Field Notes on Love

by Jennifer E. Smith

  So if your name is Margaret Campbell and you’re interested in a bit of an adventure, please email me at HugoIsNotANutter@gmail.com with the answers to these three questions, and if there’s more than one entry, I’ll pick the grand-prize winner once I’ve read them:

  What’s your biggest dream?

  What’s your biggest fear?

  What’s the most important thing you’d bring with you on the train?

  Good luck, Margaret Campbells of the world—I’m counting on you!

  Cheers,

  Hugo W.

  They’re just about finished when they hear Mum calling them down for dinner. Out the bedroom window, a fog has settled over the garden, the edges laced with gold as the sun sets. Hugo presses his laptop shut, but Alfie reaches out and opens it again.

  “You didn’t post it.”

  Hugo’s eyes flick back to the glowing screen. “I’ll do it after dinner.”

  “This isn’t a homework assignment,” George teases him. “You don’t have to proof it a thousand times.”

  “I know. I—”

  Alfie frowns. “He’s pulling a Hugo.”

  “I’m not…pulling a Hugo. I just need to think it through a bit more.”

  George nods sagely. “That’s the very definition of pulling a Hugo.”

  “Listen,” Alfie says, standing up, “you should know I think this idea is completely mad….”

  Hugo waits for him to continue. “And?”

  “And nothing. That’s it. I think this idea is completely mad.” Alfie grins as he walks to the door. “Which is exactly why you should do it.”

  When his brothers are gone, Hugo takes one last look at the post, letting his finger hover over the button that would send it out into the world. But he can’t bring himself to press it. What if nobody writes back? Or what if they do? What if he accidentally picks a serial killer? Or, worse, someone who talks a lot? What if his Margaret sees it? Or what if his parents find out?

  Earlier, after they all scattered for the afternoon, Isla sent a message to their group text asking who should break the news about Margaret to Mum and Dad. Assuming Hugo doesn’t want to, she added, which was a fairly safe assumption. He’d been with Margaret long enough that she became a regular fixture around the Wilkinson house, and Hugo can’t imagine telling his parents, who adore her. In fact, they like her so much he half suspects they’ll be cross with him for letting the breakup happen at all.

  Anyone but Alfie, he’d written back, half joking, and it had been Isla and George—the two most reliable ones—who did the job in the end. But now, when Hugo walks into the kitchen and is greeted by the smell of chicken curry—his favorite—and a sympathetic look from Mum, he wonders if he should’ve picked Alfie after all. If anyone could’ve figured out how to make this whole thing seem like a laugh, it would’ve been him, and then maybe they could’ve skipped straight over this part.

  “How are you doing, darling?” Mum asks, standing on her tiptoes to give him a kiss on the cheek. She’s almost a foot shorter than any of her children, a diminutive woman with pale skin and flyaway hair who might seem a bit scatty if you didn’t notice the determination around the edges of her mouth. When his parents found out they were having sextuplets, she was the one who decided they needed to get creative, and from the moment the children were born, she started blogging about their lives. This eventually turned into a book on parenting, and then another, until there was a whole series about them. And though Hugo has always found the books entirely mortifying, they’ve also made it possible to keep a family of eight going on more than just his dad’s teacher salary.

  But to Hugo’s alarm, his mum—who is usually in constant motion, sweeping through their lives like someone in fast-forward—is now looking at him with watery eyes and an intense stare. It occurs to him that she might try to have a talk about the breakup right here in the middle of the busy kitchen, so he gives her shoulder an awkward pat and sidesteps away as quickly as he can.

  “I’m fine, Mum. Really.”

  She looks like she wants to say more, but the oven dings, so she just gives him one last look of concern before hurrying over to take out a loaf of garlic bread, another of Hugo’s favorites.

  When his dad walks in, he’s wearing his Tottenham Hotspurs shirt, which makes Hugo laugh, because Margaret is a huge Arsenal fan, and he knows this is for him. To his relief, Dad just winks at him as he grabs a stack of plates from the cupboard and begins to set the table.

  When everything is ready, Hugo slides into his usual seat between his sisters. Isla gives him a friendly shoulder bump, and Poppy makes a funny face at him.

  “So,” Dad says, running a hand over the top of his shiny black head. Hugo can’t remember what his father looked like before he was bald; it’s as much a part of him as his smile, which makes his whole face brighten and his dimples come out so that he seems like a kid again, like he could easily be just another Wilkinson brother. On the first day of primary school, Hugo watched all the other children fall under the spell of that smile like bowling pins dropping one by one, and it gave him such a burst of pride that he’d run up to hug his dad at the end of the day, the word pounding fiercely through his head: mine.

  “Give me the headlines,” Dad says now, as he does every night, and Hugo is quick to lower his eyes. But he doesn’t have to worry. Alfie chimes in about his rugby match, and Poppy has a story about her summer job at the cinema; Oscar made some progress on the football app he’s been coding, and Isla went to the park with her boyfriend, Rakesh. George, whose obsession with The Great British Baking Show led to a job at the local bakery, spent the day learning how to make a lemon meringue pie, and the biggest news is that he brought one home for dessert.

  “You didn’t drop a penny in there again, did you?” Poppy asks, and George gives her a withering look.

  “One time,” he says under his breath.

  “As it turns out,” Poppy says, “that’s all it takes….”

  Afterward, everyone automatically turns to Hugo. Then, just as quickly, they look away again, making a forced and not-altogether-believable effort to pretend it isn’t his turn, so that he’s spared reliving the newsiest thing of all.

  “Actually, I’ve got something too,” he says, and they all turn to him in surprise. “Despite, uh, recent developments, I’ve decided I’m still going on holiday to America.”

  To their credit, nobody asks for any particulars on the recent developments. Dad simply raises his eyebrows. Mum presses her lips together and sits forward in the chair. Alfie says, “Well done you!” and reaches across the table for a fist bump. Then, sensing the mood, he slowly pulls his arm back again.

  “Margaret wanted me to have the tickets,” Hugo continues, deciding to leave out the part about how they might be worthless to him. “And I’d like to go.”

  “With who?” Mum asks in a way that seems maybe a little too calm.

  Hugo avoids looking at any of his siblings. “By myself.”

  “That’s a big trip to do on your own,” Dad says, keeping his face neutral. “You’ve never even gone to London by yourself, much less to another country.”

  “I’m eighteen now,” Hugo points out. “And if we didn’t—if we weren’t—well, I could just as easily be going off to uni a lot farther away. I don’t see how this is any different.”

  “Honestly, it’s different because you can’t make it half a mile without losing your keys or your wallet,” Mum says, sounding both apologetic and exasperated. “I love you, Hugo, and you’re brilliant in a lot of ways, but you’ve also got your head in the clouds more often than not.”

  Hugo opens his mouth to protest, but he knows she’s not wrong. When he was little, she used to call him Paddington because he was always getting lost from the rest of the group.

  “I’m close to pinning a note to your jump
er,” she’d say, her face still white with worry after finding him under a clothes rack at Marks & Spencer’s or in a completely different aisle at the local Tesco. “Please look after this bear.”

  There’s a banner at the top of her blog, an illustration of the six of them lined up from oldest to youngest, a fairly ridiculous distinction, considering all that separates them is eight minutes. In it, they’re marching one by one toward the right side of the page. First George, who is carrying a fishing rod and strolling in that jaunty way of his. Then Alfie, a football tucked under his arm and a hint of a grin on his face. Poppy—always in motion—is skipping after them, and Oscar is whistling as he makes his way leisurely across the screen. Behind him, Isla’s head is bent over a book. And then, last of all, there’s Hugo, forever falling behind, perpetually trying to catch up with his brothers and sisters.

  He’s always hated that image.

  “Darling,” his mum is saying, her voice gentler now. “It’s okay to sleepwalk your way around here. But I’d worry too much about you being on your own in a place like New York or San Francisco. The truth is, you’re just not…”

  “Responsible,” Poppy offers.

  “Ready,” suggests Oscar.

  “Sensible,” says Isla, winking at him.

  “Good-looking,” Alfie says. “Sorry, what were we talking about?”

  Mum ignores them. “Can you not take one of this lot with you?”

  “That’s not the point,” Hugo says, feeling the heat rise in his cheeks. He doesn’t know how to explain about the extra ticket without giving away his plan to find another Margaret Campbell. The rest of them know this, of course. They’re in on it too. But what they don’t know is this: even if he could bring anyone he wanted, he still wouldn’t be all that keen to choose one of them. Because this isn’t about his siblings. For once, it’s about Hugo.

  “The point is to escape for a bit,” he says, sounding a little desperate. “To see what it’s like to be on my own. Especially since…”

  “You’ll all be at uni together,” Dad finishes, and Hugo looks up at him gratefully. He’s spent the whole summer trying not to say this out loud. He’s not the only one who could’ve been accepted elsewhere, but he was always the one with highest marks, and because of that, the others have given him a pass for being so miserable about their lack of options. But what he hasn’t said—what he’s barely even let himself think—is that it’s about them too.

  “It’s not that I’m not happy about it,” he says weakly, looking from Alfie to Oscar to George, who are sitting three in a row across the table, watching him with unreadable expressions. “You know how much I…well, you guys are my…” He turns to Poppy, whose mouth is twisted as she waits to hear what he has to say. On his other side, Isla is looking at her plate. “We’ve always been a team.”

  “And now you wish you could be transferred?” George asks. His voice is intentionally light, but Hugo can hear the stiffness in it. When they were little, Dad used to joke that George was like a sheepdog, always looking out for the rest of them, trying to keep the pack together. To him, the scholarship isn’t a duty; it’s a stroke of good luck. A chance to keep moving through the world as they always have: as a unit.

  Hugo shakes his head. “Not at all. It’s just…I can’t be the only one who’s wondered what it would be like to…” He doesn’t finish the thought, though he knows they understand what he’s saying. They always do. But if they agree with him—if they’re even the slightest bit sympathetic—none of them shows it. They all watch him impassively, the looks on their faces ranging from hurt to miffed to annoyed.

  Hugo swallows hard, feeling like he’s flailing. But then he thinks of what Alfie said earlier, about pulling a Hugo, and fights his way forward.

  “The thing is, I can’t imagine being anywhere without you all,” he says, which is true, the truest thing he can think to say. “But that’s why it feels like I have to try it. Even if it’s only for a week.”

  They’re all quiet for a moment, even Alfie, until—finally—Dad nods. “Then you have to go,” he says simply, and at the other end of the table, Mum lets out a sigh.

  “Just don’t lose your passport,” she says. “All things being equal, we’d prefer to get you back at the end.”

  At breakfast Nana is telling a story about a boy she dated when she was eighteen.

  “His father was a prince,” she says as she ladles some sugar into her coffee, “and his mother was a debutante. He was very handsome, and he took me to the most fabulous parties all over New York City. Once, we danced until five in the morning. Then he kissed me on a street corner just as it started to rain. It was unbelievably romantic.”

  “Mom,” Pop says, looking at her over his newspaper. “You didn’t date a prince.”

  She winks at Mae. “I didn’t say I did. I said his father was a prince. He decided to get out of the family business.”

  “Sounds like a swell guy, Mary,” Dad says with a completely straight face, and Nana throws a balled-up napkin in his direction. He catches it and throws it right back.

  “Enough, you two,” Pop says with a weary look. Ever since his mother came to live with them this spring, meals—at least on the days when she’s been up to joining them—have turned into sparring sessions, with Nana and Dad trading good-natured jabs across the table. They’re so eerily well matched that one day, while they went back and forth about the merits of green tea, Pop leaned over to Mae and whispered, “I think I married my mother.”

  Mae finishes her cereal and rinses the bowl in the sink. “Well,” she says, her voice light as she turns around again, “I’m off.”

  “What about the gallery?” Pop asks with a frown. She’s been working there a few days a week, packing boxes and answering the phone and talking to the more casual customers who come up from the city and act like they’re on the brink of buying a painting, before they move on to the antique shop next door and go through the same routine with an old lamp.

  “Yeah, I was hoping I could come in later.” Mae does her best not to meet any of their eyes. “It’s just that Garrett is leaving this afternoon, so…”

  To her surprise, they all look thrilled.

  “Well, why didn’t you say so,” Dad says with a grin. “Please. Go. We certainly wouldn’t want to keep him. Not even a minute longer than—”

  “Give him our best,” Pop says, ever the diplomat.

  “I think it’s lovely,” Nana says with the same dreamy look she gets when they watch old movies together. “A dramatic send-off.”

  “I’m not sure how dramatic it will be,” Mae tells her. “We always knew we were going our separate ways.”

  “That doesn’t make it any less romantic,” she says, beaming. She’s wearing a blue silk robe, and she looks tiny inside it, lost in the folds of fabric. All the chemo she went through this spring—a course so intensive she was in the hospital for over a month—seems to have shrunk her. But it worked, and now, whenever someone remarks on how much weight she’s lost, Nana only grins. “Must’ve been a whole lot of cancer in there.”

  It rattles Mae sometimes to hear her joke about it; she knows how close they were to losing her. When Mae was little, some of the kids at school used to ask whether she missed having a mother, and she was always quick to bite their heads off: “I have two dads,” she’d say, eyes blazing. “And I bet they’re both better than yours.”

  But that was only half the truth. The other half was that she had Nana.

  Every Sunday, they’d drive down to have brunch in her sunny brownstone on the Upper West Side. The place was cluttered with a lifetime of knickknacks, but whenever Mae asked about anything in particular, Nana’s answers were always short on details. “I’ve lived a big life on a small island,” she’d say. “You can’t expect me to remember every piece of flotsam and jetsam.”

  It wasn’t the thing
s you’d expect that made her so important to Mae. Her dads were perfectly capable of helping her pick out clothes or teaching her about the birds and the bees. It was more about drinking tea on Nana’s window seat and watching old black-and-white movies together and listening to stories about her past. It didn’t matter that they were sometimes hard to believe. (“There’s no way she had cocktails with JFK,” Pop would say, exasperated.) That wasn’t the point. The point was that she was there at all.

  It was like having an extra sun in their orbit, an inexhaustible source of warmth and energy. They were a constellation of their own, Mae and Pop and Dad, but knowing Nana was there on the edges made their little universe feel complete.

  Now Nana’s eyes are bright as she peers at Mae over a mug of coffee. “Go enjoy your date. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that a girl your age should be out having adventures.”

  “But not too many adventures,” Dad chimes in as Mae grabs her bag and heads for the door. She gives them a wave over her shoulder.

  “I’ll be back later.”

  “But not too much later,” he calls out behind her.

  Outside, she cuts through the neighbor’s yard and then winds her way through a few side streets until she reaches the edge of town. She can see Garrett waiting outside the cheese shop, busy with his phone. When he looks up, with his messy hair and thousand-watt smile, she feels a tug of regret that this will all be over soon. It’s not like the way her best friend, Priyanka, described it when her boyfriend, Alex, left for Duke last week: like their souls were being ripped apart. Mae’s summer with Garrett has been a mixture of arguing and making out, all of it passionate, but none of it having very much to do with souls.