All Adults Here(87)

“What’s lacrosse?” Juliette asked. “It’s like hockey?”

Cecelia loved the sound of her mother saying English words she wasn’t used to—hoe-key.

“Yes,” Nicky said. “Less violent, more likely to wear boat shoes.”

“Hmm,” Juliette said. “Okay. But what did she say to you, amour? What did she do?”

“She said some really mean things to my friend, August.” Cecelia had resolved not to tell August’s secret, which made it hard to talk about, but she also thought that August would understand. Not at school, of course, just with her own parents, so that they would understand why she had done such a thing. She closed her eyes and pulled her mother’s arms tighter around her body. After a few minutes of pretending to sleep, Cecelia actually did feel herself begin to drift in and out, and she pictured herself floating on a raft in between islands. Every time she got close to one, she would bounce off some undersea rocks and head back out to sea.

At home, when things got so bad that she actually wanted to talk to her parents about it, Cecelia and her father would sit on opposite sides of the bathroom door and talk, their voices only slightly muffled by the wood. It was the only actual door in the apartment. Right now her eyelids were the wood. Cecelia heard her father pad across the rug and then felt the bottom corner of the mattress sag when he sat down by her feet.

Cecelia hadn’t wanted to say anything about Katherine—it sounded like envy, she knew, to have a complaint about a friend’s older boyfriend. That’s what Katherine said, that Cecelia was jealous, that she wished guys were trying to meet her online. It had happened before, people sending Katherine messages. But this was the first time she’d actually met up with someone. Katherine said that Cecelia didn’t understand because she wasn’t a woman yet—she still wanted to play make-believe. Two weeks later, Katherine told Cecelia that the guy had locked her in his apartment and masturbated in front of her, while she sat on the couch next to him. She’d tried to make it sound funny, like she was in on the joke, and this was what adults did, but Cecelia knew that it wasn’t, and she wasn’t, and it was most certainly not okay. It was so hard to tell someone what they didn’t want to hear, and Cecelia had agonized about telling her parents, knowing that it would turn into her telling more and more people, until she might as well have stood outside Katherine’s window with a bullhorn. It was hard enough when it was your own story, but telling someone else’s? Cecelia knew it was both indefensible and the only truly right thing to do. She had to betray her friend to make sure nothing worse happened to her. What would happen to August if she whispered to her father? Would her mother make her repeat it, not understanding? Would they call the school? Cecelia wanted to be good. She wanted to have good thoughts and be surrounded by good people. August (Robin!) was her friend, and she wanted to do right by him. By her. She wanted to do right by her.

Cecelia felt her father lie down, too, his head at her feet. The rest of his body folded along the bottom edge of the bed. Her mother shifted to make room for him, and Cecelia exhaled, knowing that parts of their bodies were touching, in silence, and that they had to be feeling things too. It was too enormous to imagine what, like trying to imagine what babies remembered from the womb.

“I’m so sorry, honey,” her father said. He propped himself up, which Cecelia could see through her eyelashes.

“She’s asleep, love,” Juliette said. “Let her sleep.”

Cecelia felt the bed shift as her father reached for her mother’s foot.

“I just hate feeling like we let her down,” Nicky said. He exhaled loudly. “This never would have happened if we’d kept her in school. We could have fought with those fucks. God, I hate Katherine’s parents. And we let them win.”

Cecelia’s heart was beating fast. Her father never said anything bad about anybody. And he never apologized, either. The downside of Buddhism, as Cecelia understood it, and also of years of therapy, was that no one ever seemed to think anything was their fault. Everything was always open to everyone else’s feelings, or the ultimate balance of the universe. If the point of life was to let things go, then you never had to be sorry about anything.

“It’s okay, amour,” Juliette said. “Come.”

Nicky rolled onto all fours and crawled up the side of the bed. Juliette inched closer to Cecelia, and Nicky lay down behind her, three anchovies in a full-size tin.

Cecelia let herself drift in and out of her parents’ breath. It didn’t matter that they were late or that they had done the wrong thing. What mattered was that they were sorry, and that they had come for her.





Chapter 39





Team Kids, Part One



There were teams in every family, alliances that buoyed the affiliated over the tides of any given trauma or daily boredom. Everyone needed a second-in-command, a buddy, a consigliore. When Elliot was born, it was Astrid and Elliot together against the world. When Porter was born, Russell and Elliot became a duo so that Astrid could feed Porter a thousand times a day, and change her diapers on the wobbly wooden console table in her bedroom. The family shifted like that for years, until all three children were school age and no one had an immediate claim on their mother that overrode the others’ needs. Porter and Nicky were thick as thieves, always banding together when a family vote was necessary: if it was time to stop for the bathroom, whether to watch Alice in Wonderland or Robin Hood for the trillionth time, who got to sit in the back back of the car. Of course Nicky went to see Porter first. Astrid could only have been miffed if she’d been surprised. It didn’t matter—he was here now, under her roof. It wasn’t that Astrid felt intimidated by her youngest child, not exactly, but she did feel like by moving away, Nicky had cast doubt on all her parenting choices. It seemed not only likely but probable that he understood something (things!) that she didn’t.