The Blessings (19 page)

“She does,” Ann says, and prays that this is true.

Once, when Abby was in third grade, she had a homework assignment that required her to check the newspaper each night for a month and record the times of the sunrise and sunset. The time inched one minute later each day, occasionally two. Dave hadn't seen the point of this exercise (and more than once, exasperated, had had to run out to 7-Eleven for the paper after he was settled in the den), but Ann had liked it. It wasn't the kind of homework she would ever assign (
old school
, Alex calls her), but there was something to it, she thought, pausing to note that small change each day.

Ann feels guilty for being so idle. Though the longer it goes on, the easier it is. When she called the school, they were nothing but sympathetic—
Take all the time you need
. The children were good, they assured her, the sub working out fine. Ann imagines a woman younger, cooler, than her. For the first time in her life, there is nothing tugging at her, needing her. Nothing demanding her presence. She has stepped out of life's current, and life rolls on without her. It's both freeing and disconcerting. Is this how Mother felt? How she feels?

A call from the nursing home: Mother escaped. She made for the exit, forgetting where she was. She wheeled herself onto the elevator and out the door, and one of the nurses found her sitting in the courtyard. Now she has to wear an anklet to alert the nurses if she tries to leave again.
She's like a celebrity in rehab!
Meghan jokes on the phone.

“Do you need anything, Mom?” she asks before hanging up. “You're good, right? You're driving?”

“Oh, yes,” Ann says.

She tries, because she feels guilty for lying to Meghan. But when she steps outside, she is instantly overwhelmed—the sun so bright it makes her eyes water, the sharp smell of the cold. Her incision stings, her nose hairs freeze. As she walks toward the car, the grass crunches beneath her feet, hard and white, blanched with frost. The basketball net looks gray and frozen. She sees an odd shine on the driveway—black ice? Her eyes film with tears. It is all too much. She turns and goes back inside.

That night, it snows. True snow, wet and heavy. Eight inches, ten. It buries the car, blankets the roads. It climbs all the way past the porch.

One of her books said that it isn't good to name things because it limits their identity. So instead of
That's a blue jay
, say:
That's called a blue jay
. Ann finds this idea appealing. Otherwise, it's easy to reduce a person to just one thing. She remembers, when they arrived for the session with the family therapist, overhearing the doctor on her office phone:
I'll have to call you back. I have a family here in crisis.
Ann had glanced into the waiting room, looking for these poor people, then realized with a start:
That's us
.

Awake in bed, Ann listens to the plows churn slowly up and down Spry Boulevard. She watches the splash of headlights move across her bedroom wall. The neighborhood is quiet, the kind of quiet that befalls a place only after a storm. By morning, the street will be alive with scrapers and shovels and bundled children—children Ann no longer knows, the children of young families—dragging their sleds and saucers up the street.

The next day, she picks through the boxes Alex brought down from the attic. Old clothes and toys. Meghan's collection of stuffed panda bears. Abby's books,
Anastasia Krupnik
and
Harriet the Spy
. Trapper Keepers and diaries, Legos with half-built helicopters and hospitals. Enough here to feel sad for, Ann could implode. She folds the clothes, puts them into piles.
Donate, Trash, Keep.
She gives away most of the clothes, holds on to everything else. In one box, she finds an envelope filled with pictures she'd forgotten. There's John with his Fu Manchu mustache. John, cradling Max in his lap, just days before he died.

The house is cold, so Ann turns the heat up five degrees. A needless expense, but for once she has an excuse to do it. She's never felt so warm, so cozy, in her own home. Never heard such lively humming in the pipes. The phone rings—experimentally, she lets the machine pick up.
Ann? It's Margie.
A pause.
Ann? Are you there?
She takes a long warm bath, the tub filled halfway up the side, submerging her scar, her knees.

Ann pictures the inside of her body as a shell. As a room, quiet, with pulsing walls, beating like lungs, the pale pink color like the smooth inside of a conch. A place she could live inside.

When Margie shows up after church on Sunday, it takes Ann by surprise. Margie usually calls first. Ann is becoming one of those people, she thinks, like Lauren after John died: someone people drop in on with no warning.

“How were the roads?” Ann asks.

“Fine,” Margie says, shaking off her boots and coat. As Ann puts on water for tea, she is embarrassed by the state of things. Dust has settled on the baseboards, dishes piled in the sink. The kitchen tablecloth, the red snowflake one that's been on since Christmas, has visible stains. And the heat—the house feels extravagantly, wastefully, warm. When they were children, they walked around indoors with cold hands and noses. She's sure Margie will confront her about it, all of it.

They sit at the table as the kettle simmers. Ann knows the determined look on her sister's face. For all her anxieties, Margie is capable of such moments: doing what needs to be done.

“Well,” Ann says.

Margie's eyes are on the window, her mouth set in a hard, thin line. Her entire face looks hard, Ann thinks: the blunt cheekbones, the deep wrinkles stitched permanently across her brow. While Ann has grown a little rounder over the years, Margie has grown smaller, sharper, worry paring down her soft corners like a whittled stick. She reaches for her cross, her nervous habit ever since she got the locket for confirmation in eighth grade. “I haven't told you this,” she says. “I haven't told anyone. Joe and I have been having some problems.”

Ann is surprised—that the problem has nothing to do with her, and that Margie would admit to it. She tries to remember the way her therapist would react to things: never under, never over. As if nothing is too strange or insurmountable.

“I'm sorry,” Ann says. “What kind of problems?”

“Money,” Margie says. She knots her hands on the tablecloth. The kettle on the stove begins to shake. “And other things.”

Ann nods, not pushing it. She knows they've struggled with Stephen, knows well how a child in trouble can take a toll. Once she saw a prescription bottle in Margie's medicine cabinet, something for anxiety or sleep.

Margie meets Ann's eyes, presses her lips together. “He's a weak man, I think,” she says. Then she looks away, mouth twitching as if she's trying to keep from crying. She blinks quickly into the cold spill of sunlight through the window. The kettle is on the verge of whistling. “And Stephen,” Margie says, and her eyes flood with tears.

Ann reaches instinctively for her sister's clasped hands, bracing herself. Stephen—it could be anything.

“There's a girl,” Margie says just as the kettle starts to shriek. Ann stands to pull it off the burner, fills two cups. When she sits back down, Margie's face looks pale, but composed. “The girl, she's pregnant.”

“Oh, Margie,” Ann breathes.

Margie quickly shakes her head, as if to an unasked question. “We barely know her. We've never even met her. They're not…you know.” She folds her hands again, knuckles straining against her freckled skin. “She wants him to do a test.”

Ann's first impulse is to empathize: acknowledge the disappointment and the shock of it, the shame. This is not the kind of thing that happens in a family like theirs, not the kind of thing they imagine for their children—and so public. But as Ann picks up her teacup, senses her sister waiting, hands clenched on the table before her, she forces a firm note into her voice.

“Well,” Ann says. “It's disappointing. But there's not much you can do, is there. Stephen has to manage his own life.”

It's the wrong thing—Margie looks instantly annoyed, a quick V sinking between her eyes. “I know that,” she says, reaching abruptly for her cup. “I was just telling you. I'm going to tell you, aren't I?”

At least her anger has unfrozen her, jarred her out of her contrite pose. Margie takes a sip of tea, and Ann does the same. As the warmth slides down her throat, blooming through her middle, Ann ventures: “I think he'd make a good father.”

Margie says nothing, staring at the table, but her face seems to uncloud a little.

“And a new baby,” Ann reminds her.

“That's true.” Margie's chin is down, hands wrapped around her cup. “I guess all we can do now is wait,” she says, and Ann nods, thinking: How much of life is spent doing just this. A call from a doctor, result of a test. Some sign of progress, forward movement—some small but crucial, hopeful change. “That's all you can do,” Ann says, and then they talk of other things. Joey's future mother-in-law, who has funny ideas about the bridal shower. A woman from Margie's parish diagnosed with chronic fatigue. Mother, the security anklet. When the tea is gone, Margie stands, puts on her coat and boots, and tells Ann that her boys will be over soon to shovel her out.

Ann stares at the car. The driveway is clear now—Stephen and Joey showed up, as promised—and the temperature is well into the forties, the old snow dripping from the eaves. Just past three thirty—she needs to leave now in order to get to the nursing home before Mother's dinner. Ann takes a breath, then starts carefully across the deck. Her scar tingles in the cold, tracing a faint line up and down her middle. She makes her way across the grass, which is slightly muddy, giving softly beneath her boots. She pulls hard at the door handle, grown stiff with the cold, but the door comes unglued. Inside, Ann turns the key—nothing. A blast of hope. Maybe the car's been off so long, it won't turn on again without a call to the mechanic, a jump start. Another day. But when she tries again, the engine catches. Sluggish at first, but it holds. Ann sits and waits as the car warms up. It's 3:45 by the clock on the dashboard. The sun won't set tonight until at least five thirty. Ann looks at the trees, bare and white against the feathery gray sky. She surveys the front seat, evidence of the last time the car was driven, the ride home from the hospital with her three children. A gum wrapper, a crumpled white bag from the pharmacy. A pink hair elastic knotted with a single long brown strand. A copy of
Recovering
on the rubber mat beneath the gas pedal, marked with Alex's size thirteen shoe. But Ann isn't thinking of her children, or her mother. She's thinking about the woman from the hospital, the one in so much pain. All night she moaned, but Ann never heard her in the daytime, never figured out her name. As she puts the car in reverse and starts backing slowly down the driveway, it occurs to her to wonder whether that woman was real or if, alone in the dark, she made her up.

D
addy?”

Patrick is standing in his front yard, looking up at his new picture windows. Custom-fit, with state-of-the-art crown moldings, fluted exterior trim.

“Daddy? Dad?”

He is thinking, for some reason, about their old apartment on Spruce Street. The worn brown couch, the galley kitchen, the coffee mugs hanging from hooks nailed to the ceiling—the entire apartment was the size of what was now their master bedroom suite. But it was cozy, that apartment, and you couldn't beat the location. It would have been impossible back then to imagine Kate ever not living in the city, critical as she was of anyone who didn't.

“Patrick!” his daughter shouts, and finally he turns. His nine-year-old is standing by the minivan, next to the sign staked in his freshly mowed lawn:
CARLSON LUXURY WINDOWS & DOORS
. She is clasping the bowl she made at her friend's birthday party, one of those make-your-own-pottery ones. They had clowns, too, and face paint. Hayley's face is painted like the puppy Kate won't let her have, black and white with a bright pink tongue hanging from one side.

“Hi, sweetheart.”

“Are you
ready
?”

She manages to look exasperated, even with the paint. “I was born ready,” Patrick says, and they buckle into the car and go.

Since his brother John died fourteen years ago, Patrick has been determined to take away some life lessons from what happened: the suddenness of the cancer, the two small kids left behind. He's concluded, among other things, that to plan for anything is pointless. There's no telling what life will become. The only things worth planning are in the short term: playdates, meetings, birthday parties, trips to the Jersey shore.

Patrick has been doing some version of this trip his entire life—even the year John died, the entire family went, the absence unbearable, the baby crying. Today he is headed to his house in Ocean City, where Kate and their five-year-old, Tate, went this morning. Hayley stayed behind for the birthday party, and Patrick picked her up after work this afternoon.
See you next week
, he said to his assistant as he was hurrying out the door. Louise is Irish, true Irish—not the kind that Patrick was championed as on Saint Patty's Day pub crawls, a red-haired mascot to his drunk college friends, but actually from Ireland, with pale arms and soft shoulders, a brogue he finds strangely soothing. That afternoon, he'd overheard her talking to Mrs. Swift about her glaucoma in a voice so gentle and lyrical, Patrick could have closed his eyes and slept.

Enjoy your holiday, Dr. B
, Louise replied.
And don't think I'm not jealous.
Something about the way she pronounced it—
jay
lous—gave Patrick an almost visceral jolt.

“Earth to Dad!” Hayley is saying from the backseat. This is one of her new lines, acquired at her private elementary school and delivered dipped in sarcasm. Patrick is not a fan.

“Yes, Hay.”

“How much longer?”

“Jeez, Hay, we just left—”

But when he glances at her in the rearview mirror, he sees that her painted-on puppy mouth is smiling. She knows she's being funny. Hayley has always had this in her—a streak of humor that makes her seem more adult, more aware, than other kids her age. Her mother's child, Patrick thinks: hyperverbal, social, with that same pin-straight blond hair. Tate was born a redhead, as if sensing his father's allegiance even in the womb. Hayley, the one they fought for. Tate, the surprise. Patrick remembers that first healthy ultrasound, how Kate broke down in the doctor's office, crying with relief. She had been driven, desperate, to have that baby, after all the drugs and two attempts at IVF that didn't take. But four years later, it was a different sort of crying, quiet and helpless, leaning her knuckles against the marble sink in the master bathroom, the plastic stick sitting among the toothbrushes and face creams. Hayley was calling from the living room, Kate biting her lip, eyes brimming. Then she had turned to Patrick and said:
Maybe one is enough
. At first Patrick wasn't sure if she was joking—sometimes his wife was being funny, sometimes she only thought she was being funny—but then he saw the doubt on her face. Was she fucking kidding? It was against his religion, for one thing, but it wasn't the only thing. It was a child.
Their
child—and after all they'd gone through for Hayley. He turned and left the room and walked downstairs. She didn't mention it again.

Patrick pulls onto 76, where the traffic is thickening, heading toward the Walt Whitman Bridge. In hindsight, he thinks, Kate's hesitation shouldn't have been such a surprise. Despite her desperation to get pregnant the first time, Patrick has realized that his wife is not a natural mother. She isn't one of those women—like his sisters or his brother's wife, Lauren—for whom mothering is just inborn. She'd wanted to go back to work when Hayley started kindergarten—a plan now on hold indefinitely. In its stead, motherhood has become Kate's career. She knows all the terms and trends—Ferberizing, tummy time—but often seems resentful of her role.
I don't know who I'm supposed to be anymore
, she'll snap.
Is this really all I am?

In these moments, Patrick feels like shouting:
You have a healthy family.

Or:
Are you just determined to be unhappy?

Or:
Look at Lauren! She never complains, after all she's been through!

Look at himself, for that matter, working insanely long hours so she can have shore houses and state-of-the-art windows, hours that will stretch endlessly into the future (because he's learned: Once you live at a certain level, there's no going back).

But Patrick can't say these things, so instead he asks:
Want to trade?
A joke, but not really a joke, and they both know it. The potential argument simmers between them, until eventually one of them backs down. They have sex, usually. Despite all the injections, the long scar from the C-section, the years of rote
procreating
—Kate's word for it—their sex life is still good, and can make other things feel less looming, less tempting.

Hayley pushes her foot against the back of Patrick's seat. They are inching across the bridge, past the gauzy Philadelphia skyline. It's boiling outside—the windows are up and the air conditioner on full blast. When Patrick was a kid, there were hot days, but not this sweltering, summer-long heat. Twenty-first-century heat. It is unbearably muggy, even at six thirty, but there will be relief once they get to the shore.

Patrick glances in the rearview mirror, at Hayley staring dully at a handheld video game. As if sensing his look, she says, “How much longer?”

“Five minutes less than the last time you asked,” he says.

Without looking up, she rolls her eyes.
Fresh
—it was the quality Patrick's parents disliked most. He reaches for the radio, tuning in the Phillies pregame, and Hayley sighs, a disconcertingly adult-sounding sigh. “I'm so bored.”

If you're bored, you're boring
, Patrick thinks, fiddling with the knob. On his childhood drives to the shore, he and his siblings were barely containable in their excitement, pressed into the backseat, itching to get to the cramped, shabby, week-long rental that was all his parents could afford. The drive was made of rituals: the license plate game, the suitcase game, the stop for cones at Jerzee Freeze. When finally they crossed the Ninth Street Bridge, Patrick would race to be the first to roll down his window and shout:
Smell the ocean!
The first whiff of salt water, confirming they were truly out of the city and away from home—the relief of space and air.

In the mirror, he sees the video game abandoned on his daughter's lap. She looks listless, painted-on pink tongue drooping from the corner of her mouth. Patrick turns the radio down. “Okay,” he says. “Let's play a game.”

“What game?”

“The license plate game.”

Hayley frowns, wary. “What's the license plate game?”

He explains the rules, and she is engaged for half a minute, sitting up to peer down from the window of their tricked-out minivan—“Delaware, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania.” A pause. “Delaware.”

“You already said Delaware,” he tells her.

“So?”

“So that's not how the game works.”

She lapses into a bored slump again. Is his daughter becoming spoiled? Entitled? Lately, fearfully, Patrick catches glimpses of the teenager Hayley will become—the knowing tone of voice, the sarcasm that is more mean than funny. Despite the big house and the fancy private school, Patrick is determined that his kids stay grounded—if they don't get something and cry about it, fine. It's how he was raised. How John's kids were raised. As they creep past the tolls toward the Atlantic City Expressway, Harry Kalas is announcing the starting lineup. He glances in the mirror at Hayley, chewing absently on her hair.

“Did you know, Hay,” he says, “we're having a barbecue tonight?”

“Why?”

“Why?” he repeats, wondering where she gets it—has she picked up on some of Kate's resistance to his family? “What do you mean, why? We don't need a reason to have the family over.”

She considers this argument and, finding it sound, asks, “Who's coming?”

“All the usual suspects.”

“What are all the usual suspects?”

He chuckles, glancing at her in the mirror. “You know, the usual crowd. Alex and Meg and Aunt Ann. Aunt Margie and Uncle Joe. Joey and Amy and—”

She sits upright. “Is baby Joey coming?”

“Yup.” He nods. “Baby Joey in the house.” Hayley loves babies; this one is just two months old. “And Stephen,” he adds.

“And Faith?”

“I doubt it, honey.” Poor kid, Stephen. For years, Patrick's nephew had had a rough time—drinking, maybe depression—but recently he'd turned things around. He got an apartment near the old rec center, a job as a security guard at Circuit City. It was a life, Patrick thought. Then Stephen got a girl pregnant; he has a daughter now he sees maybe once a month. Patrick feels for the kid. He knows what it's like to be the other brother. Knows how, when you're dealing with your own stuff, sometimes being around the family, all that normalcy, makes it harder.

“Dad!” Hayley is saying. She is leaning forward as far as her seat belt will allow, breathing in his ear.
“Is. Elena. Coming,”
she says, stressing every syllable, having evidently asked multiple times already.

“Elena.” Patrick bobs his head. “Sure is.”

“Awesome,” Hayley breathes, and flops backward in her seat.

“In fact, you better get in some QT with her, Hay,” Patrick says. “She's leaving soon. For college.”

“Okay.” His daughter nods, taking this assignment seriously. Patrick can't help smiling. His little girl has always adored John's daughter. Hayley has no memory of John, of course, except the picture of him she was trained to point to as a baby and say his name, but whenever Elena's around, Hayley is glued to her side. In June, Elena graduated from high school, the Catholic school John had instructed that she go to the night he took Patrick into his office and closed the door. They sat on either side of his desk, as if it were a business meeting, John gaunt in his bathrobe, explaining his family's financial future: retirement accounts, stocks, bonds, school tuitions. He died eight hours later.

It was when he and Kate were living in the Spruce Street apartment that John bought his house. A grown-up house, Patrick thought admiringly. A
real
house. It seemed like a palace at the time. Big by any standard, but compared with his and Kate's fourth-floor walk-up—or the cramped, three-bedroom Northeast Philly row home they had all grown up in—it was monstrous.

Patrick's house now—both houses—are bigger than John's. The house at the shore they bought three years ago, when Hayley was six and Tate two and Kate was
going cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs
, as she said. She took up all kinds of hobbies. Yoga—
marijuana for grown-ups
, she called it—Reiki and Pilates. She joined the neighborhood co-op and made phone calls for the DNC. But she was always itching for the next thing, as if she had something more to prove. The shore house became her project. She obsessively scoured the real estate listings and drove back and forth on weekends, walking through empty, sunlit rooms. Patrick liked the idea of a shore house, in theory—someplace relaxed, uncluttered, an alternative to life at home—though Kate would only consider houses built in the last decade, which meant they didn't feel like shore houses; they didn't have the feeling of salt water seeped into their joints. She insisted that buying new was the smart way, the only way.
I used to work in market research
, she liked to remind him.

The house she fell in love with was twenty-eight hundred square feet and squatted right on Third Street Beach. Patrick sent up a halfhearted protest about being on the water—too pretentious—but lost that point, too. It had six bedrooms, a master bath with whirlpool, a two-car garage. It was more space than they needed—than anyone did—but the fact was this: His wife had grown up with money. Over time, Patrick had learned this was more than just a fact of your upbringing; it was part of your core.

It was the sort of thing he couldn't have known when he and Kate first met, though in retrospect, the signs were there. Planning their wedding (paid for by her father, who also helped with their down payment), Kate obsessed over pointless minutiae like the cut of the wineglasses and precise yellow of the groomsmen's ties. Patrick figured this was what all grooms went through, and kind of liked being cast in the role—the hapless husband with the beautiful, funny, opinionated wife. But it's impossible to look ahead and know how much these things will matter, like the fact that his wife isn't really Catholic—
raised Catholic
, she says. He had liked this, too, at the time. It hadn't occurred to him what it would mean later: that she wouldn't want the kids going to Catholic school, wouldn't want any mention of God at their wedding, wouldn't want the babies baptized. Patrick was sure this worried his parents, even though they never said it.