The Whole Thing Together

by Ann Brashares

  Mr. Reese had lost the first foot to diabetes and waited for the world to end. Until he lost his second leg from the knee down and the world spun stubbornly on.

  He’d kept both feet, both eyes, his viscera, his nerves, and even his mind through the Second World War, then lost them all to sugar. “You learn to trust bitterness more than sweetness,” he’d told her.

  The night it happened was in mid-April. The fourteenth, to be precise. Her father was throwing a fancy catered party at the house for the young analysts at his firm. They got lobster canapés in return for working a hundred hours a week fifty-two weeks a year.

  Emma had come home from school for the weekend to do her housing application for NYU law in the fall. It was unusual for her to be staying at his house in Manhattan. Since he and Evie had sold the old apartment on Eighty-First Street, she felt more comfortable at her mom’s in Brooklyn. But then, last year, her mom and Adam started renting out the first floor of the house to a gay couple who celebrated their marriage in the tiny back garden. What little space they had in the Carroll Street house got smaller, so that the three sisters, now all in college, were left with one small room between them. Lila and Adam needed the money, she understood. Having tenants on the ground floor really helped.

  As usual, her two families went in different directions. While her mom and Adam collected a modest rent from Andy and Hank, her dad and Evie bought a palatial town house on East Seventy-Fourth Street, where all four girls had their own rooms, but only Sasha lived in hers. It had temperature-controlled wine cellars, radiant-heated floors, intercoms, and mystifying state-of-the art HVAC and security systems nobody ever dared touch. It did not feel like home.

  Her dad had begged her to come to the party. He was proud of the culture of his firm, his young, eager Ivy League brigade. He was proud of his young, eager Ivy League daughter. She’d resisted, because, well, who in their right mind wanted to go to that party?

  Finally, out of guilt and a sense of daughterly duty, which she’d always felt a large share of, she put on a dress and carried her low expectations with her down the stairs.

  For some reason there had been a young man standing in the doorway of her father’s dressing room. She’d heard someone thumping around on her way down and went in to check.

  “Sorry to interrupt, but what are you doing?”

  He’d turned around fast. His shirt was partly unbuttoned, his suit jacket over one arm. He looked horrified. “Oh shit. You scared me.” He’d looked down at his open shirt. His face was shiny. Guiltily he held up a stick of antiperspirant. “Just this. I shouldn’t, I know.”

  He stood on the tall side of average, a little skinny, dark brown hair cut to please his elders. “I hope the boss won’t mind.” He laughed nervously. “Or find out, mainly. I hope he won’t find out. Ever. Jesus.”

  Emma had smiled at him. She couldn’t help it. His face was open and intent. She had meant to be annoyed, but she couldn’t. “I won’t tell him.”

  “It’s hot in here, isn’t it? Do you think he purposely turns up the heat to see who can take it?”

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Thomas.”

  Emma almost laughed because the truth was so much more innocent. Nobody could figure out how to work the insane HVAC.

  “It’s kind of nerve-racking to be in his house in the first place. I’m pretty junior still. I’ve never seen him outside the office before.”

  “I don’t think he—”

  “You look pretty cool. Did you just start?”

  “Start?”

  “At Califax, I mean. I don’t think I’ve seen you at the office yet. Which floor?”

  “Oh, I—”

  He had sensed her discomfort and seemed to want to rush past whatever caused it. “I started last year. Sorry, closer to a year and a half ago. Or, well, what is it, April? So I graduated in January and started right after that. Califax doesn’t usually hire midyear graduates, but they said—” He stopped. He put the antiperspirant down. “Sorry. I talk a lot when I’m nervous. Sorry. I say sorry a lot when I’m nervous.”

  “That’s okay,” she said.

  “We should get back down there.” He’d put his jacket on and turned to show her his back. “Can you see any sweat stains? My sister told me I’m supposed to have a summer jacket, like linen or something, but I just have two wool ones. Shit.”

  “No,” she lied. “I can’t.” She’d followed him to the stairs.

  “Can you believe this place? I’ve never seen an actual house in New York City. Where, you know, people live in the whole thing. Have you?”

  “Well, uh…,” she’d said noncommittally.

  “It’s like, five floors. It’s bigger than our house in Columbus. It’s a lot bigger.”

  “Is that where you’re from?”

  “Columbus. Yes. Ohio. Shit. I can’t even imagine how much a house like this would cost. Can you?”

  “I don’t really know.”

  “You could fit my entire apartment into this hallway.” He’d glanced around the hallway. “Twice.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s not that they don’t pay pretty well at Califax, you know? I’m not complaining. Well, sometimes I complain. Are you first year? I still have some student loans, so that’s partly why I live in a—” He’d stopped and looked at her. “You are— That is—a beautiful dress—that you’re wearing.” He shook his head. “Sorry.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Do you want a drink? Are you drinking? My sister said not to drink, because it would be too easy to drink too much and make a total ass of yourself.” He stopped. “Myself. Sorry. Myself, not yourself. I can tell you would never do that.”

  She laughed. She remembered so clearly that first feeling of her heart climbing out of her chest, up into her throat. “Right. I got it.”

  He took a long breath. “Sorry. I really wish I could stop talking.”

  “That’s okay. I’m kind of enjoying it.”

  She had followed him down to the first floor, where most of the party was taking place.

  Now she felt bad for being such a brat to her dad about coming to this party. It suddenly felt important.

  She thought vaguely of making amends to her dad, and then she actually saw her dad, which was not what she wanted at all. He was large and in charge in his fancy linen jacket a few feet from the bottom of the stairs.

  Oh, no. She didn’t want to make amends yet. She did not want to see him right now. Should she dash back upstairs? Was there any way she could escape without him seeing her? Shit.

  It was too late. He saw her. Her dad’s face broke into a big smile. “You did come down! I hoped you would.”

  She remembered glancing at her sweaty new friend. Was there some way to finesse this?

  He looked shinier than ever. Shit.

  Her father’s eyes went from her to her new friend and back. “Emma, have you met Jamie?” he boomed.

  She and the young man had arrived at the bottom of the stairs together just as her father came toward them, wineglass in hand. Emma realized there was no way to stop this. Her father loved nothing if not a proper introduction.

  “Emma, this is James Hurn, one of my very finest second years,” he’d said proudly. “Princeton, class of 2013.”

  She looked at him. She stuck out her hand and shook it firmly, as she’d been taught from toddlerhood.

  James Hurn had a slightly nauseated look, as though in anticipation. Or maybe she’d imagined that part.

  “Jamie,” Jamie had said weakly, trying to keep his face on this side of a grimace.

  “Jamie, this is my oldest daughter, Emma,” her father boomed even more proudly. “Princeton, class of 2016.”

  The look on Jamie’s face as he dutifully shook her hand was so sweetly pained, so entirely crushed, she would have laughed had she not felt so suddenly, deeply attuned to his well-being. She winced apologetically.

  “Sorry,” he had mouthed to her.

  “Sorry,” she
had mouthed back.

  Emma had had a boyfriend senior year of high school. Kyle Bowen. He had a lot of chest hair. When he’d stopped calling after graduation she barely noticed. At Princeton she’d gone out off and on with the captain of the lacrosse team, Graham Cartwright. He looked great sitting at the dinner table. She remembered Mattie’s comment about him: “You know how people think you have to be smart to go to Princeton? Well, you don’t.”

  Emma was always busy with school and sports and work. Boyfriends were a box she felt she needed to check. She’d never felt true empathy, tenderness, or vulnerability toward one until the night in mid-April. And then for some reason it happened all at once.

  —

  “The Reeses’ land is worth millions of dollars,” Mattie’s father said at dinner in Wainscott Friday night, and not for the first time, as they started in on a dessert of strawberries Mattie had brought home from the farm. “Paula Reese is using some of the world’s most sought-after real estate to grow spinach.”

  “And strawberries,” Evie said with a perky look of gratitude at Mattie.

  Sasha held up her spoon. “Better spinach than another giant mansion with fourteen bathrooms and a helicopter pad. Do you really want another one of those?”

  Robert put on the half-bemused, half-eager look he got when Sasha sparred with him at the dinner table. “It’s not my decision what people do with their money.”

  “No, it’s not, but maybe Mrs. Reese is thinking about the community. Say another billionaire buys that land, which is exactly what would happen, and seals it off behind twelve-foot hedges. Then nobody else gets anything from it. Not even the billionaire, because he probably has five other houses. He’ll spend a week a year there and not even rent it to anybody else, because he doesn’t need the money. Another chunk of the East End…” Sasha snapped her fingers. “Gone.”

  “Sasha,” Evie said, in her first-warning voice. Evie was always the silent referee. She never actually played.

  Mattie got up to clear her plate. She got instantly bored with the Robert and Sasha show. She guessed they did some version of this every night, whether or not Mattie was there to be annoyed by it.

  “Thanks to the Reeses,” Sasha went on, “we get to drive along open fields growing food, and we get to buy the freshest corn and strawberries imaginable. And people like Mattie and Quinn get jobs.”

  Mattie rolled her eyes. “Leave me out of this. If I was Mrs. Reese I would take the cash in a heartbeat.”

  Robert pushed back from his plate and patted his belly. “Thank God I put money away for Sasha to go to law school,” he said, his usual complain-brag.

  When Mattie was really young—maybe five or six—she remembered asking her father if he loved Sasha the best because he loved Sasha’s mother and not theirs anymore. Of course not, he’d said, as though this was a ridiculous idea. I love you all the same. But it sure hadn’t seemed such a ridiculous idea to her. And he might have been more convincing if he’d taken even a second to think about it.

  You always protect her, Mattie had accused.

  Well, she’s a lot littler, her father replied.

  Now Mattie stopped halfway to the kitchen and turned around. “What did you put money away for me to do?” she asked.

  Her father looked at her affectionately. “Buy a dress that covers your backside.”

  Both Evie and Sasha stayed quiet. Emma would have madly cackled and piled on if she had been here, but Evie and Sasha always had to be careful and Mattie knew it. They weren’t even allowed to smile.

  “Thanks a lot, Daddy,” Mattie said, fake indignant. “And with what’s left over between that and the cost of Sasha’s law school, you can buy me a loft in Williamsburg.”

  “Can I?”

  “You may.”

  Mattie stopped again at the kitchen door, a cheap impulse inside her still not quite satisfied. “What are you and Evie going to talk about when Sasha’s at law school?”

  —

  “Ray? Over here.”

  Sasha turned around. Should she really answer to the name Ray? This seemed like a pretty big capitulation on her first day of employment at the market. But Francis, the manager, kept calling her that and she kept pretending she didn’t hear him, which was not tenable long-term. Why did Emma have to put damned Ray’s name first on the damned job application?

  Sasha straggled over from the pile of pasta boxes. “Um. Well, actually it’s Sasha,” she pointed out again.

  Francis shook his head. “Listen, I don’t have time to get to know two employees. As far as I’m concerned, you two are one person.”

  “But—”

  “Do you have a problem with that?…Ray?”

  “Uh.”

  “Hey! Polly?” He bellowed at the first cashier. “Show Ray here how to do the restocking.”

  Polly yawned and pressed her temples throughout her explanation of what to do with the unbought stuff that accumulated at checkout.

  Then there was Francis again. “Ray, get over here.”

  “Okay…”

  “A few things.”

  She followed him out back to the dumpsters. The door nearly swung into her face.

  “No sneakers. No shorts. Keep your Black Horse shirt clean. No jeans. No gum. I hate gum. No tattoos showing. This is a nice store. I don’t like the piercings you kids have. Take out the hardware when you come to work. You understand what I mean? And a smile. A smile on your face at all times. Tell that to your brother or whatever it is.”

  She followed him back to the storeroom, nearly running to keep up. “My brother?”

  “The other Ray. I don’t want to have to say all this twice.”

  “Right. Well. You see, the thing is, he’s not my brother.”

  Francis was doing something on his iPad. Was he even listening?

  “ ’Cause. See. We’re not related, actually. Actually, we’ve never even met.”

  Francis looked up at her impatiently. “He’s Emma’s brother.”

  “Yes—”

  “Are you not Emma’s sister?”

  “Right. Yes, but—”

  He was already halfway to the baked goods section. “I don’t have time for this, Ray.”

  —

  Sasha approached Francis casually a few hours later, near the end of her shift. The day’s last shipment was shelved, the boxes removed. The muscles of her arms were shaky with fatigue, but she felt like she’d pulled off the stock girl act, at least for a day.

  Francis was eating a cookie. He could often be found hanging around the bakery section. “How’s it going, young Ray?”

  She gave him a look. “Hey, Francis?

  “Yeah?”

  “I have an idea. How about if you get the real Ray to answer to the name Sasha. Then I, Sasha, will answer to the name Ray.”

  Francis chewed his cookie confusedly. When he finally realized what she was saying, he laughed.

  “I always wondered if she was Muslim or Hindu. But I thought Hindu was more likely.”

  Quinn’s father looked at the picture of the lovely Bengali girl, but he didn’t really look at it. He handed it back to her. “Why did you wonder?”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “I never did.”

  “She was your mother. How could you not?”

  Her dad shook his head. “I’m not sure what Lila told you, but I don’t know who that person is. I never knew that girl. My mother was Matilda Thomas of Califax, Ontario, God rest her soul. She was thoroughly Christian.”

  It wasn’t the first time a conversation between them had led here.

  “Do you have any other information about this girl? Do you know her name?”

  Robert was back to his computer screen. “It was on the adoption papers, I think.”

  “Where are those?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know. I’m not sure I ever took them from the Brooklyn house. They were in the metal file cabinet in the basement, and I have no memory of moving them.”

  Qui
nn stared for another moment at the face of the girl who may or may not have ever held her baby.

  Indeed, Quinn had wondered. As much as she admired the eloquence and beauty of the Quran and Hadith, images of the Hindu deities had sparked in her dreams since she could remember, as though passed along in her father’s blood. He tuned out their enchantments, maybe, but Quinn felt them strongly. Now she felt almost sure she was Hindu. Because of the bindi.

  “I wish I could have known Matilda,” Quinn said, sensitive to his state. Robert’s adoptive parents were a childless couple already in their fifties when he came to them, their miracle, their small life force. They were both gone before Robert turned twenty-six.

  Her dad looked up, his expression changed. “I do too, my darling.” For a powerful man, her father was quick to tears when it came to certain subjects, including his mother and his daughters. “You know she held you when you were a baby. I have a picture of that on my office wall. You’ve seen it.”

  Quinn nodded, withdrew from his study. She put the picture of his birth mother safely in her top drawer.

  Her heart ached for her father sometimes, even though he did not ache for himself. His unspoken traumas roamed the house like orphans, and Quinn took them in.

  She imagined that boy baby in the refugee camp. Was there someone to hold him? Was there milk to feed him? Who, if anyone, clapped when he took his first steps? In what language did he speak his first words?

  Matilda Thomas might have held baby Emma and baby Quinn, but she never held her own child until he was over two years old.

  Quinn once overheard Lila say to her brother, Malcolm, “He was so young when I first knew him, he still had terrors at night sometimes; I think his memory still reached back to the camp then.”

  At the time, Quinn had trembled with feeling, but she held back from barging in with all the questions she wanted to ask, because she knew she wasn’t supposed to be listening. In so many quiet moments since then she’d taken out those words and turned them over in her mind.