Home Leave: A Novel

by Brittani Sonnenberg

  Laura doesn’t think that Elise thinks about Sophie too much. Last week, after yoga, she had reached out and grabbed Elise’s hand while they were having bran muffins and Top of the Morning energy shakes at the local health food store.

  “You’re still her mother,” Laura said. “Of course you think of her.”

  “But fifteen years later—”

  “That’s right, Elise,” Laura says firmly, and slightly bossily. “Sophie is twenty-eight now. Not ‘would be’ twenty-eight. She is. And you still have to tend to her, inside.”

  Elise always wavers between being comforted by Laura’s convictions and dismissing them as well-meaning bullshit. Laura hasn’t ever lost anyone; she’s just read a lot of self-help books.

  Another wave of pain hits Elise in the pit of her mouth. She needs a matinee and some ice cream, she decides, even if it is forty-five degrees outside. Elise gathers her purse and keys and kisses her two yellow Labs on their heads; they thump their tails, as if they want to go for a walk. They don’t. At sixteen and fourteen, they have quite outlived themselves, especially Robo, or, as they now simply call him, the Elder.

  * * *

  That night, Elise opens an email reply from Leah, which reads, “Sounds great, thanks Mom!” Sent from her iPhone. Elise’s email was full of questions; how is “sounds great” an answer to any of those? Elise reads the email out loud to Chris, who is sipping a generous glass of merlot and reading the paper. “Teenagers,” he says, and they laugh. It’s their little joke, that Leah is embarking on an adolescent rebellion now that she avoided at fifteen. Or maybe she was just too wrapped up with Sophie’s death… Elise is making excuses for her again, she knows: Laura’s warned her against it. “She’s acting like a cunt, Elise. Don’t fall for it.” Laura loves to swear; it’s all over the poetry she writes, which is why they won’t print it in their church poetry anthology, even though they attend the most liberal church in Madison. Laura calls it censorship, every year.

  Elise wishes, like she does about her wisdom teeth, that the pain of separation with Leah had come earlier, when it was supposed to come. She’s already lost one daughter, and for the last few years, she’s had to deal with a second one drifting off, too, at thirty. But at least they’re having the wedding here, she thinks. Leah and Matthias could have eloped, or been ridiculously European and not gotten married at all. And Elise likes Matthias, who is kind, forthcoming, funny, charming. He has a clipped German accent that reminds Elise of her days in Hamburg, a time she remembers rosily, when she and Chris were deeply in love, in love with their love, and Elise’s pregnancy.

  She and Chris pore over potential wedding reception venues: the Mill, a renovated factory downtown; the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art; Highlands Golf Course, which Elise instinctually dismisses, knowing Leah; Sugarland Acres, a working farm, which Chris vetoes, pointing out the potential for a distracting cow manure odor. They settle, finally, on Quivey’s Grove, a quaint historical estate in the countryside. The photos online boast large, shady elms and a sweet white picket fence, a tiny detail that obscurely sells Elise on the place. How strange, Elise thinks, to be choosing all this for Leah, the way she would lay out the girls’ clothes for the next day in London. She hopes that this passivity on Leah’s part does not extend to her relationship with Matthias. But Leah closed the door on such inquiries with her new I need some distance edict, last year.

  You’ve got the goddamn Atlantic Ocean, Elise had wanted to scream. That’s not distance enough? How dare Leah say she needed distance? If anyone, Elise was the one who needed distance, from all of the motherly overtime she’d put in: the late-night calls, the empathizing, the tolerating of Leah’s weeping, a sound Elise had grown to find extremely irritating (shuddering sighs, snotty intakes of breath, self-indulgent crying, crying, crying); but that never meant Elise had ever considered distance something you could simply ask for, like a Christmas present.

  This is the worst part of being a mother, having to live in the thrall of your child’s tyrant. Women are so fickle, Elise thinks. So kind to men and so willing to sacrifice their relationships with one another. But Elise had never treated Ada that badly, even if she’d deserved it.

  Chris looks at her inquisitively. “Enough,” he says. “Let’s get you to bed.”

  * * *

  The next morning, the sun is out, blinding and beautiful. Zack, Robo’s much dumber son, has his chin on the bed, staring at her. His father is curled on the floor, his blond fur whitened in the sunspot. Elise grimaces as the pain comes back, swallows a pill by her bedside, and stares at the room, blinking, trying to bring herself to the day. She’s canceled all her meetings with clients because of her wisdom teeth, which imbues the morning with a summer vacation feel. Elise had lived for summers in Vidalia as a child: days spent at the country club pool, burning your feet on the hot concrete, shrieking in the water, throwing glances at the boys on the lounge chairs opposite, heading home in the quiet, cooler dusk, urging Ivy to come on, we’re almost there.

  Elise’s mind alights, briefly, on Ivy. Funny that after all those years of drama—Who’s Ivy dating now? Where’s the band touring? Is Ivy on anything? Or is Ivy’s wide smile, her fast talking, her piercing gaze, just Ivy being Ivy?—her little sister’s life has become relatively calm. Ivy has settled in Monticello, a small town not far from Vidalia. She’ll call Elise every few weeks just to chat, not to ask for money or confess her sins, as in the old days. Now she and Elise exchange laughs about their dogs, or Vidalia, or Ada. But one month ago, Ivy had called sounding worked up. In the past, that tone had signaled a downward spiral, but this time it turned out that Ivy had good news.

  “Some kids want to make a documentary about Choked by Kudzu,” she said. “They’re raising money on something called Kickstarter to get us back on a reunion tour. They might call you and ask some questions; I don’t know.”

  “Is there anything you want me to keep quiet?”

  Ivy laughed, her scraping, gravelly laugh, like a car pulling out of a driveway. “Just make me sound glamorous,” she said.

  Elise thought, for days, about what she would tell them. Would she mention Ivy’s wild years? The biker boyfriends? She would have the cameras set up in the living room, she decided, and she would sit on Ada’s (reupholstered) couch, one leg tucked demurely underneath her. She would wear her pale lavender cashmere sweater. She would be compassionate, concerned: the responsible older sister surrounded by Asian antiques. Probably the interview would get sidelined by that; they would inevitably want to hear about Singapore and China. She would grant them a tour of the apartment, she decided, if they asked.

  But they never called. Elise checked with her brother Dodge; they had called Grayson, Dodge told her, but not him, thank God.

  “We got off lucky, huh?” he said, and Elise murmured a response.

  For a few days, she thought about emailing the filmmaker—Ivy had told her his name, which Elise had immediately Googled—but she thought it would be too transparent, too attention seeking. This morning, Elise feels uncomfortably petulant about not getting the call: in preparing for the potential interview, Vidalia and Ivy have crowded back into her life, with no payoff; and Vidalia inevitably means Paps, too, sulking in the corner, shady now, opening his arms for a hug.

  Elise forces herself out of bed. Chris is gone; Elise dimly heard him moving around at four this morning, packing for a six a.m. flight. He’ll be traveling for a week: Moscow, Dubai, Riyadh. If anything, he travels even more now than before. Elise supposes she minds, in some place, but that place has grown so protected over the years, so tired of hurting and missing and trying, that his absence hardly registers now. There was a time, Elise reminds herself, in Philadelphia, when she had so eagerly anticipated his departures, when they had given her license for—for what? Elise can’t remember anything but a vague thrill, a shivery wildness that she associates with the months before her second pregnancy, something she’s only ever felt again in those married-couple crushes y
ou have with other people’s partners: an unspoken complicity across the room, starved glances at the dinner table, lingering, nonsensical conversations with fourth glasses of wine on windy balconies, too-tight hugs good night. And with Bernard, of course, Elise’s only other lover. Laura often begs her to tell the story of Bernard again, the way Sophie used to insist that she read Goodnight Moon night after night. Bernard has become a close friend now. He and Elise write each other long emails, lightly flirtatious. Bernard and Rebecca are still in Southeast Asia, living in Jakarta, a chronic expat fate Elise is relieved she escaped.

  Elise makes herself a cappuccino in their expansive kitchen, taking quiet pride in all the design details, the way she would sometimes feel, watching her girls approach from afar, walking in step, chattering. Later, when it was just Leah, Elise had been too distraught, too worried, to dwell in that easy motherly pride. She’d wanted to run forward and hug her awkward, lonely, now only child, but knew she couldn’t, that it would make Leah shrug away, and so the waiting, the forced, casual smile. There is some relief in the distance now. To not know every heartache, every real or imagined threat Leah perceives.

  Be careful how much you invest. Which parent had said that? Was it Ada? A veiled warning against premarital sex? Or more likely Charles, lending his cautious advice about renovating the first house Chris and Elise had owned in Atlanta?

  On days alone like this, before she leaves the apartment, Elise floats between homes and voices. Their apartment, the penthouse of a newly built set of luxury lofts, has walls of windows overlooking Lake Mendota. Despite the view of Madison outside, the apartment’s objects—the Chinese peasant paintings, the London pine table, the pottery from Singapore, the life-size terracotta warrior from Wuhan—toss Elise back and forth, between cultures and continents. She doesn’t mind. After years of trying to adjust to new places, acquire new best female friends, conquer new cities, Elise is content to not be anywhere when she’s at home.

  * * *

  At noon, she drives to Heritage Congregational Church, for a meeting with Mi-Yun Kim, the pastor who will lead the wedding service, a bubbly young Korean American woman who routinely cracks up the wealthy, largely white congregation, who pride themselves on their progressive political views despite their elderly Republican parents.

  “I would usually be having this meeting with the engaged couple,” Pastor Kim begins. “But I understand that they’re in Berlin.”

  “That’s right,” says Elise, feeling slightly guilty, as though she had engineered the whole thing such that she could steal the meeting from Leah. The same irrational guilt she feels at airport security: some part of her always expects them to find a concealed weapon in her carry-on.

  “Perhaps I can set up a Skype call with them,” Pastor Kim muses.

  “You can try.” Elise smiles. “But those two are hard to pin down.”

  “Right.” Pastor Kim nods briskly. “As long as they show up to the altar! Ha!”

  Elise laughs politely.

  They run briefly through the program. “I was thinking, a light sermon, nothing too serious—a couple poetry readings, some music,” Pastor Kim suggests.

  “Precisely what I had in mind,” Elise says. “I mean, what I’ve discussed with Leah.”

  “This must be difficult for you, having her so far away,” Pastor Kim says.

  “It is.” Elise has no desire to get into this with the preacher now. “But I’m just happy that she’s happy, and that she’s found someone.” She feels like a Hallmark card.

  “Of course. Now, let’s go over the organ music, so I can send an email to the organist later today.”

  * * *

  The afternoon flies by with a meeting with the florist, who is testy on the subject of wildflowers on the picnic tables outside (“They’ll wilt; wouldn’t your daughter prefer peonies?”), and a torturous tasting with a caterer, which Elise realizes she should have canceled, as she can eat only the soft things: the gazpacho starter, the mashed potatoes, the crème brûlée. She is too embarrassed to admit that her teeth hurt too badly to tear into the steak, so she lets them think that she’s either vegetarian or a halfhearted anorexic. She remembers the years Leah swore off food, like some third-world activist launching a hunger strike, how she would move things around her plate, order two starters, while Chris and Elise had three courses, the grim pride on Leah’s face as her cheekbones sharpened, her angles narrowed, insisting, all the while, that she was fine, just not too hungry. Trying to get to Sophie, Elise knew, to the prepubescent body that Leah had been so jealous of at twelve, when she acquired curves, and further still, to Sophie’s skeletal status, now departed. Leah! Elise feels a throbbing in herself, has to check it, remember that Leah’s okay now, healthy, about to be married, after all: Isn’t that what a mother wants? For her child to have a happy ending?

  * * *

  In Berlin, which lies in the Central European time zone, it’s seven hours later.

  “Is it white?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Long?”

  “I forget.”

  Leah and Matthias are sitting on a bench outside a bar, sipping Augustiner beer, their eyes trained on the soccer game, talking wedding dresses. Matthias has been trying to pry details from Leah since she bought her dress with Elise in December.

  “Lacy?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Veily?”

  “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

  Leah loves tossing out these American English ten-year-old comebacks to Matthias, who never heard them when he was growing up in Leipzig: “Finders keepers, losers weepers.” “It’s a free country.” When he was ten, Matthias and his friends had shoved down winter wool caps over the victim’s eyes, screaming “Night in America!” before sprinting away, a bizarre game based on time zones, given that they lived in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, and the idea of travel to the West was a cruel joke.

  Leah and Matthias turn their attention back to the game: Portugal vs. Norway. It’s a qualifying match for next year’s championship, when every bar, restaurant, and Späti (the ubiquitous, largely Turkish-owned convenience stores) shows the matches live, with flat-screen TVs jerry-rigged to the outside walls, the sidewalks crammed with benches.

  Leah is grateful for the noise of the match, the easy distraction, the neat geometry of skilled passes and the graceful arch of crosses over the field. From her years of soccer in Singapore, she knows what to yell at the screen, which moves to admire, what kind of defense looks sloppy. Fifteen years ago, seeing a player fall on the field would have turned her breath shallow, would have treated her to a panic attack in the bathroom, biting her fist. That’s all settled to a quiet hum now. The game is also a welcome distraction from a fight she and Matthias had earlier this morning, which they’ve been tiptoeing around ever since, alternately snarling at each other, licking their wounds, then nuzzling heads, nipping ears, then snarling again and retreating to separate corners of their apartment.

  In seventh grade at Shanghai American School, sitting out yet another miserable slow song at a middle school dance (inevitably Bryan Adams’s “Everything I Do”), watching Sophie dance with a freckled British boy, Leah had known, in the pit of her stomach, she would never get married: that was Sophie’s path. Yet here she is now, on the cusp of marrying Matthias, that jerk, she thinks, though not without affection.

  When Leah was twelve, they moved to China. When she was fifteen, her little sister died. When Matthias was eight, his father tied him to a pole outside for swearing (a loose knot, Matthias had emphasized to Leah, so that he could have escaped if he’d tried, but he’d remained there, whimpering stubbornly, for five hours). Leah hates being left alone, or any sudden, unexpected change in plans. Matthias hates boundaries and having to say sorry. Leah likes testing boundaries and hates being the first to say sorry. Matthias likes traditions and manners, which Leah often scorns. He is more excited about planning the wedding than Leah. He is the one who writes Elise back. />
  This daily role-playing, role shifting, with characters as predictable and boring as those in a passion play, without the redemption; this eternal back-and-forth, the squabbling, the jealousies, the resentments—it’s not unlike a sibling relationship, Leah thinks sometimes. How bizarre to have a partner again, to have an inseparable. How infuriating, how brilliant. She punches Matthias hard, in the shoulder, and points across the street. “Punchbuggy black, no punchbacks,” she says.

  “I gave that to you, I totally saw that car an hour ago,” Matthias says, unwittingly echoing Sophie, a light German accent inflecting his slang.

  “Oh, come on!” Leah yells at the screen, as the Italians botch another shot on goal. She feels herself relaxing, letting down her guard, which she very much meant to keep up, as Matthias draws her in for a hug.

  * * *

  At halftime, it begins to pour, and the crowd hunches inside a tiny bar that smells of cigarettes and stale beer. Leah, standing next to the open door, shivers as a blast of rain smatters the back of her neck. Earlier in the day it was blazing, as sweaty as Atlanta in July. Now it sounds like Singapore outside—the percussion of a tropical torrent—but it’s turning chilly. When Matthias and Leah leave the game, cycling back to their apartment along the canal, it feels and smells like fall.

  Leah remembers the confusion of the heat in Singapore, how it never lifted. Those deceptively mild nights, perfumed with frangipani, when Robo would sleep in her bed, to ward off nightmares. Robo. Her mother had insisted on the name, uncharacteristically refusing any compromise. Before Sophie died, when the sisters had wanted to remember what the seasons felt like (for it was always summer in Singapore), they had cranked up the air-conditioning until it was freezing, and piled on sweaters, talked about things like apple cider and Thanksgiving. It worked until you looked outside, saw the thick, tropical vines swaying, that bright blue sky, the unrelenting sun.