The Arrivals: A Novel Read online

  In the moment, you were often too tired to enjoy watching your children turn into people. It was such a busy time, so demanding. There was always somebody with a science project due the next day, always a lesson or a practice to get to, always a meal to cook or a stray mitten to find.

  And then suddenly everyone had cleared out, flung themselves into the big world, two of them to New York City, Lillian to Massachusetts, calling, sure, e-mailing often, even visiting, but they were gone, truly gone, replaced by the silence—beautiful and blessed, of course, but still, sometimes, she had to admit, strange and unnatural.

  She heard a footfall on the stairs.

  “Mom? You down here?” Lillian appeared, holding the baby, walking carefully. Philip was wrapped in a pale green blanket; he was sleeping with one red fist raised toward his head, as though he had succumbed to slumber in the middle of a cheer.

  Most of Lillian’s baby weight was gone, except for a soft part around her normally slender middle, but Ginny could see that her face looked rather drawn and gray; the lavender circles around her eyes were still there. She wore no makeup, and there was a child’s red barrette holding her hair haphazardly back from her face. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” said Ginny. “Overseeing the laundry.”

  Lillian made a small face of disapproval or irritation. “I almost slipped on the stairs,” she said. “Maybe you should think about carpeting them.”

  “Carpeting the cellar stairs?”

  “Maybe. Oh, I don’t know. Don’t listen to me. I slept for about a minute last night.”

  “You poor thing,” said Ginny.

  “And I’m dying for a coffee—but that goes right into the breast milk, and it’s not worth the risk, messing him up for sleep—”

  “Surely a little bit won’t hurt him. Half a cup?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “I could put another pot on.”

  Lillian sighed deeply and dramatically. “Don’t go to the trouble, just for me. Only if you were going to make some.”

  “Well, I wasn’t. I’ve had mine.”

  “Then never mind.”

  “But it’s no trouble. It’s just coffee.”

  “I don’t know. No, forget it. I don’t want it.”

  For an instant Ginny saw the teenaged Lillian standing before her, with her neon earrings and her identically dressed friend Heather, both of their expressions slightly derisive.

  “Sweetheart,” she said, and Lillian’s shoulders twitched.

  Ginny peered at the baby. “Sleeping,” said Lillian. “Until I put him down. Then—bam! Awake.”

  “Try the car seat.”

  “I did! He woke up.”

  “The Pack ’n Play?”

  “Same.”

  “The BabyBjörn?”

  “Hurts my back.”

  “Adjust the straps?”

  “Tried. Didn’t help.”

  The dryer buzzed. Ginny rose from the chair and opened the door, pulling out the warm towels. “So delicious,” she said to Lillian. “Isn’t it? A pile of warm towels. Smell.”

  “I guess,” said Lillian, not smelling. She looked down at the baby and chewed the outside of her lip.

  “Oh, honey. He needs to learn to sleep by himself. Otherwise you’ll end up with—”

  “With what?”

  “With a very grumpy disposition.”

  “For me or him?”

  “Either. Both.”

  “Ha.” Lillian rolled her eyes. “I might be stuck with that anyway.” She surveyed the basement, the various mountains and piles. “What are you keeping all this around for—all this junk?”

  Ginny ignored the question. “It’s okay to let him cry a little bit, you know. So he gets used to going to sleep. I did that with all of you children.”

  “I bet you did,” said Lillian, smiling wanly.

  Ginny shook out one of the towels and picked a ball of lint off it, not looking at Lillian.

  “I know you’re right,” said Lillian. “I know that, I do. I’m just not sure how to do it. It was so much easier with Olivia. Why was it so much easier?” She sat down heavily on the last basement stair, the motion disturbing Philip briefly but not fully awakening him.

  Ginny thought about that. She wiped at the outside of the detergent bottle, where some of the contents had leaked. “Well, she was all you had to do. She was your universe.” Lillian looked pained. “You could afford to hold her all day.”

  “I know.”

  “But this one… you just can’t. You’ve got too many other things to do. You’ve got to put him down.”

  Lillian took a deep breath. “I know. I mean, I know that, in my head. But he’s still so small. And it just feels wrong, when everything is so—”

  “So what?” Ginny folded the last of a stack of towels and moved the stack into the waiting laundry basket, then moved the basket to the foot of the stairs.

  “I don’t know,” said Lillian. “Nothing. I’m just tired. I’m so tired, Mom. Do you mind if I sneak in a nap?”

  “Of course not,” said Ginny, minding a great deal. She had wanted to put the laundry away, then straighten the kitchen, then pop out to Shaw’s for more fruit. Olivia had eaten it all.

  “If you mind, I’ll go ask Dad.”

  “I don’t mind,” said Ginny. “Not at all. And anyway Dad’s in the yard with Olivia.”

  “Oh,” said Lillian. Then, “That’s sweet. He’s good with her.”

  “He is,” said Ginny, smiling hard at the towels before she turned to take Philip from Lillian. She watched her daughter carefully. She looked… what? More than tired, beyond exhausted. Defeated. Ginny felt a swell of tenderness, of protectiveness. It wasn’t easy, any of it.

  “Chin up, my girl!” she said. It was an exhortation left over from her own mother, which in turn Ginny said often to her children. They had uniformly disliked it when she’d said it to them, had given over to sneers and unadulterated sighs. And still she’d kept saying it, believing, somehow, as her mother had before her, in the refrain, in the ability of people to will themselves out of despair.

  “Right,” said Lillian. Ginny watched her slow progress up the stairs, then turned her attention to the baby in her arms.

  “Philip,” she said softly. She sat again in the old rocker. If she closed her eyes, if she ignored the damp smell of the basement and the chug of the washing machine, she could imagine that she was in one of her children’s bedrooms sometime in the distant past. She adjusted Philip so that his head fit exactly in the crook of her arm. He shifted but remained asleep; his breath came steadily, resolutely. His head was hard against her arm.

  You never forgot, once you’d had children, how to hold a baby. You could almost never hold a baby without believing, for an instant, that it was yours. Philip’s weight in her arms was steady, unwavering. She looked at the tiny web of blood vessels on his eyelids, at his pale lashes, at his small pursed lips. Philip.

  Rachel wasn’t expecting anyone on a Sunday so when her door buzzer first sounded she ignored it. When Marcus moved out she had scratched his name off the label next to the buzzer downstairs and in the process—out of negligence or anger or overzealousness, or possibly all three—had scratched off part of her name. Since then she got the occasional errant ring.

  She had been out earlier in the day for the paper and a coffee. She hadn’t bothered to do anything with her hair, and she hadn’t taken any care with her clothes. She found a crumpled pair of yoga pants and a tattered sweatshirt in the bottom of her closet, and these she donned quickly, almost haughtily, as though by wearing them she was somehow punishing the society that had wronged her. She was reading an article about the upcoming Tony Awards in the Times. In the Heights, August: Osage County, Passing Strange. She longed to go to the Tony Awards. She longed for her job as a casting assistant to bring her someday close enough to that glittering stage. She put down the arts section and picked up the magazine: a lengthy article about equal paren
ting. She studied the photographs of pint-sized violin players and children frolicking across large green lawns while their parents looked on adoringly. This had even less to do with her. She put it down.

  The buzzer sounded again. She pushed the button on the intercom and waited.

  “Babe?”

  It was Marcus.

  “Babe? Are you there?”

  “Marcus?” she said. She felt a flutter in her chest; she had to put her hand on top of her heart and press down to rid herself of the sensation of impending cardiac arrest.

  “Yup. Are you going to let me up? Or should I stand here until the lady with the dancing dogs comes in?” The lady with the dancing dogs had been their neighbor; she had a pair of poodles that sometimes walked half a block on their hind legs. True story.

  Trying to ignore the waves of trepidation that washed over her, she pressed to let Marcus in.

  Their previous meeting, a month earlier, had been disastrous, from Rachel’s point of view. Marcus had come to sign a paper that allowed Rachel to close a joint checking account they had opened—stupidly, nearsightedly, it turned out, but nonetheless there it was. Marcus worked as a sales rep for a wine distributor; he had brought a bottle of a new Malbec for her to taste. Taste it she did, and then she tasted more, and soon enough they had tasted most of the bottle, and instead of dealing with the bank account they had gone to bed.

  After, they lay on the sheets that she bought six months prior, when they moved into the apartment together. Seeing Marcus once again in the bed reminded her of the unfamiliar state of bliss and joyfulness in which she had resided for a short time back then, and the sense that accompanied it, that after so many years of searching she had found what she’d been looking for.

  She hadn’t, of course. It turned out that Marcus, despite his sexiness, his generosity, his humor, and the talent he had for laying to rest the panic that occasionally surfaced inside her, was happy to leave things as they were forever. He was happy, indeed, to live eternally the life of twenty-somethings (though he had passed thirty and she was quickly approaching it), that life being a life of permanent impermanence, of being connected but not tethered, allied in mind and spirit but not in name.

  One day he had said this to her: “I can stay forever, just like this. Forever, Rachel. Or I can go now. But you’ve got to stop pushing for marriage.”

  She took a deep breath and, without looking at Marcus, said, “I understand.”

  She swallowed. “And I think you should go now.”

  She hadn’t really thought, as she said it, that he would.

  But he had.

  He moved out one Saturday morning three months ago, taking with him not only a giant brown duffel bag and the blender in which he made his protein smoothies, but also her ability to pay the rent without a considerable—really, a very considerable, so considerable that if she thought about it too much she developed an ache along the edges of her brain—strain on her finances.

  The sex a month ago was not, she was certain, disastrous from Marcus’s point of view. Nothing was ever disastrous from Marcus’s point of view, and it was that blitheness of spirit, the devil-may-care attitude, the antidote to her neuroticism, that she missed the most. (Neuroticism? She had not grown up neurotic, had she? No, certainly not. So when had she become so?)

  He tapped softly on the door, but she had unlocked it after she buzzed him in so it swung open. He looked freshly showered and alluringly tousled, carrying his familiar navy blue gym bag.

  “Oh,” she said, looking at the bag. “I haven’t been to the gym in ages.”

  “I figured. I was looking for you.”

  “You were?” Her heart lifted briefly.

  “Yeah. I was going to ask you—”

  “Yes?” She felt herself stand straighter.

  “I thought I left my sneakers behind—the Nike ones, that you use with the iPod?”

  “Oh.” The only thing Marcus had left behind was a red T-shirt, faded to a sort of apologetic pink, that bore the name of a Fourth of July road race he had run in his hometown several years ago. This T-shirt Rachel had folded carefully and placed in the bottom drawer of her dresser, underneath a pile of tank tops. She had no intention of returning it.

  “No,” she said. “No, sorry.”

  “You sure?”

  “Sure. You could have called, though. To ask.” She thought of adding, I wouldn’t have thought you were calling to woo me back. But didn’t.

  “I know,” he said. “But I was in the neighborhood. And I thought—” He looked toward the bedroom. She crossed her arms.

  “You thought?”

  He moved closer. He smelled good; she had forgotten, in the months since she’d lived without him, how good a freshly showered man could smell, and how innocent.

  “Listen,” he said. “I—”

  “You have to go,” she said. “Marcus? You have to go.”

  “Aw, come on, Rach,” he said. “Don’t be like that.”

  “Be like what?” she said in a strangled voice.

  “Why can’t we just have a little fun? That was fun, last time. Right?” He put his hand to the back of her neck and stroked softly with one finger.

  “Yes,” she said truthfully. “That was fun.”

  “So why can’t we have a little more fun?”

  “We can’t have a little fun,” she said, “because to me it wouldn’t be fun, again. To me it would be serious.” Still she didn’t move away.

  “Rachel,” he said, sighing regretfully, dropping his hand from her neck, moving backward. “That’s your problem, you know? That’s your biggest, one and only problem. You take things too seriously. You’re missing out by doing that.” He shrugged, a small, familiar spasm of his shoulders, and she looked away, because she knew that to let him see her crying now would be a humiliation she couldn’t bear to suffer. She looked steadily out the window while he gathered his bag, took one last look around for his shoes, kissed her on the cheek, and let himself out the door.

  Lillian didn’t nap. Instead she called Heather, who had grown up around the corner and who had eventually, along with her husband and two sons, taken over her parents’ house when they retired to a planned community in Arizona. Once Philip fell asleep she collected him from Ginny and deposited him in the car seat. He was dozing there when Heather arrived.

  “Well,” said Heather, dropping her purse on a dining room chair, peering into the car seat. “He’s perfect, Lil.”

  “I know,” said Lillian, smiling. “He is, right?”

  “Look at his fingers! The way they float in the air while he’s sleeping. I forgot about that.”

  “I know,” said Lillian. “He’s delicious. I swear to God I could eat him.”

  “So could I!” Heather practically shouted. “So could I.” She took a step back and reached into her bag for a package wrapped in blue tissue paper.

  “Oh!” said Lillian. “But you already—”

  “I know. But it’s just a little something. For you, really, more than for Philip.”

  Lillian rustled the tissue paper and pulled out a small square black box. She opened it and found inside a gold charm in the shape of a boy’s face in profile.

  “Oh, Heather—”

  “Someone gave me one for Ethan,” said Heather. “And I don’t know, I’m not a big charm bracelet person, but I just loved it. See the little cowlick there? God. It just breaks your heart, or something.”

  “I love it,” said Lillian.

  “It’s engravable,” said Heather proudly. “I was going to get it engraved for you, there’s a place in Winooski that’s actually pretty good, but I wasn’t sure what you’d want it to say.”

  “Heather,” said Lillian, and she could feel a quiver beginning in her lip.

  “That’s a lie,” said Heather. “I just ran out of time, really. I would have put his initials, something simple like that, but—”

  “Heather.”

  “Oh, come on. You’re not going to cry.
Are you? Are you, Lilly? It’s just a charm.”

  “No, I’m not going to cry,” said Lillian, but she could feel her eyes filling, and she turned her head away and looked steadily at her shoulder.

  “But, then, you’re nursing… the hormones.”

  “It’s not the charm,” said Lillian. “It’s not the hormones.”

  “Then what?”

  Lillian shook her head. “Heather,” she said, and she began to cry in earnest. “Heather, I left Tom.”

  “Oh, sweetie,” said Heather. She reached out to Lillian, but Lillian, having heard the back door open, held up her hand.

  “Let’s just go for a walk,” she whispered. “Let’s go.” She composed her voice enough to call out to her parents. “Philip’s right here,” she called. “He’s sleeping! Just keep an ear out. We’re going for a walk.”

  In the yard next door, Mr. Anderson, who had seemed to Lillian to be old when she was in junior high school and now was positively decrepit, was poking at weeds with a long metal stick.

  “Rachel!” he called over. “Out for a walk?”

  “Hello, Mr. Anderson,” she answered. “It’s Lillian. Rachel’s my little sister.” He cupped a hand to his ear and she shook her head and waved and walked on.

  They set off toward the lake, which lay before them, calm and glittering, inviting.

  “Say what you want about the ocean,” said Lillian. “And Tom says plenty, Massachusetts boy that he is. But I love this lake more than anything.”

  She and Heather had learned to swim in this lake, the mothers in the neighborhood pooling their money to pay for the services of an instructor. “Remember sitting barefoot at that picnic table?” said Heather, pointing. “Chewing a sandy peanut butter sandwich?”