All of Us and Everything (20 page)

Augusta nodded. “He loves you.”

“And I never stopped and I always will.” He opened his arms wide. “Tell me what I can do. Tell me what I have to do. Tell me.”

Ru looked at Teddy. She was crying though she didn't even realize it. She was moved by the artistry as much as her father's raw emotion. She said, “
That,
Teddy—
that
is a goddamn win-back.”

Esme stormed out of the dining room and everything fell silent for a moment.

Finally, Augusta said, “One of you go after her. She won't listen to me.”

“I'll go after her,” Nick said.

“Shut up,” Augusta said. “You don't know anything.”

“I'm going to take off, if that's okay,” Teddy said.

“Let Teddy go after her,” Liv said. “You invited him here just to fill out the story line to some sequel, right? Put him to use!”

“We ran into each other on the plane,” Ru said.

“And
that
just didn't come up in any conversation you've had with me since I picked you up at the airport?”

“
You
go after her,” Atty said to Liv.

“Sensitivity isn't my strong suit,” Liv said. “Let the highly acclaimed writer, who's drawn comparisons to Ephron and Kaufman, go after her.”

“Nice,” Ru said. “Very nice.”

Teddy stood up and tried to smile politely. “Thank you so much for everything, especially you, Mrs. Rockwell, and Mr….” Teddy was suddenly boyish. This display of manners should have happened when he was sixteen and dating Liv, but Augusta had never accepted him—even now she was a little chilly.

“Mr. Flemming,” she said to Teddy. “Certainly not Mr. Rockwell.” And then she turned to Ru. “Walk him out. He's your charge.”

Liv walked up to Teddy, and for a second Ru was sure that Liv was going to slap him—or kiss him. But she reached up and fixed the collar on his shirt. “You're all grown up,” she said. “I had you frozen in time.”

Teddy didn't move. He didn't say a word.

Liv patted his shoulders, and turned away.

“Poor kid,” Nick said under his breath.

“I'll go after Mom,” Atty said, pushing away from the table.

Atty ran ahead, up the stairs, and Liv said, “Hold on, Atty. I'll come too.”

Ru walked Teddy to the front door.

“I don't know what I expected,” Teddy said, “but not this.”

“I don't know what I expected either. Obviously, things got complicated.” Ru couldn't be falling for Teddy. For one thing, he was in love with someone else. But also, Ru didn't believe in falling for people in this way. She didn't believe in getting giddy around a man just because. She didn't believe that two people could meet and fall for each other. She didn't believe all that much in love—regardless of the ending of her romantic comedy and its much-lauded win-back. “Sorry about it all.”

“That's okay,” Teddy said. “I got a win-back lesson, right? Your dad is really something. Tonight was really—”

“You'll be fine,” Ru cut him off. “Go with what you were going to say to Amanda. What you told me on the airplane.”

“What was that?”

“You said you missed the way she looked at you, that that look could knock everything down and strip everything away. And then it was just the two of you.” Teddy watched her lips as she spoke. “You said you'd been missing that look ever since you left and that you couldn't spend your whole life missing it.”

“You remembered all that.”

“I have an eidetic memory. I remember things I don't even want to remember.”

“I thought you said it was cloying.”

“But it's the truth. Just tell her the truth.”

“Okay,” Teddy said. “Thanks.” He hesitated, then he stuck out his hand.

She shook it.

“Good luck in there.” He opened the screen door then turned back around. “It's funny. Liv isn't the way I remember her, but you are exactly the way I remember you, and you were only a kid, but you're still you.”

This made Ru feel inexplicably happy and weirdly desirable. He was flirting—it wasn't a flirty line but it
was
flirty in delivery. Ru laughed nervously. “You're still you, too,” she said.

“Good.” And then he walked out into the cool night.

Ru found Esme in the large attic room of the third floor, lying down in a square of light from the streetlamps shining through one of the large windows. Her arms at her sides, her feet lightly splayed. Liv and Atty stood nearby, not sure what to do.

“I'm sorry about inviting Teddy,” Ru said. “I'm not writing a book. I swear it just kind of fell into place and—”

“It doesn't matter,” Liv said.

“She's not talking,” Atty said, staring at her mother.

“We don't have to talk,” Liv said and walked over to Esme, got on her hands and knees, and lay down, putting her head next to Esme's at a ninety-degree angle.

Atty crawled over next, putting the top of her head against the top of her mother's, and Ru joined them, finishing off the strange cross.

“I bet this is how synchronized swimmers practice,” Atty said. “You know, out of water, so that they can hear the instructions better.”

“Probably,” Liv said.

“We're sisters,” Esme said, “and we don't even like each other.”

“What if that's what we have in common?” Ru said.

“That we don't like each other?” Esme asked.

“No, that we're unlikable,” Ru said.

“I'm very likable,” Liv said.

“You're manipulative,” Esme said. “It's different from being likable.”

“I used to think I was likable and then I married Doug and watched people naturally like him. I've always had to earn it.”

“I'm not likable,” Ru said. “But I
am
occasionally lovable. Sometimes someone will love me and I don't know why, but I accept being unlikable.”

“I'm not likable,” Atty said.

“Yes you are!” her mother quickly corrected her.

“Maybe I could be if I wanted to.” Atty had blamed her unlikability on her status as a faculty brat, but now she wondered if it might be genetic. She quickly tweeted
Likability is a gene?
“Anyway, I don't think siblings are supposed to like each other. I mean, that's not a belief that's widely held from what I can tell.”

“Actually, a lot of siblings like each other,” Liv said, “because they're the only ones who understand some kind of basic premise of their childhoods.”

“Have we all agreed on a basic premise of our childhoods?” Ru asked.

Liv and Esme shook their heads, and Ru could feel the answer against her own.

“Our childhood seemed fucked up at the time, in a way, and it turned out to be more fucked up than we thought,” Esme said.

“That might be a reigning definition of childhood,” Ru said.

“I think you're right,” Atty said, while tweeting
Fucked-Up Childhood in Retrospect is More Fucked Up. #sotrue

“I'm mad at your father,” Esme said to Atty. “I really thought we weren't going to screw it up.”

“There are life lessons in the screwed-up-ness, though,” Atty said, wisely.

“What happened with the musket?” Liv said. “Is this a bad time to ask?”

“You don't have to talk about it,” Esme said.

“It's okay,” Atty said, and then she cleared her throat. “The administration was having a hard time hearing me on this point I was trying to make about discrimination against faculty children. And the history teacher, who lived across the street from us, collects vintage firearms.”

“Did you steal the musket?” Ru asked.

“I think I borrowed it, personally, but that was debated at the school hearing.”

“Did you fire it?” Liv asked.

“We shouldn't get into this,” Esme said. “Atty, you really don't have to talk about it.”

“I gave a speech at parents' weekend. It was about casual cruelty. And I pulled the musket out of my STX field hockey bag. I wanted to make a point, like Flannery O'Connor, about how we'd all be better people if we lived our lives with a gun pointed at us, just on the verge of getting shot. It was kind of like a Chapel Talk if you think about it the right way.”

“O'Connor was Catholic, right?” Liv asked.

“Yes and it's an Episcopal school,” Atty said. “That hurt me in the end, I think.”

“Did you fire it?” Liv asked again.

“They don't fire,” Atty said. “I mean, they do. But they require gunpowder, scouring sticks, ramrods, and, like, lighting a match.”

“So you researched how to pull the trigger,” Liv said.

“Let's talk about something else!” Esme said.

“If I didn't, it would have been like not pulling the trigger during a production of a Chekhov play. I had to at least try. Once a gun's onstage, you've got to use it. Am I right?” The question was directed at Ru, in her role as writer.

“That's a writerly rule I've heard about guns,” Ru said. “Ditto hugely pregnant women.”

“What was the casual cruelty?” Liv asked.

“Garden variety,” Atty said. “Some people quacked at me on the rope swing. Some invitations weren't extended to me, personally. Some rumors.”

“I see,” Ru said.

“I retain all rights to my own story,” Atty said to Ru. Liv had warned Atty that Ru was a life stealer. She tweeted,
I retain all rights to my tweets.

“What?” Ru said.

“Listen,” Esme said. “We have no time to backpedal over the past. What are we going to do with the elephant in the dining room?”

“Actually, male elephants are solitary,” Ru said. “They associate with other males a little but not much. The females form the family units with a matriarch and all. It's literally what she's called.”

“Can we focus a little here?” Esme said. “We're talking about the
metaphorical
elephant.”

“Right,” Ru said, “I'm just saying it's a very apt metaphor…Never mind. Sorry.”

“I think maybe we lost something as kids,” Liv said. “Maybe we can go back and pick it up.”

“Are you saying we should try to reclaim an entire lost father from our childhoods?” Esme asked.

“No,” Liv said. “It's something else. It's how we got lost and that we're lost now. How do we get found?”

“Okay,” Esme said, exasperated. “What in the hell are we going to
do
with him, though? I can't believe he did what he did. I had another life. A completely different life!”

“You've got a great life!” Ru said, hoping that Esme's regret wasn't hurting Atty. “It's hit a rough patch, but it's been good. Really good.”

“You know he's killed people,” Atty said. “Probably a lot of people. What he did to you is probably not even close to the worst thing he's done in his life.”

“He's
a killer,
” Liv said, as if testing it out. “My father is a killer.” She'd made up so many outlandish things about her childhood, but never anything this remarkable and simple.

“We have to rely on each other now. Don't you see that?” Esme said. “Everything has changed, and we have to be rock-solid. Us. For the first time. Don't you know what I'm talking about?”

“I do,” Ru said.

“You mean something profound has happened to us all,” Liv said. “Something big that could alter our senses of self and our destinies. I'm really trying to be open to shit like this.”

“I guess that's what I mean,” Esme said.

“Did you ever like each other?” Atty asked. “Like when you were little?”

The sisters considered this, each staring at the fine cracks in the ceiling paint.

“Not really,” Ru said.

“We wore each other's clothes,” Liv said.

“No,” Esme corrected. “You stole our clothes.”

“We played Princess and the Pea,” Ru said. “Remember that? We stacked the sofa cushions and hid a marble under them, and we'd have to guess where the pea was or if there was one at all.”

“It was like we had a preternatural gift for it,” Liv said. “When we had other friends over, they'd guess wrong, but we always got it right.”