The Arrivals: A Novel

by Meg Mitchell Moore

  He laughed. “No. I wish it was like that.”

  It actually was terrible coffee, when you got right down to it, but she reminded herself, as her mother used to remind them when they were children, beggars and choosers, beggars and choosers. “What’s it like, then?”

  “Like any kind of writing. Like any kind of work, really. Hard. Torture, sometimes.”

  “What’s this one about?”

  “I’m still working that out.”

  She thought back to their conversation in the bookstore. “What about forgiveness?”

  He looked searchingly at her. “They’re all about forgiveness, in a way.”

  “That reminds me,” she said, as though the thought had just come upon her. “You never told me. Who you needed to forgive.”

  “Ah.” Father Colin rose from the table and brought his mug to the sink. He leaned over the sink, looking out the window into the darkness. He kept his gaze in that direction as he said, “The woman I told you about? Elizabeth?”

  “Yes.”

  “Her husband.”

  She felt a shiver. She pulled at a hangnail. She said, very carefully, “What did he do? That required forgiveness?”

  Father Colin returned to the table and faced Lillian. “He had a lot of anger. You could see the pain inside him, it practically pulsed. And who could blame him.”

  “Of course,” said Lillian.

  “But the anger was misplaced. He turned it on me.”

  “On you?” said Lillian, beginning to understand. “Because of the wife—”

  “Right,” said Father Colin. “Because I counseled her. He thought… he thought our relationship was inappropriate. He confronted me. Physically.”

  “He hit you?”

  Father Colin smiled ruefully. “It was more like a punch. It knocked me over. He’s a big man, very strong.”

  “So that’s what you had to forgive?” Lillian was wide awake now.

  “That, and then the fact that he brought his complaints high up the food chain. In effect, he’s the reason I’m here.”

  “They sent you away?”

  “Not forever, I hope. But to appease him, and because Father Michael got ill and they needed a pastor here.”

  “But did you?”

  “Did I what?”

  “Did you do what he accused you of?”

  “Of course not.”

  She wished the lights weren’t on. She thought it would have been easier, in the dark, to ask her next question. She said, “But did you love her? Did you fall in love with her?”

  He waited a long time before he answered, so long, in fact, that she thought that he might have forgotten her presence. Finally he said, “I don’t know. I cared about her, for certain. And something about her grief, and my desire to help her, made me imagine that I had a power I didn’t have, the power to make her anguish go away. But love her?”

  “You did,” she said softly. “You loved her.”

  There was a vulnerable bent to his shoulders then. He made her think of a little boy, waiting for praise or punishment. He didn’t answer, but he rose when she rose, and she wasn’t sure if he leaned toward her first or if she leaned toward him, and where the kiss started, but she knew where it ended, because he pulled away before she did.

  “Lillian,” he said.

  Looking down, she said, “What?”

  “You’ve been drinking. You’re upset. You’re confused.”

  “You’re confused,” she spat back. She knew that was cruel, but she was humiliated. “You’re more confused than I am.” Even though it was spiteful, and even though she said it to hurt him, she knew that it was also true, because thinking about it later, as of course she did, for the rest of the summer and even, sometimes, after that, she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he had kissed her back.

  “Don’t go yet,” he said. “Lillian? Don’t go. Stay here until you’re ready to drive.”

  She stood as straight as she could and didn’t meet his eyes when she answered. “I’m ready to drive now,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “You need—”

  She cut him off. “I don’t need anything. From you, I don’t need anything.”

  “Lillian, I care about you. But I am trying to do the right thing, whatever that is.”

  “Whatever that is? I thought you had all the answers.” She could feel that her lips were pulled over her teeth in a mean and ugly way.

  “I don’t.” He lifted his hands helplessly.

  “So you’re… pretending?”

  He was silent.

  “What would they say about that, your flock? Your woman in Boston, what would she say about that?”

  He flinched at that. “Not pretending. Believing.”

  “But how do you know what you believe? How do you know there’s anything to believe in? You don’t even know when it’s okay to love someone and when it isn’t!” She knew her voice sounded bitter, but she was reeling.

  He lifted his raised palm to the ceiling. “I just know. That’s what belief is. You know I am here to serve the many, not the one.”

  “I know,” she said. “Nobody’s asking you to do anything else.” She could still feel his lips on hers.

  He ignored that. “But I’ll pray for you and your family.”

  “Don’t bother,” she said. It was the worst thing she could think of to say, the most hurtful. “Don’t do me any favors.”

  She forced herself to drive slowly, because her hands were shaking and, really, something in her very core was shaking. But she had to steady herself after she got out of the car at home because she could hear Philip crying as she walked rapidly up the front walk and she thought at first that he was alone in his Pack ’n Play, and hungry and frightened.

  But of course he wasn’t alone. Ginny was walking back and forth in the den with him. The windows were opened, which explained why Lillian could hear him from outside. Ginny didn’t ask where Lillian had been, or why she was back so late, and though Lillian knew all that would come later she was grateful for it. Ginny said only this: “I can’t get him to stop. I found some milk in the fridge, and I warmed up a bottle and he drank it down. But I think he needs you.”

  She passed Philip to Lillian and he settled almost immediately against her shoulder, breathing raggedly, then stuffing his fist into his mouth, and finally, while Ginny looked on, quieting.

  Then the placenta moved.

  William was loading a bag of grass clippings into the pickup to bring them to the compost facility when Stephen and Jane pulled up in Ginny’s car. Stephen jogged around to Jane’s side and opened her door. He grasped her elbow to guide her out of the car.

  “Dad!” he said. He looked more upbeat than he’d looked in weeks. “Big news. We just came from an ultrasound. The placenta moved.”

  Jane stood next to him, smiling. Smiling! They were both smiling, grinning madly, even.

  “Well, that’s wonderful news,” said William. He pulled off his work gloves and squinted at them. It was a hot, bright day, and the sun was directly behind Stephen and Jane, so their outlines were faintly smudged. They moved closer to William, and he saw the way that Stephen didn’t let go of Jane. He always had his hand protectively on part of her body: her hand, her arm, her lower back.

  “But. It’s still low-lying,” said Stephen. “We’re not totally out of the woods.”

  “What’s all the commotion?” Rachel, holding her book, wearing her sunglasses, walked around from the backyard.

  “The placenta moved! And the baby is growing,” said Jane. “I might be able to have a normal delivery.”

  “Now hold on,” said Stephen. “Not so fast.” He looked at his father and his sister and cleared his throat. “There’s still a good chance of a C-section. The concern with a vaginal delivery is that the placenta can tear off the lower uterine segment.”

  “My brother, the obstetrician,” said Rachel.

  “That won’t happen,” said Jane. “It’s going to be fine. It
’s going to be fine!” She smiled eagerly at William and Rachel. There was a new fresh look to her. It could have been the makeup she had put on for the appointment, or the clean pants and shirt she was wearing, or just the fact that she was standing outside in the sunlight, but to William she looked suddenly animated and vibrant. Reborn.

  She turned to Stephen. “Can we go back to New York? I want to deliver at my own hospital.”

  “Absolutely not,” said Stephen. “Not even an option.”

  “Let’s talk about it,” said Jane. “Let’s just talk.”

  “You are going to sit down and rest,” said Stephen. “And we’re not going to talk about New York until we have that baby safely out of you.”

  “Says you,” said Jane. But there was a new firmness and resolution to Stephen, William could see that. Stephen led Jane toward the front door, still guiding her by the elbow. Did William see her twitch her arm just out of his reach before he caught it again? Perhaps. Perhaps he did.

  “Tom? It’s Rachel.”

  Tom hadn’t recognized the number on the caller ID, but the Manhattan area code was familiar, and because he had a few friends from college who lived in New York he thought it was one of them calling. It was eight forty-seven on a Thursday night. He was sitting on the sofa in the living room, the sofa that he and Lillian had chosen together soon after Olivia’s birth, the sofa on which they’d sat together night after night until he had decided to dismantle their lives, their very happiness, with his carelessness and stupidity.

  And drunkenness, he thought. Let us not forget drunkenness.

  In front of him was a pizza box with a half-consumed pizza. It was yesterday’s pizza, in fact, not a fresh one, and the previous night he had merely shoved the whole box into the refrigerator. Removing the box this evening, from its slanted, ill-fitting berth on top of a plastic grocery store bag of softening apples, he had felt a grim despair; when the refrigerator hadn’t closed properly because part of the apple bag had slipped down and got itself stuck in the door, he had nearly left it there. There was no one, after all, who would be expecting fresh milk in the morning.

  “Oh!” he said. “Rachel. I wasn’t expecting you—”

  “Were you expecting someone else?”

  “No! No, of course not.”

  “Oh, you sounded strange, that’s all. Like I took you by surprise.”

  “Nope! No surprise.”

  “I’m calling on behalf of Lillian.”

  He felt something lift in his stomach. “Why? Did she ask you to call?” Tom peeled a congealed layer of cheese off one of the slices, put an aging and withering olive into the center of it, and made it into a tiny wrap.

  “Well. Not exactly.”

  Whatever had lifted now plummeted. “Oh.”

  “But I think she wants you to come up here.” Tom took the dehydrated sponge from the sink, where it had lain for three days, and, without wetting it, worked at a spot of tomato sauce that had dried onto the counter.

  “She does? She told me that she doesn’t. She told me that she doesn’t want to see me again, ever. She told me, specifically, not to come up.” His throat clotted when he heard himself say that out loud. He thought of the way Lillian looked just out of the shower, eyes bright against the pale of her skin and her flaming hair. So many colors! How could there be so many colors in just one person?

  “She’s confused, of course,” said Rachel. “And angry.”

  “She told you?”

  “She told me. I had to wheedle it out of her, but she told me. And you were a total dick. Pardon my language, but you know that’s the truth.”

  “I know that,” he said morosely. “Believe me, I know that.”

  “A total schmuck.”

  “Rachel,” he said. “I know that.”

  “So I don’t think she wants to tell you that she wants you here, but I’m pretty sure that’s what she wants.”

  “How do you know, though, Rachel? How do you know for sure?”

  “Trust me,” she said. “I know.”

  After Tom hung up the phone, he walked out the back door and onto the deck. The dog, taking his exit as an invitation to play, followed, ears lifted hopefully.

  The previous summer he had sanded and stained that deck. Lillian, in the beginning stages of pregnancy, had been too exhausted to help, but he had given Olivia a massive sheet of white paper and a container of finger paints and allowed her to work near him, in the grass. It had taken the whole of Labor Day weekend, and he’d felt then a camaraderie and connection with Olivia that he had never experienced before or since.

  It was eerily quiet on the deck now, and mostly dark. There were just a few threads of daylight remaining in the sky. From a house on another street he could hear the sounds of children yelling and somewhere, closer by, the sound of a baby crying. He thought of Philip, and the shock of hair in the very center of his head.

  His neighbors, Mary and Parker, a middle-aged couple with grown children and a grandson on the way, were sitting on their deck with a bottle of wine.

  “Bachelor for a while, are you?” called Mary. “I haven’t seen your little angels around.”

  “Something like that,” called Tom. “Visiting their grandparents.”

  He went back inside before they could ask him any more, and the dog followed, the tags on her collar hitting against each other. She settled herself in the corner of the kitchen with a sigh, regarding Tom as he moved around the kitchen.

  He checked the phone for messages. He hadn’t heard it ring, but it was just possible that if it had rung when he was outside he would have missed it. Unlikely, to be sure, but possible. Maybe Rachel was right. Maybe Lillian did want him back.

  Nothing.

  Then he checked the computer for e-mails. There was nothing there either, not even a stray work communication, not even a meeting announcement for the following day, or a piece of junk mail. Just: nothing.

  He wandered through the rooms of the house, into Olivia’s room, where the bed was made neatly and the animals that hadn’t gone to Vermont were sitting sentry on the white shelf he had nailed into the wall shortly after they’d moved in.

  Then into Philip’s room, where the zoo mobile—the fuzzy animals with their odd, quizzical expressions—was silent. Although there was no reason to do anything, he drew the blinds, turned on the night-light on the dresser. A dried-out wipe was crumpled in the mouth of the diaper pail; he turned the blue handle, sending the errant wipe into the garbage bag that sat inside the pail. The sound of the diaper pail turning was startlingly loud in the silent room.

  In the kids’ bathroom, which he hadn’t been into since Lillian had left, a middle-aged washcloth was balanced on the side of the tub; he picked it up and put it in the hamper in Philip’s room.

  The silence!

  There were times after Olivia had become such a precocious talker, after Philip was born, that he had longed for just this type of silence. When he had invented an errand to get out of the house at certain chaotic times of the evening to achieve it. Times when he felt as if he and Lillian were jockeying for the silence so intensely that even talking to each other had destroyed it.

  And now that he had it, now that he was surrounded by nothing but silence, and now that he faced only silence until he arrived at work the next morning, he didn’t know quite what to do with it.

  In the hallway he stood for a moment in front of a picture from his and Lillian’s wedding; it was a black-and-white photo, but even so he could nearly see the red of Lillian’s hair, which she had worn long and curling down her back, with a tiny jeweled tiara on top. She looked like a princess, as beautiful as any of the princesses Olivia now coveted and collected and talked about as though they were flesh and blood and living in the house next door.

  He felt a thump in his stomach like the sensation one got traveling very fast downhill in a car. When Lillian had pulled out of the driveway, and told him not to call her, what was it that made him do as she wished? Part of it wa
s honoring her, of course, because he had done wrong. But part of it was punishing himself by taking away what was most important to him: a form of self-flagellation.

  “You might,” said Ginny, as gently as she could manage, “pick up the den a little bit later.”

  They had driven with Olivia and Philip to the Laundromat. The washing machine, they had been told, was going to take two weeks to repair. A special part, whose purpose and exoticness Ginny didn’t particularly comprehend, was on order. After the Laundromat they were going to take Olivia for a grilled cheese at the bakery on Pine Street and then, if Philip stayed in reasonably good spirits, to the playground at the elementary school for a bit of fresh air.

  Olivia found a ball of dryer lint on the floor and was rolling it tighter and tighter, then tossing it in the air to catch it. The owner of the Laundromat, a stout, grumpy woman with orange lipstick three shades off from what would have been appropriate for her skin tone, watched her, frowning. She opened her mouth and then closed it again. The only other customer was an old woman, bent over like the letter f, who was sitting on a bench in the corner reading a newspaper.

  “The den?” said Lillian. “Why?” She was sorting clothes into two giant carriages. In a basket from the house she had Philip’s clothes, which she washed with the special baby detergent. She frowned at the label on the baby detergent. “I can’t decide if I actually need this stuff still,” she said. “Or do you think it’s just a marketing ploy?”

  Ginny ignored the second question. To the first she said, “Because the den is a pigsty.”

  “What’s a pigsty?” said Olivia.

  “A house for a pig,” Lillian told her.

  “Oh.”

  “It’s not a pigsty,” said Lillian. She was wearing Philip in the BabyBjörn, having finally figured out how to adjust the straps so they didn’t hurt her back. It annoyed Ginny suddenly, perhaps unreasonably, that Lillian had only now chosen to use the Björn, when it made little sense to have a baby strapped to her. Every time she bent forward to reach into the laundry basket Philip’s head flopped awkwardly.