Perennials, page 20
During the seventh rotation, the doctor, a squat man in his fifties, came back through the swinging doors for authorized personnel only. He looked around as if getting his bearings, as if he didn’t work in this same emergency room day after day. Jack approached the doctor. Nell realized that she should stand, and she pulled Mo and Fiona up with her.
“The parents?” The doctor looked between the three of them. “Are any of you the parents?”
“No,” Jack said. “They aren’t here yet.”
“This is her sister,” Nell said, putting her arm now firmly around Fiona’s shoulder. Fiona worked for Nell at the stables, and although Nell had never taken much of a liking to her, she now wanted to protect her like she’d never wanted to protect anyone before. The fact that Fiona’s mother wasn’t there—it was too sad, on top of all the other sadness. The doctor took his thumb and forefinger and squeezed his temples. He took a deep breath.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, unable to look at Fiona. “There was nothing we could do.”
Nell was suddenly very aware of how she breathed in and out. She focused on reminding herself how to do that, like she would stop altogether if she didn’t. In, and she held it. Out, and it came sputtering. She wondered if she’d ever be able to breathe normally again. Would she always just monitor her breath all the time now, reminding herself she was still living?
“We think she had been…” He struggled to find the right words. “We think it happened many hours ago. Probably not long after she went to sleep.”
Fiona made some sort of gasping, choking noise, and Nell held on to her tighter.
He tried to look at Fiona now, but his eyes landed somewhere above her head, as if looking at her directly would cause him too much pain. “Look at her,” Nell wanted to say to him. “The least you could do is look at her.”
“Okay,” the doctor said to everyone’s silence. “Does anyone want to…? Does the sister want to…to see her?” He glanced at Nell.
Nell shook her head. “Let’s wait until the parents get here.”
“Again, I’m so sorry,” he repeated to the space above Fiona’s head. “Please let me know when the parents arrive.” He nodded in defeat and walked slowly back through the swinging doors leading to the emergency room.
—
Fiona too seemed to have forgotten how to breathe. She was trying to get words out, but they kept stopping at her throat. It sounded like she was choking.
“Deep breaths,” Nell said. “Deep breaths.”
The girl’s mouth was wide open; she was making a rasping sound as she struggled for any sort of air. She put a hand on her stomach.
“Are you going to be sick?” Nell said. Fiona nodded. Nell took her by the arm.
“Bathroom?” Nell asked the receptionist, hearing the urgency in her own voice.
The receptionist pointed, wordlessly, down the hallway to her right.
Fiona could not wait until they got to the bathroom stall and, as soon as they entered the room, vomited all over the tile.
“It’s okay,” Nell said, keeping an arm around Fiona, who was staring at her own sick on the floor. Nell grabbed a paper towel from the dispenser with her free hand. She took a corner of the towel and wiped it carefully around Fiona’s mouth.
Fiona was struggling to get air again, and it sounded like she was desperately trying to say something.
“What is it, Fiona?” Nell said. “You can say it. It’s just me.” As soon as she said this, she felt disingenuous. “Just me”? They weren’t friends, nor had they ever been. Why would Fiona want to say something to Nell, in this moment out of all moments, over anyone else?
“I—” she stammered. “I can’t—”
“I know, I know,” Nell said, moving in to place the girl’s head on her own chest.
But Fiona shook her head. Nell didn’t know. Fiona’s eyes opened wide in fear. “My mother,” she gasped, as if she had just remembered her.
—
They sat in the waiting room longer, Nell in between Mo and Fiona again. Both catatonic now. It felt both brave and foolish to still be there, to be one of the people the Larkins would have to see first. What could it have been? Did anyone know Helen might have been sick? She had ridden with Nell; she had seemed like the healthiest girl.
And what would happen to Dandelion, her horse? Another petty thought.
Nell turned to look out the window of the waiting room. It was a small hospital; Jack was sitting right there on the curb where the ambulances were parked. His hands were covering his face.
Today, everyone was supposed to go home. This was supposed to be the timely, tidy end. Mo and Nell had flights back home on Monday; once, they had planned to spend the rest of the weekend at a hostel in New York City. They were going to try to see the Sunday matinee of a Broadway show. But after Nell rejected her, Mo had changed her reservation to stay in an actual hotel, and now Nell would be at the hostel by herself. Now they would be two once-friends wandering at the same time through the same foreign city.
Still, Nell had been dreading their goodbye to each other today. She knew how she’d hurt Mo. She would apologize, she decided. All that trite bullshit about how life is too short to not apologize came into sharp, painful focus. It was the most awful way to realize your mistakes.
She heard the wail then, outside the tiny hospital window. She could hardly bring herself to turn and see it: a mother on her knees and the ugly gasps of a weeping man. Fiona stood, as if in a trance, and walked out of the hospital doors, which automatically opened for her. As if approaching a stranger, she put one stiff arm on her mother’s shoulder.
But her mother pulled Fiona onto the ground. She would not weep there alone. The men stood beside them, and Jack put an uneasy arm around the father. They looked like accessories to the tragedy, still able to stand on their feet.
14
It was evening by the time Rachel and Denise arrived, and they parked behind the long line of cars leading up to the house. Denise carried a container of pasta salad they had picked up at a grocery store in Larchmont, and Rachel held a bouquet of half a dozen white roses—one of the few flower arrangements that had been left in the grocery store, many of the petals already browning.
A woman with a round face and highlighted blond hair answered the door; she turned out to be one of the Larkins’ neighbors, and she led them inside, where they found about a dozen more women who looked like her, plus Liam, shuttling between the kitchen and the dining room, carrying aluminum pans with potholders and placing them on the table among several pots and bowls and dishes of food. Denise made room for the store-bought pasta salad between a Pyrex pan of some untouched orange casserole and a crockpot full of meatballs. Liam saw Rachel, placed the Dutch oven that he was holding onto the table, and opened his arms, the hands still inside potholders.
“Rachel,” he said, and took her into a hug.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Denise said. “Is there anything we can do? You should rest. We can help in the kitchen.”
He shook his head. “You two should have something to eat,” he said without looking them in the eyes. “Rachel, Fiona is upstairs.” He turned away from them abruptly and went back through the swinging doors to the kitchen.
Denise made herself useful in the kitchen anyway, and Rachel walked up the carpeted steps to the second floor of the house. At the top of the stairway, she looked down the darkened hallway in both directions; all the doors were closed: the doors to the master bedroom and each child’s bedroom as well.
She approached Fiona’s door, with the ornamental, cursive F hanging from the doorknob, and knocked.
There was no answer. Rachel waited a few moments for some sort of a response. She put her ear to the door; there was silence. She knocked again.
“Fiona? It’s me.”
After a few beats, Fiona told her to come in.
Fiona was sitting on top of her bed, her back leaning on the wall that the side of her bed rested against. She was holding a worn paperback novel in her lap. She looked oddly, suspiciously normal.
“Hey,” Rachel said. She sat on the bed and took her friend into a long embrace. Fiona melted into it, leaning her weight into Rachel, an action that seemed to contain as much relief as if Fiona were letting out a long-held breath. “I’m so sorry,” Rachel said into Fiona’s neck.
When they released each other, Fiona said “Hey” back.
“It feels dumb to ask you how you’re doing.”
Fiona shrugged.
“So, how are you doing?” Rachel said sadly, self-aware.
“I’m fine,” Fiona said, not returning any glimpse of emotion. She had an unreadable, stoic expression on her face.
Rachel stroked Fiona’s hair, combing each finger through the strands. She had thought it would be clearer what she had to do; she’d thought that Fiona would be so distraught that Rachel would need only to sit there and hold her while she cried. Rachel had not been expecting this sort of opaque quietness. She did not know if it was appropriate to ask questions or to talk about Helen or if she should instead pretend they were there for any other reason but the actual one.
“Are your Larchmont friends here?” Rachel managed to ask.
She nodded. “Cooking, I think. They keep coming up to bring me tea.” She gestured to an untouched mug on her bedside table. “I told them I wanted to be alone.”
They sat for a few more moments in silence.
“Do you want to be alone?” Rachel finally asked.
Fiona thought for a moment. “Yeah,” she said.
“Okay,” Rachel said, nodding too much. “I totally understand.” She took Fiona’s hands in her own. “Call me whenever you need me, any hour; it doesn’t matter. Okay?”
“Yeah,” Fiona said, but for some reason, Rachel knew that she wouldn’t.
“I’ll see you Wednesday,” Rachel said. Wednesday was the funeral.
Things had not been good between them. After Rachel left camp, Fiona had called her several times, left desperate voicemails, sent emails from the computer lab, but Rachel hadn’t responded to any of them. She felt incapable of it; she was too angry. Angry that Fiona was still at camp, as if she was somehow betraying her through the sheer act of staying, even though Fiona was unaware of what had happened. In the days that followed, Rachel didn’t leave her apartment, numbing out to bad TV and eating junk food in order to not have to piece together the events of that night, to not have to think about her father, about Micah, about this disastrously terrible summer. She was being punished for something, she was sure. But for what? She kept saying to Denise, “I don’t want to talk about it,” and she counted the days until she could go back to school. Eventually Denise turned off the TV and sat on the coffee table in front of the couch and made Rachel sit up and took Rachel’s face into her hands and had to physically shake her in order to get her to talk.
Drunk as she had been at the time, she knew she never would have wanted to sleep with Chad. He was her friend, and she had begun to find safety in that, having a male friend who didn’t seem to want anything more from her than loyalty or trust or comfort. In the past few weeks, she had started to rethink her behavior around him, replay their summer together as if she could find a place where things had turned, where things went wrong. Maybe it was something that she could have stopped. She had been affectionate with him, as she was affectionate with all her friends, though now she wondered if he’d confused her affection with flirtation or a genuine romantic interest. The thought made her deeply upset, and angry with herself, that something terrible could have been avoided had she only smiled less, kissed his cheek less.
And so she had not told Fiona, had not even spoken to Fiona until now. Rachel had thought naïvely that somehow Helen’s death would overrule everything, that something of this magnitude would erase the less tragic things that had happened to herself. But as she walked down the stairs in Fiona’s house, Rachel realized that Helen’s death only compounded the pain. It was the greatest loss to heap on top of an already broken summer.
Downstairs, Denise was carrying a bowl of pretzels into the living room. Rachel stood in the open doorframe and peered into the room: men, including Mr. Larkin, sitting on the couches and watching baseball, silently, each one with a bottle of beer in hand. Mr. Larkin, in a reclining leather chair, was watching the game but not watching it, his legs up and both hands holding the beer tightly and his gaze fixed, also tightly, on the vivid moving images ahead, as if he was looking at something inside the TV, or behind it, which no one else in the room could see.
A week after Helen’s funeral, an envelope was delivered to the Larkin home, addressed to Fiona. It was a manila envelope postmarked from York, England, with Mo’s name and return address written in the upper left corner; there was a letter inside, along with another envelope addressed to Helen at camp. Fiona looked at the letter in the manila envelope first. It was typed on a piece of computer paper.
Dear Fiona,
This came to camp the day Helen died. I took it back to England with me and have been holding on to it for the past few weeks, afraid to let it go, like if I put it in the mail, then the last vestiges of her would be gone from me. She was only in my section for eight weeks, along with thirty other girls, so I hardly feel like it’s my right to say I miss her or that she was any sort of “part” of me at all. She wasn’t, not before she died. It would be a disservice to you to pretend otherwise. But I want you to know that her smile has stuck with me, the way it was always coming out so girlish and easy, like she held some perennial secret to happiness that we forget about when we grow up.
Fiona stopped reading there and opened the smaller envelope, which was postmarked from Sacramento, though there was no return address.
Yo, Helen!
I called your house, and your mom gave me this address. I knew you were at your favorite place—CAMP! So I just wanted to say what’s up. I can’t remember the last time I wrote a real letter! Too bad you guys don’t have email there.
Anyway, sorry I’m sending this so late in the summer. I know I’ve been quiet a couple months. Josh got in trouble, so we picked up and hit the road. We’re in California, but I’m not really supposed to tell people that. You can keep it a secret, right? I will say there are some hotties in my new town. I hang out at the public pool in a bikini every day, and let’s say I’ve become “friendly” with some high schoolers. LOL.
What’s going on in YOUR love life? Did you get your period yet? Write me back! Hope you’re having fun in the woods, you weirdo.
Love, Marla
They had a second memorial service at camp, at the lake, a month after Helen’s death. It wasn’t the Larkins’ idea. Jack had suggested it in a phone call to the family, using words like “grieving” and “closure.” Fiona’s father was adamant about never returning to camp again, and her mother had lost all ability to argue, to make decisions, to even speak more than was absolutely necessary. She stayed in bed, and Liam—the only one in the family for whom moving was easier than staying still—brought her a plate of scrambled eggs and toast with butter and blackberry jam every morning. Amy would not touch it, and eventually, starved himself, Liam would eat the cold eggs while leaning against the kitchen counter before figuring out his next task.
It was congenital heart disease, they learned from the autopsy, something so random and unavoidable that it caused undue amounts of torture. They couldn’t have known, Helen’s pediatrician told them when he called to console the family, voice wobbly and full of unease, as if he’d never had to make a call of quite this magnitude. The occasional fainting was a warning sign, yes, but they’d tested and found she had low blood sugar years earlier, and that had been enough to explain it. How could they have known that it might have been something additional, something so rare and deadly that no one would have dared to imagine it?
They wanted desperately to blame him, to have someone to blame. But it was a genetic defect that could happen to you or me or anyone we know, he assured them, and they believed him: There was no one to blame even if they tried. And so the pain had no outlet, had nowhere to go, and each member of the Larkin family recoiled and looked inward as if they might, somewhere inside themselves, find the seed of the tragedy.
For the parents, it was easy: A genetic defect meant they had somehow failed her with their very core, their very DNA. Someone down the line, in one of their families, was not supposed to have procreated with someone else. Maybe, Amy reasoned, they had been too old by the time they’d had Helen. She was a mistake, after all. Or maybe, Amy’s thoughts spiraled, this was proof that she and John hadn’t been meant to procreate at all; maybe they were the ones who weren’t supposed to procreate.
It was Fiona who had thought a second memorial at the camp would be good. She had not spoken at the first service, partly because it had been too early for her to process anything and partly because she hadn’t felt she had anything worthwhile to say. It was, she knew, a terribly wrong thought to have, that she didn’t have anything good to say at her own sister’s funeral, and so she had pushed it away. But as their aunt spoke, and then Liam, and then—astonishingly—their father, she found that she was not crying. What was wrong with her? She felt a heavy, impenetrable sorrow, but it didn’t feel like her own; it felt like an extension of her parents’ sorrow. Seeing her otherwise healthy mother now need help walking everywhere she went: That was where the real sorrow came from.
Fiona’s sister—her beautiful little sister, who had once made Fiona into a forgettable, petty middle sibling—was gone. Fiona was the youngest now, and the change was swift. Immediately, she was no longer forgettable or petty; instead, she experienced the attention lavished on a girl who had just lost her only sister, and in a perverse way, she accepted it. She had, without having done anything, become a sort of elevated figure: the girl, the poor girl, who had gone from middle to youngest sibling. She was pitied; she was put on a sad pedestal. And she was more loved. Was this the most horrible thing in the world, to acknowledge that she didn’t hate this attention? She believed that it was.
