Reunion: A Novel Read online

  On the other end of the line, there is a sharp girl cry that stings my eardrums. Rita says, “I have to go. The girls are going to kill each other. Listen. I’m sorry if I’ve been snippy. I don’t mean it.”

  “I know,” I say. My glass is nothing but ice and lime now. I wave at the bartender, who is trying hard to ignore me, but I catch her eye and point to my glass. I smile. She doesn’t like me, but she goes for the gin.

  “Rita,” I say. “I love you.”

  “You too, kiddo,” she says. “Tell your brother to call me when he lands. Or text.” There is another piercing scream in my ear. “Or, you know, we’re fine. My hands are full tonight. I’ll call tomorrow.” I think I hear a doorbell ringing in Rita’s background, but the line goes dead before I hear anything more.

  8

  Nell and Elliot arrive

  I am drunk by the time their flight lands. It’s close to eleven. Storms have been bullying the entire country. From California to Colorado to Georgia. Our father shot himself in the head this morning and the weather is singing him home. I don’t buy it, of course, but it’s what he’d say. It’s what he’d want any one of us to say at his funeral. The man oozed sentimentality, but he backed it up with nothing. Zilch. Nada. All talk. No substance. And yet here I am.

  Actually, here I am, slightly drunk, sitting at the far bank of chairs at Gate 39 in Concourse C of the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport under enormous television monitors, trying by sheer force of will to rid myself of hiccups. I’m down to a single five-dollar bill, but I’m trying not to think about that.

  Nell and Elliot are among the first to deboard. They probably flew first class. Perhaps Nell was able to intimidate the airline into some sort of bereavement discount. I hadn’t even considered such a thing, but it probably does exist. A discount and extra comfort for the bereaved. It is a wacked-out world. Don’t let anyone tell you different.

  For some reason, when I see them, I do not raise my hand in greeting. In fact, when they turn their backs to me and begin their lugubrious walk toward baggage claim, I do not immediately rise to reveal my presence. Instead, slowly, I kick my bag out in front of me and follow behind them at a fairly healthy lag. From back here, people walking between us, midnight looming, cracks of thunder overhead, water pelting the floor-to-ceiling windows, they look like strangers. Like characters I’ve dreamed of every night and who finally, supernally, have come to life.

  One thing about Nell and Elliot—Nelliot if you really want to drive them mad—they’re peas from the same pod. At least physically. They are both five ten, which makes them about two and a half inches shorter than me. (Growing up, they called me names—Hateful Kate, Kate with No Date, Too Late Kate, Kate the Fake—but the taunt I truly hated was No-Mate Kate. Of course, now, older, I see that it’s clunky and artless and ultimately, I think, unjustified, but at the time I took it as prophetic—and maybe even as a curse—that my unseemly height would keep me forever without a man.) At any rate, they are dark haired and gray eyed and preternaturally prone to muscle and tan. I am bean-y and awkward, and my skin, which gets blotchy when I’m nervous, is a see-through kind of white. Not milky white like a Japanese doll. Not alabaster white like a porcelain plate. A thin, transparent white, as if someone covered my veins with cellophane and forgot to add color. I like to say that our mother had an affair, but I look too much like our father through the face—severe nose, large chin, deep-set green eyes. None of our mother’s Cherokee blood shows up in me. Which is not to say I’m unattractive. Not at all. I’m just not tidy. Nell and Elliot are tidy.

  Ahead of me by a full thirty yards, my brother pulls out his phone. Three seconds later my pocket is buzzing. I don’t bother looking. The two of them edge over to the side of the concourse and Nell leaves her bag with Elliot then walks into the women’s bathroom. I keep walking, fully expecting Elliot to notice me at any minute and then, at that minute, I’d drop my bag and run into his arms. But he doesn’t notice me. Instead, when I’m nearly ten feet from him, he turns away, totally oblivious, and I slip into the women’s restroom without him seeing me. I walk the first row of stalls, ducking to look under, but they’re all empty. I turn the corner, thinking I’ll see Nell in front of the mirror, already washing her hands, but she’s not there. So I walk the second row of stalls, still ducking to see under, until I spot my sister’s purse and, behind it, her perfectly sized feet in her perfectly sized shoes.

  I’m about to say something. I’m about to say, “How about a hug?” but then I hear a mewling, followed by a distinct muffling of tears, followed by a long, wet nose blow, and, I don’t know why, it makes me want to pull my hair and howl at the top of my lungs. It makes me want to punch in the stall door and stomp my feet and tear the paper towel dispenser from the wall. Instead, without fully thinking it through, I reach under the stall, grab Nell’s purse, turn, and run from the bathroom.

  I make eye contact with Elliot as I flee the restroom and he gives me this what the fuck look, but I’m laughing too hard to care. I run until I get to the top of the escalators then double over and grab my side. Nell is beside me in seconds, punching my arm and snatching at her purse.

  “What is wrong with you?” she says.

  She isn’t laughing and her eyes are bloodshot, which bothers me only insomuch as it seems to herald a more somber evening than I’d been hoping for—long, moist-eyed conversations well into the morning about Stan and suicide and what to do next—but I grab her and pick her up so that her feet are a few inches above the ground.

  “Tiny baby sister,” I say.

  “I hate that,” she says. She tries to push me away, but I hold her until she gives in and hugs me back.

  “You missed me,” I say, letting go finally.

  Elliot comes up behind her and drops their luggage at his side.

  “You get more and more bizarre,” he says, then he takes me in his arms and, even though he is shorter, holds me for a long time and very hard and somehow makes me feel small in a surprisingly good way.

  I hiccup into his ear. He pulls away and looks at me sideways. “Are you drunk?” he says.

  “Are you not?” I say.

  “A handful,” says Nell to Elliot. “What did I tell you?”

  “I talked to Rita,” I say, ignoring my sister. The joke is that we are in love with each other. But the love often doesn’t transcend the phone. In person, we can drive each other crazy, as she is me right now.

  “I think our stewardess was sick,” says Nell, blowing her nose, and I wonder whether she’s trying to hide the fact that she’s been crying or just being her usual germaphobic self.

  “I just tried her,” says Elliot. “She’s not answering.”

  “The girls must have pre-camp jitters,” I say. “It was bedlam.”

  He nods and looks away. I wonder if he knows about the grad student, about the tomato plants. I wonder if things have escalated, if there are machinations at work in Elliot’s life that Nell and I—or maybe just I—don’t know about.

  “She says the plan is to go to Stan’s?” I say. “To stay at Stan’s?”

  We begin as a tiny unit, Elliot in the front, down the escalators, toward the trains to baggage claim.

  “I wanted to stay at Sasha’s,” says Nell.

  “With the animal child? No way,” I say. I want to make her laugh. I want to make her forget about what we’re doing here. Even for a minute or two. This whole experience would be less annoying if she would just laugh.

  “She’s not so bad,” says Nell. “She’s growing out of it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She’s our sister,” says Nell.

  “Half sister,” I say.

  Nell puts her hand on my shoulder and squeezes. “Give her a chance, okay? For me?”

  “She’s the spawn of the devil,” I say.

  “She’s six.”

  “Girls,” says Elliot, stopping suddenly and turning to look at us as a train approaches. He doesn’t lo
ok amused with our banter. Normally we amuse him. Normally Nell and I—ping-ponging back and forth like this—normally we are the coolest thing since sliced bread to my older brother. “We’re going to Dad’s,” he says. “We’re staying there, and we’ll go through whatever we have to, and we’ll do it as a family.”

  I bite my lips together. Nell says nothing. The train is stopping; the doors are about to open.

  “Can we get on the train and get out of here?” Nell says at last.

  “Can you two behave?”

  I shrug. I feel suddenly tired, suddenly unwilling to respond, unable to articulate. The train doors slide open and I walk through. Nell and Elliot follow. We stand three abreast, not talking, looking out the thick glass windows as we roar past the underbelly of the airport—its wires and pipes and steel. It’s late. There are only a few other people on the train and they too are quiet, stunned into silence by the awkwardness of the hour. Everything slows down at night. Even the airport. There’s a reason people are scared of the dark.

  9

  taxi to Dad’s place

  Our cab hurtles its way through this city, this big, sprawling city. These overpasses. These underpasses. Red lights blurring through rain into pink blurring into lavender. The old Peachtree sign high above the intersection of I-75 and I-85. Spaghetti Junction all around us. A two-seater convertible on the side of the highway, a man straddling the windshield and the backseat, presumably trying to release a malfunctioning top. The smell. The smell of humidity. The smell of trash. The smell of roaches and wet concrete and banana peels and money and, yes, I’ll go this far, childhood, even.

  This cabbie drives the city like he was born here. Like he woke up as a baby one morning and there was his mother and there was a car and the car never stopped. Just him and his mom and this city and its streets. He darts and weaves and moves effortlessly to the left when 75 splits west, and before I know it, we are on Northside Drive and there is Bobby Jones Golf Course and, dear God, there is Piedmont Hospital, where all three of us were born, and there is Benihana, where we went on our birthdays whether we wanted to or not because our father thought we should like the knife work. He thought children who were interesting and were worth a damn—his children—should like a place like Benihana, should grow up exposed to other cultures, more interesting cultures than ours. No McDonald’s for us. No Red Lobster. No Piccadilly or Morrison’s like our friends on their birthdays. We were different. Whether we wanted to be or not. “Your mother’s dead, goddamn it,” he said to me once. “Start acting like it.” What he meant, I still don’t know. Only what he didn’t mean. Only that what I was and how I was wasn’t right, wasn’t interesting or compelling. “Do something,” he sometimes said to me. “Have an opinion at least.”

  We take Collier to Peachtree and I wonder if this is as strange and foreign but also familiar a drive for my siblings as it is for me. I wonder if they’re thinking the same thoughts, the very same thoughts. Are they looking at Piedmont Hospital and thinking of our mother? And if they are, are they thinking of her as a new mother or as a mother on her way out? As a mother covered and withered in the back of one of the hospital’s ambulances?

  An ambulance wouldn’t have taken our father away this morning. What would it have been? A van? A police van? A coroner’s van? A van belonging to the city? Or a private van? The funeral home’s van? I know the answers to none of these questions. Until this moment, I hadn’t even thought to ask.

  We pass the duck pond and next the dueling cathedrals. To our left is Habersham Road, where the parents of my first boyfriend lived. The Rutherglens. They were good people. They were nice, normal, wealthy people. They let me spend the night whenever I wanted. They put me in their daughter’s bedroom—Gretchen, who was off at Hotchkiss playing field hockey or something—and never once worried that Tucker and I would cross the line. They walked me through Stan’s divorce from his second wife and his marriage to his third. They drove me to the hospital when my first half siblings—the twins—were born. They never made me feel like a pariah for having a dead mom and an oversexed father. They just wanted me to feel safe. They just wanted me to be happy. Until I started going with Tucker’s best friend. They stopped letting me spend the night after that. God, maybe Nell is right. Maybe I am obsessed with sex.

  Behind Habersham is Woodward, where we lived until our mother died. First we moved to Howell Mill. Then to Tanglewood. Then, when Nell and Elliot left for college, my father and I moved into the high-rise and then into the house of his third wife. It wasn’t the same. Nothing is ever the same. He moved a few more times after I finally left for college. The last place being the two-story condo in a tiny, tasteless gated neighborhood on Pharr Road, which we are now too quickly approaching.

  The cab slows and I hear the click clock of the turn signal. We turn left and then slow even more.

  “Up there,” says Nell. “I have the code.”

  The cabbie turns where instructed and stops so that Nell’s window is in front of a squat brick structure with a keypad hidden at just the right height. She rolls down her window and plugs in a series of numbers. She does not, that I see, consult a piece of paper.

  “Been here before?” I say.

  “Have you?” she says, rolling up her window.

  The gates in front of us open slowly. The cabbie pulls through at a turtle’s pace.

  It occurs to me that I’m going to have to tell Elliot and Nell about the affair. And I’m probably going to have to do it this weekend. It’s not like I was planning on keeping it a secret forever, but this sudden reunion certainly makes the revelation seem more imminent. I assumed that at some point—some point in the distant, blurry, fuzzy future—I would tell them. But I imagined us gray and wizened by then. I imagined that one day we would wake up old and that decades would be behind us and they would be versed. The knowledge would have seeped into their minds and they would know and they would understand and they would have—years earlier, somehow, in the way magic works—already forgiven me.

  The neighborhood—lower middle class: lower if you’re old, middle if you’re young—is really just a large cul-de-sac around which pods of four attached row houses have been placed. There are four pods in all, sixteen condos total. Our father’s is the first condo in the second pod—the only one with the front light still illuminated. It’s a blue shingled affair, like all the rest. In front is a short manicured lawn that looks blue in the moonlight and leads up to a quick flight of a stairs, which in turn lead up to a modest front porch. Really, the front porch is shared with the other three connected condos, but there are railings to separate them. It’s not actually for hanging out. That’s clear as day. It’s purely decorative. Nobody in their right mind would spend any time on these front porches—you’d have to interact with anybody who came by. You’d have no privacy whatsoever. No, these porches are for the mailman and a hanging plant or two.

  We pull up to the curb, and the cabbie pops the trunk. Elliot opens his wallet, and I open the back door. To anyone paying attention, my demeanor should suggest not that I don’t want to pay, but simply that I’ve forgotten.

  Nell pinches me as I’m setting my bag down on the sidewalk.

  “Ouch,” I say. Though her pinches, like the porches, are merely for show.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she says.

  “What?” I say. “Are you really mad? I thought you were playing.”

  “Listen,” she says. She is whispering, which instinctively makes me want to whisper. “Get it together.”

  “What?”

  “Elliot’s really upset.”

  “He is?”

  “He was a mess on the plane,” she says.

  “You seem like the mess.” I have no idea what I’m talking about.

  She says, “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Ta-da!

  “Are you sure we should be here, then?” I nod my head at the condo. “Are you sure he’s ready?”

  “It
’s not just—” She looks at Elliot, who’s getting out of the front seat. “I’ll tell you later.”

  Elliot taps the hood of the cab, which performs a careful U-turn then heads away from us in the direction of the front gates.

  Again we find ourselves standing three abreast, not talking, staring straight ahead. Only this time we are looking at our father’s home—the last place he lived before he died, a place we’ve never seen other than the occasional emailed photograph. It feels like a scene from a movie. I wish it were a scene from a movie. I wish I were the camera and I could pull back and watch from a safe distance, somewhere up and away—a tree, maybe, or a power line. Anywhere but here. I have a quick, searing feeling that the entire weekend is going to be a series of still lifes starring me and my siblings standing awkwardly three abreast, each of us waiting for one of the others to make the first move.

  Nell, who is standing in the middle, takes my hand. I glance down and see that she’s also taken Elliot’s. And it’s unsettling only because my first thought isn’t Thank God. My first thought isn’t This is what it is to be in a family. Instead, my first thought is What if we’re not as close as I think we are? What if everything with everyone has been a series of gestures that suggest one thing but ultimately mean another?

  “Are you ready for this?” says Elliot.

  No, I think. No, I am not. I have no idea what the status of the back porch will be. The back porch, where Stan Pulaski earlier this morning shot himself. His body is gone. I know that much. Do I know where or how it was removed? No. But I know it isn’t here. Like so much of the information floating around in my brain, I can’t point to a definite answer, but I can rule out possibilities. What I mean is I have no idea what the back porch will look like. I have no idea if there’s blood or police lines. Are there always police lines when a gun is involved? Is there always doubt until a coroner’s report? Or are some things certain? Is a sixty-nine-year-old who’s found dead with a pistol in his hand and a hole in his forehead an automatically closed case? These are simply more things I don’t know the answers to. But I feel as though I should: I once wrote an entire season of Law & Order: SVU. They cut the check and everything. (A check I spent on redecorating the condo and upgrading my wardrobe. I could have used it to pay off the debt in one lump sum, but Peter said we were comfortable. He said there was a payment plan in place and we were fine. He said, “Spend it. Be happy.”) They filmed the first episode, but nobody liked the arc. What they liked was the witty dialogue. What they didn’t like was the number of unsolved cases. Olivia lost her foot in the line of fire. Ice T wound up gay.