After he’d told me about the light show, after a long silence during which Teo and I sat together, sharing mute, mutual distress at Clare’s distress, Teo turned to me and asked, “Cornelia, are you sure about Martin?” It wasn’t a question I was ready to answer or even to hear with the smallest amount of grace. I was overwhelmed and over-wrought, dry brush ready for a spark. I knew the question was real, but I pretended to think it was rhetorical, and doing that is mean—mean and unfair, not to mention cowardly. “Chickenshit” is what Linny would say. When faced with direct questions about Martin, I was plain chickenshit.
I’m not proud of my behavior. The spark caught. I blazed.
I blazed, but my voice was pure ice: “So you’re here two days and you’re an expert on Martin?”
What would most people have done in response to this response? Gotten mad, probably, which would have been entirely called-for, or backpedaled, tap danced, apologized, made a self-effacing joke, but Teo knows his way around a silence. He can keep quiet in an eloquent, watching, unfidgety way, and he knows an unanswerable question when he hears one. I’ve always admired these traits in Teo, but I wasn’t in an admiring mood. I set about filling up his steady, green-eyed quiet with my venom.
“You’ve decided he’s a bad father and a bad man. You’ve decided he’s emotionally stingy and detached and God knows what else.”
Silence.
“But what exactly do you know about having a kid, Teo? It’s pretty easy to arrive in a child’s life at a vulnerable moment and be a hero. But thinking you’re now an expert on Clare and Martin, thinking it’s your place to pass judgment, well that’s going a bit far, don’t you think?” When I finished, I was winded.
“I don’t know Martin,” said Teo. “I was wondering how well you knew him.” Teo was angry; I recognized the tightness around his eyes and the red stain spreading down the centers of his cheeks. But angry or not, when discussing important matters, Teo tends not to stoop to sarcasm, and he wasn’t being sarcastic now. It didn’t matter. I was wildfire, out of control and, apparently, there was nothing to which I would not stoop.
“Ah, so you’re not judging Martin’s relationship with Clare, but with me. Is that right? Do I have that straight now?” It gets worse. “That’s great. That’s just fine. And what about you? You’re so happily married that your wife leaves you alone during the holidays. Just how well do you know Ollie, Teo?”
This would have been unkind under any circumstances, but it wouldn’t have been so wretchedly awful, so lowdown, had I not harbored serious doubts about Teo’s marriage. In my defense, as little as I deserved defending, my suspicions regarding this were only suspicions. It’s possible that Teo and Ollie had been spending the last two years in the most blissful marital bliss imaginable, in which case my poisoned arrow of a question would have bounced off the armor of his happiness without leaving a dent. My mother certainly thought they were happy. But I had my doubts.
And, unlike most of my doubts, these didn’t arise out of my own natural and well-developed cynicism, because while I can be a cynic about some things, you may also have noticed that I can be a bit of a romantic about others. I believe in true love. On the list of things I believe in, true love is tops.
And as far as I can tell, Ollie believes in true love too, because not two months prior to her marriage to Teo, she introduced me to her “soul mate” (her phrase, not, God forbid, mine). He was her fellow fellow and fellow fast-rising star at the laboratory and was gloriously good-looking, which is probably why Ollie wanted me to meet him. Six and a half feet tall, Jamaican-born, Oxford-educated, a serious cyclist who probably did not win the Tour de France only because his broad shoulders, otherworldly cheekbones, and massive IQ weighed him down.
Even more breathtaking than his physical and mental attributes was the way my cool-as-a-cucumber sister became a lovesick, spellbound, eyelash-batting girl in his presence. When he entered a room, Ollie was just a hairsbreadth away from turning into one of those Beatles-Come-to-America girls, the ones who weep openly, clutch their cheeks with both hands, and scream. In the hour and a half I spent with them, she even deferred to his intellect on matters of science, twice.
Anyway, at some point, they’d applied jointly for a hefty grant to go work on some project in the Galapagos Islands, and what killed their relationship is that the grant was given to Edmund (that was his name, Edmund Battle) only, and he accepted it sanguinely without insisting that Ollie come too, her not inconsiderable charms losing out to the siren calls of turtles and finches and career opportunity. Edmund up and left, and next thing I knew: Ollie and Teo, till death do them part. Draw your own conclusions.
Zap. The poisoned arrow struck. And even though my behavior was indefensible, I want to jump to my own defense once again by saying that even before it struck, before I saw Teo’s slight but undeniable recoil and grimace of pain, I wished I could have taken the words back. Teo got up, went into the kitchen, and just kind of stood there, leaning on the countertop with one hand and looking at the floor. I watched him stand like that, the man who had walked through the door of Café Dora into a tangled, tangled mess, and who hadn’t walked right out again, as anyone else would have, but had set about untangling what he could as though it were the most natural thing in the world to do. The man who’d just devoted Christmas Eve and all his energies to making his sister-in-law’s boyfriend’s lonely, heartsick daughter less lonely and less heartsick. My oldest friend, a man of uncommon kindness.
I made my way over to him, wading through the swamp of shame I’d created and into the murky depths of which I deserved to be sucked down and forever lost, and I took his hand and begged for forgiveness as I’d never begged before.
And Teo forgave me.
He smiled at me, even though his eyes still had the bruised look, the look I’d put there, and he said, “This is a hard time for you. I wish it didn’t have to be so hard. I like it when you’re happy.” Then his smile got bigger. “You’re nicer.”
“You’re right,” I said, and we ended the night laughing.
Teo was right about Clare, too. Her bravery wasn’t without its price. At four a.m., I awoke to the sound of sobbing.
I sat up and rubbed her back with the circular motion I’ve always found soothing. After a while, she put her head in my lap and said, “I want my mommy.”
I thought about those words, how they contained so much more than they seemed to contain, more than any four words could hold. They meant what they meant and were also a universal cry, maybe the universal, plaintive, openhearted cry for comfort. Soldiers in the heat of battle; death-row prisoners; explorers stranded in deserts, jungles, on mountaintops; anyone sick or lost or just tired and bewildered: we all wanted our mothers. I thought about my own mother—straight-backed, eternally smiling, never without tissues, Band-Aids, lipstick, aspirin, optimism, and reassurance. Mothers—why didn’t they all collapse under such weight? I shivered.
Clare wanted her mother to be here and, also, she wanted her mother to comfort her for the loss of her mother. Temporary. Temporary loss. Please, God.
“I know you do,” I told her.
“She might come home for Christmas,” Clare said. “She wouldn’t want to be away from me on Christmas.”
No, she wouldn’t want to be. I felt sure of that. I looked down at Clare’s profile in my lap; in the dark, I could just make out the curve of her jaw and the sweep of her eyebrow over her wide eye. Viviana’s child, I thought. Viviana must love this face so much.
“Do you want to go home?” I asked.
Clare nodded. Under the quilt, her whole body was shaking.
“Then, we’ll go,” I said.
Which is how I ended up in the Twilight Zone—i.e., cooking Christmas dinner in my possibly-soon-to-be-ex-possibly-not-boyfriend’s missing ex-wife’s Main Line restaurant-caliber kitchen with my brother-in-law—God bless him—while my boyfriend (my would-be fiancé, actually, although I was quite sure he would not be) and his all-b
ut-estranged and until recently, to my knowledge, nonexistent daughter redecorated my Christmas tree in the right-out-of-The Philadelphia Story missing ex-wife’s Main Line living room. And if you had trouble following what I just told you, imagine what it was like to live it.
Not that morning, exactly, but as soon as the sky outside my bedroom window showed hints of becoming at some point in the not-so-distant future something other than pitch black, I woke up Teo, who pushed his overgrown hair out of his eyes, blinked maybe twice, and then started taking ornaments off my Christmas tree. “She’ll want it, don’t you think?” he asked.
Clare was already dressed and packing her things in the bedroom. She had blossomed into the very incarnation of Christmas spirit—bright eyes and flushed cheeks and humming “Joy to the World”—at the prospect of our going, a transformation that would have both moved and worried me more had I had time to process it. But I was loading—feverishly—turkey and pies (it had seemed like a good year to cheat and buy them) and a pan of cornbread (for stuffing) and fresh herbs and potatoes and wine and whipping cream and butter and so forth and, in my haste, plenty of unnecessary items as well, like two jars of Nutella and a box of Cheerios, into shopping bags and cardboard boxes I’d pilfered from the basement of my building.
About halfway through, I remembered to call Martin, who, after a long pause, responded to my somewhat deliriously cheerful announcement “There’s been a change of plans!” and consequent description of the changed plans with a brittle “I have to say, Cornelia, that that is a ridiculous idea.” Upon hearing this, I stopped in mid-pack, put down the bag of green beans I was holding, and took the phone out in the hallway so that Martin’s daughter wouldn’t have to overhear me remind her father of the universal rule regarding heartbroken children: If it is within the realm of human possibility to honor their requests, you do it.
I knew Clare might end up getting hurt—more hurt. I knew her mother was almost definitely not going to arrive at the moment when the carving knife was poised in the air, candlelight glinting off it, “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” tinkling on the stereo, as Clare may have been picturing; but I also knew that Clare wanted to be home. I knew it felt wrong to her not to be at home for Christmas. And I also knew that even Clare, child though she was, really didn’t believe her mother would come. She only hoped, and her hope was slender—a wisp of hope, a ghost. I knew this because I’m wise, but also because, just before I went in to wake up Teo, Clare had put her hand in mine and said, “Don’t worry. I know she probably won’t come.”
I was all set to tell Martin this, to allay his fears regarding Clare, when Martin said, “When I went to pick up Clare the other day, it was the first time I’d stepped foot in that house in seven years. Spending Christmas there would just be too awkward,” and then he softened. “You understand, don’t you, Cornelia?” And I did, I understood all too well. I understood that Martin’s fears regarding Clare didn’t need allaying by me or anyone else because he wasn’t thinking of Clare at all. I took this grim fact and filed it grimly away under “Reasons Not to Be with Martin,” a file that was growing fatter by the day and that I vowed to peruse from start to finish later, in a future when I had time for hard truths and contemplation, sometime after I’d stuffed Teo’s car full of Christmas dinner and strapped a Christmas tree to its roof.
“Martin, we’re going. You can go with us,” I said, keeping my voice steady, “or not.”
“I see,” said Martin, and he didn’t sound angry, as I’d expected. That was the thing about Martin, he was gracious and civilized when most people would fail to be. Whenever you were tempted to believe him a bad man, he would remind you that he wasn’t one. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was so important. Give me fifteen minutes.”
Despite all the strikes against it, that Christmas Day went better than you’d imagine for longer than you’d imagine.
The house was immaculate, thanks to Max, and showed remarkably few signs of having been inhabited, for several months, by a woman whirling downward into her own strange world and a desperate child doing everything she could to hold on to the ordinary one. There were a few giveaways—painful ones. At one point, Teo led me wordlessly to the pantry to show me the carefully arranged rows of canned peas and carrots and chicken soup and the three shelves loaded with boxes of Parmalat milk. I found the receipt later pinned to the bulletin board in the kitchen; Clare had had the groceries delivered and charged them by credit card. The pantry hurt. Worse than the bomb-shelter resemblance was the sheer quantity. I covered my mouth with my hand and my eyes filled with tears as I imagined my sweet girl (I thought of her that way already; I couldn’t help it) anticipating months, maybe endless months, of isolation and secrets.
And when I helped Clare carry her suitcases to her room, I didn’t mean to snoop, but after she left, I lingered and saw another bulletin board and, pinned to it, another artifact of a lonely and frightened life. A list. It was called “CLARE’S DON’T-FORGET LIST” (with “don’t” underlined three times) and said:
Eat a big breakfast; can’t seem hungry; can’t lose weight.
Take shower every morning; hair washed, brushed, neat.
Clothes: Shirts tucked in, sweaters on cold days. Check for holes in clothes, even socks. Raincoat and umbrella for rain. Snow boots for snow. Always hat and gloves when cold. Scarf when temperature is in thirties.
Watch weather report every evening; check again in morning if time.
Forge: permission slip for Nutcracker trip, note for M missing parent-teacher conference.
M missing Christmas pageant because???
The list went on and included trash pick-up days, bill-paying information, reminders to call and cancel with Max who apparently cleaned the house every other week, a list of foods (chicken soup was one) and vitamins to prevent colds and thus prevent a trip to the doctor, which I imagine would’ve been nearly impossible to pull off without a parent. In the margin, Clare had written in block letters: FORGOT TO SEND CHRISTMAS CARDS! NEW YEAR’S INSTEAD? LIST ON COMPUTER?
Clare was a marvel, resourceful and imaginative and brave, the kind of girl you usually only found in books organizing orphan uprisings or saving the world from the forces of evil. Thinking this made me feel hopeful; girls like that always won in the end, always. But I ached for her aloneness and wondered at her deep, deep need to keep her secret. It struck me that perhaps keeping the secret was vital not only because she was afraid of what the world might do to a mother like hers, but also because it was a project, a big detailed, consuming project. A way to be in control of something.
But even Clare couldn’t have kept it up for long; the list told me that, too. Even right that minute, there might have been someone out there saying, “You know, dear, Viviana didn’t send a card this year and, come to think of it, we haven’t heard from her in a couple of months, and remember how she was acting a bit odd last time we saw her…” Even if Viviana hadn’t disappeared, someone would have come to Clare’s rescue, as unwilling as she was to be rescued. Those rows of Parmalat and canned food—the thought that most of that would’ve ended up untouched on the shelves no matter what was a comfort.
As I stood looking at the list, Martin came into the room. That is, he didn’t exactly come into it, but stood in the doorway and studiously avoided resting his gaze on everything in the room except for me. That was how he would seem the entire time he’d spend in the house, balanced on the threshold, tentative, never wholly arrived. When I pointed to the list, he read it quickly, then said, “I wish I’d known what was happening. I wish she’d told me,” so ruefully that I wanted to touch him and did. I ran a finger from his ear to his chin. I’d always found that jawline remarkable and precise; now, I noticed how remarkably and precisely it resembled Clare’s. He took my finger and pressed it to his lips.
As I said, the day went surprisingly well. We were all trying hard, Teo and I—and Martin, too, I suppose—were trying hard for Clare’s sake, and she was trying hard because sh
e saw how much we wanted her to be happy; she was that kind of child. Also, maybe the day went well because Christmas is Christmas. I’m not a sentimentalist—OK, I am a sentimentalist about some things, but not about Christmas—but when a holiday has been sold as merry year after year after year, it gains a kind of momentum. The idea of merry carries you along for a good distance. It carried the four of us nearly all the way through dinner—a dinner that turned out to be, if not the most exquisite Christmas dinner ever cooked, not at all bad. At any rate, the turkey was not dry, not even the breast meat, which is not so easy to achieve under any circumstances, and is further testament to how hard we were all trying.
But it couldn’t last. Clare had been thinking of her mother all day—of course she had—and she’d pulled me aside at one point to show me a picture of the two of them together. In nearly every room of the house, there were framed photographs of Clare, who had been a lovely baby and who, apart from a brief snaggle-toothed, messy-haired interlude, had lived eleven years of continuous prettiness. There were no photographs of Martin and, until Clare showed me the one in the library, I’d seen none of Viviana, which, after seeing the photo of her, I took as a sign of enormous modesty and restraint on Viviana’s part because, if I looked like that, it would take Herculean modesty and restraint not to plaster every wall with my own image. I’d pictured Grace Kelly, and I was off, but not by that much. In fact, Viviana bore a striking resemblance to a not-so-well-known film-noir actress named Lizabeth Scott, who is sometimes referred to as a poor man’s Lauren Bacall, but who was a beauty in her own right and who steals scenes from the likes of Barbara Stanwyck in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. Besides, how poor is such a poor man, anyway? After all, it’s Lauren Bacall we’re talking about. At the worst, he’s a guy with just one vacation home and a smallish yacht. Save your sympathy.