After the Moment (8 page)

"Leigh, your being there is probably all Millie needs," Astra said. "You don't have to do anything extra."

He wasn't sure she was right, and asked how things were with her father and the new girlfriend.

"She's French," Astra said, after a pause. "She has two daughters."

"Are they nice?" Leigh asked, not sure that was the word he wanted to use.

"Nice enough," Astra said. "Look, I have to go."

Leigh sat on his bed for a while, holding his phone. He thought about Astra's cousin and knew that he'd have to leave Millie alone about her grief. But that didn't mean he'd have to leave her alone. Bubbles slept right outside the door of his sister's bedroom, and Leigh thought they should see if it was true that you couldn't teach an old dog new tricks. He'd do some research, and then he and Millie would have dog training sessions.

Finally, he put the phone down and lay on the floor, as if the ceiling held answers to questions he had yet to think of asking.

On the night of her actual birthday, Millie asked Maia to come to dinner. Leigh had seen her only once since his arrival, when she'd come by to ask if he would be willing to help her with Millie's birthday present. It had been a Sunday morning, so everyone was asleep except for Leigh and Bubbles, who'd run to greet Maia while she was still half a block away. Maia said she wanted to get Millie a gift certificate for a manicure and makeup consultation at the spa her mother went to.

"But it's all the way over in Bethesda so she'll need a ride, and I was hoping that, you know, when you get your license, you won't mind driving her."

"Sure," he said, having had no idea Millie painted her nails, let alone cared about makeup. "Of course."

"Great," Maia said. "That's great."

They stood on Clayton's lawn, the morning air heavy but not yet hot and sticky, and looked at each other. She was still thin, but there was, he thought, a hint of what she really looked like. She was narrow and almost fragile, but her eyes, with their wide, even gaze, held him as strongly as any grip.

"Are you okay?" Maia asked.

"Yeah, sure," he said.

"Well, I should go," she said, smiling at him.

Her pleasure, her gratitude, and her glimmer of happiness brought to her face, to him, and to the surroundings a light that memory would never diminish.

~~~

When they met again, four years later, Leigh realized, with her hand ever so briefly in his as they shook hello, that he'd fallen in love with her—suddenly and forever—on that Sunday morning. And not, as he'd once thought, slowly and over the course of a hot, humid summer before his senior year began. Just as the huge apartment, the party, and all of New York fell away, leaving him with only his memories, so four years ago on that morning the world had vanished, leaving nothing but a girl standing in the sun, grateful for the granting of a favor.

"So you're at college in the city," she said to him, as Kathleen introduced herself to Maia's date.

"Columbia," Leigh said. "Just this past year, though. I was ... yeah, Columbia."

He would spare her the boring saga of his college career. Although, of course, she was the one who had, in many ways, shaped it. Leigh hadn't just fallen in love with Maia on that Sunday; he had stepped off his road, the one full of protection and good fortune, into a kind of violence that had brought him immeasurable joy.

"I go to Sarah Lawrence," she said, smiling brightly. "I only come into the city for ridiculous things like this. Isn't it funny that I'd see you at one of them?"

Leigh nodded and hoped his face matched hers in polite amusement.

She was wearing a black skirt and over it a long-sleeved silk blouse that fit as closely as a corset. Her heavy dark hair was slipping out of its barrettes, and her earrings sparkled against her neck. She had found a way, he saw, to turn fragility into an invitation. Everything about her whispered,
Touch me,
in much the same way that it had once radiated,
Protect me.

It struck him that as he had failed at the latter, there would be little chance at ever again doing the former. This was a combination of regret and hope far bigger than dinner-party chatter could accommodate, and as he took his seat at the table, he slipped back to when she was still only his sister's friend.

~~~

Leigh was, he found, glad enough to see Maia again at Millie's birthday dinner, but he was mostly relieved that his father had come home from work in time for it. As they ate (meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and roasted carrots—Millie's favorites), he got, without having to ask for them, the details of what had happened to Franklin during the past year. There had been the usual things (name calling, getting shoved out of his place in line), and then worse things (someone stole his bookbag, someone else put a garter snake in his desk), all culminating in his getting locked up inside his locker.

"And, you know, he has asthma," Maia said.

"He got bad nightmares after that," Millie said. "Daddy talked to him on the phone a few times to try to help. Because he's seen all kinds of horrible things happen in school."

Leigh held his breath—it was only the second time he'd heard her mention her father since his death.

"It was really good of Seth to do that," Clayton said. "I remember he thought that maybe Franklin was in the wrong school."

"I know, and it amazed me that Park Prep could be wrong for anyone," Janet said, "but they do put a lot of emphasis on achievement."

"Wouldn't that make him really popular?" Leigh asked. "Kevin told me Franklin skipped two grades."

"One," Millie said.

"Not that kind of achievement," Maia said. "Being smart is a given. It's more what you do with it."

This made no sense, but Leigh didn't want to ask. He was nervous enough about the new school.

"Seth thought the school didn't give kids enough room to be themselves," Janet said. "Everyone has so much to do. But Millie likes it."

"I don't think it's the school," Millie said. "It's just these jerks in the eleventh grade."

"Those jerks will be in Leigh's grade this year," Maia said. "Seniors."

"So, anyway, Mrs. Staines even talked to Daddy," Millie said, "and then she quit working."

"She had a pretty cool job," Maia said. "She did fundraising."

"The firm she worked at fundraises," Clayton said. "I think she only did brochure design and things like that for them. She didn't organize the benefits."

"My mother went to a lot of those," Maia said. "Josh used to buy four or five tables for any benefit she wanted."

"Does she go to any now?" Millie asked.

"With friends, yes," Maia said. "But Charles does not go to big parties."

"That's not a bad thing," Clayton said. "He's a serious man."

They were all quiet for a minute, not wanting to draw attention to Clayton's implied judgment that Josh had not been serious. Janet had told Leigh a little about Maia's current and previous stepfathers, with Millie filling in the rest.

Maia's mother, almost three years after divorcing Josh, just as he was headed to prison, had married Charles Rhoem, who was a lawyer at the Justice Department. Maia had been in boarding school for eighth and ninth grades but jumped at the chance to move to Maryland when her mother got married (not to be with her mother or with Charles, but for the chance to visit Josh, who paid for, among other things, Maia's school tuition).

"Did you ever get to go to them?" Millie asked. "The parties?"

"Some," Maia said. "Once Mom was sick and so Josh and I went alone. It was fun."

Millie leaned forward as if to ask another question, but her mother interrupted, saying, "Let Maia eat."

"No, it's okay, I think I'm done, Ms. Davis, really."

"Did you have lunch?" Janet asked, looking at Maia's untouched meat loaf and mashed potatoes. "And a snack?"

"Uh-huh, yes," Maia said.

"Well, if you're—"

"Good," Clayton said, breaking into whatever Janet might have been about to say. "So you won't have to eat anything extra. But you need to finish."

"Mr. Hunter, please—I'm just not that hungry."

"It's not about being hungry," Clayton said.

"I know," Maia said, softly.

"So can you finish?" he asked.

"No," she said, just as softly. "No."

"You can," Janet said.

"Think of seeing Josh," Clayton said. "Remember our agreement."

"I do think of that," Maia said. "I see him on Saturdays."

"You won't if I have to call him again," Clayton said. "Your visiting him is contingent on your eating."

"You know, maybe she doesn't like meat loaf," Millie said.

Leigh, who also had been thinking that, was too amazed to speak. His father had been the one to make Maia's visits to Josh a reward for gaining weight? How odd that it should have been Clayton who came up with the idea, and yet maybe it fit.

Even Lillian said that no one was better in a crisis than Clayton.
As long as he can view something as a problem,
she said,
then he can manage it.
Meaning, of course, that he fell apart if the crisis was one in which he had to feel something, like when his mother died. Or when Janet cried because her ex-husband was dead.

"This is
my
favorite meal," Millie added. "Not anybody else's."

"Good point," Clayton said. "Maia, what do you feel like eating?"

The answer was obviously
nothing,
so Leigh piled potatoes on his empty plate and asked Janet to cut him another slice of meat l oaf.

"Remember when you used to tell me that anything a boy could do, a girl could do better?" he asked Millie.

"I was ten," she said indignantly, as if it were fifty years ago instead of three.

"Well, I think we should see if Maia can match me bite for bite," he said.

"Do you want something else to eat?" Clayton asked.

"I can make you grilled cheese," Janet said. "Grilled cheese and a milk shake."

These, it would turn out, were the foods Maia had the easiest time swallowing when she was stressed or unable to meet her calorie requirement.

"No, I'll just finish this," Maia said, picking up her fork.

Leigh took a bite of meat loaf. Maia did too. They followed this pattern—him, her, him, her—while Millie told Janet and Clayton about a family of raccoons she had seen near Calvert Park's tennis club. A discussion about rabies, urban sprawl, and the displacement of wildlife followed. Occasionally, Leigh would say to Maia,
You're doing great.
It wasn't all that different from being a field shadow to a small boy with a learning disability.

There was no greater joy, Leigh quickly discovered, than being able to drive people wherever they wanted to go. After getting his license, Leigh spent every dime he had on a used Toyota Camry with only 63,000 miles on it. It looked more like a family car than the dream car he'd had in mind, but both Clayton and Janet had asked him to make safety a priority, since it was likely that Millie would be a frequent passenger. And, as Clayton had pointed out, he would rather help Leigh buy a solid car than find out that his son's cheap fixer-upper had crumpled in an accident.

So, Leigh scaled back his fantasy to fit both his budget and his father's concerns. The Camry had a decent engine, even if the rest of it fell far short of amazing. And the first time he uttered the magic words
Can I take you somewhere?
Leigh fell totally in love with it. Its ugly purple color, its four doors, and its inability to inspire envy all faded. This was his car, and its erratic door locks and broken window controls became part of who he was, how he thought, and what he dreamed.

He took Franklin to the doctor's for his allergy shots when both Mrs. Staines and Kevin were too busy. He drove Millie to her tennis lessons so that Janet could leave for work on time. He picked up Clayton's pain medications at the pharmacy when it was almost a hundred degrees out and entirely too hot for Millie to bike there.

With great pride, Leigh asked Astra if she wanted him to come up to Vermont and get her.

"And go where?" she answered.

"I don't know," he said, not having thought much further than registering that she didn't sound happy with her father, the French girlfriend, and the daughters. "I thought you might like to get away."

"Yeah, I would," Astra said.

"It'll take me nine hours to drive," he said, picking a number out of the air.

"No, Leigh, come on," she said. "Even if you came up here and we go off to Mexico or California or into the sunset or whatever, he'll still be my father."

She was saying something important here, only he couldn't quite hear it. Astra needed help, but none Leigh could give her.

He was sorry that the magic his car brought him couldn't extend as far as Vermont, but it did allow him, every night after dinner, to drive Maia Morland home. The car took them on the same short journey that they had walked together back in March.

It turned out that Maia had been skipping lunch for close to a month because there was no quiet place to eat where she worked. She was an intern at Planned Parenthood, where there were five other high school interns and seven who were in college. She'd eaten with a group of them once, but the girls all talked about diets and how fat they were, the boys discussed their own brilliance, and one of the college interns asked her out, which made her lose her appetite for a week.

"He was that ugly?" Millie asked.

"No, it was ... I can't be dating," Maia said. "I've kissed enough boys, so being asked out makes me nervous."

Leigh, who was loading software onto Millie's computer when he heard this, shut his mind down and refused to think about Maia Morland kissing anyone, let alone
enough boys.

The important point in all of this was that she had fallen out of the habit of eating regular meals. She hadn't, thanks to her snacks and mandatory milk shakes, lost any weight, but the point of her eating plan had never really been about her weight. Janet, along with Millie's pediatrician, had done research on the best way for Maia to recover from anorexia and the answer seemed easy enough: calories.