Right before everything changed, events arranged themselves in neat lines. Each of them pulsed with meaning. Right before everything changed, she already wanted to be someone else.
Mom asked many times if Lauren was excited or nervous about starting at Bethune High, about her classes and her new friends, and Lauren didn’t bother answering because Mom would ask again the next day, like they hadn’t just done this conversation. The town or the village or somebody in charge had redrawn the school zones, and most of Lauren’s friends from middle school were branching off to different high schools. Mom worried that Lauren would feel a little lost at Bethune, but the main sensation Lauren felt was relief. When she knew everyone, like she did in middle school, she could rank everyone, including herself, and she had to keep track of which girls were in or out, who was “mad at” or “ignoring” or “in a fight with” or “had a bone to pick with” who, whether it was better to pick sides or stay neutral, how much power Lauren had in the middle of these conflicts, how she should use that power when she had it, and how she could get it back when she didn’t. It was a relief to escape all this, and for it to be out of her control. She was excused until further notice from entering a classroom to a row of heads turning slowly toward her, each pair of eyes dark and knowing and mad at you. First she would have to figure out why (but “If you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you”) and then she would have to make up for it somehow (but “If you were really sorry you wouldn’t have done it in the first place”). And she was also excused until further notice from being one of the swiveling heads, moving in sync toward their target.
For the most part, Lauren was either the swiveling head or the neutral bystander, not the target. People sometimes told her she was pretty, and maybe that was part of why. She got “heart-shaped face” a lot. Adults said, “You look just like your mother.”
“People say certain things to mothers about their daughters, almost out of habit,” Mom said. “You look like your dad.”
People think you are what you look like. Back in seventh grade, Lauren couldn’t figure out what was going on with Renée Zeitler and Kelly Kavanaugh from swim team, who had to be fake friends because their mothers were best friends. Renée was always bursting into tears when she had to spend too much time with Kelly, and Kelly went back and forth between jumping up and down for Renée’s approval and totally ignoring her. It was strange. There was something behind it that everyone knew was there but no one could see. But then, coming back from a meet in Batavia, Lauren got a ride with Kelly in the back of Kelly’s dad’s station wagon, and Lauren thought maybe she had figured it out.
Kelly suggested, whispering, that they “do practice-kissing.” “I just trust you,” Kelly told Lauren, “and if we practice with each other, that means we’ll be really good at it when we do it with boys.”
“We have to lie down flat,” Kelly added, “so my dad doesn’t see us.” The small of Lauren’s back ached in the gap between the reverse-facing seats. Kelly’s hand under Lauren’s clothes and on her breasts was clumsy but confident. Kelly opened her mouth as wide as it would go and set in motion the suctioning hydraulics of her tongue for the duration of Roxette’s “Listen to Your Heart.”
Lauren didn’t want to be doing this, and she hadn’t really agreed to it, but she did find it interesting. She had never kissed anyone on the lips before, except once in a while Mom. She had definitely never kissed anyone with wetness, open lips, her senses of taste and sound involved, or had another person’s tongue inside her mouth, and when she did think about another person’s tongue inside her mouth it was a boy. She did mind that Kelly was doing this, but she didn’t mind enough to ask Kelly to stop, or do anything that might draw the attention of Kelly’s father up in the driver’s seat, and so she waited for it to be over the way she waited for her brothers to stop doing any number of things when she had to share the back seat with them—pinching, kicking, close-shouting, a spitty finger in her ear—while also thinking about how she might get back at them sometime later.
Kelly moaned a little, and it harmonized with the chorus of “Listen to Your Heart.”
The following day, during Technology & Business, which used to be called Shop, half the class—the boys—plugged in power sanders across the room from where the other half of the class—the girls—sat down to play Monopoly around a square wooden table riddled with splinters and gouge marks. Lauren stared at Renée, who was fidgeting with the dog player piece. She kept staring after Renée had noticed.
“Renée, it’s okay,” Lauren finally said. “We all know.”
The table fell silent. Eyes flicked around. Renée looked terrified. “What?”
“It’s okay,” Lauren said, looking away from Renée and swiveling toward Kelly. “You haven’t done anything wrong, Renée.”
Kelly bleated a laugh. She wanted it to sound confused, like she was laughing at a freak blabbering nonsense, but instead it was like she was admitting something. By the end of class, Renée was sobbing as Jamie and Shannon consoled her, Kelly was vomiting in the bathroom, and poor one-eyed Mr. Van Den Leek was hovering near the scene, hesitant to turn his back on the boys carving birdhouses, asking if anyone needed the nurse. Mr. Van Den Leek never knew what to do with the girls, and he never let any of them use the bandsaw.
It was all so easy, Lauren thought now. It was all too easy.
That was in the fall. There was another big one in the winter. On the bus home from the ski club’s weekly Saturday-night trip to Kissing Bridge, Lauren shared a seat with Danielle Sheridan. Danielle had gotten breasts and hips and several inches in height all at once. She had a doll’s face: perfect-circle eyes, and it was like her freckles were painted on, and her cheeks still had a toddler plumpness. Now her doll’s head was sewn on the wrong body. Danielle was turned around in her seat to face Jeff Leidecki and Evan Lewis, who were best friends. Jeff’s mini–boom box was playing N.W.A, which was what all the boys were listening to now, and Danielle was standing up on her knees, snaking her shoulders and whipping the yarn of her long doll’s hair more or less in time with the guitar sample looping over and over. Lauren turned halfway around in her seat, too, to observe Danielle, flinching away when Danielle’s gyrating head swung too close. Jeff and Evan were goading Danielle into saying something mean about Shannon, who was absent that week with the flu. Shannon ate only iceberg lettuce leaves at lunch and could make one stick of gum last the school day: she chewed half of the stick in the morning, the other half in the afternoon.
“C’mon, admit it, Danielle,” Jeff said. His googly eyes followed all her movements. “Shannon is not hot. She’s just a secret fat chick who diets.”
“It’s like she tricks people into thinking she’s hot,” Evan said. “Just say it, Danielle.”
“Why won’t you just say it,” Jeff said.
These boys hadn’t really talked to Danielle before, not like this. They were paying her lots of attention and tempting her with more attention if she would just bad-mouth her friend. They wanted to make a trade, a deal.
“Shannon’s ass is so loose,” Jeff said, “that when she farts there’s no sound, there’s no friction—”
“Because SO MUCH PIZZA!” Evan and Jeff finished together, and they fell all over each other in hysterics. Their science class had just done a unit on friction and how it is influenced by the three forces of SMP: surface, motion, and pressure. The mnemonic device that Mr. Philbin used to remember this trio was So Much Pizza.
Evan was wiping his eyes, trying to recover. “Oh God, so much fucking pizza,” he said.
They were losing interest in Danielle. Evan rewound the N.W.A song to the beginning and shouted along with every word. It was like they were playing a video game that seemed just dangerous enough to be exciting—what if their parents heard? Jeff shouted all the n-words in these songs, and Evan sort of gulped them down.
“I love this song!” Danielle said over the music. She wanted them to believe her. There was nowhere she could possibly have heard this song before. She bounced up and down on her knees like a much younger kid.
“Isn’t it so great when Shannon isn’t around?” Jeff asked Danielle. The same tone Mom used to ask about Lauren’s day.
“Yeah,” Danielle said, grinding her hips against the back of the seat. “And her butt does look kinda big in those blue pants she wears all the time.”
They got you, Lauren thought, and turned to face forward again, as Jeff and Evan brayed. Everyone was getting what they wanted tonight. As the bus pulled into the school parking lot, Danielle was sitting on the edge of the seat across from Evan and Jeff, her knee pressed into Jeff’s groin. Danielle didn’t say goodbye to Lauren as she filed off the bus with Jeff, walking too close to him.
The next afternoon, Dad was cleaning out the garage, and Mom was at what PJ and Sean called Dead Babies Club. Lauren and her brothers were in the den trying to re-create the University of Texas at Austin’s routine from the National Collegiate Cheerleading Championships, which Sean had mistakenly recorded on the VCR instead of pro wrestling. PJ and Sean were surprisingly good at high kicks and scissor kicks, and they made a decent two-man stack. A half hour into rehearsal, everyone’s muscles flagging, Lauren took a knee to the eye socket.
“Oh, crap, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” Sean gasped as PJ high-kicked and applauded.
Lauren sat on the carpet, heel of one hand to her eye. “Please don’t tell Mom and Dad,” Sean begged. Lauren nodded—Sean hadn’t meant to harm her. She hid in her room during suppertime, saying she had a stomachache, passing the time with a pile of Time magazines and an ice pack. Before he went to bed, Sean sneaked her a Nestlé Crunch and a bag of frozen peas. When her mother came in to check on her, Lauren pretended to be asleep. The next morning, the swelling had subsided, leaving behind a purplish-black crescent.
“Lauren, honey, what happened to your eye?” Mom asked at breakfast.
Lauren, still sleepy, tapped beneath her eye dreamily. “Oh, this—”
Dad looked up from the crossword. “Is that from whatever pandemonium was going on in the den yesterday afternoon?” he asked, and Sean spilled his milk all over the table. PJ ducked his head and giggled.
Mom stared at PJ, then stood up. “Sean, sweetie, that’s okay,” she said, grabbing some paper towels off the counter. “Just try to be more careful. Lauren, what happened?”
“Answer your mother, Lauren,” Dad said. “How’d you get that shiner?”
Lauren was surprised with herself that she had prepared nothing for this question she’d known was coming, and she was equally surprised at how easily the lie came to her.
“Danielle Sheridan was dancing around on ski bus like a crazy person on Saturday night,” Lauren said. “She bumped into me. Knocked her head right into me.”
Sean was staring at his milk dripping off the rounded edge of the table. “Dum-dum, wipe it up!” PJ said.
“Sean, my love, can you help?” Mom asked, handing him a dishrag. “Lauren, why would Danielle do such a thing?”
The lie came so easily to Lauren because it could have so easily happened the way she said it did. Go back in time. Move Danielle one inch to the right. Tilt Lauren’s head an inch to the left. Play the song a little louder. Why not? Who was looking? Who was keeping track?
“She didn’t mean to do it,” Lauren said, staring at Sean. “She was just being a total idiot.”
“Danielle Sheridan is a total idiot,” PJ said, pulling a face at Sean as Sean mopped his place mat. “She’ll knee you in the face as soon as she’d look at you. Right, Sean?”
“Danielle kneed you in the face?” Mom asked Lauren, incredulous.
“No!” Lauren said. “Don’t listen to PJ. He wasn’t there. She was just, you know, messing around.”
“Should Mom call this girl Danielle’s mother?” Dad asked.
“No, no, I’m fine, it was an accident,” Lauren said as Mom came close to peer at the bruise. “Don’t do anything, please don’t call anyone. Promise, Mom.”
“I promise. It almost looks like a birthmark,” Mom said, caressing Lauren’s cheek. “There’s something beautiful about it.”
“Oh my God,” Lauren said, and ducked under Mom and out of her chair, into the mudroom to find her backpack and head to the bus stop.
By the time Lauren had traveled to school, done her locker, and sat down for homeroom, she had been asked so many times about her injury that she had a speech down by heart, so well practiced that she could riff and improvise on it, edit or remix it on the spot.
“I can see you are admiring my black eye,” she said to Renée, who approached her with mouth agape. “But you should ask Danielle Sheridan how I got it.”
Lauren’s whole body buzzed. The thrill of a good lie. Her head filled with fizzy soda. It wasn’t even a lie—it was a suggestion. Lauren could do the lie without telling it. Maybe this was the same thrill that Jeff Leidecki enjoyed every time he shouted muthafucka or the n-word on ski bus. And anyway, it was better that Danielle Sheridan got in trouble instead of her doofus little brother. Danielle had been way more obnoxious on ski bus than Sean ever was at home, and Sean hadn’t insulted anybody’s butt.
“Ask Danielle Sheridan,” Lauren kept saying. The full name felt formal, correct, like an official grade-wide investigation was under way. She wasn’t exactly accusing Danielle Sheridan of anything. She was just granting Danielle Sheridan the right to tell her own story.
Danielle happened to walk into homeroom at the worst time: as everyone else was settling into their seats, right before Mrs. Velasco called the room to order. Danielle walked in, and every head swiveled. Giggling, whispering. Somebody booed. An “EVERYBODY HIT THE GROUND!” from Gordie Garland’s corner of the classroom. Muffled laughter.
“Did boxing class run late?” Jamie asked Danielle as she passed Jamie’s desk. Danielle smiled helplessly at no one in particular, trying to be in on the joke.
Two periods later, earth science, Lauren sat at a back table with Shannon, Jeff, and Evan as Danielle approached. “Lauren, what is going on—” Danielle began, going to place one hand on Lauren’s arm.
“Don’t touch her,” Shannon said, possessive, protective.
“I don’t—how did you get hurt?” Danielle asked. Her doll’s face wasn’t crafted to show distress. Her cornflower eyes and upturned rosebud lips only knew a language of soft-spoken delight.
“Do you remember thrashing around on ski bus like a crazy person?” Lauren asked. An even tone. Again, it wasn’t an accusation—it was a question, regarding an observable event with witnesses. Did Danielle remember? The question didn’t assume one answer over another. Lauren wasn’t lying. She was acting, she supposed, but she wasn’t lying.
“But I didn’t—” Danielle said. “I never touched you.”
Jeff squealed. “You just touched her,” he said. “Like five seconds ago, I saw you.”
“You weren’t jumping up and down and messing around?” Lauren said. “Didn’t people see you? Weren’t you dancing to the N.W.A song?”
“‘One Hundred Miles and Runnin’,’” Evan said. Backing up the story. These were bland statements of fact. Lauren didn’t single out Jeff or Evan as witnesses. They had to come forward on their own. No one likes to be put on the spot.
“But I didn’t give you a black eye!” Danielle said. Her voice cracked. Her lashes blinked mechanically.
A Baby Born doll, with nine lifelike functions and eleven accessories.
“If you didn’t give her a black eye on ski bus,” Shannon asked, “then who did?”
“I have no idea!” Danielle said, one tear spilling down her cheek.
“So are you calling Lauren a liar?” Shannon asked.
Shannon was enjoying this too much. She and Lauren weren’t even all that good friends.
“No, I am not calling her a liar!” Danielle spluttered.
Shannon was one of the first kids in school to get three-way calling at home. She liked using it with girls who were in a fight, but one girl wouldn’t know that the girl she was fighting with was listening in on the conversation. Shannon would probably call Danielle tomorrow but not tell Danielle that Lauren was there, too, on the other line, cross-legged on her bed, hunched over her phone, one hand clamped over the receiver to hide her breathing.
“And when she was done beating up Lauren, she called you fat and ugly, Shannon,” Jeff said as Evan bayed beside him.
Sometimes Shannon would telephone a boy and girl who were rumored to like each other and conference them in without saying anything, not even hello. If you lucked out on the timing—if both of them answered on the first or second ring—each would think the other had made the call; they wouldn’t know a third person was involved at all, or not at first. Shannon called these “crush calls.”
“No!” Danielle wailed. “I didn’t say that about Shannon! I did not!”
“What is going on?” Mr. Philbin asked. “Evan, stop acting like a hyena. Danielle, what is wrong? Do you need the nurse?”
That’s what all the male teachers always said when a girl at Mayer Middle School was crying. Do you need the nurse?
“No,” Danielle said, looking back and forth between Lauren and Shannon.
“Then sit down, Danielle,” Mr. Philbin said.
Shannon wore an ominous smile. “She will be destroyed,” she whispered to Lauren, leaning across the table. “We will crucify her.” She’d gotten that line from a movie about high school. If Mom heard Lauren saying that, she would want to wash her mouth out with soap—Mom wouldn’t do it, but she would threaten it.
Lauren watched Danielle’s back, two rows over and one seat up. She could tell Danielle was crying. Just then Lauren remembered Sean’s bag of frozen peas, left underneath her bed. They would be a thawed lump right now, puddling into the baseboard. Hopefully the ceiling wouldn’t leak. Danielle’s head was bowed and her shoulders were shaking. It was all so easy it was boring. It was embarrassing.
Now Jamie and Jeff were off to Kent, a bookish place with a strong Model United Nations team and a famous novelist among its alumni; Shannon and Evan to Knox, which was nicknamed Jox. Kelly to Catholic school; Renée to Nichols, the private school near the Albright-Knox art gallery—Mom spoke of Nichols like it was a kingdom visible from a misty distance, a castle behind a fortified moat. Bethune was only a mile away from their house by road, and closer if you cut through the yards, out of the subdivision where the Brennans lived and through two more: first the rich one, where O. J. Simpson and Ahmad Rashad used to rent a mansion with a pool and tennis court and now where first-generation Indian and Korean and Jewish doctors lived, and then the “more modest” one, as Mom would say, where second-generation Irish and Italian and Polish factory foremen and secretaries and schoolteachers lived in one-story houses with one-car garages, extra bedrooms in the basements.
Although Lauren didn’t know other kids at Bethune, with the exception of Danielle, some of the teachers knew her: the old-timers who had been there since the school opened, back when Mom and Dad had been part of the first graduating class. Both the chemistry teachers, all three of the gym teachers, almost the entire English department. Once in a while they’d call Lauren by Mom’s name, or stare at Lauren like they didn’t know what year it was.
“Brennan—any relation to Pat Brennan?”
“I taught your mother, didn’t I? Jane?”
“You’re Jane Thirjong’s . . . little sister? Oh, right, pardon me.”
Mom and Dad loved to go on and on about their days at Bethune, like they were on a talk show, because they liked to remember when they were young.
“Open-plan learning, they called it,” Dad said.
“Very few interior walls,” Mom said. “You didn’t really have classrooms.”
“You had basically one huge room.”
“No desks, just sofas and big tables.”
“The idea was to mix up the grade levels and subject areas and just have a whole Free to Be . . . You and Me situation.”
“Sort of a hippie hangover from the sixties. We can have the Summer of Love all school year long.”
“Oh, and no carpets, do you remember that? No noise insulation whatsoever.”
“But the teachers rebelled. They stacked up filing cabinets as makeshift walls.”
“And milk crates.”
“They stole them from the cafeteria loading dock.”
“Mrs. Norris brought in all those hand-painted floor screens, what do you call them?”
“Chinoiserie.”
“Yeah. I read the Federalist Papers under those things.”
“Treadwell stole thirty desks out of the basement that they’d already sold to a parochial school in Lackawanna.”
“Oh yeah, of all the teachers Treadwell was the ringleader.”
“Treadwell,” Mom said, shaking her head. “Easiest A in the English department.”
“Treadwell was at Woodstock. Speaking of hippie hangovers. You can see his hairy butt in a Life magazine spread, Lauren,” Dad said.
“It sounds like a big, loud mess,” Lauren said.
“Sure, but it didn’t feel like it, because we didn’t know anything else,” Dad said.
“You’re lucky to be going there, Lauren,” Mom said, “because after that big, loud mess you’ll be able to concentrate anywhere, under any circumstances. It will serve you well when you go to college.”
“Why?” Lauren asked.
“Well . . . your dorm room might be noisy when you’re trying to study.”
“But then I could just go to the library,” Lauren said.
Mom hesitated.
“Couldn’t I?” Lauren asked, and stopped because she felt herself going mean. It could just hang there in the air that Mom didn’t actually know what she was talking about, because Mom never went to college. Lauren was in high school now—the time was over for doing easy, embarrassing things.
Bethune felt pasted-together, low-stakes. Nobody could even agree on how to pronounce it. “Rhymes with buffoon,” Dad said. “BETH-yoon,” Mom said, or sometimes “BETH-un.” Mr. Treadwell insisted on “Beaton,” which he said was the Scottish pronunciation, although the school was named for a lady from Buffalo, an architect. Bethune had a sense of “make do,” as Mom would say. Lauren liked this. Important things happened at Kent and Jox, and the most important things of all happened at Nichols, because parents paid a lot of money for their children to go there.
“Well, usually it’s their grandparents paying it,” Dad said.
Lauren was tired of danger, tired of the tightrope feeling of middle school. Nothing dangerous or thrilling could possibly happen at a school attended by, for example, Paula Brunt. On their first day at Bethune, Lauren nodded hello at Paula as they walked into first-period biology class. They had attended the same schools since kindergarten but not interacted much. Paula was sour and ungainly, wide-hipped and flat-footed, dark hair in a blunt bob. She tended to have one close friend at a time. Lauren and Paula smiled at each other walking into second-period Speech & Communication class, tried to ignore each other walking into third-period Global Studies class, and burst out laughing when they discovered they’d been assigned the same fourth-period English class. By lunchtime, they shuffled wordlessly toward the same empty table in the sunken pit of the cafeteria.
Lauren didn’t have to account for herself with Paula. None of their interactions had any danger to them—there was the sourness, yes, but nine years of proximity to Paula had made the sourness familiar, almost comfortable. She was steady and pleasingly boring. Her house, in one of the “more modest” subdivisions slightly farther north, looked like the house on Roseanne. You opened the front door, and inches away was the couch and the TV, and you sat down and watched the TV. There was even a crocheted throw over the back of the couch, like on the sitcom. Paula’s mother was a nurse. She went to bed extremely early or extremely late, depending on the shift she’d been assigned at the hospital. Paula’s father worked nights as a foreman at the brass factory, and he, too, was often at home sleeping or eating at odd hours, or he was in his pajamas when the rest of the world was dressed and out. They were quite lovely, as Mom would say, Mrs. Brunt especially so, usually offering Lauren something to eat, but they were too absorbed in trying to cycle their bodies into waking or sleeping rhythms to do a lot of chitchat. Their house was always tidy, but gray and cramped in a way that couldn’t be fixed with a deep housecleaning or a paint job or a new piece of furniture.
Lauren liked it there because the Brunts’ house had an intelligence of its own, orderly and near-silent, requiring no evident enforcement of rules and no meaningful adult supervision. The intelligence of the house might have had something to do with why Paula was the only person of Lauren’s age, to Lauren’s knowledge, who said she had had sex, more than once, with different boys. The boys didn’t talk about it, or else they did and Lauren just didn’t know—and Paula didn’t have a “reputation” like some girls did, maybe because she was not someone the boys would brag about. It was mean to think that, but Lauren knew it was true. Somehow, something about Paula told the boys that she was available. Pheromones had nothing to do with looks. Maybe Paula was practice, like Kelly had seen her friends as practice. There was a power in that, and Lauren wondered if Paula resented that her power had to be concealed. There were boys as old as seventeen, boys one year away from college, who wouldn’t acknowledge Paula if they passed her in the hallways but who, she said, had been inside of and on top of and beneath her. She had watched them lose their senses, and they had lost their senses because of her. When Lauren thought about it she forgot to breathe.
Paula was familiar and unknowable at the same time. She had taught herself a wordless language of looks and gestures, the secret history of how bodies fit together, an animal knowledge of scent. She knew what other people wanted and they didn’t even have to tell her. There was a thrill and a danger in what she knew that Lauren didn’t.
It is not so different over here, Paula seemed to say. It may be strange now, but soon you will know what I know.
Bethune’s teachers appeared ready to accept Paula as a fellow member of their adult world, as they already did with some of the senior girls, like Abby Yoon and Claire Finnerty. Abby was probably going to be valedictorian and probably going to get into Harvard, and now she wanted to direct the fall play and she would probably get to do that, too. She worked hard and happily at things that apparently came very easily to her—debate team, first-chair violin—and her teachers regarded her as a minor celebrity, their gazes blushing and parental. Everyone thought that Claire—class treasurer, writer of award-winning poems, Seven Sisters–bound—was a shoo-in for homecoming queen, but then she wasn’t even voted onto the court, and it was a minor scandal. It showed that a lot of people at Bethune didn’t like her, maybe because she used words like ersatz and perspicacious in regular conversation and looked exactly like Jessica Lange, but the snub also made her seem less perfect and therefore more vulnerable, and that made her even more likable among people who liked her already. Mrs. Bristol, the hardest A in the English department, brought up Claire’s exclusion from homecoming court in a class discussion on the theme of jealousy in Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton—Mrs. Bristol didn’t mention anyone by name, but everyone knew what she was talking about.
It was the English teachers who loved Abby and Claire best of all. The English department was its own little fiefdom: no core requirements, no quizzes, no non-negotiable due dates, freshmen and seniors mingling in the same classes. All the teachers had tortoiseshell glasses and season tickets to the Buffalo Philharmonic, half of them with subscriptions to The New Yorker and half to The New York Review of Books so they could share around the table in the English department office, which was really just a bunch of carrels arranged in a semicircle. The men in tweeds, the women in floral blouses and peasant skirts. The English teachers didn’t call on Abby or Claire or Paula so much as they chatted with them in the midst of class while the other students watched. This was especially true of Mr. Smith, the new guy. Midtwenties, youngest teacher in the department by a decade or more. Round hazel eyes, silky dark hair that curled just over the back of his collar. Sometimes he wore a sport coat, like his department elders, but mostly tucked flannel shirts, jeans, Converse sneakers. It was like he had grown out of being a student but not quite grown into being a teacher. Mr. Smith felt low-stakes, too. Just out of teachers’ college—there was no way he knew what he was doing. He could spend half a class period dissecting a half-dozen lines of one poem, just going back and forth among Abby and Claire and Paula, not even trying to open the discussion out to the whole class. One day the four of them had some in-joke going about “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” on the part about the cliffs “that on a wild secluded scene impress / Thoughts of more deep seclusion.” Without raising her hand, Lauren asked if Mr. Smith ever used to live in Tintern Abbey. The four of them laughed, but Lauren didn’t understand why the question was funny.
“How come you almost never call on Lauren in class?” Paula asked Mr. Smith. The top of her voice sounded like sympathy for Lauren, but the bottom of it was making an inside joke.
Mr. Smith winked at Paula. He said, “Eh, she knows I know how clever she is.”
It was Paula who told her that Mr. Smith lived alone in a one-story brick house in the “more modest” subdivision next to the Bethune campus. Behind his back, Paula called him “the emancipated minor” and, occasionally, “the man-child,” even if she did laugh at all his jokes.
Mr. Treadwell, still the easiest A in the English department, was coming close to retirement, and he was handing Drama Club over to Mr. Smith. Mr. Treadwell liked Noël Coward and Oscar Wilde—he did productions full of arched eyebrows and curlicue sentences. Characters holding unlit cigarettes in long silver holders from the Mélange thrift shop on Elmwood Avenue. Mr. Smith wanted to do the midcentury American tragedies: Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams. Plays with yelling and boozing and monologues. And cigarettes, still, presumably. For the 1991 fall play, he chose Miller’s All My Sons.
“Now there’s a play that ends with a bang,” Dad said.
“That’s a heavy one!” Mom said. “It’s got suicide—no, two suicides—World War II, negligent homicide. Smothering mothering. Usually when high schools do Arthur Miller, it’s The Crucible.”
“Is Chester the Molester still running the drama club?” Dad asked.
“I don’t know who you mean,” said Lauren, although she did.
“Patron saint of handsy drama teachers,” Mom said.
“Mom knew Treadwell very well,” Dad said.
“I did one play,” Mom said, “and he’s harmless, anyway. Big hugger. But that’s all.”
“It’s a new guy,” Lauren said.
Lauren tagged along to the All My Sons tryouts with Paula to “keep her company,” by which she meant that her audition would give her a legitimate excuse for being late to swim practice. Lauren had been swimming competitively for so long that when she imagined quitting it was like imagining dropping out of school or eloping with Evan Lewis. She got her best times in relays, where three other swimmers were depending on her and judging her performance, but she honestly didn’t care where she placed when she swam on her own.
“You were so smart about your audition,” Paula said afterward. “Play it big and silly.”
Lauren couldn’t remember the audition very well. It was a blur of loud talking and arm-flapping and trying not to laugh or look down at her script.
“Like they say about kittens and puppies at the ASPCA—the ones that go crazy and throw themselves against the cages are the ones who get homes,” Paula said.
“Blah, blah, blah,” Lauren said.
“How you kept moving around, pacing around the stage even when it wasn’t your line—like Look at me, look at me,” Paula said.
“Well, I mean—wasn’t that the point?” Lauren asked, raising her chin with the effort of keeping her voice buoyant, unserious. “The whole point of the audition? To say, Look at me?”
Paula didn’t answer. She wore a smile like she had won the game, upper lip pulled down, nostrils flaring. Her satisfied-piggy smile. She did that a lot. The smile was like Paula wanted you to know she had a secret that she’d never whisper in your ear.
The cast list for All My Sons was posted outside the band practice room first thing Monday morning. There was an exit door just down the hall, so Lauren could just happen past on her way out and take a peep at the list, out of idle curiosity. Abby and Claire were peering at the paper tacked to the wall as she approached. Claire smiled at Lauren. “So you’re the designated freshman,” she said, batting her eyelashes like Lauren had done something deliciously naughty.
“Who, me?” Lauren asked.
“There’s one in every play—it’s a tradition,” Claire replied.
“It’s a good thing,” Abby said. “Mr. Treadwell always reserved one big role for a freshman, and Mr. Smith seems to be doing it, too. Take a look. And congratulations.”
Lauren looked at the list. Claire was Ann, obviously, and Abby was the director, obviously, and Lauren was Kate, the matriarch.
“There must be some mistake,” Lauren said.
“The designated freshman always thinks that,” Abby and Claire said in unison.
After English class was over, Lauren hugged her books to her chest and stared at the corner of the desk Mr. Smith sat behind.
“I don’t want to play this part,” Lauren told him. “I’m grateful and everything. But I think another person would do a better job.”
“You don’t want to play the mother?” Mr. Smith asked. He was talking like Claire had told him the deliciously naughty thing that Lauren did. He leaned back in his chair. “That surprises me. Kate is arguably the most complex and fascinating character in All My Sons.”
“Mm.” Lauren nodded. Mr. Smith talked so fast that it was like she had to start responding before she figured out what he said.
“So you agree?” Mr. Smith asked. A friendly challenge.
“Um.” Lauren offered a pained smile that showed all her bottom teeth, like Mr. Smith was in a pickle and she was so terribly sorry that she couldn’t help him get out of it.
“What are your objections?” Mr. Smith asked. “About Kate. Be specific.”
“She’s just—she’s deluded,” Lauren said. She was mumbling. “She’s dumb. And old, although that’s not her fault.”
“Okay. What’s so dumb and deluded about her?” Mr. Smith asked, straightening up and adjusting his glasses.
Lauren frowned. “She just lies to herself and her family about everything. She pretends her child isn’t dead, and she pretends her husband is a good person. She’s in total denial. She thinks she’s protecting her family, but she’s wrecking it.”
“That’s perceptive—I can see why you’d say all that,” Mr. Smith said, “but I’m not hearing you say why you don’t want to play her.”
“Well, I also have swim team after school every day,” Lauren said. “I can’t go to swim practice and rehearse the play at the same time.”
“Swim team will wrap up in, what, two or three weeks?” Mr. Smith asked. “We can nail down other parts of the play in the meantime and concentrate on your scenes later. Also, you were aware of that conflict with swim team when you auditioned. It didn’t bother you then, did it?” Mr. Smith’s grin was like he had caught Lauren in a fib but he wouldn’t tell on her.
“I just . . .” Lauren shrugged, first one shoulder and then the other, her body corkscrewing on itself. She wanted to take up less space in the room. “I don’t feel comfortable with this. I just don’t. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry—this is great!” Mr. Smith said, leaning forward and clapping his hands together in glee. “Feeling comfortable is the last thing an actress should want. This should push you out of your comfort zone. You know you’re doing something right,” he said, tapping one finger in the air, “when it hurts. When you think, Wait—should I even be doing this?”
“Yeah,” Lauren said. Dad would say that Mr. Smith was as oblivious as a bulldozer.
She stared over his shoulder at a collage of old political cartoons. Woodrow Wilson blowing a soap bubble out of a pipe inscribed league of nations. She pushed her books into her chest. Her breasts had come later than the other girls’, and sometimes she was still taken aback to discover them there. “Also, I’m—I’m only a freshman? It feels weird to play the mom.”
“Weird how?”
“Not believable. I won’t look like her.”
Mr. Smith frowned and shook his head. “That’s up to you. The audience wants to be told what to see. They give you their consent when they buy a ticket.”
Lauren nodded and stared at the carpet. “So . . . um . . .”
“Were you hoping to play Ann, perhaps?” he asked. Ann, the would-be bride of the dead son. After he dies, Ann falls in love with his surviving brother, much to the distress of Kate the matriarch. “What’s the first thing anyone in the play says about Ann?” Mr. Smith asked. “Do you remember?”
“No . . . that Ann’s boyfriend died in the war . . .” Lauren murmured.
“That she’s beautiful,” Mr. Smith said. “Before we know her name, she’s the beautiful girl. Well, who wouldn’t want to play the beautiful girl? Beloved by all, widowed before she could become a bride, thwarted by tragedy, bearing up despite everything . . .”
Mr. Smith nodded expectantly, waiting for Lauren to pick up the thread, raising his eyebrows above his glasses. Lauren sensed that he was saying something else without saying it, or that he wanted her to say it, whatever it was, and she would only be able to figure it out later. President Woodrow Wilson was sneering at her from behind his pipe, and AP American History students were filing into class.
“Listen, any pretty girl can play Ann,” Mr. Smith said, gathering up his things and standing up. “There are very few actresses, young actresses, who can play Kate. You are one of them.”
“I don’t have to do the play if I don’t want to,” Lauren said to the corner of the desk.
“How does your friend Paula feel about the whole thing?” Mr. Smith asked.
People already thought of Lauren and Paula as a pair. Paula was assigned to be property mistress. “She told me she’s not even jealous,” Lauren said, looking up. They both smiled like they were finally sharing something.
“And are there people in your family who object?” Mr. Smith asked.
Mr. Koslowski, the AP American History teacher with the comb-over, was standing beside Mr. Smith. He looked at his watch, looked up at the clock on the wall, sighed.
“My mom is super religious,” Lauren said, frowning on one side, glancing back at the AP American History students to see who might be listening, “but no, I doubt she cares one way or the other.”
“She’s Catholic?” he asked. Lauren nodded. “Ah, my people,” he said. “So full of remorse, so excited to do things to feel remorseful about.”
“She’s only Catholic for herself,” Lauren said. “She doesn’t make me go to church or anything.”
Mr. Koslowski half placed, half tossed his things onto the front desk and started writing on the blackboard, hitting the chalk against the slate with extra dismissive force. Mr. Smith, still standing beside the desk, feigned that he didn’t notice.
“Well, I’m glad we talked,” he said. “An actress should get down and dirty and fight with her character and argue with her playwright. I admire that in you, Lauren.”
Lauren tucked her chin against her chest, her hair falling in her face.
“Okay, you are now in physical pain due to this conversation, so score a hundred points for me,” Mr. Smith said. Lauren laughed weakly and stood up straighter. “But just do me this favor,” he said. “Before you decide—”
“I already decided—”
“Before you do that, ponder what Arthur Miller says about Kate in the stage directions. He calls her ‘a woman of uncontrolled impulses, and an overwhelming capacity for love.’”
“Not impulses—uncontrolled inspirations,” Lauren corrected him. She felt both pride and irritation with herself for pointing out his error.
“See, you know her better than I do,” Mr. Smith replied, bowing in a joking way to Mr. Koslowski, who was now scowling at the two of them. A few students behind Lauren tittered.
“I need to start my class now,” Mr. Koslowski said.
“Just trying to embrace some of that old open-plan spirit, Koslowski,” Mr. Smith said. He danced his hands in semicircles, like a pitchman on a late-night infomercial. “Overlapping conversations, cross-disciplinary collaboration, hybrid vigor.”
Lauren was inching away as Mr. Smith turned back to her, gathering up his things from the desk. “‘A woman of uncontrolled inspirations,’ right,” he said, starting to walk alongside her. “Think about what an uncontrolled inspiration might look like. And think about the people in your life whom you could describe in the same way. We can’t condemn anyone with that much inspiration and that much love to give. Even if they drive us crazy.”
Right before everything changed, during those first weeks of high school, there were signs at home of what was to come. Stacks of paperwork left on the kitchen counter in the morning, then silently whisked away. A pamphlet titled Adoption: The Ultimate Journey of Faith, on top of the refrigerator: Lauren accidentally swept it to the floor when pawing for a banana. Mom’s general state of distraction, her spaciness, was nothing new, but now it was a single, distant object that seemed to hold her.
Mom was driving her home from swim practice in their wood-sided station wagon. The Chappaquiddick, Dad called it, because he said it was the same model some drugged-out blond newscaster had drowned in, “just like a Kennedy girl.” The dragon wagon, Sean and PJ called it, for reasons lost to time. Past sunset, mottled lights fell on the hood and dashboard, painting geometric patterns on the backs of Lauren’s hands. Whenever Sean and PJ weren’t in the car, Mom padded out these commutes with some nonessential errand, or a drive through a neighborhood they hadn’t seen in a while. Lauren liked the serene pointlessness of these detours. She could have walked or biked home or picked up a ride from a teammate, but here with Mom there was a privacy in the dark, a privacy-with-another she otherwise could find only with Paula. A key to feeling alone-yet-together was that they couldn’t look directly at each other: Mom’s voice trailing off in concentration as she made a left-hand turn against four lanes of Transit Road traffic; Lauren watching Mom’s hands on the steering wheel and the stick shift, her long piano-player fingers, the veins flat and faint. She had a young person’s hands, smooth and soft and musical. The other moms didn’t have hands like hers.
They used to get this kind of intimacy on nighttime strolls around their neighborhood, but Lauren had grown sheepish about them. “We’re not walking anywhere,” Lauren said. “We start at home and then we just walk home.” They could pretend the car trips had a point. Lauren did not want Mom to know how much contentment she took in these evening errand runs. She wanted Mom to see them as an act of daughterly generosity, almost condescending. She could keep her desire for her mother a secret from her mother.
Lauren curled up in the front passenger seat, knees drawn to her chest, her hair smelling of chlorine and burrowing a warm damp patch in the headrest. On the radio, AIDS activists chanted on the White House lawn.
“That’s the same group that locked themselves to the pews in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral,” Mom said. “The famous church in the Big Apple.”
“Why did they do that?”
“To get attention for their cause. Anything they would do in a church will cause a hullabaloo.”
“So you must hate them,” Lauren said, rolling her eyes.
“I don’t hate anybody. Certainly not them. Jesus would have sat down there in the pews and heard them out. And here we are out in the boonies, talking about them, right? That’s a good result for them.”
Honeycombs of shadow and light moved across the dashboard and Mom’s hands. “Mr. Smith is so weird,” Lauren said into the half darkness.
“Who?” Mom asked.
“Mr. Smith. Remember when I told you about the Drama Club adviser?”
“Oh, yes, I’m sorry, I remember.”
“He says that during rehearsals we should feel free to call him Ted.”
“Hm.”
“Not in class. Just when we’re working on the play.”
“Still. Do you think that’s appropriate?”
Lauren shrugged. “I mean, I guess it’s up to him what he wants to be called. Right?”
Mom didn’t say anything.
“Some of the kids call his office the Tedquarters and hang out in there all the time,” Lauren said.
Lauren considered whether or not she should tell Mom that Mr. Smith let kids drink in Tedquarters. Or didn’t let them, exactly, but he “looked the other way”—that’s what Dad would say whenever the Town of Amherst let him slide on a certificate or a piece of insurance or something. Lauren turned it over in her head. It seemed childish to tattletale, but it also seemed childish not to tell Mom—or not childish so much as sneaky, somehow ungenerous.
“I think it’s weird,” Lauren said, “because—”
Mom was turning up the volume on the radio. “Sorry, honey, just a minute, I want to hear this—”
The radio announcer called it a hospital siege, in a suburb of Salt Lake City. The perpetrator’s wife had given birth to ten children. Two of them died shortly after birth; delivering one of the surviving babies, the youngest of them all, had nearly killed the wife. After recovering, she had “gotten her tubes tied,” Mom was explaining.
“Is that the same as a test-tube baby?” Lauren asked.
“It means she couldn’t get pregnant again,” Mom said. “The egg wants to travel down a tube to the uterus, but the tube is tied off and there’s nowhere for that poor little egg to go. That’s why her husband was mad—not that he—I mean, there’s no excuse for what he did. But he wanted more children. He thought God wanted them to have more children.”
One night, the husband went to the hospital where his children were born. He had two guns and a bomb. He was looking for the surgeon who he thought had hurt the mother of his children. He took hostages: nurses, babies, new mothers, a woman in labor. In the end, a nurse—also a mother—was dead, shot in the back, and a baby was born while the man held a gun to her mother’s stomach. Mom talked about the man and his wife like she knew them. She called them by their names, Rick and Karen. Before Rick went to the hospital with the guns and the bomb, he brought home ice cream bars for all his children.
“What kind?” Lauren asked.
“Rick said he and Karen had one more baby in heaven waiting to be born,” Mom said. “It drove him crazy that he couldn’t reach that baby. What kind of what?”
“How did he know that?” Lauren asked. “That there was another baby?”
“He just felt it, I guess. He probably couldn’t explain it. He knew there was someone out there just waiting for him.”
“They could have adopted, if they wanted more kids,” Lauren said.
Mom took in a sharp breath. Startled, happy.
Lauren looked up at Mom. Her light brown hair in a ponytail, the J of its tip resting on one shoulder. The other moms wore bobs and pageboys, not ponytails. The night patterns moved across Mom’s face like the veil on a film-noir heroine.
The next night, her mother was gone.
It would be two weeks, Dad told them. Or maybe more. No return date set in stone. If Mom was gone two weeks, she would miss Lauren’s Erie County Interscholastic Conference swim meet—Lauren probably wouldn’t make sectionals, not even for the relay, so that would be it for the season. She would miss five of PJ and Sean’s soccer games, and if she was gone two days longer than two weeks, she would miss Sean’s science fair.
Mom was “doing church work in Eastern Europe,” Dad said, slumped on the couch watching the Bills game, like nothing had happened. He was unsure about the details. What work? “Traveling around to different countries with her church group.” Which country? “Ah, Eastern Europe.” That’s not a country. What church group? “Or it could be more accurate to say ‘missionary work.’” Since when is Mom a missionary? Dad made a scoffing noise. “I don’t keep very close track of this stuff,” he said. But didn’t you talk about it first? “It’s a free country; she can do what she wants. Lauren, I’m trying to watch the game.” It sounds expensive, all that travel—did the church pay for it? “Pretty sure I’m paying for it.” But you didn’t even get to go. “Hey, this is how it works. I earn the money and she spends it. What’s hers is hers and what’s mine is hers.”
Sometimes Dad talked like this about Mom. Lauren felt that old thrill in hearing it, but it left a sick aftertaste, like she’d binged on candy just because Mom said she couldn’t. Dad talked about Mom like she was his disobedient oldest child who would steal his credit card and run around unsupervised.
“Don’t worry about any of this, Lauren,” Dad said. “Your mom is going to come back home, and the Bills are going to win the Super Bowl.”
Lauren sat cross-legged at the lip of the Bethune auditorium stage at an evening rehearsal of All My Sons, Claire and Stitch Rosen on either side of her, as Mr. Smith paced around them. Abby in the audience seats. Stitch, a sophomore, played Joe, Kate the matriarch’s husband, affable manufacturer of defective aircraft parts. The scene: Kate begs Joe to preserve the fantasy that their older son is still alive, somewhere in the Pacific theater, destined for a happily-ever-after with Ann, the beautiful girl.
Stitch had been one of the last boys to change. Over the summer, his voice dropped, his nose widened, his legs grew so fast that they bowed with the effort. He had bad skin and a glassy, distant affect, as if he were always five minutes away from falling asleep. It was often difficult to tell if he was bored by the task at hand, or in fact extremely engaged to the point of a trancelike state. Onstage, he projected his dialogue in a baritone singsong that didn’t sound much like the mild tenor drone of his regular speaking voice. Maybe his delivery was a prank, but because he was so committed to the joke, and because he never broke character or revealed the punch line, when he was onstage there was a vibrating tension—a suspense of uncertainty, an essential mystery to his every word and gesture. Mr. Smith said Stitch had charisma.
“‘Nobody in this house dast take her faith away’—c’mon, that’s a great line!” Mr. Smith was saying to Lauren. “It lands like a series of blows. It’s pretty close to iambic”—he paused, whisper-counting the beats—“hexameter. Poetry in prose.”
“It can still be a good line if I say dare instead of dast,” Lauren said.
“And what an act of projection!” Mr. Smith continued.
“Or should,” Lauren said. “No one in this house should take her faith away.”
“Kate says they shouldn’t rob Ann of her faith that her beloved is still alive,” Mr. Smith said, “when really Kate is talking about herself. ‘No one dast take my faith away’ is what she’s truly saying. She’s saying, ‘Nobody mess with the reality I’ve created for myself—’”
“You get that, right?” Stitch asked Lauren. Lauren didn’t know if Stitch was making fun of her or making fun of Mr. Smith, or neither, or both.
“‘—because—because I’m the one holding this family together,’” Mr. Smith–as-Kate finished.
“Are we sure it’s not a misprint?” Lauren asked. “Dast?”
“Think about it: Kate had a son old enough to be a pilot in World War II, so even if she’d had him just out of her teens . . .” Mr. Smith’s eyes widened, and he held his hands open toward Lauren, as if giving her some kind of cue, like this scrap of information was especially relevant to her. “So even if she’d had him very young, she would have been born at the turn of the century. You don’t think people talked a bit different back then?” Mr. Smith said.
“Try the line again?” Abby said. She had to call out to be heard from the seats, yet she still sounded calm and patient.
“Nobody in this house—dast—take her faith away,” Lauren said.
“You say that word like it’s in quarantine,” Stitch said.
“Words will never hurt you, Lauren,” Claire beside her said.
“Think of people you know of—of great faith,” Mr. Smith said. “Your mom, for instance.”
Lauren glanced over at the auditorium exits as if Mr. Smith had spotted Mom there.
“My mom?” Lauren asked.
“Or, Ted, do you think it would be helpful for Lauren to imagine that she’s doing Shakespeare?” Claire asked, and turned to Lauren. “You wouldn’t change all the thees and thous in Shakespeare, would you, Lauren?”
“You’re not even in this scene!” Lauren said.
Claire smiled languidly at Lauren from where she sat, her legs slung to one side under a long corduroy skirt. She shaded her eyes and looked out at the seats where Abby was sitting.
Paula said that there were two Claires, the cat and the dog. The cat was slinky and sneaky. She watched you and avoided you at the same time. The dog gazed at you dreamily and wanted your approval and you wanted to take the dog home, but then you found the cat sneaking around your house instead. Lauren missed Paula, just then.
“Okay,” Mr. Smith said, clapping his hands together. “Lauren, you have homework. Tomorrow morning, when you’re in the shower, say the line ten times fast. It will be just you in there, no one to make you feel self-conscious, and you can really—really wrap your mouth around it. Uh, wrap your tongue around it. Whatever!”
“Stop Harris-ing her, Mr. Smith,” Claire said, teasing, and Mr. Smith shut his eyes and shook his head, putting his hands up. Everyone in the upper grades thought it was hilarious how the senators in the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings said Harris instead of ha-RASS. Jason Harris, a junior, had to deal with a lot of jokes. The lower grades, as well as PJ and Sean, had more to say about the pubic hair on the can of Coke.
“Do you want somebody to walk you home?” Stitch asked Lauren.
“No, thanks, I can walk,” Lauren said, shouldering her backpack.
“Is your mom still away, Lauren?” Mr. Smith asked. Claire cocked her head in sympathy. Lauren tugged at one strap of her backpack, pretending to adjust it. How did they know about Mom? What did they know? Lauren paused in the space between the question and her response. She felt the space she took up in their imaginations.
“She is coming back soon,” Lauren said to the strap of her backpack. “See you guys tomorrow.” She kept her head down as she walked toward the stage exits. She heard Stitch yell “BYE, TED!” as he leapt into the orchestra pit.
After rehearsal, Stitch practiced skateboard tricks in the Bethune parking lot, which bordered the football, soccer, and baseball fields that spread out behind the school. The hollow hiccupping roar of the wheels on the asphalt followed Lauren as she approached the chain-link fence that divided the school grounds from the ranch houses on half acres lining Fox Hollow Lane, narrow and winding. A chunk of the fence peeled back to leave a child-sized opening that Lauren could stoop and maneuver through, into an undeveloped lot, dense with trees and undergrowth. She kept forgetting to ask Dad about that lot. To reach home, Lauren would walk through the lot, cross Fox Hollow, and cut through the Reillys’ yard, next door to Mr. Smith’s house.
Centuries of tree growth shaded and blanketed the houses along this stretch. The Reillys’ wooden ranch nestled under maples and pines. The unvarnished back deck was almost as big as the house. Mr. Reilly hunted deer. He aged the meat in coolers, placing them at the top of an old kiddie slide and opening the drain plug to let the bloodied ice trickle down the dingy yellow plastic.
Past the hedgerow behind the Reillys’ house was the outermost street of the wealthy subdivision, half of it still woods. Stitch Rosen’s house was one of those, on Sycamore Run. These backyards were where the auto mechanics and cosmetologists, the Reillys and Spizzotos, shared property lines with the physicians and attorneys, the Kumars and Epsteins and Kims.
“You never cut through the Rosens’ yard, do you?” Mom asked at breakfast, the last morning she was home.
“No, I don’t go that way,” Lauren said, although she usually did. The Rosens lived in a five-bedroom colonial on a double lot, with a huge weeping willow out back. Half of their backyard was still woods, sprawling enough that Lauren liked to pretend she was lost in them, like Gretel or Red Riding Hood, although becoming lost was never a real risk. When she reached the weeping willow, Lauren could see them through their kitchen window: Mrs. Rosen washing dishes, one of Stitch’s brothers putting something in the microwave.
“Good, I’d rather you took another route home,” Mom said.
“Why?” Lauren asked, assuming the answer would be stupid before she heard it.
“Because Dr. Rosen is a baby killer!” PJ said.
“No, he’s not,” Lauren said, looking at Mom for an explanation.
“No, no,” Mom said, as Dad rapped his fist once on the table and pointed at PJ. “No, he’s a family man with children, religious, a good man. Or I can only assume he is a good man.”
“Religious but not Catholic,” Dad said.
“But he is misguided, yes—not because of his faith, it has nothing to do with that, don’t be so ridiculous—and I do pray for him,” Mom said.
“Good-lookin’ guy,” Dad said. “Fit. Served in the IDF.”
“What does any of this have to do with me cutting through his yard?” Lauren asked. All Stitch had ever said about his dad was that he worked long hours.
“That is enough, Lauren,” Dad said.
“And how do you know he wants you to pray for him?” Lauren asked, and then Dad was yelling. Yelling on Mom’s last day.
Going home tonight, Lauren stopped under the weeping willow and saw Dr. Rosen through his kitchen window. Washing dishes, maybe. He was looking up and adjusting his glasses, focusing his attention on something Lauren couldn’t see. Then he lifted his hand. He was waving at her. She stumbled over the Rosens’ cat, slinky in the moonlit grass, and waved back.
The grass inhaled and exhaled, breathing her feet off the ground. The darkness was milky and changeable, like you could move your finger through the air and write a story. Silent armies of squirrels rappelling from the pines to assemble in tactical formations. Other people’s parents having sex with each other in the Patels’ swimming pool. A baby crawling alone through the damp thick grass, gurgling with determination. The rules change at night, and so the baby stands, delivers a stern speech in baby language, pulls up the Rosens’ petunia beds, then creeps back into her house—Stitch’s house?—up the stairs, into her crib. She wakes before dawn and cries out in shivering distress. Her mother rushes in, moving in a high-speed sleepwalk. The sodden, freezing clothes could be blamed on a faulty diaper; some hazy failure of housekeeping could account for the black bands of earth under her tiny fingernails. Whatever she had done was undisclosed to her now.
Lauren had reached home. She turned the knob of the back door and found it locked. She walked around the house, past her mother’s impatiens, pachysandra, the little pussy willow tree she’d planted when Lauren was born, but the front door, too, was locked. No one in her house ever bothered locking the doors when they were at home. She fished around in the bottom of her backpack for her key.
The house was different as Lauren unlocked and opened the door. The light was yellower, more diffuse, bouncing off new surfaces. In the den, Sean was sobbing.
“But I don’t want to sleep in PJ’s room!” he wailed. “I want my own room!”
“Don’t cry, honey.” Nana Dee’s voice. Lauren hadn’t known she was coming over.
“It will be fun, like a sleepover,” Mom called to Sean from the kitchen. Mom! Mom was home. How long had it been since she heard Mom’s voice? Lauren had forgotten this strange, singsong delivery, like Mom was projecting from the Bethune auditorium stage.
Then, a nervous jolt of laughter from Dad. Had Lauren ever heard Dad laugh at all? The most he ever managed was a dry cough and a That’s funny.
“I can’t believe you kept this a secret all this time.” Aunt Marie’s voice.
“Well, we didn’t want to get anybody worked up until we knew it was a done deal,” Mom said. Who was “we”?
“Hello?” Lauren called as she closed the door behind her.
She heard the pounding of small feet against the parquet floor of the kitchen, then the thump of a small body hitting a wall.
“Oh!” she heard Mom say. “Ah—este bee-nuh?”
What was she saying? What was wrong with her? It occurred to Lauren that Mom was making a halting attempt at a foreign language. Another voice she’d never heard.
The pounding resumed, and a tiny figure appeared in the entryway to the kitchen. A scream rose up from the figure, who came barreling down the hallway into the foyer where Lauren stood. A glad running girl. There was a confusion in the girl. She wasn’t a toddler, but she was a toddler’s size, with a toddler’s unsteady gait. She walked as if walking were new to her. Her legs were long spindles, her hips rotating atop them with a mechanical grind. Her brown eyes shiny as marbles. She cocked her head and windmilled her skinny arms and stamped her feet and screamed again. Nothing could make her happier than seeing Lauren there.
“Lauren,” Mom said over the little girl’s screams and Sean’s diminishing sobs, “I want you to meet someone very special.” Aunt Marie behind her, waggling her fingers at Lauren.
“Mom, you’re home,” Lauren said.
“Boo-nuh, cheh meh fatch!” the little girl was exclaiming.
“Mom?” Lauren was asking, trying to catch her mother’s eye. Mom hovered over the girl, her expression warm and worried. “Mommy, what’s going on?” The Mommy curled Lauren’s tongue, forced and fake.
“Hiya, hew-you! Hiya, hew-you!” The girl nodded in Lauren’s direction, staring over Lauren’s shoulder with an expectant, openmouthed smile. Her eyes reflected all the light in the room. “Bee-nuh! Bee-nuh!” She grabbed at Lauren’s hand and shook it as she jumped up and down. She knew what she meant. She was delirious as she welcomed her sister to her new home.
“You have a new sister?” Paula was chewing into the phone receiver, potato chips or something.
“An adopted sister,” Lauren said. It was late, past ten. She was sitting up in bed under the covers, the phone receiver in her lap. Mom’s and Mirela’s voices muffled through the adjoining wall of Sean’s bedroom, a bleating baby talk, oohs and whoos, little kids playing ghosts.
“That’s so cool,” Paula said, crunching. “It’s cool, right?”
“I mean, yeah,” Lauren said. “It’s a nice surprise.”
“A surprise?” Paula asked. “So you didn’t know this was happening?”
“Oh, I mean, I had an idea, sure—we talked about it,” Lauren lied. “It was a surprise just because we didn’t know exactly when it would happen. My mom didn’t want any false alarms.”
Crunch, crunch. “Huh. Wow. That’s awesome.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty awesome.”
“Where’s she from? What’s her name?”
“Mirela, from Romania.”
“Wow, you never mentioned it at all,” Paula said, yawning.
Lauren sank into her bed, flat on her back, the phone at her ear half-propped against her pillow, the receiver and cord rising and falling slightly on her chest. A creak and a few soft clicks on Paula’s end of the line, too: fidgeting, nesting. Putting each other to bed. Moments before, Lauren had felt a heavy certitude that she would confide in Paula how blindsided she felt, how confused. Now she felt that heaviness changing form, descending into imminent sleep. Sleep would whisk away the unconfessed hurt before it traveled down the phone line, before Paula could hear that Lauren was an outsider to her own life, home, and family, that her own mother was a stranger to her.
“How old is she?” Paula asked.
“She’s, um—I think she’s three?”
“You think?”
Lauren laughed softly. “It’s been such a big day. I’m blanking out. I’ll tell you more tomorrow, okay?”
“Yeah, of course. Hey, Lauren, I’m really happy for you and your family. This is so exciting.” The sudden absence of Paula’s usual sourness and skepticism made her simple congratulations feel startling, naked, almost painfully earnest.
“Thank you, Paula, so much.”
“Hey, before we get off the phone—come see my tree sometime,” Paula said. “Maybe tomorrow before rehearsal?”
“Your tree?”
“Yeah, the beech I’m making out of papier-mâché for the play. It’s so big I’ve had to construct it in three parts that I can sort of stack together. It’s taken over the prop room. I’m trying to figure out if I should make three different trees for each night of the performance—because they have to fall down every night, you know? Or maybe I can make one tree that’s hardy enough to fall and get back up again. Oh, and maybe we need another one for dress rehearsal . . .”
Lauren laughed. “That sounds like a lot of work,” she said. “I can help you. I promise. I’ll come see your tree.”
The word Mom used a lot in those first weeks was exuberant. Also vivacious and lively and full of life.
“Our Mirela is so full of life—she just doesn’t know where to put all that energy!” she would say. “Everything is so new and exciting for her.”
Mirela was exuberant, and that was why she would grab the pen out of Lauren’s hand as she sat at the kitchen table marking up her All My Sons script, why she grabbed and tore at the pages, why she grabbed anything in anyone’s hand at any moment—Sean’s Game Boy, PJ’s Sony Discman, the crossword or the can of Budweiser in Dad’s hand—in order to throw it or smash it or pound it into the floor.
“She’s learning how to share,” Mom said.
She was vivacious, and that was why she stumble-skipped up to every shopper in the supermarket, pawing at their coats and shoelaces, expressing her vivacity in loud, staccato vowels. She was lively, and that explained the constant motion, running, jumping, tripping over her own feet, spinning around and around until she collapsed into a kicking heap. And everything was so new and exciting for her, and that was why there was so much screaming. Nana Dee presenting her with a Peaches ’n Cream Barbie made her scream. The taste and feel of the ordinary parts of dinner—the crumby scruff of a chicken nugget, a runny slice of tomato—made her scream. Anything soft and fluffy—a stuffed monkey, the fur on Midnight, the cat—made her scream. Walking down a flight of stairs made her scream.
Bathtime was only screaming. Bathtime was the worst of all, by far. Mom would sit in the tub for hours in a bathing suit, draining and refilling the water when it went cold, pouring more bubble bath from the bottle, trying to coax Mirela into the suds with her. Mirela’s screams recoiled off the tiles. She kicked the locked bathroom door. The scene would repeat itself later in the evening in Sean’s—now Mirela’s—room. Lauren sat in bed listening to Mom soothing Mirela, pleading with her to go to sleep, at least lie down, at least come close to her bed. Mom had replaced Sean’s Buffalo Bills sheets with pink princess linens. Finally a silence.
“She’s probably never had a doll of her own before, a bed of her own,” Mom said. “She’s never had American food. God knows what kinds of baths she’s had. Everything is scary to her.”
“But why does she have to scream all the time?” Sean asked. “It just makes everything scarier.” Sean still refused to share a room with PJ. At night he took a sleeping bag to the basement.
“Maybe screaming was the only way she could be heard before,” Mom said. “It’s how she expresses herself. It’s not like she only screams when she is upset.”
“That’s even worse, though!” Sean said.
“But it’s our job to show her a better way to say what’s on her mind. We just have to be patient. God will show us how. What she needs most is love.”
“Her eyes are far apart,” PJ said.
“Lauren’s eyes are wide-set, too,” Mom said, looking at Lauren. “Like Jackie Kennedy.”
“Lolo!” Mirela said, pointing at Lauren. Her smile was electrocuted.
“Lauren and Mirela could be sisters,” Dad said.
“They are sisters,” Mom said.
I have a sister, Lauren thought, and felt a feral nothing, a gust of wind, present and unseen.
Abby said they could find Claire’s and Lauren’s All My Sons costumes at the Salvation Army on Transit Road. Abby drove them there in her Volvo one afternoon. It was in the low sixties, unseasonably warm, and the sky and the air had a blush to them. Deepa Singh, who edited the literary magazine with Claire, came along for something to do. She sat in the back with Claire, and Lauren sat up front with Abby. This was new, driving places where no one wrestled or cried over who got the front passenger seat. Deepa wore her long hair differently every day: in two twisty buns, in four slim braids that started at the nape of her neck. She could twist it behind her head and stick a pencil in it while carrying on a conversation and it would just stay that way.
Abby smoked a Marlboro Light out the window. She had a tape in the deck of the Pixies’ Surfer Rosa and turned up the volume almost as high as it would go. The music was ruined, screeching, but it also sounded right—there was no way to fix it. The songs sounded like they were recorded in a black and white world, everyone’s bodies flattened into lines and circles, illuminated skeletons, and it was the music that pulled the lines of limbs around, yanking an arm out of its socket and reattaching it hand-to-shoulder, and the bodies howled in pain but they were happy, too, because what the bodies felt was new and interesting, and when it was all over the bodies would be different and better than they were before.
Abby singing along with every word granted Lauren permission to love the music the way Abby did; Claire and Deepa in the back seat, shouting over the music about submissions to the literary magazine, granted Lauren permission to just tolerate the music the way they did, for their friend whom they loved. Whatever happened in Abby’s car, whatever Abby and Claire and Deepa talked about, was more complex and more real than anything else Lauren had known before, because they were capable of finding this music and understanding it well enough to enjoy it, and that understanding could vouch for anything else they were interested in and any other opinions they might hold.
Stitch, too. Lauren imagined him here in the car with them and chewed on her thumbnail.
This was Lauren’s first trip to a Salvation Army. She wanted to ask the other girls if they got all their clothes there, but didn’t in case it was a dumb question. Abby wore Converse and a hoodie and jeans, every single day. Deepa wore Converse and complicated layers of plaid flannels and jeans with colorful patches on them. Claire wore clogs and long, fuzzy cardigans over dresses and skirts that never rose above the knee, and Abby called it “frump chic” and Deepa called it “librarian chic,” and both of these phrases were compliments.
At the Salvation Army, Claire came into Lauren’s dressing room without asking, a brownish bundle over her arm, just as Lauren was stepping out of her jeans. “You have a lovely figure,” Claire said, “and your costume sort of has to hide that, because Kate is lovely in her way but not like you are lovely.” Lauren pulled the dress over her head and pushed the curtain open on the dressing room, stepping in front of the cloudy three-way mirror. Beneath her bare feet, the linoleum floor seemed covered with a layer of almost-dry nail polish. The dress smelled decayed, like a piece of clothing could die and rot. It was cotton, with a cinched waist, flared skirt, and a big brown-and-white floral print, spotted with mildew at the hips.
Abby and Claire nodded their approval of the dress. Abby ripped off the $5.99 tag before she bought it with petty cash from the Drama Club fund. The rule at Salvation Army, Abby explained, was if an item of clothing for sale was missing a tag, it was automatically priced at $2.99.
“What about Claire’s costume?” Lauren asked.
“Oh,” Claire said, tapping a finger on her chin. Like something small and amusing had slipped her mind. “I have mine already.” She smiled and rubbed Lauren’s arm. “I’ll show it to you when we get back to Tedquarters. I hope you like it.”
Tedquarters had wall-to-wall carpeting the color of creamed corn, a couple of halogen standing lamps, two sagging maroon couches pushed against perpendicular walls, a long cafeteria table, and a small battered desk that only Mr. Smith sat at. Natural light came through a single window, high and narrow. A film covered everything: dead skin, soda residue, a hoagie-ish debris. If Lauren spent too long in there, she started to feel itchy. The week of the performances of All My Sons, the senior girls decided that Tedquarters needed what they called “a woman’s touch.” They said this in a high singsong, like it was a joke and yet it wasn’t. Deepa brought in a chevron tablecloth and a colorful crocheted throw for one of the sad couches. Abby brought in succulents and a snake tree. Claire brought a bamboo bowl filled with satsumas. Lauren had never heard of succulents or satsumas. She wondered how they’d found out about them like she wondered how they’d found out about the Pixies. She had decided to bring a satsuma to Paula next door in the prop room when Claire appeared in front of her in her costume, pretty and airy, a lilac confection with a sweetheart neckline and frilly cap sleeves.
“So pretty,” Lauren said.
Claire shrugged. “My mom insisted on sewing it herself. According to the script, it has to twirl,” she added, and twirled. “I am so ready,” she said. “I think it’s because of you, Lauren. You are so on point.” She flopped girlishly onto one of the sagging sofas, her dress fanning around her. She looked up at Lauren and patted the sunken spot beside her. Lauren sat down and dipped her head toward Claire romantically. They laced their fingers together. At this moment, they were friends. Lauren would just sit here a moment, and then go help Paula with her tree.
“So your mother stole a gypsy baby and brought it home.” Andy Figueroa was standing over them, hands in the pockets of his one-size-too-big suit. A sophomore like Stitch. In his role as the surviving son, Andy had to kiss Claire toward the end of Act I, and he was always going on and on about how revolted he was about the kiss. He felt embarrassed to be in love with Claire, and resentful of it, just like a lot of their classmates.
“My family is none of your business,” Lauren told Andy. With her index finger, Claire was drawing tiny circles in the palm of Lauren’s hand and humming lightly. A song of solidarity, no questions asked—Lauren hadn’t talked to anyone about Mirela, except for Paula.
“It is my business,” Andy said, “because that little freak attacked my mom when she was picking up my brother from football practice.”
Lauren could picture it easily: her mother waiting for PJ or Sean in the parking lot behind Mayer Middle, Mirela running up to Mrs. Figueroa, Mrs. Figueroa trying to wrap the girl in a hug, Mirela rejecting the touch, thrashing, kicking. Maybe Mrs. Figueroa had come away with a fat lip or a scratched cheek. She had been Lauren’s and PJ’s and Sean’s third-grade teacher.
“Your mom is scared of a three-year-old?” Lauren was saying to Andy. “Sounds like your mom is the one who’s got problems.”
On Lauren’s second day of kindergarten, she took a wrong turn down the long corridor to her classroom, froze, and saw Glinda the Good Witch in a doorway. It turned out to be Mrs. Figueroa. She must have been wearing her regular school clothes, but in Lauren’s memory she sparkled and twinkled and stood seven feet tall. A voice like a flute from the land in a lullaby. A wand on the desk just behind the door, just out of Lauren’s sight. Kindergartner Lauren ran into her arms. Mrs. Figueroa scooped her up and buried her face in Lauren’s neck, as if she’d been waiting for her all that time. They’d never seen each other before.
“That kid should be locked up in a loony bin,” Andy said.
“Andy, enough,” Claire murmured, shifting languidly, hanging on to Lauren’s hand.
Or maybe it had been the second day of first grade, not kindergarten. Because there was a teacher’s aide who helped the kindergartners to their classrooms, Lauren remembered, but by the time you were in the first grade, you were on your own. More likely she would have lost her way in first grade. You could tell the story however you wanted it.
“You should probably stay home from opening night tomorrow, Andy,” Lauren said, “because that little freak will be in the audience, scaring your mom.”
Claire took her hand away. Mrs. Figueroa’s rs purred and a shhh threaded and rounded through her speech. It twirled in Lauren’s ears like a figure skater, like Claire’s dress.
“Shut up, Lauren,” Andy said.
“I just want you and your mom to feel safe,” Lauren said.
“Lauren! See me outside.” How long had Mr. Smith been standing in the doorway? Claire got up from the couch, not looking behind her, humming as she joined Deepa and Abby at the long table.
Lauren lowered her head as she followed Mr. Smith down the hall.
“Come in here. I want privacy,” he said.
“You can’t go in the girls’ bathroom,” she said.
“Lauren,” he said. A bark. The sound of an impact, like his voice was striking something in the way and what was in the way was her. He sounded like Dad.
He shut the door behind them. Three stalls, the harsh cleanser smell and then another smell beneath it, loamy and animal.
“Lauren, what’s gotten into you?”
“Andy was—”
“Andy is Andy is Andy,” Mr. Smith said. “I don’t think it’s any surprise to anyone who Andy is. This is not who you are.”
Mr. Smith was standing too close. Lauren wanted to move away, but she was already against the wall. He wasn’t that tall, had only a few inches on her. Maybe that was part of why he came across as so young, why people might underestimate him.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said those things,” Lauren said.
“At the beginning of the school year, you seemed like such a sweet girl. You were such a sweet girl. What happened?”
“I don’t know.”
“You will have to do better than that.”
“I don’t know what to say. I’m really, really sorry.”
Lauren had done something very bad. What she did had cornered her in this small, dank room with an angry man in charge of her. He was everywhere, it was like he was on top of her, but the menace was also coming from inside her—she was the one who was doing it, she was the one who could stop it, but she didn’t know how. She needed to say whatever could get her out of the room.
“Things are just—a lot has happened at home. My mom.”
“What’s going on with your mom?”
“I don’t—it’s just—please, I’m sorry. I wish I could go back and rewind. I’m sorry, Mr. Smith.”
He was relenting. “Mr. Smith is what my mother calls me,” he said. “Call me Ted. Outside of class, I mean. You can call me Ted.”
“Ted.”
“So you’re having trouble at home.” She nodded. He smiled. “Well, we can talk about that.”
“Do we—do we have to talk about it in the bathroom? Because someone might—”
“You can have trouble at home, but you don’t need to have trouble at school. Nobody is going to cause you trouble at school. Andy Figueroa, he’s noise, he’s static—just ignore him. Be smart. Switch the dial on the radio and get a better station.” He pantomimed turning a knob with his thumb and forefinger. “You can tell me anything, you know,” he said, “even the things that make you angriest or saddest—especially those.”
“Okay. I’m sorry.”
“You said that. I got that part. You are that sweet, smart girl that I remember. Don’t forget that.”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“Even if you’re not feeling sweet, we can pretend. Like a role. My class, my play, is a place where you can be sweet. And smart. The two can go together, you know? You don’t have to play the role anywhere else, unless you want to. Just here. Maybe it will become a habit. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“You play the sweet girl and it’s just what you become.”
With a chivalric little bow, he held the door to the girls’ bathroom open for her. At the door to Tedquarters, he made the mock-simpering bow again, adding a rotating flourish of one hand. She felt sick and then a jubilant petulance, an irresistible full-body rejection of the premise that this ridiculous small man could set the terms by which she could talk to a peer or enter a room.
She walked straight past him, past Tedquarters, her eyes cast impassively ahead.
“Lauren, what the hell?” he called after her.
She found Paula in the prop room, cheeks smudged with wet flour, sucking on the index finger she’d just nicked with an X-Acto knife, but humming along in an undaunted way to Steve Miller Band on the tape deck. Music that Lauren’s parents liked. The linoleum eddied with climbing cardboard branches and cascades of butcher paper. Paula swiftly set up a workstation on the floor for Lauren, assigning her to the dress rehearsal tree: presumably the least consequential of the four beeches. Lauren tore the strips of newspaper, dipped them in the thin gruel congealing in chipped cereal bowls, and laid them down, moving from root to trunk. She bent into the lulling monotony of the task and Paula’s voice wooing to “The Joker.” She observed with appreciation how the work became incrementally more difficult as the dribbling glue hardened around her fingers and clinched her wrists, as if Paula had chosen this work especially to still her shaking hands.
Mom wouldn’t talk about what she had actually done to find Mirela and bring her home. “The way you forget childbirth, you forget Romania,” she said. Mom liked this joke so much she kept making it, whenever she wished to avoid a question. The joke meant adopting Mirela was both private and gross, and so it was inappropriate to ask about it.
Here and there, things trickled out by accident. The cigarette breath of the “baby broker”—he was the guy who seemed to be in charge, who talked too close and wore a beat-up leather jacket over a patterned acrylic sweater. That was very Mom, to notice if someone wasn’t wearing natural fibers. The big day, day three, was when Mom began to suspect that all the babies she met were a bait-and-switch.
“In Romania, the kids age in dog years—you’d meet a newborn girl, and the next day she’d be a five-year-old boy!” she said.
Then she caught herself. “But forget all that. Mirela’s here with us now, and that’s all that matters.”
Lauren pleaded with Mom to leave Mirela at home for opening night of All My Sons. “Even if we had already found a sitter whom we could trust to handle such a lively little girl,” Mom said, “Mirela is part of our family now. We don’t shut one another out. We’re all in this together. She will be so proud of her big sister, in her stage debut!”
Lauren considered. “If you can’t get a sitter, maybe you could stay home with her?” she asked.
Mom laughed. “Lauren, if you are trying to hurt my feelings, you might succeed, but you’re not going to change my mind. I wouldn’t miss your play for the world. We will be there. For you. As ever.”
“Mom,” Lauren said, “did Mirela get into a fight, or something, with Mrs. Figueroa?”
Another laugh. “No,” she said. “She crawled into her car and asked, in her own special Mirela style, for Mrs. Figueroa to take her home. It was a struggle for us to get her out of the car, but it was all fine.” She was nodding, still laughing. “Oh, just fine.”
When it got bad with Mirela, Mom did what she called the squeeze. She showed Lauren how to do it with a Raggedy Ann doll. Sit down on the floor, pull Mirela into your lap, wrap both of your arms around her from behind, pinning her arms to the sides. She’s hitting and kicking all the while. The two of them rocking back and forth, Mirela arching and butting against the hold, grunting, thrashing. After long minutes the tantrum would die, like it had been suffocated with a pillow. Mirela and Mom on the floor, panting, emptied out.
“So she didn’t hurt Andy’s mom at all?” Lauren asked. “He was lying?”
Her mother rubbed one wrist absently. “She didn’t hurt anyone. The only one Mirela ever hurts is me.”
“Lolo!”
It happened—and Lauren had known it would happen on opening night, she just hadn’t known how or when—during her big early monologue. Kate the matriarch, in her floral-pattern housedress and matronly bun—Abby had swept and sprayed and bobby-pinned it herself—has a headache. Through a haze of pain, she recounts a dream about her probably-dead son. She talks to her living son about her dead son. She sees her dead son’s face in the cockpit of his plane as he flies past their house, the house her boys grew up in. She reaches out to touch him, try to stop him, but stop him from what? Dream logic can’t account for it. She hears his voice. She looks into his eyes. The tree she planted in his honor, Paula’s papier-mâché beech, snaps and falls in his wake.
“Lolo! Lolo!”
The slap-slap-slap of tiny patent-leather shoes on the auditorium floor. Murmurs and giggles from the audience. Mom in a stage whisper: “Mirela! Come back here!”
“It’s a—I have a headache—” That wasn’t Lauren’s line, not exactly. The audience laughed at the symmetry of screaming child and aching head.
“I couldn’t sleep,” Lauren said over Mirela’s noise. The audience laughed again. What were her lines? She couldn’t remember them, only the gist.
“Just give me the gist,” Dad always said whenever Mom was boring him.
The slap-slap-slap pounded down the dialogue until it was flat and illegible.
Mirela ran into the stage, the thump of her little body against the wood. Lauren felt it through her feet, in the low beige heels she’d borrowed from Nana Glenis. Mirela leaping against the lip of the stage again and again, trying to hoist herself up onto the boards.
“Lolo! Lolo!” Mirela’s screams were strangling her. Mom was trying to pull her away. Mom wore lipstick and pearl earrings, Lauren saw, her hair upswept. Mirela wore a blue gingham dress and a soft pink cardigan. Her hair in two braids. They had tried.
“I—I was tossing and turning—” Lauren said.
“What was it, Mom?” Andy asked, staring at Mirela. “The dream?”
Lauren was looking down at Mirela, too. The top of her head had thin patches—Lauren hadn’t noticed before. This little girl who all of a sudden lived in their house. “A dream . . . but I didn’t know it was a dream . . .”
Mom was whispering into Mirela’s ear, but her hands on Mirela and the puffs of her breath against Mirela’s face only spurred the girl on. Again she tried to jump onto the stage. The audience’s laughter quieted, replaced by a rustling: people turning in seats, or standing up, searching for someone who could do something, wanting to help but not knowing how.
Lauren walked to the front of the stage.
“I was fast asleep, and . . .” Lauren bent down and reached for Mirela. One of her hands could span Mirela’s upper arm. How tiny and thin she was—Lauren had seen it but not felt it. Mirela, who usually pulled away from touch even as she begged for it, went strangely limp as Lauren hoisted her by both arms onto the stage. She weighed nothing. She was a doll out of the prop room, slumped and boneless, staring out from a shelf in the dark.
Below them, Mom jabbed both index fingers toward the exits, and Lauren nodded in agreement. The anonymous audience heads turning toward Mom as she ran to the exits, and then turning back to the stage. Lauren knelt down in front of Mirela, holding her hands loosely. Mirela’s face was slack, her eyes trained somewhere over Lauren’s shoulder. Silence.
“. . . I was fast asleep and I saw my child,” Lauren said. “Right in front of me. I saw my child’s face.”
“Mom—then what happened?” Andy asked. Andy was still there. Lauren had forgotten him. His voice trembled.
“She was calling to me,” Lauren said, looking back and forth between Andy and Mirela. “I could hear her like she was in the room with us.” Her tone was confidential, a message intended only for Mirela, yet her voice carried to the back rows.
Mirela swayed back and forth, her face still blank.
“She was so real I could reach out and touch her.” Mom was at the edge of the stage wings, just out of sight of the audience. “I took her hand, and . . .” Lauren stood up and began guiding the girl toward her mother.
“I knew I could save her, if only she would stay with me . . .” Lauren was saying.
The two girls had reached the edge of the stage. Lauren pressed her free hand onto Mirela’s jutting shoulder blade, urging her toward Mom, whose arms were outstretched.
“. . . if only she held on to my hand,” Lauren said as Mirela took a few mechanical steps toward Mom, then ran past her into darkness.
“But then she was gone,” Lauren said. She clasped her empty hands and cast her face upward. One periwinkle stage light shining square on her face, one eye glinting like a dying star. “She was gone. And then—I woke up.”
The applause, an ocean wave, infinite sound and infinite weight, tossed Lauren upward and caught her again. She floated on it, stunned and still. She broke apart in it, dissolved into the stage lights.
“We—we never should have planted that tree,” Lauren said as the applause retreated into foam, and the play went on as intended.
Lauren—Kate—was supposed to break down in tears at the end of All My Sons, weeping for her husband and her child. Stage-sobbing was easy to do in rehearsals: hide face in hands, shake those shoulders, work up a little extra saliva and suck at it to mimic the sound of sniffles. But when the gunshot rang out on opening night, a starter’s pistol on loan from the phys ed department, Lauren jumped and wailed, her fight-or-flight systems activated. She moaned her husband’s name and took her surviving son in her arms, and her body believed her, issued signals and responses according to what she had seen: Stitch’s silhouette through the window of the plywood stage façade, the shot, the fall. The stage directions said to push her weeping son away—with love, with firmness—and to move toward the porch, toward the silence upstairs in the house where her husband’s body lay. But instead Lauren hung on to her stage-child Andy Figueroa and sobbed real tears as the curtain fell. She cried through curtain call and then she ducked into the dank bathroom down the hall behind the stage, the one where Mr. Smith had told her to be sweet, and she sobbed to the edge of retching, forehead pressed against the stall door.
She felt herself altered. Bewitched. As if the only way to trick Mirela had been to trick herself. She made-believe and it was just what she became.
She fixed her makeup as best she could with wet paper towels and reported to Tedquarters. The cast and crew spilled out the door as Mr. Smith was wrapping up some speech. Lauren pushed against the flow to get inside the room. Everyone looking at her, the swiveling heads, some smiling and proud, some confused. Paula moved with the crowd toward Lauren, wearing her satisfied-piggy smile. She clapped Lauren’s shoulder in either congratulations or sympathy. Stitch was right behind Paula. “Lauren, you were good! Ted was asking for you in his speech—I don’t think you were here,” he said, one hand on Paula’s shoulder and the other holding aloft a beer in a brown lunch bag.
Lauren couldn’t look at Mr. Smith when she reached him at the back of Tedquarters. “I am so sorry,” she said into the breast pocket of his corduroy blazer, the color of honeyed tea. She pressed her face into his chest, his sternum, and felt a strange surprise—she didn’t know what she had expected to find there, a shirt stuffed with wood chips or goose feathers, not something hard and curved, smooth and implacable. She turned her face to see the Blue Velvet poster hanging over his desk, across from a rectangular grid of old Playbill covers, swimming in front of her. “Mr. Smith, I asked her not to bring her!”
“Lauren, no,” Mr. Smith said. He was holding her so tightly, both of his hands rubbing up and down her back. She stiffened against his hold on her, startled and pleased, and she wondered who was watching.
“That was astounding, truly,” Mr. Smith was saying.
Lauren’s breath was shallow between Mr. Smith’s arms and chest. “Mr. Smith?”
“My personal rule is never to be the one to break a hug,” he said.
“Okay,” Lauren said, slowly pushing out of the hug. She hoped he wasn’t offended.
“Those were your sisters?” he asked.
“My mom and my sister.”
“That was your mom?”
Now it was Mr. Smith who was acting. He knew Mom was young, young in a way people noticed.
Claire was at her side. “Lauren, you were incredible,” she said. “Celebrate with us, come on.” She handed her an elegant silver flask. Lauren took a swig.
“Oh my word,” Claire said, “we have to get Lauren’s vodka face into our next stage production.”
“I don’t know anything about that, by the way,” Mr. Smith said, waving his hands around.
“I couldn’t do the lines—I couldn’t even remember them—I just had to deal with what was in front of me,” Lauren said, smacking her lips to deflect the taste of the vodka.
“Exactly,” Mr. Smith said. “You know, a great acting teacher once said, ‘The art of the actor is living truthfully in imaginary circumstances,’” Mr. Smith said. “But you, Lauren—you were living imaginatively in very real circumstances!”
“You people are ridiculous,” said Andy from the floor, his head and arms draped over his knees. “This was a disaster, and we’re acting like it was some great thing.”
“Andy, please,” Mr. Smith said.
“That’s not constructive,” Abby told Andy.
“I’m sorry, Andy,” Lauren said. “I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
“You’re not supposed to hug me at the end!” Andy said. “You’re supposed to let go of me! You’re supposed to do what the script says!”
Lauren lifted her chin and stared down her nose at him. “Andy, you lied,” she said. “You lied about Mirela. She didn’t hurt your mom. She didn’t hurt anyone.”
“Just do what you’re supposed to, the next time!” Andy said.
“I did,” Lauren said. “I did what I had to.”
“I think our boy needs another hug,” Claire said.
“Do you want to come out with us tonight, Lauren?” Abby asked, and Claire was drawing little circles on Lauren’s shoulder again.
It was going to be Claire and Abby, and Deepa and Julie, who was Deepa’s best friend and wore the same layers of flannels and patches, like they chose from the same closet every morning. And Stitch, a kind of mascot. Abby’s car.
“Hey, I’ll come,” Paula said.
“Oh, I don’t know if there’s room in the car,” Abby said. “I don’t think there is. Maybe you can find another ride?”
Paula nodded and said good night, ducking her head and speed-walking out of Tedquarters, down the hallway, past the band practice room, and out the door. She got it, nothing personal. It was best that it came from Abby, practical and clear-eyed Abby, who could squint at the situation like it was a tricky math problem, solved by subtracting one.
Claire in the passenger seat, everyone else in the back: Lauren in the middle, Julie to her right with Deepa on Julie’s lap, her legs slung over Lauren’s, and Stitch on the left. Lauren had changed back into her jeans and sweater after the performance, but she worried that she had absorbed some mildewy essence from her costume, and the others might discern it in the closeness of the back seat. She could smell Stitch. He smelled like outside even when he was inside, like trees and dried leaves or some sleek small mammal who lived in the woods but took his meals indoors. Like he lived in his own big backyard, up in the weeping willow. He breathed laboriously through his nose, except when he was onstage. Abby stopped at the 7-Eleven so Julie and Deepa could run in for jumbo Slurpees.
Claire twisted around in the passenger seat to look at Lauren. “How’s your sister?” The wide-eyed solicitousness in her voice, the predatory purr, the cat and the dog.
“Like, tonight, or in general?” Lauren asked.
Claire shrugged, almost flirtatiously.
“I didn’t get a chance to talk to my mom before they left,” Lauren said. She tried to introduce a businesslike clip to her voice, as in the thirty-second addresses they had to prepare each week for Speech & Communication class. Thirty seconds to summarize the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Thirty seconds to encapsulate the Bush administration’s response to the AIDS crisis. Synthesis of facts, stripped of analysis or interpretation. “My mom says Mirela’s behavior will calm down when she learns English—she won’t be so disruptive if she can express herself in the same way everyone around her can.”
Claire nodded. “That’s probably true. Did you know that Abby didn’t speak a word of English until she was five?”
“What? No way!” Lauren heard the edge of screeching shock in her voice. She looked at Abby in the rearview. Abby’s mouth twisted down on one side, in concentration or annoyance.
“Yup,” Abby said after a moment.
“How come?” Lauren asked, softly. “I mean, if you want to say.”
Abby puffed through her nose and her frown deepened. “It’s not some big secret. That’s when my family came here from Korea. I went to kindergarten, there was no ESL where I went to elementary school, so I just figured it out.” Claire had turned back around in her seat and started singing to herself, like the conversation had nothing to do with her.
“Hey, I made you this,” Stitch said, handing Lauren a cassette. He had written down the names of the songs on the sleeve of the cassette, in pencil. “That way,” he said, “if you don’t like the record and you want to tape over it, you can just erase the track listing and write in the new songs.” The instructions were so straightforward and obvious, and his delivery of them so wide-eyed and earnest—like he was slightly unsure whether she would understand or remember—that Lauren could not figure out if he was putting her on or not. In the front of the car, Claire was looking over at Abby with a hand over her lips, pretending to stifle a giggle.
Julie and Deepa came back, poured out part of each Slurpee onto the asphalt, filled each cup to the top again with vodka from the elegant flask, which, it turned out, belonged to Julie, and passed the cups around.
“I also have cough syrup if anyone needs it,” Deepa said, and everyone but Lauren nodded in appreciation of her foresight.
The movie was called The Man in the Moon, about a family in the South in the 1950s. The scenes were humid and sleepy, and the movie and the spiked Slurpee made Lauren feel the same, and she faded in and out of sleep. The pretty teenage sisters in the movie lived with their golden-backlit mom and sweaty, attractive dad and adorable toddler sister in a nice old house on many acres of farmland. They didn’t have much to do. Whenever Lauren woke up, one of the sisters was brushing her hair or swimming in a pond or lying around. Their mother was pregnant, although her oldest was about to go off to college. Lauren wondered why Mom hadn’t just had her own baby if she wanted another one—she had to be younger than the mother in the movie.
Then a boy showed up and both sisters fell in love with him, and they thought of little else but him. Lauren thought about who her new friends might be in love with. Claire was dating a football player, Dan DeFilippo. He wasn’t a particularly good football player, and he had the highest GPA on the team. Lauren was pretty sure they’d had sex. Abby was sort of seeing a guy who went to Buff State and worked at the Home of the Hits record store on Elmwood Avenue and had tattoos on his arms and maybe other places. They’d definitely had sex. Deepa was sort of seeing a guy at Canisius College who she’d met through Habitat for Humanity. They probably hadn’t had sex. Julie, who was an aspiring opera singer and always played the lead in the spring musical, wasn’t dating anyone. Neither was Stitch, obviously.
Lauren woke up again with her head slumped toward a man sitting beside her, her hair falling on his sleeve, and she put a pinky to the corner of her mouth to wipe some drying saliva as she started to tell Mr. Smith she was sorry for invading his personal space when she smelled Stitch’s outdoor smell. It was Stitch’s arm—it was Stitch sitting beside her. She heard someone giggle, and someone else passed her the Slurpee.
“I’ve never seen a movie where nothing really happens,” Lauren said in the lobby after it was over. Everyone laughed, although she hadn’t meant it as a joke. “Not like that was a bad thing. Just new to me.”
“Nothing happens except for when the hottie farmer boy runs himself over with his own tractor,” Deepa said.
“I think Lauren was asleep for that part,” Claire said.
Abby dropped Stitch off at his house and pulled into her own driveway, on the opposite end of the block. It had been decided that all the girls would sleep over at Abby’s. Lauren felt an intense contentment in the drift of the evening, how she swam along in the calm, unyielding current of these efficient and leaderless girls. They seemed to view their boyfriends as casual hobbies—they wouldn’t obsess or compete over a boy like the girls in the movie. They came to decisions about food and entertainment and sleeping arrangements and the arc of their lives’ destiny with little discussion and no apparent conflict.
“May I use your phone? I just have to call my mom,” Lauren asked Abby, and she felt very young.
Lauren was the first one to wake up the next morning. Abby’s house was bigger and nicer than hers. The living room where they all slept had an arched, double-height ceiling. Great wooden beams, windows down to the floor. She lay still under her down sleeping bag, Claire and Abby in sleeping bags on either side of her on the piled rug, Julie and Deepa under blankets on the sectional sofa above them. Lauren’s throat was scratchy-dry, and her eyes were clumped and sticky with the stage makeup she’d slept in. Last night’s hairpins were piercing her scalp and she was holding back a cough and she badly had to pee. Still she lay there, listening to the tick-tick of the mantelpiece clock, comfy mounds of living blankets rising and falling slightly all around her. She wanted always to feel this cozy, this embracing joy of belonging.
She crossed her arms in front of her, each hand on the opposite bicep, and felt Mr. Smith’s hand gripping her upper arm, squeezing, sliding up and down, in the doorway to Tedquarters last night, just before they’d left for the movie.
“Congratulations again, and listen—don’t worry about Andy, all right?”
His thumb nicked the side of her breast, and again. He hadn’t meant to do it. She put her hands on her hips, to move the arm he was rubbing away from her chest.
“I won’t, I promise,” Lauren said.
“I think what it is, is he likes you, and he doesn’t know how to handle it.”
“Um, okay,” Lauren said, looking over his shoulder at her classmates milling around. Anyone could overhear. Gary Wisniak, the affable head of the set construction team, came past them, offering Lauren a high five. She returned it, taking the chance to step back a foot from Mr. Smith, his hand slipping off her arm. “Well, thanks for everything,” she said to Mr. Smith.
“Don’t you think so?” he persisted, stepping forward. She was cornered again.
“I don’t think he thinks about me much, unless I’m getting on his nerves for some reason.”
“To be honest, I’m surprised that boys your age pay attention to you at all.”
“What?!”
He stepped back and grinned. “Because they’re all terrified of you.”
“Huh. I doubt it.”
“You’re too mature for them. Way out ahead of them. That’s why they don’t appreciate you. When you get closer to college, all of that will change.”
“Okay, well, I guess I’ll look forward to that. Good night, Mr. Smith.”
She turned over onto her other side in her sleeping bag and thought about the movie. At the beginning, the two sisters are lazing in the screened-in porch of their house at twilight, in their old-timey underclothes, listening to a love ballad on the phonograph, telling their small troubles to the man in the moon. The sisters are bored and bickersome, but this is when they are happiest in the whole movie. Not when the boy shows up and the excitement starts, but right then, when they are just rolling around in themselves and taking each other for granted and waiting for something to happen.
Lauren wondered if either of the sisters had figured out how to masturbate. It was the ugliest word she had ever heard. Mrs. Graziano, the health teacher at Mayer Middle, had taught the word to them. Lauren had figured out how to do it by accident two summers ago, lying on her stomach on the living room couch reading Flowers for Algernon while everyone else was out of the house, and she was pressing her hips against the cushions because it felt so nice, and then it all overcame her and she knew from then on she’d have to do this at least once every single day.
Lauren crept out of her sleeping bag inch by inch, working to preserve her new friends’ sleep, a game she could play and win by herself. She found her backpack in a little pile on the hearth, found a bathroom in the hallway off the kitchen, peed, splashed some water on her face, dabbed at her clotted eyelashes with a tissue, wiped at smeared eyeliner, plucked out the hairpins. Crimped locks of her hair stuck straight out from her head. She rummaged around in her backpack for a comb and found the tape that Stitch had given her. Claire and Abby had noticed how Stitch had underlined each word in the title of each song.
“Song titles should be in quotation marks, but still, that is so cute,” Claire had said.
Lauren tried to tamp her hair down with wet fingers, then bent over and held her head under the running faucet. The water ran cold then tepid. She was relieved that none of the other girls had seen her like this. She rubbed her hair with a hand towel, and her face went hot as she remembered: Mirela onstage, Mom running into the wings, the tears, the speeches. As cozy as she had felt just a few minutes before, she now felt urgently that she needed to leave this house, that she could not be seen, that the older girls had only been doing a kindness by asking her out with them, that they would not want to see her now, having caused such a commotion with her weirdo family.
Abby’s mom was in the kitchen, slicing strawberries and watermelon, frying eggs. “Good morning, Mrs. Yoon,” Lauren said, putting up a goodbye hand. “I’m Lauren. Thank you very much for having me over.” A promise not to bother her further, to get out of her way.
“Hello, good morning!” Mrs. Yoon waved at Lauren with a charming urgency, as if from some distance. “Stay, please stay.” She put one hand on Lauren’s shoulder, the gentle pressure of her touch substituting for the language Lauren didn’t speak.
“I couldn’t bother you, ma’am, but thank you so much.”
She cut through the dewy yards in the thin morning light. The front door was locked—Mom always locked up the house at night now—and Lauren let herself in with her key. Everyone was still asleep. After weeks of getting home late or sleeping over at Paula’s, she hadn’t seen her house in a while, not in daylight, not alone without somewhere else she already had to be.
Dark scuff marks all over the hallway walls. Puncture wounds here and there. In the living room, the carved-wood mallard ducks on the mantelpiece and the clusters of framed photographs on the piano had disappeared. The chunk of rock from the trip to Italy when Mom and Dad fell in love, gone. The line of Lauren and PJ and Sean’s school pictures that climbed the wall opposite the staircase—all gone, too, each frame leaving behind a faint rectangular footprint. A lingering vinegary odor, the result of Mom’s iffy attempts to cook sarmale, thick glutinous rolls stuffed with beef and bacon and salty cabbage. A Romanian dish to remind Mirela of home—not the true home she was taken from, but a pretend home she might have had under different circumstances, one filled with the smell of hot, wet garbage.
It occurred to Lauren that Abby and Mirela had something that she did not: a first country, a first language, the other life that provided the first strand of the double helix of a real person. Lauren’s was a half life. She imagined that if she tried to describe this insight to Abby, she would twist her mouth to one side and look away.
Midnight slinked down the hallway and rubbed herself against Lauren’s ankles. She was thinner, her tail bigger in proportion to her body. Lauren had chosen her from the shelter, but Mom had given naming privileges to Sean, then aged five; he chose Midnight for her black fur. Lauren had been mean to Sean about the name, called it “tacky,” and she felt bad about it now—it was a good showing for a five-year-old, she had come to realize, and Midnight always loved Sean best. These days, Midnight and Sean spent a lot of time together in the basement, because Mirela could only reach the basement with great hollering effort. Creeping down, down, with slow noise.
Lauren sat cross-legged in the hallway and rubbed between Midnight’s ears. The cat’s eyes rolled back in her head as she leaned into the rub, overwhelmed by Lauren’s touch, baring her teeth. Lauren let her nibble roughly at her knuckles and bite down into her palm.
“We’ve been through a lot,” Lauren whispered to Midnight, wincing as she tried to ease her hand out from between Midnight’s jaws. “Let’s just let off some steam.”
“Sean is regressing,” Mom said, the following weekend. She was driving Lauren to sleep over at Paula’s house, Mirela strapped into the car seat in the back.
Sean had moved more of his things into the basement that week after Mirela destroyed the planetarium he constructed with paint in primary colors, foam and string and Christmas lights. Sean cried so hard he fell into a fit of dry heaves and refused to go to school.
“It’s annoying you went to all that trouble of baby-proofing the house when it didn’t even work,” Lauren told Mom. There were zip ties on the pantry door and cutlery drawers. Chunks of adhesive rubber stuck to table corners. A padlock on Mirela’s door, which was still decorated with construction-paper cutout letters, with shoelace stitching in pigskin brown, spelling S-E-A-N.
“Annoying to who?” Mom asked.
“To you, I guess,” Lauren said.
“Dad helped, too,” Mom said.
“Sure he did,” Lauren said. Dad was always at work lately, even at night. He said he had paperwork, but he could just as easily do the paperwork at home.
“Parents always have to take precautions,” Mom said. “It honestly wasn’t much different when you and your brothers were babies.”
“But Mirela isn’t a baby,” Lauren said.
“But if you count from the day she joined our family,” Mom replied, “it’s like she’s still a newborn.”
“Babby,” Mirela said, pensive. She could sit happily for hours strapped into her car seat, looking out the window and babbling to herself, kicking the back of the front passenger seat.
They were learning Mirela. One thing they had learned was that she was best in the car and worst at home. “That’s because home is where she feels safest, ” Mom said. “She can test boundaries. You and your brothers were the same. So often perfect angels out in the world until we got back to the house and all heck broke loose.”
“Mirela is never a perfect angel out in the world,” Lauren said.
“Anyhow, Sean feels displaced,” Mom said. “It’s probably just a phase. You had a minor regression phase, too, right after PJ was born, when you weren’t the baby any longer.”
“I did?” Lauren asked. “I don’t remember that.”
“Of course you don’t. You were only about the age Mirela is now.”
Do you even know how old Mirela is? Lauren thought.
“That’s one of the funny parts of all this,” Mom said. “Mirela probably won’t even remember it.”
“Everybody else will,” Lauren said glumly.
“You know what Sean asked me the other day?” Mom asked. “He said, ‘Mom, when will Mirela be normal?’” She laughed.
“And what did you say?” Lauren asked, trying to sound uninterested in the answer.
“Well, I told him that Mirela has a very unique way of experiencing the world—”
“There’s no such thing as very unique,” Lauren said. “You’re either unique or you’re not.”
“—and her unique way of experiencing the world is one of the many gifts she has to share with us,” Mom said, looking up into the rearview mirror. “Isn’t that true, Mirela?” Mirela kept humming out the window.
“So Mirela destroying Sean’s solar system was a gift?” Lauren asked.
“That’s pretty much what Sean asked, too. No, it wasn’t a gift. But it was her own way of showing enthusiasm—I know that’s hard to understand, but it’s true. Or—think about the play.”
“I never want to think about the play ever again,” said Lauren, who thought about the play frequently.
“Okay, well, however you feel about it now, there’s something wonderful about being able to create a moment like that. The moment that you and Mirela had together. That’s a gift. No one who was there will ever forget that night.”
“And I’m sure Sean will never forget Mirela destroying his solar system.”
Mom sighed. “The gift that we can give her is patience. Love and patience is all she needs.” Mom was turning onto the circular drive that bisected the lawn in front of Saint Benedict’s.
“All she needs to become normal?” Lauren asked.
“All she needs to become herself.” Mom glided into a spot across from the rectory in the near-empty parking lot.
“What are we doing?” Lauren asked. “You go to mass tomorrow morning. Aren’t you doing the dead baby mass?”
“Lauren. I expect that sort of talk from your brothers, not from you.” Mom took her keys from the ignition. “I’ve got some boards and plywood from a couple of your dad’s construction sites in the trunk. Flimsy stuff. We’re going to break them down and—”
“We?”
“Not you. Unless you want to.”
“‘We’ who?”
“We, you know, uh, the Respect Life committee. We’re going to try to use them for signs at our next day of action.” Mom was already opening her door and sliding out of the front seat.
“Mom . . .” Lauren whined. She slumped in her seat.
Mom was opening the door on Lauren’s side. “C’mon, you don’t have to carry anything—I mean, not if you don’t want to. It won’t take long. Just be another pair of eyes on Mirela for me,” she said, and walked around to the trunk to start removing the boards.
Lauren got out of the station wagon and opened the door to Mirela in the back seat as Mom lugged a stack of plywood to the rectory. As Lauren unclipped the car seat straps, her diaphragm collapsed and the air in her belly coughed out of her throat; she crumpled over in surprise, a shrunken balloon. Mirela had punched her in the stomach, and now she was scooting under Lauren’s hunched frame to escape the car, and Lauren wheezed as she caught Mirela around one thin wrist, the girl pulling and scratching to get away. Lauren steadied herself on the door frame, then sat down on the pavement, her hand clenched around Mirela’s arm, to keep the screaming, fighting girl safe at her side. She watched as Mom hurried out of the rectory and back to the car. Mirela was tugging at her with mounting fury.
“Lauren,” her mother said, exasperated, “why are you sitting on the ground when you could be helping?”
“Lolo!” Mirela screamed.
Ridiculous tears filled Lauren’s eyes as she tried to remember what Mom had demonstrated with the Raggedy Ann doll. The squeeze. It had looked like it would be so easy, Mirela had roughly the proportions of Raggedy Ann, but her head was a swinging club, her arching back was a rubber band she could use to catapult herself out of the hold, she had ten hitting limbs, she had teeth. A fat tear fell from Lauren’s eye into the crook of Mirela’s neck, and Mirela wailed like she’d been scalded.
Lauren again felt herself altered. Bewitched. Her internal organs had grown or shifted around, or the casement of her body had shrunk. She’d been tricked. Her anger was childish, and she was embarrassed by it, and the embarrassment magnified her anger. It was Mom who had staged this, but why? This was not where she was supposed to be. This was not supposed to be her sister. Mom was not supposed to be this strange child’s mother. This strange child was not calling her name.
“You offered me a ride to Paula’s!” Lauren shouted, as Mirela bicycled her legs in an attempt to escape her grip. “If you didn’t want to just give me a ride to Paula’s, you should have said so!”
“Lauren—”
“Lolo!”
“I didn’t ask for this!” Lauren said. “I don’t want to be here! I’m not supposed to be here!”
“Be here!” Mirela said.
“Ladies, can I be of some assistance?” a man’s voice called out. An average man of average build, striding out of the rectory toward their car. Salt-and-pepper hair and beard, pressed jeans and a blue crewneck, eyes crinkling with benevolence. It took Lauren a couple of seconds to register his priest’s collar, long enough for Mirela to break free and run to the man, her stick arms outstretched. Mirela flung her head away from him as he scooped her up into the hug she begged for and refused, screaming in delight as he tossed her around and dangled her upside down.
He was new here, Lauren remembered—he was the one who had replaced Father Paul, who had been put on “medical leave.” Mom and Dad would always laugh with each other in a secret way when Father Paul’s “medical leave” came up, usually when Nana Glenis went out of her way to mention it so she could go on and on about how Father Paul had gotten “railroaded,” and then Dad would make some horrible dirty joke about “railroading” that PJ and Sean would repeat for days, and Dad would find that funny at first and then he would get mad at them, even though they learned it from him, so really it was like Dad was mad at himself.
This new priest, Father Steve, was the one Mom would get giggly about, and he appeared to know Mirela already, well enough to understand that she seemed happiest when she was spinning and flying and losing her breath.
“Father Steve,” Mom sighed, sheepish, relieved, as Lauren got to her feet. “Could you just keep an eye on Mirela while we finish unloading these? Oh, and this is my older daughter, Lauren—I’m sorry you haven’t met before now.”
“How do you do,” Father Steve called. Lauren ignored him and took the last pile of boards out of the trunk.
“Manners, Lauren,” Mom said.
“Nice to meet you, sir,” Lauren mumbled, pushing her palm against an edge of plywood, hoping for a splinter.
“Maybe next time you can be thoughtful toward your sister and me, even when you think no one is looking,” Mom murmured to Lauren as they dragged their parcels over the sidewalk and into the rectory.
By the time Mom and Lauren reached the classroom where the Respect Life committee convened, Mirela had moved on from Father Steve to the Huebler sisters. She danced ring-around-the-rosie with Summer and she climbed Charity like a ladder.
A door-sized poster was laid out on the table closest to the entryway, all reds and purples, the imagery dripping, steaming hot.
“Jesus, Mom, what is this?”
“Lauren, watch your language,” her mother said.
“What are you going to do with this?” Lauren asked.
“We are trying to be truth tellers, Lauren,” Father Steve said. “We just wish we had a different truth to tell.”
“But that’s disgusting,” Lauren said. Her mother began silently rolling up the poster, her face unreadable.
“You are absolutely right, Lauren,” Father Steve said. “It is disgusting. I’m afraid that’s why we’re here.”
It wasn’t Mom who’d staged this after all. It was this man with the creamy voice, stroking his beard like he could extract a sermon through his fingertips. Pick some scripture out from under his fingernails. This was the man, or the kind of man, who would have talked Mom into bringing Mirela home. He was why they were here, why Mirela had punched her.
“Lauren, wipe that look off your face now,” Mom said.
There were more posters splattered with the same reds and purples and black block-capital letters stacked up against the classroom windows. An impression of bawling offal, a rotting mess in the back of a truck, no one discrete component that could be recognized and named. The horror was so far inside that it couldn’t be dug out.
“Mom,” Lauren asked, “tell me, please—what are you doing with these signs? Where are you—why do you have these?”
Mom looked down silently at the poster in her hands, a monk with her scroll. Her ponytail had come loose and strands of hair hung in her eyes.
Father Steve cleared his throat. “So, Lauren. Your mother tells me that you and Mirela made quite the big impression in your stage debuts,” he said.
A chair toppled over behind him, a Mirela scream.
“Mom?” Lauren said again. “Mom, please.”
“Perhaps—uh, perhaps you should do an all-ladies production of All My Sons called All My Daughters.” Father Steve had an easy confidence, like he could convince other people he was clever just by believing it himself, puffing up his chest like he was converting the oxygen he extracted from the air into something pure, edifying, forest-sustaining.
“That’s interesting,” Mom said. “What would the corrupt matriarch produce instead of defective plane parts?”
“Hmm. Pretty dresses, I would think,” Father Steve said.
Lauren wiped the look back on her face. “Tampons,” she said. A drop of spit on the p.
Mom smiled hard. “Lauren says things just for effect,” she said. “My apologies, Father.”
“No apologies necessary.”
“And, Father, you’re missing a plot point—pretty dresses never killed anyone,” Mom said, a jingle-jangle in her voice.
“Tampons kill,” Lauren said. “You ever hear of toxic shock syndrome?”
“Lauren, that is enough,” Mom said, closing her eyes.
“I suppose I haven’t thought this through,” Father Steve said. “But it seems to me that mothers like yours, Lauren, think of everyone’s children as all their daughters, all their sons.”
“Yup, that sure is the title of the play,” Lauren said. She was acting like her brothers.
“Mothers like yours feel called upon by God to love and serve every human life,” Father Steve said. “Your mother has set a great and Christly example in welcoming Mirela into our community of life.”
“Mirela!” Mom gasped. “Where is Mirela?” She darted out of the room. They could hear her calling the girl’s name up and down the hallway.
“You were supposed to be watching her,” Lauren said to Summer and Charity.
Charity snorted. “That’s news to us,” she said.
“She’s always running away,” Summer said.
“I’m so afraid we’ll see her picture on a milk carton someday,” Charity said.
“Mind your own business,” Lauren said.
“In that case, I guess we weren’t supposed to be watching her,” Summer said, snapping her gum in victory. Charity giggled.
“We are all one another’s business,” Father Steve said, as Lauren moved past the sisters to follow Mom out the door. He opened his hands, a gesture of philanthropy. “We are all responsible for one another. And, Lauren . . .”
Lauren stopped in the doorway and looked back at him.
Father Steve folded his hands and smiled. “Lauren, this is God’s house. No one could ever go missing here.”
Paula didn’t seem to mind that Lauren started coming home with her almost every day after school without really asking. Maybe she thought Lauren felt bad about going to the movie without her on opening night. Or maybe she didn’t care and never thought twice about it—that was probably the answer, because she never brought it up.
For two weeks straight, as soon as she got home every afternoon, Paula wanted to catch the last couple of hours of the Kennedy nephew’s rape trial. Lauren pretended to do homework, but she was watching, too. She could gather that it was vulgar to follow the trial, or at least it was vulgar to talk about it; she wouldn’t have wanted Claire or Abby or any of the other senior girls to know she was following it. Now that the play was over, Lauren suspected that she was a toy that the senior girls had grown out of, a doll, like the old G.I. Joes that Sean would bring down from the attic and then, in a flourish of maturity regained, banish upstairs again. Lauren feared she wasn’t useful to the senior girls. She couldn’t drive; she could only be driven around. She didn’t know the right music; she could only be appreciative of the music they listened to. She couldn’t ask the senior girls over to her house; she didn’t ask Paula over, either, even though she didn’t care what Paula thought of the Mirela situation.
“He’s like Blane, how he nods and bugs out his eyes when he wants to fake being sincere,” Paula said of the Kennedy nephew. Blane was the cute, rich boy who dumps Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink. They get back together in time for the prom, but you know he’ll just dump her again after the movie is over and no one is looking anymore.
The Kennedy nephew was a good witness for himself. A studious young doctor in training, calm, measured. A polite and upstanding fellow who trusted the process and who could feel his innocence, just like he could feel the family blood in his veins, its density and temperature. All reasonable people could share his innocence with him, feel it pumping through them, too, once they had heard his side of the story. He could keep his story straight. The woman who accused him cried a lot and couldn’t describe exactly what happened and forgot so much and wanted everyone to take her word for everything and insulted the defense attorney just for doing his job. “Please help me get this over with!” she said, crying, but that wasn’t what anyone was there to do, and Lauren had to look away although she couldn’t see her face. The television plopped a big, blue-gray dot over her head.
“Saves her the embarrassment,” Nana Glenis had said, over for dinner on the opening day of the trial. She kept a corner of her attic devoted to Kennedy memorabilia: clippings, buttons, Life magazines, the negatives of the roll of film she shot the day President Kennedy gave a speech in Niagara Square. She could name all eleven of Robert and Ethel Kennedy’s children in order of age, middle names included. Nana Glenis left before dessert, after Mirela threw a fistful of mashed potatoes at her and poured a cup of water over PJ’s head.
“No, it’s not about embarrassment—it’s more about privacy,” replied Mom, who was upset that the alleged rape had occurred on Good Friday. “For any of them to be out carousing on Good Friday, of all days!”
“Jesus needed a couple of beers up there on that cross,” Dad said. “You gotta beat the heat.”
Paula was sure that the Kennedy nephew did it, and Lauren was, too. It wasn’t a conclusion that Lauren reached after weighing the evidence—that the sobbing woman who said she was raped had been raped by the man she said raped her seemed a self-evident truth, available without benefit of a jury trial or news coverage. Yet there was another, equally self-evident truth in the trial, which was that the Kennedy nephew knew how to behave correctly, how to control and parcel out his presentation of himself, and his shrieking accuser did not. Carrying on like that. She was messy. She had ginned up this whole mess. She was messed up in the head.
“Making a scene,” Nana Glenis said. “Hasn’t that poor family been through enough?”
There was what happened, and then there was the story of what happened. The story was what was more important, because the story would keep itself alive in the retelling of it, long after what happened was dead.
Mom had been nervous about Thanksgiving, and it’s true that Mirela ripped both legs off the turkey and then locked the turkey and herself in Aunt Marie’s downstairs bathroom. Mom had been nervous about Christmas Day, and it’s true that the youngest cousins were distraught when Mirela tore the wrapping paper off every present under Nana Dee’s tree before anyone else woke up. Now Mom was nervous about Lauren’s birthday, but it was Mom who wanted a big party at their house, not Lauren. Lauren’s birthday fell right after the holidays, when most people felt gorged on parties and presents. But Mom said this birthday was extra important because it was the first one in the immediate family since Mirela came home.
Both sets of grandparents came over, Uncles Brian and Mike and Joe and their wives and all the cousins. The uncles and Granddad, Mom’s dad, sat in the den watching the Bills, who were two games away from making it to the Super Bowl for a second year in a row.
“Norwood’s really been redeeming himself this season, don’t you think, Lauren?” Uncle Mike asked with his crinkly smile. Lauren’s baby pictures looked like Uncle Mike’s when they were both smiling. Scott Norwood was the kicker who had missed a long, difficult, but not strictly implausible field goal at the end of last year’s Super Bowl, which the Bills then lost by a single point. Lauren didn’t follow sports, but she sensed that one’s attitude toward Norwood could be a litmus test for a person’s entire worldview. A small minority of Bills fans wanted Norwood banished to another team for spite; others had nothing against him personally but found it nearly unbearable to see his number on the field, like the other Bills and all their fans were being haunted by the ghost of his defeat; still others wrote impossible movie scripts in their head about a Super Bowl sequel on the order of Rocky II, whereby the Bills not only win the match but by one point, courtesy of a long Norwood kick, one that would avenge the man, the team, the blighted city, and of course, the tragic squandered genius of O.J. in one perfect arcing firework of a field goal. Dad, like most Bills fans, was soft and forgiving toward Norwood in a way that felt out of keeping with his personality generally, calling him “a good guy who had a bad day at work.” Lauren was surprised and moved that Dad could acknowledge an uncomfortable, unfamiliar feeling and put it into words, and it helped her understand why so many of the men in her life spent so much time sitting still watching sports.
The great-aunts came to her birthday party, Eunice and Faye, with their crumpled-paper voices and ashtray kisses. They mixed big polyester prints with dark brocade scarves, and all their clothes smelled like the Salvation Army, and they wore bulbous brooches in iridescents and jewel tones, clip-on earrings that rattled and dangled, clacking fake pearls. Sometimes they gave their jewelry to Lauren on the spot: a cameo locket with a sapphire-green eye; a yellow-gold signet ring of adjustable size. Lauren wore the baubles to school, feeling like an heiress, until Claire told her, with apologetic discomfort, that her great-aunts’ things were cheap. Lauren appreciated knowing this. But how did Claire know? How could she tell? Her mom must have explained it to her.
Lauren didn’t ask Julie or any of the other senior girls to the party. Paula came, a couple of PJ and Sean’s friends. Danielle Sheridan, of all people, owing to a chance encounter between Danielle’s and Lauren’s mothers at Bells market. A buffet spread, a Bells sheet cake from Nana Glenis, and a homemade malted chocolate drip cake from Nana Dee. Balloons that PJ and Sean had blown up and tied themselves, streamers that Mirela tore down, a construction-paper banner that Mom had cut, mounted, and strung herself, using supplies from the Jo-Ann fabric store on Transit Road, reading happy fifteenth birthday lauren. Mirela ripped it in half. Mom taped it back together, and Mirela ripped it in half again.
“She’s just so excited about Lauren’s birthday,” Mom explained. “She means well. We have to celebrate who Mirela is, not who we might think we want Mirela to be.”
The house filled with people, smiling faces bobbing in Lauren’s direction, but before they reached her there was Mirela, Mirela in every room, corner, doorway, Mirela in front of you and behind you and under your feet, Mirela laughing, jumping, hitting plates of potato salad and soft-cooked baby carrots out of surprised hands, pulling at sleeves, kicking at ankles, being herself. A car backfired in the crowded kitchen, raising a whoop from Nana Glenis; it was Mirela, who’d stolen a smoldering cigarette from between Aunt Faye’s fingers and attacked the balloons with it, pop-pop-pop. Lauren leaned against the sink, watching, wondering who might volunteer to try taking the cigarette away from Mirela.
“Happy buh day!” Mirela hollered at everyone, every conversation, every face scanning past. “Happy buh day!”
“I wanted to thank you for inviting me to your birthday party.” It was Danielle by Lauren’s side, holding a small white box with a large blue bow. The words sounded practiced. Danielle looked ill at ease in a starched white blouse. Lauren imagined her taking it off as soon as she got back home, pulling on a loose T-shirt, flinging her legs over the side of the couch to watch Yo! MTV Raps.
The box flew out of Danielle’s hands onto the floor tiles, landing with a clinking crunch. “Ohhh,” said Danielle, crestfallen, as Mirela ran past her to kick the box into the next room. A group shout rose up from the den, signaling a happy development in the Bills game.
“It’s okay,” Lauren said, picking up the cigarette Mirela had dropped on the floor and flicking it into the sink behind her. “Thanks for whatever was inside that box.”
“So, uh—yeah, I just, I wanted to thank you for inviting me to your—”
“Happy buh day!” Mirela was back, she was there, she was always there, yelling, looking back and forth from Danielle to Lauren. “Happy buh day!” Danielle smiled down at Mirela as if through great ennobling pain.
A familiar feeling burbled back, coating Lauren’s synapses. It was the feeling of sitting back in class and watching Danielle disintegrate. Pull on her string.
“Hey, Mirela,” Lauren said, leaning over her like they were in a conspiracy. Lauren wasn’t sure if she wanted Danielle to hear what she was about to do. “Has Mom ever told you,” she asked the girl, “the story of what I did the day before I turned three?” She held out her palms to Mirela for pat-a-cake. “Before the sun went down, I went from room to room turning out all the lights in the house, yelling, ‘Go to bed, go to bed!’ because I thought that way my birthday would come sooner.” Danielle laughed, and Mirela pummeled Lauren’s palms with her little fists.
“My mom has told that story a million times,” Lauren said, looking up at Danielle. “You’ll probably hear it from her before you leave today, Danielle.”
She turned again to Mirela. “What did you do,” Lauren asked brightly, “the night before you turned three?”
Lauren had conjured something on the night of All My Sons. A new scene, another girl. She could do it again, whenever she wanted to.
Mirela hit Lauren’s palms harder, harder.
“Go ahead, tell us, Mirela, we’re listening—what did you do on your birthday?”
Harder, harder.
“Mirela, listen—do you know what a birthday is?”
“Mah buh day!” Mirela said.
“Nooo, Mirela,” Lauren murmured, catching both of the girl’s fists in her hands as she got down on her knees. “It’s not Mirela’s birthday. It’s Lauren’s birthday. I don’t know when Mirela’s birthday is. Do you?”
“Mah buh day! Mah buh day!”
Danielle was fading out. It was just the two sisters in the room now. They were onstage together again, alone, holding hands.
“Nope, sorry, Mirela,” Lauren said. She controlled the edge in her voice. She heard Andy in her head. Little freak. “Your birthday is the day your mommy gave birth to you. But we don’t know your birthday. And we don’t know your mommy.”
“Mama,” Mirela said, pointing across the room where Mom was stringing the happy fifteenth birthday lauren banner for the third time.
“That’s not your mommy, Mirela,” Lauren said, shaking her head ruefully.
“Mama,” Mirela said. She was blinking rapidly. She was trying to think. “Mama. Mama.”
“But where’s your real mama, Mirela?” Lauren asked, her throat constricting and pinching the words, choking them off.
It was torn. It was over. There was no use stopping now. Lauren had dragged them all the way under. Their lungs were filling with water.
“Where is Mirela’s mommy?” Lauren asked. Altered, bewitched. “Not Lauren’s mommy. Mirela’s mommy, who gave birth to Mirela, on Mirela’s birthday.”
“Mama,” Mirela said, her finger stabbing the air, her eyes darting everywhere. “Mama. Mama.” She jabbed both arms, she stomped her feet, she spun around and around, screaming “Mama,” then screaming no words at all, strangled vowels and pure pain, sirening up from the child on all fours.
“My mommy doesn’t know your birthday, Mirela,” Lauren whispered, although no one could hear her. Her brow was dotted with sweat and her eyes were dry. “I’m so sorry.”
“Lauren, honey, what happened?” Mom was by her side.
Danielle was back. Danielle had never been gone. She was backing away. Lauren rose to her feet again, her knees knocking together. “I think . . .” She leaned back against the sink, reaching behind with both hands to grip the edge of the counter, unsteady with what she’d done. “I think Mirela is sad that it’s not her birthday.”
“No my mama!” Mirela was wailing like she’d been burned. “No my mama!”
Even that day, after Dad asked everyone to leave and Mom had taken Lauren’s place at the sink, holding a washcloth to her bloody nose—even then, Lauren knew it wasn’t Mirela’s fault. Mirela didn’t have any say. Lauren didn’t, either. No one asks to be born. No one chooses their family. No one gets to say, You. You’re the one. You’re the one I want to be my mother.
That night, Lauren said to Mom, “Mirela is special because she is chosen.” She was trying to be kind. Lauren didn’t feel guilty, not yet. “You chose her, Mom, you just didn’t know how hard it would be.”
“But I chose you, too, Lauren,” Mom said. “I conjured you. I’d seen you before. They put you in my arms and I knew it was you.”