GINGER

THE TOP OF Max’s arm is warm against mine as I lean into him. How many times did the two of us sit on these hard stone steps together, trying to make sense of all the things kids have to sort out on their way to growing up? Doing all the little tricky things it takes to grow up, step by step, into an anxious and unsettling world. I ask him how his kids are doing, and as he answers Laney glares. She wants me to tell Mia that Max is divorced, but what I say is, “Your son must get the science thing from his mom.”

You hoard your friends, Laney is forever telling me. You stick friendship in your pocket like a lone dollar bill that, if lost or given away or even spent on something precious, will leave you without. She thinks friendships multiply when shared, and maybe they do for her. It doesn’t occur to her that the wreck that will result if Mia gets involved with Max will take out my friendship with him, too.

The four of us stare out across the water, clear sailing and a clear view of the house for any damned reporter in a boat. Is that something on the horizon? I squint into the early sun. Wipe my glasses on Max’s shirt (which provokes a halfhearted protest from him) and then squint again. It’s not the ferry; that only runs in summer. I push back the sudden hope it’s the girls. But Annie and Iz aren’t coming; we told them not to. Any minute now the phone is going to ring, Annie saying she got my message.

But they can’t call. Shit. They can’t call.

Well, they don’t likely even know what’s happened yet. Betts’s Isabelle is so absorbed in her studies and in the work she does at the legal aid clinic that she probably has no clue, and surely Annie wouldn’t have watched the news on a Friday night.

I really don’t want Annie to come all this way, even though I would give anything to see her. It’s her first term at Princeton, and she has enough of a challenge to start with at college since she can’t write any better than I can. Dysgraphia, they call it now, which I guess is a good thing, that they have something to call it, although God knows we worried about labeling her anything other than perfect. Annie tests as well anyone when it comes to filling in circles with a number two pencil, but the process of having to write out answers hits a glitch in her brain. She’s smart enough to make up for it, and if her teachers think (as mine always did) that she is just being lazy rather than efficient when she writes the shortest complete answer possible, we can point to the report in her file which they ought to have read: thousands of dollars of doctor and occupational therapist time to conclude that Annie has “a processing difficulty.” Which means she can’t write worth shit.

I check my watch, worried she’ll see the news on the Internet before she listens to her phone messages. But when has she ever cared more about the news than about friends? She’ll have gotten my message and called me, and when she couldn’t get me she’ll have phoned Ted, who no doubt explained this to her the same way I explained it to him when we talked from the car: “Was it awful? Yes, absolutely. But there was no question: it was an accident.”

Annie has been at Princeton since early September. Ted and I came home from getting her settled and, for the first time in twenty years, sat at the dinner table without a child. We took our usual seats, Ted at the deep gouge where B.J.’s robotics team powered up their robot only to have it topple over rather than roll, me at the sprinkle of pits where Annie’s catapult for AP Physics took out the light fixture, scattering tiny lightbulb shards we picked from the table and chairs and floor for weeks. We sat kitty-corner from each other, facing empty chairs.

I’d been sitting next to B.J.’s empty seat for two years by then, but it’s one thing to sit next to emptiness, and another to stare straight into it. I wanted to slide over into our son’s seat, but I couldn’t bear to do it. Then Ted slid over into Annie’s seat and reached across the table and took my hand. And the next night, just before dinner was ready, he turned on PBS NewsHour and professed an interest in a story about the Taliban throwing acid on girls walking to school (a story Mia covered but that Ted never in a million years would have found interesting). We took our plates into the family room and settled into our club chairs, facing the TV.

It’s not always an easy dinner, watching the NewsHour. Even the best homemade pasta doesn’t go down that well with, say, children being pulled from earthquake rubble, or African mothers brushing flies from their children’s faces, willing to do anything for food. It’s always the mothers, too. These children must have fathers, but it’s always the mothers shown on the news.

That’s what I’d seen, mothers on the news, the night before Annie’s eighteenth birthday, which is maybe why after Ted and I went to bed that night I lay awake wondering if she was as lonely as I had been the night before I started law school, the eve of my twenty-first birthday. Sometime before midnight, I got out of bed and pulled on the first clothes I came to. I popped in my contacts in the downstairs bathroom so as not to wake Ted, filled a thermos with coffee, left a note that I’d woken early and gone to the gym, and drove east from Cleveland across the endless stretch of Pennsylvania Turnpike and up U. S. 1 to Washington Road.

It was nearly dawn by the time I got to Henry Hall, a gothic stone building that had looked lovely the sunny afternoon Ted and I moved Annie into her dorm room—a single that was stark and cold even with its view of other pretty gothic buildings through leaded windows, even with her bedding and books and the WELL-BEHAVED WOMEN RARELY MAKE HISTORY poster from her bedroom at home. Rain was threatening as I pulled to a stop across the street and sat looking up at windows I knew weren’t Annie’s (her window doesn’t face the street), remembering the way Mother had shown up at my door in Ann Arbor the morning of my birthday, after we’d said goodbye. I sat watching Annie’s dorm in the darkness until I must have drifted off to sleep, because the next thing I knew the sky was a paler shade of gray and a rusty bicycle came so close to nearly clipping a girl right in front of me that I shouted, Look up, for heaven’s sake, Annie! although the girl wasn’t even blond.

Annie emerged from the dorm, finally, wearing her favorite leather jacket. No umbrella in evidence and, God, she looked unbearably thin. How could she have grown so thin in only two weeks? She walked with her too-long neck bent forward as if to shorten her gawky six feet. Most near, most dear, most loved and most far.

I rolled down my car window, wanting to shout It’s her birthday! to the nearby students: a couple kissing far too passionately for this early in the morning, a group of girls giggling together, four boys singing in harmony as they walked in synchronized step down the puddled path. But I said nothing. After she disappeared into a nearby building, I sat watching through the open window, willing her to emerge laughing with a classmate about the red bow tie the professor wore or the way the nerdy guy from Arizona wouldn’t stop hitting on her.

When she did emerge, she was alone again. She looked in my direction, as if sensing she was being watched. I thought to wave, but she turned and looked in another direction, then another, before ducking her head toward the pavement and following the path toward the heavy dormitory again. An old gray Chevy passed between us, its wipers pushing aside the drizzle as Annie mounted the old stone steps, heaved the door open, stepped inside. And then I sat watching the empty space she left behind.

I thought to go around to where I could see her window, but somehow I could no more move that morning than I could that first kidless dinner. I sat and watched the dorm for another hour as the rain came harder on my windshield, not a thunderstorm but just a long, steady rain, the kind that would likely fall all day.

It’s her birthday, I kept thinking. Her eighteenth birthday.

I pulled my cellphone out, finally, and I dialed her number and sang “Happy Birthday” when she answered. I wanted to ask if she was eating well, if she was taking her vitamins, if she was making friends and who she ate dinner with when the dorm cafeteria was closed, who she ate lunch with every day for that matter, or if she ate lunch at all, if she wasn’t too shy to sit at a table with strangers, if it had gotten harder rather than easier as the days passed. But I only asked if she’d gotten the package we’d sent.

She was waiting till after dinner to open it, she told me. She didn’t yet know that it was an apple-shaped pendant encrusted with diamond chips, with a card saying she was the apple of our eyes and we hoped she’d always know how much we love her.

“We can’t wait to see you at parents’ weekend,” I said.

“Me, too.”

“I can come sooner. Do you want me to come sooner?” Not wanting to say the word “lonely,” a word I realized only in that moment had hung over me long into that first year of law school, even after I’d met Laney and Betts and Mia, after we’d become the Ms. Bradwells I wanted us to be.

When Annie didn’t answer, I thought of how hard it had been to say goodbye to Mother that second time, that morning after I thought I’d already said goodbye. How close I’d come to asking to go home with her.

Annie and I talked for a long, long time that morning, with me just outside her window and Annie imagining me pouring a third cup of coffee in the kitchen back in Cleveland five hundred miles away. We talked about her classes and the cafeteria food and the girls on her hall, the friends she had not yet made although she pretended she had. Then we said goodbye, and I listened to the click of her phone closing, her letting go of me. I turned the key in the ignition, and I turned the wipers on and I watched them push the raindrops from the windshield until the rain began to let up a little, and I headed back home.

I LEAN AWAY from the touch of Max’s arm against mine, toward Laney, toward the comforting feel of her sweatered shoulder, remembering Mother’s words that first morning I woke in Ann Arbor: A new day, a new year, a new life. An opportunity to leave the past behind. The sordid past? Had Mother actually used that word, or had I heard it in her don’t-fuck-up-again tone? I wonder for perhaps the first time if it was hard for Mother to leave me at law school, if she worried about how I’d manage, whether I’d be lonely, whether I’d make friends.

Lonely. The word hangs over me now more than ever, with my children gone and nothing else in my life, really, with my days reduced to rattling around the empty house every morning after Ted goes to work. I have no office to go off to, which maybe is my “choice,” maybe Ted is right about that. Maybe I could have gotten another job in the law when I didn’t make partner at Caruthers. But if I couldn’t be at the top of the legal world—or what I thought was the top—I didn’t want to be in it at all. It’s the same way with my poems: when The New Yorker and The Atlantic and Poetry reject them, I should submit to less prestigious magazines, but I never do. It’s the way I am, I do see that. If I can’t be the best, I don’t want to be anything. I keep my failure to myself.

I have friends, of course: Trish from my spin class, my book club, our Saturday night dinner gang. But they aren’t the Ms. Bradwells. They have no more idea than Ted does how I’ve longed for this weekend, and yet how I’ve dreaded, too, being with these friends who have within their reach the dreams I’ll never achieve.

Lonely. I feel it worse here at Mother’s empty house, even with Laney’s arm warm against mine, with Max beside me and Mia on the other side of him. Was Mother ever lonely like this? Behind the frantic activism she lived and breathed for all the world to see, did she ever feel anyone knew her? Did she ever wonder if the person she’d grown up to be was the person she meant to become?