One Week In December

by Holly Chamberlin

  “Well, I’m sorry,” Julie was saying. “I seem to have made an awful lot of mistakes with my children and I’m just finding out about all of them today!”

  Lily squeezed her mother’s hand. “Oh, Mom, I’m sorry. It’s just that, I don’t know, I have a lot on my mind right now. Suddenly it feels like everything I thought I knew to be one way is really the other way, or both ways at the same time. Which makes no sense, but maybe nothing makes any sense. Maybe that’s the point.”

  Julie sighed, got up from the table, and gave her daughter a brief but strong hug. “Welcome to the gooey mess we call life. Every time you think you’ve got something in your grasp, it seems to slip away or change beyond recognition.”

  It was not what Lily wanted to hear. “I think I’m going to lie down,” she said.

  Lily retreated to the bedroom she always used when visiting her parents. It was the same room in which she had slept as a child when visiting her grandmother. There was comfort in the familiar surroundings. Lily was not a person who relished constant change and newness.

  Julie had sewn the curtains by hand when Lily was only four; for Lily’s twelfth birthday, Nora had made the quilt that covered the bed in sections of vibrant yellow, deep green, and multicolored calico. Though the curtains could use replacing and the quilt was threadbare in parts, Lily refused to let them go.

  Over the low, painted wood dresser hung a mirror that was original to the house. At least, it had been part of the sale when her grandparents had bought the house back in the 1960s. Or maybe it had been in the 1970s. Anyway, the glass wasn’t very clear, but Lily loved the rather ornate, heavy oak frame and was glad the old mirror hadn’t been moved to another location in the house.

  A small bookcase against one wall held a variety of old schoolbooks, as well as several often-read copies of Nancy Drew mysteries; a paperback copy of Jane Eyre that Lily had bought at a garage sale for fifty cents; and an oversize illustrated book about horses, from the time when Lily had been obsessed with the idea of owning a horse of her own. That phase passed after her first horseback riding lesson had ended in disaster. She’d been too frightened of the size of the animal in actuality to enjoy one moment of the experience. In books, horses looked so noble and romantic. In reality, they were terrifying and had very big teeth.

  On a shelf over the bookcase sat a row of dolls: a Barbie with impossibly matted blond hair; a small rubber baby doll, naked; a threadbare Raggedy Ann. Lily had always found it hard to part with things she’d once loved. Maybe in that way she was a bit like her grandmother.

  Lily curled up on the old single bed—Rain was using an air mattress during her visit—but was unable to drift off to sleep. Instead, she found herself thinking more about secrets and silence. She found herself thinking about how deceptions both large and small were so much a part of human interaction. About how easy it was to find yourself alone or apart. About how suddenly you could feel lonely.

  Lily remembered when Nora had asked her what her friends had said about Cliff and his cheating. Nora had asked if her friends had been supportive, if they’d offered advice good or bad, if they’d sworn their loyalty to her as fellow women, warriors in the battle with men.

  But the truth was that Lily had no real friends, and hadn’t fully realized that until the break with Cliff. The person she’d turned to first had been Nora, her grandmother. The only place she’d wanted to run off to for sanctuary had been her parents’ house in Maine. Aside from informing her roommate and a few other women in her social circle that she and Cliff were through, she hadn’t opened up to anyone but her family.

  Why? Lily turned on the bed so that she could get a glimpse out the window. The sky—at least the part of it she could see—was that weird winter white. It seemed foreboding and Lily turned her back on it. She wondered if other large families were like hers, a self-sufficient unit, a self-sustaining environment. As far as she knew, none of her siblings had close friendships. In the Rowans’s case, the Rowans were enough.

  But that couldn’t have been entirely true, not always true. Because Lily had learned that lots of people had cared enough about Steve and Julie and their children to come to Becca’s rescue, to help the Rowans execute their scheme to pass off Rain as David’s child.

  She wondered. Had the family dynamic changed after that? Had Lily, only five at the time, absorbed a new modus operandi, one that taught it was best to turn inward in times of trouble, as well as in times of joy?

  Lily sighed. Secrets. Was she the only person over eighteen who didn’t have any secrets? Try as she might, she just couldn’t think of one piece of information she was deliberately holding back from the people she loved. She wondered if it was inevitable that one day she would, like most everyone else, have something she could reveal to no one, or to only a select few. A word she regretted having spoken. An act of betrayal, perhaps. Maybe even a crime.

  No. Lily knew that she was in many ways inexperienced, but she was one hundred percent certain she’d never commit a punishable crime. But there was a lot of life ahead of her—she hoped. And it seemed entirely possible that some day in the distant future, she, too, might be sharing a deeply held secret with her own daughter or granddaughter.

  Lily sat up. That was the future. For now, she was going to live and enjoy as simple and honest a life as she could.

  28

  “Uh, Liv? Could you try to keep the noise level to a dull roar? I’m trying to get some work done and I can hear you all the way down in the den.”

  Olivia hadn’t heard her sister enter the attic. She got up from the dusty wooden floor and turned, wiping her hands on her jeans.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t bring work home,” she said.

  Becca let that remark slide. She had no doubt that her older sister brought work home all the time. When you owned your own business, your work was your life; the public invariably leaked over into the private. It was much the same for the vice president of an ambitious business-to-business advertising firm.

  An old, porcelain-faced doll in a long, dusty white dress was propped on a painted bureau. It caught Becca’s eye now and she reached for it. “I remember this from—”

  “Don’t touch it!” Olivia cried.

  Becca jumped and withdrew her hand. “Take it easy, Liv. I wasn’t going to throw it at the wall. I just wanted to see it.”

  “See with your eyes, not with your hands.”

  Before she could stop herself, the words were coming out. Stupid, hurtful words, spoken unthinkingly as most stupid and hurtful words are spoken. “It’s a good thing you didn’t have kids after all,” she said. “They’d be petrified to breathe around you.”

  Olivia’s face became a mask of fury. “How dare you say such a cruel thing to me!” she cried. “You have no idea of what you have. You have more than I ever will, and yet you’re so selfish you’re grasping for more! My children would suffer? What makes you think your child won’t suffer with you as her mother? What makes you think you deserve your daughter?”

  Becca knew she should apologize, but she simply didn’t want to. Not now, not after her sister’s last challenge. “Uh, I deserve my daughter because I gave birth to her,” she said. “Anyway, what business is it of yours? My relationship with Rain has nothing to do with you.”

  “Yes, it does,” Olivia shot back. “This is a family issue, Becca, and like it or not, you’re part of this family. We all are. What one of us does affects every other person.”

  Becca laughed. Really, her sister was unbelievable. Her obsession with the unit called The Family was ludicrous. “Oh, please, Liv,” she said, “get a life!”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that you’re obsessed with this idea of The Family and it’s driving everybody crazy. I’m an individual, Liv. It was an accident that I was born into this group of people who call themselves the Rowans. We’re all alone in this world. We all have to act independently, each one of us. We all have to live and die by ourselves. We all h
ave to be self-sufficient.”

  “If you really believe that,” Olivia said with a sneer, “it’s probably why you’re so miserable. Everyone can tell, you know. You’ve become like a—like a pod. When was the last time you went on a date? When was the last time a man even looked at you with interest?”

  The questions were like barbs in Becca’s side. “My personal life is not open for discussion,” she replied lamely.

  Olivia laughed a mean-sounding laugh. “You know, Becca, this whole thing is entirely unfair. I’m the one who wanted a baby and I’m the one who tried and tried to get pregnant. Do you know how much time and money I spent at fertility clinic after fertility clinic? Only to find out that even if I did manage to get pregnant, my body wouldn’t be able to maintain the pregnancy? Do you know how much that hurt me? Of course you don’t. You don’t care about anyone but yourself.”

  “That’s not true!” Becca protested. “I—”

  But her sister wasn’t listening. “It’s just so goddamn unfair. You’re the one who got pregnant just like that, first time around, and you didn’t even want a baby. You didn’t even care enough about your child to fight to keep her. And now you’re demanding her back? You have no right to that girl. I should have been the one to have her. Mom and Dad should have given her to me!”

  Becca was stunned. And a little bit scared. She’d had no idea her sister had wanted to raise Rain as her own. She had no idea her sister had been harboring such rabid resentment. For a mad moment she wondered if Olivia was capable of harming her—or of harming Rain. But no. She didn’t think her sister was that far gone into sadness. Still . . .

  Olivia stood with her shoulders thrust back, arms held straight at her side, a completely unnatural, terribly rigid pose. Becca hardly recognized the woman who stood before her.

  “I’d like you to leave,” Olivia said.

  Becca was only too happy to oblige.

  29

  The two women sat in companionable silence. Nora was knitting, her workbag at her feet, neatly organized. Her granddaughter sat cross-legged on her grandmother’s bed, idly twisting a length of yarn.

  Lily looked now at the tall pine dresser against the wall. A white lacy cloth was laid across the top. On it, next to a photo of Nora and Thomas on their fortieth wedding anniversary, sat a small square object. It was a daisy, first pressed in a book and then glued to a piece of wood and coated with shellac. It was a keepsake from Nora’s first date with Thomas. She had been fifteen and Thomas, just turned sixteen.

  Lily had always thought it terribly romantic of her grandmother to keep such a token of remembrance. She herself had saved a ticket stub from the first movie she and Cliff had seen together. But when just a few months later Cliff professed to not remembering ever having seen the movie, let alone with Lily, she’d tucked the stub into an old book, figuring she’d find a more meaningful token of their relationship someday, something that mattered to both of them. And now, looking around her grandmother’s room, Lily realized that she never had found such a token and she wondered why.

  Nora had kept other things, too, each one representing a member of her family. A cat’s eye made of purple and lilac wool that Olivia had made in grammar school hung over the bed. In a case on a shelf sat David’s various medals for excellence in high school science. A framed photograph of Becca as an oak tree in a first-grade play stood on the dresser, alongside a terribly juvenile poem Lily had written and framed for her grandmother’s birthday many years before.

  All these things were evidence of love. They were gifts given because the givers had wanted to give them, not because they were forced. They were items Nora had chosen to keep because they held a special meaning or evoked a special memory. Unlike the “gift” that Mr. Pollen had brought to the house . . .

  “By the way, Grandma,” Lily asked, breaking the long silence between them, “what did you do with that—thing—Mr. Pollen gave us? I’ve got nothing against pinecones on a tree or in a wreath but . . . as tableware?”

  Nora looked up from her knitting and grimaced. “I put it in a plastic bag and asked your father to keep it somewhere in his studio. Preferably out of sight. I didn’t have the heart to throw it out after poor Mr. Pollen went through so much trouble to make it for us.”

  “Maybe he made it for you, Grandma. Maybe he has a crush on you.”

  Her grandmother gave her a look. “Are you trying to give me a heart attack? Because the thought of living under the same roof as Mr. Pollen—which, quite possibly, is made of pinecones—just might kill me. And what about the ghost of Flying Hammer Hattie?”

  Lily laughed. “I’m sorry. I was only kidding.”

  The women lapsed back into silence. Lily’s attention was caught by another photo of her grandparents, this one on the bedside table. The couple was arm in arm and smiling broadly. They were dressed as if for church or an important event. As far as Lily could tell, both of her grandparents looked as if they were about thirty-three or thirty-four. Was the photograph taken during the time that her grandfather was having the affair with the other woman? Would he have had the nerve to smile into the camera while holding the arm of the woman to whom he had vowed to be faithful, knowing full well that he was being unfaithful to her?

  Lily looked away. She was beginning to feel as if she were a character in a creepy Victorian sensation novel, like Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone or one of the other novels she’d had to read in a course she’d taken her sophomore year. On the outside, the family looked completely normal, even dull, but on the inside, every single member of the family was either insane or evil. Sometimes they were both. Everyone was embroiled in lies; everyone held dark and dirty secrets.

  Well, maybe the Rowan family wasn’t exactly as bad as all that, but still. Lily had caught another glimpse beneath the veil of respectability, and it depressed her. Was everybody doomed to dissemble? If that were the case, she thought with a wry note, then she would make a fortune as a lawyer.

  “Grandma,” she asked suddenly, “are you going to tell Olivia the truth about Grandpa Thomas? About the affair, I mean. I was thinking that because she’s so obsessed with the past, she might want to know the full truth about her grandparents’ marriage.”

  Again, Nora looked up from her knitting. She was astonished at the idea. “Lord, no,” she said. “What does Thomas’s affair have to do with whatever it is Olivia is experiencing? No. Olivia is a very unhappy woman. I don’t know for certain what it is she’s looking for up in that attic, but I don’t think ‘truth’ has anything to do with it.”

  Lily sighed. “Well, whatever it is, I wish she’d stay out of the attic at night. Rain slept through the noise, but I was awake until almost two in the morning with her rummaging around up there.”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t squirrels?” Nora asked with a smile. “We did have a bit of an infestation last spring.”

  “How can you have a bit of an infestation? Aren’t infestations by nature overwhelming? Anyway, if it was squirrels, they were on steroids. No, only a human being could clomp around like that. I swear she dropped a trunk right over my head.”

  “I’m afraid asking her not to make so much noise probably won’t get you anywhere. At any rate, it will only be a few more days. James told me they’re leaving on the twenty-seventh.”

  “I guess they can’t leave the business for too long. And they probably have New Year’s Eve plans.”

  “Yes. Maybe.” Nora simply couldn’t imagine her oldest grandchild and her husband enjoying a romantic dinner for two. Not this year. Not given the all too obvious tensions between them. Nora would have liked to help—if there was a way to help save another person’s marriage, and she doubted that there was.

  Lily got up from the bed and walked over to a framed photo of her grandfather. She looked at it closely. It had been taken at a lake, probably somewhere in Massachusetts. Her grandparents hadn’t had much money to travel often or far; what money they had they’d invested in the Kently house. In the ph
oto, Thomas stood on the grassy shore, just by a wooden dock. He wore a floppy hat and was holding a fishing rod in one hand and in the other, a huge fish, obviously his catch. He was grinning and looked happy and proud.

  “Everyone always says what a great guy Grandpa was,” Lily said, returning the photo to the dresser. “Everyone says he was so nice and funny. The way David talks about him, it was like Grandpa was his hero. How could everyone have been so wrong?”

  Had Lily not learned anything from their talks? “They weren’t wrong,” Nora said with emphasis. “Your grandfather was a good man. He was loving, and smart, and hardworking. But nobody is perfect, Lily. Even good men—and good women—make mistakes.”

  “An affair is a pretty big mistake!” Lily protested. “It’s not like it happens without you knowing it. Ooops, I seem to be having an affair! How did that happen? I mean, you have to want to do it and decide to do it. How can a good person consciously decide to break his wedding vow and still be a good person?”

  “Oh, Lily,” Nora sighed. “You are so young! And, at the risk of angering you, I must say that you are also quite naïve. How did you manage to remain so—untouched—for so long?”

  Lily didn’t seem to be offended by her grandmother’s question. “I’m not naïve, Grandma,” she replied. “I know affairs happen. I just don’t think they should.”

  “Of course affairs shouldn’t happen. But they do and, really, it doesn’t help to condemn the one who strayed without at least trying to understand why. And without then trying to forgive. And, in certain circumstances, without trying to give the relationship another chance. That’s what mature adults do, Lily. They try to understand, to forgive, and to put broken relationships back together.”

  Lily didn’t say anything for a long moment. Finally, she admitted to her confusion. “I don’t know if I’ll ever see things the way you do, Grandma,” she said.