“Who?”
“Daddy. Angela. You.”
“Cecily! My goodness, why would you think something like that? Of course it’s not your fault. Why would it be your fault?”
Cecily shrugged.
“I don’t know. I was just wondering. Maybe because I messed up at the feis…or maybe there’s another reason…”
“Maya?” said her mom. “Run to the laundry room and see if the dryer has stopped.”
Maya’s expression said, And miss all this? But she did as she was told.
“Listen to me, Cecily. Sit down.”
Cecily sat. There was a gob of dough on the stool; she peeled it off and put it on the island. Her mom said, “You are ten years old. You are responsible for yourself. You are not responsible for anyone else in this family, for their happiness or their unhappiness or anything else. Do you understand me?”
Cecily nodded, and another one of the big fat tears fell out of her eyes.
“Do you really understand me?”
Cecily nodded again.
“That’s better. And you know what? Whatever feels wrong now, it won’t always feel wrong. I promise you.”
“Are you sure? Are you positive?”
“Positive.”
Cecily wanted to believe her. But she didn’t, not really.
CHAPTER 48
GABE
Friday the thirteenth.
Traffic was deadly, a full stop on the Golden Gate.
NPR on the way home. Kim Jong Un had executed his own uncle. Wow. Visa awarded its CEO compensation valued at $10.5 million. Asian stocks fell for a second straight week. A Finnair flight with the number 666 to Helsinki (designation HEL) had an almost full flight. Gabe didn’t consider himself superstitious but no way in hell would he have boarded that flight. No way in Helsinki.
Gabe picked up the phone to call home and check in, then put it down without dialing. His Bluetooth was broken and the cops were real bastards about the tickets at rush hour, plucking off the drivers like cherries from a tree. Must be some kind of quota thing. Gabe had three over the past year, stupid nothing calls, not worth the price tag. It never was.
Man, he was so tired, the NPR voices almost lulled him to sleep. The Desolation of Smaug was still trouncing everything else at the box office and they were expecting a killer weekend. Gabe had zero interest in The Desolation of Smaug. His brother Michael was a Hobbit fan, but Gabe never got into it.
Early to bed, early to rise, was the way they used to do it on the ranch. That was the way to go. Let your body give in to its natural rhythms, the rhythm of the earth. The land. But he never did that anymore. Late to bed, early to rise, that was the way he was playing it, burning the candle at both ends. He’d better watch it. He was no spring chicken anymore.
Finally, traffic moved. Slowly, but it moved. He wound his way toward home.
Pulling into the driveway he saw Angela. What was Angela doing, in the driveway, waiting for him?
He got out of the car and moved toward her, and later, when he replayed it, it seemed like it took him several full minutes to get to her. But of course it didn’t.
She was wiping her nose with the sleeve of her sweatshirt, her Harvard sweatshirt, and talking incomprehensibly into it.
“Wait,” said Gabe. “What happened? What is it?” Fire was his first thought. That didn’t make sense. He would have noticed a fire. Or: robbery at knifepoint, Angela the only survivor. Also unlikely, but it happened, sometimes there was a single survivor from a tragedy. “Where’s everyone else?”
Angela lifted her face from her sleeve. “Everyone else?” She spat the words right at him. He sort of had to duck. “I don’t know where everyone else is. I’m not talking about everyone else! I’m talking about me, Dad. I didn’t get in. I just got the email. I didn’t get into Harv—”
The last syllable of the word disappeared into an alarming sort of gulp as Angela’s crying began anew.
“Oh,” said Gabe. “Oh. Oh, I see.” His heart nosedived. He felt dizzy. Anna Fletcher passed in her Infiniti. She waved, but Gabe didn’t wave back.
“I’m a failure,” said Angela. “My whole life I worked for this! My whole life. Maria Ortiz got into Yale. She’s sixth in the class, Dad. I’m first. And I didn’t get into Harvard.”
Gabe looked at his daughter’s crumpled, tear-soaked face and said, “Come here.” He reached for Angela but Angela turned from him and ran back into the house. For a long time he could hear her sobs, long after he could no longer see her.
CHAPTER 49
NORA
8:15 p.m.
Dear Marianne,
Oh boy. It’s official. The world has come to an end. Do I sound facetious? I don’t mean to…
The embarrassing thing was that Gabe also cried. Not that afternoon, and not in front of Angela (thank God) but later, in the bedroom, in the dark, when he thought Nora was asleep. In fact Nora was asleep, but the crying woke her. She lay for a minute without acknowledging it (she had been sleeping with her face turned away from Gabe), just to make sure she wasn’t imagining it.
She wasn’t.
He was crying.
This was the man who had stoically brought Frankie to the vet on the day of his euthanasia, not just handing him over to the tech but going into the room with him and holding his gigantic, fluffy head throughout the awfulness, of which he had never spoken to Nora after. She hadn’t asked because she knew she couldn’t handle the details.
This was the man who had, dry-eyed, tossed the first shovelful of dirt on his father’s coffin after it was lowered into the grave in a wooded cemetery in Laramie.
Who hadn’t cried when Nora made him drink Cabernet and watch Terms of Endearment with her on DVD on her thirtieth birthday because she’d never seen it before. This was Gabe, who’d been scooped up in the early days of Elpis because he was so shrewd and even-tempered, because he could look at a foundering company and see immediately what the problem was, then set about fixing it with methodical care. He was as unflappable and pragmatic as Barack Obama. He was a stalwart, a rock.
She flipped over, and in the dim light afforded by the moon shining through the skylights she observed her husband of eighteen and a half years lying on his back, his shoulders quaking, tears falling and wetting the gray T-shirt he always wore to bed and which had been washed so many times it was nearly transparent. She loved that shirt, and every time she considered relegating it to the rag bin something stopped her (not just the fact that she did not really have a rag bin); she always folded it lovingly and returned it to the dresser drawer.
Nora said, “Gabe?”
In answer Gabe offered only a sniffle that turned into a snort halfway through.
Nora put a hand on the gray T-shirt in the vicinity of Gabe’s shoulder. She said, “It’s one college she didn’t get into. There are hundreds more, millions more!”
Nothing.
Nora sighed. What she wanted to say was “Are you kidding me with this?” She wanted to say, “Pull yourself together.” She wanted to point out that there were real tragedies occurring in the world, refugees fleeing war-torn countries in the Middle East and Africa, children going to bed hungry in Appalachia, young girls forced into drug dealing and prostitution just across the bay in Oakland, walking up and down International Boulevard at all hours of the night. Even right here at home was a tragedy big enough to cry about: Nora had lost her job.
But she had to be the calm in the middle of the storm. So what she actually said was, “I know this was important to you. I know you really wanted her to experience what you experienced. I know, we thought they’d accept her. But the truth is, she didn’t get in. And just because it meant so much to you, that doesn’t mean it’s the be all and end all of everything—”
“But,” interrupted Gabe, and his voice breaking through the tears was somehow more pathetic than the tears themselves.
“I know,” said Nora. She tried to adopt the soothing, maternal tone she used when her c
hildren had stomachaches, right before they threw up into the garbage can. “It’s hard to see her this upset. I hate it too. Believe me. But it’s life, Gabe. Kids don’t get everything they want. Nobody gets everything they want, that’s just how it is.”
“But—”
“I mean, no offense, but you don’t know if you would get into Harvard today.”
“Nora.”
“Don’t get mad that I said that. It’s just I’m sure the standards have changed. I read this article online…there are six-year-old violin prodigies and thirteen-year-old doctors out there. There’s a fourteen-year-old who gave a TED talk, and a four-year-old member of Mensa. How are regular people, even regular super-smart people, supposed to compete with that? It seems hopeless. The whole thing seems really, really hopeless. Honestly, I’m not sure why most people bother.”
“Nora.”
Okay. Enough was enough. He was still crying. Nora couldn’t be in the bed any longer. She swung her legs over the edge. Reflexively, she stepped carefully, in case Frankie was sleeping there. Old habits.
“You know something?” She wasn’t in a comforting mood anymore. Suddenly she was livid. She thought of all the people who had died making their way west. Nelson Mandela, ambassador of peace, was dead. Nora had disappointed Arthur Sutton. She could have been arrested. She might lose her license. She had certainly lost her job. Cecily had quit the one thing she loved. Angela had cried herself to sleep. And even if she’d gotten in, so what? That could mean how many more years of the same pressure? Depression rates at the Ivies were just as high, higher sometimes, as they were anywhere else. Nora was a lioness protecting her cubs from harm, and the harm, it turned out, was in their very own den. “You know what? I’m glad she didn’t get into Harvard.”
She expected an audible explosion but she received only silence. She moved close to the door to see if she could hear any movement from the hallway. Quiet as the grave.
She turned back to the bed. “That’s right. I said it. I mean it. I’m glad. I’m glad she doesn’t have to go through four more years of keeping up with the best of the best. I am so tired, Gabe, of all the stress in this house. I can’t stand it another second. I don’t want it for her, and I don’t want it for us. Do you know that a fifth grader in Cecily’s school had to go home last week because she had an anxiety attack before a science test? Eleven years old, Gabe.”
“Nora—”
“I don’t want Cecily to go through all this. I don’t want Maya to. I hope they want to go to art school! Or no school. I look at Angela and her friends and they’re all walking around like a bunch of terrified zombies. They don’t laugh anymore. They’re seventeen years old, eighteen, whatever, and they don’t laugh! Have you noticed that? They used to laugh, and now they don’t. I laughed when I was seventeen. I laughed all the time. I used to worry about what we’d do when Angela was old enough to start going out with boys, sneaking beers. Now I want her to be doing that! I wish that’s what we were worried about. Gabe. When is the last time you saw Angela smile, a real smile?”
Nothing.
Nora was on a buttered roll; she couldn’t stop. Suddenly it was all enormously clear to her. “We did this to Angela, Gabe. We are to blame, not anybody else. We saw we had a smart kid, a kid with potential, and what did we do? We pushed her and pushed her, and then we set the bar so high for her, and we never told her it was okay to want something different. We never even introduced the possibility of something different. We joke about how she shoved that kid down the slide at Montessori but really we were proud of it, because it showed she had fight in her. And she had plenty of fight in her when she was three. But now she’s seventeen, and she’s beaten down, and she thinks she’s a failure. She’s gotten straight As on every single report card since report cards were invented, and she’s in there crying herself to sleep. And you know what? It’s our fault.”
Gabe cleared his throat.
A little voice in Nora’s head told her to stop but she kicked the voice to the ground and stomped on it and kept right on going.
“You know what else?”
No answer. Nora forged ahead, like a pioneer making her way west, like Lucy Whipple in the gold rush tale Cecily was reading. “I wish you’d never gone to Harvard. I do. I wish you had never gone there so you wouldn’t have spent the last decade and a half telling her how great it was. I wish you’d never taken her to that football game, setting up these unreasonable expectations. It’s your fault, Gabe. I blame you.” Even as she said this Nora knew it wasn’t entirely true. She was complicit, the Bonnie to Gabe’s Clyde. The pride she’d taken in Angela’s accomplishments, the way she’d allowed Angela’s light to reflect back on her, like she was the moon to Angela’s sun. Like it said something about her, about them as a couple, as a family: Look how successful we are, to have raised such a successful daughter! Look how smart we must be! Good parents, smart parents, doing it right. And she herself, sneaking around in her underutilized yoga pants to pull up an endangered plant because she was too scared to have a mistake—an innocent, honest-to-goodness mistake—revealed. It was sickening.
“Nora!” Gabe’s voice was about as sharp as it ever got. He was out of the bed too, facing her across the expanse, a handful of sheet crumpled in his hand. The tear stains on the T-shirt were almost comical. But not quite. Nora blinked at him. “Stop talking. Listen to me. I have to tell you something. Right now, I have to tell you something.”
Nora stopped talking; Nora listened.
Gabe looked down at his handful of sheet, his eyes not meeting Nora’s. The moon shined weakly upon them: a waning gibbous. He cleared his throat and spoke distinctly. There was no other sound in the room. Even so, she figured she must have misheard. He said it again.
“I didn’t go to Harvard.”
—
“Well, that’s ridiculous,” said Nora. “Of course you went to Harvard. You graduated in 1989.”
“Nora,” said Gabe. He reached over and switched on his nightstand lamp. In the shadows it cast across the bed his face looked drawn and haggard. He looked seventy. “I didn’t. I made it up.”
“There’s a diploma hanging in the office.” She marched down the hall to the office. Both girls’ bedroom doors were closed. Cecily and Maya used to sleep with their door open but suddenly they did not. They were growing up. Nora could hear Gabe padding behind her.
She sat in the office chair and Gabe leaned against the doorframe. Nora looked at the diploma. “Look! It has a seal and everything. There’s fancy calligraphy, signatures. It’s a real diploma.” Nora had never even framed hers, never hung it. She didn’t know where it was. Her mother might still have it, along with Nora’s wedding dress, which she’d paid what Nora thought was an exorbitant sum to have boxed up and “preserved,” in case any of Nora and Gabe’s (then hypothetical) children wanted to wear it. Her children would never wear her wedding dress: it had a high neck and long lace sleeves, and it screamed mid-nineties.
“I made it,” said Gabe. “I had a buddy who did that kind of thing, documents and so forth. We made it sort of as a joke, at first. Someone showed him a real one and he worked from that. But it looked real, so I framed it. It’s a dead ringer, you’d realize if you saw the real thing.” His voice caught on the last word.
“But,” said Nora, “your brother Michael calls you Harvard Boy. You know your way around Cambridge.” She was talking fast, trying to make him understand. “You used to hang out at the bar featured in Good Will Hunting! Of course you went to Harvard.”
“I didn’t. Nora, I didn’t. I lied.”
“No.” She shook her head. “It’s impossible. You have all that clothing.”
“Stay here,” said Gabe. “I’ll be right back.” He left and returned holding two glasses of the Bulleit, plus the bottle. He handed a glass to Nora. She downed it like it was coconut water. There were two chairs in the office: the desk chair, which Nora had claimed and wasn’t giving up, and a straight-backed chair in the corner
in which nobody ever sat.
Gabe remained standing. He started talking. While he talked, he shifted his weight back and forth from one foot to the other. Besides the gray T-shirt, he was wearing a pair of forest-green boxer shorts Nora had given him the previous Christmas.
There was an explanation for everything. Gabe held a degree from the University of Wyoming in Laramie. A good solid state school with a ninety-five percent acceptance rate and a giant football stadium. No Harvard. It was okay, it was fine. He excelled at the business classes he took. His professors said he had real talent for understanding the problems companies had and for figuring out how to fix them. Rare in an undergraduate, they said. A ranch boy! He’d never been told before that he was good at something. His parents weren’t much for compliments.
After college he moved to Boston, where he took a class at the Harvard Extension School. One class, that’s it, not part of any program. A class on the principles of finance that any old joker off the street could register for. They talked all the time about that, he and Nora, about how they lived only a couple of hours apart but had to move clear across the country to meet each other. That’s why his brother Michael called him Harvard Boy. He was making fun of Gabe, not complimenting him.
One of his business professors from Wyoming knew a guy who worked at the Boston Consulting Group—that’s how Gabe got the internship. He thrived there, but the country was heading toward a recession. They weren’t hiring for any full-time positions. So when the internship ended, he went west in that battered, tan Subaru Leone he had when he met Nora.
“Like the gold miners,” he said. “Seeking my fortune.”
Nora didn’t smile. That Subaru had been broken into three different times when Gabe lived in the Mission. The last time it wasn’t even worth putting in an insurance claim—they’d simply removed the plates and left it parked on Dolores Street. One day, when they looked for it, it was gone.
Gabe finished his drink and poured more. Finally he sat in the straight-backed chair, on the very edge of it, like he thought he didn’t deserve to lean back. As far as Nora was concerned, he didn’t. It seemed that now that he’d started talking about it he couldn’t stop. “It happened like this. Remember when we met, at that bar in Noe Valley?”
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