All of Us and Everything (14 page)

Ru put the money in her pocket but didn't react. She was trying to be coy.

Mrs. Pedestro, who was never much of a go-between to begin with, said, “Did you hear me?”

Ru nodded.

“You'll like him,” Mrs. Pedestro added.

“Thanks,” Ru said.

Coincidentally, Liv and Esme were visiting at this point. Doug was on a golf weekend with college friends, and Liv's apartment was being fumigated.

Ru packed a duffel bag and put a note on the side of the fridge where the family often communicated shopping needs, mainly toiletries and feminine products.

The note told them not to worry. She'd be fine and back in less than a month.

No one saw the note and so began the now infamous three days of her unnoticed absence, followed by eighteen days of Esme, Liv, Augusta, and Jessamine's fear and anxiety set to a strange background noise of quiet confidence. Ru would be fine. She'd said so.

Augusta doled out the news. She hadn't planned to and she wasn't ready, but she never really would be.

“The box of letters from your father to Herc Huckley over the course of many decades shows that he was actually present for many events in your lives—a combination of graduations, plays, choral concerts, athletic events, even a wedding or two.” She glanced at Esme and Liv.

“Which weddings?” Liv asked.

“Esme's first and your second, at least.”

“Holy crap!” Atty said. “What about me?”

Augusta nodded. “He was at that multicultural pageant where you danced like a Japanese person with an umbrella.”

“I was a wisteria maiden,” Atty said.

“He was there?” Esme's eyes teared up.

“I don't know why he chose to come to that event in particular,” Augusta said, obviously disappointed.

“That one girl, Sadie Worthaus, was always spinning her umbrella the wrong way,” Atty said. “I was actually pretty good.”

Ingmar was still roaming anxiously. “Sit!” Esme shouted at the dog. “Sit!”

For a moment Ru thought her sister was yelling at her and she almost shouted back,
I am sitting!
but then stopped herself, realizing her sister was ordering around her dog.

“There's a larger point here,” Liv said flatly to Atty. “I want to know what my mother means by the phrase
our lives aren't our own.
”

“And the words
very involved in our lives,
” Esme said.

They all looked at Augusta, even Ru, whose reconnaissance didn't reach this far. “It seems he respected your request,” Augusta said to Ru.

“It wasn't a request as much as it was an ultimatum,” Ru said. “All-in, full transparency. Or out. For good.”

Augusta was stunned by this confession. Her daughter had put this to Nick at age sixteen? It had taken Augusta nearly two decades to get there.

“What about me?” Esme said. “And Liv?”

Augusta turned to Liv. Hers was easier news to deliver. “He gave you gifts,” she said.

“Gifts?”

“Well, scholarships and contest winnings and that little windfall from the woman in your building who died and you didn't even remember her.”

“Like in the game of Life, bank error in your favor,” Atty said. She wanted to tweet this very badly—and a bunch of other one-liners—but she was too afraid she'd miss something genius in the process.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Liv said. “Do you mean to say that I'm
not
lucky? I've been just…coddled?”

“You're lucky to have been coddled,” Atty said. “That's true of white privilege everywhere.”

“Don't give me your boarding school regurgitation right now, Atty, okay?” Liv said. “I'm the only one here who's also been educated in one of those elitist prisons, and I know what's what.”

“God. Fine!” Atty said. “I was just trying to help.”

Liv stood up. “I'm going to go smoke three cigarettes,” she said, and she walked toward the back door that led to the small stone patio. Ingmar got up and followed her as if he wanted to smoke too.

“Don't you want to know what he did to me?” Esme asked her sister.

“Not really,” Liv said.

“Liv,” Ru said. “Just stay.”

Liv stopped by the back door and fumbled through her pocketbook for her pack of cigarettes and lighter. “Okay. Go ahead.”

Augusta put her elbows on the kitchen table and then let her fists drop, not with anger, only a kind of exhaustion. “Well, it turns out you might have gotten into some Ivies,” she said to Esme, “if not for your father's interference.”

“What?” Esme said.

“Your father doesn't like Ivy League educations. He thinks they breed overbreeding and an overly inflated sense of self.”

“I knew it!” Esme said. “I knew I was good enough for those schools!” She felt vindicated, almost gleeful. “See, Atty! I always told you that it didn't make sense!” She wanted to call Doug and Big-Head Todd and a number of teachers at the boarding school, including Little-Head Todd, who'd gone to Princeton and wore its gear relentlessly. It took a few seconds for her to realize that she'd missed the Ivy League education itself. That it was gone, forever. Her face went a little slack as the realization washed over her.

“And he might not have liked all of your choices in boyfriends,” Augusta said.

“Excuse me?” Esme said.

“He liked Doug,” Augusta said. “He ran checks on him and his family. And he approved. Wholeheartedly, it seems. But…”

“Who didn't he like?” Esme asked, but she knew.

Darwin Webber.

The way he'd disappeared not only from Esme's life but also his own. Just, one day, gone. Esme had been wrecked by the news. She'd come home and missed classes for two weeks. Her mother told the school that Esme had a form of mono.

Liv looked at Ru and shook her head, trying to telegraph to Ru to stop Augusta. Ru was closer. She could reach out and cover their mother's mouth.

But Ru was stricken too. She muttered, “No. Don't.”

It was too late. Esme stood up so fast that the kitchen chair kicked out behind her and fell backward, slapping the floor.

“Who was it?” Atty asked.

Esme's sisters were eyeing her with such pity and fear that they confirmed it. “Was it because he was black?”

“Was he black?” Augusta said. “I thought he was German.”

“He was of African descent, somewhere in the mix, I think,” Ru said. “But also German.”

“He wore really brightly colored polo shirts,” Liv said, apropos of nothing.

“What
boyfriend
? Who are we
talking
about?” Atty said.

“No one you know,” Esme said and walked to the doorjamb leading to the dining room. She steadied herself and then pushed off, away from them, reeling.

Augusta said, “I've learned that when grief is kept to yourself, it expands. If it were a dog, I would take the dog out on a leash and walk it around the neighborhood and people would pet it or scold it for eliminating where it shouldn't. But grief isn't a dog and I couldn't share mine and it just got bigger and bigger inside of me, like it was forcibly pushing my other organs around. It applied so much pressure to my lungs, my breathing went shallow. I could only eat little tiny meals because my stomach felt flattened against some other interior organ. It was all too much. I thought that if I called it off, the grief would go away, but it didn't.”

Liv had gone out the back door to smoke.

Esme had stumbled from the kitchen, her shoes clomping on the stairs slowly as if she were climbing a steep rocky precipice.

Ru wasn't listening. She wanted to follow one of her sisters, but she wasn't sure which one would want to be followed at the moment. She felt culpable. Maybe she hadn't told them because she'd been trying to protect them. But she hadn't protected them. She'd asked for her own freedom from her father's interference when she should have negotiated a deal for all of them.

Atty was still in the kitchen, rubbing Ingmar's congenitally compromised hips. “I get that,” she said to Augusta. “I know something about grief—what with my father's indiscretion.”

“My grief was about loving someone you can't actually be with, someone you can't even acknowledge.”

“Our griefs have a lot in common then,” Atty said.

Augusta was startled. She had shared her grief and Atty had accepted it as a recognizable version of her own. Easing up, that's what she felt.

Easing.

Liv stood on the back patio, still holding an unlit cigarette. She'd blamed much of her life's failings, her personal weaknesses, her inability to want things that other people wanted and to attain them in honest ways, on her father's absence.

Even smoking. She'd always thought she wouldn't have been a smoker if she'd had a real father.

But, well, shit. Turned out she'd had a real father and he gave her gifts. He actually made her life easier. But this upended the things that she'd used to build the foundation of her life. If the universe didn't love her and her father did, it meant that—in one fell swoop—she was vulnerable in the world because her luck was no longer a shield, and she'd lost her scapegoat.

She looked at the cigarette then she lit it and for the first time in her life, she wondered if she didn't have anyone to blame but herself.

Upstairs, Esme lay down in her canopy bed and stared up at the metal framework. She could smell Liv's cigarette smoke through the screened window. She wished that Ingmar weren't so suspicious of stairs and were the type to jump on a bed and snuggle with her. Why couldn't he be more like Lassie, an archetype of American dog-heroism? It's why she'd been drawn to collies to begin with.

She thought of Doug and for no reason she could negotiate, she missed his body, his broad calves and thighs and then dainty knees like doorknobs on a house from the colonial era. She missed his chest, only lightly furred, and his hunched shoulders, as if bent to create a curtain of his shirt in order to hide his subtle paunch. It was a pretty strong yet humble body. She wanted to curl up next to him and punch the soft dough of that paunch, knee him sharply in the groin…

And she wanted to whisper to him that she'd loved him, but she'd loved Darwin Webber more, and so, in a way, she'd cheated on Doug in spirit before he ever cheated on her in reality because she didn't even head into their marriage with the kind of love she knew she was capable of.

Her father was worse than she'd thought. He was worse than the idea of her mother having sex with strangers. He was worse than abandonment too. He'd ruined her life.

And she thought of finding him and yelling at him in public—perhaps on a putt-putt golf course. Augusta would never have allowed something as touristy as putt-putt golf—the Rockwell girls were already too vicious for croquet; what would happen with an audience?—but surely a dad would have insisted on putt-putt, maybe even annually.

And then she only thought of Darwin Webber as she last saw him—running toward her after a game of pickup soccer, popping the ball toward her but catching it in his locked elbows. A trick.

And then he was gone.

Never even a blip on the Internet. No data. Nothing.

What had her father done to him? Where was Darwin Webber now? What had become of his life? What would become of all of their lives now that they knew the truth?