In the silence, our housekeeper came around and refilled our water glasses. The sound was soothing, and—and I couldn’t focus. I kept staring at my father’s hands, thinking, I will not throw up. It would make too much noise. My father would hear and there would be consequences, perhaps he would comfort me or perhaps he would be mad, I never did know and there was no way I could control it then so I would control it now, my panic, and I would not throw up.
I was twelve. I wanted to make him proud. I swallowed.
Milo was watching our father’s hands as well. “It isn’t important for me to know the Belgian prime minister. Except that I could introduce you to him. Through his son.”
My father’s fingers were curling around his fork. They were spearing a piece of meat and bringing it to his lips.
“Then you understand why you’ll stay at Innsbruck,” my father said, and “Charlotte, eat your veal,” and that was that, and I did not throw up. Not that night.
Our trip to Lucerne coincided with Milo’s return to school. We took a guesthouse outside the town, small and “sweetly Scandinavian” and full of tatty, comfortable furniture. We would be there for his orientation week.
It was not economical for both of us to attend boarding school, my father had told me, and unlike me, Milo had already learned everything that Alistair Holmes had to teach him. He needed an advanced education. But I was taken along on these trips because I still had my uses. I knew how to listen. I knew how to remember, and how to report back the important parts to my father in digest. I was left to play with the children, to glean what I could about their parents.
That year, the year I was twelve, the children I played with weren’t precisely children. I spent the first week thrown together with the table-tennis prodigy Quentin Wilde. He was fifteen. His family had gotten him access to the school’s facility before classes had even started so that he would not miss a single day of his training regimen.
Quentin needed an audience, apparently, and I was to be said audience. I was told to watch him play. I was told to be suitably impressed. His mother was an American energy secretary of some sort and his father stayed at home to care for their children. I wasn’t sure what care he was providing, as Quentin and his siblings all attended boarding school, but it didn’t seem to extend to his son’s physical well-being. It was hard to focus on the table tennis, as I hated it, and as Quentin’s hair was, as his name suggested, wild. I couldn’t help thinking how badly it needed to be cut.
(Late the night before, so late that it was nearly morning, my parents had had an argument, and I’d been awake to hear it.
This is absurd and you know it, my mother had said. Even through the wall I could tell she was seething. I was good at listening through walls. I’d been trained, after all. You realize that it costs nearly my entire yearly salary to send Milo here. You don’t apply for aid—
Which would make our financial situation publicly known. Which would defeat the purpose of all of this. A slammed drawer, the same sound that had woken me. Another soft, hollow thud. Be rational, Emma.
I am being rational, she said, lower. Being a woman with a contrary opinion does not render me hysterical. The very least you could do would be to pretend, at least to your children, that they’re something more than stepping-stones for your career. That you love them.
For God’s sake, I believe in being honest with them—they know I love them—
Do you, now? Take some responsibility, Al! You’ve lied so much that you’re beginning to believe yourself. You were sacked from the ministry! You were caught selling information! It’s like you’re beginning to think that you’re the wronged party, and now you’re putting our children through the—the gauntlet of your expectations so that you can use them like some ladder to climb back to the top—
You’re mixing your metaphors, my father said coldly. His tone meant, You’re drunk, and perhaps she was. I didn’t know if that negated her argument.
You should want better for them. I do. I’ll take them and leave, I will—I’ll take Lottie, at least—don’t you see she’s skin and bones? Don’t you care?
I had never supposed my mother liked me this much. I allowed myself to feel pleasure for a few moments before my critical brain resurfaced. My father had taught me: People have motives, Lottie. People aren’t blindly altruistic. Even if all they’re getting is the thrill of self-righteousness, they’re seeking some reward.
But if my mother said he was wrong about my education, perhaps the things he’d told me during lessons were wrong as well. Still, I’d never heard her contradict him in person. Not ever. And now she was saying that he, too, had motives, and they were even less altruistic than most people’s, though I was also old enough to know that perhaps she was just emptying her arsenal at him as an offensive. (Arsenal. That was the football team my father had been discussing yesterday. I played with the idea for a moment. Arsenal, games, arsenals, losing—)
It wasn’t clear who was telling the truth, if anyone was at all.
You’re coddling her, my father was saying. She shows so little promise anyway. The Jameson diamonds? That was a sad accident, and you know it. You’d take her and in the name of her protection, you’ll spoil whatever potential she actually has. I won’t allow it.
Your expectations—
This time, the sound was glass, and shattering, and loud enough to wake my brother in the twin bed next to mine. Go to bed, Emma, my father said, and this time he said it, You’re drunk, and Milo reached out to touch my shoulder before he shut his eyes again.)
It’s important to know that I had this in mind.
Quentin needed a haircut. I knew how to cut mine; I did quite a nice job at it. I offered to cut his, and he accepted, and back at our empty guesthouse, taking my shears out from my kit, I stood in the bathroom alone. I knew I was a few steps away from breaking.
But I could fix it. Myself. I had a method: I let myself feel it, my crackling, sleepless brain, the boredom of watching some idiot boy hit a ball for hours and hours, the unfairness of spending my days in late July, in Switzerland, in a stuffy gymnasium when I could be reading the encyclopedia or blowing things up in the backyard, and the sad fact that even if my mother wanted me as a bargaining chip it was preferable to not being wanted at all, and then I scooped up those feelings the way I’d been taught and buried them in the ground below my feet.
For the first time, my method didn’t work.
I tried again. I stood there for some time, shivering with the force of it, and it rose up from my stomach this time, a clutching, sad sort of panic, and my thoughts moved faster. I felt it. Felt everything. I knew I wanted to erase myself from the top down, like a drawing, and that still I wanted someone to touch my edges and tell me that they loved me despite them. I tried again. I failed. I was crying, and marveling at the idea of myself crying (crying!), when Quentin found me.
Unexpectedly, he pulled me into a hug.
“Home stuff?” he asked when he let me go. I nodded. “Fuck them.”
There wasn’t much to say to that, so I didn’t.
His eyes roved over the bathroom counter, over my cosmetics kit. With one snakelike hand, he pulled out the bottle of Adderall. “You a fan?”
I considered. “Not particularly.”
“You’re a weird kid,” he said, and emptied a few of my pills into his palm. “Listen. I’ll trade you. We’re having a party later—me and Basil and Thom. You’re a little young, maybe, but if you want you can come along. Want a sampler?” He dug a bottle out of his backpack and shook out two little white pills. “Here,” he said, giving one to me, “cheers,” and tossed his back.
I hesitated.
“It makes all that shit you’re feeling go away,” he said, and I swallowed it down so quickly that he started laughing.