All of Us and Everything (18 page)

“I can give that a try.”

“And remember it's easier to steal another girl's boyfriend than it is to take a boy who doesn't want a girlfriend and turn him into someone who does.”

“Really?” Atty thought of Lionel Chang, kissing her. She felt—in a flash of memory—his hand fondling the front of her padded bra. Lionel had been dating Maeve Brown at the time, but that hadn't stopped him, and Atty hadn't won him over. In fact, the whole thing was the start of her ruination. Even now, one of the reasons she tweeted so much was that Lionel Chang was a follower. (She had 3,904 followers—a number she was proud of.) Maybe Lionel saw her tweets. Maybe he didn't. But still she wanted to prove to him—and others, including the vicious Brynn Morgan—that she was doing just fine. Thank you very much.

“Absolutely,” Liv said. “I've built a solid career on that realization alone.”

Atty stiffened but accepted the advice. “Okay,” she said, taking a short breath in and then out. “What else?”

Augusta went to Jessamine for advice. She'd never done anything like it before. She didn't ask people for advice generally because she'd never been impressed by the kind that people gave unbidden, but ever since she and Jessamine had endured the hurricane together—the ripping wind, the ferocious tide, the fear of death—things had changed between them. After the storm, they'd trudged through the wreckage of the first floor together wearing hip waders left behind by some long-dead Rockwells. Jessamine never brought up her husband again, and Augusta surely didn't ever speak a word about her own ex-husband of sorts, but things had opened up between them—for God's sake, they'd huddled under the old oak table on the third floor, clutching each other for dear life at the height of the storm—and there was no way to ever completely go back to the invulnerability of their previous relationship with its elaborate system of privacy fences. Perhaps Augusta had been looking for a reason to seek Jessamine out as a friend, a confidante, and this was the opportunity.

Augusta found Jessamine in the laundry room off the kitchen pantry. Not used to interacting with people on intimate issues, Augusta started awkwardly in the middle of her thought. “They'll eat him alive,” she whispered to Jessamine. “I've written him a letter and dropped it, but I think I should call him off. What do you think?” She assumed that Jessamine had absorbed enough of the current crisis by simply breathing the same air. If she'd really thought about it, she'd have realized this made no sense. She sighed and rubbed her hands together. “Maybe he'll never get it. The lines of communication are old and, to be honest, I've never understood how they worked.” And then in a rare moment of self-awareness, Augusta said, “Are you following me?”

Jessamine
was
following her and
did
know how the lines of communication worked. In 1983, the year before Augusta called it quits with Nick Flemming and later made a commitment to personal honesty, Jessamine had found the stash of toys Nick had bought the girls over the years—board games from the Soviet Union, blocky Russian lettering over a man in a red gas mask, spraying an industrial city with green chemicals; cloth dolls from Vietnam in wide straw hats and silk dresses; handheld fans of lace trim made in Cuba. The stash, hidden in a hamper in the back of a closet, made the stories of the long-lost-husband-as-spy a little more believable. And Jessamine and her husband, before his death, pieced together a feasible history of the secret relationship, which, one time, included Jessamine following Augusta to the location under the boardwalk where she hid her letters, and Jessamine's husband taking a day off work once to keep an eye on the hiding spot, from afar, snapping pictures of Mrs. Pedestro picking up the letter. From there, they lost track of what Mrs. Pedestro did with the letters exactly but they assumed that she had her way of getting them to Nick Flemming because after a week, Augusta returned to the location to pick up a new correspondence from him. Within a few days, she made plans for Jessamine to watch the children so she could allegedly visit her friend from her old days in DC, a woman named Cloris Branchwell, an invalid who could never come to visit Augusta. When Jessamine and her husband dug through the white pages of the DC phone book in the library, they found no Cloris Branchwell.

Jessamine required no lead-up to Augusta's confession in the laundry room. “They need to meet him. He needs to meet them.” The air smelled of dryer sheets. “It's beyond you now.”

“Beyond me?” Augusta's reach into her daughters' lives had never had a border before—or if it had, she wasn't aware of it.

Then suddenly Augusta remembered having sex with Nick for the last time. A piece of shrapnel had worked its way out of his body—on his chest, the right side, not over his heart. After it was over, she felt the wetness on her collarbone and touched the spot. Her fingers were smeared with blood. She drew in a breath.

“Sorry,” he said. “It happens. You know, I've taken a few bullets over the years.” He walked to the bathroom and, with the door open, picked a few shards from his chest.

And she realized that he was lucky to be alive. She loved him so much she couldn't speak. She lay there, shaking, knowing that she couldn't go on like this—seeing him only here and there, falling into intimacy and then nothingness over and over. It had worn her out. She was done. “If I loved you less,” she said, “I could keep going.”

It was the truth and he knew it. “I understand.” He said it so easily she assumed that he felt it too.

He sat on the edge of the hotel bed while she taped gauze over the wound. By the time they were saying their goodbyes, parting in a crowd of tourists, it had bled through the gauze and his shirt bloomed like he was wearing a red boutonniere. He stood still, watching her go, and when she glanced back, the tourists were pouring around him. He was waiting for her to change her mind, to rush back to him, to cry a little and maybe even bite his shoulder—a habit that made him seem real to her.

But she didn't turn back. She kept going.

“What are you two whispering about in here?” It was Ru. She'd swung into the door frame.

“You're back!” Augusta said. “How was the reading?”

“Fine,” Ru said, and she stepped into the laundry room with them. Suddenly Augusta felt smothered. There wasn't enough room for all of them. She started to push past Jessamine toward the exit but Ru had her blocked.

“I spent the last nine months in a one-room hut with seventeen people—well, then there was a new baby so eighteen people. Four generations. I miss small spaces.”

“Well, I've been living in a three-story Victorian basically alone for a very long time. I like a little air.” Augusta moved for the door again.

But Ru kept the gap closed. “You didn't answer my question. What are you two whispering about?”

Augusta didn't want to confess she'd asked Jessamine for advice. It could be taken as a sign of weakness. So she said, “I'm just waiting for word, that's all. I hope your father gets in touch.”

“Have you asked Mrs. Pedestro?” Ru asked.

Augusta tightened her expression. “Mrs. Pedestro? Why would I ask her anything?”

“She's the go-between,” Ru said. “You knew that, right?”

Augusta's head shook ever so slightly. “Mrs. Pedestro…”

Ru turned to Jessamine. “She had to know it was Mrs. Pedestro! I mean…surely!”

Jessamine gave a tight-lipped smile and raised her eyebrows.

“I mean, you know all about this, don't you, Jessamine?” Ru said. “You know all of our secrets, right?”

Augusta whipped around so fast that her elbow knocked a canister of Spic and Span off the shelf. It fell to the ground, giving up a little puffy green cloud. They all stared as it rocked back and forth for a moment, then slowly Augusta looked at Jessamine. “Well?”

Jessamine folded her arms on her chest. “After a few decades, you piece things together.”

“You know,” Ru said, “Jessamine came the closest to asking where I went when I was missing for twenty-one days.”

“What did she say?” Augusta asked and then turned to Jessamine, putting the question to her directly. “What did you say to Ru?”

“I don't remember exactly.” Though she had an inkling, she preferred not to get into it.

“She asked me if I'd gone where I needed to go and done what I needed to do,” Ru said. “It was simple.”

Augusta felt completely rattled. All of these people with all of these lives. Augusta had thought she'd cornered the market on secrets, but evidently her family was full of them. She rubbed her lips with the back of her hand as if she were suddenly aware she'd put on too many coats of lipstick. “Okay, then. Okay!” she said, and she reached for the door frame and pulled herself out of the pantry. “We'll ask Mrs. Pedestro! We'll find out if the bastard is dead or alive!”

When Ru came home after running away to find her father, Augusta sent her to a therapist, a tall woman with deeply inset eyes. Before the woman became fascinated by the exactitude of Ru's memory functions, she focused on Augusta. Ru described her mother as “a baby, a doll, fragile like that.”

“Really,” the therapist said. “And so you think of your mother as a baby doll you must protect?”

“No, no,” Ru said. “She's a baby on the outside but on the inside she's more like a mobster. She might be powerful beyond measure.”

“And so she's a mobster baby?”

“No,” Ru said, “maybe more of a baby mobster.”

And this was a perfect example of the baby mobster: Standing in the pantry, Augusta proved in one moment to be incredibly naïve—she'd never assumed her housekeeper for the past few decades understood anything about her private life?—and then in the next was storming out of the house to confront Mrs. Pedestro about her role as a top-secret messenger and to find out if the father of her children was dead or alive.

“She's on the move!” Ru shouted to her older sisters as Augusta banged out of the front screen door. It was an expression they'd used as children to explain the flurry that followed one of their mother's inspirational ideas about founding a new movement. “I repeat: She is on the move!”

Ru ran after her mother across the busy street as Liv and Atty ran downstairs together and followed.

Esme appeared at her bedroom window. “What's going on?”

Ru shouted, “She's going to ask Mrs. Pedestro if our father's dead or alive!” Ru's plan had veered off-course. She'd walked into the pantry to tell Jessamine and her mother that she had a guest coming to dinner—one sad and forlorn Teddy Whistler—but she'd missed that window now. Everything had careened out of control.

“How would Mrs. Pedestro know if our father's dead or alive?” Esme shouted back.

Jessamine stepped out of the front door onto the small lawn and looked up at Esme. “She's been the messenger between your mother and father all these years.”

“How do you know that?” Esme asked.

Jessamine shrugged.

Augusta knocked on the Pedestros' front door. By the time it opened, Ru, Atty, and Liv had formed a semicircle behind her.

Virgil Pedestro answered. His hair had thinned and grayed, but he had the same nervous smile and wore a polo shirt with the collar up. “Who do we have here?”

Ru looked at the ground, hoping he wouldn't recognize her from the night she barged in on him, naked except for a blue blazer, standing behind a tripod.

“Where's your mother, Virgil? Is she here?”

“Maybe she is and maybe she isn't.”

“Like I have time for this shit, young man,” Augusta said. “Tell her I want to talk to her right now.”

Virgil opened the screen door a little, dipped down, and peeked at Ru's face. “Are you Ru Rockwell?” he said.

Augusta reached out and grabbed Virgil by the short row of buttons on his shirt. “Get her now. Do you hear me?”

“Hey, hey!” he said, lifting his arms in the air. “Ma! Mrs. Rockwell's here to see you! Ma!”

Mrs. Pedestro appeared behind him, looking exactly the same as the night Ru handed her the letter she'd written to her unknown father. Her hair was still puffy and pinned back on one side. She was wearing the same kind of clothes—well fitting and nearly sporty. She'd just washed her hands, it seemed, and was drying them with a sand-dollar-appliquéd hand towel.

“Augusta,” she said, sensing alarm. “What is it?”

“I want to know if Nick is dead or alive.”

“I can't say anything like that. I can't…You know…It's not…There are rules.”

“Is he dead then?” Augusta said, nodding curtly. “He's dead. Isn't he?” She reached out and grabbed Atty, who was closest. The girl's eyes went wide. “He's gone. That…triple asshole! He's dead!” Their mother wasn't accustomed to cursing so when she did, her expletives were often strangely vivid and inventive.

Here, again, was a perfect moment when the line between baby and mobster was blurred beyond distinction. Was her mother a baby about to break down wailing on Mrs. Pedestro's lawn, or was she faking it, using the threat of explosion to bully Mrs. Pedestro into telling her the truth?

“No, no!” Mrs. Pedestro said. “He's not dead! He lives in a retirement complex in Egg Harbor. He's got a shih tzu named Tobias. He's fine!”

“Egg Harbor?” Augusta said. “What's in Egg Harbor?”

“He has a shih tzu?” Liv said, laughing. Ru wasn't sure if it was the fact that the term
shih tzu
was inherently funny or that the small dog seemed to emasculate their father's image—or both.

“Why'd he name it Tobias?” Atty said. “After the novelist Tobias Wolff?” Raised on a boarding school campus, Atty was inculcated in the art of naming pets after writers.

“Is he still
with it
?” Ru asked. “Mentally?”

“Let me put it this way,” Mrs. Pedestro said, tucking her chin to her chest. “There's a sign in his room that reads:
IN CASE OF EMERGENCY: DO NOT WAKE ME UP BY TOUCHING ME OR EVEN SHOUTING WITHIN TEN FEET OF THE BED.
”

“I don't know what that means,” Liv said.

“He was trained to wake from a dead sleep, disarm, and pin an intruder down,” Ru explained.

“Cool,” Atty said, gripping her iPhone then quickly tweeting.

“How do you know what's posted
in his bedroom
?” Augusta asked Mrs. Pedestro.

“I've visited him. He gave me a tour,” Mrs. Pedestro said defensively. “He was surprised to hear from you after all these years, Augusta. He was sure it was over.”

“It is over.”

Mrs. Pedestro looked at Augusta as if she felt sorry for her, and then she turned and pulled a small envelope from a drawer in a hall table. “I was going to slip this in our mutual hiding spot, but I guess that's not necessary anymore.”

Suddenly it felt like Mrs. Pedestro and Augusta were the ones who were clandestine lovers all these years. A wash of self-consciousness seemed to make Augusta blush, a rarity. She didn't reach out and take the letter. It was as if she'd have to admit Mrs. Pedestro's intimate role in her life, and she couldn't do it.

Ru took the letter. Liv then ripped it out of Ru's hands, opened it, read it, and then handed it off to Atty, who read it aloud.

Augusta,

Of course I want to see the girls. You've told me to show up and that's what I'll do.

As for my enemies, you're right. They're mostly just beset by nostalgia not vengeance.

Love,

NF

“He could show up at any time,” Ru said and it dawned on her that her mother must have thought she was seizing control of the situation by demanding Nick Flemming show up at their house—but by not setting a date and time, she'd actually relinquished all control. It was a grave tactical error.

“What's
NF
stand for?” Atty asked.

“Nick Flemming,” Liv said, in a soft motherly tone Ru had never heard from her before. “Your grandfather.”

“Enough!” Augusta turned and started to head back to the house, but she took only a few paces before she stalled and looked at Jessamine in the yard and Esme still propped in her bedroom window. She glanced back over her shoulder at Liv, Ru, Atty, and Mrs. Pedestro.

Then her eyes went back to Jessamine. In some strange way, Jessamine knew Augusta best of all. Augusta searched Jessamine's face and she saw sorrow there, but also courage. Jessamine looked at Augusta steadily.
Cherish this,
that's what Jessamine's face seemed to say. Jessamine's husband was now dead. Augusta had been preparing herself for change, thought she was open to it, but this was too much at once.

A car pulled up—a little economy number—and a man stepped out. Teddy Whistler. He looked at the family looking at him. “Hi!” he said and waved.

Ru felt a strange desire to trumpet—it was how the elephants reacted to a surprise or when they were excited. On top of everything else, here was Teddy Whistler, returning to the Rockwells' front lawn where she'd seen him so dizzy and dazed, professing his love for Liv. Ru knew that she shouldn't feel like trumpeting when she saw Teddy, but she did, instinctively. She piped up from the Pedestros' lawn, “Oh, and Teddy Whistler's coming to dinner!”

“Teddy,” Liv whispered.

“Yes,” Ru said.

Liv turned on Atty, angrily. “
This
is the man you told me about! Why didn't you say his name? Why didn't you—”

“She doesn't know,” Ru said.

Atty glanced between Liv and Ru. “Who is he?”

“Teddy from Ru's book,” Liv said. “She didn't make him up. He was already real.” The last time Liv had in any way acknowledged the existence of Teddy Whistler was the angry voice mail she'd left for Ru after reading the summary of her novel in
The New York Times Book Review.
The truth was that Ru had listened to the message, but was simply too ashamed to bring it up. She'd been waiting in line for a friend's retro punk rock concert and when Cliff asked who it was, she hit
DELETE
. “Just my sister Liv, confusing life and art.”

“A spectacle!” Augusta whispered. “After all those years of hiding and fixing and keeping it all together, it's just a spectacle!”

And then Ingmar started barking, deep inside the house.

Augusta's back went straight and she started loping, which turned into a very slow and heavy jog. She raised her hands in the air, stopping a bit of traffic, and then she was running. She'd always told her daughters she'd been very fast as a child, but the girls had doubted this. It seemed, for a moment, that she was charging Teddy Whistler and so he took a step toward the driver's-side door, but she veered, rounding the car.

“What is it?” Esme shouted.

“That son of a bitch! Your father!” Augusta said, raising her fist in the air.

Augusta could feel him. He was already in the house. She was sure that's what had alarmed the dog but also she just
knew.
The moment before she'd ever laid eyes on him—that first time—she'd sensed his presence running alongside the downtown bus. She sensed him each time they met in public—a crowded train station, a bookstore, an airport bar. In all of those various hotel rooms, she knew he was going to knock just moments before he knocked.

Liv, Ru, and Atty took off after her.

Esme made a Statement of Personal Honesty. “My life is a shit show,” she declared, and she dipped back in through her bedroom window and headed for the stairs.

And soon enough all of the Rockwells were gone, leaving Teddy Whistler and Jessamine. He walked up to her and extended his hand. “Hi,” he said. “I think I was invited to dinner.”

Jessamine smiled. “Welcome to the Rockwells'.”