A Family Daughter

by Maile Meloy

  “That’s okay. I’ll stay.”

  She finished her shift and walked out into the afternoon light, feeling dazed. She thought about going to Student Health, but she didn’t want to be told that something was wrong with her body, and she didn’t think they could fix what was wrong with her head.

  She walked home carrying sandwiches for dinner. It was August, and the days were getting shorter already, and school would start soon. She felt less and less like she would be able to fit in again, and fake her way through, pretending to worry about papers and midterms.

  She had hoped Dr. Tirrett would be compassionate and helpful, and blame Jamie less than he blamed himself, but he came home shaken and subdued, and wouldn’t tell her what was wrong. She didn’t press him, because he didn’t seem to want to be pressed. They ate the sandwiches in silence, and then Jamie went out on the patio with his guitar, but he didn’t play it, he just sat there. Abby left a message asking Dr. Tirrett to call her, and picked up the phone when it rang.

  “Jamie is really upset,” she said, hoping the doctor would give her a clue. “I know why he went there, but this seems different.”

  There was a silence on the line. Dr. Tirrett wasn’t going to let anything slip.

  “I called because I had this thing today at work,” Abby said. “This feeling came over me, and I thought I was dying. I felt completely doomed, and so dizzy I was afraid I’d fall over.”

  “Are you okay now?”

  “I think so. Another waitress said it was a panic attack.”

  “That wouldn’t be an unusual response to the kind of stress you’ve had lately.”

  “Can I make it go away?”

  “You can think about the reasons for the stress,” she said, “and the history of how you’ve responded to it. There are visualization exercises you can learn.”

  “I was dragged to too many yoga classes as a kid,” Abby said. “I’m not into visualization.”

  “Have you thought about going back to school?”

  “No,” Abby said. “Yes. Sort of.”

  “Is anything absorbing to you, besides this relationship?”

  “No. The problem is I’ll always have a relationship to him, I can’t change that.”

  “I know,” Dr. Tirrett said. “Go talk to him. But just talk, okay? Don’t do anything that lets you avoid talking.”

  Jamie was still on the patio, not playing his guitar, so Abby went outside to try.

  11

  JAMIE LAY IN BEDwith Abby in the dark, in the quiet lull that always came before the guilt returned. He had a hand on her bare hip, where it curved down to her waist.

  “I was thinking,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. That we’re the same people we were before, but we’ve done this thing that people would think is really wrong, but it didn’t feel that wrong as it went along.”

  Abby said nothing.

  “It’s interesting,” he said. “Don’t you think?”

  “I guess.”

  “I think you should write a book about it.”

  Abby laughed.

  “Not a true account,” he said. “But like a novel. You used to write me those letters about high school, and life with your mom. I think you could do it.”

  “I don’t know how.”

  “Just write down what happens.”

  “That’s not a book.”

  “It could be, though. It could have Dr. Tirrett’s plot: a Catholic mother raises her teenage daughter’s baby as her own. And then he—the son—finds out that everyone has lied to him.”

  “Because they were trying to give him a normal, stable life.”

  “But it can’t be normal.”

  “Okay, so what does he do?”

  “I don’t know. If you wrote it, you could tell me. It should have sex in it, and a murder. People like books about murders. It can be set in California.”

  “Then people would guess about this.”

  “You just tell them it’s a novel.”

  Abby laughed, and they lay there for a while in silence.

  “You do think I look like Margot, right?” Jamie asked.

  “Of course. She’s your sister.”

  “But I don’t look like Teddy.”

  “Not much.”

  “So you think it’s possible.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “It does help if we’re cousins,” he said. “Cousins get married all the time.”

  “But I grew up as your niece,” she said. “And we’re not getting married.”

  “Here comes the groom,”he sang, to make her laugh.

  He thought about confronting Yvette with the question: Are you my mother? It was the question the baby bird asks the steam shovel in the children’s book he had read to Abby when she was a kid.

  He had taken care of Abby when she was a kid. That was what made lying here in bed with her so unforgivable, more than whatever blood relation they had. When she was asleep, she looked like she did at seven, sleeping on Yvette’s couch: all the years fell away and the muscles went slack, the lips soft and open. She could still sleep through anything, like a kid, and watching her brought his transgression home. The guilt crept back, like the tide moving up the beach. How could he summon the moral force to ask his mother if she had lied to him, when he was sleeping with her granddaughter?

  “Abby?” he said finally.

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t want to say this, but I think I should probably leave, don’t you?”

  Abby didn’t say anything, and lay very still.

  “You don’t have to write a novel, but you do have to go off and have your twenties.”

  Still Abby was quiet.

  “I’m giving you weird attacks and I’m going to give myself an ulcer. This can’t be good for either of us.”

  “I don’t want you to go,” she said.

  “I don’t want to either,” he said. “But I don’t think we can keep this up.”

  12

  YVETTE WENT TO VISITClarissa up north. She knew Abby had kept her at a distance, after Henry’s death, and it had hurt Clarissa deeply. It was so hard to see your children in pain. Yvette was in pain because Clarissa was in pain because Abby was in pain. Did it never stop?

  Yvette put her suitcase in Abby’s old room, and Clarissa said they were meeting her friend Del for dinner.

  “Is Del a boyfriend?” Yvette asked.

  “She’s a friend,” Clarissa said. “She’s a woman.”

  “Oh,” Yvette said. “What an unusual name.”

  “Her name’s Delilah. But she won’t let anyone call her that.”

  Del already had a table at the restaurant, which had a brick front and large glass windows, and Yvette thought idly that the woman reminded her of poor Henry. She was big and sandy-haired like him, and shook Yvette’s hand with a strong grip. Yvette wondered, with a start, if Del was a lesbian.

  “What a nice place this is,” she said, to hide her shock at the idea. “Do you come here a lot?”

  “Sometimes,” Clarissa said vaguely.

  They sat on three sides of a square table, with Clarissa in the middle, and ordered wine from a slim young waiter. There was a faint sound of clanking dishes from the kitchen. After a moment, during which Yvette tried to think what to say, Clarissa asked, “Do you remember the photographer who took our picture for Dad?”

  “What photographer?”

  “It must have been when Dad was in Korea. Someone took our picture.”

  Yvette flushed, unprepared for the question. “Oh. Yes, I remember that.”

  Clarissa waited, frowning, while the waiter set the wineglasses on the table. “Did you maybe”—she cleared her throat—“have an affair with him?”

  “Oh, no!” Yvette said, remembering the kiss she hadn’t wanted, the cut lip when she twisted free.

  “You see?” Clarissa said to Del.

  “What did happen?” the big, strange woman asked.


  “Nothing,” Yvette said. “Nothing. Why?”

  Clarissa hesitated again. “Remember how I wouldn’t eat, as a kid?” she asked. “And you would make me sit with my plate after everyone left the table?”

  “Oh, honey, I thought you were going to starve.”

  Clarissa glanced at Del and seemed to gain confidence. “Well,” she said, “I was trying to figure out when that started, and what I keep thinking of is the photographer.”

  “He took our picture for your dad.”

  “But then he came back.”

  “To deliver the pictures.”

  “He came back more than once.”

  “He did ?” This was news to Yvette.

  “He had a white and green car, and he would drive by our house when Margot and I were outside.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Was the photographer’s car white and green?” Del asked.

  Yvette thought it had been but said nothing. Who was this bullying woman?

  “The man, the photographer, wanted to talk to us,” Clarissa said.

  “Margot wouldn’t go near him, but I thought it was exciting. He would call me over to the car, and I would stand by the rolled-down window, and he would ask me questions.”

  “About what?” Yvette asked.

  “I don’t know. About our family, I guess. About you.”

  “And you told him things?”

  “I was five!” Clarissa said.

  “I’m sorry, honey. I’m just trying to understand.”

  “I thought he was very romantic,” Clarissa said. “Once when we were talking, he reached out and touched my hair.” She touched her own hair, as if remembering.

  “Oh, no,” Yvette said.

  “That’s all he did,” Clarissa said. “I think I had fantasies about him coming to be our father, because Dad was away.”

  “Oh, honey.”

  “Margot couldn’t stand him, and threatened to tell on me. I can’t believe she didn’t. But there must have been something going on between you, right? Or he wouldn’t have come to the house. And then Dad was so different when he got home, and I stopped eating— somethingwas going on. I can’t just be making this up.”

  “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry.”

  “So what happened?” Del asked.

  Yvette considered telling the woman to mind her own business. But then she took a deep breath and told them the story she should never have told Teddy, and hadn’t told since.

  The photographer had taken their picture, and then Yvette had made him a drink—“We did that back then,” she explained—and then he wouldn’t leave, and he grabbed her and kissed her. “You and Margot were playing outside,” she said. “I can’t tell you how terrible I felt. I felt eaten up by guilt.”

  She had gone to confession in a church where she didn’t know the priest, and he had said she must tell Teddy. Teddy had responded badly. He had hated leaving her alone, when he was in the service, and the photographer had confirmed his fears.

  “But I didn’t have an affair, sweetheart, I promise you I didn’t.”

  Clarissa said nothing.

  Yvette sensed that her daughter was disappointed. Clarissa must have wanted her mother’s infidelity to be the source of all her problems. Yvette felt almost sorry that she couldn’t give her daughter that satisfaction; Clarissa’s shoulders had sunk a little, and a discouraged frown made her look older than she was.

  “My parents had problems in their marriage,” Yvette said. “My father was a—a roué, you know. When I started to have my own family, I thought that as long as you children knew that Teddy and I loved each other, everything would be all right. I thought that was the important thing, and that was what I tried to do. I never would have had an affair. My mistake was in telling your father about a thing that meant nothing.”

  Clarissa nodded, vaguely.

  The waiter came back. “Are you ladies going to want something to eat?”

  “I’m not hungry,” Clarissa said.

  “Neither am I.”

  “We’ll have a large mushroom pizza,” Del said. “If you two don’t recover by the time it comes, we can take it home.”

  Yvette took up her wine, feeling sad. It was sweet and cold, the glass slick with condensation. That poor, lustful photographer had done nothing more than kiss her once and touch her daughter’s hair. Not terrible things, in the catalog of human villainy. But they had used him to make each other unhappy, and were using him still.

  13

  AFTERJAMIE LEFT TOWN, Abby started school again. She moved back into the dorms with Miranda, with some apprehension. The other students were cheery and suntanned, at the end of the summer: they wore flip-flops and toe rings, and cried out with happiness at seeing friends. They had no responsibilities; even midterm exams felt years away. So they threw Frisbees, they planned parties. Outside her window was a beach volleyball court, where girls in bikinis played two-on-two. Abby felt like a dark presence, carrying her private sense of disaster and chaos through an ad for light beer.

  She wasn’t sleeping well, but Miranda stayed at her boyfriend’s, so Abby could keep the lights on at night. Sometimes she wrote letters to Jamie, but she didn’t send them. She was taking a class on the eighteenth-century novel and read Robinson Crusoe and Pamela until it was light outside. In the morning, to keep herself awake in class, she wrote out the lectures verbatim. The professor spoke slowly. He was a tall, deliberate man with a beard, who never smiled.

  One day, as she was putting her notebook away, the graduate student who led her discussion section sat next to her. He had called on her unexpectedly the week before, and she hadn’t forgiven him.

  “You missed section,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m Peter Kerner,” he said. “I’m your TA.”

  “I know.” She had just been on the point of remembering his name.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Fine.”

  There was a pause, and she surveyed him for signs of gayness—Miranda would want to know. He had nice, curly brown hair, which would be a warning sign for Miranda, but that was all. He was clean-shaven and wore a checked shirt that had been washed a lot.

  “I was watching you taking notes today,” he said. “I was sitting over there.”

  Abby waited.

  “Have you missed any lectures?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “I’ve skipped a few this term. He tends to improvise, and I’m not sure what he’s covered, and I have to put the midterm together.”

  “Okay.”

  “I have a feeling your notes are pretty—complete,” he said, “and I wonder if I could borrow them. Just to make sure what should be on the exam.”

  Abby flushed. “I do it so I won’t fall asleep,” she said.

  “Do what?”

  “Write everything down.”

  “Don’t you sleep at night?”

  She wished she hadn’t said anything.

  “I could have the notes back to you on Thursday, if I took them today,” he said.

  Abby slid the notebook across the little folding desk. It had nothing but class notes in it, no thoughts for Dr. Tirrett, no letters to Jamie; she was careful to keep things separate.

  He took the notebook, watching her. “Thanks,” he said.

  On Thursday, Peter Kerner caught up as she walked to class.

  “You can have this back,” he said, out of breath. “It was really useful.”

  She took the notebook.

  “You really write everything down.”

  “That way I don’t have to process it,” she said.

  “You can process it later,” he said. “What will your paper be about?”

  “I don’t know yet.” She had tried to finish Joseph Andrews the night before but fell asleep, and slept until morning. The sleep seemed to have made her more tired.

  “You never talk in section,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Wh
ere did you grow up?”

  “Santa Rosa. North of San Francisco.”

  “What do your parents do?”

  She hesitated. “My mother’s done a lot of things,” she said. “My father was a lawyer, but he’s dead.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Abby said nothing. They had reached the building and went inside.

  “I was going to guess they were divorced,” he said.

  “Do I look that wounded?”

  “It was something about the quality of your shyness.”

  “They were divorced, before,” she said, then wondered why she had told him.

  At the top of the stairs, outside the lecture hall, with a crowd of students moving past, Peter Kerner said, “If you want to talk about the paper, you can call me. I mean, that’s true for everyone.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay,” he said, and they went to their usual seats.

  During the lecture, which was about the novel Joseph Andrews as a response to Richardson’s Pamela, she thought about Peter Kerner sitting behind her. Then she thought about Jamie’s idea for a novel and how he was like a Fielding character, directionless and likable. He had gone to San Francisco to put distance between them. He still hadn’t asked Yvette whether Margot had been pregnant in France.

  The class ended, and Abby looked for the TA as she left, but he wasn’t there. She had taken hardly any notes. There was a rock band setting up in the flat concrete square outside the building; Abby skirted the backs of the amplifiers and walked toward the dorms. It was a sunny day, and girls lay on the grass with their shorts rolled up, reading. A boy fumbled a football, so it bounced toward one of the girls. He touched her arm in apology, and she smiled forgivingly over her sunglasses.

  There were folding tables set up, with petitions to sign, and cookies for sale by a Korean sorority. Hanging from the cookie table was a handmade poster with pictures of each of the girls, and their names in curly handwriting. Near the dorms, a girl was leading pairs of dancers through a dance to Spanish music on a boom box, the girls skillful, the boys awkward but willing, shuffling their big feet.

  Inside, her room was cool and silent, and Abby felt relieved. She had inherited a laptop computer from her father’s law office, and she waited while it booted up and then typed a heading: