The Blessings (22 page)

“You're
kidding
me, Louise,” he says, thick with sarcasm. “There
isn't
?”

She exhales a laugh, a puff of relief. “For a second I thought you believed me!” Then she sighs, an oddly long, contented sigh. “Was that okay, then? Sending it?”

Like that, it's as if they're conspiring already. Competing twinges of guilt and nerves fire off in his gut. “Well, sure,” he says, staring at the granite countertop. “Of course it was.” He adds, “I'm glad you did, Louise.”

“Oh?” He can hear the pleasure in her voice, pictures her pink cheeks bunching. He sees himself standing in the ocean, letting the sand grip his heels.

“Well, so…,” Louise says. Her voice has a new edge, eager, slightly flustered. “How's the beach? Sounds pretty tame there, have to say.”

“That would be because I'm not at the beach.”

“No?”

“I'm home.” He adds, “But my wife isn't.”

“Oh,” she says, and his feet get sucked in to the ankles. A thin sweat has broken on his brow, despite the air-conditioning blasting from the kitchen's every pore. Sweetly, she asks, “You decided not to go, then?”

Patrick stares hard at the counter, at the empty beer bottle, the sign jammed awkwardly in the trash can. He looks up at the darkened window, and he makes a decision. “I went,” he says. “But when I got your text, I came back.”

She laughs again, a different laugh, more like a giggle, and it is then that Patrick knows for sure he hasn't misread anything. He knows, too, that this would be easy. To be charming and funny, to meet up with Louise in the city, sleep with Louise in her small, sweltering apartment with the cupcake carriers. He can see it all, the ease of it all; it breaks his heart, how easy it would be.

“Well, then…,” she says. She's hoping that he'll jump in to steer the conversation, as he should. He's a prick for letting her just hang there, but suddenly he can't bring himself to speak. “What are you doing tonight?” Louise says.

Patrick stares hard at the refrigerator door: a watercolor that Tate made at school.
Mommy, Daddy, Hayley, Me.
It isn't a coincidence, the picture—he could look anywhere and find a reason not to go through with this. The framed family photos, the fridge filled with juice boxes, his wife's hand lotion on the edge of the kitchen sink.

Then he thinks of John. This, he knows, is something his brother would never do. But is that even true? Does he know that for sure? Or has his brother become so sanitized in his memory, so sanctified, that he can do no wrong? It's been fourteen years—who can say?

As he stares at the window, the truth settles over him, and he knows he won't do anything. He'll ease off the phone, without hurting Louise's feelings. He'll call his wife and apologize and go to bed alone in his strange, glowing house. In the morning, he'll drive back to the shore, to his family. Whether that's who he really is, or who he's decided he has to be, it hardly matters.

“Dr. B?”

“What's that, Louise? I think my phone cut out for a sec,” Patrick says with another guilty stab.

“I said, um, what are you doing? Later tonight?”

He summons up his most self-deprecating tone. “Well, let's see,” he says. “Sadly, Louise, since I'm an unhip old fogy, I'll probably hit the sack around nine thirty.”

“Oh?” She manages a confused laugh. “You will?”

“Ten, tops,” Patrick says. He knows he should just be honest with her. He should say:
I'm tempted, Louise, but I have to do the right thing here
. But he can't—it would make work too complicated. What he needs is to make her think it was all a shared joke, end the call without any injury to her self-esteem. Be funny. Put her at ease.

“When you're out having fun tonight, think of me,” he says. “I'll probably be doing the crossword puzzle.”

She laughs uncertainly. “That's sad, Dr. Blessing.”

“Maybe watching a little TV,” he says. “
Masterpiece Theatre. Murder, She Wrote.
”

“Maybe we should have you fitted for bifocals,” she says, playing along, and Patrick laughs overly hard in appreciation. In the office, he thinks sadly, things will be fine. “Good night, Louise,” he says, and then hangs up the phone. The silent house throbs around him. He looks at his kitchen, all the glossy chrome and granite, the fridge door covered with the kids' pictures. He has no right to be so unhappy, he thinks.

When he walks into the living room, Patrick kicks off his shoes and then stretches out on the white couch, the one the kids aren't allowed to sit on. His feet are still a little sandy, but he props them on the opposite arm. He stares at the ceiling, an ornate chandelier, and remembers the day he and Kate moved out of the apartment on Spruce Street. He'd just finished med school and was starting his residency, and they were moving into a bigger, nicer apartment in West Philly. Still, they couldn't afford movers, so they did it all themselves. They carried armfuls of stuff down four narrow flights of stairs, bloated trash bags and cheap lamps and books packed in liquor store boxes, tossing them in the Budget truck double-parked outside. At the end of two hours, they were exhausted and sweaty and a little giddy. The only thing left to go was the couch. It was brown and sunken, a relic from Patrick's college dorm room. They each picked up one end, then Kate insisted they have sex on it in the old apartment one last time.
It deserves a proper send-off
, she said.

So they did, which left them feeling loopy and unmotivated, and hungry, so they ordered a pizza and split a bottle of wine. When they picked up the couch again, it seemed to have grown heavier. They shoved it through the apartment doorway, then spent ten minutes trying to maneuver it around a tight corner of the stairwell between the third and fourth floors. Kate stood on the landing holding one end, while Patrick perched a few steps below her, bracing the other with his chest. Then Kate stopped pushing. “This isn't working,” she said. “It's stuck.” She looked at Patrick across the sagging brown cushions, her damp blond bangs plastered to her brow, and she smiled, a familiar streak of mischief on her face. Without discussion, they both dropped it. The couch hurtled fantastically down the stairs, bouncing between the wall and railing, crashing into pieces at the bottom, a cheap wooden arm, a splintered foot. The railing snapped in two.

It was a feeling he'll never know again, Patrick thinks, staring at the ceiling. Because now he could never be so reckless. He no longer has the sort of life where you just let things break. It isn't just the things he owns, it's the person he's become. But he can still remember how good it felt, trying so hard to hold on to that old couch and then just letting go.

E
lena is always stopped by security in airports. She has “a look,” her brother Max says. A big baggy green coat, hair shaved on one side and long on the other. She wears lots of layers. Coat, hoodie, T-shirt, and, sandwiched in the middle, her dad's blue button-down shirt, the soft denim one with the sleeves that hang an inch past her fingers. Maybe it's the layers that look suspicious—she could be hiding anything in there.

“The shirt was my dad's,” she says to the security guard as she's jamming her feet back into her Chucks. She isn't trying to be fresh. She blurts things out when she's nervous. The guard looks at her without expression, then waves her through.

Elena knows that children of dead parents sometimes construct fake memories, idyllic scenes that never really took place. She has only a few memories of her dad, but she's pretty sure they're real. They
feel
real. In one she's standing in her crib as he walks in, holding a baby. In another she's in the car beside him, a stuffed owl in her lap. Supposedly memories don't form before the age of five, but Elena is sure she remembers the time she ran into the pool and her mother jumped in to save her. She wasn't even four yet, but her mom can corroborate the story, and Aunt Kate.
That was a very difficult summer
, her mom says whenever it comes up, as if in defense of something.
Daddy dying was the first really hard thing that ever happened to me.

Mostly, though, what Elena knows about her dad—or thinks she knows—she has constructed from negative space. In his absence, he's become a way to explain all the things about herself she doesn't understand, all the things that are so totally different from her mother. Her mom is traditional, conservative; she still goes to church every Sunday. Elena is a creative. She wants to adopt kids, to travel the world. Physically, she takes after her mother—nobody in her dad's family has their dark skin and hair—but her height is her dad's, and her nose, both things she happens to like about herself. She used to despise her name until her grandmother once said offhandedly, “Your father loved the name Elena.” She realized the hypocrisy but couldn't help it. After that she loved it, too.

Elena can't reminisce with Max about their father; he was too young to remember anything about him, not even the possibly shadow memories that Elena has. But Max has his looks, and his personality, apparently—
There's John's confidence
, her family says at his swim meets, when Max has the poise to wait on the starting block until the very last second—unlike Elena, who gets so rattled by everything. Elena has her memories, though, and in that way she guesses that she's lucky. Max has only things. A green Eagles hat. A heavy gold pen. Elena has things, too, like the denim button-down, which she wears when she needs luck, or comfort, like for a midterm or a ride on a plane.

She walks down the aisle, messenger bag hitched to her shoulder, and spots her seat—a window. Her stomach tightens up. She wouldn't have chosen the window, wouldn't have chosen to fly at all (had it been up to her, she would have gone by train). But the trip to Boston had been a graduation present from her cousin Abby—more like an aunt than a cousin, really. They're almost twenty years apart, but they've always been close. Abby babysat when her dad was in the hospital (though Elena has no memories of this, either). She's spent the past two days in the South End of Boston, in an apartment Abby shares with her boyfriend, Charlie. “Boyfriend,” Abby said, frowning. “Such a weird term at my age.”

“Kind of a weird term at any age,” Elena agreed.

On her first night, over wine and lasagna, Abby and Charlie told Elena they were getting engaged. “That's awesome,” Elena said. It came out sounding childish, but she meant it. She thought it made sense to wait until you're older, thirty-five, at least—her mother was twenty-two when she got married (the same age Elena is now, which is insane)—and she likes Charlie, who is arty but in a genuine way. He asked her lots of questions about her photography. Yesterday, they took her to the Museum of Fine Arts and to the ICA, where Abby works.

“We're going to move back,” Abby told her, dipping a piece of bread in the lasagna. “To Philly. This summer, most likely.”

Elena was surprised. Abby hadn't lived at home since she left for college; since then, a lot had changed. Her parents got divorced, her sister Meghan  had a serious eating disorder—things such a part of the fabric of the family story that it was almost weird to think there was a time before them. When Meghan was in high school, she used to babysit a lot for Max and Elena; she was already bulimic, though nobody knew it yet. Later, of course, Elena would know tons of girls with eating disorders and recognize the symptoms—in old pictures, she can see Meghan's weight fluctuated in weird ways—but she doesn't remember her cousin as skinny, or chubby, or sad. What she remembers mostly is a night that Meghan was babysitting and let her stay up past ten, confiding in her about a boy she liked as they took turns dipping the same spoon into an ice-cream tub—like a slumber party in a movie—then made Elena brush her teeth and promise not to tell. It was one of the best nights of her life.

“It was when my mom got sick,” Abby said, and her eyes grew briefly teary. Then she shrugged. “That was it. I knew then I would move back someday.” She tapped the back of Charlie's hand. “It just took a few years to get all my ducks in a row.”

Elena nodded as Charlie topped off their wineglasses. When she was in high school, her aunt Ann had had surgery because the doctor found cancer. Luckily, it was caught early; her dad's had been caught late.

“It's strange,” Abby continued, shaking her head. “You hear how people's priorities change and eventually they go back to where they came from, like some kind of homing instinct. And you think it won't happen to you, but then something changes, and there you are.”

Elena understood moments like this: where a thing just clicks and the world looks different—
crux moments
, she called them in her Artist Statement.
When the world looks suddenly, irrevocably changed.
Like the time she was nine and her mom apologized for yelling and it occurred to Elena for the first time that grown-ups could be wrong. Or her sophomore year of high school, when she was going out with Paul Dow, who was doting but clingy, and she realized you didn't have to like people back just because they were nice.

“I'm glad I lived other places first, though,” Abby told her.

“Definitely,” Elena said, adding, “Actually, I'm taking next year to travel.”

“Oh, yeah?” Charlie said. “Where to?”

“I'm not sure yet,” she admitted sheepishly, but they both nodded, undeterred by her lack of a plan. The truth was, she wasn't really planless; there were just so many things she wanted to see that she couldn't decide—she was less interested in whole places than in details. Brunelleschi's doors in Florence. Monet's gardens. In Geneva, the longest bench in the world—she can already imagine trying to take a picture of it, to capture the paradox, the sense of intimacy and endlessness at the same time.

“Europe, mostly, I guess,” she said.

“You should talk to Alex about Spain,” Abby said, lifting her wineglass. “He went there once with that girl Rebecca.”

Elena had never met her cousin's old girlfriend, but Alex had recently caused a stir in the family, marrying a woman he taught with at Columbia, a biology professor named Cynthia. They eloped without telling anyone, which Elena had thought was pretty cool, although her aunts were upset they hadn't been there.

“I forget where exactly,” Abby said. She frowned, took a sip. “But ask him. It was near Seville, I think.”

“I definitely will,” Elena said. She was grateful for Abby's faith in her travel plan. When Elena told her mother about it, she had freaked out, predictably. Her dad would have been more open-minded, Elena was sure. But her mother was a worrier and had never gone anywhere, never left the country except for their honeymoon to Bermuda. In retrospect, Elena hadn't helped her cause by the way she'd broached the subject:
Mom, I'm taking a year to see the world
.

The
world
?
her mother had pounced.

Well, not the
world
,
she'd said.
Just parts of it.

Elena rummages in her messenger bag, digging out her iPod as a woman takes the aisle seat beside her. Elena can tell right away this woman is from Philadelphia. Something about her unfussy sweater, her salt-and-pepper hair, the gold earrings shaped like little shells. She looks as though she could be friends with Aunt Ann or Aunt Margie, though why exactly is hard to explain.

“Hello,” the woman says.

Philadelphia—the “o” sound confirms it.

“Hey,” Elena says.

The attendant walks by, clicking shut the overhead compartments, and Elena feels a catch in her throat. She leans her head back, sliding her thick silver ring back and forth over her knuckle. She's always hated flying, even before the World Trade Center, but that was when her fears intensified. She was almost eleven then, and Max nine, and somehow his being two years younger—or not having yet gone through those particular, nine- and ten-year-old years—was enough to keep Max relatively unaffected, or unaware. It was the same with their father dying: Elena was just old enough to remember what life was like before, Max just young enough not to know anything different.

For weeks after the attacks, Elena had nightmares. Fathers jumping from buildings and bridges, fathers drowning, melting in fires. She dreamed about those signs with the missing people on them plastered all over New York and woke up crying in the middle of the night. It got so she was afraid to fall asleep. That was when her mother found Gail, a children's grief counselor, and Elena started seeing her every week. She told Gail about her nightmares, and about her father, what few things she remembered. In high school, she talked about her growing annoyance with her mother. They disagreed about everything back then—what Elena was wearing, who she was hanging out with, the fact that she was being forced to go to Catholic school. Then, in her junior year, her mom decided to go back to college. It drove Elena insane. Not because she had to help more around the house, or even the weirdness of both of them having homework to do, but the way her mother transformed—the new haircut, the new cool clothes. The morning of her first day, Elena caught her turning in circles in front of the mirror, wearing a pair of skinny jeans with the tags still on. Her mom had never finished college, because she dropped out when she got married.
I can't believe Dad was okay with that
, Elena once said.

Her mother looked hurt, but only for a second.
It was what we both wanted
, she said, then added,
You don't really know him
.
You only know a version of him.

Elena guessed this was true, but still, it wasn't what she remembered. It's not the sense of him she gets from pictures, either, and she understands pictures. The way a certain light or angle can capture the essence of a person: something not immediately visible, something the person may not even realize can be seen. In one of Elena's favorite pictures of her dad, he's sitting by the pool, in the shadow of the house, with the sun lighting half his face. The light falls in a diagonal line, one eye bright and one in shadow. He is looking right at the camera, his expression focused, attentive, as if whoever's taking the picture is the most important person in the world.

The flight attendant is giving the safety spiel about the flotation devices and oxygen masks and Elena is quietly freaking out. She knows these safety procedures by heart yet feels compelled to listen every time, afraid that by not listening she may jinx herself and plummet to her death. She kneads her hands inside the shirtsleeves, squeezing fistfuls of cotton, and tries to visualize being back in Philadelphia, the plane coasting to a stop on the runway. She reminds herself that the flight is less than an hour—the length of an art history lecture or a show on TV.

Elena realizes the woman next to her is saying something. She yanks her earbud out. “Sorry?”

“Would you like one?” She is offering her a mint. “They help me relax.”

“Thanks,” Elena says, and takes one, adding, “I have an irrational fear of flying.”

“I've never liked it either,” the woman says, dropping the mints back in her purse.

The engine is revving now, the plane moving slowly down the tarmac. Elena's stomach is in knots. “Were you in Boston on vacation?” the woman asks. Maybe she's asking because she's interested, maybe to distract her; whatever the reason, Elena is thankful.

“Yeah. I was visiting my cousin. She lives in the South End. With her boyfriend. He's cool. He's an artist. They told me they're getting married, which is cool, because they're older. I definitely want to wait until I'm older.” She knows she's babbling but can't stop. “It was a present for my college graduation—the trip, I mean. Because my cousin couldn't get to my show—I majored in photography, and all the seniors have this final show—” The engine is louder now, almost shrieking, as the plane gains speed. “I have to get used to this,” Elena whispers, gripping the arms of her seat. “I want to travel next year.”

“Oh?” the woman says. “Where are you going?”

“Europe,” she says. “Geneva. Italy. Spain. Seville, maybe,” she says as the plane lifts into the air.

Sometimes, Elena has trouble imagining her parents together. She wonders what would have become of them if her father were still alive—would they still be married? She suspects this isn't a question you're supposed to ask. You're supposed to think they would be in love forever, but Elena is a realist. More than half her friends have parents who are divorced. She knows things end, people change and grow apart—even people you wouldn't expect, like Aunt Ann and Uncle Dave.