Christmas, Present (7 page)

said.

“I want Mama, though,” Amelia said apologetically. Elliott thought, Should I get Laura? Would she be touched, perhaps too much, at the humble sweetness of this task? But suddenly, as Amelia clung to his arms, Elliott heard a few drops flow. “Go ahead, honey,” said Elliott. “Go on and let the wee out.” For some reason, the tensile grip of Amelia’s arms brought home to him the enormity of his life’s cataclysmic change. An empty bed. A single line of pairs of shoes. Drawers and drawers filled with no scarves and unmated socks and

a shower rod without bras drying, like miniature ban- ners, on rows of hangers. Turning off the alarm, alone, waking in the dark, without Laura, like a heat-seeking missile, having nudged her firm butt against his back, until he literally was over the edge of his side of the bed. Would the day still bloom without Laura’s sleepy murmur, “Time to make the doughnuts, Ell. Time to hit the deck.” Athena’s whining growl of awakening, as she rose, hind end first, from her pad on the floor. The smell of Antonia’s Flowers, the bottle he gave her every Christmas. Would the grass grow now that they would no longer bicker about who’d mowed it last? Would the sun rise now that they could no longer beg each other to get up and make the oatmeal and give the other just five more precious minutes of sleep before the onslaught of the day? Carpooling and dinners, school forms—he and Laura joked that school for three children generated more paperwork than the Pentagon—all on him, all for him, all without Laura to remind him that none of it mattered, that tomor- row would be soon enough? Amelia looked up at him with her widely spaced, always tentative gray eyes.

“It’s okay,” he told her. “Everything will be okay.”

He washed Amelia’s hands between his own and dried them on a cheap, nonabsorbent paper towel. Why give people in crisis such short shrift? he thought. Why not pillows, blankets . . . muffins?

He supposed such niceties were reserved for the birthing rooms, the places where relatives waited for good tidings.

“You were going to say . . .” His mother-in-law ambushed him when he and Amelia emerged.

“I wondered what you had told the girls,” he finally said, “so I would know later.”

Miranda sighed. “I wasn’t going to tell them any- thing, but Annie asked right away if her mother was very sick, and of course then it was how sick, and then it was who would look after them . . .”

“All this on the way from Natick?”

“I’m sure you can explain things better later on,” Miranda told him. “I certainly didn’t volunteer any- thing they didn’t ask.”

“That’s good.”

Miranda sighed again. “Her father . . . Laura’s

father.” She sighed in reverse, a long, repentant, inward breath, but her expression—so far as Elliott could tell— was not fond but exasperated. “He’d fallen in the shower and cut himself shaving. I heard him fall, or Suzie did, and I thought it was the cut that made him so woozy; he was bleeding. They
stitched the cut
. Can you imagine? He died four hours later.”

“I suspect they thought he’d live, even if he were impaired somehow.”

“They may have; but that’s not what they told us,” Miranda said decisively.

“So you feel as though you’ve been through this.” “I don’t mean this as an insult to you, Elliott, but

however much you love your husband, it can never feel the same as losing your child. Your child dying. I still don’t believe that it will happen. I keep thinking the surgeon will find some . . . some way. I can’t look at her, sitting there all shiny and with her hair brushed, and make that square with her being fatally ill. Dying while we watch, helpless to do anything for her.”

Elliott said, “He said there was no hope. Doctor

Campanile. Virtually. That we could put her on life support to harvest her organs.”

“You refused that.”

“No. It’s what she wants.”

“Elliott, that’s . . . beastly. Don’t you think it actu- ally encourages doctors not to try as hard?” Miranda asked. “That’s what Juliet thinks.” Juliet was Miranda’s younger sister.

“This doctor is a pretty square shooter.”

Rory, her eyes rubbed nearly raw, walked into the room and asked for a Pepsi. Elliott fished in his pock- ets and gave her a dollar in change.

Rory sat down. “It’s exhausting me,” she said solemnly.

“And so it should,” Miranda told her granddaugh- ter. “You are very brave, Aurora Miranda.”

Rory leaned against Elliott’s knee. She felt immense, weighty, her sixty sprightly pounds a limp mass. “Dad,” she said.

“Hey?” Elliott hugged her, subtly shifting her weight from his tingling knee.

“Are we going to have to sell our car? And our house? Because Mommy died?”

“No, who told you that?”

“Caitlin Carver’s mother got divorced and she had to sell their house.”

“Oh, Rory. Mommy and I aren’t getting divorced. We’ve never been mad at each other like that and we never would be. We won’t have to sell our house. Everything in our house will stay just the same. Don’t worry, baby girl.”

“How about the dog? She eats, like, ten pounds of food a week. We’ll have to sell Athena . . .”

“We won’t have to sell Athena.” Rory kicked off her shoes and padded out into the hall to the pop machine. “Dad?” she asked softly, glancing back in. “Am I going to have to quit?”

“Quit what?”

“The gym? I know how expensive it is, and Mom says I’m ready for private lessons, but you don’t have to get them for me . . .”

“We’ll have to . . . figure things out,” Elliott said. “It’ll be all right.” Rory left the room, and they heard

her drop the quarters, then the clang of her pop can hitting the tray. “Why is she thinking about selling the dog?” he wondered aloud, half to Miranda and half to himself.

“Children do,” Miranda said. “They did, mine, when their father died. They were going to . . . Elliott, you certainly can tell me to shut my mouth if you wish to, but I have been here. Mine, they were going to hold a garage sale and sell their old clothes because they were afraid of the very same sort of things. It wasn’t exactly selfish. It’s not exactly as though they’re self-centered . . . it’s more as though they’re pro- grammed for self-preservation first . . . I can’t explain.” “You’d think they’d think of nothing but their

mother.”

“But Laura looks the same to them as she always did. She hasn’t lost her hair, or been in a wheelchair... how can you expect them to grasp how sick she is?” Miranda asked, and then added, “You
are
okay, aren’t you?”

“My wife is dying,” Elliott told her, shocked. “How can I be okay? I’m not sobbing and screaming, but.. .”

How am I, Elliott thought? I’m an idiot buying cards that say “Way to Go, Graduate!” I’m a flatliner, trotting around on the tile.

“I mean, are you okay financially?”

“What . . . ? How can
you
bring that up? Or, more to the point, only you
would
bring that up, Miranda. Now, of all times.”

“Because I care. I can help, that way. Do you really have enough to take care of them? Without Laura’s income?”

“Actually, we have very good insurance. Laura insisted.”

“That’s very odd. Her income was not significant.” “It was a big help. It paid for the girls’ lessons. As for the insurance. Laura wanted to get it while we were younger because the premiums were cheaper. And it was like an investment. For the girls. We did it years

ago.”

“Mmmm,” Miranda mused. “It’s almost as if she had a presentiment.”

“No, Miranda, it’s almost as if she thought we could get low rates, and it would be an investment A savings

account we couldn’t touch every time one of the kids wanted a GameBoy.”

“Well, what has it . . . how has it done?”

“We should realize . . . a couple of hundred thou- sand. Or more.”

“That won’t go far.”

“
A hundred thousand dollars
?” Rory cried. Elliott and Miranda started. They exchanged perhaps the first synchronic gaze in their entire acquaintance: Nothing Rory said would make either of them rebuke her. “We’ll be rich! We’ll be as rich as the Priors or the Wisens! We could put in a pool!”

The price being one mother, Elliott thought, giving Miranda a poisonous smile, which she did not deserve. “We won’t be as rich as the Priors or the Wisens and we aren’t putting in a pool because Amelia can’t even swim and could fall in, and . . .” He could not stop himself. “Rory, I can’t believe you just said that.”

“What?” Rory asked.

Elliott sighed. Rory had no sense of the social vice comprised by mentioning money in the same breath with death, the awkward cross-tied position of the

heir. Though shocked by his child’s naked material- ism, he knew mortal irrevocability was still unreal for Rory. Someone at work had once told him that chil- dren grieved in reverse, that while adults were stricken sharply at once and slowly recovered, children were initially blasé, but the longer the loved person was absent, they experienced greater recognition of loss.

He and Miranda watched Rory wander back to her mother’s room. Simultaneously, Miranda and Elliott released deep breaths.

“We actually would be quite flush by our standards, Miranda,” Elliott said abruptly. “I
thought
you were asking if I was
doing okay
.” A hatred so foul and siz- zling it felt like internal combustion gripped Elliott’s gut; he was surprised Miranda did not feel it lick out and scorch her composed face.

“Well, good,” Miranda complimented him. “What Rory said is normal, Elliott. Children want to know what’s going to happen to them. They can’t grieve if they’re afraid that their beds will be taken away. I know that much.”

“How are
you,
Miranda? Are you okay?”

“I’m not stupid,” Miranda said, opening the clasp on her bag, extracting a perfectly clean handkerchief. “I know you’re asking how I feel about Laurie. She’s my child. I expected her to outlive me by many, many years. I suppose I’m in shock.”

“But you didn’t act that way while she was alive,” Elliott interrupted. “God!” He slapped his forehead. “I mean, during our marriage.” He could not believe his audacity. No one living ever spoke this way to Miranda. “You weren’t
motherly
. Or
grandmotherly
. You
agreed
to come on holidays. That’s not all there is to it. You didn’t . . . call for no reason. Do you know you never once had the girls stay overnight?”

“But I worked at night . . .” “You didn’t have to . . .”

“I did, and also . . .”

“You just found it easier to deal with perfect strangers and make their dreams come true than to deal with your own children,” Elliott said thickly, aware this would have none but an ill effect and dis- gusted with himself for saying it. “Don’t you see what a mess Stephen is? That he lives like a college boy?”

“We had card parties,” Miranda said. “Card parties?”

“And charades. And the children would play, oh, whatever they did, hide-and-seek, outside in summer, that game with the flashlights . . . hordes of them, cousins and kids from the block.”

“Ghosts in the Graveyard,” Elliott told her, sud- denly cold.

“We would have these get-togethers, when Stephen Senior was alive. We’d make a bowl of punch, rum, and apple cider. All of us were so poor. My sister, Juliet, and Stephen’s friend Jimmy from work, and his wife, she was Greek.” Miranda went on, “I can remember us literally rolling up the rug in the old house, to dance. We have old eight-millimeter movies of us dancing . . .”

“And after?”

“I honestly tried. I remember a Fourth of July bar- becue I tried to put together. I burned my eyelashes off starting the grill.”

“I don’t know what this has to do with how you were to your own children . . .”

“I didn’t know how to do things! How to do the things to keep their lives the same. You’ll have to do that, Elliott . . . ,” Miranda said, her face flushed.

“I will,” he said stoutly.

“Take care you do, because otherwise . . . nobody invited us, Elliott,” Miranda said. “A widow with four children is not an asset to a gathering. And I suppose they were naughty. Stevie was. Angela was.”

“Why didn’t you just read to them? Listen to the same music as you had before, with Stephen Senior? Watch the home movies, together?”

Miranda folded her hands. “Well, Elliott, I suppose I was afraid it would hurt me too much,” said Miranda. “To be honest, I did not feel the same. I didn’t feel like doing the same things. I could always say I was busy. With work.”

A widow with four children is not an asset,
Elliott

thought.

* * *

W

ith Rory nestled beside her, fiddling with the dials on the bedside radio, Laura told

her daughter that she knew how it felt to want to be the most popular one. “I was that way, too. I would try to tie my scarves around my neck—we all wore these little silk scarves the size of a bandana, but wrapped around with little clips on them, and I could never get them right. I would try to tie them on for forty min- utes in the morning, until the scarf was filthy and damp from my hands, and then I go to school, and there was Petty DiCastro, with hers tied just like on the video in JC Penney’s. They had this little TV you could watch to learn how to tie the scarves once you bought one.” Rory had been the child to whom Laura could prattle forever. She always seemed interested and made appropriate comments no matter how far off the path Laura strayed. “What I mean is, I tried too hard to fit in, until I found my sport. What I want you to do, even if you don’t stay in the gym, is try very hard not to be that kind of person even for a little while.” Rory nodded vigorously. “Do you know what I mean? The kind of person someone popular can talk into

anything? Once, the popular girls—there were four of them, and they wore a knot in their shoes tied exactly the same way—talked me into standing on the edge of Rat Prairie . . . you don’t know where Rat Prairie is, do you? I suppose Rat Prairie isn’t even there anymore; it’s condos. But it was named for what was in it. Anyhow, while they went in there and made out with their boyfriends in the tall grass, someone set a fire, and the rats came running out. The fire department came. I was the one there. They took me to the station. I was hysterical. It was the most horrible thing I ever saw, the rats, Rory, like in the Pied Piper . . .” Why am I rambling, Laura wondered. Is it because of what is going on in my head? No, she thought ruefully, I always rambled. I could never get to the point. Elliott called it backing around the corner to the beginning.