by Mandy Berman
She sipped her fresh glass of wine and began to ask Rebecca more questions about herself.
* * *
—
Later, Fiona caught Liam while en route to the bathroom. He was walking back to his bedroom, fresh out of the shower with a towel around his waist.
“Cover it up,” she said, faux-shielding her eyes.
“Har har,” he said, continuing to walk past her.
“Hey,” she said from the open doorway of the bathroom.
“Yeah?”
“What’s up with you and Ed?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean…” She lowered her voice now. “Do you not like him? You seemed weird in the living room.”
“I never said I didn’t like him.”
“I know you didn’t say it.”
“I’m tired,” Liam said.
Her brother, who liked nearly everyone, worried her. What if Ed wasn’t as good as he seemed?
“Did he do something?”
“What?” Liam said. “No. God, no.”
“I don’t understand, then.”
Liam looked down the hallway to the closed door of their mother’s—once their parents’—bedroom.
“It’s just weird.”
“Yeah, it’s super fucking weird.”
“Right?”
“Yeah.”
“I keep feeling like,” Liam whispered, “I hear her talking in a sweet voice to a man, I assume it’s gonna be Dad. Our whole life there was one dad figure. How do you recalibrate that? Seeing Mom with someone else?”
“I haven’t figured it out, either,” Fiona said. “But he seems to make her happy. And that makes our lives easier.” She was surprised by her own one-eighty on Ed, though she suspected that Liam’s hesitancy about him made her more enthusiastic, as if she felt the need to make up for it. When she had thought that Liam was okay with Ed, she’d felt more freedom to disparage him. She couldn’t quite handle the idea of her mother being entirely alone in her happiness.
“Yeah,” he said, looking down at his bare feet. If he were done with the conversation, he would have left by now.
“What?” Fiona said.
“I need to tell you something,” he said.
“What?”
“Let me get dressed. I’ll come to your room in five?”
* * *
—
They sat at the foot of her bed. Her heart was racing, and she felt that hot claustrophobia that came back so often these days: the clammy hands and the tense neck and the feeling like her intestines were bunched into a tight wad.
He was in his pajamas now—a Yale T-shirt and sweatpants. His brown hair was cut so short these days, it was already almost dry. He put his hands on his knees to prepare to speak.
“I saw Dad,” he said.
“When?”
“A couple weeks ago. We had lunch in the city.”
“That bastard,” she said, without yet hearing why they had met or what they talked about or what he was doing with his life these days. She still felt so much anger toward him, and even the mention of his existence, in anything other than vague terms, catapulted her into a state of rage.
“That bastard is still paying your college tuition,” Liam said.
“As he should.”
“I’m feeling a little…”
“What?”
“Conflicted.”
“What’s there to be conflicted about?” Fiona said. “Why did you meet with him?”
“He asked me to,” Liam said.
“And you just…said yes?”
“Not right away, but…eventually, yeah. He’s our dad.”
“So what?”
“So he can still bankroll your existence, but you don’t even feel the need or responsibility to talk to him anymore? To give him a shot?”
“It’s not a two-way street, Liam.”
“Fine, we don’t, technically, owe him anything. I wanted to see him. Is that okay?” He said this last part sarcastically.
“Well, how is he?”
“He’s fine,” Liam said. “He’s living in a high-rise on the Upper East Side.”
“Oh, well, I’m glad he can enjoy his bachelordom now that he’s in the city.”
“He’s in a relationship, actually.”
“I don’t want to hear any more.” Fiona waved a hand, trying to keep Liam from sharing new information. “You shouldn’t have told me this.”
“I’m going to keep seeing him,” Liam said.
“He cheated on Mom! He went back to work two weeks after Helen died! Does all of that not tell you anything about the kind of man he is?”
“It’s complicated. Marriages are complicated. Mom wasn’t blameless.”
“Oh, good, now he has you sipping the Kool-Aid.”
Liam shook his head. “Don’t you ever…?” he said.
“Don’t I ever what?”
“He lost her, too.”
“You should go to bed,” Fiona said, standing up. “It’s been a long day.”
“You’re really going to kick me out of your room in the middle of this conversation?”
She crossed her arms over her chest. She was acting like a child, and she knew it, but this felt like one issue that could not be touched.
“I really don’t see what else there is to say.”
Liam left her room, and a few minutes later, while in her own bed, she heard cooing on the opposite side of the wall that she shared with him. Rebecca was repeating something over and over to Liam in the same soothing tone, like an incantation. It was so calming that Fiona herself fell asleep to it.
* * *
—
When she awoke on Thanksgiving morning, Fiona went for a run, as she’d promised herself she would. The morning was cold but not unbearably so, and by the time she warmed up, she was reminded of why she liked running in this weather: the way it opened up her sinuses, made her breathing so clear and easy; the way it made her lungs feel, large and expansive; the way it turned her cheeks and fingertips cold and red, and how satisfying it was, when she was done, to walk inside and warm them again. Back in the house, she took off her sneakers and skipped up the steps to the upstairs shower but found, to her confusion, the door to Helen’s bedroom open.
They kept that door closed at all times. Or at least they had, all the times that Fiona had been home. The matter was never discussed, but Fiona assumed there was nothing to be gained by keeping the door open. It was too awful to consider redoing the room, finally getting rid of Helen’s stuff, and just as awful to leave it all there on display. So until Amy or one of the kids tackled the issue of the bedroom, it would, decidedly, stay closed.
Perhaps Amy had been going in to check on things, Fiona thought. Perhaps Amy had made a habit of spending time in there by herself. Perhaps, even, Liam was looking for something—a book or an old photo or another item of nostalgia.
Of course, neither of them would be inside. The Larkins stepped around their grief, not through it.
Fiona peeked into the bedroom, still maintained exactly as it had been, and found, instead, Rebecca, holding and staring at a picture of Helen, ten years old. It was one of Fiona’s favorite pictures of her sister. It had been taken after a riding competition; Helen had just won some ribbon or other for jumping. (She was always winning ribbons; Fiona had lost track of them.) In the photo, she was still wearing her black velvet helmet, the strap undone, her yellow curls falling down to her shoulders. She was not looking at the camera but kissing the nose of her horse, Josie. Helen had been a gifted rider—much more so than Fiona—and she loved that horse, Josie, probably more than she loved Fiona. After Helen died, they sold Josie to their summer camp, where she now serviced however many hundreds of keen little girls were learning to ri
de. Josie would spend the rest of her days plodding in circles in a beginner’s arena, around and around.
“Hi?” Fiona said.
Rebecca jumped backward, knocking over a row of miniature horse figurines on the bookshelf. She righted them and then put a hand over her heart.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You scared me.” Fiona delighted in seeing the seemingly perfect young woman from the night before now caught in an awkward moment.
“Sorry,” Fiona said. “I didn’t know who was in here.”
Rebecca was still quite beautiful, and she recovered instantly from the awkwardness. She was wearing leggings and one of Liam’s T-shirts. Even though she had just woken up, her skin was clear and even, her dark hair was loose and wild, and her features could barely have been enhanced by the use of makeup. In fact, Fiona realized, she hadn’t been wearing any makeup the night before, either. Her face had looked exactly the same as it did now. Rebecca was just that pretty.
“No, I’m sorry,” Rebecca said. “This was very out of bounds.”
“It’s okay.”
“I was on my way to the bathroom and I got nosy. Incredibly so. I’ll go.”
“It’s really okay. I don’t mind.”
Fiona glanced down the hallway; all the other bedroom doors were closed. It was only the two of them awake. “It’s weird, isn’t it,” she said, looking around this room for the first time in two years: at all the riding ribbons pinned on the walls, and the trophies lining the bookshelf. A few photographs of Helen’s friends, from camp and from school, pinned to a corkboard: middle-school-aged girls looking silly, their tongues stuck out, or pouting, lips pursed, in an attempt to look mature. One poster of the cast of High School Musical. The room was a reliquary, an untouched exhibit of the life of a thirteen-year-old girl from suburbia in the year 2006. How long before the posters would have changed, the ribbons been taken down, after Helen had outgrown them and they had become vestiges of immature interests? How long before the photographs of old friends would have been replaced with new ones?
“What is?”
“That we keep the door closed.”
“Well,” Rebecca said. “Maybe. Nothing about this situation is exactly normal. It’s not like there’s a manual.”
“I think there is?” Fiona said. “In a therapist’s office, somewhere.”
Rebecca let out a sympathetic smile. “I’m an only child,” she said, “so when Liam talks to me about her, I think there’s a part of me that might never really understand. I thought seeing her room might help. It’s stupid, now that I say it out loud.”
Fiona swallowed. “Liam talks to you about her?”
Rebecca nodded.
“And did it?”
“Huh?”
“Seeing her room? Did it help?”
Rebecca looked around, and her gaze landed on a framed photo of the five Larkins, from a ski vacation many years ago, all five of them wearing snowsuits in various neon colors, lined up on top of a mountain, goggles resting on their foreheads. The only picture of the five of them left on display in the whole house. Fiona remembered hating that day, because she had been fourteen and Helen eight, and Helen had already proved to be a better skier than she was. Fiona remembered sulking in the lodge after lunch, after the picture had been taken, not wanting to go back to the slopes, and wishing that someone in her family would ask her what was the matter. But when she said she didn’t feel like skiing anymore, her father had simply said, “Suit yourself,” and the four of them went back out there, an even foursome, energized and pink-cheeked, the picture of a healthy American family.
“I get why you keep the door closed,” Rebecca said by way of response. Then they left the room together, shutting it away behind them.
10.
LIV’S HOUSE WAS decked out for Thanksgiving, as it was for every holiday. The long dining table was impeccably set, with the fine crystal and a tasteful array of tall, glowing candles, pinecones, fresh clementines, and dried eucalyptus leaves, arranged fastidiously by one of the housekeepers. A fire was going in the parlor, and above the mantel was a giant arrangement of branches with orange flowers blooming from them. These branches were on every surface in the house, in vases so tall they obstructed mirrors and furniture: not only in the parlor, dining room, and kitchen, but also in the library, in the bathrooms, and on the dresser and nightstand in Liv’s bedroom, where they had greeted her upon her arrival earlier today.
When she was very young, Liv never noticed how the flower arrangements changed with every holiday. All of the other houses in McLean looked like hers: sprawling colonials of at least three levels with sloping, manicured lawns out front; in-ground pools and spacious yards out back; tasteful hedging surrounding it all for privacy. All of her classmates in school also had parents who were high-powered lobbyists—or diplomats, or senators, or cabinet members. It was only when she began to read novels that she fully understood the scope of the many worlds outside of her own, learned that most people’s parents did not have jobs that determined, more or less, the trajectory of the free world. She read Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, Little House on the Prairie. She learned about class from the March family, learned that girls like Meg and Jo had to have jobs of their own to support their family, and still they did not have enough money for gowns as nice as the ones that the other girls at the ball had.
And so, though Liv understood by age ten or so that her life was privileged—in comparison not only with the lives she read about but also with the handful of scholarship students from the city who attended her middle school—she did not become particularly grateful for what she had. In comparison with almost everyone she knew, it was the status quo. It was the world she lived in and enjoyed and the world in which she wanted to stay. The thought of losing it, or of not having it at all, seemed preposterous. Her parents had also grown up like this—her father over in Arlington, her mother in Tokyo. Maintaining a certain quality of life was important to the Langleys, because adjusting to a, well, lower-quality life was really not an option.
Nonetheless, Liv felt a certain amount of nervousness when bringing people home with her. In middle school and high school, she went to friends’ houses more often than they came to hers, mostly because she understood that her family was different. The dynamic in her house was not like that of her friends’, the moms there to welcome them home from school with snacks at 3 P.M.; her mother was certainly a warm presence, but by the time Liv was in middle school, Kimiko had gone back to work at the embassy full-time. And when Liv’s parents did come home in the evenings, the atmosphere was unhappy, antagonistic. Sometimes it was silent, or downright awkward. Many nights, her father didn’t even make it in time for dinner. Liv had often felt, as a child and as a teenager, that her role was that of conversational lubricant, common interest, mediator, glue. The focus was perpetually on her, and she often sensed that if she ever made a misstep, if she ever strayed from the path they’d set out for her, she would single-handedly break her family in half.
This was the first time she was bringing a boyfriend home since high school, and those visits had been perfunctory and short—Cyrus picking Liv up and taking her elsewhere, Liv always certain to be ready to go upon his arrival. Her parents were dying to meet Brandon, Kimiko had said over the phone (the “we,” Liv knew, referred to her mother and not to her father, Robert), and Brandon was also coincidentally from the D.C. area; certainly it wouldn’t be too much trouble for him to come over for Thanksgiving dinner? They’d be sure to have the meal late enough in the evening so that he could also eat with his family in the afternoon, as was traditional for them.
Liv wasn’t even going to tell Brandon that he was invited, but he’d messed up her plan by inviting her to eat with his family in the afternoon, and there was no way she’d be able to explain that to her parents without reciprocating the invitation. So they did both meals: first eating with Bran
don’s entire boisterous extended family in Bethesda—thirty-five people, catered, babies and great-grandparents and everyone in between—and then driving back over to McLean for cocktails and dinner, only the four of them; it was bound to be a humorless evening in comparison.
Brandon put on a suit jacket and a tie for dinner with the Langleys, which Liv knew her father would appreciate. In their short drive over to her house, she was quiet.
“You recovering from all that mayhem?” Brandon asked. “I know they can be a lot.”
In truth, she’d loved how loud and chaotic it was; it was so different from what she was used to, being the center of attention, the one point of accord between her two discordant parents.
“I liked it,” she said. “The silence at my house is going to be deafening in comparison.”
“Well, good,” he said, squeezing her leg as he kept one hand on the steering wheel. “Quiet sounds good.”
When they pulled into the driveway, she could tell that Brandon, whose family was upper-middle-class and entirely comfortable, was still impressed by the Langleys’ house, which embarrassed her.
Kimiko greeted Brandon with a hug, and Robert with a handshake. Robert held a crystal glass of scotch in his other hand. It was five P.M., a reasonable time to start drinking. Liv hoped this wasn’t one of those days he’d started early.
The first thing Robert asked Brandon was if he would like a drink. They walked over to the bar cart, Robert’s crystal decanters filled with brown liquids of various shades. He described what was in each one to Brandon, and Brandon listened attentively. Brandon said he would have whatever Robert was having, and Robert poured him a generous helping into a crystal glass that matched his own. He refilled his glass, too, while he was at it, even though it didn’t look like he needed a refill.
“Dad, can I have a little?” Liv asked.