All of Us and Everything (6 page)

Liv, wrapped in a fur coat, sat in the Adirondack chair in the empty apartment where she used to live, facing the wide-open windows, the wood floors wet and curtains gusting.

Augusta was on the third floor of the house on Asbury Avenue, her face so close to the dark glass that her breath misted the window and she couldn't see anything but fog. She backed away and still saw fog—the dusty white bloom of cataracts. Below her, the ocean rushed in over the polished wood floor of the living room, rising up the thin ankles of the piano.

Each of them was looking for something.

Maybe one another—in some form of memory, nostalgia, ghosts of who they once were tucked away inside the others' collective memory and what they once meant to one another. Isn't that sisterhood and motherhood—a way to find versions of yourself locked away in others?

I'd prefer you all stay close to home,
Augusta had said.

Home.

In three days' time, Ru would write Cliff a letter, telling him she was sorry but that she was calling off the engagement. She would suggest that she wait to return the diamond ring in person, instead of trusting international mail.

But right now there was some scurrying in the middle of the longhouse near the fire.

The matriarch, with a pipe clenched in her teeth, made a clicking noise at Ru, indicating that she should gather near. Ru stared at the broad bare globe of the young woman's stomach. “The baby?” Ru asked. “It's coming?”

The matriarch waved Ru closer.

“I wasn't expecting that,” Ru said to herself. “And that's the one thing I should have seen coming.”

The fourth generation in the longhouse was about to be born.

EIGHT MONTHS LATER…

Esme and Atty had been living with Augusta in the house on Asbury Avenue for a week, their long-snouted collie in tow. It had proven to be a turbulent school year. After news of Atty's father's affair swept the boarding school—Doug stayed in France—Atty chunked the rest of the year in a downward spiral that ended, spectacularly, in a “behavioral prank” involving the history teacher's Civil War–era musket. Esme and Atty didn't offer more details to anyone than necessary. After a disciplinary hearing, she was NIB'ed—a polite way to say that she'd received a letter stating that she was “Not Invited Back” for the following year. The letter was overkill; they weren't coming back anyway, so why be so official about it? Atty hadn't yet been placed in another boarding school because Esme hadn't found another job on the boarding school circuit, which she blamed on a prejudice against the non-Ivy-League-educated; inexplicably, she hadn't gotten into Smith or any of the Ivys and her guidance counselor had thought she'd be a shoo-in. Meanwhile Doug, Esme's soon-to-be ex-husband, was quite happily glomming off his French girlfriend, the dentist.

While Esme and Atty tried to recover from their personal hurricane, many others were still reeling from the
actual
hurricane.

Hurricane Sandy had killed over 125 people. It destroyed over seventy-two thousand homes and businesses in New Jersey alone, causing over sixty-two billion dollars in damage.

It broke people down.

But it seemed to have broken Augusta open.

Esme sensed that her mother was altered by the storm on what seemed a molecular level. Augusta told Esme that the storm meant that life was precious—including her own—and she felt herself, for the first time in a long, long time, pushing outward. “How else to explain it?” she'd told her daughter. “I'm pushing—
outward.
”

The house on Asbury Avenue got off light compared with many others. The hurricane destroyed the family furniture on the first floor—the piano, sofas, armchairs, books. The entire set of Nancy Drew mysteries—fifty-six books in total—taking up a low shelf were either damaged or swept out to sea; even the bottom halves of a few paintings had been damaged. The faces of old, now dead Rockwells seemed to be bobbing heads, the paint beneath their shoulders forever chipped and blurred. Augusta kept the paintings on the walls. However, her great-grandfather's whimsical taxidermy of various rodents in elaborate dress having tea had to be thrown out. All other furniture had been cleared away and temporarily replaced by beach chairs and a small circular glass-topped garden table.

Augusta wanted the house exactly as it had been before the storm—which was the same as it had been for decades.

And so she sent Esme and Atty around to antiques shops, secondhand shops, garage sales, and Goodwills with pictures of the living room and dining room in hand, trying to match the furniture as closely as possible. So far, they'd only been able to replace the dining room table and chairs. Some items would prove much harder—an antique secretary's desk, a specific grandfather clock, and, impossibly, the glass-encased display of two taxidermied squirrels sipping tea in a parlor.

The day that the man with the package appeared at the house on Asbury Avenue, Esme and Atty were at an estate sale on Sea Spray.

“This can't be psychologically healthy,” Atty told her mother as they walked through the pallid living room. “You get cheated on, kicked out of your house, fired, your daughter—once a golden girl—has a breakdown, and then you're forced to re-create your childhood home like a twisted museum?”

Esme noted that her list of failures was too quickly rattled off not to have been previously cultivated, perhaps even tweeted.

“Were you really once a
golden
girl? Isn't that a little revisionist history?” Esme said. They had developed a frank camaraderie over the course of the troubling year.

“Next to that girl with the musket at parents' weekend, I'd say, Yes, I was once a golden girl.” She tweeted this, adding
#sarcasticyolo.

After the musket incident, while the school year wrapped up, Atty had taken a leave of absence and worked intensely with a therapist. This would supposedly help repair her badly dinged high school record. Those fourth-tier schools she'd once feared were now aspirational. There was some talk of trying to address some of this positively in her college entrance essay. Atty couldn't figure out a way to package the musket incident, though—an interest in historical firearms? Esme's colleagues would ask how Atty was doing with such saccharine sympathy that Esme wanted to slap them. It was a humiliating time for both of them.

Esme had told Augusta that Atty wasn't crazy. That weird, uptight, self-reverential school was! Heap on top of that a father who skips the preset Skype calls with his daughter and, well, Atty was deservedly pissed off. To be honest, Esme had been jealous of her daughter in that moment on the field hockey field, giving an oration on life and the living, musket in hand—armed with a piece of history.

Rockwellian teen years were sometimes difficult. Liv had dated a local bad boy while Esme was already off at college. (Obviously the whole thing made a great impression on the impressionable Ru, who'd written a book and film loosely based on it all.) Liv was shipped off to a prestigious boarding school as some lavish form of punishment that Esme had always envied. Things always weirdly worked out for Liv. Even her recent arrest for illegally vandalizing her ex's apartment had landed her in a rehab center that was more like an upscale spa.

And Ru had been a troubled teen. She ran away at one point—Esme couldn't remember the details—but she'd come back and had to go to counseling too. She was probably a writer because of some therapeutic necessity, a better kind of coping mechanism than Liv's drug use and boozing, but not too different in root cause, probably. It wasn't their fault anyway. They'd been raised by someone who remained pathologically delusional. Esme loved her mother, but she was troubled.

Still, Esme worried. Atty had lost it, plain and simple, and although the therapist felt she was taking great strides, Esme was sure there was something Atty wasn't telling anyone.

At this very moment, her sisters were on their way home. Would they be positive or negative influences on Atty? Esme wasn't sure. She only knew that she alone seemed to be the Rockwell woman who had managed to keep her shit together.

She was looking at embroidered pillows, none of which looked like items from her childhood, but was distracted by Atty's voice echoing in the distance. “Hey! Excuse me! Do you have any taxidermied squirrels? High-class ones, sipping tea like they're British?”

And she knew that Atty was only asking so that she could tell the story in a tweet to her followers. Atty's most recent update was that she had 3,465 followers—who on earth wanted to hear what her daughter had to say?

The bigger question, though, wasn't how many followers she had, but if she had any friends—the living, breathing kind. And Esme was fairly sure she didn't.

The collie lay down and Augusta slipped off a shoe and rubbed his freshly buzzed back. He let out a contented moan, a moan so human that it reminded her of having a man in the house, something she didn't really know anything about.

Augusta had spent a good bit of the last few months looking up charitable organizations and writing checks and shipping them off to help others get back on their feet. She'd never been the type to give to others all that much. As the Rockwell money had been made by people now dead, Augusta's notion of money was that it was tied to independence and forever dwindling. She'd worked hard to protect her inheritance, which she never saw as selfish because she was a single mother with three children to support and then she was the aged mother who didn't want to be a financial burden. But now, suddenly, with a tragedy hitting home, those sentiments felt like flimsy rationalizations. She was giving and it felt good.

And amid all of the grief and loss, weirdly she felt—for the first time in a long time—hopeful. Yes, she had sent Esme and Atty out to find replicas of their old life, but that was mainly to keep them busy. Change was coming and it would be bigger than the trappings of interior decor.

Augusta couldn't tell what was next, but she knew that it was going to be swift and absolute. Maybe she was preparing for death, but it didn't feel like it. Instead she was pretty sure she was going to take one more swing at living. She simply didn't know how.

Right now, she was thinking about what to say to Atty. She felt like she had to rehearse things because she didn't know how to approach the girl. She was an edgy person, that Atty. And not edgy as in cutting edge. No. She was edgy in that she had edges—sharp ones. She'd even been an edgy baby. Her cry sometimes sounded more like a caustic criticism than a baby crying. Augusta wanted to reach out. How much longer did she have to make a connection with her granddaughter?

The hurricane certainly made her aware of the very fine scrim between life and death. It reminded her of the play
Our Town.
Liv had once had the role of Emily in a high school production. Her daughter was onstage—a dead girl, wandering around the edges of her life. It had been disconcerting to watch, but worse because Liv had been so convincing. This was right after Liv had broken things off with a very bad young man—that Teddy Whistler—who'd upended their lives and finally ended up in a detention center. Maybe Liv had felt dead a little. Later—months or even a few years—Augusta would find herself in some small ordinary act and imagine that some ghost was watching her, envying her this simple domesticity. And now she envied her own life, because she and Jessamine could surely have died in that storm. Her life felt so newly frail.

And her daughters were set to converge on the old homestead? She was quietly overjoyed. Maybe the newness of living her life would be getting the chance to raise the girls again—this time as grown women. Surely, she'd do a better job this time around.

That was when she heard the knock at the front door.

She wasn't expecting her daughters quite yet. Ingmar started barking. Augusta was surprised by this sudden display of typically masculine protectiveness; Ingmar's fluffiness and dainty snout had feminized him in some way. Augusta shushed him and moved to a window and saw a young man holding a box. He stood there for a few moments and then backed up and stood in the small front yard, looking at the house itself, searching it.

Actually, he wasn't a
young
man, really. He was probably middle-aged or nearly so. But she realized that she was old enough now to think of anyone middle-aged as young. He didn't appear to be evangelical. The God peddlers, as her mother used to call them, usually traveled in pairs and avoided the wealthier neighborhoods, where God was already assuredly in place.

The box was large and square enough to contain a cake or a hat. Was he bearing a gift?

She decided he was probably bringing a gift
to someone else.
Maybe an old boyfriend of Esme's had heard she was getting divorced and back in town.

Or maybe he was at this door by mistake.

In any case, he seemed harmless.

She walked to the door, vaguely self-conscious that the house might smell like Indian food. Esme had recently cooked one of those dishes that smelled like body odor.

By the time she opened the door, the man was heading back to the sidewalk.

“Hello!” she called. “Can I help you?”

He turned around and looked at her as if he expected to recognize her but didn't.

“Who are you looking for?” she asked.

“Augusta Rockwell,” the man said and then he walked toward her, extending his hand. “I'm Bill Huckley.”

She took his hand and shook it.

“I think you knew my father, Herc,” Bill said. “Hercule Huckley the Third. My mother refused to keep the tradition going. I got lucky.”

Augusta drew in a sharp breath, prepared to say something—but what? She felt a little light-headed. There was too much sun, too much glare bouncing off the cars. The grass looked glassy. Herc Huckley.

“Are you okay?” Bill asked.

“Yes, yes,” she said, smiling.

“So are you Augusta Rockwell?”

“Ah…” She turned around for a moment, looking over her shoulder at the house. She felt like it was a boat that had lifted anchor and was now slowly floating away from her—so slowly that it was almost imperceptible. Or was she the one moving?

Herc Huckley. She remembered him clearly. A pale young man back then, sandy-haired, a little doughy. She could see him clearly sitting at the thick-legged table in the rental he'd shared with Nick Flemming—she'd met Nick on a bus in a snowstorm. The night before John F. Kennedy's inauguration. She could see Nick's face clearly in her mind too; she could smell the wet wool of his coat.

She felt exposed suddenly. Her cheeks flushed. She wasn't allowed to know Nick Flemming, not at all. Ru, as a teenager, had read sci-fi novels—dank, brittle things picked up at the used-book store—that talked about different universes, and that was where Nick Flemming and Herc Huckley belonged. None of her daughters had ever heard these names.

She looked at Herc's son and saw little resemblance, but it was there when he smiled at her. A crinkle around his eyes, one errant dimple.

“It is you. Isn't it?” he said, boyish with hope.

She nodded, clamped her hands together. “It's been so long!” She laughed nervously. “Your father was a law student at George Washington when I met him.” She didn't add the rest:
He was friends with someone I knew well.

Ingmar was sniffing through the screen, trying to get the stranger's scent.

“And Flemming?” Bill said softly. “Nick Flemming?” His expression was hard to read.

Was he coming to tell her that Nick was dead? Was this the way she would find out, once and for all, that it was truly over? She felt unsteady, glanced up and down the street. “Do you want to come in?” She didn't want him lingering in the yard. She wasn't supposed to say Nick Flemming's name—not ever.

Bill looked down at the box in his hands. It wasn't for Esme or someone else on this street. It was for Augusta. The realization shook her.

“Sure,” Bill said. “You know it wasn't easy tracking you down!”

The house was dark compared with the bright day, almost tomblike. “I apologize if it smells like Indian food and mildew, and for the lack of furniture. Storm damage. We haven't quite…” She trailed off, looking for a specific word.

“Rebounded?” Bill offered.

“No, but it does start with an
r,
” she said. “I won't be able to think of the word until I stop searching for it directly.” The mind is a bear trap, she thought to herself, yawning open and then suddenly snapping shut.

“Memories work that way too,” Bill said, and for the first time he looked older to her, truly middle-aged. The harder edges and contours of his face had been wiped clean when they were outside, bleached by the sun. But now, in the cool dark of the house, his face was shadowed. He looked heavier—or maybe more weighed down.

Ingmar nosed him impolitely, but backed off when Augusta told him to go lie down. He wandered a few yards away and plopped on the hardwood.

They sat in the beach chairs, and he balanced the box on one knee, his hand spread flat on its lid.

“I forgot to ask,” she said. She wanted him to tell her if Nick was dead or alive, but she didn't want to appear anxious. “Do you want something to drink?”

He shook his head then glanced back toward the front door, as if he was having second thoughts about being here at all. “I'm fine. I don't want to take up too much of your time.” He lifted the box then and put it on the glass-topped garden table between them. “I found some papers going through my father's things. He kept this footlocker in the basement office of the bar he inherited from his father.”

“How is your father?” she asked. Grown children only went through their parents' old things when they had to.

“Physically, he's very healthy, but he has Alzheimer's. It's fairly advanced.”

“I'm so sorry.” Augusta deeply feared the disease. She didn't want to be the husk of someone long gone. There but not. A demanding physical reminder that our frail memories are what make us who we are. “And Flemming?”

Bill shrugged. “I don't know,” he said. Augusta was immediately relieved. She'd have preferred the news he was robustly alive, but this was hopeful. “Hurricane Sandy leveled the bar,” Bill explained. “It's just a footprint now, and when I helped clear what was left, I found the footlocker and these papers.”

Papers. The box was filled with papers. Augusta nodded. “I see.”

He then slapped his knees and rubbed them like he'd once been an athlete and the knees pained him. “Maybe I shouldn't be here.”

“What papers?” Augusta said.

“Your name shows up. And I think, I don't know, I think maybe some of what's written might make a difference to you.” Ingmar was back, wedging up close to Bill, indicating that he wanted to be petted. Bill obliged, distractedly. “Or maybe it's filled with things you already know. Maybe it's stuff you've made peace with. But, well, I don't know if I'm here because I want to help you or because I'm hoping you can help me.”

She looked down at the box, reached out to touch it, but then pulled her hand back to her lap. “Help you? How?”

“Help me understand my father, who he once was, what kind of person he was. I just feel like…” He crossed his arms on his meaty chest. “I need to know him or I can't really know myself somehow.”

“Well, I don't know that I'm going to be much help,” she said. “I didn't know your father all that well. We met a few times. Briefly.”

He leaned in then, elbows on his knees. He lowered his voice and said, “But you've heard of The Amateur Assassins Club, haven't you?”

Her heart started beating so quickly she wanted to put her hand over it, as if saying the Pledge of Allegiance. Instead she locked her hands in her lap. Her face must have revealed some recognition because he scooted forward to the very edge of the chair. Ingmar lifted his snout and sniffed the air as if he sensed change as a scent.

“The Amateur Assassins Club,” Bill said again. “Those words mean something to you. Don't they?”