The Blessings (8 page)

Elena is peering closely at the pile of wet trash, poking at it with one hand. Kate has the urge to stop her—is that even sanitary?—but it's not her place.

“You know what else I never did?” Lauren says. “Pumped gas.”

“Well.” Kate chuckles. “That's easy enough.”

“I never put air in tires, either. Or changed the batteries in the smoke alarm—it started beeping the other night and I couldn't find it. It beeped for over two hours. I guess this is why you don't let yourself become too dependent on your husband. Because he might die.”

Kate stops with the pole and stares at Lauren. Lauren isn't crying; she doesn't even look close to crying. Her expression is flat. Maybe sadness has become so much her baseline that sad things don't even register as sad anymore.

“Oh, Lauren,” Kate says.

Lauren looks out over the pool, the trees. Her bathrobe is hanging open, Max draped across her thighs. Her diamond necklace, the one John gave her, glints in the core of her throat. “I'm not up to this.”

“Of course you are.”

“I'm not…made for this.”

“Well, Jesus Christ, who is?”

Lauren shakes her head. “I'm just not a strong person.”

“Oh, Lauren. Sure you are.”

“No. Really. Some people are and some people aren't. Some people are just more capable. Like you.”

If only she knew. That Kate had spent the last twenty-four hours making pathetic attempts to seduce her own husband, being shuttled down her gynecologist's back stairs. Neither of those things would ever happen to Lauren, not in a million years.

Elena flings one arm up, triumphant, waving wet silver foil from a candy bar, shouting, “Look what I got!”

“Great, honey,” Lauren says as Max lifts his head. He clambers down to the ground and scampers toward Elena, diaper sagging almost to his knees. Suddenly everything—Lauren's gaping robe, Max's legs across her lap, Elena picking happily through the trash—makes Kate's eyes fill with tears. She pats the top of her head, looking for sunglasses that aren't there.

“Kate?” Lauren says. She is squinting. “Are you all right?”

“Sorry,” Kate says, swiping a finger beneath each eye. “It's nothing.”

Elena looks up then, too, alert to some shift in the air, watching Kate with those big, long-lashed eyes. “Are you crying, Aunt Kate?”

“A little,” Kate says. “But I'm fine, honey.”

“Are you sad?”

Sad
—a word this little girl must have heard a lot of lately. Three years old. What could she possibly understand it to mean?

“I'm a little bit sad,” Kate tells her, forcing a smile, feels it tremble dangerously on her face. “But don't worry.” She looks back at Lauren. “It's nothing, Lauren. Honestly. Just hormones—” She catches herself a second too late. The excuse has become such a reflex that she forgot who she was talking to. Kate had no intention of foisting her problems on poor Lauren. “Sorry,” she says with a short laugh. “Strike that from the record.” But her sister-in-law does not look fazed. In fact, she looks slightly energized, as if the intimation of someone else's trouble has awakened something in her, some new tick of life.

“Are you and Patrick trying?”

Trying
—the term has always made Kate cringe. But Lauren is just the type who would say it. The ones who say it are the ones who get pregnant, Kate thinks.

“Well, you know. Trying is the operative word,” Kate allows. She touches the corner of each eye. “It hasn't been going so well.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Don't be,” Kate says, wanting to add:
You can't feel sorry for me. Your life is so much worse!

“What does your OB say?”

Kate shrugs. “She doesn't know. No one knows. There's nothing really wrong—nothing
technically
wrong, I mean.” She is talking quickly now, and Lauren looks as though she's really listening to her, as though she actually
understands
her, and Kate has to suppress the urge to tell her everything—the rote sex, the embarrassing seduction attempt, the sadness theory. But she can't tell Lauren the sadness theory, not when Lauren's life is the sadness.

“Anyway,” Kate says, with another awkward laugh. “That's the deal. But we're not telling people, really. The family, I mean. Because, you know, once it's out there…”

“Oh, I know.” Lauren smiles then, a genuine smile. “Believe me. I won't say a word.”

It occurs to Kate that maybe she doesn't really know Lauren—has her sister-in-law always been so blunt? She's always struck Kate as so upright and proper, but maybe grief has altered her, reshaped her. Maybe, in the same way Kate's college friends have become more soft and circumspect, the profoundness of Lauren's loss has made her more candid, brought other, truer parts of her to light.

“Thanks,” Kate says. She surveys the pool. The water looks cleaner, even bluer somehow. The breeze makes slight ripples in the surface. The kids are still playing in the trash pile, Elena making piles of the piles, instructing Max on where things go.
Bugs. Leaves. Paper.

“Listen,” Kate says then, propping the pole at her side. “I want to help you, Lauren.”

“You already have.”

“No, no, not just today,” Kate says. “Not the pool. I mean, in general.”

Lauren shakes her head quickly. “That's okay.”

“Truly, I want to—
we
want to. Patrick and I could take the kids off your hands once a week,” Kate says, warming to the idea. “How about we pick a day and make it a regular thing? How about Sundays?”

Thinking: This might be good for Patrick, for both of them. Get them out of their cramped apartment, draw Patrick out of himself. Isn't that what kids can do?

“Really,” Lauren says. “You don't have to.”

“No, I insist! You could have time to yourself once a week. Clean the house or—no, something better. Something decadent. Treat yourself. Have a spa day! Get a pedicure.”

Lauren looks at her feet, her bare toenails. “I'm a mess, I know.”

“No, no, that's not what I meant. I just think you deserve a break,” Kate says. “Let me help you. Please.”

But Lauren shakes her head again, more firmly. “No,” she says, and she pulls her robe closed with one hand. “But thank you.”

“Oh.” Kate fixes her eyes on the pool. “Okay,” she says, but feels chastened, rejected—the feeling sprawls through her body, blooming in her gut. She wishes she had never asked. Wishes she had her sunglasses to hide her face. She looks over at Elena, who is still wearing them, giggling as she sprinkles grass into Max's hair.

“I just like to keep them here,” Lauren explains. “With me.”

“No, no, it's fine. Totally fine. I understand.”

Lauren looks down at her bare wrist, as if for a watch that isn't there. “I better go get dressed. They'll be here.”

“Right,” Kate says. As she sets the pole down on the edge of the pool, she notices the left knee of her capris is smudged with dirt.

Elena giggles again, louder, drizzling grass on Max, glancing up to see if anyone will stop her. Then Max lunges for the trash pile and flings a fistful in the air. “Maxy, no!” Elena shrieks, and slaps him across the face.

“Elena!” Lauren jumps to her feet. Elena ignores her, pushing Max to the ground with both hands. Kate is shocked—she's never seen Elena act this way. “Elena! Stop that!” Lauren shouts as Max begins to cry. Lauren starts rushing toward Elena, who looks at her and lets out a loud shriek, then dashes toward the pool.

“Elena, no!” Lauren screams, her tone shifting instantly from anger to panic. Elena is racing toward the five-foot end, her jellied shoes clapping on the wet cement. “Stop! No, Elena! Not near the pool!” But Elena doesn't hesitate for a second, running straight for the water and jumping off the side. Kate's heart stops beating. Elena's brown face bobs to the surface and then drifts under. Lauren leaps in after her, sending up a great splash, and for a moment there is an unearthly silence—Max watching too, fingers in his mouth, standing a safe distance from the edge—as Lauren's purple robe billows beneath the churning water, like a sprawling sea creature, the silence long and terrible, until finally Lauren surfaces with Elena in her arms.

It is not until they touch the side that Elena starts to cry. Kate has never heard a child cry like this before. The sound is more like wailing, like keening—the sound of anguish itself. Kate feels paralyzed as Lauren rises slowly from the water, climbing up the metal ladder with Elena held tightly in both arms. Her purple robe has fallen open to reveal her naked body, her legs sturdy and brown. Without pausing, she walks toward the house, lips pressed to Elena's temple. The heavy robe is streaming water, the wet sash dragging at her sides, but her stride is even and calm. Elena is still wailing, and Max is crying now too, the backyard a whirlpool of grief. Kate watches as Elena buries her chin in Lauren's shoulder, water dripping from her pink party dress, sandaled feet limp at her sides. When her eyes meet Kate's, they are wide and terrified and slide right over her, not even seeing her. Lauren keeps her lips pressed firmly to Elena's hair. She doesn't turn as she opens the back door, saying over her shoulder, “You'll watch him, Kate?”

Kate nods, unable to speak. Lauren's ferocity startles her, reduces her. She watches as they disappear inside. When the back door shuts, the yard goes abruptly quiet, Elena's cries swallowed by the huge, airtight house. Even Max's whimpering tapers off quickly, now that his mother isn't there. Kate looks at the baby and the baby looks at her, then wanders back to the grass. A bird chirps sweetly in the trees. The surface of the pool is calm again, the tumult already forgotten. Kate's white sunglasses quiver on the bottom. When she looks again at Max, he has returned to playing in the trash pile, tearing leaves into pieces. She can do nothing but stand there, watching him, until a thick wind stirs, scattering the pile and blowing the trash back into the pool.

D
riving to Mister Wok at quarter to midnight on a rainy Tuesday, Dave curses under his breath. Mister Wok is a shabby suburban Chinese restaurant that probably does no business after nine on weekdays and closes in fifteen minutes and he's the guy who just called for a single carton of moo shu pork. On the phone, Dave couldn't understand a word the guy was saying, but he sounded justifiably annoyed. “Appreciate it,” Dave said, and left the house immediately so as not to keep the guy waiting. Now he's hitting every red light. “Goddamn it,” he says. This is new, the cursing. At fifty, Dave has finally discovered its appeal.

He parks in the deserted lot by the strip mall and runs for the Chinese place. The door is locked. He signals the guy vacuuming, who ambles through the empty restaurant to let him in. “Thanks, buddy,” Dave says, rain dripping down his glasses. The guy returns to his vacuum. After-hours rock music is blasting through the speakers. The cashier, a teenage girl with a shy smile, appears from the back to hand him the stapled brown paper bag. Dave wants to tell her it's not what it looks like, that he's not some lonely middle-aged guy ordering takeout to eat alone in front of the TV. He doesn't even
like
Chinese food. “Eleven fifty,” she says, and he hands her a twenty, saying, “Keep the change.” An absurd tip—Ann would kill him.

As he hurries home, wipers flapping, the car filling with the smell of greasy pork, Dave tries to remember if he's ever even seen Meghan eat Chinese. His daughter has always had weird eating habits, but lately she's been choosy about when and if she eats at all. She refuses to eat in public but doesn't like to eat at home, either, at least at any normal times, like meals. She'll sit at the table with him and Ann and complain about her stomach hurting, then excuse herself and disappear to her room. Later, though, she might eat a frozen pizza. Or the next morning, he'll find an empty ice-cream tub in the trash. It isn't healthy, all that junk food, but it's better than nothing, Dave thinks. This is his rationale when Meghan announces some urgent craving at eleven thirty on a Tuesday, when he's settled in front of the TV in the den with a bowl of chips and a beer. “Daddy?” she calls. “I'm starving. Can you go get me a…” Is she testing him? Wanting to see if he'll go? If there's anything he wouldn't do for her? His little girl, the baby of the family. The one who loves him unreservedly. He can't say no to Meghan, especially if it means seeing her eat something.
I'm starving
, she tells him. He goes.

Dave tears through the sleeping streets, wanting to get the food home before Meghan has a change of heart. At the stop signs, he jams on the brakes. The car jerks forward. A little thing, but it feels good to do it. Most of the neighbors' houses are dark now, their porch lights on, kids tucked safely in their beds.
TOWN WATCH
, say the signs pinned to the front lawns. The signs are shaped like eyeballs, red with black pupils, so the entire neighborhood looks like a crowd of staring eyes. Dave volunteered to do a shift, eight to ten every third Saturday. They became a Town Watch community last year, an attempt to feel safer. There had been a few incidents—a burglary, some smashed car windows. You wouldn't think it of this neighborhood, just by looking. The houses are all kept up, from modest middle-income ones like Dave's to the giant ones in the cul-de-sac on Trafalgar. But they're only a mile from the city and sometimes, lately, the danger spills over.

Dave pulls into the driveway, hurries through the rain and in the front door. His daughter is exactly where he left her, on the couch in a nest of fuzzy blankets, empty Diet Coke cans crowding the end table beside her. His wife sits in the rocking chair, a stack of fourth graders' spelling tests in her lap. With Abby living in New York and Alex at college, this is the nightly tableau: Meghan on the couch, Ann in the chair.

“One moo shu pork, coming up!” Dave says brightly, whipping the takeout box from the paper bag, dangling by its metal handle.

“I'm not really hungry anymore,” Meghan says without glancing up from the TV.

His heart sinks. She's watching a movie she's seen a million times, a teenage comedy about an unpopular girl who becomes cool.

“Not hungry?”

She shakes her head, just barely.

“Why not?”

She shrugs. “I'm just not.”

“Well, did you eat something else?” he says, a tick of annoyance in his voice. Ann detects it immediately and shoots him a look—quiet but firm, warning him to shut down this line of questioning. But how does this make any sense? How the hell do you go from hungry to not hungry if you don't eat anything? Neither of them is looking at him now, their faces pointed at the TV.

“Dad, that really smells,” Meghan says. She pulls one of her blankets up over her mouth. “Oh, my God. I'm going to be sick.”

Dave walks into the kitchen, holding the carton by the handle like a tiny purse. He throws it into the fridge and slams the door, then retreats to the den.

To Dave, it's simple: You're hungry, you eat. But apparently this is not the case with his daughter, for reasons that elude him. They've taken her to the pediatrician, who referred her to a gastroenterologist, who said nothing was wrong with her. But Meghan keeps complaining. Her stomach hurts. She's not hungry. As a little girl, she was a big eater—she would request Dave's pancakes on Sunday mornings, invite her friends over for pizza night on Fridays (now, on the rare occasion she's seen eating pizza, she blots it over and over until there's a pile of oily orange napkins beside her plate). She used to have a little baby fat but in the past year has gotten noticeably thinner. A growth spurt, Dave reasons. Fifteen. Don't most girls thin out at fifteen? And aren't most fifteen-year-olds temperamental? Lately Meghan will have bursts of energy—chattering away on the phone, screaming cheers from the sidelines at her field hockey games, blasting music in her room—but then, just as suddenly, become quiet, irritable, giving flat one- and two-word answers, curled up on the couch. With just the three of them at home now, her moods dictate the temper of their house like storm systems sweeping in and out. Or maybe they're just more obvious without Abby and Alex there. Because Meghan's always been moody, Dave reminds himself, sensitive, dissolving into tears when she wasn't invited to a classmate's party, or watched a movie that was sad or scary, or at the funeral for Ann's brother, who died of cancer three years ago. Only three years—could that be affecting her still? Every time Dave thinks his way through the problem, it feels like plodding through a thicket of evidence, considering and discounting, like tidying columns of checks and balances at work.

He can't talk to his wife about it. Lately, he and Ann seem to be drifting toward opposite poles—as Dave gets increasingly agitated, Ann grows more measured and composed. It wasn't so long ago they actually
did
things together on occasion—a movie, dinner at the pub around the corner—but after more than twenty years, his marriage has been reduced to this: a bond of worry about their children. They come together, trade observations, retreat to their respective corners. It's tax season, a time Dave has traditionally dreaded, but this year he welcomes the excuse to work late.
Did she eat?
he asks when he gets home.
Some
, Ann reports.
A little.
They don't argue; they've never argued. They barely touch, unless by accident. His wife used to be curvy, but in recent years her body seems to have withdrawn along with the rest of her, her shape softening, losing its definition. She stopped dyeing her hair. At night, she watches TV in the living room with Meghan, and Dave watches
Letterman
in the den, with chips and a few beers. Sometimes he just sleeps in the chair.

This weekend, all three of Dave's kids will be home for almost twenty-four hours. It doesn't happen often, not outside of holidays and the Jersey shore trip every August, which both involve Ann's entire family. But this Saturday, all five of them will be under one roof, and Dave feels its approach as excitedly as a vacation. Alex they had known was coming; it was his spring break from Penn. Abby was the surprise, calling to say she'd broken up with her boyfriend, Leo, and needed a “break from real life.” Dave was overjoyed—both that he'd get to see her and that Leo was out of the picture. He'd met Leo only once and told Abby he seemed like an interesting guy (
interesting
—he'd chosen the word carefully; not positive, not untrue), but Dave had instantly disliked him: a skinny twenty-three-year-old with a mangy ponytail and the brooding intensity of a kid who's never actually experienced a hard thing in his life.

He seemed like a punk, honey
, Dave told her on the phone, which at least made her laugh.
A punk? Really, Dad?

Abby was arriving Friday night and heading back late on Saturday. Dave tried to convince her to stay at least until Sunday morning, but Abby started protesting about this thing she really had to get back for, so he dropped it. They'd take what they could get. By Friday evening, Ann has stocked the kitchen with all of Abby's favorites—cinnamon-raisin bagels and root beer and a spinach lasagna, which sits cooling on the stove as they wait for the sound of her car, glancing at the oven clock, telling Meghan to stay off the phone to keep the line free in case Abby calls from the road.

“This is why we need call waiting!” Meghan cries. It's her most recent crusade: Meghan desperately needs call waiting, Ann doesn't want the unnecessary expense. For his part, Dave just has no desire for any more phone calls. They already gave in on the cordless, so Meghan could talk privately in her room, but apparently now all her friends have call waiting—and in the end, what's more important? The promise of an uptick in Meghan's mood? A glimpse of her old, cheerful self? For this alone, he knows they'll eventually cave.

At nine fifteen, Dave hears the Volkswagen zip into the driveway—a smart buy four years ago, one hundred thousand miles on the odometer then and still going—and Abby comes through the back door, dumps her laundry-bloated duffel on the floor. She kisses them both on the cheeks and collapses on the couch. “What a drive,” she says, holding out her hands before her, palms up. “I'm vibrating.”

“Bad traffic, huh?” Dave asks.

Ann is still standing, hands clasped in front of her chest. Her smile is tight and small, but Dave knows she's overjoyed that Abby's home. Abby, who surprised and saddened them by wanting to go to college in New England, who used to call them tearfully when she first got there but now seems to have acclimated to living somewhere else. Four years in Maine, a move to Brooklyn. She looks like someone who lives in Brooklyn, Dave thinks. More angular and confident. Her eyes are lined with black, jeans ripped at one knee. She rakes one hand through her hair, long and messy and tangled in her long silver earrings. In her left ear alone, he counts three. “Where is everyone?”

“Alex is coming home tomorrow,” Ann says.

“Tomorrow morning,” adds Dave.

“And Meghan's watching a movie—”

“Meg!” Dave yells. “Where are you? Your sister's here!”

Meghan slouches into the kitchen, cocooned in a blanket, with her sweatshirt hood pulled up. “Hey,” she says flatly.

“Hey yourself,” Abby says, and laughs.

“What?”

“What's wrong with you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Could you sound any less excited to see me?”

“I'm excited,” she says. “I've just been waiting for the phone.” She gives Abby a quick hug, then picks up the cordless and leaves the room.

Abby looks at them, waiting for an explanation, but Ann says, “Are you hungry?”

“Hungry?” Abby scratches her cheek. “Maybe.”

“I made a spinach lasagna…”

Abby opens the fridge and pulls out the Chinese takeout carton. “What's this?”

“Moo shu pork,” Dave says.

“Moo shu?” she says, prying open the box flaps. “Since when does anyone in this house eat moo shu? Are we getting more culinarily adventurous?”

“It's Meghan's,” Dave says.

She peers inside. “It's full.”

“She asked for it. But then she wasn't hungry.”

Abby closes the box and stares into the fridge.

“What can I get you?” Ann presses. “A sandwich? Lasagna?”

“Whatever,” Abby says, shoving the box back in. “Lasagna's good.”

Saturday morning, Dave proposes they all drive to Penn to pick up Alex. They can walk around the campus, then go to breakfast at the American, a classic diner Dave's own father used to take him to when he was a kid.

“I really don't feel good,” Meghan says as they're putting on their coats.

Dave turns to her, keys clutched in his fist. She's standing in the kitchen doorway, wearing an enormous
PENN
sweatshirt and baggy black running pants with white stripes down the sides. “What's wrong?” he says.

“I think I have a fever.”

“Well, did you take your temperature?”

“I don't have to. I can just tell.”

“Here, let me feel,” Ann says, and moves a hand toward Meghan's forehead, but she ducks out of her reach. Ann freezes.

“I have a fever,” Meghan mumbles, looking at the floor.

“Well, maybe you just need some Tylenol,” Dave says, appealing to Ann for backup. “Shouldn't she take some Tylenol? Advil? Why doesn't she take something?”

“I don't need Tylenol,” Meghan says.

Ann says nothing. Abby stands up abruptly and walks onto the back deck, clomping heavily in her tall red boots.

“Why don't you go up and take a nap, Meg?” Ann says.

“I can't take naps,” she says. “And anyway, I'm not tired.”