Perfect Family (10 page)

“Wrong. William's the all-American guy. Into sports, C-student, baseball-cap kind of a guy. Pony idolized him.”

“Can I ask you something?

“Shoot.”

“What happened? It's hard to believe anybody like her could drown.”

Her father had practically wet his pants telling the family what to think. “It was an accident. Her hair got hooked around a broken link in a chain. The police don't know why.”

“It's a criminal investigation?”

“Between you and me?” She loved the intimacy a person could have with strangers, and Keith Brink was just passing through. “Pony would try anything. Nothing ever scared her.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I'm saying there are ways to brush up against death and then go too far.”

“Suicide?”

“With Pony, it was more like she was always flirting with danger. She didn't stop when she should.” Mira leaned toward him. “She didn't like to take precautions, that's all. She drove too fast. Fucked without protection. Skied out of control. Risk is more fun, no question, but hey, it's risk. It gets you closer to death. That's the definition.”

“What about you?” he asked. “Are you like that?”

Her eyes traveled all over his face. He had a tiny hairline scar over his eyebrow, the faint beginnings of crow's-feet. She felt breathless.
Yes,
she thought.
Sure. Like right now.
“Not in the water. I would never take the chances Pony took in the water.” She showed him with her hand how Pony did the forbidden jackknife off the raft, how she'd jump high and quick as a whip, then straighten so her front skimmed the side of the raft. “It's the straightest way to dive in, but you can break your neck. Maybe that's what she did, and she ran into the chain. Or maybe she hyperventilated. It wouldn't be the first time, by a long shot. She liked to hyperventilate so she could stay underwater longer. But you can black out.”

“You tell anybody this stuff?”

“What's the point? She'll still be dead.” Tears welled in her eyes.

He took out a perfectly white handkerchief and handed it to her.

“I need air,” she said.

She and Keith walked to Elizabeth Park. She'd let herself get off
on Pony's freewheeling spirit, her refusal to follow rules. She'd been bragging about Pony as if she were alive and still full of it, and the realization that she wasn't had pulled the rug out from under her. They sat on a bench overlooking the Rose Garden, which was in full bloom and fragrant. A wedding party was being photographed; all the bridesmaids were in shocking pink. A line of white limos waited at the curb. “My mom once told me we don't have the stamina for hardship in our family,” she said.

“Yeah?” he said. “Why'd she say that?”

“I have stamina,” she said. “Nobody thinks so, but I do.”

“What happened to her? To your mother?”

“Weren't we just talking about me?” she said.

“You're the one who brought her up,” Keith said.

He had a point there. “A brain aneurysm. You know, a stroke. It was sudden.”

“Those are two different things. Which was it?”

“What difference does it make?” Mira had been watching bright pink bridesmaids squeeze into one of the limos.

“So I guess all you girls look like your dad, and your brother favors your mom?”

She studied his face. She felt both brazen and entitled. He'd had acne as a kid; there were small pitted scars. “How old are you?” she asked.

“Thirty-six,” he said.

“Twenty-seven.” She tapped her chest. “That's a big difference.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning it's a big difference.” She kept her eyes on his an extra beat, long enough to feel the familiar, sweet pull at her core. She touched his cheek lightly to feel the tiny marks.

“I never bought you that coffee. You up for it?”

They walked back without speaking, their bodies bumping from time to time. As they went into the restaurant, she felt Keith's hand at the small of her back, a reassuringly protective gesture. It melted her the way a man's touch usually did. It got her thinking about
what she liked in him—the way he looked, sort of craggy; that he was from somewhere else and that he'd go back to wherever that was; that he was a little bit formal; that he'd taken the time to be so nice to her, to express his condolences; that he'd cared for Pony, too. There was just one thing, and the time had come to ask it. “So let's get this straight,” she said after they'd sat down again in the restaurant. “Were you two an item? I say yes. But tell me I'm wrong.”

“I never even touched her,” he said. “It wasn't like that at all.”

They sat in the window facing the street. He ordered a pot of tea. She ordered an iced coffee. They each had a salad. He smiled at her. Damn, but he had the bluest eyes. “So tell me more about yourself,” he said.

Mira told him that she was adjunct faculty at the University of Hartford, enough to squeak by on financially; that she'd had a short story published in a literary magazine; and that someday she would write a novel, but her father would have to die first because she couldn't bear to have him read any of it. “I love my dad,” she said. “It's nothing personal.”

She told him she went to a lot of writers' conferences, which was where she should have been right then. She loved the feeling of sitting around after a reading. There would be wine and cheese. Sometimes somebody would make hash brownies. She usually got it on with the visiting writers, although she didn't tell Keith that part.

He listened attentively. She told him how the Carterets were high achievers and how it had been hard for all of them to come along after a company president like her father and a beauty like her mother. Hard to live up to either one of those ideals. And then, because she was on a roll and because he didn't stop her, she told him about the Christmas cards. How the whole family would line up in front of the fireplace at Thanksgiving for the official family portrait, all of them in new clothes, all smiling at the camera. “We were a very good-looking group,” she said. “We were this perfect family,” doing
those little quote signs with her fingers to show that she was being ironic, that she knew perfectly well there was no such thing.

 

She was fourteen, and her mother was taking her to Halifax, Nova Scotia, for the abortion. Water everywhere, Mira remembered. Rivers and canals and bays in a gray city dominated by a fort that people told her repeatedly not to miss. The crown jewel of Halifax. And the rain came down. The sky held, dreary and gray, so that forevermore Mira would hate the rain.

The clinic was called Floris House, a large brick mansion that was once somebody's estate. The people were nice, but they dealt with her mother more than with Mira. She was led from room to room, told what to do, interrogated gently, but otherwise she might as well not have existed. She was the vessel containing the abomination. She was so ashamed of herself that she could barely speak above a whisper.

The night before the procedure, in her cell-like white room, she had asked her mother the most frightening of all questions: “Does Daddy know?”

“No,” her mother said, and it was a small miracle, as far as Mira was concerned, the only bright spot in her world, that her shame was contained to the two of them. “He thinks we've gone to the lake for a few days.” Indeed, it was to Fond du Lac that they would return after her “procedure” so Mira could rest. Mira went back to watching
The Simpsons
and
Whose Line Is It Anyway?
on a small black and-white TV. She felt juvenile watching those shows, but they were familiar and comforting. Krusty the Klown was onstage when her mother aimed the remote, muted the television, and said, “Sweetheart, I'd like to know your thoughts.”

At first Mira was confused because she thought her mother was asking about Krusty. Then she remembered where she was and what would happen in the morning. “I'm so sorry.” She had been saying this for two weeks.

“Beyond that.” Her mother was dressed in a flowery-print dress
with short sleeves. She had goose bumps dotting her arms. It was cold in Floris House. “What are your thoughts about the procedure?”

Mira's mind went blank. She raised her shoulders and let them drop. “I don't know,” she said, although she knew exactly what she thought. She was so relieved she could barely contain it. Her only concern was that something would happen between now and the abortion that would delay or even cancel it. The clinic would burn down, or the doctor would be killed in a car crash, and then it would be too late and she'd have to go to term. She could hardly wait to have it over with, to be rid of the terror she had felt every moment since she'd known she was late.

“Is it a life?” her mother asked.

“No,” Mira said immediately. “Not yet.”

“When does life begin?” her mother said.

They'd had this in school. Conception, birth, the third trimester? One of those. Her social studies teacher had posed the question one day, out of the blue. Mira couldn't remember the answer, if there even was an answer. She did not consider what was inside her a life. Not remotely. “When a baby is born, I guess,” Mira said.

“So, and I don't mean to trivialize this, but you see this as something akin to an appendectomy? A tonsillectomy? Just the removal of something inside you?”

Mira nodded, feeling like whatever she said would be wrong. Was it possible her mother would change her mind, not let her go through with it? But her mother went back to her book, and Mira was glad the conversation was over. She stared at the muted TV screen. Bart and Lisa were in the audience, laughing at Krusty.

“We'll keep this between ourselves, shall we?” her mother said.

Fuckin' A,
Mira thought, but said, “Okay,” with the reverence she knew was expected.

“This is a very private thing,” her mother said. “The most private thing.”

Mira gave a solemn nod.

“Did you consider having the baby?” her mother said.

“No,” Mira practically shouted. “God, no.”

“I need to be sure,” her mother said. “Absolutely sure. If you don't want to go through with this, you can change your mind right up to the last minute. I want you to be absolutely clear about that. It would be complicated to take this baby to term and to give birth, but if that's what you want, that's what you must do.”

“I don't want that,” Mira said. “I'm positive.” She thought of school, of her friends, of being one of
those
girls—there had been exactly two—who came to class pregnant, bigger and bigger all the time, and then just disappeared. People made jokes about those girls. The boys call them cunts.

“Does the boy know?” her mother said.

“No,” she said. She'd thought this part was over, where her mother kept asking and she kept refusing to say who it was. Peter Cassidy would be in so much trouble.

Her mother glanced down at her book, and Mira hoped the conversation was over. But her mother laid down the book again. “Something very similar happened to me,” she said.

This was big news. “You had an abortion?” Mira said.

“No,” her mother said. “That's the point. I didn't.” She glanced at the window. Rain streamed down the panes. “Can you keep this to yourself, Mira?”

“Yes,” Mira said. Was she ever. She was willing to keep anything to herself.

“I had the baby. That's why I've been asking all these questions. Things were very different for me.” Her mother's chin trembled as she spoke.

“What happened to it?” All Mira could think was that one day someone would come to the door and say they were the baby. The way she'd seen on
Unsolved Mysteries.

“The baby was William,” her mother said.

“William!” Mira had been conned. Her mother's story collapsed. It was a lesser deal, a much lesser deal. Not the same at all. Never
theless, she scrambled to understand so she could respond. “You and Daddy
had
to get married?” she said.

“The man was not your father,” her mother said. “He was someone I knew many years ago.”

“Wait a minute,” Mira said. It was all happening way too fast. “William has a different father than us?”

“I'm telling you this because of what's happening to you, sweetheart, and what will happen tomorrow. You need to know that you're not alone. People handle these things in many ways. There's no one right answer. I simply want you to be sure. This is a big step. In the future, it will take on importance for you, whichever course of action you take. The abortion or having the baby.”

“William has a different
father
?” Mira asked again.

“Yes.”

“But who?” Mira wished her mother would just say.

“We weren't right for each other. It didn't last.”

“But who?”

Her mother smiled. “His name was Lawrence.”

“So William is like my half brother,” Mira said. “Lawrence. What was he like?”

“Handsome, mercurial,” her mother said. Months later, Mira would look up the word:
Lively, witty, and fast-talking
, the dictionary said.
Likely to do the unexpected.

“What about me?” Mira asked her mother. “Am I Daddy's daughter?”

“Well, of course you are,” her mother said, looking so surprised. Call her crazy, but it was a fair question.

“Does William ever see him?”

Her mother shook her head. “Please don't talk about this with either William or your sisters. I'm telling you for a purpose. I believe in sharing very private information when it bears on one of my children's lives. What I've told you was for your ears only, Mira.”

“Okay,” Mira said. And then an odd thing happened. She slept well that night, and in the morning, through the haze of anesthetic
and afterward, the pain and cramps, she thought not at all of herself and what was happening to her but of her mother and William and Lawrence. In the car, driving from Halifax to Fond du Lac, she knew better than to bring up the subject, but it didn't matter. She felt content. She and her mother were bound to each other. Secret for secret, silence for silence.