by Ann Packer
Someone began talking about something else, and she let herself go—not more crying, but a spiral into what she and Dr. Lewis called the Bad Feeling. It was where she’d been living for a long time. She knew it very well: like a room, like a jail cell. It was the place where she hated herself the most. It was the place where she could feel like puking at any time.
But: your parents gone, no forwarding address. She couldn’t imagine it.
Lucas stared into his lap.
When the session was over everyone stood. Some would go to art, some to yoga, some to music. Some saw their shrinks. She’d seen Dr. Lewis first thing this morning, and though she’d stood, too, she hung around the emptying circle, looking half at Ivan and half at Lucas, who had not moved.
Lucas knew she was still there—she could tell, maybe from how determined he seemed not to look anywhere but down. Ivan was on his feet: watching the dispersing kids, glancing at Lucas, smiling across the ring of chairs at Lauren. Was it the same day Lucas cried that she thought the jack of diamonds looked like Jeff Shannon? Ivan had been playing cards with Casey. And now Casey was gone. On her last day, she’d motioned Lauren into her room and pulled up her pant leg to reveal a huge number of cut marks on her shin—some faint and white, some crooked, some shiny red. She said, “You have to decide every day not to do it.”
Lucas leaned forward and rested his forearms on his legs. Lauren walked around the outside of the chairs and sat on the one nearest him. He looked at her, then looked away again. She didn’t know what to do—she felt sort of idiotic sitting here, but she wasn’t going to just leave him, not this time.
The Oiron holiday celebration was in a ballroom at the Palo Alto Sheraton, on the last Saturday night of the party season. There were several hundred people there, eating and laughing and sipping better champagne than you’d think would be served at a corporate party, because Russ’s brother-in-law owned a winery in Napa.
But Brody couldn’t really enjoy it. Liz hadn’t wanted to come, and they’d fought over whether or not it was OK to leave the kids—to leave Lauren—home alone. “What do you think will happen?” he’d asked her, and the answer had hung in the air between them, unspoken.
They’d spent the first part of the party together, but now she was on the other side of the dance floor, talking to Mike Patterson’s wife. In bed last night he’d approached her, just a hand on her hip, but she’d stiffened and moved away. They hadn’t made love in a long time—certainly not since Lauren had come home. Maybe not since the night he left the bed as soon as he was finished.
That night, the way he was: he remembered a period early on when she sometimes wanted it that way. “Be rough with me,” she’d say. “Fuck me.” Proper Liz! Other times, she’d tell him to pretend they’d just met. Or either of them might whisper to the other, “You’re not allowed to move until I say so.” They were adventurous then, playful. Now you couldn’t even call what they did making love. Or not always, anyway. Plenty of times it was just having sex. Like having lunch. Just something you did because you needed to.
He scanned the ballroom. Russ was standing near the bar with an exquisite young Asian woman, who had the most perfect mouth Brody had ever seen. She was maybe twenty-five, and she gazed at Russ with a dreamy expression on her face, as if she’d float away if he removed his arm from her waist.
A waiter passed with a tray, and Brody helped himself to more champagne. He knew he should eat, but he felt stubborn about it, imagining Liz would tell him the same thing.
He looked at Russ and his date again. How would it be to have a girl like that—to feel, even briefly, less your usual self than her happy idea of you?
He headed over to a group from sales, arriving in time to hear one of the guys say, “And so we rode the chairlift back down the mountain and returned her equipment, and now when I go skiing, she goes to a spa.”
This was met by much merriment.
“Separate vacations! The secret of marital success!”
“My parents spent four weeks apart every year.”
“Whether they wanted to or not.”
“Oh, believe me, they wanted to.”
Brody smiled and moved on. His parents would no sooner have taken separate vacations than lived separately. They were midwestern. His dad called his mom Sarge, as in Yes, ma’am, Sarge, right away, Sarge. Winking at Brody, making sure he understood it was just a joke.
“Here’s the man we need.”
Brody turned to find three of his colleagues standing in a small cluster, and he shook hands with each of them, good party handshakes.
“What’s your guess on the cost of this thing?” Bruce Sellers said.
“Who cares?” said Rajiv Chaudhari. “It’s a write-off.”
“Oiron company party,” Brody said, “sixty-five thousand dollars. Employee happiness, priceless.” He thought for some reason of last year’s party: dancing with Liz as it got late, the mingling smells of perfume and sweat. He looked over to where he’d last seen her, but she was gone.
“Rumor has it,” Bruce said, “he’s going to one of those private Caribbean islands for Christmas.”
“No, he’s buying one.”
“As a present for her?” Tony Blank said, and they all looked over at Russ’s date. “I’d buy a country,” he added, and they all chuckled.
Brody drained his champagne. What would Russ do for Christmas? He thought of Russ’s former house in Woodside, of a dinner party he and Liz had attended there one December, when the entire estate was strung with little white lights. There was a butler, or at least Brody and Russ had a joke about there being a butler; to this day Brody didn’t know whether the guy had been hired for the occasion, as Russ insisted, or not.
He imagined Russ driving by the house this week, looking at the lights, continuing on.
Tony said, “Hey, d’I tell you guys about my new toy? Early Christmas present from my wife? She got me a Ski-Doo snowmobile.”
Bruce said, “Screw you, my Yamaha’s better.”
“Why’d she give it to you early?” Rajiv said. “Don’t tell me there’s another wrinkle to this Christmas thing.”
“Come off it,” Bruce said to Rajiv, “we know you grew up in LA,” and Rajiv grinned.
Brody stood with them for another five or ten minutes, talking about Christmas plans and work gossip and who was skiing where. A little later, drunk and hungry, he found Liz in the hallway to the restrooms. She was studying a framed newspaper article about old Palo Alto—or was pretending to, anyway.
“Ready to go?” he said.
“Sure.” Her phone was in her hand, and she opened her purse and dropped it inside, then closed the purse with a snap.
“You called home?”
“Everything’s fine.”
“Excellent,” he said, and a look of disgust came over her face.
“You’re smashed.”
“So?”
“Just making an observation.”
They made their way back to the ballroom. The dance floor had filled, and he imagined the heat, the way the music would feel in his legs.
From across the room Russ waved, then met them near the door. “Taking off?”
“We’ve got to get home,” Liz said.
Russ hesitated for a moment and then took hold of her hands. “It’s been such a hard stretch for you guys. I want to tell you again how sorry I am—I’d do anything to help.” He leaned forward and kissed her cheek, then stepped toward Brody and pressed his lips against Brody’s cheek, too. “Take care, you two. I’m glad you came.”
At the car, Liz held out her hand for Brody’s keys, and he almost gave them to her. “I’m fine,” he said instead. They both got in, buckled up. He wanted to say something—I’ve got it covered, Sarge—but she might scoff. He backed out from the spot, taking care to make every move as smooth as butter. He cut through Stanford, remembering the day early in their relationship when she showed him around her old haunts, and how his curiosity about her life as a c
ollege student told him he was getting serious.
He looked over at her. She was staring straight ahead, eyes so firmly on the road she might as well have been the one driving. They passed the golf course: trees on the left, trees on the right, darkness everywhere. His cheek tingled, and he brought his fingers up to touch the spot that Russ’s lips had grazed.
It would be freezing, but Lauren’s dad wanted to go to the beach. Lauren could tell her mom wasn’t all that into it, but she was going along, all fakely cheerful about how nice it would be. As for Joe—he just shrugged. That was pretty much all he did anymore. “Whatever”—all he said. Last night, watching TV with him while their parents were out, she’d had this feeling of wanting to say something, but she hadn’t known what, and he was zoned out, or zoned into the show—just zoned.
“How about you, Laur?” her dad said. “You game?”
Last Sunday, after going with her parents and Joe to get a Christmas tree, she’d spent the afternoon reading dumb magazines and trying to make herself call Amanda. Today would be the same. She’d talked to Amanda once during the week, but it was too weird. Amanda had told her something about Jeff Shannon, and though Lauren knew Amanda was trying to help, trying to keep her up-to-date, she didn’t want to hear about it. Jeff Shannon was probably waiting to torture her when she got back. Waiting to smirk again, make her feel like a dog. The jack of diamonds. What was the hardest thing to scratch? A diamond. Lauren felt she couldn’t scratch Jeff, couldn’t affect him. This was Dr. Lewis’s idea, and it was sort of like an English paper and sort of true.
“Lauren?” her dad said.
“Sure, OK.”
They gathered sweatshirts and blankets. In the van, her dad set two bottles of Poland Spring in the cup holders and drank them in quick succession, before they’d even reached the freeway. Lauren was behind him, Joe behind their mom, his whole body angled toward the window.
“A week till Christmas,” their mom said, looking back. “Any last requests?”
Lauren considered. She’d asked for clothes so far—and a new cell phone, to replace one she’d lost. It was kind of a sneaky request; how could they deny her a new cell phone now? But whatever.
She shrugged.
“Joe?” her mom said.
He looked up. “Yeah?”
“Is there anything you want for Christmas that you haven’t told me about?”
“Oh. Nah.”
They took 92 up the mountain, the road twisty and surrounded by forest. At the top, the Skylawn Cemetery. Today, a funeral procession blocked the way, and for a while they just sat there, waiting. At last they crossed the intersection and began the descent to Half Moon Bay. Lauren could see the ocean, steel colored under a gray sky. It was going to be ridiculously cold on the beach. What were they going to do, huddle on blankets, count the minutes until they could reasonably leave?
Down they went, slowly, slowly, slowly: there was a lot of traffic.
“Kind of late for people to be coming over here for trees,” Lauren’s dad said.
Lauren saw her mom open her mouth as if to disagree, then close it.
“Joe,” she said, turning around again, “do you want to miss school Friday and head up to Tahoe Thursday afternoon?”
“OK,” Joe said. “Whatever.”
“Hang on,” Lauren’s dad said. “I have to think about that.”
“So do I,” Lauren said. Her mom swiveled her head and went all concerned looking, and Lauren said, “I was kidding,” which she in fact had been, but she could go with it as serious—she kind of liked it, actually.
They reached the flats on the ocean side, and now they wound past nurseries and Christmas-tree farms. They passed the pony ride place, and Lauren registered it not so much as the pony ride place but as the place about which they always used to say, There’s the pony ride place. She remembered coming over here to the pumpkin festival once, with her mom and Sarabeth, just the three of them. Sarabeth had bought her a little wooden witch riding a broom that had bristles of real straw. In the hospital, Lauren had kind of hoped she’d see Sarabeth when she got home, but if her mom and Sarabeth were in a fight, who knew when that would happen. And what kind of weird fight were they in? Her mom wasn’t the fighting type.
At last they reached the light at Main Street. The clouds were darkening: massing over the horizon, coming inland to mingle with the high fog.
They took their usual access road to their usual parking area. Outside the van, the wind was ferocious. They ducked their heads, rounded their shoulders, shoved their hands into their sweatshirt pockets. At the path, Joe took the lead; Lauren was in the rear, just behind her dad. The water was vast and dark, edged by a long, wide stretch of beach. They were at the top of a cliff, and Joe picked his way through beach grass and shrubs until he came to a steep, narrow trail down to the sand.
Her mom was afraid of heights. Or no: of falling. Without a look back, Joe skipped his way down, but her mom only glanced back over her shoulder and then hesitantly took a single step. She waited, then brought the other foot after her and stopped.
Help her, Lauren thought, but her dad didn’t move.
Again, her mom moved one foot, and then, very slowly, the other. There was a turn in the trail now, and Lauren couldn’t see the angle of descent, but her mom’s stillness told her it was getting steeper. Her dad put his hands on his hips.
Her mom stepped down again, but now she slipped a little and gasped, and she reached a quick hand to the ground to steady herself. “Ow,” she exclaimed, and she pulled the hand right back and looked at it, then clapped her palm against her jeans and stared straight ahead.
“Dad,” Lauren said in a low voice.
He turned.
“Help her.”
“She’s OK.”
She couldn’t stand it. She stepped past him and said, “Want a hand? I can go ahead of you, you can hold my shoulder.”
“Just go on down,” her dad said in a nice-enough voice, but it was like that was it, no choices, Lauren had to go. Her mom smiled at her—it’s OK—and Lauren shrugged and made her way down. From the beach she looked back up. Her dad was in front of her mom now, her mom’s hand on her dad’s shoulder.
Joe came up. “What are they doing?”
“They’re coming.”
With the toe of his sneaker he lifted a piece of seaweed and flung it away. He looked straight at her with a question he’d never ask, and she felt her face warm and looked up again. Her parents had taken another step or two, but they had a ways to go.
“Come on,” she said, and she and Joe started toward the water, as if there might be something to see in it that they couldn’t see from where they were now.
To Brody, Liz’s hand felt light—as if she didn’t want to trust him with her weight. He took a step, then waited for her to follow. Another, and she hesitated and then came, too. He remembered a time, maybe twenty years ago, when she had ridden him piggyback. “I’ll make you fall,” she’d laughingly warned him, but he’d turned his back and reached for her thighs, and she’d gone along with it. They were south of Carmel, cypresses black against the blue sky, a cold wind freezing Brody’s ears. Were they married yet? He didn’t think so. She was heavy. At the steeper parts it took all his leg strength to brace them against falling. Point Lobos, that’s where it was. On her back was a little knapsack of food, and once at the water’s edge they sat on a high rock and ate sandwiches and Oreos, bought—the Oreos—by him because she’d said at some point that she couldn’t stop eating them once she started, and he wanted to see this, evidence of a ravenous appetite. On the rough rock, she proved it. She ate twelve Oreos, sixteen. Then she lay back and groaned happily, and he bent over her and licked the black crumbs from the corners of her mouth.
“Thanks,” she said now, as they reached the beach.
He turned back to face her. “Sure.”
“Cold?”
“You bet.” He offered her his hand, and after a moment’s hesitation she took
it. The kids weren’t in sight. They crested the high point of the beach and stopped, looking at the ocean. It was not so dark from here—more foamy, green-gray. Two men and a young woman—a girl?—walked away from them, to the south. In the other direction, Lauren and Joe headed north, paralleling the waterline, Joe several feet ahead of Lauren. As Brody watched, Lauren bent to look at something in the sand, and, without turning around, Joe paused, too.
Liz seemed about to speak and then didn’t. They stood there watching their children, hands still together. This trip to the beach, Brody thought, this day in the cold air. Couldn’t it help them all?
25
Like most of their cohorts in the choral group, Liz’s parents had dressed in Christmas colors, her father in a dark green sweater with reindeer on it, her mother in her red velvet pants and a sweater appliquéd with a Christmas tree. Though held at a church, the program had been billed as multicultural, and hanging above the singers was a banner reading CELEBRATE YOUR HOLIDAY in a dozen languages.
Liz and Brody and the kids were in a pew about halfway back. Brody and the kids seemed to be on autopilot, but when the sing-along part of the program started, Liz tried to hum along and then actually joined in on her favorite, “Deck the Halls.” To her surprise, the mere act of singing lifted her, and as the verses continued she raised her voice. She remembered one Christmas when she was a very little girl, standing with her family on the porch of their house in Swarthmore and listening as a group of caroling neighbors filled the night air with song. Afterward, back inside the house, she took hold of Steve’s hands and did a ring-around-the-rosy with him, she was so happy.
Cookies and cider were served in the community room once the concert was over. Liz’s parents rushed to say hello, and again her mother couldn’t look at Lauren. “It was wonderful,” Liz said. “Didn’t you think so, Lauren?”