So here they were, June sixteenth, in his office with a bottle of seltzer.
“You should be happy for your sister,” he said.
“It’s just not fair,” she said. “She just gets to pretend none of it ever happened? Why can’t I do that? You think I wouldn’t like to do that? She just gets to act like everything’s perfect and I’m the huge fuckup, but she fucked up too, Dad; Violet and her huge fucking secret, but I’m not the only person in this family who fucks things up, okay?”
“Nobody said that, Wendy. What are you talking about?”
She looked at him with an odd clarity for just a second before tilting her head up toward the ceiling again. “Just for-fucking-get it.” And then she was crying and what could he do, then, besides hug her? He held her until she fell asleep and then he positioned her on her side on the couch in case she threw up, and then he went out front and got Miles.
“You might want to go keep an eye on her,” he said, and his son-in-law shoved his hands in his pockets and toed the dirt like a teenager and then nodded.
“Thanks, David.”
“Should I be worried?” he asked. He’d always liked Miles, albeit reluctantly, given how much older he was than Wendy. But he could tell how much the man loved his daughter, and he suspected, now, that Miles was probably the only thing keeping her from hitting rock bottom.
“I ask myself that hourly,” Miles said. “I don’t have a good answer.”
He returned, disoriented, to the party, and he spun Gracie in circles and posed for photos and he kept saying, Thanks, we’re thrilled; we couldn’t be happier; we’re so proud of her, and he didn’t even notice when Miles guided Wendy out to their car and drove her home.
In bed that night, a night on which he should have been blitzed by his happiness, he was still thinking about his conversation with his eldest daughter.
“Wendy said something strange to me,” he said.
Marilyn rolled to face him. “What?”
What huge secret? Not their Violet. Violet had nothing to hide. Violet, who’d gotten weepy during their requisite father-daughter dance to “Sweet Thing,” who’d made him also get weepy during said dance, who appeared wholly at peace, lithe and unburdened, bound for an impressive career and married to a man she loved.
Marilyn was watching him, sleepy and affectionate, rubbing her foot between his calves underneath the blankets. Wendy had been completely obliterated. She hadn’t even recognized her father’s office. Certainly she hadn’t meant anything by it. Certainly he didn’t need to burden his wife, who’d had such a nice time, who was so beautiful and trusting. “Well, now I can’t remember,” he said lamely.
She smiled and reached to cup a hand to his face. “Too much to drink?” She scooted closer to him, twining her leg between his thighs, and she leaned in and kissed him before urging him onto his back and climbing on top of him, his lovely, oblivious wife, and he let her, kissed back and let her and pretended that what Wendy said hadn’t set off an alarm bell somewhere deep inside of him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“He’s worried about germs,” Marilyn said flimsily, acknowledging Liza’s disappointment when she realized that David wouldn’t be coming. A half hour earlier, as she banged around the house, throwing anything in her purse she thought might prove useful in the coming hours—playing cards, ChapStick, and, inexplicably, a flashlight—she’d stopped and fixed her gaze lethally on her husband. “You’re being a child.”
“I’d just be in the way.”
“You don’t deserve to have your ego massaged right now,” she said, “but you know that’s not true.” Of course she knew he had other reasons. She couldn’t identify the other reasons, but she knew they existed, and she knew they had to be weighing heavily on him for him to be protesting so forcefully, but she was too anxious to stop and try to get to the bottom of it.
“Can we drop this, Marilyn?”
“She needs you,” she said.
“You’ll be there.”
“I need you.”
“You would have lost your mind if your dad showed up when you were giving birth.”
“My dad wasn’t the dad to me that you are to the girls,” she said. She felt a murky mix of grief and nostalgia and a fresh wave of sadness for Liza. “Our daughter is having a baby, David. Alone. She needs us.”
But he wouldn’t budge. So she was in the car with her daughter, the driver, for once, marveling at Liza’s composure; the only evidence that betrayed Liza’s unease was the way she’d suddenly go quiet, gripping the handle above the window.
“It’s okay, love,” Marilyn murmured, and she felt a pang of retroactive empathy for David, beside her in the hospital again and again. Of course there was nothing she could do. And Liza probably wanted to kill her, just as Marilyn had repeatedly wanted to kill her husband.
“Why didn’t you warn me about this?” Liza asked, surfacing, letting go of the handle.
She rubbed Liza’s shoulder, steeled her own nerves. “I didn’t want to spoil the surprise.”
There was a smell, when she and Liza were seen to the birthing room, powdery and sharp, that nearly brought her to her knees, not because it called up associations she was trying to repress, but because it reminded her of her husband, way back when, when the hospital smell was still a novelty, before it became part of him and then, gradually, part of their marital ether, like those proverbial frogs adjusting to the pot of boiling water. They navigated the next few hours together, whiling away the time, determining which nurses were their favorites. But she could tell, from Liza’s inability to keep still or quiet, that the contractions were worsening.
“You want to lie down, sweetheart?” she asked, and Liza shook her head, going over to the window, looking at once immense and childlike, both frail and formidable.
Marilyn didn’t notice the door opening behind her.
“How’re we doing in here?”
She recognized the voice at once, knew it at the base of her skull. David’s not my patient; he’s my friend. She turned slowly, and she was ashamed to admit that the first thing she took note of was the fact that Gillian had a good deal more gray in her hair than when last she’d seen her.
How long had it been? At least a decade. Probably closer to two. She now existed without ties or context, appearing to Marilyn only in dreams or especially dark marital moments as the woman who’d once held the power to unravel all that she had worked to create. Her status as the doctor who’d delivered Grace, who’d pulled them both through that unexpected and terrifying time, had been demoted by what happened afterward. The night David told her that Gillian was leaving to start her own practice, she’d tabled her initial reaction—relief that it was over; anger that she had to feel relieved in the first place—but later fucked him vigorously and uncharacteristically, wakened him in twilight with her hand down his briefs, rejoicing, mine mine mine.
And yet here she was. She looked to Liza in surprise, but her daughter’s face betrayed nothing—she recognized, from her own experience, the blank inwardness of Liza’s gaze, that singular focus on the task at hand. All that mattered at the moment, and for the next indeterminate number of hours, was inside of her; the external world faded away.
“Marilyn.” The look on the doctor’s face was candidly benevolent, easy and amenable. She came over and opened her arms for a hug.
Marilyn embraced her loosely. “Gillian.”
“I was just thinking about whether or not I’d run into you. I hoped I would.”
Liza, from the window, detached incredulity, her voice gravel: “Oh, fuck.”
It was her instinct—a physical tugging—to go to her daughter, to do what she could to absorb some of the pain as her own, but Liza had violently waved her off during the last few contractions.
“What are you…” Doing here would be a silly question, of course.
Does David know you’re here would be overly hostile. Who knew how many hours she’d be spending with this woman. Liza made a whinnying sound, and they both turned to regard her. “Sweetie, do you—”
“No,” Liza breathed out, impatient.
“Full circle, huh,” Gillian said softly, touching Marilyn’s elbow.
Her psyche was being pulled so intensely in two directions—her shock at the sight of David’s old friend, and the transmuted agony of seeing her daughter in so much pain—that she didn’t feel she was fully partaking in either situation.
“I hear she’s doing great,” Gillian said, pulling her decidedly into the mental camp of her daughter’s labor. Until now, only nurses had been checking in on Liza.
“Yes, she’s a trooper.”
“That runs in the family.” Gillian squeezed her arm again. She didn’t remember the woman being so touchy. “How’s it going, Liza?”
Her daughter, once again in the land of the living, arched her back and shook her head, coming to lower herself onto the bed.
“Human existence is a ludicrous notion, isn’t it, love?” Marilyn said.
“Indeed,” Gillian said, though Marilyn hadn’t been talking to her. She fiddled with one of the monitors. “David on his way too?”
Marilyn froze, unsure of how to answer. She wondered if the woman had ever completely stopped loving her husband, or if it was something that haunted her still. But she nevertheless resented Gillian’s presence a bit, the fact that she was once again encroaching upon the privacy of their family, even if Liza had solicited it.
“David just had a heart attack,” she said. “He’s not really up for—such excitement.”
Before Gillian could react, Liza asked, “Could you check me, Dr. Levin?”
She looked to her daughter in gratitude, tears in her eyes over all of it, the excess of emotion clouding everything about the current state of their lives, and she held Liza’s hand as Gillian, once again, took their fate in hers.
* * *
—
It was astounding how much more slowly time passed when you weren’t the one giving birth. Marilyn remembered, when her daughters were born, the hours seeming at once interminable and transitory, ticking away on an entirely different clock, but in the hospital with Liza, she was sharply cognizant of the sun going down and her phone battery dying, of the stale feeling in her mouth and the hungry rumbling of her stomach and the itchiness of her eyes, begging to close. Liza was getting more and more agitated—“Oh my God, Mom, could you stop standing like that?”—and so she took the opportunity to slip into the hall and call her husband, with whom she was not at all interested in speaking, but she knew he would want an update on Liza, and thus far she’d only sent him terse, informative text messages. Wendy had texted them both earlier to tell them that she’d found Jonah.
“Hey, sweetie,” he said. “How goes it?”
Life seemed to be throwing them evenly divided deluges of good and bad; they were in a relatively good place now, new babies in transit and missing persons found, but she was unrested and irritable and she didn’t have the energy to table her anger. “Well,” she said, unable to keep the stiffness from her voice. “She’s at seven centimeters.”
“Oh, good; that’s—”
“Gillian’s been incredibly attentive,” she broke in archly. “As thorough as ever.”
He paused. “Oh, God,” he said. She could practically hear his mind at work. “Marilyn, I’m— I feel like such a— I completely forgot.”
“So you knew,” she said. “You knew and didn’t tell me.”
“No, honey, I just— I planned to tell you; I kept meaning to but then everything happened with Jonah, and then with Ryan, and I just got distracted, but I— Liza wanted someone who— I don’t know. Knows our family. Someone who can maybe understand—you know, that things are sometimes more complicated than they seem.”
“We’re not the Mansons. It’s not like we have this big lumbering secret in our—”
“I was just trying to be supportive, honey, and I thought it might upset you so I was trying to figure out the best time to tell you, but other things kept—and then suddenly…”
In his trailing off, she was reminded of the bad deluge they’d just endured, the worst deluge, David in this same hospital, three floors down in the cardiac ICU. She massaged the bridge of her nose.
“It’s not so much her that I’m angry about as the fact that you didn’t tell me. And that you’ve developed this ridiculous germs paranoia and let me come here and get absolutely blindsided.”
“I’m not at a hundred percent,” he said, and in the softness of his voice she recognized real dejection. “I didn’t think I’d have the energy to stick it out for a long labor, or like I’d be in any position to be of help when I—I still don’t feel quite like myself, and it just didn’t seem doable.” This admission, coming from her stoic husband, was huge. “She’s been through so much already. I want her to have this happy moment without worrying about me.”
“Oh, love.” She sighed. She glanced up to see Gillian coming toward her down the hall.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” he said. This oblivious man she’d fused lives with. “Believe it or not, it really did slip my mind.”
“I forgive you,” she said. “We can talk about how insane you are when I get home.”
“Kiss Liza for me. Tell her I love her.”
“I will.”
“Tell yourself that too.”
She smiled, keenly aware of Gillian, feet away. “You do the same.”
“Sorry to interrupt,” Gillian said when she hung up.
“Not at all.”
“I brought you some coffee. We’ve got a long night ahead of us.”
“Oh—thank you.” She accepted the cup and took a sip, winced at the sweetness.
“Sorry. Old habit. I rely heavily on caffeine and sugar in times like these. Is it your first?”
“First what?”
Gillian smiled at her. “Grandchild.”
“Oh. No. I have— Violet has two boys. Or—three, actually.” She snagged on this. “Eli and Wyatt are still little guys. And Jonah is—well. Sixteen, now.”
“How on earth do you have a sixteen-year-old grandchild?” Gillian asked, smiling.
“It’s a long story,” she said. “There’s a lot going on in our family at the moment.”
“I’m so sorry about David,” Gillian said. “I had no idea, Marilyn. How’s he doing?”
“He’s recovering,” she said. “Slowly. Steadily, physiologically. He’s home; he’s mobile. But I think it’s— He’s having a hard time feeling— Lord, it’s the scariest thing in the world, our mortality, isn’t it?” She was unprepared for the catch in her throat.
“One of the perks of my job is that I can just will myself into thinking that all we do is get born. Forget the rest. Though that’s becoming harder and harder the older I get.”
“I remember thinking how young you seemed, back then,” Marilyn said.
“Gloves are off, I see.” Gillian laughed.
“Oh, I didn’t mean— I just mean it’s funny how— Back then you seemed closer in age to my girls. Now you—well, we’re contemporaries. I guess it all just evens out. How are things with you?”
“Things are good,” Gillian said. “I’m healthy. I’m busy. I have two boisterous German shepherds and a fair amount of joy in my life.”
It was strange to hear it in such frank, clinical terms, but Marilyn envied her, in a way, how she was so confidently able to itemize her happinesses, without earmarks or asterisks.
“I still think about you and David sometimes,” Gillian said. “Your family. I’m pretty sure you’re the origins of my unattainable standards of living.”
Marilyn shook her head. “Ah. Oh, well, we—”
> Gillian tactfully changed the subject: “Liza’s an impressive young woman.”
As if on cue, her daughter’s voice: “Dr. Levin?”
Gillian abandoned her mug on the triage desk and Marilyn followed suit.
“The sugar was a good idea,” she said, trailing the doctor back into her daughter’s room, feeling her anxiety creep back in, but Gillian, going to Liza, didn’t reply, had already moved on to the next thing.
2010–2011
Strange bruising on his abdomen, fatigue, significant weight loss. Wendy was astounded that she hadn’t noticed, but then again she hadn’t been noticing much of anything, and Miles was thin to begin with. The things she couldn’t have seen—his elevated white count, for instance—were confirmed by the doctor, and these things yielded a theatrically grim prognosis and an immediate, aggressive treatment plan, chemo and radiation. It was almost laughable, how magnificently fucked they were, how such larger-than-life tragedy could befall a single family—and they were such a small family, God! She would never forgive herself for the distance she’d created between them after Ivy, for all the times she appreciated life without him.
For the first week, they barely talked, focusing on completing the necessary steps: paperwork, consultations, an alarming shopping list that featured ominous items like shower curtain liners and nonlatex gloves. And the night before he began his treatment, they sat on the roof together, twined in the loveseat under the comforter from their bed. She could feel, now, his boniness. They were still tiptoeing around the subject, still feeling license to be coy, avoidant as adolescents and afraid to discuss anything head-on.
“You could still easily die before me,” he said. “You could get struck by lightning. Or hit by a bus. Or—you know, Ebola. Swine flu. Endless possibilities.”
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