Fifty-One
Forty-eight hours after landing in Rochester for the wedding, Clara was driving a rental car back to New York City by herself, wondering how fast she would have to go to skip into a parallel universe, one where her family didn’t even exist. She tried to muster umbrage, but even Clara, with her bottomless anger and laundry lists of fuckups, couldn’t believe what had happened.
No. She couldn’t believe what she’d done.
Somewhere around Binghamton, her hangover started to lift and shame fully descended.
She tried not to think about Philip flying back to New York without her or about how nobody would speak to her this morning—except for that punishing breakfast with her mother—all developments that a younger Clara would have used to successfully fuel her outrage.
Today, they were devastating. And once she let the full force of the previous night hit her sober heart, all she could see was the look on Bridie’s face, and she had to pull over and tell herself to breathe.
This morning, when they should have been getting dressed for church, while Philip was packing and not speaking to her, the phone in the hotel room rang. It was her mother. “Meet me downstairs in the hotel restaurant, please.”
Nina was sitting in a booth with a pot of coffee on the table.
She motioned for Clara to sit and started in before Clara could even pour a cup.
“For a very long time, I have chosen to let you nurture your disappointment in and anger with me,” Nina began.
“And I have appreciated—more than you can possibly imagine—the recent feeling that we might be getting somewhere, you and I, somewhere accommodating. And I have tried, Clara, I have tried so hard to understand and be accountable for all the ways in which I hurt you and your sister. Your lack of forgiveness has been hard and painful. But this? What you did to Bridie—”
“But I didn’t—”
Nina raised her hand. “I know. We all know because you said it a thousand times last night. You weren’t doing anything, but who do we credit for that, Clara? You?”
Clara lowered her head in her hands. “No,” she said. She was miserable and terribly sick. “I don’t know what to do. I think I should leave.”
“That seems to be something at which you excel,” Nina said, her voice clipped.
“I learned from the master.”
The waitress put the food down on their table.
Nina had ordered eggs Benedict for the two of them, and the plates had been sitting under the heat lamp for a little too long, because the vivid yellow hollandaise was starting to form a slightly wrinkled skin on top.
Both Clara and Nina picked up their forks at the same time and, in an identical motion, swiped the hollandaise, and broke the yolk, which was perfectly cooked.
They looked up at each other. “I’m sorry,” Clara said.
“I’m sorry I said that. Even I don’t believe it anymore. ”
Nina motioned for her to eat, and they dug into their breakfast and ate quietly for a few minutes. The eggs weren’t helping Clara’s stomach. She pushed her plate away and poured herself some water.
“What do you believe?” Nina finally asked.
“About you and Finn?”
“We can start there.”
“I don’t know. To be honest, my feelings around it calcified almost immediately. I thought you chose him over us, and it felt terrible. You left us, that’s a fact.”
“I left your father. I lived ten blocks away. I didn’t leave you.”
“But that’s how it felt!” Clara could hear herself. She sounded younger than her seventeen-year-old self. She sounded like she was ten. Five.
“I wasn’t happy with your father. I made a mistake marrying him, except of course that I’d do it again if it meant getting you and Bridie. I would do it a thousand times. But, Clara, I couldn’t accept paying for that mistake for the rest of my life.”
“Was it because he was gay?”
“Somewhat. Not fully, but partly. Not that this is any of your business, but the intimacy was—”
Clara winced and stopped Nina. “I get the picture.”
“He had an enormous secret that closed him off emotionally. We were ill-suited. He wasn’t happy.
I wasn’t happy. And then I fell in love with someone who loved me.
If anything, I wanted you girls to know that mistakes aren’t life sentences.
Life is full of options, even if the world tries to tell you it’s not.
I wanted you to believe in choice, to trust your desires. ”
“I guess . . .” Clara was tired, she couldn’t think straight, and she had the sinking feeling that what she’d done last night couldn’t be fixed. “I guess I wish it hadn’t been so easy for you to go.”
Nina put her hands out, palms up, and beckoned to Clara. Clara took her mother’s hands, crying now, and they both held on tight. “It wasn’t easy, my love. None of it was easy.”
“LET THINGS SETTLE FOR A bit,” her mother said as she helped Clara load her luggage into the back of the rental car, the vile turquoise that only seemed to exist at Hertz. “And then you’re going to come back to fix this.”
Back in New York after the endless ride home, she went directly to her old place and sat forlornly in the kitchen of the apartment she’d never thought would be her apartment again, looking out the window onto an airshaft covered in pigeon shit.
For so many years, she’d believed rage was the fire that ignited her.
She realized, as a person who was no longer a teenager, that what she’d felt during all the years since the morning of the note, wasn’t anger or resentment or fury or plain sadness, but something else.
Grief. The thing that had propelled so many bad decisions in her life, that had brought her to this sad spot in this sad room with its sad view, was grief.
She hadn’t known what to call it back then, but she recognized it now that she’d endangered so much in her life.
And because she wasn’t a selfish child anymore, just a sloppy adult, the grief flared with renewed vigor, made itself comfortable and felt horrific.