All Adults Here(84)

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Elliot’s office door was closed. It was such a big house—Aidan and Zachary shared a room, and the other bedrooms, for additional children Wendy and Elliot might have had, were used for absurd purposes that they had brainstormed out of necessity: a home gym, a playroom, a library, for which they had purchased leather-bound, hardback books by the foot, books that they never even remotely intended to read. Astrid knocked on the door and waited for Elliot’s response. She heard him sigh, already exasperated, and then slowly turned the knob.

Elliot was golfing. That is, he was pretending to golf, with a video game on the TV screen. Astrid hated that he had a television in his office. That wasn’t an office, it was a clubhouse, a teenager’s fantasy of what grown-up life was like.

“Hi, Mom,” Elliot said, without turning around.

“How did you know it was me?” Astrid asked.

Elliot bent his elbows back in a faux swing, only a tiny controller in his hands, and whacked a pretend ball high into the simulacrum of a blue sky.

A score appeared on the screen, and then Elliot clicked a button, turning the screen gray; he tossed the controller onto his desk. “What’s up?”

“I wanted to talk to you about a couple of things, can I sit?” Astrid pointed toward the leather chair opposite Elliot’s desk. He nodded, and she sat primly, ankles crossed, with her purse on her lap.

Elliot picked up his phone off his desk and pressed some buttons. “Sure. I have a call soon, about a thing, but yeah.” He sat on the edge of his desk like an impatient high school principal.

Her heart was beating fast in her chest, thumping closer to the surface than usual. She looked at Elliot’s body, still as slim as when he was a boy. There was no fixed point in a person’s life, no definitive period. Yes, one’s friends from childhood always seemed like grown-up versions of children, and work colleagues were hard to imagine as adolescents with elaborate orthodontia, but when Astrid looked at her eldest son, she saw all of him at once: the sporty teen, the charming toddler, the inconsolable baby, the law student, the husband, the new father. All of them here, all of them exactly Elliot.

“I’m sorry,” Astrid said. Elliot had moved from the desk to stand before the window. She stood now behind him, both of them staring out at the lawn. Zachary and Aidan were outside, taking turns whacking Wiffle balls off a plastic T-ball stand. They swung their whole little bodies every time, nearly falling to the ground, no matter if they hit the ball or not. Wendy was sitting a safe distance away in an Adirondack chair. The boys were rough on people and things but not each other, and Astrid liked watching them wait patiently and rotate through their batting lineup of two.

Elliot stiffened. “Did Porter call you? Wendy?”

“About what? No, honey, I need to apologize to you.” She’d been doing it wrong; he didn’t understand. “It’s about Barbara Baker, actually. She was the one who told me that she’d seen you, do you remember?”

Elliot turned around to look at her. The sun was shining behind him, which put his face in shadow. “Jesus, Nicky was right, you are obsessed with Barbara Baker. It’s weird. Do I remember what?”

For a moment, Astrid wondered if she’d concocted the whole thing, if it had been a dream. But no: She could tell the difference between her imagination and her memory, at least most of the time. “You were in the seventh grade. I told you that someone had told me that they’d seen you. That someone had seen you. On the rocks, by the water. With that sweet boy, the one who moved away. And I told you to stop whatever it was that you were doing. That’s what I’m apologizing for.” It was too little, of course, too little and too late by decades. But still, Astrid felt something lift off her shoulders the moment the words were out of her mouth. “I’m sorry, my love. It must have had more to do with me than I realized. You weren’t doing anything wrong.”

Elliot cocked his head to one side. His face—what she could see—was impassive. “I don’t remember that,” he said. There was a thunk outside, but neither of them turned to look. The boys were cheering. One of them had connected and sent the ball sailing through the air. Wendy was clapping, and they could hear the sharp smacks of her flat palms.

“Your friend, Jack? His parents moved to California, to Berkeley, I’m pretty sure. Not too far from where Wendy’s from, actually. You don’t remember him?” Childhood was infuriating this way—she’d felt it over and over, when one of her children (all three of them!) would inevitably forget the words to a song she’d sung to them five hundred times, or a book they’d read, curled up together, six, seven, eight times a day, and then time passed and they had no recollection, and the information was stuck there in Astrid’s head, marked as important. Maybe this was just another Runaway Bunny, something that she’d weighed down with meaning over the years until it was an anvil around her neck, when really, it was her own anvil, not his. “Oh,” Astrid said. “Well. He was a boy, and you were close friends.” She stopped there.

“It’s okay, Mom,” Elliot said, finally. “It’s fine. I’m sure it wasn’t that bad, whatever it was.” Elliot’s phone began to vibrate on his desk, and he jerked himself away. “I have to take this.” He picked up the phone and said hello, and then he opened his office door and waited for his mother to leave. Astrid stepped into the hall and then Elliot closed the door behind her. She had done it. She had done it. Astrid lifted her chin and saw herself out.