Stay With Me (2 page)

Julian and Janie are standing in front of the ocean with Clare between them. Janie is wearing her sunglasses like a headband and Clare has a paper party hat on. Julian's hand is on Janie's shoulder and they're looking down at Clare, but also at each other. Something in my father's expression—a kind of drunken bliss—tells you: here was a great love. A love that was big, sweeping, and, in the end, impossible. But no matter the end, it was here. Right between them.

Da still got very quiet whenever Janie's name came up and he always put off calling her back when they had to talk about my sisters (a new boyfriend, a job, a medical thing or an apartment). I know he loves my mother. You can hear it in the way he calls her name—letting the
I
roll slowly into the
s
of Elsa. But I thought he could love Mom while also still having his great love be Janie. Of course, maybe I was wrong and that great love had vanished the minute they split up.

Since I had not been there to see or hear it for myself, I felt free to make up certain things. One way or another, I wanted to know the story of
before.
Then I might feel like less of a stranger when my sisters and my father were together.

"We aren't strangers," my mother would say. "It's that they were a part of him first. It's not better, it's just first."

I knew she was right and Da was still with us, while his life with Janie was gone. But it had existed, and in a way, I came from it as much as Clare and Rebecca did. I looked at old photos, at my sisters, and on occasion at Da himself, and easily imagined what had held them and Janie together. Before it flung them apart.

A great love and a great ruin.

The very best information I had about Janie and Julian came from Rebecca, who had told me how Da spent the years between his marriages. The great love photograph itself was one Rebecca took on her twelfth birthday. The camera was a present from her parents and the frosting on her cake was, she said, full of sand. When I told Rebecca that yes, I wanted to meet her mother, I must have thought Janie could help me take stories which didn't belong to me and make them mine.

There were two important stories that Rebecca could not—or would not—help me with. The first concerned two hotels my father's family had owned since the early 1900s. They were lost long before my sisters were born. The hotel in Spain was sold to pay the debts of a gambling cousin. The bigger one in Egypt, where Da grew up, had to be sold when life there for Jews became impossible. The hotel in Alexandria has become a government building, but the one in Barcelona is still open for guests.

As far as Abranel family history goes, the story of the lost hotels belongs to Clare. She has the only photographs of them and she's the lawyer for a man who owns lots of hotels. She treats hotels like living, breathing things. The happiest I've ever seen her was talking about a contract that would deliver heated towel racks to hotels in Germany. If I told her I loved the lost hotels, that I had plans to visit them one day, she would be offended. They are hers to long for.

The other story Rebecca wouldn't speak of concerned the wide scars on the insides of her arms, which ran down toward her hands. She'd cut open her wrists two years before I was born and though I knew certain external details of
the incident,
which is how Da and Clare described it, I didn't know why she did it. Mother said that she doubted Rebecca herself knew, but I was sure there was a reason. An unwritten, secret story that Rebecca was waiting to tell me.

I certainly didn't think Janie would tell me about
the incident,
and I knew that the hotels were lost before she ever met my father. But I was anxious to check reality against my imagination. Against a birthday photograph from twenty-plus years ago. I never really knew why Janie agreed to meet me and my parents had no reason to object. It was easily arranged.

One meeting might have been enough for both of us, but since Janie was a lighting designer and I had recently figured out that plays were made for dyslexics, we developed other reasons for talk and tea and sweets.. Plays have a structure built into them that helps me to keep events and characters straight. So it's easy to keep track of the order. Janie knew a lot about plays and I had a lot of questions. I had joined the drama department's tech crew at school, but it wasn't enough to build the sets. I wanted my ideas to be the ones that got built.

My mother could and did help me with the actual set building. From her I learned how to work with a blueprint. How to calculate weight and support. To shop for supplies and to let my hands lead me through the process. But Mom could not read a play and see the set.

Janie could do that. She could immediately see how to close the gap between a great idea and the impossibility of building it. Conversations with Janie were full of How
about just a hint of that?
or
Have you thought of working around this?
or
Lighting will fix it.
I often brought my ideas to Janie and she was the one who taught me never to start designing sets for the entire play.

"Find a scene," she said. "Or better yet, a corner of a scene. One person's single action. What are they doing and where are they doing it? Build your set on a tiny moment."

"Just one?" I asked her. "How do you know which to pick?"

"You start with a detail that most grabs your attention and move out," Janie said. "Don't impose your big idea on the play. For—"

"For the play itself is the big idea," I said, finishing for her.

Janie and Da both spoke in absolutes which were easy to remember but required, Rebecca said, more doubt than faith. The girls found my attachment to their mother hilariously peculiar and were forever trying to dilute it just a little. From Rebecca I found out that Janie had greeted the news of my mother's pregnancy by saying,
Julian's back-up plan.
And Clare told me that her mother had remarked that my name, Leila (from the Persian meaning "dark as night"), was
pretentious but serviceable.

I thought Janie's comments were interesting. Up until I heard them, I had worried that I was the one daughter for whom Julian had not planned. Perhaps I was a back-up to my sisters, but since the girls didn't always like Da so much, maybe expanding his plan was smart. And the only thing I had ever had to say about my name was the rather lame
I am not a rock song
to people who called me Lay-la instead of Lee-la. Besides, as far as I was concerned, after all the time she'd spent talking to me about her work, Janie could pretty much say what she wanted. Clearly my sisters, into their thirties by the time I was ten, had forgotten just how precious attention is from a grownup who is not your parent.

I asked Janie about leaving my father only once.

"You look happy in the pictures," I said. "What happened?"

She was quiet for so long that I thought she was coming up with a polite way to tell me I was being rude. Instead she went to a cabinet in her bookshelves, opened it and poured herself a brandy. She did not add ice. Or water.

"How does it go? 'Things fall apart,'" she said, once she had sat back down. "Wait, no. Throwing poetry at you is exactly what Julian would do."

Da does quote poetry rather a lot. I don't mind because, in poems, the meaning doesn't come from the order. And everyone gets confused reading poetry. Not just people like me.

"When things end, what matters is not that everything's in pieces," Janie finally said. "It's how you decide to carry them."

I thought that as nonanswers go, this one was pretty cool because she was miles away from saying that when love died, you picked yourself up and made the best of things. That you carried ruin with you was surely something I already knew from watching my father, but it seemed more believable spelled out by Janie.

It took a while, but I did find the poem. The one that she wouldn't quote.
Things fall apart.
It's not about divorce or great love; more a certain kind of violence. It's the first thing I think about when the city is attacked. And when Rebecca succeeds in killing herself. Pills this time. No scars, but no surviving either.

My sister's departure should be where to start. A more clever girl would open with it. But I, of course, go hopelessly backwards to Janie, dead a year by the time it happens. And then ahead until I can clearly see the decisions my father and Clare are making about their portion of ruin. I arrived when Rebecca's life was more than half over, and my share of what she leaves behind is therefore small. Just big enough to carry.

I
T'S A FEW DAYS AFTER
T
HANKSGIVING IN THAT YEAR WHICH IS ALREADY FULL TO BURSTING WITH BAD NEWS.
P
ARTICULARLY IF, AS WE DO, YOU LIVE IN THE CITY.

Da stays home from his hospital office every other Tuesday to do paperwork. On those days, I let him know I'm back from school and then leave him alone. It's understood that nothing is to disturb him.

When the doorbell rings, I run for it, ready to sign for a package. We don't do Christmas or Chanukah (
Secular means secular,
Da says), and Mom tries to make up for it by giving me things I "need" during the last month of every year. Of course, she has no time to shop, so I get a lot of my not-presents from catalogues.

Only it's not a package. It's Raphael. Raphael Barclay, who's sort of our cousin but not really. Raphael's mother is my Aunt Ingrid, who's not really my aunt. She was once married to my father's brother, but he died—he drowned in the ocean—back when Da was still in Alexandria. A few years later, Aunt Ingrid married Raphael's father when the Abranel family was in Paris. That's where they first lived after leaving Egypt.

Keeping as little as that straight is almost impossible. And there's more.

While everyone was still in Paris, Raphael's father, who was American, introduced Janie, who was British, to Julian, who eventually became my father. The cocktail party where Janie and Julian met was in Paris. Raphael's father wasn't just an American who married Aunt Ingrid. Uncle Harold was, as Janie had described him to me, the man
whom everyone knew.

Even if I often can't follow how, I know the Barclay family is a part of my family. That it's confusing is part of the proof that we all fit. Apparently, visual aids do help.

Rebecca told me that when Raphael dated Clare, he had to draw her a chart to prove they weren't related. Raphael is a lot like the hotels, in that he totally belongs to Clare. Even though they went out for less than three months and broke up when I was four. Janie told me that she thought Raphael was completely unsuited to Clare, but she said that about everyone Clare dated.

I like Raphael. Everyone likes him. Janie had said if he would stop being in love with Clare, she would like him too. Mom felt that he'd be perfect for Clare. Something which amazed me, as she normally goes out of her way to avoid contradicting Janie's thoughts about my sisters. Raphael's a lab science person like my mother (she's a pathologist and he studies genetics), but he's a much better dresser than she is.

"Leila," he says.

"Hi," I say, and then, because I have only ever seen him here when it's Clare's birthday, "Clare's in Hungary."

She's either working there or visiting the superstar of her unsuitable boyfriends, whom
no one
likes. I do, though, because he's unbelievably beautiful and speaks with a great accent. More to the point, he lives in Budapest, which is where Clare's boss owns two apartment buildings. They're being renovated and she goes to Hungary a lot for work as well as unsuitable-boyfriend stuff, and as I am trying to remember what this particular trip is for, Raphael says,

"It's Rebecca. She's—"

At which point he covers his face with his hands and starts to cry, so I know nothing good is to follow and yet all I can think is that the only other man I've seen cry is my father when Janie died. It doesn't look that different on Raphael.

"Rebecca's killed herself" he says, and his voice breaks up, but the crying stops. "I'm sorry. Julian's office said he was here."

"He's working," I say, wondering if
killed herself
means something different from what I think.

Because, of course, Rebecca cannot have done this. There is simply no way on earth she did this. Even I know Janie will kill her. And then I remember.

"You'd better come in," I say, when what I mean is
Go away.

Janie died last year, and until then no one ever noticed how old my father is. Now people ask all the time if he's my grandfather. This will more than finish his accelerated aging process.

"Oh, God," Raphael says, sliding his hands up under his glasses. "The cleaning lady called me. I'm the emergency contact when they're out of town."

After Janie died, Clare and Rebecca moved into their mother's rent-controlled apartment, and one of the many decisions that move involved was hiring a cleaning lady. My sisters are each messy, but in different ways (Clare with paperwork, Rebecca with clothes), and neither wanted to straighten up after the other. The cleaning lady is from Chile and incredibly cheerful. What English she has, she tends to sing; to me, for example,
Good morning, little one.

For a split second I think that the truly unforgivable thing is that Rebecca let this woman, whose name I knew just two minutes ago, find her. And then I think entirely too much about what I do know of Rebecca's scars. Of
the incident.
Clare found her. Up at Janie's weekend house in Connecticut. In the tub and half dead. Blood everywhere.

Clare's in Hungary. Safe with her boyfriend. Good for Rebecca.

"I'll get my father," I say.

"Let me," Raphael says, handing me his coat, scarf, and briefcase.

Later, I will be grateful he gave me something to do. But right then, I am furious. Thank you, I am
not
the coat check girl. I think how stupid Raphael is, how useless, how a better person would have called my mother first and made sure she was here when Da got the news.