I pushed myself sideways in my chair, moving from under his grasp, so I could look my father in the eye.
Until that moment, I don’t recall ever having disagreed with him—not out loud—that was my sister’s job. Mari was the pot-stirrer. I was the peacemaker. But there is a price to keeping the peace and, sometimes, it’s too high.
“Why would you say that? I own my own home. I have a job, a savings account. And I’m forty years old. I’m an adult, Dad. I have been for a long time. I haven’t borrowed a dime from you since the day I graduated, not even when I was laid off. I’ve always taken care of myself and I can take care of Olivia too.”
My mother leaned forward in her chair. “Margot, Dad isn’t saying that you can’t take care of yourself. We’re very proud of you. It’s just that—”
“Just that what?”
“Don’t interrupt your mother. And don’t speak to her in that tone!”
“I’m sorry,” I said, purposely modulating my voice and opening my hands, trying to adopt a less defensive posture. “I’m not trying to be disrespectful, but … you can’t have it both ways. You can’t say you’re proud of me in one breath and say I’m unfit for motherhood in the next. It’s not fair,” I said, swallowing hard as I felt my eyes begin to tear. “And it’s not true.”
His expression of anger replaced by sympathy, my father reached out and touched my shoulder again.
“That’s not what I meant. You’d be a wonderful mother, but a child needs two parents. That’s what Olivia should have had all along, a real family, with a mother and a father. Now she can.” He squeezed my shoulder. “You see that. Don’t you, Bunny?”
17
Margot
Philippa was insistent. “Now that Olivia is stable you need to go out. Do something normal, see your friends.”
“She’s right,” Nurse Trina said. “The sofa in the waiting area is starting to form a dent where you’ve been sleeping on it. If anything happens, I’ll call you. You should get out for a little while at least. You haven’t set foot outside the hospital since Christmas.”
Was it only Christmas since all this had begun? It seemed so much longer.
Since the accident the hospital had become my whole world. It was hard to remember that, outside those walls, not so far from the smell of disinfectant and the yellow-white glow of fluorescent lights, the soft squashy sound of nurses’ rubber-soled shoes on linoleum floors, the beep and buzz and whoosh of medical machinery, the clatter of soda cans falling from vending machines in the waiting rooms, and the drone of televisions left on through the night by patients who couldn’t sleep and loved ones who wouldn’t, life went on just as it always had.
Philippa and Trina had a point. Now that the immediate danger had passed, I had to reconnect with the outside world and my community. If I was going to raise a child on my own, I would need help. I would need my friends.
It was New Year’s Eve, but the Cobbled Court Quilt Circle was gathered up in the workroom above the quilt shop, just like every Friday.
Only two weeks had passed since I’d been in this same room, at my usual spot in front of the same sewing machine. Tonight, however, I hadn’t sewn a stitch. My glass of wine stood on the table untouched, next to a brownie with one bite out of it and my cell phone, out where I could see it and answer immediately if Trina called. So strange that things were so normal.
“I’m sorry,” I said, pausing to take a breath. “I don’t mean to keep going on. You probably have plans for the evening—parties and dates and things.”
“Not me,” Virginia said. “I haven’t gone out for New Year’s Eve in forty years. It’s dangerous; too many drunks on the roads. I’ll be in bed and asleep by ten o’clock.”
“Which is the same time I’m due to meet Charlie at the restaurant,” Evelyn added. “Until then, I’m all yours.”
Ivy, who was stitching the binding, used her teeth to bite off the end of a thread. “I’ve never had a date for New Year’s. I never have any dates. Isn’t that sad?”
“We’re your dates,” Virginia said. “Just like every Friday.”
“I’m not sure that counts.”
“Why not?” Abigail asked, pausing to pick some stray threads off her black velvet skirt. I’ve never seen anyone quilt in an evening gown, but Abigail acts as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “I have more fun sewing with all of you on Friday nights than I ever had when I was dating.”
“Including your dates with Franklin?” Ivy asked.
“Franklin was different. A prince of a man,” Abigail said, looking rather regal herself. “If not, I’d never have married him. Ivy, most men are either perfect boors or perfectly boring. You, of all people, should know that.”
“I suppose.” Ivy sighed as she pulled a new length of thread from the spool.
Abigail frowned. “Oh, for heaven’s sake. First Margot, now you. You’re not moaning because there’s no man in your life, are you?”
Ivy’s face broke into a grin and her mask of misery disappeared. “No. I’m just hungry. I figured I’d stand a better chance of snagging the last brownie if you felt sorry for me.”
“You’re terrible,” Abigail scolded, then handed her the plate. “Here.”
“Sure you don’t mind?” Ivy’s hand hovered over the brownie as she scanned the faces of the group. “Anybody? Last chance.”
Abigail held up her hand. “I’m having trouble squeezing into a bathing suit as it is. I don’t know why we’re going out,” she grumbled. “Our flight to Bermuda leaves at ten-thirty. We’ll be lucky to get five hours sleep. And I don’t see why we always—”
“Yes,” Evelyn interrupted, giving Abigail a pointed look over the top of her reading glasses and tilting her head in my direction. “Your life is a perfect nightmare, Abbie. Too many parties. Too many trips to exotic locations. Absolutely fraught with worries and problems.”
Abigail took the hint. “Oh. Yes.”
She turned to look at me. “Margot, that was an extremely insensitive thing for your father to say, but I’m sure he didn’t mean it.”
“Oh yes, he did. I’ve said the same thing myself. And in this very room.”
“Well, in a perfect world,” Ivy mumbled through a mouth full of brownie, “I agree with you; a family with two happy, loving parents is the ideal. But the world isn’t perfect, and my kids are much better off living with just a mother than they would be living with a mother and an abusive father. Don’t worry so much. You’ll be a great mother, Margot.”
“I hope so. My mother was a great mother, and my father …” It felt a bit disloyal, speaking about my dad to my friends, but I really needed to talk this out with people who I trusted, who would tell me the truth.
“He has his faults, but he really cared about us. He just didn’t always know the right way to show it. In a lot of ways, he and Mari were just too much alike.” I sighed. “Do you think I’m being selfish? Maybe Olivia would be better off with my folks.”
Evelyn put down the quilt block she’d been trimming and looked at me. “Do you really believe that?”
It was a good question, but hard to answer.
In many ways, my childhood was idyllic. My mom stayed home to take care of my sister and me, fixing us a hot breakfast and walking us to the bus each morning, welcoming us back from school with a glass of milk and homemade cookies every afternoon, helping us with our homework, tucking us into bed every night. Dad worked hard, but he always made time for us, especially when we were little. In the summertime, we loved to help him work in the garden, growing beans and tomatoes and fat orange pumpkins to carve into jack-o’-lanterns in the fall. In the wintertime, he’d take us sledding and skating and help organize snowball wars for all the kids on our block. And he built us a tree house that was the envy of the neighborhood.
My father was and is a very loving man. But Dad was also a hard man, a man of high standards, standards he applied to himself and to his children. That’s not all bad. I owe much of
my success to Dad. I wanted so much to make my father proud, and I worked hard to do so.
But it was different with Mari.
School was a struggle for my sister, even when she worked hard. By the time she got to junior high, she stopped working hard. I think she got tired of putting in so much effort and seeing so little result. That’s when her relationship with my father started to unravel. The blunt-spoken criticisms Dad intended as encouragement and advice, my sister took in the worst possible light. Mari started to talk back and act out. She flaunted the rules, skipped class, ignored curfews, started hanging out with a rough crowd, and did everything possible to push my father’s buttons.
It worked. Our formerly calm and happy home became a battleground with daily arguments erupting between my father and sister while Mom and I played duck and cover, she in the kitchen and me in my bedroom, waiting for it all to be over.
One day, it was.
Three days after her sixteenth birthday, Mari ran away. My parents were frantic. They called the police, even hired a private investigator. No one could find her. We didn’t hear from her for almost four years.
She called me from a rehab center. I was twenty-three, recently graduated from college, working at an entry-level marketing job in Manhattan, living in an apartment with two other girls. I talked my roommates into letting Mari move in after she finished rehab, and they agreed. Mari came to live with me, but she didn’t stay for long.
For years, that was the pattern. Mari would disappear for months or years at a time, then she’d reappear, call me or Mom, usually me, from some rehab program, ask to move in with one of us while she got her life on track, only to jump the track after a few weeks or months and disappear again.
Seven years ago, Mari called from Pittsburgh to say she was back in rehab and needed my help. She needed money. Enough so she could rent a place of her own until she could find a job. Moving back in with the family, she told me, put too much pressure on her, summoned up too many bad memories and old patterns.
“I know you’ve been burned before, Margot, but it’s going to be different this time. I promise. I’m going to get clean and I’m going to stay clean. I swear I am.”
I’d heard it all before, of course, word for word, but there was something in my sister’s voice, desperation, but also a kind of hope, that made me want to believe her. If she’d just been asking for a place to stay, I’d have said yes without any hesitation. But she wanted money. The office rumor mill said that a round of layoffs was due any day and that the marketing department would be first on the chopping block. I’d bought a weekend cottage in New Bern only a year before. After the down payment and closing costs, I only had six thousand left in savings. My rent in Manhattan ran twenty-five hundred a month, so that wasn’t much of a safety net. And as much as I wanted to believe what my sister said, that this trip to rehab would be her last, I knew that handing money to an addict and expecting them not to spend it on drugs was like putting a sir-loin steak in front of a dog and asking him not to eat it.
“Mari, I want to help, but … things are hard for me right now. There’s a rumor that my company—”
“Margot, I’m pregnant.”
“You’re what?”
I’d heard her perfectly well; I just couldn’t believe what I’d heard.
“Pregnant!” she shouted and then squealed with excitement. I couldn’t see her face, but I could hear her smile through the phone line. “I didn’t plan it. But now that she’s coming, I’m just so happy.”
“She? It’s a girl?”
“Well, it’s too early to know for sure but, yeah, it’s a little girl. I’m sure of it. And, Margot, I’m going to be a good mother, I am! I’m going to turn my life around for good, for both of us. I have to. But I need your help. Just for a little while. If it were just for me, I wouldn’t ask, but … Please, Margot … We’ve got no one else to turn to.”
“What about the father?”
“I don’t know who it is,” she said softly. “I know how bad that sounds, Margot. I know I’ve screwed everything up, but … but that’s all over now. Please don’t judge me.”
“Oh, Mari.”
The plaintive tone of her voice pulled me up short, filled me with shame. What had I done or said to make my sister think that I stood in judgment over her? No one in this world can afford to throw stones, me least of all.
“I’m not judging you. I just want to help you. Did you talk to Mom and Dad?”
Mari was quiet for a moment. “I called them first.”
I didn’t ask what their reaction had been. I didn’t have to. If it had been good, she wouldn’t be calling me.
“No,” I said firmly, answering Evelyn and settling the matter in my mind. “My parents are too old to parent a six-year-old.”
I didn’t tell them about my other reasons for reaching this conclusion. Even among your closest and best-intentioned friends, some things should remain private. Just as I was bound by blood to help my sister when she asked, so I am bound by my faith to honor my father and mother. But honoring my parents didn’t necessarily mean doing everything they wanted me to do—not when conscience and common sense told me to do otherwise. Not when the interests of a child were at stake.
And didn’t the admonition to respect parents extend to my sister too? Whatever mistakes Mari made in her life, when it came to mothering, she was dedicated and selfless, doing for her child what she could not or would not do for herself. She would have walked through the fires of hell for Olivia. In some ways, she did. Everything she did, no matter how hard, she did with Olivia’s welfare in mind.
Now I had to do the same.
“So, what do you do now?” Ivy asked. “Will you sue for custody?”
“I don’t want to,” I said. “I don’t think families should have to go to court to settle their differences.”
“But if it comes to that, will you?”
“My parents have hired an attorney.”
Evelyn offered to give me a lift home, but I want to walk. I’m hoping the cold air will clear my head.
Since the accident, I feel like I’ve been living underwater. People say things to me, but the words are muffled in my mind. They do things to me, but I am numb to their impact, unable to understand their actions or sort out what provoked them. I’m going through the motions, doing what I must, but stupidly and slowly, as if trying to wake from a deep sleep, to shake off a bad dream that refuses to end.
No one is on the street this time of night. The shop windows are dark and the doors all locked. It is snowing, but lightly. Banks of clouds cover the moon, and the only light comes from the soft glow of the antique style street lamps. I walk west down Commerce Street, moving from one lamp to the next like a sailor following a line of buoys that lead to a safe harbor. I try to think, to feel, to figure out what I should do, but the thoughts, feelings, plans come to me in a chaotic jumble and leave no marks, bouncing in and out and off so quickly that I can’t sort through them.
Glancing across the street to the Green, I see a figure in white standing in the shadows, just at the spot where a circle of lamplight gives way to the darkness. For a moment, before I remember that I don’t believe in such things, I wonder if I am seeing a ghost, if perhaps my sister’s soul is searching me out. The prospect isn’t as frightening as I’d have thought.
My heart pounds and I feel a sudden lurch of joyful expectation, the first full-blown emotion I’ve felt in days, like pushing up from the bottom of a deep pool and discovering I can breathe again. But as I step off the curb, I see that the apparition in white isn’t a ghost, only a snowman made by children who were playing on the Green. The pounding in my chest stops, or at least ceases to make itself felt, and suddenly, I am underwater again.
Walking across the snowy street, I feel wet on my cheeks and know that I am crying, that my body is responding to the grief that I won’t let myself feel.
I want to see my sister. I want to bring her back, to see her one more time, t
o ask her what to think, how to feel, how to do the one thing I have never been able to do—fight—to ask her if she is sure, really sure, that this fight is worth it.
If Mari is not here to raise Olivia herself, is it really so important which damaged and dysfunctional member of the family fails to fill her shoes? Now that she is far from this world, removed from the wounds and recriminations of the past, able to see life, not just as it is now but as it will be in time to come, past walls that separate what seems to be and into the substance of what is, perhaps she has changed her mind.
I want to ask her so many things, and so on the dark and deserted Green, with icy flakes of snow hitting my face, mixing and melting as they meet the warmth of my tears, I do what Mari and I used to do when we were little and built snowpeople in the park, in those days when my left hand was always cold because Mari was forever losing her mittens and I always gave her one of mine, back when we were young enough to believe that snowmen could come to life and too young to imagine unhappy endings: I pretend.
“Are you sure?” I ask the snowman, my absent sister’s stand-in. “I know you’re angry with them and I don’t blame you, but if this is just about getting back at Mom and Dad …”
The black pebble eyes stare at me accusingly.
Do you really think I’d let my personal grievances get in the way of what’s best for Olivia? This isn’t about me and you know it. It’s about him. About them.
“I know ….”
And I do know, in a way I never did before. My father has done and said some awful things, but I’ve always excused him because I believed that the good in him outweighed the bad and because, if I am honest, the worst of it was never directed at me. Mari bore the brunt of his anger, and I let her. I never said anything because I was afraid of rocking the boat and violating the complicated set of rules that are the cost of keeping the peace and my father’s favor.
Ties That Bind Page 9
