Lucy by the Sea (Amgash, #4)(56)

Then I asked her about her sister. “She’s gotten skinny again,” I said. And Becka’s face changed, she looked away from me, and then she said with a big sigh, “Mom, Chrissy’s going through a rough patch, that’s all I’m allowed to say.”

“A rough patch? What kind of rough patch?”

“Mom.” Becka looked at me with her large brown eyes. “I’m not supposed to tell you, so I’m not going to.”

It was hard, after that, to enjoy myself. But Becka cooked us dinner and she talked and talked, and she was so Becka; she did make me happy.

“You sleep on my bed, I’ll sleep on the couch,” she said, and she dragged a quilt from a closet and got the couch all made up, and I said, “That looks really cozy, actually,” and she said, “You want to sleep there? Sleep wherever you want, Mom. Seriously.”

So I slept on the couch, and I was surprised that I slept—but it is because of Becka that I did. She really did make the world seem like a cozy place. In the morning she said, “Okay, so in four days I will come into the city and we will see each other again, and then when Dad gets there, I’ll come back and see him too.”

We hugged and hugged as Chrissy sat behind the wheel of her car waiting for me to get in.





ii


When I stepped into Chrissy and Michael’s house, I was surprised to find that I had the reaction I always have to the houses of other people. I mean, I did not like it. I had been inside this house a couple of times before when Michael’s parents had lived in it; David had been there with me as well, once, when Chrissy became engaged to Michael. But stepping through the side door now, watching the thin legs of my daughter as she went before me, I felt a sense of dismalness.

The house seemed terribly grown up. The curtains that hung at the windows were beige with golden-colored strips weaving through them. The sun came through the window of the kitchen, which made the refrigerator and the stove—both aluminum-seeming—gleam. The table was dark wood, and I thought: This is not unlike Catherine’s house, Chrissy’s grandmother. When I first saw Catherine’s house, I was still practically a child, and I was astonished by the beauty of it. But this did not astonish me, it depressed me.

Michael walked into the kitchen and said, “Hi, Lucy, so nice to see you,” and we hugged. I felt his arms on my back; he was really hugging me.



* * *



—

Michael made dinner while Chrissy and I sat at the table and talked. She spoke mostly of her work with the ACLU, and I thought: She is not talking about anything real. And I think by that I mean that she was not talking about how she felt, but she was pleasant and we all ate dinner at their dark table, and I did notice that Chrissy had just a salad and three glasses of red wine. Afterward they took me upstairs to their spare bedroom and we all said goodnight.



* * *



—

A few hours later I heard Chrissy speak to Michael in a voice I would never have thought could be hers. She said, “I don’t believe you couldn’t even take the garbage out!” She did not know I heard, I had stepped out of my room to get a glass of water in the bathroom to take a sleeping tablet, and standing at the top of the stairs I heard her in the kitchen saying this to Michael, and her voice was so terribly—unbelievably—harsh. Michael only murmured something, and then I heard a cupboard door slam and I went into the bathroom quietly.

I thought to myself: She has lost all respect for him.

But in the morning, she drove me to the train station, and she said, all smiles, “Okay, enjoy New York, I will see you there in two days!”

Michael had just said goodbye at the door, quiet, as he often was. I had hugged him goodbye, and he did not hug me as hard as he had when I’d arrived.



* * *



—

The train ride into the city seemed interminable. I could not stop thinking about Chrissy. I thought: The girl is forty years old, if she gets really skinny-sick she could die. I thought: Something is wrong in her marriage.



* * *





It was a sunny day, and as the train got closer to the city, I felt a very small—but real—sense of excitement, just looking out the windows of the train and seeing more and more buildings—and people, too, who were sometimes sitting on their tiny terraces that looked out over the train tracks. All this made me feel almost happy.

But when we pulled into the city itself I could see in the distance the building I had once lived in. And I did not feel anything. And I continued to feel that way as I got out at Grand Central, which felt eerily empty to me; only a few of us walked through it, and all the stores in it were closed. And then there were no taxis, as I had thought there might not be. So I walked around the station, and on the other side was one taxi and he took me to where I was staying.

An emptiness had come into me.





iii


The Airbnb was in midtown, and there were lace curtains on the windows, and it was on the first floor of a brownstone. I had lived in a brownstone in Brooklyn years earlier and I had forgotten that one could not see much from inside, but these curtains made me feel like I was inside a coffin. When I had moved to Manhattan I had always lived high up in a building, and I had always had a view of parts of the city. So I felt even stranger as I walked through the two rooms, and when William called me I could not explain to him what I was feeling. But I told him about Chrissy, and his voice dropped and he said, “Oh God, Lucy.”