All the Lasting Things (15 page)

The phone continued its trill, and Claudia opened her eyes to find her brother doing Stanley.
Hey! Claud-ia!
She knew that Benji would flay her for failing Max, turn the life preserver of her meeting with Nick into a sinking ship, but on the fourth ring, she broke down and answered anyway.

“Tell me you’ve been kidnapped,” Benji whispered fiercely into the silence before she had a chance to say hello. “Tell me you’re bound and gagged in some cabin in the woods and that’s why you’re not here right now.”

“Why are you whispering,” she asked with dread. “Is he there?”

“Of course he’s here. He’s where you’re supposed to be. Here!”

“Can he hear you?”

“
Now
you care about his feelings? Where the fuck are you?”

She told him.

“What are you doing there?”

“Heading back.”

“Wait.”

“Benji.”

“Here’s what you do, Claudia. You put the key in the ignition. You’ve got the key, don’t you? You turn the car on. Then you turn your ass around and get here. Turn around and get here now.”

But she couldn’t. She could no sooner find her way to Palmer Street—to Max and her mother and the fallout of a decision she’d made when she was barely old enough to order a drink—than she could transform her car into a plane and jet back to the city through the cloud-slung sky.

“Then I’m coming to you.”

“Don’t,” Claudia pleaded. “Please don’t.”

“Those are your choices.” His voice struck her, sharp as a hatchet and just as hard. “Stay where you are. Don’t even
think
of leaving. I’ll drive to the city if I have to, Claudia. I’ll break my leg again, I swear I will, I’ll kick down your door.”

She sat in the car, the rolled-up windows turning it into a sweatbox, the discomfort of which she felt she deserved. As the minutes rolled by, twenty, thirty, forty, the chime of Oliver’s incessant texts arrived, like the traffic report on New York 1, every ten minutes. Finally, feeling the next ding would be the hammer blow to the head that would end her, she dinged back with a text of telegrammatic brevity:
Sorry! Case of nerves. Call later.

The echoing sound of yet another message stirred her to crack the window just enough to throw the phone out of it. It was from Benji.
Inside
,
it read,
@ McDonald’s.

She made her way into the violently lit faux-timbered lodge where people peed and bought forty-ounce drinks in a mad cycle, wearing the enormous sunglasses of a Hollywood starlet in hiding. Wending her way through a herd of elastic-waistbanded feeders on a do-or-die hunt for pumpable ketchup, Claudia positioned herself at the mouth of the dining room, glancing from one sticky table to the next until her eyes stopped on her worst nightmare. There, at the back of the room, framed beneath a forged Bob Ross depicting the saccharine splendor of fall Adirondack foliage, sat Benji and Evelyn.

She took off her sunglasses as Benji’s eyes met hers. To Claudia the two of them, sitting side by side with the grimmest of looks on their faces, resembled nothing so much as a twisted Oedipal take on
American Gothic
. She mouthed “Fuck you” to her brother, at which he turned to Evelyn, put a hand on her shoulder, and excused himself. Evelyn could have used the sunglasses to hide her own red and swollen eyes, which, watching Benji as he went, soon came to rest on her daughter. She pulled one, two napkins from a tabletop dispenser and used them to blow her pink-tipped nose.

“Are you kidding me right now?”

“She made me bring her,” Benji said as he approached, hands up in a posture of defending himself against a crazy lady.

“She’s almost eighty, Benji. How can she make you do anything?”

“You’re right. I should have knocked her down and driven over her.”

“No. But what resolution do you think we’re going to come to with her here? Why didn’t you bring him too?”

“You mean Max? He has a name.”

“Max,” she said miserably.

“None of this is Mom’s fault. Or Max’s. You know that, right?”

She may have been the gladiator expected to lay down her sword and die, but self-defense came as reflexively as a hand pulling back from a flame. “So where is he? Why isn’t he in your little vigilante party? You didn’t leave him with Dad.”

Benji rubbed his hands roughly over his face, as if to scour the anger that twisted his features. “Sandra’s with Dad. Max went back to his hotel,” he said with overly determined calm. “Seeing that you’re suddenly interested in his whereabouts.” He looked over his shoulder at his mother, at the impromptu interrogation chamber they’d set up in an orange plastic booth and said, “Come on.” When Claudia didn’t move, he grabbed her by the wrist and pulled. “Come. On.”

She slid into the booth across from bad cop and crying cop and bowed her head. Evelyn, snuffling into her rough cardboard-colored napkins, said nothing, while Benji spoke in the fierce whisper he’d adopted for the day as his favorite tone. “Are you nuts?”

The room, loud and bright and beset with an oily smell that buried itself under Claudia’s skin, was freezing, better suited to storing burgers than serving them, and Claudia, chilly in a tissue-thin cashmere sweater that showed the tank top she wore underneath, longed to pick up one of the two steaming cups of coffee that sat on the table in front of them. They hadn’t thought to get her one. Or had thought
not
to get her one.

“Mom? What are you doing here?” she eventually asked.

“Oh,” Evelyn said tearfully, as if speaking through a mourning veil. “Another right I don’t have.”

“I only meant that you and I have things to discuss. Things we might not want to discuss”—Claudia spoke softly—“here.”

“I’m glad you think we have things to discuss,” Evelyn shot back. If her voice had, with those first words, threatened to slip into a pit from which no sound escaped, it suddenly found a toehold and, climbing to firmer ground, said more loudly, “Because apparently we didn’t have anything to discuss before.”

“I don’t know how to talk about this.”

“Well then. Nothing’s changed.”

Claudia scanned the room helplessly. A contestant in a hidden camera show, she’d been set up and now waited for the host to come and put a stop to it, tell her it was only a joke.

Benji placed his hands on the table, avoiding the sticky soda rings and a gory smear of ketchup. “The point of this isn’t to discuss this now. Here. The point is to get you home, Claudia. You need to do what’s right.”

She bucked at the words. “I don’t know what you expect from me. Yesterday this kid blows my door off its hinges and walks into my life. I don’t get time to adjust to that? I don’t get to figure out what that means? I’m not ready—”

“Ready?” Evelyn snapped. “Was Benji ready to be stopped in the driveway? Was I ready to have a grandson I never knew
existed
up and march in?
How could you?
Both
of you? How could you keep such a thing from me? For twenty-two years?”

Benji did his best to duck Evelyn’s attack by marshaling his troops behind hers. “Mom’s right. Your door wasn’t the only one blown off its hinges yesterday. What about my door? What about Mom’s?”

“What about that boy’s?” Evelyn said. “We’re sitting here thinking about ourselves.” Evelyn pressed the wet, wadded paper mess to her tearing eyes. “I’ve never met two children so stupid. So thoughtless.”

“You won’t believe this, but I put a lot of thought into that decision. I agonized over it.”

“You have no gratitude.”

“Gratitude!” Claudia barked.

“We deserved that much. You don’t think your father and I deserved that? To know what was happening? After raising you the way we did? After loving you? You don’t think we could have
helped
you?”

“You would have made me keep it.”

“Him,”
Benji fiercely corrected.

“And no,” Evelyn went on without pausing, “we wouldn’t have let you give him away.”

Benji took stock of the surrounding tables, a seismograph reading the disturbances that their rising volume might be making, but no one looked their way. Whatever was happening with the crying old woman proved universally less interesting than a quarter pounder with cheese and fat fistfuls of fries.

“We would have raised him. I would have.” Evelyn wept.

“He wasn’t yours to raise. He was mine. And I did what I thought was best for him. I did what I thought was best for you.”

“You did what you thought was best for
you
.”

“Yes. Mom. I did. I was twenty-two years old. Did I want to be stuck in Alluvia for the rest of my life? Did I want to marry Nick only to divorce him one or two or three years down the line? After we’d inflicted whatever damage we could on each other—and the baby—and Max—because all those years that passed were years we wanted to spend living other lives.”

“There’s nothing wrong with Alluvia. I’m tired of you carting out that song. You were raised there. You’re perfectly fine.”

“Am I? Because you’re making me sound like a monster. Both of you.”

“Can we
please
go home?” Benji asked.

“She’s telling me she’s too good to live where she grew up,” Evelyn said, unable to surrender a bone still shredded with meat.

“You and Daddy decided where to live,” Claudia answered. “You decided how many children you wanted. You decided how you wanted to raise them. Nobody made those decisions for you. Why should I have let you make them for me?”

“Nonsense,” muttered Evelyn.

“It’s not nonsense, Mother. It’s not.” Her resistance broken down, Claudia reached across the table and took a defiant swig of Benji’s coffee, wishing it were something made from sour mash. “Benji and I were gone, grown up. You and Daddy were free. You’d been saddled with children for eighteen years—”

“Saddled,” Evelyn broke in, “is your word.”

“You know what I mean. With us out of the house, you could finally go out and live your own lives. You’d done your time. You
deserved
to live your own life. Doing what
you
wanted to do. Whether you took advantage of that—”

“Claudia,” Benji warned.

“Let her finish.”

“Nothing.” Claudia retreated. “All I’m saying: I thought you’d be better off if you never knew.”

“Do I look better off? And tell me. What did I want to do? Tell me, She Who Knows All. How do you know what I wanted to do?”

“I don’t. But I thought there might be something other than raising children.”

“I’ve never been ashamed of being a mother.”

Claudia sighed. “I’m not saying you were. Or should be.”

“Then what would you have me do?”

“I don’t know.” Claudia threw her hands up. “Travel?”

“Can we stop?” Benji broke in. He looked from his mother to his sister to the milling gluttons around them. “We need to go home and finish this,” he said, eyes sharp and serious.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Claudia answered. “He shouldn’t have been able to find me. He would have been better off if he never did.”

Benji leaned in. “You are so fucking selfish,” he said. “And that’s coming from me! If I find it selfish, think how selfish it must be.”

She didn’t have to play at being furious. Her blood, rising fast and hot into her pale cheeks, balked at the injustice of Benji’s tone. Why did the whole of her family’s sympathy rest with a boy they’d known for less than a day? Where was their love, their compassion for her? “Since when did you find the Manual for Good and Upright Living?” Claudia asked. “Share a page, Benji. Please. In your infinite wisdom, tell me, what am I supposed to do? Or is the best way to find some support in this family to find a bridge to jump off of?” Her voice cracked at the end of a sentence she regretted uttering as much as she relished it. She tore a stiff napkin of her own from its plastic dispenser and pressed it to her eyes.

“Claudia!” Evelyn gasped.

The tables had turned. Usually fuckups of such magnitude, with such gnarled, historical roots, belonged to Benji. Claudia wasn’t prepared for the scrutiny of sitting in a chair especially reserved for him.

“What am I supposed to do?” Claudia asked.

“You’re supposed to go see him.”

“I was there.” Claudia snuffled wretchedly. “I was there at seven o’clock this morning. Just sitting there, outside the house. I saw him. He was right there on the porch. But I couldn’t.”

“It’s almost three.” Benji tapped his empty wrist, as if a vestigial watch confirmed his calculation, and asked, “You weren’t sitting there for eight hours. Where have you been?”

Like a deer that had wandered into an unexpected clearing, Claudia stood undeniably exposed.

“Claudia?”

“Nowhere.”

“Nowhere? For eight hours?”

“I drove around.”

“For eight hours?” Benji repeated. “Where did you go?”

“I told you. Nowhere.”

“You didn’t see anybody?”

She didn’t like where this was going or that Benji, so quickly, knew how to get there. “Who would I see?”

He squared his shoulders, gazed long and hard into her eyes. “You tell me.”

“Benji. Stop.”

“Who did you see?” Evelyn asked.

“Claudia?”

“Stop!”

Benji pressed his palms to the table and leaned in. “You didn’t!”

Evelyn dropped her napkin and narrowed her eyes. “What?”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Who else do you know?”

“Who?” Evelyn asked.

Benji put a hand on his mother’s back to stifle her. “You hate everyone else in this town. Who else do you know?”

“I’m not on
trial
here.”

“It would make sense,” Benji reasoned. “I mean Max is his son too.”

Claudia raised her hands to her ears as if he’d set off firecrackers next to them. “Can we not use that word right now?”

“Son?”

“Benji!”

“So you did see Nick?” A pause. “I thought he lived in Seattle.”

“I can’t listen to this,” Evelyn cried, hiding behind fresh napkins.

“Well? What does he say?”

Claudia balled her napkin into a hard little wad and dropped it onto the table. She didn’t answer.