By 10 P.M., Nick Flemming—father and husband—was lying on a cot in the large room on the third floor of the Victorian, under the row of windows where, once upon a time, Augusta had taught the girls to conduct a storm. He’d driven back to the retirement village, packed a bag, and returned. His shih tzu, Toby—after being thoroughly sniffed by Ingmar and given a little growl—was asleep at his side. The room was now used for storage, and he wondered if he was being stored there too. Was he some relic of the past, still obdurately drawing air, or was he really home, for the first time in his life?
On the second floor, Ru was sharing a double bed with Liv, who’d taken a sleeping pill. Liv was dreaming of Easter eggs, one of which was Technicolored, and she knew it held a demon rabbit. She was snoring lightly and wouldn’t recall the dream in the morning. She never did when she took sleeping pills.
Ru got up, grabbed her phone, and walked down the hall to the bathroom. She locked the door. The bathroom felt large and echoey, and she didn’t like how she still felt exposed. So she pulled back the curtain on the old clawfoot tub, stepped into it, and drew the curtain closed. This was better, more like a safe cubicle. She remembered for a moment loving the language lab in high school because it had little dividers between stations and headphones that made everyone else disappear.
She had to call Cliff.
Sitting down in the dry tub, she stared at her phone.
She was afraid he’d be angry at her, though he’d shown no signs in the letters he sent following the breakup. He’d never even really asked for more explanation, and he certainly didn’t ask her to reconsider, which she had to respect.
She thought about what Esme had said, that whatever happened it had to be about them. They were reclaiming their sisterhood. Ru had felt it in the moment—a surge of love—but now she was uneasy. It was hypocritical of her to make that kind of promise without telling them the truth about her engagement. Why hadn’t she already come clean? Jesus. Why was she holding back?
She thought about the writing tip of holding on to a secret—the power of the unspoken to charge a scene. She wondered if she was doing that, subconsciously, and if Liv was right. Had she invited Teddy just to play out some old story line or start a new one?
Maybe it was simpler than that. Maybe she thought that Cliff would convince her she was wrong. She’d seen him convince so many people of so many things as a producer. He was so winning, so vital. It was like other people just wanted to live in his het-up heartbeat and so they said yes, even when they knew they shouldn’t. Maybe she thought she was wrong and it wasn’t really over so why tell her sisters one thing when she’d just have to circle back?
She hit Cliff’s name in her contacts. He was probably on Pacific Time so she wasn’t worried about waking him up.
She hoped for voice mail. “Please, please, please.”
But he answered. “Hello? Ru?”
“Hi.”
“You’re back safe and sound. Hold on, let me excuse myself.” She imagined him at a restaurant or a party. She heard him telling people he’d be right back. There was a hoot of laughter, some music.
In a few seconds, she heard a siren. She assumed he was outside now.
“Welcome back to the US,” he said genially.
“Thanks.”
“How are things?”
She was sitting in a bathtub in her childhood home and her father was with them; her family was, for once, all sleeping under one roof. Things were…reverting, upended, normalizing in a ridiculous way? “Good,” she said. “How are you?”
“Pretty good. We got a first-look deal. Did you hear?”
She hadn’t. She’d always wanted a first-look deal. “What studio?”
“Sony.”
“How’s Terry taking it?” Terry was his producing partner who’d had a Sony issue a few years back.
“Water under the bridge. He’s happy.”
“You sound really good.”
The line went quiet. He was somewhere windy. She could hear the rippling fuzz. She wondered if he was choked up. “Just let me save face.”
“Of course.” He was asking her not to push him on how he was taking this.
“I’m in the city.” He’d been born and raised in Manhattan. The city would always be New York City no matter how long he lived in L.A.
“I’ll come in.” What would that be like? Would there suddenly be passion? Would they end up having sex? What did people who used to be engaged feel for each other?
“Where are you?”
“At my mom’s.”
“Good. I’ll come there.”
This made her panic. “Why here? I mean, we’re all here—my mom, my sisters, Atty…” She’d told him all about her father, but she couldn’t mention him without opening up too much.
“I never got to see your people or where you came from. I want it to make sense.”
“You want what to make sense? Me?”
“Why you gave up on us.”
“I don’t think it’ll help,” she said, tapping the shower liner and sticking her big toe up the faucet. She’d known her mother and sisters and this place she’d come from all her life, and it hadn’t helped her make sense of anything.
“I feel like the negotiating power is tilted my way,” he said. “My mother started smoking again. My father suggested suing you.”
“On what grounds?”
“Whatever grounds. It’s just where he goes, emotionally.”
Ru wondered where Cliff had gone, emotionally. Did she really know him? She hadn’t ever let him know her—not completely. She’d held back in tiny ways and then she’d broken up—in a letter from another country like a coward. “Okay. Come here. Do whatever you have to do.”
“How about Saturday? I’ll have to clear some things, but will you be around?”
Ru agreed and gave him her mother’s address. They set a time midafternoon. But she thought of Amanda, Teddy Whistler’s ex; Amanda should be allowed to stick with her plans, marry who she wanted—right or wrong. Teddy should disappear, let her go.
“See you then,” Ru said.
“Remember when we used to make fun of married people?” Cliff asked.
“Yes.”
“That seems like a long time ago now.”
“It does.”
“I refuse to miss you,” he said and it was the most intimate thing he’d ever said to her. Then he hung up.
Ru slid down the tub’s curved back and stared at the ceiling, spotted with mold. She thought of Teddy Whistler’s face. It appeared in her mind in full color—the way he looked at her as she recited what he’d said on the plane.
Teddy was back. Her father was back. Cliff was coming. It was like an attack of men. What did it mean?
She didn’t want to think of men. She wanted something soothing, something simple.
And suddenly she thought of the baby born in the longhouse where she’d spent the last nine months. The baby was a girl named Chau, and the family had let Ru hold her and walk her along the dirt road for long stretches every day. The baby had full cheeks, a slick of dark hair, and shiny eyes. Ru missed the baby’s smell, her gummy smile, even her sharp cry. Ru understood why her mother had three babies with Nick Flemming. Her love for Nick must have been incredibly complicated, but the love you feel for a baby is pure and simple and visceral. Once you have one, you must just want another. The question wasn’t why her mother had gone on to have three kids with someone she couldn’t be with. Ru decided that maybe having three babies was an effort to counterbalance a complex, distant love with one that was primal, intimate, and close.
Atty and Esme were in the bedroom next door, the trundle pulled out from under Esme’s canopy bed. Esme was wide awake and clear on one thing. Her bastard of a father would track down Darwin Webber, apologize, and retract any threats. She felt flushed with courage. She had sisters. It was their journey now.
But then again, it was her sisters—not just the idea of sisterhood—and she wasn’t convinced that her sisters were trustworthy. Liv was a drug addict, for shit’s sake, and Ru was a writer who, like a bottom feeder, relied on other people for characters. Liv ignored the facts of her addiction and only talked about her time in rehab like it was an extended spa stay, and Ru hadn’t even invited her fiancé over to meet them. Was she embarrassed of Cliff or of them? Probably them.
(And of course Esme had looked up Rob Parks of Parks Cabinetry and there were no photos of him on the Internet. Who could avoid that these days—and still be an entrepreneur?)
Still, Esme was the one with an urgent need, and so she wanted Liv and Ru to get on board with the Darwin Webber mission. Would she bring Atty? Esme was worried about her. In telling her rendition of the musket incident, she hadn’t made any connection to her father’s abandonment. Esme wasn’t sure how to approach the subject. She preferred not to talk about Doug herself.
“Atty,” she whispered. “Are you awake?”
Esme wasn’t sure what she’d say to her. Maybe she’d just ask her what she thought about the evening, help her process some of this. It could segue naturally to a discussion of Atty’s father, couldn’t it?
“Atty?”
Atty was awake but she didn’t say a word. She’d tweeted as many one-liners as she could.
Do synchronized swimmers sometimes practice out of water? #someolympicsportsareBS
Being manipulative is different from being likable. #butbarely
If you’re lucky, you’ll wind up an oil portrait staring into a room for eternity. #avoidpainters
She’d gotten a few retweets and favorites, but nothing from anyone at the boarding school who mattered, and certainly not Lionel Chang. He never retweeted or favorited. In fact, sometimes he went months without tweeting even a single peep.
She was turned away from her mother. She’d been crying, silently. She wasn’t sure why, but it had to do with dying and being reduced to some portrait hung on a wall, doomed to stare out at the dining room; this is how she’d felt at boarding school all those years—a lonesome witness. She was lonesome.
There was also her ever-growing love–hate relationship with Nancy Drew and some unattainable version of self. Of course, Liv had told her to know how to cry on a dime but to never let anyone see her crying for real. Liv had told her many things—her guns, as they put it—but none of them seemed to help her in this situation: She didn’t want to talk to her mother because she was trying to become someone else and her mother could never allow it.
Augusta was the only one who wasn’t in bed. She was pacing her bedroom on the second floor, aware of her family, the house alive with them restlessly breathing all around her. She felt her parents’ ghosts, batting around downstairs. Gulls—she remembered how, as a child with rheumatic fever, she’d hallucinated that their shrieking fights were gulls filling the house, all wings and noise.
“Romantic fever,” she whispered. “Like I ever had a choice.” She’d fallen in love and it was quick and deep and all-consuming. It overtook her body as the fever once had.
She could hear the snapping of the Rockwell flag out her open bedroom window. She dipped through the window—the air hot but gusty—and unhooked the flag from its post. She pulled it to her chest, ducked back in through the window, and stood there, holding the bundle like a baby.
At one point, before Ru was born, Nick wrote, “Let’s at least try to live as husband and wife, let the kids have a father. I’m about to get three months of leave. We can rent a place. A lake house in Maine.”
She said yes. They rented a house on Damariscotta Lake and he showed up thin and weak. Ulcers were eating him up. She quickly understood that he’d been sent on leave so he wouldn’t bleed to death.
The summer was beautiful—canoes and an outdoor shower, a fishing dock, a small island filled with blueberry bushes, distant campers singing songs that carried across the lake.
But as the three months slipped along, Esme and Liv got attached to him. Augusta had called him Daddy and Esme had picked it up.
“You could resign,” she said. “You could get another job.” But she knew it was too late. She saw the way he scanned the lake, everyone they passed on the street, in restaurants. She knew that he slept lightly, if at all. He was scared. That wouldn’t end.
“I have to go back,” he said. “I’ll always feel hunted so I have to be allowed to hunt.”
“I’m willing to take risks to be a family.” She wasn’t sure, though. She didn’t know what she was trying to sign on for.
“Some people love a storm and some fear it,” he said. “And some people love it because they fear it.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I can’t let you all get swallowed by a storm.”
Their cabin bedroom had two twin beds, with thick sheets and wool blankets. They made love in one of the beds, knowing that they’d failed, that he’d never really expected to succeed, and that this was the beginning of a long end.
Maybe Augusta was still in love. Maybe it was no longer possible. Maybe she wasn’t ever a real wife.
But she would always be a mother.