Charmed Particles (24 page)

But Rose had her own area of concern, for in each of her public appearances, there was, from the electorate, the whispered question:
What about this husband of hers? What kind of a marriage is this?
As though Rose and Randolph's arrangement might be a harbinger of poor judgment on Rose's part. How were they to know, some wondered, that she wouldn't take it into her head to go traipsing off after this husband of hers on one of his expeditions, leaving them high and dry?

Lily spent her school days immersed in her classes, attempting to avoid thinking about her mother's campaign, dreading the moment she felt sure would come, in which one of her classmates would corner her, demanding an explanation of her mother's stance on the issue. It hadn't occurred to her that, even among her AP classmates, with the exception of Meena there were few other students as focused on the issue as she was, and that this scenario was unlikely to arise. For Lily, her mother's position on the issue left her feeling publicly freakish, as if she'd been born with a second head.

At the end of the school day, Lily and Meena made their way through the halls to their lockers. From overhead, above the racket of the crowded hallway, came the disembodied voice of the principal, making his end-of-the-day announcements. “As a reminder, next month Nicolet Public High School will host the public hearing on the matter of the proposed Superconducting Super Collider. We expect you to help make all of our visitors welcome.”

Lily and Meena loaded their backpacks with books. “Congrats, Meena!” a blond girl with a high ponytail called out as she passed. “So excited to have you on the squad!” echoed another girl, whom Lily didn't recognize. Meena waved to them and continued loading books and folders into her backpack.

“Who's that?” Lily asked.

Meena pretended not to have heard her.

“What does she mean, ‘on the squad'?” Lily asked, hefting her backpack over one shoulder. “What squad?”

Tom Hebert leaned in between Lily and Meena's lockers. “Oh, didn't you hear, Lily?” He shoved a copy of the school newspaper into her hands. “Meena's one of the new soccer cheerleaders.”

Meena glared at Tom as she made her way through the jostling crowd.

Lily looked down at the newspaper, then up, elbowing her way through the teeming hallway to catch up to her friend. “Is this a joke?” she asked, rifling through the pages of the newspaper as they made their way to the bus.

“No,” Meena said, sliding into their usual seat just behind the driver.

Lily sat down beside her.
Freshmen soccer cheer squad: Meena Mital, Carrie Praeger, Jill…
She looked up at Meena. “But you never said anything about this.”

Indeed, Meena had not, knowing precisely how Lily might respond on the off chance that she made the squad. “I just wanted to try something new,” Meena said.

Lily was confused. “But,” she began, “you don't just take up a new hobby, just like that, out of the blue.” Her brow furrowed as though working through some difficult equation.

Meena looked at Lily, exasperated. “Of course you do. We're teenagers. That's exactly what we're supposed to be doing.”

When Lily arrived home after school, Rose could tell by the faraway look in her daughter's eyes, by the frown line on her forehead, that something was amiss.

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

“I'm fine,” Lily insisted. She sank into a chair in the living room and hid herself behind one of her schoolbooks. Rose watched her, curious, but did not press. She was herself preoccupied by a new wrinkle in her political ambitions.

It had become clear to Rose that if she were to stand any chance of unseating Mayor Callahan it would require an overhaul of her family's unconventional living arrangement. And so she had resolved to ask Randolph something she had promised herself she never would.

Earlier that day, she'd sat at Randolph's desk to write a letter, looking out over his curios as she began.
It is not, of course, necessary to cancel what you've already planned
, she wrote.
But I wonder if, perhaps, by the summer you could arrange to be
—Here she paused, wanting to say
home
, but realizing, as though for the first time, that the house in Nicolet had never felt like Randolph's home, even to her.

This draft, like each of her previous attempts, she had crumpled into a ball and swept into the wire wastebasket beside the desk.

After an awkward dinner, during which Lily had been nearly silent, Rose managing only to extract from her that her day had been “fine” and that she'd done “fine” on her history exam, Rose told Lily that she would be out for the evening for a campaign meeting. “I'll be home at nine, all right?” to which Lily, having returned to the living room and again hiding behind her book, replied only, “Fine.” What was worse, Rose wondered—a vocal, disapproving Lily or this quiet, sullen version?

Lily liked having the house to herself. She listened to the sound of the garage door closing, of her mother's car backing down the driveway. The sump pump in the basement hummed, the dishwasher, loaded with dinner dishes, sloshed away, and it felt peaceful to be there alone.

She wandered into her father's study, ran her fingers along the shelves of mementos from his trips: pottery, antiques, figurines, vases—a collection by which he hoped to acquire a full and complete knowledge of the world. At the window, a telescope stood at the ready. Open on the big leather chair in the corner was a book filled with drawings of mythical creatures. Next to it sat an old steamer trunk, on top of which rested the shell of a tortoise. She felt close to him there, among his collections. She sat down at his desk, pulled a sheet of writing paper from the drawer, and began a letter.

I feel like I don't understand anyone anymore, or like they don't understand me
.

As she wrote, she noticed in the waste bin beside the desk a collection of crumpled pieces of paper much like the one on which her pen now rested. Here and there, peeking from among the wrinkled folds, she caught glimpses of her mother's handwriting.
Home, difficult
, she could make out.

She reached into the bin, smoothing the first page out over her own letter, and began to read.

When Rose returned home that evening, she closed the door of the garage behind her, hung her coat on the hook along the laundry room wall, and slipped her feet out of her pumps.

Lily was waiting for her in the kitchen holding one of the discarded letters, now smoothed flat on the table before her.

“Oh, Lily, you startled me,” Rose said, coming into the kitchen. She looked at what her daughter had spread out on the table before her. She could make out the arcs and swirls of her own handwriting in among the spots where the paper had been crumpled, then smoothed flat.

“You always told me to be proud of our family,” Lily said, her face stern.

Rose took a deep breath.

“You're caving,” Lily continued. “You're caving to social pressures that you should be smart enough to ignore.”

Rose pressed her hands to the counter, remembering Lily's face as a child, turned up to hers, worry marking the corners of her eyes—something she'd picked up on the playground.
Is it true
, she'd asked? She'd sniffled when Rose had finally coaxed it out of her—
that a mother and father living apart no longer loved each other?
“Oh my goodness, no,” Rose had said, taking Lily on her lap. How patiently she had explained to Lily that their family was different, but that they loved one another just as much as any of the families who lived together all the time.

“Lily,” Rose began. “Like many things in this world, this is not as simple as you're making it out to be.”

“I'm so sick of people always saying that,” Lily said. “It's like the thing adults tell kids when they don't want to admit that they're selling out.”

There was a long moment of silence between them, the quiet sounds of the house continuing on in the background.

“I haven't sent it,” Rose said finally. “I didn't send any of those letters.” She wondered now if she ever would. If she could ever find the right words to ask this of Randolph.