The Admissions (32 page)

She couldn’t look at him, but she couldn’t look at the diploma either. She looked instead deep into her glass.

The voice spoke to Nora again; it was not just bossy but persistent too.
You also have something to tell, Nora-Bora.

She cleared her throat and tipped her glass to her mouth, but it was empty. The bottle next to Gabe was empty too.

Come on,
said the voice.
Do it. Tell him.

“Um,” she said. “You can’t resign, Gabe. You can’t. I lost my job.”

This time she talked and Gabe listened. Sometimes he shook his head and sometimes he nodded sympathetically. When she got to the part about the circles of dirt on her knees he winced and took her hand. Another time, on another day, she would love him for that.

But not yet. Right now she was still bewildered.

“What do we do now?” Gabe said when she was done. His voice sounded like it had been cracked open and cooked on the sidewalk. “What are we going to
do
?”

“I don’t know,” said Nora. It might have been the truest thing she ever said. “I have absolutely no idea.”

Eventually they hobbled back to bed like a couple of old ladies, where, amazingly, annoyingly, Gabe could sleep but Nora couldn’t. That didn’t seem fair to Nora, that she should be the one to lie awake until the wee hours, fuming and worrying. They were like characters in some kind of twisted O. Henry story, where she risked and lost her job to try to save the family, and he tried to save his job but lost the family in the process. Wait, that didn’t make sense. How did
The Gift of the Magi
go again? She was too tired to think it through. Her eyes, opened into the darkness, burned, but when she closed them they opened right up again.

For a long time she tried to hate Gabe.

But as soon as she got the hate loaded up and ready to go little snippets of memory would creep in. This was the man who had danced the Charleston with Maya at her Daisy troop’s daddy/daughter dance even though neither of them knew how. Who had, just now, held her hand and nodded sympathetically when she told him about the Marin dwarf flax. Who had run out and bought a little pink hat and a bottle of champagne the day Angela was born. Who always kissed her mother hello and who did that funny-awkward half-stand anytime a woman at the dinner table in a restaurant left to use the restroom and who never said no to a board game with the children and who always remembered to scrape down the grill and who told her all the time she was just as pretty as she was the day he married her, which couldn’t possibly be true. The man who, just now, had winced when she told him about her mistakes. He’d winced, like it had happened to him!

How could she hate this man?

She couldn’t.

And yet. He wasn’t who she thought he was, this whole time. All these years!

Was she partly to blame, for being so impressed when she thought Gabe said Harvard, all those years ago?

Yes,
said something inside of her.

No,
said something else.

It was all so confusing.

To calm down she imagined herself in the land that Betsy and Tacy had inhabited more than one hundred years ago, where mothers baked a lot and fathers came home early from their jobs at the downtown shoe store or the pharmacy and children freely roamed hillsides after school because there was literally
nothing else to do.

What had ruined that way of life? Nothing much. The automobile. The airplane, the rocket ship, the rocket-propelled grenade. Two world wars. The movies, the television, the iPhone, Google, Wii, 401(k) plans. Terrorism, global warming, property taxes, gluten allergies. Urban sprawl, Instagram, the SAT, childhood obesity, Twitter, parents friending their children on Facebook.

Yes, indeed, it was all so very,
very
confusing. What could they do now? What would
Angela
think? What would she do, once she knew? How would they manage from here?

Nora wanted then what everyone wants in times of duress or general unease; she wanted what soldiers struck down on the battlefield want before they take their last breath. She wanted her mother. She wanted to go home.

But it was the middle of the night on the East Coast, and Nora was the loneliest person in the universe.

It would have been so much easier if Nora had
made
Gabe tell Angela the truth on Saturday. He wanted to be forced; he wanted to be marched to Angela’s door like a POW with a gun to his head, maybe with a blindfold on. But she didn’t force him. Instead she
supported
him, in a way that was both touching and infuriating. For much of the day he caught her looking at him with basset hound eyes: loving, sad, all-knowing in a slightly droopy way. Once in the kitchen she squeezed his hand and he had to blink back tears. It was pretty unmanly of him but he couldn’t help it.

Around ten in the morning Angela emerged from her room in her running clothes. She spoke to nobody and slipped out the front door, returning an hour later, sweaty and red in the face. Gabe was hiding around the corner like a spy in a 1950s movie, missing only the fedora and the drizzly weather.

“How was the run?” Nora said. She was using a voice that was like a poor imitation of her normal voice. Angela shrugged and took the water Nora offered.

“Sweetie, you know it’s not the end of the—”

Gabe saw Angela hold up a hand, palm out, and Nora stopped talking.

Cecily had a sleepover birthday party at night, and Maya was invited along to keep company with the younger sister of the birthday girl. Two down.

“Gabe, don’t you think you should—” said Nora once, but Gabe didn’t even let her finish the sentence. He shook his head, and she stopped talking.

Around six thirty Angela asked to borrow the car keys. The rule was that she was to say where she was going and when she was coming back anytime she took the car, but she volunteered nothing and neither Gabe nor Nora called her on it.

Three down.

Well, that settled it. Gabe couldn’t tell Angela something if she wasn’t there to tell, could he? Nora and Gabe ate pizza in front of an old episode of
Breaking Bad,
neither of them really watching. Gabe felt like a prisoner on death row granted a reprieve for another day.

But the reprieve didn’t last long. At eight thirty Angela returned, tossed the car keys on the counter, and made for her room. Nora gave him a look that said,
Now?
and he gave her one that he hoped said,
All in good time.

After a while he pulled himself up from the couch and started down the hallway as though it had been his idea all along.

How to broach this subject?

President Obama often said, “Look,” before he made a point, and that gave him an air of authority.

Look, Angela, there’s something I have to tell you.

Actually, come to think of it, it made Obama sound a little bit defensive. Might have something to do with his dismal approval ratings.

Angela? Do you have a minute?

Too formal, that’s how he’d approach Doug Maverick at work.

Knock, knock. Who’s there? Daddy. Daddy who? Daddy who has something to tell you.

Finally he knocked, waited for the desultory
Who is it?
and opened the door. Angela was lying on her unmade bed, staring at the ceiling. There was an uncharacteristically untidy heap of running clothes on the floor. In the wastebasket next to the bed Gabe saw a mound of Kleenex, but when Angela turned her face toward him Gabe could see that her eyes were dry. The windows were closed even though the evening was relatively mild, and there was a sour odor that didn’t seem to be directly related to the running clothes. It smelled like…well, at the risk of being overly dramatic, Gabe might say it smelled like disappointment.

Gabe sat in the desk chair and turned it to face the bed.

“How are you doing there, kiddo?” he asked. He hadn’t called her
kiddo
for at least four years.

“Okay,” said Angela. “I guess. But not really.”

Gabe cleared his throat. “You know it’s such a crapshoot, who gets in and who doesn’t, I should have been more aware of that. I mean, I was
aware
of it, but all along I thought, well, who wouldn’t want
you
? Right?”
SMILE ALL DAY LONG
, said those little Post-its, back when Angela had so much love to give she didn’t know what to do with it all. Back when it was spilling right out of her.

Angela pushed herself to a sitting position. First her lips moved with no words coming out, and then they moved again and the words followed: “Did I disappoint you?” The unexpected guilelessness of the question made something tear in his heart.
Now,
he told himself.
Go.

“Of course you didn’t,” he said. Deep breath. “In fact, if anything, I disappointed myself.”

She looked warily at him. He thought of the night she was born, a full February moon rising over the city. He remembered it like it was last week. It had been such a shock, that the hillock in Nora’s stomach had suddenly become an actual person (“Not exactly sudden,” Nora would say; labor had lasted sixteen hours…), with a real set of lungs and
tears,
actual tears, squeezing out of her big round eyes. She’d seemed downright offended at first, to be forced from the womb like that and into the harsh light of the delivery room, and Gabe had felt his heart expand to take in all of her.

“What do you mean?” she said.

Now or never.
Well, he would choose never, if it was really an option. But it wasn’t.

“A long time ago,” he said carefully, as though the words themselves might break if he didn’t put them down gently, “a long time ago I told a lie, and instead of coming clean with it like I should have I kept it going for a long, long time.”

After he told her, there was a silence so heavy it was like a sheath.

The first thing she did was laugh, long and hard. She’d never laughed that hard at an actual joke he’d told. He waited until she’d finished and he held his face in its passive, guilty expression until Angela stopped laughing and looked at him and said, “I’m laughing because it’s a joke. You’re joking, right?”

He shook his head. “I’m not joking. I wish I was. Were? I wish I were.”

It took a minute, maybe more, for that to sink in fully. Finally he said, “Sweetie?”

“I don’t even know what to say. I’m
stupefied.
”

“You see, Angela, I—”

“You mean when you walked me around the
campus…
”

Gabe gulped. “I was pretending.”

“When you bought me all of those stupid sweatshirts, when you told me what it was like looking out at the
Charles River
—”

He swallowed hard. “I was imagining.”

“Not imagining.”

“No.”

“You were lying!
Lying,
all that time. Dad, you were lying!”

Dad. Not Daddy. The beginning of the end.

“Angela, I understand that you’re upset, but listen, it doesn’t really change any—”

“Are you kidding? You must be kidding. It changes
everything.
Everything.” She sat back against the pillows. “Everything you forced me into, pushed me to do. Everything, my whole life. My whole life, which is now completely ruined.”

“Oh, now, honey, I don’t really think I
forced
—”

She was standing now, and trembling visibly, her face baking-soda-pale.

“Get out.”

“Ang—”

“
Dad!
I said, get
out
! Of my
room
!
I don’t want to talk to you.
I don’t even want to look at you. First the intern, and now
this
? What’s next?”

“Wait,
what
?” Gabe said. “The intern? What do you mean, the intern?”

“Like you don’t know what I’m talking about.” She spat that at him. If words had actual poison, Gabe would be a dead man. “You’re sleeping with the intern.”

“Angela! I am
not sleeping with the intern.
I would never sleep with that intern. Any intern!” He shuddered, then he looked around for Nora, who would normally step in and say,
Don’t talk to your father that way and put your running clothes in the hamper
and who would then restore peace and order to the house. But Nora wasn’t there.

“Get
out,
” Angela said again, “of my
room,
” and this time he thought she actually bared her teeth at him. She was glaring at him with all the force of her moon eyes and the message in them was so clear it needed no translation.

He was Dad now, not Daddy. He was a liar and a cheat. He’d done it: the ultimate damage. He’d lost her.

“Get some hiking clothes on,” said Nora. It was Sunday morning. Angela was back in bed, under the covers, the blinds pulled against the light.

“Hiking?”

“That’s right. We’re going to see the redwoods.”

“I’ve seen the redwoods.”

“We’re going to see them again.” She pulled the comforter off Angela and shook it a little. Angela covered her face with her pillow and said, “Go away! I don’t feel like talking to anyone.”

“I will not go away. We’re going to Muir Woods.”

Angela lifted the pillow a fraction of an inch and said, “Who’s going?”

“Just the two of us.”

“Really? What about everyone else?”

“They’re not invited. Get dressed.”

Angela said,
“Ugh,”
but she pulled herself out of bed and began opening and closing her dresser drawers. “This is
ridiculous,
” she said. Still, in ten minutes they were in the car.

At the park entrance, Nora paid the admission fee, consulted the map, and said, “We’ll do the Ocean View, to Lost Trail.”

Angela said, “Sounds appropriate.” And rolled her eyes.

“Then we could do Fern Creek to Bootjack.”

“Bootjack’s long,” said Angela.

“Have you got somewhere to be?”

Angela rolled her eyes again and Nora said, “Well, we’ll see how we do.”

Nora hiked her backpack onto her shoulders and started walking, leaving it up to Angela to come along or not. If there was one thing she’d learned from all these years of parenting it was that, when given the option, generally the offspring
did
eventually follow, rather than get left behind.

Nora inhaled and exhaled and began to feel some delicate semblance of peace descend upon her. However many times she walked among the redwoods they never failed to impress her with their majesty and strength and their total disregard for the minutiae that kept humans permanently tied up in knots of anxiety. The redwoods didn’t care what college you went to or how you got your job or what your SAT scores were or if you ate enough kale or even if you were a good parent or not: they were just standing there, year after year and decade after decade, concentrating utterly on survival. That was it. One job, and they did it consummately. How
cooperative
of them.

They’d been walking for several minutes when Angela said, “I’m so mad, Mom. I’m so mad I could just scream.”

“I know,” said Nora. She was breathing more heavily than Angela was, naturally. Oh, to be seventeen again! (But not really, actually.) “I’m mad at Harvard too,” Nora added. “Not to accept
you,
of all people! I mean, really, it makes me crazy.” Of course she knew perfectly well that wasn’t what Angela meant. In front of them a man wearing a small child in a backpack paused to look up at one of the trees. A tiny hand emerged from the backpack, pointing.

“Aren’t you
mad,
Mom? Dad told me he just told you the day before yesterday. You! He’s your
husband
!” Angela’s voice was so strident that the hiker with the backpack turned to look at her. You were supposed to be peaceful in the great outdoors. Nora and Angela passed the man with the backpack and Nora gave him a polite, how-do-you-do nod, but inside she was roiling with envy. That child in the backpack looked so small and uncomplicated. Nora wanted to be able to wear her children like an accessory. Had she appreciated it enough, when she could?

She didn’t answer Angela’s question. A few minutes later Nora paused at an informational sign about the coastal fire road. She stared at it for several seconds, not reading any of it, not really. Her left quad registered a complaint. She really should start going to yoga with Linda. She attempted a halfhearted stretch. Maybe they wouldn’t make it all around Bootjack after all. She’d call Linda tomorrow. No, wait, she couldn’t call Linda. Arthur had fired her. She felt a spasm of grief as she remembered.

Angela said, “Mom?” and her voice sounded like a little girl’s voice, at once full of hope and doubt. “Aren’t you mad?”

Nora craned her neck and tried to see the top of the redwoods. She couldn’t, not really. She said to Angela, “These have been here for, what? Zillions of years?” What would they do when Angela was out of the house and they didn’t have her to tell them all the things they should know but didn’t?

Angela snorted. “Six hundred.”

Nora ignored the snort and absorbed the correction. “Right. A long time.”

“What’s your point?” The words were teenager-ish and even a little bit snotty, but behind them Nora sensed curiosity and maybe even some genuine warmth.

“My point is…” What was her point, exactly? She herself was furious with Gabe, then right on the heels of that she felt guilty for being furious, and then confusion about feeling guilty. “My point is, if these trees have been here for hundreds of years, and they’re probably going to be here for hundreds more, well, it may not seem related, exactly, but don’t you think you could go easy on your father?”

“Do
you
plan to go easy on him?”

Nora looked at her feet in their ridiculous hiking boots, which she trotted out only once a year. Softly she said, “I do. For a mistake.” She began walking again.

“No,” said Angela. “No. It wasn’t a mistake, it was a
lie
! He lied to me, my whole entire life! He tried to make me follow him somewhere that he’d never even been. He didn’t do that to Cecily, or to Maya, but he did it to me.”

Well, yes. That was certainly true. “But.”

“But what?” Angela spat the question at Nora.

“Have you never done anything you shouldn’t have? I mean, anything that was a little…well, a little morally nebulous?”

“I don’t know,” said Angela staunchly. But when Nora tried to meet her eyes she looked away. “Nothing like what he did.”

They came to a steep set of wooden steps and began the ascent. The blood was pounding in Nora’s ears. Angela may as well have been walking on a cloud; she wasn’t exerting herself at all.

When they reached the top of the steps Nora leaned against the railing and said, “I have. I dropped Maya on her head and I’m sure that’s why she can’t read.”

“You did? No you didn’t.”

“I did too, when she was a baby. And only Aunt Marianne knows. I never told Daddy. That’s the morally ambiguous part. Isn’t that awful?”

Angela’s eyes, behind her sunglasses, were inscrutable. “Um,
yeah,
that’s awful. Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

“Because I felt so guilty. I wasn’t paying attention to her. I was paying attention to work instead.”

“You
dropped
her?”

“Well. I let her fall. Which is just as bad.” Even now, the memory unleashed in Nora a great internal shudder.

“That’s not why Maya can’t read.”

“Who knows? Maybe it is…” Nora rubbed her finger along the railing. She’d probably get a gigantic splinter. Gabe was really good at removing splinters. Nora was hopeless; she didn’t have the patience for it. What if Angela got a splinter? Would she let Gabe remove it? Probably not. Definitely not.

“I thought he was having an affair with the intern. When he told me he had something to say I thought that was it.”

“I did too,” confessed Nora.

“You did?”

“It crossed my mind.”
A hundred times,
she added in her head.

“Gross, right?”

“I think she’s horrible.”

“Same,” said Angela. She almost smiled, but Nora could see her catch herself.

“Would you have preferred
that
secret?”

“Yes.”

“You would have?”

“Kind of, yeah. That would have been more…expected.”

And less to do with you,
thought Nora. Fair enough. Teenagers were the centers of their own universe; they almost couldn’t help that. It had to do with the hormones. It was practically a medical condition.

“I mean, if he really had been an alum, maybe I would have gotten in. Maybe that was the edge I was missing. I can’t stop thinking about that.”

Angela was right. That was a real possibility.

There was a pause, and then Angela looked down at the railing and said softly, “I
did
do something I shouldn’t have this year.”

Nora waited. Even the birds—even the redwoods—seemed to be waiting to hear what Angela had to say.

“I took Adderall from Joshua Fletcher.”

Nora wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but she hadn’t expected
that.
“You
what
?”

“I stole Adderall.” She pulled an ironic face. “
Addy,
if you prefer to use a nickname. To help me stay awake to study.”

Nora remembered the message on Angela’s computer.
Anyone know where Addy is?
She’d thought that was a classmate’s name, short for Adeline or Addison. Or maybe a teacher. What an idiot Nora was. “And nobody knows? Oh my God, Angela—” Normally her Catholic upbringing did not permit Nora the taking of the Lord’s name in vain, but these were special circumstances. Obviously.

“Daddy knows.
Dad.
Mrs. Fletcher knows.” Angela drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I apologized to her. I guess Joshua knows too, I’m not sure.” She started walking along the path and Nora followed her. “She was really nice about it. She hugged me…and, well, she was just nice. It made me feel terrible, like I didn’t already feel terrible about enough this year.”

Angela slowed until Nora caught up and they began walking in tandem. It was better that way, neither of them looking directly at the other. “And nobody told me?” asked Nora.
This isn’t about you,
a little voice said. But wasn’t it? If it was about her children, then it was about her. That’s what parenting was, the good and the bad of it.

“Dad wanted me to tell you, but—I thought you’d get all mad.”

“I would! I am! I am all mad!” Nora was livid, absolutely livid. “I’m furious—”

“But I’ll never do that again. It was stupid. I won’t, Mom, I swear. The pills made me feel terrible and jittery and awful and lose my appetite, I hated them, I don’t even think they helped that much…”

What had Maya said back in the fall?
Angela’s been crying in the afternoons.
And Nora hadn’t guessed. She remembered Angela dropping the water glass, bursting into tears, running to her room. She remembered Angela at Thanksgiving dinner, not hungry. She wanted to scream.

This was why Catholics went to confession. You told your sins to a priest, hopefully one you’d never seen before and would never see again, and you were in the clear. You didn’t have to tell your mother or your daughter or anyone else. You didn’t really even have to go into the details.
I killed a man. I yelled at a child. I lost my temper, I said a swear, I disobeyed my parents.
Nora stole a sideways glance. Angela closed her mouth and then opened it again and for a second she looked like a baby bird trying to capture a worm from its mother, and, just like that, Nora’s heart melted a little bit, and then a little bit more.

After a few beats of silence Angela said, “I feel different. Toward Dad. He doesn’t seem like the same person, ever since he told me. He seems like a stranger. Is that crazy?”

Well, it wasn’t crazy at all—this was the crux of Nora’s problem too. So there, under the redwood canopy, she made a decision. Be first. Be better. Be the example. She rooted around inside the ball of anger and resentment and found a small bloom of love. Small, but with the potential to grow. She said, “You know what, honey? You won’t always.”

“I will. I
will.
” Angela kicked at a chunk of dirt on the trail.

“Not if you don’t let yourself.”

They had come to a fork in the trails. How perfectly appropriate! Wouldn’t Robert Frost (New England by way of San Francisco) just have had a field day with the symbolism. Angela stopped and sighed. “I don’t believe you. I want to, I just—don’t.” Angela shook her head. “I don’t want to do Bootjack. Do you?”

“No,” said Nora. “Bootjack is
exhausting.
I never wanted to do Bootjack. I want to go home and have a big glass of wine.”

“Yeah,” said Angela. “Me too. Except for the wine.”

They turned back toward the visitor center, toward the parking area, toward home. Nora wanted to look again at her daughter but instead she concentrated on the trail ahead of her.

Such a messy and complicated business. Life. Family. But there was only one way to do it, wasn’t there? You just had to keep going, one foot in front of the other.

“You’ll get over it, sweetie,” said Nora. “People get over worse.”

“No,” said Angela. “No, I won’t. It’s too big. It’s huge, Mom. I can’t get over it, and I won’t. I know I won’t.”

Truly there was nothing to match the righteous anger of a teenager, was there? That feeling of being wronged, there was almost a joy in it.
Look, see? I told you the world had it out for me!

And after all, maybe Angela knew her own potential for forgiveness better than Nora did. Maybe the damage was too great, and maybe she wouldn’t get over it at all.

In no time Cecily was shaking her shoulder. She had overslept! Nora never overslept. She was generally up with the birds, up like a farmer’s wife, preparing her charges for their day, packing Cecily’s and Maya’s lunch boxes, whipping dishes around the kitchen to get breakfast made for whomever would eat it.

Cecily was dressed, ready for school, right down to her backpack and her shoes, which she wasn’t supposed to put on until she left the house (realtor’s rules, or just another sign of the differences between Nora’s generation and her children’s; she and Marianne had grown up cheerfully clomping through their 1,800-square-foot Cape in their Stride Rites and their Buster Browns).

Cecily leaned close to Nora and Nora could smell the mint from her toothpaste on her breath. The spot next to Nora in the bed was empty. Gabe was gone too—that offsite.

“Oh geez,” said Nora, squinting at the clock. “I totally overslept. I’m sorry, honey. Let me get you some breakfast.”

“I’m good,” said Cecily. “I made toast. I made some for Maya too.”

“Did you?” said Nora. “That’s great.” She felt prouder than she should have—it was only toast, and Cecily was ten. But in the world of cosseted, twenty-first-century children self-made toast represented some sort of achievement. “Great,” she said again. “I’ll throw on some clothes, and let’s get you two to school. I can give Angela a ride too, if she’s running late.”