I'd Give Anything

by Marisa de los Santos

  “She’s fine. I’ve gone in twice. Normal temperature, normal everything. Some of them just cry. Although that one seems to be trying to set a record.”

  “You mean”—I gestured toward the window—“that one’s mine?”

  The nurse nodded. “Yours,” she said. “Forever and ever.”

  “You think it’s because she misses me, right?”

  “Sure,” said the nurse. “Let’s go with that.”

  It was the beginning of over fifteen years (and counting) of insomnia, of watching my daughter be not just awake in the middle of the night but something beyond awake, hyper-attuned, as if not only her eyes but also her entire consciousness were dilated, letting in too much world. When she was crib-bound, she would scream until I picked her up, at which point her screams would drain out of her little by little until she fell into a soap bubble–fragile sleep. When I tried to put her down, performing a kind of breath-held series of glacially slow ballet moves in which my chest remained pressed to her body long after she had made contact with the mattress, she would wait until the moment when I thought I was home free, when my hand was on the doorknob, to scream once again.

  Once she could get out of bed by herself, she would come into our room and stand next to ours, edgy and trembling as a gazelle when the lions are nearby, whispering, “Mama,” her middle-of-the-night name for me (the rest of the time it was “Mommy”), until I walked her back and either resettled her and left or, more often, lay down next to her, where she affixed herself to me with the tenacity of a tree toad. Until she was five years old, the wakeups occurred every two hours. At five, old enough both to read on her own and to feel ashamed of sleeping with her mother, she would come into our room just two or three times a week. On the mornings of the nights that she didn’t, I would walk into her room to find all her lights burning and books everywhere, on the floor, on the bed, sometimes splayed open across her chest, or tucked under her head. Her face would be flushed, damp tendrils of dark hair sticking to her pink cheeks, as if she hadn’t so much fallen into sleep as wrestled it bodily to the ground.

  At fifteen, when most of her friends could sleep anytime, anywhere, and well past noon, Avery and I had cobbled together a bedtime system that involved equal parts science, common sense, and superstition verging on witchcraft. A weighted blanket, a diffuser with an array of essential oils on rotation (lavender, jasmine, vetiver, bergamot, rose, vanilla, chamomile), meditation apps, visualization apps, soothing music, soothing teas, melatonin, breathing exercises, yoga poses, warm baths, soothing bath salts, soothing books, amber lightbulbs: Avery would try various combinations of these elements until something worked, and then she would use that combination again and again, until it stopped working, which it always, eventually, did, usually because some bump in her daytime life jarred her and caused the tricky off switch in her brain to malfunction. The bumps were mostly ordinary growing-up issues—a fight with a friend, a big test, a bad grade, a missed goal on the field hockey field, a boy who decided he liked someone else—but after dark, fueled by adrenaline and exhaustion, the bumps would grow into mountains, into volcanoes.

  But what always astonished me about Avery was how pulled together she seemed during the day. Not seemed, was. Funny, popular, a better than decent athlete, a way better than decent student. Her friends and teachers didn’t know, couldn’t have guessed, that the girl with the clear eyes, ringing laugh, and sheet of shining hair, the one winning debates and field hockey games and reading her papers aloud in class, was also the one who would sit in the passenger seat on our desperation nighttime drives, her eyes fixed on the windshield, her right thumbnail clenched between her teeth or the one who would still, at least once a month, sleep in our bed with me, slipping in one side while Harris, out of long habit, slipped out the other.

  When I got home from my mother’s house, Avery was already there, sitting at the kitchen table with her favorite snack laid out before her: a bowl of microwave popcorn, a dish of yellow mustard to dip it in, and a glass of milk. Her laptop sat open on the table as she watched what I knew without looking was an episode of Friends, her latest resurrected-from-the-past series. She’d watched the whole ten years’ worth of episodes twice through and was starting on a third go-round. When she heard me come in, she didn’t glance up but lifted a finger and announced, “I’m about to do homework, just as soon as Chandler chokes on the gum.”

  She sat there, my daughter, so lovely and absorbed and eyelashy and full of grace in her soft gray sweater and red suede sneakers, her hair tucked behind her ears and pouring down her back.

  “Fine, but after the choking, maybe you could put off doing homework for a few minutes,” I said.

  With a dramatic flourish, Avery hit pause and cast concerned eyes upon me.

  “Mom, are you feeling okay?”

  “Ha-ha.”

  “Because I thought I just heard you request that I delay homework, which just can’t be right. Are you feverish? Or possibly febrile?”

  “Feverish and febrile are the same thing.”

  “Really, Mom? Thank you so much for clarifying that. How about drunk?”

  “Drunk is different.”

  “Are you it?”

  “I wish.”

  “Blow to the head, maybe?”

  I wanted her to go on and on in exactly this manner all night long. But instead I said, “Honey, I need to talk to you about something,” and her playfulness vanished—instantly, like a channel switch—and was replaced by a tense, watchful stillness. I wanted to slap myself and then Harris and then Harris again, harder.

  I sat down at the table and closed her laptop and told her. I had asked Harris if I could be the one to tell, which made so much sense that I couldn’t even get mad at how eagerly—like a frog snapping up a juicy fly—he’d agreed. After some soul-searching, I had decided to tell the truth, but with all of my darkest suspicions, even the ones that were so close to certainties as to be almost indistinguishable, left out.

  After I’d finished, Avery shut her eyes and said, with tenderness and sorrow, “Oh, Dad. What did you do?”

  “Honey, your father’s not a person who is used to people thinking he’s done anything wrong, so when it happened, he panicked.”

  “By ‘it happened,’ you mean that someone thought he’d done something wrong, right? Not that he actually had. Right?”

  I paused, searching for a path between facts and what I only believed were facts, and settled on, “Dale Pinckney jumped to the conclusion that your father was having a sexual relationship with the woman he’d seen him with, his intern.”

  Avery held up her hand, like a traffic cop.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Bad choice of words. I just hate the word affair, always have. It’s too pretty.”

  Avery shook her head.

  “You said woman,” said Avery. “It should be girl. You said she was still in high school, so even if she was eighteen, she was still a high school girl. If you say woman, it sounds like you’re trying to cover something up or make it sound better than it was. So it’s girl. We should just say that.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But anyway, he wasn’t. Dale Pinckney was wrong.”

  While I did not know this to be an absolute fact, I felt in my bones that Harris had not had sex with Cressida Wall. I couldn’t quite explain why. Maybe because his demeanor bespoke longing—bottomless, desperate—but not satisfaction. I would not have gone so far as to say that he wouldn’t have had sex with her at some point; I just didn’t think he had.

  “But just knowing how it appeared to Dale sent your father into a whirlpool of confusion. So he tried to convince Dale not to tell his boss. Your dad couldn’t bear the thought of other people thinking what Dale thought.”

  Avery considered this, and then looked up at me, with light in her eyes. “Oh. Because of us. He wanted to protect us.”

  I remembered my conversation with Harris that first night in our yard. He wanted to continue his relationship with Cressida, I
thought. But there was no way I could say those words to my child with her face full of hope. Besides, maybe wanting to protect us was part of Harris’s motivation, deep down. Who was I to say it wasn’t?

  “Well, that would make sense,” I said. “He would never want anything to hurt you.”

  Avery sat in silence, serious, blinking, thoughts flickering in her coffee-colored eyes. Then she looked at me and said, “Who is she?”

  I hesitated. “It doesn’t matter, does it?”

  Avery sat up straighter. “You can tell me her name. What if I know her? Does she go to my school?”

  “No, no, of course not.”

  “Please just tell me.”

  Even though I had spoken aloud that odd name more than once, I suddenly found it hard—physically hard—to say. Oh, Harris, could you not have dallied with a Susie or an Anne? My mouth was sticky, clumsy. I swallowed. “Cressida Wall.”

  Avery gasped, her mouth falling open. Automatically, she raised her right thumbnail, rested it on her lip, which was trembling, bit down. I knew what I was seeing: doubt swinging toward her like a wrecking ball, her faith in Harris taking a hit, bricks tumbling down.

  “She’s beautiful,” said Avery, her voice tight and small. “Everybody thinks so.”

  Because I didn’t know what to say, I reached out and took Avery’s glossy bowed head between my hands.

  “She’s a senior at St. Michael’s. She runs track, and she was at that debate competition last summer. I follow her on social media. She’s beautiful.”

  “It doesn’t matter, honey. Except that it probably has something to do with why Dale jumped to the wrong conclusion.”

  Then, she said, in that same tiny heartrending, shrink-wrapped voice, “Do you think Dad thought she was?”

  I kissed the top of her head. I had never wanted to lie to anyone so much.

  “Dad is kind of a distracted guy. He doesn’t always notice what other people notice,” I said. God knows it was true.

  “Still,” she said. “Do you?”

  I lifted her hair and pulled the silken weight of it over one of her shoulders and began to braid. There was a voice I used—low, slow, cadenced, chant-like—on those car rides or when Avery would lie next to me in the middle of the night, her brain jangling with frightening thoughts. I used it now.

  “When you were little, like three years old, right after we’d moved into this house, I would take you to the playground, and, oh my gosh, you loved it. It was fenced in with a gate that shut, so the kids could roam around by themselves, and you adored that freedom. You’d climb and dig in the sand and go inside the playhouse or you would lie belly-down on one of the big swings. There were so many kids, but I always knew right where you were, even when I was talking to other moms. I just knew. And then one weekend, your dad asked to take you by himself, and I didn’t really want him to. Because of the way he’s distracted, always in a bit of a fog. I was afraid he wouldn’t keep track of you. But I didn’t want to say no. So he put you in the wagon and pulled you to the playground, and after I was pretty sure you two must have gotten there, I ran over and sidled up to the playground, outside the fence, and hid behind a tree. And you know what I saw?”

  Her eyes met mine. “What?”

  “You climbing up the jungle gym with great big Dad climbing right behind you. I saw other parents watching him, but he didn’t notice. All he noticed was you. And he ducked into the playhouse even though he barely fit through the door. It was like Gulliver’s Travels. He even sat in the sandbox.”

  Avery smiled. “He probably took up the whole sandbox,” she said.

  “He loves you so much.”

  It wasn’t an answer to her question about whether her father thought Cressida Wall was beautiful. I knew it, and I knew she knew it, but I set before her the one thing I recognized at that moment—at that moment and for all time—to be absolutely true about Harris McCue, the best, most basic fact of him. Avery might’ve gotten mad or walked out or demanded an answer to her question, but she didn’t. Neither did she say, “I love him, too.” But she let my sentence rest there between us, and then her teeth released her thumbnail, and she said, in the tone of someone agreeing to perform a task or do a favor, the tone of someone who has decided: “Okay.”

  Chapter Five

  June 15, 1997

  Tonight, at the Quaker burial ground, Trevor said, “I hate her,” and even though he’d said it before and had even yelled directly at her, in the meanest possible voice, like someone spitting in someone’s face, “I hate you!” more times than I could count, sometimes sticking in a “fucking” or a “bitch” or both, I never believed he really meant it until tonight.

  I was lying on my back on the grass between two gravestones with Trevor nearby lying on his back between two others. The humidity and the city lights had thrown a veil over the sky, but you could still see some stars, white and dissolving, and I was about to say something about how weird it was to think that the stars were always up there, even in the daytime, how brighter lights just trick us into thinking they’re gone, when Trevor said it, not loud but hard and ugly, like an ax blow: I hate her.

  Right away, I imagined all those Quaker souls in their little gauze bonnets and plain dresses and black suits—our friends, is how I thought of them, our guardian angels—hearing the venom in my brother’s voice. I imagined the whisper of their skirts and coats as they drew back from us, all their inner lights startled and fluttering like candle flames in a breeze.

  He doesn’t mean it, I wanted to tell them.

  Except that I know Trev better than anyone and I think he did.

  Sitting here now, in my room, at three in the morning, feeling like the only awake person in the universe, I’m trying to figure out exactly why I think he meant it, about what made this time different. It could be because of the place, the burial ground. I can’t remember Trevor ever saying those words in that place before. Usually, no matter how boiling mad we are when we sneak out of our house, our fury spends itself on the ride over, as we whoosh soundlessly past lines of parked cars, past storefronts and row houses with their awning-shaded windows like sleepy eyes, so that by the time we’re leaning our bikes against the low wrought-iron burial-ground fence and tugging open the gate, which is always unlocked, we are mostly emptied of it. We rarely bring up whatever it was that sent us reeling out the door and instead talk about other things—school, our friends, books, whether or not pure good or pure evil exists, whether or not we believe in God—or we don’t talk at all, just sit inside a loose, comfy pocket of shared silence.

  But when we do talk there, we mean what we say. It’s like an unspoken rule. Or more like an unwritten vow, the kind you sign with Xs of blood. At the burial ground, we tell the truth.

  Can a person hate—truly hate, the way people hate Nazis or slavery or war—his own mother?

  They had a fight. They always have fights, but I guess maybe this one was especially bad. I don’t know because I wasn’t there to hear it. I usually stick around to argue in Trevor’s defense when he’s too mad (or drunk or stoned, which sometimes happens) to stick up for himself, but mostly just so he knows I’m where I always am, which is on his side.

  But I wasn’t there this time.

  Tonight’s fight—well, last night’s now, I guess—started months ago, when we were sitting at the dinner table and Mom told Trevor that she had decided that he would live at home during his upcoming first year of college. No “I need to talk to you about something,” no “You’re not going to like hearing this, but.” She didn’t even put her silverware down or clear her damn throat. Just carved up Trevor’s future the same way she cut the meat on her plate: calm, calm, calm, slice, slice, slice. I’ll never forget that voice. So much like a scalpel that you can almost see eerie arctic operating room lights flashing off the blade.

  Trevor said, “That’s not happening.”

  “You will commute until you demonstrate to my satisfaction that you are responsible enough not t
o disgrace yourself or—more to the point—your family.”

  Before Trevor could jump in and totally demolish his chances of changing her mind, I said, “That’s not fair!”

  No one looked at me.

  “It’s like you’ve already decided he’ll mess up, Mom! How can you do that? You can’t! You need to give him a chance first!”

  Again, not a glance. It was like one of those dreams where you may as well be trapped inside a Mason jar with the lid sealed tight.

  “Like you’d ever actually stick to that,” said Trevor, sneering. “So—what now? I’m supposed to beg and promise I’ll behave? Grovel? Is that what you want? Because I know you can’t wait to get rid of me.”

  “You will stay here for your freshman year, assuming you don’t flunk out before it’s over, at the end of which I will assess. Consider it a test,” said Mom, and she went back to cutting her steak.

  Then, Trevor had stood up, leaned over, and, with one giant sweep of his arm, sent her plate and water glass crashing onto the floor.

  My mother had looked down at the rubble of crystal and china on the floor, made a ticking noise with her tongue, and said, “At least it wasn’t the Waterford.”

  They’d had five different versions of the fight since then, and last night’s ended with Trevor shouting that he would make her regret it, that whatever disgraceful behavior she’d expected from him at school would be nothing compared to what he’d do right here at home. Then, he ran out of the house, leaving the front door gaping like an open mouth behind him.

  My mother said, “Virginia, shut the door; mosquitoes are coming in.”

  At about ten o’clock that night, from my bedroom window, I watched a police car glide into our driveway, with my brother in the backseat. I opened my window to listen. Trevor had gone out with his friend Eddie Rourke in Eddie’s pickup truck. When the cop stopped them, Trevor was drunk and there were three stolen stop signs in the bed of Eddie’s truck.

  By the time I got down the stairs, Trevor was standing in a splatter of streetlight with his back to the police car, his hands jammed into the pockets of his shorts, his eyes on the ground, and Mom was shaking hands with the officer, a kid who couldn’t have been much older than Trevor. After he left, Mom didn’t say a word, just turned and walked—with precise, unhurried steps—down the driveway, up the stairs to the porch, and into the house. If she has ever even once cut across our lawn, I’ve never seen it. I stood with my heart banging and a sob welling in my chest, watching my brother staring down at the road as if he were trying to burn holes in the asphalt with his eyes.