The Admissions

by Meg Mitchell Moore

  “Right, I know.” Nora rubbed her eyes and twisted her pencil in her hands. “I’m sure I’ll find another buyer.” It must be difficult to be wife and mother and realtor all rolled in together, with one of her birds preparing to flee the nest. Perhaps that was what was bothering her, the oldest, Angela, almost out of the house. Maybe she needed to talk to someone about that. Nora would never see a therapist. Arthur felt confident in saying that. She was too practical and of-the-moment for therapy. Too busy.

  Arthur felt a tug of sympathy for Nora, he did, but still he envied her, too, the unruliness and mess of family life. She was always, during her non-Sutton-and-Wainwright hours, consumed with her volunteer obligations at the girls’ schools and field trips and overseeing homework and shuttling them around to the various activities because it seemed that in the modern age you were not allowed to be a child who simply came home from school and existed: you had to be well rounded and accomplished and coddled and fed lots of flax and wild salmon and carefully monitored for signs of potential failure.

  His non-Sutton-and-Wainwright hours with Linda were lovely, in their home on Marina Boulevard, looking out at the boats. But so very quiet.

  “You will,” said Arthur. “You’re a wonderful realtor. And it’s a beautiful home.”

  “It’s overpriced,” murmured Nora.

  “It’s beautiful,” said Arthur firmly.

  For Arthur and Linda there had been just the one baby. Just the one, a little girl, living only one day, like a mayfly. They had named her Dawn. That’s when she entered the world, that’s when she left it, that’s why Arthur was up before the sun every day of his life since then—he said a little prayer, paid a little homage, as the first threads of sunlight made their way across the sky. Often in the early morning he walked from his and Linda’s home down to Crissy Field, where he let the wind whip his thinning hair, and he watched the lucky dogs running along the beach. They had been so young then, Arthur twenty-nine and Linda twenty-six. Still nearly children themselves, it seemed to Arthur now, though at the time, when it happened, he felt older than the hills. A heart defect, not repairable. Dawn had no chance.

  Come to think of it, they were all very quiet and subdued at the conference table today, not just Nora.

  “Grace?” said Arthur. “What’s next?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Grace. “I’m not myself today.”

  Nora was on that immediately, shifting from tired mode to caretaking mode, stretching her hand toward Grace. “Oh, sweetie. Is it the cat again?”

  Grace’s cat! How did Nora know what was wrong with Grace’s cat? In fact it seemed downright exhausting to be Nora—on top of everything else she was tracking a sick cat.

  Grace nodded and took Nora’s outstretched hand. Seth looked uncomfortably at Arthur.

  If Dawn had lived she’d be thirty-one years old; sometimes Arthur wondered if she’d have been a mother by now, and what kind of mother she would have been. Linda would have made a phenomenal grandmother, with just the right amount of doting, and she’d have been able to counsel Dawn to take it easy, not to worry so much about every little thing. Nora could probably use some of that. Her own mother lived too far away to do much of that for her.

  Not all single women over the age of thirty-five lived alone in apartments with felines, Arthur knew that, but Grace did. It was hard to look at her and not think she had come straight from a casting call: the conscientious, slightly grumpy, loyal-to-a-fault secretary. Office assistant, Grace corrected him if he slipped. Don’t you dare call me a secretary. She was Sutton and Wainwright’s secret backbone.

  “It’s just…well, she’s on a steroid, prednisone, and it’s supposed to work immediately but I’m not sure if it’s doing anything. I hate to think of her alone, in my apartment. If something happens.”

  “Do you need to leave, Grace?” said Arthur. There was an impatient note in his voice that he tried to snuff out but that he didn’t quite get to in time.

  Nora whispered, “I think she should.” She rubbed Grace’s back.

  Arthur and Linda were not cat people—they were not pet people, their house was uncluttered and clean as a museum—but even so, Arthur tried his hardest to work up sympathy for Grace. And for the cat, he supposed.

  “Okay,” said Arthur. “Well, in that case, if we’ve nothing else to discuss: meeting adjourned.”

  Grace leapt up.

  Oh, for Heaven’s sake.

  CHAPTER 19

  NORA

  “Listen,” said Seamus O’Malley, taking Nora’s elbow and leading her to a quiet corner of the studio’s waiting room, quiet being a relative term, since inside the studio a clamorous beginners’ hard-shoe class was lurching along under the tutelage of one of Seamus’s underlings and on the other side of the waiting room the under-thirteen ceili group—Cecily’s—was ostensibly warming up for their practice but was actually engaged in an (illegal) bartering program involving gum and Twizzlers. They were sitting directly beneath a sign that read NO FOOD IN THE STUDIO OR WAITING ROOM. WATER ONLY, PLEASE. But Seamus seemed to be turning a blind eye, so Nora turned a blind eye too.

  Usually, out of necessity, Nora just opened the door of the Audi while it was practically still moving and deposited Cecily in the parking lot to make her way into class. Today, though, Nora had a check to drop off and a mother to connect with about a costume piece. She was glancing at her phone, waiting for the mother, when Seamus grabbed her.

  “Listen, Nora,” said Seamus. Nora took a second, as she always did, to enjoy the way her name sounded when Seamus said it. He was two decades in America but, thank God, the vestiges of his brogue remained. Seamus could say anything to Nora, he could tell her she’d just been diagnosed with a rare blood disease or that a buyer had walked half an hour before closing escrow and still it would sound like he was singing her an Irish lullaby. “Is Cecily okay?”

  “Why?” Nora looked at Cecily, who was busy bartering with Fiona.

  “She seems a bit shook, is all.”

  “A bit shook?” It wasn’t unusual to be perplexed during a conversation with Seamus. Once he told the ceili team that they couldn’t hit a cow’s arse with a banjo. Cecily had looked it up on Nora’s iPhone on the way home. (“Oh!” she said. “It means we’re hopeless.”)

  “A bit unwell. A bit not like herself.”

  “She looks like herself to me,” said Nora. “She looks exactly like herself.” She glanced over at Cecily. When were Lawrence and Bee going to drop the hammer on her? How many miles a week was Gabe running, and why? Should she take Maya to a neurologist? Had Angela finished the application? And, seriously, what was for dinner?

  “I think you know, Nora,” said Seamus, “that we need this team to do well. To qualify for Worlds. We’ve put a lot into this, everybody has.”

  “I know. Cecily has too.” The ceili dresses had run each family $750. “Believe me, Seamus, Cecily has put as much into this as anyone.”

  “Sure she has,” said Seamus. “But the uniformity, that’s what’s crucial here. Cecily’s a gorgeous solo dancer, we all know that. But she’s losing her concentration with the ceili and that’s where we can’t be losing it. Ceili is all concentration, that’s all it is.”

  “I know,” said Nora. Seamus’s brogue was sounding less adorable.

  “See if you can’t rein her in a bit, yeah? Normally I would say don’t be troubling yourself, you know our Cecily can always pull off whatever we throw at her. But keep an eye, will you, Nora?”

  Cecily! Cecily was the light in the darkness, the bird singing in the trees. Worry about Cecily?

  “Okay,” she said congenially to Seamus O’Malley. It was warm in the studio; Nora wanted to get out of there. She had thirty-eight things to do. Her phone was buzzing. “Okay,” she said. She was a wife and a mother and a real estate professional; she could add one more thing to her list. “I will keep an eye, Seamus.”

  She answered the phone on the way out of the studio. Gabe.

  “I
think we made a big mistake.”

  “How’s that?” Nora marched toward her car, slid in.

  “I think we should have sent Angela to private school.”

  Nora started the car. “What?”

  She could practically feel Gabe nodding. “I mean it,” he said. “Skip Moynihan told me that the Ivies aren’t taking from public high schools anymore. That if you really want to get in you have to come from a boarding school, like that one down in Monterey, what’s it called?”

  “I don’t know what it’s called. That’s insane. We’re not sending our children to school in Monterey.”

  She backed out of the space.

  “I know that. We’ve missed the boat for that, obviously, with Angela. But if those are the kids who are getting in, maybe we should have—or maybe Cecily, or Maya—”

  Nora thought of Angela, worn out, overworked, crescents beneath her eyes: moons beneath the moons. She didn’t know how kids stood it these days. She couldn’t have. She could barely stand watching it.

  “Oh, Gabe. Gabe, Gabe. That is simply a dog you can’t walk back. You have done everything you could. We have done everything we could. Go back to work.”

  “Fine,” said Gabe sharply, but he stayed on the phone, like he was waiting for her to say something.

  CHAPTER 20

  GABE

  “Or notice the bears asleep at the zoo. It’s because they’ve been dancing all night for you…”

  Cecily was reading to Maya. Okay, that was sweet. That was very sweet. Gabe, on his way to his bedroom to change out of his work clothes, paused to listen.

  Cecily looked up, saw him standing there. She smiled and went back to reading and he felt pinpricks in the backs of his eyes. Don’t cry, you old bastard. It’s just two kids reading. No big deal.

  He changed his clothes and returned to the living room.

  The scene put him in mind of his own brothers, that was all. Michael and Ryan. Not that they sat around reading books with dancing polar bears on the cover together when they were kids. But they did play with Legos. When they had time. There were always chores on a ranch, endless work. Kids today didn’t do many chores. They didn’t have time: they were too busy training for adulthood. Also his kids didn’t live on a ranch, so there was less to do. In their defense.

  From faraway places, the geese flew home, read Cecily in a clear, firm voice.

  The ranch. Gabe remembered a winter sunset, the whole sky a blood orange. The biggest sky in the world. He remembered waves of panic coursing through him when he was a small child, briefly lost in the Dillard’s in Cheyenne, his hands grasping a blue silk dress in the ladies’ department, waiting for his mother to claim him.

  He remembered his brother Michael’s high school girlfriend, Lauren Foster, who had eyes like a cat’s, light green. He thought Michael would marry her, they all did. They’d all been a little bit in love with Lauren. Okay, Gabe had done more than be a little bit in love with Lauren. He’d acted on it. He couldn’t help it. Nobody could have helped it—Lauren Foster at seventeen had been an absolute goddess.

  A coward move, Gabe.

  A decades-old mistake.

  The moon stayed up until morning next day, and none of the ladybugs flew away. Cecily moved over on the couch and patted the empty space next to her and Gabe sat down.

  Just before his mother’s death she told him that she’d seen Lauren at a county fair and that time hadn’t been kind to her. This news depressed Gabe. He preferred to think of Lauren Foster as forever seventeen and beautiful, long-legged and tan, sitting at the kitchen table at the ranch house with bare feet and jean shorts and a bikini top. Which at the time hadn’t seemed nearly as strange as it did in retrospect. In landlocked Wyoming.

  So whenever you doubt just how special you are, and you wonder who loves you, how much and how far…

  His brother had married a woman from Vancouver. He’d never gotten over what Gabe had done. Stupid of Gabe to tell him.

  I can’t believe you would do something like that, Gabe.

  “Now you read,” said Cecily. “Just this last page, take your time.”

  “I can’t,” said Maya.

  “Of course you can. It’s just one page, two paragraphs, really. You can do it.”

  “I don’t want to do it. I want you to read.”

  “Maya…”

  What an asshole move, Gabe.

  “Okay,” said Cecily, frowning. Heaven blew every trumpet and played every horn on the wonderful, marvelous night you were born.

  She closed the book.

  “Daddy?” asked Maya. “What was it like on the night I was born?”

  “Darkest midnight,” said Gabe. “Magical. Well, not exactly midnight, more like one thirty or two. But still magical. Angela was born at midnight.”

  Cecily leaned her head against Gabe’s arm. “I remember when Maya was born. Aunt Marianne came to stay with us, and Angela had the stomach bug. I was born in the daytime. Right, Daddy? High noon?”

  “That’s right,” said Gabe. “Lunchtime. That’s why you like lunch so much.”

  “Everybody likes lunch.”

  “Not everybody.”

  Gabe took the book from Cecily and studied the cover. Two polar bears doing a waltz, and above the title a full moon, with two eyes and a mouth just visible. The man in the moon.

  CHAPTER 21

  NORA

  1:23 a.m.

  Dear Marianne,

  There’s a three-quarter moon tonight. I don’t know the official name for that, but Cecily would. She’s doing the phases of the moon at school.

  An email went out looking for a parent or two willing to preside over an evening trip somewhere-or-other for proper viewing.

  They said “parent” but of course they meant “mother.” They always mean mother.

  I pretended I didn’t get it.

  Tuesday morning, eight twenty-three. Nora had seen all three of her girls off to school. Angela had slouched her way out the door to walk with a couple of friends from the neighborhood and Nora had delivered Cecily and Maya to the turnaround circle at the elementary school.

  It was all very much the opposite of relaxing, this morning routine, and nothing about it seemed to get easier as time went on. Maybe when Angela was off at college—maybe then it would get easier, for there would be just Cecily and Maya to look after.

  Nora did not remember her mother rushing around like this to get Marianne and Nora out the door when they were schoolchildren in Rhode Island. She stood in her robe at the door as they walked themselves to the bus stop under gray New England skies. Surely she provided them with breakfast, but Nora did not recall made-to-order omelets. Cheerios and milk, maybe a raspberry Entenmann’s strudel when they were on special at the market. Of course there were only two of them, not three. That made a difference. Suzanne Ramsey, one of the moms at Cecily and Maya’s school—mother of four—theorized that no matter how many children you had, everything seemed easier once you subtracted one.

  Now, instead of going into the office the way she normally would, Nora was back in her kitchen, scrubbing dried egg from the stove, wiping smoothie residue from the counter, straightening the dish towel hanging on the stove handle, because she had to get to the monthly meeting of the Spring Fling committee for the elementary school.

  She was feeling unfairly peevish about the Spring Fling meeting, coming at a very busy time of year: the Harvard application looming, Cecily’s ceili team gearing up, the science fair. Maya’s class was putting on some sort of play before the Thanksgiving holiday, and Nora needed to go back and read the email to see what was expected of her. Then, of course, there was the dwarf flax, looming over her like a storm cloud. She found herself hoping fervently that something would happen to the Millers’ expansion plans—nothing too tragic, not an illness or anything, but maybe a gentle dip in the stock market that would affect their earmarked funds, or a respectable yet irreparable falling out with the architect—

  The dishwash
er was chugging along, as it had been since before Nora dropped Cecily and Maya off. The more exclusive the brand, it seemed, the longer the wash cycle. Ridiculous. She had time to call her mother, whose phone call from a few days ago she had not yet returned.

  “Nora-Bora!” said her mother. “I was just thinking about you.”

  “You were?”

  “Well, sort of. Inasmuch as I’m always thinking about you.”

  Nora said, “Awww,” and was surprised to discover a little catch in her voice. She glanced around the kitchen, refolded the dish towel, and suddenly felt nearly as exhausted as she’d ever felt. She wanted to lean into her mother across the telephone wires, to be enveloped by Aileen’s sturdy and freckled arms.

  “How are you, Nora?”

  Nora sighed. The dishwasher was telling her that forty-nine minutes remained in the cycle. Seriously? She could have hand-washed everything faster. “Oh,” she said. “You know, busy. Tired.”

  “Right,” said Aileen. “You’re always busy out there, all of you.”

  “Big fall for Angela,” said Nora. She scarcely remembered submitting her application to the University of Rhode Island. There’d really been no doubt that she’d get in, and she hadn’t applied anywhere else. Was she being hypocritical, getting all over Angela for not coming up with another list of schools? Of course she wasn’t! It was a different situation entirely.

  “Well,” said her mother. “You do rush around quite a bit. I mean, you’re like a whirling dervish whenever I see you.”

  “It’s a lot to keep up with!” protested Nora, who wasn’t sure about the whirling dervish comparison; she knew from Angela, courtesy of an extra-credit project for eleventh-grade English the previous year, that a whirling dervish was not, as Nora had always believed, a type of bird similar to a roadrunner, but a member of a Muslim order known for its ecstatic dancing rituals.