Reunion: A Novel (19 page)

“Wait,” she says. “You forgot. One more thing.”

She hands me the shopping bag.

“What is this?”

“Also for you,” she says. “Your father wanted you to have it. In his note, he asked me to give this to you.”

I take the bag but don’t look inside.

Wait.

“There was a note?” I say. Nell said nothing about a note. Elliot said nothing about a note. Which means either they don’t know about it or they
do
know about it and have said nothing to me.

“Yes,” she says. “There was a note. For me.”

She stubs out the second cigarette in the same coffee mug at her feet, then rises and squeezes my shoulder.

“Bedtime,” she says. “I’m beat.”

And, according to Sasha anyway, this is the end of the conversation.

I
go upstairs and get into the top bunk. Nell stirs, but she doesn’t wake up. Honestly, I wish she would. I wish she’d all of a sudden kick the bottom of my mattress and say, “Are you awake,” and I’d say, “Yeah, are you?” And she’d say, “Do you feel as lost and lonely and out there as I do?” And I’d say, “Yes, yes, yes.” I’d tell her about the note and we’d decide
as a family
what we think about that. We’d decide whether we should demand to see it or whether we’re all right with it being something personal, between husband and wife.

Outside, on the porch, I was tired. But now I am wide awake, my heart and brain racing to see which can go faster.

I climb back off the bed and just stare at Nell. I try to will her awake, attempting to summon whatever black magic Sasha summoned in order to will me awake. She doesn’t budge. I could just wake her. I could just shake her until she groggily comes to, but that would seem too theatrical. That would seem like the kind of thing you do when someone is newly dead, not when he’s a few days dead and all you’ve done is discover that he left a note.

I go to the guest bathroom and take my shopping bag with me. I lock the door before lowering the toilet lid and taking a seat.

It’s a book. That’s all. A copy of
The Egoist
, by George Meredith. I open the front cover and find exactly what I thought I’d find—an inscription from me to my father.
Happy 50th. Maybe you’ll learn something.
I close the cover. Heat rises in my cheeks. This is what shame feels like. I remember this gift very clearly. I remember how dignified I felt, how righteous. I hadn’t even read the book myself, but I thought the title would somehow disgrace him, would somehow suddenly shine a mirror in front of him. We were in the process of packing up the high-rise and moving in with Joyce by then. Nell and Elliot were off doing their own things at college. They never would have approved of such a gift. They would have said it was funny in theory only. In reality, it brought me to his level. And now here I am, sitting on a toilet, clutching it to my chest as if it’s the man himself.

In a note to his wife, my father told her to return this to me. I am completely ashamed. What must Sasha think of me? No wonder she wants to keep the note to herself. I wouldn’t want to share it with me, either. What kind of daughter gives a gift like this to her own father, no matter what kind of father he is? A worthless daughter. A cruel daughter.

It isn’t fatigue that comes over me now. It’s lethargy. It’s sheer lack of energy or willpower. I could die on this toilet for all I care. I could sit through the night and let them find me tomorrow, toppled over and, if we’re all lucky, magically dead from a head wound incurred in the fall. Would anyone inherit my debt?

And now I’m feeling sorry for myself, which is even worse than shame. Even worse than just owning up to how I was and maybe even how I still am. I open the book and reread the inscription. This book is my punishment. From the grave, Stan Pulaski plays a powerful final move.

I flip to the opening chapter and am surprised to find a series of pencil-scribbled notes. I rub my eyes, squint, and bend closer to the text. Though miniscule to a degree that borders on obsessive and not the way I remember it, this is my father’s handwriting. I flip through a few more pages. Each one’s margin is filled with penciled notes. I stop randomly somewhere in the middle and read:
They let me get my hand in the pork and beans, and it was good and it was sweet.
I flip ahead and find this:
I went and did and gratified. Go and do and gratify
. I flip to the last page, which is covered entirely with the same thing:
Ack ack ack. Ack ack ack. Ack ack ack.
I flip to the title page. Beneath
The Egoist
, he has written,
This is a story about passion. About not letting your brain die. Don’t let your brain die.
The words of the last sentence are underlined. One at a time.
Don’t
let
your
brain
die
. The only other bit of his handwriting on this page is at the bottom. It’s written more carelessly than the writing beneath the title, as if it was a last-minute thought or as if he hadn’t planned to add anything else to this page, but then changed his mind. It says only this:
He was best at mealtime.
It was how Sasha began her eulogy—if you can call it a eulogy—which means she’s read this book. Or at least she knows what’s here. I don’t blame her. How could I blame her? I’d have done the same thing.

I turn the book upside down and hold it by its covers. The pages open like an accordion. I give the book a gentle shake, and a piece of paper falls into my lap. How did I know to do this? Because I am his daughter. Because I’d have hidden a note, too.

I close the novel and set it on the floor next to my feet. The paper is thin and waxy. The writing is even more delicate, even more miniature than the writing in the book. I hold it up to the light and read.
You think I don’t feel anything, but that’s not true. I feel everything. I feel too much. It is the same with you. You think I’m being mawkish. What I’m being is an original. What I’m being is on the fringe.

There is a knob at the base of my throat, a fast-distending knob.

He used to hold up his hands and say, “Hit me. It will make you feel better.” And do you know what? It always did make me feel better, which made me hate him even more. I was young. I didn’t want a simple solution. I wanted to struggle.

It must be close to four or even four thirty by now. The viewing isn’t until ten. If I get back in bed now, I might get an hour or two before the sun comes up, before someone makes their way to the kitchen to brew coffee, before Mindy heads to the TV room and turns on the morning cartoons just a little too loud.

Ack ack ack.
What troubles me is that I think I know what he means.

M
orning comes sooner than I want it to. Little baby birds chirp outside the window. Electricity in use purrs all around me. I’d insisted to Peter I wasn’t depressed, but surely there is something wrong when the sound of morning birds—when the mere sight of daylight—fills your brain with sorrow and woe.

I bend over the top bunk and look below. Nell isn’t there. I listen harder, ignoring the nest of hungry bobwhites outside my window. The shower is running.

It doesn’t smell like anyone’s started coffee yet, so if I go down, at least there will be something for me to do.

There’s a buzzing beneath my pillow. I lift it and there’s my phone. I must have stashed it there when I finally climbed back into bed. Dad’s book is also beneath the pillow, and I have no memory of having put it there. I crack my neck, which thankfully appears to have no memory of having slept on the six-hundred-page novel.

I answer my phone. It’s Peter.

“Hi,” I say, sounding, no doubt, stunned.

“Hi,” he says.

I’ve been waiting for this call. But in all that waiting, I’ve not planned anything significant to say.

“Is this a good time?” he says.

“Sure,” I say. “Yes. Of course.” I sit up in bed.

“Here’s the deal,” he says. He’s already had coffee. Either that or he’s been up all night. He sounds entirely too alert for six a.m. on a Saturday morning. But that’s Peter. Entirely too alert. More alert than I’ve ever given him credit for.

“Listen. I’m sorry about the airport.”

“Me too,” I blurt out.

“Let me talk, all right?” His tone is gentle, not at all aggressive, and this—not yesterday, not the day before, not the day before the day before, but now, this very instant—is when I know for sure, 100 percent, that it is over. If we had a fighting chance, he’d be livid. But all the fight’s gone out. Of him. Of me. It’s what I knew was coming, and maybe even what I’ve wanted, but now it has arrived. I’d heard the whistle, but now the train has officially reached the station.

“All right,” I say.

This is it. This is how two grown-ups end a marriage.

“Go ahead.”

“I’m sorry about the airport and I’m sorry about Nell.”

He pauses, but I don’t dare interrupt.

“I could tell by how she sounded that you hadn’t told her yet. I didn’t mean to out you. I want you to believe that. I really, truly thought you’d have told her.”

He pauses again. I say very quickly, “I believe you,” and I do. And it dawns on me: Peter is still the man I married. He’s every bit the decent, intelligent man I chose all by myself more than a decade ago. The man I confided in about my credit card bills. The man who, without an ounce of judgment, helped me chart the slow path to recovery. Nobody had a gun to my back. Nobody forced me into a corner. It’s not his fault that his biological clock started ticking. He was only being honest.

“You’re dealing with things down there. Things that I’m sure are different and probably harder than you thought they’d be.”

He pauses. I am not crying. Perhaps we are both disappointed. Perhaps we are relieved.

“I’m going to go away for a little while.”

Another pause. Still no tears.

“I’ll be gone for a week at least. At least through next Sunday.”

Another pause. And while I am not exactly crying, I am aware of a swelling in my ducts. I am aware of a burning in the bridge of my nose.

“You’ll have the place to yourself to pack up,” he says. “This seems pretty fair to me.”

And it seems pretty fair to me too, but I am unable to say anything.

“Kate?” he says. “Are you there?”

I nod, but of course he can’t see me.

“Kate?”

Just then the bedroom door opens. It’s Nell, in a towel. Her hair is dripping. I hold out the phone to her. She doesn’t immediately understand, but something on my face—a look of panic, a look of heartbreak, a look of acceptance—clues her in enough to take the phone and answer it.

All I can do is nod, which Nell relates perfectly—as perfectly as I would have her do it—to Peter. With intermittent pauses for his words—I know better than to guess the specifics—she says, “We understand. No, of course. We think that’s very fair. Yes, of course. You too, Peter. You too.”

She closes the phone, and I take a deep breath. If tears were imminent a moment ago, they’ve passed now.

“Are you okay?”

She hands me the phone.

“Better now,” I say. “That will be the worst of it.” Then I tap my chest. “In here. That will be the worst of it in here. We’ve been headed this way for a while, I think. Even before.”

She’s looking up at me where I’m sitting on the top bunk, my legs hanging over the side. She puts her hand on my knee. “It’s all going to be fine. You know that, right?”

I nod. “I know that.”

“You have some work to do, though.”

“With Elliot?”

“With everyone,” she says, then moves her hand from my knee to my wrist. She turns the watch so it faces her. “It looks good on you.”

“You think?”

“Yeah,” she says. “You wear it well.”

Of course she isn’t surprised by the watch, which means she’s known about it. Which means she might also know about the book and perhaps even the note. I look at Nell—Nell, whom I’d always regarded as an open book. Yet another thing I was wrong about.

“Why do you do it?” she says.

“What?”

“Lie.”

I look at the ceiling, but there are no answers there, no cue cards written out.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I really don’t.”

She nods. “You should think about seeing someone.”

Now I nod.

“A therapist,” she says.

“But not Peter,” I say.

“No,” she says, and she gives me a queer little smile. “Not Peter.”

“Nell?” I say.

She twists then squeezes her hair so that large droplets of water land on the rug at her feet.

“Are you still mad at me?”

“I don’t think so,” she says. “I’m just trying to figure you out.” She fake-punches me on the shoulder and says, “Let’s do this thing.”

By which she means, let’s go say goodbye to our dad.

N
ell lets me sit in the front seat on the drive to the funeral home. She doesn’t admit it, but I know what she’s doing. She’s trying to keep a little distance between me and Elliot. It makes no difference. His contempt is palpable from the backseat. I tried over coffee to break the ice, but he just turned around and walked out of the kitchen. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t give me a dramatic stare. He just turned around and walked away. To me, this means the ball’s in his court. Not that he owes me an apology, but if you’re going to thwart someone’s attempt to right a wrong, then it’s on you to let that person know when you’re ready to hear offers. If Elliot wants to be left alone, I can leave him alone. At least, I can try.

On the drive over, Mindy is somber and somewhat frantic where she sits in the booster seat behind her mother. She looks grayer than she has the past few days. She wouldn’t eat breakfast, and now her hair is hanging lopsided into her face. Her immediate mission is to complete a scarf she started knitting only last night. She wants to put it in the coffin with Stan. She’s asked permission. None of us has a problem with it, and heaven knows those funeral directors have seen worse and weirder. Mindy has been told that she will be seeing her father for the last time. She has been told that he will look the same, but also different. She’s been told that if she feels scared or sad at any time, she should simply tell Sasha, and Sasha will whisk her away. But it’s unclear what Mindy actually understands. It’s hard enough for
me
to understand exactly what’s about to happen. Of course it’s hard for a six-year-old.

Mindy’s knitting needles click away in the backseat. Sasha turns up the A/C and turns down the radio.

“I talked to Louise this morning,” she says.

“How’d that go?” says Nell.

“She’s not coming.”

“Fine by me,” says Elliot.

“Whitney and Stan Jr. aren’t coming either,” says Sasha.

“Is there anyone you didn’t talk to?”

“I didn’t talk to them,” she says. “Only Louise. She couldn’t wait to tell me.”

“That woman is a piece of work.”

“I did call Lily, though,” she says. “And she said she’s still coming, so I asked her to pick up Joyce.”

“Good,” says Nell. “That was good thinking.”

And it was good thinking; it was great thinking. Here’s this woman, this woman who is younger than I am, my father’s fifth and final wife, and she’s handling all the exes and their children. What is she, a superhero? Why isn’t one of us—me, Nell, or Elliot—handling this? Why is it I feel we are somehow the children in all this? Not adult children, but
children
children. Sasha makes me feel young and incapable. Is it just that she has a kid and has to behave more maturely? Is it that simple? I’d probably be more bothered by it except that I’m just so relieved that all this organizing has been taken care of by somebody else. And it’s so nice to have things taken care of! I miss having parents.

“So it will be just the seven of us,” she says, “and we can stay as long or as short as you want. I promise not to get all sappy in there.”

“Get as sappy as you like,” I say, sort of surprising myself. “For real. Who knows what we’re walking into? I mean, how can anyone prepare for this sort of thing?”

No one says anything, which makes me think they haven’t understood.

“I mean an open casket,” I say.

Still nothing.

“Because of, you know.” I tap my head.

“Jesus,” says Elliot. He punches the back of my seat. “We get it already.”

Mindy knits more furiously.

“Sorry,” I say.

I look out the window. I am eternally dense.

To my right is Bitsy Grant, where Stan used to play tennis on the weekends. Golf was for suckers, he said. Golf was for Republicans. He’d been a Republican when he was younger, when there was more money, before all the alimony and child support. Then he became a liberal. He became a liberal who believed in playing tennis and bulk-buying at Sam’s Club. Then he became a depressive and a hoarder and, somewhere in there, suicidal.

Joyce and Lily are sitting outside the funeral home when we pull up. There’s this “shade garden” that’s been created in the center of the parking lot. But now, because of the garden and its three myrtles and two benches, the parking lot is a roundabout.

We park in one of the spots reserved for loved ones—that’s what the sign says,
FOR LOVED ONES
. It’s old-school Atlanta out here.

Mindy dashes across the parking-lot-slash-roundabout to the shade garden, where Joyce is already beginning the tiresome task of standing, brushing herself off, and straightening her body as best she can. Lily is holding her elbow gently, and I’m reminded all over that I oughtn’t punish this young woman just for having a toad of a mother.

“They’re ready for us,” says Lily, as they cross toward us. “But we thought we’d wait for y’all.”

Normally, at a funeral, which this certainly is not—this is a viewing, a saying-goodbye and nothing more—there is someone who is obviously the lead beloved. There is the current wife or the oldest son or the most cherished granddaughter who everyone in attendance understands has the most right to grief. But here, it is not so simple. Not so obvious. There is the current wife, who is also the estranged wife and about whom I am still feeling the tiniest bit silly for having mistaken her winks and touches as flirtations. There is the oldest wife, who is also the most removed, the most out to lunch, the closest to death. There is Lily, who—though she came after us—was probably just as neglected as we three were, if not more. Dad hated Whitney. He would have had an even easier time writing off the twins than he did us. There is Mindy, who probably really does love him more than anyone else here, but she is the youngest and therefore the slowest and least able to comprehend. There are the three of us and we are here, we did come here, we did make this awful trip, but that certainly doesn’t merit title of chief beloved.

And so, as a result, the seven of us walk toward the French doors of the funeral home as a sort of stilted blob—none of us wanting to claim the lead, none of us wanting to be left behind.

I’m right there in the middle of the blob, right there at its heart as we funnel clumsily through the doors and into the icy, achy air-c
onditionin
g of the reception area. There is a hand at my back and I turn and there is Mindy, my little confidante. My gangly angel fairy. My sister.

“Here,” she says in a throaty, high-pitched whisper. She holds up the world’s narrowest and least effective knit scarf. “Do you think he’ll like it?” She is all sincerity, all earnestness and honesty. There is not an ounce of treachery or cynicism in her.

I take the scarf and study it. In fact, the stroke work—except where she ended and was in such a hurry—is quite skillful.

There is a whole universe at work in Mindy’s brain, a whole universe of thoughts and wonders and concerns. There is an entire person in there, just waiting to get big and grow up and regret life. And suddenly, I see that the most important thing in the world isn’t that I missed my own childhood, but that she not miss hers.

“He’ll love it,” I say. “He’ll just love it.”