by Emma Straub
The conductor did not smile. Instead, he checked his watch. “We’re now holding up the train, ma’am.”
Cecelia was just about to ask him why on earth he would call a thirteen-year-old “ma’am” when she saw her grandmother running down the stairs, her purse flapping behind her like a taupe leather cape.
“There she is, she’s right there,” Cecelia said, so relieved that she thought she might cry. Once Astrid got to the platform, she waved with both arms until the second she was close enough to touch her granddaughter, whom she then gripped on the biceps and kissed on the forehead. They were more or less the same height now, with the balance tipped slightly in favor of youth.
“You may release her now, sir,” Astrid said. “Mission accomplished.”
The conductor turned on his heel with a small nod, and a moment later, the train pulled out of the station, as if in a huff.
“Hi, Gammy,” Cecelia said.
“Hi, sweetheart,” Astrid said. “I saw someone get hit by a bus today.”
Cecelia’s eyes widened. “Like, a person?”
“A person. A woman my age. I’ve known her for most of my life. So I’m feeling a little bit scrambled. Do you know how to drive, by any chance?” Astrid pushed her sunglasses up so they sat on the top of her head. Her eyes did look a bit swimmy, and for a moment, Cecelia wished herself on the other side of the platform, heading back in the opposite direction.
“I’m thirteen.”
“I know how old you are. I taught your father how to drive manual when he was eleven.” Astrid pointed. “We did parallel parking right over there, on the next street, next to the river.” She mimed a car driving down the embankment and falling into the water. “Ha! Splash!” Nicky was the youngest of his siblings and had done everything early. The family lore was that if Elliot, the eldest, did something at six, Nicky would do it at three, with Porter doing it somewhere in the middle. Being in the middle meant no one remembered anything except as a foggy mist, just the most general idea that Porter had been there. That was sometimes how Cecelia felt about her parents, too, though of course she was an only child and they had no one else to pay attention to, other than themselves.
Cecelia cringed. “I don’t have a car. Obviously. I mean, even my parents don’t have a car.” It was warm, too warm to be standing in the full sun. It hadn’t seemed so hot in Brooklyn. Cecelia was wearing a sweater and she wanted to take it off, but she already had the two suitcases plus her backpack and she didn’t want more to carry. “Who got hit? Did they die?”
“Barbara Baker, a total pain, and, yes, she died. From where I was sitting, it looked instantaneous, which is what we all want, god knows. It’s okay, I can drive. But let’s make that one of our little projects, mmm? Every woman should know how to drive. You never know when you’ll need it. Come along, I’ll get one, you get the other.” Astrid reached for the handle on the small suitcase and tugged it along behind her, bumping it up one step at a time. Cecelia grabbed the handle of the larger suitcase and followed in Astrid’s wake.
* * *
—
It should have been a five-minute drive to the Big House, but the roundabout was closed, so it took eight. Astrid drove with her hands on ten and two when she wasn’t using the gearshift. Cecelia held her backpack on her lap, hugging it close, a health-class flour-sack baby. Astrid clicked on the radio, which was set, as always, to WCLP, Clapham’s local NPR station, the local news with Wesley Drewes, whom Cecelia had always pictured like a cloud with eyeballs, looking over the whole town, zooming in and out wherever necessary.
“When is your father going back to New Mexico?” Astrid didn’t mask her distaste for the plan.
“I’m not sure. In a couple of days, I think.”
“He sure likes it out there. How one could enjoy yurts and scorpions is beyond me, but that’s Nicky. You know he never liked peanut butter, just because everyone else did? He pretended he was allergic. How about your beautiful mother?” This was said without sarcasm or rancor. Juliette had become a fashion model in her teens after a talent scout had stopped her and her mother on the sidewalk in front of her dance studio in Clignancourt. Her whole life had been like that—someone happening along with an idea, opening a door. Juliette would then walk through the door, whether or not it led to a laundry chute. Cecelia looked more like her father, with a wavy nose and soft brown hair that looked blondish if you weren’t standing anywhere near an actual blond person.
“You know, the same. Eating radishes with butter, that sort of thing.” The streets of Clapham were wide and leaf-dappled, at least in high summer. It was where Cecelia had learned how to ride a bike, how to swim, how to play catch with an actual baseball mitt, all the things that were harder to do in New York City, at least with parents like hers. She’d been forced into dance class with her mother, but through a combination of clumsiness and mutual embarrassment, Cecelia had been permitted to quit fairly early. “But mostly I think she’s sad.”
“No one wants to send their child away,” Astrid said. “Well, no, I suppose some people do. Some people send their children to boarding school as soon as they can! But your mother is allowed to be sad. It’s going to be just fine.”
“Okay.” Cecelia wasn’t sure how much her parents had told her grandmother about what had happened in Brooklyn.
“You know, we thought about sending Elliot to boarding school in New Hampshire when he got to high school, somewhere he’d rub shoulders with future captains of industry. But Russell—your grandfather—was never going to let that happen. People move to Clapham for the schools, he’d say! Why would we send our son away? What’s the point of having children if you get rid of them before they even have anything interesting to say?” Cecelia stared at the side of her grandmother’s face. Astrid was often chatty, but the chatting didn’t usually tend toward the personal. Cecelia made sure that her seatbelt was buckled, just in case. “How many interesting things does a teenage boy say, really? Though your father was interesting, he really was. All our conferences with his teachers were mortifying gush-fests, just fountains of compliments, as if they’d never met a charming person before.” Astrid reached over and lightly patted Cecelia’s backpack. “Becoming a widow is like having someone rip off the Band-Aid while you’re in the middle of a totally separate conversation. When you’re a widow, you don’t get to choose. We were married for twenty-five years. A good run, but not if you take the long view. Not like Barbara and Bob.” Astrid slowed to a stop at a red light—one of two in town—and leaned forward, resting her head against the steering wheel. “I should call him.” The light turned green, but Astrid didn’t move, and therefore didn’t notice. Cecelia swiveled in her seat to see if there were any cars behind them, and there were.
“Gammy,” Cecelia said. “Green light.”
“Oh,” Astrid said, sitting up. “Of course.” She rolled down her window, stuck out a hand, and waved the cars to go around. “I just need to sit for a moment, if that’s all right with you. And your mother mentioned something about some trouble with your friends?”
“Yeah.” Cecelia’s bag buzzed in her lap, and she dug out her phone. Her mother had texted: Hi hon just checking to make sure Gammy picked u up + all is well. Luv u. Call when you get to the Big House. <3 Cecelia shoved the phone back into her backpack and shifted it down between her feet. “We can sit here all day, if you want to.” There had been trouble with her friends, in a way, though the trouble was really just that some of her friends were under the impression that they lived in a video game and that they were adults whose actions had no consequences, not children whose judgment-making skills were not yet fully formed. The trouble was that people always told Cecelia things, and that she wasn’t a lawyer or a therapist. She was just a kid and so were her friends, but she seemed to be the only one who knew it. The trouble was that her parents had given up at the first sign of trouble, like a disgruntled child’s first gam
e of Monopoly. They’d folded. Folded on her.
Astrid reached over and took Cecelia’s hand. “Thank you, dear. I appreciate that. Most people are in such a hurry.”
“Not me,” Cecelia said. “Absolutely no hurry whatsoever.” She closed her eyes and listened to Wesley Drewes describe the weather.
Chapter 5
Spiro’s Pancake House
Elliot heard about Barbara Baker from Olympia, who ran Spiro’s Pancake House. She hadn’t seen it happen, but she had heard the ambulance and the commotion, and she had taken out the binoculars from under the cash register. She’d seen Astrid cross the street, and thank god, Olympia said to Elliot, thank god, your mother is the perfect person for that type of thing. Everyone knew that Astrid was capable in trying circumstances. Then Olympia had watched the EMTs lift Barbara’s body onto the gurney. Elliot stared out the window as Olympia spoke, imagining the scene.
“And my mother was right there?” He pointed with his fork. “Right there?”
Olympia nodded. She was Spiro’s granddaughter and had babysat for the Strick children, which meant that she always asked personal questions and lingered too long after pouring coffee, but Elliot liked the food at Spiro’s better than anywhere else in town and so he came anyway. Why were there binoculars under the cash register? Elliot wasn’t surprised—Clapham was that sort of place, entirely too small for even the semblance of privacy. “Right there. She probably felt the breeze, you know, of the bus going so fast. You know that feeling? When you’re sitting there, and a truck goes by, and the whole street rumbles?”
Elliot felt his body give an involuntary shake. “God,” he said. “It could have been her. It could have been my mother.”
Olympia tucked her lips into her mouth and bowed her head. “It’s a tragedy.”
“I would be an orphan,” Elliot said.
Olympia put her free hand on his shoulder and left it there for a few seconds before turning her attention to her other customers.
At least twice a week, Elliot pretended to have early-morning site meetings so that he could leave home sooner and eat breakfast on his own. Meals at home were often a disaster, with chunks of oatmeal on surfaces that weren’t even remotely close to where the oatmeal had been ingested, and wet bits of scrambled egg floating in his coffee. And that was on days when the twins were more or less well behaved. He had never screamed the way Aidan and Zachary screamed, never—if he had, Astrid would have put him out on the front step. Elliot and Wendy were clearly doing things wrong, but he didn’t know how to fix it. Wendy had the patience in the family. It wasn’t sexist to say that. Surely the boys would grow out of their insanity eventually, and Elliot would again be in awe of them, as he was when they were first born and he was sure that their birth was the crowning achievement of his life, having had a part in their creation, even if it had taken a few doctors’ assistance and, of course, Wendy’s body to hold and carry and deliver. Maybe it was a blessing of childhood that most people couldn’t remember much before they were five—what good would it do to remember life as a savage toddler, totally divorced from societal norms? It was as if each human evolved from being a chimpanzee in a single lifetime. No one wanted to remember the jungle.
* * *
—
Even when he came for lunch, like today, Elliot always sat at the counter and he always ordered the same thing—eggs over easy, extra bacon, wheat toast, no potatoes. Olympia filled and refilled his water glass every time he took a sip, the cold silver pitcher sweating drops onto the stack of paper napkins next to him. WCLP was playing over the diner’s radio, as always, and had just switched from Local News with Wesley Drewes to Clap If You’ve Heard This One, the trivia show hosted by Jenna Johansson, one of his younger brother Nicky’s former girlfriends. Clapham was like that—everyone was someone’s high school love, or someone else’s mother, or your cousin’s best friend from camp. Elliot liked where he was from, and being where he was from, almost always, but he did occasionally have daydreams that were just like his own life only with no wife or kids and he went through an entire day without bumping into six people he’d known since childhood, without knowing exactly where and when he would run into them. In general, though, he thought that the longer he’d known someone, and whether they knew his family, increased the chances of people hiring him and so Clapham seemed like the best place to be.
“Large hazelnut coffee, four sugars, lot of cream,” Olympia said. “That was Barbara. For a little while, maybe ten years ago, she was into the egg whites, but not anymore. My brother said they stopped the bus just past the country fairgrounds. They set up two cop cars, and he could have crashed right through them, but he didn’t. He just slowed right down.”
“It was the actual bus driver? The school bus driver?” Elliot dragged some bacon through the yolk on his plate. He was still thinking about how many times he and his mother and his wife and his sister parked on the roundabout every week, how easily it could have been his mother, just now, flattened into oblivion. When his father died, Elliot had been too young to have accomplished anything—he’d been a larva, still full of limitless potential. That had been the tragedy, all the things that his father wouldn’t see. But if his mother died, now, today, it would be a tragedy of another kind. What more had he become? Sure, he had a wife, he had children, he had a business, a house, but Elliot thought that by the time he was in his forties he would have more. The cruelest part of becoming middle-aged was that it came on the heels of one’s own youth, not some other, better youth, and that it was too late to start over.
“Who else would it have been?” Olympia’s grandfather had come from Greece, but she was born in Clapham. She was older than Elliot by ten years and had children of her own, one of whom had just graduated from high school, which Elliot only knew because her cap-and-gown photo was thumbtacked just behind Olympia’s head. At least he thought it was Olympia’s daughter. They were a huge family, and Olympia had a couple of sisters, Elliot knew—the graduate could belong to any of them. He should know, but he didn’t.
“I thought it was someone who just wanted to take a joyride, you know, a kid. A drug addict, I don’t know! I didn’t think it would be the actual bus driver.” Elliot shoveled half a piece of toast into his mouth. “That’s fucking scary, excuse my French. My niece is going to be on that bus in a few weeks, my kids are going to take that bus someday. I took that bus.”
Olympia crossed herself airily and then kissed her fingers. “They’ll have a different driver by then,” she said. Someone shouted from the kitchen, and Olympia looked at Elliot’s plate. “Want more toast?” He nodded, and she pushed through the swinging door back into the kitchen.
Spiro’s was fifty years old, maybe more. Some years ago, after her grandfather died, Olympia had replaced some of the booths in the back, and a few years after that, she’d replaced the stools at the counter and the counter itself. The jukebox was the same one that had been there since Elliot’s childhood, as was the ancient silver milkshake machine, which looked like a giant metal toilet plunger but made the town’s best shakes and floats, hands down. Wendy, Elliot’s wife, had never particularly taken to Spiro’s, because she thought it was grungy, but most people acknowledged it as one of the main centers of town life, and it was where Elliot often met clients, to prove that he was Clapham through and through.
Some people wanted to get out of their hometowns, in order to prove themselves. That was the old-fashioned way, to set out for the big city on foot and drive home in a Rolls-Royce. Elliot felt exactly the opposite. What would success matter, if it happened somewhere else? He wanted witnesses. That was why, when the building on the corner came up for sale again, he’d bought it. Him, Elliot Strick. He’d bought it with every penny of his money and he’d routed it through a corporation and an address that belonged to Wendy’s parents in California. It was his to figure out, his to build. And when he did, everyone would know it. It made his stomac
h hurt to think about it.
Elliot swiveled around on his stool, the same way he had as a kid. Unlike some of the other babysitters, who had been inattentive and careless, more interested in the snacks in the pantry and the cable TV, Olympia had been tough. In some ways, it was a relief, knowing that she had boundaries, and rules, just like their mother. Some of Elliot’s friends had had mothers who went barefoot, mothers whose silky bras were slung over the shower rod, mothers who left candles burning after they went up to bed, and they made Elliot so nervous that he couldn’t go to their houses anymore.
His phone buzzed on the counter, and Elliot flipped it over. His sister, Porter. Just checking in, are you coming to see Cece today? Also hi you smell like poop. Elliot rolled his eyes and chuckled, despite himself. He typed back: Are we required to go to the Big House to welcome her? I have a meeting, boys have jujitsu. Wendy is bugging me.
Elliot watched the three little dots appear and disappear, as if his sister was starting and restarting whatever she had to say. They weren’t particularly nice to each other; were any adult siblings? They saw each other when their mother told them to. Elliot didn’t care, it was fine. Finally Porter wrote back: She’s a teenage girl and I promise does not give a shit if you show up. This weekend is fine. If you wait longer than that, Astrid will murder you in your sleep.
Elliot didn’t respond. Olympia pushed back through the swinging door and slid another neat pile of buttered toast beside his mostly empty plate. Once, when he was probably seven or eight, Olympia had caught Elliot cheating at Monopoly, and she had banished him to the backyard like a dog with fleas. He’d had a bit of a crush, then.
“I heard that the building on the corner got sold again, did you hear that?” Olympia craned her neck to look over her patrons’ heads, out the window, and across the roundabout. “I wish whoever it was would just get it over with. What’s the point, you know? Buy it, turn it into a bank, whatever, just do it, you know?” She shook her head.