Home Leave: A Novel (16 page)

Catch me! Sophie screams. Leah is too old for manhunt, but she pretends to like the game for Sophie’s sake; she runs for her life. She crawls back into bed with dirt on her knees.

Leah is grateful the next night at dinner when for once her parents talk animatedly to each other, their chopsticks dripping with strands of Filipino noodles. She basks in their back-and-forth about work, old friends from Atlanta, plans for Christmas. She even volunteers something about David when they ask.

Later, Leah and Myla laugh in the kitchen about François, the French man with gray teeth whom Myla has begun dating. They chew on soft, fresh, sugary buns from the Chinese market. It is only when she plays her favorite Indigo Girls album as she is about to sleep that Leah remembers Sophie’s face. Not under the trees now but in the soft folds of a casket. Leah sees her family at the undertaker’s two days before Sophie’s funeral. The undertaker chewing gum silently, out of respect. Going from Sophie’s face twisting on a yellow silk pillow, to her face on a pale blue puckered cushion, then white linen. Sophie’s head flailing, knocking against dark oak corners.

“You don’t love me anymore,” David says to Leah, two weeks later, from her bed.

They are in Leah’s room studying for a history exam.

“You only care about your sister. You’re so wrapped up in your fucking grief.”

Leah carefully kneels to the floor, as if she means to scrub a stain out of it.

“I love you so much,” she hears, as she carefully closes her eyes, waits for it to come. There. The soccer field glows neon green. Then Leah is shouting, screaming on the floor, kicking, and there is Sophie jerking too now, grabbing at bits of grass, spit running, the sun beating, tearing at the carpet, the soccer girls hovering, Leah’s parents coming into the room, David trying to explain what happened, Sophie lifted and taken by six arms to the ambulance, Leah left writhing on the bedroom floor, alone.

“How are you feeling about Christmas coming, Sophie?” At his error, the British therapist colors and checks his notepad. “Leah—I’m sorry. Are you anticipating—”

Leah looks out of the window. A week has passed since David was in her room calling for her parents to come, pointing at Leah on the floor, Leah’s mother shaking her—“Leah, Leah, Leah”—as Leah shook.

In the therapist’s office now, across from her, Leah’s mother sighs loudly and her father growls. “Leah.” She ignores them and replays a memory with Sophie and her father in Indiana, walking through the cornfields at her grandparents’ farm.

Sophie had asked, “How does an airplane work, Dad?” Leah’s father, the former engineering student, had explained excitedly. Leah had walked behind the two of them, stroking the cornstalks, feeling the soggy ground beneath, watching dark liquid dribble up onto her sneakers with each step. She hated the practical questions Sophie loved to sort out, hated the wooden brain puzzlers Sophie adored, and especially hated how much her father admired these things in Sophie.

Leah had run up to join the two of them, interrupting her father’s explanation, shouting her own question: “If you guys could be anywhere in the world right now, where would you be?”

“Leah!” Sophie had exclaimed, exasperated.

“Leah! Sophie!” Leah mouths to herself, feeling her mother’s worried look on her, her father’s frustration, the counselor’s impatient smile, the edge in Sophie’s voice.

The day before Christmas vacation, Leah performs in Mrs. Kedves’s winter play. The audience in the high school theater is packed tightly, but when she looks out, all Leah can see is white light. In the last scene, she moves towards the slain Romeo and carefully steps across the white line of the soccer field onto the masking-taped
X
marked for Juliet’s breakdown. Leah begins to sob. She kneels over the body. She bites back the scream so the next actor’s line will not be interrupted. The audience claps loudly at the end, and Leah accepts flower bouquets.

Sophie narrows her eyes. You’re using me.

It’s not like that, Leah insists. I miss you. I’m nothing without you.

Then why are you smiling?

The following day, Leah’s family boards the plane to Koh Samui, where the three will spend the Christmas holidays. Each of them touches the outside of the plane, and they silently take their seats. Leah speaks first.

“Hey, look, Mom, the guy that you love is in one of the movies they’re showing.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, look at your magazine. Dad, can we switch seats so I can show Mom?”

“No way, I want to see this guy too.”

“Dad! Seriously, can we switch—” The three of them have become adept at playing merry, although they often collapse in exhaustion, midjoke, and can’t finish the act.

“Slippers or socks?” Leah’s father pokes her and points at the waiting stewardess.

“Slippers, please.”

Two hours later, when her parents are asleep, Leah remembers Sophie’s head on her shoulders during flights back home. It always fell in the worst places, the round shape somehow pointy and hurting Leah’s shoulder. Leah sits up and adjusts the blanket. She lies back and remembers those flights before. She would tell Sophie her leg had fallen asleep, prompting Sophie to cackle maniacally and start kicking Leah’s dead leg.

“Ow! Stop it, Sophie, I’m serious.” Both of them dissolving into hysterics that would make whatever couple was in front of them turn around.

When they went camping for the first time, Sophie and Leah left the site every five minutes to pee in the woods. “Isn’t it fun to do it out here?” Sophie would ask, crouched over pine straw as their mother had demonstrated, Leah squatting under a maple tree nearby.

“Yeah, it’s great, but I can’t go anymore.”

“Just think about waterfalls,” Sophie had suggested.

Warm tears on her cheek, on her neck. Through the plane window, the goddamn stars.

“That’s when I cry about Sophie the most, I guess,” Leah’s father says to Leah, midflight. He whispers, so as not to wake up Leah’s mother, sleeping in the seat beside him. Throughout the cabin, as dark as forest, thin beams of light pool onto the pages of sleepless passengers’ novels. Stewardesses float down the aisles noiselessly like restless spirits.

“There’s something about being alone in the plane on a business trip by myself. When it’s dark and I have a window seat.” He sighs misshapenly and pats Leah’s hand. Leah twists her mouth. “What about you? Are there any times like that for you?”

Leah looks up at the movie screen. It is a slapstick comedy set in rural America, midwinter. Bill Murray screams silently at another actor and lunges at him with a snow shovel. “Leah?”

“Oh. Um. Well—no, I don’t know. No, not really. No specific times that I can think of right now, anyways.” She can feel herself retreating, taking Sophie’s hand, going underwater where the sisters sit together, silently. Her father’s voice bounces off the water’s surface above.

“I understand,” he says, hurt.

She forces a yawn. “I’m going to try and get some sleep, Dad.”

“Sounds good. Good night, Leah.”

“Good night.”

Through half-closed eyes, Leah watches her father pull his seat back and take her mother’s hand. They lie there together, sweetly shrouded. After a few minutes, he begins snoring.

Leah turns to her side and turns on her Discman. She pulls the blanket over her head and closes her eyes. An hour later, she is still awake. If she could only… Leah shifts uncomfortably in her seat and tries to find the best sleeping position. She is nearly asleep, clutching her pillow, beginning to dream, when a noise rips the sleep. An airplane noise, nothing more than a rattle somewhere in the bags overhead, but to Leah it sounds like broken machinery inside.

Sophie? The shadow of a nod, but no human head lays itself on her shoulder; there is no even breathing from the other bed. Only the noise, which Leah stiffens against like a wounded animal, half-alive, tensing in the jungle for the tiger’s return. What is a paw step and what is a birdcall? And what is only the echo of the mauling in your ears?

S
ophie never would have gone for it. Thailand? For Christmas?
It’s way too hot there,
she would have protested, and would have kept on protesting until she got her way. She was a traditionalist: she wanted burgers on the Fourth of July and a chill in the air on Christmas Eve. That’s one reason we wound up here on Koh Samui on December 21: to get as far away from her as possible.

Of course, as soon as our plane touched down, despite the bamboo flute playing in the airport arrivals lounge, and the rambutan welcome drink when we showed up at the Four Seasons, it was obvious that she was just as present—by which I mean painfully absent—as she had been in Singapore, if not more so. I could see it in the slouch in Leah’s shoulders, the forced smile on Chris’s face, the tightness in my own voice.

You could nod smugly and say, “Of course—what did you expect? That running away to a tropical paradise would solve everything?”

And to that I would say: it was worth a shot. After eight moves in eighteen years of marriage, Chris and I had gotten pretty good at getting out of Dodge when the going got tough. But it had never been this tough.

In the breezy, rattan-flavored lobby of the Four Seasons, I finished my welcome drink and downed another, didn’t say a thing when Leah went for the non-kids cocktail. Cheers. You lose your sister at fifteen, you’re automatically older than twenty-one, in my book. Plus, I didn’t have the energy to oppose her. If a little rum helped her lose that look of horror, even for five minutes, it was worth it.

The three of us drifted down to the pool area, as porters in glimmering Thai dress spirited away the luggage. I gave them a pained
I’m sorry it’s so heavy
smile, as Chris gave them a tip.

I wondered how we appeared to the other vacationers lounging on deck chairs beside the infinity pool, reading various European issues of
Vogue
. They regarded us furtively behind sunglasses and large straw hats.
Americans,
they probably thought, taking in Chris’s blinding white sneakers.
Spoiled single child,
they might have decided next, regarding Leah’s black mood. And me?
Professional expat wife,
logging my French manicure, the dark tan I’d gotten walking around the American school track with Jeanette Lawless (another southerner, a middle school math teacher, and my latest best girlfriend), as I tried to keep an eye on Leah at soccer practice, trying to look like I was absorbed in what Jeanette was telling me about her son’s ADHD.

Since losing Sophie four months ago, I’d experienced an urge that I hadn’t felt since Leah was a newborn: to keep my eldest close. It was driving Leah crazy, I could tell. Even now, as she cleared her throat and told us that she was going on a walk and drifted off, her lanky frame far too lanky these days, I wanted to call her back, rock her to sleep, scream that she couldn’t leave us now too. As anyone who’s had a teenager knows, that was the one thing I wasn’t supposed to do.

Yet in between impulses to suffocate Leah and to burrow into Chris like a baby marsupial, I also badly wanted to do the opposite: I wanted to run away from both of them.

Specifically, with Bernard Pinker. I know, I know, a stupid name. And a horribly stupid idea: How on earth could anyone even consider nursing a crush after losing their daughter? In many ways, Chris and I had grown kinder and more tender to each other in the months since Sophie’s death than we had in years. And yet. Bernard Pinker was the only reason I wanted to get up in the morning. I’d met him at the new faculty orientation when I’d begun teaching at the American school. He’d led an afternoon session on stress management. Afterwards, I had stuck around the classroom to introduce myself as the others filed out. So much moving had taught me to sense, within about thirty seconds, who I did and didn’t like, which strangers I would or wouldn’t be friends with. I didn’t waste time talking to those I didn’t like right away, and I made sure I got to know the ones I felt compelled by. Mama would have died of shame to hear me say such an unchristian thing. Then again, her own mother had sworn by rules that were even worse: don’t trust people with green eyes, for example, or avoid lending things to people with small ears. After Sophie’s death, my own screening criteria had become more extreme, and a lot of my old friends no longer passed. Anyone who said it had been Sophie’s “time to go,” for example, was immediately out.

Everyone at the Singapore American School was surprised that I hadn’t quit my teaching job after returning to Singapore from Sophie’s funeral in the States. The high school principal tried to talk me out of coming back. But what was I going to do at home all day? Start a mah-jongg club? Harmonize with the clucking geckos? Build a Buddhist shrine to Sophie with her soccer cleats and favorite Redwall books? Develop a full-blown alcohol and drug addiction? No, thanks. I was back in school a week after we came back from the States, same as Leah.

Bernard was a high school counselor (not Leah’s, thank God), and the only colleague who didn’t duck his head when he saw me in the teacher’s lounge, or tell me that Sophie was an angel. Bernard was a British atheist who believed only in Lacan. Bernard was thin and frail, as though he’d had a childhood illness (he hadn’t). Bernard loved art-house movies. Bernard was also spending Christmas in Koh Samui, staying at the same hotel with his ratty wife, Rebecca, who worked for BP, or British Pollution, as Bernard called it.

Chris and I had already contemplated spending Christmas in Koh Samui, long before I overheard Bernard telling Dan Fawcett, the chemistry teacher, about his and Rebecca’s plans. But I must admit that I began petitioning for the Four Seasons in earnest after learning that Bernard and company would be staying there too. Chris held out for a safari in Tanzania for a few weeks, then gave in. Leah didn’t care where we went, she informed us icily, staring out the living room window, as though willing us to disappear.

I hadn’t yet divulged my thing for Bernard to Jeanette. But I knew what she would say. It was laughingly obvious, wasn’t it? I was using Bernard as an escape from my grief, just as we had fled to a Thai island to try to shake Singapore’s sadness. But the difference with Bernard was that it worked. Not that I didn’t feel sad about Sophie in his presence. But I didn’t have to fight it.

We’d started having lunch together sometimes, since we had the same hour free on Tuesdays and Thursdays. One of those first lunches, when my crush was still a dim, nascent affection, I’d burst into tears out of nowhere. The cafeteria was serving
roti canai
, a dish that Sophie had hated. A smile came to my lips, imagining Sophie’s exaggerated grimace at the fried pita and curry, and then the smile froze as I remembered that Sophie was no longer around to hate
roti canai
. It didn’t make sense—it wasn’t as though it had been her favorite food, a dish that prompted a bittersweet memory of her enjoying it at a restaurant—the pain stemmed from the fact that I had forgotten, for a second, that she was gone.

I numbly paid for my
kway teow
and walked straight through the cafeteria doors, instead of taking a left into the teachers’ lounge. I headed downstairs, holding my tray, nodding to the kids who yelled “Hey, Mrs. Kriegstein!” I walked to the bleachers bordering the soccer field, put down my lunch tray, and sobbed.

Bernard had followed me. He quietly sat beside me on the metal bleachers. He didn’t tell me about his mother’s death or his father’s cancer; he didn’t tell me that Sophie had lived a full life, or describe her smile to me as though I hadn’t seen it before. He just sat there. Eventually, when I’d stopped crying, I told him about the
roti canai
, and he gave my hand a squeeze, and I gave a tiny squeeze back, and then we let go and stood up and walked around the soccer field where Sophie had collapsed.

He was just a good friend. A good friend I put on makeup for, a good friend whose presence made my heart race when he gave me a wave across the school parking lot. A good friend I imagined at night, lying next to Chris.

I had set my alarm for six, for a seven a.m. tee time. I didn’t have anyone to play with—Elise hated golf—but I didn’t care. I’d never been as good at golf as the other sports I played in high school and college—basketball and baseball—and so I always looked forward to nine holes alone, without anyone to witness my mistakes.

The hotel breakfast area was an open-air affair, covered with a traditional Thai thatched roof. It was practically empty, just a couple of cute yoga moms who were getting in their mango shakes and snake fruit before classes on the veranda overlooking the bay. I could hear from their broad accents that they were Americans (midwesterners, if I had to bet) so I said good morning to them, and they smiled back cheerfully, with that extra kindness you grant a compatriot in a foreign country.

They hunched together as I walked to my table, and I overheard them negatively comparing their husbands’ physiques to my own. I smiled to myself and stood a little taller. I considered myself lucky: as my colleagues’ and college roommates’ bellies had ballooned, I had stayed slim—thanks to my genes and my daily twenty-minute workouts, which I stuck to regardless of where I was: Moscow, Abu Dhabi, Buenos Aires. The only day I had missed for the last ten years had been the morning after Sophie died, when I could barely have told you my own name. But the following morning I was back at it. From the look Elise gave me, when she saw me doing push-ups in the bedroom, I could tell she considered it callous, crude. She didn’t understand that I had to hold on to something. She and Leah had the luxury of falling apart. I, for all of our sakes, did not.

Both Elise and I had aged well: people told us all the time that we looked like we were in our thirties, when we were both in our early forties. Nobody had said that to us in the last four months, of course: you don’t comment on how fresh the bereaved look. Elise looked different, I thought, although it wasn’t what you’d expect: she didn’t have baggy eyes and hadn’t gained or lost weight. If anything she seemed more vigilant, more vivacious, although it had a dangerous edge to it, in my mind. The way her eyes shone looked unhinged. And she was hardly sleeping. She came to bed after me and was often up before I woke. I felt guilty about how well rested I was, by contrast. How could a PowerPoint presentation I’d been assigned at the annual board meeting last year have made me lose more sleep than my younger daughter’s death?

I had to wait on a Japanese couple to tee off, and then it was just me and the smell of freshly cut grass. It was a gorgeous course. Koh Samui gets insufferably hot in the afternoon, but right now the temperature was perfect. Below, to my left, the sea sparkled like Crest toothpaste, and, to the right of the driving range, lime-green rice paddies glowed.

I missed Sophie. Out here, alone, it was a pure missing, much different than the convoluted sadness and anger I felt when I was with Leah and Elise. I knew that wasn’t right, that I should be spending more time with those two now than I ever had, that Sophie’s sudden departure should make me appreciate them more. It did, in some ways. But I had lost my buddy. I’d never explicitly wanted a son, unlike some of my guy friends, but I admit that I had been pleased and proud when it turned out that Sophie had an affinity for math and science, that she excelled in sports, that she was desperate to know how everything worked. What made a car engine run? What made an airplane lift off the runway? One of my favorite memories with her was buying a physics kit in Atlanta—she couldn’t have been older than nine—and wiring up a lightbulb, watching her excitement when we finally got the circuits correct.

Leah and Elise didn’t care about that kind of thing. It wasn’t their fault. But I felt increasingly unsure of myself around them, without Sophie’s steady camaraderie: outnumbered and insufficient. I was working longer hours now, disappearing into the office. It was a slippery slope, I knew. That’s partly what this trip was for: getting back together, spending time with one another. And here I was on the golf course, alone. Nice one, Chris. I tried to call Sophie to mind, to think of something she would have said, how she might have teased me. “Aw, come on, Dad, lighten up!” But it was just me, saying it in her voice to myself, and it didn’t even sound like her.

Then, as I was practicing my swing, the rare thing happened: a fresh memory surfaced. One nightmarish consequence of Sophie’s death was how quickly memories of her had become stale: how her smile, or the image of her in a softball uniform, became as familiar and meaningless as the picture of my long-deceased great-g
randmother
, which I’d passed every day in the hallway as a child.

But this memory of Sophie hadn’t occurred to me since it had happened, three years ago, in North Carolina. All of Elise’s family were up at Ada’s mountain house. The girls had said they wanted to come along with Elise’s brothers and me to play golf. I’d said no at first, then given in: I was never as tough as Elise when it came to setting rules. I’d even let Sophie drive the cart, after giving her careful instructions. On the ninth hole, she had suddenly gunned the engine when we were in reverse, and before I could say a word, we were headed for the pond as fast as a golf cart can go. I managed to lean over and slam the brakes, and we came to a shuddering halt on the seventh hole, as the golf clubs clattered out of the back and scattered on the grass. Leah was laughing her head off in the backseat. Sophie looked up at me, pale and wide-eyed. I rarely saw her unsure of herself. I think she was surprised when I wrapped her in a big hug instead of scolding her. When we got back to the house, she was already bragging about it, claiming she’d meant to do it, which Leah fiercely contested. But here, in Koh Samui, on the third hole, I suddenly felt touched again, remembering that look of panicked vulnerability, her stark need, in that second, for me, and my own relief, knowing what I could do for her, and doing it. All gone now.

“Sir? You going now?” A Thai caddy honked the golf cart horn behind me. I’d been standing next to the ball for some minutes, and a group of Italians were waiting impatiently. I hit horribly, as I always do when strangers are watching, and got on my cart to chase the ball down. I was relieved to feel tears in the back of my eyes.