What I Had Before I Had You (19 page)

I round the corner of the emergency wing and find Carrie, sitting all folded up behind an empty concrete planter, sweatshirt stretched over her knees, her feet in their flip-flops protruding beneath, cell phone to her ear. She looks up at me, and I see the graphite bleed of her eye makeup below her lower lashes. Poor Carrie. In New York they will make her say “y'all” and “pecan” for them and laugh. They will do their hair differently.

“Don't do that to me,” I say.

She drops her chin to her chest and lets out a little hiccupping sob. “Mm-hmm,” she says into the phone.

“Who are you talking to?”

She doesn't look up. Ah. She is telling on me. If it's one-something here, it's eleven-something in Texas. I know the chair he will be sitting in and the level of bourbon in his glass. The TV will be tuned to Comedy Central on mute.

“Does he say hi?” I ask. Carrie listens for a second and then holds the phone out to me. I cross over to her and sit as near as I dare. Kandy is sitting on a bench across the emergency driveway, reading a book under a street lamp. She must have had the book in her purse. So prepared.

“Sam,” I say into Carrie's phone, and before he speaks, I think I can feel his breath on my cheek, coming through the tiny holes in the purple plastic. I'm trying so hard to focus on the ways he failed us, but I can't help it—his breath makes me think of his lips on my skin, and of the rise of his chest when he sleeps, and of his white toes poking through the threadbare socks that I wanted him to replace. He is probably wearing those socks right now. I don't know when I will stop thinking these thoughts. I had hoped divorce would be a cliff off of which our love would fall and shatter into a million pieces. It turns out divorce is just a piece of paper, and I miss my husband more than I will say out loud, despite everything.

“I don't know what to say to you about all this,” he says.

“Nothing is fine.”

“Are you okay? Handling it okay, I mean? Carrie says the police are on it, not much else you can do till they find him, right? Olivia? You there?”

“Mm.”

“Let me know as soon as you know anything, okay? Will you do that?”

“Yes,” I say. Now that he has been invited into the crisis of the custodial parent, I will not be cruel. I snap the phone shut.

Carrie blows out a mouthful of air and pillows her head on the stretched sweatshirt between her knees. I put a hand on her back, but she shivers me off.

“We'll find him,” I say.

“Whatever.”

“Probably. Odds-wise.”

“Probably.” She squeezes her eyes shut. “The really bad thing is . . .” she starts. I am silent, afraid to discourage her honesty with my voice or my breath or my touch. “If we didn't find him, it might be . . . Things might be . . .” She inhales sharply, coughs.

“Sweetness,” I say.

She picks her head up and fixes me with a tortured look, and I understand: It's Carrie versus Carrie in there. She's battling for her soul. “Does that make me a bad person?”

“No.”

“I mean, obviously I hope he's okay. Obviously I, like, love him.”

“It's been a bad year for us all.” When I think of myself as a teenager, raging through that dire summer, and then I think of the kind of girl that Carrie is, I am ashamed. There is no parallel. Carrie has been betrayed, overshadowed, and overlooked, and here she is, wandering the night streets on my whim, crying not out of self-pity but from her own struggle to be good.

We stand up without speaking, pressed shoulder to shoulder. Kandy drifts to meet us as we make our way back to the parking lot. As we walk, Carrie twines her wrist around the crook of my elbow and hangs on. It's the middle of the night, and nobody is looking. I know I haven't earned the right to comfort her tonight. She is giving me this.

Sometimes I wonder if I would be selfish in a clutch situation; if some black-robed inquisitor stood over my family and said,
Which one shall I take?
, if I wouldn't just close my eyes and wait and see. Or worse, if I wouldn't leave, as I left my mother. But right now I know that I don't need to worry about this, that truly, as he reached for one of my kids, I would yell,
No, take me!
For Carrie and Daniel, I would throw myself in front of a bus. I would eat lava. I would photocopy forever.

 

14

T
HE FIRST FEW
days at the Seventy-third Street house are tentative. Clearly, there has been much talk about me since my first visit. Laura and Courtney sit at the foot of my bed, asking me what TV shows I like and what drugs I've done and if I am a virgin. I lie because I don't know yet if I have to. It's hard to think of them as real girls, as cousins. I keep expecting them to run away. I feel more stable in my mind, but also farther from home than I have ever been. They lend me clothing and walk nervously past my open door, asking is there anything I need?

In this household, strong emotion doesn't make sense, and there is an even pace to the passage of time that I have never known. I accidentally lock myself in the bathroom and have to yell until Laura comes to show me how to jiggle the handle. I limp from chair to chair and read magazines with my bandaged right leg propped up on pillows. We go to a movie matinee, and I sit in the aisle seat with a special footstool that the ushers let us drag in. When I turn and look down the row, it's like looking in two facing mirrors, their faces familiar iterations of one face. Nobody forecasts the length of my stay, at least not out loud. It must seem to Laura and Courtney that I have no choice but Christie's guardianship. But I can see an unease in Christie sometimes, a flicker of a glance toward the front door, a twitch at the ringing of the phone, that tells me she knows my mother will come for me; that sooner or later, there will be a reckoning.

I lie on a chaise in the backyard while Christie jabs at her rosebushes with a huge pair of scissors. Abruptly, she says, “Your mother and I made a koi pond when we were in high school, right there,” pointing to the green rosebush in the corner, up against the fence. “And now that bush won't flower.”

My mother still owns half of this house, Christie tells me. She grew up here. Christie drops these bits of information on me as she passes through rooms, as she brings me glasses of fancy juice: black-currant nectar with seltzer, peach-orange-carrot infusions. Christie has taken time off work to monitor my convalescence, so she is always around the house, angling at me. She is a molecular biologist at NYU. She says it is fascinating work, but when she tries to explain it to me, it puts me off. It sounds too familiar: faith in what cannot be seen.

Christie drives me around to all the animal shelters in Brooklyn, and we walk past kennel after kennel full of dogs who are not Blanche. Despondent mastiffs with lazy, iridescent eyes, fearful gnashing mutts, beagles frenzying against the chain link in their eagerness for the man in work pants to take them into the back room for the best walk in the world. Endless litters of orphaned puppies. I wonder if they really are orphaned. People just take baby animals; they don't wait long enough to see if the mother is coming back. I imagine the mother dog loping stupidly around, thinking,
I could swear this was the place
. I cannot beat the lump in my throat. Poor Blanche. I crave her rusty smell and the feel of her sleeping bulk against my back. I resolve not to stop looking, but I don't know where else to look.

MIDDLE OF THE
night. The front door opens and shuts. I am eating yogurt in the kitchen, reading one of Laura's detective novels with my leg propped up on a chair. The regularity of sleep schedules in this house is something I can't get used to. No lights come on, but the approaching footsteps are sure. A man materializes in the kitchen doorway from the darkness of the hall, and I can see that he is Laura and Courtney's father. They take after him physically: broad shoulders and lean muscle. His forehead, beneath a youthful shag of light brown hair, is deeply lined. He wears square-framed glasses, and there is something hopelessly sad in the architecture of his face in that moment before he realizes I am there.

“Excuse me,” he says. “You're Olivia?”

I nod.

“Tom.” He shakes my hand like a business acquaintance. “Are you enjoying New York?”

“Yes,” I say, reduced to a child's dumb interview answers by the suddenness with which I have been torn from the world of my book. “Thank you.”

Tom opens the fridge and stares at its contents, bathed in fluorescence. He selects a Tupperware container and pops the lid. “Shrimp?” he asks, holding it toward me.

“No, thanks.”

Tom wanders back into the dark hallway, eating from his Tupperware, and I hear him go upstairs very slowly, hesitating over each heavy step.

TOM'S RETURN OCCASIONS
a family outing. I claim that I can walk okay; Christie puts me through a battery of tests in the living room. I wince silently when I come down on my right foot, and the pain blushes out through my thigh, duller and rosier now. I am a good liar, though, and Christie says okay. We go to a fancy Asian fusion restaurant and eat a three-course lunch, my first such. I order duck and it comes whole, its neck twisted in an attitude of shame beneath its breast, its head startlingly attached. I thought they would lop it off before putting it on the plate. It looks like the duck tried to shelter its poor duck face from the heat of the oven. I can't eat it, but I pull the meat apart some to make it seem eaten. I see Tom and Christie glance at each other, I see Laura and Courtney's clean white plates. The silver credit card tucked in the leather folder.

Christie flashes a family membership card at the concierge in the Natural History Museum. We wander apart and come together, ogling displays on puffer-fish anatomy and listening to a gray old man wax passionate in the planetarium about the birth and death of stars. I have to leave my camera in the cloakroom. Christie and Tom share a love of the inner workings of things, and the girls are instinctively curious. I just look at things without reading the placards. I run my thumb along the smooth edge of a meteor when the guards aren't looking, and I see Christie alarmed, fighting the impulse to chastise me.

“Olivia, come take a look at this,” says Tom, beckoning me over to a case of prehistoric fossils. “Fantastic!”

I am not sure what he finds so fantastic about these rocks, but he is clearly and forcefully trying to draw my enthusiasm, so I say, “Wow.” One minute he puts on a show of enthusiasm like this, and the next I can say something right to his face and he'll barely acknowledge me. Courtney and Laura adore him. They fight for his attention. Sometimes one of them will hang back to talk with him alone and I'll see them walking in step, slouching the same slouch, laughing into their hands.

The museum becomes for me another kind of museum, a Museum of Own Family, in which I can study the rituals and habits of this rare species. I observe my aunt and uncle in front of the dioramas of Early Man. Christie is explaining something to Tom, gesturing with her hands. She looks at the hairy little Homo sapiens behind the glass as she talks, and not at her husband. Tom nods again and again, his hands clasped behind his back. He is wearing a blue polo shirt, khaki shorts, and dopey white folded-down tube socks. They talk without touching and then they drift apart. Laura and Courtney come to get me whenever they find anything particularly interesting. We browse the skeletons of extinct creatures, joking about what they must have looked like. Courtney says to Laura that they are something that sounds like
wumpus-bumpuses
. They squeal with laughter. “Oh, sorry,” says Laura, realizing my exclusion. “It's hard to explain.”

I find myself alone in a long rectangular room devoted to genetics. Colorful double-helix statues spiral toward the ceiling, and a video about Gregor Mendel plays on a loop. There is a blown-up photograph of a family, two parents and two children. Red circles are printed over their hereditary characteristics: bent little fingers, cleft chins, tiny hairs between the second and third knuckle. The little boy in the picture is holding his mother's hand, and the father has the little girl on his shoulders, and they are all smiling toothpaste smiles. I want to draw red circles around the smiles, around the happiness itself.

We convene on a bench in the grand museum lobby, while Tom slips out to make a phone call on his enormous Motorola cell phone. Christie's aspect changes—the muscles in her face relax, and her hands drop to her purse to fumble for hard candies. “Did you see the extinct-creatures exhibit on the fourth floor?”

We nod.

“Did you take notes, Courtney? You could use that for one of your makeups.” Courtney has failed biology and must start this year with a makeup course so that she can mend her permanent record for college admissions. It's the worst thing she could have failed. Courtney sighs. Through the rotating glass doors, I can see Tom gesturing on the phone.

“It's so nice to have you, Olivia,” Christie says, drawing my attention back. “It's just such a treat.”

This statement works us over like a camera panning out, and we are awkwardly silent, thinking about my presence here. I blurt my question: “So why did my mother leave?” It's the wrong time and place to ask it, and it feels heavier now, having waited in my mouth for days and days.

“To have you,” Christie says carefully.

“Why not have me here?”

“She wasn't thinking straight. She had only been diagnosed a year or so before.”

“With what?” I ask.

Christie holds out a palm full of hard candies, and Laura and Courtney take theirs automatically. They look at me. “Bipolar disorder. Is that— Have you heard of that before?”

This is, in fact, the first time I have heard the words “bipolar disorder,” but that doesn't mean it's news. The term describes my mother perfectly—having two poles, riding the sine wave between them, leaving behind her a wake of disorder. I think of the divine-energies chart. “Oh, sure,” I say. “Yeah.” They look relieved. “So what happened?” I ask. My toes curl in my shoes.

“She was manic. She thought we wanted to hurt her. What did she tell you about us, growing up? Anything?”

“Just that my grandparents are dead and that she was an only child.”

“Yes, your grandparents are dead,” Christie says, stung.

Tom comes in, slightly sweaty. “Are my girls having fun?” he says, and everyone smiles mechanically.

“Why would she think you were going to hurt her?” I ask.

“Cab's waiting,” Tom says, and everyone jumps up. My question is stranded, unanswered, in the museum lobby as I follow my new family down the great concrete steps and out into the street.

JAKE IS HOME
by now, I imagine. Summer is still summer, and maybe they've gotten back into the Emerald, found a suite on another floor. Kids are skinny-dipping and sunbathing and skateboarding and making out. There are backyard parties with kegs of PBR, and long nights of talk, confessions of love. When I think of this exquisite summer going on without me, I feel derailed. But I can't go back to that. I betrayed all the best people. It hurts less to imagine that they hate me than to imagine that they don't. If I go home, it will have to be different. Everything will have to be different.

If my mother has returned, I imagine that the empty house is teaching her lessons. In my absence, she can see that she has been wrong to treat me like a child, to lie to me, to make me doubt my own mind. She is praying—not talking to God but praying, like a penitent—for my safe return. I imagine her tidying everything, readying everything. Collecting her hair in a tight, neat ponytail, trimming her jagged toenails. She puts her tarot decks in a shoe box and slides them under the bed. She balls up the divine-energies chart. She goes to a doctor and takes whatever is prescribed for her; she'd rather be a good mother than a good psychic. She chooses me over everything else.

COURTNEY AND LAURA
have their own secret life. Theirs is a muted rebellion, the threat of failure dangling over their heads. Still, they tell Christie they are sleeping over at a friend's house and sneak across town to Columbia dorm parties, where cute, stubbly journalism majors fill their plastic cups with mysterious punch.

They take me along to one of these on a Friday night when Manhattan seems apt to boil over: the screeching traffic, the anxious sidewalk crowds, the city swelter. We meet some of their girlfriends from Chapin, girls in black tank tops and tight tapered jeans, and hail a cab. “This is our estranged cousin,” they say to their friends, and we giggle because it is true.

The dorm is a high-rise with a view of the Hudson River. In the elevator, older boys look me up and down. I think I'd better be wild tonight; I could use a thrill to get out of my head after all the illuminations of the week. I study Courtney's warped reflection in the elevator's chrome wall and see not the flesh-and-bone girl I know she is, but the ghost staring back at me, and this gives me a little push, a little reignition. When the elevator stops and we get out, we are mortal again, and I feel the loss and need a drink.

“You're probably used to crazier parties than this,” says Laura as we shoulder through the crowded dorm hallway. Cheesy pop music plays from a stereo that someone has dragged into the hall. My friends would roll their eyes and pull all the tape out of the cassettes.