All Adults Here(86)
“Aaaahhh,” Rachel said, from the face cradle. “This is great.”
“It hasn’t even started yet,” Porter said. She slid her left arm out from under the sheet and reached into the gully between the two tables. “Rach,” she said. Rachel picked up her face and saw Porter’s hand, then slid her right arm out to meet it. They clasped fingers. Porter wanted to tell Rachel that she’d finally done it, gotten rid of Jeremy, but as far as Rachel knew, she already had long before.
“Ready?” one of the therapists said from the dark hallway, where they were waiting in total silence, like assassins.
“Ready,” Porter and Rachel said, in unison. They let go of each other’s hands, and Porter felt happy to be alone, together, each of them in their own bodies, with their unknown passengers floating inside, like ocean liners sailing across a dark ocean. Alone, together, and full.
Chapter 38
Parents Come Home
Astrid and Cecelia were planning to spend the afternoon making sign-up sheets for the newly reinvigorated Keep Local, Shop Small petition—Astrid bought half a dozen clipboards, and a brand-new box of pens. It was Astrid’s idea to reinvigorate. The plan was to assemble their materials at home, drive downtown, park the car, and spend the day walking up and down Main Street, collecting signatures. Cecelia had agreed to participate as part of her punishment, though it had become clear that all her punishments existed in quotation marks and could also just be described as pleasant time spent with friends and family. Cecelia had asked August to help, and he had agreed, as long as his parents didn’t need him at the shop. They were sitting at the kitchen table when the doorbell rang.
“Get that, would you?” Astrid asked. She pulled down her glasses and looked at Cecelia over the bridge of her nose.
Cecelia shrugged and slumped off her chair. She pulled open the heavy door without looking through the peephole, because no one in Clapham ever used a peephole, because if it was a homicidal maniac, the door was probably unlocked anyway, so why bother.
Her parents were standing on the oversize doormat, a small suitcase behind each of them. Her father had trimmed his beard, Cecelia could tell, and her mother’s skin looked brown and freckled, as it always did in late summer and early fall. Their mouths were open in frozen smiles, as if posing for a photograph.
“Mom? Dad?” Cecelia felt a lump in her throat and swallowed over and over again, willing it away.
Juliette stepped forward first, pulling her daughter close to her chest, and when Cecelia’s face was buried in her mother’s hair, and she smelled her perfume, and her natural deodorant that never worked very well, and the smell of her laundry detergent, a smell she’d never actually thought of before, until she smelled it right at this moment, that was when the lump got too big to swallow away, and she buried her face in farther, so that no one would notice that she had started to cry. Her father reached around her, closing her into the middle of a parent sandwich.
* * *
—
Cecelia had so rarely been in the Big House without her parents before moving in, but now it was strange to have them there, like suddenly having visitors to a zoo be able to climb over the barriers and into the cages. Cecelia wasn’t sure which animal she’d be—maybe one of the wild ones that looked just like a regular dog, so kids would get up to the edge of the enclosure, peer in, and quickly move on. After coming in and kissing Astrid hello, both of Cecelia’s parents followed her up to her bedroom.
Nicky walked the perimeter of the room, touching the curtains and the knobs on the dresser and the scalloped edges of the full-length mirror. He eventually settled in the cushioned window seat and sat with crossed legs, his hairy toes wiggling inside his sandals.
“I always liked this room. It has the best light,” Nicky said.
Juliette crawled on top of Cecelia’s bed with her. “This is a nice room. It’s big!” Cecelia let her mother pull her close, two spoons of the same size. Cecelia had her father’s face, her father’s hair, her father’s skin. Unless your father was Brad Pitt, that wasn’t what you wanted. Cecelia had always wanted more proof that her mother’s beauty had contributed to her makeup. Having her mother’s body so close reminded her of all the ways it hadn’t: the way Juliette’s ankles looked in sneakers, with a deep hollow on either side, a body part asking to be photographed for a magazine; the way Juliette’s shirts hung off her collarbones like a shirt on a hanger. Her body was never awkward unless she wanted it to be. Cecelia felt that exact way about herself, only perfectly inverted. She was always awkward. Even being hugged by her mother, Cecelia wasn’t sure where to put her arms.
“So who is this girl at school?” Nicky asked. “What happened?”
“Do we have to talk about it already? She’s just a girl who is not very nice,” Cecelia said. “I know I shouldn’t have hit her. I wasn’t planning on it. And I do have self-control, most of the time.”
“And she’s Jeremy Fogelman’s daughter?” Nicky asked, a curious eyebrow lifted.
“Who’s Jeremy Fogelman?” Juliette asked, into her daughter’s neck.
“Porter’s high school boyfriend. A human lacrosse stick.” Nicky shook his head and rubbed his cheeks, as if it would will his beard to grow faster.