkin for her in the shape of a bird, and after he had brought Lillian her lunch, he carried the flowers up the stairs and knocked softly on Jane’s door.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “It’s William.”

  “Oh! Come in.”

  He pushed open the door. “I’ve brought you something,” he said.

  “Roses!”

  “Admittedly, they’re castoffs from Lillian, but still. I thought it might brighten things up a bit.”

  She smiled. “Thank you,” she said. “I think they will.”

  William shrugged. “I’m not sure why they’re castoffs.” Jane nodded. “It seemed like a delicate subject, so I didn’t ask.” He put the vase on the dresser and stood uncertainly in the center of the room. “Is there anything else… is there anything I can get you? I’m whipping up peanut butter and jelly sandwiches downstairs. I’m folding paper napkins to look like birds.”

  “No. Thank you, William, but no.”

  “Are you comfortable? Are you miserable?”

  “As comfortable as I can be,” she said. “And as miserable as you’d expect.”

  “Olivia,” whispered Rachel. “Stop tossing around and go to sleep.”

  “I can’t,” said Olivia.

  Rachel thought Olivia should be able to, because Olivia had the bed—Rachel’s old bed—while Rachel had been relegated to the extra air mattress on the floor beside the bed. It wasn’t even a good air mattress. She could tell that it would probably once again lose a large percentage of its air before dawn.

  That wasn’t strictly true, the relegating. Her current position on the floor was her own doing. When Rachel saw the host of stuffed animals Olivia kept in the bed with her, and realized that those animals wouldn’t fit on the air mattress, or would slide off in the middle of the night, as if from an ark rapidly sinking into the carpet, she told Olivia she could keep the bed. She thought perhaps Olivia would protest and insist on Rachel taking the bed, but of course she didn’t: she was three, and oblivious to other people’s feelings, and Rachel had been silly to expect otherwise.

  Anyway, it was interesting to study her old room from this vantage point. Before turning off the lights she had a direct view under her bed, where she could see a stack of old magazines—Seventeen, most likely—and a clear square bin full of scrunchies. On the door, an old Nirvana poster. On the wall—still!—was a giant poster from The English Patient, the two lovers locked forever in that forbidden kiss. (How she had cried at that movie, how she had vowed never to let her true love escape.) Earlier that day in the very back of the closet she had located an old prom dress and the dyed sandals that matched it, and alongside them a row of Halloween costumes on wire hangers: a giant puppy suit, a race-car driver outfit, a Michael Jackson moonwalk jacket. She couldn’t remember having worn any of those costumes. Had she?

  “Olivia!” she said again. “If you stop moving around you’ll be able to go to sleep.” She had a moment of longing for her New York City apartment, its solitude and order. Here at the house, she was discovering, everything was slowly descending into chaos. Her mother’s normally orderly kitchen was orderly no longer; you could hardly find anything decent in the refrigerator with the bottles of breast milk and juice boxes and plastic-wrapped bowls of leftovers clogging it, and every time you reached for a glass you found that the dishwasher was either full and waiting to be run or full and clean and waiting to be unloaded. In the den you could not sit down to watch TV because the den was now Lillian’s room and had been given over to stacks of children’s laundry and a diaper pail giving off a stale and offending odor. You could not even consider putting in a load of laundry without first interviewing the entire household to find out who had left a load of whites squatting in the washing machine. It was like living in a college dorm again, without the camaraderie and the meal plan.

  Still, given the choice between this and staying in the city, constantly reminded of the pregnancy and the miscarriage and her inadequate job performance and of how far behind Whitney she was on the path of life—indeed, how far behind everybody she was!—given that choice again and again, she would choose this every time.

  “I can’t sleep,” said Olivia. “I can’t go to sleep!”

  Rachel sighed. “Well, Olivia, you just have to.”

  “But I can’t.”

  “Do you want to go downstairs and sleep with your mother?”

  “No.”

  “Well. What then?” Someone had installed a night-light in the room, and in its glow Rachel could make out just the contours of Olivia’s body in the bed.

  “You could read to me,” said Olivia.

  “I could?”

  “Yes. If you read me one book, then I promise I’ll go to sleep.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  So Rachel rose from the air mattress, turned on the light, and stood before a pile of library books stacked by Olivia’s bed. Library books! She found that quaint and surprising. She hadn’t taken Lillian for a library user. She supposed that was her mother’s influence. She chose the first book in the stack.

  “Frances!” sh
e said. “I remember Frances. That little badger. Slide over.”

  Olivia moved over in the bed and Rachel climbed in beside her. It was awkward with all the stuffed animals, and the pillow Olivia was using was thin and inadequate for the two of them, but with a little maneuvering, and a little rearranging of the animals, Rachel was able to get comfortable. Olivia put her thumb in her mouth and began working at it, and Rachel, after peeking at the date-due card (the book was already overdue, but who was she to judge?) and fingering the plastic library sleeve, which held the odors and sensations of her childhood, began to read.

  “ ‘It was breakfast time,’ ” she began, “ ‘and everyone was at the table.’ ”

  She glanced at Olivia, whose eyelids had fallen already to half-mast.

  She kept reading. By the time she got to the part where Frances was waiting at the bus stop, skipping rope and singing her signature song, she sensed a change in Olivia’s breathing. She extricated herself carefully and smoothed the hair back from Olivia’s face. The little girl was deeply asleep.

  “Come with me,” said Ginny to Stephen. “I need help picking out your father’s birthday cake.”

  Stephen was bent over the newspaper at the kitchen table.

  “Really?” he said doubtfully. “His birthday isn’t until next month, right?”

  “I know. But I don’t want to forget.”

  “You can’t do it without me?”

  Ginny had her purse hooked over one arm, her sunglasses on, her car keys in her hand. “I can’t do it without you,” she said.

  They drove to Mirabelles on Main Street. The girl behind the counter was waifish and had a spider tattoo above her wrist. Why, thought Stephen, looking at her, would anyone tattoo a spider on her wrist? How could you possibly think that a spider tattoo was something you wanted to live with for the rest of your life?

  “I need a cake,” Ginny told her. “For the twenty-third of August. For… let’s see.” She looked at Stephen. “How many are we now?” Stephen shrugged. Ginny began counting on her fingers. “You, and Jane, and Lilly… well, let’s just say ten. Nothing wrong with leftovers. The most chocolatey chocolate cake you make.”

  “Gotcha,” said the girl. “You want the Old-Fashioned Chocolate Cake.”

  “Old-fashioned sounds exactly right,” said Ginny. “And two lattes,” she added. “For here.”

  “Mom—” When Stephen was away from Jane he felt anxious.

  “For here,” she said again, firmly, and the waif looked from one of them to the other, her eyes big and round in her face, like those of a baby.

  When they had their lattes Ginny found them two seats at a small round table and they sat. Stephen was facing the street. He watched a mother push a baby carriage. He wondered about the baby inside the carriage, and he wondered about the mother too. What had she been like at the end of her pregnancy? Had she yelled at her husband? Had her husband been more understanding than he? This was unexpected, the distance he felt suddenly from Jane.

  Ginny turned to see what Stephen was looking at, then turned back. She took a sip of her drink and said, in one breath, “I hear you’re going to be a stay-at-home dad.”

  Stephen lifted his chin. Hadn’t William told him not to bring it up? And clearly he had brought it up himself. “For now,” he said.

  She laughed.

  “What? What’s funny?”

  Ginny stirred sugar into her drink. “Nothing. I just… it’s just, it’s a big leap you’re making.”

  “Why? I’m home all day anyway. It’s less of a leap for me than it would be for Jane.”

  Ginny frowned. “I don’t know.”

  He leaned toward her. “Mom. She earns all the money! She’s already the breadwinner. Without those bonuses we’d never in a million years be able to pay the mortgage. Why do you have a problem with my taking on the other role, if I don’t?”

  She looked briefly to the ceiling. “I don’t have a problem with it.”

  “Clearly, you do. Or you wouldn’t have brought it up.”

  “I just don’t know if you realize what you’re in for.”

  “Does anyone, though? Does any new parent? Did you, when you had Lillian?”

  “I suppose not. But I was—”

  “What? Younger? Less prepared?”

  “I guess.”

  “Female?”

  “Well, yes, of course. That too. But also, I had no expectations about any of it! About keeping my life, and so forth. I had no life to keep. I was a young bride, and that was that. Parents these days—”

  “What?” Stephen said. He pushed his cup away from him, as though by disowning the drink he could find his way out of the conversation.

  “It’s different, that’s all. I mean, Lillian—”

  “I am not Lillian,” Stephen said savagely. “We are not Lillian. I’m not looking to be Lillian.”

  “I know that. I know you’re not.” Ginny made a tiny gesture of supplication toward him. “But parents these days, it is different, I know it is. There’s a certain level of… dissatisfaction that wasn’t there when I was first a mother.”

  “How do you know? How do you know it wasn’t there?”

  “Because! Nobody talked about it. Nobody worried about living up to some absurd ideal. There was no ideal. But now, I don’t know. It just seems like you’re all laboring under this belief that you can have it all. I know that sounds like a cliché, but really that’s what it is.”

  “But I’m not! We’re not trying to have it all. We’re each trying to have a piece of it, and we’re trying to make it all come out right for the baby.”

  Ginny was silent for a moment. She studied the pastry case. “Maybe so. But that baby is going to need its mother.”

  “But that baby will have its mother! Nights and weekends. And the rest of the time, it will have its father. It will have me.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I concede that. But that time is so precious, and it goes so quickly. I mean, already Philip—” She paused. “And Jane’s going to miss so much of it. And I don’t think she’s going to realize it, until that time has passed.”

  “But that’s such—that’s such an old-fashioned way to look at it.”

  Ginny sighed, then sat up straighter. “I know. But why is old-fashioned bad? That way worked for so long.”

  “It worked, until it didn’t work. So people found other ways around it.”

  “No. It worked until people decided it shouldn’t work that way, and then it stopped working. People started messing with it.”

  “But there are plenty of happy stay-at-home mothers. And plenty of happy stay-at-home fathers. It’s just more flexible now. It can work a bunch of different ways.”

  “Maybe.” Ginny lifted her cup and drank the last of the latte. When she put the cup on the table Stephen put his hand over hers. It was the same hand it had always been, the same hand that had held his, had steered him and guided him across countless streets. “Mom,” he said.

  “What?” She nearly whispered it.

  “You worry entirely too much. I can do this.”

  “I know. I know you can. But it’s hard,” she said seriously. “It will change everything. Everything.”

  “Hard doesn’t scare me. So let me do it. Okay? Let me show everyone I can do it.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay, I will.” And together they rose and threaded their way through the tables and exited the cafe for the humid July air.

  “What’s the news from Tom?” Ginny said to Lillian later that day. Despite the heat, they were making dough for cookies for the church bake sale. Olivia was standing on a footstool at the counter, wearing a gigantic apron that said “Kiss the Cook.”

  “Don’t touch your nose,” said Lillian, ignoring her mother’s question. “If you touch your nose you have to march right back in the bathroom and wash your hands all over again.”

  “I didn’t,” said Olivia.

  “In the bowl,” said Ginny, handing Olivia a measuring cup full
of sugar. Olivia dumped it in. “Good,” said Ginny. She had a speck of flour on her chin.

  Ginny peered at Lillian. “Is everything all right?”

  “Of course,” said Lillian. “What wouldn’t be all right?”

  “It just seems odd,” said Ginny, “that Tom hasn’t called much. You’ve been here for weeks.”

  “He calls on the cell phone,” says Lillian. She checked to see how carefully Olivia was listening. “Late at night.”

  “Aren’t you sleeping late at night?”

  “Not always.”

  When she went for drinks with Heather two nights prior, her friend had said, “Don’t you think he deserves to talk to Olivia, at least?” They had sat outside the restaurant on Church Street where Heather used to work and ordered drinks with tropical names that came with patterned paper umbrellas.

  “No,” said Lillian shortly. “He deserves nothing.”

  “But—”

  “Nothing,” said Lillian.

  Now Olivia dipped her hand into the batter and extracted a chocolate chip.

  “Don’t,” said Lillian and Ginny in chorus.

  “I didn’t,” said Olivia.

  “You did, though,” said Lillian.

  “But I didn’t mean to.” She worked her mouth into a pout and her lips began to tremble.

  “Oh, eat the chip,” said Lillian. “I guess the world won’t end.” She held the electric mixer in one hand and searched with the other hand for the beaters.

  “Wrong drawer,” said Ginny. “Top left.”

  “Got it,” said Lillian.

  “Grandma,” said Olivia. “When can I eat a cookie?”

  “You have to bake them first, my love,” said Ginny. “Do you think he’ll come up?”

  “Who?”

  Ginny sighed. “Tom.”

  “Oh. I don’t know. Sometime, I guess. He’s very busy at work.”

  “Who?” said Olivia.

  “Daddy. He’s got a huge project going on. He can’t afford the time.”

  “Beat, Lillian,” said Ginny.

  Lillian turned on the mixer and they all peered into the bowl.

  “Now we roll the balls,” said Ginny. She held out a spoon to Olivia and laid three baking sheets on the counter. “That’s the best part! Like Play-Doh.”