22

Christmas loomed. Ordinarily there would be a tree up by now. Ordinarily Liz would be done with her shopping by now, would be focused instead on helping Lauren and Joe do theirs, on transporting them as needed to the malls, suggesting gift ideas for her parents. She’d be wrapping presents during the day and baking at night.

Instead, she was watching Lauren.

The moment of saying goodnight each night (entering her bedroom uncertainly; what would she be doing? how would she seem?)—this was what Liz returned to constantly, looking for some kind of knowable, even progressive story. But there was none. Lauren was in her pajamas or not, listening to her iPod or not. She was sort of cheerful or not.

Goodnight, sweetie. Goodnight, Mom. It could be as little as that.

Last night, she’d been in bed already, reading, and for a moment it had been for Liz as if five years had vanished and Lauren was the child who saved up her confessions and worries to hand over to her mother at bedtime. Not that she’d said anything, but Liz had imagined it. She’d tried to tell Brody about it afterward, about how the picture had been so vivid, but his lack of interest was palpable. Had he left the room while she was in the middle of a sentence? She thought he might have.

She and Lauren were on their way home from the hospital. An ordinary Wednesday afternoon, but there was a ton of traffic, and it would only get worse as December progressed. Lauren stared out the window.

“Would you like the radio?” Liz said.

“If you want.”

Liz reached for the power button, then changed her mind. Turning on the radio was too much like saying: We aren’t talking.

“I talked to Grandma earlier—she sends her love.”

“OK,” Lauren said. “I mean, thanks.”

They’d come by on Sunday, Liz’s parents, but only to say hello; they were on their way to an afternoon concert in the city. “Stop back by on your way home,” Liz had said, and they’d demurred so fast she knew they’d discussed it beforehand. Later that night, already irritable, Brody had muttered something about overkill, and when she asked him to repeat himself, he said, “Stop being such a program director. Your poor parents. Things have to happen in their own time.”

It was almost dark when she and Lauren finally pulled into the driveway—almost dark and barely five o’clock. On the way into the kitchen she called up the stairs to see if Joe was home. “Want to come have some hot chocolate?”

“No, thanks,” he called back.

“What about you?” she said to Lauren. “Hot chocolate? I was thinking I’d make myself some tea.”

“No, thanks.”

Liz filled the kettle and set it on the stove. She wanted to check the voice mail, but having Lauren with her felt a little like having a guest. Did Lauren sense that?

Depression, Liz had read recently, was anger turned inward, and she wondered if Lauren was angry now, specifically, right at this moment, though of course that wasn’t how it worked: it wasn’t lively, targeted anger; it was submerged, indiscriminate anger, something very unlike the feeling you might have when suddenly provoked.

She got herself a bag of English breakfast tea. When the water boiled she poured it into her mug and then went to the phone. The stutter tone sounded, and she pressed MEMORY 1 and MEMORY 2 and learned that she had one new message. She hit the 1 to hear it, and the automated voice said it had been sent today at 1:38 p.m., but then, instead of the message, there was more from the automated voice, and suddenly Sarabeth’s voice saying, “Sarabeth Leoffler.” And then, “Hi, Liz, it’s me. I’ve been thinking about you, and I was just wondering how things are going. Let me know when you can. Bye.”

For days Liz had been feeling she should call Sarabeth. Now Sarabeth had beaten her to the punch.

“What does it mean,” she said as she put the handset back in the charger, “when a message comes with an introduction of who it’s from?”

Lauren looked up from the newspaper. “What?”

“I just got a message from Sarabeth, but it wasn’t just her voice—there was an automated voice beforehand saying it was a message from Sarabeth Leoffler, but ‘Sarabeth Leoffler’ was in Sarabeth’s voice.”

“She undergrounded you,” Lauren said.

“What?”

“She didn’t actually call you—she sent you a voice message.”

“You can do that?”

“Duh. Then you don’t have to actually talk to the person.” Lauren thought for a minute. “That’s sort of weird from Sarabeth.”

“Tell me about it.”

“What do you mean?”

No, Liz thought, don’t tell; and then, somehow addressing Dr. Lewis: Or should I? “We’re having some problems,” she said.

“You and Sarabeth? That’s so weird.”

“How?”

“I don’t know,” Lauren said with a shrug. “You don’t have problems with your friends. You’re not a kid.”

“Adults have problems.”

“Yeah, with their mortgages. Or with us. Or, you know, with their husbands or wives.” At this last her voice dropped a little, and she looked away.

“Or with alcohol,” Liz said. “Or with authority. Or with anger, or anxiety, or depression.”

Lauren gave her a quick look. “Is it about me?”

“Sweetie, no,” Liz said. “Of course not.” She kept her eyes on Lauren, commanded her face to behave. And it wasn’t about Lauren; not really.

Lauren looked away for a long moment. “Is she coming to Tahoe?” she said at last, turning back.

Sarabeth coming to Tahoe for Christmas was very occasional—it was crowded up there in winter, only the main house open, the cabin closed till May or June. And this year Liz’s parents were so nervous about the whole thing, Liz didn’t want to complicate matters. “Should we go?” her mother had asked on the phone this morning. “Should Steve and Kelly and the twins? Are you sure you don’t want just your family? We’d all be fine with that, you know.”

But her mother’s fear had nothing to do with it. Neither did how much space there was. Sarabeth wasn’t coming because Liz didn’t want her to.

“Not this year,” she told Lauren.

“Because of your fight?”

“It’s not a fight,” Liz said, but Lauren gave her a quick, knowing look, and Liz understood that in fact it was.

In a while Lauren left the kitchen, and Liz got started on dinner, browning chicken breasts, slicing vegetables for a quick sauté. It was so dark out; the windows were like mirrors intended to reflect the room back at her, a picture she didn’t want to see.

In a little while she heard Brody’s car. “Boy is it cold,” he said as he came in. “Bet we’ll have a frost tomorrow.” He seemed about to approach her and then changed direction and went to the mail instead. He flipped through it slowly and then turned, his face organized into a look of careful neutrality.

He said, “Something smells delicious.”

She said, “Just chicken.”

This was how they often talked these days, in code. He had just told her that he was not disinclined to see her in a favorable light, and she had replied that that might be true, but that he hadn’t convinced her.

“Kids upstairs?” he said.

“Yeah.”

All I can do is repeat myself.

In that case you haven’t convinced me.

He ran his hands over the sides of his head. His hair wasn’t going gray so much as losing color, fading. It was the color of putty now, whereas it had been a light brown before. He gave his bad shoulder a tentative roll, and she saw him wince.

How foolish that they were in this state, how stereotypical. Well, the daughter ended up OK, but the marriage…

What did she want from him? For an intense moment she craved Sarabeth’s company, not her voice on the phone but her self, across a table. Sarabeth was so smart—what would she say? What did Liz want?

Brody wanted time to pass. Not hours or days, but great swaths of it; he wanted it to be April, July. This made him sad: the last weeks before Christmas had always been his favorite time of year. He remembered the snowy downtown streets of his childhood, getting out of his mom’s station wagon for a quick run through the frigid air into the drugstore. The huge backseat door, and if you didn’t look first you might put your feet down in four inches of slushy water. At home there was an air of expectation; he and his sister were better friends at this time of year than any other. A year older, she generally ignored him, but in these weeks she’d put a finger to her lips and lead him to a closet where a giant shopping bag had been shoved under a shelf. “Stop, idiot,” she’d whisper if he made a move toward the bag, and he’d stop, and then they’d stand there companionably for another moment or two.

After dinner, he watched TV with Liz and Lauren for half an hour, then went upstairs with his laptop. In the little TV room at the end of the hall, he plugged into an outlet and downloaded the e-mails that had come since he left the office. He glanced at a couple of news sites and then, on a whim, picked up the phone and dialed his sister’s number in Cincinnati. It was after eleven there, but she was always up late.

“How’s Mom?” he asked after he’d reported on Lauren. “I’ve talked to her, but I can’t get a read on how this whole thing’s affecting her.”

Marilyn was silent for a moment, and he braced himself for a worrying story. But she said, “You know what keeps going through my mind? Not that this is an answer, but Dad couldn’t have stood this. Dad.”

Brody thought about this. His father had been the sentimental one in his parents’ marriage; it was he, not Brody’s mother, who’d cried at Marilyn’s wedding. Brody would never forget the sight of his dad’s face when he came to the pew after tucking Marilyn’s hand into the hand of her husband-to-be: a tear on each cheek, his mouth contorted by the effort to conceal his feelings. Once he was seated, Brody’s mom passed him a tissue from her purse and then took his hand and held it for the remainder of the ceremony.

He’d loved being a grandfather. Marilyn had waited to have children, so Lauren was the first grandchild, and Brody and Liz took her to Cleveland when she was just five months old. Every evening that week, Brody’s dad came in the door from work, spread a cloth of some kind over his dress shirt, and sat holding the baby until dinnertime.

“She’s really quiet,” he said to Marilyn.

“Does that scare you?”

“Not by itself.”

“Oh, Brody.”

He reached for a paperweight on the far side of the desk, and the movement caused the phone to slide sideways, setting off a bell somewhere in its innards. The phone was at least ten years old and had all the heft of a plastic pencil holder; he made a mental note to get a new one as soon as possible.

He said, “The whole thing could’ve been so much worse.”

“You mean she could have succeeded?”

“Or done serious damage to her liver. She could be on a transplant list right now.”

“Oh, how awful.”

“Or she could have damaged the tendons going into her hands,” he went on, but he was thinking how strange it was that the word “succeeded” could be used in this context. Succeeded. A successful suicide should be an oxymoron. He remembered Liz telling him about Sarabeth’s mother, early on in their relationship; she said Sarabeth was the daughter of a suicide, and he was confused for a moment, thinking she meant Sarabeth was the daughter of—the offspring of—an act of suicide, in the way someone might be the offspring of an extramarital affair, or a May-December romance, or a drunken night.

If Lauren had succeeded, he’d be the father of a suicide. The creator, the primogenitor, of a horrible act.