No One Tells Everything (19 page)

You feel the old eggbeater at work in your head, stirring up the morass of drift, failure, and confusion. And anger. Always anger.

You want to hide, you want to be gone, you want to disintegrate like those swirling flocks of birds that move as one but then scatter into a million tiny points. You want to shake your mom, that nice lady who gave birth to you and your impossible desires. Mess up her neat hair, destroy her ordered house, kick her until she calls off the party through broken teeth and bloody lips.

You’re able to stuff the violence back in a cage. And instead you masturbate to you and Hadley on the hood of your car. But it doesn’t work all the way and you get limp and you sneak out to your BMW and fly through the contained suburban streets.

Downtown. Dirty and mean and pulsing with filthy life. You go west to where the dealers and the whores troll, and in your fancy car you circle the decaying blocks and their vile humanity looking for something, anything.

Yeah, you’ve got forty bucks to get off with her ugly vacant mouth and you feel the tide of heat and anger rise in you once again, her small neck so close to your fat hands choking the steering wheel. You wonder if this makes you no longer a virgin.

Then you drive home and nothing has changed but at least you are exhausted. You fall asleep curled up on the floor beneath your window and focus on how you will reinvent yourself at Emeryville College. You will be thin and handsome and comfortable and smooth. You will fit.

G
race used to go for months—and one time in her twenties, for years—not thinking of Callie’s death. Of the car. The glare. The blood. These days, it’s more and more like an infected wound, deepening, itching, burning. Her life careened off-track at the moment of impact. She remembers there was a woodpecker, the tap-tap-tap of its beak against an oak trunk in the background, underneath the call of the cicadas. She remembers that Mr. Jablonski, the old widower who lived in the only small house on the street, had already driven by once that day, probably on the way to one of his church meetings. She had a fiery sunburn on her back from falling asleep under the sprinkler. The night before she had been awakened by the sound of her parents fighting, their words spit and hurled, then her mom crying. She tiptoed to Callie’s room but, as usual, her sister just slept right through it. She remembers thinking that if there were a fire, she wouldn’t help Callie down the rope ladder that was kept in a trunk in her closet, that Callie would be on her own.

###

“I haven’t told my lawyer I talk to you. He wouldn’t be too happy if he found out. He doesn’t want me to talk to anyone.”

Charles sounds low today, like getting the words out requires tremendous effort.

“What about what you want?” Grace asks.

“That hasn’t always been the best guide.”

“It still matters.”

“Do you know what death method they use in New York?”

“You shouldn’t think about it.”

Lethal injection, she thinks.

“If I’m sentenced to die, I hope I can figure out a way to kill myself before they can,” he says.

“Charles, I’ve had times when I’ve thought about that kind of thing. Am I high enough if I jumped? Am I going fast enough if I crashed? It’s terrible to think like that.”

“It’s especially hard in the late afternoon, just before the sun starts to set. Even though I’m glad I can see the sky through my tiny window, I’m anxious about the darkness. Dr. Jerry said that the stress of the approaching trial wreaks havoc on a person’s emotions. He said he’s seen inmates hallucinate.”

Charles inhales, and then exhales before continuing.

“You’ve seen her picture, right?”

Grace starts at this shift to Sarah.

“Yes,” she says.

“It probably didn’t even do her justice. It wasn’t only that she was beautiful, or that I was into her, but she gave off light or something. It’s hard to describe.”

Silence.

“Charles?”

“It’s hard for me to talk about her.”

“I know.”

“It’s not like the papers said. We did know each other. I thought she knew me better that anyone had before. I thought, finally,” he says.

“Did you two hang out together?”

“At first I drove her into town when she had to run errands. We hung out in my room and listened to music sometimes. She liked classic rock. I pretended I did. When I moved off campus I thought she would come over and we could take walks on the beach and stuff, you know? That probably sounds stupid.”

“No,” Grace says. “It sounds really nice.”

“I just—” Charles’s voice cracks. “I thought that she could like me too.”

###

“Grace, we’re playing tennis at four,” her mother says as Grace arrives back from a walk in the woods.

“Uh, no thanks,” she says.

“Yes,” her mother says, looking squarely at her.

“What? No. I’m not playing,” Grace says, shaking her head.

“Yes you are. And that’s final.”

Grace realizes that tennis may be her mother’s version of a duel. Her mother hands her a plate with a tuna sandwich on whole wheat.

“I don’t play tennis anymore,” Grace says.

“Then you’ll be a little rusty. Lemonade?”

She eyes her mother above her sandwich as she takes a bite.

“Yes, please,” she says.

“I have a racket you can use. And sneakers.”

Her mother sets a big glass of iced lemonade in front of her.

“It would be good for you to run around. Get a little sun.” She slides a napkin to Grace and sits across from her at the table. “You used to be such a good player.”

“I was totally mediocre.”

Her mother refuses the bait.

“Mom, I’m leaving tomorrow. My flight’s in the morning.”

Her mother closes her eyes and sighs.

“I figured this was coming. Considering your performance at the Chenowiths’.”

“My performance? What about Dad’s?”

“Grace. What are you so angry about? You’re a grown woman. No, wait,” she says, holding up her hand as Grace opens her mouth. “Frankly, I don’t want to know. I don’t care. I’m too old for this.”

“I think it’s fair to say it’s not helping. Me being here.”

“I don’t get it with you two,” her mother says, exasperated.

“Let’s face it,” Grace says breezily. “He thinks the wrong sister died.”

Her mother’s hand catches the edge of Grace’s cheek, for the first time in her life, in an awkward slap. It feels hot and good.

“Goddamn you, Grace,” she says. “You are infuriating.” She straightens her headband and takes a deep breath through her nose. “I’m sorry. That was inexcusable.”

“It’s okay,” Grace says. “It puts me in a better mood to beat you.”

Her mother laughs a little. In her tired face, resting in the cradle of her palms, Grace sees her own.

“It doesn’t matter what I say, does it? When did it stop mattering what I say?” her mother asks.

“Mom, there’s no need for you to worry about me.”

“I hope you know someday what it is to be a mother,” she says.

“Don’t hold your breath.”

For a fleeting moment, her mom is the young woman dressed in black in a church pew, sitting behind her husband, awash in loss. But then it’s gone and she’s up, whisking Grace’s plate away to the dishwasher.

“Are you happy with your life?” her mother asks, looking out on the yard through the window above the sink.

“Are you?” Grace launches back.

Her mother swings around.

“What does that mean?”

Grace shrugs.

“What is it with you?” her mother asks. “Is that some sort of jab?”

“Forget it.”

“No, Grace Elaine, I will not forget it. Do you disapprove of me, is that it?”

They stare, in standoff. Grace’s face prickles in shame. She wishes her mother would slap her again and again. She wishes her mother would scream and throw things and tear her hair out.

“I made my choices and I’m content with them,” her mother says. “Don’t blame me if you’re not so sure of your own.”

“Sorry,” Grace says, sliding down into her chair, regretting her childishness, weary of her provocation.

Her mother sits again at the table but looks out the window at a hummingbird hovering at the feeder.

“I know I wasn’t the type of mother that put notes in your lunchbox. Maybe I didn’t hug you enough or ask about your feelings like they do these days.”

“Mom.”

“You seemed like you could take care of yourself. Better than the rest of us, anyway. Remember that time I forgot to pick you up from dance class? You must have been seven or eight. You walked home by yourself and never even got mad about it.”

“I was mad,” Grace says.

“You didn’t say anything.”

“Maybe I learned from the best.”

Her mother presses her lips together.

“Karen says our daughters resent us because they have too many choices now. They wish they had the built-in excuse of a traditional role,” she says.

“This coming from a woman who followed her husband to France when he ran away with another woman, begging him to take her back,” Grace says.

“She didn’t beg him. She knew what she wanted.”

“Oh please,” Grace says. “I suppose the facelift was for her, too.”

“Cynicism does not become you,” her mother says, standing and brushing crumbs from the table into her hand.

“What would become me? Fake cheer? A husband?”

Her mother shakes her head and empties the crumbs into the sink.

“We’re leaving for the club in an hour,” she says, as she walks out of the kitchen.

After Callie died, her mother spent days in her room, emerging occasionally when friends came by, her face tight, her eyes remote. She sipped at tea but that was the extent of her intake. Grace lurked just out of view, listening to the murmurs, the tinkling of spoons against china cups, feeling such enormous weight from above and pull from below that she thought if she gave in to it, she’d be sucked down into the center of the earth.

Her father shuffled between the bedroom and his closed office. He never looked at her.

###

They drive onto the meticulous grounds of the country club, canopied under the branches of 300-year-old oaks. Grace has avoided the club ever since college, appalled by the discrimination and the tacit approval of her parents and their friends. As a kid she didn’t notice that everyone was white and Protestant, but she was acutely aware that in their town, one’s family was either in or out, and when a club application was turned down, it was the subject of dinner-party whispering.

The grand old clubhouse is still impressive from the outside, colonial white with black shutters, but inside it is faded around the edges; the carpeting needs to be replaced, the gaudy chandeliers in the dining room are dated, and the old fox hunting–themed cocktail lodge is losing its luster. But out in back, where the manse spreads out into acres of verdant growth, the club is the same, stately with the ramshackle elegance of old money. The air is cool and frenzied birds call from leafy overhangs. From the wide balcony of the stone patio the first tee is visible below.

Grace hates that even now she feels the lulling familiarity of this place. She thinks of Charles reading a book of quotations in his cell, the walls the same color as the ceiling, in the greenish tinge of a single overhead lightbulb.

They walk down to the tennis area, where an aging pro with dyed-brown hair air-kisses her mother hello. Grace avoids an introduction and takes to the court.

She wears a faded black T-shirt and cut-off jeans, clothes she found in a giveaway pile in the garage. Her mother is in a sporty, navy and white striped tennis dress, legs toned and tan, and she is quick around the court. Grace drags her heavy, clunky feet, her chest tight after every point. She has to lean over to catch her breath. She misses every first serve and has to dink in a second. She hits wildly, going for winners and missing, unable to get her torpid body to the ball on time.

They play two sets. Her mother gleams, trouncing her 6-2, 6-1.

“I guess that settles it,” her mother says, toweling off her brow.

Grace sucks down water but it doesn’t help.

###

“It’s not like I didn’t want to have friends,” Charles says. “I just didn’t know how other people did it.”

“Friends are overrated,” Grace says. “You know my only friend is my bartender back in Brooklyn?”

He laughs a little.

“I managed to shed everyone else.”

“How come?” he asks.

“I prefer to be alone. I feel safer keeping things to myself.”

“You’re funny,” he says.

“I’m going back to New York tomorrow. You can call me there,” she says.

“Okay.”

“I’ll visit you.”

He sighs.

“I’d like that, but unfortunately I’m only allowed three visits a week. And those are taken up by doctors and lawyers working on my defense.”

“Oh. Maybe sometime soon, then,” she says, trying to disguise her disappointment.

“You know, Sarah was so pretty and I’m not even sure she knew it. When she smiled it was like, pow!”

It’s the most animated he’s ever sounded.

“When I first saw her she was walking with two girls who I kind of knew from the fraternity house. It was like they were in black and white, and only Sarah was in color. I waited for her after class so I could introduce myself. I felt okay about the whole thing, not like I was putting on an act or anything. She came to one of the happy hours in my room. Other guys talked to her and stuff but she talked to me, too. She listened. She was cool. And she didn’t even have to try.”

He stops talking.

“What else?” she asks.

He pauses, tired out by his remembrance.

“Her favorite album was Blood on the Tracks by Bob Dylan. It wasn’t my type but I grew to like it because she did. I used to drive her to yoga class and wait for her, then drive her back to campus. I don’t know. We were friends.”

Her mother calls her down to dinner and Grace is not quick enough to cover the mouthpiece of the phone.

“You’re so lucky,” he says.

“Sorry,” she says.

“It’s okay,” he says.

“There’s something I wanted to tell you,” Grace says. “An image you might think about when it starts to get dark. This morning when I woke up, I saw spring tree leaves of a million shades of green from the window. A clear pale sky. And each time the wind blew, there was a flutter of pink petals from a crabapple tree.”