I mentally scramble for a way to get her out before the couple upstairs starts grunting and moaning again. Is it Dad? I can’t even convince myself that my father is not upstairs fucking another woman. There’s no other logical explanation.
“Mother, I want to tell you everything.” I leave my suitcase by the elevator and walk to the front door. “Let’s go grab coffee. That little place up the street. Pano’s?”
“Coffee?” Mother has a way of injecting tiny amounts of scorn into just about anything, including the little laugh she offers at my suggestion. “You just got here. I just walked in the door. Why would we—”
“Fuck, yes!” The exclamation comes from upstairs.
Mother freezes and whatever drops of scorn she was poised to deliver congeal on her painted lips. Her eyes slowly climb the staircase before they return to meet mine. She looks as self-assured as she ever has, but there’s a film over her eyes as fragile as blown glass.
“Mother, we could—”
“It’s fine, Bristol.” She nods to the suitcase by the elevator. “Take your bags upstairs and we’ll talk at dinner about your trip to see your brother.”
“But, Mother, we should—”
“Bristol, my God! Can’t you just listen for once? Can’t you just for once do exactly what I ask you to do and not make my life any harder?”
It isn’t true. It isn’t fair. I haven’t made her life harder. Not ever. I’ve accepted the nannies who raised me when she and my father took Rhyson on the road. I lay on the couches of New York’s finest therapists when Mother abdicated walking me through my “issues” as a child. I was an honor student. When she asked me to do the stupid debutante thing with the sons and daughters of all her Upper Eastside friends, I did it. I’m in an Ivy League college, like she wanted. If anything, I’ve bent over backward, pretzeled myself to please her when I could.
I turn to leave, but a door upstairs flies open, and a blonde girl, maybe a year or two older than I am, rockets down the hall. Nina Algier, a brilliant flute player and one of my parents’ clients, stops and stares at us over the railing above, hair wild, eyes wide and horrified. Tall and coltish, she’s a rising star in the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She looks back over her shoulder as my father joins her there.
Rhyson and I share his dark coloring, taking only Mother’s gray eyes. He looks so much like Rhyson and Uncle Grady, handsome, distinguished, with just a little gray at the temples. His eyes flick to me before moving on. I never feel like I even register for him. I’m not musical; therefore, I’m worthless. That is how it’s always felt. The hardness in his eyes softens just a bit when he sees my mother, maybe with remorse. I’ve never seen my father sorry for anything, so I wouldn’t recognize it on him.
“Angela,” he says so softly that his voice barely reaches us by the door. “You’re home.”
I bounce a look between my father and my mother and Nina Algier, certain that I’m in an alternative universe. That’s all? That’s fucking all he has to say?
Nina, who has been as still as an ice sculpture to that point, galvanizes into action, rushing down the stairs. Her white silk blouse is half-buttoned and hanging from the waistband of her skirt, and there’s a flush painted on her cheeks when she cannons past us. She smells of my father’s cologne.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Gray,” she mumbles, avoiding our eyes and fumbling with the door handle until it finally opens and she springs free.
“Go to your room, Bristol,” my mother says, her voice the same low, even tone it’s always been. “We’ll talk about your trip later.”
I’m torn between railing on my father, comforting my mother, and getting the hell out of here. I take door number three.
Or rather I take the elevator. As soon as I step off and start toward my bedroom, I hear their raised voices. Their anger, their contention, it was a sound I had never heard before that moment. Not even when Rhyson sued to emancipate did they present anything other than a united front. A cold front, but always united. My parents aren’t prone to displays of affection or expressions of love, so I never expect the emotion that rises from downstairs before I hear the front door slam.
Damn this day. It has ravaged me.
I flop onto my bed and close my eyes. My room, which has been empty for months, is cold. New York is cold. It was only last night that I waded nearly naked into the waves, a hedonist seeking my pleasure with a beautiful man I thought I knew in no time. Even after only a handful of days, I thought I knew. How he got close enough to break my heart so quickly, I’m not sure, but I know it is not whole. Maybe I fell for the possibility of him. The idea that there was actually someone out there who saw me, flaws and all, and would accept me. “Got” me. That must be it. And yet, I can already feel those places around my heart that I stiffened and starched to forget him . . . softening. Giving some quarter and asking me if I shouldn’t let him explain. If maybe he does deserve that second chance.
“Weak bitch.” I’m the only one in the room to hear the admonishment. I’m the only one who needs to.
Exhaustion must have demanded her due, because I don’t even recall falling asleep. When I wake, the room is darker and colder. I’m not in LA, the land of sand and sun. It’s still New York, and it’s still cold, and maybe that’s as
it should be. I slip out of the wrinkled clothes I flew and slept in and put on leggings and a Columbia sweat- shirt before padding down the stairs in search of food. Surely Bertie made something for me.
I’m in the kitchen, foraging between the pantry and the fridge, when I hear the weeping. I drop a drumstick on the counter and follow that sorrowful sound. Seeing your mother cry for the first time is always hard for a child. I don’t know that it’s any easier because I’m twenty-one years old. I can’t recall ever seeing her tears, not this way. Not sprawled on the living room floor surrounded by shattered glass and spilled liquor.
“Mother, let me help you.” I reach for her, but she wrenches away.
“Leave.” A broken sob drowns the word. “God, why can’t you just leave me alone like everyone else does?”
Her words are always sharp, but I think she sharpens them to their finest point for me. And they always find their mark, bull’s-eye in my heart.
“Get up.” I grab her arm despite her efforts to keep it from me. “There’s glass everywhere.”
“Bertie will get it,” she slurs.