The Arrivals: A Novel

by Meg Mitchell Moore

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Ginny. “Not for certain. But last night, I thought I heard something from their room. Raised voices.”

  “Raised?”

  “Semi-raised. Raised, as far as Stephen is concerned.”

  “God,” said Lillian. “What about, do you think?”

  “Who’s fighting?” said Olivia. William had bought her a small plastic sandbox in the shape of a frog, and she was sitting cross-legged inside it, pouring sand from a hot pink pail to a yellow pail and then back again.

  “Nobody,” said Ginny and Lillian together.

  With one hand on the screen door Ginny turned and looked back. “Lillian?”

  “Sleeping,” said Lillian. “I’m fast asleep.”

  “You should go talk to her, Lillian.”

  “To whom?” Lillian adjusted her sunglasses.

  “To Jane.”

  “Jane? I do talk to her! I talk to her all the time.”

  “It just seems like she must be lonely, poor thing.”

  “That,” said Lillian, “is the most sympathy I’ve ever seen you show toward Jane.”

  Ginny sighed and picked at a small hole in the screen. “It can’t be easy.”

  “No,” said Lillian. “No, it can’t.”

  “So you’ll talk to her?”

  “I’ll talk to her,” said Lillian. “I don’t know what I’ll say. But I’ll talk.”

  “We’re going to the Ben and Jerry’s factory,” said William. “Come with us.”

  Rachel looked up from her book. “Me? Who else is going?”

  “Just Olivia and me. And now you.”

  Rachel turned the corner down on the page to save her place in the book. She felt a ripple of guilt for doing this in her father’s presence, because theirs was a house in which you were always supposed to have a bookmark at the ready. She said, “Why not Lillian?”

  William shrugged. “She said she wasn’t interested. But Olivia is over the moon.” He tipped his head to the ceiling; they could hear little feet running rapidly up and down the upstairs hallway. “That’s her getting her shoes on.”

  “I take it you told her about the free sample at the end?”

  “Bingo. And she’s fascinated by the idea of the Flavor Graveyard.”

  “Who wouldn’t be,” said Rachel. “I wonder how many flavors have died since I was last there? When was I last there, anyway? Can’t remember.” She stretched her arms above her head and yawned. “And what about Mom?”

  “Not interested either. She’s got things to do.”

  “Stephen?”

  “Errands for Jane.”

  “What kind of errands? And what if I’m not interested either?”

  “Don’t know what kind of errands. And not interested is not an acceptable answer from you.”

  “I don’t have a lot of choice, do I? When you put it that way,” said Rachel.

  “Exactly,” said William. “Get your things. We’re aiming for the eleven thirty tour.”

  Though she’d been sleeping more than usual since arriving home, Rachel found that as soon as they pulled onto the highway she was overcome with a dense, stubborn sleepiness. No matter how she tried she could not force her eyes to remain entirely open. The heat from the sun coming in the window, the gentle motion of the car, the serene NPR voices emanating from the radio: all these combined to give her a sense of safety and well-being, a feeling like being rocked gently back and forth in a cradle. She was somewhat embarrassed about this, for it seemed like a childish and vulnerable thing to do, at age twenty-nine, to fall asleep in a car your father was driving, on the way to what amounted to a field trip, so she turned her head toward the window and arranged her sunglasses in such a way that her father, were he to look over, might assume she was enjoying the view. She guessed from the silence in the car that Olivia was asleep. Rachel was in that odd, rosy stage, the waiting room between full sleep and wakefulness, when her father spoke, loudly, abruptly.

  “I never liked him, you know.”

  “What? Who?” She sat up and lifted her sunglasses.

  William glanced over at her. His hands were tight on the steering wheel, and his mouth was set in a straight line.

  “Marcus,” he said. “Marcus. I always thought you were too good for him.”

  “Oh, Dad.” Rachel sighed. “That’s such a… such a parent thing to say. I mean, I appreciate it and everything, but you really don’t have to—”

  “I’m not,” said William. “I’m not doing anything except speaking the truth. Marcus is a jerk, and you’re too good for him, and I’m glad that you’re done with him. And that’s that.” He spoke with an uncharacteristic vehemence. Almost a venom. How much did he know? Had her mother told? Rachel felt some color rise to her cheeks at that possibility. She looked down at her hands, then out the window. The trees against the summer sky, the sun now almost directly above, the day so bright it almost hurt to think of getting out of the car.

  A stirring from the back seat then, and Rachel turned around to see that Olivia’s eyes were open, and that she was watching and listening. How long had she been awake?

  “Marcus is a jerk,” said Olivia softly, somberly. “Marcus is a jerk.” And then louder, with more glee: “A jerk.”

  “Olivia!” said Rachel. “That’s not a nice word. Don’t use that word.”

  “Grandpa said it.”

  “I know. But he shouldn’t have. He didn’t mean it. Right, Grandpa? You shouldn’t have. You didn’t mean it.”

  They were off the highway then, on the winding two-way road that led to the factory.

  “Cows!” said Olivia, pointing at the sign.

  “I shouldn’t have, in present company,” said William. “And I’m sorry for that.” Then, more softly, “But I did mean it.”

  They pulled into the crowded parking lot, and Rachel felt some heaviness in her beginning to lift or ease. Perhaps she should have been torn between leftover loyalty to Marcus and finding comfort in what her father had said. But she allowed herself to veer almost entirely toward the comfort. She took Olivia’s hand and led her across the parking lot and toward the entrance.

  After the tour, and after they emptied their pockets of change for Olivia to use in the penny-squashing machine, and after they explored the Flavor Graveyard, and after they admitted that the end-of-tour samples whetted their appetites without satisfying them, they ordered cones from the counter and sat outside at the picnic tables.

  “This is nice,” said Rachel after a while.

  “I know,” said William. “It is. I’m glad you came.” He put his hand on hers, but only very briefly: truly, they were not a physically demonstrative family. But to her surprise he went on, even after he had returned his hand to his cone. “We used to do things a lot together, do you remember?”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Things like this. When your brother and sister had grown out of doing things with their parents and you hadn’t yet.”

  She thought, but didn’t say, Go on.

  “You were always the easiest to be with.”

  “I was?” She was pleased. “I would have thought that was Stephen.”

  “Nope, you were. It took less to make you happy.” He must have seen some disappointment or sense of slight in her face because he held his hand up. “ I don’t mean that in a bad way. It’s a compliment, really. I don’t mean that your standards were low. I suppose it was something that came from being the youngest. You had an ease with the world. A joy. Anyone who came near you, you could make them smile.”

  “Dad!” said Rachel, flushing. “Not really!”

  “What? It’s true. But don’t you dare tell Lillian or Stephen that I said so. Lillian will get herself in a snit about it.”

  She was absorbing this when Olivia said, “I need the bathroom.”

  “Really?” Rachel looked at her father, panicked.

  “You’re up,” he said, shrugging. “I can’t very well take her into the men’s
room.”

  Rachel had never taken a child to a public bathroom. She had never, in fact, taken any child of any sort to any kind of bathroom. What rituals and etiquette were required? What complications might arise?

  Olivia handed her dripping cone to William. “Save this,” she instructed.

  It was not so bad. Rachel managed to squeeze into the stall with Olivia and helped her navigate the tie on her shorts. “Mommy always wipes the seat first,” said Olivia, and dutifully Rachel took several squares of toilet paper and did as she was told. The only tricky part was after, lifting Olivia to the sink to wash her hands; Rachel’s hands were damp from her own washing, and there was no way to support Olivia and dispense the soap at the same time, but Olivia was a good sport about it, and they worked their way through it.

  When they were nearly done an older woman who had just come out of a stall and stood washing her own hands said to Rachel, “Your daughter is adorable.”

  “Oh,” said Rachel. There was a beat when she could have corrected the woman, but she didn’t. And Olivia, generally an ardent and enthusiastic calibrator of adult mistakes, didn’t say anything either. “Thank you,” Rachel said. She tightened her hold on Olivia’s damp hand and they looked at each other, aunt and niece, in the fluorescent light of the bathroom, this secret—all secrets—safe between them.

  Lillian knocked cautiously on the door to Jane’s bedroom and when Jane said, “Come in,” she entered.

  “Sorry,” said Lillian. “I didn’t know if you were sleeping. So I knocked really quietly, just in case—”

  “Ha,” said Jane. “Sleeping. That’s an optimistic thought.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. I’m never sleeping.”

  “Never?”

  “Feels that way.”

  “So what are you doing, then?”

  Jane nodded her head toward a small color television balanced rather precariously on the dresser. Stephen had dug it out of the basement and had somehow figured out, with William’s help, how to splice the cable to share the signal from the downstairs television. “Sit, why don’t you,” said Jane.

  Lillian sat on the straight-backed chair from the hallway that someone had pulled into the room. “I never took you for an Oprah watcher,” she said, rubbing a finger on the arm of the chair, where there was a scratch as thin as a thread. Why hadn’t she thought of putting the chair in here when she was using the room, for when she was nursing the baby? Instead she had propped herself up in bed with a stack of pillows, but one of them—the baby, the pillows, or she herself—was always sliding around inopportunely.

  “I’m not, usually. But I’m… well, I’m a bit low on options.” Jane’s computer was closed on the bed beside her. The sheet was pulled up over her stomach. On the floor beside her was a pair of pink slippers, and on the nightstand a glass of water with tiny bubbles floating on the top.

  “It’s hard to sleep at the end of a pregnancy,” said Lillian. “Awful, really, that your body is expected to carry on more or less normally when you have all that going on inside it.”

  “I know,” said Jane. “I mean, I doze sometimes. But the real sleep, that’s pretty rare. And Stephen—”

  “What?” Lillian leaned forward toward the bed.

  “Well, he doesn’t get it.”

  “Of course he doesn’t. No man does.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes,” said Lillian emphatically. “It’s a simple matter of biology. They will never get it.”

  “I mean, he’s wonderful, don’t get the wrong idea.”

  “I’m not,” said Lillian. “I promise you that. But you’re pregnant and you’re miserable and he’s the one who put you in this position and whether it’s logical or not there are times when you hate him.”

  “Exactly,” said Jane, smiling. “That’s exactly right.”

  “God,” said Lillian. “I can’t believe you’re surviving this at all, to tell you the truth. I’d lose my mind.”

  “I did, I think. Last week. Completely lost it. Thought they might have to put padded walls in here for me.”

  “Ha,” said Lillian. “Could raise the value of the house.”

  They sat for a moment, contemplating the television.

  “Miracle sextuplets,” said Jane, nodding toward the screen. “Plus twins, separated at birth.”

  “In the same episode? You got lucky.”

  Jane laughed. “I guess so.”

  “Sextuplets is… six, right?”

  “Right. They thought there were five, but one was hidden in the afterbirth.”

  “Gross,” said Lillian. “Really?”

  “Truly.”

  “Hidden? In the afterbirth?”

  “Right.”

  “Imagine that being your legacy.”

  “All of their names start with the letter K. Kieren, Kaleb… I can’t remember the rest.”

  “Jesus,” said Lillian. “That seems like a poor choice.” She placed her palms flat on her thighs and leaned back. The chair, after all these years, had really held up quite well.

  “And now I know what I’ve been missing all this time,” said Jane. “I’d never watched Oprah before, until last week.”

  “Never?”

  “Not once. Didn’t know what all the fuss was about.”

  “Not even in college? Killing time in the afternoons?”

  Jane blinked and looked startled. “Killing time? In college? No.”

  Lillian yawned and stretched her arms above her head. “Really? What did you do in the afternoons, then? In that blissful time between your last afternoon class and dinner? We used to sit around the common room in the dorm and watch Oprah. Which dates me, I guess, because now college students have everything in their dorm rooms: computers, flat-screens, all the rest of it. But not us. We had one TV in the common room, and we crowded around it, elbow to elbow. God, I used to love that four o’clock time. Nothing to do. Nothing expected of you.”

  “In the afternoons?” said Jane. “In college? I don’t remember having any free time. In the afternoons, or any other time.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. I was studying.”

  “All the time?”

  “All the time. When I wasn’t in class, I was at the library. Same with business school. I studied for seven years without taking a breath.”

  “God,” said Lillian. “How dreary.”

  Jane looked down. “Not to me. I was… pretty intense, in college. I guess I still am. When it comes to work.”

  Lillian inspected a freckle on the back of her hand. Funny, the way people said “know it like the back of your hand,” when really she thought she spent very little time contemplating hers. She hadn’t really known about this freckle, until now. Perhaps it was new. She wondered idly if she should make a note of it, in case it turned into something suspicious. Cancer. Weren’t you supposed to do that? Maybe she would take a digital photo of it, and store it on her computer, along with all the other digital photos she would never get around to dealing with.

  Thinking of her digital photos, and her computer, caused her to think about the unorganized piles in the basement and the garage that she had meant to go through before Philip’s birth, which then led her to think about Tom living alone in their house, which then led her to think about her marriage, crumbling like a pile of old bricks, and all this caused her heartbeat to quicken uncomfortably, so she turned her mind firmly away and forced herself to study Oprah’s beautiful glossy black curls and made her voice sound casual and nonchalant. “Better late than never, to become a member of the Oprah club,” said Lillian. “I should think it would be hard to rejoin regular life, after all this luxury.”

  “Right,” said Jane, snorting.

  Lillian stretched out her legs in front of her and examined her toenails, which were crying for attention. Perhaps later that afternoon she’d leave the children with her mother and run out for a pedicure. It wouldn’t take more than an hour, round trip, maybe
an hour and a half. She could go during Olivia’s naptime. If Olivia decided to succumb to naptime. She looked back at the television screen. “Is it just me, or has Oprah looked the same age forever?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jane, shifting in the bed. “You know, they say no single person has had as much of an effect on the average American.”

  “As Oprah? Is that right?”

  “I believe it, kind of. Day after tomorrow, by the way, is ‘The Day I Found Out My Husband Was a Child Molester.’ ”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You know, if I were as rich as Oprah, I’d quit my job.” Lillian stood and walked toward the dresser. The music box she’d had as a little girl was still there, placed incongruously next to the glass vase of marbles. From the window she could see William watering the container plants on the deck.

  “Would you?” said Jane eagerly, casting a glance toward her computer. “I wouldn’t. I couldn’t.” She flushed briefly. “In fact, I can’t wait to get back to work. To feel useful again!” She looked at Lillian. “Sorry, I didn’t mean—”

  “No,” said Lillian. “It’s okay.”

  They both turned their attention back to the television. When a commercial for yogurt came on, Lillian leaned toward Jane and said, “I never felt that way, about work. Back when I worked.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. I always thought—I mean always— that once the first baby came along I’d quit.”

  Jane’s BlackBerry, on the nightstand, buzzed. She looked at it and then looked away.

  “You can get that,” said Lillian.

  “No, that’s okay.”

  “Do you want me to hand it to you? You look like you want to get it.”

  Jane shook her head. “I’m trying to sever the ties a little bit. Once this baby’s out… well, they’ll have to do without me for a little while. A few weeks, anyway. But things are really nutty at the moment, so it keeps going off.”

  “Nuttier than usual?”

  Jane studied Lillian. “Much. Much more than usual. I can’t even begin to say—”

  “That’s okay,” said Lillian. “I doubt I’d understand anyway. But weeks? Weeks is nothing. You’ll want months, won’t you?”