All of Us and Everything (16 page)

Then he pulled off his hood and Ru recognized him immediately—Teddy Whistler. One of his eyes was red and puffed-up.

He took a seat. “Sorry I'm late.” Again with the being late and the apologizing for it. His hair was wet but unlike last time when he'd pushed it back in a delicate way, he used his whole hand instead and roughly shoved it. His face was flat, empty of expression.

Slack.

Was he sad?

Jesus. Was he going to start crying?

Had things gone badly with Amanda? Had he kind of lost his shit again? On the plane, he'd seemed relatively sane—if not a little more overtly hopeful than most people in the world—but had Ru misread him? She imagined how he must have leaned over to the heavyset salesman from Kansas and talked him into changing seats. What had he told the guy? “That woman, right there, wrote a book about me that was made into a movie. I'd kind of like to call her on it.”

“Okay,” Ru said again. “We have time for just one question.” Ru stared at the original audience, hoping Teddy wouldn't raise his hand. She assumed he'd either Googled her and found this event online or had seen one of the shitty little flyers taped up somewhere around town. Was he a stalker? Did the rain require an entire slicker?

Finally, Atty raised her hand. “Who's the guy in the Gorton's Fisherman rain gear? What's up with him?” she asked while snapping a picture of him with her iPhone and Instagramming it.

Ru looked at Teddy again. “I wrote something for him.”

“A commissioned piece?” Atty asked while typing into her iPhone.

“Kind of.”

Atty swiveled in her seat. “Are you happy with her work?”

The bloggers and book clubbers turned around and stared at him too.

“Not really. It went badly.”

“How?” Atty asked.

“It went badly at a New Jersey party-boat engagement brunch.”

Atty tweeted
Guy in yellow slicker shows up. Things went badly on a NJ party boat. #nosurprise

“Did you crash an engagement brunch?” Ru asked.

“I rewatched your movie,” Teddy said. “Your Teddy Wilmer win-back was public—to great effect.”

“Did you write him a win-back?” the pink, blistered blogger asked. “You won an award for those. Didn't you?”

“I did,” Ru said.

“Teddy Wilmer's win-back is so public,” a pale blogger added. “I mean it had to be!”

“You look like someone punched you in the eye,” Atty said.

“That's because someone punched me in the eye,” Teddy said.

“Oh,” Atty said.
Jersey party-boat-goer was punched in the eye.
#Njpartyboatingisacontactsport

“It's over anyway. She won't speak to me again,” Teddy said. “The wedding is next weekend. I'm done.”

“Do you love her?” Atty asked, resting her chin on the back of the metal folding chair.

“Yes,” Teddy said. “Very much.”

“Oh, honey, your win-back backfired on him,” one of the book clubbers said to Ru.

“You have to fix that!” the other finished her thought, as one could only after forty years in the same book club.

“I don't think it's my responsibility,” Ru said.

“But you screwed him over,” Atty said. “I think you have to try to make it right.”

Atty didn't even really know exactly how much she owed Teddy Whistler. Still, Ru tried to back out of it. “If she's not going to even speak to him again,” she said, “I don't think—”

“You either believe in the stuff you write or you don't,” one of the bloggers said.

“I don't,” Ru said. “It's fiction.”

Ru Rockwell doesn't believe in her own work. #itsfiction

“But in your speech, you said that fiction speaks to a larger truth,” a pale blogger said, holding up her iPod. “I taped it. Just audio.”

“Are you shitting me?” Ru said. “You didn't ask me permission to do that.”

“I'm taping
this
too,” the blogger said with a warning tone.

“You have to do something,” Atty said. “I mean, what's the point of being an author if you just screw up people's lives?”

“You owe it to him,” the pink, blistered blogger said. “Look at him.”

And there sat Teddy Whistler in his wet yellow slicker and she remembered him that night when she was just a little kid in her pajamas, looking down at him from her open bedroom window, the wind gusting around her. He was a little older and tragically in love and drunk, beautiful, sad, and crazy.

Ru took a deep breath and was about to say no, and storm off. In other words, she was going to run away, but she thought it was time she stopped running away. Instead, she heard herself saying, “I'd help if I could, but what could I possibly write for him now?”

“You could just make it up to him and invite him to dinner,” Atty said.

“Dinner with the Rockwells,” Teddy said. “Who'd be there?”

“Both of my sisters are in town.”

“Huh,” Teddy said. “You know, I'd love to be invited to dinner with the Rockwells.” He'd been denied this in his youth.

Ru was sure it would be a mess, but on some level she felt like Liv was owed a little surprise like this—for bitching at Ru about writing the book to begin with, as if Liv's drama hadn't drowned out much of Ru's own childhood, and for all the baby comments, and Ru's Poos, and for not even coming to baggage claim to pick her up, and for a lifetime of beating Ru down at any chance. She could dress this up as something she was forced to do. She might even be able to pass it off as a good deed. Plus, young Teddy Whistler probably should have been invited to dinner way back when. I mean, all he did was fake being a hero. Isn't that what we all do?

And then, in a flash of precise memory, Ru remembered how it felt to be poised at the window on the night he showed up drunk on their lawn.

Ru, just a girl, staring down at this beautiful, raw display, with her recording device of a brain, with her big wet eyes.

Ru, absorbing the declaration of love.

“Okay, yes,” Ru said softly. “Come to dinner.”

Esme had googled Darwin Webber countless times since the dawn of the Internet. None of the Darwin Webbers was
the
Darwin Webber.

After hearing that her father was responsible for Darwin's disappearance, she googled him on Atty's iPad in her canopy bed and once again found no matches.

She tracked down two of his friends from college on Facebook. This wasn't her first time asking them about him, but she tried again. One told her that the man had fallen off the face of the earth. The other didn't respond at all; a glance at his embittered posts revealed that he was going through some personal shite—maybe a custody battle of some sort.

Jesus H. Christ, she wondered, did her father kill Darwin Webber and dispose of his body? Was Nick Flemming a spy or a mobster?

She looked up Darwin's older brother, Phillip, whom she'd called many times after Darwin was gone. At first, Phillip had been distraught, but he had always seemed to know something she didn't. The family never put out a missing person report and when Esme confronted Phillip about it, he finally told her to let it drop and to stop calling. That was when she took it the hardest. Whatever had happened to Darwin, he didn't want anything to do with Esme. It was over.

She knew, in a way she couldn't explain, that Darwin wasn't dead. If he were, she'd have felt it. She didn't make a habit of believing in this kind of mysticism, but this was beyond rational thinking, and she accepted it because it comforted her.

Her mother might not have known he was partially black—it was just a small wedge of the total pie—but her father would have, what with his practice of vetting people. Was her father a racist? Was that the problem? Was Darwin not rich enough or from the right family? His parents had been hippies. Did Nick Flemming have something against hippies
and
Ivy League schools?

She spent the rest of the day looking up the coveted details of the Ivy League educations she'd missed out on—a recent Princeton reunion where Bon Jovi gave a concert, the significance of the three-legged chair for Harvard's president at graduation, Yale's secret Skull & Bones society.

She rode spikes of anger. Augusta had betrayed her daughters. She'd told some smidge of the truth but allowed it to be interpreted as a lie. That was as bad as lying, wasn't it?

Esme wanted to know how her parents met, why they'd had three children if they couldn't even manage to get married—who did that nowadays, much less back then?

But most of all, she was stunned that her mother had fallen in love at all, ever. Augusta seemed resolutely solitary. She was annoyed at Esme's wedding. Almost disapproving. Augusta didn't care for the extravagance of it all, but, to be honest, it hadn't been an extravagant affair. So what were all those snide comments about? At the time, Esme had suspected Augusta was jealous. A woman who had sex with strangers instead of entering into a committed relationship would be jealous, right? But now she knew her mother had been in a relationship in some weird way for a long time. How in the world did it start and then, of course, why did it end? She was particularly interested in endings since her own marriage was mid-demise.

And though it might seem petty, what the hell were her father's family's health issues? Her whole life the paternal side of her medical history had been blank. What if she'd had an aneurysm or gallbladder issues or came from a line of hemophiliacs and never knew? Why hadn't her mother told them this?

And then Esme remembered her uncle. Uncle Vic. A dim memory of fishing on a dock. There'd been a bucket of worms, a hook—shiny and sharp—and this man teaching her how to cast and reel though she was much too young. How young, she couldn't remember. Her mother had been an only child. So Uncle Vic had to have been from her father's side of the family? Where were all of those relatives?

Her biggest regret was her father running off Darwin Webber, but the Ivy League education was a close second. Most of the faculty members at the boarding school, because of their elite educations, had a permanent shield to protect them from any insult the world flung at them. Esme would never be able to prove that she belonged among them.

And she
did
belong among them. She was owed another life altogether. She could feel the other life; that was the problem. She could sense it riding alongside the one she was in right now—betrayed by her husband, trying to get a divorce, kicked out of her home, unemployed, and raising a daughter who may or may not be imbalanced, but who'd proven to be emotionally volatile. My God, she worried about the effect this year had had on Atty.

Actually, to be honest, she'd felt the other life all along. When she was marrying Doug, she imagined—with visceral exactitude—what her wedding would have been like with Darwin Webber, down to the details of his older brother's toast. She imagined their first apartment, how they'd have had a few more kids, and dogs, and taken in stray cats. It was so real that she felt it could almost be explained by physics. Physicists believed in things like alternate universes, didn't they—even though it was embarrassing for them to admit?

She lay back in the bed. The breeze from the open window made the thin gauzy material of the canopy breathe lightly.

Screw her possible genetic weaknesses, her lack of relatives, her lost childhood with two parents, and even the Ivy League. There was no way to get any of that back. It was behind her now. She wanted one thing—to know what happened to Darwin Webber, maybe to see him again with her own eyes. She'd exhausted her investigative skills.

Then it hit her that Ru, at sixteen, had somehow found their father.

And then she thought of the old man himself.

If she was owed another life, her father was surely her debtor.

The flag was on display. If there were any ties left, this was a signal that should draw him back.