“How’s it going?” Mark said.
“Good,” he said. “Better. Better every day.” He smiled at his mother, his face naked, open, vulnerable. Oh, she had been astonished, completely staggered, holding him in her arms for the first time. She had not been herself at all, not the Claire she’d known her whole life, pressing him against her chest, holding him for dear life, that newborn boy. She did not even recognize herself as a mother. In a two-year period her own mother had died and she had nearly left her husband and now here was this impossible thing, this life, all packed into this teeny-tiny body no bigger than a throw pillow. And so she had held him and held him and held him, through babyhood and toddlerhood and beyond, long after it was necessary, carried him to bed, carried him through supermarkets and malls and airports, carried him from the car to the house lest his toddler feet falter, and then one day—maybe he was six? maybe seven?—she had put her little boy down and never picked him up again. If only she had known that day, that time, that it was the last time. But by then she had another little life she carried around (though not in the same way, if she was being honest, never with exactly the same fervor), and one day when that life, her little girl, was six or seven she put her down and never picked her up again either. Would it be better to know that moment was that moment? Or was it better not knowing? Better to know, as she lowered her boy onto his SpongeBob SquarePants sheets, that she would never lift him again? Better to know, when she and her mother talked idly about the coffee they always stopped for at that diner on I-35, that it was the last conversation they would ever have?
?
Her father and Nancy flew in late the night before Thanksgiving and came over early in the day on Thursday. Meredith was still in bed and Evan was out for a run when Claire answered the door. They had skipped their normal June trip west—the summer had been consumed by Evan’s surgeries—so she had not seen her father since the Christmas before, and watching him and Nancy slip off their winter coats in the front hall she felt it had been years, that she had lived a whole life since seeing them last, and she felt some emotion in her break ranks for a moment, as if this father might be a father to whom she could say, “Daddy, oh my god, you can’t believe what I’ve been through . . . ” But, instead, there were the typical exchanges and predictable expressions of support, her father with his one-armed hug for all and then Nancy, the stupendously loving Nancy, who surely would have hugged everyone with eight arms if only she had been born an octopus.
There was endless fussing over Evan when he returned from his run. How wonderful he looked! How handsome! The glasses were so becoming! Had he grown another six inches since they’d last seen him? Did the girls ever stop calling? He fielded the questions with ease. He seemed happy to discuss anything and everything with his grandfather and Nancy. His grandparents. They were indeed the children’s grandparents and to pretend otherwise, Claire knew, was unfair to everyone involved. Nancy and her father were already married by the time Evan was born. The children called them Grandma and Grandpa, and she did not move to correct them, because there was no correction that made sense.
The hardest part was that her children, when they were young, did not understand that Nancy was not her mother, that there had been another woman, a mother, who had raised her into adulthood but died before she could meet them. The number of times she had this conversation with both children, looking at the photo album: “Who’s that?” “That’s my mother.” “I thought Grandma was your mother.” And then she would have to tell them, yet again, break the awful news of her mother’s death to her children for the fiftieth time. They still forgot occasionally, even as teenagers, and sometimes asked Nancy questions about their mother as a child, and Nancy would cheerfully say, “You’ll have to ask your grandfather,” and Claire would mentally add, “because your mother was raised by another woman who died before you were born, and who was not afforded the immense pleasure of knowing you, her beautiful grandchildren, whom she would have utterly cherished.”
God, she thought, death was complicated. And exhausting. And apparently it just kept on being complicated and exhausting forever, probably until you yourself died and became an exhausting complication that someone else had to constantly negotiate.
Maybe, Claire decided, standing at her kitchen counter over the dead turkey, it was possible that she was a tiny bit depressed.
?
“It’s like my brain just knows,” Evan said to her father at the dining-room table. He held a fist out in front of him, representing the ball. “I’ve done it so many times that it’s hardwired. Catching’s harder than hitting, but—”
“You’ll get there,” her father said, a medical pronouncement based on absolutely nothing of fact, because her father had never been overly concerned with facts. “It’ll just take time. Like riding a bike.”
Mark looked across the table at her, the merest shade of a wry smile on his lips. Even he—even Mark—knew that catching a baseball half-blind was absolutely nothing like riding a bike.
“When does the season start?” Nancy said. “I want to plan our trip now.”
“There are some preseason games in February,” Evan said.
“Baseball in the snow!” her father exclaimed. “This stuffing is tremendous.”
“May I be excused?” Meredith asked flatly. She had disposed of much pretense of politeness over the last couple weeks, although the level of sourness displayed today, especially in front of her visiting grandparents, was something of a new low. She’d hardly said a word throughout the meal.
“Don’t you want seconds?” Mark asked. “There’s more of everything. There’s loads of stuffing.”
“I’m really tired,” Meredith said.
“It’s been a long day,” Nancy said, nodding. “Full of excitement.”
It had not been a long day, Claire thought, and there had been no excitement.
“Yeah,” Meredith said. “I mean, yeah. I’ll be back, okay? I’m just going to lie down for like ten minutes.”
She scooted her chair out and left the room, and the table fell silent, everyone slipping seamlessly into the we’re-not-talking-because-we’re-too-busy-eating charade. Well, Claire thought. Now you’ve seen her. Now you’ve put your eyes on her. Now you know.
“I think she looks terrific,” Nancy said after a minute. “Considering everything.”
“There are good days and bad days,” Mark said, pouring himself another glass of wine. Claire wondered if he really thought this was true or if this was just the whitewashed in-law version of things. Since it was Mark, it was entirely possible he had talked himself into believing that there were good days. She wondered which days, specifically, he had in mind.
“The poor girl,” Nancy said. “The other one, I mean. What’s her name?”