A Family Daughter

by Maile Meloy

  “No.”

  “What’s the point of writing if people can’t read it?”

  “You can’t read it yet .”

  “You’ll say that until you’re ninety. If it were me writing something, I’d knock on your door every five minutes to make you read it. Tell me at least, am I in it?”

  “Ja mie, ” she said.

  “I am,” he said. “I know I am.”

  After he had left, Abby thought that sleeping together was strange, but at least it was straightforward. Having done it in the past was unsettling and unstable, like walking a tightrope. At one end was the knowledge that it never should have happened, at the other the possibility it might happen again. They were balanced somewhere in the middle, feeling tremors run through the wire.

  She read what was on the computer screen. The page she was on seemed plausible, but she wasn’t sure about what came before, and there wasn’t anything yet that came after. The niece character had slept with her uncle, and was pregnant. She didn’t want Jamie reading that. She didn’t want anyone reading it.

  She figured the time difference to make sure Peter would be awake and called him in San Diego.

  “I was wondering when you’d call,” he said. “How is it?”

  “The woman we’re staying with, Saffron’s mother, died yesterday.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “There are problems with the will. I shouldn’t stay on long, but I have a favor to ask. I want to make a will, in case I get hit by a bus. I’m going to leave my computer to you, and I want you to erase the hard drive.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “I’m fine. It’s just in case. I don’t want my family reading something I haven’t finished. I was going to ask Jamie, but I can’t trust him. I don’t think he could deal with the idea.”

  There was another silence.

  “Maybe this is laying my cards too much on the table,” Peter said, “but I don’t know if I could deal with it either. I would be really—sad, if you died, and I don’t think I could destroy what you’d written. I think I would want it.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “I promise, it’s not any good.”

  “I don’t care,” he said. “I don’t want to be part of any scenario where you get hit by a bus. I want you to look both ways crossing the street.”

  “I will.”

  “If you don’t, I’ll publish the book as it is. I’ll add a lot of bad sentences first. With bad punctuation.”

  “Peter, I’m serious.”

  “So am I,” he said. There was something new in his voice.

  “I’m on their phone, I should go.”

  “Give me the number and I’ll call you back.”

  She read it off the phone. “Give me five minutes.”

  She hung up and sat thinking. The thing in his voice sounded like fear, and she wondered if he was really afraid she might die. She typed herself a note: “uncle has to deal w/ death of niece.” She would give him some time to prepare—an illness, no buses. The niece in the book had a baby coming, but the baby shouldn’t die. There could be a decision: to save the girl or the baby. The family gets involved. Her father would want her to live.

  Henry had been on her mind all day, and she thought now about what her father would have thought of Peter: if he would have dismissed him like the others or approved. She thought he might have liked Peter’s directness and his way of joking seriously, but she couldn’t know for sure. The feeling of moving forward alone was strange and bracing and mixed with dread. Dr. Tirrett would say she was afraid of investing in people, if she were still seeing Dr. Tirrett.

  Abby heard the door next to hers—Katya’s door—slam shut, and she listened for a fight going on, but there were no more sounds. The bathwater started to run in Katya’s bathroom, and then the phone on the little desk rang. Abby picked it up before anyone else could.

  39

  TEDDY’S EYESIGHT WAS worse, and he was even more dependent on Yvette. He could still see, but he was relying on the memory of what things looked like to process what they looked like now. He knew where his things were in the bathroom on bleary mornings: the upright, red shape a toothbrush, the shorter, darker one a razor.

  Since retiring, he had volunteered for the lay ministry at the church: picking up the wafers from the priest and giving communion to people who couldn’t get to church. But now Yvette had to drive him on his visits. One of the old men was blind, and Teddy thought soon he would be, too. He had seen plenty. He wanted no extraordinary measures to keep him in this world, and eye surgery at eighty-three was an extraordinary measure. And it was expensive; the way he and Yvette were going, they would outlive their retirement and be a burden on the children. He wasn’t about to spend a lot of money so someone could take a knife to his eyes.

  “They have new ways of doing it now,” Yvette said.

  “So it’s even more expensive.”

  “We have the money and we have insurance,” Yvette said. “That damn Depression was sixty years ago. I’m not letting you act like we’re still in it.”

  “I get around all right,” he protested.

  “You do not!” she said. “I have to drive you. I’m taking you to the surgeon, and if he says he can fix it, then that’s it. I’m not your chauffeur anymore.”

  So Teddy found himself in an examination room, with a giant diagram of an eye on the wall. He knew it was an eye, he could see that. He wanted to go out to the waiting room and triumphantly say he could see things he wasn’t used to seeing, just fine. But Yvette would point out that the eye on the wall was three feet tall.

  The surgeon was disconcertingly young, as young as Teddy’s children. He said Teddy’s eyes were at just the right point, not too early and not too late, and it would be a simple procedure to remove the cataracts and give Teddy back his sight.

  “Completely?” Teddy asked.

  “I can’t guarantee that, but I think so.”

  “How much does it cost?”

  The young man named a figure, with no embarrassment.

  “I’ll have to talk to my wife,” Teddy said.

  “She already caught me at reception,” the doctor said. “She told me not to let you balk at the price, because Medicare would cover most of it.”

  Teddy was indignant. “I’m not balking.”

  “I really think you’ll be surprised at the results,” the surgeon said. “Everyone is. My grandfather had it done. People don’t realize how long their vision has been impaired, so having it restored is startling.”

  “You mean I’ll see all my wife’s wrinkles,” Teddy said. He said it lightly, as a joke. He thought suddenly that maybe hewanted to see her clearly again.

  The surgeon smiled. “I would guess so,” he said.

  The receptionist had a nice voice, and dark hair. Teddy made an appointment on a computer screen to have somebody’s grandson put a sonic probe into his eyes and then suck out the lens and put in a folded-up new one, and he gave the pretty woman Yvette’s e-mail address. He had begun life, he reflected, with the radio, the telegraph, and the Victrola, and had been perfectly happy with those.

  He went out to the waiting room, and Yvette looked up from her magazine. He guessed that she was anxious. The doctor was right; he didn’t know for how long he had been relying on an image in his head.

  “Okay,” he said. “You win.”

  40

  IN THE LATE AFTERNOON, everyone from the estancia drove in two cars into Buenos Aires for the funeral. The mood was subdued, and Abby watched the ranchland go by outside the tinted window. Then they were on the freeway on the outskirts of town, with giant apartment complexes and dilapidated row houses hung with laundry, and then they were in the city, on a wide avenue canopied with trees. Outside the basilica and the cemetery there were milling tourists. Stalls sold leather bracelets and photographs of tango dancers.

  Inside the church, they filed in
to a pew. Magdalena had been left at home; she hadn’t seemed at all wistful about not driving on a bad road for the funeral of an employer who had never been particularly nice to her. The shrines on the walls of the church were ornate and gilded, and to Abby’s right was a seated statue of Christ, looking gravely disappointed, with the crown of thorns on his head and his elbows on his knees in brooding thought.

  A few gray-haired tourists passed through the church to visit the Franciscan cloisters, stopping to gape openly at the funeral. One of them, in snakeskin cowboy boots and a gray suit, with a turquoise ponytail holder in his white hair, slid into the pew next to Abby. “What’d I miss?” he asked, in an American accent.

  “Nothing so far.”

  “Name’s Freddie,” he said, grinning to reveal two missing front teeth. “I’m Josephine’s half brother. I guess from your face that they didn’t tell you about me.”

  “No,” Abby said, wondering if there would be more complications with the will. Saffron was at the other end of the pew.

  “I knew Josephine on and off,” Freddie said. “Our father wanted us to be friends. Saffron invited me, which surprised me a little. I’m a healer, so I can tell that my niece is very angry.”

  Abby nodded.

  “If Saffron wasn’t so resistant to me, I could heal her,” he said. “I’ve healed people who weren’t even in the same country as me, but it’s easier up close.” He paused, studying Abby. “Like if there was something wrong with you right now, it would be easy for me to heal you. You don’t seem resistant.”

  “I think I’m all right.”

  Freddie shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

  “How are you the half brother?”

  “Josephine’s father had an affair,” he said, “with my mother. I got my healing ability from her. But she was an actress and couldn’t be known to have a baby out of wedlock. So I grew up with another family. But my real mother had real abilities, real sensitivities. I’ve read a lot about her. You’ve heard of Jean Harlow?”

  “Yes,” Abby said.

  “No one knows this,” he said. “They said she was on salary strike from MGM in 1934, but she was pregnant with me. It would have been a great scandal. I know she felt terrible about leaving me with that other family. But it wasn’t her fault, she was trapped by her circumstances. She had kidney disease, you know, so having me was probably what killed her so young.”

  “I’m sorry,” Abby said.

  “You’re not sure if I’m telling the truth,” he said, watching her. “I did a lot of drugs in the sixties, that damaged my mind. I had to go into the hospital a few times. But I know a few things.”

  “Okay,” Abby said.

  “I’m much better now. My father helped me out when he was alive, and he told Josephine she had a brother. So when I had to ask Josephine for help a few times, she came through. A good deed in a naughty world. I don’t know how I’ll fare under Saffron. She’s a tough one.”

  The choir had taken their places, and now they started to sing. Freddie stopped talking and watched the singers with interest.

  From the other side of Katya, Fauchet tapped Abby’s shoulder. He motioned her closer, behind Katya.

  “Don’t believe this story of Jean Harlow,” Fauchet whispered, under the sound of the choir.

  “Who is he?”

  “The child of an ordinary mistress,” Fauchet said. “He invents the rest.”

  The man was absorbed, by now, in the choir. Abby wondered if he looked like Jean Harlow but could remember only blondness.

  T.J. was sitting on the kneeling pad at Fauchet’s feet, drawing on a collection envelope with a stubby pencil. After Freddie’s story, watching him filled Abby with surprising sorrow. The little boy would wonder for the rest of his life why he felt dislocated and unwanted. She wanted to write a letter to his future self that he could carry with him, sealed, until he needed it—a letter that would explain things. But it wouldn’t work. So you had the explanation of the pain, so what? You still had the feelings, and the explanations didn’t make them go away.

  “Josefina,”the priest was saying, “era una madre buenisima, una católica muy devota, una amiga veramente leal.”

  After the service, they went to see the tomb where Josephine would be, among the houselike monuments to the dead families of Argentina, outside in the blinding sun. Because there was no family tomb, Josephine had a slot in a long enclosure with rows of square tombs in one wall. Two men in dusty work clothes were sitting on a bench inside, eating lunch in the shade, and they watched as the sober little group came in. Some of the tombs were empty and the doors were open a crack; it made Abby feel queasy.

  Freddie sidled close to Saffron, and either he really had healing powers or Saffron was too distressed to notice, because she let him put an arm around her.

  “I can’t believe she wanted to be here,” she said.

  Freddie steered her toward the door. “Let’s go get lunch,” he said, and the rest of them followed.

  41

  JAMIE WOKE AT THE estancia from a dream of a funeral Mass in which Martin Russell was dead in a coffin, killed by a pitchfork. It was morning, and Saffron wasn’t in the bed. She had spent three days shut in her mother’s office downstairs with the lawyers, coming out for sandwiches and sleep. Whatever winning meant, Saffron would win.

  Martin Russell was arriving in the afternoon, stopping in Buenos Aires on someone’s solid-gold yacht, and Saffron had made clear that she hoped Jamie could be civil. His head hurt. He went downstairs and found Katya in the big room with the fireplace, watching T.J. run a toy truck over the rug.

  Jamie dropped down on the opposite couch. He saw himself in the kid—a certain absorption he had, as if he were screening out the rest of the world. It was how Jamie had felt rocking his head on his pillow at night to music in his head, and how he had felt learning to play the guitar. He hoped the kid wouldn’t end up with people who wouldn’t understand him, who would stop him disappearing into his own world.

  Katya was wearing the bathrobe from her room, and it swallowed her up, but her legs were visible to the knee. Her feet were tucked beneath her. He had seen her only in big men’s shirts and jeans.

  “I was thinking he maybe understands my language,” she said, as if it were a conversation they had been having. “But nothing.”

  To demonstrate, she said something incomprehensible. The boy went on playing with his truck.

  “What did you say?” Jamie asked.

  She blushed. “Only a stupid thing.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I said I wish to eat your heart.”

  “Yikes.”

  “It means how much I love him. But you see, this is very stupid.”

  He noticed again how different she looked when the color came into her face. “Do you?” he asked. “I mean, feel that way? You’ve just met him, right?”

  “The feeling to be a mother is very strong,” she said. “I cannot explain this.”

  Jamie thought of Margot and wondered about very strong feelings. “Teach me to say it,” he said.

  She repeated the words and laughed when he tried to say them. It began with egdyem mega and then became impossible. He wanted to ask about the Russians who bought her but was afraid of betraying how thrilling that suddenly seemed.

  Then Saffron came in, wearing a tight gray sweater and a swinging skirt, a diamond crucifix between her lovely breasts. Her abject grief was gone, and she said good morning as she walked through, barely looking at Jamie, getting ready for Martin’s arrival.

  Jamie sat fuming on the couch and finally got up and stalked back to the guest wing. His own room depressed him, so he knocked on Abby’s door. She had hardly come out in the past few days; she showed up at dinner, and swam in the pool at night. Now she opened the door, still in pajamas, and he invited himself in and sat on the bed.

  “Do you think Katya’s pretty?” he asked.

  “Oh, no,” she said, closing the door. “Jamie, not that.”

/>   “What?”

  “Promise me you won’t get involved with her.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You can’t bullshit me, Jamie.”

  “Maybe I’m just looking for a distraction. I can’t believe Saffron invited Martin here.”

  “It seems completely in character.”

  “You’re supposed to be sympathetic.”

  “That’s not true,” she said. “I’m supposed to be objective and help you see Saffron clearly.”

  “And your objective opinion is?”

  “That she can’t possibly be worth it.”

  “I wish you knew her in private,” he said. “She’s so funny and sexy. She’s different alone. I’m going crazy.”

  “She cheats, Jamie, and she’ll always cheat. And you can’t stand that—you want her to be yours. So you have a problem.”

  “Stop being so rational.”

  “Then get out of my room.”

  He looked at her, confused. “Are you jealous?”

  “Oh, probably,” she said. “Put yourself in my shoes. It’s a very weird position I’m in.”

  “I thought you wanted to normalize things.”

  “This is not normal!” she said. “Would you like it if I came to you moping about the funny, sexy, cheating guy I was obsessed with?”

  “No,” he said. “But you wouldn’t get yourself into such a mess.”

  “Just go away. Okay? That’s what I want.”

  “Fine.”

  “Just go.”

  He reached for her shoulder. “Abby, babe.”

  “Don’t touch me,” she said, stepping backward and bumping into a chair. “You can’t come to me when she rejects you.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Please go.”

  “Do you love me?”

  “Jamie, I’ve always loved you, since I was seven. That’s my problem.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Get out of my room,” she said.

  42

  DR. TIRRETT WAS ON CALL at the university counseling office, for walk-in support during exam time, but it was a slow morning and she forced herself to read through her divorce papers. She tried not to be enraged at her husband. She tried to understand the psychological process by which he had bankrupted his business and deceived his creditors, and to find in him the man she had married. When the receptionist said, “We’ve got one,” she was glad for an excuse to put the papers away.