The Ramblers (20 page)

Clio looks around at the glorious green campus, the place that once intimidated her. “Sometimes, I'm still dumbfounded that I managed
to get myself out of that broken house in good enough shape to come here.”

“Were your parents proud of you? They must have been, right?” he says, rolling with the abrupt topic change. “I mean, it's Yale.”

“Yes and no,” she says. “I think they wanted to be, but it was never that simple.”

School was a salvation for Clio, a place that felt safe and normal, and she worked hard and got good grades and this got her mother's attention. A science teacher encouraged her to apply and shepherded her through the process, reading all of her application materials, with the exception of her personal essay. “It's just sort of private,” Clio had said. Her teacher had nodded in understanding. She got in. And then she hatched this foolish plan to come here and start over and forge a normal life.

The plan, at its most cellular level, was to get out. To climb in the backseat of her parents' battered Ford wagon one final time and travel the measly few miles to campus, to walk with them, maybe even between them, through that big fancy gate. They would help carry her things. They would climb together the steps of her assigned dorm and watch as Clio quite literally kicked open the door to her future. They would help her unpack, get settled.

It didn't happen this way.

She arrived alone. She walked through the door of her dorm and there was Smith, glamorous and tall, all tanned legs in a pair of white shorts and a blue floral blouse. She wore her dark hair in a ponytail and flashed a beatific smile. In the background, Smith's crisply coiffed parents hovered. Bitsy snapped tags from fancy tasseled throw pillows. Thatcher fixed Clio with his squinty, judgmental eyes and pinned her with that cruel question that's stayed with her.

Where are your parents?

Oh, they couldn't be here today.

Clio left it at that, but what more was she supposed to say? That her
mother had tried to kill herself days before? That she was all drugged up in a small room in the psych ward at Yale–New Haven Hospital, that her father wouldn't tear himself away from his wife even for an hour to take his only child to college?

“I remember that April day when I got my acceptance letter. And I just thought it would be a happy thing, that we'd celebrate, but it wasn't that simple. I hate to admit it, but I was so relieved to be getting out of there and then so guilty about my own relief. When I got here, I was so overwhelmed, Henry. So excited, but I also felt like an impostor.”

She remembers now those flutters of optimism she felt standing on this grass for the first time as a student. Yale. A world she'd glimpsed from the little coffee shop where she'd sit with Jack as he worked shifts in high school, stacking napkins, refilling stirrers, watching college students come and go, students lugging big books that would lift them up in some poetic and heralded way, students brimming with easy laughter, students who were on their way to a species of greatness well beyond what she herself could hope for.

She remembers the dizziness and awe and gratitude and respect and mostly fear, always fear, that it would all be taken away. And so she worked very, very hard to make sure it wasn't, to prove that she in fact belonged. And yet she never quite did feel that she did. She always felt fringe, peripheral, like an observer studying an exotic breed of bird, taking notes, doing research. It astonished her how many of her classmates seemed to take it all for granted, these four years, this tremendous opportunity. They skipped classes and got drunk night after night and many of them, like Smith, managed somehow to pull off near-perfect grades. Their nonchalance was a badge of sorts, something Clio both envied and felt sickened by.

“I had this interesting optimism. Told myself it would all work out,” she says to Henry. “I had these vivid recurring dreams. They were really simple. My parents just turned around and told me they loved me.” She plays it out in her head now, this hopeful story. Eloise and William Marsh said they were proud of their only child, Clio; they
owned up to their shortcomings and apologized, noting how overwhelmed they were by life and circumstance. There was always a happy ending where they told Clio how much they loved her.

But they were only dreams.

“I just wanted to be normal, Henry,” she says. “That's all I wanted. I didn't want to break any records or win any prizes. I just wanted to fit in.”

Even then, she knew normal was a chimera, that, if anything, normal is a pejorative, boring, anti-Tolstoyan term. Clio knew that smart kids, Yale kids, would shun normal and embrace oddity, originality, wildness, whimsy, that if anything darkness and deepness would be championed over light and surface and ease, but those were the things she wanted: light and surface and ease.

From across the campus, Clio eyes Vanderbilt Hall, where she and Smith went freshman year for a party. Clio's first college party. Before it all went black that night, the details were sharp. She was just another freshman girl and she trailed behind Smith and a group of other freshmen along High Street. They all seemed to know each other. They were giddy, skipping, tripping, already drunk, or maybe just happy. Clio hung back, watched her own feet plod along, progressing on the pavement where so many great people had walked in their day, one foot and then the next, and she wondered if she would ever catch up, whether she'd ever be one of them, those who led the way. They all filed upstairs, swam into a crowded room. Bodies bumped, hands flailed, pretty lips were curled into victorious Ivy League smiles. The revelry was full throttle and red cups were everywhere, dotting the darkened scene—in fingers, on heads, on mantels, on ledges and sofa cushions. She drank a cup of punch and then another and felt like she was floating, like she was
fine
. She had more.

The next morning, she woke up in a hospital room at Yale–New Haven and learned that she'd come in with a .12 blood alcohol level, that her stomach had been pumped.

“There was this one night just a few weeks into college,” Clio says,
holding Henry's hand between both of hers. “I was so frightened, Henry. I was so sure it was my time. I went to a party with Smith and I felt so anxious in that room with all those kids, so out of place. And I drank and loosened up and the next thing I knew I was waking up in a hospital room and I was convinced that the disease was there, just lurking in my genes, waiting to pop. I'm still anxious about it.”

The memories of that one night continue to haunt her all these years later. She was all alone, tucked into a hospital bed. Her arm had fresh scratches and was tethered to an IV bag. She tried to hide her tears, but the room was menacing in its brightness and they were big, her tears, tumbling down, streaking salt on her cheeks. The nurse looked away, said nothing. The black sky outside veered gray, and morning came. They called her parents, but there was no answer.

“I actually requested a psych consult and this young doctor comes and I tell him all about my mother, about her illness, and I want to know if I have it. And this poor guy starts asking me these questions about how I sleep and whether I talk fast sometimes and whether I ever feel my mind racing. And these questions make me even more nervous, but he releases me. He tells me he thinks I'm fine, a wait-and-see kind of thing.”

“But
look at you,
” he says again, optimistically. “You're okay.”

Is she though? Is she okay? Wasn't she the one on a street corner in a bathrobe and heels, what, seventy-two hours ago? Bipolar usually presents in adolescence or in one's early twenties, often during college years. For Clio's mother, it emerged soon after she gave birth to Clio—at eighteen—and there Clio was, her age at onset, and all she could feel was fear. She learned to deal with the fear—maybe she internalized it—but it was always there, in the corner. And when she graduated, it was so hard for her to go to New York even though it was all she wanted to do. Though the guilt she felt for leaving, for not sticking close, was acute.

“Yes
. Maybe,
” she says. “Maybe now I'm okay. But I wasn't. I was a mess. I joined this awful suicide support group in midtown. I had this
horrifying recurring dream where I found my mother and she wasn't breathing and I did nothing to help her. But then something happened, and these things got better.”

“What happened?” he says.

“I met you, Henry. And I began having moments where I wouldn't think of her and you and I have had so much fun, but then the other night when I saw the apartment and you said all those wonderful things, I felt like this big liar, you know? I felt you needed to know about all of this. To know what you're getting. I come with a lot of baggage. It didn't seem fair. And then you mentioned wanting us to have a life together. To be a family. And this was incredible, Henry, but you know something? I haven't allowed myself to even consider having kids. Even if I'm spared in this game of genetic roulette, what's to say my kids will be? I'm not sure I'm willing to risk that.”

He takes her face in his hands. “And what's to say I won't be hit by the M79 next week crossing the street going to get my
New York Times
? Or that I won't wake up with bloody cancer all over my body like my poor mum did? Or that you won't discover some brand-new species of hummer in some remote isle or some much younger and better man and leave me? Clio, we
never
do know about anything, do we?”

She has a sudden urge to grab him tightly and hold on for dear life. So she does.

We never do know about anything.

“No,” she says. “I guess we don't.”

“I've never wanted you more.”

S
o, this is it,” Clio says, walking Henry through the front door of the house. Somehow, it looks different, and feels different, with him here.

“I'm picturing you as a little girl,” he says, looking around. “Bouncing around here in your pigtails.”

There wasn't much bouncing. Or pigtails. There was tiptoeing and sneaking and she did her own hair and learned to cook her own meals.

“Sorry it's nothing fancy,” Clio says, ashamed of the humble surroundings.

“Don't apologize,” Henry says, standing still, surveying the space. “This is the kitchen, I see?”

“Yes,” Clio says. “We spent a lot of time in this room. Mostly at this little table my father built. Had all of our meals here.”

She had many breakfasts alone. Her father often worked odd hours and frequently slept through until noon, and her mother was either in bed too or up and about, buzzing with energy, cooking up some elaborate meal she would never finish. Often the ingredients would end up thrown on the floor.

“And the living room through there,” Henry says, walking into the dimly lit wood-paneled room.

Clio nods and follows him into the room, the room Eloise never called a living room. Living was done in every room. “She called it Darwin's Parlor,” Clio surprises herself by saying. After all this time avoiding the topic, it feels strange to talk about her mother.

Henry reaches into an open box and pulls out a few books. “All Darwin,” he says, studying them. “My God, you weren't kidding around.”

Eloise had a manic fixation with Charles Darwin. She'd spend thousands of dollars, blowing through money they didn't have, buying books and artifacts en masse. Packages would arrive daily and her elation was wild when they did; she'd rip into the boxes and stockpile her treasures in the room off the kitchen, Darwin's Parlor, leaving the shelves ominously empty, stacking books into precarious towers that would invariably tumble, flipping an internal switch to black rages or brooding depressions. To make up for her epic sprees, her exhausted father took extra shifts at work. There were times when they only ate ramen or leftovers Jack's mom, Katherine, brought over. On more than one occasion, Eloise insisted she saw Darwin in their small yard. Clio and her father learned quickly to play along; questioning her claims was too risky.

Clio meets Henry's eye, shakes her head, forces a smile. She joins him in sifting through the boxes. She finds it, holds it up. “And here we have the pièce de résistance, an expensive early edition of
On the Origin of Species
. My childhood Bible. Other kids learned about princesses and pirates and I learned about natural selection.”

Henry takes the book from her and studies it.

When it came in the mail, Eloise called Clio in and sat her down and presented it like it was a new puppy. She let Clio hold it, run her fingers along the spine.
You should know it's actually called
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life
.

“I'm thinking all this Darwin material served you pretty well, though,” Henry says, a twinkle in his eye. “A bird guru, curator at one of the best museums in the world, professor at an elite university.”

“I suppose,” Clio says quietly.

What she does not say: Eloise practically locked Clio, her sole student, in this room to conduct her “lectures” on Darwin's life and work.
He was nearly forbidden from sailing on the
Beagle
because of the shape of his nose, Clio! He once ate an owl while in the Glutton Club at Cambridge, Clio! He would have been a doctor but couldn't stand the sight of blood. He was a backgammon fiend! Had a mountain named after him by age twenty-five! Remember: he didn't actually coin “survival of the fittest”; that was Herbert Spencer! He married his first cousin!
He lost faith in Christianity when he witnessed slavery and lost his beloved daughter Annie to scarlet fever when she was only ten. His wife, Emma, filled a small box with Annie's treasures and kept it with her until her own death.

“Would you put the Christmas tree in here?” Henry says, squinting, snapping her from the sluice of memories.

“One of them, yes.”

There were always several trees. Leading up to the holidays, Eloise talked fast and made grandiose plans and proclamations, but several days of this and she'd be fully manic, ablaze with a cutting desire to make everything
perfect
. It was always a depressing portrait of excess. Seven pumpkin pies. Four nativity scenes. A tree in every room, decorated with homemade ornaments.

“What were your Christmases like as a girl?”

There is a sense of wonder in his eyes and Clio can tell that he's simply curious, but she finds herself bristling; this simple question makes her recoil.

“I'm sorry,” he says, seeming to sense her discomfort. “I just want to know things.”

“It's okay,” she says. “I want to tell you, but it's hard.” Telling is reliving in a way; telling makes it more real. “An example? One Christmas, I took my gifts up to my room and she ducked her head in and told me to clean my room because there was wrapping paper and boxes everywhere. And I was a kid and I stalled and then I heard her coming and without a word, she dumped everything, every single gift and other things too, into a giant garbage bag and took it out to the lawn and burned it in front of me.”

“My Lord,” Henry says. “You went through hell, Clio.”

She nods, fighting tears that want to come. “And now she's gone and now I get to worry about my dad. Lucky me.”

“What's he like? You haven't said much about him.”

“He's a good man,” she says, thinking about this, “but it's been so hard for him. They met in high school. She got pregnant when they were seniors. They had me. They stayed together. And I know he was doing his best, working all those jobs, tending to her impossible needs, but he also enabled her.”

Even as a girl, Clio was amazed that her father didn't leave. All of those fights, the howling screams and shattered glasses and delusions of grandeur and bleak months in bed and constant threats of suicide and attempts to burn down this house. Eloise would disappear for days at a time and they'd find her in odd places with odd men, and he just took it. He was her punching bag and Clio had a front-row seat when she wasn't in the ring herself. And that was the worst, when Eloise turned her aggression on Clio and her father did
nothing
. He was supposed to protect her, right? But he just treated Clio like this unlucky partner in crime, like they were in this bad situation together.

His refrain:
We'll have to talk to the doctor about tweaking her meds.
But the problem was that most of the time she wouldn't even take her meds. And Clio could handle it, but it devastated her that her father was never present for the other stuff. The science fairs and school plays
and soccer games. She didn't want her mother on the sidelines, but he could have found a way to be there. He made his priority clear; he was always working or tending to the ever-unpredictable Eloise.

“Did you have a service?” he says.

“A small one,” Clio says. “Just my father and me and Jack and his parents. We went to the cemetery for the burial and came back here to the house. I made egg salad because it was her favorite.”

“Did she leave a note?” he asks, and then backpedals. “I'm sorry. Am I asking too many questions?”

Clio shakes her head no. It surprises her that his questions are welcome, that she wants to tell him these things. “She didn't leave a note, but trust me, I tore this place up looking for one.”

“Of course you did,” he says, taking her hand and holding it.

“Even now,” she says, looking around, “I wonder if there's some place I haven't looked. I find myself holding out for this secret letter of apology. It's really pathetic.”

“It's not pathetic,” he says, taking her shoulders, pinning her with his eyes. “It's
human
. It only makes sense that you want to understand.”

Clio nods. Leads the way to her bedroom. She hears a sound. And it takes a good minute to register that the sound is coming from her. She's weeping. Huge, heaving sobs shake her entire body. Henry grabs her from behind, drapes his hands around her, kisses the top of her head again and again.

“I'm just so angry,” she says, her words weak, her eyes brimming with tears. “I know she was sick and in pain, but how selfish is it to end your life? And I'm angry because it's always been about her. I'm so tired of this. I'm sorry to unload all of this on you. It's just a lot to be back here.”

She catches her breath, startled that she's telling him all of this. Henry spins her around to face him, pulls her down to sit on the bed. She looks at him, his gently lined, handsome face, the silvery shadow of stubble on his chin, the endless blue of his Irish eyes. She kisses him, pulls away.

“
Stop
apologizing,” he says, putting his forefinger to her lips. She opens her mouth and takes his finger in. Looks at him. He pulls his finger from her lips and traces a line down to her chin, then to her neck, and lower and lower, until he's tugging at the button of her shirt.

“I've never wanted you more,” she says.

Clio unbuttons her own shirt and peels it off. Henry buries his head between her breasts. She pushes him back on the little bed and climbs on top of him. He's hard beneath her; she can feel it through his jeans. He scrambles to unbuckle his belt as she kisses his neck, bites his earlobe. It only takes a moment or two and he's inside her and it occurs to her that the window is open, that someone might see, that Jack might see, but this only turns her on more. She rocks back and forth fast and hears him moan and he holds his hand to her mouth and she kisses it again and again and again and she screams out, louder than she's ever screamed maybe, and he pinches her side as he does when he finishes and when she stops screaming she opens her eyes and looks down at him and smiles.

They lie there. Pressed against each other in the tiny bed.

He points at the ceiling. “Tell me about the stars,” he says, his voice still husky.

“Eloise and I put them up,” she says. “I remember that day. She stood on my father's ladder. She knew everything about every constellation. That was a good day.”

“So there were good days?”

“There were,” she says, thankful for the reminder. Eloise could be magically present: humorous, ebullient, deeply curious about the smallest details. Nothing, to her, was meaningless. Everything was of consequence, worth learning about.
Let's look it up,
she'd say about the odd-shaped cloud in the sky, the dead bug on the driveway. These were characters and stories, part and parcel of an ineffably ordered cosmos. When she was flying, her enthusiasm would ripple through everything. She'd present gifts from tag sales, she'd pontificate about her latest
theory
about self and world.

“I've noticed that sometimes you call her Eloise and sometimes your mother.”

“Yeah,” Clio says. “Depends on the memory. If it's a tough one, it's easier if she's Eloise.”

A sound comes from downstairs.

“Shit,” she says. “My dad.”

“Shit!” he says, shooting up.

And they are laughing like kids, scrambling for their clothes. She slips into the bathroom and fixes herself in the mirror.

“Pull yourself together, Mr. Kildare, and come say hello,” she says, kissing him once more, running off.