Half of What You Hear

by Kristyn Kusek Lewis

  Oh, Livvie.

  “Mom,” she says, barely able to get the word out, the panic evident in her voice. Mommy. The word flashes in my head. Mother.

  “Why on earth would you do that?” I shout, my voice trembling and panicked. “Why would you do that to your friend?”

  She looks down at the ground, her face hard, my questions bouncing right off her.

  I take another step forward, so close that I can see the tiny mole just beneath the collar of her shirt.

  “Livvie, you need to come with me. Right this minute!” I say, trying and failing to keep my voice measured. I will grab her by the scruff of her coat if I have to. I’m not above it. “This is unacceptable,” I say through gritted teeth.

  “Mom, stop!” she says, her voice barely a whisper. “Mom, people are . . .”

  I scan the street. Sure enough, a crowd has gathered. A family holding their leftover containers outside the café across the street. Carol, outside her shop, the green dress in her hands. William, just a few feet away, standing in the threshold of the bakery. The other girls have scattered, like cockroaches in the light.

  “Livvie.” I lower my voice. “Livvie, what’s gotten into you?”

  “Mom,” she pleads. “Can we just . . . Can we go?” The look on her face is pained, like she’s the victim. I am so angry at her. I have never been this angry at her. I have been irritated and frustrated, worried, like after that day in the parking lot, when she wouldn’t talk to me and it scared me about what was yet to come. About moments like this. I grab her arm and yank her in the direction of the inn.

  As we start down the street, I feel like we are walking across a stage. Eyes on us. People whispering. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the Volvo that I nearly collided with pull up to the curb. The driver rolls her window down. Mindy. Of course. What a coincidence—except, no, there are no fucking coincidences in Greyhill. How could there be?

  “Everything okay, Bess?” she says, a soppy smile on her face like the last few minutes have disappeared, a lightning flash swallowed into the dark sky.

  I look at her, her cheeks sucked in as she sips something from a monogrammed Tervis tumbler. What’s the smile for? I wonder. Is this her way of letting me know that she saw what just happened, that she was right about my daughter? Kind of a mean girl, she’d said the other night. The words ring in my ears.

  “Fine, Mindy,” I say, my voice shaking as I grip Livvie’s arm. “Everything’s totally fine.”

  Nineteen

  “Brittany made me do it!” Livvie wails as I drag her into Cole’s office. “It was all her idea!”

  I close the door, resting my palms on the back of it for a moment to collect myself and slow my pounding heart.

  “What is going on?” Cole says, standing up from his desk. His gaze goes from me to Livvie.

  “Go ahead, Liv,” I say, my voice still trembling with anger. “Go ahead and tell him.”

  She looks at me, her eyes pleading, and then her face crumples again. She stands there, her shoulders shaking from her sobs, Cole and I watching her from opposite sides of the room. He comes around his desk and puts his arm around her, catching my eye when I shake my head at him, telling him to stop.

  No, I think. No, she does not get a pass on this. If we coddle her through this, she’ll never learn.

  “What happened?” Cole says, his voice gentle. “Livvie, what is it?”

  “Go ahead, Liv,” I say, my voice like a sergeant’s. “Go ahead and tell your father about the scene you just caused in the middle of town.”

  “Scene?” I knew that would get his attention. He shifts a half turn toward her, putting his hands on her shoulders so he can look directly into her eyes. “What scene, Livvie?”

  “It’s her fault!” she screams, her right arm flailing in my direction. “She’s the reason there was a scene!”

  “Oh, no, no, no,” I say, taking a step toward them. “You do not get to put this on me, Olivia.” I look to Cole. “I was in Carol’s shop and happened to look out the window just in time to see your daughter push her friend down in the middle of the street.”

  “Livvie,” he says. “Is this true?”

  I roll my eyes. I want to kick the earnest, even-keeled, Mr. Brady–style reasoning right out of him. “Yes, Cole, of course it’s true!”

  “It was just a joke, Mom! You’re the one who freaked out and started screaming in the street!” she wails.

  “Livvie, lower your voice,” Cole says, looking from me to her.

  “It wasn’t a joke, Livvie. Don’t you dare lie to me! I saw the whole thing, and I saw the look on Lauren’s face when you pulled her onto the sidewalk and stepped over her, and then kept walking while you laughed with your friends!”

  “I didn’t mean it!” she says, snot running down her face as she speaks. “I didn’t mean to do anything!”

  “Oh, Livvie, enough with the act,” I say. “I saw you with my own two eyes, and you clearly meant to do exactly what you did. Why on earth would you do something like that? This is not who you are! This is not the girl we raised you to be!”

  “I don’t know,” she says, her eyes on the floor as she cries. “I don’t know why I did it.”

  “Because Brittany told you to?”

  “Oh, Bess,” Cole says. “Come on.”

  I gasp. “Really, Cole?” I put my arm out to Livvie. “Look at this! Is this the kid you know? You didn’t see what I just saw out there. It’s these kids she’s hanging out with! Eva’s daughter!”

  “Come on, Bess,” he says, pulling a chair out for Livvie to sit down. She does, wiping her nose with the sleeve of her shirt. “It might not be . . .” He looks at Livvie. “Is what your mom said true, Liv? Was it because of the other kids?”

  She nods her head, her eyes still on the floor. “Brittany dared me to do it,” Livvie says. “She dared me to.” She starts to cry again. “I don’t know why I agreed, I just . . .”

  “Livvie, you know better than that,” Cole says.

  “We taught you how to treat people,” I say. “You know better than to hurt someone like that.”

  She finally looks at me. Finally.

  “Like you can talk, Mom.”

  My stomach drops. I suddenly feel dizzy. “What?”

  Her chin starts to wobble. “Like you can talk!” she says, her voice gaining strength. “Look at what you did! You got fired because you were mean to someone! And it was the First Lady!”

  I’m stunned. I look at Cole, the pressure in my chest like the wind’s been knocked out of me. Of course, the kids knew what had happened with me. We’d talked about it—how kids at school would probably say things, how they might hear things that might or might not be true—but we said it was a more complicated situation than we could really explain, and they seemed okay with that reasoning.

  “Livvie,” Cole says. “What happened with your mother’s job has nothing to do with this situation.”

  She looks down at her lap. “How could it not?” she says. “I heard you on the tapes, Mom. What did Grandma say when she heard them? Was she proud of how she’d raised you then? What do you think people are going to think of you now? Now that they’ve seen you screaming at your daughter in the middle of town?”

  My mouth falls open. I look to Cole, whose shocked expression matches my own. She’s never talked back to either of us this way. “Livvie,” I say, trying to keep my voice steady. “Livvie, what happened with me, once again, has nothing to do with this. Now, here’s what’s going to happen: We are going to go home, and you are going to get on the phone and call Lauren’s house and apologize to her. And then you are grounded. Your father and I will think of an appropriate punishment.”

  Cole’s eyes meet mine and he nods, just slightly, in acknowledgment.

  We sit there, all three of us silent, but I can feel the anxiety and sadness swirling in the room as plainly as if we were sitting in the center of a storm. I don’t want her teenage years to look like this. I can’t let her
teenage years look like this.

  “Mommy,” Livvie suddenly says, her voice small. “I’m sor—” She starts to cry before she can get the words out.

  I go to her. I am so angry, so confused, but I know what it’s like to be her age, and so I put my arms around her and shush away her sobs. “I know you are,” I say. “And I know you know better.”

  “I didn’t mean it,” she says. “I really didn’t.”

  “I know,” I say. “But you need to think about Lauren now. There are consequences, Liv. You have to make this right.”

  She nods into the crook of my neck. Suddenly the door creaks open, and Max steps in, a baffled expression on his face. “They told me you were all back here,” he says, hitching his thumb toward the hall. He looks at Livvie. “What’s going on?” he says. “Did something happen?”

  “It’s okay,” Cole says. “We’ll talk about it later. Let’s let your sister collect herself and then you guys go out front. I want to talk to your mom alone for a minute.”

  Livvie looks up at us like a cowering, orphaned animal. She stands, wipes her hands across her face, and then follows Max out to the hall.

  “So which one of us is going to call Eva?” I say, once the door has closed behind the twins.

  “What are you talking about?” he says, moving back around his desk.

  “One of us needs to,” I say. “Mindy saw the whole thing, too, you know.” I shake my head. “This fucking town,” I say, muttering under my breath.

  Cole rubs his hands over his face. “What exactly happened out there?”

  I gesture toward the door. “You heard her. Just what we said. I saw her push Lauren down and start walking away and laughing with Brittany and those other kids, and then I ran after them.”

  “Why did you run after them, Bess?” He sounds tired, a fact that only incenses me more. He doesn’t get to judge how I handled this, not when he’s sitting back here in his little office, drinking iced tea and getting his ass kissed by his staff while I’m out doing the hard labor of raising almost-teenagers.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  He sits down and threads his fingers through his hair, scratching at his scalp. “Listen, I don’t know what happened. I didn’t see it—”

  “No, you didn’t,” I say. “Of course you didn’t.”

  He sighs. “Bess, at a certain point, we’re going to have to let her figure this stuff out on her own.”

  “You think I should just mind my own business? Just turn my back while our daughter carries out Brittany’s orders?”

  “I don’t think she’s doing anything she doesn’t want to do,” he says.

  “And that’s a good thing? When she’s making these kinds of decisions?”

  He sits back, his palms flat on the desk pad in front of him. “And it’s better for you to fly into the fray and start screaming at her in the middle of town?”

  My stomach starts to burn. “Oh my God,” I say. “How did I not get it? I should have known. You’re more worried about how this looks than about what actually happened.”

  “Oh, come on, Bess,” he says. “Come on. It’s just, like I said the other night—”

  “Don’t get me started on the other night. So what is it, Cole? On top of everything else, now I’m a bad mother?”

  “Bess, don’t be ridiculous.”

  “You’re the one who’s being ridiculous!” I say, starting for the door. I put my hand on the knob before I turn around. “So make a decision,” I say. “I’m not backing down. Are you going to call Eva or am I?”

  He closes his eyes. “Fine,” he says, throwing a hand up in the air. “I’ll do it.”

  “And what are you going to say?”

  “I don’t know, Bess,” he says. “But I’ll do it.”

  “Tell her what I saw, and tell her what Livvie said—that her daughter was the one who made Livvie push Lauren. Tell her we won’t stand for her kid to treat ours like one of her minions. Tell her that Livvie is not going to do her dirty work.”

  He looks at me across the silent room, my words reverberating in the air. They sound silly and childish now that they’re hanging out there between us.

  “Okay,” I say, leaning back against the wall and rubbing a hand over my mouth. “Maybe it’s not the solution.”

  He looks at me, his eyes aching and sympathetic. It’s a look I know well after this past year.

  “Did you hear how she spoke to me?” I say, the tears welling up in my eyes.

  He hops up from his desk. I meet him in the middle of the room and bury my head in his chest. “I just don’t know what I’m doing, Cole. I don’t know how to handle her growing up.”

  “I know,” he says. “This is new for all of us.”

  “How will we get through it?” I say. “I just want everything to be easier. And calm. I just want her to be okay. I want all of us to be okay.”

  He doesn’t say anything. He rubs my back, his chin resting on top of my head. “I don’t know,” he says. “But it’s going to work out. It’s going to get easier, I promise.”

  “Right,” I say, but the truth is, I don’t believe a word of it.

  Twenty

  “Well, it sounds like you’ve had a shitty few days,” Susannah says, staring at me from across the table in her breakfast room. She’s invited me over for lunch, and I’ve just unloaded on her about what happened with Livvie yesterday. I’m apparently so fed up with everything that I’ve lost my will to care about whether it’s wise to confide in Susannah.

  “I didn’t even tell you about how my mother-in-law laid into me,” I say, my mind zipping back to the night before, when Cole and the kids and I were eating our spaghetti dinner in silence, Livvie pushing her food around her plate, and Diane started knocking on the front door, her telltale staccato bang-bang-bang, the sound like a lunatic woodpecker. I’d locked the door before dinner, anticipating this, and felt a swell of justification when I heard her start jiggling the doorknob.

  Cole offered to go deal with her, but I met her out on the front stoop, closing the door behind me so the kids wouldn’t hear, and listened to her go on for an easy ten minutes about how her phone was ringing off the hook with people calling to ask about my quote-unquote outburst. “She acted like I’d walked down the middle of Maple stark naked,” I say now.

  Susannah moans. “That woman.” She shakes her head. “What is it about you that bothers her so much?”

  “I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent trying to figure that out,” I say. “I’m simply not the kind of person she pictured for a daughter-in-law. I am the embodiment of the hardest lesson she’s probably ever had to learn, which is that she can’t control everything, including who her son chose to marry.”

  “That’s a good way to put it,” she says, pointing a finger at me. Her lipstick is bright pageant-girl pink. “Teddy’s mother was similar. She was like a wax figure in a Chanel suit. No pulse, no personality, no opinion.”

  “I think that’s what Diane would prefer me to be,” I say. “I think I’m too much, if that makes any sense. Too focused on my work—or used to be—too independent, too Northern . . . Too much not like her, essentially.”

  “I saw her walking into the Parlour the other day,” Susannah says, referencing the local hair salon.

  “She gets her hair set and pressed every other Tuesday.” I laugh. I know I shouldn’t, but it feels good to vent about Diane—like sneaking a second cookie at night after everyone else is in bed.

  Susannah makes a face. “She’s like an old woman! Goodness, her taste . . .”

  “I know,” I say. “You should hear how she’s fighting me on updating the inn.”

  “Updating the inn?” she says, waving hello to Cindy as she comes into the room.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Cole and I have a lot of ideas. Bradley’s receptive to them,” I say, conscious of how her eyes flicker at the sound of his name. “But Diane . . . she acts like we want to turn the place into a carnival.”

>   “If you don’t mind me asking, Bess . . .”

  “Shoot.”

  “What is it like, running it?” she asks. “Wasn’t Cole a lawyer back in DC? This is a big change.”

  I nod. “He was. And he’s happy to not be one anymore.” I look at her and smile. “I think. Anyway, the inn is good. It’s always been a stable business, but Cole and I would like to do something to shake it up.”

  “Great idea,” she says. “I know people in town shudder at the thought of it, but Greyhill has real potential to be a destination. You know, it’s so beautiful, and with the wineries that have popped up everywhere, I really think something could happen around here.”

  “Maybe,” I say. “Though, to be honest, after the week I’ve had, I have a bad taste in my mouth about everything about this place.”

  “I get it,” she says, twisting in her seat to call for Cindy, who’s walked through a swinging door into the kitchen. “I have an idea,” she says. “Something I was thinking about this morning. It’s a beautiful day, so much warmer than it should be. Are you up for eating outside?”

  “Sure,” I say.

  And just when I think Susannah can’t top her ability to surprise me, I find myself helping her out the window of her childhood bedroom and onto a terrace that I didn’t even know existed.

  “Susannah!” I say. “This is crazy.” I noticed when she got up from the table that she didn’t use her cane, and I thought of what Cindy whispered to me in the hall the last time I was here—that Susannah’s problems since the accident might be more in her head than in her body. Even though she’d asked for my help, she didn’t have any more trouble crawling out the window than I did.

  “Perfect!” she says, brushing the dust from the windowsill off her hands.

  “This is where we’re eating lunch?” I say, shielding my eyes from the sun. The view is glorious, mountains in all directions, lit up in vibrant shades of orange and red. I take a step in the direction of town, watching the cars move up and down the tiny grid of streets, the buildings looking, from here, like the ones in a train set, with their boxy shapes and sweet, shingled roofs. It looks so quaint. And, I think, like lots of things viewed from a distance, so harmless.