Zen and Xander Undone

  Xander wilts against me. I lean back against the couch. I never thought of this. Never once. Slowly the stunned feeling seeps out of me.

  “I wish I could say something that would absolve her.” He stands up, walks behind his desk chair, and leans against the back of it as he talks. His eyes remain on Mom’s letter, which rests in Xander’s lap. “We were very young. And I’d married a woman who wasn’t good for me. Who made me unhappy. But it was wrong.”

  “What about our dad?” Xander asks. I don’t have to look at her to know she’s trying hard not to cry. “Was she already with Dad at the time?”

  “No.” He slices the air with his hand as if trying to cut away any doubt. “Not at first. She began dating him shortly before she and I split.”

  The room is deadly quiet. Through the open door I hear a television come on, some sticky-sweet children’s program. The little boy giggles. He’s so lucky not to know about this.

  “Look, girls,” John says. “Your mother was a very good person who made a mistake. She realized how serious it was before I did. And she was the one who broke it off. Long before she married your father.”

  “But why did you send her the statue after she got married?” Xander asks. Her eyes are hard, and I realize that she doesn’t trust what he’s telling us.

  He takes a deep breath. “Because my first wife left me after Marie married James. Your father. And I wanted Marie back.”

  “So you tried to steal her away from Dad?”

  “I sent her the statue with a note that I was in town and would be waiting for her in a hotel room.” The memory seems to sap his strength, and he sits down in the chair again.

  “Did she come?”

  He looks at us both, seeming to measure us. “Yes. She did. She tried to give me back the statue, but I wouldn’t take it. And she left. I never saw her after that.” He blinks twice, and I see a glisten in his eyes. Quickly he lifts his fingers to his face as though checking for tears.

  “You really loved her,” Xander says quietly.

  For the first time, he smiles at us. “Of course I did.”

  Who She Loved More

  NOW I CAN ALMOST SEE whatever it was Mom saw in him. He’s small, and skinny, and his face is pleasant, not really handsome. But when he smiles, his face takes on a masculine quality that reminds me of Adam somehow. There’s something very decent about him.

  I look at Xander. Her expression is still hard. She doesn’t believe him.

  The phone rings somewhere in the back of the house, and I hear little feet running for it, then a squeaky “Hello?” followed by “Daddy!”

  “Just a moment,” John says to us before getting up.

  Once he’s out of the room, Xander darts off the couch. “Are you buying this?”

  “Yes.” I’m sick of her suspicions. “He’s given us no reason to doubt him. You saw Mom’s letter.”

  She half shrugs, then plops back down on the couch, arms crossed over her middle.

  I hear the murmur of John’s voice. By the tone I’d judge he’s not talking to a student. There’s none of the professional distance in his voice, but there is a nervousness, as though he’s a little afraid of the person he’s talking to. Slowly his voice gets louder as he makes his way back to the study, and his words become clear. “They seem fine to me . . .”

  I look at Xander. She is staring at me with round eyes.

  “They’re right here . . . I’ll get them . . .” John comes back in the room and holds out the phone to Xander. Of course she waves it away, the coward, so he hands it to me and stands by the window.

  “H-hi, Dad,” I stammer.

  “Do you have any idea what you’ve put me through?” He is literally snarling.

  “I’m sorry!”

  “Answer my question!”

  “I thought it was rhetorical.”

  “Are you seriously going to give me attitude at a time like this?” This is just like something Mom would say. To hear it come from Dad sounds a little weird, but somehow comforting too. “You are grounded for the rest of the summer.”

  “We probably deserve it.”

  Xander is biting her bottom lip as she listens. She has broken into a sweat.

  “How did you find us?” I ask.

  “Nancy told me you’ve been sniffing around the whole John Phillips thing. Asking questions, reading your mother’s documents, snooping around, and generally being two hideous little miscreants.” I have never known my dad to be so angry. I can actually hear his spit hitting the phone as he talks. “Who told you to go around asking questions? Your mother’s past is none of your business!”

  “Nancy wasn’t supposed to say anything! We didn’t want this to hurt you!”

  “Nancy didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know.”

  This stops me cold. All this time we could have asked Dad about this. We could have avoided so much heartache! “So you know about Mom and John Phillips?”

  “Of course I do. She was gone for two days—you think I wouldn’t notice that?” He clips the last word, as though trying to bite back the whole sentence.

  Two days.

  “She was gone for two days?” I ask him, my eyes on Phillips.

  His face colors.

  Xander’s head pops up.

  The line is silent for a couple beats. “What did he tell you?”

  I can hardly make my voice work. It feels like rusty gears. “That she went to see him at his hotel and left right away.”

  Phillips drops his head into his hands and hides there. Xander stands up and paces back and forth behind the coffee table, two steps up, two steps back, like a caged cougar.

  The phone line is quiet for so long that I begin to wonder if Dad hung up, but then he clears his throat. His voice is thready. “Nancy is booking me on the next plane out there. I’ll be there at eight o’clock this evening. You’re to drive to the airport to meet me.”

  “Dad!” I say, trying to cling to him somehow with my voice. I feel like the whole fabric of my life has been shredded and all I have are tendrils of false memory.

  “We’ll talk about this later,” he says, and hangs up.

  I put the phone down on the coffee table in front of my knees. Phillips sinks into his desk chair again. Xander and I both stand over him, waiting for an explanation. He does not meet our eyes, just rubs at his Adam’s apple, seeming to think through some complicated problem in his head.

  Xander sits back down. In a deep, threatening voice, she says, “Start again. The truth this time.”

  He spins his chair a half turn and looks out the window behind his desk. I look too. There’s a hummingbird feeder outside, and a tiny little buzzing bird darts around it, sucking at sugar water with its long, thin beak.

  I turn to see Phillips working his mouth like he’s trying to relearn how to form words. “She didn’t want you to know,” he said. “That’s why I lied.”

  “I need the truth.” Xander is crying. I don’t have to look at her face to know that.

  I’m not crying. I’m too numb.

  He looks at the floor as he speaks, each word carefully considered before it is laid before us. “She came to my hotel room. She was crying, and holding the bird statue. She wanted to give it back to me. She said she had a new life now and she needed to forget about me.”

  I have to look at the floor. I can’t look at his strained face as he talks.

  “I wouldn’t take it. And I asked . . . begged her to just stay with me. Just to talk. She’d had an argument with James, and every time she tried to leave, I took advantage of her confused feelings and I got her to stay.” The room is silent for a while, and I hear the weird, distant sound of a children’s song coming from the TV. The strangeness of the contrast between this room and that room turns my stomach.

  “I thought when Marie left Hanover to be with your dad that I could somehow put the pieces of my own life back together. I tried to make it work with my first wife. I really did, but something had died between
us, and she finally gave up. She knew that I was still in love with your mother.”

  Something in his voice changes, and I look at him. With a jolt, I see that his eyes are on me, and there’s such longing and sadness in his expression, I realize that he’s seeing Mom in me. I pick up a couch pillow and bury my face in it. I can’t have him looking at me that way. It just makes me know all over again that Mom is dead and Xander and I are all that’s left of her.

  “By then, your mother was married, but I came for her anyway. It took a lot of talking, and coaxing, but I got her to listen to me. And for about twenty-four hours, I had her convinced that she and I belonged together.” I hear a strange sound and look up to see that he’s chuckling to himself, though there’s no humor in it. “That was the happiest twenty-four hours of my life. Until Jeremy was born, that is.”

  The room feels stuffy, like the air is too thick to breathe or talk through. My mind is jammed up, and I can’t make myself think. When someone finally speaks, it’s Xander. “Where were we during all this?”

  He smiles sadly. “With your grandmother. You don’t remember any of this?”

  We both shake our heads. “We’d have been toddlers still,” Xander says.

  We’re all awkward, and silent, until Xander speaks. “In her note, Mom said she was sorry for being cruel.” It’s not a question, but she’s asking something.

  He rubs his scalp with his fingertips, back and forth, hard. “We spent the night in my hotel, and the next day we decided that the best thing would be to leave town, let your dad get used to the idea. She always planned on coming to get you girls when the dust settled. I want to make that absolutely clear. She contemplated leaving your father, but never you. Never.”

  His gaze is steady as he pauses, looking at both of us, willing us to believe him. And I do. I know he’s not lying. At least this much I know about Mom. She would never have abandoned me and Xander. She loved us too much. It doesn’t really help, though, knowing that she wanted to take us from our dad. It feels sickening to know how close my family came to breaking apart forever.

  “But she came back,” Xander says, her voice sounding dry like frayed cotton.

  “We got as far as Montpelier before she made me turn back.”

  He stops there, but Xander and I only wait. The story isn’t finished. I need to know everything.

  He sighs. “I tried to convince her. I begged her. She had to scream at me because I refused to understand. She finally said, ‘I love James more than you.’” He tries to laugh, but his eyes are sad. “‘I love him more.’ That’s how she was cruel, since you want to know.”

  He shakes his head; his gaze drops. By his expression, which is full of pain, I know for sure. This is exactly what Mom said to him.

  I love James more.

  The room is quiet, except for the faint sound of cartoons. Finally Xander speaks. “Can we see it?”

  He is boneless in his chair, his eyes rubbed raw, his skin sallow. He looks like someone who has just gotten over a terrible disease. He nods, and leads us through his house, to the back behind the kitchen. It’s a tiny pantry, barely large enough for the three of us to stand in, filled with soup cans and boxes dusted with flour. John reaches to the top shelf and pulls down a small shipping box that is hanging open with lots of bubble wrap spilling out. He holds it, staring into the box for what seems like a long time. Then he swallows, audibly, and hands the box to Xander.

  “Actually, girls, I would like you to take it.”

  “No,” I say. My voice sounds very loud in this tiny room. “Mom wanted you to have it.”

  “It meant enough that she remembered me at the end.” He pushes the box into Xander’s stomach and closes her hands around it, folding her fingers gently around the corners of the cardboard. “I mean it. I’ve got a family now. And a wonderful wife. I shouldn’t let my house get crowded up with ghosts.”

  I want to tell him no again, but Xander nods. “I understand that,” she says.

  He leads us to the front door and opens it for us. John’s little boy turns around when he sees us and yells, “Swimming, Daddy!”

  “Five minutes,” John tells him. He turns to look at me and Xander, his sad eyes darting between us. “You both look so much like—”

  “Thanks,” Xander interrupts. It’s too painful to let him finish.

  He nods in understanding. “Thank you for coming to see me.”

  “Goodbye,” Xander says, and turns to go to the car.

  Something pulls me, or pushes, and though I don’t want to do it, I step forward and kiss John on the cheek. His stubble tickles my bottom lip, and a spark of electricity snaps from my fingers to his shoulder. If I hadn’t stopped believing Mom was still in the world, I would imagine that spark is a message for him from her. When I pull away, his face is rubbery and undone. I can’t make myself speak, so I run to the car.

  We drive off without looking back.

  We’ve gotten what we wanted. We have the answers. And considering what it might have been, the story came to a conclusion that I can live with. Mom didn’t cheat on us for years. She slipped up for a couple days. So why don’t I feel better?

  I look at Xander in the rearview mirror. She’s squinting through the bright windshield at the street, looking sullen and angry. She doesn’t feel any better either.

  Adam knows enough not to ask us about it right away. He just drives, waiting patiently for us to tell him when we’re ready. But what will we say?

  That Mom didn’t have an affair so much as a couple days of temptation. That she came to her senses and ran back to Dad, who forgave her. It doesn’t really matter, in the end, how many men Mom loved, because it turns out we don’t feel any better. We solved the mystery, got the answers we were looking for, and now we’re back where we started.

  Mom is dead. John Phillips was just one facet of her life that we didn’t know about. But there were a million facets to the diamond that was Marie Vogel, and the only ones we ever got to see were of her being our mom. The mischievous teenager, the brilliant academic mind, the confused lover, the torn heart, all of these were parts of her too, but we never knew these sides of her, and we never will. No matter how many mysteries we solve, no matter how many road trips we go on looking for the key to Mom’s past, she’s never coming back. Except for the letters she wrote to us, there’s no way we can ever know more about her than we already do. Mom’s life is a closed book we can never read.

  It’s like we were trying to build a bridge to wherever Mom is. But that’s impossible. Not only did we lose Marie the mother, we lost all of her, and we lost the chance to know the rest of her. Forever.

  I’ve been talking to her in my mind since she died, trying to convince myself it wasn’t true. But it is. Mom is gone.

  I let out a little groan and lie down on the seat, shielding my eyes with my arm. I hear Xander’s breath come in starts and hiccups, and I know she’s buried her face in Adam’s shirt and she’s quietly crying, just like I am.

  Dinner in a Tacky Hotel

  DAD LOOKS LIKE HE’S AGED about twenty years when he comes through the airport gate. His eyes are baggy, and his hair hangs in his eyes. He walks bent over, looking at the floor, so that he almost bumps into us before he notices we’re standing right in front of him. Xander and I smile sheepishly, but he doesn’t return our smiles. He seems brokenhearted, and I feel even worse about making him worry so much. Adam takes his garment bag from him and we lead him out to the parking garage. He walks to the driver’s side and snaps his fingers. Adam gives him the car keys without a word.

  We’re on the highway, on the way to the hotel Nancy booked for us, before Dad finally says a direct word to Xander and me. “I really don’t know what to say to you.”

  “Daddy, I’m sorry,” Xander pleads. She’s in the front seat next to him, and she leans forward, trying to get him to look at her, but he won’t. “We tried to get permission. We really did.”

  “And I said no!” Dad punches the steerin
g wheel. The car swerves, and the driver next to us honks his horn. Dad tries to calm himself down with deep, shaky breaths. “I lost my wife, not even a year ago! For twenty-four hours you made me think I might have lost the two of you as well. Do you know what that did to me? Do you?”

  Xander shrinks back into her seat. She almost never has this look on her face, but it’s written all over her profile. She’s totally ashamed.

  “Adam, your mother has been through enough without you wandering off.”

  “I know,” he says. He’s staring at the back of Xander’s head with worry.

  We all brood as Dad pulls in to the hotel parking lot, and we pile out and go check in to our rooms, Adam and Dad in one, Xander and me in the other. It’s a nice room, decorated with burgundy and gold curtains and plush, squishy carpeting. It’s almost nine o’clock, and I’d love to ignore my empty belly and crawl between the sheets, but Dad knocks on our door and calls, “Let’s go have some dinner.”

  Xander and I follow him down the hallway. The carpeting is so thick, I can’t hear our footsteps. Dad seems a little less furious now, but he still seems heartbroken. I’m starving, but I’m so filled with dread about what he’s going to say to us, I can’t imagine eating a big heavy meal. What I really want is Cream of Wheat, the way Mom used to make it when we were little. She would drop cut-up dried apples and apricots into it, and drizzle honey on top. I’ve tried making it for myself, but I can never make it taste the way Mom could. That’s one more thing I wish I’d asked her. How did you make that Cream of Wheat?

  “Vanilla,” she whispers in the sound of the elevator doors opening for us.

  Of course. Vanilla.

  But that wasn’t Mom. It was my subconscious or something. Wishful thinking. And I’ve got to let that go. I can’t keep hurting like this, and talking to a figment of my imagination isn’t helping me.

  “Where’s Adam?” Xander asks worriedly.