The Admissions

by Meg Mitchell Moore

  Eventually Mrs. Fletcher released her and held her by the shoulders and looked deep into her eyes. Definitely, on the eyelash extensions. Nobody had eyelashes like that naturally, except maybe babies. “Be careful out there, honey. It’s a wild world. You take care of yourself. You have no idea what you’re in for.”

  “Okay,” said Angela.

  When she was outside the front door, and sure Mrs. Fletcher couldn’t see her, she ran.

  CHAPTER 36

  NORA

  10:14 p.m.

  Dear Marianne,

  I’m not even attempting to go to bed yet (tonight, at all? not sure yet) because I know I won’t sleep. Everybody else is in bed (even Gabe! he’s snoring a little bit in that way that gives me a hint of what it might be like one day to be married to an old man). Maya is sleeping with no fewer than fourteen stuffed animals (I counted) but her favorite is still that pink unicorn you gave her two Christmases ago. Angela is never, ever in bed this early, and maybe she’s not asleep, but when I crouched down to look for the strip of light under her door I saw nothing. So I didn’t even knock; I just slunk off.

  I remember when she would never go to sleep without a goodnight kiss. Even when she was eleven, twelve! Then all of a sudden it stopped. All of a sudden, I didn’t know when her day ended.

  A couple of hours ago I got off the phone with Pinkie’s mom (Cathy, not that you need to remember that). She was livid! Absolutely livid. I don’t remember a time when Cathy Moynihan has actually been angry with me. She’s one of those extra-sweet, super-cheerful, always-on-top-of-things people who never seem stressed and volunteer for everything and then take on work the other volunteers (me, often) sign up for and never get to. She does it all with a smile, etc., while at the same time baking healthy muffins with ingredients like hemp and chia seeds. And pinning things on Pinterest. She’s like a movie version of a mom.

  Of course she has only one child and she doesn’t have a job. I can’t help thinking that makes it easier on her.

  Anyway. She was livid because earlier today when Pinkie and Cecily were watching what I thought was an innocent documentary about the building of the Golden Gate Bridge for a school project they were actually watching—on my iPad, using my iTunes account—a documentary about all the people who have committed suicide by jumping off the bridge. It’s called The Bridge, and I guess Pinkie was so upset by it that she couldn’t go to sleep tonight.

  Don’t you dare watch it, Marianne. I sat down with it after I got off the phone with Cathy. (Luckily the rental was still good; you know how much I hate renting something twice, Marianne. It rankles my frugal nature.) It’s beyond upsetting. Seriously, don’t watch it. Whoever made the documentary interviewed the parents of these poor souls, so you get a lot of regular people sitting on plaid couches and petting their lap dogs and wondering where they went wrong in their parenting.

  One guy took out the recycling for his parents before he went and jumped. Like it was any other day.

  Can you imagine? And Cecily and Pinkie watched the whole thing.

  I see that bridge every day. It’s the backdrop to so many of the homes I sell. The sun rising near it, setting over it: it’s a symbol of all that people love about this city.

  After I watched it I marched into Cecily and Maya’s room and I said, “This is the information you need, Cecily. The main span is 4,200 feet. The total wire used is 80,000 miles. That’s what your teacher wants to know. Not this other stuff.”

  And you know what she said, Marianne? She said, “If I was there, Mom, I would have saved him.”

  I said, “Who? The guy who took out the recycling?”

  She said, “Any of them.”

  I see that comment as proof of Cecily’s essential, irrevocable goodness. She has a solid gold heart, this child of mine.

  She must have inherited it from you, Marianne.

  CHAPTER 37

  GABE

  “Ah,” Gabe said to Abby. They were standing on the Golden Gate Bridge. “This is what it’s all about, isn’t it? This is what makes living here worth it, what makes up for the traffic, the expense. Look at that view.” Mount Tam to the north, the city to the south. Alcatraz in view. A sailboat with pristine white sails passing underneath. Beautiful.

  A gaggle of Japanese tourists passed them, chattering and pointing. Then came a woman in a sari. On the west sidewalk (they were on the east) he could see a couple riding bicycles. It was warm for late November, must be mid-sixties. Abby peered at him with those odd, close-together eyes. It was strange, standing here with a woman almost his same height. She moved in closer. She parted her lips just a little bit, like she was going to kiss him.

  “Oh, no, Abby,” he said. “You’re facing the wrong way. You’ve got to look out, to appreciate it.” He put his hands on her slender shoulders and turned her. Gently! So gently, so she could see the twilight purpling of the sky. He could feel the vibrations from the traffic underneath his feet.

  She turned.

  “Look at that,” he said, in his most tender and accommodating voice. “It’s like nothing else in the world, this bridge. It means so much to so many people.”

  It would be so easy, from there. A push, a fall, a tragic accident, a young and promising life snuffed out.

  So easy.

  —

  “Gabe? Gabe? Earth to Gabe…”

  Gabe jerked back to reality. He and Nora were making homemade spaghetti sauce. This was a highly unusual occurrence, the two of them cooking together on a Friday night. They used to do it quite often, before kids. In his dismal little apartment in the Mission they’d once attempted Lobster Thermidor. It had been a certified failure, and they’d paid through the nose for the lobsters. But there was lots of wine involved, so it was fun. Like most things with Nora were fun.

  He pulled himself back into the present.

  “You have to skin the tomatoes before you chop them, you nitwit. That’s why I have the water boiling. Remember? You make the little X at one end and drop them into the water for exactly sixty seconds, no more, no less.”

  “You’re talking to me like I’m someone who never watches Chopped,” Gabe said, channeling his normal voice.

  If he pushed Abby off a bridge, Nora would never lovingly call him a nitwit again. He’d never make homemade spaghetti sauce again; he might never eat it again. Plus, wouldn’t it be difficult to push someone tall off a bridge? Much easier to push a petite person, you’d have physics on your side. Though the rails on the Golden Gate were pretty high, no matter the size of your victim.

  You’re a sick bastard, he told himself. You know that? A sick, sick bastard.

  Tomorrow, he would tell them at Elpis. Tomorrow, he would make it right.

  Or if not tomorrow, then definitely the next day.

  CHAPTER 38

  MELVIN

  Melvin Strickland sat in the teachers’ lounge with a Starbucks coffee and a croissant. He was supposed to be watching his cholesterol and his blood pressure and everything else a man of his age (fifty-six next week) should be watching; his wife, who worked as a hospital administrator at Kaiser San Francisco, had sent him off for the day with a container of fruit salad and another container of hummus. To go with the hummus was a snack bag filled with baby carrots. He felt like a preschooler, unpacking this food from his satchel. So he supplemented.

  Melvin Strickland had been teaching at the same school for two and a half decades. He’d seen his own children, three of them, two boys (easy) and a girl (more difficult than the two boys put together), through their own high school years. There had been some bad moments, and many good.

  Melvin Strickland had seen thirty-one of his students accepted at Ivy League colleges. He remembered the best students he’d ever had—he could, when called upon, also remember the best work of the best students: his mental filing cabinet was extremely well organized. He figured in two and a half decades he’d graded north of 28,000 essays. He’d written hundreds of recommendation letters. He was, to put it
gently, exhausted.

  So when Leslie Simmons approached and sat down across from him the day before Thanksgiving (without asking), Melvin found himself decidedly this side of happy. Leslie unpacked, in short order, a Greek yogurt, a whole-wheat wrap with (she told him) almond butter, and some sort of salad, heavy (naturally) on the kale. Leslie was in her late thirties. Smart but scattered. Still had young children at home, preschool and younger, which explained the scattered. Degrees from Johns Hopkins and Stanford, which explained the smart.

  “It’s such a treat,” Leslie said now. “To come in here every day and worry only about my own food, not what anyone else is eating, not cleaning up anyone else’s messes.”

  “Ah,” said Melvin charitably. He remembered those days, but only barely. Mostly he remembered them fondly, but his wife was always reminding him that the sheen of nostalgia did a lot to conceal the reality. She was pragmatic nearly to a fault, which was why she was so highly valued at Kaiser.

  Leslie was going at the salad with what could only be called gusto. “I think these five lunches are the best part of my week.” She smiled at him. She had a pretty smile. “I love Mondays. Sometimes the end of the weekend can’t come fast enough for me.”

  This was a depressing confession, but Melvin didn’t let on. Instead he inquired politely after the AP English Lit class—the crown jewel in the school’s English department, and one that had been bequeathed to Leslie this year. By all accounts she was doing well.

  “Oh, it’s wonderful,” said Leslie. She had come to them via a school in Antioch, where parental oversight was zero and student fervor a negative five. They were lucky they had nabbed her when they did, before she burned out. “Sometimes I can’t believe how smart these kids are,” Leslie said, “and how hard they work. How much they care. My word. I mean, some of this work—they really blow me away, these kids. I didn’t learn that kind of critical thinking until college.”

  Melvin had been born with critical thinking skills. He thought of his years-old novel, rewritten so many times that it no longer bore much resemblance to what it had originally started out to be, which was a satire of a high school writing workshop.

  “For example,” said Leslie, “you should see some of these extended essays…”

  Melvin felt his mind beginning to drift. His children would be home for Thanksgiving, and he couldn’t wait.

  Leslie was saying, “…far and away the best in the class. Might be the best I’ve seen, for high school.”

  Melvin was listening, but not really. In fact he was thinking about his novel, and whether or not he was ready to pull it out again, tackle some revisions. Maybe over the Christmas break. Winter break! They weren’t allowed to say Christmas, not in this day and age. Since when was he old enough to use a term like “this day and age”? He felt like he was nineteen a lot of the time, until he looked in the mirror and saw an old man staring back at him. But the novel. He could strip it down to its barest bones, set right everything that had gone wrong. And if the details seemed dated (the setting was the late nineties), well, he could fix that. He could move it up a decade, add a few iPhones, a Twitter reference.

  “Are you okay, Melvin?”

  “What? Yes, of course.” In fact, he had felt short of breath for a moment, but the sensation passed. Must have been the thought of unearthing his novel.

  “Good. You looked a bit off there for a sec.” Leslie was still talking, enthusiastically spooning yogurt into her mouth at the same time. “Virginia Woolf,” she said.

  Melvin perked up a little. He loved Virginia Woolf. Then his mind trotted off again. He wondered if the satire in his novel still held up. Perhaps he should change the setting from a high school to a college—a fictional version of a small liberal arts college, maybe in the East, or the Midwest. The Midwest could be funny, though Melvin wasn’t that familiar with it. Maybe a road trip was in order, over the summer. His wife got two weeks off from Kaiser. They could rent a Winnebago, stop at the Grand Canyon on the way out. He’d never seen the Grand Canyon. A change in setting might solve some of the novel’s more cantankerous problems. California as a setting for fiction was sort of overdone, in his opinion. Apologies to Steinbeck.

  “The use of indirect discourse in, let’s see, it was in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. Just spot-on. I mean, I did graduate work on Virginia Woolf, and I don’t remember writing anything like this. Melvin? Melvin? You okay?”

  Somewhere deep inside Melvin Strickland’s formidable memory, a bell rang. “Hold on,” he said. “Do you have that paper?”

  “Not on me,” said Leslie, holding up her hands to show that they were empty, save a fork on which reclined a forgotten piece of kale. “But I’ll remember to show it to you, at some point. Plans for Thanksgiving, Melvin?”

  CHAPTER 39

  NORA

  “Please, Linda,” said Nora. “Come fill your plate.” The Hawthornes had the Suttons over for Thanksgiving dinner any year they didn’t go back east. Nora set up the dishes on the sideboard. She had thought about canceling the dinner this year, because she had trouble looking Arthur in the eye after what had happened in the Millers’ yard. It would have been terrible if he’d known about it, of course, but it was nearly as awful that he didn’t. Nora didn’t like keeping secrets, even if they were of the self-preservation variety.

  But instead of canceling she’d gone full steam ahead: a new set of holiday place mats from Crate and Barrel, three complicated side dishes she’d never made before, a piecrust she’d had to wrestle into the pie plate because the timing of it had to be perfect. Two lovely red wines she’d researched carefully, plus a bottle of champagne to serve with the appetizers.

  “Don’t bother with Linda, Nora,” said Arthur. “She’s on day thirteen of a twenty-one-day cleanse. I said to her, ‘Who starts a cleanse during the holidays?’ but she just smiled and handed me a hemp seed smoothie.” He raised a hand to the side of his mouth like he was telling a secret and stage-whispered, “I dumped it.” He was extra-jovial because he and Gabe had started in on the cocktails early.

  “Oh, you did not,” said Linda, punching him playfully on the shoulder. “You loved it.” Inwardly, Nora rolled her eyes. Normally she thought of Linda and Arthur as the world’s greatest love story, but just at the moment her nerves were slightly on edge and she didn’t quite have the stomach for anything that might make her feel inferior.

  “Anyway, the cleanse is not so restrictive. I can eat most of what’s here.” Linda repaired to the sideboard and returned to the table with a tiny helping of squash. “Besides, this way I’ll be done before Christmas.” She smiled and Nora released an internal sigh. She loved Linda Sutton to death, but she did not approve of cleanses. Through gritted teeth she said, “Why don’t the rest of you go up.”

  “I might skip the turkey. I’m thinking of becoming a vegetarian,” announced Cecily.

  Nora sighed, outwardly this time. She had about as much patience for vegetarians as she had for cleanses. “No, you’re not a vegetarian, Cecily. We had a pepperoni pizza last night!”

  “Pepperoni isn’t real meat.”

  “Where do you think it comes from?” asked Angela. “The garden?”

  “No, but,” said Cecily. “It doesn’t seem real.”

  “Why vegetarianism?” asked Linda, with genuine interest. She leaned toward Cecily.

  “My teacher says that cow flatulence is causing global warming.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” said Nora. She looked helplessly at Gabe. He’d grown up on a ranch, he’d know! But Gabe was busy pouring wine for all the adults save Linda, who covered her glass with the flat of her hand and shook her head regretfully.

  “Actually it’s true,” interjected Angela. “The methane the cows release is way more damaging to the climate than carbon dioxide. One cow can release, like, two hundred pounds of methane per year.”

  “Aren’t you fortunate not to have a brilliant child?” Nora said to Linda and Arthur. She thought she saw Linda f
linch, but that was probably because she’d noticed the melted butter in the squash.

  “What’s flatulence?” asked Maya.

  “Farts,” said Cecily. “Cow farts.”

  Maya said, “Gross.”

  Gabe said, “Cecily!”

  Cecily said, “Sorry.”

  “Well, it’s just completely uncalled for,” said Gabe. “We have guests here, and I don’t know how the conversation got so—”

  “You’re right, Daddy,” said Angela. “I’m sorry I started it.” She shot Gabe a look that Nora—if she had to put a name to it—would probably call guilty. That was odd. Nora made a mental note to look into that later.

  “Please don’t start being a vegetarian until tomorrow,” Nora said. “Any of you. I was up at six with this turkey.”

  “I’m not a vegetarian,” said Angela. “But I’m not that hungry.” Gabe was looking sharply at Angela. What on earth was going on around here? Nora said, “Gabe? Not you too, right? Please, not you too.”

  “I’ll eat enough turkey for all of you put together,” said Gabe loyally. “I’m not scared of a little meat.”

  “Thank you,” whispered Nora. She could always count on Gabe.

  Gabe, bless his heart, piled his plate to the sky. So did Arthur. So did Nora, out of spite, and Maya, because Nora served her and she didn’t have a choice. She’d never eat it all, but Nora felt better that at least one of her children had a groaning plate.

  “Well!” said Nora, once they were all seated. “Should we have a blessing?” Her children and husband looked surprised, the way they always did when Nora’s childhood religion snuck its way into the household. Interloper! they seemed to say to the prayer. You don’t belong here, now get on back to where you came from. But obediently, they all bowed their heads and folded their hands in their laps.