by Ann Packer
“Ryan and Sierra were kissing.”
Bill took this in, surprised and yet unsurprised. Ryan had loved Sierra since they met. “They’re very close. Did it make you uncomfortable?”
James picked up his pillow and hugged it, pressing his face against it and saying, “Oooh, I love you. Kiss-kiss-mmm-mmm-mmmm. Dad, who do you think will do it first, Robert and Gina or Ryan and Sierra?”
Bill took a deep breath. He had always answered his children’s questions about sex as simply as he could and with close attention to how much they might really want to know. But until now the subject had been abstract. “I think you’re wondering about sex,” he said. “You’re curious and your body is starting to change, and it’s very natural.”
“No,” James said. “I’m wondering about fucking.” He grinned and began chanting, “Robert and Gina sittin’ in a tree. Eff You See Kay Eye Enn Gee.”
“That’s not a good word,” Bill said. “I don’t want you to say that word.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s not a bad thing—it’s a good thing. It’s just a bad word.”
James was silent for a moment. “I don’t get how boys do it.”
“Do what?”
“Eff You See Kay. Together.”
Bill hesitated. “Any two people can make love.”
“I’m probably not going to get married. I might be a bicycle racer. Can we still go to that place? In the book?”
The book lay open in Bill’s lap. The hills were so golden he could almost smell them. “We’ll make a point of it.”
• • •
Robert lay on his bed, more and more bothered by Gina’s having said the country was overdue for an assassination. She hadn’t even said “the country.” She’d said “we.” She’d made it very personal, as if the two of them were the ones who were overdue. And “overdue”—that made it sound like a library book, which seemed awfully glib to Robert. Unserious. Here was something he hadn’t properly considered until now: in addition to being less mature than he was, and less honest, she was also less serious. Was she really the right girl for him? Maybe not.
In another part of his mind, a small dark region governed by small dark motives, he saw that the only way to make sure James didn’t tell her he’d been thinking about breaking up with her was to break up with her.
And in another region, bright with artificial light, he told himself that he didn’t want to put her on the spot about sex—which, being a young man, he would inevitably end up doing—and so the noble, the kind, really the loving thing to do was to end it before things got that far. To protect her.
He noticed that one of his desk drawers was slightly open, and because of the drawer’s contents he knew he had not left it that way himself. Who had been in his desk? He opened the drawer farther and grabbed the pack of cards that was not actually a pack of cards but a container for three foil-wrapped condoms. They were still there. He dumped them out and rehid them in the top drawer of his dresser, in the toe of a sock. He did need to break up with Gina. No matter how much he’d practiced putting condoms on, and he’d practiced plenty, he just couldn’t imagine how you did that in front of a girl.
A little later, the doorbell interrupted Ryan and Sierra, lying on the couch wrapped in each other’s arms. The room was generally lit by three lamps, two on tables and one on the floor, but once the others had left, Ryan had extinguished two, leaving himself and Sierra in the near dark.
“I think it’s my mom,” Sierra said.
“Probably,” Ryan agreed.
Neither moved. They knew Sierra would have to go home and they didn’t want to part until the last possible moment.
The doorbell rang again, followed by a knock.
“Where is everyone?” Rebecca said, appearing from the bedroom hallway and heading for the door. “You guys don’t hear that?”
“We do,” Ryan said.
Sierra’s mother was on the doorstep, hugging herself against the cold. She resembled most of the Sand Hill Day mothers, with her unstyled hair and artless attire, a baggy tweed sweater and desert boots on her feet. But with her high forehead and small nose and bow-shaped upper lip, she was clearly Sierra’s mother, though age had transformed Sierra’s disarming prettiness into a somehow ordinary beauty.
“I’m sorry,” Rebecca said. “Come in, you must be freezing.”
The woman peered past Rebecca into the living room. Rebecca looked, too, and realized that from this angle, lying in the dark, Ryan and Sierra could be viewed as a little too cozy for eighth grade: Ryan on his back and Sierra more or less on top of him, their legs like crossed pairs of scissors.
“Hi, Mommy,” Sierra said.
“Hi, baby.” The woman stepped inside and said to Rebecca, “Sierra asked if she could spend the night, but I don’t think so, do you?”
“Oh, my gosh,” Rebecca said. “I’m not the mother. You know our mother, right? Penny?”
The woman laughed. “Of course. I know who you are, you’re the amazing Rebecca. And I’m Janice.”
“Mommy, don’t embarrass her,” Sierra said. “Or me.”
Rebecca hesitated. “Did you want me to get my parents?”
“No need, no need. I’ll just scoop these two up and take them back to our house.”
Now Rebecca felt her eyes go wide.
“Oh, honey, I’m sorry,” Janice said. “I was kidding. Baby, come on,” she called to Sierra. “You two lovebirds will see each other tomorrow.” She turned back to Rebecca and said, “I’ve been watching these two for years, cheering them on.”
Sierra disentangled herself from Ryan and they both stood. Ryan tucked his hair behind his ears and took Sierra’s hand. He whispered something into her ear and they came to the door. He looked radiant. When they were gone and the door was closed, he sat down on the entry hall floor and clutched his knees to his chest. Rebecca knelt next to him.
“This day,” he said, “has been terrible and wonderful.”
She was about to hug him but thought he might not want her to. Robert had had a girlfriend for almost three months, but until today she hadn’t truly believed anyone in her family would ever love someone outside it.
But Ryan would—he already did. And he would be loved in return, for six years. Despite the forces of puberty, he and Sierra would grow to resemble each other—his hair growing longer, hers cut shorter; his clothing becoming a little feminine, hers a little masculine—so that when the end came, as it would when they were nineteen years old, they would feel as if they were dividing a single being with only one copy of each character trait.
Robert would break up with Gina on the day after George Moscone and Harvey Milk were shot, and he wouldn’t date another girl until his sophomore year at the University of Michigan. She was from New York, and she told him after a couple of weeks that he was too nice for her. Next he tried to woo a midwesterner who told him after three dates that he was too caustic for her. The following year he developed an infatuation with a lesbian that kept him distracted and miserable for months. At last, still encumbered by his virginity on the night of his twenty-first birthday, he went to a bar on State Street with the sole intention of correcting this once and for all. He struck up a conversation with an older woman (it turned out she was thirty) who had no eyebrows and wore a head scarf. After a couple of drinks she confided that she had alopecia and was totally bald. After a couple more drinks he confided his problem to her. She invited him to her apartment, and they began a relationship that lasted until he left Michigan for medical school sixteen months later.
On the night George Moscone and Harvey Milk were shot, Penny washed the dishes and then went down to her studio. She knew she was failing to honor her word to Bill, but the circumstances were extraordinary and seemed to justify a postponement, and she was still there when the sun came up.
She served breakfast to Bill and the kids
and then, once they were all gone, she drove to a furniture store in San Mateo and bought what was called, incorrectly for her purposes, a daybed. And from then on she slept in her studio, though no one but she ever called it that.
7
RYAN
She had such pretty skin. I looked at her and smelled her and touched her and didn’t want to do anything else. Her mouth was sweet and rosy. I would rest my face against her body and feel full of love, more than I ever had before. This girl. People tell each other “You’re mine” or “You belong to me.” There are songs. I didn’t feel she belonged to me. I felt she was part of me.
This is science—genetics—but it is also emotion. Mothers say it all the time. For fathers I think it can be too much, like looking at the sun or into the face of God if you believed in God.
She was born on August 7, 2002. About a week before, I had felt Marielle’s cervix start to soften, and a few days after that my fingertip found an opening. Then one morning the opening seemed to have widened. Marielle had been uncomfortable, up with contractions in the middle of the night, and we called our doula. No, she said, it didn’t sound like labor had really started. The contractions were irregular and too far apart. She urged us to go for a walk, as a change of scene or a way to move things along. We drove to the coast, to the small sheltered beach where San Gregorio Creek empties into the ocean.
It was deserted, socked in with fog. I wrapped a blanket around Marielle’s shoulders and we made our way along the wet sand line. Ropes of seaweed lay in our path, smelling salty-sour. Gulls circled overhead.
Marielle was five-nine to my five-eight and she was sturdy, with beautiful broad shoulders and a small upturned nose. Pregnant, she was so much larger than I that we laughed whenever we saw our reflections in a shopwindow or the mirrored lobby of our OB’s office. La Géante, she called herself. But she was still graceful, and as she moved across the sand I imagined a great ship gliding over the ocean.
“Love,” she said, “you’re too quiet, what are you thinking? Don’t be frightened. It happens every day. Every minute.”
I reached for her hand and squeezed it. I was scared about the pain. She wanted an intervention-free birth, and she liked to stick with a plan once she’d made it. I had asked my father to reassure her that the baby would not be harmed if she accepted pain relief. “I think she knows that,” he said. “Don’t you?”
“I’m okay,” I told her now. “I’m excited.”
A troubled look came over her face, and she turned away and vomited onto the sand. She heaved a second time and then a third, so violently she nearly lost her balance.
“Oh, my God,” I said. “Are you all right, love?”
“I think so. I think I am.”
“Maybe we should sit down.”
“I’d never get up again. Let’s go back to the car.”
We took a diagonal toward the parking lot, leaving the wet sand. She held one hand on her belly and the other on my arm. As we reached the asphalt, a contraction gripped her, and my heart galloped. We were entering something unfathomable. We got into the car and began the climb up the mountain. A few minutes later she gasped.
“I should pull over.”
“No!”
She timed them herself: steady, four minutes apart. She moaned as each began but was quiet as they continued. She vomited again in the hospital parking garage and again waiting for the elevator. “Sorry,” I said to the people behind us. “We’re sorry.”
By the time she was checked it was too late for pain relief. In all the years I’d known her she had kept her hair very short, with little pieces hanging over her forehead and in front of her ears like the bristles of small paintbrushes curling as they dried. These were damp now, and once the nurse was gone I wiped her face with a cloth.
“Do you want to feel?” she said.
“Your cervix?” At home, the two of us lying in bed, it had been easy for me to snap on a glove and slide my fingers into her vagina—just an extension of our closeness. But her body seemed different on the sanitized paper liner of the labor bed. “What if I hurt something?”
“You won’t.”
“Do you want me to?”
“Oui,” she said, inhaling hard so that the syllable sounded even more French than usual.
I pulled on a glove. With her feet in stirrups and her back elevated, her vagina seemed very shallow, and my latex-covered fingertips found her cervix instantly. I could hardly believe it was the same thing I’d touched hours earlier. It felt a little like one of the rubber rings that came with the mason jars we bought for making jam one summer.
I washed my hands again and took a steadying breath. My phone vibrated in my back pocket. We wanted the birth to be private, but I’d called my father to alert him, and he’d called Robert and Rebecca. I turned off the phone and put it in Marielle’s overnight bag.
She gripped my hand so tightly I could hardly pull my fingers apart after she let go. She labored in that room for less than two hours, but it felt like two days. Then she delivered our daughter with just four pushes.
A nurse told me that I cried out at the moment Katya was born, but I don’t remember that. The earliest photo shows me calm at Marielle’s side, eyes on the baby.
We spent two nights in the hospital and then stayed at the big house with my father for a week, happy to have our meals prepared for us. Rebecca told me later that no one expected us to go back to the shed. They all thought we’d get used to the house and eventually it would be our father who moved, to an apartment somewhere or even Rebecca’s guest room. But we loved the shed and when we got back there, in the middle of August, we were so happy. I had two more weeks until school started, and we gave ourselves over to newborn-baby rhythms, slept when Katya slept, the three of us living life from our Murphy bed. The rough plank walls were hung with my students’ paintings, special pieces they’d made for me, and postcards from art museums around the world. We liked pictures you could breathe in, landscapes and seascapes, blues and greens, and we had images of farmland and forest and ocean by first- and second-graders and by Titian and Monet.
The shed was surrounded by trees, so it was cool and dark, and there were days when we didn’t go outside. Other days we carried Katya up to the big house or put her in her car seat and drove to a pretty outdoor place, a park or café, for an hour in the sun. Marielle wanted bright, clean tastes, and I flavored herbal tea with spearmint leaves and sliced lemon and served it to her iced as she nursed. One morning she asked for something sweet, and I drove down to Webb Ranch and bought half a dozen containers of raspberries and blackberries; while she and Katya slept, I baked a pie with a lattice crust. Marielle woke first and I arranged some pillows so she could sit up and then brought the pie over and held it close as she pulled off sticks of golden pastry and dipped them in the steaming purple fruit.
In those first weeks, Katya made noises like a mewing kitten as she emerged from sleep. When she nursed she sounded like something smaller and less feline, though we couldn’t think what it was. Her hair was thick and black and after a bath dried in a soft Mohawk.
The night before school prep started, I couldn’t stand the thought of leaving, but once we were in our next phase it was okay. When I got home each afternoon Marielle handed Katya to me or I lay down next to her, and we found our way back together.
I didn’t get scared until my father’s pneumonia. He began coughing on a Thursday evening and by Monday he was in the hospital on IV antibiotics. It wasn’t Katya’s immediate health that concerned me, the time she’d spent in his company before his symptoms began. It was what she’d face in the months and years and decades to come. Somehow I had not thought about this. She was going to get sick. Coughs, colds, fevers, worse. She was five months old and it was not if, it was when. In bed the morning after my father’s admission to the hospital, I began to cry. With the heel of her hand, Marielle pushed my tea
rs away, up toward my ear. A little trickled in and I shivered.
It came upon me at odd times. I had her in a baby swing at Peers Park in Palo Alto, green and shady on a day in early May. She was about nine months old. I was pushing her gently and saying, “Higher, higher,” and suddenly I could hardly stay upright, I was so distressed by how dangerous it was to be alive.
Another time, after she’d started walking, we were all at the zoo and I lost sight of her briefly. She wasn’t far away, a few yards, but for a second or two I had to look for her. That was all: I had to look for her. I hadn’t thought about all the times when I wouldn’t know where she was.
And then there was the night James met her, when she was seventeen months old, just after our father died. James was in Chile when he heard, and he had to make his way home, flying from Santiago to Panama City to Houston to San Francisco. He’d been away so long I was nervous about seeing him, not knowing what he’d be like.
His flight landed very late. Robert and Rebecca went to pick him up at the airport while Marielle and I waited at the house. We’d put Katya to sleep in one of the bedrooms, but at the sound of the car doors she started crying, and I went to check on her. She was in the collapsible crib my father had bought for grandchild naps, half asleep but alert enough that she heard me and lifted her head. When she saw me she pushed herself onto her knees and raised her arms.
“Get you out.”
“Little baby, it’s nighttime.”
“Out.”
I lifted her and her head went straight to my shoulder. I hummed a little and tried to put her down again, but she shook her head and I knew she needed to be held for a while. I carried her to the living room, James becoming audible as we got closer. He was talking fast.
“This guy in first class, had to be a drug lord, multiple diamond rings, a maroon leather jacket—”
“Maybe he just had bad taste.” That was Robert.
“No, he was definitely a drug lord.”
I reached the living room and saw James before he saw me. His hair was matted and he wore an old motorcycle jacket over a faded T-shirt. He had bloodshot eyes and dry, cracked lips. He’d been traveling for twenty-six hours and had to be exhausted. But he looked aged, too, as if he’d lived through more time than I had since we were last together. He’d left in the summer of 2002, shortly before Katya was born, with a thousand dollars and a tense look on his face. We heard from him irregularly via email. Once or twice he called our father and asked for a loan. After these calls our father always seemed sad, and Robert speculated that he was disappointed in James. I thought he missed him.
