“Blame your father and his dominant genes,” said Maureen.
But probably, after all, the strangeness hadn’t been because of Lily’s hair or the posthumous assemblage of their nuclear family. Probably it was because Lily was in jail, and after an hour the three of them would be leaving without her. And even if Lily knew rationally that there was nothing Andrew and Maureen could do about it, how could this abandonment not feel to her like a betrayal? After all, when the time was up and the security guards arrived, did Andrew or Maureen physically fight them? Did they grab Lily and try to make a break for it? Did they throw themselves in front of her and tell the guards that they could take them but they could not, could absolutely not, take their daughter? They didn’t. Instead, they rose and hugged Lily and whispered promises and encouragement and then, at the appointed time, they left, widening the new, terrifying chasm between Lily and everyone else. Andrew could almost hear it happening. He’d certainly heard it in Lily’s voice—We barely have soap, she’d said, and in that “we,” it seemed to Andrew, she had signified allegiance to a different realm. In some very fundamental respects, and through no fault of her own, Lily now had more in common with the worst people in the entire world than with her own family.
“Really, it was so beautiful,” said Maureen. “Like yours.”
“It wasn’t beautiful,” said Anna. “Mine’s not, either. Like Lily said, it’s just hair.” But she did not shrink away from Maureen; in fact, Andrew thought, she settled in closer to her.
That night, Andrew dreamed of flying away. When he woke, he stared at the ceiling fan above him, waiting for the sedative effects of its cyclonic whir. In three days, he was supposed to be leaving Buenos Aires. His plane ticket was already booked.
Andrew had had the flying dream often when Janie was sick. In the dream, there was no question as to whether he was flying away for good—he knew that he was delirious with the wickedness of precisely this—though he was always unable to make his way through the elusive dream-memory and figure out how he had ever let it happen in the first place. All he could really remember was the exhilaration: In the dreams he flew low enough for a detailed aerial view of the world; for some reason he seemed always to be headed north (to Canada, perhaps—like an escaped slave? Or like a draft dodger?), and whatever had allowed him to leave in the first place was already far, far behind him, and he could not account for it. This wasn’t so different from the way it must feel to do inconceivable things in real life, Andrew thought. There wasn’t a single cell in our bodies that was the same as the day we were born, and yet we were still held responsible for everything all of our former selves had ever done.
Nevertheless, after the dreams Andrew had always felt a guilt that was nearly tactile—not unlike the guilt he used to feel after the occasional sex dream (about old lovers, or old almost lovers, or students) back when he and Maureen were first married. Andrew could scarcely believe now that such trivialities had ever mattered so much to him. There had been great stretches of sexlessness between him and Maureen during those dark barren months when Janie was dying, and touching each other seemed unthinkable (not forbidden and thus alluring, but beyond comprehension, outside the realm of possible occurrences, something belonging to paraphysics or myth), and Maureen had even told him once that she did not care if he slept with someone else. Andrew’s actually acting on this was, as Maureen surely knew, implausible (who would he possibly have slept with?) and yet he did not take her offer as a dare, or as a taunt, or as a trap. When Maureen said she would not care, Andrew really believed her. During that time, and exactly as psychology predicted, Andrew was dreaming of losing his teeth.
Andrew got up and put on his bathrobe. He switched on the light. Outside, a cadaverous alley cat was mewling at a garbage can. He opened the door to the living room and jumped. Anna was sitting on the edge of the couch, watching the television with almost no sound.
“Hey,” said Andrew. His voice was craggy. “Why are you up?”
“Why are you?”
Andrew shrugged and began rifling for coffee filters. He opened the mini-fridge and stared into it dumbly. “Do you want a yogurt?” he said. Anna pointed to the yogurt she was already holding. Andrew closed the refrigerator.
When he went home, the idea was that he would try to resume his life. He would meet with Peter Sulzicki, the lawyer; he would meet with the accountant; he would, perhaps, make an appearance at his classes. From now on, he and Maureen would alternate weeks in Buenos Aires—a jointly devised plan that Andrew knew he couldn’t postpone forever. Trading weeks meant that Lily would always have a visitor, and that Andrew and Maureen would each be able to keep a foot—or at least a toenail, as Maureen had said—in their former lives. It was understood that they would have to do this because they’d need the money and small interim scraps of sanity their jobs afforded them. It was also understood, though never mentioned—much like the possibility of Janie’s death was never mentioned until it was already a reality, already in the past, already an event they were moving further away from with every second that passed—that they might never get out of this thing. They might, in fact, be in it for the long haul, and they had to try to keep now whatever they would need for the duration. Andrew had discussed this explicitly with his dean, who had listened with tented fingers and uncharacteristic generosity. He had a full beard and seemed to know how much everyone expected him to stroke it; Andrew suspected that he did not do this out of spite. Even so, he had been kind. An extra TA had been assigned to Andrew’s class. A grading schedule had been worked out.
Andrew poured himself a coffee and padded over to the couch. On the TV, a reporter was interviewing an athlete. “Who is that?” said Andrew.
“A tennis player,” said Anna.
“Oh.” Why didn’t Andrew ever think to turn on the TV? It was such a friendly presence. He cocked his head to one side and let the Spanish slip around him; it was a uniquely tantalizing feeling—that sensation of something eddying just beyond your comprehension. “I didn’t know they did tennis here,” he said.
“He won the U.S. Open.”
“Oh.”
“Is he saying anything interesting?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I guess probably not.”
Andrew rose and went to the window. He leaned his head against the glass. Outside, the light was sepulchral and thin, and Andrew remembered the light from his dreams: the sun tilting through the clouds, casting vast lattices of shadow on the ground; Andrew, above it all, skimming over stands of majestic northern firs, great meadows of allium flowers, rattling trains on trestle bridges. In the dream, Andrew was always struck by how easy it was to do all of this. He was always amazed that he had not done it earlier.
Andrew turned back around and found that Anna was frowning at him. “Am I supposed to ask you if you’re okay?” she said.
This, Andrew knew, was not an expression of genuine concern. It was a tactic of confrontation, inherited from Maureen and based on the premise that the speaker had silently suffered more than you had—more than you could ever even imagine someone suffering—and that condescending to deal with your weakness now was merely the latest trial to be endured with superior resilience and grace.
“I am okay,” said Andrew. “Of course I’m okay. Obviously, it’s probably not great about your sister’s hair.”
“Well, I mean, it’s the kind of thing she probably would have done to herself anyway.” Anna grabbed the remote and turned up the volume on the TV. “She’s always been weird.”
Andrew considered this. Had Lily been weird? She was high-spirited, certainly, and maybe there were times when that had put her out of sync with her peers in various small ways. It was true she hadn’t worn a bra until a bit later than she should have—this had been a point of principle, and she’d been earnest and humorless on the matter—and there had been something a little strange, and more than a little funny, about a child so young fighting a battle so old and so lost. But that only meant that
she had ideas of her own. Andrew, through his squeamishness, had even been a little proud of her. “Weird?” he said. “You think so?”
Anna raised her eyebrows and said nothing.
“How do you mean, ‘weird’?” said Andrew. Lily was a little socially awkward, maybe; it was possible that she wasn’t quite as naturally intuitive about other people as girls were usually expected to be. He remembered a phone call from her sometime during her freshman year in which she’d complained about an entry-level political science class. She couldn’t do it, she said, because she couldn’t figure out what worked for people—why were certain slogans effective and others ineffective, why were some unguarded moments seen as winningly humanizing and others as gaffes, why did people trust certain politicians and mistrust other ones? Why, she wondered, had “It’s the economy, stupid” resonated so widely as a phrase?
“Well,” Andrew had said, “I suppose because it was the economy, stupid.”
“That doesn’t really matter with that stuff, though,” said Lily. “It was just some magic formula or something.”
“Is that the kind of thing they’re teaching you there?” he’d said worriedly.
“I don’t know how you do it,” she’d said. “How do you ever guess what people are after?”
“I don’t,” he’d said. “I guess what states are after. Much easier. They behave like cue balls.”
On the TV, the show had gone to a commercial, and Anna’s eyebrows were floating farther and farther toward her hairline. “Never mind, Dad,” she said. “If you guys never saw it, I’m not going to be the one to tell you.”
“Anna,” Andrew said sternly. “You are clearly trying to say something. I would like to know what it is.” Lily was maybe a tad socially inept—but that wasn’t “weird,” per se, as Anna so uncharitably put it. And she was maybe a tad smarter than the bunch, which made the bunch a bit inaccessible to her—but that was certainly not an extraordinary state of things. And anyway, the gulf between Lily and most people was very, very slim: She was smart, but she was not as smart as she thought she was. A slight overestimation of one’s intellect was a useful sort of self-deception, Andrew thought; it pushed a person toward confidence and risk taking and high standards. This was a quality that Andrew had seen countless times in his boy students and almost never in the girls, and so he couldn’t help but find it somewhat endearing in a daughter.
Anna stared at the television. If she did not want to answer, Andrew had no idea how he was going to make her. But then she turned to him, her eyes full of a terrible adult patience that he had never seen before. “Do you remember,” she said, “when Lily killed that animal?”
Andrew began to laugh, but he could hear that his laugh sounded frightened. “No,” he said.
“It was a banana slug or something. You really don’t remember?”
“A slug? Why would I remember something like that?”
“She and her friend killed it.”
“I see.”
“They found it in the backyard. She was seven, I think.”
“And this slug,” said Andrew. “Its significance was what, precisely? Was it a special pet of ours? A work colleague of your mother’s?”
“It was Lily’s idea. She kind of goaded her friend into it. It was pretty disturbing.”
“Disturbing? Come on, Anna. If she was seven, you were what, five? I’m not sure your concept of disturbing was at its most sophisticated.”
Anna shrugged. “She liked killing it. You could tell.”
Andrew could hear how little Anna expected him to believe her, and how little she cared that he wouldn’t, and he felt, suddenly, an overwhelming, choking sadness that turned to anger in his voice. “Oh, and what?” he said. “You’re going to tell me next she was wetting the bed and setting fires while I wasn’t looking, too? It was a slug, Anna. Put it in perspective. Killing a slug is not torturing a puppy.”
“I don’t think you would have noticed if she was doing that, either.”
“Jesus Christ!”
“I’m not saying she was doing that,” said Anna. “She wasn’t. I know that because I know what she was doing and I know what she was like.”
“Have you been feeling unattended to lately, Anna?” said Andrew. “Are you maybe a little jealous of your sister right now?” He knew this could not be a useful thing to say, but he was angry, and he had long ago decided never to yell or raise his voice when angry. Losing your temper never made your case for you; it only made you sound foolish and sputtering and inarticulate—whenever Andrew heard people bellowing sloppily into their cell phones he couldn’t help but think how much more serious their anger would seem if they could keep it calm and well reasoned and under control. When Andrew was angry, he tried to be communicative and nondefensive, to explain intentions and interpretations, to make “I” statements. He tried never to let aggression bleed into unsullied areas; he tried to keep hostility quarantined, the better to effect its excision. But not even Andrew could be calm all of the time, and when he felt himself becoming too angry to stay that way, he had a signature tactic of his own: attempting to ascertain the true origins of his opponent’s behavior. This move had the benefit of seeming completely high-minded (nearly academic, even), communicating how completely irrational he found the other person’s behavior (so totally beyond the pale of comprehension that he could only assume—indeed, he had to assume—that there were other dark forces at work within them), and being, of course, impossibly maddening, all at the same time.
“I’m sure this trip has been hard on you,” said Andrew. At least you’re not unjustly detained in a foreign country! he wanted to scream. At least you’re not dead! Because it could be a whole lot worse than this, Anna, Old Sport. “I know we’ve been very focused on Lily. And maybe you’re not getting what you need from us right now. But, sweetheart, this is not the right way to act out. This is not the right thing to do with those feelings. This is not a good way to get attention.”
Anna was seething. “You’re being a fucking asshole, Dad.”
“Okay. You got me. I’m an asshole. We’re all down here trying to help your sister hang on to her life just to torment you. Because it’s my idea of a good time. Because I’m an asshole.”
“You know that isn’t what I mean.”
“Well, what do you mean, exactly? Please elaborate. We’ve got all the time in the world, Anna. We certainly don’t have any bigger concerns right now.”
Anna screamed at him then, swore and screamed like she never did during her adolescence, though Lily sometimes had, and then slammed out of the room. And Andrew sat on the bed for a time, patting himself on the chest, as though he could smooth over the divots that had lately been gouged into his heart.
· · ·
Andrew went downstairs a few hours later, ready to broker some kind of stopgap peace. He knocked on Maureen’s door and she appeared.
“Hi,” she said.
Something about seeing Maureen when he’d expected Anna made Andrew consider her face anew: the fractal lines around her eyes, woven like bits of tapestry; the way they somehow made her eyes seem brighter by contrast. He was relieved to see that she had not been crying, at least not recently.
“I can’t leave,” said Andrew, surprising himself. It was not at all what he’d thought he was going to say.
“What?” Maureen held open the door. Andrew stepped over a pile of Anna’s gym clothes and into the room.
“I just can’t,” he said.
“Because she cut her hair? We’ve got bigger problems than that.” Maureen went to the window and opened the curtain. In the gray wash of light, Andrew wasn’t sure whether he could actually see the red in Maureen’s hair. Maybe he only sensed it, like a pentimento from an abandoned painting.
“Anyway, we’ve talked about this,” said Maureen. “You have to go back. That’s where your life is.”
“Is it?” said Andrew fretfully. “I don’t know. It keeps moving around.”
�
�Maybe you’re just misplacing it.” Maureen sat on the unmade bed. “The wages of age, you know.”
“It wouldn’t be the only thing, these days.” Andrew joined Maureen on the bed. He rocked his shoulders through their sockets. “Your daughter’s mad at me,” he said after a moment.
“I know.”
“I see,” said Andrew grumpily. “She said something?”
“What was it about?”
“Surely you already know that, too.”
“I don’t. Really.”
Andrew stared into the silent television screen. There was something oddly comforting about this; he felt a sudden, unreasonable hope that it might materialize into an oracle and offer up a prophecy. “She said something about Lily,” said Andrew. “She said something about her killing an animal.”
“Oh,” said Maureen mildly. “Did she mean the slug?”
“What?” said Andrew. “Yes. Why didn’t I know this?”
“I don’t know.”
“I mean, why does absolutely everyone else know this? It is not an exaggeration to say that this has probably been literally on the evening news. I don’t understand why I didn’t know this.”
“Me, neither. She cried about it for, like, a week.”
“Why did she do it, then?”
“I have no idea.”
“Well, anyway,” said Andrew darkly after a moment. “A slug isn’t really an animal.”
“No.”
“I actually think it’s pretty misleading of Anna to characterize a slug as an animal.” Andrew closed his eyes. “I have to wonder if she’s actually pretty angry at Lily.”
“I’m sure she is,” said Maureen. “I mean, aren’t you?”
“Mad at her? No. Why would I be?”
“Well, she’s made some pretty dumb decisions.”
“She’s a kid.”
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