I freeze. “Oh, God,” I say under my breath. “You have company . . . I should have . . .” The floaty, relaxed sensation I was still enjoying on the car ride over is gone and I find myself wishing Madison had put a second pill in that envelope.
Eric turns back and looks me in the eye. “It’s fine,” he says warmly. “You know Rufus.” He gestures to the dog, who’s nipping at his heels, and smiles at me. I feel a little buzz.
“You renamed him.”
He winks at me. “And you remember Connie, of course.”
“Hi!” She gives a little wave from where she’s sitting on the couch. I nod.
“And these are my parents, Gary”—he gestures to the man sitting on a folding chair in the dining room—“and Deborah.” His mom is standing near the TV. She starts walking toward me, her arms open.
“Oh, it’s Christmas,” she says. “We can hug hello.”
A chorus of “No!” stops her in her tracks.
Bewildered, she looks at Eric and Connie. Then they both start speaking at once.
“She has a terrible cold!”
“She doesn’t like to be touched!”
“She’s a mutant!” Aja chimes in gleefully. He’s just appeared from the hallway.
Eric’s mother’s eyes widen with each explanation and she places her hand over her chest, as if the commotion is causing her heart to race and she needs to slow it. Feeling awkward, I offer her a smile and wave the gloved fingers on my right hand at her.
She cocks her head in rightful confusion at me, as if to ask: which is it?
I clear my throat. “Ah, mostly what Aja said. I have a rare allergy. To um, other people. I can’t be touched.”
“Oh!” Eric’s dad, who’s been mostly silent, roars from his seat. “Just like my wife! Eh, Deborah?” He laughs at his own joke, his rotund belly literally quivering from the effort.
“Gary!” She rebukes him sharply. And then lightens her tone. “I think we’ve had enough Glenlivet, don’t you?”
“Ah, no such thing, my love.” He looks at me and raises his hand in a waving motion. “Come on over. We were just about to dig into dessert.”
I glance at Connie, who’s rolling her eyes, and then at Eric, who puffs out his cheeks and blows a slow breath. He sidles up near me and whispers: “I forgot to tell you—I hate Christmas, too.”
When we’re all seated on the metal folding chairs, Deborah dishes out slices of apple pie onto paper plates. The dog sits at my feet like a statue, looking up at me with his big puppy eyes.
“This is delicious, Eric,” says Deborah, patting her mouth with a napkin.
“Connie brought it.”
“Oh,” she says, turning to her daughter. “What are these apples—Pink Ladies?”
“Yeah, I think so,” Connie says, brightening.
“Next time, try Honeycrisp or Granny Smith. They really are the best for baking.”
“Ah. Noted,” Connie says, shooting Eric a look. He chuckles.
“Can I go to my room now?” Aja asks. My eyes widen at his empty plate. I’m still on my first bite.
“No.” Eric says. “Grandma and Grandpa are only here for the afternoon. They haven’t seen you in months.”
“They’re not my grandparents,” Aja says evenly. “And Iggy got the new King’s Quest, too. He’s waiting on me to play it.”
“Oh, it’s fine, Eric,” Deborah says. “Let him go. It’s Christmas!”
Eric sighs for a third time. “Fine.” Aja jumps up from the table and rushes off. “Does everyone have everything they need?” He glances at me and says in a lower voice: “You good?”
I nod.
“So, Jubilee, I don’t mean to pry, but I’ve never heard of your allergy before,” says Deborah. “You really can’t be touched?”
“Like the Bubble Boy,” Gary declares, a few decibels louder than everyone else at the table. He goes to reach for his glass of scotch and Deborah gently puts her hand on his arm.
The table goes quiet and I feel everyone’s eyes on me. “Um. Not exactly. He had some kind of immune disease or deficiency, so he was really susceptible to germs in the environment and from other people. Mine is just an allergy, like to peanut butter or eggs. It just happens to be to the skin cells of other humans.”
“Fascinating,” Deborah says, taking a sip of her coffee. “So what does it mean exactly?”
“Just what you said, really. I can’t have skin-to-skin contact with anyone.” I glance at Eric. My face is getting hot and I hope he can’t tell. “I get pretty severe rashes, and there’s a risk of anaphylactic shock.”
“Oh my God.” Deborah puts her hand to her chest, and I take a bite of my pie, hoping she won’t ask any more questions. “Your poor mother.”
I inhale at her words and a piece of crust flies into my throat, causing me to cough violently. My eyes water, and I take a sip of coffee.
Eric speaks up. “So, Mom, um . . . Jubilee loves Emily Dickinson. Isn’t she your favorite poet as well?” I look at him, hoping to convey gratitude at the change in subject, weird though it may be.
“Yes, one of them.”
“Mom was an English major at Smith.”
“She’s brilliant, actually,” adds Connie. Then under her breath: “Shame she never did anything with it.”
Deborah cuts her eyes at her daughter. “Well fortunately, a woman can live a fulfilled life in many different ways, Connie.”
I slip the dog a piece of crust under the table.
“Jubilee’s a librarian,” Eric says.
I clear my throat. “Circulation assistant.”
“Marvelous!” says Deborah. “You must love reading as much as I do.”
“You should see her house,” Eric laughs. “You can’t throw a stone without hitting a book.”
“Who are some of your other favorites?” asks Deborah. “I’ve been on a T. S. Eliot kick lately. He was an interesting man.”
“ ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ ” I say, remembering the poem from an 1800s American literature class I took online. The professor lectured passionately on it, clenching his fist to emphasize words. This isn’t a love [clenched fist] poem, but rather a poem about longing [clenched fist]. Eliot wants romantic love, yes. But more than that he wants to connect [clenched fist]. He wants to find meaning [clenched fist] in his stultifying, tea-drinking routine.
“I like that one.”
Deborah tilts her head, studying me. “Yes,” she says, kindness pooling in them. “I do, too.”
The table falls quiet, the only sound forks scraping bits off plates. An ease settles over the room and it occurs to me that this must be what it’s like. Family. Togetherness. Though I’m an intruder, I allow myself an indulgent moment and pretend that they’re mine, looking slowly from face to face to face, until I land on Eric.
Eric.
A booming voice knocks me out of my reverie. “ ‘Let us go then, you and I. When the evening is spread against the sky.’ ”
Connie looks at her father, bewildered. “Dad?”
“Oh, Gary,” Deborah titters. “Honestly.” She turns to Connie. “He’s just reciting the poem. The Eliot one.”
“We really should head out, though,” Gary says. “Got a long drive ahead of us.”
A fuss is made over clearing the table, who’s going to do what, and then Deborah and Gary have their coats and hats on and are ready to leave.
“Aja!” Eric yells.
“Oh, don’t disturb him,” Deborah says. “We’ll just pop in and say bye.”
When they get back to the front door, Connie announces that she’ll be leaving, too, and a mix-and-match of hugging ensues. I stand back, near the coffee table with no glass, the dog sitting at my heels, so as not to get in anyone’s way. Deborah fills the spaces between the good-byes and Merry Christmases and love-yous with banal chatter, like “Did you hear about that blizzard coming next week?” and “That folding table and chairs set worked perfectly for our little holiday, Eric
. So charming!” At that, Connie lets out a sharp laugh and elbows Eric in the side.
Then Deborah walks toward me and holds up her hands. “No hugs this time, I swear,” she says.
I smile.
“It was so lovely to meet you. Perhaps we’ll see each other again?”
“I’d like that,” I say.
WHEN EVERYONE’S GONE, Eric turns to me and shrugs as if to say: Family. What are you gonna do? I just smile, but my insides are tumbling, an ocean wave of unexpected feeling. We’re alone in the room, and though we’ve been alone before, somehow this feels different. Like the air is charged. I wonder if he feels it, too. If so, he doesn’t let on. “Are you still hungry? I’ve got some turkey in there. There’s more pie.”
“Yeah, I actually am,” I say, my stomach rumbling. The pie didn’t do much to fill me up. “Turkey sounds great.”
I follow him into the kitchen, the dog still at my heels, and Eric starts pulling things out of the fridge.
“Your mom seems really nice,” I say as he transfers some turkey onto a plate with two forks.
“Yeah. Don’t tell Connie that, though.”
“They don’t get along?”
“You know, just typical mother-daughter stuff.” He freezes, the forks suspended in the air. “I’m sorry. I’m such an asshole. Here, your mother just . . . and I . . .”
“It’s fine,” I say. “Really.” Even though a lump has started to form in my throat. I blink back tears. I’ve been thinking more about her, ever since my talk with Eric, and I wonder if maybe my ire at her was partly typical teenage hatred. And I never had the chance to grow out of it with her. Or I never gave her the chance. I think of all the times she invited me out to Long Island over the years, and the disappointment in her voice when I would say no. But god, everything was always about her. And it was just so irritating.
But maybe in person it would have been different, or maybe as we got older, we could have gotten along better, and I just never gave her the chance. Or—after watching Connie and Deborah tonight—I wonder if maybe mothers are always irritating, no matter how old you are. And maybe you love them anyway.
I eat my food in silence as Eric pulls on a pair of rubber gloves and starts on the mountain of dishes piled on his counter and in the sink. I slip Rufus a few pieces of turkey whenever Eric’s back is turned.
When I’m finished, I take the plate, scrape the bits leftover into the trash, and set it on the counter with the rest of the dirty dishes.
“Thanks,” Eric says.
I grab a kitchen towel from where it’s hanging on the oven door and pick up a pan that he’s just finished washing. The water droplets left on it immediately soak into my gloves, so I peel them off to keep them dry. Eric eyes me. “Is that safe?”
“I don’t know. Are you going to be able to resist touching my very sexy hands?” I wiggle my fingers, teasing him. I’m not sure where this surge of bold confidence has come from, but I’m glad when he chuckles—sending a jolt of electricity up my spine. I pick the pan back up and start drying it. We work in silence, a comfortable assembly line, until I give voice to something that’s been bothering me.
“You know a lot about me from reading that New York Times article.”
“Yeah.” Eric cuts his eyes at me, as if waiting to see where I’m going with this.
“It’s not fair,” I say. “Tell me something I don’t know about you.”
He continues washing dishes, vigorously scrubbing a Pyrex. He’s at it for so long that I start to think maybe he didn’t hear my question. Suddenly, he stops scrubbing and the room falls still.
“I killed my best friend,” he says.
I stand there, a little stunned. “Well,” I say, recovering a little. “I was kind of expecting something along the lines of ‘My favorite color is purple.’ Or ‘I have six toes on my left foot.’ ”
He doesn’t laugh.
I pick up a clean wooden spoon and start wiping it down, then ask softly: “What happened?”
He rinses the glass dish, sets it on the counter for me to dry, and then turns off the water. “I had a client, Bilbrun & Co., acquiring an aluminum factory in Kentucky. Just a little five-hundred-person plant. My team was responsible for due diligence, and I thought the plant was overvaluing their property. I had to hire a Realtor I didn’t know in Kentucky, so I wanted to go myself and walk through it with her, make sure everything was on the up-and-up.” He pauses and puts his hands on the counter between himself and the sink for support. “Ellie had a soccer championship game that weekend, and I had already missed a lot of her games that season. So I asked Dinesh if he would go to Kentucky in my place.”
“So you two worked together?”
“Yeah. Not the same team, but we were always doing little favors like that for each other. ‘Always wanted to see the Bluegrass State,’ he said when I asked him. ‘Maybe I’ll take the wife, go horseback riding while we’re there.’ ” The side of Eric’s mouth turns up in a little half smile at the memory. “Bilbrun chartered a plane. I didn’t even know he took Kate until . . . until I got the call that the plane had gone down on the way there. Engine failure or something.”
“Oh, God,” I say under my breath. I want to say more, but a shriek so primal fills the air and steals my breath. Aja is suddenly in the room, his mouth emitting the sound like a banshee, his little fists clenched by his sides, eyes squeezed shut, his tan face turning a muted red. And then the screaming starts to turn into words. “YOU KILLED THEM! YOU KILLED THEM! HOW COULD YOU?” Tears drip from his eyes like coffee percolating into a pot, and his words start to run together, as if they’re tired of being words and want to return to just being sounds. “YOUKILLEDTHEMYOUKILLEDTHEMYOUKILLEDTHEMYOUKILLEDTHEM.”
“Oh my god. Aja,” I hear Eric breathe. He steps toward him, but Aja sees him and is off like a shot, slamming his door with so much force the sound reverberates down the hall.
Eric goes after him, and I hear gentle knocking and mumbled words, but a minute later he’s back, grabbing the back of the kitchen chair with both hands and leaning into it. “Fuck,” he says, drawing out the word.
“Is he OK?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “I don’t know. He won’t talk to me. Won’t open the door.”
“Want me to try?”
Pressing his lips together in a straight line, he says: “I don’t think so. Let’s give him a minute to cool off.”
He straightens his back up abruptly, standing to his full height. “I need a drink,” he says. He walks into the dining room and grabs the bottle of Glenlivet from the table and brings it into the kitchen, where he divides what’s left into two small glasses.
“Oh, I don’t . . . I’ve never . . .”
“Drank scotch?” he says.
“Drank at all,” I say.
He raises his eyebrows at me. “Just into hard drugs, huh?”
I duck my head. “They were prescription.”
We both smile, and the tension dissipates a little.
He opens the freezer, puts a few cubes of ice in one of the glasses, and hands it to me. “Let the ice melt a little bit before you try it.”
I take the glass and put it to my mouth anyway. How bad can it be? I take a sip.
Bad. The answer is very bad. I sputter and spit, the small amount of liquid that made it down my throat burning as if I downed gasoline and someone put a lit match to it.
He shakes his head and mutters, “Stubborn,” then moves into action, getting me a glass of water, which I gratefully accept. Once I recover, he joins me at the kitchen table, and we sit there, sipping our drinks. I stick with the water.
“Aaaaaahhhhh.” A noise comes out of his mouth—a mix between a groan and a sigh. “Man, I am parenting to beat the band this year.”
I look at him—and even though I’m worried about him, the seriousness of what just happened with Aja, I can’t help it. I giggle.
“What?” he asks.
“ ‘To beat the band’?
” I ask.
“What? It means—”
“I know what it means,” I say, cutting him off. “It’s just—is this the nineteen fifties? Or are you just that old?”
His lips turn up, a genuine smile, and I’m glad. “Oh, excuse me. I’m sorry my idioms aren’t modern and trendy enough for you.”
I grin back at him. As we sit in comfortable silence, I replay what Eric was telling me. I take another sip of my water and then clear my throat.
“So that’s how Aja came to be your son, then? He told me you adopted him after . . . but I didn’t know exactly what happened.”
He takes a deep breath. “Yeah,” he says, exhaling. “Stephanie didn’t think we should. Adopt him, that is. It was our last big fight. Well, as a married couple, anyway.”
“What—why?” I say. “I can’t imagine anyone not wanting Aja.”
He studies me for a minute, gives a little grin, and then takes another sip of his scotch. “She thought he should be with his relatives. In England. But that wasn’t what Dinesh wanted. Also . . .” He pauses and glances at the hallway to make sure Aja hasn’t magically reappeared. “She was worried about Ellie. How it would affect her. I was concerned about that too, of course, but kids adapt. I thought it would be good for her—a lesson that life can change in a big way sometimes. And that we have to be there for the people that we love. Take them in.”
He reaches his right hand up to ruffle his hair, forgetting that he still has his rubber gloves on from dishwashing. When he realizes it, he drops it back on the table. “Stephanie didn’t agree. Said she just couldn’t go through with it. And I couldn’t not go through with it.”
“Wow,” I say.
He drains his glass. “Anyway,” he says, “that was kind of the end of the end for us—me and Stephanie. We filed for divorce shortly after they died.”
I wrap my hands around my cold glass, letting everything Eric just told me sink in. Everything he’s been through. My heart hurts for him in a way that it’s never even hurt for myself. I look at him. Really take him in, not just his “good bone structure” and olive eyes, but the tiny lines around his mouth; the way his hair sticks up like he just got out of bed, no matter how many times he tries to flatten it; his unbuttoned collar, revealing the vulnerable divot of skin at the base of his neck; the ridiculous yellow rubber gloves still on his hands.
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