‘Of course.’
‘Well, I guess we both fucked up where old Car’s concerned – gotta live with it. But life is good, right? I mean, I have Todd and the boys, you have Brian and Savannah – you wouldn’t trade her for the world, even to have a kid of Carson’s.’
‘Nope,’ Meg agreed, though of course it was fully possible that the two children Kara was referencing – Savannah and a theoretical child of Carson’s – were in fact one in the same. But Kara had no clue that Savannah might not be Brian’s. No clue that Meg had seen Carson the day of her wedding and that she had not been nearly as successful at closing the door behind her as she thought she’d be.
‘Are you doing okay? You sound cranky. Maybe get a nap in. God, I wish I could steal time for a nap! You should see my kitchen counters – do you think Keiffer and Evan could get their lunch plates past the clay mockup of Mt Doom and into the sink? Anyhow, I better go; I hear Tony screaming about something, and Todd’s out in the garage.’
Meg smiled at the happy disorder of her sister’s home. ‘I’m glad you called.’
‘Tell Dad to call me. Kisses to all,’ Kara said, and they hung up.
Meg simply stood there holding her phone for a minute afterward, wistfulness and loss washing over her. She missed Kara and Beth and Julianne, but they, at least, were still walking the Earth. They, at least, were accessible by a half-day’s airplane journey. But their mother, snatched away so suddenly that Meg still sometimes picked up the phone to call her before remembering, was lost to her, to them, forever. How was a girl – all right, a woman – supposed to manage without her mother? The notebook diaries gave her windows through which to view her mother in their past, but what of today, when she needed a supportive arm around her shoulders?
‘Oh Mom,’ she sighed. ‘Is this as good as it gets?’
The dark quiet of the screened porch, late that night, soothed Meg only a little as she sat on a chaise and sipped gin, straight. Brian and Savannah both had been asleep for hours, but she had yet to even feel like closing her eyes. She was tired – so tired she couldn’t even calculate how many hours it had been since she’d slept. But her thoughts swirled and tumbled like river rapids, making sleep impossible.
Her mother, she knew, had lived with turmoil most of her life – she was the youngest of eight kids whose father died in Normandy. Then she married into it; Meg’s father was always launching some half-planned scheme that inevitably failed. The first was a citrus farm like the McKays’, with thousands of young trees that were killed in the second year by some blight he hadn’t known to look for. Next he bought the land that would later become their horse farm and built a huge greenhouse, for the supposedly easier job of growing rare orchids to sell to collectors. Yet neither he nor her mother, who by then was also tending her, could master the expensive, sensitive plants, which died off steadily while the debt blossomed.
Just after Kara’s birth, when Meg was five, he gave up that particular dream; they sold off all the orchid paraphernalia at a loss and built stables, with the goal of not just boarding thoroughbreds but also breeding them. Her father was sure his powers of persuasion wouldn’t be lost on the horses or the people who liked to buy them. He succeeded just often enough to encourage him to sink more money into the venture, and by the time Julianne was born, nine years after Meg, the family was firmly shackled to what would become her father’s most enduring obsession.
She remembered many times – whole seasons, in fact, when all she and her sisters ate for lunch was bread and jam, or eggs from the noisy, skittish chickens they raised. They wore shoes from the thrift store and clothes bought at Saturday-morning yard sales. They learned early how to answer the phone and politely tell the bill collectors that their parents were busy but could they please take a message? She had coached her sisters, the three of them standing in front of her looking like uneven stair steps, each taking a practice turn with the phone. She’d been twelve, maybe thirteen. ‘Show them all,’ her mother had directed. ‘You know how Julianne likes to run for the phone.’ Julianne, at three, was easiest to train – she was happy to imitate, to earn Meg’s praise, while Beth and Kara had asked questions Meg couldn’t answer and knew better than to forward to their parents:
‘Why do the people keep calling, Meggie?’
‘Why won’t Mommy or Daddy answer the phone?’
Only when some large man or another showed up – always in an ill-fitting suit – did her father deal with matters himself. From her bedroom window she would watch the men leave, her father putting them into their nondescript sedans with a smile and a handshake. Making dubious promises that had, a few years later, led to one of her own.
Her affluent adult life could hardly compare with the craziness her mother endured for so many years, but she liked that they shared a steady temperament. For as far back as she could remember, she too had weathered what crises came by trusting that solutions would present themselves – always with the help of the Blessed Virgin, of course, or so her mother wanted her to believe. Meg endured, too busy minding her sisters, or feeding the chickens, or currying the succession of horses her father always insisted were Triple-Crown winners in the making, to do anything else.
Tonight the low chirping of crickets outside the porch spoke of good luck, something she felt sorely short of just now. Yet as quickly as this self-pity reared up, she pushed it down; she had no right to feel sorry for herself, none, and she buried the urge by remembering that, short of the unstoppable medical crises she’d faced now and then as a doctor, she was responsible for everything in her life, good and bad.
Responsible, that was the trait that made her rescue her parents from looming foreclosure and allow her sisters to finish growing up there on the farm, instead of crammed into some tiny, roach-infested apartment. That was the trait that kept her from seeking out a definitive answer to Savannah’s paternity. The trait made her a popular, respected doctor – and tempered her guilt when things went wrong even after she’d done everything right. She was always careful, responsible, even when she didn’t want to be. Almost always.
But in the same way her mother could not, despite valiant efforts, save the family from the ruin that seemed sure until Meg married Brian, Meg’s effort had not been able to save the Langs’ baby. Nor had it secured the satisfying life she’d rationalized would follow her marriage in due time. You could work hard, stick to all the rules, and still fail.
Which made her wonder why, then, she bothered to be so damn careful.
The sweet, musky smell of aging honeysuckle blooms drifted to Meg on the warm night’s breeze. She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, putting aside the heavy thoughts, her worry about her arm, the guilt she felt over losing the Langs’ baby, and the odd lack of guilt she felt for having encouraged Clay’s attentions, putting them aside and simply filling herself with nature’s sensual buffet. A warm spring night. Sweetly scented flowers. Damp soil. The smell of wild mint and freshly mowed grass.
The grass brought her back, for a moment, to something Brian said earlier. She’d told him about the stillbirth, and he was, of course, sympathetic. ‘Jesus, Meg, how awful for them,’ he said. But then he added, ‘I don’t mean to sound insensitive, but do you think Lang will still do our lawn?’
Ever practical.
A mockingbird, apparently confused about the hour, began its litany of calls someplace off on the east side of their property, a three-acre estate in a community of similar ones. Meg turned in the direction of the sound, as if it was possible to see the bird at three AM. She saw the silhouettes of towering pines and oaks
