“Goodbye, Reuben,” she called from the step where she was sitting.
“Bye, Lucy,” he said. “Goodbye.”
Fall 1973
Twenty
MAGGIE SAT ON the side of her bed in the dark—late November, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, a black, starless evening, the weight of water in the air.
Outside her window, the Mallorys were arriving from Vermont.
Their friends, gathering on the Painters’ porch that afternoon, speaking in whispers about Zee, expected them sometime after six.
“As if we don’t know what’s happened,” Maeve said, straddling the porch railing with Maggie. “My father says that we’ll find Zee quite altered—whatever altered means.”
Maggie had felt ill all day. Not as if she were actually coming down with something, but a familiar creeping malaise, a hollow feeling in her stomach. She didn’t like to talk about Zee. She didn’t even want to think about her. But Maeve insisted on Zee Mallory as the subject of conversation as if she were a stranger in a mystery story of what ifs. What if she won’t talk. What if she brings the child Miranda home to live with them. What if she’s gone completely crazy and runs around her front yard with nothing on.
Maggie wouldn’t engage.
Leaning against the posts next to the porch railing where Maggie was sitting, Lane and Josie badgered Will Sewall for information.
“She should be fine eventually,” Will said, “but she is fragile now.”
Just after six, Zee’s old van pulled up in front of the house and Adam got out of the driver’s side door, crossed the lawn, hurried up the steps to the front porch, into the house, and turned on the lights room by room so the place that had been the center of life in the neighborhood was lit up like Christmas, all yellow lightbulbs smiling on the Mallorys’ arrival.
Just the sight of it lit up made Maggie teary.
Night after night for months, she had watched the Mallorys’ big house, which had since summer been completely dark after the sun went down, a blank on the landscape of the neighborhood even in the flickering streetlight.
Once the lights were on, the boys jumped out of the car and fell onto the street, tumbling into the house like puppies as they raced room to room.
Adam came back out, followed by an ambling Blue, and opened the van doors, calling for the boys to help, which Luke did, and the two of them carried luggage into the house and up the stairs.
In the passenger seat, Maggie could make out the shadow of Zee. She seemed small and still sitting in her corner of the car, her head tilted against the window, no gesture to suggest that she would get out and follow her family into the house.
Just beyond the car, Blue wagged his long tail, barking at her.
Adam came out then, in shirtsleeves without his jacket, opened the passenger side door, reached in, and Zee stepped outside but Maggie couldn’t see her until they moved beyond the van and were visible in the streetlight, walking slowly, Zee holding his hand.
She had never seen them hold hands, never seen a gesture of affection between them.
On Thanksgiving afternoon, Maeve had come over with her father’s copy of The Joy of Sex, hoping to restore the intimacy of their old friendship, which had been secured in the spring and summer by hours lying on the floor on their stomachs, imagining their future lives with some mixture of delight and disgust.
Maggie shook her head.
“I can’t,” she said, unequal to The Joy of Sex. “Maybe after Christmas.”
As if Christmas would mark a magical line between then and now. Now she had a father who lived in New York with his wife, Elaine. Which was no different than her life had been before Reuben Frank was her father except the knowing, the fact of it.
The lives of men and women seemed too complicated to Maggie, too sad and dangerous to be contained in a picture book about the joy of sex.
Downstairs, August and Lucy were talking. August had come for dinner and stayed, as he often did lately. Gabriel too, but he was in her mother’s room reading to Felix—Winnie-the-Pooh again. He had decided to write a book about a boy called Gabriel and his bear.
MAGGIE HEARD HER mother call out to someone knocking at the front door.
She didn’t sit up or look out to see who it might be, except to hope that it wasn’t Adam Mallory. Or Zee. Especially Zee.
Someday she would tell Maeve about her Uncle Reuben. Not yet. She didn’t want to tell the story her mother had told her about falling in love with Reuben even though he was married. Not because of the story, which she would have liked if she had read it in a book. But this wasn’t a book and somehow the story as her mother told it did not make sense. Reuben was still Uncle Reuben to her, an uncle by choice. Perhaps he would grow into her father but for the time being she wasn’t even certain that she wanted him to, although she sometimes caught herself looking in the mirror over the sink in the bathroom searching her face in the glass for his reflection.
ZEE SAT UP in bed while Adam unpacked, Daniel on the telephone calling his friends, Luke sprawled across the bottom of their bed.
“What does Miranda look like?” Luke asked. “Like us?”
“Like your mom,” Adam said. “You’ll meet her. We’ll go up as a family to Cavendish a couple of times a year.”
“She has a pretty face and lots of hair,” Zee said. “She smiles at us when we say her name but she can’t talk.”
“Or walk?”
“Or walk.”
He rolled over on his back.
“Will I go back to Lafayette tomorrow?”
“Back to your same class,” Adam said. “They’ll be very glad to see you guys.”
“I know. They probably missed us especially because we are the only twins.”
Blue had wandered into the bedroom with his old purple elephant which he offered to Zee, dropping it beside her hand, and lay down on the rug rolling over on his back.
“Maggie doesn’t live here anymore, does she?”
“She lives with her own family,” Zee said.
“Good,” Luke said. “Daniel will be happy about that.”
“Adam?” Zee asked after the boys had gotten in their pajamas and gone to bed. “Have you spoken to Lucy?”
“I’ve spoken to everybody.”
“And everybody knows about Miranda?”
“They do.”
He took off her sweater and turtleneck, slipped off the corduroy trousers she was wearing, tossing them on a chair. She had no underwear. Out of the suitcase he took a one-piece pair of long johns bright red with buttons, the kind a child wears, which he’d gotten for her to wear in Vermont’s cold autumn, and climbed into bed next to her.
“Can we sleep with the light on?”
“Of course,” he said.
She had been out of the hospital in Hanover for three weeks, staying in the small rental apartment Adam had taken on the Dartmouth campus close to the boys’ elementary school. It was necessary that she see Miranda before she left to go home—the doctors at the hospital insisted, using that word necessary. Days and weeks went by of reading and walking and sleeping, visits to the psychiatrist, afternoons with the boys. But she wasn’t ready.
And then she was.
Miranda was excited to see them. She didn’t know who they were except that they had come to see her.
“I don’t remember this from the last time. I remember that she knew us.”
“This is normal for Miranda,” Angela said. “Isn’t it, Mr. Mallory?
She climbed in Zee’s lap, nuzzled her head in her mother’s neck, squirmy, her arms flailing as if they were semidetached, her knees pressed in Zee’s belly.
And then her small fist suddenly flew up in the air, sharp on Zee’s cheekbone.
Zee uttered a little cry but she didn’t let go, holding Miranda’s body tight, pressed against her.
“Good,” Angela said. “She needs to be enclosed.”
“Was that unusual?” Adam asked.
“The striking out?
That happens,” Angela said. “And then she settles down. It’s reflexive, I believe, and perfectly normal.”
In the car after they had left to pick up the boys in Hanover for dinner, to pack to go home to Washington, Zee drew up her knees, resting her chin on them, watching the darkness settle on the farms as they drove east to New Hampshire.
“Did you hear how many times Angela said normal?”
“I did,” Adam said.
“Such a strange concept, don’t you think?” Zee asked. “Normal.”
“I never thought about it.”
“I was glad Miranda hit me,” she said, and laughed, maybe for the first time in months, her hand resting on the seat between them. “It seemed a normal thing for her to do.”
THE LIGHT BESIDE Zee’s bed shone on her hands, which were purple, and she held them up out of the direct light to see if they with everything else had changed, if they had turned into her mother’s blue-veined hands, but hers were purple only in the light and at an angle, which was reassuring as if intimations of her former self, from long ago when she and Adam were first married, were beginning to surface.
“Adam?”
“Yes?”
“I’m glad to be home.”
LUCY WAS MAKING Boeuf à la Bourguignonne with stewing beef, bacon, carrots, onions, garlic, thyme, and bay leaves from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
“My mother was French,” she was saying to August. “I told you that. ‘Caroleen Baldween,’ she called herself before my father died.” She wiped her wet hands on her jeans. “She was a wonderful cook.”
She dropped the small white onions in boiling water, picked up the pot after a minute and poured it through a colander in the sink, turning cold water on the onions to stop them from cooking. She had never cooked with recipes but this was different.
This was a party.
The kitchen counter full of groceries, beef and greens for salad, small red potatoes which she would sauté the next day, crusty baguettes. Roses. She didn’t even like roses—but these were soft yellow, the buds just opening, and they seemed the right choice gathered in small bunches around the house, spots of butter yellow in November.
“I’ve never given an actual party before,” she said, cutting the skin off the onions. “People have come by and we’ve had tea or hot chocolate, and once or twice in New York I made spaghetti and meatballs for the mothers and girls in Maggie’s class. But never a party.”
On the stove cider was simmering in cinnamon and cloves, filling the house with the smell of winter.
“Tomorrow, maybe you’ll show me how to build a fire,” she said to August, who was walking now, almost his old self. “I’ve never even tried our fireplace.”
“In Philadelphia, we had a wonderful old apartment near Penn with a fireplace, and before she got sick Anna loved to give parties and cook steaks on a grill over the burning wood.”
“Is that why you moved to Washington, because Anna got sick?”
“We moved after she was diagnosed because her parents lived here,” August said, sitting on the rocking chair in front of the window, his feet up, the dummy for Vermillion the Three-Toed Sloth open on his lap. “Before she was diagnosed, we had decided to separate, but I came with her to Washington because she was sick and didn’t want to live in her parents’ house.”
“You never told me that,” Lucy said. “Actually I’ve told you everything about me and you’ve told me almost nothing.”
“That’s true. I have told no one except Gabriel, who forgets.”
She looked up and August was watching what must have been the light from a television in the house behind hers, pensive as if he were considering, in the slow process of deciding what to say.
“We were separating because I had failed to make tenure,” he went on speaking into the space around them. “And I’d been fired.”
“Aren’t they the same thing?”
“I was fired for an affair with a student. They were perfectly correct to fire me.”
He put Lucy’s book on the table, folded his arms across his chest.
“I had a relationship with a freshman student and she informed the administration and that was that. So Anna and I were separating.”
Lucy put the onions aside, slipping into a chair across from him.
“I see,” she said.
August lit a cigarette, leaning back in the rocker.
Lucy sat very still, her chin in her hands, looking into the darkness just beyond him.
“You’re not upset?” he asked.
“Surprised. I guess that’s what I am,” she said. “Besides, I thought you were falling in love with me.”
“I am,” August said.
Someone was coming up the front steps.
“Adam,” August said.
Through the window Lucy could see the top of Adam Mallory’s head.
He came in the house without a coat although it was cold, standing in the kitchen, his arms wrapped around himself, a shadow of a beard, his eyes bleary, an awkwardness to his large body as if he were not able to find a comfortable way to stand.
“It’s been a long trip,” he said, “but we’re home.”
“I’m so glad. Would you like a cider?” Lucy asked. “I also have beer.”
“Neither,” Adam said.
“You know I’m giving a homecoming party tomorrow for you.”
“Will Sewall told me. That’s lovely of you, Lucy.” Adam leaned against the refrigerator as if he were too tired to stand without support. “That’s why I came over. I know it will be easier for Zee not to have to explain to people she has known for so long who didn’t know there was Miranda.”
“Of course.”
Lucy wanted to say more, to add something as the room strained with silence, but nothing sufficient to the occasion came to mind.
Adam reached into his back pocket, took out his wallet, brown leather with a single fold, opening it to a small square photograph of a young girl, the size of school pictures.
“She was eleven the day Zee drove with Maggie to Vermont,” he said.
Lucy took the picture but it was difficult to make out Miranda’s features. In the photograph she looked more like a child than a girl, with black hair in a pixie cut and large, round eyes.
“Her eyes are deep blue,” Adam said, and he turned to leave, stopping at the kitchen door.
“Lucy?” He mopped his brow with the sleeve of his shirt. “I’m sorry for the trouble we have caused you. I don’t know what else to say.”
Lucy got up to see him to the door but he moved quickly ahead, hurrying down the steps, and she watched him cross the street, almost running into the house, the lights off on the first floor. And then she saw him dash by the window in the upstairs hall, heading into his bedroom.
“Oh my,” she said, going back into the kitchen.
August was putting out his cigarette.
The air moved with the expectation of a kind of intimacy, too much for Lucy back at the sink, cutting the skin off the onions, slicing them on a wooden cutting board.
“What did you put in the sauce for this bourguignonne?” August asked.
“Bacon and beef stock and tomato paste.”
“Red wine?” he asked.
“It’s in the recipe,” she said, washing the carrots. “Lots of red wine!”
AFTER MIDNIGHT, LUCY lay next to Felix, her head still spinning, her stomach full of butterflies.
The lights went on in the second floor of August’s house and from her bedroom window she could see him coming to the top of the steps, his face against the glass, a wave to her, a kiss on the windowpane, and then he walked out of view.
Down the hall, Maggie was still awake.
“Mama?” she called. “Are you sleeping?”
“Not yet,” Lucy said.
“Can I sleep with you?” she asked, already her bare feet slapping the hardwood floor.
“I would love that,” Lucy said.
Maggie crawled in beside her mother, her head on the same pillow.
Outside the wind was picking up, the gentle cracking of branches, the swish of autumn leaves against the windowpane.
Lucy lay on her back watching the lights from the cars on Witchita Avenue race across the ceiling, down the wall, a sense she had of expanding life and promise, a certainty about herself as if she were actually capable of growing beyond the old twig bed, beyond the bedroom in the house above the basement where her father had died and into the world.
Wide awake—Maggie’s hand loosely in hers, Felix’s breath warm and damp on her neck—Lucy was imagining tomorrow.
The butter yellow roses in short fat vases, a fire in the fireplace burning orange when people started to arrive, the buffet table set with votives, wine and cider on a chest in the hall beneath the photograph of Reuben Frank, Boeuf à la Bourguignonne bubbling on the stove, the lights dim, Sinatra playing in the living room, the front door flung open to welcome the families of Witchita Hills, her neighbors, her friends, her dear friends.
And they would embrace her as they filed into the house and filled the rooms with laughter.
Acknowledgments
To my family: Po Bich Elizabeth Rusty Caleb Jessica Kate Aaron
Wide Umbrellas
To Jeff Connie Porter Carol Dolores Frank Glo
And always to Timothy
With gratitude to Jill Bialosky, Alison Liss, and
the team at W. W. Norton
And Gail Hochman
*Witchita Hills exists in spirit but not in fact
Copyright © 2012 by Susan Richards Shreve
All rights reserved
First Edition
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You Are the Love of My Life Page 27
