“He’s getting room service,” Dad says. “He thought we’d want to be alone to talk.”
Xander rolls her eyes. I know just how she feels. I sometimes wish Adam weren’t so damn appropriate all the time. Now Dad can really let us have it without worrying about appearances.
We are seated at a comfortable corner booth, and we can hear the fountain that’s in the middle of the room, drizzling water over mossy, jagged rocks. The waiter is very soft-spoken and polite, and he takes our drink orders right away. Mint tea for me, Diet Coke for Xander, and a martini on the rocks for Dad, which shows how upset he is. He hardly ever drinks hard liquor.
He weaves his fingers together and looks at us. We stare at one another long enough for the waiter to bring our drinks and take our orders. When he leaves, Dad takes a sip, and another, sets his glass down, and finally speaks. “Why didn’t you come to me about Phillips?”
I look at Xander, who is staring into her lap as though she’s making a breakthrough about the construction of blue jeans. So I say, “We were afraid that Mom had an affair with him, and if that was true, we didn’t want you to know.”
His eyes are electrified with rage, and his voice seems to crackle. “You imagined that you knew something about my relationship with your mother that I didn’t?”
“We wanted to protect you,” Xander says quietly. “You’ve been a little . . . fragile lately.”
“This is how you protect me? By disappearing for two days . . .” He breaks off, his tired eyes wandering over the table.
Two days. Xander and I look at each other, and I can tell she’s realizing the same thing I am—that our leaving reminded him of how Mom left with Phillips all those years ago. And when he finally found us, who had we gone to see?
How could we have been so selfish?
“I’m so sorry, Dad,” I whisper.
“Me too,” Xander says.
“We just thought—”
“What?” he spits angrily. “That your mother was a cheater?”
“We could never have imagined that there was another man in Mom’s life, and when we found out there was . . .” Xander trails off.
I can’t stop a tear from falling down my face. “I felt like I didn’t know her all of a sudden.”
Dad glares at us both, but when he sees the pain on our faces, his anger seems to melt away a little, and he lets out a long, low sigh. “Girls, your mother was exactly who you thought she was. She never misrepresented herself to anyone. She was always honest with me about her feelings for John, and when those feelings faded away, she was honest about that too.”
I lift my eyes to Dad’s. He’s still angry, but at least now he’s trying to do something. He’s trying to be our dad, maybe for the first time in almost a year.
Xander must see it too, because she says, “I missed you, Dad.”
This does something to him, and he leans back in his chair as though he’s suddenly too tired to sit up straight. For a second I have the insane idea that Xander has ruined it and with a few short words Dad has gone back to being the same boneless heap he’s been for the past year.
The way we’re all sitting here, dazed and sad, reminds me of how we all looked the night after Mom’s funeral, when everyone had left and we were all alone, the three of us, newly aware that one of us was missing, and would be forever. Xander was pale and wan, Dad looked gray and angry. My eyes looked huge and shocked, as though the rest of my skull had shrunk from sadness. I remember I felt that something in the world had gone terribly, terribly wrong, and that we had lost our chance forever to fix it.
Soon the waiter brings our orders, which surprises me because I don’t really remember ordering. BLT for Xander, French dip for me, grilled cod for Dad. I eat mechanically. I can hear Xander chewing and swallowing, and I want to tell her to stop being such a pig. But I hold my tongue. At least everyone is eating, proof that this isn’t really so bad as the night after Mom’s funeral. Nothing could be that bad.
“Look, girls, I know deep in my heart that your mother loved me totally, and I her.” His eyes flash with the passion of what he’s saying. “We loved each other more every day. I have absolutely no doubt about that. Okay?” he says sternly.
“Okay,” we both whisper.
Dad pushes his plate away. He leans his elbows on the table and looks at Xander with a steady eye, and then at me. “I’m sorry, girls.”
Xander looks up from her half-eaten dill pickle. I put down my sandwich, which is clammy and cold.
“I’ve been so sad.” He rubs his whole face with one big hand. “I haven’t really been there for you.”
“That’s okay,” Xander tells him. She reaches across the table and rubs his shoulder. “We understood.”
“You needed me,” he insists. “I shouldn’t have left you girls alone to figure out what to do with all your grief.”
“Is there any other way?” I ask.
He crinkles his eyebrows, not understanding.
I remember the portraits Aunt Doris painted of Mom, and it helps me formulate the idea into words. “I think everyone does their grieving alone.”
Dad’s face softens. In spite of what I’ve done to him over the past forty-eight hours, he seems proud of me. “You might be right about that.”
Xander makes a face. “How come she always gets to be the wise one?”
Dad smiles a real smile. “Because it’s your job to be the smart-ass.”
We all laugh, weakly. Dad doesn’t seem furious anymore.
The waiter comes to take our plates away and asks if we want dessert. Xander nods emphatically, and soon we’re eating enormous hot fudge sundaes, extra nuts for me and Dad, extra whipped cream for Xander. She has a dot of white on the end of her nose because she always takes too big of bites, but Dad and I don’t tell her. We smirk at each other as she prattles on about how she can hardly wait to get some lab time at Caltech, she just hopes they let freshmen use the electron microscope or the particle splitter or laser doohickey. Something like that—I’m not really listening.
After we finish our ice cream, we all lean back. Xander rubs her belly unabashedly. Dad burps kind of loudly, then whispers, “Excuse me,” his face red.
We feel like a family again. One of us is missing, but somehow we closed the circle.
What is it about ice cream that can do that?
“So, Dad, who’s sending our letters?” Xander asks. She leans forward, testing her boundaries, as always.
I elbow her in the ribs. She can never let go of anything.
He looks at her, his eyes narrowed, and he clips his words as he answers. “Your grandmother. Which you probably could have found out had you visited her on Mother’s Day as your mother asked you to do.”
This shuts Xander up for a good long time.
The Last Day
IT’S SO EARLY, the robins aren’t singing yet. I can hear a warbler in the oak tree by Adam’s house. One by one, more birds answer his call.
Xander and I are standing on the front porch with her mountain of luggage between us. Most of the clothes in her bags are new from a shopping spree we went on last week. The shirts she bought have a plunging neckline, and the pants are snug around the hips, but it’s a vast improvement over the ripped jeans and halter tops she’s been wearing lately. “I’m de-skanking for college,” she announced to one saleslady at Macy’s, who kept her distance after that.
Dad bought her a new laptop with enough memory to handle the kind of data she’ll be crunching in her research projects at Caltech. Nancy got her a fax machine/printer, and Adam bought her a gold necklace with a heart-shaped pendant. He engraved something on the back, initials that stand for a private joke between them. Xander won’t tell me what it means, but that’s okay. I don’t need to know.
“You’ll e-mail me, right?” Xander asks me, biting her lip. She doesn’t usually let herself look scared, but today she’s not hiding anything.
“Of course I’ll e-mail you. You better answer.”
/> “I will.”
“None of this, ‘I read it and couldn’t respond right away, and then I forgot’ crap. Answer me right away.”
“I will! God!” she says, but she has a sad smile on her face. She looks over at Adam’s house. The downstairs lights have come on, and we catch glimpses of Adam and Nancy rushing around, getting things ready. Nancy won’t take him to the airport for another two hours, but they got up early to come say goodbye to Xander before she leaves this morning.
It’s probably best that they’re leaving on the same day. It will be easier than watching one of them go, and then the other. To be really honest about it, I’d say that what I’m feeling isn’t so much sadness as fear. I’ve never known a life without Xander stirring things up and Adam calming things down. I’m not sure I even know what I’ll be like without them. Without Xander as my counterbalance, will I still be Zen? Or will I be plain old Athena Vogel, with nothing and no one to define me?
Finally Adam and Nancy come out with his black luggage—two large duffel bags and an overstuffed garment bag. Once they have everything stacked and ready, they stop puttering around and just stare at us from across the street. Xander holds up her hand.
“Aren’t you guys a little early?” Xander asks as Adam saunters across the street, one hand in the front pocket of his jeans.
“So?” is his answer.
He stands at the edge of our lawn and looks up at Xander like he’s Romeo and she’s Juliet. For a while it seemed like they would kill each other like Shakespeare’s lovers, but now it looks like they finally accepted they can’t live without each other. They’re both much nicer people now that they finally gave in to it.
“You’re looking very collegey,” Nancy tells her as she bounds up the porch steps.
She means the beautiful wool blazer Mom ordered for Xander, which was delivered yesterday by Grandma in a large pink box. Its gray-brown color brings out Xander’s eyes. When she tried it on, she had to blink back tears. “It’s beautiful,” she whispered to Grandma, who only nodded, looking very proud that she was the one who could bring it to her. There was a note from Mom, too, that said, I’m more proud of you than I can say.
I got a note too:
Dear Zen,
It must be so hard to be left behind, first by me, and now by Xander. I wish there was something I could say to ease your heart right now, but I think you’ll just have to feel the pain.
Xander isn’t just your sister. You know that, don’t you? Not all sisters have what you have. Don’t let go of it. There is a precious silver thread you can always walk across to find each other, wherever you are, in whatever holes you’ve dug for yourselves. I feel better about leaving knowing you have each other. You always will.
You’re going to find your own way. You’re going to become the woman you were always meant to be.
Love always,
Mom
It was the perfect letter for today, for saying goodbye.
Because Mom’s not here to do it, Nancy engulfs Xander in a big hug. “God, I’m going to miss the trouble you cause,” she says.
“Well,” Xander says casually, “keep your eye on the news. You never know.”
“You make headlines, kid, I’ll disown you,” Nancy says. She wipes her eyes with her shirtsleeve and heads inside. “I hope your father is making coffee.”
“He’s trying,” I tell her.
I take a seat on the porch swing and look off toward the sunrise, which is just starting to pink up the sky. “Cheer up,” Mom whispers in the call of a chickadee twittering in a lilac bush. “Cheer up up up.”
But it’s not her. It’s a bird.
From the corner of my eye I watch Xander and Adam hanging on to each other, swaying back and forth. They stay like that for a long time, just holding each other quietly, like they’re hoping they might get stuck that way and they won’t have to say goodbye. I hear a soft little sob from Xander, and so I get up and go inside to find Nancy, Dad, and some coffee.
When we come back out with a big tray of reheated cinnamon rolls, a pot of strong coffee, and five mugs, they’re still holding each other right where I left them. Nancy clears her throat, and they finally pull apart, reluctantly, like strips of Velcro.
Dad pours a cup for everyone, and we all sit back down, Xander and Adam on the steps, me and Nancy on the porch swing, and Dad on the bench by the door. I imagine Mom hovering near the spider web that’s tangled in the railing, glistening with dew. Mom always found spider webs fascinating, and she’d stare at them, following the course of the thin silk threads, trying to see how the spider wove it. She’d say, “Don’t tell me that isn’t a form of intelligence. Look at it!”
It’s a good web, and if she were alive today, that’s where she’d be standing, looking at it to distract herself from the fact that Xander is leaving home forever.
Suddenly the feeling of Mom being with us on the porch is so strong, I can almost trick my eyes into seeing her there, her dark eyes trailing through the web as the first morning sunlight plays in its strands.
She turns toward me and smiles.
“Do you guys ever feel like Mom’s here with us?” I ask before I even know the words are in my mind.
My question goes unanswered, because Dad is completely unraveled by it. He hides his face in his hand and whispers, “She should be here to see you off.”
Nancy leans forward and gives his back a little pat.
I look at Xander, who is watching me, a strange expression on her face. Her eyes dart over to the spider web and hang there for a second, almost as if she sees Mom there too, before darting back to me again. She blinks slowly, a faint smile on her lips.
I love my sister.
When there’s no more time to linger, we all stand up, and Dad parks the Audi in front. Everyone grabs a bag and we load up the car, and Dad walks around to get into the driver’s seat. Dad’s driving Xander to the airport alone because she doesn’t want a big goodbye scene in public. Adam, Nancy, and I all stand around awkwardly, waiting to see what she’ll do.
Xander chooses Nancy first, grabbing both sides of her face with her hands and squeezing her cheeks. An odd thing to do, but since Nancy is odd, she seems to understand completely what this means. “I love you to pieces,” she tells Xander through her squished-together cheeks.
Xander laughs because it looks so funny. “I love you too.”
Xander releases her, and Nancy turns away because she’s crying. She waves without turning around and jogs into her house.
Now it’s just Adam and me, looking at her. I take half a step forward because I’m sure her last goodbye, the place of honor, will be for him, but she surprises me, and turns to him with a radiant smile.
He steps forward and takes hold of her hand.
“Everything to me” is all she can say.
He nods, but he can’t speak. He grabs on to her and holds her, staring off angrily at Lake Champlain, which is starting to glow brilliantly with the rising sun.
They don’t say anything. He lets go of her abruptly, and he runs off, pounding up the porch stairs and into his house just like Nancy did.
She gives me a wry smile through her tears. “He’ll never get over me.”
“Over you?”
She shrugs. “I mean, Jesus, Zen. I’m eighteen years old. What am I going to do? Marry him?”
“I thought—”
“The future will come how it comes.” She says this bravely, with some resignation. With the palm of her hand, she scrubs her face free of tears. “Do I look okay?” she asks.
“You look like my sister,” I tell her.
She turns away, toward Lake Champlain, just the way Adam did. “You will always be, until the day I die, my best friend in the whole world.”
I look again at the lilac bush. The chickadee is still there, hopping from branch to branch. I can’t look at Xander as I speak, but somehow that feels right. “Me too.”
We don’t hug. The Vogel sisters don’t hug.
She touches the tips of her fingers to my forehead, gives me an aching smile, and turns to get in the car.
Once inside, she rolls down the window and gives me her brattiest sneer. “Oh, by the way, I gave the lovebirds to Adam.”
A shriek of anger bolts through my throat. “Why didn’t you ask?”
“You would have said no.”
Her voice is defiant, but her eyes are full of deep sorrow. My anger fades, because I know what it means to her, to give Mom’s statue to him.
“Well, as long as there’s a good chance it’ll stay in the family.”
“A chance,” she murmurs, wistful, as she rolls up the window.
She places her palm on the glass. I place my palm there too.
We stay like that, looking at each other, until Dad revs the engine.
I watch them drive away until the car gets lost in the glare on the lake.
The house feels empty. I wonder if Mom is sitting next to Xander on the plane, making sure she gets there okay. I don’t know if I’m kidding myself about that or not. I’ll never know. But I suppose I can believe what makes me feel better. That’s probably what Paul would say. I’ve just said goodbye to Adam before he and Nancy drove off, and now I’m on the porch swing, trying to read a book.
There’s a pit in my stomach a mile deep.
I keep catching my eye on the same sentence over and over again, but it won’t sink in. I want them all back, but I can’t go back. I’m stuck on this swing, moving around but staying in the same place.
I hear gravel skipping, and I look down the street to see Paul walking along, his camera around his neck, his hands in his pockets. When he sees me, he smiles, and I notice for the first time that his teeth are a little off center from the rest of his face, which gives him the grin of a scoundrel. I like it.
“Whatcha doing?” he asks me.
“Everyone left today,” I say tearfully.
His posture droops, and he sits down next to me on the porch swing and gives me a long-faced look of commiseration. “You okay?” He rests his hand on my foot, pats it a few times. I like how he touches me. We communicate so easily that way.