Good Family (27 page)

“Just a minute.”

I swear to God, I can see his flashlight! “Give me that,” I say, grabbing the brush.

“Done!” says Jessica as I slap one last dab on the jockey’s cheek.

We fly down the sidewalk, leaving the defaced jockey to stand guard in front of a house owned by a person my mother used to call the Drape Man.

“Lose the paint,” says Ian. “It’ll lead them back to our house.”

Sure enough—like Hansel and Gretel’s crumbs, dribbles of paint trail after us. Jessica shoves the can into a cedar hedge, and we continue on through the night, giddy with anarchy and a sense of possibility that recalls a twenty-five-year-old memory of picking up an Indian woman hitchhiking home.

We bound up the stairs, shushing one another and stifling laughter. When we reach the landing, I see the light is on in the tower room. Mother’s room. It’s barely 4
A.M
. It occurs to me she must have had a restless night for her light to be on, but no sooner have we pushed through the front door and come into the dining room than I hear Miriam’s voice at the top of the stairs saying, “Is that you, Maddie? You’d better come.”

H
er breaths are so far apart—each one seems like the last. Everyone’s awake now. Sleepy, tousled, they’ve filed into the room. It will be dark for another hour or so; then, the sound of a broom will start. Mother is under her pink blanket cover, her hair combed back from her face. She is pretty like this—here, on the cusp of dying. Sadie, too, was in pink.

I want to tell her we painted the Drape Man’s lawn jockey white. Mother would laugh. She could see the fun in iconoclasm—especially when my father wasn’t looking.

But I don’t think she can hear me now. Ever since yesterday, she’s been hovering somewhere else. No one speaks. Adele touches her, and I realize it’s okay, that it will not hurt her. Is it easier to leave this world with people holding you? Or to be left alone?

There—a breath. Dana’s eyes trace foggily over mine, and I nod. I hear everyone breathing, hear the shift in their weight, feel their focus pressing in. For once, the solemnity in our family isn’t forced.

I left Angus during the Christmas of 1987, less than a year and a half after we were married. I didn’t return his or my mother’s calls. There would
be no service, no memorial. Later, Angus stood outside my new apartment and hollered. By May, Sadie would have been walking.

Let’s talk about how you related to your family after Sadie died,
Dr. Anke said.
Why did you remove yourself?

I was expected to be a brick, and alcohol was the surest way. It was either that or go crazy
.

Dr. Anke flinched at the word.
But you couldn’t prevent it, could you?

Which? The death of my child? Or going crazy?

Mother breathes in a sudden, raspy breath. Her mouth opens as if she’s gulping air.

“What’s that?” I say to Miriam.

“Soon,” Miriam says.

Keep the Corbu furniture
, I told Angus when I opened the door. He slapped me and called me an ungrateful bitch. It was a good excuse to keep drinking.

“Is she suffocating?” asks Dana.

“She’s shutting down,” says Miriam.

I was pulled over for driving under the influence. I was booked, fingerprinted, spent the night in jail with a woman who had knifed her boyfriend. We spent hours consoling each other. Her body was bone-thin and smelled of fried fish, but she leaned into me, and I held her as if she were my child. In the morning, they released me. I didn’t have enough money for a cab, so I rode the bus from Laguna to Santa Monica. All those months of driving aimlessly had paid off. I knew my way around.

“She’s releasing,” says Adele.

Jessica says, “Shouldn’t we say something to her? Sing?”

Eventually, I was drinking because I had to—not because of my marriage or my child, or that Jamie broke my heart, or because it made the oil slicks look pretty. I drank because every cell in my body demanded it. Adele would say another spirit had moved in. She may be right. There is no redemption in losing a child.

“We should light candles,” Adele says. “And incense. It will calm her spirit.”

I touch my mother’s skin, placing my hand across her clavicle, where she used to trace Joy perfume. A dead branch. A twig. Even her blood runs like the sap of a diseased tree. I want to ask her if she’s sorry. I want to explain to her that alcoholism is an illness and that you don’t have to die from it.

Adele and Jessica bring candles from all parts of the house. The hiss of a match, the air fills with pyrite, and the walls take on a golden glow. Slow deaths allow opportunity for ritual. It’s the sudden ones that rob you of the ability to prepare.

I’m sorry I hurt you and Dad.

I’d returned to Sand Isle alone the summer after Sadie died. If there are ghosts in this house, I was one of them. It was a summer of murky, edgeless days. I threw empty bottles down the laundry chute. I hid them under my sweaters. I was an animal. It was an embarrassment for my parents—to have a grown child go to pieces like that. It is one thing to get tipsy at parties—another to pass out.

Unacceptable. Absolutely unacceptable.

I don’t remember if they said I had to go, or if those were my words. But I left. Eleven years is a long time to bleed.

I feel as if I’m doing my mother’s breathing for her. She was always afraid of water, and now her lungs are drowning. I suddenly gasp for air. It’s lavender I’m craving, the evidence of ghosts. But I can only smell the fresh Michigan morning, the faintest scent of fish. She is so still. Not a single breath. Like Sadie, her eyelids aren’t completely closed. The slightest lightening, and the sweeping starts. The ghosts are gone.

I
an finds me in the nursery. It is almost lunchtime, but no one has made any plans. Philip has called the undertaker, who will be coming later to take my mother’s body across the channel. The arrangements seem suddenly overwhelming—where to have the service, what prayers to say, what hymns to sing, who to give the eulogy. We’re none of us religious—except for Dana and Adele—and Adele’s suggestion of the
Buddhist practice of chopping up the body and feeding it to the birds, while exotic, is met with skepticism.

Everyone has retreated into whatever gives him or her solace. Derek has returned to the beach to work on his structure. Downstairs, piano music starts and breaks off. I hear Dana in her bedroom talking to Philip, arguing even. It came sooner than we thought it would. I don’t know how I imagined Mother’s actual death, but it was correlated with the packing of trunks. Not that there are trunks anymore—they’ve been long put out to pasture—but the ritual of packing up and closing down provides the coda of the summer. We would have dragged up the boats, stripped the beds, pulled in the wicker, closed the curtains, emptied the refrigerator, covered the furniture. Before the crew from the Sand Isle Association arrived to drain the pipes, we would have said to Mother,
There, you can die now
.

But she’s jumped the gun.

“So what are you doing?” Ian asks.

“Sitting.”

He curls up beside me on the bed. The springs, like all of the box springs in this house, squeak. How can you have privacy in a place where you can hear snoring through the walls? Perhaps there is a tacit agreement to ignore certain realities: bodily functions and parents fighting, screaming babies, or a young man touching his cousin who has braces on her teeth.

“When I was little, I played with chipmunks,” I say.

Ian says, “Most of
my
friends were imaginary.”

“At least you
had
friends.”

Ian studies me with a sideways look. He knows when I tumble into self-pity.
I have no sympathy for you, Maddie Addison
, he has said to me more than once.
Your cup runneth over
.

“Do you have any ideas? Because this service is going to be a travesty if we don’t get our act together.”

Ian adjusts himself to sit cross-legged on the bed. “Not for Evelyn’s service, no. But I
do
have an idea for a film.”

“My mother just died, Ian.”

“Yes, and I’m rarely appropriate. So I was thinking—” Ian’s face has that intensity he gets when he’s tracking a subject. “Let’s make a film about your family!” He leans back as if he’s just bestowed me with a brilliant gift.

I fight my eyebrows, but there’s no stopping them. “My family? How fascinating. I’m sure it will have mass appeal.”

“I’m being very serious, Maddie. Think of an Altman film. Think of Chekhov.”

Ian can cajole me out of a mood like a parent distracting a pouting child. “We just…follow them around with a camera?”

“Actually, I’m thinking of moving away from documentary and more into dramatization. Sedgie, of course, can play himself.”

It occurs to me that Ian isn’t being entirely flippant. I try to wrap my head around the concept, but the creepiness of using one’s family as material notwithstanding, why would anyone be interested? Every summer, we return to our childhoods to play charades and Sardines. As a family, we’re prone to substance abuse. We fret about an old house and argue points to which none of us is qualified to speak. Besides, everyone hates rich people. Even when they’re not rich anymore.

As if he’s read my thoughts, Ian says, “People use their families as material all the time, Maddie. That’s what artists do. And you don’t give your family enough credit. You underestimate them.”

“Oh, please…”

Ian sighs and shakes his head. He rolls over and lies back on the pillows. The bed creaks. Through the window, he regards the woods. “The
Appassionata.
”

“Excuse me?”

“Beethoven’s
Appassionata
. Miriam told me it was one of your mother’s favorite pieces. Someone should play it at her remembrance.”

I lie back with him, marveling at Miriam’s ability to resurrect a mother I never knew. Side by side, Ian and I stare at the ceiling. “Does it smell like lavender in here?”

Ian closes his eyes and inhales deeply. Then he sneezes. “And dust.” From behind his head, he yanks one of the old throw pillows that have lain on the bed since the beginning of time. The pillow is flattened and so barren of stuffing it doesn’t warrant the name. Ian sniffs it. “There,” he says, tossing the offending object away. “Lavender. The Victorians made everything into a sachet.”

I cast my eyes around the room. The Tigger bedding is gone from the crib. Someday, another baby will lie here. It was just about this time of day that I found her. Midmorning. I had been talking on the phone to Angus. For years, I blamed him for keeping me on the line. For years, he blamed me for not noticing the monitor was too quiet. Mother strained for every last gasp of air, so why does a baby simply stop?

Where do they come from, your ghosts?
Dr. Anke asked.

Are they memories that cling like cooking smells? Or are they our lost children, our lost selves, beating like moths against a window? When I was a child, I thought I knew.

“God,” I say, regarding the scented pillow on the floor. “Not even the ghosts were ghosts.”

I
t is not Beethoven that Beowulf is playing when I come into the living room, but something dense and marshier that fits the heaviness of the house. “What’s that?” I say.

“Berg.
Wozzeck
.”

The sequence of discordant notes describes exactly how I feel. It seems appropriate that Beowulf has chosen an opera about madness. From time to time, someone goes upstairs to visit Mother’s body. At the moment, Derek and Adele are sitting cross-legged on the porch like bookends, their hands resting palms up on their knees. I make out Adele’s shorn head next to Derek’s shaggy one backlit by the lake. Whatever they are meditating on, I’m sure it has to do with a reinterpreted reality. Maybe we’re all looking for our separate universes—mine one of celluloid and videotape; Sedgie’s
ablaze with klieg lights; Dana’s orderly sequence of stitches. Edward disappeared altogether. And now Ian wants to make a film.

I find Dana in the kitchen making peanut-butter sandwiches. The counter is patina’d with years of cooking and cursory cleanups. Dana sets out a plate depicting one of the buildings of Princeton University. The edge, I notice, is chipped.

“I didn’t know you could cook,” I say.

She looks askance, but I smile to show I’m kidding. Ever since she made her confession the other morning, I have seen her through kinder eyes.

“It must be exhausting,” I say, dipping my fingers into the peanut-butter jar, “to have to be so good.”

“What are you talking about?”

I lick my forefinger. “Mom and Dad had such high expectations for you.”

Dana cuts the sandwiches in half, sets them on the blue plate. “Like they didn’t for you?”

“It wasn’t the same.”

Dana raises an eyebrow. She takes a paper napkin from the little holder on the counter, folds it into a triangle, tucks it under the sandwich. “I’m not doing a very good job,” she says.

“You
are
,” I say, meaning it. “You’re doing a wonderful job. Jessica’s fine.” I pause, waiting to see if this small dart of praise can pierce my sister’s stoicism. When she doesn’t budge, I press on. “I wish we’d had
half
the support that she does.”

Dana gives a faint, defeated smile. “And now they’re all gone.”

“The last of the grown-ups,” I say.

“I don’t suppose the cousins will be able to afford to keep the house. Adele’s broke, and Sedgie’s run out of money. His last divorce…”

Yet Ian—who’s not a part of this family (but who seems to think he is)—sees gold in our stories.

“Dana,” I say, “would you ever go see a movie about a family like ours? You know, a family on the cusp of…something.” It occurs to me that we
are on the brink, like the dinosaurs with their pea brains that had no idea of what was about to transpire when the meteor hit.

Dana chews vaguely at the crusts of her sandwich. “You mean a big family of cousins who are forced to live together for a few weeks each summer in a once-grand house?”

Weather reversals, apocalyptic geological upheaval, the demise of life as we know it. “Something like that.”

Dana picks at the bread. I find myself waiting too eagerly for her verdict. “Maybe,” she says finally. “But to make it interesting, you’d have to have a murder.”

D
ana thinks we have to have a murder,” I tell Ian as we walk along the sand. I have dragged him down to the beach to get out of a house where everyone seems at sea.

“Hmm. Are there any that you know of?”

Scanning my family’s history for trauma and scandal, I come up with Grannie Addie’s breakdown, Uncle Jack’s alleged wartime cowardice, and Edward’s psychosis. Other than that, not much. Derek’s tower shimmers in the sun. “An abortion?” I say hopefully.

Beneath the straw hat he stole from Sedgie, Ian is slathered in sunscreen. “
Who
had an abortion?”

“Dana. When she was nineteen.”

“Ah,” says Ian. “That explains it,” as if it all makes perfect sense.

I marvel at his ability to intuit things I miss entirely. At the same time, I’m annoyed. “Explains what?”