by Maile Meloy
“And now you can have a new life. Not everyone gets this chance. Not everyone takes it.”
“They take it all the time,” Margot said. “And they ruin their lives and alienate their children and end up alone.”
“You’ll never be alone.”
She looked at him. In this light she looked like she had fifteen years before. “I’m afraid,” she said. “My sons will never understand.”
“They will,” he said. “They’re adult men.”
She took his hand in both of hers and turned it over, studying it. It was the hand the resident had stitched up, and she ran a finger over the scar. “What happened here?” she asked.
He stretched his hand, moving the scar like a narrow worm between his finger and thumb. There had been glass, he thought. A window? A bottle? He remembered that when the resident asked him what happened, he’d said, “How the hell would I know?”
“If I tell you the story,” he said, “you can’t be disgusted and run away.”
“Of course not,” Margot said.
She was concerned now: her whole body was turned to him, in the green dress, with that womanly, motherly need to make everything all right. She pressed the injured hand between hers, and he wondered if it were true, if he had found a way to make her stay.
70
AFTER THANKS GIVING, Peter tried to convince Abby that he had not looked into her family and seen the heart of darkness. This was what families were like. He joked: he said he was writing about Poe and Southern Gothic, and it was useful for him to see California Gothic. But Abby was in a funk in which it was her fault that Margot had left Owen, that Jamie had married Katya, and that Katya had abandoned Jamie and T.J. She was preoccupied with her own guilt.
One night Jamie called while Peter was reading, and Abby spent a long time on the phone in the bedroom. Then she came out, sat at Peter’s feet on the couch, and said T.J. had the flu and was home from school. Jamie wanted her help: he had to go back to work, and T.J. was comfortable with Abby. Katya hadn’t been much of a mother, but she was still his mother, and the loss had been hard.
“I have to go up there,” Abby said. “Just for a few days. I can’t stand that he’s sick and miserable and Katya left him.”
“Who’s ‘he’ in that sentence?” Peter asked. “Jamie or the kid?”
“The kid,” she said.
“You have classes here.”
“Astronomy doesn’t need me,” she said. “T.J. does.”
But she didn’t have the oppressed look of family responsibilities on her face; she seemed too energized for it to be about visiting a sick kid.
“I think you should finish this semester,” he said. “You’ll see them at Christmas.”
“I have to go.”
She got up from the couch and went to the bedroom, and Peter followed her. She was gathering dirty clothes.
“This is the old joint custody habit, isn’t it?” he asked. “You pretend this is your life for a while, and then you go back there, knowing you can come back here. Everything can be temporary.”
She laughed and moved past him with the laundry. “ Whatwould I do without you to explain me?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Sleep with your uncle?”
She paused, looking astonished and hurt. But she didn’t have an answer, or she wasn’t going to deign to answer. She put the clothes in the little stacked washer-dryer in the kitchen. She was washing T-shirts and jeans and underwear to take with her.
“I have an assignment for you,” he said, forming the idea as he said it. “You can go up there, but your assignment is to remember that I’m here.”
She started the machine and it hissed, filling with water. “Of course,” she said, without conviction.
“You can’t pretend that I don’t exist.”
“Of course not.” She poured soap into the machine.
“It’s an imaginative exercise,” he said. “You’re going to tell me what happened, eventually, because that’s in your nature. So just remember that I’m here.”
She put the bottle back in the cupboard and turned her whole body to face him.
“Peter,” she said. She seemed completely serious now, tired but focused and in the room with him. “How could I forget?”
71
SAFFRON WAS NUMB from the neck down but wide awake and staring at the little green curtain beyond which the doctors were making an incision she couldn’t feel, well below the bikini line as agreed, and then she felt them lifting the baby—she felt the new lightness of her body—and suddenly she was shaking uncontrollably. They had told her that there was a hormonal shift at the moment of separation, but she hadn’t expected anything this strong. Her whole body was shaking, she knew it without being able to feel it. She felt suddenly protective; she wanted to shout at the doctors not to take him out, to put him back. She started to sob. Then he was lifted high enough that she could see, through the blur of tears and drugs, his little ear. The side of his face, wet with blood, and his slick, dark hair. He took a breath, and she saw him do it—a little gasping fish—and she felt left behind. She had been doing his breathing, she had. Now he was doing it without her, and the sobbing came harder. She had been prepared to fake emotion—to simulate, for the doctors and for herself, feelings she would never have, and now she couldn’t speak for the trembling and the tears that soaked her face and her gown.
“Martin,” she said, and she searched for him in the blur of the room, blinking.
“I’m here,” he said. He was wearing green scrubs and looked pale and traumatized.
“Oh, you didn’t watch, did you?” she said.
“Couldn’t help it,” he said.
“Martin, the baby,” she said, fighting the drugs to be coherent.
“They’re just cleaning him off.”
“Martin,” she said.
“What?”
“He’s alive .”
72
DOMINICK WAS DRINKING coffee on his tiny balcony one morning when Margot came out in that damn kimono she hid herself in. It was a beautiful, clear blue morning, not hazy like the last few mornings had been, and Margot sat down in the other plastic chair, crossed her legs with the flowered kimono over them, and said, “I’m going to go home.”
Dominick felt the shock but had expected it and kept very still, looking for his next move. It had been an enormous, a colossal mistake to tell her about his drug trouble. He had counted on her wanting to save him. “This is your home,” he said.
“I mean with Bennett, with my son. To Louisiana.”
He hated the idea of Bennett, who had been sent by the family to fetch her, but the kid was not the point. “You mean to your husband.”
Margot said nothing.
“To go fuck your husband in your big expensive house,” he said.
“Please,” she said.
“You turn my life upside down twice, ” he said, “and now you want to go back to a life that bores you, and leave me here. How does it feel, to take people so lightly? Other people don’t take things so lightly, you know? How do you know he’ll take you back?”
“He will,” she whispered.
“He says that now,” he said, warming to the topic. “But I’ll tell you something about men: he’s going to think of me every single time he goes down on you, every single time he fucks you. You’ve wronged him, Margot, and you can’t expect everything to go back the way it was. The bitterness will fester. Every day, he’ll think of me.”
Margot didn’t move. “Are you finished?”
“No. I’m not finished. I’m not even started.”
“Have you taken your pills?”
“I don’t need the pills.”
“You do.”
“What I need,” he said, “is for you to explain to me how you justify this. You abandon your husband and come halfway across the country to finally acknowledge, after fifteen years, that you love me—that we fit together in a way you never fit with anyone else. You make me finally feel
that the one thing I always wanted is mine . And you string me along for a while under this delusion, and I feel safe enough to tell you I’ve made some mistakes. But this scares you, so you start to believe that you miss your good towels. Or your fancy refrigerator. Or the library committee. What is it you miss? The big Christmas at your parents’ house? Is that the bait?”
“There’s no bait.”
“Or are you just revolted by me? Say it. You wrecked his life, and now you’re wrecking mine again . I want to know how you justify it.”
“You can’t hold me responsible for your life,” she said, but she didn’t sound like she believed it.
“Is that what your son told you to say?”
“Everyone wrecks their own lives.”
“Actually, they don’t,” he said. “Other people help, all the time. Your son is—what, twenty-six? He doesn’t know anything, Margot. No one knows anything at twenty-six.” He felt a throbbing in his left temple and blinked a few times to force it away.
“You’re disturbed.”
“You bet I am,” he said. “But I’ve been better since you came.” He took her hands in his. “I’m better because of you.”
Margot didn’t pull her hands away.
“Give me a little more time,” he said. “Stay a little longer.”
Margot took one hand back to wipe her eyes with it.
“You love me,” he said. “You know you do.”
Tears ran down her face, but she let him kiss away the salty trails. He kissed her cheeks, her eyes, her mouth, and then he stood her up and led her back inside.
73
MARGOT WOKE UP in Dominick’s apartment not knowing where she was. She got up to go to the bathroom, but she was thinking of her own house, and she walked into a wall, bumping her forehead and cursing softly. Dominick’s bathroom was on the other side of the bed. She turned and went the other direction.
The anxious, buzzing sensation that came and went, sometimes in her chest and sometimes at the base of her skull, was there this morning, just at the place where her hair was tied back, as she washed her face. She had lost weight and could see the ridges of her sternum marching down between her breasts. She put a hand flat over her chest, to cover it up. Then she remembered she was supposed to meet Bennett for breakfast. She had promised him she would make the break, and now what would she say?
Dominick was awake when she went back into the bedroom, so she took her clothes to the bathroom to dress. He thought it was the addiction that bothered her, but it wasn’t, it was the amorphous darkness in him that she couldn’t get her arms around. She pulled on the skirt she had bought in town, the cotton sweater.
“Where are you going?” Dominick asked when she went back out.
“I’m having breakfast with Bennett.”
There was a silence.
“I’m coming with you,” Dominick said, swinging his legs out from under the bedcovers.
“No, you’re not.”
“I am, it’s my right,” he said, and he stood, naked and handsome, with his thick black hair starting to gray on his chest and around his penis. He ran his fingers over his head, where the hair stuck straight up, and pulled on a pair of trousers lying over a chair. “What time are we meeting?” he asked.
“I’m going alone.”
He buttoned and zipped. “It’s time young Ben and I hashed a few things out.”
Bennett was already waiting at a table in the coffee shop when they arrived. He looked startled to see Dominick, and Margot was shamed into silence, caught between the two of them. Bennett was the good older son the way Margot had been the good older daughter, so it was only natural that he had been sent to tell her Owen was languishing at home making model airplanes. She loved Danny, who was mischievous and wild, but Bennett understood her, and knew the burden and the pleasure of being reliable. He had arranged for time off from medical school, which seemed rash. She wondered if someday he would do something as entirely irresponsible as she had done, and give up all claim to being good.
“Benny!” Dominick said, and he clapped Bennett on the shoulder as he stood to meet them: the hearty lawyer act. “I’m Dominick. I’m glad we have a chance to talk.”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” Bennett said, but he looked panicked.
“She’s changed her mind,” Dominick said.
“Mom,”Bennett said, looking at Margot. They were attracting attention.
“So it’s okay, you can go home now,” Dominick said.
“She’s my mother.”
“Exactly,” Dominick said. “She’s a separate person, with a life of her own.”
“She has a life with us.”
“Had,”Dominick said. “You have to go have your adult life, and be a doctor, and she gets to have her adult life, with her kids grown up. And in that life she’s staying with me.”
“You said you were leaving him,” Bennett said to Margot.
“I know,” she said, confused.
“Dad really needs you.”
She looked around the coffee shop, at the moms with strollers, and the girls with sunny hair and short skirts, and the brooding young men with laptops. Two of the girls were openly watching her. “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about this here.”
“It’s all right,” Dominick said. “You kiss your son now, and he goes back to school to learn how to cure diseases.”
Bennett seemed to be in tears. “Mom,” he said.
In that moment, an odd feeling came over Margot, a warmth in her whole body and a very specific physical pull that was almost sexual, a kind of contraction, a memory of birth. She realized that Dominick had made a mistake in provoking this scene, because she couldn’t leave her son for him. Her husband was a separate being, someone she could lose, but her sons were part of her. She would walk over Owen’s body to protect and console them, and she realized now that she would walk over her lover’s body, too. She moved to Bennett and pulled his head close to her; he was actually crying now.
“Sweetheart,” she said. “It’s all right. I’m coming home.”
“Margot,” Dominick said.
She turned to face him, protecting Bennett.
“I’m going home,” she said. She had not yet ruined her life. They would take her back.
“This is home,” Dominick said, obviously trying to keep his voice under control. “He doesn’t need you anymore. I need you.”
But she was sure of her obligations now, which were not to Dominick. They had always been to her sons, and the vengeful look in Dominick’s eyes told her she was right. She had been right fifteen years ago. She had wasted so much time, and hurt so many people.
There was some confusion, then. A waitress approached them, and Dominick called her an insensitive cunt and tipped a chair clattering to the tile floor. A male manager asked him to leave, and Dominick did, and it was then that Margot lost her composure. She sank into the booth where Bennett had innocently waited for her to join him for breakfast, and she thought she would never stop crying and trembling. She held her hands tightly together to keep them still. It was like being caught in the circulating surf, unable to get air. It would never end. Bennett finally fell back on his training and drove her to the hospital, where they gave her a sedative and put her, weeping, to bed.
74
JAMIE WAS SITTING on the couch in his apartment, with only the kitchen light on, listening to Abby putting T.J. to bed. He couldn’t hear their words, only the reassuring low voices. T.J. had gotten better since Abby arrived, and was happier, and Jamie felt a weight lifting off him. He was thinking how nice it would be to go to a bar with decent music and cold beer when Saffron called from the house in the wine country.
“Fauchet told me that Katya left,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
“Thanks,” he said, trying to decide how he felt about hearing her voice.
“How’s T.J.?”
“Better some days than others,” he said. “I haven’t told him yet how Aunt Saffron stole his m
illions. One thing at a time.”
“Oh, Jamie,” Saffron said. There was a pause. “I’m calling about Christmas.”
“What about it?”
“I’m going crazy up here, it’s so lonely. My father’s going to Scotland with a girlfriend. And Martin’s family gives me hives.”
Jamie waited to see where this was going.
“If you’re going to your parents’ house,” she said, “I wondered if we could come, too.”
“You’re joking, right?” he said—though there was a small, secret thrill that she wanted to be with him.
“I want my baby to have a more normal childhood than I did,” she said. “I want him to have Christmas in a house with wall-to-wall carpet and some nice people, and a TV on somewhere, with a football game. I don’t think that’s so much to ask.”
“So find another house!” he said. “America is full of them! Don’t you see how that might be uncomfortable for me?”
“Abby’s novel made your family seem really appealing.”
“It’s a novel. It’s not my family.”
“Just think about it, okay? My uncle Freddie needs a place to go, too.”
“The nutcase healer?”
“We don’t need to stay at the house,” she said. “It would mean a lot to me. I’ll call tomorrow.”
He hung up the phone. Abby came in from T.J.’s bedroom and sat at the other end of the couch. “Who was that?”
“Saffron, inviting herself to Christmas at my parents’ house.”
Abby laughed. “Not really.”
“I think your novel made her curious.”
“Did you tell her no?”
“Not really. I tried.”
Abby stretched out on the couch, with her back against the armrest. “We don’t have to go,” she said. “It’s such a coercive holiday. Maybe Jesus will come back for the millennium and say, Folks, this whole Christmas thing has gotten out of hand. It’s a little embarrassing to me, all the fuss and the shopping and the suicides. And I wasn’t even born in December. So let’s just have Thanksgiving and leave it at that. And then he’ll go back up to heaven.”