The Blessings (3 page)

“It's snowing!” someone says.

“Snow! Is that really snow?”

“I didn't hear anything about snow, did you?”

A tremble of worry moves through the room, prompting departures to happen more quickly—kids wrapped into coats, shoes pushed onto feet. Her mother's expression has dissolved into concern.

“It's nothing,” Abby tells her. “Look—it's just a few flakes.”

Her mother looks outside, presses her lips together. Her hands are knotted at her chest, next to her bright Christmas pin. “Why don't you just leave in the morning?”

“I can't,” Abby says, panic swelling inside her. She looks to her father, who looks at her mother. “If I leave in the morning—” But she can't bear to finish the thought, because any number of things could happen then: She might get snowed in, get to Nicole's house late or not at all, miss the party. Her mother looks so worried that Abby feels a spasm of annoyance—
it's not a big deal!
—then feels guilty, because she doesn't want to leave feeling annoyed, and because she knows how much her mother loves her, that there are people who would give anything to be loved that much.

“I'll be fine,” she says.

“Be very careful, sweetheart,” says her dad, the only one who calls her that.

“Call us when you get there,” her mother says. “As soon as you get there.”

“I know,” Abby says, kisses them, and shuts the door.

In the snow, the neighborhood is strangely quiet. Abby's footsteps shush along the sidewalk, leaving fresh prints. Flakes fall gently beneath the glow of the long-necked streetlights, the telephone poles strung with thick, sagging wires. Christmas lights pulse crazily, silently, on the narrow houses—lights twined around railings, Santas blinking on front porches, a red-nosed reindeer raising and lowering its head to a scrap of bald lawn. Abby unlocks her new used car. The smell of it is unfamiliar still, vaguely pinelike, the trace of an old air freshener. The air is cold, but she doesn't turn on the heat. Instead she shuts the door and watches the bright flakes drift onto the windshield, flashing red and green, landing and resting for a moment before disappearing into the glass. A mix tape waits in the cassette player, a bunch of songs Abby and her roommates recorded in a burst of feverish sentimentality the night before they left. She thinks about playing it but instead just sits, watching her breath bloom and dissolve, feeling a strange heaviness in her chest. Fog creeps in from the edges of the windshield. She looks at the street with all its blazing windows, and it occurs to her how strange it is that families live together in houses—how odd that some combination of fate and genetics brings these three or four or five people together to live, day in, day out, in the same small space.

It's another thought she might not have had before going to college, another of the kind her family might not understand. She looks at Aunt Margie's house, a brick row home with a green slate roof, attached to an almost identical one on either side. Gran and Pop live in a red-roofed version six blocks away. Abby studies the porch railing with its plastic braids of holly, the electric candles leaning in the windows, dark shapes moving inside.
Relief
—this was a term she learned in Intro to Art History, the way part of a sculpture can stand out more sharply in relation to other parts. The way her family is not like other families, the way Abby is like her family and she isn't. The way the row homes of Philly look cramped and tiny compared with the houses of New England, separated by wide porches and snowy fields.

The door opens and out come Aunt Lauren and Uncle John, a slice of light widening on the porch behind them. They step carefully down the snow-dusted stairs. Lauren minces along the sidewalk, holding a casserole pan in her gloved hands. Uncle John, tall and handsome in his long gray coat, carries Max in the crook of one arm and holds Elena by the hand. Elena, mittens dangling from her coat sleeves, has her head turned, neck craned sideways. She is looking right at Abby—the only one who sees her sitting alone in her car—and Abby gives her a big smile and a furious wave, letting her know that
everything is fine, everything is okay
. Elena lifts one hand, uncertain or maybe just tired, a single droop of the wrist. Then she is scooped into the backseat, and the doors clap shut, and Uncle John slides behind the wheel, headlights on, snow falling softly through the beams.

Abby waits until they drive off before she turns the key. The dashboard glows. She sits and lets the engine warm, the way Uncle Patrick told her. When she looks up at the house one last time, she is startled to see her mother standing in an upstairs window. She's parting the curtain with one hand, the other palm resting on her middle. She's probably been watching Abby this entire time. The sadness this ignites in her is so acute it makes her eyes fill. She swipes quickly at her face. Now that her mother is watching, she needs to get moving. Abby rubs her palm on the windshield, clearing a circle in the glass. She can't see well, but well enough. As she turns the headlights on, she pictures the drive to Boston tomorrow morning—the way the landscape will decompress as she moves north, the buildings flattening and the sky opening, the pine trees gathering along the sides of the highway, the way the change will feel both slow and sudden.

W
hat struck Lauren most at the funeral was how hard her niece Meghan was crying—long, shuddering sobs that echoed through the quiet cavern of St. Bonaventure's. Cheeks mottled, eyes swollen, her older sister Abby leaning down to whisper in her ear. It was alarming, Lauren thought. Not that it wasn't a sad thing, a terrible thing. Her grandfather, after all. The suddenness of it, and the open casket. It must be confusing for an eleven-year-old girl. Maybe Meghan, poor thing, thinks his death had something to do with his smoking. Lauren recalls how her sister-in-law Ann had described Meghan's reaction to the school assembly on cigarettes, crying so hard that she made herself sick. Lauren had nodded at Ann's story, hoping her face conveyed the proper mix of sympathy and understanding, but she was thinking:
That doesn't seem right.

Now, at the luncheon, Lauren is watching as Meghan stands next to the buffet table, eating cheese and crackers. Her face is streaky, swollen, the aftermath of her sobbing at the cemetery when they all sprayed holy water on the coffin. Her ponytail, tight and smooth three hours before, is drooping, pieces falling loose from its sparkly neon band. Even when she was a little girl, back when John first started bringing Lauren around to family parties, Meghan had always seemed like a concern. She had a slightly feverish quality about her, chubby cheeks flushing with color as she flung herself into people's laps or clung to their knees. Lauren watches as Meghan swipes her bangs out of her eyes with one hand, reaches for a cracker with the other.

From her lap, a sigh. Lauren looks down to find the baby gazing up at her with his serene brown eyes. “Well, hello there.” Lauren presses him closer, inhales him. “Are you getting hungry, little man?”

Lauren is relieved—pleased—about how her children are turning out. Both of them are easy babies, good sleepers. (Whoever said you don't get two easy ones was wrong.) Elena, two and a half, regularly draws compliments from strangers.
Isn't she well behaved? And gorgeous. Look at those big, big eyes!
Elena's are the kind of baby eyes that seem to absorb everything—long-lashed, inky, almost violet. She didn't get them from Lauren, with her brown Armenian features, and not from John, with his light blue eyes and clean, crisp face. (Was it possible for a face to actually look Catholic? If so, her husband's did.) The eyes, Lauren thought, belonged to her maternal grandmother. It pleased her that her small, scattered family had triumphed in some minor way over her husband's big, close-knit one.

She scans the room, finds John stationed by the door. He is shaking hands, receiving condolences, thanking people for coming. Old neighbors. Friends of the family. Colleagues of his, old co-workers of his father's. Young men in crisp black suits, stooped men in brown ones. Lauren watches him clasp an elderly man's hand, kiss his wife's cheek. Chivalrous and confident. John always was. It isn't arrogance—it's as if doubt simply doesn't exist for him, as if he doesn't know the feeling. This, more than any financial savvy, is the key to his success. In his dark suit, he looks terribly handsome—an inappropriate thing to think at her father-in-law's funeral, but Lauren can't help it. At the family parties, John sometimes recedes a little, gathering around the TV, accepting plates of butter cake, becoming the younger brother to his older sisters, who fuss over him and Patrick, assigning them some old helplessness they remember from childhood. Here, though, he is the strongest presence in the room. It comforts her. Lauren has never felt completely at ease around John's family—the bigness, the competence, the tight sphere of constant togetherness. But it doesn't matter because at the core of her life is this: her husband, their children. Their little family of four. The moments John says:
How did I get so lucky?
Or:
Do you know how much I love you?
Like feeding her babies, these are the hidden intimacies, the private exchanges, on which she builds her life.

The baby squirms. Lauren looks down, sees his little pink face working up to a cry. “Hang on,” Lauren says. “I know, little one. You're hungry.” She scans the room for someplace private to steal away. It's a large, multipurpose room, wood-paneled, the kind that can be modified to suit any occasion. Tables draped in starchy white tablecloths, now covered with balled-up napkins and discarded plates. A hearth adorned with tasteful sprays of flowers. On the far side, Lauren spots what looks like an unused coat closet. She'll have to wade through all these people to get there, but she has the baby—an excuse to keep moving. Lauren wraps a few cookies in a napkin and tucks them discreetly in her diaper bag. Then she fixes her face in a polite smile, shoulders the bag, and starts across the room. In an hour, she thinks, the babysitter will arrive with Elena, who John had agreed (thank God) was too young for the funeral. When Elena appears, she will lighten everybody's mood. She'll be wearing the puffy pink dress Lauren laid out for her this morning. She will recite her litany of new words—
happy
,
chicken
,
phone
. Early Monday morning, when they returned from John's parents' house and retrieved Elena from the neighbors', she had crawled right into her father's lap, as if sensing his sadness, and curled her head into his neck.

The call had come at one thirty in the morning. Mrs. Blessing had called Ann and Margie, who called Patrick and John. John's father had been asleep in bed, and somehow John's mother had heard—sensed—he wasn't breathing, the intuition from a lifetime of nights spent beside him. Everyone had rushed to the house, the children and the grandchildren, wearing their middle-of-the-night clothes, sneakers and sweatpants, plastic hair clips and eyeglasses. John took charge, calling the paramedics, and later Mike Leary, an old high school classmate, now co-owner of the local funeral home. Patrick and Kate sat together at one end of the couch, holding hands. Kate looked remarkably put together for the hour—jeans, a sweater, even makeup and earrings. Maybe they'd just gotten home from somewhere when they got the call? (Lauren's nights were now devoted entirely to nursing. She couldn't fathom being out that late anymore, and didn't miss it.) But despite this, Kate looked genuinely upset—she always wore the right expression and always seemed to mean it, both traits Lauren envied—as she rubbed Patrick's wrist with her thumb. Patrick was crying, his shoulders slumped and shaking. The teenage boys stood around uncomfortably, looking stunned and uneasy in their hooded sweatshirts and huge plaid flannel pants. It was like some alternate, late-night version of a family party, twisted and vulnerable and strange.

John's father was still in bed. John had told the Learys to wait an hour before coming so everyone had the chance to see the body. In small groups, they filed in to see him in his blue-striped pajamas, a wooden rosary twined around the bedpost, his arms by his sides. (Had someone moved his arms, to place them there so neatly? Was this the duty of the wife?) Lauren stood slightly behind John, saying nothing, feeling her pulse beat in her cheeks. The glowing arms of the bedside clock pointed to two forty-five. She kept one hand on John's back, as if bracing him, or maybe herself, and held the baby in the other. Mr. Blessing looked colorless, frozen, his mouth agape. One eye was open, one half-closed. Rigor mortis. Somehow she hadn't anticipated this. But more shocking than the body of John's father was the presence of John's mother, keeping vigil over this terrible tableau. Lauren was almost afraid to look at her, but when she did, Mrs. Blessing was startling in her composure: eyes two tidy pools of water, spine ramrod straight. It was as if she'd been preparing for this moment all her life.

When Lauren followed John back to the living room, she felt dizzy. The Learys had pulled up outside, headlights shining in the dark. They were approaching the house. They were both wearing suits. Someone was sobbing, a hoarse, deep sound—Stephen, of all people, a stocky fifteen-year-old in sweatpants and big sneakers, crying raggedly. Margie went to touch her son's shoulder, but Stephen shook her off, stepping onto the porch and slamming the door, the long shade shivering against the glass. Then Meghan started to cry again, and the baby began whimpering in Lauren's arms—oh, thank God.

She stole off to the spare bedroom and quietly closed the door. It was John and Patrick's old room: two twin beds with blue bedspreads, a small rabbit-eared TV, a rocking chair with a flat braided mat on the seat. A simple wooden cross hung above the door. Lauren sat and rocked as she nursed the baby. Then she worried the others might hear the floorboards creaking, so she sat perfectly still. She watched the dark sky out the window. She heard activity in the room next door. The low rumble of voices, the squeak of a metal hinge—or a zipper? She shut her eyes. She just wanted this strange, awful night to be over. She thought about how it was something they would all remember forever. How this was family: to own such moments together. To experience them in all their raw shock and sadness, then get the food from the refrigerator, unwrap the crackers and fill the glasses, keep the gears turning, the grand existing beside the routine, the ordinary.

The Learys drove away. For the next two hours, they all stayed. It was nearly five when they convinced John's mother to try to get some sleep—would she get back in that bed? Lauren couldn't help wondering—and five thirty when she and John pulled into their driveway, the first faint pink glimmer of dawn coloring the sky. John turned the engine off and put his head in his hands. It was only then that he cried. Lauren had never heard her husband cry before. It was an awful sound, halting, awkward, as if his body weren't sure how. He moaned. Lauren touched him lightly, tentatively, on the shoulder. She couldn't imagine what he was feeling. Both her parents were alive and in good health, living in a retirement village in Florida. In twenty-six years, real tragedy had not touched her life at all. She rubbed John's wrist—a gesture, she realized, she'd stolen from Kate—and murmured some things about getting through it, calling out of work, eating something, getting some sleep. Imperfect, but it seemed to calm him somewhat, and as she slid into bed an hour later, having collected Elena from the neighbors' and put both her children back in their cribs, Lauren felt relieved—even a touch proud—that they were surviving this sad thing.

Lauren peers out from behind the thick curtain of the empty coat closet. From this vantage point, she can nurse the baby and observe the entire room unseen. “Come on,” she whispers to him. “I know you're hungry.” Max cranes his neck, twisting his head, distracted by his new surroundings. Lauren touches his cheek, steadying him. “Up here,” she says, and he looks up at her, blinking slowly, and latches on.

If Lauren could, she would breast-feed forever. Part of it is the closeness, the almost magical intimacy. The way her milk lets down when she hears her children cry—it still happens even with Elena, who switched to formula before Max was born. But breast-feeding has also become her escape. It allows her to step away from the family without penalty, to go collect herself in a spare room. Because she isn't like Kate, who socializes with everyone so effortlessly. She isn't like John's sisters—look at them standing by the hearth in their muted dresses, dark blue with discreet gold earrings, gracefully accepting condolences. John's mother stands beside them, equally composed, eyes brimming but never spilling over. All of the Blessings excel at this: looking right, acting right. At the wake, they had been tirelessly gracious, which was no easy feat—John's family seemed to know half of Northeast Philadelphia. (When Lauren first told them she'd grown up in Upper Darby, they had paused—
the other side of City Line
, one said, and the rest nodded, as if orienting her on the other side of the moon.) The wake had lasted four hours, the line stretching down two city blocks in the biting February cold. For the past week, the entire family had been together constantly, shifting from house to house at night. Only the setting changed, and the food, which seemed to appear as if from nowhere, all of it appropriately subdued. Nothing decadent, not too much spice or frosting. Nothing delicious. Plain and practical, just sustenance: pound cakes, cold salads, casseroles, triangles of ham and cheese.

A sharp cry—Max is peering up at her with a furrowed brow, as if sensing her inattention. “I'm sorry, bug,” she says, cajoling him to latch back on. She hikes up one side of her bra and switches sides, repositions his rosy mouth, then reaches into her bag for a cookie. When she looks up again, biting into it, Kate is standing in her line of sight. She is impossible to miss—tall and blond, with a daringly short bob. She's wearing a short, satiny jacket and wide gray trousers. Fashionable even at a funeral. An hour earlier, when Lauren went to the car for the diaper bag, she'd run into Kate in the parking lot, smoking furtively. “Oh, I know!” Kate had said. Her voice always had the slight rasp of someone who'd been yelling over loud music all night. “It's terrible,” she'd said, dropping the cigarette, grinding it out with her sharp heel. “It's so incredibly inappropriate—especially here. Please don't tell on me.”

“Don't worry,” Lauren had said, though she did find it disrespectful, considering. She had hugged Max to her chest, fumbling for her keys, as Kate pulled a little tin of mints from her purse.

Now Kate is standing by the drinks station, chatting easily with the nephews: Stephen and Joey and Alex. The boys look stiff, drawn, awkward in their black or brown suits, holding dimpled plastic cups of Coke. Lauren never would have approached the boys, especially not all together. From time to time she manages a conversation with Alex, who will offer a few polite details about school. Joey is friendly enough, but always in motion. But Kate is at ease talking to anyone—even Stephen, who Lauren finds intimidating, with his dour expression and broad shoulders and whiskered upper lip.