All of Us and Everything (9 page)

“All these big shots in town? Where do you think I was headed?”

“I don't know,” she said. He was gazing at her—not staring,
gazing.
“Maybe you're the type to crash galas and parties. Am I right?”

“So you're saying I'm not the type to get an invitation?”

She shrugged. “Are you?”

He shook his head and then whispered, “I was on my way to an assassination, but I've been delayed.”

“I didn't know assassins took the bus.”

“What can I say? I'm not highly paid.”

“Why are you making up stories? I thought you preferred the truth.”

“Do you think I'm lying?” he'd said, sheepishly.

“I think you're horsing around.”

“I couldn't lie,” he told her. “Not to you.”

The night went on, attenuated by snow. Hours passed on the bus. Dark gathered all around them as the bus inched forward. He told her that he was a law student at George Washington, that he was the youngest of five boys, that he liked jazz and had voted for Kennedy, of course. She confessed things too, but nothing about Max Stern, the dental student.

At one point, Nick took liquor orders for people on the bus. He hopped off to bang on the window of a shuttered liquor store. The owner was inside, socked in by the snow. Nick talked him into selling a few bottles. The man appeared at the plate-glass storefront. He was sleepy, bleary-eyed. Some of the passengers waved, including Augusta. He waved back, stuffing bottles in brown bags.

The bus got rowdy after that. They sang Christmas carols, though the season was over, and a few pop tunes—“Mack the Knife” and, fittingly, “I Want to Walk You Home.”

“We should get out of here and hit one of the galas,” Nick said. “They'll have food and booze and bands, but not many people showing up to dance.”

A little tipsy, she said, “Yes, let's!”

They got off the bus, doubled back the direction they'd come, and hustled up E Street. Eventually they started passing restaurants and large hotels.

“Just up ahead,” Nick said, “another block.” Finally, he stopped and said, “This was where I was headed. This one, right here. Should we crash it?”

“I'm not dressed for it,” Augusta said.

“I don't think they're being picky.”

There was no need to crash. Two anxious men in top hats ushered them in off the street into a large nearly empty dance hall. There were pyramids of fresh shrimp, a full open bar, servers carrying trays of small hot hors d'oeuvres. The band was fantastic; the drafty dance hall echoed. Every time the door opened, the entranceway fluttered with snow as if a ticker-tape parade were passing by on the street. They danced to everything, warming up enough to take off their coats. As a girl, after the rheumatic fever, she'd been stricken with Sydenham's chorea, also called Saint Vitus' dance, her face and hands and feet taken over by occasional spasms. Her handwriting became broken and blocky, her face sometimes went rigid while her body squirmed restlessly. The romantic fever wouldn't let her go, and she became shy, always scared her body would betray her somehow. But with Nick all of that old self-consciousness disappeared. She could remember, even now, the heat of Nick's skin when he pulled her in for a slow song, the feel of his hand cupping the small of her back, the breadth of his collarbones. Sometimes falling in love is immediate, headlong, and permanent. She knew that he wasn't like anyone she'd ever met before or would likely ever meet again. She didn't believe in marriage, so could she believe in love? None of that mattered. The night wasn't of this earth. All of the landmarks were blotted out by snow. This wasn't Washington, DC. This wasn't even America.

And she knew that even though she was falling in love, she could never keep him. He was too urgent about living. She could never hope to contain him. She knew it from the beginning.

Sitting at a round skirted table, he said, “Jesus, it's him.”

Augusta followed his gaze to a man in a red blazer. In his midsixties, the man had a waxed mustache, a bulbed stomach, and short arms. He walked, chest-puffed, to the men's room.

“Excuse me a minute,” Nick said, standing up so quickly that his chair nearly kicked backward.

Augusta grabbed his sleeve. They were both a good bit drunk by this point. She laughed and then regained her composure and said very seriously, “You're not going to assassinate him, are you?”

“It's just a game,” he said. “I've got to get within five feet of my mark.”

“A game?”

“A club.” He leaned down, putting his cheek to hers, and whispered, “I've told you too much already.” Then he pulled away, winked, and followed his mark into the bathroom.

Later, Augusta would come to understand the club. It was simple—overachieving law students challenged one another to mock assassinations. This was before Americans became so deeply and personally scarred by the word
assassination
—before the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Bobby. They had no idea what was looming, how, one day, the club would feel Old World, cast over in darkness.

A few minutes later, the old man walked out, as chest-puffed as ever, his short arms swinging at his sides, and Nick appeared next.

He jogged over to her and grabbed her hand. “Let's dance.”

The band eventually played the last song. They walked back out into the snow. After four blocks, they found the very same bus. The passengers were quiet now. Many dozed against the windowpanes.

After they boarded, they approached the Ellipse and saw, through the front windshield, a motorcade rocketing through the park, headlights cutting the darkness, spinning red lights churning the air.

Augusta imagined trying to explain this night to her daughters—and the months that followed, so passionate she felt devoured. Esme wouldn't understand. She'd never accept that her mother was once—even briefly—a different kind of person. Liv might accept it. She lived a nonconventional life. And Ru? Ru would nod as if she already knew the truth. Ru was prescient this way.

This was the night that changed Augusta's life, and for a short time the world was a completely different place. It was impossible to explain, too close to something sexual, but it was more than sexual. It was a kind of desire that, once stirred, never left her.

It was a costly desire, and her love for Nick Flemming would eventually exact great sacrifice.

Was it time to tell her daughters the truth? Would they even believe her? There was a time—after the dissolution of The Personal Honesty Movement—when the girls had questioned whether she was lying about their father. Esme accused her of having sex with strangers—she'd never forget it.

The box probably contained some proof. If Herc Huckley's son knew about The Amateur Assassins Club, what else did he know?

She sat up and planted her shoes squarely on the floor.

Ingmar had given up on his nose-whining and was likely dozing. The house was completely quiet.

She stared at the closet.

This was what had come to her. This was what had bobbed to the surface of the storm—
for her.
This was what she could no longer ignore.

She walked to the closet door and put her hand on the knob.

She would open the box, spread its contents on her bedspread, and allow what was to come.

Liv knew that Ru would know where to find her, if not consciously then instinctively. Liv had picked Ru up at this airport twenty years earlier—when Ru was sixteen and had disappeared for twenty-one days. Just like last time, Liv parked her mother's wood-paneled Wagoneer in a handicap spot in the short-term lot and smoked a cigarette out the open window.

Liv was nervous because she was always nervous. She missed the quiet routine of the spa-like rehab center—the persistent smell of tea tree oil, the quiet watercolor painting lessons, the soothing blink of the EMDR lights, and the long, winding conversations about her childhood—the one she invented bit by bit, loosely based on her own past. Ru wasn't the family's only storyteller! Liv didn't tell her therapists her main secret, that she was lucky—weirdly, perversely, and oddly lucky. Yes, she worked for things here and there, but overall the world extended offers she couldn't explain, and she took them. She simply had learned to accept it.

Frankly, she didn't trust therapists, and she'd hated the rehab center's trust-based activities—trusting addicts is counterintuitive. She didn't really fully trust anyone, and certainly not herself.

She was taking an antidepressant, and the occasional Xanax for spikes of anxiety. She'd scored a few Valiums—her favorite antiques, as she called them—from a friend whom she visited briefly after rehab for the express purpose of possibly scoring her favorite antiques. She took a Xanax now—not wanting to waste a Valium—and lit another cigarette. She was well aware that Ru had taken her place as the youngest in the family, the baby, and hadn't even had the courtesy to be the opposite gender, which would have allowed Liv to be the baby
daughter,
if not the actual baby. On top of that thievery, Ru had also been a bit of a genius though airheaded and impractical in that way geniuses are allowed to be. It was Liv's lifelong job to take Ru down a few pegs, to keep her humble, to make sure that she had firm footing in the real world.

It was exhausting and didn't make Liv feel like a good person, deep down. But that was her role and so she stuck with it. Changing roles at this stage would only disrupt all of the familial patterns, causing great upset to everyone involved, and wouldn't actually last. The old roles were like ruts in a well-traveled dirt road. Eventually they would be drawn back to them.

With the motor running and the air-conditioning on full blast, Liv put out her cigarette and thought of her mother's house, her childhood home. Did she secretly wish it had been washed away by the hurricane? She wasn't able to decide. She knew it was time to go back, but mainly because she had nowhere else to go.

The end of her stint at the Caledonia had been a bad scene. It was the real estate agent who did the dirty work. The agent, middle-aged with a recent face-lift, was terrified that Liv would attack her so she called the cops. Liv had only left the apartment once in sixteen days—to eat her favorite meal at her favorite restaurant—but mainly during this stretch of time she'd remained drunk and high, plotting cherry-picked marriages on the walls in Sharpie. (One of the cops was a single woman and had actually asked some earnest follow-up questions about Liv's method on the ride to the station, which was slightly vindicating.)

It didn't help that she'd found one of her ex's dismantled hunting guns—he came from pheasant-hunting types—and had tried to put it together in case the post-Sandy fallout turned to civil unrest. She was trying to explain this, slurringly, to the cops and real estate agent, whose face was propped with gauze, but only made things worse by picking up the parts of the weapon and swinging them around.

But it was all okay. The world would forgive her. It always did and it would show it by offering her something soon.

In fact, her oversized Louis Vuitton bag was filled with engagement pages pulled from her mother's
New York Times
and
Washington Post
s. She fiddled with the leather drawstring but resisted opening her bag. She'd taken them just to feel close to one of her old addictions, not to fall back into it.

“The universe loves me and will provide,” she whispered. It felt like a comforting little dinner bell jingling in her chest, and then she lay down on the front seat, curled up, and fell asleep.

She was woken up by a knock on the window.

There was Ru's face. She wore no makeup. Her brown hair was unkempt, not dyed. She was wearing a long cotton wraparound skirt, a tank top, and some kind of weird shawl. “Christ,” Liv muttered.

She sat up and rolled down the window.

“What the hell?” Ru said. “Why didn't you meet me in baggage claim?”

“I thought we'd meet in our usual spot.”

Ru cocked her head.

“This isn't my first time picking you up at an airport after you've run away.”

“I was doing research,” Ru said, too quickly not to have touched on a sore spot.

Liv shrugged.

“You fell asleep,” Ru said.

“I'm taking a lot of antidepressants.”

“Why?” Ru gripped the door where the window had been rolled down, and Liv noticed her engagement ring. If Liv had to guess—and she knew diamond rings—it looked like it weighed in at around thirty thousand dollars, and she also knew that Ru probably had no idea what it cost and therefore didn't seem to deserve it. And why wasn't the fiancé picking her up?

“I'm depressed,” Liv said.

“Why?” Ru asked again.

“Don't ask
why
like a toddler. People are always going to think of you as a baby if you act like a three-year-old.”

“You're the only person who thinks of me as a baby.”

“I'm not the only one.”

“What if you aren't depressed and you're just sad?”

“Sadness is an appropriate response when things are going badly. Depression is feeling bad even when things are going very well.”

“Are things going very well?”

Liv squinted through the windshield. “In fact, no.” Then she looked at Ru through the open window. “You're wearing a blanket.”

“Unlock the fucking doors, please.”

“Oh, look!” Liv said. “And now you're going to throw a temper tantrum?”

“I'm speaking in a very normal voice,” Ru said slowly and calmly, but not in a normal voice at all. She was thinking of elephants—the way they roared to intimidate one another and sometimes when they were joyfully reuniting with another elephant, returning. She couldn't ever really differentiate between the two roars. “I'm thirty-six years old,” she said to her sister. “Can you please unlock the fucking doors?”

Liv had forgotten that she was in the car and Ru was locked out of it and that they were actually heading home.