Reunion: A Novel (17 page)

I
’m standing at the sink doing dishes with Sasha. Mindy is to my right, standing on a kitchen stool. I hand her a dish; she takes it, dries it, stacks it with the others. Nell and Elliot are sitting at the kitchen island behind us, drinking wine and watching us clean. Normally I would mind, but they did the undesirable tasks of seeing Whitney and the twins to their cars and calling Joyce a cab. I’m happy to do some manual labor if it means I’m not required to participate. I’m happy to stand at the sink and watch the suds form and dissipate. Mindy and I can eavesdrop just fine from over here.

Nell is saying, “You know what I think about? I think about that cabin we used to go to before Mom died, where we’d all play Monopoly and wait for the snow. Mom would make bread and Dad would cook some huge meal and you and I would shake cream until it turned into butter.”

By
you
she must mean Elliot, because I have no memory of this cabin or these happy idyllic times, and so I break my self-imposed stupid vow of silence and say, “I don’t remember this.”

“Because you weren’t born yet,” says Elliot. “Or maybe you were just a baby.”

“I remember this one time,” Nell continues, “maybe the last time—it seems more romantic that way—”

Elliot groans. He’s a million miles away. My beautiful brother. He is on autopilot and his life is shit.

“Listen,” she says. “It was hunting season and Dad was out hunting and Mom made us stay inside all morning until the gunfire stopped. You and I”—again with the
you
, and I feel I am being made acutely and deliberately aware that this story is for Elliot, not for me, and that I am being allowed to enjoy it only as an audience member, as someone no different from Mindy or Sasha—“stood at the window looking at the snow, waiting for the quiet. We kept sneaking on our coats and every time Mom passed through the kitchen she made us take them off so we wouldn’t burn up.”

“I remember this,” Elliot says. Perhaps he is closer than I think. Perhaps he is merely far away from me.

Mindy is as quiet as a mouse, entranced by potentially inappropriate adult material.

“There was a series of volleys,” says Nell, “and you pointed and a hunter in the distance walked out of the far woods toward three little mounds.”

“The hunter was Dad,” says Elliot.

“Don’t ruin my story,” says Nell. I imagine her elbowing him in the side, but I don’t turn around to see. “But, yes, the hunter is Dad. He passes the first mound and you say, ‘It’s a goose,’ but I say no. He passes the second mound and you say again that it’s a goose. He gets to the third mound, the one closest to us, and by this time I can tell that it
is
a goose, because it’s moving a little bit.”

I hand Mindy a dish. She is standing dead still, staring at the cabinet in front of her. She is waiting to learn the fate of the goose, and I wish I could tell Nell to stop, to remind her that a child is in the room—a child who might have nightmares about dead geese—but I can’t tell her to stop, because I don’t want to tell her to stop, because I want to hear what happens next. I want to hear if, at some point, I, as a little baby maybe, become part of this memory after all.

It occurs to me that Nell might finally be drunk, which would be a kind of relief to me. But who knows? Maybe she’s just feeling maudlin.

“I’m watching, really watching,” she says, “because I’m curious what the hunter will do.”

“Dad,” says Elliot.

“I’m curious what he’ll do. I know I was young and naïve, but I really didn’t know what to expect. I think I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d picked the thing up and hugged it.”

I glance at Mindy. She’s come back to life enough to take the dish from me, but I can see her focus is entirely on the story being told behind us. Little kids must love hearing stories from adults about their time as children. It must be a way to compare and contrast what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong. They’re probably always listening, waiting for an adult to accidentally offer a possibility or an adventure they’d never thought possible.

“He gets to the third goose and Elliot turns away.”
Elliot
, not
you
; I look over at Sasha and see that she is now facing away from the sink and listening to Nell’s story, which Nell must also have observed because now she’s telling it for more than just Elliot’s benefit. “Elliot says, ‘I can’t watch,’ like he knows what’s coming, but I don’t know what’s coming, and the next thing, Dad is digging his heel into what I’m assuming is the neck of the goose. Dig, dig, dig. Elliot yells for Mom but still I keep watching. Dad goes to the middle goose, walking now toward the woods again, the one goose already in his arms, and does the same to it, and he goes to the last goose—the one closest to the woods—and repeats the motion. Heel into neck. Heel into neck, over and over. What economy he had! The way he walked past the first two birds. The way he came back, one by one, so he’d have to carry them only so long and so far.”

There is a pause in the story. I turn around and see Nell take a sip of wine and I think,
Definitely, definitely she is drunk.
She says, “That’s what I think about.”

“You think about the economy of your father, of the hunter,” says Sasha, smiling. “Dark.”

“It is, isn’t it?” says Nell. I’ve never liked when she sees her own charm, when she’s aware of her own oddness. It’s like watching her watch a mirror. It’s disconcerting.

“Those four years,” I say, and hand the last dish to Mindy, who takes it carefully and dries it lovingly, her attention now returned to her chore. “Those four years extra that you guys got because you were older, and all the living that got done before I was old enough to be aware of it—it seems like some of the greatest living Mom and Stan ever did.”

“Give me a break, okay,” says Nell. “I’m just telling a story.”

She’s taken my comment as a jab, as sarcasm, which isn’t how I meant it. This is why sincerity trumps everything else. This is why a person should never turn to dissembling and lies. When you’re ready to come out of it, when you’re ready to stop being cynical, people don’t know how to read you.

“No,” I say. “I mean it. I’m jealous that you had four more years with them when they were younger and happy. I’m jealous Elliot had five more years.” I look at Sasha. “I hope it’s okay that I’m talking about Dad being young and happy. I’m really not trying to say anything inappropriate.”

Sasha touches my forearm, gives it an itty-bitty squeeze, then says to the room, “When did everyone get so sensitive?”

The pink outside the windows has faded finally. The street has filled with cars belonging to people coming home from work. It’s Saturday night. They still have half the weekend ahead of them. The streetlight at the foot of the driveway hesitates, then glows thick and steady. The ginkgo in the front yard seems all of a sudden brighter, more golden in the light. We are at the peak of summer. It is nearly three days since my father walked onto his back porch and bit down on a loaded gun. But it feels like an eternity since then. An absolute eternity.

I
walk into the kitchen. It’s after midnight. Mindy and Sasha went upstairs hours ago. Only the stove light is on in here, and Elliot and Nell are on opposite sides of the island, leaning toward each other, whispering. Elliot’s got his cell phone in his hand.

I hear Nell say, “I don’t know what to tell you. She’s gone too far. I agree. But still.”

I flip the overhead switch to let them know I’m there. E
llio
t stands up and rubs at his eyes. “What the fuck?”

I correct him. “We say ‘aphid’ in this family, young man.” I’m trying to be playful.

“Turn the light off,” says Nell.

I turn it off. Nell is still leaning over the counter, but
Elli
ot is standing there, looking at me with his arms crossed. Neither of them makes a move to speak.

“Listen,” I say.

Now or never
, I’m thinking.
Now or never. Tell them.

“Kate,” says Nell.

“I have something to tell you guys.”

“Not now,” says Nell.

“Yes, now,” I say. If not now, when? Life is now. Life is right this second, whether we like it or not. What changes later? What changes tomorrow? Nothing. Peter needs me to stop calling him. He needs me to stop texting. He needs his space and his time. But to what end? Decisions have been made. Let’s get on with it already. Let’s face the facts and move on.

“The funeral’s tomorrow,” I say. “The next day we’ll all go home. This isn’t a conversation I want to have over the phone.” In fact, I have no idea where I’ll be going the day after tomorrow. Not home. But Elliot will go home. Nell will go home. I’ll go back to Chicago and begin the grave task of separating my things from Peter’s, of figuring out how to pay my impossible bills.

Elliot looks like he wants to punch something. He looks, in fact, like he wants to punch me. Probably I should take Nell’s advice. I should turn around and slink back upstairs. I should get into the top bunk, fall asleep, and in the morning go to the funeral with everyone else. I should call a cab from the funeral home and have it take me to the airport immediately after. I still have forty dollars and some change. I can make it stretch if I have to. So, yes, we all agree then: I
should
keep my mouth shut. But I don’t. Like I said, life is being lived right now. Right this very second.

“Six months ago—” I say.

“Don’t,” says Nell, standing up straight suddenly.

“—I had an affair.”

“Fuck,” she says, and stoops over again, so that now her head is resting on her arms, which are resting on the kitchen island.

“You did what?” says Elliot.

“I had an affair.”

Nell isn’t even looking at me. She’s exhausted.

Elliot, though, is at full attention.

I say, “Peter wouldn’t stop talking about adopting. Nobody was listening to me. I had an affair.”

Elliot takes a step toward me. “Is this why—?”

Nell says, “No.”

“Are you going to hit me?” I say. The whole thing reeks of melodrama, like something one of my freshmen would come up with as a substitute for a real climax: the three of us standing in the dark at midnight in a near-stranger’s kitchen—our father’s funeral looming, me finally sharing my secrets, Elliot considering violence, Nell trying to keep the peace.

“You selfish little—”

Nell interrupts him. “Don’t say anything you can’t take back, Ell.” She puts a hand on his shoulder.

“Ha.” He says it in that gross, dull voice that I’m beginning to think all men are capable of. “‘Don’t say anything you can’t take back?’ How about ‘Don’t
do
anything you can’t take back?’”

“Like an affair?” I say. “I get it.” And I do get it; some decisions are irreversible. But like I’ve said, sometimes it’s the irreversible ones that help a person get to know herself a little better. It’s the consequences that matter. It’s the fact that there are no do-overs that makes life matter at all.

“You
don’t
get it,” Elliot says. “You have no idea what you’re talking about. That’s your problem.”

One night, after I’d told him I didn’t want a baby—ours or anyone else’s—Peter woke me up. I’d cried out in my sleep. “What is it?” he said. “What is it?” He had his hand on my chest. He was trying to comfort me. “Tell me,” he said. There was nothing but me and him and the sound machine in that room, and so I told him: It was a dream. A terrible dream. And in the dream I’d awakened in a strange room, a room I’d never been in. A gang of children was crowded around me. “Where am I?” I said to the children. “You’re home,” they said. “You live here.” I shook my head. “I don’t,” I said. “Tell me where I am.” But the children said I was wrong. They said I belonged to them and they to me. I pushed them away. “It’s a dream,” I told them. I was filled with relief. “It’s a dream.” But they shook their heads and chased after me. “It’s not a dream,” they said. “It’s real. You want to take care of us. It’s real.”

I told all this to Peter. My guard was down. I wasn’t thinking.

He took his hand away from my chest. “You’re trying to hurt me,” he said.

“I’m not,” I said.

He sat up. Our bedroom was dark. I couldn’t see his face.

“Then you have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said. He slept on the couch that night. I started looking on message boards the next day.

The point: Peter was right then, and Elliot is right now: I have no idea what I’m talking about.

“Oh, Kate,” says Nell, but she doesn’t say it with any sort of sympathy. Instead, she’s looking at me like I’m some ragged kitten that can’t take the hint that this isn’t a no-kill shelter.

“You’re vile,” says Elliot.

I am. It’s true. But I’m cornered, trapped. I feel I must claw my way out, and so I say, “You know what? My agent wanted me to write about this.”

“Write about what?” Elliot looks bored with me. They both look painfully bored with me, with this stranger who’s been masquerading all these years as their sister.

“But I told her there was nothing to write about.” I can’t stop myself. “I told her there wasn’t a story here. I told her, my family is tedious. I told her, my family is shit.”

The three of us are just standing here, no longer a single united still life. Lines have been drawn, sides have been taken, teams have been formed. It is me against them.

Elliot’s right. This is boring. This late-night run-in feels forced and ultimately inconsequential. To hell with Atlanta. To hell with this funeral. To hell with these people.

“Forget it,” I say.

Neither of them responds. They’ve won. I’ve lost. I know that much. But the question is, won what? Life? What would that even mean?

They’ve both got their arms crossed now. They’re looking at me like I’m a rat drowning in its own excrement. They’re giving me nothing, not even a twig to hold on to. If car keys were on the counter in front of me, I’d grab them and walk out the door. If a bottle of bourbon was on the counter in front of me, I’d grab
it
and walk out the door. But there’s nothing on the counter in front of me, and so there’s nothing for me to grab, and so, in a completely undramatic fashion, I turn away from them and walk empty-handed and alone out the back door.

“Wait,” I hear Nell say.

“Let her go,” says Elliot, which is what they both must decide on, because they do let me go.

Outside it’s not exactly cool, but the humidity has dissipated and it’s actually kind of pleasant. I’ve always liked Atlanta late at night. Wait. Let me rephrase: at night, I find the city tolerable. There are fewer people (depending on what part of town you’re in, obviously). The crickets are out. The crickets
and
the cicadas. It seems almost manageable at nighttime. The streetlights soften the edges, cushion the hard lines.

I take a right out of Sasha’s driveway and cross so that I’m on the lighted side of the street. There is no plan. There is no place for me to go. But a walk will clear my head. A walk will calm me down. That’s the theory, anyway.

I knew Elliot would react strongly to the infidelity. I knew from the very beginning. So it’s not his reaction that comes as a surprise to me. And I knew Nell would be disgusted. But Elliot had called me vile.
Vile.
I can’t remember the last time I’ve even seen that word in print, much less heard it. You’d think I cheated on him. It was hatred I saw on Elliot’s face, a look of impasse, as if this time I really have gone too far and now there’s no possibility for forgiveness—short term or long.

I was hoping Elliot would take the news more like Rita had, or if not with such generosity, then that he might have reacted with disappointment, but also with pity, also with sadness, also with an air of reassurance. Some indication that
We can get through
this, and we’ll do it together.
As opposed to
Pack your bags. You’re out of this family.
Am I missing something?

I replay the scene in my head.

The kitchen. The dark. Nell saying, “Don’t.” Nell saying, “Not now.” And what about what she said when I walked in? Did she say, “She’s gone too far”? I had assumed they were talking about Rita. I had assumed they were huddled in the darkness in the kitchen to talk about Rita and Rita’s choices.

But Nell said, “Don’t.”

Nell said, “Not now.”

In Elliot’s hand there was a cell phone. He must have been on the phone before I walked in. He’d been on the phone with Rita. And Rita—Rita had been on the phone with me.

Thunderbolts.

Lightning.

Clarity.

They were talking about
me
. As in,
I
had gone too far. In advising Rita to cheat,
I
had gone too far. Rita called Elliot. Of course she called Elliot. And she told him. She told him that I thought she should have an affair.

It doesn’t feel good, but the revelation actually feels better than my pure lack of understanding. Elliot isn’t mad about the affair—well, I’m not sure I should go that far just yet—but what’s
really
eating away at him, what caused that gnarly look of hatred, is that I counseled his wife. I counseled betrayal.

Of course. Of course.

It all makes sense now. Which isn’t to say I wouldn’t do it again—counseling Rita, that is; I’d undo my performance in the kitchen just now in a heartbeat—which
is
to say I do think there’s some unpopular sensibility to my logic. But at least I understand the offense, which means I can begin to craft an apology.

And Nell—Nell had said, “She’s gone too far.” And she’d added, “But still.”
But still. But still.
Which means that she sees my side. She might not agree with me, but she is able to see my side; she is able to remember her role as a sister and our roles as family members. We are still a unit. A unit in crisis, perhaps—massive fucking crisis—but still a unit.

I stop under a streetlamp and look up at the muted yellow light. The electricity pulses in the air and makes a thick, buzzing hum. All around the bulb are black winged things that are also buzzing and humming and pulsing, buzzing and humming and pulsing.

And I think,
It’s getting closer.
Yes, yes. The epiphany is getting closer. I can feel it. I can feel it knocking about in me, shaping itself, forming itself into something that—one day, one day soon—I will be able to hold on to.