“I worry about you,” Tracy said.
He turned away. His own mother never said she worried about him. She probably did, but she never said it. “You don’t have to be so nice,” he mumbled, gazing out the window at the flat white scenery beyond the pane.
She laughed. “It’s not that great an effort.”
“Sometimes I think you treat me nicely to make up for Danny. Don’t bother.”
“Danny’s nice,” she said, sounding defensive.
Mark snorted.
“He loves you, Mark.”
Another snort. “He hates me, but that’s okay. It is what it is.”
“He doesn’t hate you,” she insisted.
“All right. He doesn’t hate me.” The sill, Mark noticed, wore a light film of dust. Whoever had cleaned his room—his mother or the cleaning service—had skimped. He traced his finger across the painted wood, leaving a white X in the gray. “He just thinks I’m a royal fuck-up and acts accordingly.”
“He envies you, Mark.”
Mark laughed, only it sounded more like a groan than a guffaw. “What are you, nuts?” He turned from the dust, the glass, the X, and faced Tracy. “He’s Mr. Perfect. The Ivy Leaguer. The hot-shot lawyer, pulling down six-figures. The husband. The soon-to-be father. He’s never made a mistake in his life. What the hell does he envy me for?”
“Don’t you know?” She looked genuinely surprised. “You’re the beautiful brother. The tall, dark, and handsome one. The guy everyone loved because you were so gorgeous. The natural athlete. He got A’s. You hit homers. Which do you think matters more to a boy?”
He stared at her, wondering whether this was high-resolution hearing, whether what she was saying sounded weird to him because he was sober. If he’d had his usual quota of vodka, he might have heard her say, “Danny will never forgive you for ruining his graduation party, and every time he looks at you, he sees blood on your hands.” But he had no alcohol in his blood, and he’d heard her say something that made no sense.
“You’re crazy,” he said. “You’re a good person, Tracy, and I appreciate you, but you’re crazy.”
She shook her head. “Someday, you’ll realize you’re a good person. In the meantime . . . ” She stepped back into the hall and sent him a parting smile. “You’re the one who hit homers.”
I’m the one who hit a girl on Baker’s Hill Road, he almost shouted after her, but she was already gone. And he had no vodka, no beer, not even a joint.
All he had was a too-empty room and a too-dusty windowsill.
And a promise that maybe, standing under the tree and listening to Becky chant, he would feel better.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
OTHER PEOPLE’S houses were filled with Christmas warmth. Elyse was certain of it. She knew there were houses with huge Douglas firs standing in living rooms, their bases draped in red and green felt skirts, their boughs laden with tinsel and ornaments and glittering lights. She knew there were houses with stockings hanging from mantels, with Styrofoam snowmen and spray-painted pine cones adorning tabletops and sugar cookies shaped like candy canes baking in the oven.
She’d seen movies. She knew some people did Christmas right.
In fact, she had vague memories of Christmases years ago, when . . . well, her parents had never gone for a Douglas fir, but they used to have a white plastic tree with gold flecks painted on it, and Elyse’s mother would spray pine-scented air freshener through the house. She’d buy Christmas cookies, not bake them, and blame the absence of stockings on the house’s lack of a fireplace. Elyse would dutifully pretend, for Katie’s sake, that Santa Claus actually existed, and she wouldn’t get mad when Katie woke her up at six a.m. Christmas morning, shrieking, “He came! He came!”
Now, there was no tree, real or plastic. No cookies—the Fabiano females were watching their weight. No pine air freshener.
Just the sound of her mother and The Toad arguing in the kitchen, the way her mother and father used to argue in the kitchen. Evidently, one charming holiday tradition—arguing—continued.
There would be no wrapped packages under the non-existent tree for her this year. She’d asked her mother and father to skip buying her anything and just give her cash. She’d need money for her trip to Paris. Katie would probably give her something—she’d bought Katie a sweater; the girl was seriously fashion-challenged and needed any assistance Elyse could give her, wardrobe-wise—but they would exchange their gifts privately. No scene of love and warmth as the family gathered around the tree, sipping eggnog and singing carols while they unwrapped their presents.
The less time Elyse spent with her family, the better. She’d eat a little in her mother’s house, a little across the street at her father’s house. She’d pocket the checks her parents would have made out to her. Then she and Becky would get together with Florie, maybe meet her blushing groom.
And Elyse could hang out with Mark. She wasn’t sure she liked him as much sober as she had when he’d been drunk most of the time. She enjoyed drama, and for the past few weeks, he’d been profoundly undramatic. But she was determined to have sex with him, finally. One more step along the path to . . . wherever. One more item she could cross off her list of things to do before she died.
She had endured a hug from her mother and a lame smile from The Toad when she’d arrived, but now she was shut inside her bedroom, her haven. Through the closed door she could hear their voices rise and fall like storm-swollen waves. Her mother yelling at The Toad for having bought a fruitcake. The Toad yelling at her mother for refusing to bake a fruitcake. Her mother calling The Toad a fruitcake.
They weren’t really fighting about the fruitcake, Elyse knew.
She pulled her phone from her purse and punched in Florie’s number. She rarely called Florie, but she was too curious about Florie’s marriage to wait for Becky to construct a plan for the three of them to get together. ’Tis the season, anyway. She could phone Florie directly, wish her a happy holiday, give her a hearty ho-ho-ho.
And then ask when she could meet the lucky man who’d be making Florie his bride. In Elyse’s imagination, he resembled a male version of Florie: tall, gawky, hair growing in undisciplined waves, eyes watering in the icy December air.
“Hello?” Florie sounded distant, her voice framed by a din of traffic noise and rustling. “Elyse?”
“Merry Christmas,” Elyse said, reminding herself not to shout. Where the hell was Florie? At a mall somewhere, maybe, doing her last-minute shopping. The hissing sound implied Florie was outdoors, so maybe she was in a mall’s parking lot.
“The same to you,” Florie said. “I can’t really talk right now . . . ”
“When can we get together? I want to meet Lover-Boy!”
“Oh . . . ” Florie’s voice drifted for a moment. “I’m not in Wheatley.”
Of course she wasn’t. Wheatley was too small and quaint for a mall. “When will you be getting home?”
“That’s the thing,” Florie said. “I’m not . . . I mean, I’m in Amherst.”
Elyse made a face. “Don’t tell me you still have exams. It’s two days before Christmas.”
“Hang on a sec . . . ” Florie spoke to someone, then returned to the phone. “I’m working right now. I’m going to stay here.”
“Are you collecting donations for your church again?” Right before Christmas? When she ought to be in Wheatley, discussing bridesmaid dresses with Becky and Elyse?
“Not collections, but it’s church business.”
“What do you mean? How can you not spend Christmas with your family?” And with us, Elyse added silently. How can you not be in Wheatley to see your closest—your only—friends?
“This is where I belong,” Florie said, her voice harsh with conviction. “Not with my family. Here. This is where God wants me to be.”
&nbs
p; Elyse snorted. “Don’t give me that God shit. You’re supposed to be with your family for Christmas. Remember that whole Ten Commandments thing about honoring your mother and father?” Probably not the best thing to say, but Elyse had no patience for false piety. If God wanted Florie to be in Amherst right now, did God want Elyse to be stuck in the House of Obnoxious Quarreling? Did God want Mark to be in the Land of Sobriety after he’d spent the past how many years swimming in the Sea of Inebriation? Had God wanted April to be in the middle of Baker’s Hill Road when Mark happened to be driving by?
It was crap, all of it. God didn’t know where the hell he wanted anyone.
“I can’t talk now,” Florie said, dull, measured syllables. A click, and the phone went silent.
Fucking bitch! Florie was always so excited when Elyse phoned her, so thrilled, so grateful. How dare she cut Elyse off like that?
Her indignation made her laugh. I’m the fucking bitch, she thought, flopping onto her bed and staring at the ceiling.
Florie should have been quivering with gratitude that Elyse had phoned her. Instead, Florie had spouted a bunch of bullshit. God wanted her in Amherst? Honestly. If God had half a brain, he wouldn’t want anyone in Amherst, that small, smug town filled with crazed college kids, frat boys, giddy girls, pompous profs, prissy restaurateurs, and used-bookstore owners.
Elyse would bet her Christmas money Florie didn’t have a fiancé. That was why she wasn’t coming home for the holidays—she was too embarrassed to face Elyse and Becky, too ashamed to have to admit she’d invented her engagement in an effort to make herself interesting. Becky had Emerson; Elyse had a whole shitload of guys, and hopefully would have Mark before she rang in the new year. But Florie had no one.
Through the floorboards, Elyse’s mother’s harangue rose like steam, chased by the rumble of The Toad’s gravelly voice. Elyse barely heard the tap on her door before it swung open and Katie entered.
Katie still needed to lose a few pounds, but her teeth were straighter, at least, and her hair had some shine and body. She’d look good in the sweater Elyse got for her. A deep V neckline, narrow cables—slenderizing.
“Are you sleeping?” Katie asked.
Obviously, the very act of answering would be an answer in itself. Elyse sighed. “Who could sleep through that racket?”
“I don’t know why she got a divorce.” Katie plunked herself onto the mattress, creating a mild tremor beneath Elyse. “She fights with The Toad just as much as she ever fought with Dad.”
“If The Toad had half a brain, he’d just say rib-it, rib-it. That would shut her up.”
“Nothing shuts her up,” Katie said, sounding wise and weary beyond her years. “Elyse? Would you take me to Paris with you?”
Elyse checked herself before bellowing a resonant no! She would not take her kid sister to Paris with her. She would not spend the next stage of her life being a proper role model for Katie, a babysitter, a pal. She didn’t want friends in France; friends would tether her. She wanted freedom. Experience. Everything a woman should cram into her life before she died: as many men as she could manage. As many visa stamps as her passport could hold. As much life as her soul could embrace before fate sent a car her way.
“I don’t know how long I’m going to stay in France,” she said, which was true. “And you have to finish school first.”
“I hate school,” Katie groaned. “I hate studying. I hate Mom. I hate fighting. I hate everything.”
“So glad you’re in the holiday spirit,” Elyse muttered. “Wasn’t your Plan B to become a nun?”
“I’m thinking a Buddhist monk would be better,” Katie said. “I could go live on a commune. Maybe I’ll become a Hare Krishna and wear an orange bathrobe.”
For an odd moment, Elyse flashed on a mental image of Florie standing on a street corner in an orange robe, chanting incomprehensible syllables while her eyes focused on a distant hallucination of utopia. Maybe not so odd a moment. The way Florie had said, this is where God wants me to be, as if she had no choice in the matter, as if she were God’s puppet, a robot programmed to do as she was told, without question . . .
“I’ve got to make a phone call,” Elyse said, pointing toward her bedroom door. “Good-bye.”
Katie scrunched her face into a cranky frown, then heaved herself off the bed and shuffled to the door. “I hate you, too,” she said as she stepped out into the hall, but she didn’t sound as if she really meant it.
She didn’t close the door behind her; Elyse had to do that. Not that anything she had to say to Becky was so private, but she needed to block out the clamor of her mother’s voice, and The Toad’s, as their quarrel veered from why he hadn’t bought a bigger ham to why she dressed like a slut in clothes designed for skinny teenage girls. Some things never changed, Elyse thought with a sigh as she shut her door.
Seconds later, Becky answered her call. “What’s up?”
“It’s Florie.” Elyse flopped back on her bed, nestled her head deep into her pillow and studied the textured swirls of paint covering the ceiling. “I think she’s become a pod person.”
Becky laughed. “Is her fiancé a pod person, too, or is it a mixed marriage?”
“Who knows? She isn’t in Wheatley. She stayed in Amherst—get this, Beck—because God wants her there.”
Becky laughed again.
Elyse didn’t share her amusement. A gust of indignation blew through her. “I mean, I called her. I called her, which you know I don’t do very much because she’s such a twit. You’d think she would be happy I called her. Instead, she gets all pious and snooty and says she’s working and she can’t talk—and honestly, it sounded like she was standing on a street corner looking for tricks—and she says God wants her to be in Amherst.”
“As if God has nothing better to do than keep tabs on Florie’s whereabouts,” Becky said, then fell silent. Elyse could picture her thinking, her pale eyes narrowing as she compressed her brain cells in an effort to squeeze out some ideas. “Wouldn’t God have wanted her to be with her family for the holiday?”
“That’s exactly what I told her. And she more or less hung up on me.”
“Wow.” Another resonant pause, and then Becky said, “We’ve got to go to Amherst.”
“Why?”
“To save her.”
“I think she’s already saved,” Elyse joked. “Isn’t that what the whole God thing is about?”
“Don’t ask me. I’m an atheist.”
“I’m not going to Amherst,” Elyse said.
“It’s, what, an hour-and-a-half drive? We can go out there after Christmas and see what’s going on with her.”
“I don’t give a shit what’s going on with her,” Elyse argued. “She hung up on me.”
“First she says she’s getting married. Then she doesn’t come home for Christmas. Then she hangs up on you. There’s something seriously wrong, Elyse. She’s in trouble.”
“I don’t want to save her.”
“You have to. She’s one of us.” Becky added, in a wheedling tone, “I’ll get Mark to come, too. We’ll all go out there together.”
The thought of a trip to Amherst with Mark perked Elyse up. Becky could drive, and Elyse and Mark could sit in the back, snuggled up, touching each other discreetly while Beck the Brain was busy plotting how to rescue Florie from whatever demon-god had her under his spell. Maybe they’d run into a blizzard and they’d get snowed in, and she and Mark would share a room. Becky could stay with Florie and deprogram her. And Mark and Elyse could fuck their brains out.
“Road trip,” she said, trying not to sound as excited as she suddenly felt about the prospect. “I guess it has possibilities. Can you borrow one of your parents’ cars? I don’t think I can get my father’s wheels for a trip to Amherst.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”<
br />
“Ho ho ho,” Elyse said, deepening her voice as much as she could. She was no Santa, though. Just someone who might see one of her Christmas wishes come true.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
THE DAY AFTER Christmas, the UMass campus looked like the set of a movie about a neutron bomb. The walkways were neatly shoveled, the roads plowed, the buildings clean and silent, the decorative pennants slapped by an icy breeze.
No signs of human life. No students swarming along those shoveled walkways, no cars driving the plowed roads, no hip-hop jangling through the windows of those buildings. The place looked abandoned and forlorn, a village after an epidemic had ravaged it. Becky was almost afraid to enter Florie’s dorm. The floors might be strewn with dead bodies.
Moot point. She couldn’t enter the dorm because the door was locked and no one was around to unlock it.
She returned to her mother’s battered car, where Elyse and Mark were waiting. Her mother could easily afford a newer car, but a recent model would have looked anachronistic parked in front of her family’s antique colonial, so her mother continued to tool around town in her vintage Volvo sedan, with its random scabs of rust and its “coexist” bumper sticker. It had absurdly low mileage, given its age, because Becky’s parents commuted to work together in her father’s hybrid, which was only three years old and was stored in the single-car garage shed so no one had to know that the residents of an antique colonial owned a modern vehicle.
Becky suspected that eventually the Volvo would become hers. If she wound up attending graduate school at an institution where a car was a necessity, her parents would present her with this rattly old vehicle with its sticky clutch and its tape deck where a newer car would have a CD player. “It’s lasted for all these years,” her mother would say, beaming. “Surely it will last a few more.”
Cars didn’t work that way. They didn’t age via momentum. The older the car, the less likely it would last. But Becky would accept the gift gratefully. She’d even accept it if she decided to stay in Cambridge. She couldn’t count on Mark’s sister-in-law to shuttle her home for the holidays, and she could park a car this old on a city street without having to worry about whether it would be stolen or vandalized.
The April Tree Page 29
