An Act of Love (23 page)

Linda found herself staring at a display of inexpensive, gaudy, Christmas earrings. Silver bells tied with red bows. Gold Christmas trees with jewels for lights. Gold boxes
with red ribbons. At one time Emily would have squealed, “These are so cute!” Would she still? Would this season hold any pleasure for Emily at all? It must; Linda would not let everything be ruined. She swept four sets into her hands, for Emily and for her three best friends. Then another, for Janet. And another, for herself.

And another. For Tina Dr. Travis.

“Like my hair?”
Janet asked after the waiter took their order.

“It looks great. It always does.”

“I had it colored. First time. The road downhill begins.”

“Nonsense. You look thirty.”

“I doubt it. And I
am
forty-three. Next year Georgia graduates from college. Can you believe it? And Johnny starts. Empty nest.”

“You’ll love it.”

“I don’t think so.” Janet’s eyes teared up. “Oh, Linda, Georgia wants to move to
Seattle
.”

“Oh, Janet.”

In the fifteen years she’d known Janet, it had always been Janet with her blond hair and long legs and adoring husband whose life seemed more normal, whatever normal meant. Her husband was a lawyer and Janet owned a stationery store but didn’t let it take over her life. She just enjoyed stocking what pleased her, having clientele she liked.

“What’s up with you?” Janet asked. When Linda didn’t answer at once, she remarked, “You seem preoccupied.”

“Just trying to think of anyone I forgot to buy a present for. I think I got more presents for Sean than anyone else.”

“Let me see them.”

Linda lifted out the boxes from the nest of packages and held up the clothing for Janet to admire: red knit Christmas pajamas, a sailor outfit as soft as a cloud.

“Why are babies so seductive?” Janet asked, sighing.

“Nature is very clever,” Linda replied. “If we had to start right off with adolescence, the human race would never continue.”

Janet caught the tone in Linda’s voice. “Something
is
bothering you.”

Linda bent over her shopping bags, returning the baby clothes to their boxes, hiding her face until she could gain control of her emotions. “Just a lot of things on my mind, that’s all. It’s a busy season.” She felt angry to the point of tears. She’d known Janet longer than she’d known Owen;
Emily
had known Janet longer. She confided
everything
to Janet in the past; it was a kind of betrayal to their friendship to keep silent now. But what could Linda do? She did not think the spiral of betrayals would stop here.

Chapter Eighteen

That night Linda
sat with fourteen other people in a semicircle in the dining room of West 4. A coffee machine bubbled cheerfully away in the far end of the room, reassuring them of imminent release from their metal folding chairs.

“Let’s talk about the holidays,” Dr. Travis suggested to the group. Everyone groaned. “Let’s talk about what it feels like to have a family member in the hospital during the holidays.”

“I don’t mind saying that it’s damned inconvenient!”

Linda turned to study the man who had spoken.

“Could you introduce yourself, please?” Dr. Travis asked.

“Bartholomew Wight. Bart. This is my wife, Reba.”

He was silver-haired and portly, but elegant in his three-piece immaculately tailored suit. His wife was simply beautiful. Enormous blue eyes, a gentle smile. Linda could see where Keith’s looks came from.

“I’m a lawyer,” Wight said. “Estate planning. Probate. Taxation. Personal injury.” He looked around the group as he spoke, nailing each person with a word. “I have a small but successful firm and my good name is worth money to me. We entertain a lot. Have to. People know they can count on me, trust me. I’m reliable. My clients consider me the Rock of Gibraltar. We give a Christmas party at our home every year for upwards of two hundred people and Keith, my only son, should be there. He’s a liability when he isn’t.”

“They choose my clothes for me for the party,” Keith said, staring at Dr. Travis.

“I wouldn’t have to if you didn’t insist on dressing like a—a Las Vegas showgirl! Silk shirts! Flowered vests!” Mr. Wight’s face was growing red.

“Dear,” Mrs. Wight said warningly, putting her hand on his arm.

Linda exchanged a look with Emily. She wished Owen were here to see the other families; their own might not seem so terrible by comparison.

“Just one day a year!” Mr. Wight bellowed. “Hell, not even that! Just five hours a year.
Five hours a year
we ask our son to behave as if he’s a normal human being who’s come from a decent home so that my fellow lawyers and prospective clients can be
reassured that I’m someone they can depend on.”

“You didn’t mention that you also want me to have a girlfriend with me.”

“All right, fine, I
do
want you to have a girlfriend with you. You’re eighteen years old. It’s time you had a girlfriend. Otherwise you seem odd.”

“Dad, I
am
odd.”

“Only because you choose to be! Out of some misbegotten desire to bite the hand that feeds you.”

“I’m
not
‘choosing’ to be gay to torture you and Mom! I
am
gay, and I don’t want to pretend that I’m not! I want to be accepted for who I am.”

Keith was nearly at the point of tears and Bartholomew Wight was turning purple. Dr. Travis interjected smoothly, “Let’s talk about why it is that this particular season pushes so many of our buttons.”

“Television,” Arnold said. “Television propaganda.”

Cynthia’s mother nodded. “It is hard, trying to live up to the—the”—she spread her hands as if feeling for the right word—“the glittering perfection of television Christmases.”

Linda agreed. “It’s like Christmas is the end of a novel, and everything on that one day has to be tied up in a perfect bow.”

“Nonsense,” Bartholomew Wight growled. “No one achieves perfection, ever. Christmas is about family, plain and simple, we all know that, and once a year I think it’s not too much to ask my son to act like one of the family.”

“To publicly deny that I’m gay,” Keith said.

“You go, boy,” Emily said softly and gave Keith a nod.

Poor Keith
, Linda thought, shifting in her chair, and was not prepared for Dr. Travis zeroing in on her daughter.

“Emily, how do you feel about this Christmas? Do you expect to spend it in the hospital?”

Emily shrugged and in a small voice said, “I guess. I know I don’t want to go back to the farm.”

Then where will she spend Christmas?
Linda wondered.
And where will I?

“You’re supposed to go home for Christmas,” Cynthia’s mother reminded her.

“I don’t have a home anymore,” Emily replied bluntly.

“I hate Christmas!” Arnold’s mother burst out. An emaciated platinum blonde,
she sat drumming her fingers on the patent leather purse in her lap. “We always fight. Always.”

“Because you want me to drink with you,” Arnold said.

“A glass of champagne. Is that so awful? One glass of champagne to celebrate the season? Oh, no, you have to become Mr. High and Mighty!”

“Your boyfriends can drink champagne with you.”

“And you’ll do what? Spend the holiday in a church basement with a bunch of drunks and addicts?”

“Mom, I
am
a drunk and an addict.”

“You know I can’t stand it when you talk that way.”

Frustrated, Arnold folded his arms over his chest and announced to the ceiling, “Man, I am definitely staying here for Christmas.”

“The Holiday Bin,” Keith quipped.

“You see?” Mr. Wight said, pointing at his son. “He thinks this is all some kind of joke!”

Dr. Travis went to the blackboard and wrote:

POWER

PRIVACY

PEACE

“These are the issues we’re focusing on in our group meetings,” she said, looking at the parents. “Before we adjourn for dessert tonight, I’d like to propose that we all think about these words over the next few days as we approach the holiday season. Obviously all our problems won’t be solved by the twenty-fifth of December. We can’t hope to achieve perfection. And when families are under a strain, holidays can push that strain to the breaking point.”

She continued to speak, but Linda didn’t listen.
Emily said she didn’t have a home
. The magnitude of that statement took her breath away. It would be sad if Emily spent Christmas in the hospital, but after Christmas? If Emily really didn’t want to come back to the farm, then … then what would they do? A void opened before her.

When Dr. Travis finally released the group for dessert, Linda tried to pull herself back into the moment. Theoretically now everyone should mingle, getting to know one another, becoming acquainted with the people and the relatives of the people who shared their lives here in this ward. But each family broke off into its own little enclave. Linda
and Emily took their gingerbread and ice cream and sat across from each other at the end of one of the tables.

Linda felt oddly timid with her daughter.
I must go carefully
, she thought.

“Look,” she said, pulling the bell earrings from her purse. “I thought you’d like these. And your friends.”

“Thanks.”

“Would you like to give a pair to Dr. Travis?”

“I guess.”

“I got some for Janet, too.” She told Emily what she’d bought for the Ryans. “I like the gingerbread.”

“We made it ourselves. From scratch. It’s supposed to ‘engender group participation.’ ” For a moment the old Emily was back, mischief in her eyes. “Really Keith and I made it while Cynthia sat in the corner sucking her thumb and Arnold searched through the kitchen cupboards looking for real vanilla extract.”

“Oh, Emily, that sounds kind of … grim.”

“It’s better than being on the farm.”

“Really?
Really
? I worry about you being here.”

Emily relented. “It’s not a lot different from Hedden. Believe me, we’ve got just as many nutcases there.”

Linda smiled. For a moment the old rapport was between them. “Why do I not feel reassured?”

“Are you going to finish that?”

“Um …” Linda realized that at every moment she was judging, gauging, measuring:
Will it upset Emily if I don’t eat the gingerbread she baked?

“Can I have yours?”

“Sure.” Relieved, Linda shoved her plate across the table. Looking around the room, she said, “Keith’s handsome.”

“I know. And he’s funny. And Cynthia is great, except when she’s depressed.”

“Is that very often?”

“Only when she’s awake.” Seeing her mother’s face, Emily added wearily, “Just kidding.”

The mood broke.

“And you think you’re … getting somewhere … with Dr. Travis.”

“Yeah.” Emily’s face grew serious, grew old.

“Tired?”

In response, Emily yawned.

Some of the other parents were leaving. “I’ll go along, then.”

“Fine.”

She moved to hug her daughter, but Emily shrank away.

“I love you,” she said to Emily.

“I know, Mom,” Emily said wearily.

Linda left the room, and the ward, and the hospital. She found her car in the echoing lot and began the long drive back to the farm.

As she drove
away from Basingstoke, Linda yawned and stretched so deeply she shuddered. Echoes of the evening in the Family Group filled the dark air of her car. She made her living by writing fiction, and yet she had trouble imagining a mother like Arnold’s, a father like Keith’s. She had immediately, instinctively, passionately loved her child, and this, she had thought for a long time, was the one true quality she shared with all women.

But of course she knew of one exception.

It had been a surprise, even a shock, to become acquainted with Bruce’s mother, the beautiful Michelle. Artistic Michelle.

Linda had met Michelle herself at the opening of one of her shows in Cambridge soon after Owen and Linda married. Linda and Emily had just moved to the farm and all four were in a delicate period of adjustment, when each word and look was scrutinized for overtones and the children fell into squabbles over nothing at all.