The Visibles (29 page)

I caught Claire’s arm as she headed for the pool. “I wouldn’t worry about Thomas or anything. Or Frannie.”

“I’m not going to,” Claire said stiffly. “Thomas’s father has lived a good life. He plays in a bluegrass band. He has a boat. He taught Frannie a lot of songs. He’s a good person.” She watched as Frannie pushed through the sunshine-yellow door into the pool area. “It doesn’t change who he is, and it won’t change who Frannie is, either. I couldn’t imagine my life without her. I couldn’t imagine the world without her in it. It’s not like I’m going to feel guilty now for having her. I got enough of that already. It’s not like we had any idea.”

I gazed at her, briefly confused. “I wasn’t trying to make you feel guilty,” I said. “But the test would be really easy. It’s a tiny blood sample, that’s all. Frannie wouldn’t even feel it.”

Claire stared at me, exasperated. “That’s up to her. It’s her choice, when the time comes.”

“But don’t
you
want to know?”

Her hair fell over her face. “Would
you
like to know how you’re going to die? Or how your daughter’s going to die?” Then she laughed bitterly. “Maybe you would, actually. You always wanted to know the answers to everything. You’d be much happier if your whole life was plotted on a perfect course and went exactly to plan, no surprises.”

“I’m just saying—”

“Some things aren’t like that,” Claire said. Her face was getting redder and redder. “It’s not always black and white, yes or no. Thomas, Frannie’s father? He’s gay. He’s down there in Louisiana with James, his boyfriend. They’ve been together for two years now. He came out
shortly after I got pregnant. I should have known, really—I sensed he was unhappy, even when we were dating. I’ve heard enough from people about how this was a selfish decision, how I shouldn’t be bringing a child into the world without a proper father. You wouldn’t believe what people said to my face. But he’s a good guy, Summer. He’s a great father. James is a good person, too. He’s a lawyer—he set up a trust fund for Frannie, for when she gets older. So how’s that for things not being black and white?”

She whirled around, storming into the pool. I followed her, feeling like my head was detached from my neck. The pool air smelled humidly of chemicals. The lifeguards sat on their high chairs, twirling their whistles. The pool was large, with twelve lap lanes, a shallow swimming area, and a diving well. There were normal-height diving boards as well as two higher ones, the highest one seemingly grazing the skylights in the vaulted ceiling.

Frannie was already in the shallow end, bobbing with a few other girls. Claire dropped her towel onto a plastic chair and pulled jerkily at the strap of her suit. My nose and eyes stung with chlorine. I walked over to her and touched her arm. “I’m sorry.”

She sighed and rolled her eyes. “It’s all right. I probably would’ve found out sometime, if that’s what his father’s got. But God, Summer. Is this some sort of complicated revenge? Did you come here just looking for a way to ruin my day?”

“Revenge?”

Claire wagged a finger in my face. “You were the one that found me. I was cautious about it, but I thought, Jesus, we’ve been out of school for years, we’re different now. But maybe you aren’t. I mean, maybe you want revenge for…for I don’t know, everything I knew about you, when we were young.” She stared me down. “It’s not like I wanted to know any of that stuff, Summer. It’s not like I sought it out.”

“What are you talking about?” I whispered.

Claire shook her head. She concentrated hard on a flyer for synchronized swimming classes that was taped up on the wall. “That one summer, when we were at Long Beach Island? You were going into eighth grade, I was going into ninth? We were such good friends. And
then when school started you just…stopped speaking to me.” The same thing happened when we were older, too.”

I stand up straighter, astounded. “
I
stopped speaking to
you
?”

“Yeah, you did.”

I let out a barking laugh. Finally I said, “You could have introduced me to your friends, you know. The first set of friends. The people that were on the back of the bus.”

Claire wrinkled her nose. A long moment went by. “Why didn’t you just
ask
me to introduce you?”

I stared at my bare feet, coughing out a laugh. “You don’t
ask
about that kind of thing, Claire! At thirteen years old? The last thing you do is ask! And besides, you stopped speaking to me, too. After that.”

Claire took her bottom lip into her mouth. “You’re right. But I thought I was bothering you. You always seemed so…
irritated
when I said hi.”

I turned away. How could our rift have been even remotely my fault? She was the one who ignored me when we started school. She was the one who shunned me after our argument in Prospect Park, avoiding me for months. She was the one who didn’t bother writing from San Francisco and turned away from me that following autumn.

I ran my hands up and down my arms, feeling a headache coming on. Was it possible I’d pushed her away first? I considered eighth grade. Whenever I saw Claire coming down the hall, surrounded by her sparkling, captivating friends, I always pretended like I was busy. I pointedly looked in the other direction when she waved to me; I feigned deafness when she called my name from the other end of the hall. Why did she need me, after all, when she had all of them? A few years later, when we’d sort of become friends again, I said to her,
Leave me alone,
and eventually, she did.

I’d been ashamed by her pity, yes, but I might have turned away from her for other reasons, too: Maybe I hadn’t wanted to invest anything in her. Maybe I figured that if I did, Claire would eventually abandon me, just as my mother had. The past suddenly twisted, making me feel uncomfortable and a little breathless. I wondered who else I had pushed away. Who else I was
still
pushing away.

“Do you think about school a lot?” I blurted out.

Claire shrugged. “I do, I guess. But not any more than I think about anything else.” She rested on her heels, assessing me. “You think about it a lot, huh? Of course you do.”

There was no way I could deny it. “Probably too much.”

She kicked off a flip-flop. “I don’t know. It happened. It sucked. School sucked. End of story. There’s nothing we can really do about it. And who knows who I would’ve been if it wouldn’t have happened the way it did? I would’ve been really different, I think.”

“But do you think you would’ve been better? Happier?”

“Are you suggesting I’m not happy?” A furtive smile crept onto Claire’s face. She laced her hands over her thick stomach and let out a breath of air. “This is quite a conversation to have, after years of not seeing one another. I mean, I was hesitant—I
wondered
if it would come up—but I thought maybe we’d start out a little slower. You know, what you think about DC, what you like to do for fun, if you know what anyone else from Peninsula is doing. Not, like, serious shit. I deal with angry people who think big business is poisoning our water supply every day. I need some lightness in my life.” She looked at me carefully. “And you probably do, too. You shouldn’t let everything scare you. You should let go a little.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, my voice choked.

“For what?”

“Just, you know. For things. Everything.”

Claire snorted. “Stop it. Forget what I said. I was being ridiculous. And so are you.” She said it in such a motherly, confident tone, I immediately stood up straighter.

Frannie barreled for us, water spraying off her tiny arms and legs. “Dive!” she screamed, grabbing her mother’s arm. “High dive!”

Claire looked at me. “She loves the platform.”

“You let her go on that?” I pointed at the highest diving board, aghast. The ladder just kept going. “She doesn’t get hurt?”

“Nah. I was scared when she first did it, but we watch her. I had to sign a release, though, allowing her to go off. She never jumps without me watching. That’s our rule.” Claire started to follow Frannie, her long
hair swinging. She looked over her shoulder. “It’s actually really fun, Summer. You should try it.”

Afterward, we went to a diner down the street, ordering heaps of breakfast foods as if we’d just swum for miles. Claire ordered blueberry pancakes, I got an omelet, and Frannie got a Belgian waffle with whipped cream on top. When Claire’s coffee ran low, Frannie marched to the checkout counter and rang the bell for service. When she came back, Claire said, “Let’s pretend we’re French,” and the two of them took small bites of things and said,
Oui oui,
and pretended to blow smoke rings, using coffee stirrers as cigarettes. They nuzzled noses and giggled at each other. Frannie even made up a song about me, about a girl named Summer who had a dog named Winter and liked to eat pea pods in the spring. “Pea pods?” I asked her. “Yes, pea pods!” Frannie looked at me crazily, like I was the stupidest person in the world. Claire sang, too. All of a sudden I felt so sheepish for questioning Claire’s happiness.

And when they walked me to the Metro station afterward, Frannie gave me a hug and told me in a very adultlike voice that we would be seeing each other again soon. When she pressed her head into my knees, a warmth came over me, something I hadn’t felt in a long time. I felt like I did after crying—exhausted, and a little foolish, but cleaner. “It was very nice to meet you,” I said to Frannie. I pulled the Bio Dome Habitat I’d bought at the Smithsonian from my purse and handed it to her. I could just see her marveling over the little ant colonies, loving it. “I hope to see you soon, too.”

A
Muppet-like woman
on the Weather Channel announced that atmospheric conditions were unusually favorable for a blizzard, with air circulating off the Carolina coast, moisture feeding in from the Atlantic Ocean, cold air damming down south. “It’s going to be a big one,” she said, waving her hands around a map of clouds and arrows. “So stock up now. Hit the grocery store. Be ready.”

“Oh, dear.” My father took a bite of eggs.

“It’ll be okay.” Rosemary patted his leg. “Don’t worry.”

It was Saturday, and we were at a diner near the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, one of Rosemary’s old favorites. The only things on the diner’s walls were clippings from newspapers that had reviewed it over the years. Someone from
Newsday
in 1986 thought the egg creams needed some work but that the grits were passable, and that someone from
New York
magazine thought the service was slow, but in all, it got four out of five stars. I stared at the serifs on the word
York
for so long it didn’t look like a word at all.

Steven, wearing a zip-to-the chin navy sweater and jeans, checked his cell phone messages. Philip flagged down the waitress for more coffee. He tried to take my hand, but I pulled it away. He looked at me questioningly, but I couldn’t return his gaze. Angie and Rosemary were talking about Rosemary’s gardening book. “So you see, I wanted to make the gardens as varied as possible, to give people a range of what they can do.”

“Will your book talk about things that will grow in California?” Angie asked. “Steven and I have a little back garden plot that I’d love to find a use for.”

“I’m sure,” Rosemary said. She pulled out the binder, which she must have carried everywhere, and flipped through the laminated pages. “I have an example somewhere in here.” Although I wondered how—every garden she was featuring was in Vermont.

Angie patiently waited, patting her bangs, which were cut bluntly across her forehead. She had a fifties vibe about her, and today she wore saddle shoes, cherry-red lipstick, and a pink twinset—it made me think, startlingly, about Stella and the twinset sweater–wearing girl her husband had once dated, the one who’d fallen through the thin ice. I couldn’t imagine what Steven had told Angie about our family. Whatever it was, maybe it hadn’t been the truth—she didn’t seem the least bit awkward or uncomfortable.

“Really, artist colonies are just like mental hospitals or rehab facilities,” my father was saying to Philip. “Only people don’t go there to dry out, they go there to…I don’t know. Juice up. But they spend a lot of time in little rooms, thinking about themselves. They gather around a central television. They play ping-pong. They eat the carrot sticks they give you at every single lunch. It’s really no different. We sometimes have silent dinners, where no one speaks. At first it’s strange. You think you’re
supposed
to talk, that it’s awkward not to. And you laugh and you don’t make eye contact with anyone and you gobble up your food as fast as you can. But after a while…I don’t know. It becomes nice. It’s like this huge weight is off you. You don’t have to talk. You can just exist.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “You eat dinner at the colony?”

My father shrugged. “The chef there is great—except for the carrot stick obsession, that is. Rosemary goes, too.”

I looked around aimlessly for a while, until my eyes landed on Rosemary. “Hi,” she said, beaming.

“Hi,” I answered, not quite as enthusiastically.

“You tired?” she asked.

“Something like that.”

My father said a few more things, then excused himself, heading down the narrow corridor for the front door. The others acted like it wasn’t a big deal, but I got up and followed him, wondering if he was going to light up another cigarette.

There was a line outside for tables; about a half hour before, we’d been standing in it, too. Every so often, a waitress served people coffee in oatmeal-colored mugs. Another waitress handed out orange slices and cookies. I followed my father a few doors down, where he stopped in front of a hardware store. And, sure enough, my father pulled out a Marlboro from his pocket and fumbled with a pack of matches.

“I can’t believe you’re doing that,” I said.

He glanced at me. “I know. Bad habit.”

“Bad habit?” I clenched my fists. “You used to make me look at the scariest skin cancer photos to keep me away from cigarettes.”

“Skin cancer photos?” His face clouded.

“The woman with the…the hole in her leg? The guy dying in the hospital bed? You tortured me with them.”

“Oh. Right.”

His eyes still looked faded. I wondered suddenly if this was a gap in his memory, an old wound from ECT. “Do you…not remember?”

“Sort of. I guess. It was a while ago.”

When my dad and Rosemary came to Cobalt to help clean out Stella’s house, I checked his toiletries bag to see if he was still even on medication. He was—a different antidepressant, the same sleeping pill, and another prescription I’d never heard of, maybe something for anxiety. The prescribed daily dosages were still quite high. There was a time when I knew every detail of my father’s drug regimen, perhaps even better than he did. It was a long time ago, now.

“It’s weird being in the apartment,” I blurted out. “It’s weird that you’re going to sell it.”

My father put his hands in his pockets and leaned back. “We can’t just let it sit there.”

“It’s just…even if I have some strange memories from there, it’s hard to think that it’s just going to
go away
. That it won’t be ours anymore.”

“I know.”

We stood facing the street, our breath coming out in translucent puffs. I felt him looking past me—but for what? “What if I bought it from you?”

He smirked. “At market value?”

“No. What if I…I took over your mortgage? I could probably manage that with a job, right?”

“They would have to do a credit check on you,” my father said slowly.

“I have good credit, probably.”

“Would you and Philip buy it together?”

“No, just me.” I felt a rush of euphoria, followed immediately by a stomach-gnawing surge of doubt. I imagined living in the apartment alone, sleeping in my old bedroom.

My father pulled at the edges of his hat. “New York City is going to be nuked. It’s dangerous to live here these days.”

“You don’t really believe that, do you?”

He shrugged.

“I mean, seriously, Dad,” I said. “You’re going to come back to New York eventually. Don’t you want somewhere to live once you do?”

He stared at me. Suddenly I wanted my father to tell me something important. Anything. Something that indicated that someday maybe we’d be normal around each other again.

But instead, he said, “There’s a new subway line, you know. The V. It’s part of the Sixth Avenue train. I saw it on the subway map on the way over. I guess it’s an alternative to the F, although not in Brooklyn. The end of the line is Second Avenue and Houston.”

I eyed him carefully, but his face was blank. This was who he was now, at least for me. The crack between us had instantaneously sealed after September 11, because it had seemed petty to fight about anything. I never mentioned anything about the things I’d said, and he never mentioned anything about the things he’d said. Our conversations remained superficial, usually arts-and-culture-related, or about things Philip and I did on the weekends, or about llamas and Vermont—because, I supposed, it was easier that way. Sometimes, when we were talking about
nothing on the phone, I wanted to tell him all Stella had said to me about his accident. All those secrets. I also wanted to ask him where his rehearsed speech years ago had come from. Had his new therapist told him to get on the phone with me and tell me that I was hindering his growth as a person? Or had he come to that conclusion on his own?

A tall, slender woman with a fur-lined hood walked on the other side of the street. After a moment, she stopped and peered at us. The hood was tight around her head, so it was hard to see her face, but I could tell she was in her thirties or forties. Her black down coat extended past her waist, ending in two thin dark denim-clad legs and tall black boots. She was sophisticated in a different way than the ghetto-fabulous girls of Crown Heights, the neighborhood the diner bordered. To my astonishment, the woman held up a gloved hand and, with some uncertainty, gave my father a little signal.

“Do you know her?” I asked. My father’s face grew pale. His hand was at his chest, and his fingers were curled. I wasn’t sure if he had been waving back. The woman slunk down the block in the general direction of the Brooklyn Museum, pulling her expensive-looking black leather purse close to her side.

“We should go back in,” my father said, turning back for the door. I didn’t know what else to do but follow. On my way past the line of customers, I got a big whiff of the plate of orange slices a waitress was passing around. They smelled so ripe and tart, they brought tears to my eyes.

Stella had remained in that central Pennsylvania hospital for a few more days until she was stable enough to travel back to Cobalt. After that, there was really nothing we could do. We had to accept this. Stella’s oncologist had pushed hospice pamphlets into my hands. They referred to this as
the death process.
Hospice professionals made
the death process
as comfortable for the patient as possible. Hospice professionals were available around the clock, because patients often fear going through
the death process
alone.

I imagined the spots on Stella’s brain the latest MRI had detected.
They were palpable and writhing. After a while, I would enter her room and she would think I was someone else, often her sister. “So did you talk to him in study hall?” she babbled. “Who?” I asked. She rolled her eyes. “Tommy Reed. Jesus, Ruth! You’ve been talking about him all week.” Her hands fluttered open and closed, like she was a little squirrel digging in the ground.

And one time she glared at me and said, “It’s been three years, Ruth, and you’ve said nothing to him.” She wagged her fingers in my face. “Get over it. So he made a mistake. The baby is healthy. You think the world knows, but who cares if they do? The only one who really cares is you.”

“What are you talking about?” I’d asked. “What baby?”

Stella snorted. “Always in denial.”

Stella made less and less sense. I worried she would die in her room alone, so I set up a cot near the door. Once, in the middle of the night, she sat up in bed and stared at me.

“Your father was in a mental institution,” she screeched, witchlike.

“I know that,” I said.

“And he’s got something in hiding.”

“What is he hiding?” I asked.

“Like the Nazis,” she announced.

“What?”

She flopped back down on the bed, exhausted.

A few days later I spoke to my father on the phone, telling him about Stella’s worsening condition and how he should probably come to Cobalt soon.
Stella says you’re hiding something,
I wanted to add.
She told me everything about your past. Sometimes she thinks I’m your mother. Will you help me understand this?

But I didn’t. Instead, I went to the old chest of drawers in the living room and pulled on the brass handles. I had moved the secret engagement photo of Kay and Mark from my father’s old desk drawer in his bedroom to the top drawer in the chest, next to the deed to the house, Stella’s insurance information, and the pamphlets for the hospice. Kay’s center part was so finely etched.
I know something about you,
I whispered to her. I wished she could talk back, tell me what she knew, too.