No One Tells Everything (11 page)

The junkies nod off like lovebirds, one’s head nestled on the other’s shoulder.

###

She is so small. That’s the first thought Grace has when she sees her mother, hanging back from the gathering of happy people greeting the arrivals in Cleveland. She is still pretty—that face that Grace would recognize through the cosmos—with her bobbed silver hair swept back from her face in a tortoiseshell headband, standing there in a pale pink cardigan, khakis, and cream-colored driving shoes. As the professor would say, now there’s a fine-looking woman. No one would ever know that she is in the midst of crisis. Grace wants to take her narrow shoulders in her hands and shake her.

“Hi, honey,” she says. Grace has to lean down a little and her mother hugs her with her elbows tucked in, not wanting to get too close. When she lets go, she holds her daughter at arm’s length and says, “You’re too thin, Grace. You need to eat more. There’s leftover pork roast at home.”

Grace rolls her suitcase and follows.

“How’s Dad?”

“He opened his eyes today. And nodded his head. But they don’t really know yet.”

“How are you?”

“I’m fine,” she says.

The view of Cleveland is brief. Smokestacks against the horizon. Terminal Tower, once indicative of a thriving industrial city. Despite its incessant efforts to revitalize, the city continues to crumble.

Grace somehow expected to see the bare, black tree trunks of winter, but as they drive east swiftly away from downtown, she is met with a Midwestern spring—the deciduous trees awash in pale green buds, daffodils crowding the bases of trees and signposts, the white bursts of apple blossoms. Even though she wishes it didn’t, this place feels like home. The statuesque silhouettes of oaks. The gnarled branches of buckeyes and elms. She cracks her window for the smell, that mix of damp dirt and new grass and honeysuckle. She resents the beautiful veneer of where she grew up, its lie of tranquility. Nice and pristine on the surface, messy and angry underneath. Part of her would like to take a bulldozer right through the middle of every well-groomed lawn.

Her mother is quiet, and she drives with her gaze straight ahead. Grace knows she should reach out to the familiar thin-skinned hand that rests on her mother’s lap and take it in her own. But she can’t.

“George’s went out of business,” her mother says, as they pass a vacant shingled building where they used to go for birthdays and throw peanut shells on the floor. “No one went there anymore.”

And that is the thing that makes Grace cry a little, silently, her face toward the side window. Callie loved that place.

“Kristen Mitchum is getting a divorce,” her mother says. “She’s going to move back in with Maureen and John. For the time being. I guess it’s a good thing now that she couldn’t get pregnant. He left her for his dentist.”

Grace nods at the news of her childhood friend, the Mitchums a constant in her parents’ narrative. She wonders what her mother could possibly tell them about her.

“Did he say anything yet?” Grace asks.

“Who?”

“Dad.”

“Oh. Yes. A little. He’s going to be just fine, Grace.”

You don’t know that, she wants to say.

They drive through the town of Hunter, Charles’s hometown, past the polo field and the sweeping meadows, the horse barns and colonial mansions. Grace is already antsy to get back to New York.

“Mr. Chenowith has prostate cancer, but they caught it early,” her mother says. “You’ll have to go over and say hi to them sometime while you’re home. Marjorie always asks about you.”

The river is on the right, the Chagrin, rushing past, dark and swirling, its banks lined with sycamores and weeping willows, their thin hanging branches dipping into the water with the breeze. The car clicks into a lower gear as they climb the steep hill that turns into one of the few remaining nineteenth-century brick roads; a tunnel of overarching tree branches occludes the sky. And then they are on their street, Woodland Road, home to the Taylors, the Millers, the Mitchums, the Chenowiths, the Carlisles, the Coopers, and so on. No one ever leaves, and Grace feels the heavy tug of being pulled back in.

The driveway has been repaved recently, the fence at the entrance freshly painted white amidst the ivy. The juniper bushes are shaped and trimmed perfectly flat across their tops. The driveway curves around a cluster of pines, and as they approach the large house set on a bit of a hill, its side lawn gently rolling down, the first thing Grace thinks is that her parents must have felt giddy with adulthood and the rightness of their new life when they first bought it. Stone façade, white clapboard siding, black shutters. Built in 1836. A screened-in porch added in 1968. A flagstone walkway put in by her father in 1976. The front door is back to deep red after a brief period of forest green in the eighties. Near it, the crabapple tree her mother put in after Callie died is now giant and flush with pink petals.

“The house looks good, Mom,” Grace says, slicing her finger scar with her thumbnail.

“Yes,” her mother says, putting the car in park without pulling into the garage. “It’s a good house. Maybe next time you won’t feel the need to stay away for so long.”

Her mother smiles and starts to get out, unable to say what she really wants to.

“I’m glad I came,” Grace says.

“I am too. Though I suppose it wasn’t exactly a choice, was it?”

Grace sits and watches as her mother shuts the car door, brushes a twig from the path with her toe, and then lets herself in through the side door by the kitchen.

Later, after her mother has retreated to bed, Grace tiptoes into her father’s den. It smells the same, like leather and the must of old books, but it feels eerie. She feels like an impostor and, at the same time, a detective at a crime scene. His walnut rolltop desk is open and in disarray. Boxes of slide trays litter the floor. She falls into his big chair, molded so closely to his body, and rocks back with her feet against the ottoman. On the wall is a black-and-white picture of the four of them holding hands in a row, smiling in the sun, like a portal to a world that never existed. The house creaks and settles in the night wind. She can’t relax. On the side table is a glass with the stale remains of whiskey. She drinks it like a shot and gags on its warm, medicinal thickness.

She forgoes the mahogany bar, always the centerpiece of the living room, and forages in the wine cellar off the basement. Unable to find the light, she grabs the nearest bottle, a Bordeaux from 1972, which would make her dad blanch. She takes it up to her bedroom with a mug she finds in the kitchen that says, “New York’s the Big Apple but Cleveland’s a Plum!”

Her room was redone after she left for college and she’s thankful that it retains none of its girlhood ghosts. Like the rest of the house, it is spotless and ordered. Her mother now uses it for her study, a place to read—biographies mostly—and take care of Junior League business— she is chairwoman for the annual garden sale—and do crossword puzzles. The room is cloaked in red toile wallpaper. There’s a rocking chair, a white iron daybed, and a cherry desk that used to hold sewing materials but now holds paper, envelopes, and the like. There are no photographs, there is no history.

Her mother has pulled the curtains and turned down the bed. Grace takes off her pants and, in underwear and a T-shirt, slides in, welcoming the clean coolness of the white, white sheets. The wine bottle balances on the thick beige carpeting below. She props up the pillows, pours the mug full, and situates a notebook on her knees.

Dear Charles,

I was so pleased to receive your letter. Thank you for responding and for the things you told me. I do understand about not being able to talk about the case. And certainly your need to be cautious is understandable. I’m sorry you have to use the inside of a pen but your writing is very neat and legible. Besides, it’s not often that people write handwritten letters anymore.

As you can see from the return address, I have left Brooklyn to come home to my parents’ house in Cuyahoga because my father has fallen ill.

You said you’d probably be willing to talk about your life, I would just need to ask. I guess I’d ask you to tell me about yourself from the beginning. My number here is below if you are allowed to use the phone. Please call.

She spills a crimson splotch on the comforter, and then turns it over to hide the stain.

###

The day is warming, but morning freshness lingers in the shade. Grace pulls on jeans and a sweater and a pair of her mother’s bedroom slippers and pads out to the mailbox with her letter to Charles. She raises the red flag. She walks back to the house and around the side to her mother’s tomato garden, a rectangle of dark new earth with two rows of vulnerable plants. The backyard is small and shaded by the edge of the woods that their neighborhood abuts. Grace steps gingerly over the logs and vines, trying to avoid the wet leaves and mud patches that have already seeped through the slipper soles, and sits on a fallen tree just far enough into the woods that she can’t see any signs of civilization. She used to come out here when she was a kid and pretend she was lost in a forest. She would spin herself around and lie dizzily on the ground, looking up at the lattice of branches blocking the sky, and imagine that her family, the neighborhood, the world she knew had disappeared.

She looks up now, but it doesn’t help shake the dread she feels about seeing her father. She can count on one hand the times that they have been alone together, each trying to avoid the strained conversation and silences, the blame for not being what the other needed.

When she was thirteen, during one of her parents’ parties, Grace listened to her Saturday Night Fever record in her room while the glasses clinked below and she thought about Billy Cooper, who mowed their lawn in his jean jacket and Pink Floyd T-shirt. She had just reset the needle on “If I Can’t Have You” for the third time when her door swung open. Mr. Morgenstern was a partner at the firm where her dad worked, a son of the founder, young, and as her mother used to say, a bit of a playboy. That night he was in jeans, which made Grace think he was cooler than the rest of the adults, and with his hand on the doorknob, he thrust his head into her room.

“Oh, hi,” he said, acting surprised by her presence.

“Hi,” she said, shyly.

He was handsome and she liked him. It was rumored that he smoked pot.

“I was looking for the bathroom,” he said.

He ran his hand through his curly hair as he stepped into the room.

“Two down on the left,” she said, turning down the volume of her record player.

“Hey, don’t turn it down on my account. Can I hang out for a while? I’m a little bored with the old-timers downstairs.”

She smiled, flattered, and said, “Okay.”

He kicked the door closed behind him.

Instead of choosing the chair or even the bed, he sat down next to her on the floor, his leg touching hers. She inched away and he scooted closer. She laughed. She had long hair to her childish straight waist with barely an inkling of breasts, and she had done little more than kiss a boy over the summer as they wrestled one night in the sand trap of the tenth hole at the club.

Mr. Morgenstern pretended to study the foldout double-album case, nodding his head to the music.

“Did you like the movie?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said, even though she’d found it dark and strange. “I liked the dance scenes.”

She smelled smoke and alcohol on him.

He set the album cover down and leaned his head back against the edge of her bed. He dropped his hand onto her knee. She laughed again because she thought it was a mistake, a joke of some kind. He looked at her, his eyes drunk and watery, and did not laugh back or even smile. He hand moved up her thigh and squeezed.

Grace froze, confused and scared.

“Mr. Morgenstern,” she said.

“Hey, baby, call me Hank,” he said, moving in to kiss her neck.

He pulled open the fly of his jeans and rolled over onto his knees, his hands now up her pink-striped Lacoste shirt. She tried to squirm away but knocked her head against the bedside table. She couldn’t scream because she didn’t want anyone to find them out; she knew it was somehow her fault.

There must have been a knock, but she didn’t hear it.

“Grace?” Her dad stood in the doorframe.

Mr. Morgenstern was off her then. He jumped to his feet, hiking up his jeans in one swift motion.

“Hey, Jack,” he said. “Must have gotten lost on the way to the bathroom.”

With a cocky grin he pushed past her father.

“Grace?” her dad said quietly.

She started crying, pulling down her shirt, but she was so relieved. He would make it better.

“Are you okay?”

She nodded, and hugged her knees to her chest. More tears.

Her father could barely stand without swaying. He was loaded, of course.

“I’m sorry. God.” He looked behind him and back at her. “The boss’s son,” he said, as if an excuse. “You’re okay, sweetie, aren’t you? You’re not hurt or anything?”

His nose was red, his necktie loosened around his neck. He didn’t go to her and she didn’t run to him. He looked past her as she watched the carpeting. Aren’t you going to yell at him, she thought, aren’t you on my side? She remembers thinking that he would have done something if it had been Callie.

Her dad never said anything to Hank Morgenstern. Never mentioned it again. For all she knew, he didn’t remember it the next day.

From then on she locked her bedroom door.

Her father’s strange behavior in the weeks leading up to her return home was, the doctor said, the result of a small stroke, which often precedes a bigger one as it did in this case. It is unclear what damage has occurred. His speech is slow and slurred but he is able to respond to simple questions. They say his mind is fine, just trapped. His right side shows signs of paralysis but that seems to be improving by the hour, or so her mother tells her at the kitchen table when she goes back inside. Her mother has already been to the hospital and back.

“I wish you would have gotten me up,” Grace says.

“That’s not my job anymore, Grace,” she says, pouring her some coffee. “You’re a big girl.”