Our father sat silent for a long time. In class, he often did the same thing, listening to a student’s comment and then staying silent, holding it in his mind like a crystal, watching the light hit it from different angles before replying. The habit took some students time to get used to, those seemingly awkward pauses, but they grew to appreciate it, taking it as the compliment it was that he would so carefully consider their words, this Great Man who could have felled their ideas with one verbal blow. “You cannot support a child on what you make at the Beanery,” he said. “And you don’t have insurance.”
Bean nodded. “I know. I’m working on that.”
“And you’ll live here?”
“I don’t have to. There’s the apartment above the Beanery. Dan usually rents it to college kids, but he said I can have it if I want.”
“Your mother wants you to live here. I think she wants to have a baby around, but I don’t know if it will be good for her. Babies . . . You get so little sleep.”
“She’ll be finished with the treatments by then,” Cordy said. “And it might make her feel better. I think it makes her feel like she has something to look forward to. But I haven’t decided yet.”
He stood, clearing his dishes, rinsing them slowly, deliberately, setting them in the dishwasher. He held his hands along the rim of the sink and stared out the window, the palest breath of light allowing him to see out before the glass became a mirror in the darkness. “Why do you make it so hard for yourself, Cordelia? Why can you girls never choose the easy way?”
“I don’t know,” Cordelia said sadly.
When Cordy turned the conversation—the argument, really—over in her mind that night, her cheeks flushed with chagrin. Rubbing angrily at the red stains of embarrassment, she tried to stop herself from saying aloud the words that sounded so childish to her now. An apartment above the Beanery. A leaf she had already turned over.
How did he have this power to make her sound so young, so silly? Those words that sounded so strong in her mind and her heart fell from her lips like jump-rope rhymes. Staring out into the garden, she blew sharply against the glass. He was right. She wasn’t prepared. She couldn’t do this—couldn’t take care of a baby when she was such a baby herself.
It hardly seemed like a surprise when she heard a car in the driveway and then a soft knock at the door, a muffled tap in the sleeping house. She pulled herself from the window seat and opened the front door to find Max, the friend who had dropped her off in the middle of the night when she’d first come home. His hair fell over his forehead in greasy strings, and he wore a T-shirt studded with holes over a long-sleeved shirt and a pair of threadbare cargo shorts. It seemed to her that it had been years since the last time they’d seen each other, and Cordy felt inexplicably relieved at the sight of him.
“Cordy,” he said with a quick jerk of his head. “I could use a place to stay.”
She hesitated, standing there in the doorway, the night’s heat wrapping itself around her. Max needed a shower—she could smell the road on him: unwashed clothes and gasoline spilled on his shoes from the last time he’d filled up, the remnants of coffee and cigarettes on his breath. A rush of memories came at her so hard she had to wrap her hand around the door handle to keep from stepping backward. That was where she should be. On the road. Free. Where no one judged and no one questioned and no one ever thought about tomorrow.
“I could use a ride,” she replied.
Bean was grateful for the instinct that had told her to keep a couple of good outfits back from the consignment shop, even if it meant that many more hours of Story Time in the children’s room to pay off her debts. She had something important to do that day and she wasn’t doing it without the armor of good clothes.
She dressed carefully, the way she always had in New York, and had done less and less of since she was here, letting the layers of artifice she’d shellacked over herself peel away each day. She straightened her hair until it lay smooth, used every brush in her makeup kit, and finally nodded at herself in the mirror, satisfied.
It was sad how eagerly Edward leaped from his chair in the living room when she knocked on the front door, watching him through the front window. She felt suddenly, magnanimously, sorry for him, how horribly lonely it must have been to have Lila and the kids away for so long, how hard it was to watch youth and your looks drifting into the realm of memory, how he worked to hold himself up to standards he’d adopted long ago—which books to read, which wine to drink, which music to listen to—when he could have thrown it all aside and been who he wanted to be.
“I was hoping you’d come by tonight,” he said, reaching for her. “It’s been too long.” He went to kiss her, but she stepped aside and his mouth only brushed against her hair, thick with perfume.
“I can’t stay, Edward. I just came by to say I’m sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry for,” he said. He went to kiss her again, his breath heavy with wine, and she let him get close, let herself feel his warmth one more time before she stepped away again.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
Bean clasped her hands in front of her waist. “I can’t do this anymore, Edward. We have to end it.”
He looked surprised, then shocked. He reached out for her hand, took it in his. “Don’t be silly. We don’t have to end it. We’ll have to be a little more careful, of course . . .” His smile turned into a leer, and her mood soured. The very thought of being with him revolted her now, and the idea of sneaking around behind Lila’s back, sending him home to his children with the taste of her on his lips, made her want to cry.
“No, Edward. It’s over. We should never have done this in the first place. God, I think about Lila and I just . . .” She thought of the picture of Lila on the refrigerator and felt sick and angry. She turned away, looking at the blankness of the wall behind the door.
“I don’t want to talk about Lila.”
“You don’t want to talk about her?” Bean nearly shouted, turning back to him. She paused, composed herself. “We have to talk about her. You are married to her. And she loves you. I can’t imagine why, but she does. And you should be on your knees every night thanking God that she puts up with you, that you have anyone who loves you enough to promise to put up with your bullshit ’til death do you part. We should all be so lucky.”
Edward was wide-eyed and speechless. Bean’s palms were sweating, and she could feel herself breathing as though she’d run a lap.
“Goodbye, Edward,” she said, and turned on her (couture) heels and walked out the door, feeling like, for maybe the first time in her life, she’d done something completely right.
While Cordy had packed her bags, Max had showered and eaten approximately half of the contents of the refrigerator, and then they had left, Cordy behind the wheel, her belly brushing its fake fur cover.
They spent the night in an empty, anonymous house, Cordy sleeping on a racked-out couch that pressed its frame urgently into her back. When she awoke coffee-shop early, she wandered the house, no different from a hundred others she’d slept in before. At some point it would have been inherited upon the death of a parent, and taken over by some slacker with only the mildest of intentions to update the tired décor. But then the furniture began to swell with the bodies of friends just passing through, and the refrigerator filled with beer instead of food, and the screened porch was speckled with the tiny ends of hand-rolled cigarettes, and it became a way station instead of a home, and it just wasn’t worth fighting anymore. And though Cordy had certainly been grateful for houses like this time and time again, they always left her feeling bleak and a little empty, as though she were walking away from a mewling stray kitten.
And then they drove to a festival in a park miles from anywhere she knew, another of a million attempts to re-create Woodstock with a cast too self-conscious to stage an effective revival. Cordy was sitting in a tent with Max and some of his friends, and trying hard to remember what it was she had hated enough abou
t Barnwell to have forced her here. She should be at her shift at the Beanery right now, she thought, and the idea of that place made her ache with longing—the smell of the coffee, the clatter of silverware, the way the sound rose and fell during the day from sleepy early risers to the bubble of the lunch crowd to the purr of afternoon lingerers. Had she really fallen madly in love . . . with a coffee shop?
Cordy sighed and leaned back against a pile of backpacks in the corner, resting her hand on her belly, stroking it slowly. No matter how much she loved the Beanery, it wasn’t hers anymore. She’d blown that by taking off. She looked over at Max, who was staring at her stomach intently.
“You’re pregnant,” Max observed.
This brilliant thought had taken him over a day to assemble.
“It happens,” Cordy said.
“Not to me,” Max said vaguely. Cordy wondered whether he meant that literally, that he was somehow surprised that he had never been pregnant, or just that he had never had the pleasure of knocking someone up.
“So are you on the kick again?” he asked. A boy—he was a boy, really, lanky and red-eyed, with patchy stubble on his cheeks—stumbled into the tent and collapsed on one of the sleeping bags in the back, promptly falling asleep with his leg draped unceremoniously over Cordelia’s thighs like a disobedient lapdog.
She hadn’t heard that phrase in a while. People had all sorts of names for that world, where you rolled from town to town like tumbleweeds, following bands, following dreams, following lovers, following stars. But Max had always called it being “on the kick,” given his penchant for getting kicked out of places for minor issues like refusing to pay his hotel bill.
“I don’t know,” Cordy said. Suddenly the tent felt close and hot, the sunshine through the red nylon making Max’s hollow cheeks glow in an eerie trace of veins and blood. “I need . . .” She pushed the boy’s leg roughly off her own, stood up and opened the tent flap to emerge into the air.
The stage was far away, beyond a small copse of trees that hid the campsite’s restrooms and showers, and the music was only a dull blur of thumps and shouting. A group of people played hacky sack by a cluster of tents and camp chairs. A young woman near a battered RV was rinsing laundry under a spigot. Her blond dreadlocked hair tangled down her back, looking thick and dirty in the fading afternoon light. Behind her, a toddler wobbled unsteadily around a broken camp chair. Cordy’s fist opened and closed.
The woman looked up at Cordy, her face wearing the mask of a woman twenty years older. Cordy’s hand went to her own throat, stroking the bones gently. She could do it. She could raise a child on the kick, bring it up on the open road and bands and starlight campfires in the desert. It would grow up open-minded and free, a leaf on the wind.
And she would look like that woman, untethered and exhausted. And the baby would never know the map of a bedroom ceiling the way she knew hers. And her milk would dry up on the thin and inconsistent food of the road. And Cordy would not feel Dan’s warm and grounding arms around her, and we would not know our niece or nephew, and our father would not murmur sonnets to his grandchild, and the baby would never know what it meant to hate Barnwell so deeply that she couldn’t help but return to it.
The band finished a song, the crowd cheered. The hacky sack players gave up and wandered back toward the stage and Cordy drifted after them, pulled in their wake. The field was massive, hemmed in on each side by tidy municipal fencing, and inside its boundaries a teeming rush of people, so many bodies in motion. Witness this army of such mass and charge.
In that field was her past, a blur of sight and sound, a flood of experiences all designed to keep out the world, not to embrace it. Inside her body was her future, her family, all that would hold her in. Her stomach twisted slightly in guilt as she thought of us back home, wondering where she was, assuming the worst, assuming the truth.
But if she went back right now—if she could find someone to drive her all night—maybe we’d forgive. Maybe we’d forget. Maybe we’d understand.
Maybe we’d believe that this time the change was for real.
Cordy rushed back to the tent to get her things.
She couldn’t have known that at that moment we were hardly thinking of her at all.
TWENTY
When Bean got home after work, our father was standing at the front door like a dog begging to be let out. He and our mother had long ago begun a tradition of pre-prandial walks, the most our mother could ever be expected to adhere to a schedule. He might come home from the office late in the afternoon and she would leave her dinner preparations (and us, once we were old enough), and the two of them would wander the sidewalks of the town. And despite the fact that our mother could no longer participate, he persisted in this tradition.
“Your mother’s resting,” he said, by way of greeting, and walked out of the door into the cooling evening.
But when Bean walked upstairs to change, she heard a strange gasping sound coming from our parents’ room. Her heels spun gunshots as she ran to their door and opened it. Our mother was definitely not resting. She was bent strangely, as though she had been interrupted while getting off the bed, her back arched, one leg stretched out, hovering above the floor. She lay on one bent arm that was shaking with the effort, and her eyes were wild as her other hand reached for Bean.
“Mom!” Bean shouted, rushing toward her. “What the hell is going on?” She was looking for blood, for vomit, for anything, but all she could hear was the dangerous rasp of our mother’s breathing, and all she could see was the jerking, flailing motions of her limbs. Bean pushed her back against the pillows, tugging the bent arm out from under her. Our mother gasped for breath and tried to sit up again.
“Jesus,” Bean said. “Rose!” she screamed. Her voice echoed in the empty house. She opened her mouth to call for Rose again, and then realized her error. Rose wasn’t here. Rose wasn’t going to rescue her. Not this time.
She grabbed the phone off the table and dialed. Our mother’s breathing had slowed, but was still rough and wheezing, her eyes wide, the circles beneath them dark against her shockingly white skin.
“I need an ambulance!” Bean shouted into the phone when someone answered. She ran to the window and shoved it open. “Daddy!” she shouted. He couldn’t have walked that far. And then she shouted again, half into the phone and half into the night, as our mother shook behind her, “I need an ambulance!”
Bean was completely furious.
How was it possible that Rose was not here right now? This was absolutely 100 percent Rose’s kind of emergency. This was completely the place where Rose would shine. Where she could climb right up on her martyr’s cross and talk about how she’d saved our mother’s life and wasn’t it so lucky that she had been there?
And where the hell had Cordy gone? No one had seen her since a few nights before, when our father had run into a slovenly refugee helping himself to leftover chicken, which he was eating directly from a plate in the refrigerator. Had she finally decided that we were right, that she had no business raising a child, and taken off on the winds that had blown her here?
Here is a measure of how upset Bean was: she didn’t even notice how handsome the doctor sitting beside her on the waiting room chair was. She didn’t even glance at his perfectly tousled hair, didn’t even purse her lips temptingly at the gleam of his white teeth, didn’t even watch his broad hands smoothing his white coat as he sat down.
Or maybe this was a measure of how much she had changed, after all, somehow, and finally.
There had been a clot, in our mother’s arm, or maybe her leg, and worsened by the enforced disuse of her bed rest, by the chemotherapy, by the radiation, it had broken off and traveled into her lungs. Perhaps the doctors had told our parents that it was something to guard against, but between our father’s mind being eternally on the book in his hand and our mother’s mind being perpetually . . . well, elsewhere . . . they hadn’t told us. And while they swore it was nearly impossible to predict
, shouldn’t we have known?
But we wouldn’t have heard it anyway, would we? With all of us wrapped up in our own private traumas, we weren’t any good to anyone. Not even our mother.
So it had crept through her veins and into her lungs, which is what had left her wheezing so desperately. And she was going to be okay, she was going to be okay, the handsome doctor said this many times, and Bean nodded agreeably each time he said this, but they were going to keep her for a little while. And we could go home and come back for visiting hours tomorrow.
But our father, of course, set up shop in an uncomfortable chair in our mother’s room, so Bean went home alone.
Where Cordy was waiting.
“Holy crap, Bean, what’s going on?” she asked, when Bean came in, slamming the door behind her. “Where is everyone?”
“Where the hell were you?” Bean asked. She stalked to the refrigerator and flung open the door. Cordy had been curled up on the sofa, but she padded after Bean into the kitchen.
Cordy hesitated. “I just went . . . out. With some friends.”
“Going out lasts for a few hours, Cordy. Not days. What’d you do, hit the road and then chicken out?”
Cordy’s back stiffened. “I didn’t . . .” she said, but she couldn’t finish the sentence.
“Well, you picked a hell of a time to disappear. Mom’s in the hospital.” Bean fluttered her fingers impotently at the food in front of her and then closed the door.
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