The Grown Ups (13 page)

“I'm sorry you still have to deal with all this,” Bella said. “So where is he now?”

“The patriarch?” Suzie gave a short little laugh. “Well, that would be anyone's guess. I don't know, we really don't speak.” She picked up her beer and took a swallow. “There was a rumble of illegal trading, a misallocation of funds or something like that, but it never stuck.” She sighed. “He always lands on his feet.”

“Does he pay for school?”

“For me? No, no, no.” She shook her head. “I have some scholarships and loans.”

“Really?” Bella was shocked. Harvard, and now med school, couldn't be cheap.

“I don't want him to touch my life any more than he already has. It's just been one humiliation after another. I can't stand it. My mother and my brothers will always give him the benefit of the doubt. But I can't.”

Bella leaned forward, her head nearly touching Suzie's. It was a relief to not be focused on her own problems. “Does your mother still want to be with him?”

Suzie made a face. “God, no. She finally let that part go. But she still accepts his money. I wish she would get her own life, get away from that damn dependence on him. But then most of her days she spends in a vodka bath, so . . .” She sighed. “She's way past the point of changing.”

Bella put down her chopsticks and leaned back in the chair. She was stuffed to the point of being immobile and she wondered how she was ever going to get up and away from the table. She admired Suzie's handling of her complicated life, but she had sunk so deep into her own misery over her mother's death and Sam's disappearing act that she offered none of those sentiments to her oldest friend.

Bella paid the bill, courtesy of her father. They wandered slowly through the narrow streets of Chinatown arm in arm, sluggish from dinner. They were in no hurry, had no particular plan until Suzie spotted a sign for psychic readings above a store that sold beauty supplies. She practically skipped the few steps to the door and held it open for Bella.

Bella peered inside before she moved forward. It smelled like dust and heat and rancid wok oil. In front of them was a narrow storefront lined with shelves. The atmosphere was like that of a low-rent Duane Reade.

Suzie took Bella's hand in hers and led the way to a makeshift counter along the back of the store. A young woman with a Hello Kitty T-shirt was bent over a textbook. The inky hair on top of her head was cluttered with brightly colored plastic barrettes. She didn't look up from her book.

Suzie tapped her fingers on the counter. “We're here for a reading.”

The girl looked up and slowly looked Suzie and Bella up and down. “For two?” she finally asked.

Suzie nodded quickly.

“Fifty.”

Bella tugged on Suzie's arm. It was too much. But Suzie was already digging through her bag for her wallet. She placed the bills on the counter. The girl stood up, jammed the bills in the pocket of her jeans, and sat back down.

“Where do we go?” Suzie asked. “Here?” She looked around the room.

The girl blinked and ran a hand over her eyes as if she were hoping Bella and Suzie would disappear. Bella was starting to feel a prickle of sweat on the back of her neck. She noticed a series of stains across the top of Hello Kitty's head right below her pink bow on the front of the girl's T-shirt. From the pages littered with charts, the textbook on the counter appeared to be chemistry. When the girl removed her hand from her face she peered up at Bella and pointed. “You.”

Suzie swiveled around. Bella swallowed hard and nodded. “Yes?”

“You have too many questions.” The girl shook her head. “Not good.”

“Really?” Bella was irritated. Any idiot would know she had questions. But too many? How could she have too many questions?

“Too much back there, too much.” The girl looked beyond Bella, over her shoulder. Bella felt a trickle of sweat between her breasts. The girl winced, looked back down at her textbook, and shook her head.

Bella wanted to demand an explanation of what “too much back there” meant, but she felt like she couldn't catch her breath. She didn't want this girl in the dirty T-shirt to be the one who
told her Sam didn't want her. She turned to Suzie and said, “I can't,” and then she bolted from the store.

Even though she heard Suzie behind her calling her name, she didn't stop running. Suzie finally caught up to her in a funny little alley shaped like an elbow because Bella, coming around the blind corner, had tripped on an overturned plastic milk carton. She was bent over, her hands on her thighs, panting loudly, when Suzie put a hand on her back.

“Bells! Are you okay?” Suzie rubbed Bella's back. “What happened?”

Bella's ankle throbbed, her lungs hurt, and she felt like she might throw up. She tried to stand up straight. “I'm fine,” she managed. She didn't know whether she wanted to cry or scream. What the hell was wrong with her?

“I'm sorry.” Suzie looked like she was about to cry. “I'm sorry I freaked you out. I thought it would be fun, I guess. I don't know. I'm so sorry.” She rubbed Bella's back. “Do you want to sit someplace?”

Bella shook her head. “I'm tired.”

“Sure, ” Suzie said, her voice relieved, as if it was obvious that was what was wrong with Bella. Her mother was dead. Sam had disappeared. Her life was shit. She was tired.

“I'm just really tired,” Bella said again, willing herself to believe it. She hobbled back toward the main street. Her ankle was sore, but not horrible. She could walk on it. She put out her hand to Suzie.

When they were younger she and Suzie had followed their horoscopes with religious fervor. During sleepovers they always pulled out the Ouija board. Of course all of their questions had been about boys. Why had they never asked what they were going
to be when they grew up? Why had they been so consumed with who they were going to kiss? Who they were going to marry? Had things changed at all since they were thirteen?

She had no idea what that girl was going to tell her. But if it was anything close to an answer she couldn't bear it. The unknown was the weight that was keeping her here. Without it, she would surely float away.

The apartment had
two bedrooms but Suzie and Bella shared the king-sized bed in the master suite because it was what they had always done. After dinner it took everything Bella had just to change and wash her face before she dropped onto the bed. Suzie made her prop her foot on a pile of pillows and handed her a bag of corn she'd found in the freezer. She wouldn't quit fussing with the pillows, the corn, the lighting. She brought Bella a glass of water she didn't ask for, and then opened the window for air circulation. Eventually she stopped moving and stood by the curtains, rubbing her feet back and forth against the carpet, as if she were running in place.

“Suzie, please relax,” Bella said, testing her toes as she wiggled them beneath the bag of corn. “I'm fine.”

Suzie twisted a wad of curtain fabric in her fingers. “I feel awful. I thought the psychic would be fun, a diversion. I didn't want to make you feel worse.”

Bella shrugged. She wanted to stop talking about the psychic, but she didn't want to draw any more attention to her freak-out. And Suzie had paid a lot of money and hadn't even gotten anything out of it. “What would you have asked?”

“Oh.” Suzie hesitated and looked up at the ceiling. “Probably something stupid like: Am I going to get into med school, or is this thing with Michael real . . .”

“I don't think you need the psychic for those answers.”

“No?” Suzie said. “You think, really?”

“Ugh,” Bella said. She rolled over onto her side away from Suzie. The corn slid somewhere into the tangle of blankets around her legs. “I think it's pretty obvious that you are going to get into med school and that Michael is totally into you.”

“Bells,” Suzie said, and then she was quiet for so long that Bella finally rolled over to look at her. Suzie's face was pale, and she looked terrified. “I love him,” she whispered.

Bella struggled to sit up. She kicked the bag of corn. She missed the girls they once were, dreaming about happily ever after, never imagining that they would get scared or hurt or need to be saved. “Life is surreal, Suzie. But you picked the right Turner brother.”

“I did?” She cracked a slow smile as she walked toward the door. “I did.” She said emphatically. “I really did.”

Bella watched Suzie go. It wasn't long before she heard the low murmur of her voice from the other room. Michael must have been sitting on his phone, waiting to hear from her.

Bella stared at the ceiling. She wasn't so much a realist as a coward, afraid of everything. She thought of all the things she might have said to her mother, or to Sam. All the wrongs she could right, all the possibilities that had passed her by, all the chances she'd had to make something, anything, more meaningful. There were too many blank spaces to count, and too many regrets.

S
am's mother gifted him a handful of days when no one
knew he was in Vermont. Although she didn't say why and he didn't ask, he felt generosity there between them.

What he should have done was get in touch with his father, with Bella. What he did was find a bar tucked away in a dingy, beat-up bowling alley in the basement of a building, just blocks off the town green, and drink.

Middlebury, with its mix of privileged college students and farmers, was easier to hide in than Sam imagined, especially in winter. Quickly, he established a pattern of sleeping till mid-afternoon, walking into town, and drinking all night. The trek back along the winding roads to the home his mother shared with her goats and Tom was just enough to sober Sam up so he didn't get hit by a car or freeze to death in a snowbank.

Every one of those nights, Sam sat at the bar listening to the crash of pins, the swoop and click of the electronic setup. With each drink he was more aware of his body forming an apostrophe. A woman who worked the dinner shift always pushed a basket of
fries his way even when he didn't order them, and stopped serving Sam when he'd hit his limit. She also asked him questions he didn't want to answer. On his fifth consecutive night on the same stool she said, “You know, I can tell you really don't have your heart in this.”

Her comment made Sam blush. He felt like he'd been caught with a fake ID, even though he was a fully legal twenty-one. Even worse, he felt like a moron.

A cheer came from the tables behind him and Sam turned to see a group of women in matching T-shirts scanning the electronic scoreboards with rapt attention. “So, what are you hiding from?”

Sam looked down into his piss-colored beer. He didn't even have the balls, or the resources, to order hard liquor. “Well, I flunked out of school, which I haven't shared with my father yet, and I left my girlfriend's apartment under the pretense of going to tell my father and then instead came here to visit my mother.” He paused. “I haven't talked to either of them since I got here.” He left off the part about the recent death of Bella's mother.

She looked disappointed, as if she had expected him to cop to something else. “First, you need to get in touch with that girl. Even if you don't want to see her again, that's not right.” She stopped wiping the bar with a sour gray rag long enough for Sam to know she was serious. “And who cares that you flunked out? You don't think that half the kids at this college aren't doing the same thing?”

Sam held up a finger to make a point. “Big difference between them and me.”

She gave Sam a funny look. “Big difference between you and me.” She shrugged and walked down the bar and refilled another beer. “And you're still here.”

Sam sent Bella a letter that said:
I'm sorry. I'm at my mother's house. I'm really sorry. Sam.

A week later Tom handed him a small square envelope in return. Inside on a torn sheet of notebook paper it said:

Sam folded the paper into a slim rectangle and stuck it in the back of his wallet. He wished he understood what she was really trying to tell him. Was that forgiveness for his stupidity? Was it anger? He thought of Bella sitting in the winter sunlight eating cinnamon toast in her apartment. He wasn't sure anyone would ever be as generous about his failings as a human being again. The words felt like something he should keep.

He helped his mother care for her goats. He trailed her to the pen. He learned their names. As soon as the goats heard the gate latch lift they stumbled over one another to knock against his mother's legs. His mother made clucking noises of greeting deep in her throat.

Sam collected the warm pale blue eggs the hens laid, and he listened as his mother told him how to make goat cheese. He remembered none of the details but he was grateful that she kept up the conversation even though he said nothing in return.

His mother was alone a lot, but Sam didn't necessarily think she was looking for company. Tom was teaching a beginning
fiction class at the college this semester as well as freshman composition, and was editing his new book. So he stayed late at his office at school, leaving Sam to cook simple dinners for his mother: omelets and toast, or frittatas with goat cheese and herbs. They ate them in front of the woodstove, in a small room tucked off the kitchen, where his mother had a crowded desk covered with books and papers and photographs of Michael and Sam when they were younger. Most were unframed, their edges curled, and a few had the remains of tape left yellowed in the corners, as if she had grabbed them quickly on her way out. In a way they reminded Sam of Mr. Epstein's photographs in the shoebox.

Sam stopped going to the bowling alley. Instead he accompanied his mother to the ice-covered pond that sat behind the barn, cupped in a pocket between two slopes slick with crusty snow. She and Tom always skated after dinner, and she hated to miss it. Sam wore Tom's skates, which were a size too big. His ankles wobbled as he made his way out on the ice, where his mother, a lumpy yellow scarf wrapped twice around her neck, skated figure eights around him and laughed. She seemed to always swoop in to save him just as he began to fall.

Sam remembered the skating rink in their town, where everyone took lessons together until the boys split off for hockey and the girls for figure skating. His mother always stayed for the adult free skate afterward, bribing Michael and Sam with hot chocolates and candy bars from the vending machine. The boys had sat thigh pressed to thigh in the bleachers, sweat trapped under their collars as icy tips formed in their hair, candy wrappers crumpled at their feet and wisps of foam mustaches dusting their lips, as she skated lap after furious lap, stopping only when the horn blew, signaling the end of free skate.

Every evening after skating Sam made drinks: herbal tea for
his mother and coffee for him. His mother looked through seed catalogs and made notes on a yellow legal pad for a future garden. Sam listlessly flipped through a stack of magazines that bore Tom's name on the labels:
Poets & Writers, Farmer's Almanac, The Atlantic, Bon Appétit
. Their feet, clad in heavy socks, shared an old footstool covered in woven strips of fabric, and the only sound came from the radio tuned to NPR. At first, Sam slipped into his mother's life, hoping she wouldn't notice he was an interloper. Yet he could tell from the way he caught Tom staring at him at breakfast sometimes that he had plenty of questions for Sam, but out of respect for Elizabeth, he didn't ask.

After two weeks where the sameness of his days and nights had begun to wear, Sam was restless. He couldn't continue to hide there. But he didn't know what to do. Frankly, he was surprised by his mother's lack of prying into his future. “Mom?”

“Hmmm?” She didn't even glance up from the catalog in her lap.

“Don't you want to know? Aren't you even curious?”

She stopped writing, her pencil poised above the pad. “About?”

Sam exhaled in a fit of frustration. Vermont was too quiet. His mother's world was too quiet. He hated the way people enunciated on NPR. He could not take another night like the previous six. “Can we stop this?” He gestured around the room, claustrophobic from her full new life.

“What, Sam? You came here. I opened my home. I figured you would tell me if you wanted.” She shrugged, seemingly perfectly willing to allow him his secrets.

Sam stood up and paced the small room. “I should have known.”

“What should you have known?”

“Uh, okay. You left, remember?”

“Of course, I remember. I'm not following you, Sam. If you want me to understand something, you need to tell me.” She put down the pencil and the catalog. “It's about school?”

“Well, Christ. You already know?” If she knew what he was running away from, why hadn't she said anything? Why was she refusing to be his parent?

She shook her head. “I know you're supposed to be in school and obviously you aren't.”

Sam nodded. “I'm not going back.” He looked over at her to gauge a reaction.

His mother didn't so much as blink. “It sounds like you've already made a decision. Why are you so angry?”

“You really did give up everything, didn't you? You walked out the door and you just gave up mothering? Is that really all you have to say to me? That I made the decision?” Sam was pacing the room now, his voice rising. It was hot, way too hot. The woodstove was stifling.

“You are twenty-one years old. If you don't want to finish school, you don't want to finish school. What am I supposed to do?”

“BE MY MOTHER!” Sam's voice bounced off the walls, so he lowered it to add, “Fuck.”

“Hey—everything okay?” Tom leaned against the doorframe. He had a bulging canvas bag full of papers and books slung over his shoulder. He was still wearing his coat and boots and he was frowning, his brow creased. He must have heard Sam from outside. “Lizzie?”

“We're fine,” Sam's mother said.

Tom looked at Sam for confirmation and he nodded back, offering a weak “Sorry.”

Tom gave Sam another, longer look but then turned and left the room. Sam could hear him climb the stairs and walk around
the bedroom up above them. The toilet flushed and the springs of the bed creaked.

“I should go,” Sam said. “I wasn't thinking when I came here.”

“Sit down, please. Can we start again?” his mother asked gently.

“I don't know what more there is to say,” Sam said, but he did as she asked. He looked over at his mother. She was resting her head against the high back of her chair. Her lids were heavy. She was up at four every morning and she had to have been tired, sitting here at night keeping him company. Her hair, in a thick braid, was flipped over one shoulder. Sam blinked, trying to remember what she looked like years ago. But he couldn't find the image in his memory bank.

“You were always the easier baby, the easier kid. Michael felt everything so deeply. Even as an infant. You were a relief and a joy.” She hesitated, so Sam waited to see where this was going. He certainly had nothing to add. “So maybe I took advantage of your easiness. In you, I saw your father. In Michael, me. I thought you would be okay. That Hunt would be better for you anyway. Michael was done. He was gone. He knew what he wanted.”

“That sounds like a bullshit excuse that made it easier for you to leave.”

“Maybe, but it wasn't.” She hesitated and licked her lips. “Are you trying to say that you can't finish college because I left? Or that I somehow made college difficult?”

Sam shook his head, a little ashamed that he'd tried to blame her. “No.”

“Okay, then,” she said quietly. “Okay.”

Sam shrugged. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“You get to start over here? You get to make a new life with someone closer to your sons' ages than your own? Are you going to have babies again? What is this all about?”

Sam's mother leaned forward and gripped the arms of the chair, a small smile on her lips. “I am very protective of this life,” she said. “But there is no such thing as starting over. Everything that makes me who I am, who you are, began at birth. You cannot lose that, and you cannot escape that. You take it with you.” She paused and pointed a finger at Sam. “Our problems aren't the same, Sam. Why does it bother you how old Tom is? We are committed. Age doesn't mean so much now.”

Sam felt heat rise to his cheeks and the prick of tears in the corners of his eyes.

“It might matter to him one day,” he said huffily, regretting the words when he saw her flinch.

“Perhaps,” she said with enough weight behind the word that he knew she thought about that.

“I don't care. I don't care about any of this.” Sam stood up, his fists clenched. He bit the inside of his mouth hard to stop the tears. “Sleep with whoever you want. That's what happened with Mr. Epstein, right?”

His mother slumped back against the chair. “I may have done some stupid things. Questionable things. But I didn't sleep with him.” She paused. “He wasn't the reason why I left. But he helped it along. I hadn't been happy.”

Sam put his hand up. “Don't tell me: Dad was ruining your life.”

“Sam, no. Not at all. I was ruining his.” She paused. “But then I suppose I didn't lead you to believe anything different. It was easier to make you think Hunt was the bad guy without saying anything at all.”

“I never believed it was Dad's fault.”

His mother looked a little surprised by Sam's confession, which just confused him even more. So she wanted them to think it was Hunt's fault but then when he said he never did, she was hurt? Sam couldn't stand to hear another moment of this. “I'm going to bed.” He turned and headed out of the room. The hallway was freezing and he stopped and leaned against the cool plaster walls. He heard his mother come up behind him. “I just wanted my mother, that's all,” Sam mumbled against the wall. “I just wanted to see you.”