All of Us and Everything (22 page)

But as the three months slipped along, Esme and Liv got attached to him. Augusta had called him Daddy and Esme had picked it up.

“You could resign,” she said. “You could get another job.” But she knew it was too late. She saw the way he scanned the lake, everyone they passed on the street, in restaurants. She knew that he slept lightly, if at all. He was scared. That wouldn't end.

“I have to go back,” he said. “I'll always feel hunted so I have to be allowed to hunt.”

“I'm willing to take risks to be a family.” She wasn't sure, though. She didn't know what she was trying to sign on for.

“Some people love a storm and some fear it,” he said. “And some people love it because they fear it.”

“What's that mean?”

“I can't let you all get swallowed by a storm.”

Their cabin bedroom had two twin beds, with thick sheets and wool blankets. They made love in one of the beds, knowing that they'd failed, that he'd never really expected to succeed, and that this was the beginning of a long end.

Maybe Augusta was still in love. Maybe it was no longer possible. Maybe she wasn't ever a real wife.

But she would always be a mother.

Over the next three days, Esme, Liv, Ru, and Atty worked hard at sisterhood.

Liv found an acupuncturist and they went in together and got individual sessions. Liv explained that this would help get their Zen straight and allow them to open up to life and all of its possibilities.

“Like your father orchestrating a big gift?” Esme said.

“Or like in the romance department?” Atty asked, earnestly.

Liv shrugged. “Just go with it.” She missed Mrs. Kwok, though—in one swollen moment—and wanted to thank her for pulling her out of the window during the hurricane.

During her session, Atty tweeted,
Living pincushions. Is this really about love? #sisterhood
and
Feel like one of Nabokov's butterflies stuck to a corkboard. #sisterhood
and, finally,
F this sh*t. I'm perforated. #sisterhoodnotworthit

They played a few rounds of Spoons, but Liv and Esme grabbed a spoon simultaneously and even after a bit of wrestling, neither would let it go. They sat on chairs in the kitchen for forty-five minutes until Liv acquiesced. “This is stupid. You win. What's wrong with you anyway?”

“I win!” Esme said and then she restacked the deck of cards and put the spoons into the dishwasher.

Atty tweeted,
Watching grown women revert to middle school hierarchal structures. #uglysisterhood

Early one morning, they pulled old bikes from the shed out back and worked on them for about an hour and a half before realizing that the tires were so rotted they'd never hold air. Sweaty but undeterred, they rented beach bikes and rode them on the boardwalk.

Atty tweeted,
I hate old lady exercise. #sisterhood
and
We're all wearing yoga pants and no one's doing yoga
.
#sisterhood
and, finally,
If my bike had a basket, I'd shove Toto into it. #sickofsisterhood

They tried to teach Ingmar to climb the stairs with a series of treats and failed. Atty tweeted,
The collie clings to land, will never climb the ladder to success. #overratedanyway

They hung out on the third floor, too. Ru found the old record player and put on some Sean Cassidy. Esme sorted through old photographs. Liv taped the best ones to the wall—for some reason, this was a comfort. Atty dug through old boxes, and inside one, wrapped in tissue, she found three wooden items she couldn't name. “What are these?” She held them like a strange three-stemmed bouquet.

“Conductor's batons,” Ru said.

“You all took conducting lessons?” Atty asked.

Liv reached out and took one of the batons, lifting it in the air with a familiar ease. “We conducted storms,” she said. “Augusta taught us.”

Esme shook her head. “It was a strange childhood,” she whispered.

“It's a strange adulthood too,” Ru said.

And then a phone beeped.

“Gotta go check on the flan,” Liv said.

“You're making flan?” Esme asked.

“It's a comfort food.”

Over flan, the four of them took the time to devise a plan.

Esme already knew what she wanted from her father—to track down Darwin Webber and apologize—but they'd decided that they each needed to make a request.

“I'm just his granddaughter. Do I need to want something from him?” Atty asked.

“You can go either way,” Esme said.

“I could use a hand looking for Nancy Drews,” Atty said. “I'm missing six of them and I can't drive.”

“Well, the old man can drive so there. You've got yours,” Ru said.

Liv tried to beg off on the grounds that she'd gotten more than she'd expected from the man.

“That's just material stuff,” Esme reminded her. “You can want something on an emotional level too, you know.”

“I'm not really comfortable with wanting on an emotional level,” Liv said.

“Well, we
all
have to ask for something,” Ru said, inventing a rule.

“Otherwise, I'll get pegged as the needy one and that's not fair,” Esme said.

“What do you want then, Ru?” Liv asked Ru.

“I'm not sure yet, but I know it'll come to me.”

“I love you, Augusta Rockwell.” The voice came out of the darkness. Augusta was in bed, wearing a nylon nightgown, just a thin sheet over her. She knew the voice. She'd wanted to hear it, longed to hear it—in this bedroom, coming out of the darkness—most of her adult life.

“You're not allowed in my bedroom,” Augusta said.

“I could back out and stand in the hallway, but it won't change anything.”

She sat up and pulled the string on her bedside lamp. “This is a very difficult situation. The girls—” She could see him now. He wore a T-shirt, a robe tied at his waist. He'd once been the man running alongside the bus in the snowstorm on the eve of Kennedy's inauguration.

“I'm not talking about our daughters right now. I'm talking about us.”

“Well, we're in a difficult situation too,” she said.

“Remember the hotel in Geneva with the Lilliputian elevator? Remember the Montreal massage?”

They'd had sex in that Lilliputian elevator. She'd had a double orgasm as a result of Nick's Montreal massage.

“I'm the only other person who holds it,” Nick said.

“Who holds what?”

“Everything we ever were. And you're the only other person for me. You're my other person, Augusta. It's just the two of us.”

She felt flushed. She nodded. “I know.”

“Without you in my life, everything that happened between us is just a shadow. It's not real. You make the past real for me. Our past.”

“Remember Maine,” she whispered. “The wool blankets. The twin beds after the babies were asleep.”

“We're still in love with each other.”

“It never made any sense,” Augusta said.

“No. It never did.”

It was quiet a moment. Someone started singing out on the streets somewhere. Someone drunk.

“How long should I stand here?”

She stared at him then shook her head. “Not yet.” And she lay back in bed, the down pillow puffing around her. “Not yet, Nick Flemming.”

Ru ferreted through Esme's suitcase, put on her sister's sneakers and shorts, and announced that she was going for a run.

“You're wearing my clothes,” Esme said.

“I know,” Ru said. “We're in this together now.”

Ru wasn't going for a run. She hated the idea of running. She thought it was something that someone should do either while playing field hockey, as she once had, where opponents wielded clubs, or if one was being chased.

She was actually meeting Teddy Whistler at an ice cream shop three blocks from the house. He'd texted her about his plans to crash Amanda's beach wedding. “What do you think? If I don't do it, will I regret it the rest of my life?”

She was going to talk him out of crashing the wedding but her reasons were suspect. The problem was that Teddy Whistler kept appearing in her mind—as she was trying to fall asleep, while washing her hair in the shower, even while talking to her sisters about their long-lost father. There were mini clips of him, running on loops.

Teddy Whistler on the airplane, saying, “No, I think it only matters who loves who last, but that also would have been me.”

Teddy in his slicker at the reading, saying, “Sorry I'm late.”

Teddy getting out of his rental car in front of their house. “Hi.”

Teddy at the dinner table. “You're engaged?”

Teddy looking at her when she was saying goodbye to him at her front door. “…You are exactly the way I remember you, and you were only a kid, but you're still you.”

Even when she wasn't thinking about him, she knew that the loops were playing in her subconscious, where she preferred them, but it was hard work not to think about Teddy Whistler. She tried to tell herself that she was thinking about him because he'd been the subject of her creative work. But she also was afraid of another possibility—one she didn't believe in philosophically or in reality: She was falling in love with him even though she didn't really know him and she couldn't really articulate why she was falling.

She jogged out of the house and down the first block just in case anyone was watching, then she slowed to a fast walk. By the time she got there, Teddy had ordered two scoops of lime and was eating the cone, one hand in his pocket, standing in front of the shop. His left eye was still swollen but also now tinged a dark blue.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi.”

She ordered a scoop of mint chocolate chip, and they walked toward the beach.

“I want to confess something,” Teddy said.

“What's that?”

“I've made families everywhere I've ever gone.”

“How do you make a family?”

“I play the orphan hero and people take me in.”

“Did your parents pass away?” Ru asked.

“No. I'm not an orphan or a hero. But my family never amounted to much by family standards. You nailed them in your book, to be honest. But your family is, by far, the most volatile and layered of any family I've ever seen.”

“Thank you, I think.”

“How's the fallout at the Rockwell home today?” he asked.

“We've decided that each of us needs to get what we need from our father, in some way.”

“Like he has to pay off some debt?”

“I'm not sure.”

“What do you want from him?”

“I'd like it to be something concrete. Nothing abstract, like love. That feels too open-ended to me.”

“But the concrete thing would represent love, right?”

“I guess so.”

“So why not just bypass the concrete thing and go for love?”

By the time they got to the beach, they'd eaten their cones. They sat in the sand and stared out.

“I'm trying to play this out in my head—finding Amanda before the wedding, somehow getting a moment alone,” Teddy said. “I'm running out of time. Maybe I didn't tell you that, but some of the guests are on my side.”

“I actually showed up to talk you out of this,” she said.

“I thought you said I should go back to what I said about her on the plane.”

“You crashed the engagement party. The groom punched you. I think she gets it. She's a grown woman and you have to trust her to know her own mind.”

Teddy shook his head and smiled. “Sometimes people want to be saved from something. They want someone to swoop in and change their life.” He pried off his loafers.

“Doesn't that sound sexist to you?”

Teddy took off his socks and cuffed his pant legs then stood up and walked toward the ocean. “No,” he said. “Because it's what I want too. All those times I was playing the hero, I was a kid. I just wanted someone to save me. You know that, don't you?”

No. She hadn't known that. Was that the actual theme of her own work? “But you're a grown man now,” Ru said, following him. “You don't need anyone to save you.”

“Oh, really?” He reached out and took her hand, looking at the fat diamond ring. “Weddings are just dramatizations of two people saving each other. They may as well be set in shark tanks, not at altars.”

She took a deep breath and held it, then said, “I'm not getting married. My family doesn't know. I called it off a while ago. Cliff is coming in a few days so I can give him the ring back.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“And he's just letting you go?”

“Yes,” Ru said. “That's actually the way it should be done.” Why wasn't Cliff fighting for her?

Teddy thought about this for a minute or two. “I let Liv go,” he said. “I mean, I didn't have a choice because I was in juvie and then that hospital, and when I got back she was at boarding school, and I gave up.”

“You moved on. There's a difference.”

“Tell me something, Ru.”

“What?”

“Tell me a true story. Not something made up.”

“Okay,” Ru said. “Elephants can actually purr. It's more like a rumbling purr but it can carry for long distances. They use it to communicate, to bond, sometimes when they're trying to find a mate. That sort of thing. It's beautiful really.”

“That's not exactly what I meant. Beautiful as that is. I was looking for something true about
you.
”

“Oh.” She thought of telling him about tracking her father down in Guadeloupe when she was just sixteen years old, and how he'd said that she was so like him. What did he mean by that? How did she interpret that then? Should she think about it now? “I don't deal in the truth,” she said.

“Maybe you need an example. I once wrote
I HEART AMANL
on an overpass not too far from here when I was eighteen.”

“Who's Amanl?”

“I had to run from the cops before I got to finish the
d
in Amanda. I'd only done the straight line, not the rounded part. Never got to the final
a.
”

“Amanl. Very romantic.”

“Now your turn. One thing. One true thing.”

Ru thought of her mother's Personal Honesty Movement, the
Symphonie Fantastique
playing on the record player, the storm. “I don't like the truth.”

“Why?”

“It never feels true enough.” She'd tracked down her father in a bar in Guadeloupe. It hadn't seemed real—not while sitting there with him and certainly not as the image of him dissolved over the years, not even seeing him again now after all this time.

She pivoted.

“Whatever happened between you and Liv?”

“She doesn't believe in love and I do. Do you?”

Ru shrugged. “I believe it happens, but I'm not sure I believe it's sustainable.”

“What if it's not sustainable, but it just keeps happening—to the same two people, over the course of a lifetime? Did you ever think about that?”

“No, I did not.”

“No, you didn't,” Teddy said. “But that would be worth fighting for, wouldn't it? Finding that person you keep falling in love with?”

“I guess so.”

“You guess right.”

And looking at Teddy Whistler, on the beach, barefoot and pants cuffed, she felt—for the briefest second—that everything else around them was gone and it was only the two of them. Alone. She felt like she could fall in love with him many times over.