The Admissions (14 page)

“This is called the power selector ring,” said Cecily’s father. “And this is the eyepiece lock ring. And
this
”—he fiddled with something that Cecily couldn’t really see—“is the eyepiece lens. I can’t believe I remember all this. It’s all coming back to me, it’s like riding a bike.”

Actually, Cecily couldn’t see very much at all of the parts of the telescope. There was only a quarter moon. They were on the roof of their house. “The beauty of a one-story,” her father had said.

Cecily’s father had held the ladder steady for her to climb up and then he had followed her while Cecily’s mother held the ladder for him and said things like
Take it easy, Gabe!
and
Do not let her hurt herself, she has to compete soon
and
Are you sure this is a good idea?

Cecily hadn’t even known that her father owned a telescope; it was tucked inside the closet in the office in a special case with purple velvet lining, like something a wizard would bring along to work. But at dinner, when her mother asked her about how her moon chart was coming along, her father, who hadn’t appeared to be listening to the conversation at all, said, “You want to see the moon?
I’ll
show you the moon.”

“I used to use this all the time on the ranch,” he said now. “I guess I was a stargazer.” He looked at her expectantly, and obligingly Cecily smiled, although she wasn’t sure if this was a joke or not, and if it was she didn’t get it.

Sometimes her father looked in the mirror and scrubbed his fingers through his hair and said,
Look what an old man I’m turning into.
He didn’t look so old to her—Pinkie’s father was bald and he looked older than Cecily’s dad—but sometimes when she paused in front of the wedding picture of her parents that sat on one of the built-ins in the living room and saw what he’d looked like then, she could see what he was talking about. There was also a picture of him holding each of the girls when they were infants, his big strong hand palming their little baby heads. She loved those pictures. Now he was wearing a headlamp, which made him look like the pictures of underground gold miners in South Africa that Mrs. Whitney had shown them. Her father definitely had a dorky side.

“Okay, then,” he said suddenly. “I think I’ve got it adjusted. It’s not the Hubble,” he said now. “But it’s better than nothing.”

Cecily didn’t know what the Hubble was but didn’t especially feel like getting into it.

Are you guys okay up there? Cecily?

“Fine, Mom,” she called out, though in fact she was terrified of heights and even this distance up made her feel queasy and uncertain. She tried not to look down but instead looked across, over the roof of the Fletchers’ house and to the yard beyond.

“Now,” said her father. “First rule of looking through a telescope. Before you do it, you look at the object with your naked eye and you observe everything you can. What do you see?”

Cecily trained her eyes on the moon. “A waxing crescent,” she reported. They’d learned that at school. “Twenty-nine percent.” She’d looked that up online. She closed one eye, then opened it and closed the other eye. “I see the sliver that’s lit but I also see the outline of the rest of it. A very light outline. The part that’s lit is reflecting the light of the sun, and the part facing away from the sun is in darkness. It takes the moon 29.53 days to move around the earth.”

“Very good,” said her father approvingly. He cleared his throat in a way that let her know more and better information was coming. “Technically,” he said, “it’s more like twenty-seven days, but because the earth is continuing to move around the sun during each lunar phase, we observe it as twenty-nine days. If you were a star, for example, observing the phases of the moon, you would see a twenty-seven-day cycle. Okay?”

“Okay,” said Cecily. How did parents know so much about so many different things? Her father was looking up at the sky, his hands folded behind him. He sighed deeply and happily and put his hand on top of Cecily’s hair and messed it up a little. She didn’t mind. Angela really minded when her hair got messed up; she spent a long time on it each morning. “Okay,” she said in her mother’s voice. “Whatever you say, boss.”

Her father shook his head at this. “How can you do that, sound exactly like her?”

Cecily shrugged modestly. “I’ve been practicing with Pinkie. You should hear
her
do her mom.”

“You could take that act on the road,” her father said. “Now, when you’re ready, put your eye to the telescope. And tell me what you see. I have it set at the right angle, so kneel or bend down or whatever works best for you, but don’t touch anything.”

The night air was cool and dry. Cecily shivered; she was wearing a thin fleece but had turned down the jacket her mother had offered.

She was prepared to overdo it for her father’s benefit.
(Be extra nice,
her mother had whispered when her father was setting everything up.
I think he had a long day.)
Every day seemed like a long day for her father. She was ready to be the cheerful, appreciative kid her father was expecting. She was ready to pretend to be wowed.

She bent until her eye was level with the eyepiece and looked.

She didn’t have to pretend at all. She was wowed for real. Up close, the moon was gray and looked like a giant rock. It was covered with pits that looked like you could put your finger right into them. In fact she found she was, embarrassingly, holding out one hand as though she could actually touch the pits. When she realized she was doing that she put her hand down.

She said, “Wow,” but that word didn’t seem like enough to convey the unnamed emotion she was feeling. It was astonishing, that something that looked so bright and simple from far away, something that sat in the sky night after night after night, looked like
this
up close. That they could just point a telescope (a telescope her father had owned since before she was born and had never mentioned) and see it, just like that, no big deal.

“With the Hubble they can see individual craters. They have specific names, you know. I think the largest is called Bailly.”

There was that Hubble again.

“
See you on the dark side of the moon.
That’s a line from an old Pink Floyd song. I used to listen to a lot of Pink Floyd.”

Cecily sort of wished her father would stop talking, though she would never hurt his feelings by saying that. She wanted to be alone with the moon.

“Makes you feel sort of insignificant, doesn’t it?” he said.

“Yeah,” she said. But in fact the opposite was true for Cecily. It made her feel huge and mighty. It made her feel like she wanted something big to happen. More than that: like she wanted to
make
something happen. Like she had a power in her she hadn’t known she had. That wasn’t it, exactly. But it was hard to explain. Maybe not a power, maybe more like a responsibility. It made her feel like she was the beating heart of the family, or maybe even the heart of something bigger.

Her father let her look for a while and then he cleared his throat again and said, “Had about enough? Your mother’s going to send a search party up here.”

Reluctantly she moved away from the telescope and allowed her father to use his headlamp to repack it in its velvet-lined case. Every part had its own spot in the case; even the tripod folded up small enough to fit in. It was very satisfying, watching it get packed up like that.

When he’d closed the case Cecily said, “Thanks, Daddy. That was—” she paused, then, for lack of anything better, said, “That was awesome.”

“Thank
you,
Cecily. We should do this more often. I can’t tell you how—”

His voice splintered off and he lifted his eyes to the sky and Cecily felt slightly embarrassed, the way she did when her aunt Marianne, talking once about one of her cases to Cecily’s mother, had started crying. Still talking, but with tears slipping down her face and her makeup all smudged beneath her eyes. (Cecily hadn’t known where to look.)

She shifted her gaze down to the ground and this time her stomach didn’t drop. Wait until she told Pinkie about this, about looking at the moon through the telescope but also about the way she felt now. She felt like she could fly over the rooftop of the Fletchers’ house, and maybe all the way up to the great gray rock itself. She wasn’t afraid of heights after all.

She wasn’t afraid of anything.

Nora and Maya sat with a book:
Biscuit Visits the Big City
. Biscuit, the intrepid puppy, was attempting to navigate the streets of Manhattan. Woof, Biscuit. Maya’s nose was running slightly and her bangs were in her eyes. Nora smoothed them from her forehead. In twenty minutes, she had to start dinner. She glanced at her watch. Fifteen minutes would be better. Better still would be if she’d already started it.

“Try, sweetie,” said Nora. “I just don’t feel like you’re trying.”

She felt an off note in her voice. She tried to tamp it down—Angela could read the
Biscuit
books when she was three but you were
not supposed to compare your children,
every parent knew that. Too late: Maya heard it too and looked at Nora from underneath the hair with a look that said: betrayal.

“I
am
trying,” said Maya. “I just can’t do it.”

Maternal
betrayal, the worst kind. It wasn’t Maya’s fault she couldn’t read. It was Nora’s fault.

Maybe it would have been easier if they were elephants. Angela had once told Nora that in the elephant world, after a mother gives birth, a bunch of the other female elephants chip in on the work so the actual mother can focus on eating enough to nurse the baby. They were called
allmothers.
What a lovely concept.

“I just—honey, I just don’t understand why you can’t do it. You know your letters, and you know the sounds the letters make. We’ve been over the flash cards so many times, sweetie. I know you can do it.”

But elephants were also pregnant for nearly two years. So no thank you to that. Nora adored infants but she loathed being pregnant. In fact she was suspicious of any pregnant woman who claimed to love it, because in Nora’s mind it simply wasn’t possible. She thought of what Maya had looked like as a baby, her face scrunched up like an elderly man’s, her delicious legs kicking, and her heart softened. Imagine if someone had told her that one day she’d feel impatient if that little creature was a late reader. She would have said to that someone, “Don’t be
ridiculous.
I am
not
going to be that kind of a mother.”

“I want to,” whispered Maya, swiping at her nose. “I really want to, but I can’t.”

Before you had kids everyone told you all the wonderful and tragic things your kids would do to you. They’ll make googly eyes and you’ll fall in love! Wonderful. They’ll ruin your figure! Terrible. They’ll light up when you walk into the room. Wonderful. When they become teenagers they’ll smash up the car and say really rude things to you in public. Terrible.

But nobody talked about the things
you
could do to ruin
them.
That was the dirty little secret of parenting. You didn’t find out about that until you became a parent, and by then, of course, there was no going back. All sales final.

When Maya was an infant Nora took her—just her—to visit Nora’s parents and Marianne in Rhode Island. Nora’s father wasn’t up to the trip out to California. Angela was already in school, and they had a good after-school babysitter who could care for her until Gabe got home from work. The same sitter—an elementary schoolteacher who hadn’t found a job,
perfect
—was willing to work extra hours to care for Cecily too, because a two-year-old and a six-hour plane ride and a three-hour time change were a lethal mix. Maya didn’t know her days from her nights anyway. They’d be gone from a Monday night through midday Friday. No big deal—in fact, a bit of a break for Nora, a chance to focus on just the new baby. It was October, Nora’s favorite month in New England. She’d been working like a maniac, pulling together a sale in Tiburon. Arthur was calling her several times a day.

Nora’s mother had said,
I think you’re working too hard. Sweetheart, they’re only young once.

(To which Nora had answered, under her breath,
Thank goodness.
)

Gabe had said,
Things at Elpis are going really well, you don’t need to do this.

(To which Nora had answered, firmly,
Yes, I do.
) They didn’t need her income then the way they did now with college tuition looming, maybe, but it had taken a while to get back into the market after her last break. She didn’t want to lose her client base. She didn’t want to disappoint Arthur. She didn’t want to be one of those women who slipped out of the workforce when their children were young and then
forgot
how to do it and suddenly found themselves fiftysomething empty nesters turning an old play area into a craft room. Not Nora! No, sir. She didn’t even know how to craft.

People said lots of things to her back then, but nobody ever said,
I’m afraid you’re going to hurt the baby.

On Tuesday they drove up to Boston and walked through the Common while Maya napped in the BabyBjörn. Pizza at Regina in the North End for lunch. That night, in the port-a-crib set up in Nora’s old bedroom at her parents’ house, Maya slept for six hours straight for the first time ever and then woke up and nursed like she’d been on a desert island for two weeks. Absolute heaven.

Marianne took Wednesday and Thursday off from work. On Wednesday they walked at Town Beach, which was deserted but because the day was warm retained a glorious, mournful, end-of-summer feel. The leaves on a few of the trees along Boston Neck Road were beginning to turn.

On Thursday, when her parents were off at a dentist appointment, Nora set Maya, freshly changed, freshly fed, on the bed while she engaged in an argument with her parents’ dial-up modem to get an addendum to the contract over to the office in time for the start of the West Coast business day.

She left the room. Number one rule of parenting: Don’t leave the baby lying unsupervised on a bed. Okay, maybe not the absolute number one rule, but it was right up there.

And Maya, who had never rolled before, thought that might be a good time to start. She rolled off the edge of the bed and hit the uncarpeted floor in the guest room. The worst noise Nora had ever heard in her life. The fastest Nora had ever moved, running back into the room from the upstairs office to Marianne’s old bedroom where the modem was.

Maya was out for five seconds, maybe ten, seconds that lasted a year each, during which Nora’s only two thoughts as she held her were: I’ve killed the baby. And: Now, of course, I have to kill myself.

Then Maya opened her gummy little mouth and cried. Screamed bloody murder.

“Ambulance?” said Marianne, running up from the kitchen, but Nora said, “
God,
no, just drive us, please. Just drive us, faster that way.”

Marianne drove, and Nora sat in the backseat. She’d had to buckle Maya, still screaming, into her infant seat, but she didn’t wear a seat belt herself. She didn’t deserve a seat belt! She didn’t deserve anything. She leaned over Maya the whole time and whispered useless, inane things that nobody could hear over the screaming. There was a divot on the back of Maya’s head that seemed big enough to fit an egg into, although in retrospect it probably wasn’t. Nora thought a bump might have been easier to take—a divot was such a
subtraction.
Like something had actually been lost, left on the bedroom floor.

First a nurse triaged Maya. Then came a resident, who asked all the same questions that the nurse had asked, and then the attending physician, who did everything all over again. The doctor was older, maybe sixty, with thinning gray hair and deep lines around his mouth. His white coat was slightly rumpled.

Maya scored a 14 on the Pediatric Glasgow Coma Scale! It was almost the highest score you could get. Weirdly, Nora was proud of that, like somehow it boded well for the SATs. She sort of wanted to show the other mothers in the emergency room.

The doctor said, “How long did you say she lost consciousness for?”

Nora said, “Ten seconds, maybe fifteen. No, maybe five. I really don’t know. I’m sorry. I’m so so sorry.” Like he was going to give her absolution, not medical advice. Like he was a priest.

And Maya blinked at her, as if she were saying, Um, shouldn’t you apologize to
me
?

“I don’t see any cause for real concern. But we’re going to observe her for the next few hours, just to be sure.”

Observing
sounded nice and gentle. Nora could handle that.

While they were waiting for Maya, Marianne asked, “Should I dial Gabe’s number for you?”

And Nora, who had meant to say, “Yes, please,” had simply said, “Not right now. I’ll call him later.”

And didn’t. She never told him. Kept it to herself. Something like that, something so terrible, for which
she’d
been to blame, kept it all to herself. That was her secret: that was the one thing.

By the time they flew back to California the divot was no bigger than a walnut. Nothing that couldn’t be covered with a hat. Babies always wore hats! Especially on planes, where the temperature was unpredictable. A couple of days later it was an almond, then a sesame seed, and then it was gone.

When Gabe picked them up at the airport he held Maya up in the air and said, “I missed you two!” and tickled Maya under her chin until she smiled. Then he kissed Nora on the forehead and said kindly, “You look exhausted. You didn’t work too hard out there, did you? You better not have.” Nora sucked in her breath and shook her head and felt like the worst person in the entire world.

Now, so many years later, Maya couldn’t read, and it was all Nora’s fault. Something had happened in her brain that day, the fall had loosened something that had never been put right, whatever that kindly ER doctor had said. How did they
really
know what went on inside such a tiny brain, when they couldn’t see anything? They didn’t know, but Nora knew. She had ruined her daughter, and she’d kept it to herself.

If she’d been an elephant, if they’d all been elephants, none of this ever would have happened.

Where were the allmothers when you really needed them?