The Blessings (23 page)

Her mom never dated anybody after her dad died, not that Elena knew of, but last summer she decided to go on Match—
I think seventeen years is long enough to wait, don't you?
Her mom sounded nervous, telling her, but Elena was happy she was trying it. She had a job as a paralegal, had finished her degree. Max was away at college. Elena didn't like thinking of her mom being alone. When Gran died last year, her mom was so sad; even though Gran was living in a nursing home and had dementia, the two of them had always been close. Gran was over a lot when they were little; after she broke her arm, she'd lived with them for almost a year. The family had always seemed apologetic about that, but her mom had never seemed to mind—
I owe her a lot
, she always said.

When her mom called to say she had a date, Elena was happy for her, but the guy sounded lame. Divorced, which was fine. But a car salesman. His online name was OldFashionedGent. In his profile, which Elena's mom read to her over the phone, he talked about treating ladies right. “Ugh,” Elena groaned. “Nobody who says ‘ladies.'”

But her mom found this inexplicably charming. “I don't know,” she said. “Your dad was a gentleman, you know. He was kind of old-fashioned, actually.”

It was exactly the kind of thing Elena found impossible to fathom, but this time she kept her mouth shut.

When her mom came home from the date, she called Elena in her dorm. Elena could tell right away that her heart wasn't in it.
He was fine
, she said airily.
There was nothing wrong with him.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement
, Elena said.

Her mother laughed, but sadly. She was maybe a little tipsy. Then she started talking about her dad. She told a story Elena had never heard before, from before they were married, when they were at a wedding and some guy was hitting on her. Her dad stepped up to him and said:
I see you like looking at my wife?

Oh, my God!
Elena said. She was on her bedroom floor, pressing the phone to her ear, trying to block out the sounds of her roommates in the kitchen.
Really? That's like out of a movie.

I know
, her mother said. She sounded almost giddy.
It was.

She offered a few more morsels and Elena gobbled them down—how the guy apologized and her dad ended up shaking his hand, refreshing his drink, and then her parents left—her young parents, a fancy hotel on a cold night in Philadelphia, just a few months before their own wedding—and then her voice seemed to close, like a curtain drawn, and Elena was abruptly aware of all she didn't know. The fact that her mom had had a relationship with her dad that was private, that was theirs alone. It made Elena feel jealous of her and sorry for her at the same time.

The next weekend, Elena went home and convinced her mom to let her look at her profile. SingleMom2—the name alone made her feel a groundswell of sadness. But as she read on, she felt better. The description was nice; it sounded like her.
I am a proud mother of a beautiful daughter and a wonderful son
, it began. Reading it, Elena teared up. Her profile picture was one Elena had taken last August, at Uncle Patrick and Aunt Kate's shore house. She has a dark tan, the way she always did by August, and she's smiling and looking away from the camera, one hand holding her hair. Elena tweaked her profile to be a little more boastful, changing
average
to
slender
and adding that she was pretty (she was). Then they browsed through other people's profiles, checking out the guys who had e-mailed and winked at her, and by the time they had waded through all the cheeseballs and bodybuilders and weirdos they were laughing so hard they were crying.

The plane is in the air. Elena pulls the shade down, but only halfway, in case the woman beside her wants to see. She closes her eyes, focusing on the sound of the woman turning the pages of her magazine. She tries not to think about where she is, but she can't help picturing what could happen—the plane falling, an engine failing, the bottoming out in her stomach, the pieces crashing, her mother picking through her room. Elena has always braced herself for tragedies, had the ability to instantly summon them in gruesome detail. For her, these awful things always seemed possible. Gail told her it was understandable, her feeling this way, because she'd had a formative experience with loss. She compared it with being in a car accident and tensing up every time you went around a sharp corner.
Muscle memory
, she said.
You learned at a very young age that things can disappear.

“Drink?” says the flight attendant.

“Oh. Yeah—um, ginger ale, please.”

The pop and hiss of the can lid makes her feel a little calmer. The woman next to her unlatches the little tray and opens a cranberry juice.

“So,” the woman says. “Did you say you're a photographer?”

“Oh—yeah. Well, I mean, I majored in photography.”

“Photography.” The woman nods. “That's different.”

Elena smiles—it is so much like her family.
That's different
, they said, about the stud in her nose, the variously colored streaks in her hair.

“What do you take pictures of?” the woman asks.

“Um, well, it's kind of weird. It's photography, but mixed with found objects. So it's more like photo-collage,” Elena says. She wants to explain it in a way that's clear and unpretentious. She hates when the kids in her class are deliberately obscure. “The subject is my family, mostly. It's about these contradictions”—
the dualities of family life
, she called them in her Artist Statement—“having this identity as part of a big family but also this part of yourself that's separate, dealing with your own private stuff, that they never really know. Or dealing with the same stuff, just differently.”

Elena frequently hears her friends complain about their families, but she's never been that stupid. She knows how lucky she is to have the family she does. As different as they are—her cousins Joe and Hayley, who she hangs out with at parties, are a jock and a cool girl—she's always loved being near them, all of them. It makes her feel as though her dad is still around. She loves hearing the old stories, sitting around the table after dinner, some worn thread picked up as casually as a comment about the weather or the food.
That reminds me of one time John…gosh, I think John was about seventeen…
handing off the baton. Listening, Elena feels drowsy, all her fears seeping out of her. She could curl up at their feet.

Most of the stories and pictures of him Elena has memorized, but occasionally something new turns up. When Aunt Ann was home recovering from her surgery, she cleaned out her attic and found a bunch of photos she'd forgotten that she had. For Elena, it was a treasure chest—all these images of her father she didn't already know by heart, new details she could add to her pile. In a few he has this insane mustache, but beneath it his face looks just like Max's. In another, he's wearing the blue shirt she has on now, holding her in the crook of one arm. She's laughing, looking up at his face.

Aunt Ann said she could have them, and some of them ended up in her senior thesis:
Where We Live
. The project was dioramas, done in shoeboxes, like in elementary school. In the boxes she created scenes of family, domesticity, rooms assembled from a combination of photos and found things. A slice of fabric from the inside lining of the blue shirt became a runner on a miniature dining room table; a newspaper headline about the Twin Towers, copied over and over, turned into wallpaper in the kitchen. She used photographs for the people, a combination of old pictures she found and new ones she took—a pair of folded, freckled hands; Max's face, half-submerged in bright blue pool water; the little gold cross her aunt Margie always wore. An old Sears portrait of the grandchildren taken before Max was born. Her parents' wedding picture—crazy, how young her mom looked—and the one of her dad's face, half-lit. Elena doesn't mean for the work to be depressing; she thinks it's lame, the kids who believe that only dark stuff qualifies as serious art. For her, it's about both feelings.
My work is about a paradox
, she wrote.
The moments when everything you know is suddenly different, but everything is the same.

There is a spot of turbulence and the plane dips. Elena's stomach balloons into her throat. She closes her eyes, feels a sharp prick of sweat under one arm. Another abrupt sway, the rattle of soda cans in the attendant's cart, and the seat belt light blinks on. “We can expect a little turbulence, folks,” the captain says.
Oh God. Oh no.
Elena squeezes her eyes shut and digs her nails into her palms. She became an agnostic when she got to college, but right now she prays.
Please don't let this plane crash, okay?
She tries to breathe in through her nose and out through her mouth, the way Gail taught her. She visualizes the airport in Philadelphia. Visualizes her brother strolling through the terminal in the nylon
WIDENER SWIMMING
jacket he always wears. She focuses on the woman beside her, the calm rustling of her magazine, how she licks her fingertip between each page, the way Gran used to when she read them stories. In a few minutes, the turbulence has passed.

For her final show, Elena's entire family showed up. She hadn't told anyone about it but her mother, who spread the word to everybody else. Elena was one of the few kids who had any family members there at all, much less eighteen of them. She wasn't surprised—her family came to everything, especially anything involving her and Max, forever making up for what was missing—but she was touched all the same, by them all being there, by their unease among the art kids with their pierced lips and dyed hair. Aunt Ann circled the room slowly, pausing before every photograph, as if giving each equal attention. Aunt Margie fidgeted nervously with her necklace, but this didn't mean anything; she always did. Alex and Cynthia walked through the exhibit slowly, talking with their heads bent toward each other, his hand on her back. Her cousin Joe and his wife focused on keeping their kids from screaming or touching things, four-year-old Joey III and Caitlyn, the newborn, wearing a flowered headband that practically engulfed her tiny head.

Aunt Kate and Uncle Patrick showed up late, as usual, as if blowing in from a storm. Uncle Patrick was in his doctor's coat and Kate was dressed as fashionably as a college student, in leggings and knee-high boots. Hayley and Tate moved in a techno-trance, absorbed in games on their parents' cell phones. Uncle Joe was there, too, squeezing his huge body through the narrow aisles. He did a brief walk-through and then stepped aside, puffing slightly, and talked to Uncle Dave, who had come even though he wasn't married to Aunt Ann anymore. Meghan scooped up baby Caitlyn—she was always glued to the babies—and swept past the photos, effusive about everything, then stood beside her dad. Of all of them, her cousin Stephen looked the least comfortable, hands in pockets, shifting from foot to foot. Maybe he felt awkward around college students—he'd gone to college for only a semester and a half. Elena knew that Stephen struggled with things, not exactly like the things she struggled with, but she'd always felt a connection to him all the same. He had a daughter now, a six-year-old, Faith, and around her Stephen was the happiest she'd ever seen him. “Cool stuff,” he told Elena, then ducked outside to smoke. When Elena's father died, Stephen was in high school, so he was a reliable source of information there. Once he told her,
He took you seriously,
even if you were saying something really fucking stupid
, and Elena remembered that picture with the half-lit expression and thought this sounded true.

At the show, her family took pictures—pictures of her pictures, like tourists in art museums. “Get in,” they told Elena, which meant that her head or shoulder was blocking some part of the work in every shot. But her family liked pictures with people in them, so Elena stood next to each of her photos, smiling over and over, sometimes grabbing Max or Tate or Hayley and making them get in, too.

Toward the end of the show, Elena noticed her mother looking at one of the dioramas.
(Dis)comfort.
This one was done in layers, five shoeboxes stacked on top of one another like the floors of a tall, unwieldy house. On some floors, people sat alone in rooms; on others, the same people were all grouped together. She was trying to get at this feeling of being separate and together, belonging and not belonging at the same time. Her mom had been stopped in front of it for minutes, holding her fingers to her lips.

“What do you think?” Elena said, coming up beside her, and to her surprise, her mom hugged her.

By the time she's finished her ginger ale, Elena doesn't feel quite so scared. For minutes at a time, she can actually forget she's in the air. This is good practice for next year—she'll have to fly to get over to Europe, even if she'll be mostly riding trains once she gets there. She loves the idea of trains, rolling through different countries, watching the scenery slide by the window, staying in hostels in random towns. Surely the experience will be filled with those
crux moments
—the world, altered slightly. She knows they aren't the kind of thing you can go looking for, but she can at least get in position.

“It's a pleasant seventy-six degrees in Philly, folks,” says the captain's voice. “We are preparing for our descent.” He sounds so confident already—thanking them for flying, projecting to a future where they've already landed safely in Philadelphia—that Elena starts to believe they'll make it down intact.

“Nice weather,” the woman says. “I hear it's going to be nice all week.”

“That's good,” she says. “My mom's having a party for me tomorrow. For my graduation.”