Christmas, Present (8 page)

Was
that,
she thought
,
because of what was wrong

in my head, even then?

“Rory, listen.” Laura willfully gathered her thoughts and tucked Rory’s small shoulder under her own arm as they reclined on the bed. “Are you listening to me? Nothing, no matter how much it matters at the time,

is worth doing something you think is wrong. And you always know.”

“How?” Rory asked.

“You ask the still, small voice, like Father Delabue said,” Laura told Rory. “And if you feel a doubt, that’s your real self telling you what to do, always.”

“Even if it’s telling you to be afraid,” Rory ventured. Laura sighed. It was foolish, and Laura knew it to be foolish, to try to impart an encyclopedia of moth- ering into a spare few minutes. But a spare few min- utes were her lot. She could not protect Rory from her eager, anxious personality, from being the child who knew the birthdays of everyone else in her class so she could mourn in advance to which parties she wouldn’t be invited. That was a mother’s job—They’re only jealous of you, sweetheart. When you’re older, they’ll all want to be your friend—all the ready, hopeful false- hoods of parenthood. Perhaps they were jealous? Per- haps Rory really simply was a late bloomer, as Laura had been? She could not confer goodness and confi- dence on Rory like a healing, like the prophylactic

antibiotics she’d given her for troublesome earaches when Rory was a baby. She could only give Rory a memory, and it had better be a sufficient one.

“Well, like now, of course, it’s natural you should be afraid,” Laura told her. “That’s simply recognizing your own real feelings.” But Laura also reminded her daughter to think of all the times fear could be a trick- ster, the times Rory’d cried before meets, terrified she would fall on the beam and hurt herself or—worse, for Rory—foul her routine, and how many times she had gone ahead and done it despite her fears, and done it perfectly, landed it perfectly.

“Should I write this down?” Rory asked. “I wrote it down for you.”

“Will you be our guardian angel?”

“If I can.” Laura caught her breath at the sharp veer of the questioning. “Of course I will. But Rory, here’s a secret. Even if I die, you can see the best part of me again. When you get to be forty”—Rory’s eyes widened—“you do this. You look down at your hands, and you’ll see my hands. You’re the one who looks just

like me, except your pretty curly red hair. You’ll see my hands because your hands will have grown to look just like mine.”

“I won’t make regionals,” Rory mourned, “because I’ll be emotionally disturbed.” Laura thought, and grimly, of her mother’s misplaced candor, on the drive from Natick. Her mother would go ahead with her champagne brunch. Laura’s funeral would have to wait.

“Yes, you will make regionals,” Laura told her daughter firmly. “People go on after horrible things happen and it actually makes them better at whatever they do. You know how Father Delabue always says, when you’re sad, offer it up? That’s how you do it. You offer it up.”

“To Jesus?”

Hell, thought Laura. “No, to Mama,” she said, holding tiny Rory against her with all her strength. “I will always be your mama, Rory. I will always be inside you.”

“I don’t believe in Santa,” said Rory. “Anymore.

Will Santa come?”

“Absolutely. Why would Santa punish you because your mom got sick?”

“Well, I’ll have to miss a lot of school,” Rory con- cluded, her face finally dry, but swollen as a plum.

“That’s right,” Laura said. ’Tis an ill wind, she thought.

E

lliott and Miranda sat knee to knee, Elliott’s jeans nearly touching the sharp camel crease of Miranda’s slacks. Miranda accepted a copy of the
Globe
from a passing volunteer in pink. Now, Elliott thought,
she’s going to read the paper?
She said
,
“You’ll have to make sure they keep in touch with Suzie’s chil-

dren and Angela’s . . .”

“Why don’t
you, too
?” Elliott cried. “You’re the matriarch. You have the house on the Cape. Why didn’t you build a little compound with guest cottages at the shore? Why don’t you now, in light of this? Why don’t
you
preserve the extended family?”

Guest cottages, he thought. That’s a little Kennedy.

Asking a bit much. “Why didn’t you at least reassure them, all the time, back then? Why don’t you make a resolution to do it now?”

“Well, Suzie was almost a teenager when Stephen died, and she wasn’t much interested in things like that.. .”

“She was nine, Miranda! No bigger than Rory. Laura and Angie were little. Angie was practically a baby. I’m sorry for this, but my own father has done a basically crap job with the girls . . . and so has my sister. It’s not only you.”

Good God, he realized then, I haven’t called my father. Or my sister.

He glanced at his watch. The time was flooding past; it was already morning, breakfast time on school days. Nurses were hailing one another, wishing one another good holidays. Elliott realized his time with Laura was collapsing slowly, like a spent parachute— that his life
A
.
D
. was about to commence. And there had been no time, to tell her how he had never, at a party, lusted for another woman, how he had never felt anything but lucky to glance across the room at his

innocent little imp in her one fancy black dress, Laura’s mittened hand so trustingly on the crook of his elbow, Laura grimly instructing him that he couldn’t chisel cost when it came to perennials, that one box of sedum was not enough to fill in the cracks in a wall, Laura learning the tango from a videotape and becom- ing furious when she couldn’t teach him, Laura. Laura! But he would not know, not for days, during the bustle of the funeral, the parade of the casseroles, that eventually time would grind down to a slow-motion dressage of seconds and minutes to be hurdled. That time would change character, from the headlong gal- lop of family life to a grim march. Seconds would become weeks, weeks centuries, for months to come. He would glance at calendars and be stunned to see that it was still February, that his tragedy, like a weight he needed virtually to strap onto his back and carry with him wherever he went, had grown no less heavy, so he could not even begin the process of speeding up, of trying to outdistance it. The weight would confer

its own terms, its own tenancy.

He would have the sense to avoid paging through

photo albums; but he would not be able to stop the flip-book in his head—of the moments wasted because they were presumed infinite, the nights two tired young parents had contented themselves with a pat instead of a tumble, turned their backs to each other—
turned their backs!
—and gone to sleep grate- fully, in the utter certainty that each of them would have another chance, tomorrow, or Saturday morning. All those chances had been wadded into a sloppy ball and tossed away for him by an indifferent fate.

Miranda’s lips were moving. Elliott had to wrest himself down into the room to concentrate on her words. “I was off there, distracted,” he apologized. “Tell me again what you just said.”

“I loved them,” Miranda offered uncertainly. “You should know. I loved them. My sister and I didn’t come from a family where you got hugged and kissed just for coming through the door. Stephen Senior did. And his parents were always petting and patting him, too. Like your mother.” Elliott thought briefly of his own mother, her careless tousles, her habit of massag-

ing his neck, once annoying, now longed for. “How was I to change . . . ?”

Elliott drew a deep breath. “You have time, Miranda. I’d take it. You know, Laura doesn’t think that you love her. She doesn’t think you’re proud of her. She thinks you’re proud of Angela and that you love only Suzanne.”

“That’s absurd.” Miranda silenced him, her fingers absently braiding Amelia’s hair.

“I know it’s horrible to tell you. But while she can still understand you, you might say something, for your own sake . . . she doesn’t really know how her sis- ters and brothers grew up so close . . .”

What Miranda said next, Elliott would remember one day, years later, when he’d chased Annie down the hall so furiously that he’d run into the wallboard over the laundry chute, nearly breaking his nose, leaving a mark that would remain for years. Annie had told him to shut his fat mouth when he grounded her after she was caught sneaking Rory out of the house at mid- night to meet boys at the gazebo.

All those years later, he would confide in Miranda that during their confrontation at the hospital, he truly had not realized how very hard it would be, how friendships would grow slim, then dim, then brittle and sparse. Abashed, he would apologize—over coffee he had learned to brew with delicate expertise—for his hysterical and presumptuous suggestion that she start a family
compound
. And with reticence and tolerance, she would assure him that the addition she’d built onto the cottage, after Laura died, was no accident. She would assure Elliott that, for all his mistakes, he had done what she had not—bound the girls to him as well as to one another, not only with unqualified love but with the tireless expression of it. And Elliott would recall exactly what Miranda had said to him, her defense against his barrage. She’d said, “I think I was afraid they’d turn away. That they’d always liked Stephen Senior better.
And
they had each other, and that is really how it is supposed to be, Elliott. It’s sup- posed to be them against us.”

It would turn out to be the best advice anyone would ever give him, and it would see him through

those times when both Annie and Rory assured him that they fervently wished he had died instead of their mother.

But that night, when neither of them could back off, they were both relieved to be drawn off the subject by the sound of pounding feet. Angela, her scarf and coat thickly frosted with wet snow, flew past the quiet- room door on her way to pop into every room on the hall until she found Laura. Cobb, her fiancé, stopped to shrug at Elliott and Miranda. “We barely got into Logan. It’s closed now,” he said. “We got a flight at six
A
.
M
.” In his hands he held a large, lifelike stuffed Scot- tie, a plaid bow about its neck. Amelia got up from the floor and took it from him, tucking it under her arm with a businesslike air, as if she understood that this was her duty, the beginning of her acceptance of homages.

A

fter Angela had cried herself to sleep in the hard leather chair, Laura finally allowed her-

self to feel tired. She would not let herself sleep; but

she lay back and burrowed into the blankets, glad of the downy yielding cuddling of the bed jacket. To her dread, she was beginning to feel cold, cold even to the touch.

Just as she had settled, Elliott tried to bring Amelia in. The tot screamed and hid her face in Elliott’s sweater. “She was asking for you, really,” Elliott told Laura. His face, in the room’s artificial light, was nearly lavender.

“It’s okay, Ell, she’s scared,” Laura told him with res- ignation. “She doesn’t get all this sadness over me just sitting here.”

“But you have to hold her. You have to hold her now, and touch her.” Elliott was desperate to protect both daughter and wife.

“I won’t have any memory and neither will she,” Laura told him firmly, almost heartlessly, as her mother walked into the room, with Laura’s brother, Stephen. Stephen, in a sweater and a stupid Sherlock Holmes hat half unraveled, was soaked to the skin. Angela awoke and cried out his name, but Stephen gazed, levelly, quietly observant, into Laura’s eyes, as

Angela clung to him around the knees from her seat near the bed.

“My car died,” he said.

“It’s the night for it,” Laura told him.

“Do you want to talk to Laura alone?” Miranda asked her son.

“For one moment,” said Stephen. He cupped Laura’s chin in his hands. “Sissy,” he said.

“Come and wash your face, Angela,” Miranda told her.

“I don’t want to leave.” Angela was awake and freshly primed to cry.

“Come and have a glass of water and wash your face,” Miranda said, and Angela, her snow-clotted scarf still hanging from the neck of her sweater, fol- lowed. Looking back as if in afterthought, she took Rory’s hand and picked up Amelia. “Come on, Rory glory,” Angela said. “Is your ACL still strained?”

“I don’t think so,” Rory said, sticking out one leg, displaying her knobby knee with its ropy muscled thigh. “I lifted weights.”

“I’ll check it,” Angela told her.

And Laura had a sudden preview of how life would be, as if she’d been scissored out of a picture—a space, yes, there would always be an empty space, but with life proceeding, smiles and warnings, encouragement and endearments exchanged around and through her.

Life.

“Get my credit card out of my purse, Stevie,” Laura told him.

He did, and did not ask why. “Ell is going to forget where the presents are, though I wrote it all down for him. They’re in the closet behind the boiler. You’re going to forget, too. I love Ell because he is so much like you, not in any way that people would notice. In ways only I notice.” She watched, with a nearly dispassionate pity, as Stephen’s eyes filled. “What I want you to do is give me a kiss and then go out and buy everything you can. Solid gold jewelry for Annie. Weights and a portable chinning bar for Rory, and expensive soap for both of them. The real creamy stuff, in teenager boxes. And boom boxes. And get Amelia one of those little cars that a kid can really sit in that goes on its own. And those twin babies that ask for ice cream . . .”

“Wait,” he said. “Do you have a pen?” Carefully, he wrote down every item Laura named.

“Then scatter it all under the tree. Everywhere. And take the price tags off. Please take the price tags
off
. I ask you this with all my heart. And . . . and please get married, Stephen. I can’t take care of you anymore. You can’t call me on the phone and tell me you just had sex with the backup singer for Pat Benatar. Please find a good woman and get married. And look after Elliott. And Anna.
Annie.
She’s changing her name.”