The Ramblers (18 page)

“Onward.”

B
ack home now. Tate is buzzed but not drunk. In fact, he's far clearer than he's been in ages. He opens his laptop and reads Olivia's e-mail again and writes his response.

To: Farnsworth, Olivia

From: Pennington, Tate

Time: 9:30 p.m.

Subject: I do not despise you

Liv,

I do not despise you. I could not despise you if I tried, and let me tell you, I've tried. I'm happy to be back here. I think New York City might be my place after all. When we were here, I don't think we knew how to love it. I think it was too overwhelming for us. It still is, but I find myself welcoming that. The material
is endless and as a rookie photographer, I'm a kid in a candy shop.

It's hard to believe that it's Thanksgiving again. I look back to this time last year and realize things were falling apart. I didn't see it, but I wasn't looking to see it either. Why would I? I think about how quiet you were in St. Louis, how you offered little in conversation with my parents, how you barely touched your food. You were beginning to slip from me even then.

I've been barely holding my head above water, Liv. I finally feel like things are looking up, but none of this is easy. It's the hardest thing I've ever done, forging a life without you. I'm just now beginning to remember what it is to have fun, to laugh, to be me. I know you know this, but you are fine. You do not need me to be fine. You have proven that to me.

I don't think I can see you when you come to New York. I don't think that would be good for me, or for us. I'm not sure what the point would be. I trust that you're sorry. I don't need to see you to believe you. I don't need to see you to forgive you. I'm not sure, but I think I've already forgiven you. Maybe I'm too quick to forgive? Maybe that's just another weakness of mine.

I need to protect myself. I need to move on. I need to make this place home.

I got the papers. I can't help but think this is all related, your sudden need to make things right. You said that you didn't care about the money. Maybe it was foolish of me to believe you? Maybe we all care about money more than we think?

Happy Thanksgiving, Liv.

T

He types the words fast, faster than he's ever written something. The sentences pour from him and appear, lines of black on a white screen. He reads it all over and he hovers the mouse over Send, but then closes his computer and heads to the kitchen to fetch a beer.

He stands there, alone in his top-of-the-line kitchen that needs cleaning, and drinks his beer. His mind wanders and he thinks of her, but it's a different her. Snippets of the day flash through his head. Smith, all concentration, flipping through a rack of dress shirts in the little boutique. Smith laughing. Smith watching that kid at the restaurant. He's never bought the bullshit about right place, right time, the crap about love at (second) first sight. He's too smart for that. And yet, what is this? He finally decides to put an end to his hibernation and go to the game and there she is, an enigmatic soul hiding behind her phone. And they talk. And he doesn't want their talking to end. And all he can think of is what it will be like to taste her perfect lips and be inside her. And now he is going to Thanksgiving with her family and escorting her to her sister's wedding. These things should feel onerous and overwhelming, but the thing is they don't. They don't at all. He wants to meet her family. He wants to get dressed up and dance.

But what about Olivia? What if she's really coming around? Shouldn't he slow the fuck down and really try to make sense of this all? If he really loved her, wouldn't he give her another shot? What does it mean that he's thinking so much of another girl? And the money? Does he even give a shit about the money? And maybe it's only fair that he owes her just what the lawyer says he owes her. She worked herself into the ground while he was building the app. She did help with the contracts and all the legal stuff.

Without much thought, he starts running Google searches, looking for Smith's ex. It's incredible what a few pieces of information can do. He types in “Asad, Pakistan, neurosurgeon, Mass General” and he is bombarded with words and images. He studies the pictures first. The guy seems tall. His shoulders are broad and his eyes are dark and he's seriously handsome. He wears a suit in each picture. Tate finds himself despising him for no good reason at all.

He clicks over to Instagram and Smith's feed. So many clean, careful images of candles and pillows and impeccable stacks of clothing. Interspersed are pictures she's taken of herself, and here, he focuses. That milky skin. Those blueberry eyes. That long dark hair he wants to yank.

He sees she posted a photo just moments ago. He can tell from the background that she's home, sitting in that big window in her living room. She's smiling and it's so close up that he can see her bare collarbone. She writes one word:
Onward.

He texts her.

Tate: Onward.

Smith: You stalking me?

Tate: Something like that. What are you doing?

Smith: Brushing my teeth. Going to bed.

Tate: Bed?

Smith: Bed.

Tate: Sounds like a plan.

Smith: I like a good plan.

Tate: You do, don't you?

Smith: Good night, Tate.

Tate: Good night, Smith.

Smith: Goodnight Moon

He puts his phone down. Opens his laptop again. Saves his e-mail to Olivia as a draft.

In his bedroom, he pulls his shirt over his head and steps out of his jeans. He folds both items and places them on top of his suitcase. Tomorrow he will unpack this suitcase and put things away. He will wash his underwear and his sheets. He will frame his favorite photographs and hang them on the wall.

Onward, indeed.

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Yet why not say what happened?

— Robert Lowell, “Epilogue”

by Clio Eloise Marsh

F
ALL 1996

Essay for Application to Yale College

I
have a 15–30 percent chance of being diagnosed with bipolar disorder in my lifetime because my mother has the disease. She was diagnosed in 1979, shortly after I was born.

For many years, I didn't know she was ill. I just thought she was very happy sometimes and very sad at others. I thought that it was just the way she was and I learned to read her moods the way farmers learn how to predict storms. Sometimes, she races around a mile a minute. This is mania. Sometimes, she spends weeks or months in bed. This is depression. She has words for it though, words I like better than the medical terms:
flying
and
falling
.

I learned the truth about her illness when I was thirteen. She went on a trip to England without telling us. Her plan, we learned later, was to visit Charles Darwin's grave in Westminster Abbey. She needed to spend some time in the hospital when she came back and this is when I found out she was sick. I started to research everything I could about bipolar disorder. I learned that it usually presents around age twenty-five. I learned that more women than men suffer from it. I learned that children with at least one bipolar parent are far more likely to have it too.

Obviously, this scares me, but I'm trying to stay positive. I know that when carefully monitored and treated properly with medication, bipolar patients can succeed and flourish. I know that there is a good chance that I will be lucky and be okay. I know that I love my mother, and even though my childhood has not been easy, I would like to stay close to home for college. Yale is minutes away and it is my biggest dream to be able to study at such an excellent school and also remain close to my parents.

I think being my mother's child has made me thoughtful and resilient. I don't take life or good health for granted. I would like very much to study science, to learn more about genetics and evolution, because the topics are of great personal interest to me for reasons that are probably pretty clear.

I also love birds. My mother has encouraged this interest and we love to watch the birds in our backyard together. Two springs ago, we made a hummingbird feeder out of an empty Gatorade bottle, a salad dressing cap, tinfoil and artificial flowers. We mixed some sugar nectar and waited. One day, a little ruby-throat came and it was the most magical creature I've ever seen. I've learned a lot about hummingbirds now, including that they are the only birds that can fly backward.

Whatever the future holds, I look forward to leading a positive and productive life, to moving forward, hopefully beginning at Yale.

“It's over.”

T
he phone call came at 10:47 p.m. last December 22.

Clio had just been named associate curator at the museum and Smith was on a mission to get over Asad, so they went downtown to Karaoke One 7 to celebrate/cope/let loose a bit.

When Clio's phone buzzed, a sake-bombed Smith was onstage delivering an embarrassingly shy rendition of Coldplay's “Fix You.” When Clio saw that it was Jack calling, her stomach seized and her throat tightened. It was late. Jack was a dad to a toddler and an infant now, and their late-night calls, once a constant, were a thing of the past. Clio knew something must be very wrong.

And it was.

She dashed out to the street to answer and
stood in the blustery cold on Sixth Avenue while he told her the news she'd been consciously or unconsciously anticipating and fearing for years now.

Those moments were stark and surreal, grainy in retrospect, haunting like an antique film. She waited for Smith to finish her song and told her what happened and Smith, ever graceful and composed, turned ashen at the news and looked as if she might be sick. Clio said she would take a taxi straight to Grand Central, catch a train home to New Haven, and Smith insisted on coming with her. But Clio didn't let her; she pushed her away. She needed to do this alone.

Clio caught a cab and she sat there in the darkened backseat, her body limp, melting into the duct-taped fake leather, and it struck her as simply unfathomable that she was in a taxicab, traveling through the city she'd come to love, and her life had, in a matter of moments, just fallen apart. She was heartbroken, but she was also relieved. Two words floated in her head. Words that made her feel terribly guilty.

It's over.

When she arrived at Grand Central a mere eleven minutes later—why does that detail stick when more important ones have faded?—she teetered at the top of the big stairs, fixed her gaze on the small round clock in the center of the terminal and felt a deep vertigo, like she might tumble all the way down. Part of her wished this would happen, that she'd knock herself out. But it didn't happen. She held on. She held on to the railing and descended one shaky step at a time. She found the right track for her 11:22 p.m. train. Somehow she found it. She slipped onto the train just as the doors were closing.

When the conductor came around and asked for her ticket to New Haven her voice cracked and only then did she come close to crying. Not when she got the phone call from Jack. Not when Smith hugged her and then began to sob, wetting Clio's shoulders with tears. Not even when she saw her mother's pale and lifeless body in that quiet hospital room. Not when she gathered with her father and Jack's family in her living room to eat egg salad and say a silent good-bye. It was as if
the tears were stuck or perhaps all cried out. They hadn't been a picnic, her thirty-three years.

But that conductor of that late-night train? His face stays inked in her mind, his features crisp, the butterscotch hue of his eyes etched in her memory. He was a wonderfully nice man and asked Clio if she was okay. Maybe he could see she was rattled and racing and Clio nodded yes, that she was fine, even though part of her wanted to tell him everything. Even in that tattered and tortured moment, she resisted the urge to do this. Even then, she knew you don't do this, this is not something that's okay to do, to tell unsuspecting people deeply dark confessions, that your mother has just hanged herself on your childhood swing set.

The memories come flooding back as she stands in the great hall of Grand Central for the first time since that tragic night. She's early this time. At the entrance, she takes in the familiar sight, the awe-inspiring details of the cavernous space, the big American flag that went up right after 9/11, the tie-dye swirl of human beings in transit. She steps slowly down the stairs, studies people as they pass. She wanders through small coffee shops and newspaper stands, all of them fancy and seemingly new, but buys nothing. She's tempted to scoop up a
New Yorker
to escape and pass the time on the train, but this is exactly what she can't let herself do. She needs to be alert and aware and
think
about how all of this is going to go down, with her father preparing to vacate his home of more than thirty years.

Her mind snags on the question that's pressed her for months now: how do you tell the man you love that your mother committed suicide? She tells herself that her mother's death has nothing to do with her, but the shame she feels has been paralyzing. At the museum, she's told only Greta, the grad student she supervises, a girl with her own grisly stories, a girl with whom she's grown close, but everyone else thinks her mother was simply ill and passed.

She boards her train. She has her choice of seats, picks one in the middle of the car, facing the right way, the direction the train will travel. She looks around, wondering suddenly if this was the exact car
she was on. She has no way of knowing, but much comes back now. The quality of the artificial light that fateful night, fluorescent and eerie; the cloying smell of sweat and newspaper mixed with industrial grease; the rattling clunk of the train making its way; the snips of drunken banter floating from fellow passengers; minutes passing in a soft, cinematic blur, a stretch of time during which she was neither asleep nor awake, her mind mottled with dreamlike images of her mother from over the years, a haunting highlight reel.

She's right back to that night again. On December 23, two days before Christmas, the train pulled into the New Haven station on time at 1:17 a.m. Clio got off and floated almost unconsciously through the dim tunnel she'd walked so many times before and climbed the stairs to the main level and frantically looked for her father. She felt panic rising, but then she spotted Jack walking through the doors of the station. His eyes were an angry red, swollen no doubt from crying. He wrapped her in one of his perfect hugs.

I'm so sorry,
he said.
Your dad sent me to pick you up.
Later, she'd learn that her father had disappeared from the hospital and no one could find him. It was not lost on her that he picked the one time she needed him most in her life to check out.

She and Jack climbed into his old beat-up Chevy. Just sat there for a while.

Do you want to go to the hospital?
he asked.

Is that what I should do? Is she still there?

Yes,
he said.
I think so.

The time of death, Clio would learn, was called at 10:41 p.m. Cause of death: asphyxia. Just six minutes before Jack called with the news. This detail pierced her more than others and guilt spiraled within her. What if she had called Eloise that afternoon to talk about birds? Bird talk was their secret language and always livened up her mother. She knew all the Latin species names and loved uttering them. What if Clio had gone home earlier for Christmas instead of staying in the city to put in more work at the museum? What if she hadn't gone to
Costa Rica the month before to do fieldwork instead of going home for Thanksgiving? Why did her father call Jack before he called his own daughter?

The train moves now. Soon Clio hears the conductor coming on through. She holds her ticket in her hand, nervously tracing its edges, and waits for her turn. When she looks up, she longs to see the man from last year, but it isn't him. It's a new man. He's tall and thin and balding and he looks so tired.

He punches her ticket and disappears.

Her phone rings. A blocked number. She comes close to answering but doesn't. There isn't a voice mail.

Her phone rings again. She looks and sees that it's Henry. Her heart flutters as she answers.

“Hello?”

“Clio, love, I have some good news.”

She waits, feels her pulse quicken. “What?”

“I'm coming. I rearranged things. This is more important than a few PR meetings. I can only stay for the afternoon, but I want to get there. My train is due in at 1:05.”

She smiles into the phone but also notices how badly her hands are shaking. This is what she wanted, what she asked for, and yet part of her was relieved that he couldn't come. She has no idea how this will go. “I'll pick you up at the station then,” she says.

“Wonderful.”

“Henry?”

“Yes, Clio?”

“Thank you. I know this isn't easy,” she says.

“No, Clio, thank you for inviting me. My meeting's starting, so I must run, but I will see you very soon.”

She hangs up just as the train is pulling into the station. She gets off and makes her way to the concourse, where her father waits at the top of the steps. For a moment she doesn't recognize him. His hair is almost white and he seems hunched, much older. But it's him.

“Hi, Clio,” he says stiffly, throwing an awkward arm around her shoulder. He takes her bag to carry to the car. To
his
car (this is how Clio now thinks of things—
his
car,
his
house), which smells definitively of cigarettes. He's been smoking again. He quit many years ago; both of her parents did. She looks over at him but says nothing. If he smokes, he smokes. He's
alive
.

She planned to come back frequently, maybe even once a month. Her father deserved this. To lay eyes on his only child, to have someone with him at the house, to help do the wash, stock the fridge. But she couldn't bring herself to do it. The thought of being in that house filled her with foreboding, a pervasive dread, and she felt paralyzed. Time rolled by. She drummed up all kinds of excuses: she was busy writing grants and doing her own research and planning expeditions in the field and also teaching an undergrad course at Columbia and leading her Sunday tours. And then she was getting to know Henry.

Her father took the train to the city a couple of times instead. And they were fine days, quiet but fine, and Clio would give him tours of the museum and the neighborhood and they'd go to the park, to the Ramble, and even though it was hard to see him, it meant something that he was there, in the tangle of her life.

The engine makes a worrisome sound.

“Is there something wrong with the car?”

“Possibly. I'll have to get it checked after the move.”

The move.
The move.
Her father is moving out of their house. It was her idea. She brought it up last year and he was resistant at first, but then realized it would be good to downsize, to get some distance from the memories.

The enormity of this begins to hit her and she feels a catch in her throat. This is exactly what she's wanted for him to do and yet now it's happening and she's feeling shaken. She reminds herself of the practicality of this transition; it's too much for him to maintain the place. It wouldn't be good for him to stay there.

“How's the house?” Clio says.

“Pretty much packed up. Didn't touch your room. Left your mother's dresses in the closets, in case you want anything. Shouldn't take long. You can turn around tonight if you want. Spend Thanksgiving with Henry.”

“Henry's Northern Irish. He doesn't care about Thanksgiving,” she says, hesitating, tracing the chrome door handle on the passenger side. “He's coming.”

“Coming?” Her father turns toward her. His eyebrows arch in confusion.

“Here,” she says. “Today.”

“What do you mean today? When?”

“Around one. I'm going to take him around campus and then we'll head back to the house. When will you get off work?”

“Six,” he says.

Her father nods and drives, winding them through familiar streets toward their home. “I wish you would have given me some warning, Clio,” he says huffily.

“I just found out myself, Dad. He didn't think he could get away from the hotel in its first week, but he's coming. He can't stay long, but even if you just get to say hello, I figure that's better than not meeting him, right?”

“I guess.”

Her dad has never been a fan of surprises. This makes sense. All those years with Eloise, all that ferocious unpredictability. She flips on the radio. They listen to a weather report, learn that Thanksgiving travelers are scrambling to book earlier flights to avoid the big storm bearing down on the East Coast. A messy mix of snow, rain and wind threatens to complicate the busy travel day and ground the giant balloons at the Macy's parade. Forecasts call for sustained winds of twenty miles per hour and gusts of thirty-six miles per hour.

When the small house comes into view, Clio feels a shiver travel through her body from her ears to her toes. She tastes vomit in her mouth. Her hands tremble and her palms grow slick. After this
weekend, she's concerned that she might be at the edge of another panic attack. She must eat something. She forgot to eat earlier. She looks over at Jack's house next door. A small pink bike sits outside it. He has daughters now. A three-year-old named Maddy and an eighteen-month-old named Gabby. They live in Chicago but are back here visiting his parents for Thanksgiving, just as they were last year.

Her father stops the car. The drum of the engine fades into an evocative silence. Sunshine blasts in on them.

“Clio,” her father says, grabbing her hand, then taking her chin to turn her face toward him. “You were busy moving on. You're here now. I'm happy you're here.”

Clio nods. Tears come, but she won't let them fall. It's a familiar feeling, this welling up. All of those years of stuffing it down, of wanting to let go or lash out, but resisting because she knew her role: to be a buffer, to support them with her meekness and invisibility, to quietly navigate the turbulence. There was enough drama. She couldn't add to it.

She looks over at her father and feels an intense mixture of empathy and anger. He's been through hell, a hell only she knows, but he never once put Clio first. He never pulled her aside and asked her how
she
was doing. It was always about Eloise, her cycles, her depressions and episodes. It was a given that Clio would hold it together and she did, but the resentment built.