The Imperfects

by Amy Meyerson

  She feels Beck move beside her, stepping toward the tombstone to place a small round rock on its top. It’s been stripped of its white cloth. Beneath a Star of David, beneath Helen’s name, her date of birth and death, the gravestone reads:

  Beloved Grandmother, Mother, and Daughter

  One of the Fifty Children

  Survivor

  As Beck steps away from the grave, she reaches into her coat pocket and fingers the pointed leaves of Helen’s brooch. It seems vital that the brooch is here to say goodbye to Helen, too.

  Deborah is the next to leave a rock on Helen’s headstone. Resting her hand on the curve of stone, she shuts her eyes and says goodbye to her mother. The granite is cool against her skin, but it sends a warm wave of energy through her body. It’s Helen’s energy, grounded and sensible. Dependable. Nothing like the violence she’d felt when she held the Florentine Diamond. Viktor was right; Helen had done everything she could not to let Joseph Spiegel come between them. Beside Survivor on the gravestone, Deborah wishes she’d thought to add Protector.

  The children and Ashley place their stones beside Deborah’s until there are five small stones lining the top. Tyler is the first to cry, and Lydia hugs her brother. Deborah embraces them both, her cheeks wet with tears, and she reaches for Ashley and Beck to join them. They stand there graveside, sobbing, for Helen, for the end of a year of mourning, for the engraving that memorializes Helen’s past, for the five stones resting on top of the headstone, for the sixth stone that should be there, too.

  * * *

  Jake tells himself that he was too busy to fly east for Helen’s unveiling. Between Helen Jr., notes on his script, shifts at the bar, he simply can’t get away. It’s just a gravestone. It will still be there whenever he wants to visit Helen. He tells this to Ashley, to Kristi, too. They both say they understand but warn that it’s a decision he can’t take back.

  By April, when Viktor’s case is still open but no longer active, Jake has enough money saved for a deposit on a studio in Kristi’s building. He furnishes it with a bed and nightstand, a small table, not even a television. Some might find it depressing, the barrenness of the space, but Jake doesn’t want to get comfortable here.

  His apartment is out of range for a baby monitor, so Kristi texts him whenever Helen Jr. wakes up. He keeps waiting for her to offer him the couch, but the living room is Helen Jr.’s—if he sleeps there, he will wake her. So he retreats to his studio to sleep. He stays in Kristi’s apartment all day while Kristi is at work, finishing edits when Helen rests, taking her to the park and the reservoir when she needs a distraction. It’s a routine, a family life. Not exactly the one he wants, but the one he accepts.

  When he and Kristi’s days off align, they bring Helen Jr. to the beach, to Huntington Gardens where she marvels at the flora from all over the world. In Santa Monica, they sit beneath an umbrella that Jake has hammered into the sand. Jake wipes the sand from Helen Jr.’s hand before she can shovel it into her mouth. It becomes a game, and she repeatedly tries to thwart Jake, laughing as he says, “No. Helen, no.”

  Kristi looks up and smiles at them before returning to Jake’s pages. It’s uncomfortable, pretending not to watch her read. Kristi is a slow reader. Methodical. It takes her more than a minute to read each page, even though it’s a script, not a novel, the bulk of the page blank space. He can’t watch anymore so he lifts Helen and charges into the ocean. She laughs as waves hit her calves. It’s a perfect moment until salt water splashes in her eyes and she starts to cry. She wails and rubs her eyes, the telltale sign that she’s crashing. Jake carries her, thrashing and screaming, back to the umbrella.

  “Kris, we should get going,” he says, trying to keep hold of Helen Jr. as she writhes in his arms. The sounds of her cries wreck him, even though he knows she’s not in pain.

  Kristi looks up at him with a strange mix of pride and longing. She rests the last page of the script on the pile by her side. “It’s perfect.”

  That night, when they put Helen to bed, Kristi leads Jake into her bedroom.

  “You’re sure?” he asks.

  “Don’t ruin it,” she says. It’s been eight months since he’s kissed her. She opens her mouth and he slips his tongue between her teeth. Right away, it becomes wondrously familiar.

  While Jake keeps his apartment, two floors down, he spends his nights in Kristi’s bed, their bed. If Helen Jr. notices the change, nothing in her behavior conveys it. She’s the same happy child whose cry continues to break her father even when he knows it’s just tiredness or hunger.

  In June, when they have all begun to lose count of how many months it’s been since the diamond has disappeared, Jake sells his script. It isn’t a life-altering amount of money. It isn’t $550,000. But it’s enough for a deposit on a two-bedroom apartment in Frogtown.

  He arrives at Kristi’s with a bottle of champagne and the four ring boxes he bought when he got home from Vienna. So much has changed since last September when the Millers returned victoriously from the City of Dreams. Briefly, it seemed so promising, their lives flush with money, their relationships better than ever, but he didn’t have any of the things then that he has now.

  “Babe,” he calls when he enters the apartment, warm from the kitchen where Kristi is cooking her mother’s eggplant recipe. She barrels into the living room, holding Helen Jr. against one hip. Helen Jr. has recently started to crawl, and she fights for her freedom.

  Kristi notices the champagne. “So, it’s official?”

  “They want to start shooting in the fall.”

  Kristi lets Helen Jr. free and runs over to Jake, embracing him.

  “It could still go south,” Jake reminds her to prevent her from getting her hopes up. That’s Hollywood—a project too big to fail one minute, abandoned the next.

  “Shh,” Kristi says, pulling him toward her.

  The boxes bulge in his pockets, creating awkward space between them. He takes them out, waiting for her to say, Oh, Jake, and start to cry, but she appears as wary of those boxes as she was the last time he tried to give them to her.

  “Kris—” Jake begins.

  “Don’t.” She forces him to meet her eye. “We’re together. You, me, Helen. We’re in this, but I can’t marry you, not while you still aren’t speaking to your family.”

  “I talked to Ashley and the kids yesterday,” he protests, even though he knows this isn’t what she means. “I can’t, Kris. I’m afraid to let them into our lives, into Helen Jr.’s life. They’re destined to disappoint.”

  “I can’t tell you what to do. If we marry, I want it to be a merging of our families. I don’t want to start off with any more people missing.” Jake knows she means her mother’s family, Helen’s. “And that script you wrote, the one we’re celebrating? It belongs to them, too. You should let them share it with you.”

  Kristi takes the champagne bottle and disappears into the kitchen, leaving him standing alone with the four ring boxes. He returns them to his pockets, feels a gentle tugging at his leg, and sees his daughter trying to stand against him. She’s not strong enough yet, not that that diminishes her effort. Jake bends down and lifts her into the air.

  In the kitchen, a cork pops and Kristi returns with the champagne. They clink glasses, but the moment isn’t as celebratory as he wants it to be. He knows Kristi is right about the script, the story it bears. Part of him wants to share it with Beck, to have her be proud of him. In the eight months since she ran out of the vault, she hasn’t contacted him. Ashley keeps reminding him that he needs to be the bigger person. Something holds him back, though. Stubbornness, perhaps, or the lingering anger over the $550,000, which still rattles him at random moments. It isn’t the money exactly. He wants to be a bigger person—he just doesn’t know how.

  Twenty-One

  A year and a half later

  When Jake learns that his new film will premiere at S
undance, he only invites Ashley. He hasn’t seen Beck or Deborah since the diamond’s disappearance two years ago. Kristi has stayed true to her promise not to marry him so long as he remains estranged from the Millers. Even this is not enough to compel him to let his mother and sister back into his life, into Helen Jr.’s life. Besides, Jake and Kristi are living as partners, as mother and father to their daughter. It’s easy for him to forget that their union isn’t legally recognized. He still thinks of Beck at times—whenever he hears a Nirvana song on the oldies station or sees a bird tattoo that resembles the one on his sister’s forearm—but thinking about her is like poking a fading bruise. It doesn’t hurt unless he prods it, and eventually the pain becomes more familiar than the injury itself.

  As he’s packing for the weekend in Park City, his mind drifts to Helen. When he was writing his script, he didn’t have to miss her. She was with him while he crafted her dialogue, while he experienced the moments of her life previously unavailable to him. While he got to know Flora, too. Leib. Martin. Now that he has finished the film, he feels her absence more acutely than he has in the years since she’s been gone. He only could have written this movie after she died, but he can’t imagine watching it without her now. It reminds him of My Summer of Women, when she’d declined his invitation to the premiere, nudging him to invite Deborah in her place. Despite the fraught relationship she had with Deborah, Helen had wanted them to be family, all of them. Suddenly, it doesn’t seem right, honoring Helen while forsaking the Millers.

  * * *

  Beck is in her second week of the semester when she receives the letter from Jake. In the fall, she’d enrolled in a master’s program for school counseling. Unlike her law school application, where she’d omitted her expulsion, she shaped her personal essay around her misdeeds in high school, explaining how they compelled her to want to help others. In class, with her peers, she’s open about Mr. O’Neal. Together, they plot what they would do as counselors if a similar situation arose.

  Beck is cooking dinner when the deliveryman knocks on the door of Edgehill Road. Right away, she recognizes Jake’s nearly illegible handwriting on the envelope. It’s been the same since high school, slanted, almost hieroglyphic. He’d trained himself to write this way, thinking it looked edgy, then had never been able to simplify his script. When she was in college, Beck had gotten Jake to transcribe a Simone de Beauvoir quote in his unique hand, then had it inked onto her lower back. As she takes the envelope from the deliveryman she unconsciously rubs her right side where her brother is permanently branded onto her.

  The envelope is addressed to her and her mother. A letter, she assumes, but whether it’s to make amends or to fortify their estrangement, she can’t begin to guess. She wonders whether this is what it felt like for Jake, those years after My Summer of Women premiered when he was waiting for her to forgive him. Although she’s dying to open it, she rests it on the dining table, so she and Deborah can look at it together when her mother returns from the flower shop.

  Unsurprisingly, Deborah’s flower business never took off, not simply because she decided to grow flowers people other than her grandson associated with weeds. She simply didn’t have enough output. The weather was too erratic, the summer too hot, the competition from established florists too steep. Despite her lack of business prowess, she has an eye, a knack for putting together the perfect bouquet. Recognizing her talent, a local florist offered her a job as an arranger. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s consistent, and she likes the work. For the first time in as long as she can remember, she isn’t looking for the next idea. Sometimes, she thinks about the diamond. Mostly, she misses Viktor. Every Monday, his seeds arrive like clockwork. She plants them, mourns the death of each seed that doesn’t sprout like she’s losing Viktor all over again, but the packages keep coming, reminding her that someday he might return, too.

  By seven, when her mother walks in the door, Beck has set the table and dished out two bowls of vegetable chili for their dinner. While her mother has not turned her vegan, Beck has agreed to keep all meat and dairy out of the house. They both pretend it’s to prevent contaminating Deborah’s daiya cheese with the cooties of Swiss or Muenster. Really, it’s so Deborah doesn’t have to test her willpower. She feels better about herself when she follows her vegan diet, so Beck supports her mother, however much she wishes she could slip a little beef into their chili.

  “What’s this?” Deborah shouts as she walks into the dining room. From the kitchen, Beck hears her mother tear open the envelope. In the past, Beck would have screamed at her mother for opening it without asking Beck first, especially since Beck has been resisting the urge to read Jake’s letter for the last hour. Today, she finds it funny. Typical Deborah. There’s something comforting in her predictability.

  “Beck,” she shouts, and Beck runs into the dining room. Deborah holds up a reservation for two plane tickets. “Guess who’s going to Sundance?”

  Beck takes the envelope from her mother and unearths a short note from Jake: I hope you’ll come.

  “That’s it?” Deborah asks. “That’s all he has to say to us?”

  “It’s plenty,” Beck insists.

  * * *

  “I don’t understand why I can’t go, too.” Lydia pouts, leaning against the doorframe as she watches her mother pack. “Jake invited me, you know. It’s not fair that you just said no.”

  Lydia is a teenager now and every inch of her acts the part. Toward Ashley at least. Ryan is insulated from her attitude, her wrath, her scheming. After an early release for good time, he’s been home for eight months. In prison, he’d lost his middle-aged bloat and returned to his family taut, something of a stranger. He’s quieter now, not exactly broken, but humbled. Rather, he’s become more of the man Ashley had met in her early twenties, always complimenting her and making small gestures like having a glass of wine waiting when she walks in the door or folding her eye mask on her nightstand so she’s able find it when she’s ready for bed. When he was away, almost every meal was takeout. Now that he’s returned, the kitchen is once again his domain. He’s expanded his cooking repertoire from the ham and baked fish his mom used to make to chicken Kiev, beef Stroganoff, goulash. Ashley and Ryan agree that this family arrangement works best for them, one where women work and men stay home, keeping themselves out of trouble.

  After Ashley staged the Whitmores’ house, it had sold in a weekend. Their agent asked her to stage two other houses, then offered her a position. Ashley didn’t explain to Georgina why she decided to turn down the job at Bartley’s. If Georgina were to find out what Ashley is doing instead, she’d tell their old friends, I offered her a real job. I feel sorry for her, I do, but thank God she didn’t take it. I mean, could you imagine? Tragic. Ashley’s life isn’t tragic. She has a job she loves, one on a schedule she sets around her family.

  For the first month after Ryan returned home, her children were stiff and overly polite with their father, not quite trusting that he was back. Quickly, they began requesting meals, and it became a game, seeing if their father could make baked Alaska, if he had the audacity to cook rabbit. He became a regular at their soccer tournaments and dance recitals. Ashley was relieved that her children weren’t embarrassed to have him on the sidelines and in the audience, cheering them on like any other proud father. Eventually, their acceptance gave her the courage to let him in, too.

  “We’ve been over this,” Ashley says to her daughter. “You and Ty are going to have a nice weekend with your father.”

  “All they ever want to do is watch James Bond movies.” Lydia holds her pointer finger to her temple and pretends to shoot. “It’s so boring.”

  There are several reasons Ashley needs to go to the premiere alone. First, there’s Ryan. She can’t bring Lydia and not bring Tyler, and Ryan can only exit the state with permission. She’s not ready to leave him alone for a weekend. Whether it’s because she doesn’t quite trust him or because she fe
els guilty, she isn’t sure.

  Second, there’s Ashley herself. While Ryan was away, she acted as a single parent. There were weekends where she and the kids drove down to Philadelphia, others where Deborah or Beck came to visit, but even when Deborah watched the kids so Ashley could have a glass of wine with a friend, she was constantly distracted, waiting for a call that the kitchen had caught on fire or that Tyler had broken his arm, doing some sort of séance with his grandmother. This is the first time she can get away in as long as she can remember.

  Finally, there’s the Millers. She doesn’t trust the four of them together again for the first time since they lost the diamond. Whatever’s been left unsaid, they need the freedom to say it, to be able to have a Miller-style blowout if the weekend calls for it. That can’t happen if Lydia and Tyler are with them.

  Ashley stares at her daughter from across the room. Lydia is wearing her uniform of black leggings and a hand-cut T-shirt that is about two inches shorter than Ashley would prefer. She simultaneously looks her age and so much older.

  “I need to go alone,” Ashley says as she places a camel V-neck sweater in her suitcase.

  “Whatever. Besides, it’s not like there’s anyone famous in Jake’s movie, anyway. And, like, half of it’s in German.” Walking away, she adds, “Also, that’s an old lady sweater. Not in a good way.”

  Ashley surveys the sweater before deciding her daughter is right. All the clothes in her bag are earth-toned as though she’s hoping that, if she dresses understatedly, the Millers will behave understatedly, too. As she reconsiders her wardrobe, she realizes she’s more than a little nervous about this weekend.

  * * *

  Again, the Miller women meet in Salt Lake City, where a driver takes them to that small, usually quiet town in the mountains. This time, they’re familiar with the dress code—boots and sweater jackets, simple makeup and hair. The Millers know a lot more about The Women’s Empire than they did My Summer of Women. They know it starts with Flora and ends with Helen, that the film is, as one critic wrote, “a heart-wrenching tale of one woman’s courage and the lasting impact it had on her daughter.” They know they are not a part of this movie, not directly, which makes them more connected to it than the previous film that had tried to capture their lives.