by Emma Straub
“Ready?” one of the therapists said from the dark hallway, where they were waiting in total silence, like assassins.
“Ready,” Porter and Rachel said, in unison. They let go of each other’s hands, and Porter felt happy to be alone, together, each of them in their own bodies, with their unknown passengers floating inside, like ocean liners sailing across a dark ocean. Alone, together, and full.
Chapter 38
Parents Come Home
Astrid and Cecelia were planning to spend the afternoon making sign-up sheets for the newly reinvigorated Keep Local, Shop Small petition—Astrid bought half a dozen clipboards, and a brand-new box of pens. It was Astrid’s idea to reinvigorate. The plan was to assemble their materials at home, drive downtown, park the car, and spend the day walking up and down Main Street, collecting signatures. Cecelia had agreed to participate as part of her punishment, though it had become clear that all her punishments existed in quotation marks and could also just be described as pleasant time spent with friends and family. Cecelia had asked August to help, and he had agreed, as long as his parents didn’t need him at the shop. They were sitting at the kitchen table when the doorbell rang.
“Get that, would you?” Astrid asked. She pulled down her glasses and looked at Cecelia over the bridge of her nose.
Cecelia shrugged and slumped off her chair. She pulled open the heavy door without looking through the peephole, because no one in Clapham ever used a peephole, because if it was a homicidal maniac, the door was probably unlocked anyway, so why bother.
Her parents were standing on the oversize doormat, a small suitcase behind each of them. Her father had trimmed his beard, Cecelia could tell, and her mother’s skin looked brown and freckled, as it always did in late summer and early fall. Their mouths were open in frozen smiles, as if posing for a photograph.
“Mom? Dad?” Cecelia felt a lump in her throat and swallowed over and over again, willing it away.
Juliette stepped forward first, pulling her daughter close to her chest, and when Cecelia’s face was buried in her mother’s hair, and she smelled her perfume, and her natural deodorant that never worked very well, and the smell of her laundry detergent, a smell she’d never actually thought of before, until she smelled it right at this moment, that was when the lump got too big to swallow away, and she buried her face in farther, so that no one would notice that she had started to cry. Her father reached around her, closing her into the middle of a parent sandwich.
* * *
—
Cecelia had so rarely been in the Big House without her parents before moving in, but now it was strange to have them there, like suddenly having visitors to a zoo be able to climb over the barriers and into the cages. Cecelia wasn’t sure which animal she’d be—maybe one of the wild ones that looked just like a regular dog, so kids would get up to the edge of the enclosure, peer in, and quickly move on. After coming in and kissing Astrid hello, both of Cecelia’s parents followed her up to her bedroom.
Nicky walked the perimeter of the room, touching the curtains and the knobs on the dresser and the scalloped edges of the full-length mirror. He eventually settled in the cushioned window seat and sat with crossed legs, his hairy toes wiggling inside his sandals.
“I always liked this room. It has the best light,” Nicky said.
Juliette crawled on top of Cecelia’s bed with her. “This is a nice room. It’s big!” Cecelia let her mother pull her close, two spoons of the same size. Cecelia had her father’s face, her father’s hair, her father’s skin. Unless your father was Brad Pitt, that wasn’t what you wanted. Cecelia had always wanted more proof that her mother’s beauty had contributed to her makeup. Having her mother’s body so close reminded her of all the ways it hadn’t: the way Juliette’s ankles looked in sneakers, with a deep hollow on either side, a body part asking to be photographed for a magazine; the way Juliette’s shirts hung off her collarbones like a shirt on a hanger. Her body was never awkward unless she wanted it to be. Cecelia felt that exact way about herself, only perfectly inverted. She was always awkward. Even being hugged by her mother, Cecelia wasn’t sure where to put her arms.
“So who is this girl at school?” Nicky asked. “What happened?”
“Do we have to talk about it already? She’s just a girl who is not very nice,” Cecelia said. “I know I shouldn’t have hit her. I wasn’t planning on it. And I do have self-control, most of the time.”
“And she’s Jeremy Fogelman’s daughter?” Nicky asked, a curious eyebrow lifted.
“Who’s Jeremy Fogelman?” Juliette asked, into her daughter’s neck.
“Porter’s high school boyfriend. A human lacrosse stick.” Nicky shook his head and rubbed his cheeks, as if it would will his beard to grow faster.
“What’s lacrosse?” Juliette asked. “It’s like hockey?”
Cecelia loved the sound of her mother saying English words she wasn’t used to—hoe-key.
“Yes,” Nicky said. “Less violent, more likely to wear boat shoes.”
“Hmm,” Juliette said. “Okay. But what did she say to you, amour? What did she do?”
“She said some really mean things to my friend, August.” Cecelia had resolved not to tell August’s secret, which made it hard to talk about, but she also thought that August would understand. Not at school, of course, just with her own parents, so that they would understand why she had done such a thing. She closed her eyes and pulled her mother’s arms tighter around her body. After a few minutes of pretending to sleep, Cecelia actually did feel herself begin to drift in and out, and she pictured herself floating on a raft in between islands. Every time she got close to one, she would bounce off some undersea rocks and head back out to sea.
At home, when things got so bad that she actually wanted to talk to her parents about it, Cecelia and her father would sit on opposite sides of the bathroom door and talk, their voices only slightly muffled by the wood. It was the only actual door in the apartment. Right now her eyelids were the wood. Cecelia heard her father pad across the rug and then felt the bottom corner of the mattress sag when he sat down by her feet.
Cecelia hadn’t wanted to say anything about Katherine—it sounded like envy, she knew, to have a complaint about a friend’s older boyfriend. That’s what Katherine said, that Cecelia was jealous, that she wished guys were trying to meet her online. It had happened before, people sending Katherine messages. But this was the first time she’d actually met up with someone. Katherine said that Cecelia didn’t understand because she wasn’t a woman yet—she still wanted to play make-believe. Two weeks later, Katherine told Cecelia that the guy had locked her in his apartment and masturbated in front of her, while she sat on the couch next to him. She’d tried to make it sound funny, like she was in on the joke, and this was what adults did, but Cecelia knew that it wasn’t, and she wasn’t, and it was most certainly not okay. It was so hard to tell someone what they didn’t want to hear, and Cecelia had agonized about telling her parents, knowing that it would turn into her telling more and more people, until she might as well have stood outside Katherine’s window with a bullhorn. It was hard enough when it was your own story, but telling someone else’s? Cecelia knew it was both indefensible and the only truly right thing to do. She had to betray her friend to make sure nothing worse happened to her. What would happen to August if she whispered to her father? Would her mother make her repeat it, not understanding? Would they call the school? Cecelia wanted to be good. She wanted to have good thoughts and be surrounded by good people. August (Robin!) was her friend, and she wanted to do right by him. By her. She wanted to do right by her.
Cecelia felt her father lie down, too, his head at her feet. The rest of his body folded along the bottom edge of the bed. Her mother shifted to make room for him, and Cecelia exhaled, knowing that parts of their bodies were touching, in silence, and that they had to be feeling things too. It was too enormous to imagine
what, like trying to imagine what babies remembered from the womb.
“I’m so sorry, honey,” her father said. He propped himself up, which Cecelia could see through her eyelashes.
“She’s asleep, love,” Juliette said. “Let her sleep.”
Cecelia felt the bed shift as her father reached for her mother’s foot.
“I just hate feeling like we let her down,” Nicky said. He exhaled loudly. “This never would have happened if we’d kept her in school. We could have fought with those fucks. God, I hate Katherine’s parents. And we let them win.”
Cecelia’s heart was beating fast. Her father never said anything bad about anybody. And he never apologized, either. The downside of Buddhism, as Cecelia understood it, and also of years of therapy, was that no one ever seemed to think anything was their fault. Everything was always open to everyone else’s feelings, or the ultimate balance of the universe. If the point of life was to let things go, then you never had to be sorry about anything.
“It’s okay, amour,” Juliette said. “Come.”
Nicky rolled onto all fours and crawled up the side of the bed. Juliette inched closer to Cecelia, and Nicky lay down behind her, three anchovies in a full-size tin.
Cecelia let herself drift in and out of her parents’ breath. It didn’t matter that they were late or that they had done the wrong thing. What mattered was that they were sorry, and that they had come for her.
Chapter 39
Team Kids, Part One
There were teams in every family, alliances that buoyed the affiliated over the tides of any given trauma or daily boredom. Everyone needed a second-in-command, a buddy, a consigliore. When Elliot was born, it was Astrid and Elliot together against the world. When Porter was born, Russell and Elliot became a duo so that Astrid could feed Porter a thousand times a day, and change her diapers on the wobbly wooden console table in her bedroom. The family shifted like that for years, until all three children were school age and no one had an immediate claim on their mother that overrode the others’ needs. Porter and Nicky were thick as thieves, always banding together when a family vote was necessary: if it was time to stop for the bathroom, whether to watch Alice in Wonderland or Robin Hood for the trillionth time, who got to sit in the back back of the car. Of course Nicky went to see Porter first. Astrid could only have been miffed if she’d been surprised. It didn’t matter—he was here now, under her roof. It wasn’t that Astrid felt intimidated by her youngest child, not exactly, but she did feel like by moving away, Nicky had cast doubt on all her parenting choices. It seemed not only likely but probable that he understood something (things!) that she didn’t.
Astrid and Birdie went shopping for dinner. It was unclear what Nicky ate—Soup? Vegetables?—but Astrid knew that she wanted to feed everyone. Birdie had spent her whole adult life as a single person, a single addition to Thanksgiving meals and wedding receptions, and she seemed to be enjoying the chaotic nature of parenthood, and the challenge of cooking for a brood. She recommended tacos, which sounded interactive and fun and easy to alter for Nicky’s vegetarian diet. Astrid watched as Birdie filled their cart with things she didn’t have in her kitchen: three different kinds of chilies, a pineapple, cilantro, cabbage.
“This is nice,” Astrid said, walking alongside Birdie, who pushed their cart. “I feel like I’m on a date and you’re trying to impress me.”
“You are on a date,” Birdie said, kissing Astrid on the cheek. “But I don’t need to impress you.”
They checked out and carried the heavy bags to the car. The grocery store was on Main Street, two blocks before the roundabout, with a large parking lot set behind a wooden fence. From the front door, Astrid looked straight down Main Street. Clapham was lovely in the fall. The leaves had begun to drop, and the ones on the trees were starting to turn yellow and orange and red. It was a beautiful town. And now it had all three of her children in it. Astrid took a few steps away from the parking lot. Cars slowed as they approached the stop sign before the roundabout and stopped when a person stepped out into the road to cross the street. People were polite here, on the whole. They were rule followers, and do-gooders. They voted in midterm elections. They mowed their lawns.
“Did you ever think about moving back to Texas?” Astrid turned her face but kept looking forward.
Birdie set her chin on Astrid’s shoulder. “No. I like winter. When I was a kid, we’d sometimes get these catalogs in the mail that had winter coats in them, and I would fold down the pages. Boots too. I love winter boots.”
“Do you think Clapham is an okay place? I don’t know, I’ve just been thinking. Is the town too small? Should I have moved somewhere else, after Russell died?” A woman stepped into the white crosswalk and held up her hand to stop an oncoming pickup truck, as if her small hand could stop all that steel. Astrid held her breath, but the truck squeaked to a stop with room to spare. It was easiest to worry backward, when you couldn’t change course even if you wanted to, or sideways, into equally impossible parallel universes. Astrid could no sooner leave Clapham than grow wings.
“It’s very okay,” Birdie said. “Even nice. And if you’d gone somewhere better, you wouldn’t have me.” She set down the bags she was carrying and rubbed Astrid’s forearms. “Let’s go roast some pork, it’ll make you feel better.”
* * *
—
It turned out Nicky wasn’t a vegetarian anymore. Children didn’t have to tell you anything. He came into the kitchen when Birdie was expertly slicing peppers with a sharp knife, and he immediately began to help. Astrid sat down and watched Nicky and Birdie work together.
He’d always been like this—easy to incorporate, easy to get along with. Even as a teenager, Nicky had been able to hold long conversations with middle-aged women about gardening and dog training and other things he didn’t ostensibly know anything about. He was a good listener.
“I want to have everyone over this weekend,” Astrid said. “I don’t know how long you and Juliette are planning to stay, but I really want to have all three kiddos and all three grandchildren here at the same time.” Birdie had assigned Astrid the guacamole, and she was dutifully slicing the soft avocados in half and scooping the green flesh into a large bowl.
“Sure,” Nicky said. He was slicing garlic now, doing whatever Birdie put in front of him. “But I saw Elliot last night. Porter and I made him come to Buddy’s with us.”
“Buddy’s!” Astrid whooped. “The three of you? I had no idea.” She felt a pang of jealousy at not having been invited, though of course she was also overjoyed that her children cared enough about one another to get together without her pushing. Astrid grabbed the onion on her cutting board and sliced it in half. Tears sprang to her eyes immediately, as they always did. Why had no one figured out how to fix that problem?
“Yeah, he came with us,” Nicky said.
“How does he seem to you? I think he and Wendy are having some problems. I don’t know. He just seems so unhappy, and work seems fine, and the boys seem fine. I just assume. I know it’s none of my business, but I really think so. I’ve tried to talk to him about it, but he’s so hard to get through to.” Astrid wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “Yeesh.”
“I think Wendy’s fine. I mean, it’s an adjustment, them working together, but I don’t think that’s the problem.” Nicky looked up, biting his lip, and waited to see if his mother would pounce.
“She’s working with him? At Strick Brick? No one tells me anything. You know, I do worry that he doesn’t have enough business. I know it was so important for him to hang his own shingle, but are people hiring him? Does he have enough projects?” Astrid looked up, her eyes swimmy.
“Oh, I’m sure his business is okay,” Birdie said. She lifted a lid off a pot on the stove and the whole kitchen filled with a warm, smoky smell. She looked at Nicky. “Did he talk to you about any new projects?”
Nicky cocked his
head to one side. “He did. Did he talk to you?”
“He did,” Birdie said, her voice low. “The kids and I were at the shop the other night, and we saw Elliot by the roundabout. Seemed to be checking out some properties.”
Nicky locked eyes with Birdie. “Oh yeah?”
“What on earth are you talking about?” Astrid was still crying. She slid out from behind the table and carried her cutting board over to the counter. “Checking out what properties?”
The front door opened. Cecelia and Juliette were laughing—Juliette had driven Astrid’s car to pick up some wine in town, after not having driven in a decade. Astrid still wanted to teach Cecelia how to drive—before there was too much snow on the ground, she was going to do it.
“Hi, sweetheart,” Nicky said. Cecelia wound her way around everyone and to the stove. Birdie lifted the lid again and let Cecelia breathe in the steam.
“Oh, yum,” Cecelia said. “I’m so hungry.”
“Doesn’t Gammy feed you?” Nicky said. He winked at his mother, knowing the exasperated sounds that would begin to bubble in her throat. “I’m joking, Mom.”
“No, wait, I don’t want us to get off topic,” Astrid said. She put her hands on Cecelia’s shoulders, as if to claim physical responsibility, though of course the girl belonged to her parents more. “What did Elliot do? What’s the business? What are you talking about?”
Cecelia froze. “You told her?” She looked at Birdie.
Birdie shook her head. “I didn’t.”
Juliette snuggled her body against Nicky’s, no matter that he was holding a large knife. “It’s fine, Mom.” Nicky made a face at Birdie. “I think?”
“Who knows,” Birdie said. “People have tried before.”
“People have tried WHAT? Okay, right now, one of you tell me what’s going on!” Astrid shouted. “Where do you want these onions, Birdie?”