All Dressed Up (24 page)

Mom sent the
Odette costume out to be professionally cleaned. Emma, meanwhile,
did not seem to be enjoying her high degree of emotional attention.
She spent a lot of time lying on her bed in the dark, and stayed
locked away inside herself even when she and Sarah were in the same
room together. She acted as if she was trapped in someone else’s
body and as if this created a vertigo and nausea so extreme that
she just had to stay still and silent and acquiescent in the hope
that the dizziness would go away.

Sometimes she
had conversations with Mom and Dad, which Sarah was gently kept out
of. Mom and Dad could be heard murmuring to each other in their
bedroom, with Mom’s voice rising and Dad’s staying calm.

Finally,
flights were purchased for Mom and Emma to Florida for the day
before Christmas. There was going to be some fiction given out to a
few necessary contacts and friends involving Florida and tennis,
very vague, consulting on a new women’s tennis academy. They had
taken a two-bedroom motel suite with a kitchen, and would stay for
three and a half months until the baby was born.

During her
prenatal care, Emma would keep up with her studies privately and,
the following fall, she would go to a very well-regarded boarding
school in the north-east. She was too bright to drop out of school.
She needed the best chance to catch up.

The baby would
come back to London and everyone would think – and be told – that
it was Emma and Sarah’s little brother or sister, and that Mom had
carried another pregnancy to term at last. “We kept it quiet until
after the birth.”

Nobody would
ever know different. Sarah was never told the reasoning behind this
decision, only that nothing must ever be said. “For all our sakes,”
said Dad.

He and Sarah
had a quiet Christmas. Dad had been, probably, the most insistent
about the plan for the baby. He never argued anything out at
length, which made it all the more unsettling when he stuck to a
strong conviction.

Sarah was
still waiting for it to be her turn. If she could just ride out the
winter, ride out Dad’s attempts to take her to every museum and
concert in the whole of London, ride out Mom on the phone from
Florida telling her she didn’t have to give up ballet
completely.

But she did
have to, this she knew.

It made her
ill to think of dancing on the sidelines at Greater Metropolitan,
of watching the ones who still might make it, of being known as the
once-elite girl who had already lost her tiny chance and now took
classes with the hobby dancers. She insisted on starting back at
the international school and never darkened the doors of Greater
Metropolitan again. Dad picked up the Odette costume from the
cleaner and returned it to the school.

Tulle cleaned
up better than feathers.

In late
February, Billy was born. Emma was back at the motel suite within
twenty-four hours, although without the baby. Billy was small, less
than four pounds. His lungs weren’t fully developed and he had
trouble maintaining the right temperature in his little body. He
stayed in the hospital for almost a week. During this time Mom
called up the boarding school in Massachusetts and arranged for
Emma to start there right away. She flew north on her own, and was
met by a teacher at Logan airport.

What she was
feeling, she kept to herself. As Sarah had said to Amber a week ago
regarding the canceled wedding, Emma always pretended that she was
totally, aggressively, glass-shatteringly okay while sucking up the
energy of everyone around her in supporting her fiction.

As for what
Sarah was feeling…

Still on hold.
Patiently, dismally, sucking it up.

Her spirits
were so low they went off the map, so low she didn’t even
understand how gray she was. Dad was heroic. As he had for Mom the
previous year, he quietly changed his schedule so he didn’t need to
go away that winter and barely gave Sarah a minute to herself. For
hours they toiled around stately homes, the birthplaces and
gravestones of the famous, collections of art and weaponry, parks
where eventually spring began to show.

Dad told her
about Karl Marx, Michael Faraday and George Eliot, Gothic versus
Romanesque arches, Henry the Eighth and his six wives, and Lord
Elgin’s raids on classical Greece. Sarah could see how hard he was
trying, how diligently he was packaging his love, but she was
waiting for Mom, and her thoughts began to scare her as they
flirted more and more seriously with self-harm.

By the end of
March she had gotten as far as eliminating the methods she knew she
wouldn’t be able to stomach. Wrist slitting, gas oven, noose and
kicked chair. She’d also considered and rejected the ones with
difficulties of technique or access. Guns, car exhaust fumes.

Tube stations
began to present a danger. The impulse would only need to endure
for a moment. It would only need to be timed and executed right.
One last ballet leap. There were several days when Sarah trusted
herself so little that she took the bus instead of the Tube, and
she honestly didn’t know, then or in hindsight, if this was
self-dramatization or hormones or life insurance.

In early April
Mom announced her imminent arrival with Billy, and Dad began to
make cute Dad-like preparations, fretting over whether to buy
flowers and champagne, whether to plan an elaborate meal, or would
Mom just want to sleep? He rented a car and then couldn’t reach her
by phone to ask if she was bringing the baby already strapped in a
suitable carrier. The car rental company provided one and he almost
made Sarah stay home from the airport in case they ended up with
two carriers and too much luggage and not everything could fit.

“I’ll hold the
spare carrier on my lap,” Sarah promised. The spectacle of Dad
getting so anxious stirred something inside her – the first inkling
of a better feeling – like an eddy of wind stirring dried up autumn
leaves. She thought about him, instead of about herself, and it
felt like a welcome respite.

And then they
arrived at Heathrow and there was Mom looking tired and happy and
the baby – Billy – was awake and she handed him to Sarah right away
and he smiled at her. “How are you, sweetheart?” Mom asked her.
“How have you been? I mean, really?”

And somehow,
despite Mom’s searching look, it was too late at that point.
Holding an adorable and silky-haired and still insanely smiling
Billy, Sarah once again said, “I’m fine,” because it was just so
much easier than saying anything else, when saying something
wouldn’t bring her destiny back.

The sense of
loss turned into a permanent habit and she couldn’t talk about it.
The breath she needed to take before launching into the words came
from a part of her lungs that had rusted. Her mouth wouldn’t open
to let out those particular phrases. She was locked in a
sound-proof box, and she needed someone else to work really hard at
turning the key. It seemed as if no-one would. Emma was far away,
fighting her own battles, so there was no sister closeness or
sister friction to push her forward. The impetus had died.

Meanwhile,
Billy smiling for her in the arrival concourse at Heathrow Airport
was so instantly important that she wondered afterward if he and
Mom had developed a conspiracy about it together. Have a big nap
right before we land, sweetheart, then wake right up and make your
big sister fall in love with you.

Which, oh, she
did.

When he felt
something, it swept over his whole body. When he cried, even his
knees and ankles took part. When he was feeling good, he kicked and
writhed and his little chest filled up with happy air. He listened
to the rumblings of his little system as if it was a volcano. When
he saw Sarah, his face lit up because she was a vision of
heaven.

He loved his
plastic baby bath so much that there was barely any water left in
it when he was done. His little hands went smack, smack, smack down
on the water and splashed it all out. He startled when too much of
it landed in his eyes and mouth, but he never cried.

He made
singing curtains of bubbles in his bottle as he sucked the formula
down. Sometimes Sarah would mess with his head by deliberately
smiling at him while he was trying to feed, and he would be
instantly distracted and break off from his sucking and his little
lips would widen into a beam of a grin and formula would leak out
of the sides of his mouth and trickle down to his satiny neck and
chest.

She would let
him start sucking again and then she’d give another smile, so he’d
be going smile, suck, smile, suck, getting totally messy and
happily confused about what his mouth was meant to be doing. She
would laugh at him and kiss his tummy over and over, which became
dangerous after a while because then he would reach down and yank
on her hair with his little fists.

Mom slaved at
the coalface of baby care much of the time. She did the night feeds
and messy diaper changes. She took care of him all the hours Sarah
was at school or with friends. But at forty-one she didn’t cope
with a baby as well as she’d thought she would. Billy healed her
pain but wore her out, and she depended on Sarah a lot.

Sarah watched
TV all that spring walking the floor with him when he had colic. In
the summer and fall she sat with him tucked in her arms drinking
his bottle. She took him for walks. She propped him on her lap and
showed him books, which he regarded with serious attention. When he
started on fruit puree she did choo-choo train with the feeding
spoon in the kitchen every evening while Mom cooked dinner. There
were some days and evenings when she was stuck with him while Mom
and Dad went out and he just screamed and screamed and all she
could think of was Emma on the far side of the Atlantic, oblivious,
escaped, scot-free.

But like a
parent, she was chained to him by love. Chained to life by love.
She couldn’t make that ballet leap in front of a train now, because
Billy would miss her and she would miss him. Emma, the real parent,
didn’t understand how that felt.

“He did save
my life,” Sarah told Emma, as ballet camp drifted into view. “But
that day when I came home still wearing my Odette costume all
filthy and dripping under my raincoat and no-one noticed because
you were busy telling Mom and Dad that you were pregnant… Well, the
timing could have been better. It’s like something died but there’s
no grave. I never cried. I always said I was fine because, you
know, there was a sense that, “Are you okay, honey?” was a hint
that Mom wanted that answer. Sometimes you don’t want the kind of
attention you get when you’ve had to ask for it. No, I’m not fine,
God damn it, help me. I didn’t want to have to say it. I guess I
needed someone else to make the first move, or something, and
no-one ever, ever said on their own, straight out, I’m sorry for
your loss. Because it was a death, Emma.”

“No-one ever
said it to me, either.”

“How can you
say yours was a death?”

Emma tightened
her face and didn’t bother to reply. Sarah looked at her and said
slowly, “I guess it was. I’m sorry.”

“A death of
me. Part of me. I wasn’t ready, and at the time it was the easy way
out. Get out of jail free. I thought I’d have that whole lost part
of myself back if I gave Billy to Mom and we pretended he was hers,
but I didn’t, it had just died for good. I’m sorry for your loss,
Sarah. I never understood how hard it was for you.”

“And I’m sorry
for yours. I never understood, either.”

“And I guess
neither of us ever told anyone how much we needed to hear it,” Emma
said.

“We should go
back to the beach. Mom could be calling by now.”

They didn’t
say anything more, paddling back. Thinking about doctors and
hospitals, Emma had the question drumming through her again.

Call
Charlie?

Wait?

Back and forth
it went, up and down, bumping like a playground seesaw in her head.
All those crazy feelings she’d had. Caring so much about the dress
that she’d sent Sarah to steal it back. Caring so little that she
was almost glad of the stains. The stains kept the dress out of
bounds. Starting those projects that she’d then failed to complete.
The graves. The canoes. And searching for Billy’s perfectly
imagined puppy, all gangly and big-pawed, with the promise of
growing unsuitably huge and doubling the grocery bills.

Chapter
Eleven

“We were seen,
finally,” Mom said on the phone. She sounded tired but not too
stressed. “A nurse, then a doctor. They’re not sure if it’s
appendicitis. They’re sending him for an ultrasound, and then the
surgeon’s going to look at him, and see what he thinks. I managed
to get hold of Dad.”

“We’re coming
down,” said Sarah.

“I’ll see you
when you get here. If by some miracle we’re done by then and
they’ve decided to send him home, we’ll wait for you.”

“Anything else
you want me to bring?” Sarah listed what they’d already
gathered.

“I can’t think
right now.”

“There’s
something I have to do before we leave, Sar,” Emma said. She picked
up the phone, keyed in a number, listened for a moment then spoke
to the machine. “Charlie? It’s Emma.” Her voice was fragile. “Can
you call me?” Sarah looked at her and she flapped her hands to say
keep away, don’t ask about it, there’s nothing to say.

On the way up
to the gate they stopped for the mail and found an invitation for
each of them, to Brooke Lang’s combined ‘fling before the ring’ and
bridal shower. She hadn’t sent the invitations out as early as
bridal etiquette dictated. The fling-slash-shower was only eleven
days away, and the wedding just over a week after that.

When they
reached the hospital, Billy was still waiting for his test. He sat
in a cubicle on a plastic chair pulled close to Mom’s with his head
all tired and soft in her lap.