The Arrivals: A Novel

by Meg Mitchell Moore

  It was untrue, what she’d said to Whitney. No matter how she tried to spin it, it was untrue. She was a charity case.

  Lillian and Ginny and Olivia made it to the bakery for grilled cheese but skipped the playground. Olivia, perhaps sensing something amiss, did not complain. Even though the trip home was only a few minutes long she fell asleep in her car seat, sucking rhythmically on her thumb.

  “Poor thing,” said Lillian, turning around to look at her. “Exhausted.” She had composed herself somewhat in the car on the way home and had put on her sunglasses.

  Ginny said, “Don’t you think—”

  And Lillian cut her off so quickly and certainly, raising a flat palm and saying, in a voice cold and hard, a voice that brooked no argument, “Mother. Don’t.”

  Ginny couldn’t remember when Lillian had last called her Mother, if in fact she ever had.

  “Don’t,” said Lillian again.

  So she didn’t.

  “What do you want me to tell Dad?” Ginny asked, pulling into the driveway and turning off the car.

  Lillian sighed. “I don’t know,” she told her seat belt. “You can tell him, I guess.”

  “Okay. I mean, he might have guessed. We all wondered, of course.”

  “But not when I’m around.”

  “No,” Ginny said. “Of course not.”

  Lillian carried Olivia in and brought her straight up the stairs, intending to put her down for a proper nap in her bed. Stephen was coming down the stairs as she was going up. Ginny heard him say, “Where were you?” and heard Lillian say, shortly. “Laundromat.”

  “You could have asked me. I’ve got clothes to wash.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Stephen. You’re an adult. Go yourself.”

  Stephen walked heavily down the stairs and stood morosely in the foyer, then sighed and ambled through the kitchen and out onto the deck.

  “What’s eating him?” said Ginny to William, who was standing at the sink, filling a glass with water. She put Philip’s car seat on the floor.

  “Go easy,” said William. “I think they’re fighting.” He made a jerking motion toward the ceiling with his head.

  “No! Them, too?”

  “Why? Who else?”

  Ginny waved her arm. “Never mind. A story for another time.”

  She unbuckled Philip and lifted him out. “Oh, you,” she said. “You’re soaked.”

  She brought him into the den and laid him down on the makeshift changing table on the floor. Her hips protested, and then her knees. “I am getting too old for these sorts of acrobatics,” she said to Philip. He gurgled up at her, eyes wide and unblinking, and caught hold of his foot with both hands.

  Ginny fastened the new diaper, then rummaged in a pile of clothes on the floor—clean, she suspected, though she certainly could not guarantee it—for a onesie. Really, the den was a tremendous mess. Since the last time Ginny had been here Lillian’s belongings had migrated to the far reaches of the room. There on the desk was a mass of her makeup and hair elastics; in the corner was a pile of paperbacks that Lillian had unearthed from the basement or from the closet in Stephen’s old room. Crime novels, mostly. She could see on the cover of one a black-gloved hand holding some sort of revolver.

  She tried not to think of what Lillian had just told her. It was too upsetting to think about, her daughter nursing a broken heart all these weeks, sharing the news with nobody. Of course, as she’d told Lillian, they’d all suspected. But until it was confirmed Ginny had been able to believe that nothing was truly wrong, that Tom was, as Lillian said, simply caught up with work.

  Her gaze returned to the desk, and she saw there a pile of bills that she had opened and looked through but had completely neglected to pay.

  “Oh, Philip,” she said reproachfully to the baby. “The electric bill! I forgot all about it.”

  She laid him carefully on the floor, and when he began to whimper she wagged a finger at him and said sternly, “Don’t. Not now. If I don’t get this bill paid we will all be sitting around in the dark while buckets of ice cream melt inside the freezer.”

  He turned his head to the side and rooted around his mouth with his hand until finally his thumb found its way in. It touched and heartened her somehow, this tiny person’s capacity for self-comfort.

  She watched him for a moment until his eyes closed. Then she turned her attention back to the desk. To clear a place to sit she had to move a package of diaper wipes and a copy of Bear Snores On from the desk chair.

  She looked through the pile of bills until she located the electric bill, and then she found the checkbook and opened it to the register page. All of it was there, a record of the last year, written alternately in her neat straight hand and in William’s slanted one, for they had not, despite Stephen and Jane’s advice and promises that banking on the Internet was secure and convenient, moved in that direction. It wasn’t the security Ginny was worried about; it was something more old-fashioned that she was reluctant to give up. She enjoyed the physical act of writing the checks. She liked balancing the checkbook with her little black calculator, licking the envelopes that held the bills, lining up a stamp in each corner, carrying the whole pile to the mailbox.

  And there, in William’s handwriting, was the record of a check written to one Rachel Owen earlier in the summer for twenty-five hundred dollars. Ginny paused. She considered. She looked away, then looked again at the register, as if it might have changed in the interim. Rachel Owen. Twenty-five hundred dollars. She looked at Philip and saw the way his eyeballs moved behind his eyelids.

  Under different circumstances, perhaps any other summer, this discovery—the proof of a secret between William and Rachel, and an expensive secret, at that—would have caused her to raise her voice loudly, forgetting about the sleeping baby, forcing William to come running from the kitchen to see what was the matter. But this summer? No. Why shouldn’t Rachel be able to ask her father for help when she needed it? And why shouldn’t William be able to help Rachel in his own way, as she had in hers? “Why not?” she said aloud, and she wrote out the check for the electric bill while beside her Philip slept.

  “That’s it,” said William. “We’re going out to dinner.”

  “Really?” Ginny was on her knees in the closet, sorting through some old shoes. “Where will we go that will accommodate the children? Flatbread?” She tossed a pair of William’s old sneakers out of the closet. “You don’t wear these anymore, do you?”

  He saw that she had a big black garbage bag at the ready. “I do, actually,” he said, tossing them back into the closet.

  She held up a pair of black pumps. “These,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve worn these since Stephen’s wedding. Good Lord.”

  “Save them for Rachel’s wedding,” he suggested. “They’re beautiful shoes.”

  She rolled her eyes. “They will be long out of style by the time that day comes,” she said.

  “We don’t know that.”

  “No,” she said. “We don’t.” She sat back on her heels and pushed her hair out of her face. “Pizza sounds good, the more I think about it. Olivia will do well if we go to Flatbread. They have crayons—”

  “No,” said William decisively. “No pizza. No children. No anybody. Just us.” He sat on the bed and looked at her.

  Ginny frowned. “But what will the others do?” She tossed one of the black heels at him and nodded toward the bag. He didn’t put it in; he held onto it, inspecting it. He supposed one could tell a lot about a person by considering a pair of shoes she had worn for an important occasion. There was a smudge along one toe, for example. Perhaps he had caused that smudge. He was notoriously clumsy on the dance floor.

  “They will fend for themselves,” he said. “The way that adults are meant to do.”

  “But—”

  “No but,” he said. “A nice dinner. Just the two of us.”

  Her frown deepened.

  “You,” he said.

  “What
?”

  “You shouldn’t look so upset! About being asked to dinner.”

  She smiled then, a lovely smile, and he was grateful suddenly for her, and for the house, and for the bits of the garden that he could see from the window. He was grateful for the dirt underneath his fingernails, and for the shower he was about to take, and for the meal he was going to have later with his wife. He would call for a reservation, someplace downtown, someplace nice like Trattoria Delia or L’Amante. They would have wine.

  He tossed the shoe back at her. “Put on something nice,” he said. “Wear these.”

  They did have wine, and she did wear the shoes, and as Ginny sat in front of fettuccine with cherry tomatoes, saffron, and white wine she looked across the table at William. They were seated near the window, and she watched him watching the passersby, the steady stream of people along College Street: teenagers, college students, young parents with strollers, slightly older parents with recalcitrant teenagers trailing behind them.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “Nothing,” said William. “Just looking at the people. Looking at how young everyone is.”

  Ginny looked. “It’s a young town,” she said. “Always has been.”

  “I know! But we were once part of the youth of it. Remember?”

  “I do,” she said. They were quiet for a moment.

  Then, into the silence, she said, “Lillian’s left Tom, you know.”

  “Oh, Jesus. Not really?”

  “Really. There was—” She found she couldn’t think of the right way to say it, almost couldn’t say it all. She felt, even though Lillian had given her permission, that she was betraying her to talk about it. “There was an infidelity.”

  “On whose part?”

  “His.”

  William set his lips in a thin and unreadable line. Finally he said, “Poor Lilly.”

  “I know,” said Ginny. “She’s devastated. Of course she is! Absolutely devastated. And keeping it from us all these weeks. Well, I just can’t imagine how lonely it’s been for her.”

  William was silent.

  “William?”

  “What?”

  “I thought you’d be more… I don’t know. More angry when I told you. I thought you’d want to kill him.”

  “I do,” William said softly, and she saw then the set of his lips was not unreadable at all; she saw the tiny, angry vein pulsing in his forehead. He was furious.

  “Poor Lilly,” she ventured, echoing his words. The vein still pulsed. “And poor Tom,” she added.

  “Poor Tom?” He nearly spat it. He put down his fork.

  “Well, yes. I’m sure he’s aching with regret.”

  “He should be.”

  “Maybe. But.”

  “There is no but.” He looked steadily out the window, then back at her. His gaze was unforgiving.

  It occurred then to Ginny that she didn’t know what she thought. If you removed yourself from the specifics—the sex, the physicality of all of it, the mess— then who knew what it all meant, to Tom or to Lillian or to their marriage? Who knew anything, really?

  She drank from her wineglass. She had a vision of Lillian as a single mother, of Olivia growing up without a father. Of Philip in the yard five years hence, nobody to play catch with. It was unbearable, all of it: the thought of Lillian staying with Tom, and the thought of her leaving him for good. The thought of her staying with them indefinitely, and the thought of her not staying with them any longer.

  They sat without speaking while the waitress cleared their dinner plates and poured the rest of the bottle of wine into their glasses. “Dessert?” she said.

  “No,” said Ginny.

  “Yes,” said William.

  “I’ll bring the menus anyway,” said the waitress. “And you can take a look.”

  When she had gone Ginny took a sip of her wine and said, in a shaky voice, “William? Do you think we’ve done something wrong?”

  “What? How?”

  “That they’re all so—unhappy?”

  “They’re not all unhappy.” William’s voice had softened. He reached across the table and put his hands on Ginny’s. She forgot sometimes how big his hands were, how capable of covering her own completely, making them disappear.

  “But they are. Stephen and Jane are miserable. Every time he comes out of that room it looks like they’ve been fighting—”

  “Well, naturally. Jane has been confined to a bedroom for nearly six weeks, and not even in her own bedroom, mind you. And Stephen has to take care of her in his parents’ house. Nightmare situation, really.”

  “Nightmare,” agreed Ginny.

  “But temporary. When the baby comes it will all be all right.”

  “But will it? Or will that just bring another set of complications, but different ones?”

  “Well. Of course. But it’s a baby. Complications are part of it. It’s easy to forgive a lot when there’s a baby in the room. You, of all people. You know that!”

  “And Rachel—”

  “Rachel is struggling. Also temporarily.”

  She thought of the check. “But they’re all struggling! In one way or another they’re all struggling.”

  He leaned toward her and tightened his hold on her hand. “And weren’t we ever struggling, when we were their ages?”

  Ginny lifted her head to look at him. “I don’t know. It seems to me we had the basics.”

  He sat back and wiped his face. “Now it seems that way. But back then? Who knows! We were young. Poor. We didn’t have the faintest idea what we were doing.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. Remember that time Rachel knocked over an entire can of paint on the kitchen floor? And we didn’t notice until she’d crawled across the den?”

  Ginny laughed. “I remember.”

  “And Stephen and Lillian watched the whole thing happen—”

  “But they didn’t say anything!”

  “Because they wanted to see what knee prints would look like on a floor. How different they’d be from footprints.”

  “God,” said Ginny. “I’d forgotten all about that. Disaster. One of many.”

  “You see? For all parents, sometimes.” He sobered then, and squeezed her hand before letting it go. The waitress returned with the dessert menus, which were as elegant as wedding invitations. William squinted to read the tiny font. Then he put the menu down and looked sharply at Ginny.

  “Why are you taking it so personally?”

  She thought about that. Then she took a deep breath and touched her hair. She didn’t look directly at William when she answered, because she thought that if she did she might begin to cry.

  “Because they’re my life’s work.”

  He remained silent, watching her, listening.

  “If they’re not happy—if they’re not capable of living on their own, and being happy— it means I’ve failed. I should take it personally.”

  “Oh, Ginny.” He reached across the table and laid his hand on her cheek. She pressed it in closer.

  “This is it,” she said. “I’m sixty-three years old. This is what I’ve done with my life. They’re my masterpiece, and they’re broken.”

  “Ginny, Ginny,” he said tenderly, and they sat like that for a while, and the waitress, coming back to take their dessert orders, must have sensed something momentous, because she backed away slowly and left them there, sitting by the window.

  Rachel dialed the landlord’s phone number. He was a squat Lebanese man with kind brown eyes and thick forearms. She pictured him surrounded by a large brood of similarly dark-haired, dark-eyed children, in an apartment in Queens, a place with lots of rugs with complicated designs and a spicy aroma emanating throughout.

  She had deposited William’s check in her account. But that money was long gone. She had owed a horrendous amount on her cell phone bill, and she was past due on her credit card, and now she owed Whitney for the bridesmaid dress: she was still short.

&nbs
p; Breathe, she told herself. Breathe deeply.

  She was willing to beg for mercy. She was willing to do anything. She would go on some sort of payment plan. She would babysit the brood of Lebanese children!

  “It’s paid,” he said. “You’re off the hook.”

  “What do you mean, paid?” Rachel felt a flutter somewhere behind her collarbone.

  “Paid,” he said. “You don’t owe. August is paid. You’re okay until September.”

  “Who paid?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Got the check, cashed it, didn’t look. Don’t care.”

  Next she called Marcus. He was somewhere outside; she could hear the sirens, the squeal of traffic. Suddenly she missed the city, the noise and heat, the window air-conditioning units spitting onto the street. She missed the prim little dogs with bows in their hair. She missed the anonymity, the sense that at any point, if you wanted to, you could disappear.

  “Did you?” she said immediately.

  “Did I what?”

  “Did you pay the rent for me?”

  Silence. In the background she heard someone yell, “What the fuck, man?”

  “I don’t know,” said Marcus. “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “Someone did.”

  “Well, then, I guess maybe I did.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not? I had it, and you didn’t. That’s all.”

  “It’s that simple?”

  She thought again of her apartment, and how lonely, how half inhabited, it had seemed after Marcus left. How she dreaded being by herself. But now, after weeks on the air mattress, after nights listening to Olivia breathe while she struggled to get to sleep, after mornings elbowing for room at the breakfast table, the solitude she had eschewed seemed suddenly appealing. Because, after all, why did solitude have to be lonely? It didn’t, of course. Not if you allowed your mind to focus elsewhere. New York City was chock-full of people living successfully on their own: fulfilled, engaged, even happy.