“Oh. Right. Crap.” For a second her face freezes. Then she starts to laugh. Suddenly I’m laughing, too, a high-pitched hysteria, so hard that, at last, tears stream down my face.
“Girls?” Mum walks up to us. She’s carrying a small white paper bag from Fred’s Pharmacy. Her beautiful face looks tired, worn thin. “Care to share the joke? I could use a good laugh.”
“It must have been the week before Conrad died,” I hear my mother talking on the phone in her bedroom. “We haven’t made love since.”
We’ve been back in New York for a few days. The city is sticky. The banana-vomit smell of rotting garbage rises from the streets. No matter what we do, we end up with big sweat marks in the armpits of our shirts. Air conditioners drip rancid water onto the sidewalks below. Our apartment is sweltering and close with dust and mothballs and the sweet odor of cockroaches in the walls. Everyone hates being here, but Leo can’t go back to the woods. He blames himself for the accident: he’s the one who insisted we go sailing that day. He pushed the boat out even though the waves were too rough. At night his thoughts, his blame, spiral outward. He stomps back and forth in the living room, scotch in hand, ranting at my mother, a broken record of what-ifs, looking for answers he can’t find. Why didn’t I make him wear a life jacket? Why was the life preserver tied with a double knot? How could no one have noticed? Did Conrad see the wave that took him? Did he know?
“No,” I say, my throat constricting on itself. “He never saw it coming.”
Now that Conrad is gone, Anna has her old bedroom back. Every time Leo walks past the room he looks at her as if her presence there is a betrayal.
“I need to get the fuck out of here and go back to L.A.,” Anna says to me. “It’s like we’re living in a morgue with an angry goat.”
It makes no sense, but I know what she means.
“Don’t ask me that,” Leo screams. “I can’t stand it. I can’t stand it.”
“It’s not my fault,” my mother pleads.
The door to their room is closed, but I can hear the shouting through my bedroom wall. There’s a loud crash and then the sound of glass breaking.
“Get rid of it,” Leo shouts.
“Stop it,” Mum yells. “Stop it! That was my grandmother’s lamp.”
“Fuck your grandmother.”
“Please. I love you.”
The bedroom door opens and Leo slams past me, runs out of our apartment, out of the building, into the hot night. My mother sobs in her room. I force myself to listen until, unable to stand another second, I put my pillow over my head.
Five weeks later, Leo tells us he’s moving out. He packs his bags, his saxophone, and kisses my mother goodbye.
“Don’t go. Please don’t go,” she begs.
She stands there, gripping his arm, lonely already, even before he has gone. When the door shuts behind him, she goes to the window and waits until he appears, watches as he trudges down the street, away from her. She is already beginning to show.
1984. May, New York.
The baby dies during my mother’s labor. The umbilical cord tears, the baby cannot breathe, suffocating in amniotic fluid. They try everything to save it. They rip and pull, tear her vaginal wall, her perineum; doctors screaming, nurses running. It is a boy. Tiny and blue, like a Picasso child. Leo has disappeared and left no forwarding number, so he never learns that both of his sons have drowned.
My father comes with me to the hospital to collect Mum. He pushes her wheelchair out to the curb, careful not to hit any bumps. There’s a Checker cab waiting for us. My mother’s layette bag of washed and folded baby clothes is slung over the back of the wheelchair. She doesn’t notice, as we drive away, that my father has left it hanging there. Out the rear window, I watch it swinging back and forth before it finally stills.
The cherry blossoms are in bloom along Fifth Avenue, bathed in sunlight.
“I love this time of year,” my mother says. “We should have a picnic. We can make cucumber sandwiches.” Her eyes are hollow.
“Let’s just get you home,” my father says. “Elle made soup, and I put a ripe avocado and a head of Boston lettuce in the icebox. I’ll run out after we get you settled and pick up some bourbon. We can all use it.”
“I need to find Leo. I need to tell him.”
“Yes,” my father says, “I’m working on it.”
There is something different in his voice, an authority and a tenderness I don’t recognize. As the taxi speeds us toward home it occurs to me that for the first time in my life, I have parents.