Eleven.
As Lili had foreseen, Ava opened her attack before her butt even hit the front seat.
“So, why were you at school?” She wedged her enormous backpack into the passenger floor space, moving her chair back until it caused Lally to squeak.
Frances looked in the rearview. Lally was half asleep, despite the squeak. Milo, Wyatt, and Theo were in the third row, reveling in the extra space because Kate was occupying Lucas’s usual seat. He had been picked up by Bill, whom Frances had only glimpsed in the distance. Dentist appointment, which Bill had alerted Frances to the week before. He was very on top of it, Bill was; maybe Julie had felt unnecessary.
Frances looked across at her daughter, whose face was calm enough. “I just wanted to talk to Jennifer about how you’re doing at school.”
“You’d already talked to me, wasn’t that enough? Jennifer doesn’t know anything.” Her fingers were tapping on the seat belt, little percussive noises that belied her quiet delivery.
“Is there something to know, Ava?” In the rearview she could see Milo’s eyes, watching her. He couldn’t hear very much from back there, but he could read their tone. She dropped her voice, “Maybe we should talk about this once we get home? We could just sit and . . .”
“Chat about how you’re invading my privacy? Sure, let’s grab a cup of tea and talk it through, shall we?” Her daughter turned to face the window and said nothing for the rest of the trip.
Frances sighed. “Yes, let’s have some tea.”
Once they were home and Ava had walked Kate, Theo, and Wyatt down the block to their houses, and Milo had gotten Lally and himself their inevitable bowl of Pirate’s Booty and had sat down with her for their regulation half hour of post-school TV, Frances carried two cups of tea up to Ava’s room.
Ava looked up, apparently surprised to see her mother. “Oh, are we really going to have tea?”
Fortunately, Frances knew she’d just been sitting there waiting to nonchalantly throw out that line, in the hopes of getting first blood. No dice.
“Yeah, I thought it would be a good idea.” Frances held up the tea. “But if you don’t want to, it’s fine.” She looked around the room at the early teenage mix of old horse posters and new rock star posters (similar hair styles), the blend of dolls and books and makeup. She understood why parents who lost their children kept their rooms just as they were: Every single thing in this room meant something. Either it meant something to her or it simply meant something to her because it meant something to Ava.
Ava took the tea and resettled herself on the bed, putting her laptop to one side, keeping one of her earbuds in, just in case she needed to do that “Oh, I’ve just been distracted by a notification, I’m going to let my gaze drift to the screen to underscore how unimportant this conversation is” move. Again, nice try.
“Both earbuds out and close the screen, OK? I want to talk to you, and I want to hear what you have to say.” Frances suddenly wondered if she should wait for Michael to come home, but it was a bit late to change tack now.
Ava rolled her eyes, but complied. Honestly, the eye-rolling thing just had to be developmental. There was no other explanation for its simultaneous appearance in pretty much one hundred percent of tweens and teens, all over the world. Three wisps of underarm hair, the first actual pimple, and eye rolling, all at once. Frances got a brief mental montage of teenage eyes rolling in the spotty faces of multitudinous nationalities, then returned her focus to the kid in front of her.
“I went to talk to Jennifer today, because your dad and I were worried that you didn’t seem to be bringing the same attention to school as you used to. It’s as simple as that.” She smoothed the coverlet, flicking a crumb to the floor.
“As simple as ‘My kid is failing, what are you going to do about it’?” Ava pulled her legs up under her, just in case her mother’s smoothing hand got too close.
“No, you’re not failing. You’re just not succeeding.”
Ava snorted. “Isn’t that the same thing?”
Frances shook her head. “No, and you understand what I’m saying and what I mean, and there’s no point pretending you don’t. Look, lovely.” She put her hand on Ava’s knee, but her daughter twitched it away, frowning. “We love you, and want to help you, that’s all. It’s our job.”
“Well, how about I fire you?”
Frances smiled. “You can’t. It’s a lifetime appointment. We have tenure.”
Ava wasn’t smiling. “I never hired you.”
“We were appointed at birth. Your birth.”
“How come Milo gets a pass?”
“He doesn’t, but our expectations for him are different from our expectations for you. He’s ten. We expect him to lower the toilet seat after peeing, eat his vegetables, and that’s about it.”
“You weren’t that easy on me.” Ava’s eyes were glittering, but Frances couldn’t tell if it was tears or rage.
“Yes, we were. Easier, maybe, because you were the first and therefore we didn’t know how mean we could be. Poor Lally’s going to be sweeping chimneys by the time she’s eight.”
Again, no smile. Usually humor would breach her dam of irritation, her hormonal wall of ice. Frances waited.
“Lally gets away with everything.” This was clutching at straws. Ava doted on Lally, and the feeling was mutual. When Lally had been a baby Ava had been ten, and for a brief period it was only Ava who could stop her from fussing. It had been instant glory, witnessed multiple times by various members of the family, and the connection was still there.
“She’s four. Are you suggesting we send her to college? Should Milo be looking for work in the financial sector?” Frances tried to touch Ava again, but she still held herself too far away. “Darling, we want all of you to be happy, and that means different things at four than it does at fourteen.”
“What is it supposed to mean for me, then?” Frances could hear an actual question in Ava’s voice, rippling across the surface belligerence. She really wondered what happy should mean for her, and Frances remembered that feeling well. She smiled and tried to soften her tone.
“We expect you to work hard at school, get enough to eat, get more sleep than you seem to want, and to have a social life. Not a continuous round of parties and sleepovers because that would mess with the first three, but fun is allowed and indeed encouraged.” Frances looked at the face she knew better than her own, watching for clues as to what Ava was thinking. She would get a tiny indentation at the corner of her mouth when she was trying not to cry. She fisted up her hands when she was getting frustrated. She stopped blinking so much when she was about to throw a total shitter. So far her blink rate appeared normal, but Frances was ready to duck. “And we also want you to tell us what’s going on with you, to keep communicating with us.”
“How is that supposed to make me happy? Aren’t I allowed a private life?”
“Of course you are. Everyone is. But we’re here to help you, to support you, like a pit crew, but without the jumpsuits and awesome whirry wheel-changing tools. We can’t do that if you don’t tell us what you need.”
“What if I don’t need anything?”
“We all need something. No one gets out of here alone, babe.” Why was this so hard, why was her child resisting her so much, so furiously? When she was small Frances had been her everything, and now she seemed to resent her mother’s very existence.
“But what if what I need is to be left alone?” Ava’s tiny indentation was there now, at the corner of her mouth, but so was the reduced blinking. The teenager was fighting herself for control.
Frances tried something else. “Have some tea.”
“I don’t want any fucking tea.”
Pause. Crap, now Frances needed to make one of those snap parenting decisions that she so frequently got wrong. She should have waited for Michael. Should she get angry at the cursing? Should she not? Two milliseconds, three milliseconds, four milliseconds . . .
“Then don’t have any fucking tea.”
Ava rarely heard her mother swear, except occasionally in the car, and this was startling enough to provoke a small smile. Frances doubled down, as this seemed to have been successful. “How about some fucking cocoa?”
Ava’s smile widened. “Nah, tea’s fine.” Her nascent tears seemed to be under control, and she took a sip and blinked at a normal rate. Frances cheered inwardly, and was tempted to get up and walk away while she was ahead, even though she hadn’t done anything except get her daughter to smile and drink tea. Seriously, some days that might be as good as it got. But then she remembered her conversation with Jennifer, and decided to press on.
She softened her tone, tried to sound open and nonjudgmental. “Jennifer said you’ve dropped your extracurriculars . . . What’s up there?”
In the blink of an eye the smile was gone. Ava scowled. “What’s up? Nothing’s up. The extracurriculars were (a) boring and (b) time consuming, and now I’ll have more time to do my precious homework. Isn’t that what you want?”
Frances shrugged. Maybe it was contagious. She’d be rolling her eyes next. “If you need more time to do your homework then it’s good you gave yourself that time.”
“Because I’m too stupid to do my homework in a regular amount of time?”
Oh, for fuck’s sake. “No, you were the one who mentioned homework.”
“Because that’s all you care about.”
“No, all I care about is you. I thought you liked working on the newspaper.”
“They got a new editor. It wasn’t me. I quit.”
Frances was surprised. “Because of that?”
Frances could tell Ava wanted very badly to look at her computer screen and feign indifference; her hand even drifted toward the laptop. “No, I just didn’t enjoy it anymore.”
“And the animation club?”
“Flip-book shit. It was stupid.”
“And the orchestra?”
There was a pause. Frances watched her daughter’s face. Ava was clearly trying to remember if she’d said she was doing a rehearsal the previous week, which she had, and wondering whether or not Frances had realized she hadn’t been. It was quite the little opera of facial expressions, and in the end the teenager decided to roll the dice.
“Yeah, that, too. I went last week, but I’m not going to go anymore.”
Frances pondered. Should she call her on the lie, wait for Michael to come home and discuss it with him, or let it slide right now but come at it another way?
She plunged on. “Oh yeah? Jennifer thought you’d stopped a couple of weeks ago. But you told me you were at rehearsal last week, right?”
Ava shrugged and frowned. “Did I?” She reached for her tea, took a sip.
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure. What did you do instead?” There, that was straightforward. You know and I know that you said you were at rehearsal and we both know you weren’t, so tell me the truth. Good, right? Right?
“Nothing. Hanging out in the library I guess. I forget.”
Ah. Fuck. A sideways bluff, a teenage classic. Maybe I was doing something you wouldn’t like, maybe I wasn’t, I don’t remember. How much do you want to push this, Parent? We can both walk away at this point, the pothole covered over, appearances preserved. Wouldn’t that be the easier choice? Go on, let it go.
Frances didn’t want to let it go. Her own parents had been masters of the “everything’s fine here, move along, nothing to see” while at the same time being so incredibly miserable and fucked up they could barely breathe. They’d never recovered from losing her brother, but everyone in the neighborhood thought they were doing really well, so brave, an inspiration.
“I don’t believe you. If you quit a couple of weeks ago then you’ve been ‘at rehearsal’ at least twice since then, and I’m pretty sure you stayed late at least one other day.” Frances raised her eyebrows. “What’s going on, Ava? I’m not angry. I just want to know what’s up.”
Ava looked at her mother, a momentary look of hurt almost immediately replaced with anger.
“My private life is none of your business.”
“Yes, it kind of is. I don’t need color pictures, a verbal overview is fine. Are you seeing someone? Are you doing drugs? Are you counterfeiting money under the bleachers?”
Which was when the gasket blew, and all the way off. Ava sat up and pointed her finger, her face flushing. “You think you’re funny, don’t you? You’re always so ready to make a joke, to make it seem like we’re all so cool and relaxed here, sharing goals, working as a team, whatever theory you’ve gleaned from whatever parenting book or podcast you’ve listened to recently.” Ava looked at Frances with a more than reasonable facsimile of disdain. “You’re no different from anyone else’s parents, Mom, just a prying, fat old woman whose own life is essentially over and who needs to run their kids’ lives to distract themselves from imminent menopause.” She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up, physically escalating the conflict while giving herself space to swing.
Frances took a breath and stayed down. At moments like this she felt sorrow in a way she never experienced in any other context. Sorrow for herself because, let’s face it, that shit was hurtful, and sorrow that she had failed at parenting so badly that her child was capable of such cruelty. She knew Ava saved her harshest words for her, she knew that intellectually, but she also knew that those feelings were real, that at points like this Ava genuinely didn’t like her very much.
“That’s not true, and it’s very mean. I just asked you a reasonable question. There’s no need to make a federal case of it. Just tell me what you were doing, and why you’re lying to me about it.” Frances really hadn’t wanted this conversation to go this way. “I don’t think of you as a liar, Ava. Please just tell me what’s going on with you.”
“Nothing. I already told you. I hung out at the library and did my homework. There’s nothing.”
“Why did you tell me you were at rehearsal?”
Yet another shrug. “Because it was easier than explaining why I wasn’t.”
“Which you still haven’t explained. And who’s Piper?” Don’t get angry, Frances. The minute you get angry, the minute you raise your voice, you lose the argument and everyone ends up in tears and the emotional hangover the next day is such a bastard.
Ava crossed her room to sit in her scruffy, oversize armchair, a fixture since she’d been born. She’d been nursed there, rocked there, read to for years and years. Now it was her own nest, and as she pulled her legs up tightly, Frances could see her thinking hard and trying not to lose the fight. Winning mattered so much to her because she hadn’t yet realized that she and Frances were on the same side. “Piper is nobody. Just a girl at school who liked me and doesn’t like me anymore.”
“‘Liked’ in the romantic sense?”
Ava deepened her scorn, if that were possible. “You’d love that, wouldn’t you? If I was gay like Iris? It would be so easy to look cool then, you could just be like, ‘Yeah, my kid’s gay, it’s fine, as long as she’s happy.’ You’d be so accepting and right-on about it.”
Frances felt her temper rising. “And that would be bad? I should throw you out of the house instead?”
“No.” Ava tossed her head, looking momentarily like the piebald in the poster above the chair. “Oh, never mind, Mom. You don’t even know what you don’t know.”
Count to three. “And what about the orchestra?”
“I quit because I wanted to have more time. I want to have some space, for crying out loud. I need time to myself, time that is just mine.” Suddenly, she had tears in her eyes. “Everyone knows where I am and what I’m doing all the time. I have a schedule on the wall. I have organized activities. I have about as much freedom as someone on death row and that’s pretty much how I feel. I just want to have something private, something only I know, and a little fucking room to breathe.” She turned and buried her face in a pillow that said “No Bad Days” on it in fluffy letters. “I just want you to leave me alone!”
Frances reached for her. “Ava, I . . .”
From the pillow, desperately, “Mom, I’m not speaking hypothetically. I want you to leave me alone now. Just go away. I hate you!”
Frances got up and walked out, almost in tears herself.
That went well.
To add insult to injury, even though it wasn’t needed, Michael was annoyed with Frances for going ahead without him.
“I thought we agreed to talk to each other before talking to Ava?”
Frances was sitting on their bed, surrounded by dogs as usual. She nodded. “I know, it just . . . I should have waited. I didn’t think it would go that badly, that quickly.” They kept their voices low, but Michael wasn’t one of those people who needed volume to make his displeasure felt. He wrinkled his eyebrows at her.
“Do we even have a theory about why she dropped her extracurriculars? Do we know anything about this Piper girl? Has she ever mentioned her?”
“Maybe. I don’t remember it, but that isn’t cast iron. Those first weeks of school are always such a clusterfuck. Three different schools this year, all new names, I’m surprised I remember who’s teaching which kid.”
Michael looked at his wife, who was hiding behind Jack and Diane. He loved her very much, but he found himself increasingly mystified by her relationship with Ava. For his own part, he found the teenage girl living in his house as confusing as the ones he’d gazed at as a teenager. He hadn’t understood them then, and barely any of them would even deign to talk to him. When his kids brought home friends he could never tell them apart. They all looked like critters to him, just fast-moving blurs of hair.
“Was that Bella?” he would ask, and Frances or Ava would roll their eyes and say, “No, that was Quinn, they’re completely different!” and he would shrug. He knew his own kids at a vast distance, or from the corner of his eye, and that would just have to do. He loved them unreservedly, especially Ava, who was the most like him. But his conversations with her were completely different from the ones she and Frances had.
Early on Frances had told him something he’d taken very much to heart. “You,” she’d said, “are the alpha man in your daughter’s life. You are the model. Every other man in her life will be measured against you, and her relationships will be measured against ours. If you speak to her disrespectfully she will accept that level of shit from a future boyfriend.” She’d paused and smiled at him. “No pressure.” He tried hard, and largely spoke to Ava about neutral things, or things they both agreed on, or sometimes he would just listen to her rattle on about whatever she wanted to rattle on about. He would be sitting there and suddenly that conversation with Frances would pop into his head, and he would get anxious: Am I being supportive? Am I understanding her and encouraging her to share her thoughts? Would I be OK with a future boyfriend treating her this way . . . ? But then he would get so irritated at the thought of some future dickhead treating his daughter badly that he would drift off, and suddenly Ava would be looking at him silently with one eyebrow raised. D’oh.
But Ava always cut him slack, something she was apparently never prepared to do for Frances. Any tiny error, any thoughtless word, and Ava would be all over Frances like white on rice. He could see how much it stressed Frances out, but then he could also see how her stress made it worse, how caring about Ava too much was preventing her from letting that shit wash over her.
He went over and sat on the bed next to her, stroking the dogs’ heads and reaching for Frances’s hand. “Honey, you just need to back off a bit.”
“I try!” Frances pulled her hand away. “It doesn’t matter what I do, I get into trouble every time we speak. It’s like walking blindfolded through a field of, I don’t know, exploding things in the ground.”
Michael frowned. “A minefield?”
There was a pause. “Yes, a minefield. Jesus, it doesn’t help that I’m clearly developing a brain tumor the size of a fucking tangerine.” She rested her head on her husband’s chest, over the head of Diane, who stuck her nose up and tried to lick their chins. “You’d be much better at this than I am, so maybe that would be for the best.”
Michael hugged her. “Look, I get to be the guest star, the occasional cameo appearance. And, unlike on old episodes of Columbo, I don’t always have to be the bad guy.”
“I miss Columbo.”
“I’m sure they have it on Netflix.”
“What if it isn’t as good as I remember it?”
“Few things are.”
“I love you.”
He grinned above her head. “I know.”
Anne was in the bathroom, washing her face, the grains dissolving as they always did. Charlie was sitting in the bedroom watching Theo and Kate playing some game or other on the iPad. Anne could tell from Kate’s tone of voice that things were about ten minutes away from going supercritical. She’d take eight of those minutes to finish in the bathroom and then walk out and pull the irons out of the fire just in time. What a heroine she was. She made a face at herself in the mirror and heard Theo’s voice in the other room say, “Who’s Richard?”
She clutched the side of the sink and her hand slipped in the water she was washing her face with. Lurching forward she almost cracked her head on the mirror. Her blood turned to ice, a phrase she’d never understood until that very second, and she heard Charlie say, “No idea, is it something in the game?” He didn’t sound all that interested.
Theo sounded puzzled. “No, he just texted me.”
Please, God.
“What did he say?”
“‘Are you there?’”
“That’s all he said? Is that my iPad or Mommy’s?”
“I don’t know.”
No, really, please, God.
Charlie sighed. “Show me.”
Anne looked at her reflection and listened to the last seconds of her old life ticking away. She looked so old stooping over the sink, her ratty kitten pajamas—a Mother’s Day gift from the kids—a little damp on the front, her quivering arms barely holding her up. She looked like a dog about to vomit, hunched, fearful. No one will ever know.
Charlie’s voice again. “It’s Mommy’s iPad . . .” He raised his voice. “Hey, Anne, did you know you’re getting texts on the iPad? Does that mean you’re not getting them on your phone?”
She could speak. “No idea, babe.” She sounded totally normal. “Who is it?”
“I don’t know, some guy named Richard?”
“Huh . . . I don’t know anyone called Richard. Maybe it’s a wrong number.” My voice couldn’t sound more innocent and disinterested.
“Can I have it back, Dad?”
There was a tiny pause, and Anne could almost see the small frown on Charlie’s face, followed by the usual microshrug and casting aside of worry. It was his way. She loved him for it, ironically enough.
“Sure, here you go.” Another pause. “Nearly time for bed, though, OK?”
Anne rested her forehead against the mirror in the bathroom and willed herself not to smash it there, killing the selfish monster who threatened her family.
Instead she reached for her dressing gown and walked out to lie to their faces.