The Herd(66)

Gary and Karen had pulled out the sofa in the den for Katie and made it up with plaid sheets and a triangle-pattern quilt, and the sight of it made me want to weep. Their perfunctory kindness blasted through me, a grenade. They left us alone to “freshen up” and Katie turned and said something about hotels being sold out tonight, and I stalked upstairs without letting her finish. I rolled my bag into Eleanor’s room—they’d placed me here and Mikki in the guest room, which only felt creepy now that I was alone among Eleanor’s things.

This was where we’d hung out when visiting from college, sprawling across her bed or on the floor. I could almost see the three of us, our younger, silkier, frothier selves. Once, fascinated by these close new friends whose pasts were a mystery, we’d all described what we were like in high school. Mikki had been an arty kid, choosing her outfits from the thrift store at first out of necessity and then with determined weirdness. And though she didn’t use the word, it wasn’t hard to ascertain that Eleanor had been popular. At the time I’d felt even more thrilled that they wanted to be friends with me: straight-A, straitlaced, teacher’s pet Hana, now in with the A-listers.

Nearly a decade had passed since graduation, but the room was untouched. I felt like someone entering a museum exhibit as I moseyed up to the bed, smoothing a palm over the cloud-print comforter. Framed posters studded the teal walls: a Miro print she’d purchased at a museum store, a woodcut pattern that was probably a sheet of expensive wrapping paper, an unofficial movie poster for Pan’s Labyrinth, pink and black and eerie. I flopped onto the bed and cried, an indulgent, sobbing, sniveling cry with long wet sniffs powering huge, braying cries.

The holidays always made me feel sad. Ninety-nine percent of the year, I could be happy with my life, with everything I’d built for myself: the close friends who served as my surrogate family, the career I loved and clients who adored me, the quiet thrill of competence and action and determination and, of course, external validation: You did good. And then the holidays rolled around and with them, a torrent of pictures and updates and hashtag-grateful (somehow less basic than #blessed), shiny happy people with their beloved families, writing odes and ’gramming pies. And something about all the Rockwellian joy split something open, a crack through which envy flowed, a little girl crying up at the sky and realizing life’s not fair. I want that. I wanted a mom who actually wanted to see me. A dad who made special cheese dips and built fires on Christmas Eve, not a man I’d stopped calling years ago only to realize he didn’t care, wasn’t about to pick up his end of the relationship. I knew these were Champagne problems, peanuts compared to the family strife millions of others felt. But every year, around this time, I’d look around at the wreaths and pies and blinking holiday lights and ask into the starry heavens, my own “Silent Night”: Why these parents, why this, why me?

But at least I’d had Katie. Even when we were thousands of miles apart on a holiday, I knew I could reach out, squeeze her hand under the metaphorical table. She had the same shitty dad, one even more distant to her than he was to me, and while she and Mom were closer, she saw it, understood how Mom pushed me away like the opposite end of a magnet.

And then this year, my makeshift, chosen, surrogate family had whiffed away like a candle flame. Eleanor with a hole in her neck. Katie with her secret project, just inches behind my back. It was so hurtful, it still felt unfathomable. And then to whip it around on me? I realized why that move felt so familiar: It was right out of Mom’s playbook.

I was an idiot. I’d stupidly thought being here would be nice: This loving couple, unlike the parents I’d grown up with, scooping us in as if we were their foundlings. This grand home, with its multiple family/living/recreation rooms—it was like a life-size dollhouse, unlike the small ranch we’d all lived in before high school, and then the two-bedroom apartment Dad rented in Culver City.

Oh, Culver City. What a bold move that’d been, in retrospect: announcing, adultlike, that I was leaving Kalamazoo and joining Dad in California. He and Mom had been fighting for months, for years, and then one night, as Mom was scooping out the casserole and complaining that he was late for dinner, he called to say he was in a hotel in Wheaton, heading west and never coming back. I was fourteen years old and gutted by the two months that passed without him. I told everyone it was just because Mom and I had never gotten along; Dad was laid-back and lax, the kind of “cool” parent all teens want. Plus, as I admitted only in my angsty middle school diary, Mom seemed to resent my presence, though it was entirely her own fault: She and Dad had adopted me when I was two, shortly after a series of miscarriages and dismayed acceptance that they’d never be biological parents. Two years later, Katie had been their miracle, their dream come true. And I was the odd-looking child inconveniencing them.

Of course, Dad wasn’t any more interested in parenting than Mom was. He set me up on the daybed in his new apartment—I never got a real bed, never thought to ask—and continued on with his adult life, finding a job and dating new women and leaving me to fend for myself. How lucky for him, for both my parents, that I was smart and determined, that I got myself into Harvard no thanks to them. When he’d driven me to LAX for my flight to Boston, my suitcases almost bursting in the trunk, he’d turned up the baseball game on the radio in lieu of talking. I’d spent the entire drive—plus the six-hour flight—panicked about how I’d get myself from Logan International to my dorm.