Together Alone

by Barbara Delinsky

  Now she was losing her grip.

  It had to be, but that fact didn’t ease Emily’s dread. The time was too short, four days gone in a flash. Before it seemed at all possible, Emily found herself behind the wheel of the wagon, with Jill’s eyes fixed on the turnpike ahead, and every inch of spare space behind them filled.

  Emily tried to think of what might have been forgotten. “Do you have your bank check?” It represented Jill’s summer’s earnings and would be her spending money at school.

  “In my wallet.”

  “Your tuition receipt?” She had to show it to get her dorm key.

  “In my pocket.”

  “The campus map?”

  “Right here,” held aloft in the tightest of grips.

  “Careful. Don’t crush it.”

  Jill relaxed her hand.

  As they passed Springfield, Emily tried to think of last bits of advice. Time was running out fast. “You should be able to pick up curtains and a carpet at stores on the edge of campus.”

  “I know. I have a list of places.”

  “Go with your roommate.”

  “Of course.”

  “Don’t wander around alone.”

  “I’ll be fine, Mom.”

  They passed Worcester. As straight as the road was, Emily’s stomach swerved.

  “Say no like you mean it.”

  “Huh?”

  “If some boy tries to pressure you. Be firm. Use your knee.”

  Jill sighed loudly.

  When they passed the Weston tolls and Boston materialized on the horizon, Emily felt a crowding of emotion, overlaid with hollowness, shot with dread. Then Jill took her hand.

  They said little more for the rest of the trip, holding hands that way until they pulled off at the Cambridge tolls, and then life switched to fast-forward. They found the dorm and unloaded the car. They met Jill’s roommate and the girls across the hall, down the hall, and around the corner. They put things in drawers. They filled the closet, made the bed, spread Myra’s afghan. They set up a desk lamp and the answering machine and Jill’s computer.

  Fast-forward ended abruptly, with the room as neat as it would probably be for the rest of the term, and nothing else for Emily to do. So they sat on Jill’s bed, just the two of them plastered side by side, and looked at the pictures Jill had brought. There was one of Jill and five friends, crowding together in laughter at the Davieses’ party, one of Jill and her two best friends, Marilee and Dawn, one of the same three girls and their mothers.

  “I like this one a lot,” Emily remarked. The other mothers, Kay and Celeste, were her own two closest friends. She had a copy of the print on her kitchen corkboard. “And this one a whole lot.” It was a montage of five of the Larry prints, with Emily and Jill in varying states of connection.

  “My sister,” Jill teased.

  “Your mother.”

  “They’ll never guess. Just think of all that you won’t have to do with me gone.”

  Emily gave her a look. “Are you kidding? I’m spending the next month cleaning your room.”

  “Don’t touch my room. I want everything the same when I go home. I’ll clean then. It’s only seven weeks ’til fall break, less if I get lonesome. Maybe I’ll take a bus home and surprise you some weekend.”

  Emily’s throat tightened. She was losing her daughter. Oh God. “I want you to have fun here, Jill,” the rational side of her said. “These will be an incredible four years. I just know they will.”

  “What about you, Mom? Will you be okay?”

  Emily felt a thudding inside. She put an arm around Jill. “I’ll be fine.”

  “I don’t like the idea of your being alone.”

  “Your father will be home at the end of the week.”

  “Yeah. For two days, before he leaves again. Can’t you get him to stay home more? It isn’t fair to you that he’s gone all the time.”

  Emily swallowed her agreement. Loyalty to Doug made her say, “He has to work. He wouldn’t travel so much if it weren’t important.”

  “I know, but you’ve always had me before, and now you won’t.”

  “I’ll have Kay and Celeste, and John, and all the other people I know around town. I’ll have Myra, who loves to sit and talk, and if I can’t clean your room, I’ll clean the rest of the house, and when I’m done with that, I’ll do the room over the garage.”

  “My playroom?” Jill asked in dismay.

  “You haven’t played there in years. It has the potential for being a great little apartment.”

  “My friends and I loved it. Can I live there next summer?”

  “Not if someone else is paying for that privilege.”

  “You’d really rent it out?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s ours.” Which was just what Emily had told Doug when he had first suggested it. As though hearing the thought, Jill said, “Daddy’s the one who wants to do it, isn’t he?”

  Emily wondered if Jill resented Doug’s not being there at the dorm with them. Plenty of other fathers were. “Why do you think that?”

  “Because he isn’t home enough to care whether some stranger lives in our house.”

  “It’s the space over the garage,” Emily argued, as Doug had, “and it’s a good thirty feet from the house. It has a separate entrance, not even on the house side. We won’t see a thing.”

  “Was it his idea?”

  “I don’t remember whose idea it was,” Emily lied, because whose idea it was didn’t matter, “but it does make sense. The money will come in handy. Maybe then your father could stay home more.” She raised the last picture. It was another from the Larry batch. Doug was sitting on the front steps, Emily one step lower with her arm around his thigh, Jill one step higher with her arm around his neck.

  Emily had the impression that they were restraining him, deliberately holding him there, which wasn’t all that absurd, given that he had run back to answer the phone again, shortly before the shot had been snapped.

  “Nice picture,” Emily said, but suddenly she wasn’t thinking of Doug. She was thinking that the time had come, the inevitable last few grains of sand through the hourglass. She was hearing freshman sounds in the hall, knowing that Jill should be out there, not in here with her. Oh God. “I should go,” she whispered, and the tears came then, helpless tears that flowed with love. “You be good.”

  Jill threw her arms around her neck and held on tight.

  “Be good,” Emily repeated in the same choked whisper, “and have fun, and study, and call me.”

  Jill was crying, too. Emily could feel the sobbing rhythm and hated it, hated it, but loved the warmth and the closeness.

  “Call me,” Emily repeated.

  “I will. I’ll miss you. I’ll worry.”

  Emily held her back, startled by that. “Worry? About me?”

  Jill nodded, but she didn’t elaborate, and Emily was on the verge of an all-out deluge, knowing that the longer she stayed, the worse it would be. So she stood quickly, gave Jill a last hug, and ran from the room.

  She was barely out the door when she turned right back. She shouldn’t have done it, because Jill hadn’t had time to move. She was sitting alone on the bed, her face teary, looking forlorn.

  “Oh God,” Emily whispered, then said, “I’m going straight to Grannick, but I may stop at the market before I go home. If you call and I’m not there, just leave a message, and I’ll call back. We may have to do that for a while, until you start classes and things settle down. I’ll be in tonight, but not tomorrow morning. I’m having breakfast with Kay and Celeste.” She caught her breath. “Oh God,” she whispered again. She ran to the bed and gave Jill a final last hug. “Want to walk me down?”

  “Go, Mom.”

  • • •

  “It was awful,” Emily cried at the Eatery, emotional even twenty hours after the fact. “I have no idea how I found my way back to the car, and then I could barely see the road, I was crying so hard. She looked
so alone sitting there on that bed.”

  Celeste grinned. “And two minutes after you left, she was probably out in the hall having a grand time. Did you talk with her last night?”

  Emily searched her pockets for a tissue. “Uh-huh.”

  “And?”

  She blotted her eyes. “Uh-huh. A grand time. Great girls, hot guys, quote unquote. How about you? Have you heard from Dawn?”

  “Not a word, but that was the deal. She agreed to go to college in Grannick in exchange for my pretending she’s miles away. I can’t call her. She calls me. And she hasn’t.”

  “That should only be my problem,” Kay mused, catching the eye of the waitress and pointing at her coffee cup. “Three times the first day, twice yesterday. The books say that’s normal. What they don’t say is that it costs. I was forewarned about tuition, room-and-board, and textbooks, but none of them mentioned the phone bill. I’ll have to pay it before John sees it. He’ll hit the roof. He still thinks she should have gone to UMass.”

  “Hah,” Emily said. “John may make noise, but he can’t fool me.” She knew him well. She had been his friend before Kay’s, and both of those, before the girls were even born. “John is proud as punch that she’s in Washington. You wait. He’ll be looking forward to those calls.”

  “Three times a day?” Kay asked and looked impatiently around. “I need caffeine. You do know that if I didn’t love you guys so much, I’d never be here this early.”

  Emily knew about that love. Monday meetings with Kay and Celeste, sans spouses or offspring, were therapeutic. They had breakfasted through the summer and would switch back to dinners once Kay, who taught eighth-grade English, returned to work. “When does school start?”

  “Thursday. Ahhh. Here she comes.” She extended her coffee cup to the waitress with a grateful smile, then, declaring a pre-school splurge, ordered a hearty breakfast.

  Emily and Celeste ordered more modestly.

  Celeste watched the waitress leave. “Seems like yesterday our kids were taking the orders.”

  Emily knew what she meant. “It was, almost.”

  “It’s weird waking up to an empty house. I keep looking into Dawn’s room, just to make sure she’s gone.”

  “Do you miss her?” Emily wanted to know she wasn’t the only one who felt all hollowed out.

  “She just left.”

  “So did Marilee,” Kay said, “still I miss her. We’ve been separated before, and for longer periods of time than two days, but college is different. It’s significative.”

  Emily thought that sounded right.

  “It’s also about time,” Celeste avowed. “Dawn’s been my responsibility and mine alone—which is nice, when you think that I haven’t had to pander to her father all these years, and not so nice when you think of the work. I’m the one who’s had to nag and pester and bribe her to keep studying. That’s the down-side of single parenthood.”

  Just as Emily was thinking it, Kay said, “It’s the down-side of motherhood.”

  “Do I miss her?” Celeste asked. “Emotionally, yes. Practically, no. I feel relieved, like I got her where she is, and now someone else is sharing the responsibility.”

  “Who?” Emily asked, eager for reassurance. She trembled to think of Jill alone in Boston.

  “Whoever—the school, the adviser, the RA. Her. She’s responsible for more of her life. Finally.”

  “Do you think she’ll do okay?” Kay asked, with good cause. Of the three girls, Dawn was both the brightest and the most impulsive. More than once, Jill and Marilee had kept her from doing things she would have come to regret.

  Emily hoped she would find new friends to guard her like that. She worried about it even with Jill, who was eminently sensible. Jill thrived on being surrounded by friends. In the rush to align herself with a group in college, she might make a mistake. For all Emily knew, the girls on her floor, who had seemed so nice, might have been waiting for their parents to leave to show their true colors. For all Emily knew, they might want to drink themselves drunk every night, buzz-cut their hair, and snort coke. For all Emily knew, the guys would be cute and polite and thoroughly lecherous. For all Emily knew, serial killers staked out the cafeteria lines.

  Celeste didn’t seem worried. “Dawn will be fine. She knows what I expect. God only knows I’ve drummed it into her enough. Actually, her father is making noises now. Isn’t that a hoot? The shadow takes form, after all these years. She got her brains from him, and now he’s footing the bill. Little did he know when he agreed to pay her college tuition in his rush to be free of me, what it would cost.”

  “Little did any of us know,” Emily remarked. “It’s tough.”

  Celeste eyed her strangely. “Doug does well.”

  “Doing well barely meets the cost of the tuition.”

  “But he’s a single-practitioner. He markets his mind and works out of the den. He has no overhead to speak of.”

  “He has huge travel costs.”

  Celeste remained skeptical. “To look at him, you’d never know he’s anything but loaded. He was like something out of a magazine the other night.”

  “Clothes are his weakness,” Emily allowed. “Clothes and cars. But he doesn’t gamble, and he doesn’t come home with lipstick on his collar.”

  “He doesn’t come home, period.”

  “Sure, he does. He’s home most weekends.”

  “Will he come home more, now that you’re alone?” Kay asked.

  “How can he, with Jill’s bills? He has to work harder than ever.”

  Celeste made a noise. “Doesn’t it get you down, that he isn’t there more? At least I have an alimony check to warm my cold hands.”

  Yes, it got Emily down. She and Doug had been inseparable, eons ago. But she couldn’t dwell on the past. “It’s not so bad,” she said. She yawned and stretched, then set her elbows on the table and grinned. “I have the bathroom all to myself. Besides, things will be different with Jill gone. For the first time in years, weekends will be just Doug and me. Good quality time, fun, like the old days, just the two of us.” The prospect gave her hope.

  Kay sighed. “I’m envious. John knows nothing about fun.”

  “John is wonderful,” Emily argued.

  “He’s a cop. Life is one long investigation.”

  “He is decent, upstanding, and honest.”

  “Oh yes,” Kay granted. “He’s also a master worry-wart. He sees the underside of a lettuce leaf. Why do you think I pour myself into my work? If I listened to half of what he says, I’d be basket case. I don’t even have Marilee to distract me now. I’d die without a job.” She focused on Emily. “You need one.”

  “Doug doesn’t want me to work.”

  “If he isn’t here, what difference does it make?” Celeste asked. “If he isn’t here, you can do what you want.”

  “But I respect his feelings. We’ve discussed it. I’ve offered, but he says no. It’s a matter of pride.”

  “Pride? Hah! He feels threatened.”

  Emily laughed. “He does not.”

  “He’s worried that if you get a job, you might succeed at it and eclipse him. It was that way with the book.”

  “No, it wasn’t. I did that book as a favor to John. It was never intended to be anything big.”

  “You wrote a book,” Celeste argued, “and it was published. That’s one hell of an accomplishment.”

  But Emily didn’t see it that way. “I ghost-wrote it. Sam and Donnie were the ones who did the police work. They told me their story. All I did was take down their words and neaten them up.”

  Kay started to speak, stopped when their food arrived, resumed the minute the waitress left. “You did more than that, Emily. John knows it, Sam and Donnie know it, and I’d warrant Doug does, too. You listened to Sam and Donnie’s ideas, you interviewed people and verified facts, then you put everything together. You were the only one who sat at that typewriter, night after night, after Jill was in bed. It always bothered me that your n
ame wasn’t on the cover.”

  “I didn’t need it on the cover,” Emily protested, laughing again. She picked up her spoon. “It was inside. That was enough.”

  Celeste stared at her. “If it was me, I’d have milked being a published author for everything it was worth.”

  “But the work meant something to me. I didn’t do it for the money or the acclaim. Believe me, I was perfectly happy with the mention I got. I don’t aspire to be in the limelight.”

  “You may not,” Celeste said, “but I do.” She raised a piece of English muffin and held it daintily, though she wasn’t first and foremost a dainty woman. She was tall and slim, with a direct gaze and a fresh mouth. She rarely wore makeup, couldn’t bother with much more than a French braid, and made so little attempt to attract men that they were invariably attracted. While Kay leaned toward blouses and skirts and Emily toward tunics and leggings, Celeste was more comfortable in jeans and a simple white shirt. “Ladies,” she declared now, “my time has come.”

  Emily exchanged a bemused look with Kay. “Your time for what?”

  Celeste set down her muffin. “Living. Without Dawn to nag, I have undirected energy.”

  “She just left,” Kay said, as Celeste had moments before, but Celeste ignored her.

  “I’ve been looking at my life, really looking, turning it inside out and looking at it that way, too. I’ve been waking up with the sun, in a stone-gray empty house, thinking about what I want to do. For starters, I’m getting my nose fixed.”

  Kay’s jaw dropped. “You’re kidding.”

  “But why?” Emily asked.

  “Look at this nose. It’s an ugly nose.”

  “But you’ve had it forever. It’s part of who you are.”

  “Not anymore. As of Thursday morning, it’ll be narrowed and shaped, along with this.”

  Emily couldn’t see what she was pointing at. “What’s that?”

  “My double chin.”

  “I don’t see a double chin.” To Kay, she said, “Do you see one?”

  “No. You’re nuts, Celeste.”

  But Celeste was insistent. “I see the double chin, and I see the ugly nose. The fact that you two don’t is irrelevant. I’m the only one who matters. It’s my self-image.”