A new bathroom, just one. The other can wait.
One of those fancy blenders that chops up whole apples and pulverizes greens.
Maybe…oh, maybe (was this too embarrassing, to wish for something so childish at age forty-one?), a Christmas surprise.
As she approached the house she could see the Christmas tree, leaning slightly, through the living room window. She’d put the lights on a timer so they would be on when she came home after work. She’d have to straighten the tree in the stand or she’d wake up one morning to find it entirely tipped over.
Strange. There was a car in her driveway, unfamiliar, a Hyundai. She pulled up beside it and a small lithe figure hopped out. It looked like…no, that was impossible—her eyes playing tricks on her in the dark. She should put the porch light on a timer too. She didn’t know how to do that.
It really looked like…
It couldn’t be. But it was.
“Hi, Aunt Marianne,” said the voice in the semidarkness. “I didn’t mean to scare you. It’s me. It’s Angela.”
CHAPTER 60
NORA
The cost for four same-day cross-country tickets on the red-eye this close to Christmas with an open-ended return date was three thousand, two hundred, and sixty-three dollars, but none of the Hawthornes cared. After Nora talked to Angela, after she talked to Marianne, after she talked to Gabe, who knew nothing of the whole fiasco until he finally had a chance to check his phone from the offsite, Nora booked them. There were only three more days before Christmas break. Missing three days of school wasn’t going to kill anyone. She packed what she could of the Christmas presents she’d already purchased (embarrassingly, not much) and figured she’d get the rest at the Providence Place mall.
Up, up, up. Cecily gripped Nora’s hand. They were all seasoned cross-country fliers, they went east at least twice a year, and yet Nora was surprised each and every time about how nervous flying made Cecily. Maya didn’t care at all; she chattered with her seatmate, a young college student flying home for the holiday. (Booking so last minute, they couldn’t secure seats all together, and Maya adamantly wanted the seat two rows back, so she could be “independent.”) Cecily had a fear of heights, poor thing. And yet she’d stood on the Golden Gate Bridge, looking down, looking for someone to help. Gabe’s eyes were closed. Nora had scored the window seat—Cecily didn’t want it, it made her too anxious, and Gabe didn’t care either way.
The senior partners at Elpis were going to let Gabe resign without a fuss. Joe Stone was dead set against that. He thought they should use Gabe’s situation to send a message, loud and clear, to anyone out there who was considering falsifying a résumé. Internally and externally. That meant, according to Gabe, that it would be actual news—an article in the Chronicle, who knew what else. There’d be no escaping it. But the senior partners thought he could go quietly, discreetly, tail between his legs.
“Ugh,” said Nora loyally. “I never liked that Joe Stone, did you? He always seemed so smarmy.”
Nora pressed her forehead against the window. It was pitch-black; she couldn’t see a thing beyond the runway. But she’d done this trip in all types of weather, at all different times of day. She knew what was out there. The glorious bay. The Bay Bridge. And far in the distance, the celebrated, magnificent, odious Golden Gate. She loved it, she hated it.
This city, this city she had loved for so long, was tethered really so tenuously by those two long bridges. It had been carved out of nothing, out of the wilderness and the mountains, its fate tied to the fates of the gold diggers, the intrepid explorers, the bold and the fearless and the plucky. She imagined a roll of fog unfurling from the Transamerica building. And they were off.
It took Cecily approximately thirty seconds to fall asleep. When she was definitely out Nora reached across her and tapped Gabe on the shoulder. He opened one eye, and then the other, like a man in a cartoon.
“Listen,” she said. “I’ve been thinking. About staying out there.” No answer. She elaborated. “For good, I mean. Moving, Gabe. Back home, back to Rhode Island.”
Now he sat straight up and wore, for an instant, the expression he wore when he saw a snake. (Wyoming was home to two kinds of venomous rattlesnakes, and when Gabe was in elementary school a fellow third grader had died from a bite.) “Do you mean—” he said hoarsely. He cleared his throat and smoothed his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Do you mean with me, or without me?”
In another row, a baby cried. Nora remembered what that was like, flying across the country with babies. Awful. (Nobody ever said, I’m afraid you’re going to hurt the baby.) A flight attendant made her way down the aisle, tapping the tops of the seats as she went. The seatbelt sign shut off: no turbulence.
“Of course I mean with you.”
Gabe sighed and took her hand and closed his eyes again.
“I mean, what have we got to lose, right? I’m fired. You’ve resigned. Cecily and Maya are young and adaptable. Who knows where Angela is going to end up…”
Gabe held up his hand: the universal signal for Stop talking. Nora sat back. This seemed unfair. After the day Nora had had. The month she’d had! (The year.) She felt her temper begin to rise; she was about to get her Irish up. Then Gabe opened his eyes and said, “You don’t need to keep selling it, realtor of the century. I was thinking the same thing. I’m in.”
“You are?” She leaned forward. Never in a million years had Nora expected it to be that easy. Don’t sell it, Arthur Sutton always said, when it’s already sold. “You’re in?”
“I am,” said Gabe.
“Wow.” Nora sat back. She had a whole box of unused arguments in a corner of her mind. “Wow,” she said again.
She and Cecily and Gabe and Maya were the reverse gold rushers now. They were heading east to seek their fortune. They were the opposite of the bold and the plucky, and yet it felt plenty brave to Nora, to do this.
“Do you think we could get a puppy? Gabe? I’ll take care of it, I’ll do all the work, I’ll clean up all the accidents, I swear. Gabe?”
This time he didn’t answer; he was asleep.
She poked him, but gently. “Gabe?”
Definitely asleep. Maybe once he was really zonked out, totally dead to the world, she’d whisper a story to him. Tell him about the time she let Maya fall on her head.
CHAPTER 61
MELVIN
Melvin Strickland got home before his wife, Carla, even left Kaiser. Sometimes—often—he stayed late at the school, but today, this close to winter break, he didn’t. The shortest day of the year, Winter Solstice, his birthday, was only five days away.
As Melvin drove home, as he observed the white outline of the moon on the rise, as he pulled into the garage, as he entered the house, he was thinking about Virginia Woolf. Fifty-nine years old when she’d put those stones in her pockets and walked into the river in Sussex, only three years older than Melvin would be next week. As a child he’d hated having a birthday so close to Christmas, he’d considered it the ultimate swindle, but now he enjoyed it, because often his children came home for the holiday and were home on his birthday, too. The house, so often empty, filled up again with yelling and laughing and texting and little piles of clutter that drove Carla mad but that Melvin cherished as precious signs of young life.
Who knew what Woolf’s output would have been had she lived. Perhaps her best writing was ahead of her; perhaps (more likely?) it was behind her. Orlando, To the Lighthouse, Between the Acts. So many brilliant works. Melvin thought again of his novel, the satire of the high school writing class. Yes, moving it to the college campus was just the thing to cure it. He would get started over break. He might get started now! Before Carla got home, he might yank the manuscript from where it lay—the desk drawer in his case not proverbial but actual—and give it a good airing.
On the front porch was a cardboard box that Melvin had asked to have delivered from the storage facility where he kept three decades of papers. He was a meticulou
s labeler, so this was the right box.
He switched on the two lamps in the living room, the low one on the end table and the tall one in the corner. He loved the way a room looked with lamplight. No garish overheads in the Strickland household, except the kitchen and bathrooms.
You have given me the greatest possible happiness, Virginia Woolf had written in her final note to her husband, her suicide note. Was there any greater compliment? He hoped Carla thought the same of him. He did of her.
In his bag was the paper Leslie Simmons had finally brought him, “The Use of Indirect Discourse in Virginia Woolf.” A sophisticated topic but not one that couldn’t conceivably be thought of separately by two different students. It happened.
Some mild discomfort, a squeezing in the middle of his chest. He sat down in the living room. It passed. He’d make dinner for Carla for when she got home, pour her a glass of wine. His specialty was a Bolognese sauce like the one he and Carla had on their honeymoon in the Italian Alps. His secret ingredient was chicken livers, pulsed in the food processor. Sometimes a touch of veal stock, if he had it in the freezer.
Virginia Woolf, stones in her pockets. Dinner for Carla, a bottle of Pinot Grigio, her favorite, chilled, poured into a glass just before she walked in the door. The greatest possible happiness.
But first, the papers. He used the kitchen scissors to open the box, then removed the folder from his satchel and spread everything out on the kitchen table. If there was one thing Melvin Strickland couldn’t abide (and, truth be told, there were many, just ask Carla!), it was plagiarism.
And there it was. Clarissa Dalloway, running into Hugh Whitbread: They had just come up—unfortunately—to see doctors. Other people came to see pictures; go to the opera; take their daughters out; the Whitbreads came “to see doctors.” Times without number Clarissa had visited Evelyn Whitbread in a nursing home. Was Evelyn sick again? Woolf’s use of free indirect discourse here serves a dual purpose…
He could go on, he would go on, but truly he didn’t need to. You little shit, he thought, you baseball-cap-wearing louse. Plagiarizing. From your own sister. You, sir, I have no use for. I am going to bring you down.
CHAPTER 62
NORA
Later, after the tears and the recriminations and the reunions and the you-scared-us-to-deaths and the thank-God-you’re-okays, they did what people do in Rhode Island in times of joy or sorrow: they went to Newport Creamery.
“I still cannot believe that you used to work here,” said Angela. She said the same thing every time they came to Rhode Island.
“I didn’t work in this one,” said Nora. “The one I worked in is closed now.” Nora said that every time too. She studied the menu and felt a pinch of nostalgia for her earnest, freckled high school self, upselling from a cone to a sundae. Even then she could sell anything to anyone.
“Breakfast?” said the waitress. “Coffee?” Her accent was so perfectly Rhode Island that Nora thought about hugging her.
“Ice cream,” they all said together, and Nora said, “Five Awful Awfuls.”
“Junior, or Outrageous?”
“I don’t know if I—” said Angela, but Nora plowed right over her words. “Outrageous,” said Nora. “Definitely Outrageous.”
When the waitress had gone Nora cleared her throat and said, “Okay, then.” She took out a napkin, and a Uni-ball Vision pen from her bag. They’d arrived at Logan Airport at 5:43 that morning and by 6:20 they were in a rented car heading south on 95 toward Rhode Island. She was exhausted—they were all exhausted. But she was also in Organized Mom mode. She said, “Angela. I’ve spoken to Ms. Vogel, and she had some wonderful suggestions for other schools you might want to look at, for the regular application deadlines. With the Common Application and your recommendation letters already written it won’t take too much to pull things together. There really are some lovely schools in the East that you haven’t considered yet. Small, close-knit, wonderful liberal arts educations. Mt. Holyoke, Smith, Williams.”
Nora paused and picked up the napkin while the waitress delivered the goods.
“This is gigantic!” said Maya delightedly. “I can’t believe you’re letting me drink this.”
Cecily took up her straw with a considerable amount of glee and said, “We didn’t even have breakfast yet.”
Gabe nodded wisely at Nora. “Wonderful schools. Maybe we can take a look at them while we’re out here.”
“Dad,” said Angela, and there were tiny daggers attached to the word. Nora wanted to say, Don’t say it that way. You’re breaking his heart.
“I’m sure you know, Henrietta Faulkner didn’t get into Harvard either.”
“Believe me, I know,” said Angela. “I know.”
“I don’t think it was so much your application, specifically, as it was—” He choked on the end of the sentence and failed to get it all the way out. Nora handed him a napkin from the dispenser on the table and he covered his mouth with it and blinked rapidly.
Cecily and Maya were tucking into their Awful Awfuls, blissfully unaware, but Angela, who had pushed hers aside and was drinking water, was taking it all in, watching Gabe from over the top of her glass.
Nora wanted to say, “Do something! Help him! Make him feel better!” But it wasn’t her place. Angela had to come to this on her own.
“Angela,” said Gabe.
“You’re stressing her out,” said Maya around her straw.
“He’s not stressing me out. But. I’ve been thinking a lot about it and—” Here Angela took a deep breath, seemed to gather some inner strength. “And I’m not sure I want to go to college…”
Nora said, “What?”
Gabe said, “Huh?”
Cecily said, “I knew she was going to say that.”
Angela took her first sip of her Awful Awful and said, “I wasn’t done! You interrupted me, you all interrupted me.” She continued, “Let me finish. I was going to say I’m not sure I want to go to college next year. I might want to take some time, figure out where I really want to be. Take a gap year, make sure I land at the right school when it’s time.”
“Wow, hey,” said Gabe. The old Gabe would have said, Those always turn into a gap decade. The old Gabe would have said, Absolutely not.
Nora said, “I don’t know…”
“I’ve already decided,” said Angela. “I’ve completely and totally decided. I thought about it a lot. I’ve been thinking about it all fall.”
“You’re valedictorian,” said Nora. “It doesn’t seem—”
Angela grimaced. “I may not be, when they recalculate. Among other things, I didn’t exactly, um, set the world on fire with my last AP English paper. I was so stressed out trying to be perfect that I almost plagiarized.”
“Excuse me?” said Nora.
Maya said, “What’s plagiarized?” When nobody answered her she shrugged and went back to her Awful Awful.
“Ugh, never mind, forget I said anything, I totally didn’t. But it wasn’t my best, I wrote it at the last minute and it’s a big part of our grade.”
Nora thought it was wise of Gabe not to enter the fray just then.
“But what would you do?” said Gabe. “To be productive?”
“I’m not just going to sit around playing Minion Rush. If that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I wasn’t,” said Gabe.
“That’s what I’d do with a gap year,” said Maya. “I love Minion Rush.”
“I’m going to volunteer somewhere,” Angela said.
“Not a bad idea,” said Nora thoughtfully. “I know there are lots of inner-city schools in Boston, and I bet there are some rural programs not too far—”
“Somewhere far away,” said Angela. “I’m thinking India.” Her look said, Go ahead, challenge me. I dare you.
“India?” said Nora.
“Absolutely not,” said Gabe.
“Or Belize,” said Angela. “But probably India. It’s the right thing for me. Mom. It’s the right th
ing. Daddy, I know it is.”
Across the restaurant someone dropped silverware, and closer to them the door opened and brought with it a slice of New England winter air. A baby cried. Ordinary, ordinary, all of it was very ordinary. But not to Nora. Later she would look back on that moment and say, Yes! Right there. That’s when it happened. That’s when things began to change back to the way they were supposed to be. Or maybe that moment actually started a day earlier, when Angela boarded a plane to Boston by herself and wrestled her demons to the ground.
Daddy. Could you feel a person brighten from just one word? Nora thought that you could. She had been sipping at her Awful Awful the whole time. It went down even easier than a glass of Cabernet. Easy peasy lemon squeezie. It was the flavor of her youth—the flavor of full-fat, high-calorie hope and optimism. She looked down. It had happened quickly: her glass was already half empty.
Or was it half full? Corny as it was, Nora permitted herself the question.
EPILOGUE
One Year Later
“Come on, Maya,” said Nora. “We’ve got to hurry, or we’re going to be late.” Cecily was in the car already.
Sometimes Nora caught a glimpse of Maya out of the corner of her eye and thought she was looking at Angela a decade ago. Maya had grown taller and leaner over a summer spent at the beach and in an ocean discovery summer camp, which she attended when she wasn’t working with her new reading tutor to prepare for third grade. When, at the end of August, Maya came to Nora and cleared her young throat and read page one, chapter one, of Betsy-Tacy to her in a voice as smooth as butter, with real expression, pausing at all the right spots, Nora had to try hard not to bawl.
“It wasn’t just me,” said the tutor, shrugging modestly. “Something clicked. Things fell into place. That just takes longer for some kids than it does for others. She’ll be right on track before you know it.”
“Buckle up,” said Nora now. “Hurry, hurry.”
“I thought you weren’t in the business of hurrying us anymore,” said Cecily. Maya’s seat belt was tangled, so Cecily reached over and helped her.
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