All of Us and Everything (24 page)

Liv remembered that she was supposed to be figuring out what she wanted from the man. Good God, she didn't want to want love. She didn't want to talk to her sisters about wanting love. She didn't want to talk about love at all. Maybe all of her issues
were
his fault.

She leaned out the window. “Hey, old man.”

He turned around and looked up, shading his eyes. “Liv?”

“You can't play favorites,” she said.

“Favorites?”

“You've got to encourage Ingmar too. They both have aspirations, you know.”

“Oh,” he said, looking at the dogs. “Okay.”

“Let's go out for lunch,” Liv said.

“Lunch?”

“Yes. Just the two of us. Lunch.” It was a simple enough thing to want. “Let's get this over with. Okay?”

“Get what over with?”

“Lunch.”

Toby lifted his leg and peed.

“I promised Atty I'd drive her around to used-book stores to see if any more of those Nancy Drews came in,” her father said.

Liv thought about this for a second. “Even better. Nancy Drew hunt with you, me, and Atty, then lunch.” With Atty there, how much love-talk could they get into anyway? The kid could act as a buffer. Life needed more of them.

Augusta was trying to clear more space on the third floor. The house was packed. They needed more room to move about. Maybe she was feeling a little overwhelmed too—everyone was back. All of them! A family and she was the head of it.

She stacked some small boxes, making towers that allowed for a little floor space. She tried to clear off some of the long table in the center of the room. It was dusty, stuffy work so she went to one of the windows to let in more air.

But once she had one hand on the sill, she stalled.

She remembered going to the library after her bout of rheumatic fever was over. She looked up the workings of the heart. She wanted to know what might have gone wrong, the total damage.

She read the books in this very room, curled near the windows, and learned that the heart operates with electrical signals that cause it to contract. She felt electrical storms were the earth's way of getting pumped like a heart. The idea had terrified and delighted her. As a summer thunderstorm swept in, she pressed her face to the windows so she could see the ocean. She got so close she fogged the glass and had to wipe the glass clean.

And with every squall, she urged the ocean to rise up and swallow them all, whole. Love, she decided, was what weakened the heart most of all. She'd never fall for it. She stepped back from the window, let the glass clear, and decided to control the ocean. That was when she began conducting.

She looked out at the view now, the scuttle of tourists and cars, the distant dimpled glass of the Atlantic. She'd been wrong. Love was uncontrollable, but that didn't mean it was deadly. In fact, it was the only way to truly live.

The storm had come. She and Jessamine had weathered it, but she'd known then that it would churn things up, that change was coming. She hadn't expected to change, within herself. She hadn't seen that coming. She was old, yes, but she was changing. She could feel it—not unlike a fever.

Atty had called ahead but when she asked about specific Nancy Drew titles, the woman who answered the phone got curt. “You'll have to come and paw through the stacks yourself.” So now Atty was leading Nick and Liv through a used-book store's maze of stacks.

“That's her,” Atty whispered, pointing to a white woman with a pale brown Afro reading a romance at her seat behind the counter. “I'm sure of it.”

“Ask her where the mystery section is,” Nick said.

“She's mean,” Atty said.

“What's the worst she can do?” Liv said.

Atty walked up and said, “Excuse me, where are your mysteries?”

The woman lowered her book, glared at her, and then slowly lifted her book again. Atty reared back like she'd been bitten. She walked to Liv and Nick. “Vicious.”

“Still, I've got a good feeling about this place,” Nick said to Atty.

Atty nodded. “Me too.” She headed off into the stacks.

“I hate used-book stores,” Liv said loudly enough for the woman at the counter to hear. “It's where authors come to die, right? End of the road.” Then it dawned on her that one of Ru's books might be in here. She turned a circle. As delicious as it would be to buy a copy in a place like this, Liv knew it was unlikely. Instead she muttered to her father, “Old books sometimes make me have to poop.” They started wandering.

“I didn't know that,” Nick said, more a comment on missing her childhood than anything else.

“It's a third-tier detail, really. Not a gem in my personality bracelet, if you know what I mean.”

“But if we'd been pals, if I'd taken you to libraries and bookstores like this as a kid, I'd have known. Right?”

“But it's a stupid thing to know about me.” She paused in the children's section, though it was only vaguely the children's section. The place was ridiculously disorganized. She saw a copy of
The Story About Ping,
the duck book that Ru had been talking about while the German artist had her body written on, for free, at the last party she and Ru had attended together. Liv picked the book up and flipped through its pages. “I don't even like books,” she told her father. “So I would have had only sour memories of libraries and sad used-book stores like this.”

“Where would you have wanted me to take you?”

Liv shrugged. “Who knows?”

“I found them!” Atty shouted from deep in the bowels of the place. “They've got a bunch!”

“Do they have the missing ones?” Nick asked as he walked toward Atty's voice, evidently invested in her search.

Liv stood there, speed-reading the book. It was about the owner of some fishing boat always beating the last duck to make it back onto the boat. And, this time, the last duck was also the littlest duck, Ping. He hid out, scared to get on the boat, but, in the end, he decided that it was worth the beating to be with the other ducks, his family.

“What a sucky lesson to teach young children,” Liv said to herself. No wonder Ru was talking about it so vivaciously. Maybe it had haunted her, as she'd been the smallest duck in the family, as it were, or maybe she was agreeing with the message—family
is
worth taking a beating for, better than being alone.

Liv looked around. “Atty?” She thought of calling to her father but had no practice saying the word
Dad
so she didn't.

“They have number forty-eight!” Atty called out, popping back into sight at the end of an aisle, waving the book over her head.

And then Nick appeared at her side. “I'm so proud of you for tracking all these books down!” He looked at Liv. “It's fun, isn't it?” He turned back to Atty. “How many more to go?”

As Atty started talking numbers and titles, Liv froze. Holding
A Story About Ping,
she glazed over and thought only of those words
I'm so proud of you…
They were so simple and powerful. She realized that she wanted them from her father. She wanted stupid, inconsequential, deeply biased praise.

“Here,” Nick said, “let me buy it for you.” Atty gave him the book and as he passed Liv, she reached out and grabbed his sleeve, right at his elbow.

He turned. “You want me to get that book for you?”

“The boardwalk,” she said. “I want to go to the boardwalk.”

“We never go to the boardwalk,” Atty said. “I've been wanting to go forever, but my mother says it's just commercialistic crap and a way to wring money out of people from South Philly.”

“Exactly,” Liv said.

“Let's haul ass,” Nick said.

They rode the Scream Machine, the Sea Dragon, the Flitzer, and the Super Slide with its itchy burlap sacks. On the merry-go-round, Liv rode a zebra, Atty a dragon, and Nick a large sweet-looking bunny. When Nick won at the shooting gallery, Atty whispered to Liv, “Assassins have an unfair advantage.”

Liv bested them at skee ball and Atty beat them at each video game they tried. “One develops a certain eye–hand coordination that's really specific to gaming,” she explained. In truth, playing video games was how she'd first fallen for Lionel Chang, his hand guiding hers on the controller.

Eventually, the three of them were seated in a small cage, dangling at the top of the Ferris wheel. Liv felt exposed, vulnerable. She could hear the Ferris wheel's machinery, creaking around her.

“You can't give me gifts anymore, can you?” Liv said to her father.

“I have college costs,” Atty said, “and am open to contributions.”

“I'll be evening things out,” Nick said.

“Why'd you give me the gifts?” Liv asked.

“I wasn't allowed to interfere with Ru's life and I thought Esme would be suspicious of anything that just showed up, a stroke of good luck like that. But I thought you'd accept it, without asking questions.”

“Why am I like that, I wonder? Why didn't I question it?” Liv said.

“When I looked out at a crowd of kids to find you—at a performance or graduation or even just a crowd of kids getting off a field trip bus—you stood out because you wanted to stand out.”

“Well, I didn't want to be ordinary.”

“You seemed to want a charmed life. You looked around sometimes as if you were expecting someone to step in and grant you some special favor.”

“True,” Liv said. “I was kind of always expecting that.”

Atty leaned to one side and said, “You can see the house on Asbury Avenue from here, just the top floor, the bank of windows. See?” She pointed.

Liv and Nick both leaned toward her, rocking the cage a little.

“To be honest, we had a good childhood,” Liv said.

“Maybe it was better without me,” Nick said.

“We'll never really know,” Liv said.

“Do you want to have kids on your own?” Atty asked Liv.

“I don't care for the term
childbearing.
”

“As in childbearing hips?” Atty asked.

“I especially don't like childbearing hips, but also, in general, I don't care for the term.”

“You could adopt,” Nick said.

“I don't like the term child
rearing
either.”

“You could use different terms,” Atty said.

Liv shook her head. “I don't really like children.”

“But you like me,” Atty said.

“I like you because you're no longer fully a child. You're outgrowing it.”

“I hope I am,” Atty said. “The in-between sucks, by the way.”

Nick sat back and ran a hand over his gray hair. “What if you got that from me? I wasn't good at being a father. What if I could only do it from afar? What if I could only do it anonymously? I know what I
was
good at. I know what it's like to actually feel suited to something.”

“Like killing people, right?” Atty said.

“There was a lot to my job. It was complex.”

“Look,” Liv said. “My sisters might not forgive you, but I do.”

“You do?”

“I do.”

“You do?” Atty said.

“You didn't want to be ordinary either,” Liv said to her father. “And what's so wrong with that? I mean, look at all of that down there. All those people. All those lives. All of that regular daily living that people are doing so earnestly.” The teacup ride, the boardwalk, the houses, the ocean—all of it seemed to teeter and swing beneath them. “Who could say yes to one teeny-tiny little piece of living when we all know there's a lot more?”

She tilted forward, making their cart rock. Instinctively, Nick reached out and grabbed her firmly but gently around the middle. “You okay?” he whispered.

She turned around so quickly that it startled him. “What?” he said.

“You,” she said. “It was you on the subway platform.” This was the old man who'd given her the Heimlich when she was choking on a menthol drop on the subway platform. She was sure of it. “Was it? Tell me.”

“Yes,” he said. “I told you I've been on the edges.”

“You
saved
me.”

“I tried to,” he said, and she knew that he meant that he'd failed. He hadn't been able to keep her sober, to make her happy, to give her some kind of peace.

“It's okay,” she said, and she meant she knew she'd have to do it herself.