Her children asleep, her father shut up in his study, Lu goes to AJ’s room on the third floor. The linens have been updated, but it is otherwise as he left it, even as the rest of the house has been transformed around it. The transformation continues, in fact, with no end in sight. Her father seems to have become compulsive about renovation the way some women become addicted to plastic surgery. Since Lu’s return, he has remade almost every square foot of this old house and built an addition, essentially a new wing, which includes rooms for the twins and Lu. (Her childhood bedroom, which adjoins her father’s suite, is now the study to which he retreats at night, sequestering himself from all the noise that accompanies bathtime and bedtime.) But their father wants AJ to decide how his room should be redone, and AJ keeps putting him off. Lu wonders if it’s the very fervency of her father’s redecorating that keeps AJ from making any decisions. AJ has sworn off material things. Sort of, kind of. But this time capsule of a room is to Lu’s advantage tonight. She quickly finds AJ’s high school yearbook, the Glass Hour, on the shelf above his desk, a modular unit that Lu envied terribly as a kid. She envies it now—this kind of midcentury modern design is back in style and she yearns for a more modern-looking house, but her father continues to decorate in the traditional style that her mother preferred. Stout, dark wood, rich, soft fabrics that run to hunter green and burgundy.
Lu flips through the yearbook. As a ten-year-old left behind after her brother’s high school graduation, she used to study this book as if it were a sacred text, wondering if she would have as glorious a high school career as her brother. (She did not, although she finally cracked the code of social life and enjoyed the last two years.) There must be at least a dozen photographs of AJ throughout the yearbook. and it is filled with affectionate scrawls of inside jokes from dozens of his classmates. “Ach du lieber, Mrs. Bitterman!” “Still bummed we never made RP room.” “AJ Brant for President 2000.” How typical that one of AJ’s friends would calculate the first year that he could legally run for president.
But the only place she can find Rudy Drysdale is on the masthead, one of four staff photographers. And in the yearbook staff’s group photo, he is listed as absent. He was at least a year behind AJ, maybe two. Still, he almost certainly took some of these photos of AJ—in his soccer uniform, his leg bent at a seemingly impossible angle; as Sancho Panza, looking up worshipfully at Davey’s Don Quixote; surrounded by his group in a candid photo in the cafeteria. Were they a clique? Was that word even used at the time?
Penelope and Justin are only eight, and Lu already has seen so many dynamics she thought wouldn’t happen for years—mean girls, bullies, this terrible anxiety about fitting in. And there is so much concern about autism these days. Until the twins turned five or so, the pediatrician was forever asking Lu about laughter and eye contact and whether the twins would tolerate being touched. “Their father died when they were three,” Lu said time and again. “They come by their seriousness and anxiety pretty honestly.”
She bet her father was never asked these same questions about Lu, although her circumstances were similar. Adele Brant had died in childbirth. Well, not in. She gave birth. She died a week later. As a child, Lu clung to the lie—insisted on the lie—that her mother’s heart condition had not been affected by this clearly unplanned pregnancy. Lu was born, a week later her mother died. No connection, no cause and effect, just a series of discrete events. Yep, sure, that makes sense. Even as all the other myths of childhood—Santa, Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny—fell away, the Brant family maintained this well-intentioned fiction. Her father even insisted that he was the one to blame for his wife’s death. Not because Adele Brant got pregnant against her doctor’s advice, but because her husband made her move to Columbia, a place to which she could not be reconciled, no matter how hard her husband tried.
And he tried so hard, starting with this very house. If Lu says nothing as the bills come in—Italian tiles, bathtubs that cost as much as small cars, custom rugs, top-of-the-line appliances for the kitchen where Teensy continues to make most of their meals—it’s because she realizes her father is trying to make good on a forty-five-year-old promise. He lured his young wife to Columbia, saying he would do anything to make her happy here. He failed. With Lu and the twins, he has a second chance to make someone happy in this house.
But is he happy? Was he ever happy? she wonders. Then she feels guilty, as grown children often do, for how seldom they have bothered to consider a parent’s happiness.
THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
My January second birthdate seemed tragic when I was young, the cornerstone of all my social failures. If my birthday fell on a school day, it was always the first day back from the holiday, the least happy day of the year. And if it were a Saturday or Sunday, it was still an awkward time. People have no energy for celebrations after January first. Besides, my father didn’t know how to throw a party for a girl. With AJ, who had an April birthday, he told him to invite all the boys in his class, and that was that. They played in the yard for three hours, Teensy served a cake, then threw everyone out.
When my father told me I should invite all the girls in my class over for an indoor party for my seventh birthday, I saw the pitfalls. There would be no theme, no organization. If there were games, they would be too babyish. The favors would be found wanting. No, there were just too many ways to fail.
“I don’t like all the girls,” I said. “Some of them are mean to me.” That wasn’t exactly true. All the girls were mean to me. And most of the boys.
“The Brants don’t believe in leaving people out. All or nothing.”
“You’re leaving the boys out,” I said.