Home Leave: A Novel (10 page)

No response.

(Sophie’s British accent is terrible; she is merely listing British things in an American accent.)

Sophie reluctantly sits back down.

Elise nods.

Sophie begins humming the song.

Sophie suddenly vanishes. At her departure, the other family members and even the therapist suddenly slump; the brief optimism from a second ago seems to have departed with Sophie.

Silence.

Chris and Elise gather their things.

Elise nods, trying to hide the hurt. Chris wraps an arm around her and the two exit.

He turns off the lamp on his way out. The room falls into shadow. The door closes with a soft click. Leah sits in the darkened room for a second, eyes closed as though trying to summon a word or a specific memory. She can’t. It’s gone. Outside, it begins to rain, gathering the strength of the tropical thunderstorms that characterize late afternoons in Singapore.

W
hat is there to say about the Kriegsteins’ good years in Atlanta, aside from their goodness? Had Chris and Elise earned the breather, the blossoming spring, the soft-pillowed sofa, after their respective adolescent struggles in Indiana and Mississippi, all those hours spent yearning for broader, more flattering horizons? After the bumps in Hamburg, the roaring pain of childbirth, the wandering through the wilderness of early marriage, of turning from each other in dismay? Had so many homes in so many years—London for two, Hamburg for one and a half, Philadelphia for four, London again for one—forged a bond such that now, back in Georgia, where Chris and Elise had first met, they were able to stand unquavering and go about building a quietly faithful middle-class existence? With Palm Sundays at First Presbyterian (a compromise between Elise’s post-London liberal theology and Chris’s homegrown Lutheran habits) and brunch at Houlihan’s, the restaurant across the street from the church, complete with crayons and kids’ menus and Bloody Marys?

Elise had hit her stride, working as a science teacher in a public middle school, away from the expat wives, back with southern women, some of whom were tough single moms. These were females she admired and feared, with their set jaws and their tight schedules and their brittle smiles; when they came in for parent conferences, she wanted to ask them what had happened, how they had survived, but instead she stuck to the script and solemnly presented the naked woman Evan had drawn on his photosynthesis worksheet or repeated the cruel rumor Jean had spread about the new girl from Vietnam.

Did it help that Chris had quit his job? That he was casting around for what to do, shooting baskets in the driveway while the girls and Elise were in school, calling up old college friends and attending UGA alumni events, hoping to make connections? Did it help that he “cooked dinner” sometimes, Chris’s euphemism for ordering pizza, encouraged Elise to have a girls’ night out with her fellow female teachers? Did it help that their bank account had shrunk, that they now drank frozen orange juice from cans and that the girls, who had worn Laura Ashley in London, now wore Kmart? If not for the collapse of the Soviet Union, Chris might have fallen into a significant depression. But perestroika had perked his ears, he had a few ex-colleagues who were talking about expanding energy markets, and Chris spent days at the kitchen table sketching elaborate plans for joint ventures across Siberia.

Elise was proud of him for quitting and for sleeping in until eleven. She’d known Chris only as ambitious and eager to please, and his refusal, one foggy November morning in London, to put up with his boss’s insults anymore had been touching, like watching Sophie speak her first words. It was Elise who had hatched the plan to return to Atlanta, found herself a teaching job through her old college roommate, and spotted the white brick house as they were driving through Little Five Points. They still had a little bit saved, and Chris’s parents, relieved their son was back in the States, offered to help with the down payment. Elise relaxed back into her southern accent, visited her mother and Ivy once a month in Mississippi, dropped in on her brothers now and then in Little Rock, where the two had opened a hardware business together, and could hardly remember being anywhere or anyone else.

For five years, the four of them were inarguably American. The girls lost their British accents over a two-week trip to visit their grandparents on the Kriegstein farm, where they ate sugar snap peas from the vine and jumped in hay. What is there to say about a state of normalcy, other than its wondrous comforts? After they moved to China, the Kriegsteins would privately meditate on each of these unnoticed luxuries in Atlanta, like the opposite of a Buddhist exercise, pinpointing and sharpening their desires for back then, back there.

Over their five years in Atlanta, the following pleasures were freely available and routinely taken for granted: Fat bagels with slick white cream cheese. Car trips up to Athens, for basketball games at UGA. Braves baseball games. Front lawns. Laughter. Chilled white wine on plastic chairs in the driveway with the neighbors. Driving alone. English. Anonymity. Sunday school. The neighborhood gang. Four square. The dogwood tree in the front yard, on the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street, just right for climbing. The shady, overgrown, ramshackle alleyway. Hiding places. The honeysuckle vine, bending over the driveway, fragrant, offering a faint, near-imaginary nectar when you sucked on the blossom’s stem. Unpolluted air. Chocolate chip cookie dough milk shakes. Family members in the same time zone. Large libraries, full of English books. Buttercups in the backyard. Citizenship. Country stations. Oldies stations. The greatest hits of the seventies, eighties, and today.

Over the five years in Atlanta, the girls grew, became people. Elise stared at them each morning, astonished. At Leah’s furrowed brow over a book, at Sophie’s white-blond curls, clipped back with red barrettes. The screaming fury that had characterized Leah’s first eight months in Hamburg had subsided into a quiet watchfulness that occasionally broke out into a private fit of giggles with Sophie. At seven, then eight, then nine, then ten, Leah was every inch the older daughter, tall like Chris, conscientious, hesitant to join games or other children until she felt secure. The girls’ respective complexions spoke to their personalities. Leah had delicate, pale skin, and straw hair. She burned easily, with freckles that spread over her face at the first hint of sun in early spring. Sophie had olive skin, dark eyebrows. When they went to Florida, to the beach house that Ada rented each summer, Sophie wriggled out of her mother’s sunscreening grasp and turned a gingerbread gold. Leah, pouting her disapproval, was made to wear a T-shirt over her bathing suit and still got feverish at night, as Elise rubbed aloe on the spots she’d missed. Leah, having no older sister, needed more protection. Sophie was less shy and wanted badly to win, coaxed Leah into races down the street, her taut tan body coiled and desperate to overtake.

Five years in Atlanta: 1987: Leah in the backyard, frowning with concentration, weaving purple clover chains. 1988: Sophie sprinting after a fading neighborhood friend in the early dusk, letting out a sharp laugh of triumph when her finger reaches his shoulder blade: “You’re it!” 1989: Leah gathering piles of books in the delicious cool of the air-conditioned library: Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, the Boxcar Children: careful not to pick any books with a copyright date later than 1960, because they were more likely to have sad endings. 1990: Sophie building a fort in the backyard with her best friend, Ana, dragging ferns over the stick frame and sweeping pine needles off the floor. 1991: Leah watching
Look Who’s Talking
at her best friend’s house and asking Elise the next day how babies are made. 1987–1992: The sisters’ twenty-two-month distance, their opposite natures, bind them to each other like sun and shade. This pleases Elise, who always wanted a sister closer to her own age. Since she was a child, the seven years separating Elise and Ivy have felt like a gulf she couldn’t quite bridge, like the ravine the Ebert kids used to fling themselves across on a rope swing, holding on for dear life to the fraying twine.

Elise knows that Ivy’s band has gotten good—very good—from the newspaper clippings that Ada sends her in the mail. When Choked by Kudzu comes to Atlanta in 1988 and plays at Chastain, Elise strains to love the music but recoils from the gravel in Ivy’s voice, the obvious fury of the guitar wail. Sometimes Sophie or Leah asks to hear one of Aunt Ivy’s tapes on a road trip to Indiana, to visit the Kriegstein farm, and Elise is always relieved when the tape is finished, the same feeling she gets when the credits finally roll after a particularly violent film.

What is there to say about the good years, aside from their goodness? Was it a mistake to leave the comfort of Atlanta, to presume that struggle abroad would be better, more interesting, build character? How different was that celebration of hardship from the farming philosophy practiced by Chris’s father, waking up at four every morning to work the land? For that matter, how different was it from Ada’s Southern Baptist soft spot for suffering?

Chris and Elise stay up late into the night discussing the potential move to Shanghai. They are on their fifth year in Atlanta. It is a sultry summer night, and thunderstorms are rolling in. The girls are in bed. Sophie is asleep; Leah is watching the storm tear across the sky, feeling safe under the covers and behind the window. On the front porch below, a little spray from the rain catches Elise’s arm and she moves her rocking chair back. “You and the girls would be able to come back each summer for vacation,” Chris is saying. “There’s an American school there where you could teach and the girls would go to school.”

Elise thinks of Janice Wong, a single mother who teaches language arts at Elise’s middle school, who stayed in Atlanta when her husband went back to Taiwan. That’s how it happens sometimes. But the idea of a move to Asia also excites Elise. She pictures herself walking through fresh produce markets, fingering silk, exploring bamboo groves. “I want to go there and see it first,” she tells Chris firmly, trying to sound ambivalent.

“Of course,” he says. He takes her hand and moves her rocking chair closer to his. A flash of lightning lights up the street and they both shiver. “China would be so much fun with you,” he says. She nods and snuggles into his sweater.

Let’s say they had stayed in Atlanta. Elise keeps teaching at the middle school, has a brief affair with the art teacher, an amateur photographer who seduces her after a photo shoot of Elise leaning on trees in Piedmont Park. Chris begins working as a consultant for a firm expanding its operations to Siberia; begins learning Russian on tape during the long transatlantic flights. Leah joins the less nerdy of two nerdy cliques in high school, gets an adorably dorky boyfriend, suffers a secret abortion at seventeen, and afterwards breaks up with said boyfriend and starts performing at a lot of poetry slam events. Sophie becomes a popular athlete, remains best friends with Ana, and surprises everyone by choosing a beat-up red pickup truck for her first car, her first sign, at eighteen, of any latent eccentricity. She drives out to Pomona with Ana, who will be studying at UC Santa Cruz.

If they had stayed in the States, would
it
have happened? Was Sophie’s death a foregone conclusion in any geography, a heart failure built into her system that would have struck her down on any continent? Later, the doctors would say, “There was nothing you could have done. Undetectable heart conditions are just that: undetectable. You mustn’t blame yourselves.” But because the death will happen in Singapore, its occurrence will be unimaginable anywhere else. Thus, in the parallel (irrational) universe, where they stay in Atlanta, where the good years never end, Sophie never dies.

What remains to be said about the good years, aside from their goodness, is the following: they were unsustainable, and in that sense, never safe. In other words, staying in Atlanta was never a distinct possibility. It was too late for Elise and Chris, having lived in Hamburg and London: by the fifth year, Atlanta had begun to feel boring. They saw it as a particularly pleasant rest stop, a quiet chapter in their cumulative adventure. Even Leah, with eleven-year-old pretentions of grandeur, craved a “next,” though her memories of “before” Atlanta were limited to the backyard in London, fish and chips, and falling blossoms in a British park. Still, Leah grumbled that they always went to the airport to pick people up but never went anywhere themselves. Sophie also longed to fly somewhere far away, because then you got toiletry kits with slippers and toothbrushes, which Chris always brought back for the girls after his trips to Russia. Also, the one time Sophie and Leah had flown to Wyoming for their babysitter’s wedding (visits to Indiana and Mississippi were always limited to road trips in the van), they had been allowed to drink Coke on the flight, which Elise forbade otherwise.

In Atlanta, Elise is a science teacher. In Shanghai she will be an expatriate mother, then a guidance counselor and a self-appointed disciplinarian who chases the Chinese American and Filipino boys from the basketball court into math class.

In Atlanta, Chris is an out-of-work husband, a dreamer, a regular at the local deli, where he always orders club sandwiches with fries and tries to avoid chatting with the overfriendly waitresses, something he hates about the South: how much you have to talk. It is twenty years too early for smartphones, so Chris brings along biographies of Gorbachev to make him look preoccupied. In Shanghai, Chris will again be a front-runner, a deal maker, a man who gives speeches and unsuccessfully refuses traditional Shanxi grain alcohol, a man in charge of five hundred Chinese American factories without knowing a full five words in Chinese.

In Atlanta, Leah is a fourth grader who curls up in corners, always reading, oblivious to Elise’s calls to supper; who is still not unconvinced that Santa Claus exists (despite Sophie’s pragmatic assertions to the contrary); who wants to become her mother, flaxen blond and beautiful; and who resents Sophie for being poised to assume Elise’s legacy, given the honeyed color of Sophie’s curls and her ease with strangers. In Atlanta, Leah reads in her own closet, hangs upside down with Sophie on the monkey bars, and lets out a scream, sledding down the hill in Piedmont Park the one day a year that it snows. In Shanghai, at twelve, in one year, Leah will be taller than most Chinese men.

In Atlanta, Sophie performs in the talent show alone when Ana suddenly drops out. Sophie dons her black turtleneck and leggings and white gloves and does an interpretative dance to Enya while Ana stays at home with a fake headache. In Atlanta, Sophie is secretly pleased when Leah comes in to sleep in her room, snuggling into the bottom bunk, even if Leah talks too much when Sophie wants to fall asleep. In Atlanta, Sophie collects baseball cards and never wears dresses except to First Pres, the only time Elise puts her foot down. In Shanghai, Sophie will politely reject the advances of a gawky British boy in her class, except for once at a school dance, when she feels sorry for him. She will lose Leah, a little, to Leah’s own teenage loneliness, a territory Sophie will swear to herself never to enter, and which she never will. In Shanghai, Sophie will always order lemon chicken when they go to their favorite restaurant.