I'd Give Anything(28)

“Hate them,” I said.

“Of course they do! What if Tex and I have ugly kids?”

Kirsten called her boyfriend Tex because he was the most New England person ever to be born. Sailing. Squash. Harvard. Nantucket red pants. A library with a ladder. His real name was Adams Frost. I adored him.

“You’ll hate them,” I said.

“Have a baby,” said Avery, pointing her finger at Kirsten. “ASAP. I need something to play with.”

“Well, in that case,” said Kirsten.

There was Avery, still in her down jacket, aglow and sprawled on our rug with easy, face-to-the-sky joy, like a little girl making snow angels, more relaxed than I’d seen her since Harris got fired, and I sat drinking in the sight, wanting the moment to last forever, while all the while I was about to drop death into the room like a bomb. When she was four, riding in her booster seat in the back of the car, she’d spotted a raccoon dead on the shoulder of the road and asked why it was there and if it was okay, and immediately, I said, “He’s just taking a nap” (“A nice little nap. On the road. In a pool of his own blood,” Kirsten would quip later, when I told her about it), and Harris shot me a reproving look. When we talked about it that night, I argued that she was too young, that even if she weren’t too young, a girl who fought off sleep like a demon, who believed, at 3:00 a.m., that there were snakes coiled up in her dresser drawers and scary “ladies made of bones” in her closet, did not need to add death to her night-panic repertoire. The snakes and ladies might be gone, but Avery was still that child grappling with wild fears in the middle of the night.

“Avery, sweetheart,” I said, gently.

She sat up fast, causing the dogs to slide off onto the floor. All three of them looked at me with wide quizzical, worried brown eyes.

“Is it Dad again?” she asked, and for the first time that day, I wanted to cry.



After I told her, Avery cried. Not hard. No sobbing. But she cried the way she did sometimes in the car when we went on our insomnia drives. Tears running down her cheeks, but no sound at all. Over in minutes, like a summer rainfall.

“You know what’s weird?” she said, afterward, wiping her eyes. “I’m crying because I’m sad that I’m not sadder.”

“Don’t be, baby,” I said. “This is truly a case of whatever you feel is the right thing to feel.”

I was sure about this for Avery. For myself, my feelings or lack of feelings? Not so sure.

Avery sat next to me on the living room sofa, both dogs in her lap, their faces turned toward hers, tipped upward like pansies facing the sun. Kirsten sat, cross-legged, on the floor at our feet.

“Your grandmother was just not that good at being a person,” I said.

“How did she turn out that way?”

I shook my head. “I didn’t know her parents that well, but from what I remember, they seemed nice. A little formal. Her dad seemed to always be reading something, even at Christmastime. A newspaper or a book. My mom had a younger sister who died at the age of maybe ten or eleven. Leukemia, I think. The only reason I know is that there was a photo of the two of them together at my grandparents’ house, and I asked about it once. Her name was Frances, and they called her Franzy.”

“Franzy,” said Avery, thoughtfully. “That seems like a nickname for someone in a happy house, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said. “I thought the same thing.”

“I never knew that,” said Kirsten. “About the sister.”

“She told me the one time I asked and then never mentioned it again,” I said.

“Do you think that’s why she is the way she is?” said Avery. “Was, I mean.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Growing up, I wanted to believe that was why, but she had so many chances to change over the years, so many reasons to be different. Trevor, for instance, and me.”

“Honestly,” said Kirsten, “and I realize I’m biased here because Adela never liked me, not even for five minutes by accident, but for a long time, I thought she was just probably born that way, missing a chip.”

“You thought?” said Avery. “What changed your mind?”

Kirsten’s eyes met mine.

“You,” I said to my daughter. “She loved you.”

“Oh,” said Avery. Her eyes began to well again.

“No, don’t feel bad that you didn’t know it or didn’t love her back,” I said, quickly. “I didn’t realize it myself for a long time. When you were born, she didn’t act interested in you. She came by after I’d brought you home from the hospital, and she didn’t even ask to hold you. She just looked you over appraisingly, as if you were a piece of furniture she was thinking of purchasing, and said, ‘Well, she got the Sartin ears, thank God. Harris’s ears are a travesty.’ I was furious.”

“She had a point about Harris’s ears,” said Kirsten.

I shot her a warning look, but Avery laughed.

“One day, when you were about six, our babysitter canceled, and I had to leave you with Adela,” I said. “When I went to pick you up, my mother was sitting at one end of the dining room table, working, and you were sitting at the other end cutting out snowflakes, totally absorbed. I used to love to cut out snowflakes.”