The History of Us (39 page)

“Come on, Theo,” he said. “Things can’t go on like this.”

She shook her head again. “Nobody wants me,” she said, in a child’s tremulous voice, and then she put her face in her hands and began to sob. She sat down hard on the bed and cried, curled in on herself. For a moment—just a moment, before he went to her and took her in his arms—Josh saw her clearly, more clearly than he had in a while, or maybe for the first time ever. She was his sister, his older sister, his role model, his judge and jury. She’d known life without him, but he’d never known it without her. She could understand him like no one else or crush him like no one else. She and Claire were the people in the world who came closest to being him. Wasn’t that something to marvel at, how little DNA separated them from being each other? And yet she was a person outside all of that. She had her own secrets. She hid her own hurts. She struggled and she failed. She needed him.

He held her until her sobs diminished into sniffs, and then
he got her tissues, and ran after Eloise, who was sitting in her car staring at the house with a blank expression, not yet gone. He told her to wait for them, and then inside he packed his own bag quickly and supervised Theo, now wrung out and moving slowly, while she packed hers. Then he carried both bags to the car and opened the back door for Theo, who climbed inside without a word to Eloise and closed her eyes. It felt good to take care of people, to set his own worries aside. He offered to drive and Eloise took him up on it. “Don’t worry,” he said to her worried expression. “It’ll be okay.”

Later, after they’d stopped for dinner, with Theo asleep in the backseat, Eloise asked, “Do you feel like I didn’t want you?”

He didn’t, but he knew he would have told her,
no, never,
even if he did.

The car slowed for the turn onto the road through Sewanee, and
Theo woke to murmuring voices, darkness, movement. Josh was talking. “I thought you just knew the place from when we all visited Francine.”

“No, we came a few times when I was a kid,” Eloise said. “Francine rented a house in the Assembly a couple of summers. Maybe three. Then she insisted we come visit when your mother was applying to colleges. Rachel was her good girl, you know, so Francine thought she might actually do what she wanted. She didn’t even try it with me.”

“I always liked coming here,” Josh said.

“I liked it, too,” Eloise said, “but mostly when we went for walks without Francine. I do like how peaceful it is. How little changes. It’s a good place for nostalgia because everything is always the same.”

“Kind of like Cincinnati.”

Eloise laughed. “More actually changes in Cincinnati,” she said. “Unbelievable as that is.”

Theo listened with her eyes closed, resisting the urge to combat Eloise’s reflexive dismissal of her city. She didn’t want them to know she was awake. Why? What was she hoping to hear? Some secret they hadn’t let her in on? Some life lesson? Some explanation for everything? Maybe she just liked being transported somewhere, listening to voices in the dark, memories of the sleepy arrivals of childhood.

They were silent a moment and then Josh said, “So you really think she’ll call me?”

“I really think she will,” Eloise said. “Or that she’d be glad if you called her.”

“Thank you,” Josh said, his voice heavy with emotion. And then, in a lighter tone, “But will she ever let me see her feet?”

Eloise laughed. Theo felt the pang of exclusion: They sounded so at ease with each other, so familiar, so full of immediate and intuitive understanding. While she pretended sleep in the backseat, afraid of how their tones might alter into wariness if they knew she was listening.

When the car stopped in Francine’s drive and Josh turned the engine off, Theo opened her eyes. Josh turned around to see if she was awake. When he saw that she was he gave her an encouraging, reassuring smile. “Should we go in?” he said.

Eloise didn’t look at Theo. She had her gaze fixed on her mother’s house—small, stone, on an isolated road that curled through woods full of deer. Nothing like Francine’s other house. Theo watched as Eloise opened the car door and swung herself out, moving as if against resistance.

Josh got out, and then Theo followed, the last duckling in line. What would happen when they saw Claire? Theo expected drama. She expected a return to earlier arguments, emotions lobbed like grenades. Around them the woods sang with insects. The night was so dark here, no streetlights, no city buildings. The stars were visible and bright. It felt like her sister had gone back to fairyland, and they’d followed, bound and determined to return her to the actual world.

The door to Francine’s house opened and Claire stood waiting in a rectangle of light. Her too-short hair was pulled back into an unsuccessful bun, so that an electric halo of hair stuck out around her head. She wore a long, sleeveless top over leggings and as they approached Theo saw her shiver a little in the cool night air, cross her arms over herself. Her eyes were frightened. She looked like what she was, a dumb kid. A dumb kid who had no idea what she was doing.

Everyone looked at Eloise to see what she would say. But Eloise didn’t say anything. She held out her arms.

T
heo woke early to a room bright with morning light. Francine had
inadequate curtains and no blinds on the windows in this room, which were small and looked out into the woods. It was the room Theo had always stayed in with Claire when they visited their grandmother, but this time she’d slept in it alone. Claire and Eloise had stayed up late talking, a conversation in which Theo hadn’t felt invited or entitled to participate. Claire had been sleeping in the other guest room, and Eloise must have slept there, too.

As soon as Theo opened the door she smelled coffee and knew Francine was up. Francine was an early riser, up at 5:00
A.M
. and incredulous of anyone who slept much later than that. She’d already been in bed when they arrived. Theo could smell bacon, too. When they visited, Francine always cooked breakfast as soon as she herself got up, and then left it on the kitchen counter. Soggy bacon, cold eggs, toast a little too moist with butter. Theo and Josh always dutifully heated up these offerings and ate them. Eloise would make noises of disgust, mutter about passive aggression, and leave, taking Claire with her and returning an hour later with a cardboard cup of coffee from the local café.
“I don’t know how you can drink that swill she makes,” she’d say to Josh and Theo as they grew older. It was true Francine’s coffee was awful, and not helped by the addition of skim milk, which was the only dairy in the house. It was the gruel version of coffee. But Theo and Josh never wanted to hurt Francine’s feelings, and found it unnerving that Eloise actively wanted to.

Josh was still asleep on the couch, a pillow over his head, when Theo tiptoed past. Sure enough, eggs and bacon were waiting on the counter. Theo was up so early that they were still warm. She fixed herself a plate and, steeling herself, a cup of coffee, and carried plate and mug into the dining room to find Francine. Her grandmother looked up from the paper and smiled as Theo came in. She was fully dressed in a collarless white button-down shirt and bright red pants. She wore purple glasses and dangling silver earrings, her hair in a neat white bob. “Good morning,” she said. “Would you like a section?” She pushed the pile of newspaper on the table toward Theo.

“No, thanks,” Theo said. She sat down and put her napkin in her lap.

“Did you sleep all right?” Francine asked.

Theo nodded, her mouth full of eggs.

“You must be tired, up this early,” Francine said. “You stay up too late.”

“We got in late,” Theo said.

Francine pulled a face. “You always stay up late.”

“I went to bed before the others,” Theo said.

Francine raised her eyebrows. “You did? I thought you’d be in the thick of it. Fighting or making up or whatever you’ve all been doing. Having group therapy.”

“No,” Theo said. “They seemed to be doing fine without me.”

“Hmmm,” Francine said. “Is that a problem?”

Theo shrugged. She poked her eggs with her fork. Her grandmother waited. Theo had always been careful not to let Francine elicit any criticism of Eloise from her, not once she understood what pleasure Francine took in it, and how it would sound coming back out of Francine’s mouth as soon as Eloise gave her an opening. But it’s hard not to voice our complaints about someone to a person so ready and willing to hear them. This morning Theo was unequal to the effort it would take to resist. “I don’t know why she had us all come,” she said. “She didn’t need us at all. She and Claire could have worked it out on their own.”

“So they did work it out? Claire’s going back with you?”

“I’m guessing,” Theo said, “based on all the apologizing she was doing, and all the comforting she was getting in return.”

Francine settled back in her seat, lifting her mug from the table and looking at Theo over it. “Are you angry at both of them? Or just Eloise?”

“Both of them.”

Francine looked thoughtful. “Claire I know all about. Why Eloise? Is it just about the house?”

“It’s about the house. It’s about a lot of things.”

“Like what?”

Theo shook her head. Her grievances sounded so petty and childish when she had to voice them. She couldn’t bring herself to describe how she’d felt seeing Eloise take Claire in her arms, so maternal, so forgiving, exactly the person she wasn’t for Theo. “We had a fight yesterday.”

“What about?”

“I guess . . . I guess about what kind of parent she was. Or wasn’t.”

Francine frowned. “And what kind of parent was she? Or wasn’t she?”

Surprised by the sharpness in her grandmother’s voice, Theo took a bite of toast instead of answering. “Busy,” she finally said.

“Busy,” Francine repeated. “You mean she wasn’t baking you cookies and cooing over your drawings?”

Theo, stung, said, “That’s not what I mean.”

“You know she had to work,” Francine said. “She had to support you. And even if she hadn’t needed the money, why would you have wanted to take her work from her? It was what kept her going.”

“I didn’t—”

“Do you know you’re the age she was when she inherited you? She was twenty-eight. Do you ever think about that? She was just starting her career. She was used to being responsible only for herself. You’re upset about the house, and whatever else you’re upset about, and I’m not saying those things don’t matter, but do me a favor and imagine if you suddenly had to take care of three children, by yourself, and you had to pay for them and dress them and feed them and comfort them and encourage them and take on the utterly impossible task of replacing the two parents they’ve just lost. Imagine that that’s what happened, and that you didn’t even have your brother or sister anymore. You know what? Everything that mattered to you, just on your own, you’d have to set aside. But it’s not like those things would go away. You might never finish your dissertation. That would haunt you. You’d feel like you’d failed.” Francine shrugged, like none of this mattered much, despite the emotion in her voice. “You’d feel like you’d failed at a lot of things.”

“I never said she failed.”

“Sure, you did, or you thought it anyway. You think she failed as a mother. But imagine, right now, you’re suddenly responsible for three other people. You have no idea what you’re doing. There’s no backup.” Francine set her coffee on the table, hard, and pushed herself up to standing. “That was Eloise. She was totally alone.”

Blindsided, in need of a defense, Theo said the first thing she could think of. “There was you.”

Francine uttered a rueful, one-syllable laugh. “There wasn’t me,” she said. “I wasn’t exactly mother of the year. Just ask my daughter.” She moved around the table, headed in the direction of her room.

“So I can’t hold anything against her?” Theo asked. “She can’t ever be in the wrong?”

“I didn’t say that, honey,” Francine said, still walking away. “I never said that.”

In early afternoon Eloise found Theo at Green’s View, one of the scenic
lookouts from the bluff into the valley below. They’d had a ritual of coming here when the kids were younger. After they’d arrived, before they unpacked their bags or, sometimes, even before they brought them inside, they’d walk here from Francine’s, strolling down the middle of the road, spotting deer and picking wildflowers, stepping aside for slow-moving cars and pickup trucks. To look out over the world from this spot was to take a deep breath. All the movement of life was stilled into beauty. They liked it especially at night, because as city dwellers they rarely saw stars like the ones here, because at night the towns below were stars, too, a shimmering pattern of lights, natural and untroubled. When people asked Francine why she was moving
back here after so many years, she’d repeatedly said, “For the view.” She’d even said that to Eloise. But there were views in Cincinnati! There were views aplenty. She could have said,
Because I felt at home there, and I have never felt quite so at home, quite so much myself, anywhere else
. Eloise would have understood that, and maybe felt somewhat less angry and betrayed. Maybe not. At any rate Francine never said that. Maybe that was what she meant by
For the view.

Theo was sitting on the grass just above where the bluff began to drop off more steeply. She had her knees up and her arms wrapped around them. As Eloise drew closer, Theo heard her feet on the gravel and turned to see who was coming. It gave Eloise a pang, how quickly Theo turned back around. “We’ve been looking for you,” Eloise said, when she got near enough to be heard. “Everybody’s ready to go.”

Theo nodded, her gaze still on the valley, or maybe on the sky. “It’s so pretty here,” she said.

“It is,” Eloise said. She sat beside Theo, a foot or so away, and mimicked her pose.

“But you never wanted to live here.”

“No.” Eloise shook her head. “This was Francine’s place. I always thought of myself as a city mouse.”

Theo gave her a sidelong glance. “And Francine’s a country mouse?”