by Deb Caletti
That night, on air mattresses on the floor, I could feel Jake waiting awake as I was, listening for the sounds of others asleep. I was so tired, and here at Brie’s house I almost felt myself drift alongside Sprout and Frances Lee, but Jake’s awake-energy kept me awake too. No one had to say it—it was our last night together.
I could see his body scoot toward me on the floor, same as Malcolm when he decided he wanted to get closer to the TV. Jake stopped in front of me, elbows on the floor, chin in his hands.
“So,” he whispered.
“Business school,” I said.
“Yep,” he said.
“In Seattle,” I said.
He nodded.
“Just over the bridge from Nine Mile Falls,” I said.
“That’s right.”
He leaned over to kiss me then, and the amazing thing happened again, this whole body tingle of satisfaction and pull. There was nowhere else I wanted to be. Nowhere. My whole life, all of me, the past me, the now me, the future me, felt wrapped up into being right there, right then.
“This doesn’t have to be over,” Jake whispered.
They were the best words I’d ever heard.
BRIE JENKINS:
Character matters.
I was beginning to realize that pancakes meant you cared enough to make pancakes, because in the morning, there was the warm smell of batter frying in oil, and Brie in her stylish warm-ups, standing by the stove as Malcolm watched Sunday-morning cartoons. We sat around the table again, and I had this family feeling. As if we were all family, version two, revised edition. A thin wisp of sadness mingled with the smell of breakfast in the air. Family visiting, family leaving. Sprout ate slowly and carefully, cutting her pancakes with the edge of her fork. Brie brushed away our offers to help with the dishes. She knew we had to get going. Today we had to make it to Abigail Renfrew’s, back to Dad’s, to the Portland Avenue Café to drop off Jake, and finally to the train station by early evening.
We stood outside on the porch with our bags. The sky was heavy and gray, promising summer drizzle. Malcolm ran in airplane circles on the grass, dropping and rolling. Then he sensed the mood, came and wrapped his arms around his mother’s waist, his knees already dewey green and grass stained.
Brie hugged Frances Lee and Jake, and then me. “You’ve gotten so lovely, Quinn,” she said. She swallowed. “I’m really proud to have been part of your life.” Her eyes were shiny with tears.
“Thank you for everything,” I said. “Everything.”
Brie gathered up Sprout’s hair in a ponytail and let it fall again. “And you,” she said. “I just can’t get over what a young woman you’ve become, Charlotte. You’ve changed so much from that little girl I first met.”
“I’m going to miss you,” Sprout said. Tears had fallen, rolling down her cheeks. Brie wiped them away with her thumbs.
“You come and see me,” she said. “Anytime.”
They hugged once more and Brie kissed the top of her head, and then Sprout walked to the truck with her head up straight. I saw Malcolm’s back as he zoomed inside again, little jeans flying up the stairs. But Brie still stood there on the porch, giving a last small wave as we left.
“The cheese stands alone,” Frances Lee said, but it sounded sad, not mean.
Sprout sat with her hands folded in her lap, staring out the window. After a while, she finally spoke. “From now on, I’d like to be called Charlotte,” she said.
Chapter Eighteen
“I thought I’d never hear from you,” Liv said when I finally reached her.
“I’ve been a little busy,” I said.
“Don’t worry. I’m dodging your mom the way I used to dodge that creepy Harvey kid in the fourth grade,” she said. “How are things going with the secret sister?”
“We’re in the car now,” I said.
“I expect all the details tomorrow,” she said. “What’s all that honking?”
“I’ll explain later,” I said.
“All right, well, I just thought you’d like to know that someone in your family is having a little fun for themselves,” she said.
I shut my eyes against the gray clouds, the raindrops falling on the glass, against Frances Lee’s one working windshield wiper. I hated for Annie to be humiliated.
“Go ahead,” I said.
“You’ll never guess who was in my sister’s yearbook.”
I opened my eyes again. The freeway. A billboard ad. Asphalt shiny and dark black from rain. “Yearbook?” I was confused now. Liv’s sister, Hailey, went to Nine Mile Falls Middle School. She played the French horn in the band and wore braces and glasses, neither of which Liv ever needed.
“Ivar was in my sister’s yearbook!”
“Ivar?”
Sprout, Charlotte, turned around to look at me, her face scrunched with worry. “What’s wrong with Ivar?” she said.
“He’s got a whole page to himself,” Liv went on. “His picture, some dweeby poem a kid wrote underneath it. About a poor, lost dog who needs food and finds a home at Nine Mile Falls Middle School. I asked Hailey, and she said he comes in the morning and stays all day and kids give him their lunches because he bends his head and looks so hungry. He’s become something of a mascot.”
“That little sneak.”
“What an actor. I told her that it looked like Ivar, and she said it couldn’t be. No tag, all that…”
“The little bone with his name on it got caught on a couch cushion he was trying to rip up,” I said.
“I know Ivar when I see Ivar,” Liv said.
“That explains what he does all day.”
“And where he goes after school.”
“What!” Sprout screeched. Charlotte screeched. “Tell me!”
“Ivar’s been conning the middle school kids into giving him their lunches,” I said.
“I knew he was getting more square footage,” she said.
“All these kids are giving up their food for poor, sad, hungry, homeless Ivar, who’s actually got his own plaid pillow and basket of dog toys,” Liv said.
“What a little liar,” I said.
“A liar who knows how to use his puppy-dog eyes,” Liv said.
“Fun’s over, mister,” I said.
ANNIE HOFFMAN:
Hank Peters, Jack Xavier, we did the “I love you,” thing before I even knew who they really were. I love you, oh, I love you, too, smooch, smooch, happy, lovey-dovey, whatever. But what does that mean? Who is he? What is it that you’re even seeing, let alone loving? You’re seeing the way they make you feel. But you may not be seeing how they treat other people, or the way they always talk about themselves, or the fact that they want to start their own business but have never had a job that lasted more than six months. You’ve got to take your time. Even though, when you feel that good, the last thing you want to do is take your time. For me, love’s been a freaking speed trap. Go fast, get caught, pay the fine. Here we go again.
What I should have said…Who is he? What’s he doing here, with me? Better question—who am I? What am I doing here? What is it that I’m calling love?
There are times for certain things, it seems—for loss, for things going right. When Mom made OCD Dean move out, it was time for things to fall apart—her car, the furnace (in November, too), shingles from the roof in a windstorm. And in my sophomore year I had a brief time of luck—a great schedule, friends in every class, essay questions I knew the answers to, a Department of Motor Vehicles guy who passed me on my driver’s test even though I drove up a curb.
But then, those days with Frances Lee and Jake and Charlotte—it was a time of secrets and of secrets splitting open. Grandma and her rabid shopping; Annie and her advertised need; Ivar, even. Me, mine. As we drove down Abigail Renfrew’s gray-drizzled street, I knew my time of secrets was nearly over. Dad and I, we would have to face that moment I was both strangely wanting and dreading—where we looked at each other and saw.
And Mom—I knew I would have to c
onfess this trip, but I still hoped we would hold this one piece away from her. I hoped Mom would never know we’d been here, in this neighborhood of fat elms and lilacs, suddenly familiar. Tidy brick Tudors with leaded windows and arched doorways. Cars parked along the street and lampposts—actual lampposts, with curved iron arms and round bulbs—
“Sprout, do you remember this?”
“Charlotte,” she said.
“Do you remember this?”
“No.”
But I did.
“You okay?” Jake asked.
I nodded. I wasn’t sure. “Here,” I said. “That one.” It had a decoration on the point of the roof, an iron cone, like a little party hat with a spiral on top.
“The address says 245,” Frances Lee said. “That’s 248.”
“That’s it, I know that’s it,” I said. I remembered that roof. I remembered those stairs, turning in an L-shape toward the door. Dad had waited there, for me to hurry up. The house looked so much smaller than I’d remembered. There were geraniums in a box.
“O-kay, if you say so,” Frances Lee said.
“Do you want to wait? We could just drop off the sculpture and head out,” Jake said.
“No,” I said. My guilty conscience had already rewritten this script, giving me a role I’d feel more comfortable playing. I could be the messenger of Abigail Renfrew’s wrongdoing, Mom’s bitchy foot soldier, icy semi-stepchild.
We rang the bell. Summer had turned cold. Frances Lee held Abigail Renfrew’s sculpture. The strange head with hollow eyes and smiling mouth looked as if it were horribly confused and trying to hide it. Where I used to see only one expression on it, I now saw a hundred feelings. Fear was there, too, and hope. Grief.
I had been right about the house—Abigail Renfrew opened the door. There she was, in front of us. If I thought Abigail Renfrew’s house seemed smaller than I imagined, she herself was much smaller too. It’s funny how big people can get in your mind, how large and powerful when their wrists are thin and their shoulders narrow. She was pretty. Memory, I guess, can also make people uglier. She wore jeans and a white T-shirt; her hair was brown, layered, long and loose, her hands filled with silver rings. She was dabbing at that white T-shirt with a wet towel. A red splotch on her chest was widening instead of disappearing. The real Abigail Renfrew—she just seemed like a woman.
“Salad dressing,” she said as a greeting. It was an apology. “It’s stained, I’m sure. Life imitating art.” She looked at us, but no one responded. “I once made a statue by that name. I think I may be a little nervous.”
“We seem to have that effect on people,” Frances Lee said.
“The past has that effect on people,” Abigail Renfrew said. “Come in. And thank you.” She took the statue from Frances Lee and put it on the first available surface, a hall table. “Self-portrait back with the self. Do you mind if I change quickly? Now, it just feels all…wet. Blech.”
“No problem,” Frances Lee said cheerfully. Too cheerfully, I thought. I gave a small, ungenerous smile that conveyed irritation hidden behind against-the-will patience. A look can do all that. A look can do more.
We sat down, and I was overwhelmed with a then/now collision. We sat on a wide brown corduroy couch (didn’t remember), across from a maroon leather bench studded with metal buttons (did remember). Tall sculpture of a woman under a waterfall (didn’t remember), carpet of diagonal colors (did remember); bookshelf (did), fireplace (didn’t). And then Abigail Renfrew was back again, in a black tank top with an open white dress shirt over it. She offered iced tea all around, and everyone said yes except me.
“What’s with the bitchy attitude?” Frances Lee asked when Abigail Renfrew went to the kitchen.
“No bitchy attitude,” I said. Bitchiness was not something I generally did or did very well, but I could summon it for a good cause.
“I would never have recognized you two,” Abigail Renfrew said to Charlotte and me when she returned with the drinks. “I don’t know if you remember, but you actually used to come over here.”
“Oh, I remember,” I said. Frances Lee hit my foot with her shoe.
“I was pretty little,” Charlotte said.
“You’d play with my cat.” Abigail Renfrew sat down on the leather bench across from us. We sat and looked at each other from our opposite couches. It reminded me of when we were kids; we’d stand in our backyard tree fort staring over the fence at Kenny, the little boy next door, and he’d stand in his tree fort staring at us. We’d just look at each other in our forts until Kenny decided to throw sticks at us.
I wondered then if Abigail Renfrew thought of me in the same way as my mother thought of OCD Dean’s kids, particularly his daughter, Brenda, who displayed her irritation at all things that were my mother—Mom’s cooking, Mom’s clothes, Mom’s conversation, Mom’s basic presence in her life. Brenda, whose favorite dinnertime talk was the “Good Old Days” featuring her own mom and dad. This was usually some story that began with “Remember the time you and Mom did such and such” and ended with “the most fun time ever,” the moral being that such fun would never be had again. Brenda is hurting, Mom said for a while, until she ran out of self-help books. Then it was Brenda needs help. Then it became Brenda is a hellish little monster. If this was how Abigail Renfrew thought of me, I wasn’t sure I minded.
“Well, I guess I should thank you for bringing back my sculpture,” Abigail Renfrew said. She didn’t sound too sure.
Frances Lee heard the uncertainty too. “Hopefully, you wanted it back,” she said.
“Oh, I did. Absolutely. I knew he’d taken it. A symbolic act…It’s a little hard to look at, though, honestly.”
Like your past behavior, I wanted to say but didn’t.
“It reminds me too much of my past behavior,” she said.
I felt the slap of shock, worried for a moment that I’d spoken out loud. We’d had this moment, Abigail Renfrew and I, where our thoughts had intersected, but she didn’t even know it. She just went on, took a drink of iced tea with a lemon slice in it. “Past behavior, terrible decisions. Hurtful acts. A painful time. A painful time for a lot of people.”
I looked up at her and didn’t like what I saw. Her eyes looked kind. It was going to be hard to hate her if she was nice.
“Dad and ‘a bad time in my life’ have been used a lot in the same sentence, I’ve noticed,” Frances Lee said.
Abigail Renfrew sighed. “Well, you can see it in that woman’s face. I made that piece then, as you probably guessed,” she said. She looked over her shoulder at the sculpture on the table. “She looks haunted.”
“Not exactly a happy smile,” Jake said.
Abigail Renfrew made an elaborate shudder.
“Happy smile, hurt eyes,” Charlotte said. She looked over at me.
“Contradictions and falsehoods,” Abigail said. “But…” She stood. She walked over to the other statue, of the woman under the waterfall, tapped it with her finger. It had a completely different feeling—a sigh. Relief. The peace of water rushing down on a face that welcomed it. “If you can finally speak your own truth, you’re free.”
Jake picked up my hand. Truth again, but coming from Abigail Renfrew. A part of me didn’t want to squeeze Jake’s hand in confirmation of Abigail Renfrew’s words. And yet this was Jake’s hand, and the truest thing about truth was that it needed to be seen no matter what it was and no matter how it came to you.
“Your work,” Frances Lee asked. “Does it mean you got there? That woman is obviously much happier.”
Abigail Renfrew laughed. “Got there? I’ve learned that it’s all about the ‘getting there’ and not too often about the ‘got there.’ If there even is a ‘there.’ I’m forty-three and still mostly a work in progress.”
Abigail Renfrew said nothing more about my father, or her and my father, or my mother and my father, or us, and maybe that was just as well. We were finished with our business with her, and what was between us was left in that strange ech
oey place of things unresolved and unspoken. Instead, she showed us her studio before we left, a converted garage space in her backyard. There was welding equipment and tubs of clay, sculpting tools and tables with small model figures. More works in progress, more pieces of women, becoming.
ABIGAIL RENFREW:
At the root of every large struggle in life is the need to be honest about something that we do not feel we can be honest about. We lie to ourselves or other people because the truth might require action on our part, and action requires courage. We say we “don’t know” what is wrong, when we do know what is wrong; we just wish we didn’t.
Art lets us tell the truth, but even art can be something to hide behind.
I did not want to acknowledge the fact of my abusive marriage, or my subsequent involvement with Barry, whose damage to me was as deep. I considered myself to be autonomous and informed, and yet my relational life was material for the variety of talk show I did not even watch. There is a surreal quality, a nagging sense that this is not one’s life. These are not, after all, the outcomes you imagine for yourself. We are supposed to have loving parents and a happy marriage and a house with pictures on the mantel, and when we do not have these things, there is a film of shame. It hurts, yes, but maybe even more than that, it feels shameful.
Because it is so difficult to face, one makes a lot of excuses. Love “distorts and deranges”—the Eurythmics again. It is human nature, as well, to seek reason when there is no reason. It can become astonishingly convoluted. He abuses because he had a bad childhood, in spite of the fact that there are endless individuals who have bad childhoods and still have a measure of self-control. Who are even kind and gentle. “Insecurity” is not a good enough excuse for bad behavior. Excuses soften the outrage you should feel until eventually you’ve lost the capacity for appropriate outrage altogether.
But, finally, I had to open my eyes. I had to stop keeping secrets. The truth, thankfully, is insistent. What I saw then made action necessary. I had to see people for who they were. I had to understand why I had made the choices I did. Why I had given them my loyalty. I had to make changes. I had to stop allowing love to be dangerous. I had to learn how to protect myself.