Love Love (34 page)

Roger came over and broke her out of her reverie. He put his hands on her shoulders.

“Congratulations,” he said.

She wanted to jump up, dance and laugh, hug and kiss him and fall onto the floor together in a moment of unadulterated glee, but it all seemed so gratuitous.

“It is good news,” she said, and kissed she him as gently as she would a child's wound.

T
he next morning, after a fitful night of uncomfortable dreams and frequent awakenings, Judy was back at the study. In her sleep-deprived state, the phone call from the night before had felt more like a dream, but on the table was evidence of its certain reality, an overnight express envelope containing plane tickets for her, Roger, and Claudia's daughter, Alexa, for a week from Saturday. Judy hadn't seen old-school tickets like these in years, with their mechanical sans serif font printed on card paper stock, stapled together on the white perforated tab. This was how all plane tickets used to look, but now people printed bar codes at home or sent them to their smartphones for check-in. Judy held the stiff stack of paper in her hands. How sad it was that so many things that used to exist didn't exist anymore. Everything, no matter how permanent it seemed, had a future date with oblivion.

The first time she flew, her mother had held tickets like these. The occasion had been a solemn one, a funeral of her grandmother on her father's side, so Judy fought to tamp down her excitement, but once they arrived at the airport, the smile of a seven-year-old knew no restraint. How marvelous that the sole purpose of this enormous building was to receive and send off airplanes! It was so much more than just pilots and stewardesses that she'd seen on television. Judy watched two men move a truckload of suitcases into the open belly of an airplane. She sounded out the named placards held by chauffeurs in black suits:
MATTHEWS, WARD, ROTHMAN
. A motorized cart beeped by, elderly passengers riding backward. An old man twirled his cane for her like a baton, and Judy turned to her father to ask him if she could ride it, except this man who stood next to her, who glared at her, looked nothing like the father she'd known.

Even now, gazing at the tranquility of Hen Cove, she could feel the weight of his unhappiness. His disappointment frightened her
so much that she burst into tears. When her mother asked what was wrong, she couldn't even say. True, her father had been upset about the death of his mother, but it was more than that. It was the beginning of their separation, of her father choosing to step away from her life, for reasons Judy still found mysterious. All she knew was what she felt, which was that when he saw her, he wished he saw someone else: turning away, closing his eyes, the rising of a newspaper wall. Wasn't it a genetic requirement for a father to like his daughter? It didn't make sense.

For a while, she tried to make him like her. In preparation for one Father's Day, she spent two months weaving a sweater, a difficult project for an adult, let alone a ten-year-old, and even though he'd held it up against his chest and thanked her, she never saw him wear it once. Which was fitting, because it wasn't what he did or said that telegraphed his feelings, but their very lack.

More than thirty years had passed since that day at the airport, and yet the emotional laceration was ready to bleed. Had she been born with such thin skin, or was this a by-product of her father's withholding? It was like the chicken or the egg, which came first. Judy picked up a piece of charcoal from her tray, aligned the sketch paper on the desk, and started with his eyes. Thick circles and curvatures, black and bottomless as a well, these were the disapproving pupils that stared at her when she wore her ratty Salvation Army jacket, her silver nose ring, black stockings with Swiss cheese holes, the rebellious accoutrements she embraced in her adolescence because he never embraced her.

She flicked the charcoal to create a pair of prickly eyebrows, then drew a shadow of a nose, and finally, filled in a straight bar for a mouth, completing his default facial mode, which was somewhere between exasperation and annoyance. After she left for college, things got better between them, mostly because they didn't see each other as often, though there was a massive blowout when she suggested he talk to a psychologist about his past trauma. As a senior psych major, Judy had thought that she now possessed the right to speak to her father about his horror of running over that mother and child in his train back in Korea. She'd even taken Korean that semester to better communicate with him, but when she returned that Thanksgiving and attempted to reach out to him, what she received was a literal slap in
the face, his open palm smacking her so fast that she thought some foreign object had flown out of nowhere and struck her. Her mother, after making sure Judy was all right, followed her husband to the den.

“I don't think he knew that you knew that story,” Kevin had told her.

“So that gives him the right to hit me?” Judy asked.

“Of course not,” he said, helping her into a chair. “It's just a bad situation.”

For the rest of the long weekend, Judy waited for the apology that never came. Her brother and her mother did what they could to salvage the holiday, making sure that one of them was always around when Judy and her father were in the same room, but that felt like a tacit acceptance of the violence that had occurred. What Judy wanted was to leave and never come back home, but she knew she wasn't that strong. She needed her mother. She needed her brother. Without them, she was alone.

“Knock knock.”

Egg salad and pickle on a plate, served by Roger.

“Thank you,” she said, and she took a bite of the sandwich. There was a hint of curry this time, a slight change of pace that was welcome to her palate.

He glanced at her sketch. “Angry.”

“My father,” she said. “What he looked like when he slapped me.”

Roger furrowed his eyebrows. “How often did he hit you?”

“That one time.”

“Oh.”

“What does that mean? That it's okay if it's just once?”

“My parents didn't spare the rod, so you're probably talking to the wrong person.”

Roger ate the other half of the sandwich while Judy summarized the incident for him. She didn't want to sound like a whiner, which probably meant she did.

“My dad was like yours. Even with my issue, he wouldn't have been pleased that I saw a shrink. He was from a different generation, where only crazy people went for help.”

“We just never jibed, he and I. Never saw eye to eye on anything.”

“Are you sure you want to take him to the doctor yourself? You don't think I can help?”

Judy shook her head. “That's not it. I'd rather just do this alone. Maybe I don't want you to see the ugliest side of me. My father is dying, and I'm sort of glad. I'm a shitty daughter.”

“You are who you are, and that's fine with me,” he said.

Roger left after finishing the sandwich, and she was once again alone. Next to her father's face, she quickly sketched her mother's, then her brother's and hers as kids. In her opinion, her family had never been a cohesive unit, but this was as close as it got, her parents in their early forties, the kids in elementary school. Until Kevin started to play tennis seriously and attended junior camp, they summered at the Jersey shore, renting a two-bedroom cottage in Long Branch. It couldn't have been any more than a few years that they went to that white house by the beach, but they were memorable ones. One evening they drove up to the carnival that had ridden into town. She watched her parents share a cotton candy, ride the Ferris wheel, toss rings at a hundred cola bottles. Judy understood how they fit together, how only she and Kevin could belong to this exclusive permutation of people. It might have been a momentary illusion, but at the time, it felt as real as Kevin's hand she was holding.

A week from now, she would be standing next to Claudia X. People would watch her, scrutinize her works. Judy wasn't ready for any of it. She wanted to have a few more drawings for Claudia, but her mind was a blank. Staring at the eyes of her father, she wanted to blame him for her shortcomings, but that wasn't going to do her any good. She'd have to work, to produce, to make something of herself. She flipped the sketch board over to a fresh sheet of white, picked up her Sharpie, and drew a line.

22

U
nlike Claudia, Denise was a model driver, signaling when she changed lanes, her eyes on the road at all times. Once again, Kevin was being chauffeured around by a woman he hardly knew. Back home, the passenger seat of his car remained vacant, a spot that had been occupied by Alice because whenever they went anywhere, she preferred that he drove. He'd loved it when she wore a skirt, the short, clingy black one with silky black stockings. On the street, her beauty was available to everyone, but inside his car, the view of her legs, together and leaning slightly to her right like a piece of human sculpture, had been exclusive to him.

Except now it was exclusive to someone else, probably that douche bag in the background photo of her work computer. Kevin sat up straighter, trying to get himself back to the here and now. He forced himself to watch the buildings to his right blur by as they left the city and drove down to Oakland on I-980, racing toward the wide open sky.

“Should we be talking about ourselves or something?” he asked.

“Since we're sister and brother,” she said, “and we have a lot of catching up to do.”

“Don't you think?”

Denise drummed the steering wheel with her fingers to some beat in her head, seemingly mulling over his request as she ramped off the highway and got on another.

“You know, there's just so much,” she said. “Even if we were to live together in the same house for the next ten years, it wouldn't be possible for you to know who I've been, and vice versa.”

“Time only moves forward.”

“I'm glad it only goes in one direction. Whatever I've done, good or bad, that's it, no do-overs.”

“No regrets.”

“A waste of time, or maybe not exactly a waste but a rerun, a repeat. Who wants to watch a rerun of a TV show?”

“Unless it was a really good episode,” Kevin countered.

“But is it as good the second time around?”

They drove up Thirteenth Avenue in Oakland, in what Kevin assumed to be a less affluent part of town, houses with paint so chipped they looked as if they were shedding, rusted chain-link fences surrounding browned-out yards. Denise parked in front of a large beige house with black shutters, perhaps the best maintained structure on the block. A small wooden sign ran down the mailbox post:
A. W. SANCTUARY
. It almost looked like a name of a person.

As soon as Denise opened her car door, two young kids ran out from the backyard, a boy and a girl.

“Auntie D!” they screamed in their high-pitched voices, their identical blond curls so gold they looked manufactured. When she bent down to embrace them in each arm, Denise gave herself wholly to the children, folding into herself, disappearing.

“Who are you?” the boy asked.

“A friend,” Denise said. “His name is Kevin.”

“That's my name!” he said, and he looked at Kevin with great curiosity. “You must be cool.”

“As cool as you,” Kevin said.

“This is Betty, Kevin's sister,” Denise said. The girl waved without meeting his eyes. She slinked behind one of Denise's legs and hugged it like a tree.

“Nice to meet you, Betty.”

The kids led the way to the back. Denise slipped out of her heels and walked barefoot, and Kevin followed them. She looked professional today, a white blouse and a navy-blue skirt, and her face was still perfectly porcelain. The fenced-in yard was big enough for a set of swings, a verdant vegetable garden that wrapped around the perimeter, and what looked like a crude maze created with football-size stones laid in concentric circles. The kids ran to the swing and jumped into their seats, launching themselves into the air instantly.

“I didn't want to tell them you're my brother because they get very attached.”

“I understand.” It felt like an excuse, but he let it go. “Who are they?”

“Technically, they belong to Amy, but she's gone, so right now, they sort of belong to the house.”

“Gone?”

“She'll be back. She's done this before, just takes off for a couple of weeks without telling anybody.”

“And you guys take care of the kids until she returns.”

“It must sound crazy to you, but the kids have been coming here for years.”

“It seems like Amy could use some professional help. I don't think a mother is supposed to abandon her children, do you?”

Denise took his arm and walked toward the starting point of the maze, a cedar garden arbor with ivy climbing over and around the lattice and the arch. “This must not sit well with you, considering what you've recently discovered about your own past history.”

He watched the kids in their swing, their limbs dangling in the air, and listened to the chime of their laughter. They were so little.