All of Us and Everything (29 page)

“He didn't kill him!” Augusta said. “I can tell.”

“He was going to say he was sorry and call the whole goddamn thing off!” Esme said to Darwin.

“Call it off? It! You mean the thing that altered the course of my life forever and that's defined every single day since? You mean
that
‘it'?” He gestured air quotes with the gun.

Nick was muttering some medical instructions about compresses and tourniquets. Augusta knelt at his side. “What's that?” she said. “Speak more clearly!”

“What's wrong with Atty?” Ru said again. “She's not right.”

“Put the gun down!” Esme said to Darwin. “You shot him already.”

Darwin lowered the gun but kept holding Atty because she was relying on him fully now.

Esme rushed to her daughter. “Atty,” she said, holding her daughter's hands. “What's wrong?”

“Nothing at all,” she said slowly.

Liv whispered to Ru, “Confession.”

“What?”

“I gave Atty Valium and I think she took it.”

“And you wonder why I've written about you?” Ru said, her eyes squinted, her head bobbing. “You make fascinating life choices, Liv. Truly.”

“How about I just call an ambulance?” Augusta said to Nick.

He nodded.

Augusta stared down at him and he looked at her out of the corner of his eye.

“What?” he grunted.

“You'd have made a very good full-time father,” she said. “You took a bullet for our girl and, maybe more important, you wear suffering well.”

“Thank you.”

Augusta called to Ru, “Honey, call nine-one-one, will you?”

“What did you do to my daughter?” Esme asked Darwin. “She's out of it!”

“What did I do? I don't even know this kid. You all came here with the intention of killing me—brutally murdering me. Slowly torturing me first, I might add.” Esme realized he must be quoting from her father's initial threat.

Liv walked up and said, “Excuse me,” to Esme. She cupped Atty's face. “Did you take a Valium?”

Atty held up two fingers. “Both!”

Liv patted Atty's cheek, took a step back, and said, “She's high. Very high.”

“Valium?” Esme said. “Where did she get Valium?”

“Both!” Atty said.

“She suffers from anxiety, and she stole the musket to kill someone. Accidentally.”

“See?” Darwin said. “This is a thing with your family, Esme. You're crazy, messy, violent people.”

“I think we're messy people,” Liv said. “I'll accept that.
Crazy
is sometimes a trigger word for some people. But then again, so is
trigger.
”

“Set her down,” Esme said.

Darwin eased Atty to the floor. She stared up at the drop ceiling.

Esme sat next to her and held her daughter's hand. “Liv,” she said, “I don't have the capacity to blame you for this right now. But I will. Believe me, I will.”

“Understandable,” Liv said, but she still sat down on the other side of her niece and took her other hand. She whispered to Atty, “You're not the closet and you're not the girl in the closet. You hear me?”

Atty nodded.

After a few moments of awkward silence—and the distant threading of the siren through traffic—Liv pointed to the music playing overhead. “This is the Smiths, isn't it?”

“You look good, Esme,” Darwin said, and he seemed to be seeing her for the first time. “I'm sorry I shot your father.”

“It's okay,” Esme said. “He deserved it.”

Ru turned a small circle and then she said, “Not to elevate a moment or to state the obvious—if any of you are already on the same page—but I think this is exactly what we needed.”

“What?” Nick whispered to Augusta. “What's she saying?”

“This could be really cathartic,” Ru said.

The doors swung open. Paramedics ran into the showroom. There was a stretcher, equipment, heavy footfalls. Lights from the ambulance swirled around them.

One paramedic was asking Nick questions. Another turned to Augusta. “Are you his wife?”

Without a hitch in her voice, without a moment's hesitation, she said, “I am. Yes. I'm his wife.”

The paramedics rolled Nick to his back. “She's my wife and these are my daughters and my granddaughter. My family.”

“Except Ru,” Augusta whispered under her breath so softly no one could hear her in all the noise. “She was actually conceived because I had sex with a stranger.”

Four hours later, Nick Flemming was waking up in a hospital bed, surrounded by his family. Liv and Ru stood on one side of his bed, Atty and Esme on the other. Augusta was holding his hand. When she came into focus—her beautiful gaze—she smiled and stroked his hair.

“The girls,” she said, “have decided what they really want from you.”

He pursed his lips to ask what he could give them, but Augusta hushed him.

“We want to know you,” Ru said. “And for you to know us.”

“Before you die on us,” Esme said.

“We probably need you,” Liv said, “in a similar way to how you need us.”

“In short,” Atty said, “there's been a lot of bullshit in this family.”

Nick nodded. “I'll try not to die. Not yet at least.” And then the faces poised around him blurred to small bits of shimmering color. He blinked. Two quick tears streaked his temples. And then he fell back to sleep.

“All this time I thought you were the center of the wheel and we were all just spokes,” Esme said. “But it's him now. It's him.” She stared at her father while he slept.

“In the spirit of less bullshit,” Liv said to Ru, “I've been thinking about cherry-picking your fiancé.”

“He's not my fiancé. He's coming to pick up the ring tomorrow. It's over.”

“Honey,” Augusta said. “I'm so sorry.”

“Why didn't you tell us?” Esme asked.

“We don't know how to really talk to each other, do we?” Ru said.

Atty was still a little woozy, but her brain function was back. She felt good, in fact. Better than she had in a long time and not just because of the drugs, but because things had felt strained for a long, long time and now they had finally broken. “You were really going to steal her fiancé?” Atty asked Liv.

“I was
thinking
about it.”

“Are you still thinking about it?” Esme asked Liv.

“Well, it's no longer cherry-picking now,” Liv said. “They're already broken up.”

“I might be falling in love with Teddy Whistler,” Ru said to Liv.

“It's because you absorbed all that love meant for me,” Liv said, with a strange sense of peacefulness. “All that shouting when he was on our front lawn that summer.”

“Remember conducting the storms in front of the third-floor windows?” Esme asked, wistfully.

The room was quiet except for the beeping of machinery, tracking Nick Flemming's vitals.

“I kept doing it, for years, storm after storm,” Liv said softly, and then, inexplicably, she started to tear up. For the first time in as long as she could remember, she wasn't crying for the sake of manipulation. She was crying because she suddenly thought of herself as a girl then a teen, standing in front of the glass, with her pear-cork-handled conductor's baton. She was crying because she was recognizing this secret self, this vulnerable girl. She missed who she'd once been. More than her husbands and more than Teddy Whistler in a boardwalk booth or on the front lawn, she missed that girl in the window during a storm—most of all.

“About that,” Augusta said to Esme. “You were right after all. I was afraid of daily intimacy, the kind you build a life on. I had trouble trusting.”

“To be fair,” Ru said, pointing at her father with both hands. “It was a tricky situation.”

“I wanted a tricky situation, and I wanted a family.” Augusta shook her head and said, “I didn't just want a family. I wanted
this
family.”

“So I had it wrong,” Esme said, “but also kind of right.”

“Are you crying?” Atty asked Liv. “For real?”

Liv was too choked up to answer. She just gave a quick nod.

Esme, Liv, Ru, and Atty spent the night in a hotel in Great Neck while Augusta dozed in an armchair next to Nick's hospital bed. By midmorning, he was discharged. And in the hospital's pickup driveway, they argued once again, though briefly, about the seating arrangements in the station wagon, the case of boxing squirrels strapped to the roof. Esme won the right to drive. Augusta was too tired to put up much of a fight. She and Nick sat in the front seat. Atty was bumped to the backseat with little discussion; there was unspoken agreement now that her barfing was anxiety-related, not carsickness.

As they headed back to Ocean City, they mostly listened to music and a few NPR spots. At first, they were each aware of the precarious balance of the boxed squirrels on the roof, but as time went on, they forgot about them and each fell into their own quiet thoughts.

They were a family. They were whole and new. Yet still, there were things that needed to be said, and, eventually, Liv said, “I'm sorry.”

“For what?” Esme said. “I don't think you actually know.”

“Well, I'm sorry I'm a drug addict, for one thing.”

“That's not an apology. That's an excuse,” Esme said.

“Yes, but I've never really said it out loud before.”

“That's true,” Atty said. “She's always hedging about it.”

Liv sighed.

“So go on,” Ru said, “what are you sorry about?”

Liv tapped the window with one knuckle and said, “I really just wanted to save somebody. I wanted to save Atty. I wanted to…”

“You gave her Valium,” Esme said. “She's a minor!”

“I thought it might help. I thought she was in a bad way.”

“She's not in a bad way!” Esme said. “She's rebounding from a difficult situation.”

“Are you in a bad way?” Nick asked Atty.

“I'm kind of in a bad way,” Atty said.

“We've all had times like that,” Augusta said. “Haven't we?”

They all agreed.

The car was quiet. They passed through a toll, which they had to pay the old fashioned way because Augusta didn't have E-ZPass.

“I have an idea,” Ru said. “Three Statements of Personal Honesty like we did at meetings of The Personal Honesty Movement.”

“Oh, I don't know,” Augusta said.

“What's The Personal Honesty Movement?” Atty asked.

“Your grandmother started a gazillion movements,” Esme said. “It was a kind of coping mechanism, a bad habit, maybe even a weird nervous tic.”

“How many followers did she have?” Atty said, knowing that she was approaching four thousand followers on Twitter, which was the most of any of her friends.

“I never got much momentum,” Augusta said, as if merely being modest.

“I'd love to start a movement,” Atty said quietly.

“I remember sitting in those meetings,” Liv said. “One woman said that she didn't like her own dog. That was her Statement of Personal Honesty and we just had to sit there and not laugh at her.”

“It ended badly, as I recall,” Esme said.

“It did,” Augusta said.

“Still, we could use it,” Ru said. “I mean there was something to it.”

“Thank you, Ru,” Augusta said.

“This time,” Esme said to her mother, “you have to actually say something specifically honest.”

“Well, of course,” Augusta said.

“You too,” Ru said to her father.

“Me?”

“It'll be a good way for them to get to know you,” Augusta said.

“Three statements each?” Liv said.

“Yes,” Ru said.

“My drug addict thing counts as one of my statements,” Liv said. “I should only have to do two.”

“Fine,” Ru said.

“You start,” Esme said to Ru.

“Okay. All right.” Ru scratched the back of her neck then rubbed her hands on her knees. “I stole things from my sister's life to make art and I should have at least asked first.”

“Better late than never,” Liv said.

“We're not supposed to comment after what's said,” Augusta told Liv. “Remember?”

“I think that was a flaw in the Movement, by the way,” Liv said.

“Regardless,” Augusta said.

“Yes,” Atty said, “I think it's way better if we just confess and no one says anything after we say what we want to. I mean, that would be a relief, wouldn't it?”

“I guess so,” Esme said, a hint of worry in her voice.

“Go on, Ru,” Atty prodded.

“My career is tanking because I can't write another book. And…” Ru wasn't sure what to say next. She searched her mind, but all she saw was the round face of the baby born in the longhouse in Vietnam and so, although she'd never admitted it to herself, she said, “I might want a baby. I mean, not one day, but soon.”

“I didn't see that one coming!” Esme said.

“That'd be real nice,” Nick said.

“Again, I think we're just supposed to listen and accept,” Liv said.

“This is really good,” Atty said. “You confess and no one can say anything. It's so not Episcopal or boarding school or family or anything. You, go,” Atty said to her mom.

“Well.” Esme rubbed her nose and glanced at the rearview and side mirrors and then finally said, “I got our father shot.”

“No, no,” Nick said. “I ran at him and I was the one who—”

Esme ignored him and talked louder. “I haven't really dealt with the fact that Doug left. And I haven't been the best mother to Atty because I'm scared.”

“Scared of what?” Liv asked and then she quickly added, “That's a question, not a comment.”

“I no longer trust my own judgment,” Esme said. “I thought Doug was the safe choice.”

Nick wagged his head. “I did too. I really did.”

“Things change,” Liv said. “People change.”

“Do they?” Ru asked.

Atty thought of Lionel Chang. He was changing on her this very moment, day-to-day. He was becoming a memory, chunks of images, and what she imagined his days were now like—sailboats, pot smoking, the Vineyard.

“Now that I think about it,” Liv told them, “saying I wanted to save someone, Atty in particular, was my second Statement of Personal Honesty so I only need one more.”

“What is it?” Esme asked.

“I don't know.”

“Okay,” Atty said. “Here are my three. I did, in fact, want the musket to fire in Brynn Morgan's face, but I only wanted it to disfigure her. If she died, though, I'd have been okay with that.” She paused. “Can that just be one because I have two more.”

“Sure,” Ru said.

“I want to see my father live and in person to tell him to fuck off. And sometimes if I don't tweet something, I'm not sure it ever really happened.” She took a big breath, held it, and then said, “That's it! Oh, and I've tweeted almost everything from our whole time together as a family. And now you all just sit here and accept the statements.”

And so they did, and Atty thought to herself—without tweeting it—Being honest sucks, but it's also very liberating. #startamovement

“Nick,” Augusta said. “Your turn.”

“I might need more time to think about this.”

“It's an in-the-moment kind of thing,” Liv said.

“Okay,” he said, “I think it had to be this way or no way at all. I couldn't have been a father the way other men are fathers. I didn't have it in me. I did it the only way I knew how. And I'm not sure if this is one Statement of Personal Honesty or three or four, but the one good thing about our family is that I appreciate every second I get with all of you. Every single second.”

“He's more of a speech type than a three-statement type,” Augusta said.

“He's good at them. You're not the only wordsmith in the family,” Liv said to Ru.

Ru glanced at Atty and smiled. “Nope, I'm certainly not the only wordsmith in the family.” She was pretty sure Atty was the real writer. “I've just got a good memory.”

And then Augusta said, “Correct, Ru. And I'm wondering if you remember the Statements of Personal Honesty that I made that day when you all were little and I taught you to conduct the storms.”

Ru nodded. “I do remember. You said,
Your father is a spy. He can't be known. I love him, despite myself.
Any amendments?”

“Just one,” Augusta said. “He
can
be known, as much as anyone on this earth can be known, that is.”