by Ann Packer
She wondered what John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, two of the central psychologists behind attachment theory, would think of Penny. From another psych class Rebecca knew that most people parented the way they had been parented, and she wished she’d been more alert during visits to her grandparents’ house, so she could have studied her grandmother’s relationship with her mother. Then again, she knew from her father that his mother had believed it wasn’t a good idea to hug or hold children, and her father certainly hadn’t followed that model.
She slowed down so she could see the street signs. Though she’d told James to wait at the phone booth, she knew he might have chosen to walk, thinking he’d intercept her. She saw a phone booth and slowed, but it was empty. She passed a bar with a “closed” sign in the window, in front of it two men drinking from paper bags. Please don’t let that be James, she thought, and then: Please don’t let that be what James becomes. He hadn’t really sounded drunk, but he’d had time to walk it off. He’d certainly been drunk on the night of the accident. Her father had told her later that James’s blood alcohol had measured .09.
She happened to look across the street, four lanes of traffic and a median strip, and there were her father and James, James climbing into the Accord. Leave it to James to have gotten the side of the street wrong! “The south side,” he’d said on the phone. “No, the north. No, the south, I’m positive.”
She made a U-turn, pulled up abreast of her father, and powered down the window.
“Ah, Rebecca,” he said. “Isn’t this just like you, coming to help anyway? I want to check on James’s friend before we go home.”
From the passenger seat James gave Rebecca a furious look.
“I’ll follow,” Rebecca said, “just in case.”
They wound through the streets until James recognized the house. There were some kids out front, two sitting on the hood of a car, three or four on the front lawn with cans of beer.
It was a scene with very different meanings for each of the three Blairs. James felt guilty, as if he’d led a bloodhound back to the foxes, even if his father was a pretty mild bloodhound who had no interest in disturbing the foxes, much less reporting them to the police. Rebecca, who’d never been to high school parties herself, found the sight discomfiting because it was so unfamiliar; she wondered not if she’d missed out but if having skipped this part of adolescent life might compromise her ability to be a good psychiatrist. Empathy was a big part of the work, and she wasn’t sure she had it. Sympathy, yes, but she wasn’t sure she had empathy.
Bill felt the passage of time. The years of his life as a father had 365 days each, and the days had twenty-four hours, and while he didn’t remember all of them, he knew about them; he sensed them. Yet there were times, the present moment among them, when it seemed he’d skipped great chunks of his children’s lives and couldn’t fathom how they’d gotten so far along without his noticing. With James, the moment a few weeks back of seeing the cars totaled was an obvious one. And somehow this evening, this late hour in front of this strange house: the big-boned teenager in the seat next to him seemed unrelated to the primary James, who was forever five years old in his father’s mind, innocent and passionate. Bill supposed that for every child there was a defining age, a fixed reference point in relation to which his parents would always view him; whereas the child’s own truest self would always be the present one.
And thus could begin any number of problems.
“Let’s see how your friend is doing,” he said to James.
“I’ll stay here.”
“I’d like you to come with me, son. Can you do that?”
“What do you need me for?”
“The folks in there don’t know me from Adam.”
“They don’t know their ass from Adam,” James said, but he got out of the car.
Greer was still on the kitchen floor, but someone had set him on his side with pillows front and back so he wouldn’t roll. Otherwise, the room was empty.
“Someone was thinking,” Bill said, more to himself than to James, but James took it as a rebuke and stifled an objection. It was true that he’d been thinking, but it was also true he hadn’t really done shit.
Bill knelt and put his fingers to the boy’s neck. His pulse was normal, but his respirations were quick and shallow. “What’s his name?” Bill asked, shaking the boy’s shoulders and slapping his face lightly. “Son, wake up,” he said to the boy. “Wake up. What’s his name?” he asked James.
“Greer.”
“Greer, it’s time to wake up.” Bill tried a sternal rub, his knuckles hard against the boy’s upper ribs. The boy let out a guttural groan but stayed limp.
Bill got behind the boy, pushed the pillows away, and tried to lift his head and shoulders. Greer’s chin flopped to his chest. “Help me,” he said to Rebecca, and together they sat Greer up, but Rebecca didn’t have the upper-body strength to support half of Greer’s weight all the way to the car. “James,” Bill said, “step in here, son.” On the count of three they lifted Greer, James supporting him under the knees while Bill wrapped his arms around the boy’s chest. Once they’d gotten him into the car, Bill took off, leaving Rebecca to drive James home.
At the ER, Bill found a couple of orderlies to bring out a gurney. He didn’t take much call anymore, and he wondered if he’d recognize the attending. He hadn’t on the night he’d brought James in.
He found the charge nurse and explained the situation. “I’m concerned,” he said. “There was alcohol and marijuana and who knows what else. Parents out of town.”
He stood by while the boy was given IV normal saline and a catheter to collect urine for a tox screen. The attending was a woman Bill knew slightly, not from medicine but because she lived in Portola Valley, one hill over from the Blairs. She ordered blood tests and a head CT when Bill couldn’t say there hadn’t been a fall.
“So this is how it works?” she asked Bill. “You move away from call right around the time your teenagers start having crises in the middle of the night?”
He smiled. “That’s about the size of it.”
• • •
Midmorning, Rebecca sat at the kitchen table watching James, his forehead supported by his hand and a plate of half-eaten toast pushed away. She’d slept in her old room, and the only way she could be sure her father had been home at all was a lingering smell of soap in his bathroom. Where had he gone so early on a Saturday morning?
“Dad’s too old for this,” she told James.
“What did I do?”
“Hmm, that’s actually a decent point. You’re right.”
“I didn’t make a point. What are you talking about?”
“Sorry, I’m going too fast. When you asked the question ‘What did I do?,’ I realized you hadn’t done anything, so I said, kind of by way of shorthand, that you’d made ‘a decent point’—meaning you’d been right to object.”
“Blah blah blah. What’s that noise? Is someone talking?”
She left the table and got herself more coffee. It was strange to be home; aside from short breaks from school she hadn’t lived here since the summer after her freshman year at Stanford, when she’d worked at the lab of her Intro to Psychology professor. The following summer—last summer—she’d worked for a human biology professor at the University of Michigan, a job she got through Robert, who had graduated and was spending one last month with his girlfriend before moving to San Francisco for medical school. Rebecca’s whole time in Ann Arbor, she saw Robert exactly twice. It had been a valuable learning experience for her, a lesson about the power of assumption. “Sorry,” he said both times. “Are you mad? I’m just really, really busy.”
James sighed heavily.
“Honey,” she said. “I know it’s been hard this year with all of us gone.”
“Ryan’s here all the time.”
“It’s not
the same.”
“How would you know?”
Ryan was a freshman at UC Santa Cruz, back most weekends because Sierra was at home figuring out her next move and working part-time at Sand Hill Day.
“Is it the same?” she said. “What’s it like?”
“I wish I could puke,” James said. “Or take a huge crap. Have you ever noticed you wake up earlier when you have a hangover?”
“How much did you have to drink?”
“Enough, Rebecca. All right? Enough.”
“Alcohol or questions?”
“God, I pity whoever gets you for a shrink.” He picked up a heel of toast, bit into it, and tossed the rest back on the plate. “I’m taking a shower,” he said. “Really great to see you, thanks for stopping by.”
Rebecca watched as he left the kitchen. He had grown five inches in the last year and had the hands of a giant.
She headed down the driveway but stopped at the spur. The shed windows were open, and she could hear the high-pitched whine of her mother’s power saw. Penny had gotten rid of her kiln and turned the tiny extra room that had housed it into a woodshop so she’d have a place to make frames for her new work. She was doing assemblages, essentially 3-D collages: she used sleeves from worn-out clothing, sprung mousetraps, plastic hair curlers, even discarded food wrappers (there was always a cellophane egg noodle bag, attached to the wallpaper background with a thumbtack). Basically she was making collections of domestic detritus. Lately she’d been adding broken bits of crockery, an idea that Rebecca believed she had borrowed from a famous artist in New York.
Rebecca knocked and the sound stopped; a moment later Penny opened the door. She was forty-nine but looked older, with her steel-gray braid hanging down her back and an absence of makeup so complete that her face seemed to have been cut out of a sepia photograph. She said, “How funny. I dreamed you were in the house last night, and now here you are.”
“I was in the house last night,” Rebecca said. “I’m leaving, I just wanted to say hi.”
Penny had pushed her goggles onto her forehead, and now she took them off and used the back of her wrist to wipe a lock of hair away from her eyes. “How is it outside? I was about to go up.”
“Clear, maybe sixty.”
“Where’s your father? I thought I heard the car earlier.”
“Gone somewhere,” Rebecca said, but as she spoke it occurred to her that he’d returned to the hospital to check on Greer.
“Well, I’m going to need the car later. I’d love it if you would talk to him about getting another car. The three of us can’t survive with just one.”
“The two of you,” Rebecca said. “James can’t drive.”
“Oh, how long will that last?”
Rebecca shrugged, not interested in a conversation about James; he and Penny were in mortal combat these days. She peered into the shed. The twin bed was shoved into a corner, and the room was jammed with assemblages, two and three deep against the walls. On the high shelf just below the ceiling, Rebecca noticed a collage she’d never seen before, strips of different blues that she could just make out were torn from maps. “Is that new?” she said, pointing. “I like it.”
Penny looked over her shoulder. “No, I don’t do collages anymore—I just moved things around a little for a change of scene. Do you want to come in? We could have some tea.”
“I have to get going.”
“I got one of those kettles you plug into an outlet and it boils water in a minute or two.”
“I really have to get going, I borrowed a car.”
Penny tipped her head to the side and looked closely at Rebecca. “You’re almost twenty-one. When are you going to forgive me?”
Rebecca was surprised by this, almost too surprised to wonder what Penny was referring to, what particular transgression was on her mind. But wonder she did. There was a long list of possibilities, but there was also the simple fact of Penny’s personality. Could someone apologize for that? Could you expect her to?
Then again, Penny hadn’t actually apologized. Rebecca had been wondering lately if her mother ever apologized or even felt guilty. According to Freud, there were two sources of guilt: fear of authority and fear of the superego. Rebecca wasn’t sure how strong Penny’s superego was. Or James’s. Her father’s was mighty.
“Mothers and daughters,” Penny was saying, “can have a very hard time getting along. You may not know this, but Grandma and I really struggled.”
“Did you?” Rebecca said, the question itself an effort and perhaps also a token of forgiveness.
“She wanted me to be like her.”
“Content?”
“She wasn’t content! She sure wasn’t content with me.”
Despite having wondered about this just the night before, Rebecca found that she didn’t want to talk about it. She had a lot of work to do and said goodbye, feeling some guilt herself as she headed for the car and even more as she decided to see if her father was at the hospital.
Penny watched Rebecca walk away, but she was thinking of her mother: not as she’d been in the last years of her life but long ago, the mother of her young childhood. “Penny, please,” that mother was always saying. “Come along.” And Penny would have to leave her crayons, leave her paste, and do as her mother wished. It was no wonder Penny was so protective of her art; she’d needed to protect it for most of her life. In adolescence she’d hidden her drawings in the back of her closet, her mother was so scornful of her “hobby,” as she called it. “Do something useful,” she was always saying. Inevitably, Penny gave it up. Art wasn’t adult, she told herself. Only romance was adult, and marrying saved her. For a time. Bill began pulling away during Robert’s babyhood, and though getting pregnant with Rebecca brought him back for a while, he became even more remote with two children in the house. When she was pregnant with Ryan she felt barely any tenderness from him at all. It had made her so sad. “What’s wrong with you?” her mother said during one visit to Sacramento when Penny had no energy to take the kids to the park. “I thought this was what you wanted.”
No, this was, Penny thought as she put her goggles back on and returned to her power saw. This was.
• • •
The day was glorious for the middle of February, the temperature heading toward seventy; when Rebecca got back to campus, she changed into running clothes and jogged to the hospital. She paused in front of the entrance. Robert had been denied admission to the medical school, and it troubled her to think she would probably be accepted and probably go.
She took the fire stairs to the pediatric ward and found her father in the corridor, wearing his white coat and badge, as he always did at the hospital even when just stopping in. He thought visitors were comforted by the sight of white coats, and he didn’t mind being stopped with questions, especially simple ones about directions or visiting hours. “It’s part of the job,” he always said, “to allay anxiety. When we can, we should.”
“Is that Greer’s room?” Rebecca said as she joined him. “Is he okay?”
“He will be.”
“Is he still passed out?”
“Rebecca, you know I can’t say. What brought you here? Just checking?”
“On you.”
“Well, I should have expected nothing less.” He pulled her close and kissed her forehead.
Through an open door Rebecca saw the bottom portions of two beds, and two pairs of feet draped with sheets. “Are his parents in there?”
“Walk with me,” Bill said. “Let’s get some fresh air.”
They walked back to her dorm, where Bill kissed her forehead again. The temptation to take advantage of her maturity was powerful. He could think of nothing her point of view wouldn’t likely illuminate, and her competence in virtually everything she undertook meant her help was always helpful. How soothing it had been to hear her voice on t
he phone last night, telling him where James was. Bill didn’t know if he could have kept calm had the call come from James himself, over an hour past his curfew and just weeks after the nightmare of the accident. Bill had been waiting up that night, too, and the sound of the cars colliding had shaken him deeply. Opening the front door and seeing the wreckage: he hadn’t felt that combination of horror and dread since his first days in the navy.
He drove home, trying to decide if he’d say anything to Penny about where he’d been and why, given that it would have to include at least a little about what James had been up to. He’d last seen her at dinner the evening before, a typically gloomy fifteen minutes of the two of them plus James spread out at the formerly crowded kitchen table. The tradition of everyone taking a turn to talk about his day had been abandoned when Ryan left for Santa Cruz. It probably would have been abandoned earlier if not for Sierra, who had participated eagerly whenever she was present.
Penny was on her way up the driveway before he’d gotten out of the car, and he decided to keep quiet. “Morning,” he said. “Or I guess I should say ‘Afternoon.’ ”
“Where have you been?” she said. “I can’t be stranded here all day. It’s absurd for two adults to share a car.”
“It’s quite common, actually. Are you going somewhere?”
“I thought I would.”
“That’s fine, that’s fine. What’s James doing?”
“I haven’t seen him. What makes you think he’s up? It’s not even one yet.”
Bill shrugged and went up the steps. Rebecca had said James was heading for the shower when she left, but his bedroom door was closed, and when Bill knocked gently and pushed it open, he found the room dark and stuffy, with James facedown on his bed, asleep. Penny was in the master bedroom, opening and closing drawers. Bill didn’t like to think of himself as avoiding her, but if he came up with a legitimate reason to do so, he used it. This sometimes involved checking on things, and now he left the house and headed for the garage, where he checked on plant food and fertilizer, thinking it might not be a bad idea to spend a few hours in the yard tomorrow. The family bicycles were neatly parked in the rack he’d bought to keep them organized, and on a whim he wheeled his and then James’s out to the driveway, where he pumped air into the softening tires and used a rag to clean the gears. While he was working Penny got into the car and drove away, which coincided nicely with his running out of things to do outside.
