The last vestiges of the sunset were settling over the lake, and Myrna got up to switch on a lamp. “We haven’t discussed the book.”
“Well, I didn’t care for it,” said Hedy.
“Didn’t you?” said Alice.
“Such a dreary premise. I couldn’t get past it—”
“I liked it well enough,” said Myrna. “But other people said they couldn’t put it down. I put it down plenty.”
While they talked, Ginny looked out at the lake and let her thoughts float and settle, trying to put her finger on what it was she was feeling, where this sense of peace and fulfillment was coming from. And while she couldn’t articulate it exactly, she thought that probably the presence of all of the people in her house—all these different creatures, with their hungers and their desires and their moods and their love—was allowing her to feel necessary, to feel loved and embraced again, in a way that she hadn’t realized she’d stopped feeling. Hadn’t realized she’d been missing.
Now suddenly it didn’t matter much to her why Lillian and Philip and Olivia and Stephen and Jane and Rachel were there. It didn’t matter how long they were going to stay. It only mattered that they were there.
“Ginny?” Alice was saying. She bit a cracker in half. “You go first. Anything to say, on or off the record?”
“Nothing,” said Ginny dreamily, taking a sip of wine. “Nothing at all. You go ahead.”
“Well,” said Alice. “Let me at it, then. I’ve got lots to say.”
Driving home two hours later, her car alone on Spear Street, the farmland to her right shadowy and mysterious in the summer darkness, Ginny thought of all of them in their myriad beds: Lillian and Olivia and Stephen and Jane and Rachel and even sweet little Philip in the Pack ’n Play, on his back, with his frog legs pulled up to his hips. This, she thought happily. This.
William was not in bed. William was at the kitchen table, doing a crossword.
“How was your thing?” he asked, not looking up.
“Not bad,” she said. “Good, actually. Wine, conversation. The usual.”
“Hmph.”
“I haven’t seen you do a crossword since we were newlyweds,” Ginny observed. She hung her car keys on the hook by the kitchen and picked up a baby rattle from underneath the table. William grunted. Ginny began to put away the dinner dishes from the drainer. Somebody had washed them, which was nice, but nobody but her ever put them away after. Washing was satisfying. This was just annoying. “Baseball not on tonight?”
He nodded his head toward the den. “Lilly turned in early,” he said. “Had to shut off the television.”
“Where’s Stephen?”
“Upstairs already, I guess.”
“It’s only nine forty-five!” Stephen was a notorious night owl, always had been.
“Don’t know,” said William. “Didn’t ask him to punch a time card.”
“Rachel?”
“Went downtown to the movies. Now she’s back.”
“Alone? Whose car?”
“Mine.”
“William! You should have gone with her.”
William looked up and considered Ginny. “How do you know I didn’t offer?”
“Did you?”
“No. I thought I was going to watch the game.”
“So go upstairs and watch the game,” Ginny said. “There’s a perfectly good television in the bedroom.”
“Not perfectly good,” William said, applying the eraser to the crossword in what Ginny thought was a rather aggressive manner. “Too small, too far from the bed. Not good for baseball.”
“Ah,” she said. “And so he crossly does the crossword.”
“Funny.”
“You’re in a mood.” She dried a water glass with the dish towel.
“I am just,” he said, “trying to do a crossword. In silence.”
“And who’s stopping you?”
“You are! Everyone is!” He stood, and drew himself up to his full height, which was considerable. He shook out the paper and folded it carefully, then placed it on the table. “There doesn’t seem to be any silence in this house.”
“Nobody’s down here! Just me.”
“Exactly,” he said.
After he had gone Ginny sat down and opened the crossword. William had filled in only two words. There was a little rubbed-out spot where he had erased too hard. She looked at the puzzle for a long time, but she wasn’t trying to complete it, not really, and after a while she put the paper into the recycling bin, locked all the doors, and climbed the stairs slowly.
She heard no sounds coming from Olivia in Rachel’s old room, and it was also silent in Lillian’s room, where (she hoped) Jane and Stephen were sleeping. Only the door to Stephen’s old room stood ajar; the rest were closed tightly against the night.
Standing there, she was reminded of nights just like this—summer, warm, the humidity still trapped cozily around them—when the children were young and she stood in this very spot after closing up the house for the night. Listening. Feeling all the life on the other side of the doors.
She knew she’d been tired so many of those nights; she knew her mind, cluttered with an ever-expanding to-do list, had already been leaping ahead to the next day and the day after that, sorting out meals and activities and carpools and all the rest of it.
And yet! Standing there, hearing only one or two lonely crickets outside in the yard, she felt a certain fondness and longing for that younger incarnation of herself, and also for the children she and William had ushered into the world from the cocoon of this old house.
Quietly she opened Olivia’s door. The little girl stirred but did not waken. She slept on her back, in a pose very like the one in which Ginny used to find Rachel or Lillian: arms above her head, as though in her sleep she had recently been reaching for something. And Rachel, on the air mattress, looking childlike herself, her long dark hair spread out behind her.
The shade was partly open, and so was the window, and as Ginny stood there a light breeze moved the shade against the window. She backed out and closed the door again and moved silently down the hallway.
William might not think it was quiet in their house, but Ginny did; she thought it was not merely quiet but was sheathed in a deep, heavy, satisfied silence, and she relished every ounce of it, drinking it in like a nectar.
Was this happiness? Ginny wasn’t sure. As she moved closer to her own bedroom she could hear the sounds of the baseball game, the gentle lull of the announcer’s voice, the occasional burst of applause. Perhaps it wasn’t happiness, not exactly. But surely it was close.
Something awoke Lillian, but she didn’t know what it was. She lay on her bed in the den, careful not to stir too much. She didn’t want to disturb Philip, who had been sleeping for four hours straight. She thought she heard a sound above so she walked softly up the stairs and in the direction of Olivia’s room. She stood outside the door.
She heard crying. But it was not Olivia’s brand of crying. Olivia, when awoken in the middle of the night, made no secret of her unhappiness. Her cries had, in the past, been strong enough to draw comments from Lillian’s neighbors in Massachusetts. No, this crying was muffled and clandestine. This was the crying of someone who didn’t want to be found out. This was Rachel crying.
Lillian pushed open the door. There was enough of a moon to allow her to see that Rachel was lying on her stomach on the air mattress with her face pressed into the pillow. Her shoulders were shaking, and even her legs, as though borne along by the inflation and deflation of her lungs, were moving.
She reached out and touched Rachel on the back and Rachel flipped around like a startled animal. “Jesus,” she said. “What the hell?”
“Hey,” said Lillian softly, crouching down next to the air mattress. “Hey, hey.” She gestured toward Olivia’s bed, where Olivia slept on, undaunted. “Come downstairs.” And Rachel, chagrined, obedient, and looking, somehow, in the dim light of the hallway, exactly like a child, allowed h
erself to be led.
By the brighter, accusatory lights of the kitchen Lillian could see that Rachel had been crying for some time. Her eyes were red and swollen; her face was splotchy; her hair was wet and matted to her cheeks. Lillian felt a flutter of nervousness and embarrassment at this unabashed display of emotion. She could not, though she scoured her memory, think of the last time she had seen her little sister cry like this. She busied herself with the teakettle and tea bags while Rachel mopped her face with the wet paper towel Lillian gave her. When she had poured the water into the mugs and brought them, steaming, to the table, she pulled out a chair and faced Rachel squarely.
“Sit,” she said firmly, as though she were talking to Olivia. “Tell.”
So Rachel told. She told all of it: the post-relationship sex with Marcus, the pregnancy, the miscarriage, the apartment, the terrible financial strain, the fact that, despite this strain, she seemed to have walked away from a perfectly good job, and a good opportunity for advancement within that job, thus sullying her reputation in what was a very small, very close-knit industry.
“I wondered about that,” said Lillian. “Mom said you had a lot of vacation saved, but that just didn’t seem possible.”
“I know. I asked her not to tell,” said Rachel. “I just couldn’t stomach the possibility of going back to work, sitting in that office, working on casting this film without my heart in it. I don’t have the energy. I don’t have any energy!”
Lillian nodded. Privately she thought anyone without an infant to care for should have an abundance of energy, but she could see that now was not the time to bring that up.
Rachel went on: “I just figured… everyone here is so wrapped up in their own stuff, nobody would notice.”
Lillian accepted that dig, swallowed it down. “Does Dad know?”
“Oh, God no! I hope not. I asked her not to tell.”
Lillian felt the practical side of her come into focus, the list-making, organized side that had carried her through college and her long-dead career. “It’s all not what you wanted, I can see that, but what about it can we fix? Where can we start?”
“I don’t know,” said Rachel morosely. She had finished her tea and she folded her hands and laid her chin on top of them, looking up at Lillian like a puppy. “I just can’t believe I did this. I can’t believe I scared Marcus away, and I thought I would still have a career, and then I screwed that up too.”
Lillian cast about for a paper and pen. Then, finding neither, she tore off a piece of that day’s Free Press and took up a purple crayon that Olivia had abandoned on the table. At the top she wrote: Apartment. Job. Boyfriend. She formed each word into a column and looked expectantly at Rachel, crayon at the ready.
“Lillian,” said Rachel. “Lilly.”
Lillian waved a hand at Rachel. “Just start spouting things out. I’ll categorize them. We’ll figure out what the most pressing situation is, and we’ll tackle that first.”
“Lillian,” said Rachel again. “I appreciate this, but this isn’t what I need.”
“Really? What do you need, then?” In Lillian’s PR days she had learned all of this, how to talk to clients, how to get them to figure out what they wanted so she could give it to them. She made another, blank, column, and waited.
“I don’t know,” said Rachel. “But not this. Not charts! Not you, even. I’m not sure I need you.”
That stung. “Okay,” said Lillian. She put the crayon down, folded the paper.
“In fact,” said Rachel, “sometimes being around you makes it worse.”
“Worse? Why?”
“Because here I am, around you all the time, reminded of your stupid happy family, your ability to procreate. I’m sleeping in the same room as your daughter, for Christ’s sake! In my old room. But she has the bed. It’s like you’re trying to throw it in my face—”
“Throw what in your face?” said Lillian evenly.
“That you have all of it. Everything I don’t have. And sometimes—”
“What?”
“Sometimes I hate you for it.” Rachel started crying again.
“Oh, Rachel.” Lillian, torn between offense and pity, began to allow the latter to overtake the former. She felt herself beginning to soften. “Oh, Rachel. You have no idea.”
“About what?”
“About any of it. It’s so different from the inside.”
“What do you mean?” asked Rachel. She blew her nose.
Lillian thought of Tom. She thought of Father Colin, and their conversation in the bookstore. She thought of the woman he’d told her about, the woman who’d lost a child. She thought of their father, and his steady, unwavering loyalty toward their mother; she thought of all the days and nights and family vacations and first days of school and sick children and broken-down cars and picnics at the lake that had built that loyalty, brick by brick.
“What do you mean?” said Rachel again. “Tell me.”
Lillian wondered why she didn’t tell. There was real intimacy between them that night, under the fluorescent lights, surrounded by the noises of the old house lifting and settling. Partly, selfishly, she didn’t want to ruin the image of herself as a wise elder, someone who knew more than her sister knew about the ways of the world. Partly she was suddenly too tired to get into it. But partly—perhaps this was the most compelling reason of all—she wanted her sister to continue to believe in all of the things she wasn’t sure she believed in anymore, the fairy-tale magic of marriage, the bolstering power of children and family.
Philip began to cry and Lillian looked toward the den. She had forgotten, for a few minutes, that he was in there, that he existed at all.
“I’m sorry,” whispered Rachel. “You haven’t slept. You must be exhausted.”
Lillian pointed out the window, where faint threads of light were visible crossing the sky above the garden. “Look!” she said triumphantly. “Daylight.”
“Sorry,” whispered Rachel again.
“Don’t be,” said Lillian. “I couldn’t be happier. This is a new world record. This is the longest stretch of time he has ever, ever slept.”
Jane’s eyes were bright and wet and she was looking at Stephen intently. Stephen, recently pulled out of a deep and satisfying sleep, tried to focus on her. She had turned on the bedside light and was sitting up against the pillows.
“Stephen?”
“What is it? The baby?” He reached toward her stomach.
“No, not the baby.”
“Oh. Thank God.” He fell back against the pillows. His mouth was dry; he wanted very badly to brush his teeth.
“What is it, then?”
“I’m going to lose my job.”
“Janey! Of course you’re not. Why would you say that?”
“Because.” She lowered her voice and looked surreptitiously around. “Because, there’s a very big mess going on over there right now—”
“So?”
“No, you don’t understand. A very big mess. Bigger than you can imagine, bigger than I can explain to you.”
Stephen sat up again. In the glow the bedside light cast, Jane’s face looked drawn and strange, like an older version of its regular self. She rubbed her eyes. She said, “And a lot of people are going to lose their jobs. High and low, a lot of people.”
“How do you know?”
“I know, Stephen. Trust me, I know.”
“But you?”
“It’s a possibility. It’s a real, true possibility.” She made a move like she was going to get out of bed and instinctively he reached out to stop her.
“Jesus Christ. Really?”
“Really.” She drew in a deep breath and looked up to the ceiling, then met his gaze again. “And if that happens, I don’t know what we’re going to do.”
He put his hand over hers. Her hand felt chilly, and he picked it up and placed it between his two hands, rubbing it. “We don’t have to figure all of that out now.” He reminded himself of his father as he said
that. All Stephen’s life, it seemed, William had been able to diffuse the urgency of a situation simply by denying that it was urgent.
“But we do. We do have to figure it out now.”
“Right now, in the middle of the night?”
“Yes. We have to be ready for it.”
“But,” he said. “Won’t you be able to get another job? If you lose this one.”
He felt her hand stiffen. “I don’t know. It’s possible that I won’t.”
“Then I’ll get a job.”
She snorted. “You?”
He thought back to the bed-rest blogs. Patience. Patience and understanding. Still, he was wounded. “Yes, me,” he said. “I had plenty of full-time jobs, before I started freelancing. I can get a full-time job, and you can stay with the baby.”
“But you,” she said, “wouldn’t make as much money! Nowhere near as much. I mean, our mortgage alone. We live off the bonuses!”
She was right, he knew she was, but he was insulted and hurt to have it pointed out.
“How do you know?”
She laughed. “Well, would you? I mean, come on. Would you?”
“I don’t know. No.”
“Exactly.”
He thought maybe he hated her for a moment. He said, “We’re not going to figure it out right here, tonight. We don’t even know if it’s going to happen.”
“You are burying your head in the sand,” she said.
“So what if I am. It’s the middle of the night. You need to sleep. The baby needs you to sleep. That’s the most important thing.”
She said, “The baby!”
“Jane,” he said, and he surprised himself by how sharp he sounded, how severe. But hadn’t he been the epitome of patience and understanding all summer? Did he deserve to have all that piled on him, and now this? “Stop it. Stop talking right now, and go to sleep.”
She turned away from him and positioned herself on her side, and he turned off the light and lay there for a long time in the darkness, marveling at his capacity to hurt, and to be hurt.
“Fighting?” said Lillian, sitting up straighter in the deck chair in which she was sunbathing. “How do you know?”
The Arrivals: A Novel Page 18