After You (25 page)

Sophie is sitting on the stairs when I get back, as if in judgment. Greg has promised to keep quiet about my indiscretion, since it would further push me off my role-model stool. I have fallen enough in recent days. She looks like she knows, or knows something, the way she is sitting with her arms crossed, her eyebrows drawn into a crease down the middle of her forehead. Her glasses perched low.

“Are you ready to talk to me yet?” I ask her, reaching out to smooth down her ponytail. I take comfort in the fact that she doesn’t move away.

“No.”

“Well, that’s a start, at least. You said no. You didn’t just shake your head.” She nods at me, serious and solemn. I should know by now that little of what Sophie does is accidental. She never lets a word slip. “How about this? You don’t have to talk at first, but I’d like you to listen. Do you think you could do that for me?”

“Okay.”

I move over to the stairs and sit down next to her, so we are shoulder to shoulder.

“Did you know that when you love someone as much as I love you, it makes you more capable of loving other people? It makes you more generous with yourself. I have even more love to give now. Do you know what I mean?”

I get a head shake negative, her eyes on her knees.

“Okay, what I’m trying to say is that being here with you and taking care of you has made me a better person. You have literally grown my heart bigger.” My eyes fill up when I realize that hitting that man was a product of her, too, an awakened life. I have taken so much more from this child than I will ever be capable of giving back. “So, when I have this baby, that doesn’t mean I’m going to love you or care for you any less. It does mean I’ll be farther away, which stinks. But that’s just simple geography. You and me? We can handle geography.”

Sophie sometimes plays that game with the big plastic globe in her room that we all have played, a finger tracing its edges as it spins, and a verdict wherever it lands.
Where do I go?
And maybe a close corollary, the one I used to play as a kid and sometimes do even now:
Where do I belong?

“Know what else? Since I’m your godmother, guess what? You’re going to be a godsister.”

“I am?”

“Yup.”

“I guess that’s pretty cool.”

“Serious responsibility, but I know you can handle it. And we’ll get to talk every day. I found this neat thing where we can see each other on the computer while we talk. So it’ll be like we’re in the same room.”

“Skype.”

“How do you know about Skype?”

“Mummy told me about it.”

“Oh.” What a waste of anticipatory pain, which reverberates now, hearing Sophie show a hand she doesn’t even know she was dealt: all of Lucy’s groundwork for a different kind of departure.

“Too bad you can’t use Skype in heaven.”

“Yeah.”

“Auntie Ellie?”

“Yeah?”

“You won’t forget about me, right?”

“How could I forget about you, Soph? You’re my home.”

“People can’t be home. Places are home.”

“Nope, people can be home too.”

Sophie stands up, takes a quick look around the room, and then looks at me, really looks at me—a sweeping of my eyes with her eyes, a long deliberation, as if mining my soul for bombs. When she’s done, she still looks pensive. She’s not quite convinced.

“I need to think more about that,” she says, and then walks away.

45

T
oday’s airport departure will be clean and clinical, all business. Greg drops me at the curb, since I can’t handle the waving good-bye as I disappear into a security line, my laptop out, my shoes ready to be placed in the plastic bin, as I feel myself in literal retreat. Getting smaller and smaller. I want my farewell to be quick, three minutes or less of hugs, and I love yous, and I’ll see you soons, because the alternative is too real and too painful. If I admit what is happening here—I am leaving Sophie behind—I am not sure I can do it. Put the one foot in front of the other and lead myself thousands of miles away from her. How did Lucy make her Parisian plans and buy tickets and rent an apartment? Maybe René was right; maybe I could never understand, even though I find myself in the exact same place, making an identical decision. I want to pick Sophie up and run as fast as I can toward Gate 43B. Steal her away, as if she were mine to keep.

We say good-bye, and I smell Sophie’s hair and watch her push her glasses back up her nose. We high-five. I give her an extra hug. I give Greg a kiss on the cheek, and we say over and over again how we’ll see each other next month, for Thanksgiving; this isn’t goodbye, this is so long for now, even though we all know a certain stage has come to an end. We are all saying good-bye to something, even if it isn’t me.

I put my arm around Sophie’s shoulder and look at her to memorize this incarnation, since she’ll grow even in these few weeks apart. Looking at her, I see Lucy and not Lucy at once, as if thirty years of friendship aren’t lost but saved-up love for this new person, who is so much more—braver, smarter, more intuitive—than we ever were.

“Did you know that the formal title of the House of Lords is actually the Right Honourable the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in Parliament Assembled?” Sophie asks me, just as I am about to walk away. She’s showing off.

“No, I didn’t. But that’s hilarious.”

“Is it?” Her face, as usual gives her away; she’s wondering whether she has lost me already, another adult laughing at what she doesn’t understand.

“I don’t know. I think so. It’s just so fussy and formal. What do you think, Soph?”

She takes a moment to answer, her lips moving as she turns it over in her mind.

“I know what you mean. I reckon it’s a little ridiculous.” And then she smiles, that irresistible smile, and I smile back, until my cheeks hurt.

“You be good,” I say, nodding, smiling, tightening my jaw, tightening my heart against the current of tears. Stupid words, though I have no others.

“I’ll try.”

“I know.”

And then she says one last thing to me before I get eclipsed by the sliding doors and sucked into the madness of Heathrow, one last thing that tells me we might be okay, that perhaps our world can be re-righted, that some things, at least, can take us back to the better parts of the before: “Auntie Ellie! Don’t forget to send me presents.”

Flying in a metal machine over the Atlantic, wrung out from crying, I fall asleep with my head against the windowpane. I dream I am in a children’s story, but this time it has little to do with gardens and redemption and overcoming obstacles. I am Peter Pan leaving behind Neverland, that beautiful far-off island nation, hurtling through the air away from my Lost Boys, leaving them to fend for themselves against Captain Hook. The wind pushes against my skin, and I soar through the night clouds, dodging the brilliant searing stars, too fast to stop and make a wish. I have abandoned all dreams of escape, of never growing up. I fly back in relief.

When I get to the airport, my dad is there waiting in baggage claim, with a sign with my name on it. My
i
is dotted with a heart.

“Dad, you didn’t have to come all this way. I could have taken a cab. I bet you have a million things to take care of.”

“I just wanted to see my darling daughter.”

I eye him with suspicion. My dad is loving, absolutely; doting, not so much. Airport pickups are usually out of bounds.

“Fine. You caught me. I needed to get out of that house. I have clearly lost my mind. I freaked out because the personalized napkins I ordered haven’t come yet. When did I become someone who cares about napkins? And that signature cocktail tastes horrible. I’m not sure what I was thinking.”

“You’re just excited, that’s all. Anyhow, I’m glad you came.” I kiss my father’s cheek, loop my arm through his, and let him take the suitcase right out of my hands.

“Me too.” He sizes me up, and for a second his eyes turn watery. “Sweetheart, you look great. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you’re positively … glowing.” And then he winks. So quick and fast, I almost miss it.

In the car, the blue Volvo that has been in the family so long I’m amazed it still runs, my dad doesn’t ask me any questions about my “situation.” Instead, he talks with nostalgia about the Big Dig, the construction headache that has terrorized the city of Boston for two decades.

“Can you believe they finished it? I swear, I almost miss all that mess. I loved the reliability of the traffic. You could count on it being a nightmare,” he says.

“You’re crazy.”

“I must be. I’m marrying your mother again.”

“You said it, not me.” I grin at my dad. Today, him marrying Jane seems like a good idea. I’m hopeful in a way that I haven’t been for a long time. “I actually think it’s great. You two. I’ll keep all my fingers crossed for you tomorrow.”

“And toes too. I need all the help I can get.”

“You’ll be fine.”

“It’s not me I’m worried about.” Since I can make no guarantees about my mother—no one, not even she, can—I keep quiet. “By the way, I seated you and Phillip at the same table. I figured you have a lot to talk about.”

“Thanks. We do.”

“It’s going to be okay,” my dad says, almost a mutter under his breath, as if he is convincing himself of something.

“What is?” I ask. I don’t know if he means his marriage or mine.

“The napkins, silly. No one’s going to die without personalized napkins, right?”

As soon as I get back to my dad’s house, I call Sophie from my childhood bedroom, or my “other room,” the one I slept in three days a week after their divorce. The decor is unchanged—pink wallpaper, white Formica, an over-the-top interior-decorating attempt by my father to get me not to hate him for leaving, even though he never left, not in any meaningful way, and it never occurred to me to hate him. He was always only a few doors away. I’m on the same phone I would use to talk to Lucy when we were teenagers and we would gossip late into the night. The phone, a relic; one of those beige plastic clamshell ones with a forever knotted cord.

Sophie and I spend most of the time talking about Inderpal: how he has read all the Harry Potter series and will rent the movies again with Sophie when she catches up; how he gave her astronaut ice cream; how he called her his BFF in a recent e-mail.

“How many days again?” Sophie asks now, with a certain drawn beat that indicates we are starting a new sort of routine. We will be doing this countdown daily, a substitute for the nightly tuck-in.

“Twenty-one.”

“Okay.”

“Twenty-one is not so bad.”

“Yeah, you’re right.”

“There are worse things than twenty-one.”

“What? Like twenty-two?” And then she giggles—pure and contagious—like all nine-year-olds do when they think they have just made the funniest joke in the world.

46

M
y parents are getting remarried in less than three hours. A leap of faith, if I’ve ever seen one, their history so gnarled and complex and painful, it’s amazing they can be in the same room, no less retake vows that they have already once failed to keep.

The backyard has begun its transformation. White chairs fan out from a center aisle, where the lawn is covered by a white runner. The chuppah is four sticks of wood canopied with my paternal grandfather’s tallis and a sprinkling of multicolored leaves. The effect is autumnal and rustic, with a dab of modern flair. Should my father ever tire of academia, wedding planning may well be a viable alternative. The house looks spectacular, and I touch my hand to my belly and wax sentimental, as it seems I’m prone to do in pregnancy:
This is beauty and love and hope
.

Claire and Mikey arrived just a little while ago; they’ve been visiting New York for a couple of days, since she has never been before. They played the role of tourist, fanny packs and all, electrified by the bright lights of Times Square, sobered downtown at the gaping mouth of Ground Zero. Later, they kissed at the top of the Empire State Building, ignoring a smirk from the security guard, who has seen that same kiss a million times before. My brother has hinted there is a proposal pending, most likely at the comic-book convention in Vegas sometime this spring. I can think of nothing more, and nothing less, romantic than that: my brother asking Claire to stand next to him for the rest of their lives while they are geeking out among hordes of people dressed like superheroes.

My mother gets ready in my bedroom. Her long gray hair is pulled back into a low bun, with a few loose tendrils. She wears an ivory suit, pin-tucked at the waist, with short matching gloves.

“What, no sari?” I ask, after I get my first glance at the bride, fighting back the mistiness that comes too easily.

“Not today.” She looks misty herself, come to think of it, which is as unlike my mother as her suit.

“You look beautiful.” And she does. Foreign, yes, and an anachronism too: She’s dressed like an ambassador’s wife at a state dinner fifty years ago. Nonetheless, looking at her is like looking at an old photograph, a one-second moment of an easier, simpler time captured in a frozen image.

“I’m scared,” she says, her eyes catching mine in the mirror.

“Of what?”

“Of absolutely every single thing. I’m about to marry the man I have loved for about three quarters of my life and the man I have fought with for just as long. What if tomorrow morning I wake up and want to run as far as I can away from him?”

“You probably will.”

“And then what?”

“I don’t know. You don’t run. You push through it. To borrow your horribly antifeminist phrase, you grow a pair.”

“Okay.”

“You’re going to show up, right?”

A tiny, almost imperceptible pause. Small enough that I choose to believe it didn’t happen.

“Of course I’m going to show up.”

My dad walks down the aisle first. A couple of flutists play a whimsical tune, light and buoyant, like a morning bird’s song. He wears a gray suit I have never seen before. Tailored. Expensive. Careful in the way a suit should be. He looks like a different man, a dapper man, without his characteristic arm patches and frayed edges, no coffee and pen stains just above the pocket. His silver hair parted on the side and combed back, like a little boy’s for Christmas dinner. The thought of my father buying a new suit for today charms me, and I have to hold myself back from running to give him a hug once he is already standing up there. Destination reached under his father’s tallis. He waits for my mother to arrive with a brave smile, which does little to hide his naked vulnerability.

I take a quick scan of the guests, who have now completely filled out the one hundred or so chairs set on the lawn. All of them are smiling either forward or backward, at my dad, or at Mikey and me, waiting at the end of the aisle. I see Claire making eye contact with my brother, their faces filled with the wonder that weddings seem to bring forth in new lovers.
This will be us one day
. I feel a happy twinge when I see how sincere they both seem and how absorbed in each other.

The rest of the guest list skews older, a crowd that has seen as many divorces as marriages. They are still capable of being expectant and ready, enjoying that delicious moment before the start of a play, when they don’t yet know if the show will be good or bad but they’re optimistic nonetheless.

I notice some family friends I haven’t seen in years, lots of faces I don’t recognize, none of which belongs to my husband. I know Phillip is here, though. I can feel it, in the weakness in my legs, the noticeable tremble in my bouquet. The way I keep compulsively reassuring my belly:
We’re okay, we’re going to be okay
.

Next, Mikey and I walk, arm in arm, slowly down the aisle, just as we promised and practiced for our father; he took seriously the bridal magazines’ warning against a gallop. Apparently a measured pace helps to build tension, he said, and we were kind enough to keep our mouths shut. Neither of us reminded him that we didn’t really need any extra tension-building at this particular event. My mother has yet to come out to follow us, and so I clench my bouquet and Mikey’s elbow and hold my smile tight across my face. What if she can’t do this? Maybe the run gene always wins in the end.

At the front, Mikey and I split. I go to stand on my mother’s empty side—
Jane’s
side—and my brother, looking sharp and boutonnièred as best man, stands next to my dad. I look over at them, ready to give my father an encouraging thumbs-up—
she’s going to show up; of course she’s going to show up—
but he’s looking straight ahead. Pale and covered in beads of sweat. He looks like a man awaiting sentencing. This, a tug on the very last bit of petal:
She loves me; she loves me not
.

I glance back out at the crowd and I spot Phillip, sitting front and center, his eyes studiously trained away from me.

The bridal music starts, Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major, and there my mother is,
thank God
, smiling a brave smile almost identical to my father’s, as all of the eyes turn to stare at her. Murmurs erupt—
she looks beautiful; how lovely—
cameras click and flash, and Jane continues to take one step in front of the other.

I am watching my mother, and my mother is watching me, and I am talking to her with my eyes:
Only a few more feet now. Almost there. You can do this. You are doing this
. And her response:
Damn right I am doing this. Oh, no, please help me do this
. We are lost in our own conversation, this motivational dialogue with our eyes, and so neither of us sees what happens next. We only hear it—Phillip, above all the others.

His panicked voice, which has a male-hero pitch: calm and reasonable and on the wrong end of hope. The sort of voice that gets people moving in an organized yet speedy fashion toward the designated emergency exits.

“For God’s sake, is someone here a doctor?” he yells to the crowd. And there my husband is, my soon-to-be-ex-husband, at the front of the aisle, looking handsome in a suit and tie, at the exact spot where we once stood and said our own vows.
Phillip
, I think, and almost tap the baby—
your dad—
before my brain catches up and realizes what is going on here.

His BlackBerry is out; he has already called 911.

I hear but don’t understand the words he says next:
Emergency, down, not sure if he is breathing. Fast
. And this:
Please. Help us
.

Everyone is on their feet and gasping, frozen in group-fear.

Phillip stands over my dad, who is no longer standing at all. He has crumpled to the ground, passed out, his hand on his heart.

“Please, please,” I say over and over again, a mantra, my pleading with God or the universe second nature, a reflex now. I try to stay calm. The books have warned me of the simple math: If I upset myself too much, I hurt the baby, and I cannot hurt the baby. We are in the waiting room of Mount Auburn Hospital, the same one where Oliver was born and lost, lost and extracted, and the way Phillip stands, stiff and alert, the heavy and expectant quality to his waiting, tells me he is remembering it too. Our last memory of this place a blurry nightmare. One of us got left behind.

“Please, please,” I say again, though I can’t tell if I am saying the words out loud or just in my head. The paralysis and blurring from fear. I don’t know where I stop and the world begins.

My mother sits next to me, gripping my hand. Silent. She is still in her ivory suit, but her hair has unraveled. The other people here look at us strangely, our formal clothes so at odds with the clinical surroundings, the flashing lights that pull up at random intervals and streak our faces red, then blue. So much activity, the ambulance roaring up the driveway, fast, they were fast, just like Phillip asked, I think. All slow motion and hyperspeed at the same time, there is no time, just a string of events, backward and forward, losses and gains, a never-ending tally, and then we were here, how did we get here again? I don’t remember. A car, the backseat; I can’t tell you whose car. My dad left to the care and transport of experts, and we followed through the parting streets, the traffic like the Red Sea, and right through the yellow lights, and then he was wheeled in, on a stretcher, the stretcher the worst part of all.

We were told to wait.

I’m sorry. We have no information at this time
.

We are waiting.

We have lived in this waiting room all of our lives.

Phillip gets tired of pacing and sits next to me, on the other side, and bumps his shoulder against mine, a light tap. A gesture of solidarity. His touch means so much, it burns. I look at him, and he gives me a half smile. There is nothing happy about it; he is saying,
I am here and you are here
, and
we are here and this is going to be okay. Today is not like that other time; we are not leaving here with less
.

He can’t promise me that, though. We may leave here having lost it all. And my mother showed up, she actually showed up, in ivory no less, and there was supposed to be dancing and for dessert red velvet cupcakes that my dad loves from the bakery in Somerville. And it’s like there were two futures, one in which we are all still at the party, where vows were said with fear and conviction, food was eaten, and good-natured jokes and toasts were made about my parents’ unlikely reunion. And there is this one, where we are sentenced to wait while doctors perform tests on my sixty-five-year-old father, to make sure his heart—the most resilient and forgiving heart I know—keeps beating.

“Thank you,” I whisper to Phillip. There is only one hero here.

He shakes his head,
no need
, and squeezes my hand, so we are now a chain, Claire, Mikey, my mom, me, and Phillip, in these ridiculous plastic chairs that bear the weight of so much pain, day in and day out; these chairs should be destroyed. These chairs, like baby-sized coffins, should not exist in the world.

“Mom?” I say.

“Yeah.” Talking right now is the hardest work we’ve ever done.

“He’s going to be fine. He will.”

“Please, please,” she says, out loud, but, of course, not to me.

A doctor eventually comes out, a middle-aged man in a white jacket, with a stethoscope around his neck and a beer gut. He has something white at the corner of his mouth, probably mayo, which makes me distrust him. When did he stop for a sandwich? Before or after they rolled my father in? Who does he think he is, eating at a time like this?

“Mrs. Lerner?” he asks.

“How …?” She can’t finish her sentence. She is trembling with her whole body, and so I stand behind her, to hold her up, to absorb as much of the fear and the pain as I can. I will take it but not let it pass to the baby. I don’t know how I will do this, but I will.

This is what adults do. We absorb and we shield. This is what parents do.

“He’s going to be fine. Absolutely fine.” The tears come now, the ones we hadn’t let ourselves shed for fear they could have meant something; they would have allowed room for the unimaginable. “Has your husband been under a lot of stress lately?”

“We were supposed to get married today,” my mother says, and motions to her ivory suit, which now looks dirty and deflated, like a Halloween costume the morning after.

“That explains it,” the doctor says. Phillip takes a step forward, a defensive maneuver, since the guy is obviously a bastard. What’s that supposed to mean:
That explains it
?

“Was it, you know, a heart attack?” my brother asks, finding the words we have been unable to say until now. Claire is behind Mikey, too, mirroring my body language with my mother, her arms literally holding him up, and that’s when I know for sure, if I ever had any doubt, that she will say yes, whenever or however Mikey asks.

“Nope. We did an EKG, blood tests, a chest X ray. His heart is in pretty good condition. Honestly, we’re not sure what happened. My best guess, though, is that this was a panic attack.”