Pictures of Us Page 5

  I’d finally shared Sophia’s phone call with Michael, but we still hadn’t told Emma about Drew. Between the prom and the play and the approaching end of the school year, she’d been incredibly easygoing, and neither one of us could bear to share the news with her. Not yet, anyway.

  “She might not be as flipped out as you think,” Michael had argued over steaming mugs of tea at the kitchen table the night before. “We weren’t married then. Kids are a lot more sophisticated these days, for better or worse.”

  “Kids are a lot more sophisticated about cell phones and fashion and movie sex,” I said wearily. “Real-life stuff is a little different. There’s a lot of child left in her, Michael. She still won’t let me give away her Barbies.”

  She had to know, of course. And we were going to tell her, this weekend probably, when we were all at home together, with time to talk. Michael had spoken to Drew again yesterday, and we’d agreed that we would drive up to Cambridge over the Memorial Day weekend to meet him. I hadn’t really faced the fact that the trip was only two weeks away—denial was so easy to slip into, a comfortable old coat I donned every day now. If I pretended that we had all the time in the world to tell Emma, I could almost make myself believe it.

  I’d pulled the Jeep up to the curb in front of the school, under an ancient elm that dappled the hood with shadows in the afternoon sunlight. I had the radio on louder than usual, a Springsteen song from my own high-school years, and I felt pretty good—I’d forced myself through yoga that morning, which I’d let slip all week, and I’d finished sorting photos for another chapter in my book. The laundry had piled up again, but I had decided not to care about that. Dirty clothes were the least of my problems this week, and the afternoon was too lovely to spoil with regret—of any kind.

  Emma banged through the front doors of the school with a gang of other girls, a rainbow of pastel shirts and short skirts, faded denim and backpacks adorned with key chains and cell phones. I didn’t wave—I knew better. But she smiled when she climbed into the car beside me and slammed the door shut. “Let’s shop,” she said.

  I shifted the Jeep into gear. “That’s the plan.”

  We decided to start at Lord & Taylor, which would have the widest selection, if not the best prices. Guilt lay at the bottom of that decision, and I wasn’t going to try to deny it. Finding out that she had a half brother, that her dad had actually slept with someone other than her mom once upon a time, when she’d long believed in the fairy-tale, childhood-sweethearts version of our life together, was going to be horror enough that it was comforting to pretend I could buy her understanding with an expensive dress.

  We clashed from the start, which shocked me. Emma had her moods, like any red-blooded American fifteen-year-old, but we got along ninety percent of the time. She still liked good-night kisses and the occasional lazy Saturday-morning cuddle, for God’s sake, so I didn’t expect a battle over something that was meant to be a pleasure. While I was fingering lovely, sleek little dresses that she proclaimed “boring” and “way momlike,” everything she chose was either too short or was so obnoxiously glittery most Atlantic City showgirls would have protested.

  “It’s a prom, not a cabaret act,” I snapped, hanging up the latest offending dress as the first sharp fingers of a headache gripped the back of my skull.

  “God, Mom.” Emma rolled her eyes and walked toward another rack, declaring over her shoulder, “It’s, like, the twenty-first century, you know?”

  “I know full well what century it is,” I hissed, hating the sound of my voice. Where had it come from? My mother had never raised her voice, never lost her cool—she had an amazing ability to disengage whenever any of us were acting up. She’d simply pull back, eye us coolly and wait until we realized that she wasn’t going to put up with whatever it was we had done or said.

  I took a deep breath and sank into one of the chairs set against a mirrored column. I could be calm. I would be calm. I had to be, about the dress and everything else. We weren’t going to get through the next couple of weeks otherwise.

  “Maybe Nana could make me something,” Emma said suddenly, chewing her bottom lip. Her backpack was slung carelessly over one shoulder and her arms were folded across her chest. It sounded like a truce, even if it looked like defiance. My mother wouldn’t make her anything too daring, but Emma would convince her grandmother to design something with a hint of sex to it, even if it was subtle.

  “Nana’s pretty busy right now, Em,” I said carefully. “You could ask her this weekend, but I can’t guarantee she’ll be able to make you a dress before the dance.”

  “I bet she’ll do it.”

  “Well, we’ll find out, I guess.” I stood up and started for the door, Emma following beside me without a word. I didn’t understand her abrupt about-face—at least, not until we got into the car and I was steering out of the parking lot.

  “Jesse invited me to a party,” Emma said, fiddling with a tube of lip gloss she’d scrounged out of her bag.

  “After the prom, you mean?” I needed to make a left onto North Avenue, which was nearly impossible at that time of day.

  “No, Memorial Day.”

  Damn it. Those same fingers pinched into my skull. The battle hadn’t been won; the venue had simply changed.

  “Emma, I don’t know…”

  “It’s at his parents’ house,” she said quickly. She’d rolled down her window, and a rush of air blew her hair back as I saw my opportunity and pulled onto the road.

  “I haven’t met his parents, Emma, and I don’t think—”

  She cut me off. “They’re really nice, Mom. And Grace is going, too. Her mom said yes.”

  There it was, the resentful emphasis on the word her. Other parents understood, that tone said. Other parents were cool.

  Of course, other parents were probably not driving two hundred miles that weekend to meet a newly discovered illegitimate son.

  “Well, Grace can tell you all about it,” I said in the most even tone I could manage. “But that weekend is a problem.”

  “I knew you’d say no. I knew it! I didn’t even have to tell you the party’s at their shore house. I told Grace I wouldn’t get that far.” Arms folded across her chest again, she was seething, her jaw tight with fury and her eyes brimming with tears.

  I couldn’t even pretend sympathy at the moment. “At their shore house? The party is at their shore house, and you thought you had a chance to go?”

  The tears spilled, bright wet tracks down her cheeks. “Grace is going!”

  “Well, I’d love to know if Grace’s mother was told exactly where this party is.” I turned off North onto Dudley with a jerk of the steering wheel.

  Silence.

  I kept my mouth shut, too. It was the smart move at the moment, with my headache ramping up again, more vicious than before, and my heart still hammering in outrage. A party at the beach, fifty or more miles away, with a boy I’d barely met? She was dreaming. Even if Jesse’s parents were there, which was iffy, it didn’t mean the kids would be supervised down at the beach. And God knows I had a good idea what teenagers could get up to when they were determined.

  She was too young still, a child beneath the tentative makeup and the clothes and the newly adopted attitude. She had no idea about boys, older boys, and certainly not about sex…She didn’t, did she? Oh God—my headache, and everything else, was going from bad to worse.

  “Why exactly is Memorial Day a problem?” Emma said, startling me out of my thoughts.

  I swung the Jeep onto Clark, my teeth clenched. What was I supposed to tell her?

  “Mom?” Resentful, demanding.

  “We’ll discuss it when your father comes home,” I said, turning down our street and into the driveway.

  She huffed “Whatever” and slammed out of the car, leaving me leaning against the steering wheel, my heart still hammering, the afternoon sun hot on the knuckles that gripped the wheel. Through the screen door she’d left open, I heard a door ban
g shut, then Walter’s confused whine.

  What the hell had happened? I’d imagined a fun afternoon, giggling over dresses, maybe shopping for shoes, too, or stopping off at Starbucks for lattes when we were done. And what had happened to the sweet, happy kid who’d been humming around the house all week, doing her homework without prodding, even picking up her dirty clothes and unloading the dishwasher?

  I got out of the car and went inside, stooping to scratch Walter’s soft head. Tossing my bag on the kitchen table, I dropped onto a chair with a sigh. It wasn’t too hard to figure out, once I thought about it. She’d been imagining what might have been, daydreaming each conversation between her and Jesse, each accidentally-on-purpose touch, probably each kiss. She’d been contentedly building a whole relationship based on what-ifs, and it had played out beautifully until I’d dragged her back to reality.

  I couldn’t blame her for the tantrum, not really. Laying my head down on my folded arms, suddenly and completely exhausted, I closed my eyes, only faintly aware of the pounding beat of Emma’s stereo through the ceiling. I’d daydreamed a whole relationship once myself.

  HIS NAME WAS CYRUS CAMPBELL. I met him in my art history lecture sophomore year when he slid into the battered auditorium seat next to mine just moments before class was supposed to start.

  “Made it,” he whispered, winking at me. Muddy hazel eyes peeked out from beneath a fringe of hair, tarnished gold, thick and uncombed.

  I think I blinked in response. He smelled like coffee and cigarettes, and faintly of turpentine, and his army jacket was still damp from the morning rain. He seemed enormous in those cramped seats, too big, too noisy, boots clunking against the worn linoleum, unzipping his backpack with abandon, sighing as he settled in to wait for the lecture to begin.

  Professor D’Angelo gave us the course overview that day, the syllabus and the standard admonitions about attendance and exams, but when I left, I couldn’t remember a word of it. Cyrus was as fascinating as he was irritating.

  A shaggy, carefree lion. That was what he reminded me of, with all that long, dirty-blond hair and those strange eyes, the casual grace of his body, slouched in a chair or loping across the park, unconcerned with his surroundings.

  And he was everywhere that semester, or seemed to be. In the dining hall, at the newsstand where I bought the occasional magazine and Mounds bars when I was stressing about class work. At the diner over on Astor Place, where Carter and I liked to have cheap omelets and coffee late on Saturday mornings, and in the library when I needed to concentrate on the history of the Renaissance. Big and blond, that slow, steady smile aimed at me like an arrow.

  Even at such a huge university, the grapevine was pretty efficient if you knew how to work it. Within a couple of days I’d discovered he was a math major who liked to paint, he was from Denver and his roommate was premed and incredibly tense about noise.

  “Doesn’t own a stereo and wears earplugs in the dorm,” Jane told me with a raised eyebrow. “Sounds like a barrel of laughs.”

  “Cyrus must love him,” Carter put in with a giggle. She was sprawled on her bed with the notes for her poetry paper scattered around her like the aftermath of a cyclone. “Sounds like the Odd Couple Goes to College.”

  Cyrus was definitely the opposite of tense. Nothing bothered him, not impending exams or lost lecture notes, not the gray, interminable rain that autumn, not my regretful no when he asked me out.

  “Okay,” he said, strolling along next to me as we walked out of the lecture auditorium after psychology one day. “I’ll take that as a ‘not now’. And if you change your mind, just say so.”

  He was nothing like Michael, not physically or temperamentally, and not what I would have considered my type, either. But I couldn’t deny that I was attracted to him—everything seemed easy and more fun when he was around. During psych lectures he doodled caricatures to me in the margins of my notebook. He smuggled extra Jell-O onto his dinner tray for me in the dining hall. He was always smiling, and usually laughing.

  Michael had never been so easygoing. He wasn’t tense, necessarily, but intense wasn’t the wrong word. He came off as laidback to the rest of the world, but inside he was usually brooding about something, examining thoughts and reactions in his head, figuring out what any given situation meant. Everything mattered to Michael.

  And not much ever mattered to Cyrus. Not my refusal of a date, not the C-he received on his psych midterm, not the news that a bar underage students had counted on for more than twenty years was closing.

  “Somebody will find another place that’ll serve us,” he said with a shrug. We were in the laundry room in the dorm’s damp basement, waiting for the spin cycle to end so we could load the dryers and head back upstairs to the lounge.

  Lopsided optimism, that was what it was. Michael wasn’t pessimistic, but he was an idealist, a romantic, which meant that life sometimes didn’t live up to his expectations. As far as I could tell, Cyrus didn’t have any.

  “We’re not doing anything,” I told Jane when she remarked on the fact that Cyrus and I had eaten lunch together at Eddie’s, a little pub on West Third. “We’re just friends.”

  Lips pursed in disapproval, she’d raised her eyebrows, but she didn’t say more.

  Across the room at her desk, Carter sighed. “Leave her alone, Jane. She’s a big girl. If she wants to break that sweet Michael’s heart, that’s her call.”

  Of course I didn’t want that. I threw my tattered stuffed pig at her, but she ducked and stuck her tongue out at me.

  I didn’t want to stop seeing Cyrus, either, though. It wasn’t cheating; we weren’t kissing or even holding hands. But when he walked me back to the dorm after class, I couldn’t stop myself from imagining what it would be like if his arm were looped around me. What his mouth would taste like, whether that shaggy gold hair would brush my cheek if he kissed me.

  The physical attraction wasn’t the only temptation. I had the feeling that Cyrus wouldn’t mind if I spent a weekend away from him, that he wouldn’t write me letters several pages long each week, that he wouldn’t be particularly interested in what I was reading or what movies I’d been to.

  And I knew, deep down, that anything I felt for Cyrus would be light, nothing more than a gentle breeze washing through my life briefly. With Cyrus, I would never feel that sometimes frightening sense of obliteration, of losing myself in what I felt for him and how much he mattered to me—of not being able to love him well enough, the way I sometimes did with Michael.

  EMMA CONTINUED RADIO silence all afternoon. The door to her room was firmly shut, and behind it the sound of her stereo was an angry drumbeat. She never emerged, not that I asked her to, not even for a soda or a snack, not even to go to the bathroom, as far as I could tell. I left her alone, letting my own thoughts stew.

  Michael got home shortly after six. He took one look at my face as I glanced up from the fridge, where I’d been contemplating dinner, and dropped his briefcase on the table to put his arms around me.

  “What happened, babe? No good dresses?”

  I leaned into him, breathing in the clean, warm scent of his skin. “Nope. No good anything, not this afternoon.”

  He stroked the back of my head, and I pushed gently against his hand, grateful for his touch. “Tell me,” he said.

  “Every dress she wanted looked like something you’d find on Eleventh Avenue at 2:00 a.m., and she also wants to go to some party at Jesse’s house.” I paused for effect. “At the shore. Memorial Day weekend.”

  His eyes widened in disbelief, but just as he opened his mouth to protest, we heard Emma pounding down the stairs.

  She appeared in the doorway to the kitchen a moment later, cheeks flushed, eyes still faintly swollen. Her hair looked as if she’d used an eggbeater to comb it.

  Without any buildup, she said, “What’s going on Memorial Day weekend?” Sullen and resentful, her voice a jagged knife in the silence.

  I released a breath and untangled myself f
rom Michael’s arms to sit down. This was not the way I’d imagined conducting this particular conversation, but there was no point putting it off any longer. I glanced at Michael, who was still recovering from the shock of Emma’s request, and he gave me a grim smile.

  “Sit down, Emma.” I motioned to the chair opposite me.

  She crossed her arms in front of her, hipshot and more defiant than ever. “I’m fine.”

  Walter was circling the kitchen, panting at Michael’s feet and then crossing to Emma, who ignored him. I tapped my thigh and he settled next to me, quivering with need and alert to the current of tension rippling through the room.

  “Sit down, Emma.”

  Michael rarely reprimanded her, but what I called his Father-Knows-Best voice never failed to do the trick. She sidled past me and scraped a chair away from the table, dropping into it with a definite flounce.

  “What?” He waited silently until she raised her eyes before answering.

  “We need to have a discussion, but if you’re not prepared to be polite, it will have to wait.” He slid another chair around to the side of the table, between us, refusing to take a side. I longed to hold his hand beneath the table, but I controlled myself. Emma was near tears again.

  “I’m sorry.” Emma’s voice was little more than a whisper. “We can talk.”

  “Aside from the fact that going to a party at the shore, fifty miles away or more, is out of the question,” he said, holding up a hand when she opened her mouth to argue the point, “we have something important to do on Memorial Day weekend. Important to me, at least.”

  “We never do anything but cook out at Nana’s that weekend,” Emma grumbled. She was examining a fingernail with exaggerated interest.