Perfect Family

“How can we live without our lives?
How will we know it's us without our past?”

—John Steinbeck,
The Grapes of Wrath

Chapter 1:
William

Chapter 2:
Tinker

Chapter 3:
William

Chapter 4:
William

Chapter 5:
William

Chapter 6:
Mira

Chapter 7:
William

Chapter 8:
Mira

Chapter 9:
Tinker

Chapter 10:
William

Chapter 11:
William

Chapter 12:
Mira

Chapter 13:
William

Chapter 14:
William

Chapter 15:
William

Chapter 16:
William

Chapter 17:
William

Chapter 18:
William

Chapter 19:
Mira

Chapter 20:
Tinker

Chapter 21:
William

Acknowledgments

Simon & Schuster Reading Group Guide

Fond du Lac, Lake Aral, Vermont

At exactly three-thirty William Carteret parked beside his sister Pony's car at the lake house. He'd been driving since two, and now the sun was falling behind the mountain, and everything—the house, the lawn, the shore, and half the lake—was in shadow. A stiff wind was kicking up whitecaps on the water. A handful of sailboats scudded quickly, their small white sails crowded together as they headed for the last race buoy.

William stretched and walked down to the water, as he always did first thing. Someone was still on the beach on the opposite shore, where they had the afternoon sun. He envied them over there, the Nicelys, the Garners, the Wrights, and their neighbors, for the long slow afternoons filled with late light and the lazy wane of day. Here on the Carteret side, they had the early-morning sun, and if you asked William's father, Jasper Carteret III, he'd say they were better off because of it, that being on the western shore meant being early
risers; it meant being industrious, disciplined, and, although this was not spoken, superior.

William turned and headed toward the house, a big old gray dowager of a place, three stories tall. The house looked tired. It needed a new roof, a thought that depressed him because it would mean an assessment from his father. He and his sisters—Pony, Tinker, and Mira—would all have to pitch in to help pay for it. Pony wouldn't be able to come up with her share, so he and his other two sisters would have to carry her again. Maybe he'd bring it up with her while he was up here, or maybe not. Probably not. There was no getting blood from a stone.

Something in one of the upper windows caught his attention, an orange shape moving to one side of the pane. “Pony?” he shouted, and immediately she was plainly in view, waving to him. Had she been there all along? Watching him? Something was going on. She'd called him that morning and told him in that rapid-fire way she had that he needed to come up to the lake, and it had to be today. She had the place all to herself. Well, she and her son, Andrew, who was only a baby. But the point was, no Daddy, no Tinker, no Mira. Pony had just come up and let herself in, and they didn't even know about it. “So there!” she'd said, meaning she'd blown off the whole sign-up sheet, the careful summer schedule that Tinker had come up with after their mother died.

She vanished from the window. A moment later, the screen door flew open, banged against the side of the house, and slammed shut. Pony came at a run, a blur of bright orange T-shirt and white shorts across the lawn, her long dark red hair streaming behind.

“Oh, Jesus, William,” she said, wrapping her arms around his neck. “You came.”

She was the youngest of his three sisters, his hands-down favorite. She was lean and tall, and she had the kind of energy that made her light as air. She hugged him, freed herself, hugged him again. She had a broad face, high cheekbones, and a perfectly straight and slightly prominent nose; it was the kind of nose, their father said,
that came from generations of breeding. Her eyes, though, those were the main thing about Pony. Big hazel eyes always alert, always taking everything in, eyes that darted quickly and constantly.

“Wouldn't not.” He glanced about, looking for evidence of someone else, but saw nothing.

She took a step back, taking him in, grinning. “Come inside. Andrew's taking a nap.” She dragged him by the hand across the lawn to the porch and into the cavernous living room with its three big faded blue couches arranged around a massive stone fireplace where the last coals of a fire still burned. The baby's toys were scattered across the floor. William recognized the orange Tonka truck that had once been his, and Matchbox cars, also his from childhood. Even some of the girls' dolls were in evidence. Andrew's clothes and diapers were stacked in piles on the furniture; the room held the dismal smell of baby and sour milk.

“Looks like a tornado came through,” he said.

“Voice down.” Pony pointed to a crib in the corner, where the baby was sound asleep.

“I'll put my stuff upstairs,” William said in a whisper.

The upstairs was like the downstairs: Pony's hair dryer lay in the sink, still plugged into the wall. Andrew's rubber toys were piled in the tub, and towels lay on the floor. William checked among the items on the vanity to see if there was a guy's razor or aftershave. He was 90 percent sure this was about a new boyfriend. But there was nothing belonging to an adult male on the whole second floor. He could hear Pony singing downstairs. An Elvis Costello tune, “Alison.”

When he went back down, she was banging things around in the kitchen. She switched to whistling. The baby was awake now in his crib, looking blankly up at William, his face creased and moist from sleeping on his blanket. He was a cheerful little guy with very blond hair. When he saw William, he opened his mouth and wailed.

“What should I do?” William called out.

“Nothing. He's just hungry.” Pony hoisted the baby out of the
crib and went back into the kitchen, where she gave him a bottle, then blitzed around, the baby on one hip, making sandwiches with her free hand.

“So what's the deal?” William said. “Why am I up here?”

She stopped what she was doing and turned to look at him, cocking her head as if she saw something surprising in him. “All in good time,” she said.

William went to the porch. A wind was blowing up the lake from the south. Overhead, the trees rustled, and from the lake came the hollow clank of the barrels under the raft as they were lifted and dropped.

A shout from next door caused William to look over at the Bells' place, partly visible through the trees. William's father still resented Dennis Bell (Dennis
père
, Jasper called him snidely) for buying the land from him eight years earlier and for the house Bell put up. William's father had sold only seventeen feet of water frontage, which was intended to force the Bells into building farther back, where the lot widened and where the house would be hidden among the trees. But Bell had put up an A-frame tight to the shore. It was a big triangle of a house with kelly-green trim, the only one of its kind on the lake, its cedar shake roof sloping all the way to the ground.

Every spring the Bells talked to William's father about blacktopping the right-of-way they shared, and every year William's father said no. The year before, a crew of guys had shown up and paved the private section of road that forked off the right-of-way to the Bells' house. William's family had contempt for the pristine condition in which the Bells kept their driveway, as if their own eroded two-track were a cut above.

Two shiny SUVs, a silver and a red, were visible through the trees. The Bell kids had Daisy rifles, and William thought he saw Denny, the youngest (Dennis
fils
), in the woods between the two houses. He was probably shooting squirrels. When Andrew got older, that would be a problem. Just as when William had been a kid up here, Andrew would have too much time on his hands by
the time he hit eleven or twelve, and if the Bell kids or grandkids were shooting, Andrew would want to shoot, too. But that would be later. Nothing to worry about now. If William's mother were still alive, she'd be over there right now talking to Mrs. Bell, asking politely if she would please keep the boy from shooting off his gun. And then she'd come back to the house, distressed because Anita Bell would have said something like “Oh, what's the harm?” That was how the Bells were, casual about important things. William's father had called the police on them once, which had done no good. It wasn't against the law to shoot off a Daisy rifle on your own land.

The door creaked behind William, and Pony was there with Andrew still slung on one jutted hip. She lowered him to the floor in front of William. “Watch him for a sec, will you?”

Driving up from Connecticut, he had felt sanguine. That was the only word for it. The day was clear. The road was empty. He'd done eighty, sometimes ninety, all the way up 91 and not a single cop, not even north of Greenfield, where there were almost always speed traps. He'd had this idea that he would sit on the porch at Fond du Lac and work, something he'd seen in
The New York Times Magazine
once, an ad for booze showing a guy with bare feet propped on a railing looking out at the ocean, laptop open, rum drink at the ready. William eyed the baby, who sat on the floor like a lump, staring up at him. He was apparently easy as kids went, or so Tinker, the eldest of William's three sisters, always said. Tinker said Andrew would sit wherever he was put and stare at something until something else—his toes or a piece of lint on the floor—got his attention, and then he'd stare at that for the next half hour. She always followed that up by talking about how her own daughter, Isabel, who was eight now, had been lithe and quick at Andrew's age, the implication being that a restless child was brighter. It was another way for Tinker to cut Pony down to size. Tinker needed to step on Pony just to feel even.

William had been six when Tinker was born. Mira had come a
year later and Pony a year after that. Three damp little animals. Their mother was always attending to them—feeding them, burping them, changing their diapers. The house smelled all the time. He stopped having his friends over because of the blast of steamy baby smell that always hit him when he opened the front door. As his sisters grew older, Tinker, an officious, chubby little girl, rode herd on the others, parroting their mother about what they were allowed to do or not do. Their rooms were down the hall from his, and he could always hear her bullying her little sisters.

But then Pony had broken off and sought out William's company. She used to hang out in his room and lie on his bed while he struggled through his homework. She had questions for him. Lots of questions.
Are God and Santa Claus the same person?
Yes.
Is our family poor because we don't have a dishwasher?
No.
What's on the other side of the stars?
Not a clue. In their very careful family she was the one he admired. She once jumped from the garage roof. When their mother wasn't there, she did the forbidden: she swam across the lake without a boat. Once, when their mother had had a bunch of women to the house, Pony had taken small bills from each of the purses left in their parents' bedroom and spent it on candy.

Pony came back to the porch with a beer for William in one hand and a real drink in the other, something amber-colored with ice, letting the screen door slam behind her; the ghost of their mother's voice echoed in William's ears:
Do not let the screen door slam.
It didn't seem like a good idea to be drinking with the baby right there. If Pony got lit, and she could, William would be stuck with Andrew. She read him. “Don't worry,” she said, putting the drinks on the table between them. “I'll be fine.”

“I thought you quit.” There'd been a time, before she had Andrew, when the family had worried about her.

“I did,” she said, taking a long swallow.

The phone rang in the living room. Pony grabbed her glass and went inside to answer it. “Hello. Hi. Yes. Uh-huh. Shit,” she said,
and then “Yeah, well, not much you can do about that, I guess.” After a few moments, the door banged again and she was back. She sank into the chair opposite. “I thought you'd be here later.”

“Is that a problem?”

She shrugged. She handed him a blistered strip of four photographs, taken in one of those old-fashioned photo booths, of a girl and boy in perhaps their late teens. The girl was blond and wore a feathered headdress. Her long hair hung like curtains on either side of her face. The boy was partly hidden behind her. He had dark hair swept back like Nixon's. It took a moment for William to understand the girl was their mother. “Where did this come from?” he asked. He turned the strip over. The words
Livvy, 1968
were written on the back. “Nobody ever called her Livvy.”

“I know. Isn't that a riot? Daddy always called her Olivia.”

“But where did you get this thing?” he asked again. The family albums were full of pictures, but none of their mother as a girl. “Lost,” their mother always said vaguely when William asked, and she would allude to a flooded basement in which photos were destroyed or to a move in which they were lost. It was always one incomplete explanation or the other.

“Cool your jets,” Pony said.

“Who's the boy?”

“Not now, okay? Later.”

Andrew let out a wail. Pony put her drink on the rail, and William noticed it was fuller than before; she must have added to it. She dragged Andrew's playpen from the corner of the porch, and bumped it down the stairs to the lawn. It was a big expandable circle she could put down anywhere, and it kept Andrew in pretty much the same place for a while. She pulled it open as far as it would go. Then she lowered Andrew into it.

William's good mood from driving up earlier was shot. He felt uneasy; anxious, even. Pony was up. She was down. In and out of the house. He wished she'd just sit still and tell him what was up. He looked out at the water. The surface was still alive with tiny white
caps. The cold water would calm him down. It would suck the annoyance right out of him.

“I'm taking a refresher lifesaving course at the town beach. I figured I'd better, what with Andrew,” Pony said.

He was so glad to hear this. Everybody would be glad to hear it. Pony was a great mother, if you asked him, but anything that made her more conventional as a mother was going to make the rest of the family happy. “That's just great,” he said.

“I haven't forgotten much.”

“Like riding a bicycle,” he said. All the Carteret kids had taken the lifesaving and water-safety-instructor courses over at the town beach the summer they were old enough. Their mother had insisted on it because she herself hadn't learned to swim until she was an adult, and she was a very nervous swimmer. She didn't care if they ever used it, if they ever got lifesaving jobs or saved anybody. No, she just wanted them to know how. The town beach lessons were famous for something called the drowning game. It should be illegal, William thought, but it was part of the Lake Aral program. The way it worked? Everybody swam into deep water at once, the whole class of twenty or thirty kids. They'd tread water for a minute or so, adrenaline going, and at the signal, each of them was to attack someone else, get the person into a hold, and swim him to shallow water. The object was to drag as many people to shore as you could. If somebody dragged you in, you lost and had to get out of the water. The last one in the water was the winner. William won it his year. He'd been fifteen, and he'd spent the winter building his upper body with weights, standing before his mirror. He'd put on twenty-three pounds that year, all muscle. Pony had won the drowning game her year, too. His sister Mira had allowed herself to be rescued right away so she could sit the whole thing out. Tinker had tried, but she had been one of the early ones to be pulled out.