A Family Daughter

by Maile Meloy

  She laughed. “For exactly two weeks. What you call disciplined and clear, the rest of the world calls dissociated and insane.”

  “You haven’t had any attacks.”

  “Are you trying to trigger one?”

  “No,” he said. He caught her hand again and swung it as they walked. “I’m all for disciplined and clear.”

  78

  MARGOT SAT AT midnight Mass between her husband and her younger son, thinking how strange it was to be doing what she had done every Christmas of her married life. She didn’t recognize this woman, the adulteress who had suffered a nervous collapse, and it was jarring to see herself in the cozy old surroundings. Owen had no idea how to treat her: he seemed caught between anger and concern, and dealt with it by not speaking. She felt utterly unresolved, singing, “All is calm, all is bright,” with Danny’s cheerful baritone on one side and Owen mouthing the words on the other.

  Then, in the backseat on the drive home, Owen’s knee brushed hers, and she felt a shock run up her thigh, like she was nineteen again. She looked at him, but he was frowning at his seat belt. He hadn’t meant to touch her; he wasn’t letting her back in so easily. At the house, he went inside without holding the door. In another country she might be stoned to death for what she had done. She guessed she was getting off easy.

  In the house, the others were still up playing rummy at the dining room table: her sister and crazy old Freddie, and the unhealthily beautiful Saffron.

  “There was a call for you,” Clarissa said. “It’s by the phone.”

  On the message pad, in her sister’s nun-trained cursive, she read, “Sgt. Tyrone called, please call station,” with a Santa Barbara number.

  Coats were being hung up, inquiries made about the sick, the kettle put on the stove. Margot felt a clammy sureness of death and wondered if Dominick had done it himself or if there had been an accident. The mad uncle was watching her, so she took the slip of paper to the phone in her parents’ room.

  “Mr. Jay asked me to call you,” the sergeant on the line said. “He wants you to post bail.”

  She felt her shoulders relax a little, and relief held judgment at a distance. Dominick had been charged with possession and disorderly conduct. The sergeant said they found marijuana on him, but he seemed to be using something else. There had been an altercation on State Street, and only Mr. Jay had been taken in. He’d used his first call on someone else. The sergeant gave her the name of a bail bondsman, who was brusque at first but then decided he was speaking to a lady and became deferential and polite. She gave him her credit card number to get Dominick out that night, and said she would find a place to receive the faxed forms in the morning.

  Then she hung up and sat on her parents’ bed wondering how to start her life again. She felt she had bought her way free from something, in a real way.

  Freddie came to the door. “Do you know where your mother keeps the dinner candles?” he asked.

  “In the top drawer by the phone desk, in the kitchen.”

  He disappeared again.

  Margot heard Saffron in the other room saying, “You can’t leave! We need someone to play your hand. Where are Jamie and Abby?”

  There was a short silence, and then Yvette said, “Oh, you guys. They’re just walking home. I’ll play Freddie’s hand.”

  Freddie came back, holding two candles and two silver candle-holders, and motioned for Margot to follow him. She got up as if hypnotized—she needed something to happen—and he led her to the laundry room. He set one candle on the old yellow Maytag washing machine and one on the dryer, and lit them with a lighter from his pocket.

  He switched out the light so the room was lit by the small flames, and he positioned Margot on one side of the washer, in line with the two candles, looking over the top of them.

  “I want you to focus on one candle and then the other,” he said. “The far one and then the closer one. Can you see them both?”

  Margot nodded, thinking she would stop this nonsense any minute.

  “Now I want you to focus on the exact point between them,” he said.

  “That would be easier if I were facing them sideways.”

  “But that’s not how it works,” he said. “That would be simple, as if you could see your whole life laid out on a time line, like a stranger’s life in a history book. Healing the past isn’t easy.”

  “Oh, healing, ” she said. “Is that what we’re doing here?” But she didn’t leave.

  “Sure,” he said. “Finding the point between the candles is like living in the present moment. It’s so easy to focus on the past or the future—those are solid and glowing in our heads, right? But they’re just ideas, they’re just recordings and projections. This moment, now, might be dark and uncertain, but it’s the only thing that’s real. So this is an exercise for focusing on it, visualizing the act of inhabiting it. You see? This moment, now, is like the point between the two candles. We have to train our minds to stop obsessing about things that don’t exist anymore, or don’t exist yet.”

  “Did you make up this exercise?” Margot asked, trying to guess, given the laws of perspective, where the exact midpoint would be.

  “Do you see the spot in the middle?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure. But I think so.”

  Freddie put one finger into the invisible line between the candle flames, exactly at the spot where Margot was concentrating. “Was it here?”

  “Yes!” she said. She was flooded with joy and satisfaction, and then felt foolish for caring.

  “I knew you’d be good at this,” he said. “You seem like a good student.”

  She beamed at him, in spite of herself.

  “Okay, find the spot again,” he said. “This is only the first exercise. It’s important to learn it before we move on.”

  Margot lost track of time and stopped worrying about what the others would think while she concentrated on the candles. There was a stack of index cards on the sewing table, the kind her mother used for recipes, and Freddie wrote words on them:PATIENCE andCLARITY . She sat on the floor, and he asked her to study the cards while the candles burned down. He said this was just the first part of the exercise, to sit with the cards and experience what the words made her feel, and to breathe deeply and evenly. They could work more tomorrow.

  When Margot stood up, her knees were a little stiff, but otherwise she felt wonderful. Freddie put his hand on her face.

  “You’re a fine girl,” he said.

  When she got to her bedroom, her husband was waiting. “So you have a new Svengali,” Owen said.

  “No,” she said. She didn’t want to examine, through Owen’s logic, the change in how she felt.

  “Did he make a pass at you?”

  She sat on the bed, exhausted. “No.”

  “I don’t really want to talk, yet,” he said. “But I want to sleep in here. I feel ridiculous on the couch, and it hurts my back.”

  “Do you want me to move out there?”

  “No. We’ll just sleep.”

  “Okay.” She slipped off her shoes. It wasn’t the romantic reconciliation she might have imagined, but it was a move in the direction she had chosen. She watched him untie his shoes and take them off. Owen’s mother had liked to tell a story in which a nine-year-old Owen, asked what he wanted for Christmas, said, “A pair of brown socks.” People laughed at the story, but Margot understood: it wasn’t the only thing he wanted, but it was a thing he needed, so he set about getting it. It was illustrative not of his oddness but of his deliberate practicality. He was sleeping in her room because the couch hurt his back and his pride, but they would move on to the other reasons.

  79

  JAMIE WOKE ON Christmas morning in his parents’ house with what felt like a killing hangover, but he hadn’t even had the pleasure of being drunk. His head felt like a solid block. T.J. was still asleep on the other side of the room, and Jamie got up quietly. He put on his old flannel bathrobe over the sweats he had slept in an
d ventured out to see who else had come down with the plague. He didn’t want to have lost the bet by getting sick first.

  In the kitchen, Clarissa was doing a crossword puzzle, looking healthy. She seemed to have resigned herself to her family’s inattention. Danny was making eggs.

  Owen came from the direction of Margot’s room and gave Jamie a look that suggested he wanted no commentary.

  “I’m getting Margot some juice,” he said. “She has this cold.”

  “I have it, too,” Bennett called, in a stuffed-up voice from the couch.

  Before Jamie could establish who had gotten it first, Yvette came out of her room in a bathrobe, in a fury. She passed Owen easily on the way to the refrigerator and pulled the door open so roughly the bottles and jars rattled.

  “Ease up there, Mom,” Jamie said.

  “Oh, I’m just so mad,” she said. “It’s no one’s fault. It’s not the baby’s fault, and it’s not Saffron’s, because she didn’t know he was sick. But what an awful thing, at Christmas.”

  “Is Dad sick?”

  “He can’t even get out of bed. We have to rethink this whole thing, getting together when there are all these germs.”

  “That sounds a lot like banning babies from Christmas.”

  “I don’t think we should gather at all,” Yvette said. “Did you hear the coughing in church last night? Everyone in town must have it by now. I’m just so disgusted.”

  Abby came in wearing pajamas, and Jamie told her they had a draw: Bennett and Margot had both woken up sick.

  “Oh, you kids,” Yvette said. “How could you bet on that?”

  “Can I pick Yvette?”

  “Daniel!”

  The doorbell rang and Saffron came in, wearing tight velvet jeans, a hood trimmed with white fur, and the baby in a sling. Jamie wondered what business a creature like Saffron had getting married and becoming a mother. She seemed to be dressing to show off the breasts that had come with the baby. There had been one moment alone in the hallway when she had thanked him for inviting her and kissed his cheek in a lingering way, the new breasts in a sweater brushing his chest, but then T.J. had come running through and she had pulled away and laughed. Now she sat down next to him with the baby in its rig.

  “How’s Patient Zero?” he asked.

  “He’s sleeping,” she said. “Thank God.”

  “These terrible kids are betting on who gets sick next,” Yvette said. “Danny picked me. Isn’t that awful?”

  “It’s all my fault,” Saffron said.

  “It’s nobody’s fault. I’m going to take this to Teddy, and then we can get Christmas started.” She left with a glass of orange juice.

  “I feel so terrible,” Saffron said.

  “You’ve been officially absolved by my mom,” Jamie said. “And she was blessed by the Pope.”

  “She was not,” Abby said.

  “In your book she was.”

  “God, those eggs smell good,” Saffron said. “They have these horribly early breakfasts at the B-and-B. Who eats breakfast before eight-thirty?”

  “Anyone with a job, I think,” Jamie said. “Or a child.”

  “My baby sleeps in.”

  “Lucky you.”

  Yvette came back from the bedroom. “Jamie, honey? I want you to get dressed and take your father to Dr. Harris.”

  “It’s Christmas Day,” he said. “Dr. Harris is at home.”

  “To the emergency room, then,” she said. “It’s not an emergency”—this was said to the whole room—“I just want to get him looked at.”

  “I’m dressed,” Saffron said. “I can go.”

  “No, you stay here. The baby shouldn’t be on the road.”

  “I’m well,” Clarissa said. “I’ll take Dad.”

  “Jamie, go, ” Yvette said.

  Jamie dressed quickly and caught up to his father, who was walking with Yvette’s help to the front door.

  “I’m all right,” Teddy said. “A little tight in the chest, that’s all.”

  Jamie threw food wrappers and music from the front seat of his car to the back, then tried to help his father get in.

  “I’m all right !” Teddy said, impatient now. “Let me do it myself!”

  But once they started driving toward the hospital, Teddy fell silent, as if consumed by the task of breathing. Jamie listened to his father wheeze. It sounded like there wasn’t any room in Teddy’s lungs.

  “You all right, Dad?”

  “I’m just fine,” Teddy managed, between breaths.

  In the emergency room, the nurse put Teddy in a wheelchair and wheeled him down a hallway while Jamie filled out information on a clipboard at the front. He hunted through Teddy’s wallet for the insurance information and found photographs: one of the young and beautiful Yvette, smiling over her shoulder, and one each of Jamie and Margot and Clarissa as kids. The photos were well handled, worn at the edges, and loose in the wallet, and they weren’t ones Jamie recognized. Margot was sweetly demure in hers. Clarissa had a mischievous smile, like she was sharing a secret with the photographer. Jamie had a happy, oblivious grin.

  Jamie tried to remember being so uncomplicatedly happy and couldn’t. He guessed that by the following year his expression in pictures had started to darken and become recognizably him. He told himself that you wouldn’t want to keep that oblivious grin through your whole life; it wasn’t an adult expression. They would put you in a home if you looked like that. But he wished he had held on to it a little longer. Margot would say he had kept his childhood intact all his life, but he hadn’t. It was there in the picture, unrecoverable.

  “When you’re done with that form, you can fill out this one,” the receptionist said, and she handed Jamie another clipboard.

  Jamie put the photographs away and started to fill in the names and numbers that would call up, for the receptionists and adjusters and actuaries, his father’s life.

  80

  TEDDY WOKE WITH the claustrophobic feeling of being attached to things—tubes in his nose and an IV in his arm—to hear his wife talking. He listened with his eyes closed, to save his energy for answering, and then he realized Yvette was talking not to him but to God.

  “He isn’t ready yet,” she was saying softly. “You know I’ll let him go when he’s ready, and I’ll follow him. I’m not afraid. But he has things to do here.”

  Teddy thought automatically about the garage door opener that worked only sometimes, and the peeling wallpaper in the bathroom. There was something else he couldn’t remember—not the dishwasher, he’d just replaced the dishwasher. Was it a porch light?

  “He has further to go with his children,” Yvette said.

  Oh, that, Teddy thought.

  “He can’t leave now, when they’re just coming back to us—Margot from that man, and Clarissa from that woman, and Jamie from his marriage. They’ve had such dark times, and they feel they’ve disappointed him, and that he disapproves, but they’re coming back. He needs to acknowledge it and accept them, or they’ll always feel incomplete.”

  Teddy opened his eyes now, to show her he was awake, but she was looking down at her lap. He couldn’t believe that she had known about Clarissa’s girlfriend and hadn’t told him. How could she not have told him? What else hadn’t she said?

  “I know people go when they aren’t ready all the time,” Yvette went on. “But let him finish here. When it’s my turn, I promise to go without an argument. Let him stay.”

  Teddy wasn’t sure he could get the air in his lungs to speak. “Yvette,” he said weakly. “I’m still here. Talk to me .”

  She opened her eyes and looked surprised. “You were sleeping,” she said.

  “I’m not now,” he said. “Talk to me.”

  “You aren’t supposed to go yet,” she said. The anger in her voice gave way to tears almost as soon as she said it. “That wasn’t the deal. You’re supposed to stay.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “You can’t!” she said.
“You’d better not.”

  His lungs were too tired for him to promise again.

  “I’ve just been sitting here worrying about you,” she said, “and I can’t do anything.”

  He didn’t know how to make her stop worrying, with tubes coming out of him, and he didn’t have the energy to talk, so he said, “Sing.” He hoped it would distract her.

  Yvette wiped her eyes with a tissue, and blew her nose, and frowned.

  “Please,” he said.

  So she started to sing one of her French songs, a war song from his childhood:

  Au jardin de mon père

  Les lauriers son fleuris

  Tous les oiseaux du monde

  Vont y faire leurs nids.

  Yvette stopped, and she seemed calmer already. She said, “My father’s brother, who was a soldier, used to sing it for my sister and me in Canada. He was the one with shrapnel in his back. In my father’s garden, the laurels are flowering, and all the birds of the world make their nests .” She thought for a second, hummed, and shook her head. “I can’t remember the next verse. It’s something about the white dove singing for the girls without husbands. But not for me, because I have a lovely one: Car j’en ai-t-un joli . And then the bird asks, But where is your husband?

  Il n’est pas dans la danse

  Il est bien loin d’ici

  Dites-nous donc, la belle,

  Où donc est vot’ mari?

  She sang the chorus, which he knew, and then she remembered the next verse:

  Il est dans la Hollande

  Les Hollandais l’ont pris.

  Que donneriez-vous, belle,

  Pour qu’on vous le rendît?

  “The Dutch have taken him, what would you give for them to send him back?”she translated. “And the girl, the wife, says,

  Je donnerai Versailles,

  Paris et Saint-Denis,

  Les tours de Notre-Dame

  Et l’clocher d’mon pays.

  “I would give Versailles and Paris,”she said, although he had understood, “and the towers of Notre-Dame, and the church tower of my own little town.”