The Most Fun We Ever Had

by Claire Lombardo

Grace smiled, listening to this boy construct her sister from memory—not necessarily Wendy as she really was, but Wendy as Grace had relayed her: the only portrait you could ever get, really, of one sister from another, tinged inevitably with jealousy and double standards and affection as deep and intractable as marrow.

  He’d hung on her every word; no one had ever done that before.

  He kicked a rock and paused to watch its trajectory down the sidewalk. “Your dad’s a stoic family practitioner who’s recently taken up landscaping in his retirement,” he continued. “Your mom is a bombshell flower child who was romanced into a life of quiet domesticity. I can keep going, if you’d like. But as I mentioned, I’ve only got twenty-five minutes. More like twenty, now. Are you leaving, like, forever?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Ben stopped again, perched atop a U-shaped bicycle rack and watched her. “I’m not going to flatter myself and assume that your bailing has anything to do with me,” he said. “But about Christmas…”

  It occurred to her to interrupt him and apologize herself, but something stopped her.

  “You hurt my feelings,” he said. “But I know you weren’t trying to. I like you so much, Grace.” Had he ever called her Grace before? “And from where I stand, this should be the easiest thing in the world because I like you and I think you like me.”

  “I do.”

  “But it’s not easy with you, and that makes me angry. I was trying to tell you how I felt, and you shit all over everything.” She heard a flash of anger in his voice. “And then you, well—”

  “This is all—these are all new things for me. I hate everything in my life right now except you. It’s hard for me to imagine how you could possibly want to be a part of that. I know that’s unattractive. I know it makes me hard to be around.” She looked down and swallowed, trying to ease the throbbing in her throat. “I need to like more than one thing about my life. Including myself. That’s allegedly how it works.”

  “So you’re just skipping town?”

  “I’m going—home. To regroup.” It was her turn to stop walking. She found a pebble of her own, swung her leg, made contact. “I really like you,” she said. “And I’m really going to miss you.”

  She took a breath and looked up at him; something in his face relaxed her, made everything feel less dire. Maybe another person couldn’t irrevocably save you, but they could sometimes calm you down, and that felt like an exquisitely magical thing.

  She kissed him then. She stepped forward and moved her face toward his face, this elusive, intimate act that had only ever before been done to her. He moved from his bike rack and leaned in and touched his hand to her face, and for exactly 1.5 seconds she wondered is this really happening and then she decided yes, it is.

  And Ben Barnes, bless his heart, kissed her back.

  2014

  Wendy was only dimly aware, as her husband died, of the fact that she wished she weren’t alone. She was mostly distracted by the process itself—the surprising tedium of it, the number of times she’d shamefully harbored thoughts like Why can’t this just end already—but occasionally it occurred to her that it might be nice to have another conscious person around, someone to sit with Miles when she had to pee, someone to bring her coffee and Cheetos and news from the outside world. Her parents had both fought hard to come and help her, but she’d resisted that without fully knowing why—because her father had never quite approved of Miles? Because the last time she and her mother had been in the hospital together was after Ivy, and they hadn’t been that close since? Gracie was in Portland; Liza was in Philly. Which left Violet, the most logical candidate for company, but Violet—it still made her blood boil, thinking about it—had demurred, claiming that her obstetrician had said she shouldn’t be in the cancer ward so late in her pregnancy. She’d been so stunned to hear her sister lie in this way that she didn’t even fight her on it, didn’t point out that cancer wasn’t contagious, that pregnant women spent plenty of time in hospitals, that the hospital was the final destination for most pregnant women, the Mecca. Her sister was avoiding her, as she had when Ivy was born. Too fragile to endure anything beyond the spotless arrangement of her own life. Taking full advantage of the fact that the universe wasn’t fucking her over in the way it was Wendy.

  But all of these thoughts were distraction, she supposed. Easier to think about than Miles, who was nearly unrecognizable beside her in the bed, his body wasted and gray, put through the wringer again and again, his eyes sunken into the hollows above his cheekbones, his thready pulse visible through the thin skin of his neck. The doctor had been saying it could be any time for three days. He’d last awakened exactly a week ago, and he’d been surprisingly lucid, weak but coherent, and she’d been so excited to see him conscious that she’d made a joke about how one of his nurses looked like a sea horse, and then he’d dipped back into sleep, so that was the last thing she’d said to her husband. The last thing she would ever say to her husband. She was holding his hand now, palm up, tracing his lines with her finger. Those had stayed the same, despite everything. The meat of his palms was gone, wasted into nothing, but the lines were still there, their familiar crosshatch.

  She maneuvered her way into the bed beside him, careful not to jab him with an elbow or a knee.

  “I’m not sure how to do this without you,” she said, feeling foolish. Her words reverberated across the empty room. She’d turned the lights off, left on only a lamp in the corner. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do.”

  They’d taken him off of the respirator. She listened to his breathing.

  “You’re the best thing in my life. Sometimes I think I used up all of my luck when I met you.” She paused. “Worth it, though, I’d say. Despite everything. Because you were around to get me through everything else. I’m not sure how to get through this. I’m not sure what you’d say if you could say something right now.”

  The pain of losing him had become physical to her in the last few days. There was an ache in her stomach that she almost couldn’t stand, a soreness she stooped her body around.

  “Thanks for letting me dig your gold,” she said, which she knew would have made him laugh. “Thanks for impregnating me. Thanks for teaching me that the expression isn’t ‘for all intensive purposes.’ Thanks for marrying me. Thanks for the time you made me come four times in a row.”

  He didn’t smell like himself, hadn’t smelled like himself for months. She pressed her nose into the folds of his pajamas, trying to find something familiar. A whiff of skin. It was there, still, and it made her start crying.

  “Thanks for taking care of me,” she said, then: “I’m trying to think of an inspirational song lyric. Want me to do my Neil Young voice?”

  This would have made him laugh, too, so she laughed for him.

  “I love you behemothically, Miles Eisenberg,” she said. She curled herself around his body, rested her head in the concavity of his chest. She fell asleep holding him. When she woke up, he was gone.

  * * *

  —

  The thing about her doctor was true. Maybe not medically true, but Violet had been told that it would be unwise to visit such a seriously sick person when she was weeks from her due date. They’d chosen someone kind of new-agey, and Violet liked her for the most part but bristled at some of her bedside manner—beyond counseling avoidance of the hospital, she made frequent use of the word yoni and could not understand Violet’s aversion to having Matt massage her perineum with olive oil. The doctor had said something about radiation and chemicals on the cancer ward, and she couldn’t shake the image of herself accidentally touching the wrong light switch and transmitting something toxic through her skin into her bloodstream, all the way to the baby, who would subsequently emerge with horns or with no life at all, a husk of a baby, like Wendy’s. You weren’t allowed to vocalize worries like these.


  It was also true that she found the doctor’s orders to be a relief. This was the shameful part. She was glad—glad!—to be given medical advice that exempted her from having to be so close to death when her child was so close to being born. Another unforgivable thing.

  But still she checked on her sister. That was something. She sent Wendy text messages, and she made brief phone calls—daily, always, despite the mundane but constant demands of her life. She kept this up until one night it wasn’t her bladder that woke her but their landline. And she’d gone immediately. She left Wyatt with Matt and she drove to Hyde Park and she arrived at Wendy’s house hours after Miles had died. And then, even then, when she’d arrived at Wendy’s door, her sister had sighed and said, “Jesus, are you dramatic.”

  So it was Violet, not Wendy, the widow, who was weeping into their mother’s arms later that night. It was Violet, after having been politely rejected from entering her sister’s brownstone, who decided to drive to the house on Fair Oaks instead of all the way back up to Evanston, crying through the dodginess of Chicago Avenue between Kedzie and Austin, who practically fell through the door of her parents’ house and collapsed into her mother’s arms.

  “I know, honey,” her mom said. She made them some tea and Violet lay curled up on the couch with her head in her mother’s lap.

  “She wouldn’t even see me,” she said, whimpering. “I did— I’m doing the best I can.”

  “Calm down, love. Of course you are.”

  She intermittently cried and flirted with falling asleep against the warm, dusty sweetness of her mother’s bathrobe. “It was— My doctor said I shouldn’t. I know that sounds— I know it’s terrible but I—”

  Her mom was smoothing a hand slowly, heavily, rhythmically over her hair. “It’s not terrible,” she said. “Violet, it sounds human and it’s not terrible, all right? We do things for our family. You’re looking out for yourself and your baby. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “Did she let you come over to her house?”

  “Just for a few minutes.”

  “Her own mother?” she said, indignant now, foolish with exhaustion.

  “Your sister’s been dealt a rough hand,” her mother said, and before Violet could tell her that she’d heard that particular statement a hundred thousand times, she continued. “Pick your battles, sweetie, okay? You’ve got a lovely life.” She patted Violet’s belly. “You’ve got a beautiful little one on the way. Everyone’s healthy. Focus on that.”

  She supposed her mother was simply trying to be optimistic—it was one of her more irritating traits—but something about the statement rubbed Violet the wrong way. Should she apologize for having a life so unmarred by tragedy? Should she feel sorry for the fact that she’d happened upon such lovely circumstances? Not to mention her own struggles, all the cherished parts of herself she’d sacrificed in order to build her lovely life.

  “I just don’t think it’s fair that—”

  “Darling.” Marilyn’s voice was colder, though she rested a hand on Violet’s shoulder. “Your sister’s just lost her husband. Let’s give her a few days, okay?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Marilyn had gone to yoga while pregnant with Grace, had adjusted the household bedtime so she got enough sleep, had choked down the vitamins she’d evaded the first three times around. And what did any of it matter anymore, really, because Grace was smoking on the roof just like the other kids had done, having just undulated her way back home on the waves of a major lie.

  “Goose,” she called, careful not to startle Gracie into falling off of the eave. “Come down here, please.” She’d been stunned into speechlessness when their daughter had called to confess, when she’d revealed to them that she’d fabricated nearly a full year of made-up classes and fake ski vacations and fictional friends; she’d been at an utter loss for words until Grace finished recounting her duplicity, and then she’d said, “You get on a plane and get home immediately, Grace Sorenson,” and she wished, for the first time, that David had given their lastborn a middle name, so that she could invoke it to more dramatic maternal effect.

  Grace had arrived home last night, thin and jittery—“Huck Finn!” Wendy had greeted her—and then Wendy had stolen her away for dinner, presumably sparing Grace from their parental wrath for a few more hours. Grace had returned home at midnight and gone straight to bed. Now it was nearly noon, and Gracie padded barefoot onto the porch, a little vagabond who reeked of tobacco. Marilyn raised an eyebrow at her, patted the space beside her on the glider.

  “You’ve always come to us,” she said, trying to remain even-keeled despite her anger and her bafflement. “When you were having a hard time, you always— We’ve been here for you, haven’t we? I just don’t understand why you wouldn’t…”

  “I didn’t want you to be disappointed in me. And you had so much else going on.”

  “The only times I’m ever disappointed in any of you are when you’re deliberately doing things you know aren’t in your best interest. Dad and I don’t care if you go to law school or clown college, Gracie. Washburne Trade School. Haven’t we made that clear?”

  “Well, yeah, but like…”

  “What?”

  “I mean you gave me a lot of attention.”

  She frowned. “I’m sorry, is that—a bad thing?”

  “I just mean I’ve always been under more scrutiny than everyone else. Because you had more—time. To pay attention to me.”

  “So we didn’t neglect you enough,” she said dryly. There was no such thing as winning, as a parent.

  “No, it’s not— I didn’t want to scare you. I feel terrible about what a disaster we all are. Wendy’s like Miss Havisham. Violet was living a way bigger lie than I was when she was my age, and now she’s just, like, this weird pod person. And Liza’s basically a single mom. You and Dad are the only people in this family who have it figured out.”

  It struck her how universal this particular take on her marriage seemed to be, among all of her daughters, Gillian, her father-in-law: everyone that mattered on the outside assumed that she and David were bulletproof. Her kids would never fully understand her, just as she’d never fully understood her own parents and just as she, in close proximity to this girl, once a tiny baby who’d grown inside her body, would never fully understand her kids.

  “It’s okay to not know what you want,” she said. “You’re still so young. You can stay here for as long as you need, and you can figure out what’s next and get your act together and think about what you’ve been doing for the last year. But the lying has to stop, Grace. It’s a surefire way to guarantee your own unhappiness.” She opened an arm to her daughter, half-expecting to be spurned. But Gracie tucked herself against Marilyn’s side, like she’d done when she was little.

  “I didn’t even mean to— You know how sometimes things just happen?”

  Marilyn closed her eyes, memorizing, as ever, the part in her daughter’s hair. “Yes, I’m familiar.”

  The screen door opened, a rusty squeak, and David appeared. Beside her, Gracie curled her knees to her chest to make room for him on the glider.

  * * *

  —

  “How worried are we about Gracie?” Marilyn asked him in bed that night. “One to ten.”

  “I don’t know. Seven?”

  “Seven’s high.”

  “I’m generally at about a five with her, though, so you have to look at it relatively.” When he’d gone to collect Grace at the baggage claim the day before he’d wanted to cry, because while it seemed like she’d aged years since she’d last been home, she also still looked so young, as wide-eyed and vulnerable as ever. His fury—at the way she’d denied them the only thing they’d ever asked of her, the truth—was replaced by sadness, which rested alongside his concern and his moderate irritation that she’d asked, once they were on Ma
nnheim headed toward home, as though he were picking her up for a normal school break, if they could stop at Johnnie’s Beef for Italian ice.

  “Just when I was starting to feel so smug about everything,” Marilyn said.

  “Pride cometh before the fall.”

  “We’ve happened upon the nesting dolls of parenting,” Marilyn said. “Every time we wash our hands of one, another materializes with a pack of Camels.”

  “That’s the danger of mass-producing children, I guess.”

  “You were right,” she said.

  “Thanks,” he replied. “About what?”

  “About the fact that we’re never going to—you know. Reach the finish line. With the kids. There’s always going to be something.”

  They lay in silence for a few minutes, listening to the house settle, to the wind outside.

  “I was thinking,” he said.

  “Were you?” She smiled. He could tell she was tired. “What about?”

  “As long as we’re still going full-throttle with the rest of the kids, I thought I might talk to Liza.” He always felt nervous when proposing new ideas to his wife, not because she judged him but because she tended to support him wholeheartedly, advancing seeds of thought into full-grown blooms practically before the conversation was over. Marilyn got things done. If you ran something by her, you had to be prepared to do it. “I thought I might see if she could use a babysitter for the fall semester.”

  Marilyn’s face lit up and she seized one of his hands, squeezing it to her chest. “Really?”

  “I heard that degenerate girl next door with the big spikes in her ears was looking for work,” he said, and Marilyn kicked his shin gently under the blankets.

  “Honey, ask her. Ask her. Do it now. That’s a terrific idea. Call her. Sweetheart, she’ll be thrilled. She’s been so anxious about going back to work. Call her now. Where’s your phone?”