Wilde Lake(53)
Randy, no dummy, had fled as soon as my attention was diverted, slowed by his limp. My Pepper Anderson kick had been effective. But no one cared about Randy anymore. Noel had stopped laughing and was looking at AJ, his unearthly green eyes round with wonder and mischief.
“Ajax Homer Brant? I thought you were Andrew Jackson Brant, like your father. How can you be AJ Brant Jr. if you don’t have the same name?”
“I was supposed to be,” AJ said. “It was a mistake, at the hospital. Some stupid nurse who filled in my birth certificate—she got it wrong. I’m going to change it legally, when I’m an adult. Plus, it’s not so bad. Ajax is a hero in the Iliad. That’s where the Homer comes in.”
Noel did not seem to pick up on the inconsistency in AJ’s story. He was probably too busy mulling the possibilities of knowing AJ’s true name. A chink in the armor of AJ the Perfect. Their friends would delight in this information if he shared it with them. Noel was not unlike me, I realized, stockpiling secrets about AJ, unsure how or when they might be used. Yet we never ended up exploiting any knowledge we gained because we both loved him so.
“Couldn’t your parents have changed it right away? I mean, your dad is a lawyer—”
“It’s hard to change a birth certificate. And my mom—”
“Our mom,” I corrected, sniffling.
“Our mom, she thought it was bad luck. To change a baby’s name. Dad said I had to wait until I was eighteen.”
“Even after she died? What did it matter then?”
The answer was obvious to AJ and me, if not to Noel. It mattered more than ever. After our mother was gone, nothing she touched could be changed. And she had named AJ, not some nurse. The house stayed as it had been, despite the fact that she had lived there less than a year. There was still a small pile of books on our mother’s side of the bed, and on the nights when I had bad dreams and went to sleep with my father, he was always far to one side, as if he were still sharing the bed with someone.
AJ, meanwhile, would not speak of her at all. Although not generally selfish, he hoarded his memories of our mother as if they might evaporate in the open air. I envied him, but the truth was, I didn’t want AJ’s stories. I wanted my own and I could never have them. AJ had a mother for eight years. I had one for eight days. That was an injustice that could never be righted. There are a lot of challenges about having twins, but at least one never has that imbalance of time. Penelope can’t begrudge Justin for having had a father longer than she did; Justin will lose his mother at the same time Penelope does.
Our mother had named her son Ajax Homer, her daughter Luisa Frida. That was no error and those names could never be changed. Our names were her legacy, one of the few things she left behind. They were burdensome when we were young, but not horribly so. As an adult, my only regret was that I had allowed myself to be “Lu” for so long that I couldn’t return to the fuller, sweeter name she had given me.
As far as I know, Noel kept the secret of AJ’s name. But in college, AJ was dismayed to discover that there were two warriors named Ajax—Ajax the Great, the son of Telamon, and Ajax the Lesser, who survived so many attempts on his life that he ended up boasting that not even the gods could kill him.
The gods promptly did just that.
“Maybe I was named for Ajax the Lesser,” my brother said to me the last time we spoke.
FEBRUARY 1
It is Sunday night before Lu has a chance to ask her father about Eloise Schumann/Ellie Cabot. She is not avoiding the topic. She is simply too busy trying to survive the weekend. Her kids are far from overscheduled. In fact, they have had to accept the hard truth that a single mom with a demanding job cannot be on call to take them to every practice, game, rehearsal, and activity. (Justin has his uncle’s flare for singing and dramatics, while Penelope loves soccer.) That’s what Melissa the babysitter is for. Lu does what she can and she manages to make the truly important stuff—pageants and “championships.” But she grew up without a parent attending most of her milestone moments, and she doesn’t feel she was harmed by this.
Even if Gabe had lived, Lu doubts the two of them would have been able to handle life with the twins without multiple babysitters, not as long as she insisted on working. And Gabe was too evolved to admit that he wanted her to be a stay-at-home mom. A SAHM. The very acronym looks like some dreary department within the Social Security Administration, or a form that one has to fill out for benefits. SAHM. Say it out loud and it’s just one letter away from “Om,” the chant of peace and contentment and centeredness. But the SAHM, in Lu’s opinion, sacrifices her center, hollows herself out by caring for others. Before Gabe’s death, they were probably on a collision course over this issue, although he was the person far more suited to staying at home. Is there such a thing as a SAHD? Say that out loud and it sounds like a toddler trying to describe her feelings. I’m so sahd.
But, having checked out of her kids’ after-school lives, Lu does cater to them on weekends as much as possible. They go to movies. They go to the place with the climbing wall. They go make pottery together. They go. And they are good company, her kids. For one thing, they have exquisite manners, thanks to Teensy and their grandfather. They also eat everything. Lu tries hard not to be Ms. Smug McSmugginton when the topic of fussy eaters comes up because she knows she didn’t really do anything to instill good eating habits in her kids. She was just too lazy to make two dinners from scratch every night and Teensy, bless her heart, is lazier still. This weekend, the twins asked to try a Korean restaurant in D.C. and they both ate kimchi.