After the Moment (2 page)

Leigh thought of all the fuss Millie's mother, Janet Davis, had made whenever Millie came to visit her father. Seth lived in a reasonable neighborhood in the block-to-block way that most city neighborhoods were reasonable. But Janet was convinced that there was every chance Millie would be shot on the street, pushed onto a subway track, or raped in a stairwell.

She had not thought to be afraid of what a car could do. Yes, Millie was technically safe, but there was no way Seth's death would leave her unharmed.

"I should speak to Millie," Leigh said, not at all sure he wanted to, but remembering clearly all the times she'd calmed down from a bruise or a cut if he just sat beside her while she got a Band-Aid or an ice pack.

"They haven't told her yet," Lillian said.

"What, is she asleep?" Leigh asked. "It's not even eight-thirty."

"Your father thinks it might be better if you were there," Lillian said.

Clayton and Janet were waiting to tell Millie that her father was dead? It wasn't as if she were six years old. She'd know right away that they'd treated her like a child. That they'd protected her from news that she, more than anyone else, owned.

"He wants me to tell her," Leigh said, knowing that neither Clayton nor Janet would ever flat out ask him to do it.

But his being there would let Millie know to be on guard before a word was spoken.

"Yes, I have the impression that he does want that," Lillian said.

Memories of Seth that Leigh hadn't even known he had kept flashing into view. The day they'd met, more than seven years before, when Seth was drinking coffee from a paper cup with a plastic lid that didn't quite fit. The way he would hold his hands under his armpits if he'd forgotten his gloves. Seth running up the stairs three at a time but always letting Millie win if they were racing to his fifth-floor apartment.

"But I have school, right?" Leigh asked. "Should I go tonight? Can I get a train?"

Seth wore wire-rimmed glasses that he was forever pushing tight against the bridge of his nose. At some point Millie had started cleaning her father's glasses by blowing on them and using her shirt to rub them clear.

"I told Clayton it would be up to you," Lillian said. "I'd like you to consider what you want."

This was an almost constant refrain of hers. She felt that Leigh worked too hard to please other people. That he didn't take enough time for what might please him—for what he wanted. Leigh, who knew he didn't do anything that made him unhappy, felt that she worried for no reason. He did well in school, he was popular, and he had a girlfriend. Although he wasn't sure where he would go to college or what he would study there, Leigh believed that the road he was on belonged to a map. One free of too many detours, and leading him to the exact places where he was needed.

Still, he'd met other mothers, had listened to Lillian's friends talk about their kids, and he figured worrying was her job. If Lillian was asking him to consider what he wanted in the face of Clayton's news, well, then this time Leigh had an answer.

"I want Millie's father not to be dead," he said.

If he left tonight, right now, he'd get to D.C. well before Millie was up. Clayton would pick him up at Union Station and they'd drive the half-hour or so that it would take to get to the house. Leigh pictured himself going into her room, the last person she saw right before her new life started. Knowing Millie, she'd either cry right away or sit for a while, trying to work out what she thought.

He also, unwillingly, thought this was something his father could do. Should do. It was his
job.
Leigh, aware that he didn't know his father that well, was reluctant to use terms that were definitive. And if the word
coward
now sprang to mind to describe Clayton, then wouldn't that force Leigh, if he broke the news to Millie, to describe himself as
brave?

Which he wasn't. He was just, at this particular moment, angry. The whole ridiculous cliché of men hitting walls only to wind up with their hands broken was making a frightening sort of sense.

"Janet will make her nervous," Leigh said. "Millie will worry that being upset will upset her mother."

"That doesn't seem possible," Lillian said. "Are you sure?"

"Millie hides everything Seth gives her in the guest room closet."

Leigh, who slept in the guest room at his father's house, was forever shaking glitter out of his shoes or getting hit on the head by small stuffed animal squirrels. Millie loved squirrels.

"I think I should go," he said, thinking of his sister trying to figure out a private way to be sad.

Or angry. Did girls hit walls? No one ever said so, but this kind of aimless rage couldn't belong only to men.

"Do you have any tests this week?" Lillian asked. "Papers due?"

"No," Leigh said. "A vocab quiz in French, but I can take it late."

"The memorial service will probably be in New York," Lillian said.

"Yeah," he said.

His mother had followed him into his room, where he was putting a shirt, a sweater, and jeans into a small bag. He had clothes at his father's, but he always liked to bring some just in case all of his things had disappeared between visits.

"I'm sure Seth's school will want to do something," Lillian said. "Tell her..."

Leigh knew his mother was inviting Millie to stay with them in case Clayton and Janet didn't offer to accompany her up to the city for her father's service.

"I will," Leigh said. "But I think Dad, at least, will come to the service."

Leigh didn't want to think about how people were going to bury Seth. It felt like a great betrayal to Millie. If she had no idea her father was dead, then no one should be making plans until she knew.

Lillian booked a train ticket online for him and then insisted on coming down to Penn Station. These days Penn Station, Grand Central, and the airports were crawling with police and National Guardsmen. There was no safer place to be in the city than at one of its exit venues. Normally, Leigh might have persuaded his mother to stay home by asking if she didn't trust him.

But he knew the news of Seth's death had brought with it the type of fear that proximity to misfortune often carries. It was ridiculous, of course, but Leigh was as glad of his mother's company that night as he had been at the age of ten when he was routinely woken up by the sound of his own screaming voice.

"Bad dreams," Lillian would say, turning on the light, helping him out of bed, and fixing him hot milk with honey. "It's just bad dreams."

~~~

When he finally got to his father's house, Leigh took a pillow and a blanket from the guest room and stretched out on the floor next to his sister's bed. When Millie woke up, he would be there, as Lillian had always been for him. He wouldn't be able to ease the end of a bad dream, but he had vague plans about cushioning the beginnings of his sister's grief.

Whatever his intentions had been, they all vanished when he opened his eyes to find her staring down at him.

"I knew you'd come," she said.

Leigh was quiet, not sure how to tell her what she apparently knew. Later, the details of her hellish night would leak out (overheard phone calls and an endless computer search until a local paper in Kansas posted the story). Right now what he focused on was that his sister had known he would come and he had.

During some of the months to follow, her faith allowed him a place on the right side of the line separating men you could trust from men you couldn't.

Millie slept for most of the day, getting up once or twice to say that she wanted to walk the dog. Leigh would find the leash, slip biscuits into his pocket, and call for Bubbles, the family's slobbering but affectionate mixed breed. By then Millie would have become exhausted looking for her shoes or hairbrush and returned to bed. Her eyes were red, but he'd not seen or heard her cry, and worried that she was doing it in her sleep.

Janet stayed home from work but had told Clayton to go to his office.

"Leigh and I will be fine," she said. "There's nothing you can do for Millie."

Leigh watched, unable to believe that his father was picking up his car keys and travel mug of coffee.

Clayton ran the legal department of Byre Consultants Group. It was a lobbying firm founded by a retired secretary of defense who had also served in the Senate for eighteen years. When married to Lillian, Clayton had worked for Exxon, and Leigh thought it was possible that oil executives were less demanding than politicians. But maybe his father just worked all the time because if you didn't write romance novels work was like that.

Clayton's father had been a lawyer, and both of Lillian's parents had worked for a chain of hardware stores. Most of the parents of Leigh's friends at school were lawyers or doctors (a lot of those were psychiatrists) or banker types. Janet Davis was a nurse, and Leigh knew that
her
mother was an interior designer somewhere in Texas.

Whenever Leigh tried to imagine his life being shaped by any of those careers, he felt as if the map he'd been following his whole life had suddenly faded from view. He knew it was a matter of continuing to do the right things: study and apply to colleges, as well as keep old friends and make new ones. But even with all that as a given, he couldn't picture himself working at something that mattered.

Leigh didn't think the law was interesting, even if it
did
dictate how the world was run. He hated his science courses, which ruled out becoming a doctor, and he didn't care enough about anything to teach it. Everyone said that college was to help focus his plans for the future, but Leigh wondered how he could focus what he didn't have.

He sometimes worried that he'd be one of those people who drifts through life, selling advertising space in a trade journal or something equally sad. He saw himself as forever waiting to figure out what he wanted to be when he grew up. Some of Leigh's private worries about his future—which struck him as monstrously selfish to be dwelling on so soon after Seth's death—must have shown in his face, because Clayton put his keys down.

"I could easily work from home," he said, and then disappeared into the sun porch, where he had a small study.

Leigh thought that Clayton should have the decency to be too upset to work. But he also envied his father's ability to remove himself from Millie's clear if not yet stated needs.

Janet, who had a suitably distracted air about her, hauled a bag of clothes up from the laundry room and set about mending them. Leigh took the garbage out and caulked two ill-fitting storm windows. He was worried that he might start mopping the floors, he was so desperate for something to do.

"I made curtains for our first apartment," Janet said when he spread his schoolbooks out across from where she was sewing. "They were yellow, and Seth thought I had performed a miracle by bringing light into a place that faced an alley."

"It was in Chicago, right?" Leigh asked.

He knew the story from Millie. Her parents had met in Chicago just as Janet was deciding that she didn't want to be a doctor but a nurse. She married Seth while still in school, and Millie was born within a year.

After Janet graduated from college with a BSN instead of a pre-med degree, Seth quit his teaching job and they went to live in Czechoslovakia. Millie was a year old when her parents lived there, both of them teaching English, and she could never quite forgive herself for having no memory of it.

"Yes, Chicago," Janet said. "I never made curtains in Prague."

They came back to the States, Leigh knew, to get divorced, with Seth settling in New York and Janet taking Millie to Maryland.

"God, I wish his mother were still alive," Janet said, putting down a sock and taking up a shirt with missing buttons.

Leigh had never thought before about Seth's having parents. It was enough, he'd thought, to have registered that Seth's life had extended to Millie, his students, and Janet. But everyone had parents, and Seth himself had once been only seventeen.

"Why his mother?" Leigh asked, because if they were going to wish that someone dead were alive, why not start with Seth?

"To keep Millie company," Janet said. "She knows that we're only sad for what she's lost."

Leigh supposed that was one way to put it. True, he was sad for Millie, but he was also sorry that Seth was dead, and he'd probably seen Seth not twenty times in his life. Janet was surely even sorrier.

"You'll be good company," Leigh said. "Millie knows you're sad."

"Your heart can break a thousand times," Janet said, "but never more than once for the same person."

Meaning, he supposed, that Janet's heart had broken when she and Seth had divorced and could not, therefore, break again because he'd died. Also meaning, Leigh thought, that his father should not be working but spending time with Janet. Because maybe no one could help Millie, but Janet, neatly divided between sorrow and guilt, could probably use her husband's company.

~~~

Clayton must have figured this out on his own, as he stayed home again the following day. Leigh was tired from two nights of sleeping on Millie's floor, and not sure he was making a huge difference, although she had followed him into the guest room that morning and pulled a box of romance novels from the back of the closet. Lillian sent her books to Millie, who loved them, and Leigh supposed that his sister bought others in the grocery store or wherever.

"Daddy always said these would rot my brain," she said, leaning against the sofa bed, which Leigh had yet to pull out. "But when I was sick or got really good grades, he'd let me read them."

Leigh sat down on the floor next to her and pulled on the ends of her hair.

"Your brain's never going to rot, Mill," he said.

"I feel sick," she said. "Like I want to throw up, but can't."

He sat with her until she fell asleep, and he lifted her onto the couch, unfolding a blanket and turning out the light.

After eating lunch, Clayton asked if he wanted to get some driving in. Leigh had gotten his permit in August, but although the required six months had passed, he hadn't completed sixty hours of supervised driving. If it hadn't been for soccer, he and Clayton would have finished the remaining two hours of daylight and seven of nighttime. Leigh was desperate to get his license. It was unnecessary at home, but having to be driven places while visiting his father was unbearable. He hated himself for saying yes, believing that a better brother would not so eagerly get into a driver's seat after what had happened to Millie's father.