“I think she’s got as good a shot as we could hope for,” he said. Andrew had watched his child die. He was well beyond considerations of pessimism or optimism. But he did not want Anna to be, and he did not want her to have to understand. “I think the lawyers are terrific,” he said. “And, of course, she’s innocent. So we’ve got that going for us.”
A shiver went across Anna’s jaw. “Of course,” she said. Her eyes were like bolts. She hated that he’d said it, maybe because it was so obvious. But then, Andrew wasn’t above stating the obvious. He was the parent. More than anything, perhaps, that was his job.
“Once,” said Anna, “just once, could you tell me that everything is going to be okay?”
Andrew nodded. “I could. I could tell you that. And it might be. That’s certainly what we all are hoping and working for. But you’re an adult now. And this might be a very long haul. And I want you to be prepared for anything.”
“Do we? Do we eternally have to be prepared for anything?”
“It seems that we do, often enough.”
Anna turned and faced the window. The light caught her flyaway hair, and she looked frenzied and, Andrew thought, angelic. His daughter. His one daughter, living and free. “I’m sorry, Old Sport,” he said.
“I hate that you call me that, you know.”
“I—you what? I didn’t know that.”
“You wouldn’t have.”
“You really hate it? It makes me feel ironical and literary.”
“That is exactly why.”
Andrew felt stung in a nearly physical way. He thought inexplicably of those furry little creatures in Australia, the ones with the vestigial, frighteningly nonmammalian stingers. “You could have told me,” he said.
“Well, I just did.” Anna stomped over to her suitcase and produced a plastic bag. Platypuses, that was what those animals were. “I bought these things for Lily,” she said, pulling out soap, toilet paper, tampons. Shampoo with cursive writing on it. A razor.
“Where did you get all that stuff?” said Andrew. “Did you go out?”
“For Christ’s sake, Dad. No. I went to the little store in the lobby.”
“They’re not going to let her have the razor.”
“Okay,” said Anna, putting the razor back in the bag. “Fine. But we need to get her these other things. She needs them.”
“We can’t get back there until Thursday, sweetie.” Was he going to have to call her “sweetie” from now on? Surely that was worse.
“She needs them,” Anna said again.
“I know,” said Andrew. “But she’ll manage. She’s been managing already.” He heard his own voice and realized he was angry. He wished he had gotten the things for Lily himself—even though it did not matter, not really. They could not see her until Thursday, anyway, and so it could not make a difference whether the things were purchased today or three days from now. And yet there was something galling about Anna having done it; Andrew imagined her walking into that lobby, flushed with exercise, meting out her foreign currency (saved from her various jobs, and then exchanged at a loss in the airport), and then selecting the best versions of whatever it was she thought Lily might need. All of this, all of this, was the job of a parent. In its unsentimental practicality it was, perhaps, the job of a father. It did not matter—of course it did not matter. And yet there was so little that could be done for Lily. Andrew couldn’t help but feel it was ungenerous of Anna to do it all herself.
“You don’t understand,” said Anna, and Andrew heard the strange timbre in her voice that used to mean tears. She coughed herself into a more serious register. “You don’t understand anything about it.”
About what? he wanted to ask. About not being able to get what you wanted? Even the narrow-minded narcissism of children should be able to accommodate enough generosity toward their parents for Anna to understand that this was not true—probably not in anyone’s case, and certainly not in his.
“We’ll get her the things she needs, Anna,” he said. The things you need and do not get and nevertheless manage to survive without—were those things ever really needs? If somebody’s need was vast, and eternally unmet, and nonfatal, had what seemed necessary really only been desirous? After Janie died, everyone was always asking Andrew if he was okay, and he never knew what to say. Because what, really, was on the other side of okay? When you stopped being okay, you were just okay in a worse and different way.
“We’ll get them to her just as soon as we can,” he said.
Anna nodded seriously.
“You were very good to think of them,” said Andrew. He hoped he sounded as tired as he felt.
“Well,” said Anna, and her voice was stronger, the voice of an adult or a pragmatist. “It was the least I could do.”
The next morning Maureen arrived.
Andrew had tracked her flight online in the hotel’s business center, calculating how long it would take her to find her luggage and hail a taxi and traverse the city’s allegedly Parisian boulevards. He waited until he thought she’d probably checked in to the hotel, then forced himself to wait ninety minutes more. Finally, he got in the elevator and rode down a floor—to room 408, which was, he figured, nearly directly below his own—and knocked on her door.
She appeared after a moment. “Hello, Maureen,” said Andrew. He wanted to tell her she looked great, though the tone seemed off, and, anyway, she didn’t. Her hair was messy—probably from sleeping thrashily on the plane—and under her eyes were two bluish pits of exhaustion. He tried to detect if she was thinner than usual; he couldn’t tell.
“Hello, dear,” said Maureen. She always called him something sweet and absolving and fond, and he always called her “Maureen.” Andrew wasn’t sure what this meant about who wanted or expected more from their postdivorce relationship, or who’d summoned greater depths of humanity or charity in their dealings, but he suspected that they’d both staked some kind of bet on their own way of doing things and he now felt fully committed to his own. They hugged with elaborate formality, which they always did, although Andrew never quite knew why. After everything they had been through together, they should slump against each other now like brothers, or puppies, or soldiers, or mental patients; the proximity of their bodies should be utterly meaningless. And yet a crisp distance had grown up between them, vinelike and intricate, and when Andrew touched Maureen, feeling the forbidding landscape of her clavicle through her T-shirt, he sensed the assertion of a new strangeness. She smelled like the airplane, vaguely clinical and foreign, nothing like her smell from their marriage—he remembered the faint chivelike scent of her body underneath some rose perfume she had that always made him sneeze.
Maureen pulled away and patted him neutrally on the shoulder. “How are you holding up?”
“Okay,” said Andrew. “You know.”
Maureen nodded and gave him that rueful look of hers he sometimes found so annoying—there was something about it that reminded him faintly of an expression of reproach, as though Andrew had failed her terribly but she was going to be a tremendous good sport about it. Maybe that was the problem with this family—they were all in direct competition with one another to see who could bend over backward the farthest, who could suffer the most. But then, Andrew reminded himself, he and Maureen had unlinked themselves in order to disrupt these precise dynamics. They were not a family anymore; they were only old friends, and pretty decent ones at that.
“How is she?” said Maureen.
“She seems okay,” said Andrew. “She’s holding up.”
Maureen raised an eyebrow, but Andrew already knew that this answer was insufficient. Over the brief years of Janie’s life and death, he and Maureen had developed an involved shorthand, rife with pseudonyms and talismans and symbols, complete with its own vocabulary and syntax and etiquette. Certain euphemisms were encouraged; others were scorned. Referencing the possibility of Janie’s death was unacceptable, but it was also unacceptable to use the phrase “passed
away” to refer to the deaths of the other children on the ward—and the other children died, too; they died horribly and they died quietly and their deaths were the deaths that prophesied Janie’s death, that made it thinkable though, of course, not endurable, and certainly never mentionable. When Andrew and Maureen were forced to mark the fact of the other children’s deaths, they did not say that those children had passed away. They said that they had died. They understood—they had tacitly agreed—that anything evasive was disrespectful. She’s holding up was, Andrew knew, just about the worst thing he could say to Maureen.
Maureen pursed her lips. “How does she look?”
“The same. Mostly.”
“Did she seem upset?”
“I mean, not visibly.”
“What do you mean, ‘not visibly’?”
Andrew squirmed. “I mean—she wasn’t crying or anything.”
“She stopped crying already?”
“Had she been?” In every conversation Andrew had had with her, Lily had seemed tired but brave, determined to show him that she was as tough as they’d always told her she was. Andrew thought of her now—crying and concealing this in order to protect him—and he knew that this was a bigger and worse kind of trouble.
Maureen’s face was crumpling into an expression of terrible kindness. “Do you want to come in and sit for a bit?”
In the room, Maureen’s clothes were spread across the bed, delicate cardigans and wool pants, things that looked all wrong for the weather. Maureen always dressed cartoonishly warmly, because she was always cold.
“It occurs to me that I don’t have anything to offer you that you don’t already have in your own room,” she said, peering into the mini-fridge. “You want a soda? Granola bar? Shot and a half of vodka?”
“I’m okay,” said Andrew, sitting heavily on the bed.
“Did you get her those things she wanted?” said Maureen. She was still bent over the mini-fridge. “The tampons and the shampoo and whatnot?”
“Anna got them.”
“Oh.”
There was nothing fraught about this “oh”—no hint of surprise or guilt-tripping, just the monosyllabic acknowledgment of information received—but it made Andrew defensive nonetheless. “You probably know better how she’s doing than I do, you know,” he said. “I mean, obviously.”
“I’m sure that’s not true,” said Maureen, standing up. “It’s just that she talks to me. She’s a girl.”
“They were all girls,” said Andrew darkly. He wondered if Maureen had known about Lily’s smoking, but he was afraid to ask; he felt that it would be understood to be his fault somehow—perhaps because he’d discovered it, perhaps because of some kind of labor division he’d never been briefed on (Maureen handles the sex, Andrew handles the carcinogens?)—and that he’d be revealed as a fool for not knowing why.
“They were all girls,” said Maureen. “But you really can’t blame me for that.”
Andrew nodded, though part of him vaguely suspected that he could, a little. It wasn’t that he didn’t love his daughters—and yes, in a way, he still loved Maureen, with a strange and calcified love. But the fact of their united femininity could sometimes seem a bit prosecutorial.
Suddenly, a whip-crack sound issued from outside. “Jesus.” Andrew hurried to the window. “Is that a gun?”
Maureen joined him. Across the street, in a small park, two young men were indeed holding guns, though nobody around seemed particularly nervous, besides a flock of scattering birds.
“I think they’re just trying to spook the pigeons,” said Maureen. She had not jumped when the gun went off. It was admirable and also suspicious, this tendency of hers not to jump.
“I wonder why,” said Andrew, though he wasn’t really wondering. He went back to sit on the bed.
Maureen lingered a moment, staring into the gathering darkness. “What did you think of the lawyers?” she said, turning around.
“They seem competent,” said Andrew. This was a keyword from assessing Janie’s doctors in the days before the Internet—when, after poring over medical texts at the library, after seeking third and fourth opinions, Andrew and Maureen had had to basically guess at who was right and what was true. The sheen of competence had always impressed them. It seemed possible to smell bullshit, and fear, even if you didn’t know all the details.
“Good,” said Maureen, coming to join Andrew on the bed. She squeezed his hand dryly, asexually. Andrew looked down at hers—it was sturdy and unadorned, slightly shaky from the effects of the terrifying boatloads of caffeine she must have consumed. He knew she was letting him off the hook—that it was understood that there was more to say, but that, for now, she was going to pretend that he had said enough. “Well,” she said. “I think you know what we could really use about now.”
“Some crystals,” said Andrew automatically. “Maybe in a pendant or something.” It was generous of her to give him the punch line to this most ancient and exclusive of in-jokes—dating back to the day during the darkest season of Janie’s illness when the hippie neighbors had called and invited Andrew and Maureen meaningfully over for tea and then had clutched their hands and given them a pile of greasy crystals instead. Maureen had laughed-choked-cried afterward: Crystals? They schedule a fucking appointment like that and then they give us fucking crystals? Crystals? Crystals? She’d said “crystals” over and over, with slightly varied intonations and ever more absurd facial expressions, until they were both laughing, laughing a complicated and manic and dangerous laugh on the floor, letting their aging bones hit hard against each other’s, commenting on the amount of grime that had been allowed to grow on the linoleum. It was the grime of people on the edge, said Maureen, and then they’d laughed some more, but not because it wasn’t true. In those days, Andrew had been closer to Maureen than he could have imagined being to anybody else—they’d had a closeness that was stranger and more frightening and more desperately necessary than anything he’d felt during the early days of their love. Maureen was the only one who could possibly understand the central fact and premise of his life; speaking to anyone else began to feel like a theatrical performance in which Andrew was increasingly badly cast. But this kind of closeness could go on only so long. After everything was over, they’d had absolutely nothing left to say to each other.
“A crystal pendant would be nice,” said Maureen. “Though I’m thinking this situation might require more serious crystal intervention.” She lay back in a chaste and exhausted heap, and Andrew followed her.
“Can you mainline crystals, I wonder?”
“Oh, that’s an idea,” said Maureen. “Maybe you can ask your students?” She was quiet for a moment, and Andrew imagined what the two of them would look like from above. They were two terrified teenagers in a foxhole, two infant children terminally conjoined at the cranium.
“I can’t believe she did a cartwheel,” said Maureen, not opening her eyes. “I mean, who knew she could even still do one?”
“Well, we spent enough on gymnastics.”
“Christ, did we,” said Maureen. “So many lessons.”
So many lessons, it was true: art and music and ice-skating; Lily’s every fleeting interest enthusiastically, abundantly indulged. Not to mention the many more practical investments—chemistry tutoring when she struggled, English enrichment when she excelled, SAT courses to propel her to the school and then, presumably, the career of her dreams. What costs had been sunk, what objections had been suppressed, to deliver their daughter into the open and waiting arms of her beautiful life.
“Whatever happened to her oboe?” said Andrew.
“That poor oboe. It suffered so much.”
“Remember Oklahoma!”
During Lily’s rendition of “People Will Say We’re in Love,” Maureen had leaned over to Andrew and remarked on how very much their daughter sounded like a Canada goose, which had made them both laugh hard enough to be shushed by other parents.
“God,” said M
aureen, laughing. “What a terrible mother I was.”
“Speaking of terrible parents,” said Andrew. “I went to see Sebastien LeCompte.”
“Did you really?” Maureen’s voice was hoarse, and Andrew thought of how tired she must be. “What’s he like?”
“He’s absurd. Affected. He looks like a homosexual pirate.”
Maureen moved her head in the way she did when she was acknowledging that what you’d said was funny, and that she would laugh if she had the energy. “Well,” she said, “she inherited her mother’s taste in men, didn’t she?”
“He looks like a postapocalyptic butler.”
“A butler and a pirate? Astonishing.”
“But he believes her.”
“Of course he believes her. Why wouldn’t he?”
“A reasonable question.”
“I’m always reasonable.”
“I know,” said Andrew, a little testily. It was true: Maureen always had been reasonable. He was starting to wonder if all this reasonableness was maybe part of the problem.
“I want to say we should have never let her come here, but that’s stupid,” Maureen was saying. “This could have happened anywhere.”
Maybe all the reasonableness—the latitude, the lessons, the open avenues of communication, the floods of communication!—was exactly their mistake. Lily had learned the oboe, sort of—but she had somehow never learned that the universe needed no excuse to fuck with you, no excuse at all, so you sure as hell better not give it one.
“It could have happened anywhere,” said Andrew. “But it happened here.” Lily. Dear Lily Pad. For the first two years of her life, she’d been their “only living daughter,” their “sole surviving child”; she had been their gem—hard-won, hard-edged. They had harnessed their sadness in order to raise her, like rivers diverted to run beneath a city. After all of that, how could they not have told her everything she needed to know?
“Did we do this wrong?” he said.
Maureen was silent for a long while, and Andrew wondered if perhaps she had fallen asleep. But finally, just as he was about to tiptoe out of the room, she spoke.
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