Chapter 13
13
From: Anna Byrne [email protected]
To: Olivia Iyer [email protected]
Date: December 25, 2009 at 10:02 AM GMT +1
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Bonjour
Happy Christmas!! Hope NYC is snowy and cold and festive. Are you staying through New Year’s?
I only just got out of bed here. Last night I went out with Faye and her friends to a beach club, one that opens in the winter only for Christmas Eve and New Year’s. You wouldn’t BELIEVE who we saw there—Elton John, and his partner, on the dance floor! Very dapper, of course. Everyone left a little ring of respectful distance around them, like royalty. Partying on Christmas Eve was a bit weird, but Theo says it’s traditional to spend the eve with your friends and the day with your family. I go out with them at least a few days a week. Bars, boats, nightclubs, restaurants. Don’t worry—I’ve been taking photos for you!
Faye’s been lending me some of her nice clothes when we go out. They’re beautiful, but she’s a little weird about it, even though it was totally her idea. Like she wants me to wear her clothes, but also wants to make sure everyone knows they’re not mine. Everyone here seems to treat me sort of like a novelty, because I’m new and American. But honestly, it’s been fun!
Missing you!
xx
Anna
Christmas, late morning. Mrs. Wilder was in top spirits in the kitchen, singing along to every holiday song on the radio. Mr. Wilder had posted up in the dining room with the newspapers and a carafe of coffee, and he periodically urged his wife to “stop faffing about and come sit down.” But she was busy preparing a traditional Christmas meal. Or heating, more accurately—Chef had prepped all the dishes the night before, so Mrs. Wilder’s only job was to put the right dishes in the right ovens (ovens, plural) at the right temperatures, and not for too long. Pippa and I sat cross-legged on the sofa in the living room, eating Toblerone and white-chocolate- dipped almonds from our stockings. Yes, I had a stocking. One did not have to be young to get a stocking in this family. One did not even need to be family, apparently.
Singin’ in the Rain was on the television, with the sound down low. I was trying to teach Pippa a card game from home, spit. Our fingers on the cards were greasy with chocolate. From the prep kitchen Mrs. Wilder and George Michael sang “Last Christmas.”
Earlier, after emailing Liv, I’d thought about calling home, to say Merry Christmas. Our first Christmas without Mom. But it would’ve been predawn in Massachusetts, a weird time to call even if you did know what to say to your dad if he did happen to answer. And I definitely didn’t. I decided to let the day wash over me, see how I felt once the festivities had exhausted themselves here.
Mrs. Wilder poked her head into the living room and said that “luncheon ” would be ready in ten minutes, and would Pippa go get her lump of a sister out of bed.
“I’ll go,” I said. I wasn’t exactly sure what Pippa might find there in the guesthouse—or, rather, who.
Taxis had queued up all night outside the beach club, so Faye, Simon, and I piled into one car when it was time to leave. At my door, Faye put her hand out impatiently, and I slipped off the heels and handed them back to their owner. They dangled from her fingers as she and Simon continued on up the guesthouse path.
Callum hadn’t warmed up at all since that night at the Pan De? Palais hotel. The shift was so abrupt, and so complete, that I’d had to accept that this, now, was the real Callum, and the kinder version I’d helped with the Citro?n was only an anomaly. He watched me often, with those eyes, and I wondered if he thought I was a poser, now that I was wearing Faye’s clothes, or a social climber, like Becky Sharp from Vanity Fair , attaching myself to his friends with suspect aims.
I slipped on my shoes and walked the white stone path along the villa and out to the guesthouse. Passing my own room on the way, I imagined dialing the phone, calling home. Listening to it ring, wondering if I wanted an answer.
What would my father think of this place, this lifestyle? To me it felt like The Sun Also Rises . Of course that was Spain, but the way Hemingway described those long days, going from one balmy spot to another, eating and drinking, finding friends—that was how it felt here. Everyone young, beautiful, aimless, charged with their freedom and an everlasting reserve of energy. They had no demands on their time. And for the first time in my life—as long as I’d finished my three hours of tutoring with Pippa—neither did I.
At the guesthouse, I knocked on Faye’s door. “Lunch is on the table,” I said, entering when she called.
“I’ve just been thinking about New Year’s. I pulled some dresses for you,” she said from the couch, as if we were continuing a conversation.
“You don’t have to do that, really.”
She stood and stretched. “Most of my formal dresses won’t fit you, of course,” she said, gesturing at my hips, as if I hadn’t noticed how different our bodies were. “But I have a few I think will really make your curves pop.” Clothes were made for girls like Faye, light and angular, but still, she always seemed to have a few that suited me, gave me that cartoony Jessica Rabbit shape. And then she would frown in the mirror, like I’d displeased her, like the whole thing hadn’t been her idea, and shoo me away like a begging dog.
When we were outside on the path, she nudged me with her elbow. “What’re you waiting for with Theo? He obviously fancies you.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said.
“He’s not just one of those London finance bros. I mean, he is in finance, but he’s a smart one. He went to Cambridge, you know?” I had a flash of Faye as Austen’s Emma: entertaining herself by matchmaking for her poor little friend Harriet, getting her hopes up for a gentleman. Faye in the bonnet and corset, turning to Mr. Knightley— Her father’s only a tradesman, isn’t that tragic?
“Don’t you think Theo’s just a flirt?” I said.
The truth: Theo’s continued attention felt marvelous, intoxicating, life-giving. Like waking up. No one had looked at me like that since various short-lived college boyfriends, and none had been half as handsome and charming as Theo. But I’d been wrong already, with Callum—and look how that had turned out.
“Look, I’ve known Theo a long time,” Faye said. “He’s a good one. He doesn’t mind that you’re not quite one of us, right? Or maybe he likes that. I mean, you’re not like the other girls around here, or in London.”
“I’m definitely not,” I agreed. It had never occurred to me that not fitting in could be a good thing. Theo thought I was smart, and funny, and pretty; he didn’t know I was broken, motherless, floundering. He never had to.
Faye and I climbed the villa’s front steps, hot salty cooking smells reaching out for us. Holiday music gathered behind the ornate door, stymied like smoke, and I paused just a moment with my hand on the doorknob, enjoying my own anticipation. I was meant to be in London, alone, but here I was instead, while Bing Crosby sang “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” I could see through the stained glass: candlelight flickering on the crowded table, bodies moving into seats. A family, whole, a sort of harmony to them. A seat for me.
Back in my room that afternoon, I sat in bed, legs under the goose-down duvet, back against the headboard. One hand lifting slices of Terry’s Chocolate Orange to my mouth, even though I was still full from lunch, and the other hand on my laptop, scrolling Facebook. All my old friends and acquaintances—Smith housemates, college ex-boyfriends, high school friends, neighborhood kids. People who’d spent time in my life, then passed out of it, or I had passed out of theirs, and now we existed together only here, wished each other happy birthday, gave condolences, or offered congratulations. They were only photos, and tonight, families: hugging in front of a Christmas tree, a kitchen stove, or a pile of shredded wrapping paper. Sitting at a table so full of laughing family that the chairs elbowed each other for space.
I opened a new tab on my laptop and topped up the balance on my pay-as-you-go phone, enough for an international call. I would call my aunt Tori’s house—Dad would probably still be there. The Christmas meal over, sitting around drinking coffee, listening to Tori complain about management at the hospital. She’d help, tell me she was glad I’d called even if she wasn’t, pass the phone to my dad in such a way that he would only feel obligated to say hello and how are things and Merry Christmas and bet this call is costing you a fortune, huh, before passing it back. I’d feel worse, or better, or glad I’d tried, or upset I’d bothered, but at least I wouldn’t feel the blank space, the empty photo where my family should be.
I was the one to blame, anyway—the day my father and I finally lost faith in each other. The day I saw I couldn’t just skip off to London for a study-abroad year, like everyone else.
It was the last week of my sophomore year at Smith. I was finishing a shift at the ice cream shop when my cousin Sylvie called from the salon downtown. She was looking out the window, at my mom sitting in her car, which had just plowed into a row of parked cars.
By the time I arrived, two police cars were there, pulled alongside my parents’ ancient little Accord like they wanted to make sure Mom couldn’t make a getaway. Hurrying toward them, I saw that one of the policemen was out and talking to my mom through her window. Then he opened the door and stepped back to let her out. It was a funny gesture—something a man of manners might do, opening the door for a lady. But really, he was giving her space, trying to see how she moved. If she was drunk, if she might stumble.
And she did, of course—just lurching a little, her torso making small arcs with each step. I got there just as the cop was catching her arm to steady her. He nodded back to his partner, still in the car, and said, “Yeah, grab the Breathalyzer.”
“Mom,” I said, reaching for her. “Mom, are you okay?”
She looked at me from droopy eyelids and smiled. “Anna.”
The cop put his arm out, barring me from her. “Step back, miss.”
“Please, she’s diabetic,” I said. “She has low blood sugar. She’s not drunk.” Mom had what her medical charts called “uncontrolled diabetes”; she hated the term, which made it sound like she wasn’t trying. But it was true that her levels were dangerously unpredictable. I’d been in school with a girl who was diabetic, and I never once saw her show signs of high or low blood sugar. She was an even keel. Mom had never had that.
The cop looked at my mom, at the holey T-shirt and gray sweatpants she wore for cleaning the house on Sundays. He looked at the patched-up car my parents shared, its poorly covered rust spots, the tailpipe hanging low underneath, the bumper now crunched in. He decided what kind of people we were. “Step back, miss,” he said again.
Fear was running through me like a current, but I spoke as calmly as I could. “Her blood sugar is low. She’ll have a seizure if she doesn’t get sugar. She could die.” I turned to Mom. “Where’s your glucagon gel, Mom? The emergency stuff?”
My mom shook her head in slow dips, like it was too heavy to hold up. “All out. Gonna get a Coke,” she slurred, looking back at the car. “A’ the store.” I looked at the cop, hoping this had convinced him I was telling the truth. But it had just convinced him she was wasted. I saw his face, his certainty, and panic zinged through my body. Calm wasn’t working. If they wouldn’t help her, if they wouldn’t let me, this would go bad very fast.
I reached forward and yanked up my mother’s shirt. On her stomach, just above the waistband of her sweats, was the port for her pump. “It’s insulin,” I insisted. “It’s a pump. She’s diabetic.”
The cop brought his arm down hard enough to break my hold, then elbowed me backward. “If you don’t get the fuck out of here, you’re both gonna be on the curb in cuffs.”
My arm throbbed and I stumbled back, almost falling on the uneven street. That’s when I saw that people were beginning to gather on the sidewalk—downtown window shoppers, dog-walking dads, Smithies on a run for bubble tea. Watching me argue, watching my mom swing gently on the spot. I wanted to tell them to fuck off, to stop watching, but instead, I pushed through them, into the salon.
My cousin sprang back from the window, where she and the other stylists and their customers were all shamelessly watching. “Coke,” I said, without preamble. “You have a fridge?”
Sylvie took me back to the break room and rifled through the mini fridge. She knew about my mom. “I called your father,” she said quietly while she searched. Finally, she put a can of Pepsi in my hands.
“Call 9-1-1,” I said to her, my voice shaking. “Ask for EMTs. Just tell them someone’s having a seizure, okay? Just say that.”
When I got back outside, the police were pushing the onlookers back. My mom was sitting on the curb, her head drifting lazily toward one shoulder. Shivering, even though it was seventy degrees out. She could be in a coma in twenty minutes.
I held up the can for the cops to see. “Just let me give her some sugar,” I said. I couldn’t keep my voice down anymore. “If she’s drunk, it won’t do shit. If she’s diabetic, it means you won’t have to hold her head when she’s seizing on the fucking sidewalk.”
The first cop shook his head. “Field sobriety test. Then Mom can have all the Pepsi she wants.”
I realized then that’s why they were moving the crowd back. Making my mom stagger up and down the sidewalk in her sweats for the weekend shopping crowd. Stand on one leg.
“No,” I said. “No, what happened to the Breathalyzer?”
The second cop shook his head. “She can’t blow enough to hit it.”
“Of course she can’t.” I took a few steps toward Mom. “I’m going to give her the soda, okay? It won’t ruin your test. It’s just soda.”
“Don’t you touch her,” the first cop said. “She drinks anything, it ruins the Breathalyzer.”
“You just said she couldn’t do the Breathalyzer.” I turned to the second cop. “If you stand her up there, she’s going to collapse, and then you’ll have a concussion and a seizure to deal with.”
He didn’t answer me, or even look at me, but he did shoot his partner a look. Probably thinking of all the paperwork they’d have to do if Mom had a diabetic fit on Main Street in front of a crowd. “She did have the pump, Rob. In her pocket. Connected to her thing.” He touched his own stomach.
The first cop shrugged like we were both wasting his time. “Fine. Just a sip, then. Hurry up. We’ve gotta get this show on the road.”
I dropped onto my knees, cracked the can, and held it to my mother’s mouth. She parted her lips, but her eyes were unfocused. I tipped the liquid into her mouth and it fizzed, and in another second, it was running back out again, pouring down her shirt, splashing both of us.
“Why isn’t she drinking?” the first cop hissed. Like I was playing a trick on him.
“She can’t swallow,” I said, my eyes now streaming with tears. “That’s what happens.” I put the can back to her lips. I poured another sip into her mouth and prayed. Mom had promised me. You could absorb the sugar through your gums, she said. Even if you’re so far gone you can’t swallow. She had prepared me for this, just in case.
When my father arrived, he was panting, red-faced, white shirt patchy with sweat. With no car, he’d run the half mile here from home. He pushed through the bystanders, yelling at them to move. The cops stopped him, of course, and I could hear them arguing, hear that my father skipped over pleading and went right to shouting and swearing at them. I knew he was just as frantic as I was, but all I could think, in that moment, was how he was adding to our little family sideshow. I kept my eyes on my mother’s face and poured more soda into her mouth, again and again, until she was soaked with it. Probably my father would end up in handcuffs, but I could only save one of them right now.
The thing that saved all of us was that the EMTs arrived. Two of them went to talk to the cops and Dad, and two of them came and sat next to my mother on the sidewalk, one on each side. Sylvie must have told them everything on the phone because they opened a little kit with a syringe in it. “Glucagon,” the woman said to me, so gently that I knew I looked completely crazed. “I’m going to give her an injection. It’ll work much faster, okay?”
I sat back on my heels. I couldn’t speak. My wet shirt clung to me, sticky with soda. But Mom’s eyes were more open now, and she was in them again. While the EMTs disinfected a spot on her upper arm, Mom looked at me. “Don’t cry, Anna. I’m okay,” she said. Still a little slurred.
The EMTs were trying to tell me I’d done a good job, done the right thing. But they felt fuzzy now, like I couldn’t really hear them. Now that Mom was going to be okay, I was so mad I could hardly see. At the cops, at everyone watching. I stood and stepped up onto the sidewalk. The blood rushed into my cramped legs, but it just felt like more anger, hot and pumping.
Then Dad was there. He hugged me, his sweat-stained shirt sticking to me. “These idiots,” he said. “They could’ve killed her.”
But I couldn’t give my anger to the cops, or the people watching, or the Smithies sipping on their thick bubble tea straws. I could only give it to my father. A person I could blame for this, and maybe for everything.
“Why was she driving?” I said, pushing him off me. My voice was too loud. “You were home.”
“She was fine, Anna. Completely fine when she left. She just said she was going to get a few things. Not out of it or anything.”
I shook my head. “So she went from completely fine to half comatose on a four-minute drive? Sure, Dad.”
“You think this is my fault?” he snapped. “You know how fast her hypos hit.”
“I can’t believe you. How could you let her leave like that?” I said, even though I knew I was being unfair.
“Jesus Christ, Anna, not everything that goes wrong in your life is my fault. As much as you want it to be.”
“You should have taken her yourself.” I was shouting again. It felt like I couldn’t control my voice anymore. It felt good not to.
Now he was yelling back. Switching into that higher gear he saved just for me. “Oh no, you don’t tell me what to do. That’s not how this works.”
“You think I want to? I want you to be the grown-up. Take care of her instead of fighting with the fucking cops, making a scene.” It wasn’t enough that we had to live this way, every single day. We also had to see how it looked to everyone else. Like we were some trashy family who couldn’t take care of ourselves.
He sneered at me. “Don’t act like you take care of her. I do. You don’t do shit for her anymore. I know why you never come home.”
I laughed viciously. “I never come home when you’re home. What, Mom didn’t tell you that?”
I saw this hit the mark, his eyes shifting to Mom and the EMTs, then back to me. “You only went to that yuppie school to give me the middle finger. And now you can’t even see your family. You’re too busy up on the hill, ” he snarled.
For once, I didn’t shrug it off. I didn’t bite back my answer. “Yeah, I am.” I pointed at him, in his sweaty, clinging shirt. “So I don’t end up like you.”
He took a step toward me, until my pointing finger was in his chest. “You spoiled— You think you’re better—”
The second cop inserted himself between us. “All right, guys,” he said. “Time to take a lap and cool off.”
And oh, I knew everyone in the crowd would love that. Domestic dispute right downtown. Officer had to step in and break it up, they’d tell their families at dinner. Real ugly.
One of the EMTs came over to us. “Which one of you’s going to ride in the ambulance?” he said.
“Ambulance?” my father repeated. I knew him; I knew he was worrying about how much that would cost. When the bill would come in the mail, which month it would hit the bank account. My mom would be back to normal in a day or two—they’d hydrate her, stabilize her levels, make sure her ketones weren’t too high—but we’d need months to pay for it. Hours on the phone, to negotiate a payment plan. Always a separate bill for the ambulance ride.
And here I was, only worrying about the scene we were making. I felt shame warming up under my skin, dripping down through my body like hot candle wax. I felt like I would die if I stayed there another moment.
“I’ll go, you move the car,” I said to Dad. “If they tow it, that’s three or four hundred bucks.”
He looked back at the old Accord, rubbed a hand over his forehead, and nodded once. I was not forgiven, would probably never be, but necessity required us to be on the same side again, for a while.
A few weeks later, when my junior year tuition bill came, it was two grand more than I’d expected; I hadn’t been given my usual on-campus work-study award because I would be abroad in London. The financial aid office said a loan could be arranged, but it all felt suddenly too risky. I’d never had a loan before, and there was no guarantee my UK student visa would allow me to work and earn money there. No guarantee my travel stipend from Smith would be enough to live on. No guarantee my mother would be safe and healthy while I was gone, the same when I returned. Chances I could not take.
The day I gave up on London, I cried in my mother’s lap like a child, leaving huge tear splotches on her scrubs. “What if this was my only chance?” I said.
“I don’t believe that, honey,” she murmured, rubbing my back. “You’ll get your chance to go, I know you will.” And I heard it, the relief in her voice. Proof that she needed me to stay, that my father was not enough. Now, of course, I saw it differently. My mother worked with sick and dying people; she must have suspected or known that her health had passed the tipping point. The point of no return. She was always tired, that year, and too thin, like clothes on a hanger, but I’d grown accustomed to it as if it were a personality trait, a way she had always been. The way you barely notice the heat at the end of a long summer.
When I finally left for London, it was in bitterness. I had chosen to stay, I had sacrificed, I had done everything I could. And none of it had saved her. I didn’t blame my father anymore; I blamed the whole world. I wanted to step outside of it, forget it, shed it like a skin and start new. And here I was, and probably my father did blame me for that, and he had a right to. I’d left him there, alone with the crater in our empty house.
A streaky peach-sherbet sunset glowed in the window of my guest suite, the squat olive trees on the hill silhouetted low against it. I picked up my phone from the bed and dialed the number. Not Aunt Tori’s, but home. It was getting late there. I could see my dad clearly, moving around the quiet house. Settling in front of the TV, a can of store-brand root beer on the table next to him. Lifting the cold can to his mouth, reaching out automatically with his sleeve to wipe away the ring of condensation it left before my mom could hassle him about it.
The phone rang four times and I heard the click of the answering machine. Even if he’d answered, even if he’d been nice, we’d both have known: it wasn’t really him I wanted to talk to. I wanted Mom to pick up. I wanted to hear her voice on the phone: Oh, honey, hi, what time is it there? I wanted to tell her about living with Pippa and Faye. Dancing with Theo and Elton John. How simple and easy and beautiful life was here, my old life far in the distance, a sailboat slipping out of the orange-streaked harbor. I wanted to say, Wish you were here, Mom.