by Maile Meloy
Her socked feet were close enough that he could touch them if he wanted. He could pull her ankle into his lap and the rest of her might come, too; she might climb over, limber girl, and kiss him like she had before.
“What does Peter think of your being here?” he asked. He could hear the catch in his own voice.
Abby was silent for a moment. “He doesn’t like it. But he trusts me.”
“Should he?”
She hesitated. Now was the time to move to her side of the couch; he could feel it in every part of his body except his poor brain, which pulled back on the reins, trying to keep control. He waited.
“I think so,” she said.
“So no backsliding.”
There was a catch in her voice now, too. “No.”
He put a hand on her foot, he couldn’t help it, and slid it up to the bare skin of her ankle. She didn’t pull back. He heard Katya saying, Nothing so fucked like this, but it seemed to come from very far away.
“No one would have to know,” he said. “I’m not going to come over there, but you could come over here. No one would know.”
Abby looked agonized.
“Just come over for a second.”
“I would know,”she whispered.
He waited. “Just for a second,” he said. “Just come sit with me.”
She glanced at T.J.’s bedroom door, open two inches and dark inside, and she sat up and moved toward him. He ached with longing, and with the idea that he was going to do this again. He hadn’t changed. She nestled against him, still hesitant, with her back to his chest as if they were just going to watch the night sky out the window. He ran his hand over her breast, remembering the exact size and give of it through her shirt, a thing he had thought he would never do again. Then she turned her face up to his and kissed him urgently, all the hesitation gone. He let go of the reins and let the horses tumble toward the edge of the cliff.
75
DOMINICK FOUND HIS old contacts, his friends, when Margot left. He found his roommate Cordy, the graying pro surfer, who wasn’t preaching sobriety anymore, and getting high after so long was sweeter for the wait. He sat on the beach listening to Cordy talk, and had what he had always wanted, what he had sought in the Jesuits before he disappointed them by being lustful: he had an elite group of brethren. People who had risen above the everyday and knew exaltation.
He woke up alone and chilled on the sand, the air misty with morning fog. He brushed the sand off his jacket on his way to the bathrooms and stretched his aching legs.
“It’s gonna be a good day,” a sunburned woman with dirty hair and a roll of blankets said. “I got a hunch.”
“You said it,” Dominick said.
“Good vibes,” the woman said. “I’m telling you.”
He waved good-bye before she could ask him for cash. He wanted to remember the night’s elation, but his head was starting to throb. The surfers and the Rollerbladers were coming out: a freckled girl tugging on her wetsuit, a muscular black man dancing in skates. All the healthy people. Where do they all come from?
He sat on the low concrete wall at the edge of the beach, noticing the pain that spread across his lower back. He shouldn’t have fallen asleep on the beach, he was too old for that. A surfer in dairymaid braids was rinsing off in the shower, and something was wrong with the right side of her face. The skin was tighter, shinier, with a smeared texture. As his mind warmed up slowly, the two things seemed connected: there was something wrong with him, and there was something wrong with her.
He wished Cordy would come back and talk some more. Maybe teach him to surf. What had Cordy been saying on the beach? That life is like the ocean, it’s huge and uncontrollable and dark, and you get your little place on the edge of it. You either sit on your board outside the breakers, and be afraid, or you paddle like hell and try to get up on the wave that might break your neck or drown you, and you get the rush and the view and the ride for as long as you can. The analogy had seemed convincing and bracing the night before.
If Margot had stayed, he could have managed. He would have been buoyed by her sensible presence, her ardent fucking, and her steadying love. He would have gone to work and come home to the smell of baking banana bread. She would claim there was something wrong with it, the bananas were too ripe or not ripe enough, but it would be perfect and sweet and nourishing and he would drop his briefcase right there to eat some. Her sons would vanish and her husband would die an unlamentable death, and everyone would whisper, It’s better, really, this way . And life would be unendingly happy. He could have ridden that particular wave for a long time. He felt a black mood clouding the inside of his skull.
The girl with the damaged face had peeled off her wetsuit under the shower and wore a red bikini and a white nylon top. She shivered, goose bumps rising on her pretty thighs.
“What happened?” he asked, touching his own cheek.
She looked up, flipping a braid over her shoulder. Her eyes were wide and pale, and must have been trusting once, when she was just an attractive girl, when everyone smiled at her happily. Now she was suspicious. “I rescued a baby from a fire.”
He had the feeling he always had, coming down from a high: that he had to struggle to register things at his usual speed. But he knew she was lying. “I didn’t mean to offend you,” he said. “Is surfing hard?”
“No.” She picked up her board and swung it onto her hip. He was going to lose her, too.
“Is it like life?” he asked, to keep her there.
She looked over her shoulder at him, and he saw only the flawless left side of her face. “No,” she said. “It’s like surfing.”
Then she was gone. The sun had come out and made him squint. He felt his hair to see if it looked like he had slept in the sand, and felt his pockets to see if he had any money. Not even a dollar for coffee. He was off to a bad start this morning.
“Good vibes,” he told himself. They had to be out there somewhere.
76
BY THE MIDDLE of December, Peter was faced with the question of what to do about Abby, who still hadn’t come back from San Francisco. She said on the phone that T.J. was over his flu but he seemed so cheerful that she couldn’t leave him yet. It was just as easy to stay until Christmas.
“And at Christmas?” he said.
“I have to go to Teddy and Yvette’s,” Abby said. “You should go see your family.” It was the same way she had said You should call the marine chemist . He was back at square one.
“Is something going on with Jamie?”
“No,” she said.
He didn’t ask if something had gone on with Jamie, in the last two weeks, because he didn’t want to know. But he did want to know.
“Is that the truth?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I need to get through Christmas alone. Margot’s coming, and my mother. I’m a different person with you and with my family, and it’s too hard to be both those people at once.”
“I like the way you are with me better.”
“I know.”
“I think you do, too.”
“December twenty-seventh,” she said.
“And meanwhile you stay with Jamie.”
“You sound like you don’t trust me.”
“Of course I don’t,” he said. “No one should be trusted alone with someone they’ve slept with. I would have to be insane. And if a girl ever needed a chaperone, it’s you.”
“Then why did you let me go?”
“You really want to know this?”
“Yes.”
He answered carefully. “It was a gamble. I took the short-term risk of you being alone with Jamie, who can’t legally steal you away, over the long-term risk that you wouldn’t stay with someone who kept you from going.”
She was silent.
“That’s true, isn’t it?” he asked.
“It might be.”
“But I thought we were talking about a week.”
“There’s nothing g
oing on,” she said: again, the present tense. “I’m not that girl anymore.”
“Everyone has limits, Abby. I have limits.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s really fine. I sleep on the couch.”
“In a better world,” he said, “I wouldn’t need that consolation.”
77
TEDDY AND YVETTE’Shouse was packed when Abby arrived with T.J. and Jamie. Margot, Clarissa, and Jamie were staying in their old rooms, and Teddy and Yvette were in theirs. Owen was on one of the living room couches, and neither he nor Margot seemed sure how to talk to each other. Bennett was on the other couch, and Danny had brought a sleeping bag for the floor. T.J. got the spare twin bed in Jamie’s room, and Abby got the spare twin bed in her mother’s. Saffron and Martin and the baby, Liam, plus her uncle Freddie the healer in a bolo tie and black snakeskin boots, were in a bed-and-breakfast up the street.
The roles of the sisters seemed reversed. Margot was pale from the hospital, and overwhelmed. Clarissa, confident, happy, and tanned from sailing, had brought the movie she’d made for her film class. After dinner the first night, she gathered the family to watch it.
“A movie?” Yvette asked. “Is that why you had a camera here?”
“It’s not going to be embarrassing, is it?” Jamie asked.
“No!”
“Really, Mom, is it?” Abby asked.
“Look who’s talking,” Jamie said.
“You guys!” Clarissa said. “You never take me seriously.”
She started the VCR, and the screen was black, and then there was a shot of the front of the house.
“Hey, that’s here,” Saffron said.
The image wobbled slightly. Clarissa’s voice, on the tape, said, “This is the house I grew up in, in the fifties. My father fought in the war, my parents were Eisenhower Republicans, and I wore white gloves to Mass.”
“Oh, boy,” Jamie said. “I think we’re in for it.”
There was a shot of the church, with Clarissa in front of it. “This is the church where I was confirmed,” she said. “I used to make up sins for confession when I couldn’t think of any. Talking back to my sister—that was a standby.”
Everyone laughed.
“Margot the unwitting oppressor,” Jamie said.
“Oh, she could be witting,” Clarissa said.
Margot, who had been rocking the baby, looked hurt. There was an awkward silence, and then she handed the baby off to Martin and left the room.
“You kids are acting like nothing’s happened to your sister,” Yvette said angrily. “You have to be careful with her.” She went down the hallway after Margot.
They had missed what Clarissa had said while standing in front of the public pool, and now she was in front of the house again. There was a breeze, and it blew her hair a little, and blew against the microphone, making a low roar. “I came here to tell my parents that I was a lesbian,” she said. “That was my plan.”
Del’s voice from behind the camera said, “You just said was .”
“Because it was a past-tense idea,” Clarissa answered on camera. “I came to say I was . Now I’m not sure I can do it.”
“What did she say?” Teddy asked Saffron.
“I think she said she was a lesbian,” Saffron said quietly.
“She did ?” Teddy said.
The image of Clarissa careened to one side of the frame, and Del spoke again, unseen. “See, this is the problem with this movie. You can’t even say ‘I’m a lesbian’ to me . So why would you want to say it to your parents?”
“Is this a fictional movie?” Teddy asked Saffron.
“I don’t know,” Saffron said.
Jamie said, “Clar? This is the movie you wanted us to watch, right?”
“Yes,” Clarissa said, as if uncertain now. “But you’re not really watching it.”
Abby sat frozen on the couch, waiting for the rest of the film.
The camera had gone inside the house and found Teddy in his recliner in the living room. It was like a trick mirror, reflecting the room they were in, but Teddy was alone there, telling stories. The room fell silent, listening. He talked about a Prussian officer who told him America would go to war, and about laying mines across a bay in the Pacific.
When Clarissa came on the screen again, explaining something, Jamie said, “Wow. You should be in war documentaries, Dad.”
The baby started to fuss, and Martin jiggled him. “Is there more of Teddy?” he asked.
“I think that’s it,” Clarissa said. On-screen, she was giving a tour of her old bedroom down the hall. “It’s almost over.” Abby could see that it was not her dream reception, as director and star.
The baby started to cry, and Martin handed him off to Saffron. People turned to try to help.
“I think he’s sick,” Saffron said. “I think he has a cold.”
Clarissa ejected the tape before the credits and left the room.
Abby followed her mother, who stopped outside her bedroom, glaring down the hall at her family. “They’ve never paid any attention,” she said. “They’ve never seen me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You don’t understand what it was like being the younger daughter. Even in that book you didn’t.”
“I’m sorry,” Abby said.
“How can they love me if they don’t see me?”
“They do.”
But the movie was already forgotten; all attention had turned to the baby’s congested sobs.
By Christmas Eve, Martin and T.J. had sore throats and runny noses, too. Jamie said all babies should be banned from Christmas.
“That would go against the spirit of the holiday,” Yvette said. “It’s about the birth of a child.”
“That’s why the joke is funny, Ma,” Jamie said.
“Oh—” she said.
The sick and the heathen stayed home from midnight Mass to play cards, and the faithful and the curious went to hear Yvette read from Isaiah. Abby and Jamie slid into a middle pew next to Margot and her family. Bennett had announced at dinner that he was an atheist—to only mild surprise—but Owen and Danny were there, and Teddy. The church filled up with parishioners in red and green sweaters.
“It’s good to get out of that house,” Jamie said. He stretched his arms over his head. “But it’s weird not to have a kid in tow. Isn’t it?”
“Sort of,” Abby said.
He let one arm come down on the pew behind her.
“Don’t get fresh,” she said.
When it was Yvette’s turn to read, she stood at the lectern and spoke from memory, in a clear voice:
For a child is born to us, a son given to us;
Authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
She sat down again, and a warm and friendly-seeming priest gave a sermon about the first reenactment of the Nativity, as staged by Francis of Assisi. He said that when Francis embraced the doll representing Jesus, the doll hugged him back. “We know that babies are difficult and wonderful,” the priest said, “that they’re rewarding and they’re a lot of work. And loving Jesus, embracing Jesus in your life, is like that: both difficult and wonderfully worthwhile.” There were wet coughs throughout the congregation: other families had colds, and not all the sick had stayed home.
Then a teenager in a black dress, her long red hair in ringlets, stood near the piano and sang “O Holy Night,” from the beginning. She sang:
Truly He taught us to love one another
His law is love and His gospel is peace
Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother
And in His name all oppression shall cease.
Abby whispered to Jamie, “That prophecy didn’t work out so well.”
“I think she means eventually.”
“I’m not holding my breath.”
Margot gave them a look. The soprano went on, the song getting highe
r and more insistent:
Christ is the Lord, Oh, praise His name forever
His pow’r and glo-o-ory ever more proclaim
His pow’r and glo-o-ory ever mo-o-o-ore proclaim.
When it was over, the girl collected her music and nodded slightly in the strange absence of applause. The Mass was finished, the candles were lit, and the congregation sang “Silent Night” and spilled out of the church. The night was cool and clear.
“Let’s walk home,” Jamie said. “I don’t want to squeeze into that car.”
They said good-bye to the others and walked past the line of cars waiting to leave the parking lot. There were roses blooming between the slats of the neighborhood fences as they started down the street.
Abby hummed “O Holy Night” as they walked, and Jamie sang, “ Christis the Lord, Oh wor -ship him or we’ll kill…you!”
Abby laughed. “Careful. His pow’r and glory might strike you down.”
“With a bad head cold?”
“Someone’s next. Margot looked pale at church.”
“My money’s on Bennett. He’s been weakened by stress.”
“And Margot hasn’t? Do you want odds?”
“No, I’ve got a feeling. Two dollars on Bennett. You take Margot.”
They shook hands on the bet, and Jamie held on to hers.
“Oh, Abby, it’s so weird,” he said. “There’s no one I’m at home with like I am with you. That’s not a come-on, I swear.”
She took her hand back and kept walking.
“Are you going to tell Peter what happened?” he asked.
“Maybe. If he wants to know. Right now he doesn’t.”
“Just admit that it’s weird for you, too.”
They passed a hedge of winter jasmine, and the air smelled headily sweet. “It is weird,” she said.
“It’s hard to tell. You’ve been so disciplined and clear.”
