The Most Fun We Ever Had (59 page)

—

M
arilyn was in a shallow sleep beside his bed—dozing, really, because she was still aware of the nurses’ incremental visits and the green glow of the cardiac monitor—and there was a nervy ache in her neck whose presence she was nursing like a plant, leaning into it and setting the soreness ablaze, feeding it all of her negative thoughts.

A jump in the heart rate monitor pulled her from her fog, and she turned, without thinking, to her husband, right into the irritated nerve. She squeaked at the sudden spark of pain. But David was blinking. Animation, finally, on the face that she’d only vaguely recognized for the last two days. She rose and took his hand—which still, too, didn’t feel quite like the hand she’d been holding since she was twenty, but they were getting there; they would get there.

“Love,” she said, bending to kiss his forehead. Not until she watched a tear fall into his hair did she realize she was crying. “Oh, there he is. There you are.”

He wasn’t fully awake—drifting, still, on the beta-blockers—but as his eyes closed again, she felt him squeeze her hand, feebly, three times.

—

G
race felt incongruously victorious on the cab ride home from Luke’s apartment. She was pleasurably sore between her legs. She’d lost her virginity to someone who seemed more or less like a decent person. She was eligible now to partake in the time-honored discussions of penises and pregnancy scares (though Luke had used a condom, of course, circumventing any need to explain that she wasn’t on birth control like every other normal twenty-three-year-old girl).

She came home to an empty house. She dropped her bag, called out for Jonah, and then happened upon what looked like some weird cult idolatry on her kitchen table, three bottles of wine—fancy-looking wine, like Violet and Wendy drank, not Hodnapp’s Harvest—and three Post-it notes covered with an adolescent scrawl. She felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up even before she read the words:
sorry if i fucked anything up. was trying to help. i took some cash from your jar but ill pay u back. tx for dinner. ben seems nice—j.

No, no, no. She called out his name again, hoping it was some kind of joke.

ben seems nice.

“What the fuck,” she said aloud. Wasn’t the universe supposed to be gentler to her, given all that she had going on? She pulled on one of her dad’s old sweaters, the pilfered, fraying articles she and her sisters fought over endlessly, and she sank down into her spot beside the fridge. She still felt a little drunk. It was just after three, which meant that it was just after five in Chicago. She dialed anyway.

“Goose?” Wendy sounded surprisingly alert.

“Hi,” she said, and even on the one syllable her voice wavered. “Jonah was here. But I just got home and he’s gone. And I’m really worried about Dad. And I just had sex with this Irish guy. I feel like everything’s— Nothing’s how it’s supposed to— And I’m so far away.” And then, because she no longer had the wherewithal to restrain them, the tears came, the type of crying that felt like throwing up.

“Oh, shit, Gracie. What did you just say about Jonah?”

She inhaled phlegmily. “He—showed up.”

“In
Portland
?”

“I don’t own multiple properties, Wendy. Jesus. Yes, in Portland.”

“Oh my God, we’ve been—we’ve all been so worried. He drove to
Oregon
? He doesn’t even have a learner’s permit. He totaled Liza’s car, you know that, right?”

“No, I actually
didn’t
know that because nobody in this family tells me fucking anything. It’s not like
I
told him to do any of this. I’d never even met him until tonight.”

“Is he okay?”

“Well, he—he’s not here anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. I just got home and he left me some wine and an apology note.”

“Apologizing for what?”

“He said he borrowed some cash and he was sorry if he fucked anything up and he—”

“He what? This is fucking unbelievable. I can’t believe you didn’t call us, Gracie.”

“I can’t believe none of you called
me.
You’re all together there and I’m alone all the way across the country and I’ve been so scared and I— Nobody even responds to my messages.
The girls.
I’m a fucking girl, too, Wendy.”

“Gracie—”

“And all I want is to talk to Dad and I’m afraid to call Mom because what if someone tells me he’s dead? Jonah is as scared shitless about Dad as I am, and I just had sex with someone I barely know, and I think Jonah might have told the guy who broke up with me about it, and I just feel like—” She gasped wetly. “Everything’s falling apart.”

“Okay, Gracie. It’s okay.”

“It’s
not
okay.”

“It will be,” Wendy said, sounding enough like their mother that Grace was almost comforted. “Goose, ah—this—person who you— Christ. The person you had sex with.”

Her dad often joked, “Most people have a mother and a father. Gracie has
four
mothers and a father.” She’d always had four women looking out for her, prodding her in different directions, regarding her with affectionate amusement or disdain or a patronizing kind of knowingness. But nobody had ever taught her anything constructive about being a woman, really. They never talked to her about sex, aside from her mother once giving her the Catholic rundown about how when you
made love
it should be with someone you loved very much (though even Marilyn had seemed a little bit skeptical during this delivery) and Wendy once using the word
orgasmic
and clarifying, after Grace had prodded her, that it meant
really, really good.
She felt momentarily bad for presenting this side of herself to her sister. She knew that she was relied on to keep the peace. She was the liaison of the family, the Lollipop Guild, the plump, kindly little diplomat who pretended not to notice when people were fighting at Christmas. She was the Sorenson mascot for youth and innocence and life that had yet to be irreparably marred by the gore of adulthood—or at least she
had
been, until about two hours ago. Or perhaps until eight months ago, when she pretended to get accepted to law school and started living a lie.

“Are you— Who
is
this person? He broke up with you right after he—” She knew this was the point where her sister would normally have used the verb
fucked.

“No. Different guys,” she said.

“What the fuck is going on in the Pacific Northwest, Gracie?” Wendy asked, and she felt herself laugh, which was—she realized then—exactly why she had called her oldest sister. “You’re safe, right? You’re— It was—God. Consensual? It was—it wasn’t—?”

“It was consensual. I feel like— Wendy, I feel like such a dirtbag. I wasn’t—I wasn’t thinking clearly and I was upset and I’m starting to feel a little bit crazy, you know? When you’re alone for so long that you—like, you stop being able to objectively see what’s normal and what’s not? Do you know what I mean?”

“Quite well, yes,” Wendy said gently.

“I never fuck up like this,” she said, and in the time it took Wendy to reply, she realized that this could possibly be offensive to her sister,
I’m not like you, the fuckup.
“I mean— Sorry.”

Wendy snorted.

“I didn’t mean—”

“For fuck’s sake, Gracie. Come on. Start from the beginning,” Wendy said, letting her off the hook, and so she did.

“It was my first time,” she tacked on in almost a whisper.

“Oh, sweetie,” Wendy said, sounding uncharacteristically motherly. “Okay. Well it’s—it’s normal for you to be feeling weird, I think.” Grace heard a crashing noise. “Hang on. I’m getting a drink. I can’t do this sober, Gracie, I’m sorry.” More clinking, then the whoosh of a sliding door and the flick of a lighter. Wendy’s voice was full of smoke when she spoke again. “Describe him,” she said, “in detail. So I know what we’re dealing with here.”

When Grace had satisfied her curiosity, Wendy said, “So how was it?”

“How was…”

“The sex. I’m just going to have to get over the fact that you’re an adult. I have to accept that. And it’s important to talk about these things. So how was it?”

Grace swallowed. “Awkward? And…I don’t know. It sort of hurt.”

“Yeah, a lot of people say that.”

“It didn’t for you?”

“Oh my God, no. It was amazing.”

“Seriously?” Another perk of calling Wendy was that her sister had enough tact to skate over the enormity of her lies for the time being, to focus at the moment on the most entertaining anecdote because everything else was too dark.

“It’s actually— It’s so funny we’re talking about this, because I ran into— You must not remember Aaron Bhargava. Jesus, you’re so young. He was my first
boyfriend
-boyfriend. And he was fucking gorgeous. He still is, it turns out. I just ran into him in the parking lot of the hospital.”

“Seriously?”

“Isn’t that a trip? Totally random. But he was a tennis player, and he—”

“Hey, Wendy? Is it okay for us— I feel selfish talking about this other stuff when—”

“Goose. If Dad finds out we spent our time weeping over him, he’ll kill us. What would he be doing if he were awake right now?”

This incited a new surging of tears, but she bit down on her tongue. “Well, it’s five a.m. your time, so he’d probably be running around the woods in that disgusting Wesleyan shirt.”

“Let’s say it’s nighttime and you’re sad and Dad’s there. What would he tell you?”

“To— I don’t know. Hang in there, I guess.”

“Exactly. And he’d make a dorky joke and give you one of those awkward hugs that’s, like, the best hug in the world, right?”

She nodded, sniffling, aware that Wendy couldn’t see her.

“Hey. Do you want to hear about my virginity being ceremoniously taken by a hot fifteen-year-old tennis player or not?”

“I do,” she whispered. She would tell Wendy everything—she was too tired to keep lying, and plus she’d already confessed to Jonah, so there was no use in further trying to keep it under wraps—but not until her sister told her this ersatz bedtime story. She curled up against the side of the fridge, hugging the cuffs of her dad’s sleeves in her hands, resting the phone against her ear. Wendy had artfully, seamlessly steered the conversation to herself, which was another thing Grace had known she would do. Sometimes it was enough just to listen to voices that weren’t your own.

2005

When Wendy got pregnant, there was shopping to do, all sorts of different ways to highlight her new assets, her adorable belly and her newly formidable rack. The joy she felt at loving her body—its roundness, its resilience, its fecundity—was wild, the wonder of fostering growth rather than starving herself into submission. She played both Brahms and Bowie to her belly at night, found inventive ways for her and Miles to continue making love, and joined a new moms walking group that lazily wandered a short stretch of 57th Street every Thursday before settling in for full-fat decaf macchiatos and discussions of sleep training.

Violet, perhaps understandably, was keeping her distance. She’d rallied, after the baby, after a while—springing from her sorrow with more vigor than Wendy figured was healthy—and started at the U of C, started dating a piece of driftwood named Matt, and she was back to her same old self, high-strung and high-functioning, none of the soft vulnerability she’d shown while living with them in Hyde Park, almost as though the whole year had never happened. But Wendy was very nearly too happy to miss her sister, too taken by all that was to come.

And then it happened, when she was exactly thirty weeks along, the baby as big as a butternut squash, and she awoke not to the feverish calisthenics of her daughter (by then it had been confirmed:
Ivy Eisenberg
) but to a troubling stagnancy, no movement at all, and she prodded anxiously at her belly and woke Miles and called her doctor, bordering on hysteria, saying, “I don’t know how I know but I know something’s wrong,” and Miles took her in a cab to Prentice and the doctor confirmed that they couldn’t find a heartbeat. What followed would forever remain a blur to her, because she forced herself to forget, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t remember, couldn’t dredge it up in dark moments when she wanted to revel in the pain of it, in homage to her daughter.

They induced her, and she was hooked up to all manner of monitors except one to track the baby’s heartbeat, which was when the shock started to wear off and the agony began to hit her, the realization that Ivy didn’t have a pulse, because her heart didn’t work anymore, because she was dead, dead inside of Wendy, and she threw up bile all over the hospital blanket, and this coincided with the medicine kicking in and the onslaught of the contractions, which were strident from the get-go, the pain requiring so much of her attention and her energy that she couldn’t even cry during them.

Miles urged her to call her parents, but she insisted that he call Violet first. Dimly, through the pain, she heard snippets of him leaving her a message:
Would be good if you could come…Not sure what…Room 249; there’s a sign on the door that…

The contraction ended and she sat up straighter. “What sign on the door?” she asked.

Miles came to sit beside her, his eye contact steady and even. He took her hand. “It’s—so people know, before they come in, that this isn’t—that there are—special circumstances. That’s the wrong word; I meant— Jesus Christ, I meant— I’m sorry.” And he began to weep, the first time she’d ever seen him cry, the man with whom she’d forged this path, who’d lost their daughter too, who would do anything for her but could currently do nothing. “I hate this,” he said. “Wendy, I…God, I hate this so much; I’m so sorry.”

Hours later—the doctor and nurses had repeatedly encouraged painkillers but Wendy adamantly declined, needing to feel present, to marinate in the pain—Miles suggested again that they call David and Marilyn, and she finally agreed, but told him to tell them not to come until after the delivery, because she didn’t want them there for what was happening now; Violet was the only person on the earth besides her and Miles who was meant to be present for this terrible occasion, but she hadn’t answered the phone yet, though Miles continued to leave messages.